Ah, another user snared by/.'s new AppendVaguelyRelatedLinkBot.
Because it's included with the summary text, a reader might reasonably believe one of these href dingleberries has something to do with the summary or article. But instead, it's a link to another, semi-random Slashdot article that is only vaguely related to the subject matter. It is most likely a tool to increase internal pageviews, recirculating readers (like greywater going from your shower to your toilet) into barely on-topic posts from the recent past.
You can recognize this phenomenon by these hallmarks:
- The link is always to another/. article.
- The dangler always feels awkwardly tacked on, like a person who doesn't understand the topic trying to chime in and sound smart. Or like the textual uncanny valley of a chat bot giving you a close-but-weirdly-off non sequitur.
Last week, it was reported that Microsoft is selling about 1,500 of its patents to Chinese device maker Xiaomi to build a 'long-term partnership.'
So this has become a thing, apparently. It's not nearly the worst thing I've seen on a news site (even just today), but it is a transparent ploy and roundly unhelpful.
Well, unhelpful to the reader. I'm sure it's helpful to the site owners to zombie up a lightly attended article from X days back and plop some eyeballs on it.
But whipslash, can you maybe ask the guys that tune the bot to make it a little less non-sequitur-y?
TFS paints an intriguing picture, and hooray fighting against copyright trolls and all that.
But.
Because of these dubious tactics the court should set aside the default that was entered earlier this month.
If the court has entered a default judgement you have already fucked up big time. Usually by failing to do something the court requires of you (like respond to plaintiff's complaint) in a timely manner.
And there is no legal mechanism I'm aware of by which a copyright holder can unilaterally "impose a $100,000 fine." They can offer to settle for $100K or threaten litigation. That'd be surprising, as the copyright shakedown MO is to offer settlement for 1-3 orders of magnitude less, in order to induce quick and quiet resolution. Or you can get a default judgment of $100K if you file suit and defendant does something inadvisable like completely ignore it.
I'm not saying that's what happened here, TFA doesn't give any details on how we got to where we are. We do know that he has an attorney now. And because of how much trouble you can get in for letting your client's case default (your inattention and subsequent harm to your client is actionable malpractice), I would be pretty surprised if he'd had an attorney this entire time and had been otherwise fighting this legal battle by the book, only now to be unfairly blindsided by a default judgment.
(This is all speculation, I'm not your attorney, this is not legal advice, refer to sig, if you experience an erection lasting more than four hours call your doctor, etc etc you get the point.)
It is rare to find someone so adept at building strawmen out of freshly picked cherries and emotional appeal.
Here and elsewhere in the thread, you conjure up horrifying scenarios based on the most depraved exemplars you can imagine. Who could argue that such remoseless, rape-and-murder-for-sport serial mutilators deserve to live?!?! (And stowed away in the same rhetorical boat: Who could argue against torture if it was the only way to prevent a nuke from exploding under a stadium full of people in 4 minutes?!?!)
You blithely sail right over all of the actual arguments about the death penalty. Some of them may not interest you, like whether or not the DP succeeds at meeting any of the consequentialist aims of our penal system, or the philosophical implications of state-sponsored killing, or whether the rejection by many DP proponents of more humane methods like N2 asphyxiation is attributable to base bloodthirst and desire to inflict suffering.
But you ought to at least consider your statistically insignificant (but headline grabbing) worst of the worst thrill-killer examples in the context of the hundreds of people who have been exonerated either from death row or posthumously after being wrongly executed.
Revenge feels great when the world you envision is your own personal little Minecraft server where The Very Bad Man is Irredemably Evil and you are 100% Certain He Did It. I wonder if it feels so great when you have to account for the very real possibility of throwing the switch on an innocent person not so different from yourself.
I've seen more than one person indicate they would like to see it used against *everyone* caught selling drugs (often a quite minor crime), and other crimes one may think minor.
Try not to let the trolls skew your perception of humanity. Yes, there are a few people that truly do hold viewpoints like that, and they are fucking savages. But by and large people are not as bloodthirsty and vindictive as the trolliest trolls here would have us believe.
I am all for calling out and fighting against ubiquitous surveillance and the continuing erosion of our civil liberties. But:
the details of your phone calls and text messages -- including when they took place and whom they involved -- are no less revealing than the actual contents of those communications
is plainly not true.
