because it would probably be a lot of fun to figure out ways to subvert Clotho and force the zombie sheep to face the very things they have programmed it to avoid.
Whoops, sorry, must be my inability to recognize subtle social cues.;)
Though I do think trying to define such an arbitrary criterion as "taste in clothes" goes totally against the spirit of geekiness. I'm not saying geeks have *bad* taste in clothes. I'm saying that geeks don't consider clothing a valid criteria for evaluating self worth. It's like bragging about one's favorite foods.
Of course, I'm not saying geeks don't care about clothes, either. We may intentinonally dress somewhat against the norm because we're disgusted at the way other people do believe that clothes are important.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the word "skillz" while not mocking script kiddies or brags about such an absurd thing as "taste in clothes" is of questionable geekiness.
A read about something like this a few weeks ago, though I'm not sure where. The gist of the article was that a marketing company is investigating the use face recognition to identify shoppers as they move around stores to determine their shopping habits, almost exactly as you described.
And they don't need a lame excuse like "protecting kids" to put cameras up. Most large stores already have cameras mounted to catch shoplifters.
And they don't need to get information illegally from the government. Simply watch the shoppers as they go through the checkout stand. Use a credit card and they know who you are.
Am I worried? Not really. The credit card companies know far more about me already.
...compilations, otherwise known as databases, go largely unprotected by copyright laws that safeguard the interests of the authors and publishers of creative works.
The use of the word "protected" presents a bias in favor of the ownership of factual databases. Databases don't need "protection" if it is entirely legal to copy them.
[Databases] are generally gatherings of information created by someone else.
WRONG. Databases are collections of FACTS. A collection of copyrighed information is still owned by the owner of that copyrighted information.
The article also gives examples in which database compilers have been exploited, but fails to give any examples in which these companies have been the exploiters. One very good example could have been the recent case of West Pubishing trying to claim ownership all federal court opinions that it publishes.
Your boss probably started way below and worked himself up the ladder. He knows what it's like up and down. You don't know what it's like to be saddled with his responsibilities.
Yea, Big Brother loves you, he feels your pain, you don't know how lonely it is at the top.:P
I'm sorry, but that is complete BS. You don't know how most people get their positions, and neither do I. But there is plenty of evidence that there are quite a few boneheads in positions of power. A little accountability from below, as well as from above, could keep costs down, keep workers happy, and keep the micromanaging morons out of the big chairs.
Besides, I seriously question the competence of anyone who feels it is necessary to deploy clandanstine monitoring software throughout an organization. It might be useful for collecting proof for grounds to fire someone, but to do it to everybody? It increases costs, destroys trust and morale (if discovered, which of course it would be), and even opens the company up to potential lawsuits.
And I do know most of my boss's responsibilities. And he'd probably agree with everything I've said so far. And I review his performance just as does mine.
Shareholders are the closest thing to real owners of a company's assets. They may not be able to buy and sell them, but they are where the buck stops.
A measure of an executives productivity is exactly the same as other employees, as far as measuring the productivity of any two employees is the same. Does he/she perform the job he/she was hired to do? How effeciently is the job done? Besides, you ever heard of a little thing called white collar crime? Embezzelment? Power without accountability can be a dangerious thing.
Would you be so against this if you could monitor what your boss is doing? And why shouldn't you be, because your boss doesn't own the equipment anymore than you do. You are both employees of the same company, and you both have a stake in making sure it remains profitable.
Ultimately the shareholders own the equipment. So, why don't the shareholders monitor everybody, including the executives? Wouldn't an executive wasting time cost a lot more than a lowely employee? Is this is about making sure resources aren't wasted, or more about keeping people "in line"?
You do realize that most of the world sees the queen as the mascot of the Great Britian. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wears a title of nobility deserves disrespect, regardless of what she represents. But then again, that's just my Yankee egalitarianism talking.
Let me rephrase that: if what is desirable is possible, though denied due to the lack of resources, it is a fantasy. So what you're saying is, that it is up to those with the power to set the standard for what is fair and acceptable? How would you respond to that assertion in a political context?
