Well... classification markings usually lead towards being a "shotgun surgery" afterthought that's required for certain documents. If your shotgun is loaded with Unclassified bullets, then everything will come out Unclassified when you pull the trigger. If you don't know that you need to retrieve your Classified bullets from the Information Security department, you'll be prone to make a mistake. At the same time, there's pressure to keep things at the least restrictive classification level possible (because managing classified material is burdensome and (hence) expensive). At a minimum, governments like at least one classification marking on every page of a document so that if an individual page falls out of a binder onto the street (contrived example, but you get the point) it's clear how it should be handled.
My knee-jerk reaction would be that somebody not familiar with the technical details may have marked this incorrectly and then posted it. Just because the top of the page says unclassified doesn't mean an honest mistake couldn't have occurred to cause it to get labeled incorrectly. If wouldn't surprise me if they are trying to protect one individual number within that document with the new (more protective) classification.
It's not like they are claiming damages for just one year
If the hyperbola in the fricking summary can be believed, then they are claiming damages for all infringement dating back to 1877, when the phonograph was invented by Edison. ^_^
IIRC, Edison went on to lead a small company that's called General Electric. I'd like to suggest that the RIAA should go after the real bad guys and launch a Multi-Trillion lawsuit against one of the world's richest companies (whose market cap is $200 Billion).
For intents and purposes, your dream world would make it easier for large businesses and wealthy individuals to sue the poor into oblivion. The poor wouldn't be able to risk a lawsuit if they knew they'd have to pay high fees once they lost.
In this case though, the RIAA can go fuck itself and your dream world seems like a wonderful place. Maybe try changing it to...
The penalty for an excessive lawsuit, when filed by an entity that I think is lame, should be >= the difference between the claimed damage and the actual damage.
This way you and your friends can still sue with impunity.
So your cousin is depending on you not to be inappropriate on Facebook and you're tempted to prove her wrong out of spite? I can't possibly imagine what could go wrong.
I see Apple as doing a favor for the App developers by removing their placebo-ware. Any software that isn't directly embedded under your skin won't cure any type of perceived condition unless that condition is a mental delusional. Thus, the software manufacture was running a serious risk of distributing an "ineffective" Cure App. They were clearly positioned for a lawsuit from a Gay person who stayed Gay after installing their App. I hope Apple, in the future, continues to remove Apps which (make a false) claim to change the chemistry within my body simply by installing them on my phone.
I agree with you, though. Being able to answer the question "How to I find talented, yet undiscovered authors so I can read their work?" is a question that begs to be answered.
I never thought I'd see the day where something so overwhelmingly positive could be construed as an attack. The licensing agreement in question isn't some kind of strict legal agreement. Honestly, it reads much more like the Ten Commandments... but in a non-religious way that isn't offensive to people who don't believe in God (which is a fairly impressive accomplishment). That you would be offended by it is astonishing. Though, with the context of the Ten Commandments in mind, what the author is essentially saying is "Use my book however you want and try not to be a dick". Even the Bible, with the whole Jesus part, admits that always being good is pretty impossible (forgiveness for sins and all that). Your objections make me wonder if you're actively defending your rights to always be a dick... which is hopelessly misguided.
It strikes me that you might also be taking the text of the agreement too literally. Don't do that. The author, I'm sure, is happy to let you read his book in spite of your occasional transgressions.
I would much rather purchase a reasonably priced ebook with no DRM so that some money goes to the author.
The self-publishing eBook market is fairly defined these days. Amazon is the one that offers 70% royalties for sales that go through its own site. I believe they also offer POD which provides 70% of MSRP for each softcover or hardcover sale an author generates. To sign up for this, authors need to shell out a few hundred dollars (which is pretty reasonable).
On the other hand, another "sales" method that I think would really work for self-published eBooks is the "Give them away for free and accept donations" method. I feel like the donations wouldn't support most authors, but PayPal (or whatever service you use) gives you $0.97 for every dollar donated.
Either of these methods *seems* to be better than the traditional method of getting 10-20% of sales when going through a traditional publisher. Anyway, book stores are dying, and the major advantage of traditional publishing has always been getting your books onto the shelves of the book stores.
You think regulators know what the hell GSM means? Heck, with cell phone technology the latest buzzword is 4G. I doubt half the tech community realizes that selling 4G is akin to selling snake oil. I wouldn't expect regulators to actually understand the nitty-gritty details.
