That's pretty funny and if only that were true. I also friend and foe (usually friend) on other issues, too. Usually on what I consider to be expressions of great compassion and understanding not limited to issues of race.
Who the fuck would miss this item if it were NOT on Slashdot?
I would miss it, for one.
I am a/. reader of mixed race. I have been watching this story unfold on/. very closely, noting the large number of/.ers who, in my opinion, seem enlightened about the effect of race as it plays out in this case and also noting the significant number of/.ers who seem to have a racial/racist stake in the affair.
Like it or not, race is one of the most important subtexts for employment and achievement in the world of technology and given the underrepresentation of race in the coverage of technology (despite the high prevalence of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and other races), the attitude, perceptions, and opinions of race on an issue like the Trayvon Martin case is important to nerds like me.
I am glad to see what other/.ers have to say about this subject, and I have been carefully adding to my freaks and friends list based on some of the opinions I've seen expressed.
The publishers know they entered the eBook business because they were afraid of the example of the movie and music industries and rather than allow their "disintermediation" (Sargent's word) they made sure none of them using the agency model would set eBook prices below a certain bar, thus destroying Amazon's so-called "monopoly" position.
Apple has a hand in facilitating the price-fixing and should be punished accordingly.
The book publishers, on the other hand, deserve to burn in hell.
What's news (at least to me and I'm guessing many others) is that this exploit does not require any other interaction than an http request. That is, no password required.
Objectively, we know very little of what we'd need to know to have good, rational opinions.
That's a great point and much of this could be avoided if the Sanford, Florida, DA would what should have been done 7 weeks ago which is place Zimmerman under arrest.
It doesn't matter WHAT these type of devices look like. Anything unfamiliar is liable to cause BLIND PANIC for the (delegated) powers-that-be. It's almost as if a simple intended-to-be-viral ad campaign could trigger a panic on the part of law enforcement.
But to answer your question more directly, the reason nobody talked about them in *this* article is because they are not a lucrative target market for advertisements. The homosexual male community is not targeted for advertisement because they are so numerous, but because the retail and marketing world believes that gay males spend a lot of money and, more importantly, influence the fashions and tastes of the heterosexual people surrounding them. Clothing stores see gay men as trend setters, so they believe that getting gay men to adopt their clothes will lead the heterosexual people to follow. Because of rampant discrimination and erasure, trans people are not perceived as having the same trend-setting appeal.
Trenchant analysis. Thanks for so thoughtful a post.
This is 2012. I understand academia moves slowly but I certainly expect more of a services provider for education than horrendous table-based layout from 1997.
While not the underlying technology, the landing page is the first thing potential (and, in many cases, existing) clients see and such antiquated structure would warn me away from such a provider. If companies like Netspot are the competition Blackboard can squash only through purchasing, Blackboard must be a really shitty company.
This move comes 6 days after I sent an email to the NYTimes.com about the paywall. Here's what I wrote:
First, I want to thank you for providing your articles free of charge for so many years. I also want to acknowledge the high quality of your reporting.
I've been reading the NYTimes online since 1998. My username is mistersquid. I have a low-traffic blog and have frequently linked to the NYTimes. Most of the articles I read from the NYTimes I find through RSS. I know how to route around the NYTimes paywall to retrieve articles, both by using 3rd party aggregators and by URL-rewriting.
However, in the last two months I have severely curtailed my reading of the NYTimes online because I understand the NYTimes wants to monetize online reading and I am unwilling to pay money. That is, I consciously avoid clicking links to NYTimes articles and look for other sources (eg. BBC), even though I know how to get around the restrictions.
I know I am only one person, but I wanted to let you know that even the nominal restrictions on article availability discourages me from reading your articles even though I know how to get the information for no charge. Insofar as readership is only as valuable as the money they pay, the NYTimes editorial perspective is valueless to the public. I don't believe this is what the NYTimes wants, but it is the situation that obtains in my particular case.
I don't have any ideas about how the NYTimes can generate revenue from people like me. I do know, though, that a paywall makes me look for the information elsewhere.
Sometimes I consider paying, but the non-discounted price for online access seems unreasonable given there is no physical distribution. I will not condescend to you by suggesting a reasonable price; I only know it will have to be lower than it currently is for me to consider paying instead of avoiding NYTimes online content.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my views regarding your pay wall.
tl;dr: You're charging WAY too much for your digital-only subscription ($180/year minimum) which costs much less than paper to distribute.
It's working for them, that's actually pretty cool.
