The more I think about this verdict, the more it feels like a judicial setup for the RIAA.
By following a number of assertions to the letter, the judge arrived at a figure that was blatantly ridiculous.
By doing so, it practically guaranteed the following:
- progression to the next level up - universal disgust for the RIAA - an increased likelihood for the followup challenge to this verdict to fail.
It feels to me as following the method for testing a theory: stretch it to breaking point and see where it comes apart. OK, I may assign subtlety where none exists, but the verdict has resulted in adding oil to the fire, and a couple of gallons of alcohol.
Let's hope that sanity now prevails. This judgement has (IMHO) made that more likely.
A good friend gave me the DVDs of the series as a present. It's fantastically funny up until the point you realise just how close it presently is to the farcical reality..
With all due respect, I disagree. This is window(s) dressing, and I think MS knows this. They still appear to think that trying to game the EU Commission will work like it has with the US DoJ (which, as a result, has lost a HUGE amount of credibility), and I think (and hope) they're in for a very rude awakening.
MS appears to forget that it's now under extreme scrutiny because the EU Commission fines to change behaviour, not posturing. The Commission hasn't exactly reached the end of what it can do with MS if it doesn't play ball properly. MS is playing a very dangerous and irresponsible game, and if the EU decides to call hem on it it will *really* hurt.
Airbus had events where the software took a wrong decision, Boeing had situations where pilot error endangered or took out the plane.
If their suspicions about the cause is correct it is immaterial if it was a Boeing or an Airbus as either pilot or system would have been operating on incorrect information.
Let's not forget that this plane was also heading into some seriously bad weather - until enough is found for a reconstruction it's still speculation as to what happened and what caused it. We may never know.
The "fix" as they call it only disables the MS plug-in for the current user who runs it. The install is system wide, so the only approach that really rips it out is the one that has been detailed in various places, hacking the register and than zapping the file from the system.
It's again complete BS, not "we're sorry we didn't ask, let's undo the damage", but "we're sorry you noticed, here's something that makes it look differently".
You can trust these guys even less than a UK MP with an expense account.
I've got one around somewhere that I think had a head crash (it was standing on edge due to the case design, and it fell over). The disk spins up, then spins down again, so I never get to a stage where the disk actually shows up on a system (ISA, in a USB 2.0 cradle). It's not critical, just curiosity, I haven't gotten around to being evil to it and then throwing it away:-).
I can't imagine a shorter route to getting pr0n on your hard disk then let students look for it. Call it an early exposure to outsourcing, including the fact that you may not quite get what you expect:-).
an American President is, at this point in history, expected to be a thoroughly amoral and corrupt human being
I find it thoroughly depressing that that seems to be the prevailing opinion. That in itself just shows what a tremendous amount of damage Bush has not only caused to the IMAGE of the US, but to the US itself. Having said that, they had willing assistance from the UK New Labour government in this, so I hope the current "it was within the rules" expense claim abusers get chucked out on their ears soon.
I've seen it in the UK, no sooner did they step through the doors of No10, out came the efforts to switch off as many controls as they could get away with so they could fill their pockets as quickly as possible. Regulators? Take away their power. Competent people in government? Lose them to consultancies, then re-employ them and pretend that's the same thing (try saying "no" as a consultant if you have a family). Protests? Tarnish those who do, and bury it under spin. The worrying thing is that it has at both sides of the ocean worked so well that it has taken TWO terms for the damage to show up. And then they vanish, publishing "memoirs", hit the speaking circuit or, in the case of Blair, apparently go and work for the people who stand to profit from the collapse. No, I don't believe in coincidences.
The main problem with such an attitude is that it flows downwards. As soon as industry sees this happening, they realise it's time to do the same because farming the economy to death MUST lead to a crash. so everyone was trousering wadfulls of cash while the going was good. Screw the man in the street, he's there to take the hit when it goes wrong. So it has, and he does.
If Obama is tring to do The Right Thing (and so far, the signs are good even though he has to do this very slowly) he must alreday have discovered that this will take more than the time he has, even assuming he can serve TWO tems. I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
For this job you need someone who has political savvy and can indeed show leadership coupled with diplomacy - and on top of that he needs to have at least a degree of technical competence to ensure someone isn't telling him lots of guff.
If I wasn't non US I'd be interested as I've done this a few times before. I built the fundamentals on a large government work when nobody was interested in collaboration, and I did international interoperability where the group I worked with was talked with making it happen but was placed at totally the wrong level to have any clout whatsoever. And we managed regardless by working at the human level.
