The Supremes already ruled that they're not going to create a new category of "unprotected speech" (the common ones that already exist include incitement, AKA "fighting words/fire in a theater"-- which has become weak sauce in the face of moneyed media corporations-- and defamation), so the Court watchers are scratching their heads, saying "if the current interpretation of the First Amendment was correctly rendered by the lower court, why did the SCOTUS bother to grant certiorari?"
In any case, we should expect to see a Jack Thompson clone (with a few aggression inhibitors installed) trotting out tired old "kids are programmed by what they see" studies without any sort of nuance whatsoever arguing for California, so any arguments we make here will get modded up, but won't reach the justices' ears or eyes. Thankfully, there are amicus briefs with the common viewpoint here filed (the idea that violent games directly cause kids to be violent is disputable at best), so it's not like the CA counsel will get a slam-dunk.
On the other hand, the legal system in this country as a whole has been trending towards the heavy prosecutorial power of the police state for decades now, so I wouldn't be surprised if former prosecutors like Sotomayor side with California on this.
If the original was shot like many other films, it may very well be dust by now. The actual material that records analog (i.e. non-digital) motion picture has a shelf life of a few decades.
(I learned about this from Lessig lectures about those who are trying to archive old films and documentaries. Basically, they're at risk of being lost forever because the conversion process trips copyright law, and often there's someone who prohibits the process from going forward.)
What's more surprising to me isn't that the DoJ issued this amicus curiae brief, it's that they issued this even with former RIAA lawyers in its top echelons. If their top lawyers believe that companies should be "free" to control information, then they would no doubt have a problem with this brief.
On the other hand(s), they may not have a problem with freeing genes from patents, they may not personally believe what their former employers believe and were merely doing their jobs (which is pretty common among lawyers-- they turn into stalwart defenders of the worst ideas because that's how the adversarial legal system works), or they don't see the philosophical connection between strict control of copyright and strict control of any other "license" (for lack of a better term) on information.
The judge may have set the precedent so that future frivolous cases like this one could enter the docket. More cases = more fees = more money for the courts. I can't prove this, as I can't read minds. But most judges don't want crap like this taking up their time, so there must be a reason why this particular judge thought that this case warranted the merit of proceeding in New York courtrooms.
I thought it was the responsibility of the legal profession to educate the non-legal scholars on what is and isn't a viable case, so I'm sensing that the plaintiff's counsel thinks that the legal fees are worth it anyway (lawyers can refuse to represent a person), or that the plaintiff is representing themselves. Usually, one would look at this like an unfortunate accident, but apparently this family thinks a 4-year-old maliciously collided with their loved one. Why else would they sue for damages?
The state of the US legal profession getting bogged down in procedural quagmire and/or gamesmanship (RIAA litigation model) is kind of like the decay of journalism-- if you don't defend your profession from crap, the crap will represent you.
Quick recap of that segment: Adam and Jamie were challenged to defeat a commercial-grade fingerprint scanner lock.They used a couple of common forensic techniques (super glue in a vacuum chamber and graphite dust-- common stuff for CSI viewers) to get a scannable fingerprint, and initially had trouble with their copied prints because the detail of the fingerprints tended to get smudged. After they "enhance" the prints by enlarging them and filling them in with a marker, their photolithographic etches* made a mold that could defeat their practice device, a fingerprint scanner compatible with Windows.
When it came time to actually test the real thing, they found that only the image of the fingerprint (at original scale) and a bit of moisture were sufficient to defeat the lock-- even a licked photocopy of the print would do.
On the other hand, a serious attempt at security would not rely on a single point of failure, so one would probably use the fingerprint scanner and, say, a PIN code.
* They censored the process, but honestly, anyone who's made a printed circuit can easily figure it out...
What you probably mean is that the traditional left-right scale would have one side being authoritarian in some issues but libertarian in others, and vice versa with the other-- in other words, there's very little in the way of nuance. For example, the typical American conservative (and even some self-described libertarians) favor low regulation and taxes on businesses, but demand tight government enforcement of immigration, sexual/marital purity, and religious partiality. By contrast, the typical American liberal/progressive favors proactive government involvement in many areas, but firm protection of civil liberties-- which no doubt sounds paradoxical, if not contradictory, to the libertarian.