Make people aware that metadata is proven to *not* be anonymous; let them know they can be identified without ever looking at the contents of their communications.
But don't try to equate knowing who someone is and who they've talked to with knowing what they said.
Even better that it's an electric jelly canal that helps track down dinner.
I am envisioning a Venetian gondola scene, our young protagonist staring out at the horizon, "One day, Immmma gonna use my electrospatial jelly senses to find that evil sea bass and avenge my father!"
Do you seriously not understand how to parse headlines, or do you just think that you're more clever than you really are?
I interpreted the headline exactly as GP did, because it's a very common way to construct headlines. X does Y [in order] to Z1, [implied "and also to"] Z2.
Thus (in a more perfect world): "Microsoft discontinues forced Windows 10 upgrade program to stem rising tide of consumer fury, avoid $9 billion in fines."
Here, simply reordering or adding an "s" to "warn" would've cleared up the confusion. It made it look like Facebook was doing this to serve you ads and warn Belgian police. Which, honestly, is why I clicked on TFH in the first place, because it sounded odd as hell.
I would expect (but in no way encourage) some Anonymous type hacktivist outfit to find and publish the (not too difficult to find) address of that new house. And at least order a few unbidden pizzas to the door.
Why are they continuing to aggressively push invasive, paternalistic, and generally super-assholey "features" that make me never want to go back to a Microsoft OS?
The pointy stick. Longest record of use by humanity and its predecessors (Myrs). Useful as both weapon and tool. Sharp sticks and the intelligence to use them (and later, fire) are, to a first approximation, the reason we are even a thing on this rock.
Is this guy from a competitor site? While he might think that's funny, this is a very serious subject and the whole point of having a registered user is lost if he/she can troll more freely than ACs. That's why people say/. is not working...
Lolwut? Are you saying I'm being too hard on the editors by gently ribbing them for missing an error in the second word of a submission, one that misidentifies the entire subject of the article?
Or that a competitor news site created this user account, undertaking a years-long campaign posting a mixture of sarcasm and legal/political commentary, slowly building a reputation of no particular significance, in order to subtly undermine* the credibility of the Slashdot editorial staff by occasionally taking a humorous turn on a typo or editing gaffe?
Or that a slashvertisement** for solar pontoons is simply too solemn and important a subject to joke about?
Or are you trolling me and I fell for it? Dammit I fell for it! Well I wrote all this out I might as well post it now.
**From TFA: Researchers found the Heliofloat technology to be so promising that they created a spinoff company to develop the platform idea for a range of industries. “Heliofloat platforms offer new possibilities for desalination plants and biomass extraction processes for salt water,” said Dr Roland Eisl, a Vienna University of Technology graduate and director of Heliofloat GmbH.
Offshore wind farms are growing in popularity as energy providers look for different ways of harvesting power from the sun without using valuable land resources.
Which is why coastal states are now experimenting with offshore nuclear reactors, to harness the geothermal energy derived from burning coal.
That's like a movie theater charging $20, you declaring it's not worth it, and sneaking in. Hey, the theater wasn't full, so it's not like you were stealing, right?
Correct, it's not like you were stealing, because you weren't--you were trespassing. And you weren't even violating copyright because no copy was made. Instead you were... trespassing.
The right to determine who can and cannot be on your physical property (the occupiable space of which is finite) is as old as the concept of property itself, and it would not be entirely absurd to argue it extends back to pre-human concepts of territoriality in the animal kingdom. Whereas the right to determine who can and cannot make copies of your works (of which a limitless number could be produced) only dates back to the 1600s, and for a very long time included only maps, charts, and books.
The reason almost every real-world analogy to copyright infringement falls short is because IP is only superficially related to real, tangible property. Not to debase copyright and other intellectual property (I am an IP attorney and songwriter). IP is critically important to the modern economy, absolutely worthy of protecting, etc etc.
But if we care about something, it behooves us to understand it, and understand why a vast swath of society would never shoplift or sneak into a movie theater, but would watch movies on PopcornTime or whatever and not equate that with stealing or trespassing.
Just adding a particular symbol ends up directly in copyright hell and can't be tuned to fit with a particular font.
