But I believe Paul Newman didn't agree with it and made a clause in his will that it should not happen to his image.
Does he have any legal right to control his image after his death? And should society be willing to spend money to enforce that control? Why? What societal good does that achieve?
I prefer my Paul Newman vintage Cool Hand Luke to remain vintage and I'd rather not suffer through Cool Hand Luke 2: Cooler Hander Luke, Cool Hand Luke 3: Luke's Mom's Revenge, Cool Hand Luke 4: Twenty Seven Eggs Later, etc.
That's well and good, but what does it have to do with any of this? If you don't want to see the remakes/updates/whatever, don't go! Your preference is no reason to limit the options of others who have a different preference.
Services are high margin products and very cash rich. you pay some guy $40 an hour and pimp him out for $200 an hour.
Interesting perspective.
From my perspective, services are a moderate-margin business at best. Your 40/200 example is extremely optimistic. For $40 per hour it's pretty tough to find people who have the technical skills to do the job, the people skills to work effectively with customers and are willing to do the required travel. Don't forget about benefits, either. Then there's overhead. You need salespeople to sell the services contracts, deployment managers to staff them, administrative staff to handle all of the details and managers to manage everyone else. Depending on your strategy, marketing can be a huge expense as well. And don't forget some "cushion" to cover contracts that go bad. Even if you're working strictly time and materials (no fixed price), you can still end up with a dissatisfied customer who drags you into court -- or who you need to give a lot of free services because it's cheaper than the court battle. All of that adds significantly to your costs.
In my experience, services is more of a 30% margin business than an 80% margin business, and that's if you know how to manage a services business. I suppose if you're coming from the perspective of selling commodity hardware, 30% margin probably sounds really good. But in many companies, 30% is barely adequate.
But your yard wouldn't use significantly less water than grass would, which would defeat their whole purpose. You live in a subtropical climate where water is no concern. They live in a desert.
If light is absorbed but not converted to electricity, isn't the panel going to get hot?
Clearly. I wonder if that affects electrical output? I've observed that traditional solar cells produce the highest output when the panels are cool. If these perform the same way, using them to heat water or something else to draw off excess heat might be necessary to achieve maximum electrical generation.
Do we really need to look at intent when you take a photographs of a naked guy in his private property and post it on the internet?
Intent is a fundamental requirement of nearly all criminal law, for good reason. And intent matters here. Did Google have any intent to embarrass the guy, or to cater to prurient interests? Clearly not. For his part, the guy had to be aware that people in tall vehicles could see him, and that matters too. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
That's right, that would be the fair thing to do. Seriously, isn't universal application generally considered an extremely important aspect of maintaining The Rule of Law (TM)?
No, but you know the camera is on top of the van (and itself quite tall), so it photographs places otherwise not visible. Lets try again: if you climbed on top of a van to photograph private properties otherwise not visible and took pictures of people without clothes there, you would be violating law.
What if you were sitting on the top level of a double-decker bus? I'm not sure that merely elevating yourself a few feet higher above the street level than most is enough to constitute invasion of privacy. In practice, I think the court would look at intent. If you carried a ladder out there to raise yourself up specifically so you could see over the wall, that would be one thing, but that's not what Google does. Their camera is positioned where it is so that it doesn't take pictures of the van, not so that it can see over walls.
Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?
I don't know about the rest of it, but I can answer the last question: To boost IBM's stock price! And as the holder of a number of IBM stock options, I must say I think that's a wonderful goal.:-)
Zoom 1:1 to see the detail. I do a lot of big prints of high-resolution images and I have no problem using a screen to get them to look the way I want.
Honestly, for most consumer cameras there's no reason to have anything higher than 2-3 MP anyway. The optical resolution isn't much higher than that anyway, and cramming 10 MP into teeny sensors uses means loads of noise.
bad choice! jpeg is lossy format, information is deliberately dropped to make an approximate reproduction!
That's the SECOND bad choice!
The FIRST bad choice is taking digital photos! They're inherently limited approximations of the actual scene; numerous issues with optics, internal filters, sensors and digital post-processing lose tremendous amounts of information.
Actually the ZEROTH bad choice is taking photos at all! Film has its own problems, and not only that, any single-lens image capture device automatically discards all depth information!