A more nuanced view of political philosophy uses more than one axis-- the Political Compass, for example, uses "economic liberty" as the x-axis and "civil liberty" as the y-axis.
And I don't mean "we looked at the evidence for the defendant and concluded unilaterally that he should be disconnected." I mean the right of the accused to defend oneself in a fair hearing. Due process is a fundamental part of the rule of law, and because it protects the innocent and guilty alike, states absolutely hate its inconvenience and the fact that it lets some of the guilty go free.
South Korea is remarkably forward-thinking in many ways, but apparently this isn't one of them.
I don't think those execs and producers got into their relatively cushy jobs by simply being good at pushing the current business model. If (hopefully when) the networks and studios start feeling the pain of their model collapsing around them, they will set up shop as competitors in the new market.
That might sound like a good thing initially, but remember, these are the guys who think that anyone who happens to hear a radio being played loudly in a public space should pay for the privilege. They've demonstrated that they're dishonorable and dishonest in the courtroom, so seriously, I don't think we should ever trust them to accept playing on a level field.
It's often not a question of what is in a standard or what technology experts know, it's what's admissible as evidence or legal theory in court that gets established as precedent. It's often stultifying to techies, but that is the reality of law that deals with technology-- either we inform the adjudicators, or we lose big time.
In this case, if the counsel for the networks manage to convince the judge that you are in fact circumventing under the DMCA (even though you know it to be wrong), the judge will rule against you, and that will be that unless you fight them through the appeals process.
The other thing is, magnetic tape has a tendency to degrade when left alone-- you'll see it in old VHS recordings and you'll hear it in old cassettes. It's a good "go-between" medium for purposes that need neither archive-quality longevity nor on-demand speed (pre-digitized recordings, data backups), but if you're looking for longevity or high fidelity, you're best off going vinyl or digital.
It seems that this is part of the "government can't do anything right" narrative at Slashdot, so the submitter and/or the editor were saying "well, this is a refreshing surprise".
Of course, poor or misleading analysis is nothing new here, sad to say.
Yeah, but the MTV "Lookit my swank mansion, yo" is for those artists that happened to be able to afford that stuff-- in other words, they're damned lucky they got their toys given that the label will demand at least an album a year and $X00,000 in sales, plus whatever they feel like as "recouping costs". If their next album flops, guess what? They're SOL. Why do the big labels all demand this model? Because they had superstars in the past that demanded 5-7% of record sales and made millions of dollars. I don't know if that scene in the biopic Ray was accurate, but I can assure you that if he did demand a 7% cut, ABC made damned sure they didn't do it for any subsequent artist. It isn't that they wanted the big stars' millions, it's that they wanted control of the entire pile of cash.
And the sad thing is, most musicians who make the fatal mistake nowadays of signing onto a major label never make it big on the stage or in the recordings market, so they're indebted to their labels with little hope of seeing financial sanity ever again. Maybe instead of blaming "Internet piracy" for their troubles, they should rethink their contracts?
If you don't know this fellow and you're into election politics, you should-- he's the Republican consultant who is adamantly against electronic ballot counters that are connected to telephone/Internet infrastructure, because tests have repeatedly shown that anyone can hack in through the network interface and change the internal ballot counts.
I still remember his solution for vulnerable electronic voting systems: "Hand-counted paper ballots. Paper ballots. Paper. Ballots." They can do it in Britain and many other industrialized nations efficiently and expediently, yet we have this impression that hand-counting ballots will take forever.
I will say, however, that having Unix tools such as ssh and bash/zsh installed by default or freely available from the OS disc is a huge advantage for OS X.
Last time I tried, cygwin & putty terminals on Windows were close to unusable in comparison.
As long as you leave your servers' settings to their defaults (except passwords), PuTTY works just fine. The only problem I've ever had is that it doesn't do multi-byte encoding.
