I'm guessing that [the 6.5 million figure is] the "value" of the merchandise, as reported by the companies who made it.
And as you imply with the quote marks around "value", these things get inflated beyond belief in the interest of propaganda. I remember reading a case a few years back where it was claimed that some piraters were busted and that they were in possession of 300 cd writers. Turned out that they had 1/20th that number of writers (i.e. 15 writers), each capable of 20x writing speed.
These kinds of antics, while not always as dramatic, are widespread and endemic. Execs can and should be held accountable, but the kinds of incentives to "cram" within the last part of a fiscal period come from the revenue-reporting environment in which companies exist, namely from the cut-off cliff that ends a given fiscal period. I think it'd be a major step forward to get rid of this cliff, and replace it with a slope. For example: let 't' denote a value between 0.0 and 1.0 denoting how far into the current fiscal period the company is. Any booking made at time t is booked in the current period by multiplying by (1.0-t), and the remaining fraction is reported in the NEXT period. Cubic, non-linear curves could be used, but the point is that this would avoid the all-to-common situations of salesmen frantically calling in favors during the last few hours of any given period.
And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer?
The voter visually verifies the printed ballot, then drops it in the box. The computer results can be used as early count results for the media, but the real vote is in the box. In the event of a recount, it's the box that gets counted. And there are random checks made between box counts and computer counts, regardless of calls for recounts.
This also addresses the vote coercion objections that people have voiced in this thread.
I, too, find numerous situations in everyday life where the volume of some sound is between annoying and painful. The other day at a department store, the volume of an inane looping advertisement on the overhead speakers was so loud that it was distorting the speakers and caused physical pain. I've begun carrying earplugs with me. They come in much handier in general than I would have thought, and they made short work of the department store ad. And when I go to the gym and three different televisions are fighting with each other, I pop in my earplugs and then cover those with my noise-cancellation headphones and crank up the volume til the sound coming through the earplugs is just right.
The article contains an example of choosing data to support breathless phrasing:
Wireless networks, already common, will spread so rapidly in 2006 that it will blanket entire cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia.
It's been known for quite a while that these two cities, among others, have announced plans for city-wide wireless networks (which the article acknowledges in the ensuing paragraph). So the translation becomes "Wireless networks will spread so rapidly that various cities will follow through on their announced plans for large networks". If wireless networking is spreading on a grass roots level, then illustrating it with large-scale, localized infrasctructural investment by government would seem to be missing the point. If the evisioned spread will be on this infrastructural level, then pointing it out by mentioning the two big "sure bets" doesn't confer insight into a trend.
France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading...
Peer2peer downloading is not illegal; the unlicensed distribution of copyrighted material is illegal. It is perfectly legal to use a p2p network to distribute uncopyrighted material. If Jane Siberry -- an accomplished artist who gives her work away -- wants to put everything she's ever done on p2p, then she is free to do it. And this is as it should be.
There are some technical differences [between viewing print/nonAd web pages vs using Tivo to skip ads], but they might be insignificant. I'd say that the largest difference is that we typically care [slightly or a lot] more for the news sources we link to from/. than for some TV corporation.
I sometimes care about my ability to watch a tv show free of advertisements as much as I care about my ability to see ad-free content on the web. Are you saying that tv/web comparisons for the sake of determining ad viewership make sense only in the domain of news, and that tv news is lower quality than web news? (which might imply that viewing ad-free pages on the web is ok when the pages are non-news?)
Even though I think each person should be free to make up their own mind about the relative quality of news in each medium, I'd personally agree web news is higher quality than tv news. But I wouldn't necessarily agree there's an imperative -- moral, economic, or otherwise -- that should induce people to voluntarily reward quality news by watching ads, in any medium. It's possible that my attitude if held on a widespread basis could lead to less news being available, but that's not the only possible outcome... and I'm rather interested to continue with the experiment of the masses having control over ads, partly because I'm optimistic about how it will turn out, and partly because I don't see any "point of no return" if new economic systems for new distribution don't evolve.