Seriously, the tiny amount of information discarded by JPEGs is negligible in nearly all cases. And I speak from the perspective of an advanced amateur photographer who shoots everything in RAW to ensure that I have every possible bit of information available for me to use in post-processing (a big part of which is the process of deliberately discarding information that I don't want in the image).
If the JPEG looks good enough on your screen that it shows what you care to see and it's what you want to keep, by all means keep it. Bothering yourself about putting everything into an "archival, lossless" format will just bloat your image store and perhaps make the whole thing too bothersome to worry about.
If you're going to put a lot of effort into image preservation, what's more important is to focus on preserving the contextual information that NEVER WAS capture by the camera. Dates, locations, people, events... that contextual data will add a lot more value to future users of the data than what gets discarded during JPEG compression.
Not really. Romney took the credit, but he took over an organization that was already in very good shape. In any case, what does it matter who did it? The point is that it can be done.
>>>Once that guy left the track, no amount of barriers or cushioning would have helped at all.
I disagree. The wooden wall they put-up now, would have...
...kept him on the track, so that the "once he left the track" case wouldn't happen, because once he left the track, no amount of cushioning would have helped at all.
Salt Lake City managed to both make money (not a lot, but enough to maintain the Olympic facilities almost indefinitely with no taxpayer contribution) and avoid the stigma of excessive commercialization, so it can be done. It's hard, though.
Mormons don't hate homosexuals. Mormons just think homosexuals are sinners, similar to heterosexuals who commit adultery or fornication. Mormons endeavor (with mixed success, granted) to hate the sin but love the sinner.
Have you ever drafted articles of incorporation and filed them to create a corporation? I have, and while you're certainly right that the primary goal of most businesses is to make money, the founders of a corporation are free to put whatever goals they like in the articles. Those goals are then carried over to the prospectus provided to potential investors in an IPO, and they define what the potential shareholders expect the company to do.
Both the articles of incorporation and the IPO prospectus are legally binding documents. A company whose stated goal is to save whales and whose CEO then embarks on any sort of activity that does not have whale-saving as its primary goal is at risk of being ejected by the board, and perhaps even criminal charges.
As I said, I don't know if "Don't be evil" is a formally-specified corporate goal of Google. But if it is, failing to pursue that goal can land the executives and board in a lot of hot water -- and more to the point, if it is a charter goal, forgoing profit to pursue it will *never* get them in trouble with the authorities.
I say this as an european, who not that long ago switched from a national currency to an european one. Back then, many people were scared of the very same thing, but it really didn't take long for people to adapt.
Duh... that's because the Euro was calibrated against the US Dollar which, as everyone knows, is the true, natural and intuitive unit of currency. I'm sure that as the Euro has drifted away from the dollar it's become harder to use.
Agreed. I have three different dedicated e-book devices, but my current e-reader of choice is Stanza on my iPod Touch. It's not as nice to read on as the bigger devices, but it's always with me, and it works in the dark.
I don't think so. If she didn't have permission in advance, she still did something wrong, even if the original authors (plural... apparently there were more than one plagiarized) later decide that it is okay.
Copyright law isn't about "right" and "wrong", it's about money. Even if the copyright holders sue, and win (which is far from certain), then all they get is some of the money she made.
All of you people waxing moralistic on this issue are just silly.
Google, as a publicly traded company, has only one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
That's not necessarily true. A publicly-traded corporations primary obligation isn't to make a profit, it's to fulfill the goals laid out in the articles of incorporation and the prospectus that defined the public offering. In most cases, those documents say that the primary goal of the corporation is to make a profit, and that, then, is what the company's directors must focus on doing. But there are plenty of corporations, especially non-profits and for-profits that have a "social good" agenda, with different goals, and the directors of those corporations would be failing in their duty to their shareholders if they focused on profit at the expense of their stated goals.
Was "Don't be evil" part of Google's corporate charter? And if so, was it given an equal or higher priority than profitability? I don't know, but if so, then Google's directors have a legal obligation to abide by it.
Slashdot Mirror
But I believe Paul Newman didn't agree with it and made a clause in his will that it should not happen to his image.
Does he have any legal right to control his image after his death? And should society be willing to spend money to enforce that control? Why? What societal good does that achieve?
I prefer my Paul Newman vintage Cool Hand Luke to remain vintage and I'd rather not suffer through Cool Hand Luke 2: Cooler Hander Luke, Cool Hand Luke 3: Luke's Mom's Revenge, Cool Hand Luke 4: Twenty Seven Eggs Later, etc.
