This: "The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our heads, but from Teslaâ(TM)s boffins in California. They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles."
So they are suing the BBC over a claim they themselves fed to the Top Gear producers which was only relayed in the show.
Yeah, really, I can see how Top Gear acted in bad faith here. How dare they trust the information from the manufacturer!
Absent a transcript of the actual communications between Top Gear and Tesla's "boffins", the substance of the above claim is entirely unclear. It would not surprise me, for instance, to find out that what actually happened was that TG emailed Tesla to ask, "Could your car make it 55 miles on our track?" If Tesla's techs replied, "Sure!" TG could then claim that "Tesla's boffins" gave them a range of 55 miles on their track.
What IS abundantly clear is that TG did NOT themselves drive the Tesla they "tested" on their track until it actually ran out of juice. I think, based on that fact, Tesla has been pretty reasonable in requesting that TG not continue to replay the show in which its purposefully misleading "test" appears to show the car running out of juice and HAVING to be pushed back to the shop. Regardless of TG's spin, they themselves admit that nothing of the sort really happened. It was a bit of scripted snark on TG's part - and deliberately misleading snark, at that.
Excerpted from ScrewMaster (602015)'s rant on iLECs and metered Internet usage:
the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with... and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.)
That behavior is far from confined to the telco industry. In fact, it's ubiquitous within the U.S. business sector, and nearly as much so in the rest of the capitalist world. Virtually across the board, this is because they're run by MBAs. MBAs have it hammered into them from admission to matriculation that increasing shareholder value at all costs is not simply their central duty, but indeed their only goal in life (aside from craven self-advancement, that is). And at no time are they ever led to question whether the highest, best good is best served by delivering that increased value over the shortest term possible (otherwise known as the "what have you done for me THIS quarter?" principle). Because, hey, by the time the problems inherent to this relentless short-term focus become apparent, the suits that inflicted them have long since been wooed away to positions of greater power, pay grade, and perks elsewhere, and it will be someone else's responsibility to return the company to record (short-term) profitability. And share price. Temporarily.
It is my observation that, quite often, those who set out to ruin the lives of many, many others on the off chance that they can turn a profit from an act that many would term to be malicious money-grubbing are just expanding a pattern of behavior that equally as typically extends years and even decades in their past. Hence my use of the word "probably"...and my ignoring of your article's origination on the time-line of events.
Blah, blah, attempted post hoc justification, blah.
Perchance do you still get royalties for that article? You seem quite eager to get people to read it...even providing a link when it could be argued that said link has nothing to do with this slashdot article and was unnecessary in your original comment given that the claim of having written it means nothing on the web...i.e. I could as easily have claimed to have written it and included a link so as to harvest the click-profits for myself.
No, I don't get royalties for that story. You obviously don't understand how freelance writing works... as only one of myriad things you obviously don't understand.
Uh, that's certainly VERY "little research". Essentially, it's an opinion piece that includes two quotes - one from a Stephens Media rep who expresses hope that the lawsuits in question will result in more linkbacks to LVRJ articles online (and, by implication, fewer cops of LVRJ content), and the other from the slimebag that runs Righthaven. Now, since Stephens Media does NOT own Righthaven, I fail entirely to see how this "suggests" in any way, shape, or form that Stephens Media is "probably a lot slimy."
Which brings up the question of why you believe that a freelance writer (i.e. - me) selling a story to a weekly magazine whose editorial management is (as is the case with EVERY ethical news operation) completely divorced and firewalled from the business management side of the operation is in any way unethical, immoral, or "slimy".
grubstake/grbstk/
Verb: Provide with a grubstake.
Noun: An amount of material, provisions, or money supplied to an enterprise (originally a prospector for ore) in return for a share in the resulting profits.
"A share in the profits"/= ""ownership".
And: "I said the money they paid you was likely slimy; I did not say you were slimy for accepting it - rather, you chose to interpret it that way," is sheer semantic handwaving on your part. Claiming that money paid for work entirely unrelated to copyright trolling and predating the creation of Righthaven by nearly three years is "slimy" implies a moral judgement on YOUR part about MY accepting it.
TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)
Uh, that's certainly VERY "little research". Essentially, it's an opinion piece that includes two quotes - one from a Stephens Media rep who expresses hope that the lawsuits in question will result in more linkbacks to LVRJ articles online (and, by implication, fewer cops of LVRJ content), and the other from the slimebag that runs Righthaven. Now, since Stephens Media does NOT own Righthaven, I fail entirely to see how this "suggests" in any way, shape, or form that Stephens Media is "probably a lot slimy."
Which brings up the question of why you believe that a freelance writer (i.e. - me) selling a story to a weekly magazine whose editorial management is (as is the case with EVERY ethical news operation) completely divorced and firewalled from the business management side of the operation is in any way unethical, immoral, or "slimy".