[Linking directly to the print/nonAd version is] probably not such a good thing... we should give servers that we're about to murder some compensation.
Rest Of U2 Perfectly Fine With Africans Starving
SAN FRANCISCO--Rock band U2, currently on tour in North America, is well-known for its human-rights advocacy, particularly its ongoing campaign to eradicate poverty in Africa. Less known to fans of the Irish supergroup, however, is that the lion's share of these efforts are made by lead singer Bono. The three other U2 members are perfectly okay with the dismal plight of Africa's poor...
It's a p2p network for exchanging hams. Smoked, honey-roasted, bone-in/out, the selection is incredible. Sometimes it takes a long time to download, and the quality can be variable, but hey it's free.
Unless you can read code yourself, you're going to have to rely on someone else to do it for you. Which means you can choose a company, much like hiring a programmer, that does NOT have a history of using such lock-in tactics, and protect yourself without ever seeing the source itself.
Agreed. Nothing wrong per se with not reading the code yourself. For the vast majority of people, there are other more effective uses of their time.
Blind faith is blind faith.
In this context the word "blind" does not convey the degree of information or careful planning that does go into one's decision to (for example) choose an open source vendor over a closed source vendor, even if one doesn't read the open code themselves. I guess in this context I'd acknowledge "blind faith is indeed blind faith", as long as I can also assert "a smart, informed choice is a smart informed choice". They're both tautologies and therefore both true... but only one of them seems applicable as rhetoric to the situation being discussed.
I upgraded to vegas 6.0c about 3 days before the rootkit story broke. I checked my system for the $sys$ rootkit according to the Sysinternals site and found nothing.
The $sys$ stuff is just one arbitrary string that a rootkit could express itself through. To be thorough, download and run the free RootKitRevealer (front info page here). This is the software made by the very guy (Russonovich) who blew the whistle on Sony, having discovered their rootkit while testing his software.
Reliance on binaries WITH source is blind faith, too, if you can't read hundreds of thousands of lines of source yourself, since taking someone else's word for it is just as much "blind" faith.
By the above logic, there's no difference between using code from a closed-source corporation or an open source corporation. Is it really all the same whether or not parts of the code have been scrutinized by people with no vested interest in locking you into vendor dependency? By people who have the same interest as you in the integrity of the code?
Anyone who thinks these situations are equivalent is destined to do poorly.
The virus hides users from seeing the messages sent out to members of their buddy list. Viruses are evolving; now they will even talk to you.
Apparently language is also evolving... it now silences words from speaking gibberish. I sure hope it learns grammar checkers from freeing them from forcing good diction.
'Camsnuffling', the latest IT managers headache being used to computer attackers to extract and store data with the help of digital camera.
'Verbgorphing', the ongoing practice of coming up with cute-sounding verbs to describe any activity that has been going on forever and for which a related technology has just taken some kind of step forward.
As the article clearly states, the question is not whether to "fight the good fight", but rather, who should fight the good fight. The article isn't inflammatory. It asks the legitimate question of whether the EFF should handle the Sony DRM case.
Why can't the EFF lodge a suit on a given issue alongside suits by state Attorney Generals, the Fed, etc? They can all try their approaches, whether they differ or not, right?
To critics of Wikipedia... the news was further proof that the service has no accountability and no place in the world of serious information gathering.
The above statement is probably hyperbolic in a manner commonly encountered in various brands of journalism. It implies that critics of Wikipedia tend to disbelieve not just partially but radically in the Wikipedia process. I suspect this is not only an unprovable implication, but an untrue one.
The Wikipedia process does have its warts, but it has produced one of the most amazingly valuable repositories of information in the history of humankind. It is now one of my regular first stops when researching just about anything, and the ratio of successes to failures has for me been very high. The information does tend to check out as true, but even more importantly, for a skeptic the information on Wikipedia serves as an excellent starting point to become acquainted with what issues might or might not be true... a launching point for whatever degree of verification a person feels they want to carry out.