I don't understand why they don't think a 13-year-old won't start lying and saying they're 18-years-old when they want to have explicit conversations with strangers on the internet. Also, I thought chat programs were supposed to disallow all people who are 13-years-old from entering explicit rooms. Shouldn't there be reasonable expectation that if somebody identifies themselves as 13 in a chatroom mean they're just trying to engage in virtual ageplay because they've already told the chat protocol they are of age? Most likely I'm thinking too hard about this, though. After all, it's not illegal too have sex IRL with a 21-year-old man dressed up as a catholic school girl no matter what age you are.
Vote with your wallet. Stop bitching and moaning when somebody
wants to make money from copyrights which they own.
The government has setup a free method (i.e. rabbit ears) for
you to watch television without paying anybody a dime. If you
can't be bothered to use the OTA signals that already provide an
adequate entertain package, then shut the fuck up.
Coupling that with YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu... is there anything
(besides sports and the latest Hollywood movies) that you're missing?
So circa 2004 when Firefox first emerged from the hollowed out husk of Netscape was the bronze age of browsers, then? Wake me up when we make it to the platinum age and Microsoft stops relying on security-through-obscurity and adds better support for Non-windows platforms...
In all seriousness, though, I'm glad Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (and Opera) are all making improvements to the state-of-the-art.
Organizations that profit for you on a regular, repeating basis are trusted sources. Google's Android Market is "trusted" because Google knows releasing malicious applications would harm it's reputation as trustworthy. If they damaged their reputation bad enough, their users would start looking for a more trustworthy source (be it Apple, Amazon, Mozilla, Microsoft, Oracle, Ubuntu, or the Free Software Foundation). Though, right now it seems that Google's only real "App Store" competitor is Apple.
I [am] sure some are getting bullied, some are on drugs, and others are overwhelmed with their homework.
I recall that bullies were the ones who were more likely to be skipping. They were also more likely to be the ones on drugs, so maybe you bundled in that consideration with your second option.
As for being overwhelmed by homework... the only reason for this is that you didn't care to either (a) spend the time after school doing what you needed to do, or (b) spend 10 minutes copying answers from your peers who DID do the work the day before. In an ideal high school with lots of over-achievers, everybody would do a little of (a) and a little of (b) so that everybody learns how to put forth the effort when needed as well as relying on social partnerships to share the pain so you don't have to deal with it all by yourself.
Is this the same Facebook who is traditionally terrible about privacy settings? It is surprising to see they are helping a (probably large) group of their users gain extra privacy. Certainly, an action like this is an isolated incident and doesn't imply that Facebook is turning over a new leaf. Or maybe Facebook is beginning to take privacy more seriously?
hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil.
To who, exactly?
To their (soon to be former) employees.
the left would be opposing actions that would cost jobs
Other comments have pointed out that citizens who don't claim out-of-state purchases such as those where they give business to Amazon are the real problem (and one of the major reasons that states need to look elsewhere for tax revenue). Amazon isn't at fault, per se. However, Amazon takes advantage of the fact that the government sucks at tracking "out-of-state purchases" and implicitly allows its customers to easily evade the local sales tax laws. Other comments have pointed out that the sales tax is evil (easy for rich to afford, difficult for the poor), so good riddance. I guess there is no shortage of confusion about the details of how interstate commerce works. The smartest, richest people know how to take advantage of federal and state tax laws.
Business helps cash flow through the economy by selling products and creating jobs.
State needs money to operate and takes some of that money.
State uses money to provide necessary services to people who buy products and work jobs.
Business gets tax bill from the State and decides to relocate to a different State.
Business sends message to people: we don't want to subsidize your necessary government services.
===
Obviously Amazon is within their legal rights to seek out favorable tax havens to operate within the United States, but hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil. I'm curious how long it will be before Texas (and other states) start sending them tax bills for the privilege of selling products to residents within their states. If I'm not mistaken, sales taxes are never added to Amazon purchases because of loopholes in the Online Sales / Across State Lines mechanisms involved in buying things over the internet. Obviously Amazon will just pass these taxes along to their customers, but at least they'll finally be competing (tax-wise) on even footing as WalMart and other brick-and-mortar stores.