The summary (and presumably TFA) assert that the paywall is working. If that's the case, why is the NYTimes reducing the number of free articles from 20 to 10? I suppose to get every last bit of subscriber mojo. Another possible explanation is that (subscriptions * X) + ad revenue - dropoff < (subscriptions * Y) + ad revenue.
In any case, the pay wall has NOT been up for a year. The pay wall has only gone into effect starting January 2012.
Given that Apple labored for the better part of the decade under the "beleaguered" banner all the while operating well outside industry norms, I doubt Apple would care what anyone says about them, let alone make business decisions based on what others say.
Now, the vast majority of people buying tablets and smartphones just want it to work - much like when you buy a car; only a small % of people are customizing it with their own after-market parts.
On Sunday, a friend of mine and I went into the San Francisco Apple Store where she purchased a new iPad.
The sales associate told us that she could purchase AppleCare plus for an additional $99. In addition to protecting the device for an additional two years, AppleCare plus allows for up two "incidents" which insures the device against the user dropping the tablet into water, cracking the glass, or whatever on top of the extended warranty against defects.
What I'm wondering is why would anybody want to pay $50 for parts they have to install themselves at their own risk when one can just simply pay for a policy that will cover the device for its non-obsoleted life?
Nerds believe fixing their own devices is somehow better than paying someone else to do it. They honestly do not realize labor is less valuable than the ability to pay somebody to labor for them.
Tech skills are one thing if you're building a space station or curing cancer, and an entirely different thing if you're talking about consumer devices.
Sure. What I meant by presentism is usually covered by the more colloquial "face time", which is the idea in corporate culture that people who are physically present in an office are productive. This can be so extreme as to discourage telecommuting even when it makes sense.
Academia generally has no such requirements. One does have committee work and office hours, but most (non-science/non-lab) work in academia is either done behind a closed door or at home. So, the freedom to work alone and/or at home may be more characteristic of the humanities and non-studio disciplines than, for example, the hard sciences and drama.
I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen
I used to be a professor (of American Literature). I am unusual in that I have a wide background which includes mathematics, programming, and skill with computer systems/networks. I love literature, languages, poetry, art, and postmodernity. I also love computers, GREP, web development, and cosmogony (this last strictly as a spectator).
Increasingly, I found academia stultifying, especially because it meant laboring in obscurity for students who were on their way somewhere else. The best students--the graduate students I mentored in their quests to find professorships--were far and few between and headed to either to the dead-end of no-humanities-jobs or the undead-end of low pay and crippling student loans. My colleagues in the math department did not (over)produce as many Ph.D.s as we in English, but their also wallowed in the budget-cut gutter. As academics, we all were getting defunded and lines for new hires were either cancelled or endlessly deferred.
All that aside, when you find yourself saying something like your livelihood depends upon a captive audience "willing to pay through the nose" while the upstart competitor is presently perceived (and sometimes is, but not always) as a "second-class citizen" you've seriously got to wonder what your future holds.
I left academia in 2010 to become an entry-level front-end developer in the Bay Area (mostly to come back to California where I grew up. I'd had enough of living in the Midwest at an R2 university). Right off the bat I made 20% more than I did as a faculty of 7 years. My salary, my environment, my autonomy--all these things have only improved in the last two years. Every day it gets better.
I do miss some aspects of academia, the colleagues and motivated students especially. I also miss unfettered access to a research library. But I don't miss grading, overwork, low pay, and obscurity. There are also things about tech employment I dislike: petty politics, office culture (presentism), boyzone, sexism, homophobia (even in SF), and 50+ hours/week cycle of declining productivity.
Anyhow, this is a long anecdote to warn people like you that academia wears thin for many academics, but academics are so specialized they often have no choice but to stay the course they set many years ago in graduate school. Others of us who have fungible skills (technology) go elsewhere when the romanticized ideal of the university is replaced by the day-to-day of academic life. As someone who fell in love with information technology with his first Apple//e ('e' for education, remember), I saw the writing on the digital wall.
You think your job at some (more likely than not obscure) university will keep-on-keeping-on now that disruptive technology (such as Ted Education, tablet devices, and Stanford's free courses) have ruptured the pristine edifice of the ivory tower?
Think hard and think again because as sure as it will rain, academic jobs are going to be even more severely constrained.
If they won't hire you as an employee why would you help them?
Because I do not want to work for Atari but still think it'd be neat to see an idea of mine implemented. Also because I have lot and lots of ideas (except in this one case, heh), and giving this one away doesn't really matter to me.