Besides, if the market will fix it, why hasn't it already? CD prices have gone up, yet the cost of production has gone down. Maybe promotion costs have gone up, but why has that increased the price of my favorite, relatively unpromoted, artists? Why does it take such a revolutionary advance in technology like the internet and MP3 for people to even begin to consider the possibility that the music cartel may break down? Do you not believe in cartels? Then why aren't the big labels in a price war, rather than colluding to force SDMI on us and rallying behind the RIAA?
And why will the clause be laughed out of court? Like the original poster said, no one's putting guns to people's heads... for the court to revoke the clause means they basically agree with me, that it's disguised coercion, or consider it unenforcable.
Why is it that every corporate apologist portrays the idea coercion must equate to guns to peoples' heads?
I mean, you live, or you die... but you still have a choice! How can there be coercion when you have more than one option?
Do you see the point here? Choosing between limited options, where those limitations are artificial, is not freedom. An artist can sign to a big label and make money, yet practically forfeit their firstborn, or go independant and live in obscurity. There are exceptions, of course, but this is the way it is for most artists, and the record companies collude to keep it that way. They have even manipulated government to give them unique priveledges, such as taxes on recording media! What was that about guns...
Besides, suppose the free market fairy does make everything all right in the end, it won't happen unless artists resist this kind of bullshit, and consumers don't buy from companies that do it.
Either way, our resentment toward Sony is justified.
That isn't exactly a valid analogy, considering that with our technology we could hunt to extinction pretty much any large land animal we wanted to.
Besides, there really are good reasons for having large dumb docile animals: they're great for domestication. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel you'd know that a primary reason that native Austrailian and American cultures were so far behind their European invaders was that their ancestors had hunted to extinction most all the large herbivores native to their lands. We would all have a much greater variety of meat now if those ignorant hunters had the foresight that we now possess.
They are not forced, participation is entirely voluntary, and the original author maintains ownership of that property, to do with as they please. Sounds an awful lot like capitalism to me.
I don't think you quite grasp that the idea that "property" denies others control over some resource, it does not enable the owner to do what they will with it. Your ability to use property is obvious and implicit. By the same token, I can steal your property and do whatever I want with it, too. That doesn't mean I own it.
By giving code away [1], you have removed control over that property. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but so can everyone else. Nobody owns it, because its infinitely reproducable. It isn't really property any longer.
And what's with this "non-forced, voluntary participation" == capitalism stuff? Tell that to sweatshop workers with no education. I'm sure they'd love to tell you about their freedom.
[1] Yes, I know there are usually license restrictions. They exist to prevent exploitment. I think most of us would agree the ideal license is no license (public domain, or BSD and its like)
Just a little nitpick, but property is the foundation of capitalism. "Profit" exists in any arrangement where some investment of resources yields more value than the resources in their previous state.
Regarding intellectual property, "open source" software is very communistic, in that it distributes ownership to the community (or removes ownership altogether, which is the same thing if the community includes everybody).
That's a bad analogy. I don't suppose the astronauts will be fighting these things with lightsabers. What this really reminds me of are the drones in Ian Banks Culture novels, who float around nagging the human characters.
Now, the real question is are the things programmable by users? I suspect productivity on shuttle missions will plummet as the astronauts start playing "Drone Combat".
This frightens me almost as much as Disney making Bicentennial Man. I wonder if this is an attempt to compete with that film. Damn, I hope El Spielbergo can pull this off.
The majority of America is stupid....a great idea for those of us enlightened enough to understand it......enlightened aristocracies...
Do you really think like this? Putting oneself on a plane above other people is the first step to fascist tyranny. And it's really creepy when combined with the doublespeek of using words like "enlightened" and "democracy".
Blech, I haven't read such bad prose since I took technical writing in college. And no, it wasn't from other students, but the postmodernist drivel the teacher forced us to read as part of the class.