The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that it has adopted the charter of informing without bias. It admittedly doesn't always achieve that, but it achieves it far and away enough. Googling the web will land a person at plenty of spots that touch passingly on a given subject, or spin a subject for the purposes of politics or marketing, but very few sites like Wikipedia that attempt to objectively portray the status and history of whatever the subject is.
because if we knew what "true AI" actually is we'd be more than half-way there
I don't quite follow this... are you saying that the ability to define something requires that the thing being defined be already within some time-horizon or developmental-stage-horizon of existing? I doubt that's what you're saying, because if so we'd be unable to define anything that doesn't (eventually) exist. But I can't think of a more straightforward interpretation of your statement...
If normal DVD readers don't access those areas of the DVD, how is a software player like PowerDVD or WinDVD determining the key to decrypt the video for playing?
A (licensed) software player doesn't determine the keys... it instead downloads its licensed key to the dvd hardware via special ATAPI commands, and the dvd hardware takes care of the decryption.
I've heard this whole "constitutional right to jury nullification" meme before, but nobody has pointed out to me just where this is enumerated; could you please humor me?
Well, you called my bluff. I've now done some research, and I regretfully admit that I misportrayed the issue when I said this was constitutionally enshrined. It appears that this is more of a precedent/de-facto thing. Thank you for helping me to educate myself.
I think some of my previous post's point can still be salvaged, i.e. there's ample precedent for a juror not being punished for exercising jury nullification, and this fact could be enough to sway people into using it when they otherwise might think it's as brazen as fraud.
Given that it's not laid out in the constitution, exercising this practice could in theory be transformed into a civil or criminal offense without a constitutional change, e.g. by the legislation of a law. Which could lead to a tremendously interesting case: what such a law were passed, and then someone brought to trial accused of violating this law was excused via jury nullification? That would be amusing indeed.
You can rip DVD's without breaking the encryption; the only thing ripping them does is rduce the overall payload size.
It's perfectly functional to image copy a DVD to another DVD (which is what the pirates do, when they are not simply shutting down the legal assembly line production at 6 PM, and running off another 20,000 copies between 8 PM and 12 AM from the legal masters).
I don't think the above is true... it's NOT "perfectly functional" to simply image copy a protected DVD to another DVD, because protected DVDs have keys hidden on them in areas that normal DVD readers don't access. Only settop boxes access these areas where the keys are stored, and must be manufactured to be capable of this only by dint of being licensed to do so. The deCSS code revealed that the keys were only 40-bit, which makes them brute-forceable by a standard desktop within a day or so, but there are now even more sophisticated approaches to breaking the encryption that succeed within seconds. Point being that this all occurs as a workaround to the fact that the keys are unavailable to computer software interfaces, and that those keys are not copied in a straight imaging of a DVD and so results in a disk that is unplayable in a settop DVD player (albeit the disk can be played by computer software that uses the mentioned approaches to cracking the keys).
it's kind of common sense that "we don't have to rule against this person if we don't want him or her punished."
Unfortunately, a court of law has numerous restrictions on the ways in which "common sense" can be applied. A perfect example would be when a jury is instructed to disregard testimony it just heard, even if the basis for the instruction is not that the testimony is false or misleading. Honestly, a lot of jurors are intimidated by court rooms and lawyers and judges, and find themselves contemplating things like justice and The Rule Of Law on a level more personal than anything that came before jury duty. This makes the fact that we have a formal constitutional right to jury nullifaction much more than a minor assist to common sense... it allows jurors who want to follow strictly legal pathways to do so, even when nullifying a law.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they decided to go with "RIM job".
