I actually didn't say whether it was a civil or criminal case, but that's actually moot since almost all of the "sauce for the goose" cases on whose petard people are proposing hoisting Sony were also civil cases. Those are often the ones where the studios factored into their damages claims the number of times a track was downloaded *from* the plaintiff via Kazaa, eMule, BitTorrent or whatever, and then applied an insane multiplier to arrive at their "punitive damages" figures. Using Google Play doesn't change things. Sure, the singer's studio could issue a take down under the DMCA, but where's the fun and profit in that, when Sony is *also* infringing copyright by distributing the track without a valid license - exactly the same setup that many of the plaintiffs in those civil cases brought by the studios were sued for?
Legal issues aside it's all going to be moot anyway. Sony won't want a DMCA takedown interfering with the money the film is currently making them, and they definitely won't want to face an embarrassing copyright infringement case. If all had gone to plan, Sony would have paid the artist's studio some money - most likely either a lump sum or a figure derived from ticket sales - they'd have taken their cut and paid her the rest, and that's almost certainly still the way things will go. So, some studio execs (maybe lawyers, maybe not) will almost certainly have a chat in the next few days, a number will be thrashed out, some money will change hands, and that will be the end of the matter.
Why limit to just the legal downloads when the **AA's lawyers certainly don't? Remember, according to the *AAs, it's also a crime to *facilitate* theft, so by making available the movie that includes the copyrighted track surely they should also be liable for all the several million torrented copies, plus all the legitmate pay-per-view downloads from Google etc. too?
While I suspect this is probaby just a case of office incompetence and someone forgetting an action that will probably be quickly cleaned up with a check in the post, I dearly hope this does end up going to court. Watching Sony's lawyers try and get themselves off the hook without setting precedents that anyone else being sued for infringing copyright can use would be priceless.
The two are not mutually exclusive, especially if the effect of the security flaw is compounded by multiple connections, for instance being able to use the exploit to turn a child process into a zombie and another child to be spawned until resources are exhausted. There's two security flaws there; the ability for a remote client to zombify the children and not having a cap on the maximum number of children in the config.
Unless you actually find Seth Rogan funny and might get some enjoyment out of watching the film the only think watching this is going to do is help make Sony and their new distributors a pile of money for what is, by all accounts, a completely terrible film that is probably going to clean up at the Raspberry's next year. You know, *Sony*, those complete arseholes behind that rootkit thing a few years ago, and not to mention all that other douchebaggery that's been smeared all over the media for a couple of weeks now? You *want* to give money to those pricks?
Just putting it on release is good enough to give the bird to Kim Jong-Un (assuming he cares in the first place since there is no way that anyone in NK outside the inner circle even knows the film exists), there's no need to help Sony survive any longer than absolutely necessary as well.
Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though), with all the readabilty issues you might expect that to bring. The works of James Joyce also still seem to be listed, come to that, so I'm somewhat curious as to just how this "readability filter" get applied. I sure hope it's not just based on reader comments, because if it is a group like Anonymous or/b/ is about to have a book censoring field day.
On the otherhand, if they can start with some of the religious dogma out there...
I didn't say that resources were not the issue (obviously they are), I said that's not the job of the UN panel. Their original purview was to bring an end to the Cod Wars by defining the boundaries of exclusive economic zones (one form of territorial waters, typically set at 200 nautical miles) based on geography in terms of land mass only, not what resources might lie in or under the ocean. Interestingly, looking at the available maps, other than fish, there don't appear to be many known resources in area of the Danish claim - although that's most probably due to lack of surveys.
Shipping is definitely going to be an issue though, although possibly not for the most obvious of reasons; while a nation cannot prevent international shipping traversing its EEZ, it can set legal boundaries on that shipping within certain UN constraints. With this new claim and a little collaboration between Canada, Denmark and Norway it could theoretically be possible for them to legally prevent some classes of Russian warships entering the North Atlantic from the Arctic Ocean. Regardless of the fun and games trying to enforce that would no doubt entail and even with Putin's current posturing like the cold war never ended, I'd expect some serious opposition from them on this, despite them clearly having little or no claim to the same waters.