The technical stuff is the easy part. Dealing with the human side of things is the hard work, but it's fun too. If you get the right team you can steer them in the rightdirection, form them and let them get ready for when you have the breakthrough (it sort of happens in parallel, but you need more focus on a strategic aim than a tactical effort to drive it in the right direction).
But I'm rambling now. What I wanted to say is that it is NOT an impossible job. But it certainly isn't going to be an easy one for the first few years.
As a matter of fact, if your understanding of a job at that level is simply staying out of trouble you are the wrong person for the job. You will really have to commit yourself.
I don't see this as "decisive action" or "for the good of us" or (etc.), it's just a publicity stunt.
Simple target, low maintenance (because few are going to bother to check if they indeed do) and doing this actively would mean having to deal with other things as well which I deem unlikely.
Someone with ADHD can in some cases not even take advantage of the few excellent teachers that are around. It's not because they don't WANT to, it's because they really can't. I didn't make that clear in a previous post - as a parent you don't want to hear your child needs a label. You WANT it to be boredom, or "just a phase", and I have a sufficiently wide background to separate BS from reality. I have SEEN the scans and the delta's.
This also means they are double handicapped by the drones out there. They already need to work harder to focus.
Umm, qEEG as used in neurofeedback has been able to identify ADHD for years now.
I think the news is that someone may have found a method that doesn't involve half an hour doing tests (in itself hard for ADHD people) while wearing a headcap with electrodes and hair full of contact gel..
Sadly, I have to disagree from simple practical experience. However, where I would agree with you is the enthusiastic administration of drugs, especially because they don't SOLVE the issue, they just convict the child to being a lifelong provider of profit.
For what it's worth, my son (you could call him a "light" case) was helped by neurofeedback. Not for everyone, sure, but in his case it worked. Ritalin is really about the last thing I'd do to him, so I'm immensely grateful it worked. ADHD is - as far as we learned (I'm no expert) - a weakness in the ability of the brain to switch regions on and off according to need. However, it's no snake oil - you can actually SEE the issue when you look at brain maps (quanititive EEG or qEEG). Rather horrible to see it confirmed, but nice that it IS confirmed so you can try to address it.
Neurofeedback is a bit like a gym and education for the switching mechanism, and for the region that doesn't work too well. It learns to switch correctly (or at least, the "mean" as sampled from many others) and the weakened region gets some exercise, like a muscle. Neurofeedback is cool in that it very quickly shows if it's working or not (no year long therapy), after which more of the same "embeds" it.
The problem with Ritalin et al is that you end up with an overall "on" or "off" state, which means if you need to switch from "doing" to "sitting in the car for an hour" you need to plan this and change medication. If you can avoid that in any way, shape or form, please do. It's really only a last ditch measure.
All IMHO, of course. I can't speak for others, only what I learned myself with my son.
Try to read up on the condition, but do it with a critical eye. I'm the first to agree that a Godawful amount of rubbish has been written about it, but it does exist. And brutally ignorant prescribing of drugs exists too.
But ADHD is no myth. On behalf of many parents with children, I wish to God it was.
Umm, sorry, no. There needs to be a balance between free and what generates income - somewhere someone has to support a living. If he/she/it is a success I'm OK with that generating lots of dosh too.
However, this is not a debate over free vs fee, this is about fee vs theft. The whole problem with theft is that it allows the overcharger to claim that it's theft that is ruining their business instead of forcing them to admit their approach is no longer valid as a business model. In other words, the belief persists that theft is the cause rather than the consequence of the way they price things, and as soon as they caught the "bad guys" the problem will go away.
The fact that attacking the bad guys equals removing them as future customers appears not to register, but let's not delude ourselves here - sharing of paid-for material of any kind beyond the fair use concept *is* illegal. Full stop. That doesn't justify the RIAA approach one bit, but even if the whole world does something does not automatically make it right.
I'm getting sick and tired of this marketing drivel called "leaking". It's plain and simple research - by dripping some data to the outside they get feedback if it's worth trying to dethrone another standard. It's a method for a company tring to manage its public face when they get a backlash against the idea, but to me such information doesn't "escape" or is not released "by accident".