1. Have the ball transmit damage to a paddle on each successful return so that divots are taken out of each paddle. As each paddle becomes more fragmented, a player's ability to successfully return the ball decreases.
1a. Introduce a healing ball that appears at random intervals headed from the middle of the pong field toward the outside. Capturing this healer would restore some portion of sustained damage.
There is little discussion of (and no answer to) the question of whether publishing links to copyright infringement is illegal in the US.
My best guess is that it is not illegal to do so (First Amendment, etc.) but this guy is not a US citizen. So this seems to amount to a international shakedown by the powers-that-be, an attempt to bankrupt this guy for sharing links to files from outside the US.
In other words, I'm guessing the guy did not break any laws in either the US or the UK and the US is shaking him down to make an example of him.
My understanding is that what he did was legal in his own country. It was only illegal in the US. Therefore, he gets extradited to a foreign country.
That's just it. My understanding is that it is NOT illegal in the US to link to copyright-infringing websites. Can someone who RTFA'd provide some clarity?
Slashdot Mirror
I see. You actually meant a scene from Episode II, not Episode IV.
No.
This is true, but the guy's password was "12345".
In other news Garen Meguerian is also suing Mel Brooks and MGM for making Spaceballs.
That's pretty funny and if only that were true. I also friend and foe (usually friend) on other issues, too. Usually on what I consider to be expressions of great compassion and understanding not limited to issues of race.
I would miss it, for one.
I am a /. reader of mixed race. I have been watching this story unfold on /. very closely, noting the large number of /.ers who, in my opinion, seem enlightened about the effect of race as it plays out in this case and also noting the significant number of /.ers who seem to have a racial/racist stake in the affair.
Like it or not, race is one of the most important subtexts for employment and achievement in the world of technology and given the underrepresentation of race in the coverage of technology (despite the high prevalence of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and other races), the attitude, perceptions, and opinions of race on an issue like the Trayvon Martin case is important to nerds like me.
I am glad to see what other /.ers have to say about this subject, and I have been carefully adding to my freaks and friends list based on some of the opinions I've seen expressed.
This is exactly what is at issue in the hub-and-spoke model of collusion (cf. section beginning "Information Sharing in the UK") the DOJ is alleging.
Quoting myself from elsewhere:
What's news (at least to me and I'm guessing many others) is that this exploit does not require any other interaction than an http request. That is, no password required.
The Flashback.K variant requires no password to install itself.
That's a great point and much of this could be avoided if the Sanford, Florida, DA would what should have been done 7 weeks ago which is place Zimmerman under arrest.
It doesn't matter WHAT these type of devices look like. Anything unfamiliar is liable to cause BLIND PANIC for the (delegated) powers-that-be. It's almost as if a simple intended-to-be-viral ad campaign could trigger a panic on the part of law enforcement.
Trenchant analysis. Thanks for so thoughtful a post.
This is 2012. I understand academia moves slowly but I certainly expect more of a services provider for education than horrendous table-based layout from 1997.
While not the underlying technology, the landing page is the first thing potential (and, in many cases, existing) clients see and such antiquated structure would warn me away from such a provider. If companies like Netspot are the competition Blackboard can squash only through purchasing, Blackboard must be a really shitty company.
The best part of the summary is that the first anchor isn't even a link, has no name, title, alt, or class attributes.
Please tell me this is not what HTML5 will bring us going forward.
Forget that. I drive with my hand on the knob.
(Naturally, my steering wheel and car are way cooler than that picture) : P
This move comes 6 days after I sent an email to the NYTimes.com about the paywall. Here's what I wrote:
tl;dr: You're charging WAY too much for your digital-only subscription ($180/year minimum) which costs much less than paper to distribute.
The summary (and presumably TFA) assert that the paywall is working. If that's the case, why is the NYTimes reducing the number of free articles from 20 to 10? I suppose to get every last bit of subscriber mojo. Another possible explanation is that (subscriptions * X) + ad revenue - dropoff < (subscriptions * Y) + ad revenue.
In any case, the pay wall has NOT been up for a year. The pay wall has only gone into effect starting January 2012.
Remember when some CRT TVs had integrated VHS decks? I hated those things. So cheap. So ugly.
Given that Apple labored for the better part of the decade under the "beleaguered" banner all the while operating well outside industry norms, I doubt Apple would care what anyone says about them, let alone make business decisions based on what others say.
On Sunday, a friend of mine and I went into the San Francisco Apple Store where she purchased a new iPad.
