That's a valid point - but if these people are going to leech off the government anyway, then its better that they're doing _something_, than nothing (interestingly there was an article on one of our (ie, Australia's) low-brow current affairs-type TV shows the other night doing an expose on what some of the dole bludgers are doing - basically just beach bumming and surfing and stuff. There was a great quote from one of them that they showed in the ad, which is all I saw - a guy saying something like "if they think what we do isn't work, they should try and come out surfing with us!")
Heh, yeh. If I ran a government that was attempting to control what people thought, I'd want them to have as much bandwidth as possible so I could ram my doctrines down their through all the time!
I'd probably use Flash to do it. Yeh, great big web pages, made entirely of Flash. That'd keep me supressed.
I could see myself between jobs and taking a couple of months in relative relaxation, doing nothing but writing open source software to meet my dole requirement, and then spending the rest of my time doing whatever else it is people on the dole do (drink? relax? whatever).
Its quite possible that it might lead to great code, because people are coding for run, with no deadlines, no boss looking over their shoulder, no (serious) responsibilities, no fear of your job getting outsourced - maybe if all those pressures are gone, people can chill out and code like never before!
I beg to differ. Having an open and honest discussion is always preferable to hiding or trying to cover up information.
I'm not saying they should cover up information - on the contrary I think everyone should be spreading the message about how awesome BitTorrent is and what a great method of content distribution it is.
But, I do think comments that basically imply the sole purpose of the technology (or at least, the sole purpose that the submitter intends to use the technology for) is copyright infringement should be left out - if only for the fact that (especially in a pseudo-legitimate publication such as slashdot), it is basically greenlighting the use of such applications for such a purpose.
I find it in-fucking-credible that Slashdot editors are willing to post an item that includes comments to the effect of: "gee, I hope [insert name of software/network/strategy] allows us to easily replicate the behaviour of [insert name of some other software/network/strategy that has previously been shut down for basically doing nothing but providing a system for people to easily infringe copyright, and more often than not charging users to do it]!"
BitTorrent is great. p2p is great, in general. But continually highlighting how great it is for piracy (yeh, regardless of how lame the RIAA/MPAA are) just puts more negative attention on it and further affixes the concept of "p2p is bad" in people's minds, rather than what they should be thinking.
I don't know if slashdot editors actually are willing to edit posts rather than just put them up (I can see reasons for doing it and reasons for not doing it), but this post would have been just super without the last sentence.
If you ask me, it is the command-line's greatest strength. You tell it to do something and it does it. If you wanted to be safe and have it confirm your request before it does each and every action you shouldn't specify the 'force' option.
Heh, I totally agree. Its like putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger and being annoyed when your brains are plastered all over the walls. Pull the trigger with -i, people!
One thing that I don't get is how these movie developers can keep putting in obviously copyrighted music tracks into their movies (I'm assuming even Breen has done this without permission).
I'm about 97% sure that here in Australia doing such a thing requires two things:
1) A license from APRA (the not-for-profit that provides licensing for such things) for 'telesyncing'
2) Explicit permission from the copyright holder
Does including a whole audio track fall under 'fair use' in the US copyright laws?
Collateral damage like Slashdot's ads getting blocked is the result.
I think you'll find the result is more hardcore ways of getting ads in front of people's faces. GameSpot, GameSpy and IGN already have page takeovers - before you can even get to the website you have to go to a separate page and look at an ad for a few seconds (with various levels of skipability).
We manage some websites and our agency have been pushing for ages for us to take these sorts of websites. We've refused so far - and seen our ad revenue go down. Its probably only a matter of time before we start putting them up.
We don't want to, and we know our users don't want us to. But short of them paying subscriptions (which of course noone wants to do), its hard to raise money from websites without ads.
I refuse to block ads, ever (except on the websites that I work on, because I don't want my views of those ads feeding bad stats, as I whale on the pages a lot more than our average user), because I'd rather have free websites with some inconvenience of ads (like I like having free tv with some inconvenience of ads) than have to subscribe to them.
Even better is to block all access and redirect web requests to a server that explains what's going on and provides patches, etc. That way people (with more than one brain cell) don't _have_ to phone customer support.
That would be awesome - redirect all HTTP requests to a simple, FAQ-style page (that makes heavy use of the H1 tag for the slower people) and provides them with links to fix their broken shit (that are allowed to be clicked on).
The most popular browser/OS combination to my sites is FireFox/WinXP too - but I'm the only one that uses them, so that information doesn't mean anything:)
Parent would be worthy of its Informative mod if there was some scope to its claim (I could mod as overrated but I'd rather actually find out what sort of number of people we're talking about here, because its pretty impressive if Firefox is the #1 browser on a decent-sized site!)