Which gives me an idea.. what if this article is in fact a hoax, à la Alan Sokal, but directed toward the Internet community by some spiteful English lit student? Take some bogus mathematics, sprinkle in some jargon with a rudamentary understanding of network architecture, and mix it together in a dense, grammatically flawed style. "Ha! Those nerds will never know the difference! Now the jokes on them! *cackle* *cackle*"
I've been reflexually registering domain names left and right which have anything to do with my work. This is annoying, time consuming, and expensive.
I don't know what you've been registering, but it sounds like what Colgate-Palmolive has done, registering hundreds of English words related to personal hygene.
If this is what you've been doing, then you're just as bad as a squatter! Except rather than extorting companies with identifiable names, you're snatching up the namespace to deny others entry into the market. A monopolist, rather than a thug, but still abusing the system.
They get no sympathy or support from me, and I'm suprised that they're getting it from folks in this forum.
We don't have sympathy for the squatters, we have antipathy towards the bureaucrats and corporate hucksters who think they have "rights" to particular domain names. They just don't seem to grok that DNS was not designed to protect trademarks, and trademarks were never intended to be implemented globally. Their own wrong assumptions are what's causing the problem. Squatters are no different than they are, just opportunists trying to make an easy profit.
Geez, some of you need to lighten up! Not every PR stunt is a manipulative scheme devised by marketting flacks. Ambrosia has actually made some pretty cool games for the Mac, and even allowed one of their most popular to be ported to Linux.
Speaking of marketting flacks, I once heard both music and sound effects from the game Apeiron on a commercial for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I only saw it once, and no one believed me. I couldn't have been the only one, will someone confirm this? It may have been made by the local station, channel 46 in Atlanta.
I doubt they got permission. It would be ironic, considering how uptight Paramount has been about copyright infringment by overzelous fans.
Man, this is really off-topic, but this kind of slippery rhetoric really irks me.
By your logic, all science, not simply evolutionary theory, is "atheistic". That contradicts the fact that you attribute the success of science on it's Christian influence.
Science makes no assumption the existence of the supernatural, but it does assume is that the laws of the universe do not change. It does not make any claims against the existence of God, but it does assume that God does not fiddle with the universe. Otherwise, no scientific measurement or observation could be trusted because there would be no way of determining if the result was affected by "outside" influence.
A theory that suggests things that contradict your religion is not itself a religion. Otherwise, most all of science is a religion, because I'm sure there are elements in every religion that contradict some well established theory of science.
Now, are you suggesting we stop teaching science completely? You can't pick and choose which theories fit your worldview which ones don't. The fundamental principle of science is that nothing is assumed with 100% certainty. That means you can't entirely discount theories with little evidence, but you'd be downright foolish to ignore those with compelling evidence, even if you have reasons to disagree with them. For this reason it is disingenuous to deny children knowledge of evolutionary theory because it inadvertently steps on the toes of a few religions.
That's exactly what I was thinking reading this article. Both Pi and El Mariachi received critical acclaim and achieved a cult following. Both were made on shoestring budgets. And both used unusal camera techniques.
So why has Blair Witch received so much attention, while these movies, though successful, remain in relative obscurity? Better marketing? Better talent? Succesful use of digital technology?
Whatever. It's because every idiot teeniebopper can identify with a horror movie. Subtitles and heavy themes confuse and bore the MTV crowd. No such problem with a low budget horror movie, because they're so cliched. The suprising thing about this one is it just happens to be done well. That make it's unique and different, therefore it's cool. That's why it's stomping The Haunting and that fish movie.
(And Pi is one of the best fucking movies ever made! What is wrong with it, aside from the technical innacruacies?)
Hmm.. all the land is company property, the products of the employees' labor is company property, and all services are provided by the company. And I thought we won the cold war.
Be worried when it becomes illegal to quit your job.
It maybe an excellent movie, but I'm hesitant to see it because of the behavior of it's marketers. They created fake fan sites to sell the movie, à la DivX, documented in this article at Salon. Pretending the movie is real is one thing. It's cute and only morons believe it anyway. But this sort of thing is disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
because it would probably be a lot of fun to figure out ways to subvert Clotho and force the zombie sheep to face the very things they have programmed it to avoid.