And if you ever needed more advanced stuff, there's always non-free apps like Tera Term.
Yes, well, check out the guy's interviews and public appearances. He is obnoxious and incredibly self-centered, and as his latest clash with Anonymous demonstrates, insecure and thin-skinned. He doesn't care that Anonymous probably shares his values, because now he thinks they're thieves cutting into his profits.
It's the guy who told one of the best interviewers in the country that she should welcome him with "open legs". I don't think intelligence and good sense are part of his skill set.
They haven't mentioned the general procedure on the show recently, but they try to test every myth in this two-step process:
Verify the circumstances laid out in the myth as scientifically as special-effects artists could
If the circumstances don't yield the results claimed in the myth, ramp up the experiment to see what it takes to duplicate the results
Very few (10-20) myths stopped at step 1, because myths and urban legends are generally stupid notions that people believe regardless of whether they're physically possible. There's also quite a few myths that stopped at step 1, because they lacked the budget or airtime to adequately test step 2 (or step 2 failed catastrophically, like the super-sized JATO car), and thus shelved the myth for a revisit.
But yeah, Archimedes' Death Ray was tested several times, and the best step 2 they got was when the MIT crew set fire to a stationary boat not too far from the shields. I think what they want to try for the final "revisit" are actual bronze shields for step 1, and a big parabolic mirror for step 2 (something tells me the DoD or NASA might deliver something).
Ironically, they tested a few tornado shelters using an old 747 (aired last week, so filming was probably early this year). They got EF4 speeds, but I don't think a 747 can crank out F5-class winds.
while I (and probably most Slashdot readers) would like them to be a little more rigorous and at least acknowledge shortcomings in their tests
They've had, what, 6 revisit episodes? And Adam calls them his favorites (except for the fact that the fans literally badger him into doing them)? They've eaten crow just about every season because they found in their retests that their original tests weren't up to snuff. I think that's more rigor than we'll see in any other reality show.
Wrong. The issue of prisoner abuse ("torture" to most folks, "enhanced interrogation" to certain folks) will surely compel a judge to set the detainee free. The reason Obama/Holder don't want to touch them with a 20-mile pole is because then they'd have a bunch of people they can't legally detain but no country in their right minds want to accept, and meanwhile the Republican ninnies in Congress will scare all the white folk about the terrorists on the loose and how Obama is their leader. Believe me, you do NOT want to be in the President's shoes.
Mind you, I'm in agreement that suspected terrorists must be tried in a court of law-- it's what we've been doing to suspected terrorists up until the neocons in the Bush White House figured that it would be just fine and dandy to haul off brown-skinned Semites to secret prisons regardless of whether they committed acts of terror, and do things to them that were done to US soldiers in WW2 and Vietnam by militarist scumbags who couldn't give a rat's ass about the Geneva Conventions.
They called it "forced perspective" in the behind-the-scenes footage. It's an incredibly neat trick if pulled off carefully, but it does limit the number of angles you can shoot-- the forced perspective shots with Gandalf and Frodo riding in the cart, for example, are pretty consistently at the same angle. Another thing is, it forces the actors to skew their line of sight, so they must react and "talk" to empty space rather than the other actor. It is possible to have a moving forced perspective shot, but it requires multiple dollies rather than just one, which can be incredibly difficult to time properly. It was most heavily used in the first LotR film because there were many more shots where the audience had to take in the size difference between Men/Wizards/Elves and Hobbits (Gandalf in the Shire, Bree, etc.), but the later films used a lot less of this because you just don't use forced perspective in massive battle scenes. In those cases you got results more easily with digital doubles, stunt doubles, actors on their knees, etc.
I'm guessing Jackson and co. will default primarily to digital, where either the Hobbits or the Big Folk are on a mocap/greenscreen stage, and the other sized folks are shot on set. That's what they did for some of the Bag End scenes where Gandalf shared the scene with Frodo or Bilbo.
The other thing is, other than Gandalf and the Men/Elves, one wouldn't need to worry about size differences-- aside from the Wizard, Bilbo's companions are all Dwarves!