My hunch is that you're just a dimwiit who didn't bother to read MY article, who is profoundly unfamiliar with the principle of editorial independence in professional journalism, and who has such a pathetically weak little ego that you have to reach around the block for a pretext to feel morally superior to strangers, based on nothing but someone else's hot air.
Having said that, I want to make clear that I have zero sympathy with Righthaven's handwaving, and I consider Stephens Media to have made a major error in judgement in allowing itself to be linked with those scumbags. Yes, it's getting harder and harder for newspapers to turn a profit as online news aggregators increasingly steal their readers. That's tough (and it's particularly tough on those of us who write for a living, since the very newspapers and magazines that the aggregators are parasitizing are the source of much of our income), but it still doesn't make it a good idea for them to associate themselves with legal bullying. However, I doubt that it will cost them many additional readers, because most people just don't give a damn about copyright trolling.
Anyway, the courts have shown little sympathy with Righthaven's conduct. Copyright trolling has turned out not to be the license to print money that Righthaven expected it to be, and I fully expect it to fold its tent and slink silently back into the slime from which it oozed, RSN.
TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)
We'd still have the problem of a script though... how many writers can write for a long(ish) miniseries and maintain quality writing, even with the book(s) as guide(s)? Few... look what happened to Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica/Craprica, Farscape, etc... Writers seem to go off on a tangent or think they can improve on the story in the book and then it all goes off the rails and crashes in a firery heap. Firefly is so great because it didn't have a chance to go off the rails...
Well, B5, Farscape, and Gacrapitica are all TV series - not miniseries. (B5 had an overall 5-year plot arc that set it apart from other series, but that wound up becoming problematic when PTEN started coming unraveled and Warner Bros. began wavering on its commitment to fund the full five years. Strazinski then was faced with the choice of either letting the series simply stop at the end of the fourth season, with a large number of balls still left in the air, or hacking the fifth season down to a size where he could, if WB dropped the series, simply fold its events into season four, and end it with most of the loose ends tied up. When WB finally committed to funding season five, late in the production of season four, he then had to stretch what remained of the overall plot arc to cover the many additional episodes between where the story stood when funding came through and his vision for the series end. It was kinda like Congress and the NASA budget, in a way.)
So, a miniseries, per se, with its predefined episode structure, would not suffer from those same problems - it woudn't be open-ended, like Gacrapitca and Farscape, nor would it suffer from the studio screwing around with the episode structure in mid-production, as happened with B5.
How could you translate the Ringworld stuff to the screen? You'd need like 5 hours of setup just to get into the main plot line. That is really the crux of the problem with Scifi and movies. There's so much supporting material that needs to be in place to make good Scifi that you just can't do it on the screen in any reasonable amount of movie time. I would love to see those you listed translated to the screen, but even The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would need to be 4 to 5 hours long to be done properly. The others... much longer. Think LotR at best.
That's exactly why the ideal audio-visual presentation mode for stories like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - and Ringworld and so many, many other SF classics - is the TV miniseries, rather than a theatrical motion picture. For all their faults, the SciFi Channel's miniseries versions of Dune and Children of Dune are cases in point. Both could have benefited tremendously from larger budgets and better casts, but the miniseries format gave them time and space to present their stories' complexities and do some serious worldbuilding, as well. And with HDTV resolution, sound and aspect ratio, TV is no longer a second-rate esthetic experience, either.
Of course, the crap factory that is SyFy is certainly not going to do justice to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, regardless. But HBO, Showtime, or even Starz is looking at a potential shelf-full of Emmys and Ace Awards, should they take up the challenge. Rome, Spartacus, Deadwood; even Boardwalk Empire show what they can accomplish with historical material, and there's at least as big an audience out there for classic science-fiction aimed at adults as there is for sword-and-sandals epics or foulmouthed cowboys. What's needed is a producer with the guts and vision to pitch a big-budget miniseries version of something like Ringworld or TMiaHM, and a talented director with a love for SF to translate it to the small screen. ONE such hit miniseries and the HBOs and Showtimes will be fighting one another to line up the rights to a whole panoply of classic SF.
The problem is that the MBAs who control the Hollywood production money (and the music industry, as well) have NO vision of their own. So, someone who has a solid track record of producing award-winning hit miniseries has to convince them that there's a market. You and I have no chance of doing so - we're rubes in their book, and what we think would be successful is of no interest to them. They're looking for book (or comic book) franchises with BIG established sales to translate to the screen (thus the tsunami of Stephen King crapola that's gotten movieized or minseriesed over the years). And that means a heavyweight the caliber of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott has to go to bat for such a pitch.