And as you imply with the quote marks around "value", these things get inflated beyond belief in the interest of propaganda. I remember reading a case a few years back where it was claimed that some piraters were busted and that they were in possession of 300 cd writers. Turned out that they had 1/20th that number of writers (i.e. 15 writers), each capable of 20x writing speed.
These kinds of antics, while not always as dramatic, are widespread and endemic. Execs can and should be held accountable, but the kinds of incentives to "cram" within the last part of a fiscal period come from the revenue-reporting environment in which companies exist, namely from the cut-off cliff that ends a given fiscal period. I think it'd be a major step forward to get rid of this cliff, and replace it with a slope. For example: let 't' denote a value between 0.0 and 1.0 denoting how far into the current fiscal period the company is. Any booking made at time t is booked in the current period by multiplying by (1.0-t), and the remaining fraction is reported in the NEXT period. Cubic, non-linear curves could be used, but the point is that this would avoid the all-to-common situations of salesmen frantically calling in favors during the last few hours of any given period.
The voter visually verifies the printed ballot, then drops it in the box. The computer results can be used as early count results for the media, but the real vote is in the box. In the event of a recount, it's the box that gets counted. And there are random checks made between box counts and computer counts, regardless of calls for recounts.
This also addresses the vote coercion objections that people have voiced in this thread.
I ressent your synicism.
I, too, find numerous situations in everyday life where the volume of some sound is between annoying and painful. The other day at a department store, the volume of an inane looping advertisement on the overhead speakers was so loud that it was distorting the speakers and caused physical pain. I've begun carrying earplugs with me. They come in much handier in general than I would have thought, and they made short work of the department store ad. And when I go to the gym and three different televisions are fighting with each other, I pop in my earplugs and then cover those with my noise-cancellation headphones and crank up the volume til the sound coming through the earplugs is just right.
I sometimes care about my ability to watch a tv show free of advertisements as much as I care about my ability to see ad-free content on the web. Are you saying that tv/web comparisons for the sake of determining ad viewership make sense only in the domain of news, and that tv news is lower quality than web news? (which might imply that viewing ad-free pages on the web is ok when the pages are non-news?)
Even though I think each person should be free to make up their own mind about the relative quality of news in each medium, I'd personally agree web news is higher quality than tv news. But I wouldn't necessarily agree there's an imperative -- moral, economic, or otherwise -- that should induce people to voluntarily reward quality news by watching ads, in any medium. It's possible that my attitude if held on a widespread basis could lead to less news being available, but that's not the only possible outcome... and I'm rather interested to continue with the experiment of the masses having control over ads, partly because I'm optimistic about how it will turn out, and partly because I don't see any "point of no return" if new economic systems for new distribution don't evolve.
Does this mean people shouldn't skip ads on Tivo?
From this link:
It's a p2p network for exchanging hams. Smoked, honey-roasted, bone-in/out, the selection is incredible. Sometimes it takes a long time to download, and the quality can be variable, but hey it's free.
Agreed. Nothing wrong per se with not reading the code yourself. For the vast majority of people, there are other more effective uses of their time.
Blind faith is blind faith.
In this context the word "blind" does not convey the degree of information or careful planning that does go into one's decision to (for example) choose an open source vendor over a closed source vendor, even if one doesn't read the open code themselves. I guess in this context I'd acknowledge "blind faith is indeed blind faith", as long as I can also assert "a smart, informed choice is a smart informed choice". They're both tautologies and therefore both true... but only one of them seems applicable as rhetoric to the situation being discussed.
The $sys$ stuff is just one arbitrary string that a rootkit could express itself through. To be thorough, download and run the free RootKitRevealer (front info page here). This is the software made by the very guy (Russonovich) who blew the whistle on Sony, having discovered their rootkit while testing his software.
By the above logic, there's no difference between using code from a closed-source corporation or an open source corporation. Is it really all the same whether or not parts of the code have been scrutinized by people with no vested interest in locking you into vendor dependency? By people who have the same interest as you in the integrity of the code?
Anyone who thinks these situations are equivalent is destined to do poorly.