The sales associate told us that she could purchase AppleCare plus for an additional $99. In addition to protecting the device for an additional two years, AppleCare plus allows for up two "incidents" which insures the device against the user dropping the tablet into water, cracking the glass, or whatever on top of the extended warranty against defects.
What I'm wondering is why would anybody want to pay $50 for parts they have to install themselves at their own risk when one can just simply pay for a policy that will cover the device for its non-obsoleted life?
Nerds believe fixing their own devices is somehow better than paying someone else to do it. They honestly do not realize labor is less valuable than the ability to pay somebody to labor for them.
Tech skills are one thing if you're building a space station or curing cancer, and an entirely different thing if you're talking about consumer devices.
Sure. What I meant by presentism is usually covered by the more colloquial "face time", which is the idea in corporate culture that people who are physically present in an office are productive. This can be so extreme as to discourage telecommuting even when it makes sense.
Academia generally has no such requirements. One does have committee work and office hours, but most (non-science/non-lab) work in academia is either done behind a closed door or at home. So, the freedom to work alone and/or at home may be more characteristic of the humanities and non-studio disciplines than, for example, the hard sciences and drama.
I used to be a professor (of American Literature). I am unusual in that I have a wide background which includes mathematics, programming, and skill with computer systems/networks. I love literature, languages, poetry, art, and postmodernity. I also love computers, GREP, web development, and cosmogony (this last strictly as a spectator).
Increasingly, I found academia stultifying, especially because it meant laboring in obscurity for students who were on their way somewhere else. The best students--the graduate students I mentored in their quests to find professorships--were far and few between and headed to either to the dead-end of no-humanities-jobs or the undead-end of low pay and crippling student loans. My colleagues in the math department did not (over)produce as many Ph.D.s as we in English, but their also wallowed in the budget-cut gutter. As academics, we all were getting defunded and lines for new hires were either cancelled or endlessly deferred.
All that aside, when you find yourself saying something like your livelihood depends upon a captive audience "willing to pay through the nose" while the upstart competitor is presently perceived (and sometimes is, but not always) as a "second-class citizen" you've seriously got to wonder what your future holds.
I left academia in 2010 to become an entry-level front-end developer in the Bay Area (mostly to come back to California where I grew up. I'd had enough of living in the Midwest at an R2 university). Right off the bat I made 20% more than I did as a faculty of 7 years. My salary, my environment, my autonomy--all these things have only improved in the last two years. Every day it gets better.
I do miss some aspects of academia, the colleagues and motivated students especially. I also miss unfettered access to a research library. But I don't miss grading, overwork, low pay, and obscurity. There are also things about tech employment I dislike: petty politics, office culture (presentism), boyzone, sexism, homophobia (even in SF), and 50+ hours/week cycle of declining productivity.
Anyhow, this is a long anecdote to warn people like you that academia wears thin for many academics, but academics are so specialized they often have no choice but to stay the course they set many years ago in graduate school. Others of us who have fungible skills (technology) go elsewhere when the romanticized ideal of the university is replaced by the day-to-day of academic life. As someone who fell in love with information technology with his first Apple //e ('e' for education, remember), I saw the writing on the digital wall.
You think your job at some (more likely than not obscure) university will keep-on-keeping-on now that disruptive technology (such as Ted Education, tablet devices, and Stanford's free courses) have ruptured the pristine edifice of the ivory tower?
Think hard and think again because as sure as it will rain, academic jobs are going to be even more severely constrained.
Because I do not want to work for Atari but still think it'd be neat to see an idea of mine implemented. Also because I have lot and lots of ideas (except in this one case, heh), and giving this one away doesn't really matter to me.
1. Have the ball transmit damage to a paddle on each successful return so that divots are taken out of each paddle. As each paddle becomes more fragmented, a player's ability to successfully return the ball decreases.
1a. Introduce a healing ball that appears at random intervals headed from the middle of the pong field toward the outside. Capturing this healer would restore some portion of sustained damage.
2. That's all I got for now.
I RTFA'd as well as perusing the /. link.
There is little discussion of (and no answer to) the question of whether publishing links to copyright infringement is illegal in the US.
My best guess is that it is not illegal to do so (First Amendment, etc.) but this guy is not a US citizen. So this seems to amount to a international shakedown by the powers-that-be, an attempt to bankrupt this guy for sharing links to files from outside the US.
In other words, I'm guessing the guy did not break any laws in either the US or the UK and the US is shaking him down to make an example of him.
That's just it. My understanding is that it is NOT illegal in the US to link to copyright-infringing websites. Can someone who RTFA'd provide some clarity?