"Leaking" is to me unauthorized and certain not of benefit to the organisation or individual "losing" the data, like Liechtenstein bank details of UK MP expense details. Not a bloody PR exercise of a company trying to massage public opinion./rant
I think the issue is more with what was stated in Parliament, the people that built it I know, and know what they're doing. It is highly unlikely they will have made statements like what was uttered in Parliament. Granted, they're no specialists, but some statements are simply unsupportable and create a false sense of security.
I would thus be more interested in what they have planned for when a problem is found. ANY large platform like this will have problems, and that requires prior planning. Given the current government I consider it likely that they already have pre-cooked press statements like "it wasn't our fault, we employed consultants" (who, incidentally, are actually not a bad club despite the one USB stick cockup), but that's not what counts.
What you need is proper audit, shutdown and notification models so that someone can close the shutters if abuse has been detected. They're talking about WiFi access, they're talking about huge amounts of people having access (which is indeed required for some of what lives in that database), and we are in principle talking about relatively few children.
I would consider a leak possible (even likely), so you need to manage down the risk such a leak can generate. This thing is supposed to be part of preventing recurrence of a highly tragic event, if it does that with a bit of leakage it's IMHO OK. However, if it increases the risk for even one child involved it should be immediately reviewed.
Shutting down may not be an option as it would return the original situation, and the risks inherent in it. I don't think anyone wants to go there.
I don't know. If he had any sense he would have a plan B ready: if the result was different he'd have to bribe the researcher to "interpret" the results to keep peace in the family:-)
I'd rather face the RIAA without a lawyer than upset the significant other:-).
It's not all bad news, though, at least they have left the ONE facility in that OO still lacks - track back cursor. Using shift-F5 you track back the cursor moves so if you just scrolled up to find something it'll take you straight back where you came from.
It's still there, but I guess now I've mentioned it as useful the UI team will probably remove it..
Slashdot Mirror
The more I think about this verdict, the more it feels like a judicial setup for the RIAA.
By following a number of assertions to the letter, the judge arrived at a figure that was blatantly ridiculous.
By doing so, it practically guaranteed the following:
- progression to the next level up
- universal disgust for the RIAA
- an increased likelihood for the followup challenge to this verdict to fail.
It feels to me as following the method for testing a theory: stretch it to breaking point and see where it comes apart. OK, I may assign subtlety where none exists, but the verdict has resulted in adding oil to the fire, and a couple of gallons of alcohol.
Let's hope that sanity now prevails. This judgement has (IMHO) made that more likely.
That was funny - music replacing production of goods and service as primary national revenue generator.
Thanks, I liked the sarcasm :-)
A good friend gave me the DVDs of the series as a present. It's fantastically funny up until the point you realise just how close it presently is to the farcical reality..
looks like Microsoft are dealing with the problem
With all due respect, I disagree. This is window(s) dressing, and I think MS knows this. They still appear to think that trying to game the EU Commission will work like it has with the US DoJ (which, as a result, has lost a HUGE amount of credibility), and I think (and hope) they're in for a very rude awakening.
MS appears to forget that it's now under extreme scrutiny because the EU Commission fines to change behaviour, not posturing. The Commission hasn't exactly reached the end of what it can do with MS if it doesn't play ball properly. MS is playing a very dangerous and irresponsible game, and if the EU decides to call hem on it it will *really* hurt.
If he hasn't built in any restrictions I predict a posthumous Darwin Award the moment the guy tries to absently scratch his nuts :-)
Airbus had events where the software took a wrong decision, Boeing had situations where pilot error endangered or took out the plane.
If their suspicions about the cause is correct it is immaterial if it was a Boeing or an Airbus as either pilot or system would have been operating on incorrect information.
Let's not forget that this plane was also heading into some seriously bad weather - until enough is found for a reconstruction it's still speculation as to what happened and what caused it. We may never know.
The "fix" as they call it only disables the MS plug-in for the current user who runs it. The install is system wide, so the only approach that really rips it out is the one that has been detailed in various places, hacking the register and than zapping the file from the system.
It's again complete BS, not "we're sorry we didn't ask, let's undo the damage", but "we're sorry you noticed, here's something that makes it look differently".
You can trust these guys even less than a UK MP with an expense account.
Don't you have to prove barratry first? I guess you would have to formulate it as "actions that amount to"..
AFAIK - IANAL..
I've got one around somewhere that I think had a head crash (it was standing on edge due to the case design, and it fell over). The disk spins up, then spins down again, so I never get to a stage where the disk actually shows up on a system (ISA, in a USB 2.0 cradle). It's not critical, just curiosity, I haven't gotten around to being evil to it and then throwing it away :-).