Yes, it does. If you were to simply divide up the Arctic Ocean as you describe then you'd have no international waters for shipping routes should the Arctic ever become a viable route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. If one nation's waters extended all the way to the polar cap then they would have a huge amount of control over shipping passing through it that wouldn't otherwise exist if at least part of that open water was free for anyone to access. While the resources will no doubt factor into the discussions, the primary purpose of the UN review mentioned is more about ensuring minimal disruption to potential maritime trade.
If every media outlet there proceeds to print as much as they can about this story then Sony will apparently have NO CHOICE but to hold them responsible and take every single one of them to court. Given David Boies' likely fees that alone will probably end them, let alone any damages that such losing suits will bring, and with the reputation as being the lawyer that drove two companies into Chapter 7 bankruptcy though bad advice it will probably end David Boies too. What's not to like with that scenario?
After a few previous high-profile incidents of this kind of error most online retailers have a clause in their Ts&Cs excusing them from obvious mistakes, errors and omissions, and Amazon is no exception. If they'd had a big banner saying "Special Offer!" or some such, or the price difference was less obvious then it was then the might have had to honour the sales, or done so out of good faith if the damage wasn't too high, but in this case they're pretty much home and dry.
No, they need to play it judiciously lest they get accused of abusing their dominant position in the industry to get their own way. In cases like this, I'd say it's justified, but if it looks like this kind of thing is going to become a regular occurance then they'd better make it clear up front that this is their policy and the expected outcome of any such future legislation. Annoying governments by acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla is a good way to get sanctions that end up costing you a lot more in the long run, albeit probably many, many, years after the original point became a non-issue.
Unless you have some really workflow/hardware your source images are going to be in either JPEG, your camera's proprietary raw format, or both. JPEG supports a standard method of tagging via EXIF directly in the image that includes a "Rating" tag that any tool is going to use. If you are tagging raw files then make sure that you write out the tagging information into.XMP "Sidecar" files. This is an Adobe defined "standard" based around XML files, but it's extremely portable and just about any image editor/tagger that supports.XMP files will follow the core Adobe standard tags, including the ones for rating images, and since it's XML you'll always have access to the tag data if the worst should happen and to roll your own tools if need be. As long as you choose software that supports one or both of those formats, then you'll be fine and about as futureproof as it's possible to be.
I'm sure there was a lot of laughter over the hack in the offices of Sony Pictures' competitors over the last few days. Now that industry-wide strategy stuff from the leak like this is starting to get attention I wonder if they are still quite so amused...
The key word in the theory is "reseeded" - note the "re". Earth formed, lost any water it might have acquired in the formation of the moon, then got it back from comets and asteroids.
I just saw "Bennett Haselton writes", mentally inserted "tldr:" in front of it and came for the LULZ in the comments without even registering what he was drivelling on about.
I have no issues with the sites I choose to visit knowing what I do there - they could get all that from their logs after all - but I also object to feeding the mill of Google, Quantserve et al so I can become their product on my bandwidth, whatever negligable amount it might be. My tool of choice for this is actually my DNS server, with ABP and NoScript only the second line of defence for all the small fry and locally hosted ad/tracking scripts. Good luck getting tracking information when any host on your domain is configured to resolve to 0.0.0.0 via my local DNS' authoratative version of the zone (you don't actually need all that many to make a huge difference), let alone serving up ads, scripts or any other crap. It's not a foolproof opt out of all tracking, but it sure as hell makes them work for a very incomplete picture of my online habits.
At 1/3 the speed of light you'd get noticeable blue/red shift along the axis of travel, which would probably be visibly apparent in the spectra of stars. You wouldn't get blurred stars unless they were passing by really, *really* close, but the pattern of stars would constantly change with the differences apparant over the course of a human lifespan. For instance, if we were moving at that speed and Proxima Centauri were roughly in the direction of travel, then it would go from ahead of us to a similar distance behind in the space of a couple of decades, and with an obvious before/after colour shift.
