The point is that the world of things that compute is vastly more than just the single desktop you've got sitting in front of your face right now. Sure, in your perspective that's all you really can see everyday in the traditional definition of "computer", but there are vast arrays of networks and electronic devices and things you never ever consider the programming and workings of that you rely on every single day; and while they might have a plethora of different brandnames associated with them, behind the scenes is good ol' linux doing its stuff.
Sometimes it's more than enough to control everything *except* the most visible sector of a particular market, and honestly, it's probably better to be the invisible winner.
Well, I went from the article which alluded to it being the leak Assange was sitting on:
It looks like the hacker group, which frequents online message board 4chan, made good on a promise Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made several months ago.
In retrospect the word "perhaps" would have been better than "reportedly" because it really is quite the assumption, and I probably should have outright ignored any sentence that starts with "the hacker group" as a matter of principle. In my defense, I had just polished off a bottle of wine at the time of writing it. Sorry for the lack of clarity though.
In terms of A), I suspect it has to do with being below the theoretical threshhold facebook might have for identifying scam users who are there to scrape information for profit/social engineering/other bad thing. Had they targeted 1000 a little bell might have gone off at facebook HQ before they had an adequate chance to actually look at what they'd managed to access.
While it might give AFACT a better description of what it would potentially need to disconnect people, there are a few things in the summary by Judge Cowdroy which suggest even if they did, it still wouldn't happen.
13. Secondly, I find that a scheme for notification, suspension and termination of customer accounts is not, in this instance, a relevant power to prevent copyright infringement pursuant to s 101(1A)(a) of the Copyright Act, nor in the circumstances of this case is it a reasonable step pursuant to s 101(1A)(c) of the Copyright Act.
I find that iiNet did have a repeat infringer policy which was reasonably implemented and that iiNet would therefore have been entitled to take advantage of the safe harbour provisions in Division 2AA of Part V of the Copyright Act if it needed to do so.... While iiNet did not have a policy of the kind that the applicants believed was required, it does not follow that iiNet did not have a policy which complied with the safe harbour provisions. However, as I have not found that iiNet authorised copyright infringement, there is no need for iiNet to take advantage of the protection provided by such provisions.
20. The law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another. The law only recognises a prohibition on the doing of copyright acts without the licence of the copyright owner or exclusive licensee, or the authorisation of those acts.
The above taken from the judge's summary of the findings
426. There can be no doubt that the respondent has the contractual right to warn and terminate its subscribers pursuant to its CRA if a breach of its terms occurs. However, that does not, of itself, make termination a reasonable step or a relevant power to prevent infringement in all circumstances. It must be remembered that absent those contractual provisions, the respondent would have had no power to terminate subscribers even if they were found by a Court to have infringed copyright. The CRA constitutes the respondent’s standard contractual terms used by a wide variety of subscribers. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, the CRA seeks to provide sufficient contractual terms to cover all eventualities, both existing at the time of the writing of the CRA and into the future. That does not mean that such terms should or would always be exercised even if a contractual right to exercise them arises.
427. Further, the right to do something does not create an obligation to do something. The doctrine of privity of contract provides that the only two parties relevant to the enforcement of the CRA are the respondent and the subscriber. Should the contract be breached by the subscriber, it is entirely a matter for the respondent to decide whether to act on the contract. Had the respondent taken action against its subscribers based on an AFACT Notice and it was subsequently found that the allegation was unfounded, the respondent would have committed a breach of its contract with the subscriber and been made potentially liable for damages without any indemnity from the applicants or AFACT. In such circumstance it was not unreasonable that the respondent should have sought to be cautious before acting on information provided by a party unrelated to the CRA.
436. The Court does not consider that warning and termination of subscriber accounts on the basis of AFACT Notices is a reasonable step...
This is exactly at the crux of the matter and should be rated more highly (and mentioned more often). The major retailers are bitching about an amazingly small minority of all purchases and simply want a tax to discourage people to even consider online shopping.
Kudos to the school here, and Beau Lotto too. They managed to achieve something absolutely amazing, educational and potentially inspirational for the kids in this class. It was a fantastic idea, and hopefully will advance the cause of science education in schools.