And they already HAVE successful film careers. TV would be a step down in income and prestige for them.
So, the solution to translating classic SF to the screen is obvious. How to get TO that solution is the new problem.
Even if it is a viewpoint typical of Republicans, not all of the social, political, and economic conservatives who align themselves with the Republican party are antiscientific. We shouldn't generalize. Also: spewing bile like that is bad for your credibility, even when your opponent is clearly equally or more aggressive.
ALL of the "pundits" and "commentators" on Faux News are rabidly antiscientific. So is every self-appointed Tea Party spokesperson I've ever heard. So are all the big-money contributors to the Repugnican Party, as well as virtually every conservative PAC.
Given those facts, I think we not only CAN, but we actually SHOULD generalize.
Pointing out your opponent's foibles easily can seem like "spewing bile" - if your opponent's foibles are squicky enough.
Adlai Stevenson famously remarked, “If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.” If that's "spewing bile", then I say, "Spew on."
At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.
The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.
Kashpureff is an asshole. He didn't "partially hijack" DNS "for a little bit" to raise anything other than his bank balance.
I wrote about the transition to what eventually became ICANN in 1997 (see paragraph 6 for Kashpureff's "contribution" to this process). Charging a fee for registrations in the bogus TLDs he "owned" was not the act of a revolutionary - it is the scheme of a buccaneer, pure and simple.
Nor was he the only malefactor. Karl Denninger of MCSNet, who asserted ownership of.BIZ and Christopher Ambler of Image Online Design both attempted to start "alternative" registries, and Ambler tried to flim-flam IANA into legitimizing his attempted namespace land-grab by slipping an envelope containing a $1,000 check into a folder of documents he gave Bill Manning of IANA at the end of a meeting, and subsequently claiming that Manning accepted it as a deposit on his application to start an "experimental registry". (This is Manning's version of the incident - Ambler's, unsurprisingly, differs. I, personally, believe Manning, who had no personal financial stake in the proposal, one way or the other.)
I will also say that, as someone who closely monitored (and occasionally contributed to) the iahc-discuss list, Kashpureff was one of the most combative and least concilliatory members of that list - although there was plenty of flame to go around on all sides of every issue discussed.
Honestly, unless there is something huge that I don't know about, I just don't get how the information gained this way could be worth the cost of our freedom.
I suspect that the NSA and/or the CIA is responsible for Obama's acquiescence to this legal travesty. We ordinary citizens have no way of knowing what "facts" their most-highly-classified presidential briefings present, nor what scenarios they spin for our Chief Executive. It is entirely thinkable that their presentations to the President are loaded with convincing evidence that such blatantly unconstitutional activities are absolutely essential for our national security.
And, of course, it's also entirely possible that their supposed evidence is wholly fabricated, and that they're leading Obama around by the nose. (Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin incident"?)
An anonymous reader writes "The avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, mainly against BitTorrent users, are about to hit a dubious milestone. In total 99,924 defendants have been sued in the last 12 months, and new cases are being filed at a rapid rate. Adult companies in particular have embraced the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme where tens of millions of dollars are at stake."
What utter bullshit.
Judges are throwing aggregated lawsuits out as fast as they're being filed. Both in Britain and the U.S., they've consistently ruled that individual downloaders must be sued individually - and the D.C. judge here in the States told the pr0n asshats that they had to sue individuals in their home jurisdictions for good measure. These cases may have been filed, but NONE of them has come to trial.
And none of them will, because it simply doesn't pencil out for the law firms involved. Some shysters here and in Olde Blighty thought they saw an angle to shoot - and they've gotten shot down themselves. These weasels are no credible threat to anyone. DON'T pay their extortion demands - respond with a promise to counter-sue them for defamation of character, instead. I'll bet you a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you won't hear another peep out of them.
From reading the article I get mostly that it's done all with Mirrors and prisms essentially. Maybe someone else can point out what's so exciting about this?
My DOG, man! Can't you see the fantastic possibilities that will open up once they start adding SMOKE to those mirrors?
As a seventeen-year-old kid, on July 16, 1969, I stood in the front yard of our rental home in Satellite Beach, Florida, and watched Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. It was THE high point of my life to that moment (although the lunar landing and historic first footstep replaced it as such four days later).
Flash forward to January 28, 1986, the day I began working for an audio-visual rental services company in Oakland, California. One of our routine tasks was to test equipment that had been rented out, to ensure that it worked properly before renting it out again. As the brand-new guy, I wanted to impress the boss with my willingness to work, so I started checking a bunch of gear that had been returned at closing time the previous day. Early on in the process, I tested a TV/monitor. I hooked up a VHS player, and that worked fine, and - going the extra mile here - I then hooked up a set of rabbit ears and checked the TV tuner.