Any religion and early attempts at astronomy would probably be... interesting.:)
It's not just the radiation levels in a galactic core or the overall velocity of the star system that bothers me, we're also quite a way into the territory or relativistic speeds here so there could also be some very odd effects at different points in a planet's orbit depending on the inclination of the orbital plane to the overall direction of motion. It seems like an awfully big strech to expect even the most primitive forms of life to be able to start under those conditions, let alone survive the trip. That badly needs a justification that the paper fails to provide, unless you count a throwaway line and a couple of references, neither of which look like the would explain how life might exist under those conditions.
Not according to a comment by Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University, in one of the linked articles and acknowledged by Mattingly - he did say that incorporating it might be an option for further research though. This was apparently a "proof of concept" with deliberately simple rules, but given the interest and positive feedback it seems to be generating I'd like to see what happens if this could be adapated to include a more complete set of rules, not to mention be adapted for other countries where this is a problem.
I tend to agree about the media. This doesn't really pass the sniff test for me, it sounds more like the Uber exec in question (Emil Michael who apologised almost immediately for his comments) simply shot his mouth off in front of a Buzzfeed journalist out of frustration at the way Uber is being treated by some members of the media and this in no way represents the official company line. Foolish, sure, but when did the media ever care about a little verbal faux pas when you can take it out of context and spin it into a clickbait story about a hot topic to grab some quick ad revenue?
Technically correct, but that doesn't help those people who expected single player to be a fully off-line mode that would let them play the game when an Internet connection was not available. Some people spend a lot of time travelling and like to have something a little more entertaining the Solitaire or Minesweeper to keep them occupied while they have some downtime, even if they are slightly hamstrung by lack of space and limited control options, so when a game promises a fully offline single player mode that's a big draw - especially given how many SP games require connectivity for their copyright protection schemes these days.
That E:D not only reneged on that initial design goal but left it until the last minute to announce the fact when they must have known about it for months comes across as a deliberate bait and switch to keep the money coming in as long as possible to me, especially when considered with the "Give us MOAR money!" rider on many of their newsletters. Sure, there are no guarantees in crowdfunding and the golden rule is "don't give money you can't afford to lose", but annoying a large chunk of your customers right before a major product launch isn't exactly the best of business strategies either. IMO, Frontier badly needs to offer an olive branch here, including at least partial refunds to those that really want one.
The porn industry would be a good bet, but on a more serious note the SKA will easily exceed that, once it becomes operational. Lots of radio telescopes, listening on lots of frequencies, and able to run 24/7... I found a few articles on likely data sizes and some of the figures are insanely large - the test size, a mere 1% of the size that final project project will reach, spits out raw data at 60Tbit/s and even after compression that's 1GByte/s. Figures for the completed array are in the range of 1EByte of compressed data (1EByte/day uncompressed) every two weeks or so, or about 70PBytes/day, so even allowing for further data aggregation they are going to be *well* beyond Facebook and the LHC in terms of daily data production.
What's missing from the stuff I looked at was any indication of long term storage capacities for retained data. I get the impression that 70PBytes is then processed and a smaller data set is actually retained, but couldn't find any hard figures on how much volume that the processed data might have, which is the value I think should be used for comparison purposes with Facebook. Maybe someone familiar with the project is reading and can fill in the blanks?
Yeah, I suspected that might be the case which is why I mentioned the robustness of the border controls. I've been across several borders between close allies and trading partners where the crossing is largely a formality and you are pretty unlucky if they even look at you, let alone ask for any ID - assuming you even bother using a road with a check point on it. Unless they were specifically watching out for him (a distinct possibility given how the Kim Dotcom arrest appears to have been arranged) it does indeed sound like he might have just got unlucky with a trip to get his tourist visa updated and maybe pay a visit to the in-laws.
I doubt very much that his method of communication with others had anything to do with things. He was arrested at a border checkpoint, so I suspect all that happened was they checked his ID as a matter of routine and got a red flag because of the arrest warrant. I doubt very much that a Thai/Loatian border guard would even know who Fredrik Neij was, let alone recognise his shirt as being the one in his arrest photo. What's more surprising to me is that Neij was attempting border crossings with an outstanding international arrest warrant - unless he wasn't aware of the warrant or the Thailand-Laos border control isn't particularly robust.
