This is the first in a number of logical steps in what is sure to be dubbed the War on Junk Food!
This "food" is so horrid that we actaully call it "junk", and yet huge multi-national corporations are feeding it to YOUR KIDS! We need to stop this, and the schools are were we have to start. I'm sure that researchers will soon provide detectors that we can install in the entrances to schools for corn-based products, but until then I'd suggest random searches and corporal punishment for anyone found with any sort of chip. The punishments should scale up as well. Clearly the death penalty would be in order for anyone carrying a sugar-based snack. Sugar-free gums are OK, though, since the dentists cabal is just too powerful to fight right now.
Seriously folks, let's pass the USA APPLE PIE act and get some cops into these schools, and some wire taps on these phones that the kids are using!
This has been tried in supercomputing environments, and it doesn't work out well because it's nearly impossible to automatically generate code to take advantage of it. When I used to work at KSR (Kendall Sq. Research, a now defunct supercomputer company), these sorts of topics were common conversation, and the universal agreement at the time (and borne out now) was that homogeneity was required in order to make supercomputing (and typical computing) usable for enough people to gain a commodity of scale in materials, research, etc.
That said, I could see small, simple, slower cores being used automatically for highly constrained sorts of speculative execution that would be forced to abort if complex code were encountered. That might be useful for handling something that looked like a typical parameter marshalling and vtable-dispatch of a language like C++. Still, it would be very special-purpose, and might not work out well in general purpose use.
Pardon me as I break with Slashdot tradition for a moment and come to the defense of the cops.
He might well have been obstructing an investigation, though you may or may not feel that it's a legitimate obstruction. That is, if one of the arresting officers were an undercover detective, then his identity might well have been blown. It's not unreasonable for the police to think, "hey, he's going to blow the detective's cover!"
On the other hand, there's clearly a fine line here, and I'm not sure that arresting him was the correct response.
The other case depends on the situation. You do have to inform people that your property is under survalance, which they guy in NH may or may not have done (usually with a sign). If he did, then the cop knew he was on film and that changes the legal status of the case tremendously. If he didn't, then he's breaking the law, AFAIK. Someone want to tell me how it works in NH/federal law for certain?
No, knowing the loopback address doesn't help you in exploring the local intranet. If there's a call that tells you "my address is 10.1.2.3", then it's a pretty sure bet that you can find some goodies in the rest of 10.1.2.0/24, including a fairly high probability that 10.1.2.1 is going to be a router or switch.
Of course, a clever program could just probe a half dozen typical addresses, but why do that when JavaScript is happy to tell you?
He's right. Current desktops don't need 8 cores. However, as four cores become widely available, desktops will begin to change. They will become more threaded, and more processing that would have been avoided previously will begin to happen passively. Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars, stronger and more pervasive encryption on everything that enters or leaves the machine, smarter background filtering on multiple RSS sources, MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc), these will all start to become more practical for constant use. Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now will also spring up. By the time 8-core systems are available, the market will already be over-taxing 4-core systems.
They're fighting it because they recognize that p2p has the potential to completely decimate their supply channels by allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interrupt their entire business plan with a mouse clicks.
This is a fact.
Please, cite a source. Any source.
I'm in full agreement with you on the theory that this is the RIAA and MPAA's motivation (though I think it goes deeper than that, and gets a bit darker as they don't merely wish to preseve, but expand their control over distribution), but this is still just what we think the RIAA and MPAA think. It harms our case when we say that this is "a fact".
Flash's accessibility features are not terribly helpful. They don't adhere to any standards, and require you to run particular software (they rely on Microsoft Active Accessibility, for example) to be compatible with them.
No, before you go around spouting "STFU" at other folks, make sure you're able to back up your claims. Just becuase a company says "our stuff has accessibility features" doesn't mean they DO, or that they are useful to people who would need them.
PS: I just tried to find out more about their accessibility features, but they use Flash to explain that, and I don't have sound on this machine... kind of useless.
This is all relatively moot right now, as it is hard to tell what the impact of the new generation of Intel (and presumably, soon, AMD) processors will have. As languages have evolved, so have processors. When C became popular, it was possible to optimize the common case of C-style function call conventions. As C++ and other langauges that used vtables became popular, processors had to re-align their optimization strategies (and in fact, were defeating compiler optimizations for years with respect to C++). Now that high-level virtual machines are the norm, another wave of processor optimization is about to kick in. From what I've heard, high-level languages such as Perl, Java and Lisp are substantially improved by the newest round of Intel processors, but it will be a while longer before we have enough experience with these new processors to be sure of what impact they have had.