I can't imagine a shorter route to getting pr0n on your hard disk then let students look for it. Call it an early exposure to outsourcing, including the fact that you may not quite get what you expect :-).
an American President is, at this point in history, expected to be a thoroughly amoral and corrupt human being
I find it thoroughly depressing that that seems to be the prevailing opinion. That in itself just shows what a tremendous amount of damage Bush has not only caused to the IMAGE of the US, but to the US itself. Having said that, they had willing assistance from the UK New Labour government in this, so I hope the current "it was within the rules" expense claim abusers get chucked out on their ears soon.
I've seen it in the UK, no sooner did they step through the doors of No10, out came the efforts to switch off as many controls as they could get away with so they could fill their pockets as quickly as possible. Regulators? Take away their power. Competent people in government? Lose them to consultancies, then re-employ them and pretend that's the same thing (try saying "no" as a consultant if you have a family). Protests? Tarnish those who do, and bury it under spin. The worrying thing is that it has at both sides of the ocean worked so well that it has taken TWO terms for the damage to show up. And then they vanish, publishing "memoirs", hit the speaking circuit or, in the case of Blair, apparently go and work for the people who stand to profit from the collapse. No, I don't believe in coincidences.
The main problem with such an attitude is that it flows downwards. As soon as industry sees this happening, they realise it's time to do the same because farming the economy to death MUST lead to a crash. so everyone was trousering wadfulls of cash while the going was good. Screw the man in the street, he's there to take the hit when it goes wrong. So it has, and he does.
If Obama is tring to do The Right Thing (and so far, the signs are good even though he has to do this very slowly) he must alreday have discovered that this will take more than the time he has, even assuming he can serve TWO tems. I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
For this job you need someone who has political savvy and can indeed show leadership coupled with diplomacy - and on top of that he needs to have at least a degree of technical competence to ensure someone isn't telling him lots of guff.
If I wasn't non US I'd be interested as I've done this a few times before. I built the fundamentals on a large government work when nobody was interested in collaboration, and I did international interoperability where the group I worked with was talked with making it happen but was placed at totally the wrong level to have any clout whatsoever. And we managed regardless by working at the human level.
The technical stuff is the easy part. Dealing with the human side of things is the hard work, but it's fun too. If you get the right team you can steer them in the rightdirection, form them and let them get ready for when you have the breakthrough (it sort of happens in parallel, but you need more focus on a strategic aim than a tactical effort to drive it in the right direction).
But I'm rambling now. What I wanted to say is that it is NOT an impossible job. But it certainly isn't going to be an easy one for the first few years.
As a matter of fact, if your understanding of a job at that level is simply staying out of trouble you are the wrong person for the job. You will really have to commit yourself.
Whoever gets the job, he/she has my respect.
I don't see this as "decisive action" or "for the good of us" or (etc.), it's just a publicity stunt.
Simple target, low maintenance (because few are going to bother to check if they indeed do) and doing this actively would mean having to deal with other things as well which I deem unlikely.
Are there maybe any funds going somewhere?
Some people do anything to get glowing reviews..
I've heard that if you stick wires in an apple you can run a clock on it.
So I guess this will be near some orchard :-)
You're comparing apples and rotten tomatoes.
Someone with ADHD can in some cases not even take advantage of the few excellent teachers that are around. It's not because they don't WANT to, it's because they really can't. I didn't make that clear in a previous post - as a parent you don't want to hear your child needs a label. You WANT it to be boredom, or "just a phase", and I have a sufficiently wide background to separate BS from reality. I have SEEN the scans and the delta's.
This also means they are double handicapped by the drones out there. They already need to work harder to focus.
Umm, qEEG as used in neurofeedback has been able to identify ADHD for years now.
I think the news is that someone may have found a method that doesn't involve half an hour doing tests (in itself hard for ADHD people) while wearing a headcap with electrodes and hair full of contact gel..
Sadly, I have to disagree from simple practical experience. However, where I would agree with you is the enthusiastic administration of drugs, especially because they don't SOLVE the issue, they just convict the child to being a lifelong provider of profit.