It's basically a matter of traffic issues more than anything. The Town Hall to Martin Place route is pretty standard for protests, I've been to more than a few that take place there. It's smack bang in the middle of the city, if Sydney had a Times Square, that would be it. Sydney is notoriously also full of one way streets, so when you block off a street, you really do screw traffic up, in an area that is over-congested to begin with. In my experience as a protester, the police are (usually) pretty cool, sometimes the lower ranks over-zealous and nervous but I've walked with the senior sergeant in charge while I was protesting before and had a good ol' chat about how everything was going; it was really very pleasant. What has happened in this case is an issue with shortnotice. They have to arrange for hundreds of police to come from all over the state (which is larger than Texas, for a little perspective) to attend and be briefed, etc. etc. Short notice also means they're not going to be able to figure out a good traffic plan in time. You can tell it wasn't an iideological problem at heart because of the alternate options they suggested, namely "police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.". They didn't mind that there was a protest, just the way in which it was planned.
I'm a big supporter of Wikileaks, of public protest, of free speech; but good planning makes the event better for the protesters, for the police and for the innocent bystanders who were unfortunate enough to be travelling through the area at the time. It doesn't necessarily mean the population is oppressed.
What I understand from your analogy is that Comcast is using the pimping/strip joint owner business model. At this point I don't even care if the analogy is flawed.
I know a guy who is blind (light sensitivity only), he tried an iPhone the other day and loved it. I do a bit of interface design, and I thought it wouldn't work so well due to the lack of tactile feedback; apparently it wasn't even an issue. Provided you have a consistent learnable layout (such as the grid icon system of an iPhone for different applications), and/or at least an alternative way of "tabbing" through interactive items on the screen, plus obviously screen-reading capability, they're set. Up until now, the visually impaired have had to rely on third parties who cater to that niche to install software onto phones to give them the screen-reading capability, but the iPhone has made this unnecessary and from all accounts is quite popular with the visually impaired community for that reason.
tl;dr yes the blind can use touchscreen based phones provided they're designed/developed well
As an aside, watching the guy I know write text messages never fails to fascinate me.
I don't understand - the condom broke in the middle so she asked him to stop, he didn't - and that's rape?
Yes. If anyone in the middle of sexual intercourse says stop, you have to stop. If you choose to disregard this direct request, it's rape or at the very least sexual assault - no matter what point during intercourse it happens.
Anyway, I have no clue whether these things happened or not, all I know is that Assange is in a world of trouble regardless. He has chosen one dangerous road.
32 whole pages including cover page, table of contents and submission credits at 1.5 line spacing? And people accuse Gen Y of having a short attention span... I'd have to agree that EMI are scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons.
Youtube are taking steps to introduce transcription to videos, but this is moot. From the article:
"But what about personal photos on Facebook? Does Facebook have to make sure the photo content can be read aloud to a blind user? Perhaps not. The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected."
Pretty sure individual user content uploaded to youtube where they are not making money (eg. "boy gets hit in groin with football") is going to be excluded. Content partners would probably have to take the time to do it to qualify for their 3 cent revenue.
I was actually thinking "add a document" in terms of transcribing video/audio with a bunch of speech in them. In your case, assuming the image isn't also a link to somewhere, an alt tag would be more than sufficient with the details "Picture of Y, taken at Z at X time". This should probably be in the meta-data of the images anyway and it would be trivial to write a small program to extract it and automate this for you. If it's a link as well, you just add a few words describing its purpose like "click for larger version". It doesn't need a thesis or anything, the visually impaired aren't looking for a web-shakespeare.
Seriously though, this stuff isn't hard and doesn't even have to be unnecessarily time-consuming.
This is what I thought until I did have to actually make standards compliant websites. I'm a web designer/developer for a government dept (not in the US though), and they require all websites and content to be accessible to those with disabilities and in regional areas with extremely low-bandwidth connections. I thought this would be hard, but making something standards compliant is really just a matter of checking a few extra things here and there, and adding a couple of extra features here and there, that's all it takes. It is actually less tedious and time-consuming than making a site work consistently across browsers. Got a video or audio file? Subtitle it or add a document which has a transcription. That's the hearing impaired taken care of. Low bandwidth audience? Compress those images and use them sparingly. Visually impaired? Make sure your designs have good text-background contrast, maybe add a text size changer in the website, and that's the low-level guys taken care of. For the completely blind, you just have to make sure your alt tags are in there, your CSS isn't a cryptic/poorly constructed clusterfuck and things are intuitively labelled.
