I've been to both China and Russia and I must say that it was *far* more apparent in Russia. There were shops along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, the main shopping area, that openly sold pirated movies, software and music. Every underground crosswalk had kiosks selling CDs full of stuff and the police neither noticed or cared. I heard that at that time, 2001, there were no real laws against it. (This may have changed in the last few years, I'm sure someone could confirm.)
In Beijing, I saw one seller of what I assumed were pirated movies. Just one at an open market on the east side, along side the people selling tiger claws and other horrifying animal parts for traditional medicines.
I really saw nothing to indicate that they had nearly as broad a culture of "piracy" as Russia did.
Here in Japan, it's perfectly legal to look at pictures of nude fifteen year old girls, but if you show an erect penis or explicit penetration, it's illegal. Photographic depictions of pubic hair used to be illegal too, but that changed a few years ago.
Basically, most anything that gets sold as "porn" in the US would be illegal here, but magazines selling what the US might consider "child porn" can be bought at any convenience store.
In the UAE, Flickr is apparently banned as being a porn site.
After Janet Jackson's withered teat was unleashed during the SuperBowl, religious conservatives of all faiths begged to have their eyes gouged out with a sharpened stick, but that may have been just a matter of good taste...
Why doesn't the US just take over the "XXX.US" domain, shovel all of their porn into it, let the Christian conservatives cover it over with landfill and shut the hell up?
The whole point of getting an MBA is so you know to use these things on the competition, and not have them used on yourself. Of course, if you got your MBA from one of those places offering them for $5 on the internet, you might not have to do any actual learning.
-- A million lemmings can't be wrong.
Sometimes the Internet ain't such a bad place to do a bit of learning, too:
"...because of the well-known Disney Studios film, White Wilderness, which was produced in 1958 and reappeared on television at regular intervals for many years afterwards. White Wilderness popularized, using staged footage, the myth that during population booms Norway Lemmings become suicidal and leap en masse off cliffs into the sea..."
I looked at the site, using a link found below and I'm wondering why you don't use something like Drupal. (drupal.org) Setup is easy, it's free and after a slight learning curve, you'll save yourself hours or days of effort. With a bit of CSS tweaking, the site could even look the same. You could use wordpress, but with an academic site like that, you probably need something with more advanced taxonomies. Plus, you'd get things like RSS syndication, which adds immeasurably to the site's usefulness. For simple text documents in word, just copy and paste. If you need something formatted exactly, use a downloadable PDF. (Preferably with the text somewhere that Google can index it easily.
Or, conversely, you could just plug your iSight into your iPod photo and install that firmware hack that was floating around the net a while back to record mpeg-2 streams.
Of course, with an iSight, you can't zoom and the focus tended to be unreliable, but it might fit the bill...
An old English teacher of mine told me once to substitute in the word "his" when unsure of "It's" and "Its". If "his" sounds almost right, go with "its".
I went there and it didn't load properly, backed out to/. and went again to the site and it came up zoomed to (what looked like) a very specific address in what I think was Atlanta...
It struck me as the kind of errors you sometimes get with mod_perl and Apache when you don't do things right...
You have a house. In front of that house is a spigot where you attach your green garden hose.
Let's say it's a hot summer day and I ride by on my bike and see that you have left the water running - is it ethical for me to stop and take a drink? Probably, even if I don't ask. (Though courtesy might dictate that I do ask. For me, it would depend upon the placement of the spigot and how much of your property I had to cross.)
Is it ethical for me to fill up a 10 gallon container and carry it away? Give myself a shower with your hose? Doubtful, but I suppose there might be exceptions.
Would it be ethical for me to attach a hidden hose over to my house where I don't have my own water? No, not likely to be either ethical or legal, with or without your permission.
No go back to the original question of a drink of water. What if you as a homeowner had removed the handle from the spigot to prevent casual "theft" of your water. (This is a common practice.) Even if I have a wrench or a spigot handle of my own, I think that you've made it reasonably clear that you don't want to share your connection. Circumventing your protective measures is probably illegal and certainly unethical.
Terrorists and child pornographers don't need your WiFi connection to do their dirty deeds. I think most of them are clever enough to figure out how to use open proxies or onion routing or some other method to cover their tracks and not risk having their deeds discovered during a routine traffic stop or a fender bender and encountering an over-curious police officer. (Well, at least *some* of them might not be that dumb. Er, then again, if you're dumb enough to be doing it in the first place, you probably *are* that dumb.)