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I actually didn't say whether it was a civil or criminal case, but that's actually moot since almost all of the "sauce for the goose" cases on whose petard people are proposing hoisting Sony were also civil cases. Those are often the ones where the studios factored into their damages claims the number of times a track was downloaded *from* the plaintiff via Kazaa, eMule, BitTorrent or whatever, and then applied an insane multiplier to arrive at their "punitive damages" figures. Using Google Play doesn't change things. Sure, the singer's studio could issue a take down under the DMCA, but where's the fun and profit in that, when Sony is *also* infringing copyright by distributing the track without a valid license - exactly the same setup that many of the plaintiffs in those civil cases brought by the studios were sued for?
Legal issues aside it's all going to be moot anyway. Sony won't want a DMCA takedown interfering with the money the film is currently making them, and they definitely won't want to face an embarrassing copyright infringement case. If all had gone to plan, Sony would have paid the artist's studio some money - most likely either a lump sum or a figure derived from ticket sales - they'd have taken their cut and paid her the rest, and that's almost certainly still the way things will go. So, some studio execs (maybe lawyers, maybe not) will almost certainly have a chat in the next few days, a number will be thrashed out, some money will change hands, and that will be the end of the matter.
Why limit to just the legal downloads when the **AA's lawyers certainly don't? Remember, according to the *AAs, it's also a crime to *facilitate* theft, so by making available the movie that includes the copyrighted track surely they should also be liable for all the several million torrented copies, plus all the legitmate pay-per-view downloads from Google etc. too?
While I suspect this is probaby just a case of office incompetence and someone forgetting an action that will probably be quickly cleaned up with a check in the post, I dearly hope this does end up going to court. Watching Sony's lawyers try and get themselves off the hook without setting precedents that anyone else being sued for infringing copyright can use would be priceless.
The two are not mutually exclusive, especially if the effect of the security flaw is compounded by multiple connections, for instance being able to use the exploit to turn a child process into a zombie and another child to be spawned until resources are exhausted. There's two security flaws there; the ability for a remote client to zombify the children and not having a cap on the maximum number of children in the config.
Erm. No. Not even if you paid me to.
Unless you actually find Seth Rogan funny and might get some enjoyment out of watching the film the only think watching this is going to do is help make Sony and their new distributors a pile of money for what is, by all accounts, a completely terrible film that is probably going to clean up at the Raspberry's next year. You know, *Sony*, those complete arseholes behind that rootkit thing a few years ago, and not to mention all that other douchebaggery that's been smeared all over the media for a couple of weeks now? You *want* to give money to those pricks?
Just putting it on release is good enough to give the bird to Kim Jong-Un (assuming he cares in the first place since there is no way that anyone in NK outside the inner circle even knows the film exists), there's no need to help Sony survive any longer than absolutely necessary as well.
Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though), with all the readabilty issues you might expect that to bring. The works of James Joyce also still seem to be listed, come to that, so I'm somewhat curious as to just how this "readability filter" get applied. I sure hope it's not just based on reader comments, because if it is a group like Anonymous or /b/ is about to have a book censoring field day.
On the otherhand, if they can start with some of the religious dogma out there...
I didn't say that resources were not the issue (obviously they are), I said that's not the job of the UN panel. Their original purview was to bring an end to the Cod Wars by defining the boundaries of exclusive economic zones (one form of territorial waters, typically set at 200 nautical miles) based on geography in terms of land mass only, not what resources might lie in or under the ocean. Interestingly, looking at the available maps, other than fish, there don't appear to be many known resources in area of the Danish claim - although that's most probably due to lack of surveys.
Shipping is definitely going to be an issue though, although possibly not for the most obvious of reasons; while a nation cannot prevent international shipping traversing its EEZ, it can set legal boundaries on that shipping within certain UN constraints. With this new claim and a little collaboration between Canada, Denmark and Norway it could theoretically be possible for them to legally prevent some classes of Russian warships entering the North Atlantic from the Arctic Ocean. Regardless of the fun and games trying to enforce that would no doubt entail and even with Putin's current posturing like the cold war never ended, I'd expect some serious opposition from them on this, despite them clearly having little or no claim to the same waters.