Whoops, sorry, must be my inability to recognize subtle social cues. ;)
Though I do think trying to define such an arbitrary criterion as "taste in clothes" goes totally against the spirit of geekiness. I'm not saying geeks have *bad* taste in clothes. I'm saying that geeks don't consider clothing a valid criteria for evaluating self worth. It's like bragging about one's favorite foods.
Of course, I'm not saying geeks don't care about clothes, either. We may intentinonally dress somewhat against the norm because we're disgusted at the way other people do believe that clothes are important.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the word "skillz" while not mocking script kiddies or brags about such an absurd thing as "taste in clothes" is of questionable geekiness.
A read about something like this a few weeks ago, though I'm not sure where. The gist of the article was that a marketing company is investigating the use face recognition to identify shoppers as they move around stores to determine their shopping habits, almost exactly as you described.
And they don't need a lame excuse like "protecting kids" to put cameras up. Most large stores already have cameras mounted to catch shoplifters.
And they don't need to get information illegally from the government. Simply watch the shoppers as they go through the checkout stand. Use a credit card and they know who you are.
Am I worried? Not really. The credit card companies know far more about me already.
...compilations, otherwise known as databases, go largely unprotected by copyright laws that safeguard the interests of the authors and publishers of creative works.
The use of the word "protected" presents a bias in favor of the ownership of factual databases. Databases don't need "protection" if it is entirely legal to copy them.
[Databases] are generally gatherings of information created by someone else.
WRONG. Databases are collections of FACTS. A collection of copyrighed information is still owned by the owner of that copyrighted information.
The article also gives examples in which database compilers have been exploited, but fails to give any examples in which these companies have been the exploiters. One very good example could have been the recent case of West Pubishing trying to claim ownership all federal court opinions that it publishes.
Your boss probably started way below and worked himself up the ladder. He knows what it's like up and down. You don't know what it's like to be saddled with his responsibilities.
:P
Yea, Big Brother loves you, he feels your pain, you don't know how lonely it is at the top.
I'm sorry, but that is complete BS. You don't know how most people get their positions, and neither do I. But there is plenty of evidence that there are quite a few boneheads in positions of power. A little accountability from below, as well as from above, could keep costs down, keep workers happy, and keep the micromanaging morons out of the big chairs.
Besides, I seriously question the competence of anyone who feels it is necessary to deploy clandanstine monitoring software throughout an organization. It might be useful for collecting proof for grounds to fire someone, but to do it to everybody? It increases costs, destroys trust and morale (if discovered, which of course it would be), and even opens the company up to potential lawsuits.
And I do know most of my boss's responsibilities. And he'd probably agree with everything I've said so far. And I review his performance just as does mine.
Shareholders are the closest thing to real owners of a company's assets. They may not be able to buy and sell them, but they are where the buck stops.
A measure of an executives productivity is exactly the same as other employees, as far as measuring the productivity of any two employees is the same. Does he/she perform the job he/she was hired to do? How effeciently is the job done? Besides, you ever heard of a little thing called white collar crime? Embezzelment? Power without accountability can be a dangerious thing.
Would you be so against this if you could monitor what your boss is doing? And why shouldn't you be, because your boss doesn't own the equipment anymore than you do. You are both employees of the same company, and you both have a stake in making sure it remains profitable.
Ultimately the shareholders own the equipment. So, why don't the shareholders monitor everybody, including the executives? Wouldn't an executive wasting time cost a lot more than a lowely employee? Is this is about making sure resources aren't wasted, or more about keeping people "in line"?
She don't look too majestic to me.
You do realize that most of the world sees the queen as the mascot of the Great Britian. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wears a title of nobility deserves disrespect, regardless of what she represents. But then again, that's just my Yankee egalitarianism talking.
Let me rephrase that: if what is desirable is possible, though denied due to the lack of resources, it is a fantasy. So what you're saying is, that it is up to those with the power to set the standard for what is fair and acceptable? How would you respond to that assertion in a political context?