I live in Japan, so a lot of my landline calls up until last year were overseas. Even before I was using VoIP, (Skype where I can,) it turned out that a lot of the long distance providers were using VoIP to route the calls and the quality was simply terrible. It was so bad that I would have to keep trying different services until I found one that wasn't overloaded and dropping parts of the conversation all over the place. It won't be long before they're doing that for local calls here as well.
Now, for 90% of the calls back home, I use Skype and the quality is excellent. Sure, most of it is Skype to Skype, but the benefit of that is that Presence is added and I actually know that the person is around and available to talk, as I usually send a quick text message before initiating a voice call.
If the local telcos demand reliable 911 access, they should pay for an emergency-only phone that uses copper to be put into every location that requires it. It should be red and maybe inside a glass case like a fire extinguisher. No buttons, either, just pick it up and you're connected to an operator.
I have the same scanner, gotten second hand, with Japanese disks for the software, so I did the download thing.
The trick is, you have to get and install the 4.0 version before installing the 4.01 update - the 4.01 package is just updates, not the whole thing. But yes, having to register to do this is annoying.
The point of this is that someone wanted to use the word "Skypecast".
Look at the the "bullet points" from the article:
>>A growing number of people are sharing the digital music on MP3 players and other music devices using freely available software and Skype, a free Internet phone service. How are mp3 players part of this? Sure, you could rip the stream from skype, tag it and save it, then transfer it to your iPod, but it would be a pain and sound pretty bad.
The enthusiasts are borrowing heavily from another personal broadcasting phenomenon called podcasting, in which digital recordings are posted on a Web site for download to a variety of music players, including desktop PCs and portable gadgets like Apple Computer's wildly popular iPod. They're borrowing more heavily from kids who used to play songs for each other over the telephone, with similar results.
"Skypecasters," as they call themselves, use Skype's peer-to-peer telephone network to distribute recordings over the Internet directly to each other for free....In a way that has little to do with any of the advantages of modern peer to peer distribution, as Skype uses P2P merely for point to point, one to few transport.
This is a case of someone tossing around buzzwords without understanding the technology, in an "iPods! P2P! Skype! Isn't it all just so neat!" kind of way.
I give it a week before some bonehead is yammering on about how "BlueCasting" is all the rage.
You're probably right - I very quickly googled for figures. Looking now, I was comparing the total mass transit of tokyo to the subway ridership only of NYC. Still, the trains and busses here run on time and it's a lot more people passing through the system. Tokyo still seems to win out in this one/
Where I live, having GBS on the busses would be redundant and fairly useless.
If I'm at the bus stop, I can look at the sign and printed there it tells me that the bus will arrive at 9:53 am. I check my watch and at precisely 9:53, the bus pulls up. Every time. When friends are at my house in the evening, they may hop onto the web to see what time the subway is leaving. Not just the last train, but any one before that.
When I lived in the states, in Washington DC, there was no attempt at keeping a schedule at all. I was on the subway one time, in the first car, when the driver stopped for a few minutes in mid tunnel, to chat with another driver who had also stopped. Since I was near the front, I could hear it and it wasn't safety-related or anything justifiable, it was all "Hey, girlfriend, how's your Momma doin'?"
Here in Tokyo, they move about twenty-seven million people around on mass transit every day. (Compare that with NYC's daily 3.1 million.) I guess to do that you have to be pretty precise about your timetables.
Strangely though, last night there was a one hour delay on my usual train. Somebody had jumped in front of it. That's about the only reason things get slowed down.
I work in an IT/Internet company in Tokyo and every few days, someone in the office pulls out yet another latest and greatest cellphone with a higher resolution camera, better ringtones, bells, whistles, doo-dads. Mine is an old piece of junk that doesn't do much of anything. It has some sort of proprietary email function that I have never used, expensive web access, I think, again never used. Recently, a company Tu-ka came out with a new model that caught my eye - their "S" model, a nearly featureless phone. It has no camera or web or email. It doesn't have an address book. For that matter, it doesn't even have any sort of display. It has an LED to let you know that it's on, I think, and that's it. If you miss a call, well, you had better hope they call back. If you catch the call, you have to ask who's calling.
On the upside, it has 840 hours of standby and 240 minutes of talk time in the battery. The operation is exceedingly simple and straightforward. The buttons are large and the sound is clear. For talking, it's a great phone. As you may have guessed, the target market is Japan's elderly, for many of whom this will be a first cellphone, probably a direct upgrade to a black bakelite rotary phone. The advertisements show old people in kimono.