Only problem I have is that I have to buy a license for JAWS so I can test out my stuff on it; otherwise i use NVDA (open source & free download) just to make sure it's basically good.
I'm not really so sure that's a concern in the places where there isn't even an infrastructure for electricity. Those kinds of places tend to be extremely poor countries (or just areas) where the people including children have to work all day in fields or factories if they want to be able to eat that day. We're not exactly talking about kids lazing on the couch all day long playing plants vs. zombies for 8 hours and shouting at their mother because they want McDonalds for dinner tonight.
Even if it were a concern, you could just program a timer into it or something.
This is pretty much exactly it. It's a matter of transparency, albeit perceived transparency and nothing necessarily to do with reality. With Paypal you transfer or get money, and upfront they tell you "this is how much is coming out of your bank account, we charge X for the exchange rate and Y for whatever other fee we have imposed.". The customer sees what the fees are, pays it, goes on their merry way and never hears about the issue ever again (in a normal case).
Banks on the other hand, well, they give you 5 pages of fine print which they can change at any time at their own discretion and tend to deal with longer-term money situations like loans and savings. Every quarter you get your statement in the mail with the 5 pages of fine print (or a hidden small sentence in 6pt font saying the fine print has changed and you should go look at it online) which may or may not have changed. Six months down the track you discover they now charge for using your bank account more than 5 times in a month, or the minimum account balance has doubled, or ATM transactions in certain random locations are liable for randomised penalties. And people get pissed because these are all essentially surprises. Sure, they were told in the 5 pages of fine print, but nobody carefully scours it for changes every single month - if they even realise something has changed in the first place. The banks know this, and they bank on it (pun intentional).
This has actually happened to me, and I'm always pretty careful about these things. I missed the small sentence saying the minimum balance has doubled on savings accounts - because it was surrounded by coupons for local businesses and information on home loans that don't apply to me at all. Suddenly I'm being docked every month for not being rich enough in one account.
Paypal may not exactly be the shining beacon of best business practise, but it's not hard to see why people are less fed up with them than the banks.
PS. Churches don't give the licenses, the government does. The government may not have created marriage, but if they can regulate it (which you don't seem to have a problem with), they can do so as they see fit - including by issuing licenses and deciding who they will issue their licenses to.
Virii is even more problematic in terms of the sound of the first i. If you're going to mistakenly hypercorrectly Latinise something, why would you pronounce the letter i two different ways in the same word? Better yet, if you want to sound really pretentious you could pronounce the V as it's taught in a lot of (most classical?) places: as a consonantal U (basically W). You'll get people wandering around soon enough saying WEE-REE-EE
Seriously though, as someone who spent... far too long learning Latin, I'm sticking with viruses. There's far too much wrong going on in that word to try to take it back to its Latin roots. This also applies to platypus and octopus but for different reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Ctrl C and V (also X and Z and I think P) predate Microsoft by quite some time.
So what you're trying to tell us is that it already has a lot in common with a vast array of existing religions?
If I had mod points, they would be yours.
The point is that the world of things that compute is vastly more than just the single desktop you've got sitting in front of your face right now. Sure, in your perspective that's all you really can see everyday in the traditional definition of "computer", but there are vast arrays of networks and electronic devices and things you never ever consider the programming and workings of that you rely on every single day; and while they might have a plethora of different brandnames associated with them, behind the scenes is good ol' linux doing its stuff.
Sometimes it's more than enough to control everything *except* the most visible sector of a particular market, and honestly, it's probably better to be the invisible winner.
In retrospect the word "perhaps" would have been better than "reportedly" because it really is quite the assumption, and I probably should have outright ignored any sentence that starts with "the hacker group" as a matter of principle. In my defense, I had just polished off a bottle of wine at the time of writing it. Sorry for the lack of clarity though.