The channel that came up was the local ABC affiliate, and I switched on the tuner just as their network announcer broke into Good Morning America to say, "We've just received this raw footage from Cape Canaveral." I watched the two minutes or so of launch footage, and saw for the first time the main fuel tank explode, and the solid fuel boosters' exhaust form the "devil horns" that would become so painfully familiar over the next few days. When the clip began to loop, and the announcer said, "We're not sure what we're seeing here," I muttered under my breath, "Well, I'm sure," and walked up to the front of the warehouse to the manager's office.
"Dan?" I said, "You probably want to see this. The space shuttle just blew up and killed everyone aboard."
Just barely more than 17 years later, on February 1, 2003, I stood in the East pasture of our little five-acre spread in Mariposa County, and watched the Columbia reenter the atmosphere above California. I wondered why I kept seeing pulses of light beneath its wings, but I was so happy to have the opportunity to view an actual shuttle reentry, that I pretty much dismissed it from my mind. Then I went back inside, posted an account of the experience to The Pigdog List, and went to bed (I'd just pulled an all-nighter working on a column for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine). When I woke up that afternoon, I checked my email, to learn... well, we all know what I learned.
I spent the next ten days writing and recording a song about the experience.
I have ten bucks that says he developed the ulcer due to the stress of having to deal with modern copyright issuess and whatever big name Hollywood studios he's had to tolerate doing business with.
Gastric ulcers are the result of "hotspot" infections by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. The most common contributing factors are diabetes, heavy use of NSAIDs, and prolonged high stress levels.
At a guess, and given his obvious weight, Jackson's ulcer was probably precipitated by diabetes and stress. Of course YMMV, etc.
In the article, they mention that the computer gets the question as text. Does anyone know exactly when the computer receives the question? Does it receive when the human host starts talking or when the human host completes the question? If it is when the host starts speaking, the computer is getting at least several second head-start on the humans.
It shouldn't matter much, because Jeopardy's rules lock the buzzers out until Alex has finished reading the question - and that lock-out period is determined by a human producer, who sits at a table off-camera, listening to Alex, and who has a button of her own that enables the buzzers.
Should a contestant try to "buzz in" before the producer pushes that button, his/her/its buzzer is locked out for three seconds - and any attempt to buzz in before that penalty period expires locks your buzzer out for an additional three seconds.
So, yeah, Watson may get to begin parsing the whole question a little early, but, typically, the human contestants get to begin working on it while Alex is still in the process of reading it, too - they just have to anticipate how it will end.
Given the speed of silicon vs. wetware, I agree that it will make a difference - but the real question is whether Watson has to determine that the buzzer is enabled by use of a light sensor (human contestants are notified by a ring of lights around the game board - which home viewers never get to see), or whether it gets notified electronically when the enable switch is activated. I say that, because, at least in my own experience, the ability properly to time the use of your buzzer is an enormous factor in whether you'll do well as a contestant or not.
When I was in the contestant pool in 1991, during the taping of the episode before I was chosen to compete, a four-time winner who was just a monster on the buzzer went up against two newbies. One of them, a little man from New Jersey, obviously became more and more frustrated as the game progressed, when he was unable to buzz in against the Monster, who completely dominated the game (the Monster was a word processor from New Mexico who played videogames as a hobby, so it wasn't surprising that his timing with the buzzer was extra-super good to begin with - and he'd had the non-trivial advantage of four previous games in which to hone his timing). Twice during Double Jeopardy, the New Mexico Monster declined to buzz in, which permitted the little man from New Jersey to do so. Both times, the question was a difficult and obscure one, and both times the little man from New Jersey failed to supply the correct answer, so, when Final Jeopardy came around, there was an empty podium where the little man from New Jersey had been, and, predictably, the Monster became a five-time champion.
Boy, was I glad I didn't have to go up against HIM.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll say. Try 1968. December 9, to be precise:
This: "The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our heads, but from Teslaâ(TM)s boffins in California. They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles."
So they are suing the BBC over a claim they themselves fed to the Top Gear producers which was only relayed in the show.
Yeah, really, I can see how Top Gear acted in bad faith here. How dare they trust the information from the manufacturer!
Absent a transcript of the actual communications between Top Gear and Tesla's "boffins", the substance of the above claim is entirely unclear. It would not surprise me, for instance, to find out that what actually happened was that TG emailed Tesla to ask, "Could your car make it 55 miles on our track?" If Tesla's techs replied, "Sure!" TG could then claim that "Tesla's boffins" gave them a range of 55 miles on their track.
What IS abundantly clear is that TG did NOT themselves drive the Tesla they "tested" on their track until it actually ran out of juice. I think, based on that fact, Tesla has been pretty reasonable in requesting that TG not continue to replay the show in which its purposefully misleading "test" appears to show the car running out of juice and HAVING to be pushed back to the shop. Regardless of TG's spin, they themselves admit that nothing of the sort really happened. It was a bit of scripted snark on TG's part - and deliberately misleading snark, at that.