H.264 is "open" like the Microsoft Open Office XML standard is open. There are bear-traps that can prevent you from using it successfully. In the case of OOXML, one of those bear-traps is requiring your documents to interpret "Proprietary Microsoft Binary Blobs".
H.264, being patent protected, means that the patent holder reserve the right to say, "Go pound sand" when your five-year license expires.
WebM is controlled by Google.... but Google has effectively put its patents into the public domain so that ANYBODY can implement a WebM/VP8 video codec.
I have a Ubuntu Dell Laptop that came with garbage Dell Software. No 30-Day Trial of Norton Antivirus, though. As Linux becomes a more popular option for consumer Desktops you should expect companies to shovel more and more crapware onto the Base systems. Linux, however, retains the ability of being trivial to do a fresh install. For a fresh windows install, I believe you still need the disc from Microsoft. If my memory serves me correctly, OEMs like Dell and HP only distribute Rescue/Reinstall Discs that reinstall all of their shiny crapware. You can get any number of Linux distributions easily by downloading them off the internet and burning them to your own CD/DVD.
Rockets required bits of "unobtanium" during the 60s. That's why the article points out that $8 trillion was spent between the USA and the USSR. Neal seems to be asking why we continue to pour money into rockets when we can be pouring money into building a space elevator that can carry stuff to orbit at $10 or $100 per pound instead of $10,000 per pound.
Part of the folly of the Space Transportation System (i.e. Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery, and Endeavour) was the it had unexpected maintenance costs that were partly linked to the reliance on the SRBs. The cost-savings of having a reusable fleet was never realized. Neal is saying, "You need to develop a non-rocket-based technology if you actually want to make space travel cheap!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Well... classification markings usually lead towards being a "shotgun surgery" afterthought that's required for certain documents. If your shotgun is loaded with Unclassified bullets, then everything will come out Unclassified when you pull the trigger. If you don't know that you need to retrieve your Classified bullets from the Information Security department, you'll be prone to make a mistake. At the same time, there's pressure to keep things at the least restrictive classification level possible (because managing classified material is burdensome and (hence) expensive). At a minimum, governments like at least one classification marking on every page of a document so that if an individual page falls out of a binder onto the street (contrived example, but you get the point) it's clear how it should be handled.
My knee-jerk reaction would be that somebody not familiar with the technical details may have marked this incorrectly and then posted it. Just because the top of the page says unclassified doesn't mean an honest mistake couldn't have occurred to cause it to get labeled incorrectly. If wouldn't surprise me if they are trying to protect one individual number within that document with the new (more protective) classification.
It's not like they are claiming damages for just one year
If the hyperbola in the fricking summary can be believed, then they are claiming damages for all infringement dating back to 1877, when the phonograph was invented by Edison. ^_^
IIRC, Edison went on to lead a small company that's called General Electric. I'd like to suggest that the RIAA should go after the real bad guys and launch a Multi-Trillion lawsuit against one of the world's richest companies (whose market cap is $200 Billion).
For intents and purposes, your dream world would make it easier for large businesses and wealthy individuals to sue the poor into oblivion. The poor wouldn't be able to risk a lawsuit if they knew they'd have to pay high fees once they lost.
In this case though, the RIAA can go fuck itself and your dream world seems like a wonderful place. Maybe try changing it to...
The penalty for an excessive lawsuit, when filed by an entity that I think is lame, should be >= the difference between the claimed damage and the actual damage.
This way you and your friends can still sue with impunity.
So your cousin is depending on you not to be inappropriate on Facebook and you're tempted to prove her wrong out of spite? I can't possibly imagine what could go wrong.
I see Apple as doing a favor for the App developers by removing their placebo-ware. Any software that isn't directly embedded under your skin won't cure any type of perceived condition unless that condition is a mental delusional. Thus, the software manufacture was running a serious risk of distributing an "ineffective" Cure App. They were clearly positioned for a lawsuit from a Gay person who stayed Gay after installing their App. I hope Apple, in the future, continues to remove Apps which (make a false) claim to change the chemistry within my body simply by installing them on my phone.
How do I as a user decide whether to download such books?
I think you asked a wonderful question. Right now, I believe the best answer is to go here but that answer is not very useful.
Another answer is to go here but that isn't terribly useful either.