In terms of A), I suspect it has to do with being below the theoretical threshhold facebook might have for identifying scam users who are there to scrape information for profit/social engineering/other bad thing. Had they targeted 1000 a little bell might have gone off at facebook HQ before they had an adequate chance to actually look at what they'd managed to access.
The above taken from the judge's summary of the findings
The above taken from the full findings available at: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2010/24.html
Large paper posters can be vandalism, I was imagining something massive and pasted to their booth sign or something... Then I saw the photo.
I can see why they're quaking in their boots.
This is exactly at the crux of the matter and should be rated more highly (and mentioned more often). The major retailers are bitching about an amazingly small minority of all purchases and simply want a tax to discourage people to even consider online shopping.
Kudos to the school here, and Beau Lotto too. They managed to achieve something absolutely amazing, educational and potentially inspirational for the kids in this class. It was a fantastic idea, and hopefully will advance the cause of science education in schools.
It's basically a matter of traffic issues more than anything. The Town Hall to Martin Place route is pretty standard for protests, I've been to more than a few that take place there. It's smack bang in the middle of the city, if Sydney had a Times Square, that would be it. Sydney is notoriously also full of one way streets, so when you block off a street, you really do screw traffic up, in an area that is over-congested to begin with. In my experience as a protester, the police are (usually) pretty cool, sometimes the lower ranks over-zealous and nervous but I've walked with the senior sergeant in charge while I was protesting before and had a good ol' chat about how everything was going; it was really very pleasant. What has happened in this case is an issue with shortnotice. They have to arrange for hundreds of police to come from all over the state (which is larger than Texas, for a little perspective) to attend and be briefed, etc. etc. Short notice also means they're not going to be able to figure out a good traffic plan in time. You can tell it wasn't an iideological problem at heart because of the alternate options they suggested, namely "police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.". They didn't mind that there was a protest, just the way in which it was planned.
I'm a big supporter of Wikileaks, of public protest, of free speech; but good planning makes the event better for the protesters, for the police and for the innocent bystanders who were unfortunate enough to be travelling through the area at the time. It doesn't necessarily mean the population is oppressed.
What I understand from your analogy is that Comcast is using the pimping/strip joint owner business model. At this point I don't even care if the analogy is flawed.
I know a guy who is blind (light sensitivity only), he tried an iPhone the other day and loved it. I do a bit of interface design, and I thought it wouldn't work so well due to the lack of tactile feedback; apparently it wasn't even an issue. Provided you have a consistent learnable layout (such as the grid icon system of an iPhone for different applications), and/or at least an alternative way of "tabbing" through interactive items on the screen, plus obviously screen-reading capability, they're set. Up until now, the visually impaired have had to rely on third parties who cater to that niche to install software onto phones to give them the screen-reading capability, but the iPhone has made this unnecessary and from all accounts is quite popular with the visually impaired community for that reason.
tl;dr yes the blind can use touchscreen based phones provided they're designed/developed well
As an aside, watching the guy I know write text messages never fails to fascinate me.
I agree entirely, which is why I used the word "anyone" instead of "a woman"; I also say it as a woman myself.
Yes. If anyone in the middle of sexual intercourse says stop, you have to stop. If you choose to disregard this direct request, it's rape or at the very least sexual assault - no matter what point during intercourse it happens.
Anyway, I have no clue whether these things happened or not, all I know is that Assange is in a world of trouble regardless. He has chosen one dangerous road.
Probably should learn to walk before running, in this case maybe The GIMP would be a better starting point.
32 whole pages including cover page, table of contents and submission credits at 1.5 line spacing? And people accuse Gen Y of having a short attention span... I'd have to agree that EMI are scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons.
You are, it's more like Pay.
Youtube are taking steps to introduce transcription to videos, but this is moot. From the article:
"But what about personal photos on Facebook? Does Facebook have to make sure the photo content can be read aloud to a blind user? Perhaps not. The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected."
Pretty sure individual user content uploaded to youtube where they are not making money (eg. "boy gets hit in groin with football") is going to be excluded. Content partners would probably have to take the time to do it to qualify for their 3 cent revenue.