Can we have this on comments too ?
Yep. Next April fools' day. I give you Cmdr Taquito's word on it.
Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just afraid to see me?
Excerpted from ScrewMaster (602015)'s rant on iLECs and metered Internet usage:
the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with ... and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.)
That behavior is far from confined to the telco industry. In fact, it's ubiquitous within the U.S. business sector, and nearly as much so in the rest of the capitalist world. Virtually across the board, this is because they're run by MBAs. MBAs have it hammered into them from admission to matriculation that increasing shareholder value at all costs is not simply their central duty, but indeed their only goal in life (aside from craven self-advancement, that is). And at no time are they ever led to question whether the highest, best good is best served by delivering that increased value over the shortest term possible (otherwise known as the "what have you done for me THIS quarter?" principle). Because, hey, by the time the problems inherent to this relentless short-term focus become apparent, the suits that inflicted them have long since been wooed away to positions of greater power, pay grade, and perks elsewhere, and it will be someone else's responsibility to return the company to record (short-term) profitability. And share price. Temporarily.
Circle of deceit, baby. It's a beautiful thing.
It is my observation that, quite often, those who set out to ruin the lives of many, many others on the off chance that they can turn a profit from an act that many would term to be malicious money-grubbing are just expanding a pattern of behavior that equally as typically extends years and even decades in their past. Hence my use of the word "probably"...and my ignoring of your article's origination on the time-line of events.
Blah, blah, attempted post hoc justification, blah.
Perchance do you still get royalties for that article? You seem quite eager to get people to read it...even providing a link when it could be argued that said link has nothing to do with this slashdot article and was unnecessary in your original comment given that the claim of having written it means nothing on the web...i.e. I could as easily have claimed to have written it and included a link so as to harvest the click-profits for myself.
No, I don't get royalties for that story. You obviously don't understand how freelance writing works ... as only one of myriad things you obviously don't understand.
Go away, you dickless troll.
Uh, that's certainly VERY "little research". Essentially, it's an opinion piece that includes two quotes - one from a Stephens Media rep who expresses hope that the lawsuits in question will result in more linkbacks to LVRJ articles online (and, by implication, fewer cops of LVRJ content), and the other from the slimebag that runs Righthaven. Now, since Stephens Media does NOT own Righthaven, I fail entirely to see how this "suggests" in any way, shape, or form that Stephens Media is "probably a lot slimy."
Which brings up the question of why you believe that a freelance writer (i.e. - me) selling a story to a weekly magazine whose editorial management is (as is the case with EVERY ethical news operation) completely divorced and firewalled from the business management side of the operation is in any way unethical, immoral, or "slimy".
Huh....actually, I chose to use the link to techdirt's piece 'cuz using Wikipedia is often considered to be "too easy" while I figured including a link to the statement of the President and CEO of Stephens Media announcing that Stephens Media had "grubstaked and contracted with a company called Righthaven" and filed 22 lawsuits as merely their opening salvo was likely to bias the reader. Especially if the reader knew the definition of "grubstake". .And I said the money they paid you was likely slimy; I did not say you were slimy for accepting it - rather, you chose to interpret it that way. Or perhaps, rather unusually for a freelance writer in America, English is your second language?
Oh, fer pity's sake:
grubstake/grbstk/ Verb: Provide with a grubstake. Noun: An amount of material, provisions, or money supplied to an enterprise (originally a prospector for ore) in return for a share in the resulting profits.
"A share in the profits" /= ""ownership".
And: "I said the money they paid you was likely slimy; I did not say you were slimy for accepting it - rather, you chose to interpret it that way," is sheer semantic handwaving on your part. Claiming that money paid for work entirely unrelated to copyright trolling and predating the creation of Righthaven by nearly three years is "slimy" implies a moral judgement on YOUR part about MY accepting it.
So kindly go fuck yourself, Judgey McJudgington.
TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)
I hope you washed the money they paid you...a little research suggests that it was probably a lot slimy.
Uh, that's certainly VERY "little research". Essentially, it's an opinion piece that includes two quotes - one from a Stephens Media rep who expresses hope that the lawsuits in question will result in more linkbacks to LVRJ articles online (and, by implication, fewer cops of LVRJ content), and the other from the slimebag that runs Righthaven. Now, since Stephens Media does NOT own Righthaven, I fail entirely to see how this "suggests" in any way, shape, or form that Stephens Media is "probably a lot slimy."