Can you spot what has been removed from this scene, gentle reader, in order to shorten it? That's right. The jokes. The jokes have gone. The funny bits, the wit, the humour. The clever stuff that made it worth including in the first place.
Those bits will probably be available in the Special Extended Edition DVD ($49.95).
Of course, there's a link to the site in question, but as is asked of Wikipedia all the time, what level of accountability is there that this information is correct?
The same level as everyone else that ever posts stuff on the Internet, I guess. If people are happy to read stuff on the Internet/watch it on TV/read it in the newspaper/hear it from a friend and then mentally flag that as "fact", well, we're screwed anyway.
Google have a pretty big reputation to protect as being the Front Page of the Internet for many people (myself included). If they bone this up, then they'll lose their reputation. The better they make the service, the more people can trust it (and personally, I'd rather people believing the first "fact" they read off Google than the first "fact" they saw on Fox News).
(I noticed this yesterday when doing a search for a publisher of a certain game - I confess, I did the lazy thing and just Believed Google (even though I didn't know what this new feature was or how it got there!) but it was so cool and easy that I just assumed it was correct. I suck!)
if China or Japan puts a man on the moon, you can bet we'll be busting ass to beat them to mars.
It was either 2001 or 2010 (I think 2010?) by Arthur C. Clarke that had the Chinese about to beat the US to go out to Saturn/Jupiter.
2001 was on TV last night (I must confess I couldn't sit through it, even though I've never seen it before), but I was weird watching this movie that was made so long ago about where we might be by the time 2001 clicked by, and thinking how far we haven't come.
Hehe, watch a good quality series for us poor old Aussies.
I must confess, the one thing we don't seem to get enough of is crime dramas/forensic shows/psychic detective shows.
Tonight we have Blue Heelers (Australian country cop show), CSI: Miami, Medium, Air Crash Investigation, Without a Trace, Law and Order: SVU, Body of Evidence, Psychic Detectives (seriously, that's the name of the show) and Crime Scene Academy, and Art Crime. The sole salvation is an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series on at 10pm.
Just about every night is like this, I shit you not. If you're not into crime dramas its a sad night of TV ahead of you.
This is a complete non-surprise to anyone in Australia that a) wants to watch TV and b) is aware of this Internet thingo and c) has heard of BitTorrent.
Not only do we often have to wait months, if not years to actually GET a series (assuming its not exclusive to one of the cable TV services, which STILL aren't available in many areas), they often find ways to screw them up.
Examples:
- Season one of Scrubs was shown by one of the networks. Season two started - six episodes into the season, if I recall correctly.
- Desperate Housewives just returned last night, after a three week break because there was something else on the networks wanted to cover
When you can download the entire season (probably in HDTV) and watch it without ads and without having to wait weeks for the networks to get their shit together (and without having to pay AU$60/month on cable, if you can even get it, which I can't, whine!), its not surprising.
(Add me to the list of people that would happily, ecstatically, and joyfully shell out money to buy fairly priced xvid/divx versions of US TV shows that I simply can't watch over here - shit, I'd probably then go and buy them on DVD as well)
I bought an Ipaq 4150 to read ebooks on, and I've been using it a lot recently. The screen is ok, but I don't really Windows CE + MS Reader - the software leaves a lot of wasted screen space, so the amount of words on screen per page is a lot lower than I would like - I'm constantly pressing the next page button (as a comparison, a Neuromancer-sized ebook works out at pages).
I got the chance to check out the Sony Librie last year in Japan and was hugely impressed with its screen, using that new e-ink jazz. I checked it out again a couple days ago and read some reviews; unfortunately its still not available outside Japan, which is a pain (worked out around US$250 I think to import one).
I've only ever seen one displaying Japanese books, so have no idea if it can even display romanji, or what it would look like. They take Sony Memory Sticks, which is a bit annoying (but to be expected), and apparently the ebooks are all in some annoying DRM format as well (but clever people have already figured out how to make software to convert to the format, so if you're lucky enough to have a non-DRM'ed library you can just convert your.txt files, or whatever.
The only other alternatives that I've found (haven't looked too hard as my iPaq is bearable at the moment) are dedicated ebook readers which have their own pitfalls (quite expensive considering that's all they do, use their own proprietary DRM formats, not able to read other common formats, etc) and more advanced iPaq-type devices (some of the newer iPaqs have high-resolution screens, plus the ability to use MS Reader in landscape mode, which I would definitely prefer), but I', not prepared to part with the $$$ at this point.