Rather than a symbol every code needs a description of what that code is supposed to show so that each font creator can implement their own take on the symbol without the meaning becoming ambiguous.
On the contrary, differing implementations across devices/platforms is, in fact, one of the majorsources of ambiguity when communicating with emojis.
Image copyright is definitely an issue. And beyond that different telecom/mobile OS companies would probably be loath to just settle on one (e.g. Apple Color Emoji) even if it were free to use (it is not). For example, rival phone mfrs may bristle at using the Apple Earbuds for the headphones emoji, or the iPhone lookalike for the smartphone emoji.
One solution might be a handful of openly licensed emoji fonts that are included by default across phone platforms (I dunno how to make that happen, short of getting a telecom consortium to agree to it, or getting the FCC, the states of New York and California, and various EU and Asian regulators to require it).
Make sure these are available as character keyboards, and include a font indicator/bit so the recipient's phone knows which open emoji font it should render with (with fallback on other platforms or where the font is lacking).
That seems like a lot of work, but I think to dismiss emojis (as some in the thread do) as unimportant trivialities is a huge mistake. Billions of people are using these things. On a scale from [affects something in my favorite emacs extension] to [affects the entire human race], it's much closer to the latter. Unicode is the right place for characters that are used on that scale, though presentation issues are rather thornier than with most other types of characters.
You insist that when I type '>' I really meant to abbreviate Sergeant, and you will go to your grave convinced that 'href' is just me fucking up 'heed' multiple times every day. But when I type 'Jewsish,' you're like, "Shit yeah man looks right to me!"
In other news, we are anticipating a rash of hires for jobs that would otherwise be worth $47-50K, getting a starting salary of $50,500 and then getting worked like the fifty cent slots on Senior Bus Day.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, another user snared by /.'s new AppendVaguelyRelatedLinkBot.
/. article.
Because it's included with the summary text, a reader might reasonably believe one of these href dingleberries has something to do with the summary or article. But instead, it's a link to another, semi-random Slashdot article that is only vaguely related to the subject matter. It is most likely a tool to increase internal pageviews, recirculating readers (like greywater going from your shower to your toilet) into barely on-topic posts from the recent past.
You can recognize this phenomenon by these hallmarks:
- The link is always to another
- The dangler always feels awkwardly tacked on, like a person who doesn't understand the topic trying to chime in and sound smart. Or like the textual uncanny valley of a chat bot giving you a close-but-weirdly-off non sequitur.
Last week, it was reported that Microsoft is selling about 1,500 of its patents to Chinese device maker Xiaomi to build a 'long-term partnership.'
So this has become a thing, apparently. It's not nearly the worst thing I've seen on a news site (even just today), but it is a transparent ploy and roundly unhelpful.
Well, unhelpful to the reader. I'm sure it's helpful to the site owners to zombie up a lightly attended article from X days back and plop some eyeballs on it.
But whipslash, can you maybe ask the guys that tune the bot to make it a little less non-sequitur-y?
Dammit you're doing this all wrong! Can't you program in a way that costs me less than minimum wage?
+8 solved in the first post awesome good work next issue!
Thanks for the additional detail, that definitely does connect some of the dots here.
Are you a doctor?
No, but I play one on TV.
But.
Because of these dubious tactics the court should set aside the default that was entered earlier this month.
If the court has entered a default judgement you have already fucked up big time. Usually by failing to do something the court requires of you (like respond to plaintiff's complaint) in a timely manner.
And there is no legal mechanism I'm aware of by which a copyright holder can unilaterally "impose a $100,000 fine." They can offer to settle for $100K or threaten litigation. That'd be surprising, as the copyright shakedown MO is to offer settlement for 1-3 orders of magnitude less, in order to induce quick and quiet resolution. Or you can get a default judgment of $100K if you file suit and defendant does something inadvisable like completely ignore it.
I'm not saying that's what happened here, TFA doesn't give any details on how we got to where we are. We do know that he has an attorney now. And because of how much trouble you can get in for letting your client's case default (your inattention and subsequent harm to your client is actionable malpractice), I would be pretty surprised if he'd had an attorney this entire time and had been otherwise fighting this legal battle by the book, only now to be unfairly blindsided by a default judgment.