Slashdot Mirror
The Supremes already ruled that they're not going to create a new category of "unprotected speech" (the common ones that already exist include incitement, AKA "fighting words/fire in a theater"-- which has become weak sauce in the face of moneyed media corporations-- and defamation), so the Court watchers are scratching their heads, saying "if the current interpretation of the First Amendment was correctly rendered by the lower court, why did the SCOTUS bother to grant certiorari?"
In any case, we should expect to see a Jack Thompson clone (with a few aggression inhibitors installed) trotting out tired old "kids are programmed by what they see" studies without any sort of nuance whatsoever arguing for California, so any arguments we make here will get modded up, but won't reach the justices' ears or eyes. Thankfully, there are amicus briefs with the common viewpoint here filed (the idea that violent games directly cause kids to be violent is disputable at best), so it's not like the CA counsel will get a slam-dunk.
On the other hand, the legal system in this country as a whole has been trending towards the heavy prosecutorial power of the police state for decades now, so I wouldn't be surprised if former prosecutors like Sotomayor side with California on this.
If the original was shot like many other films, it may very well be dust by now. The actual material that records analog (i.e. non-digital) motion picture has a shelf life of a few decades.
(I learned about this from Lessig lectures about those who are trying to archive old films and documentaries. Basically, they're at risk of being lost forever because the conversion process trips copyright law, and often there's someone who prohibits the process from going forward.)
What's more surprising to me isn't that the DoJ issued this amicus curiae brief, it's that they issued this even with former RIAA lawyers in its top echelons. If their top lawyers believe that companies should be "free" to control information, then they would no doubt have a problem with this brief.
On the other hand(s), they may not have a problem with freeing genes from patents, they may not personally believe what their former employers believe and were merely doing their jobs (which is pretty common among lawyers-- they turn into stalwart defenders of the worst ideas because that's how the adversarial legal system works), or they don't see the philosophical connection between strict control of copyright and strict control of any other "license" (for lack of a better term) on information.
Given that the Neanderthals are (un-?) dead, he might now have a case for being the real Lich King...
The judge may have set the precedent so that future frivolous cases like this one could enter the docket. More cases = more fees = more money for the courts. I can't prove this, as I can't read minds. But most judges don't want crap like this taking up their time, so there must be a reason why this particular judge thought that this case warranted the merit of proceeding in New York courtrooms.
I thought it was the responsibility of the legal profession to educate the non-legal scholars on what is and isn't a viable case, so I'm sensing that the plaintiff's counsel thinks that the legal fees are worth it anyway (lawyers can refuse to represent a person), or that the plaintiff is representing themselves. Usually, one would look at this like an unfortunate accident, but apparently this family thinks a 4-year-old maliciously collided with their loved one. Why else would they sue for damages?
The state of the US legal profession getting bogged down in procedural quagmire and/or gamesmanship (RIAA litigation model) is kind of like the decay of journalism-- if you don't defend your profession from crap, the crap will represent you.
Quick recap of that segment: Adam and Jamie were challenged to defeat a commercial-grade fingerprint scanner lock.They used a couple of common forensic techniques (super glue in a vacuum chamber and graphite dust-- common stuff for CSI viewers) to get a scannable fingerprint, and initially had trouble with their copied prints because the detail of the fingerprints tended to get smudged. After they "enhance" the prints by enlarging them and filling them in with a marker, their photolithographic etches* made a mold that could defeat their practice device, a fingerprint scanner compatible with Windows.
When it came time to actually test the real thing, they found that only the image of the fingerprint (at original scale) and a bit of moisture were sufficient to defeat the lock-- even a licked photocopy of the print would do.
On the other hand, a serious attempt at security would not rely on a single point of failure, so one would probably use the fingerprint scanner and, say, a PIN code.
* They censored the process, but honestly, anyone who's made a printed circuit can easily figure it out...