Which brings up the question of why you believe that a freelance writer (i.e. - me) selling a story to a weekly magazine whose editorial management is (as is the case with EVERY ethical news operation) completely divorced and firewalled from the business management side of the operation is in any way unethical, immoral, or "slimy".
My hunch is that you're just a dimwiit who didn't bother to read MY article, who is profoundly unfamiliar with the principle of editorial independence in professional journalism, and who has such a pathetically weak little ego that you have to reach around the block for a pretext to feel morally superior to strangers, based on nothing but someone else's hot air.
Having said that, I want to make clear that I have zero sympathy with Righthaven's handwaving, and I consider Stephens Media to have made a major error in judgement in allowing itself to be linked with those scumbags. Yes, it's getting harder and harder for newspapers to turn a profit as online news aggregators increasingly steal their readers. That's tough (and it's particularly tough on those of us who write for a living, since the very newspapers and magazines that the aggregators are parasitizing are the source of much of our income), but it still doesn't make it a good idea for them to associate themselves with legal bullying. However, I doubt that it will cost them many additional readers, because most people just don't give a damn about copyright trolling.
Anyway, the courts have shown little sympathy with Righthaven's conduct. Copyright trolling has turned out not to be the license to print money that Righthaven expected it to be, and I fully expect it to fold its tent and slink silently back into the slime from which it oozed, RSN.
Is that anything like "The Google?"
TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)
We'd still have the problem of a script though... how many writers can write for a long(ish) miniseries and maintain quality writing, even with the book(s) as guide(s)? Few... look what happened to Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica/Craprica, Farscape, etc... Writers seem to go off on a tangent or think they can improve on the story in the book and then it all goes off the rails and crashes in a firery heap. Firefly is so great because it didn't have a chance to go off the rails...
Well, B5, Farscape, and Gacrapitica are all TV series - not miniseries. (B5 had an overall 5-year plot arc that set it apart from other series, but that wound up becoming problematic when PTEN started coming unraveled and Warner Bros. began wavering on its commitment to fund the full five years. Strazinski then was faced with the choice of either letting the series simply stop at the end of the fourth season, with a large number of balls still left in the air, or hacking the fifth season down to a size where he could, if WB dropped the series, simply fold its events into season four, and end it with most of the loose ends tied up. When WB finally committed to funding season five, late in the production of season four, he then had to stretch what remained of the overall plot arc to cover the many additional episodes between where the story stood when funding came through and his vision for the series end. It was kinda like Congress and the NASA budget, in a way.)
So, a miniseries, per se, with its predefined episode structure, would not suffer from those same problems - it woudn't be open-ended, like Gacrapitca and Farscape, nor would it suffer from the studio screwing around with the episode structure in mid-production, as happened with B5.
How could you translate the Ringworld stuff to the screen? You'd need like 5 hours of setup just to get into the main plot line. That is really the crux of the problem with Scifi and movies. There's so much supporting material that needs to be in place to make good Scifi that you just can't do it on the screen in any reasonable amount of movie time. I would love to see those you listed translated to the screen, but even The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would need to be 4 to 5 hours long to be done properly. The others... much longer. Think LotR at best.
That's exactly why the ideal audio-visual presentation mode for stories like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - and Ringworld and so many, many other SF classics - is the TV miniseries, rather than a theatrical motion picture. For all their faults, the SciFi Channel's miniseries versions of Dune and Children of Dune are cases in point. Both could have benefited tremendously from larger budgets and better casts, but the miniseries format gave them time and space to present their stories' complexities and do some serious worldbuilding, as well. And with HDTV resolution, sound and aspect ratio, TV is no longer a second-rate esthetic experience, either.
Of course, the crap factory that is SyFy is certainly not going to do justice to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, regardless. But HBO, Showtime, or even Starz is looking at a potential shelf-full of Emmys and Ace Awards, should they take up the challenge. Rome, Spartacus, Deadwood; even Boardwalk Empire show what they can accomplish with historical material, and there's at least as big an audience out there for classic science-fiction aimed at adults as there is for sword-and-sandals epics or foulmouthed cowboys. What's needed is a producer with the guts and vision to pitch a big-budget miniseries version of something like Ringworld or TMiaHM, and a talented director with a love for SF to translate it to the small screen. ONE such hit miniseries and the HBOs and Showtimes will be fighting one another to line up the rights to a whole panoply of classic SF.
The problem is that the MBAs who control the Hollywood production money (and the music industry, as well) have NO vision of their own. So, someone who has a solid track record of producing award-winning hit miniseries has to convince them that there's a market. You and I have no chance of doing so - we're rubes in their book, and what we think would be successful is of no interest to them. They're looking for book (or comic book) franchises with BIG established sales to translate to the screen (thus the tsunami of Stephen King crapola that's gotten movieized or minseriesed over the years). And that means a heavyweight the caliber of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott has to go to bat for such a pitch.