Yes, it does. If you were to simply divide up the Arctic Ocean as you describe then you'd have no international waters for shipping routes should the Arctic ever become a viable route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. If one nation's waters extended all the way to the polar cap then they would have a huge amount of control over shipping passing through it that wouldn't otherwise exist if at least part of that open water was free for anyone to access. While the resources will no doubt factor into the discussions, the primary purpose of the UN review mentioned is more about ensuring minimal disruption to potential maritime trade.
Oh, please, please, PLEASE let them mean that.
If every media outlet there proceeds to print as much as they can about this story then Sony will apparently have NO CHOICE but to hold them responsible and take every single one of them to court. Given David Boies' likely fees that alone will probably end them, let alone any damages that such losing suits will bring, and with the reputation as being the lawyer that drove two companies into Chapter 7 bankruptcy though bad advice it will probably end David Boies too. What's not to like with that scenario?
After a few previous high-profile incidents of this kind of error most online retailers have a clause in their Ts&Cs excusing them from obvious mistakes, errors and omissions, and Amazon is no exception. If they'd had a big banner saying "Special Offer!" or some such, or the price difference was less obvious then it was then the might have had to honour the sales, or done so out of good faith if the damage wasn't too high, but in this case they're pretty much home and dry.
No, they need to play it judiciously lest they get accused of abusing their dominant position in the industry to get their own way. In cases like this, I'd say it's justified, but if it looks like this kind of thing is going to become a regular occurance then they'd better make it clear up front that this is their policy and the expected outcome of any such future legislation. Annoying governments by acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla is a good way to get sanctions that end up costing you a lot more in the long run, albeit probably many, many, years after the original point became a non-issue.
Unless you have some really workflow/hardware your source images are going to be in either JPEG, your camera's proprietary raw format, or both. JPEG supports a standard method of tagging via EXIF directly in the image that includes a "Rating" tag that any tool is going to use. If you are tagging raw files then make sure that you write out the tagging information into .XMP "Sidecar" files. This is an Adobe defined "standard" based around XML files, but it's extremely portable and just about any image editor/tagger that supports .XMP files will follow the core Adobe standard tags, including the ones for rating images, and since it's XML you'll always have access to the tag data if the worst should happen and to roll your own tools if need be. As long as you choose software that supports one or both of those formats, then you'll be fine and about as futureproof as it's possible to be.
I'm sure there was a lot of laughter over the hack in the offices of Sony Pictures' competitors over the last few days. Now that industry-wide strategy stuff from the leak like this is starting to get attention I wonder if they are still quite so amused...
I think you are overestimating his worth. Clearly even the man himself only thinks he's worth his weight in bronze. :)
The key word in the theory is "reseeded" - note the "re". Earth formed, lost any water it might have acquired in the formation of the moon, then got it back from comets and asteroids.
You made it that far?
I just saw "Bennett Haselton writes", mentally inserted "tldr:" in front of it and came for the LULZ in the comments without even registering what he was drivelling on about.
I have no issues with the sites I choose to visit knowing what I do there - they could get all that from their logs after all - but I also object to feeding the mill of Google, Quantserve et al so I can become their product on my bandwidth, whatever negligable amount it might be. My tool of choice for this is actually my DNS server, with ABP and NoScript only the second line of defence for all the small fry and locally hosted ad/tracking scripts. Good luck getting tracking information when any host on your domain is configured to resolve to 0.0.0.0 via my local DNS' authoratative version of the zone (you don't actually need all that many to make a huge difference), let alone serving up ads, scripts or any other crap. It's not a foolproof opt out of all tracking, but it sure as hell makes them work for a very incomplete picture of my online habits.
At 1/3 the speed of light you'd get noticeable blue/red shift along the axis of travel, which would probably be visibly apparent in the spectra of stars. You wouldn't get blurred stars unless they were passing by really, *really* close, but the pattern of stars would constantly change with the differences apparant over the course of a human lifespan. For instance, if we were moving at that speed and Proxima Centauri were roughly in the direction of travel, then it would go from ahead of us to a similar distance behind in the space of a couple of decades, and with an obvious before/after colour shift.
:)
Any religion and early attempts at astronomy would probably be... interesting.