What you probably mean is that the traditional left-right scale would have one side being authoritarian in some issues but libertarian in others, and vice versa with the other-- in other words, there's very little in the way of nuance. For example, the typical American conservative (and even some self-described libertarians) favor low regulation and taxes on businesses, but demand tight government enforcement of immigration, sexual/marital purity, and religious partiality. By contrast, the typical American liberal/progressive favors proactive government involvement in many areas, but firm protection of civil liberties-- which no doubt sounds paradoxical, if not contradictory, to the libertarian.
A more nuanced view of political philosophy uses more than one axis-- the Political Compass, for example, uses "economic liberty" as the x-axis and "civil liberty" as the y-axis.
"One... Two... FOUR!"
"Five, sir!"
"... Three!"
And I don't mean "we looked at the evidence for the defendant and concluded unilaterally that he should be disconnected." I mean the right of the accused to defend oneself in a fair hearing. Due process is a fundamental part of the rule of law, and because it protects the innocent and guilty alike, states absolutely hate its inconvenience and the fact that it lets some of the guilty go free.
South Korea is remarkably forward-thinking in many ways, but apparently this isn't one of them.
I don't think those execs and producers got into their relatively cushy jobs by simply being good at pushing the current business model. If (hopefully when) the networks and studios start feeling the pain of their model collapsing around them, they will set up shop as competitors in the new market.
That might sound like a good thing initially, but remember, these are the guys who think that anyone who happens to hear a radio being played loudly in a public space should pay for the privilege. They've demonstrated that they're dishonorable and dishonest in the courtroom, so seriously, I don't think we should ever trust them to accept playing on a level field.
It's often not a question of what is in a standard or what technology experts know, it's what's admissible as evidence or legal theory in court that gets established as precedent. It's often stultifying to techies, but that is the reality of law that deals with technology-- either we inform the adjudicators, or we lose big time.
In this case, if the counsel for the networks manage to convince the judge that you are in fact circumventing under the DMCA (even though you know it to be wrong), the judge will rule against you, and that will be that unless you fight them through the appeals process.
The other thing is, magnetic tape has a tendency to degrade when left alone-- you'll see it in old VHS recordings and you'll hear it in old cassettes. It's a good "go-between" medium for purposes that need neither archive-quality longevity nor on-demand speed (pre-digitized recordings, data backups), but if you're looking for longevity or high fidelity, you're best off going vinyl or digital.
It seems that this is part of the "government can't do anything right" narrative at Slashdot, so the submitter and/or the editor were saying "well, this is a refreshing surprise".
Of course, poor or misleading analysis is nothing new here, sad to say.
I'm not sure what's funnier, your comment, or the fact that it got modded +5 "Informative" at 70%.
Yeah, but the MTV "Lookit my swank mansion, yo" is for those artists that happened to be able to afford that stuff-- in other words, they're damned lucky they got their toys given that the label will demand at least an album a year and $X00,000 in sales, plus whatever they feel like as "recouping costs". If their next album flops, guess what? They're SOL. Why do the big labels all demand this model? Because they had superstars in the past that demanded 5-7% of record sales and made millions of dollars. I don't know if that scene in the biopic Ray was accurate, but I can assure you that if he did demand a 7% cut, ABC made damned sure they didn't do it for any subsequent artist. It isn't that they wanted the big stars' millions, it's that they wanted control of the entire pile of cash.
And the sad thing is, most musicians who make the fatal mistake nowadays of signing onto a major label never make it big on the stage or in the recordings market, so they're indebted to their labels with little hope of seeing financial sanity ever again. Maybe instead of blaming "Internet piracy" for their troubles, they should rethink their contracts?
If you don't know this fellow and you're into election politics, you should-- he's the Republican consultant who is adamantly against electronic ballot counters that are connected to telephone/Internet infrastructure, because tests have repeatedly shown that anyone can hack in through the network interface and change the internal ballot counts.
I still remember his solution for vulnerable electronic voting systems: "Hand-counted paper ballots. Paper ballots. Paper. Ballots." They can do it in Britain and many other industrialized nations efficiently and expediently, yet we have this impression that hand-counting ballots will take forever.