Another resource is here.
I agree with you, though. Being able to answer the question "How to I find talented, yet undiscovered authors so I can read their work?" is a question that begs to be answered.
I never thought I'd see the day where something so overwhelmingly positive could be construed as an attack. The licensing agreement in question isn't some kind of strict legal agreement. Honestly, it reads much more like the Ten Commandments... but in a non-religious way that isn't offensive to people who don't believe in God (which is a fairly impressive accomplishment). That you would be offended by it is astonishing. Though, with the context of the Ten Commandments in mind, what the author is essentially saying is "Use my book however you want and try not to be a dick". Even the Bible, with the whole Jesus part, admits that always being good is pretty impossible (forgiveness for sins and all that). Your objections make me wonder if you're actively defending your rights to always be a dick... which is hopelessly misguided.
It strikes me that you might also be taking the text of the agreement too literally. Don't do that. The author, I'm sure, is happy to let you read his book in spite of your occasional transgressions.
I would much rather purchase a reasonably priced ebook with no DRM so that some money goes to the author.
The self-publishing eBook market is fairly defined these days. Amazon is the one that offers 70% royalties for sales that go through its own site. I believe they also offer POD which provides 70% of MSRP for each softcover or hardcover sale an author generates. To sign up for this, authors need to shell out a few hundred dollars (which is pretty reasonable).
On the other hand, another "sales" method that I think would really work for self-published eBooks is the "Give them away for free and accept donations" method. I feel like the donations wouldn't support most authors, but PayPal (or whatever service you use) gives you $0.97 for every dollar donated.
Either of these methods *seems* to be better than the traditional method of getting 10-20% of sales when going through a traditional publisher. Anyway, book stores are dying, and the major advantage of traditional publishing has always been getting your books onto the shelves of the book stores.
Just offering my $0.02.
You think regulators know what the hell GSM means? Heck, with cell phone technology the latest buzzword is 4G. I doubt half the tech community realizes that selling 4G is akin to selling snake oil. I wouldn't expect regulators to actually understand the nitty-gritty details.
I don't understand why they don't think a 13-year-old won't start lying and saying they're 18-years-old when they want to have explicit conversations with strangers on the internet. Also, I thought chat programs were supposed to disallow all people who are 13-years-old from entering explicit rooms. Shouldn't there be reasonable expectation that if somebody identifies themselves as 13 in a chatroom mean they're just trying to engage in virtual ageplay because they've already told the chat protocol they are of age? Most likely I'm thinking too hard about this, though. After all, it's not illegal too have sex IRL with a 21-year-old man dressed up as a catholic school girl no matter what age you are.
Vote with your wallet. Stop bitching and moaning when somebody
wants to make money from copyrights which they own.
The government has setup a free method (i.e. rabbit ears) for
you to watch television without paying anybody a dime. If you
can't be bothered to use the OTA signals that already provide an
adequate entertain package, then shut the fuck up.
Coupling that with YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu... is there anything
(besides sports and the latest Hollywood movies) that you're missing?
just like every other complex human thing that gets reduced to either a goal, task, tool, or reward in a game.
I wondered if making sex into a punishment in video games would change any of the perceptions/conclusion of TFA.
What do you want to do? Go north.
You are felated by a grue.
What do you want to do? Kill grue.
The grue evades your strike and mounts you from behind.
I like how the report is available for free to "Low Income Countries" like Canada.
a new golden age of browsers
So circa 2004 when Firefox first emerged from the hollowed out husk of Netscape was the bronze age of browsers, then? Wake me up when we make it to the platinum age and Microsoft stops relying on security-through-obscurity and adds better support for Non-windows platforms...
In all seriousness, though, I'm glad Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (and Opera) are all making improvements to the state-of-the-art.
You buy stuff from trusted sources.
What makes a source trusted?
Organizations that profit for you on a regular, repeating basis are trusted sources. Google's Android Market is "trusted" because Google knows releasing malicious applications would harm it's reputation as trustworthy. If they damaged their reputation bad enough, their users would start looking for a more trustworthy source (be it Apple, Amazon, Mozilla, Microsoft, Oracle, Ubuntu, or the Free Software Foundation). Though, right now it seems that Google's only real "App Store" competitor is Apple.
I [am] sure some are getting bullied, some are on drugs, and others are overwhelmed with their homework.