(This is all speculation, I'm not your attorney, this is not legal advice, refer to sig, if you experience an erection lasting more than four hours call your doctor, etc etc you get the point.)
It is rare to find someone so adept at building strawmen out of freshly picked cherries and emotional appeal.
Here and elsewhere in the thread, you conjure up horrifying scenarios based on the most depraved exemplars you can imagine. Who could argue that such remoseless, rape-and-murder-for-sport serial mutilators deserve to live?!?! (And stowed away in the same rhetorical boat: Who could argue against torture if it was the only way to prevent a nuke from exploding under a stadium full of people in 4 minutes?!?!)
You blithely sail right over all of the actual arguments about the death penalty. Some of them may not interest you, like whether or not the DP succeeds at meeting any of the consequentialist aims of our penal system, or the philosophical implications of state-sponsored killing, or whether the rejection by many DP proponents of more humane methods like N2 asphyxiation is attributable to base bloodthirst and desire to inflict suffering.
But you ought to at least consider your statistically insignificant (but headline grabbing) worst of the worst thrill-killer examples in the context of the hundreds of people who have been exonerated either from death row or posthumously after being wrongly executed.
Revenge feels great when the world you envision is your own personal little Minecraft server where The Very Bad Man is Irredemably Evil and you are 100% Certain He Did It. I wonder if it feels so great when you have to account for the very real possibility of throwing the switch on an innocent person not so different from yourself.
I've seen more than one person indicate they would like to see it used against *everyone* caught selling drugs (often a quite minor crime), and other crimes one may think minor.
Try not to let the trolls skew your perception of humanity. Yes, there are a few people that truly do hold viewpoints like that, and they are fucking savages. But by and large people are not as bloodthirsty and vindictive as the trolliest trolls here would have us believe.
A "secure system" isn't
FTFY
Dammit, McTetris, I'm getting way to old for this shit.
the details of your phone calls and text messages -- including when they took place and whom they involved -- are no less revealing than the actual contents of those communications
is plainly not true.
Make people aware that metadata is proven to *not* be anonymous; let them know they can be identified without ever looking at the contents of their communications.
But don't try to equate knowing who someone is and who they've talked to with knowing what they said.
the ampullae of Lorenzini
Hands down the coolest name in all of biology.
Even better that it's an electric jelly canal that helps track down dinner.
I am envisioning a Venetian gondola scene, our young protagonist staring out at the horizon, "One day, Immmma gonna use my electrospatial jelly senses to find that evil sea bass and avenge my father!"
Do you seriously not understand how to parse headlines, or do you just think that you're more clever than you really are?
I interpreted the headline exactly as GP did, because it's a very common way to construct headlines. X does Y [in order] to Z1, [implied "and also to"] Z2.
Thus (in a more perfect world): "Microsoft discontinues forced Windows 10 upgrade program to stem rising tide of consumer fury, avoid $9 billion in fines."
Here, simply reordering or adding an "s" to "warn" would've cleared up the confusion. It made it look like Facebook was doing this to serve you ads and warn Belgian police. Which, honestly, is why I clicked on TFH in the first place, because it sounded odd as hell.
I would expect (but in no way encourage) some Anonymous type hacktivist outfit to find and publish the (not too difficult to find) address of that new house. And at least order a few unbidden pizzas to the door.
Why are they continuing to aggressively push invasive, paternalistic, and generally super-assholey "features" that make me never want to go back to a Microsoft OS?
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Are you listening?
Plastics.
The pointy stick. Longest record of use by humanity and its predecessors (Myrs). Useful as both weapon and tool. Sharp sticks and the intelligence to use them (and later, fire) are, to a first approximation, the reason we are even a thing on this rock.
But, yeah, iPhones and drones though....
Is this guy from a competitor site? While he might think that's funny, this is a very serious subject and the whole point of having a registered user is lost if he/she can troll more freely than ACs. That's why people say /. is not working...
Lolwut? Are you saying I'm being too hard on the editors by gently ribbing them for missing an error in the second word of a submission, one that misidentifies the entire subject of the article?
Or that a competitor news site created this user account, undertaking a years-long campaign posting a mixture of sarcasm and legal/political commentary, slowly building a reputation of no particular significance, in order to subtly undermine* the credibility of the Slashdot editorial staff by occasionally taking a humorous turn on a typo or editing gaffe?