For what it's worth, my son (you could call him a "light" case) was helped by neurofeedback. Not for everyone, sure, but in his case it worked. Ritalin is really about the last thing I'd do to him, so I'm immensely grateful it worked. ADHD is - as far as we learned (I'm no expert) - a weakness in the ability of the brain to switch regions on and off according to need. However, it's no snake oil - you can actually SEE the issue when you look at brain maps (quanititive EEG or qEEG). Rather horrible to see it confirmed, but nice that it IS confirmed so you can try to address it.
Neurofeedback is a bit like a gym and education for the switching mechanism, and for the region that doesn't work too well. It learns to switch correctly (or at least, the "mean" as sampled from many others) and the weakened region gets some exercise, like a muscle. Neurofeedback is cool in that it very quickly shows if it's working or not (no year long therapy), after which more of the same "embeds" it.
The problem with Ritalin et al is that you end up with an overall "on" or "off" state, which means if you need to switch from "doing" to "sitting in the car for an hour" you need to plan this and change medication. If you can avoid that in any way, shape or form, please do. It's really only a last ditch measure.
All IMHO, of course. I can't speak for others, only what I learned myself with my son.
Try to read up on the condition, but do it with a critical eye. I'm the first to agree that a Godawful amount of rubbish has been written about it, but it does exist. And brutally ignorant prescribing of drugs exists too.
But ADHD is no myth. On behalf of many parents with children, I wish to God it was.
Umm, sorry, no. There needs to be a balance between free and what generates income - somewhere someone has to support a living. If he/she/it is a success I'm OK with that generating lots of dosh too.
However, this is not a debate over free vs fee, this is about fee vs theft. The whole problem with theft is that it allows the overcharger to claim that it's theft that is ruining their business instead of forcing them to admit their approach is no longer valid as a business model. In other words, the belief persists that theft is the cause rather than the consequence of the way they price things, and as soon as they caught the "bad guys" the problem will go away.
The fact that attacking the bad guys equals removing them as future customers appears not to register, but let's not delude ourselves here - sharing of paid-for material of any kind beyond the fair use concept *is* illegal. Full stop. That doesn't justify the RIAA approach one bit, but even if the whole world does something does not automatically make it right.
3. Has anyone ever done a study (a real study) of the effectiveness of security cameras at preventing crime? Any sort of crime.
Here you go, that's web economy for you (two answers in one link).
Have a nice day.
Personally, I enjoy the forward looking nature of their sketches so much more than Nostramadus :-)
I'm getting sick and tired of this marketing drivel called "leaking". It's plain and simple research - by dripping some data to the outside they get feedback if it's worth trying to dethrone another standard. It's a method for a company tring to manage its public face when they get a backlash against the idea, but to me such information doesn't "escape" or is not released "by accident".
"Leaking" is to me unauthorized and certain not of benefit to the organisation or individual "losing" the data, like Liechtenstein bank details of UK MP expense details. Not a bloody PR exercise of a company trying to massage public opinion. /rant
I think the issue is more with what was stated in Parliament, the people that built it I know, and know what they're doing. It is highly unlikely they will have made statements like what was uttered in Parliament. Granted, they're no specialists, but some statements are simply unsupportable and create a false sense of security.
I would thus be more interested in what they have planned for when a problem is found. ANY large platform like this will have problems, and that requires prior planning. Given the current government I consider it likely that they already have pre-cooked press statements like "it wasn't our fault, we employed consultants" (who, incidentally, are actually not a bad club despite the one USB stick cockup), but that's not what counts.
What you need is proper audit, shutdown and notification models so that someone can close the shutters if abuse has been detected. They're talking about WiFi access, they're talking about huge amounts of people having access (which is indeed required for some of what lives in that database), and we are in principle talking about relatively few children.
I would consider a leak possible (even likely), so you need to manage down the risk such a leak can generate. This thing is supposed to be part of preventing recurrence of a highly tragic event, if it does that with a bit of leakage it's IMHO OK. However, if it increases the risk for even one child involved it should be immediately reviewed.
Shutting down may not be an option as it would return the original situation, and the risks inherent in it. I don't think anyone wants to go there.
I don't know. If he had any sense he would have a plan B ready: if the result was different he'd have to bribe the researcher to "interpret" the results to keep peace in the family :-)
I'd rather face the RIAA without a lawyer than upset the significant other :-).
It's not all bad news, though, at least they have left the ONE facility in that OO still lacks - track back cursor. Using shift-F5 you track back the cursor moves so if you just scrolled up to find something it'll take you straight back where you came from.
It's still there, but I guess now I've mentioned it as useful the UI team will probably remove it..