And they already HAVE successful film careers. TV would be a step down in income and prestige for them.
So, the solution to translating classic SF to the screen is obvious. How to get TO that solution is the new problem.
Even if it is a viewpoint typical of Republicans, not all of the social, political, and economic conservatives who align themselves with the Republican party are antiscientific. We shouldn't generalize. Also: spewing bile like that is bad for your credibility, even when your opponent is clearly equally or more aggressive.
ALL of the "pundits" and "commentators" on Faux News are rabidly antiscientific. So is every self-appointed Tea Party spokesperson I've ever heard. So are all the big-money contributors to the Repugnican Party, as well as virtually every conservative PAC.
Given those facts, I think we not only CAN, but we actually SHOULD generalize.
Pointing out your opponent's foibles easily can seem like "spewing bile" - if your opponent's foibles are squicky enough.
Adlai Stevenson famously remarked, “If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.” If that's "spewing bile", then I say, "Spew on."
Stellar wormholes exist? Yay interstellar subway system!
The patent was applied for in 1996?
Back then ... IE and Netscape were both products you had to pay for
Er ... no.
Netscape Navigator was free for personal use. Plus, even for business use, the $39.95 price tag was never enforced - and rarely paid.
Once again Tom Starck writes about something he was tangentially aware of and gets it wrong
Once again, "Dick" Sexton manages to spell my name wrong.
I think that's all that needs to be said about HIS attention to detail.
At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.
The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.
Kashpureff is an asshole. He didn't "partially hijack" DNS "for a little bit" to raise anything other than his bank balance.
I wrote about the transition to what eventually became ICANN in 1997 (see paragraph 6 for Kashpureff's "contribution" to this process). Charging a fee for registrations in the bogus TLDs he "owned" was not the act of a revolutionary - it is the scheme of a buccaneer, pure and simple.
Nor was he the only malefactor. Karl Denninger of MCSNet, who asserted ownership of .BIZ and Christopher Ambler of Image Online Design both attempted to start "alternative" registries, and Ambler tried to flim-flam IANA into legitimizing his attempted namespace land-grab by slipping an envelope containing a $1,000 check into a folder of documents he gave Bill Manning of IANA at the end of a meeting, and subsequently claiming that Manning accepted it as a deposit on his application to start an "experimental registry". (This is Manning's version of the incident - Ambler's, unsurprisingly, differs. I, personally, believe Manning, who had no personal financial stake in the proposal, one way or the other.)
I will also say that, as someone who closely monitored (and occasionally contributed to) the iahc-discuss list, Kashpureff was one of the most combative and least concilliatory members of that list - although there was plenty of flame to go around on all sides of every issue discussed.
Honestly, unless there is something huge that I don't know about, I just don't get how the information gained this way could be worth the cost of our freedom.
I suspect that the NSA and/or the CIA is responsible for Obama's acquiescence to this legal travesty. We ordinary citizens have no way of knowing what "facts" their most-highly-classified presidential briefings present, nor what scenarios they spin for our Chief Executive. It is entirely thinkable that their presentations to the President are loaded with convincing evidence that such blatantly unconstitutional activities are absolutely essential for our national security.
And, of course, it's also entirely possible that their supposed evidence is wholly fabricated, and that they're leading Obama around by the nose. (Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin incident"?)
that bittorrent IS used for legit purposes.
FTFY
An anonymous reader writes "The avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, mainly against BitTorrent users, are about to hit a dubious milestone. In total 99,924 defendants have been sued in the last 12 months, and new cases are being filed at a rapid rate. Adult companies in particular have embraced the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme where tens of millions of dollars are at stake."
What utter bullshit.
Judges are throwing aggregated lawsuits out as fast as they're being filed. Both in Britain and the U.S., they've consistently ruled that individual downloaders must be sued individually - and the D.C. judge here in the States told the pr0n asshats that they had to sue individuals in their home jurisdictions for good measure. These cases may have been filed, but NONE of them has come to trial.
And none of them will, because it simply doesn't pencil out for the law firms involved. Some shysters here and in Olde Blighty thought they saw an angle to shoot - and they've gotten shot down themselves. These weasels are no credible threat to anyone. DON'T pay their extortion demands - respond with a promise to counter-sue them for defamation of character, instead. I'll bet you a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you won't hear another peep out of them.
From reading the article I get mostly that it's done all with Mirrors and prisms essentially. Maybe someone else can point out what's so exciting about this?
My DOG, man! Can't you see the fantastic possibilities that will open up once they start adding SMOKE to those mirrors?
... Don't let Bender hear about this ...