Or that a slashvertisement** for solar pontoons is simply too solemn and important a subject to joke about?
Or are you trolling me and I fell for it? Dammit I fell for it! Well I wrote all this out I might as well post it now.
*Very, very subtly
**From TFA: Researchers found the Heliofloat technology to be so promising that they created a spinoff company to develop the platform idea for a range of industries. “Heliofloat platforms offer new possibilities for desalination plants and biomass extraction processes for salt water,” said Dr Roland Eisl, a Vienna University of Technology graduate and director of Heliofloat GmbH.
Offshore wind farms are growing in popularity as energy providers look for different ways of harvesting power from the sun without using valuable land resources.
Which is why coastal states are now experimenting with offshore nuclear reactors, to harness the geothermal energy derived from burning coal.
That's like a movie theater charging $20, you declaring it's not worth it, and sneaking in. Hey, the theater wasn't full, so it's not like you were stealing, right?
Correct, it's not like you were stealing, because you weren't--you were trespassing. And you weren't even violating copyright because no copy was made. Instead you were... trespassing.
The right to determine who can and cannot be on your physical property (the occupiable space of which is finite) is as old as the concept of property itself, and it would not be entirely absurd to argue it extends back to pre-human concepts of territoriality in the animal kingdom. Whereas the right to determine who can and cannot make copies of your works (of which a limitless number could be produced) only dates back to the 1600s, and for a very long time included only maps, charts, and books.
The reason almost every real-world analogy to copyright infringement falls short is because IP is only superficially related to real, tangible property. Not to debase copyright and other intellectual property (I am an IP attorney and songwriter). IP is critically important to the modern economy, absolutely worthy of protecting, etc etc.
But if we care about something, it behooves us to understand it, and understand why a vast swath of society would never shoplift or sneak into a movie theater, but would watch movies on PopcornTime or whatever and not equate that with stealing or trespassing.
As an English-oriented site, anything that needs to be expressed here can be done using ISO-8859-1, and even that's pushing it.
There is no need for Unicode here at Slashdot.
Bah, get that ISO-8859-1 garbage out of here! 64 characters ought to be enough for anybody.
[A-Za-z0-9.,] was all the characters we had back in my day, and we were thankful.
Just adding a particular symbol ends up directly in copyright hell and can't be tuned to fit with a particular font.
Rather than a symbol every code needs a description of what that code is supposed to show so that each font creator can implement their own take on the symbol without the meaning becoming ambiguous.
On the contrary, differing implementations across devices/platforms is, in fact, one of the major sources of ambiguity when communicating with emojis.
Image copyright is definitely an issue. And beyond that different telecom/mobile OS companies would probably be loath to just settle on one (e.g. Apple Color Emoji) even if it were free to use (it is not). For example, rival phone mfrs may bristle at using the Apple Earbuds for the headphones emoji, or the iPhone lookalike for the smartphone emoji.
One solution might be a handful of openly licensed emoji fonts that are included by default across phone platforms (I dunno how to make that happen, short of getting a telecom consortium to agree to it, or getting the FCC, the states of New York and California, and various EU and Asian regulators to require it).
Make sure these are available as character keyboards, and include a font indicator/bit so the recipient's phone knows which open emoji font it should render with (with fallback on other platforms or where the font is lacking).
That seems like a lot of work, but I think to dismiss emojis (as some in the thread do) as unimportant trivialities is a huge mistake. Billions of people are using these things. On a scale from [affects something in my favorite emacs extension] to [affects the entire human race], it's much closer to the latter. Unicode is the right place for characters that are used on that scale, though presentation issues are rather thornier than with most other types of characters.
Dear Autocorrect:
You insist that when I type '>' I really meant to abbreviate Sergeant, and you will go to your grave convinced that 'href' is just me fucking up 'heed' multiple times every day. But when I type 'Jewsish,' you're like, "Shit yeah man looks right to me!"
Get your shit together.
Love,
-floppy
In other news, we are anticipating a rash of hires for jobs that would otherwise be worth $47-50K, getting a starting salary of $50,500 and then getting worked like the fifty cent slots on Senior Bus Day.