I've built several important applications around flat file databases - because sometimes they're right for the job.
That's why we use MySQL for a lot of things. Its right for the job. Its cost effective, it serves our purposes, and we're happy enough with its limitations. We've been using it merrily in production for over four years - sure, we're not operating banks or managing nuclear missile silos, but we're not counting beans either.
I was under the impression (based on Slashdot items) that you wouldn't ever need to strip DRM - you can just happily p2p your music collection more or less legally (or at least, not-illegally)?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a valid point - but if these people are going to leech off the government anyway, then its better that they're doing _something_, than nothing (interestingly there was an article on one of our (ie, Australia's) low-brow current affairs-type TV shows the other night doing an expose on what some of the dole bludgers are doing - basically just beach bumming and surfing and stuff. There was a great quote from one of them that they showed in the ad, which is all I saw - a guy saying something like "if they think what we do isn't work, they should try and come out surfing with us!")
Heh, yeh. If I ran a government that was attempting to control what people thought, I'd want them to have as much bandwidth as possible so I could ram my doctrines down their through all the time!
I'd probably use Flash to do it. Yeh, great big web pages, made entirely of Flash. That'd keep me supressed.
I dunno, I think that's a worst case scenario.
I could see myself between jobs and taking a couple of months in relative relaxation, doing nothing but writing open source software to meet my dole requirement, and then spending the rest of my time doing whatever else it is people on the dole do (drink? relax? whatever).
Its quite possible that it might lead to great code, because people are coding for run, with no deadlines, no boss looking over their shoulder, no (serious) responsibilities, no fear of your job getting outsourced - maybe if all those pressures are gone, people can chill out and code like never before!
I'm not saying they should cover up information - on the contrary I think everyone should be spreading the message about how awesome BitTorrent is and what a great method of content distribution it is.
But, I do think comments that basically imply the sole purpose of the technology (or at least, the sole purpose that the submitter intends to use the technology for) is copyright infringement should be left out - if only for the fact that (especially in a pseudo-legitimate publication such as slashdot), it is basically greenlighting the use of such applications for such a purpose.
I find it in-fucking-credible that Slashdot editors are willing to post an item that includes comments to the effect of: "gee, I hope [insert name of software/network/strategy] allows us to easily replicate the behaviour of [insert name of some other software/network/strategy that has previously been shut down for basically doing nothing but providing a system for people to easily infringe copyright, and more often than not charging users to do it]!"
BitTorrent is great. p2p is great, in general. But continually highlighting how great it is for piracy (yeh, regardless of how lame the RIAA/MPAA are) just puts more negative attention on it and further affixes the concept of "p2p is bad" in people's minds, rather than what they should be thinking.
I don't know if slashdot editors actually are willing to edit posts rather than just put them up (I can see reasons for doing it and reasons for not doing it), but this post would have been just super without the last sentence.
One thing that I don't get is how these movie developers can keep putting in obviously copyrighted music tracks into their movies (I'm assuming even Breen has done this without permission).
I'm about 97% sure that here in Australia doing such a thing requires two things:
1) A license from APRA (the not-for-profit that provides licensing for such things) for 'telesyncing'
2) Explicit permission from the copyright holder
Does including a whole audio track fall under 'fair use' in the US copyright laws?
I think you'll find the result is more hardcore ways of getting ads in front of people's faces. GameSpot, GameSpy and IGN already have page takeovers - before you can even get to the website you have to go to a separate page and look at an ad for a few seconds (with various levels of skipability).
We manage some websites and our agency have been pushing for ages for us to take these sorts of websites. We've refused so far - and seen our ad revenue go down. Its probably only a matter of time before we start putting them up.
We don't want to, and we know our users don't want us to. But short of them paying subscriptions (which of course noone wants to do), its hard to raise money from websites without ads.
I refuse to block ads, ever (except on the websites that I work on, because I don't want my views of those ads feeding bad stats, as I whale on the pages a lot more than our average user), because I'd rather have free websites with some inconvenience of ads (like I like having free tv with some inconvenience of ads) than have to subscribe to them.
You see corpoprate propaganda, I see a way of getting a free service.
That would be awesome - redirect all HTTP requests to a simple, FAQ-style page (that makes heavy use of the H1 tag for the slower people) and provides them with links to fix their broken shit (that are allowed to be clicked on).
The most popular browser/OS combination to my sites is FireFox/WinXP too - but I'm the only one that uses them, so that information doesn't mean anything :)
Parent would be worthy of its Informative mod if there was some scope to its claim (I could mod as overrated but I'd rather actually find out what sort of number of people we're talking about here, because its pretty impressive if Firefox is the #1 browser on a decent-sized site!)