I was actually thinking "add a document" in terms of transcribing video/audio with a bunch of speech in them. In your case, assuming the image isn't also a link to somewhere, an alt tag would be more than sufficient with the details "Picture of Y, taken at Z at X time". This should probably be in the meta-data of the images anyway and it would be trivial to write a small program to extract it and automate this for you. If it's a link as well, you just add a few words describing its purpose like "click for larger version". It doesn't need a thesis or anything, the visually impaired aren't looking for a web-shakespeare.
Seriously though, this stuff isn't hard and doesn't even have to be unnecessarily time-consuming.
This is what I thought until I did have to actually make standards compliant websites. I'm a web designer/developer for a government dept (not in the US though), and they require all websites and content to be accessible to those with disabilities and in regional areas with extremely low-bandwidth connections. I thought this would be hard, but making something standards compliant is really just a matter of checking a few extra things here and there, and adding a couple of extra features here and there, that's all it takes. It is actually less tedious and time-consuming than making a site work consistently across browsers. Got a video or audio file? Subtitle it or add a document which has a transcription. That's the hearing impaired taken care of. Low bandwidth audience? Compress those images and use them sparingly. Visually impaired? Make sure your designs have good text-background contrast, maybe add a text size changer in the website, and that's the low-level guys taken care of. For the completely blind, you just have to make sure your alt tags are in there, your CSS isn't a cryptic/poorly constructed clusterfuck and things are intuitively labelled.
Only problem I have is that I have to buy a license for JAWS so I can test out my stuff on it; otherwise i use NVDA (open source & free download) just to make sure it's basically good.
I'm not really so sure that's a concern in the places where there isn't even an infrastructure for electricity. Those kinds of places tend to be extremely poor countries (or just areas) where the people including children have to work all day in fields or factories if they want to be able to eat that day. We're not exactly talking about kids lazing on the couch all day long playing plants vs. zombies for 8 hours and shouting at their mother because they want McDonalds for dinner tonight.
Even if it were a concern, you could just program a timer into it or something.
This is pretty much exactly it. It's a matter of transparency, albeit perceived transparency and nothing necessarily to do with reality. With Paypal you transfer or get money, and upfront they tell you "this is how much is coming out of your bank account, we charge X for the exchange rate and Y for whatever other fee we have imposed.". The customer sees what the fees are, pays it, goes on their merry way and never hears about the issue ever again (in a normal case).
Banks on the other hand, well, they give you 5 pages of fine print which they can change at any time at their own discretion and tend to deal with longer-term money situations like loans and savings. Every quarter you get your statement in the mail with the 5 pages of fine print (or a hidden small sentence in 6pt font saying the fine print has changed and you should go look at it online) which may or may not have changed. Six months down the track you discover they now charge for using your bank account more than 5 times in a month, or the minimum account balance has doubled, or ATM transactions in certain random locations are liable for randomised penalties. And people get pissed because these are all essentially surprises. Sure, they were told in the 5 pages of fine print, but nobody carefully scours it for changes every single month - if they even realise something has changed in the first place. The banks know this, and they bank on it (pun intentional).
This has actually happened to me, and I'm always pretty careful about these things. I missed the small sentence saying the minimum balance has doubled on savings accounts - because it was surrounded by coupons for local businesses and information on home loans that don't apply to me at all. Suddenly I'm being docked every month for not being rich enough in one account.
Paypal may not exactly be the shining beacon of best business practise, but it's not hard to see why people are less fed up with them than the banks.
They're gay, not infertile. Use your imagination.
PS. Churches don't give the licenses, the government does. The government may not have created marriage, but if they can regulate it (which you don't seem to have a problem with), they can do so as they see fit - including by issuing licenses and deciding who they will issue their licenses to.
Virii is even more problematic in terms of the sound of the first i. If you're going to mistakenly hypercorrectly Latinise something, why would you pronounce the letter i two different ways in the same word? Better yet, if you want to sound really pretentious you could pronounce the V as it's taught in a lot of (most classical?) places: as a consonantal U (basically W). You'll get people wandering around soon enough saying WEE-REE-EE
Seriously though, as someone who spent... far too long learning Latin, I'm sticking with viruses. There's far too much wrong going on in that word to try to take it back to its Latin roots. This also applies to platypus and octopus but for different reasons.