That's well and good, but what does it have to do with any of this? If you don't want to see the remakes/updates/whatever, don't go! Your preference is no reason to limit the options of others who have a different preference.
Services are high margin products and very cash rich. you pay some guy $40 an hour and pimp him out for $200 an hour.
Interesting perspective.
From my perspective, services are a moderate-margin business at best. Your 40/200 example is extremely optimistic. For $40 per hour it's pretty tough to find people who have the technical skills to do the job, the people skills to work effectively with customers and are willing to do the required travel. Don't forget about benefits, either. Then there's overhead. You need salespeople to sell the services contracts, deployment managers to staff them, administrative staff to handle all of the details and managers to manage everyone else. Depending on your strategy, marketing can be a huge expense as well. And don't forget some "cushion" to cover contracts that go bad. Even if you're working strictly time and materials (no fixed price), you can still end up with a dissatisfied customer who drags you into court -- or who you need to give a lot of free services because it's cheaper than the court battle. All of that adds significantly to your costs.
In my experience, services is more of a 30% margin business than an 80% margin business, and that's if you know how to manage a services business. I suppose if you're coming from the perspective of selling commodity hardware, 30% margin probably sounds really good. But in many companies, 30% is barely adequate.
But your yard wouldn't use significantly less water than grass would, which would defeat their whole purpose. You live in a subtropical climate where water is no concern. They live in a desert.
If light is absorbed but not converted to electricity, isn't the panel going to get hot?
Clearly. I wonder if that affects electrical output? I've observed that traditional solar cells produce the highest output when the panels are cool. If these perform the same way, using them to heat water or something else to draw off excess heat might be necessary to achieve maximum electrical generation.
Do we really need to look at intent when you take a photographs of a naked guy in his private property and post it on the internet?
Intent is a fundamental requirement of nearly all criminal law, for good reason. And intent matters here. Did Google have any intent to embarrass the guy, or to cater to prurient interests? Clearly not. For his part, the guy had to be aware that people in tall vehicles could see him, and that matters too. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
So everyone should live in windowless houses
You should acquaint yourself with the invention called "curtains".
Personally, I figure if you don't want to see me naked, you shouldn't be looking in my windows.
That's right, that would be the fair thing to do. Seriously, isn't universal application generally considered an extremely important aspect of maintaining The Rule of Law (TM)?
"Rule of Law"... how quaint!
No, but you know the camera is on top of the van (and itself quite tall), so it photographs places otherwise not visible. Lets try again: if you climbed on top of a van to photograph private properties otherwise not visible and took pictures of people without clothes there, you would be violating law.
What if you were sitting on the top level of a double-decker bus? I'm not sure that merely elevating yourself a few feet higher above the street level than most is enough to constitute invasion of privacy. In practice, I think the court would look at intent. If you carried a ladder out there to raise yourself up specifically so you could see over the wall, that would be one thing, but that's not what Google does. Their camera is positioned where it is so that it doesn't take pictures of the van, not so that it can see over walls.
What was the algorithm? For all I know (having not read TFA), it could be that they replaced bubble sort with quicksort.
Given that this is from the very well-respected IBM research labs, I really doubt it's anything trivial or obvious.
Given that the press release came through IBM's PR machine, I'm sure that the announcement overstates the applicability of the result.
Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?
I don't know about the rest of it, but I can answer the last question: To boost IBM's stock price! And as the holder of a number of IBM stock options, I must say I think that's a wonderful goal. :-)
Zoom 1:1 to see the detail. I do a lot of big prints of high-resolution images and I have no problem using a screen to get them to look the way I want.
Honestly, for most consumer cameras there's no reason to have anything higher than 2-3 MP anyway. The optical resolution isn't much higher than that anyway, and cramming 10 MP into teeny sensors uses means loads of noise.
bad choice! jpeg is lossy format, information is deliberately dropped to make an approximate reproduction!
That's the SECOND bad choice!
The FIRST bad choice is taking digital photos! They're inherently limited approximations of the actual scene; numerous issues with optics, internal filters, sensors and digital post-processing lose tremendous amounts of information.
Actually the ZEROTH bad choice is taking photos at all! Film has its own problems, and not only that, any single-lens image capture device automatically discards all depth information!