I will say, however, that having Unix tools such as ssh and bash/zsh installed by default or freely available from the OS disc is a huge advantage for OS X.
As long as you leave your servers' settings to their defaults (except passwords), PuTTY works just fine. The only problem I've ever had is that it doesn't do multi-byte encoding.
And if you ever needed more advanced stuff, there's always non-free apps like Tera Term.
Yes, well, check out the guy's interviews and public appearances. He is obnoxious and incredibly self-centered, and as his latest clash with Anonymous demonstrates, insecure and thin-skinned. He doesn't care that Anonymous probably shares his values, because now he thinks they're thieves cutting into his profits.
It's the guy who told one of the best interviewers in the country that she should welcome him with "open legs". I don't think intelligence and good sense are part of his skill set.
They haven't mentioned the general procedure on the show recently, but they try to test every myth in this two-step process:
Very few (10-20) myths stopped at step 1, because myths and urban legends are generally stupid notions that people believe regardless of whether they're physically possible. There's also quite a few myths that stopped at step 1, because they lacked the budget or airtime to adequately test step 2 (or step 2 failed catastrophically, like the super-sized JATO car), and thus shelved the myth for a revisit.
But yeah, Archimedes' Death Ray was tested several times, and the best step 2 they got was when the MIT crew set fire to a stationary boat not too far from the shields. I think what they want to try for the final "revisit" are actual bronze shields for step 1, and a big parabolic mirror for step 2 (something tells me the DoD or NASA might deliver something).
Ironically, they tested a few tornado shelters using an old 747 (aired last week, so filming was probably early this year). They got EF4 speeds, but I don't think a 747 can crank out F5-class winds.
They've had, what, 6 revisit episodes? And Adam calls them his favorites (except for the fact that the fans literally badger him into doing them)? They've eaten crow just about every season because they found in their retests that their original tests weren't up to snuff. I think that's more rigor than we'll see in any other reality show.
Wrong. The issue of prisoner abuse ("torture" to most folks, "enhanced interrogation" to certain folks) will surely compel a judge to set the detainee free. The reason Obama/Holder don't want to touch them with a 20-mile pole is because then they'd have a bunch of people they can't legally detain but no country in their right minds want to accept, and meanwhile the Republican ninnies in Congress will scare all the white folk about the terrorists on the loose and how Obama is their leader. Believe me, you do NOT want to be in the President's shoes.
Mind you, I'm in agreement that suspected terrorists must be tried in a court of law-- it's what we've been doing to suspected terrorists up until the neocons in the Bush White House figured that it would be just fine and dandy to haul off brown-skinned Semites to secret prisons regardless of whether they committed acts of terror, and do things to them that were done to US soldiers in WW2 and Vietnam by militarist scumbags who couldn't give a rat's ass about the Geneva Conventions.
They called it "forced perspective" in the behind-the-scenes footage. It's an incredibly neat trick if pulled off carefully, but it does limit the number of angles you can shoot-- the forced perspective shots with Gandalf and Frodo riding in the cart, for example, are pretty consistently at the same angle. Another thing is, it forces the actors to skew their line of sight, so they must react and "talk" to empty space rather than the other actor. It is possible to have a moving forced perspective shot, but it requires multiple dollies rather than just one, which can be incredibly difficult to time properly. It was most heavily used in the first LotR film because there were many more shots where the audience had to take in the size difference between Men/Wizards/Elves and Hobbits (Gandalf in the Shire, Bree, etc.), but the later films used a lot less of this because you just don't use forced perspective in massive battle scenes. In those cases you got results more easily with digital doubles, stunt doubles, actors on their knees, etc.
I'm guessing Jackson and co. will default primarily to digital, where either the Hobbits or the Big Folk are on a mocap/greenscreen stage, and the other sized folks are shot on set. That's what they did for some of the Bag End scenes where Gandalf shared the scene with Frodo or Bilbo.
The other thing is, other than Gandalf and the Men/Elves, one wouldn't need to worry about size differences-- aside from the Wizard, Bilbo's companions are all Dwarves!