For me, I want one because it will do what I want it to and nothing more. It will never become obsolete. As for showing it off to my cow-orkers, sure, maybe for a few laughs, but it will be pretty clear that I'm just not playing along. If it only had a rotary dial...
More and more, I'm getting away from the needless gadgets that used to clutter up my life. Where I used to say "always be charging," I now grab a couple of rolls of black and white film for my camera, my notebook and a pen and head out the door. My pictures are better for it, my notes more accessible and will never become unreadable because the hardware has become obsolete. I don't read e-books -- I read books. Sure, my music collection is a server full of MP3s, but I tend to listen at home, using speakers, rather than on my now-obsolete 5GB iPod.
"Clippy" is gone. There should never be a need for you to see it ever again. I haven't actually seen it in years.
In fact, the only place I ever hear about it anymore is here on Slashdot, where the merest mention of it seems to garner endless chuckles and mod points. Can't we just let the damned, detestable, yet mercifully short-lived abomination fade into obscurity with his ill-conceived yet now mostly forgotten friends "MS Bob" and "MS SQL Server"?
Just because you have the source it doesn't automatically make your software work together.
But having the source does make it possible for you to modify the software to do these things, if that is something important enough to your business.
Not having the source, on the other hand, precludes this possibility, unless the holder of the source has specifically allowed it.
You may think that modifying source code is something too mysterious and difficult for casual developers, but such is not the case. I'm not really a coder, but I often tweak little things in programs to get them to do what I want. Just fire up a text editor, look at the code, mess about a bit, then "./configure; make; make install" It can be tremendously satisfying.
Want to make AbiWord open Gimp documents? All you need is vi and a bit of time and talent. Want to make MS Word read Gimp documents? In that case, you're simply shit out of luck.
The content management system is doing that. Just today I was posting an article discussing Renaissance architecture and what came out was a shoegazer post about cat shit.
I think it must have something to do with the version of PERL I'm using.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to both China and Russia and I must say that it was *far* more apparent in Russia.
There were shops along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, the main shopping area, that openly sold pirated movies, software and music. Every underground crosswalk had kiosks selling CDs full of stuff and the police neither noticed or cared. I heard that at that time, 2001, there were no real laws against it.
(This may have changed in the last few years, I'm sure someone could confirm.)
In Beijing, I saw one seller of what I assumed were pirated movies. Just one at an open market on the east side, along side the people selling tiger claws and other horrifying animal parts for traditional medicines.
I really saw nothing to indicate that they had nearly as broad a culture of "piracy" as Russia did.
Here in Japan, it's perfectly legal to look at pictures of nude fifteen year old girls, but if you show an erect penis or explicit penetration, it's illegal. Photographic depictions of pubic hair used to be illegal too, but that changed a few years ago.
Basically, most anything that gets sold as "porn" in the US would be illegal here, but magazines selling what the US might consider "child porn" can be bought at any convenience store.
In the UAE, Flickr is apparently banned as being a porn site.
After Janet Jackson's withered teat was unleashed during the SuperBowl, religious conservatives of all faiths begged to have their eyes gouged out with a sharpened stick, but that may have been just a matter of good taste...
Why doesn't the US just take over the "XXX.US" domain, shovel all of their porn into it, let the Christian conservatives cover it over with landfill and shut the hell up?
The whole point of getting an MBA is so you know to use these things on the competition, and not have them used on yourself. Of course, if you got your MBA from one of those places offering them for $5 on the internet, you might not have to do any actual learning.
--
A million lemmings can't be wrong.
Sometimes the Internet ain't such a bad place to do a bit of learning, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming
"...because of the well-known Disney Studios film, White Wilderness, which was produced in 1958 and reappeared on television at regular intervals for many years afterwards. White Wilderness popularized, using staged footage, the myth that during population booms Norway Lemmings become suicidal and leap en masse off cliffs into the sea..."
NT
Please, someone, please redesign that hideous GNU logo.
Did they later convert that space to a cubicle farm?
I think I worked there.
I looked at the site, using a link found below and I'm wondering why you don't use something like Drupal. (drupal.org)
Setup is easy, it's free and after a slight learning curve, you'll save yourself hours or days of effort. With a bit of CSS tweaking, the site could even look the same. You could use wordpress, but with an academic site like that, you probably need something with more advanced taxonomies.
Plus, you'd get things like RSS syndication, which adds immeasurably to the site's usefulness.
For simple text documents in word, just copy and paste. If you need something formatted exactly, use a downloadable PDF. (Preferably with the text somewhere that Google can index it easily.