Besides, if the market will fix it, why hasn't it already? CD prices have gone up, yet the cost of production has gone down. Maybe promotion costs have gone up, but why has that increased the price of my favorite, relatively unpromoted, artists? Why does it take such a revolutionary advance in technology like the internet and MP3 for people to even begin to consider the possibility that the music cartel may break down? Do you not believe in cartels? Then why aren't the big labels in a price war, rather than colluding to force SDMI on us and rallying behind the RIAA?
And why will the clause be laughed out of court? Like the original poster said, no one's putting guns to people's heads... for the court to revoke the clause means they basically agree with me, that it's disguised coercion, or consider it unenforcable.
Why is it that every corporate apologist portrays the idea coercion must equate to guns to peoples' heads?
I mean, you live, or you die... but you still have a choice! How can there be coercion when you have more than one option?
Do you see the point here? Choosing between limited options, where those limitations are artificial, is not freedom. An artist can sign to a big label and make money, yet practically forfeit their firstborn, or go independant and live in obscurity. There are exceptions, of course, but this is the way it is for most artists, and the record companies collude to keep it that way. They have even manipulated government to give them unique priveledges, such as taxes on recording media! What was that about guns...
Besides, suppose the free market fairy does make everything all right in the end, it won't happen unless artists resist this kind of bullshit, and consumers don't buy from companies that do it.
Either way, our resentment toward Sony is justified.
when I say that we want more FREE T-Shirts!
(That's free as in beer, btw.)
Or cheap shirts at least. Hope you guys bring the new Slashdot shirts to ALS.
That isn't exactly a valid analogy, considering that with our technology we could hunt to extinction pretty much any large land animal we wanted to.
Besides, there really are good reasons for having large dumb docile animals: they're great for domestication. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel you'd know that a primary reason that native Austrailian and American cultures were so far behind their European invaders was that their ancestors had hunted to extinction most all the large herbivores native to their lands. We would all have a much greater variety of meat now if those ignorant hunters had the foresight that we now possess.
They are not forced, participation is entirely voluntary, and the original author maintains ownership of that property, to do with as they please. Sounds an awful lot like capitalism to me.
I don't think you quite grasp that the idea that "property" denies others control over some resource, it does not enable the owner to do what they will with it. Your ability to use property is obvious and implicit. By the same token, I can steal your property and do whatever I want with it, too. That doesn't mean I own it.
By giving code away [1], you have removed control over that property. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but so can everyone else. Nobody owns it, because its infinitely reproducable. It isn't really property any longer.
And what's with this "non-forced, voluntary participation" == capitalism stuff? Tell that to sweatshop workers with no education. I'm sure they'd love to tell you about their freedom.
[1] Yes, I know there are usually license restrictions. They exist to prevent exploitment. I think most of us would agree the ideal license is no license (public domain, or BSD and its like)
profit, the foundation of capitalism
Just a little nitpick, but property is the foundation of capitalism. "Profit" exists in any arrangement where some investment of resources yields more value than the resources in their previous state.
Regarding intellectual property, "open source" software is very communistic, in that it distributes ownership to the community (or removes ownership altogether, which is the same thing if the community includes everybody).
That's a bad analogy. I don't suppose the astronauts will be fighting these things with lightsabers. What this really reminds me of are the drones in Ian Banks Culture novels, who float around nagging the human characters.
Now, the real question is are the things programmable by users? I suspect productivity on shuttle missions will plummet as the astronauts start playing "Drone Combat".
This frightens me almost as much as Disney making Bicentennial Man . I wonder if this is an attempt to compete with that film. Damn, I hope El Spielbergo can pull this off.
The majority of America is stupid. ...a great idea for those of us enlightened enough to understand it... ...enlightened aristocracies...
Do you really think like this? Putting oneself on a plane above other people is the first step to fascist tyranny. And it's really creepy when combined with the doublespeek of using words like "enlightened" and "democracy".
Blech, I haven't read such bad prose since I took technical writing in college. And no, it wasn't from other students, but the postmodernist drivel the teacher forced us to read as part of the class.