Seriously, the tiny amount of information discarded by JPEGs is negligible in nearly all cases. And I speak from the perspective of an advanced amateur photographer who shoots everything in RAW to ensure that I have every possible bit of information available for me to use in post-processing (a big part of which is the process of deliberately discarding information that I don't want in the image).
If the JPEG looks good enough on your screen that it shows what you care to see and it's what you want to keep, by all means keep it. Bothering yourself about putting everything into an "archival, lossless" format will just bloat your image store and perhaps make the whole thing too bothersome to worry about.
If you're going to put a lot of effort into image preservation, what's more important is to focus on preserving the contextual information that NEVER WAS capture by the camera. Dates, locations, people, events... that contextual data will add a lot more value to future users of the data than what gets discarded during JPEG compression.
Not really. Romney took the credit, but he took over an organization that was already in very good shape. In any case, what does it matter who did it? The point is that it can be done.
>>>Once that guy left the track, no amount of barriers or cushioning would have helped at all.
I disagree. The wooden wall they put-up now, would have...
...kept him on the track, so that the "once he left the track" case wouldn't happen, because once he left the track, no amount of cushioning would have helped at all.
Salt Lake City managed to both make money (not a lot, but enough to maintain the Olympic facilities almost indefinitely with no taxpayer contribution) and avoid the stigma of excessive commercialization, so it can be done. It's hard, though.
Says the homosexual hating mormon.
Mormons don't hate homosexuals. Mormons just think homosexuals are sinners, similar to heterosexuals who commit adultery or fornication. Mormons endeavor (with mixed success, granted) to hate the sin but love the sinner.
How do you tell the difference between a spamvertiser and a joe job?
Have you ever drafted articles of incorporation and filed them to create a corporation? I have, and while you're certainly right that the primary goal of most businesses is to make money, the founders of a corporation are free to put whatever goals they like in the articles. Those goals are then carried over to the prospectus provided to potential investors in an IPO, and they define what the potential shareholders expect the company to do.
Both the articles of incorporation and the IPO prospectus are legally binding documents. A company whose stated goal is to save whales and whose CEO then embarks on any sort of activity that does not have whale-saving as its primary goal is at risk of being ejected by the board, and perhaps even criminal charges.
As I said, I don't know if "Don't be evil" is a formally-specified corporate goal of Google. But if it is, failing to pursue that goal can land the executives and board in a lot of hot water -- and more to the point, if it is a charter goal, forgoing profit to pursue it will *never* get them in trouble with the authorities.
I say this as an european, who not that long ago switched from a national currency to an european one. Back then, many people were scared of the very same thing, but it really didn't take long for people to adapt.
Duh... that's because the Euro was calibrated against the US Dollar which, as everyone knows, is the true, natural and intuitive unit of currency. I'm sure that as the Euro has drifted away from the dollar it's become harder to use.
Yeah, blame the criminals for exploiting a system
Yeah, that's like blaming the murderer for shooting people. The real culprit is clearly the gun. Or maybe the victims' lack of body armor.
Agreed. I have three different dedicated e-book devices, but my current e-reader of choice is Stanza on my iPod Touch. It's not as nice to read on as the bigger devices, but it's always with me, and it works in the dark.
I do agree, however, that the DRM situation is one decided reason to avoid e-books right now.
Unless you like Baen's content. No DRM there.
I don't think so. If she didn't have permission in advance, she still did something wrong, even if the original authors (plural... apparently there were more than one plagiarized) later decide that it is okay.
Copyright law isn't about "right" and "wrong", it's about money. Even if the copyright holders sue, and win (which is far from certain), then all they get is some of the money she made.
All of you people waxing moralistic on this issue are just silly.
Google, as a publicly traded company, has only one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
That's not necessarily true. A publicly-traded corporations primary obligation isn't to make a profit, it's to fulfill the goals laid out in the articles of incorporation and the prospectus that defined the public offering. In most cases, those documents say that the primary goal of the corporation is to make a profit, and that, then, is what the company's directors must focus on doing. But there are plenty of corporations, especially non-profits and for-profits that have a "social good" agenda, with different goals, and the directors of those corporations would be failing in their duty to their shareholders if they focused on profit at the expense of their stated goals.
Was "Don't be evil" part of Google's corporate charter? And if so, was it given an equal or higher priority than profitability? I don't know, but if so, then Google's directors have a legal obligation to abide by it.
Tell that to Dred Scott.
You're supporting my position.