Or, conversely, you could just plug your iSight into your iPod photo and install that firmware hack that was floating around the net a while back to record mpeg-2 streams.
Of course, with an iSight, you can't zoom and the focus tended to be unreliable, but it might fit the bill...
An old English teacher of mine told me once to substitute in the word "his" when unsure of "It's" and "Its".
If "his" sounds almost right, go with "its".
You are evil. ;-)
I have a lot of stuff to do today and now I'm going to be playing that all day...
I went there and it didn't load properly, backed out to /. and went again to the site and it came up zoomed to (what looked like) a very specific address in what I think was Atlanta...
It struck me as the kind of errors you sometimes get with mod_perl and Apache when you don't do things right...
You have a house.
In front of that house is a spigot where you attach your green garden hose.
Let's say it's a hot summer day and I ride by on my bike and see that you have left the water running - is it ethical for me to stop and take a drink? Probably, even if I don't ask. (Though courtesy might dictate that I do ask. For me, it would depend upon the placement of the spigot and how much of your property I had to cross.)
Is it ethical for me to fill up a 10 gallon container and carry it away? Give myself a shower with your hose? Doubtful, but I suppose there might be exceptions.
Would it be ethical for me to attach a hidden hose over to my house where I don't have my own water? No, not likely to be either ethical or legal, with or without your permission.
No go back to the original question of a drink of water. What if you as a homeowner had removed the handle from the spigot to prevent casual "theft" of your water. (This is a common practice.) Even if I have a wrench or a spigot handle of my own, I think that you've made it reasonably clear that you don't want to share your connection. Circumventing your protective measures is probably illegal and certainly unethical.
Terrorists and child pornographers don't need your WiFi connection to do their dirty deeds. I think most of them are clever enough to figure out how to use open proxies or onion routing or some other method to cover their tracks and not risk having their deeds discovered during a routine traffic stop or a fender bender and encountering an over-curious police officer. (Well, at least *some* of them might not be that dumb. Er, then again, if you're dumb enough to be doing it in the first place, you probably *are* that dumb.)
I live in Japan, so a lot of my landline calls up until last year were overseas.
Even before I was using VoIP, (Skype where I can,) it turned out that a lot of the long distance providers were using VoIP to route the calls and the quality was simply terrible.
It was so bad that I would have to keep trying different services until I found one that wasn't overloaded and dropping parts of the conversation all over the place.
It won't be long before they're doing that for local calls here as well.
Now, for 90% of the calls back home, I use Skype and the quality is excellent. Sure, most of it is Skype to Skype, but the benefit of that is that Presence is added and I actually know that the person is around and available to talk, as I usually send a quick text message before initiating a voice call.
If the local telcos demand reliable 911 access, they should pay for an emergency-only phone that uses copper to be put into every location that requires it. It should be red and maybe inside a glass case like a fire extinguisher. No buttons, either, just pick it up and you're connected to an operator.
Got a mod point for this parent? (NT)
I have the same scanner, gotten second hand, with Japanese disks for the software, so I did the download thing.
The trick is, you have to get and install the 4.0 version before installing the 4.01 update - the 4.01 package is just updates, not the whole thing.
But yes, having to register to do this is annoying.
The point of this is that someone wanted to use the word "Skypecast".
...In a way that has little to do with any of the advantages of modern peer to peer distribution, as Skype uses P2P merely for point to point, one to few transport.
Look at the the "bullet points" from the article:
>>A growing number of people are sharing the digital music on MP3 players and other music devices using freely available software and Skype, a free Internet phone service.
How are mp3 players part of this? Sure, you could rip the stream from skype, tag it and save it, then transfer it to your iPod, but it would be a pain and sound pretty bad.
The enthusiasts are borrowing heavily from another personal broadcasting phenomenon called podcasting, in which digital recordings are posted on a Web site for download to a variety of music players, including desktop PCs and portable gadgets like Apple Computer's wildly popular iPod.
They're borrowing more heavily from kids who used to play songs for each other over the telephone, with similar results.
"Skypecasters," as they call themselves, use Skype's peer-to-peer telephone network to distribute recordings over the Internet directly to each other for free.
This is a case of someone tossing around buzzwords without understanding the technology, in an "iPods! P2P! Skype! Isn't it all just so neat!" kind of way.
I give it a week before some bonehead is yammering on about how "BlueCasting" is all the rage.
People sue a *lot* less here in Japan than they do in the US.
Corporations may a bit more, but it's just not a litigious society.