It's not just the radiation levels in a galactic core or the overall velocity of the star system that bothers me, we're also quite a way into the territory or relativistic speeds here so there could also be some very odd effects at different points in a planet's orbit depending on the inclination of the orbital plane to the overall direction of motion. It seems like an awfully big strech to expect even the most primitive forms of life to be able to start under those conditions, let alone survive the trip. That badly needs a justification that the paper fails to provide, unless you count a throwaway line and a couple of references, neither of which look like the would explain how life might exist under those conditions.
Not according to a comment by Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University, in one of the linked articles and acknowledged by Mattingly - he did say that incorporating it might be an option for further research though. This was apparently a "proof of concept" with deliberately simple rules, but given the interest and positive feedback it seems to be generating I'd like to see what happens if this could be adapated to include a more complete set of rules, not to mention be adapted for other countries where this is a problem.
Do you really have to ask? "Do as I say, not as I do"; the mantra of far too many governments (and parents) for quite some time now.
I tend to agree about the media. This doesn't really pass the sniff test for me, it sounds more like the Uber exec in question (Emil Michael who apologised almost immediately for his comments) simply shot his mouth off in front of a Buzzfeed journalist out of frustration at the way Uber is being treated by some members of the media and this in no way represents the official company line. Foolish, sure, but when did the media ever care about a little verbal faux pas when you can take it out of context and spin it into a clickbait story about a hot topic to grab some quick ad revenue?
Technically correct, but that doesn't help those people who expected single player to be a fully off-line mode that would let them play the game when an Internet connection was not available. Some people spend a lot of time travelling and like to have something a little more entertaining the Solitaire or Minesweeper to keep them occupied while they have some downtime, even if they are slightly hamstrung by lack of space and limited control options, so when a game promises a fully offline single player mode that's a big draw - especially given how many SP games require connectivity for their copyright protection schemes these days.
That E:D not only reneged on that initial design goal but left it until the last minute to announce the fact when they must have known about it for months comes across as a deliberate bait and switch to keep the money coming in as long as possible to me, especially when considered with the "Give us MOAR money!" rider on many of their newsletters. Sure, there are no guarantees in crowdfunding and the golden rule is "don't give money you can't afford to lose", but annoying a large chunk of your customers right before a major product launch isn't exactly the best of business strategies either. IMO, Frontier badly needs to offer an olive branch here, including at least partial refunds to those that really want one.
The porn industry would be a good bet, but on a more serious note the SKA will easily exceed that, once it becomes operational. Lots of radio telescopes, listening on lots of frequencies, and able to run 24/7... I found a few articles on likely data sizes and some of the figures are insanely large - the test size, a mere 1% of the size that final project project will reach, spits out raw data at 60Tbit/s and even after compression that's 1GByte/s. Figures for the completed array are in the range of 1EByte of compressed data (1EByte/day uncompressed) every two weeks or so, or about 70PBytes/day, so even allowing for further data aggregation they are going to be *well* beyond Facebook and the LHC in terms of daily data production.
What's missing from the stuff I looked at was any indication of long term storage capacities for retained data. I get the impression that 70PBytes is then processed and a smaller data set is actually retained, but couldn't find any hard figures on how much volume that the processed data might have, which is the value I think should be used for comparison purposes with Facebook. Maybe someone familiar with the project is reading and can fill in the blanks?
Yeah, I suspected that might be the case which is why I mentioned the robustness of the border controls. I've been across several borders between close allies and trading partners where the crossing is largely a formality and you are pretty unlucky if they even look at you, let alone ask for any ID - assuming you even bother using a road with a check point on it. Unless they were specifically watching out for him (a distinct possibility given how the Kim Dotcom arrest appears to have been arranged) it does indeed sound like he might have just got unlucky with a trip to get his tourist visa updated and maybe pay a visit to the in-laws.
I doubt very much that his method of communication with others had anything to do with things. He was arrested at a border checkpoint, so I suspect all that happened was they checked his ID as a matter of routine and got a red flag because of the arrest warrant. I doubt very much that a Thai/Loatian border guard would even know who Fredrik Neij was, let alone recognise his shirt as being the one in his arrest photo. What's more surprising to me is that Neij was attempting border crossings with an outstanding international arrest warrant - unless he wasn't aware of the warrant or the Thailand-Laos border control isn't particularly robust.