Google have a pretty big reputation to protect as being the Front Page of the Internet for many people (myself included). If they bone this up, then they'll lose their reputation. The better they make the service, the more people can trust it (and personally, I'd rather people believing the first "fact" they read off Google than the first "fact" they saw on Fox News).
(I noticed this yesterday when doing a search for a publisher of a certain game - I confess, I did the lazy thing and just Believed Google (even though I didn't know what this new feature was or how it got there!) but it was so cool and easy that I just assumed it was correct. I suck!)
2001 was on TV last night (I must confess I couldn't sit through it, even though I've never seen it before), but I was weird watching this movie that was made so long ago about where we might be by the time 2001 clicked by, and thinking how far we haven't come.
Hehe, watch a good quality series for us poor old Aussies.
I must confess, the one thing we don't seem to get enough of is crime dramas/forensic shows/psychic detective shows.
Tonight we have Blue Heelers (Australian country cop show), CSI: Miami, Medium, Air Crash Investigation, Without a Trace, Law and Order: SVU, Body of Evidence, Psychic Detectives (seriously, that's the name of the show) and Crime Scene Academy, and Art Crime. The sole salvation is an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series on at 10pm.
Just about every night is like this, I shit you not. If you're not into crime dramas its a sad night of TV ahead of you.
Shipping to .au from amazon, if you want it in less than 6 wees, is pretty cost prohibitive :(
This is a complete non-surprise to anyone in Australia that a) wants to watch TV and b) is aware of this Internet thingo and c) has heard of BitTorrent.
Not only do we often have to wait months, if not years to actually GET a series (assuming its not exclusive to one of the cable TV services, which STILL aren't available in many areas), they often find ways to screw them up.
Examples:
- Season one of Scrubs was shown by one of the networks. Season two started - six episodes into the season, if I recall correctly.
- Desperate Housewives just returned last night, after a three week break because there was something else on the networks wanted to cover
When you can download the entire season (probably in HDTV) and watch it without ads and without having to wait weeks for the networks to get their shit together (and without having to pay AU$60/month on cable, if you can even get it, which I can't, whine!), its not surprising.
(Add me to the list of people that would happily, ecstatically, and joyfully shell out money to buy fairly priced xvid/divx versions of US TV shows that I simply can't watch over here - shit, I'd probably then go and buy them on DVD as well)
I bought an Ipaq 4150 to read ebooks on, and I've been using it a lot recently. The screen is ok, but I don't really Windows CE + MS Reader - the software leaves a lot of wasted screen space, so the amount of words on screen per page is a lot lower than I would like - I'm constantly pressing the next page button (as a comparison, a Neuromancer-sized ebook works out at pages).
.txt files, or whatever.
I got the chance to check out the Sony Librie last year in Japan and was hugely impressed with its screen, using that new e-ink jazz. I checked it out again a couple days ago and read some reviews; unfortunately its still not available outside Japan, which is a pain (worked out around US$250 I think to import one).
I've only ever seen one displaying Japanese books, so have no idea if it can even display romanji, or what it would look like. They take Sony Memory Sticks, which is a bit annoying (but to be expected), and apparently the ebooks are all in some annoying DRM format as well (but clever people have already figured out how to make software to convert to the format, so if you're lucky enough to have a non-DRM'ed library you can just convert your
The only other alternatives that I've found (haven't looked too hard as my iPaq is bearable at the moment) are dedicated ebook readers which have their own pitfalls (quite expensive considering that's all they do, use their own proprietary DRM formats, not able to read other common formats, etc) and more advanced iPaq-type devices (some of the newer iPaqs have high-resolution screens, plus the ability to use MS Reader in landscape mode, which I would definitely prefer), but I', not prepared to part with the $$$ at this point.
I've built several important applications around flat file databases - because sometimes they're right for the job.
That's why we use MySQL for a lot of things. Its right for the job. Its cost effective, it serves our purposes, and we're happy enough with its limitations. We've been using it merrily in production for over four years - sure, we're not operating banks or managing nuclear missile silos, but we're not counting beans either.
I didn't think you're allowed to say you paid for software on Slashdot :)
In Australia I'd be paying 20 cents to send a message with my mobile. So I can see an ad? I get ads for free on the Internet!
I'm guessing either Iraq, or the USA
I was under the impression (based on Slashdot items) that you wouldn't ever need to strip DRM - you can just happily p2p your music collection more or less legally (or at least, not-illegally)?