You're probably right - I very quickly googled for figures.
Looking now, I was comparing the total mass transit of tokyo to the subway ridership only of NYC.
Still, the trains and busses here run on time and it's a lot more people passing through the system.
Tokyo still seems to win out in this one/
Where I live, having GBS on the busses would be redundant and fairly useless.
If I'm at the bus stop, I can look at the sign and printed there it tells me that the bus will arrive at 9:53 am. I check my watch and at precisely 9:53, the bus pulls up. Every time.
When friends are at my house in the evening, they may hop onto the web to see what time the subway is leaving. Not just the last train, but any one before that.
When I lived in the states, in Washington DC, there was no attempt at keeping a schedule at all. I was on the subway one time, in the first car, when the driver stopped for a few minutes in mid tunnel, to chat with another driver who had also stopped. Since I was near the front, I could hear it and it wasn't safety-related or anything justifiable, it was all "Hey, girlfriend, how's your Momma doin'?"
Here in Tokyo, they move about twenty-seven million people around on mass transit every day. (Compare that with NYC's daily 3.1 million.)
I guess to do that you have to be pretty precise about your timetables.
Strangely though, last night there was a one hour delay on my usual train. Somebody had jumped in front of it. That's about the only reason things get slowed down.
I work in an IT/Internet company in Tokyo and every few days, someone in the office pulls out yet another latest and greatest cellphone with a higher resolution camera, better ringtones, bells, whistles, doo-dads. Mine is an old piece of junk that doesn't do much of anything. It has some sort of proprietary email function that I have never used, expensive web access, I think, again never used.
Recently, a company Tu-ka came out with a new model that caught my eye - their "S" model, a nearly featureless phone. It has no camera or web or email. It doesn't have an address book. For that matter, it doesn't even have any sort of display. It has an LED to let you know that it's on, I think, and that's it. If you miss a call, well, you had better hope they call back. If you catch the call, you have to ask who's calling.
On the upside, it has 840 hours of standby and 240 minutes of talk time in the battery. The operation is exceedingly simple and straightforward. The buttons are large and the sound is clear. For talking, it's a great phone. As you may have guessed, the target market is Japan's elderly, for many of whom this will be a first cellphone, probably a direct upgrade to a black bakelite rotary phone. The advertisements show old people in kimono.
For me, I want one because it will do what I want it to and nothing more. It will never become obsolete. As for showing it off to my cow-orkers, sure, maybe for a few laughs, but it will be pretty clear that I'm just not playing along. If it only had a rotary dial...
More and more, I'm getting away from the needless gadgets that used to clutter up my life. Where I used to say "always be charging," I now grab a couple of rolls of black and white film for my camera, my notebook and a pen and head out the door. My pictures are better for it, my notes more accessible and will never become unreadable because the hardware has become obsolete. I don't read e-books -- I read books. Sure, my music collection is a server full of MP3s, but I tend to listen at home, using speakers, rather than on my now-obsolete 5GB iPod.
"Clippy" is gone.
There should never be a need for you to see it ever again.
I haven't actually seen it in years.
In fact, the only place I ever hear about it anymore is here on Slashdot, where the merest mention of it seems to garner endless chuckles and mod points.
Can't we just let the damned, detestable, yet mercifully short-lived abomination fade into obscurity with his ill-conceived yet now mostly forgotten friends "MS Bob" and "MS SQL Server"?
Dead horse, meet stick.
Thanks for your kind consideration.
Just because you have the source it doesn't automatically make your software work together.
But having the source does make it possible for you to modify the software to do these things, if that is something important enough to your business.
Not having the source, on the other hand, precludes this possibility, unless the holder of the source has specifically allowed it.
You may think that modifying source code is something too mysterious and difficult for casual developers, but such is not the case. I'm not really a coder, but I often tweak little things in programs to get them to do what I want. Just fire up a text editor, look at the code, mess about a bit, then "./configure; make; make install"
It can be tremendously satisfying.
Want to make AbiWord open Gimp documents? All you need is vi and a bit of time and talent. Want to make MS Word read Gimp documents? In that case, you're simply shit out of luck.
The content management system is doing that.
Just today I was posting an article discussing Renaissance architecture and what came out was a shoegazer post about cat shit.
I think it must have something to do with the version of PERL I'm using.
Places do rent out movies for people who don't need the experience of seeing it in a theater and don't want to buy the thing.
It's also perfectly legal.
>>Microsoft's reputation rides on the quality of the program.
Microsoft's reputation rides on the quality of its marketing.