Which gives me an idea.. what if this article is in fact a hoax, à la Alan Sokal, but directed toward the Internet community by some spiteful English lit student? Take some bogus mathematics, sprinkle in some jargon with a rudamentary understanding of network architecture, and mix it together in a dense, grammatically flawed style. "Ha! Those nerds will never know the difference! Now the jokes on them! *cackle* *cackle*"
I've been reflexually registering domain names left and right which have anything to do with my work. This is annoying, time consuming, and expensive.
I don't know what you've been registering, but it sounds like what Colgate-Palmolive has done, registering hundreds of English words related to personal hygene.
If this is what you've been doing, then you're just as bad as a squatter! Except rather than extorting companies with identifiable names, you're snatching up the namespace to deny others entry into the market. A monopolist, rather than a thug, but still abusing the system.
They get no sympathy or support from me, and I'm suprised that they're getting it from folks in this forum.
We don't have sympathy for the squatters, we have antipathy towards the bureaucrats and corporate hucksters who think they have "rights" to particular domain names. They just don't seem to grok that DNS was not designed to protect trademarks, and trademarks were never intended to be implemented globally. Their own wrong assumptions are what's causing the problem. Squatters are no different than they are, just opportunists trying to make an easy profit.
Geez, some of you need to lighten up! Not every PR stunt is a manipulative scheme devised by marketting flacks. Ambrosia has actually made some pretty cool games for the Mac, and even allowed one of their most popular to be ported to Linux.
Speaking of marketting flacks, I once heard both music and sound effects from the game Apeiron on a commercial for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I only saw it once, and no one believed me. I couldn't have been the only one, will someone confirm this? It may have been made by the local station, channel 46 in Atlanta.
I doubt they got permission. It would be ironic, considering how uptight Paramount has been about copyright infringment by overzelous fans.
Man, this is really off-topic, but this kind of slippery rhetoric really irks me.
By your logic, all science, not simply evolutionary theory, is "atheistic".
That contradicts the fact that you attribute the success of science on it's Christian influence.
Science makes no assumption the existence of the supernatural, but it does assume is that the laws of the universe do not change. It does not make any claims against the existence of God, but it does assume that God does not fiddle with the universe. Otherwise, no scientific measurement or observation could be trusted because there would be no way of determining if the result was affected by "outside" influence.
A theory that suggests things that contradict your religion is not itself a religion. Otherwise, most all of science is a religion, because I'm sure there are elements in every religion that contradict some well established theory of science.
Now, are you suggesting we stop teaching science completely? You can't pick and choose which theories fit your worldview which ones don't. The fundamental principle of science is that nothing is assumed with 100% certainty. That means you can't entirely discount theories with little evidence, but you'd be downright foolish to ignore those with compelling evidence, even if you have reasons to disagree with them. For this reason it is disingenuous to deny children knowledge of evolutionary theory because it inadvertently steps on the toes of a few religions.
That's exactly what I was thinking reading this article. Both Pi and El Mariachi received critical acclaim and achieved a cult following. Both were made on shoestring budgets. And both used unusal camera techniques.
So why has Blair Witch received so much attention, while these movies, though successful, remain in relative obscurity? Better marketing? Better talent? Succesful use of digital technology?
Whatever. It's because every idiot teeniebopper can identify with a horror movie. Subtitles and heavy themes confuse and bore the MTV crowd. No such problem with a low budget horror movie, because they're so cliched. The suprising thing about this one is it just happens to be done well. That make it's unique and different, therefore it's cool. That's why it's stomping The Haunting and that fish movie.
(And Pi is one of the best fucking movies ever made! What is wrong with it, aside from the technical innacruacies?)
Hmm.. all the land is company property, the products of the employees' labor is company property, and all services are provided by the company. And I thought we won the cold war.
Be worried when it becomes illegal to quit your job.
There's nothing "free market" about closed borders and the somewhat arbitrary criteria on who can cross them.
It maybe an excellent movie, but I'm hesitant to see it because of the behavior of it's marketers. They created fake fan sites to sell the movie, à la DivX, documented in this article at Salon. Pretending the movie is real is one thing. It's cute and only morons believe it anyway. But this sort of thing is disgusting.