As a seventeen-year-old kid, on July 16, 1969, I stood in the front yard of our rental home in Satellite Beach, Florida, and watched Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. It was THE high point of my life to that moment (although the lunar landing and historic first footstep replaced it as such four days later).
Flash forward to January 28, 1986, the day I began working for an audio-visual rental services company in Oakland, California. One of our routine tasks was to test equipment that had been rented out, to ensure that it worked properly before renting it out again. As the brand-new guy, I wanted to impress the boss with my willingness to work, so I started checking a bunch of gear that had been returned at closing time the previous day. Early on in the process, I tested a TV/monitor. I hooked up a VHS player, and that worked fine, and - going the extra mile here - I then hooked up a set of rabbit ears and checked the TV tuner.
The channel that came up was the local ABC affiliate, and I switched on the tuner just as their network announcer broke into Good Morning America to say, "We've just received this raw footage from Cape Canaveral." I watched the two minutes or so of launch footage, and saw for the first time the main fuel tank explode, and the solid fuel boosters' exhaust form the "devil horns" that would become so painfully familiar over the next few days. When the clip began to loop, and the announcer said, "We're not sure what we're seeing here," I muttered under my breath, "Well, I'm sure," and walked up to the front of the warehouse to the manager's office.
"Dan?" I said, "You probably want to see this. The space shuttle just blew up and killed everyone aboard."
Just barely more than 17 years later, on February 1, 2003, I stood in the East pasture of our little five-acre spread in Mariposa County, and watched the Columbia reenter the atmosphere above California. I wondered why I kept seeing pulses of light beneath its wings, but I was so happy to have the opportunity to view an actual shuttle reentry, that I pretty much dismissed it from my mind. Then I went back inside, posted an account of the experience to The Pigdog List, and went to bed (I'd just pulled an all-nighter working on a column for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine). When I woke up that afternoon, I checked my email, to learn ... well, we all know what I learned.
I spent the next ten days writing and recording a song about the experience.
It's the second-saddest song I've every written.
I have ten bucks that says he developed the ulcer due to the stress of having to deal with modern copyright issuess and whatever big name Hollywood studios he's had to tolerate doing business with.
Gastric ulcers are the result of "hotspot" infections by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. The most common contributing factors are diabetes, heavy use of NSAIDs, and prolonged high stress levels.
At a guess, and given his obvious weight, Jackson's ulcer was probably precipitated by diabetes and stress. Of course YMMV, etc.
Guess why I know these things ...
In the article, they mention that the computer gets the question as text. Does anyone know exactly when the computer receives the question? Does it receive when the human host starts talking or when the human host completes the question? If it is when the host starts speaking, the computer is getting at least several second head-start on the humans.
It shouldn't matter much, because Jeopardy's rules lock the buzzers out until Alex has finished reading the question - and that lock-out period is determined by a human producer, who sits at a table off-camera, listening to Alex, and who has a button of her own that enables the buzzers.
Should a contestant try to "buzz in" before the producer pushes that button, his/her/its buzzer is locked out for three seconds - and any attempt to buzz in before that penalty period expires locks your buzzer out for an additional three seconds.
So, yeah, Watson may get to begin parsing the whole question a little early, but, typically, the human contestants get to begin working on it while Alex is still in the process of reading it, too - they just have to anticipate how it will end.
Given the speed of silicon vs. wetware, I agree that it will make a difference - but the real question is whether Watson has to determine that the buzzer is enabled by use of a light sensor (human contestants are notified by a ring of lights around the game board - which home viewers never get to see), or whether it gets notified electronically when the enable switch is activated. I say that, because, at least in my own experience, the ability properly to time the use of your buzzer is an enormous factor in whether you'll do well as a contestant or not.
When I was in the contestant pool in 1991, during the taping of the episode before I was chosen to compete, a four-time winner who was just a monster on the buzzer went up against two newbies. One of them, a little man from New Jersey, obviously became more and more frustrated as the game progressed, when he was unable to buzz in against the Monster, who completely dominated the game (the Monster was a word processor from New Mexico who played videogames as a hobby, so it wasn't surprising that his timing with the buzzer was extra-super good to begin with - and he'd had the non-trivial advantage of four previous games in which to hone his timing). Twice during Double Jeopardy, the New Mexico Monster declined to buzz in, which permitted the little man from New Jersey to do so. Both times, the question was a difficult and obscure one, and both times the little man from New Jersey failed to supply the correct answer, so, when Final Jeopardy came around, there was an empty podium where the little man from New Jersey had been, and, predictably, the Monster became a five-time champion.
Boy, was I glad I didn't have to go up against HIM.
Leave it to a MegaCorp to do the wrong thing.
Actually, leave it to Howard Stringer, the man who destroyed CBS News, to do the wrong thing.
Larry Ellison notwithstanding, a bigger putz you will not find.