Apparently language is also evolving... it now silences words from speaking gibberish. I sure hope it learns grammar checkers from freeing them from forcing good diction.
'Verbgorphing', the ongoing practice of coming up with cute-sounding verbs to describe any activity that has been going on forever and for which a related technology has just taken some kind of step forward.
Last I heard, state AG's for Massachussetts, Texas, and California were all lining up their own suits as well.
Doesn't mean the EFF shouldn't also be in the crowd though. The more the better.
Why can't the EFF lodge a suit on a given issue alongside suits by state Attorney Generals, the Fed, etc? They can all try their approaches, whether they differ or not, right?
The Wikipedia process does have its warts, but it has produced one of the most amazingly valuable repositories of information in the history of humankind. It is now one of my regular first stops when researching just about anything, and the ratio of successes to failures has for me been very high. The information does tend to check out as true, but even more importantly, for a skeptic the information on Wikipedia serves as an excellent starting point to become acquainted with what issues might or might not be true... a launching point for whatever degree of verification a person feels they want to carry out.
The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that it has adopted the charter of informing without bias. It admittedly doesn't always achieve that, but it achieves it far and away enough. Googling the web will land a person at plenty of spots that touch passingly on a given subject, or spin a subject for the purposes of politics or marketing, but very few sites like Wikipedia that attempt to objectively portray the status and history of whatever the subject is.
I don't quite follow this... are you saying that the ability to define something requires that the thing being defined be already within some time-horizon or developmental-stage-horizon of existing? I doubt that's what you're saying, because if so we'd be unable to define anything that doesn't (eventually) exist. But I can't think of a more straightforward interpretation of your statement...
A (licensed) software player doesn't determine the keys... it instead downloads its licensed key to the dvd hardware via special ATAPI commands, and the dvd hardware takes care of the decryption.
Well, you called my bluff. I've now done some research, and I regretfully admit that I misportrayed the issue when I said this was constitutionally enshrined. It appears that this is more of a precedent/de-facto thing. Thank you for helping me to educate myself.
I think some of my previous post's point can still be salvaged, i.e. there's ample precedent for a juror not being punished for exercising jury nullification, and this fact could be enough to sway people into using it when they otherwise might think it's as brazen as fraud.
Given that it's not laid out in the constitution, exercising this practice could in theory be transformed into a civil or criminal offense without a constitutional change, e.g. by the legislation of a law. Which could lead to a tremendously interesting case: what such a law were passed, and then someone brought to trial accused of violating this law was excused via jury nullification? That would be amusing indeed.
I don't think the above is true... it's NOT "perfectly functional" to simply image copy a protected DVD to another DVD, because protected DVDs have keys hidden on them in areas that normal DVD readers don't access. Only settop boxes access these areas where the keys are stored, and must be manufactured to be capable of this only by dint of being licensed to do so. The deCSS code revealed that the keys were only 40-bit, which makes them brute-forceable by a standard desktop within a day or so, but there are now even more sophisticated approaches to breaking the encryption that succeed within seconds. Point being that this all occurs as a workaround to the fact that the keys are unavailable to computer software interfaces, and that those keys are not copied in a straight imaging of a DVD and so results in a disk that is unplayable in a settop DVD player (albeit the disk can be played by computer software that uses the mentioned approaches to cracking the keys).
Unfortunately, a court of law has numerous restrictions on the ways in which "common sense" can be applied. A perfect example would be when a jury is instructed to disregard testimony it just heard, even if the basis for the instruction is not that the testimony is false or misleading. Honestly, a lot of jurors are intimidated by court rooms and lawyers and judges, and find themselves contemplating things like justice and The Rule Of Law on a level more personal than anything that came before jury duty. This makes the fact that we have a formal constitutional right to jury nullifaction much more than a minor assist to common sense... it allows jurors who want to follow strictly legal pathways to do so, even when nullifying a law.