I recall that bullies were the ones who were more likely to be skipping. They were also more likely to be the ones on drugs, so maybe you bundled in that consideration with your second option.
As for being overwhelmed by homework... the only reason for this is that you didn't care to either (a) spend the time after school doing what you needed to do, or (b) spend 10 minutes copying answers from your peers who DID do the work the day before. In an ideal high school with lots of over-achievers, everybody would do a little of (a) and a little of (b) so that everybody learns how to put forth the effort when needed as well as relying on social partnerships to share the pain so you don't have to deal with it all by yourself.
What's wrong with the Buffer Overflow defense? Also, might I suggest that you try protecting your data from hackers with NULL pointers.
Is this the same Facebook who is traditionally terrible about privacy settings? It is surprising to see they are helping a (probably large) group of their users gain extra privacy. Certainly, an action like this is an isolated incident and doesn't imply that Facebook is turning over a new leaf. Or maybe Facebook is beginning to take privacy more seriously?
hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil.
To who, exactly?
To their (soon to be former) employees.
the left would be opposing actions that would cost jobs
Other comments have pointed out that citizens who don't claim out-of-state purchases such as those where they give business to Amazon are the real problem (and one of the major reasons that states need to look elsewhere for tax revenue). Amazon isn't at fault, per se. However, Amazon takes advantage of the fact that the government sucks at tracking "out-of-state purchases" and implicitly allows its customers to easily evade the local sales tax laws. Other comments have pointed out that the sales tax is evil (easy for rich to afford, difficult for the poor), so good riddance. I guess there is no shortage of confusion about the details of how interstate commerce works. The smartest, richest people know how to take advantage of federal and state tax laws.
Business helps cash flow through the economy by selling products and creating jobs.
State needs money to operate and takes some of that money.
State uses money to provide necessary services to people who buy products and work jobs.
Business gets tax bill from the State and decides to relocate to a different State.
Business sends message to people: we don't want to subsidize your necessary government services.
===
Obviously Amazon is within their legal rights to seek out favorable tax havens to operate within the United States, but hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil. I'm curious how long it will be before Texas (and other states) start sending them tax bills for the privilege of selling products to residents within their states. If I'm not mistaken, sales taxes are never added to Amazon purchases because of loopholes in the Online Sales / Across State Lines mechanisms involved in buying things over the internet. Obviously Amazon will just pass these taxes along to their customers, but at least they'll finally be competing (tax-wise) on even footing as WalMart and other brick-and-mortar stores.
H.264 is "open" like the Microsoft Open Office XML standard is open. There are bear-traps that can prevent you from using it successfully. In the case of OOXML, one of those bear-traps is requiring your documents to interpret "Proprietary Microsoft Binary Blobs".
H.264, being patent protected, means that the patent holder reserve the right to say, "Go pound sand" when your five-year license expires.
WebM is controlled by Google.... but Google has effectively put its patents into the public domain so that ANYBODY can implement a WebM/VP8 video codec.
I have a Ubuntu Dell Laptop that came with garbage Dell Software. No 30-Day Trial of Norton Antivirus, though. As Linux becomes a more popular option for consumer Desktops you should expect companies to shovel more and more crapware onto the Base systems. Linux, however, retains the ability of being trivial to do a fresh install. For a fresh windows install, I believe you still need the disc from Microsoft. If my memory serves me correctly, OEMs like Dell and HP only distribute Rescue/Reinstall Discs that reinstall all of their shiny crapware. You can get any number of Linux distributions easily by downloading them off the internet and burning them to your own CD/DVD.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy when Mega-Corporations fight. Their pissing contests serve to expose how broken the system is.
Rockets required bits of "unobtanium" during the 60s. That's why the article points out that $8 trillion was spent between the USA and the USSR. Neal seems to be asking why we continue to pour money into rockets when we can be pouring money into building a space elevator that can carry stuff to orbit at $10 or $100 per pound instead of $10,000 per pound.
Part of the folly of the Space Transportation System (i.e. Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery, and Endeavour) was the it had unexpected maintenance costs that were partly linked to the reliance on the SRBs. The cost-savings of having a reusable fleet was never realized. Neal is saying, "You need to develop a non-rocket-based technology if you actually want to make space travel cheap!!!"