Sutherland's voice credits: The Wild, 24: The Game, The Flight That Fought Back, The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration, Watership Down TV series, Armitage III: Poly Matrix (a dub, I presume), The Nutcracker Prince, NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience.
He's not new to voice acting, so I don't see why his work in non-voice roles should disqualify him.
Certainly the screenwriter is a key player, but I don't think you can judge this guy. It's not that his "best" work was on Hercules/Xena, it's that his only work was on Hercules/Xena. He's essentially an unknown that got a break on a rather cartoony series and it's related shows. That doesn't mean he's a waste of hydrocarbons.
I'd wait and see what he does with it, and what the director does with it.
Though, keep in mind that those books weren't exactly Lord of the Rings. I'm expecting a movie that's going to have to have kender (sigh) and a plethora of posturing mages. The only thing that will be really interesting is to see what the take on the dragons will be. Anything else that's good about it will be cream.
You're falling into a typical trap with respect to typecasting. Sutherland is a fine actor, and he's done some very good work in fantasy and SF. He'll play Raistlin just fine, and no, you don't need "that guy that played that other wizard" to play every wizard ever depicted on the screen. What's more, I'm not sure that Sir Ian would make a very good voice actor. He has a fine voice, but he's also a very physical actor. Sutherland, on the other hand has done a fair amount of voice work, and he does an excellent job.
Then again, you could argue that everyone in Hollywood these days is a voice actor, given the amount of dubbing your average movie has.
With respect to Raistlin, I'd be far more concerned about the screenwriter's and/or director's take on the story and characters than the choice for one particular actor.
Doesn't work. Been tried in the U.S. and other countries.
Usually, there's precident going back hundreds of years on how religions can be constrained. You're not allowed to use "sacrements" in the U.S. if they're controled substances; you're not allowed to kill people in any country I know of, even if your religion requires ritual sacrifice (even if the sacrificee is consenting); most countries will take children away from parents if their treatment is seen as "abuse", even if the abuse in question is in keeping with the religious practices of the parents. Just like speech, no country that I know of offers a universal freedom of religion. You may consider this a good or bad thing, but it is what it is.
Winning is easy. Don't deal with your bank online unless you type in the name directly or use a bookmark, and always double-check the spelling.
The other way to go would be to have some very short domain name that everyone comes to recognize as a gateway (sort of a tinyurl for financial institutions), and have every bank interaction start with something like this:
To containue, please visit, http://bankurl.com/citibank
or the like. That way, the user knows that any site NOT asking them to do this is phishing, and any site that gives them a URL to any other domain name is bogus.
It would have to be universal though. Citibank asking you to type in their own domain, Bank of America doing the same, etc. would not lead to enough consumer awareness to the protocol. Everyone needs to go through the same redirecting site, so that they all recognize the URL. Of course, this leads to very high availability concerns and the need to protect the hell out of that domain, but we already rely on DNS to be secure for finance on the Web, and if a consortium of banks can't keep a server farm up 24/7, they have bigger problems.
In case you didn't realize (yes, I got the sarcasm), YRO is about the legal system as it affects the Internet and other topics of interest to Slashdot readers. This story is a bit of a reach, since it's a simple legal matter that happens to involved Google, but still, if you thought that articles in YRO were just about matters directly affecting your own personal rights, then you'll be sorely dissapointed when you go back and review the history of YRO. It's much more general than that.
Copyright was an author or creators right to say don't copy my shit.
No. That's how it's been re-interpreted by copyright holders who currently have enough power to get laws like the DMCA pushed through congress. Read up on common law and the addition of copyright to the constitution. Copyright exists to, and I quote, "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Please note that, "don't copy my shit," isn't in there. Please, also note that the stated goal is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to allow people to make money. Allowing you control over the works isn't the goal, it's the carrot. It's the incentive that we, the people, give to those who can enrich and improve our lives. If they're not actually doing that, then the system has failed, and should be re-structured so that it accomplishes the stated goal.
Others have commented (quite well) on the piracy vs. theft angle, but I'd just like to point out that your question is too simplistic.
The question should be: has the return on investment for granting copyright begun to wane, and if so what should be done to revitalize it? Now you have a whole other beast. The question is not: what can we do to help these poor international corporations, but the fundamental questions of why there is copyright in the first place. Copyright was a tool, invented before the age of electronic information, to enrich the body of public knowledge and cultural heritage while, in turn, benefiting those who produced copyrightable works.
With functionally infinite copyright periods; low-cost electronic publication; and an explosion of commercial applications for information, there is a real case to be made that copyright no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact serves to stifle the commons that it was meant to enrich.
Once you see that this is the case, it is easy to understand why piracy is so wide-spread: there is literally no defensible argument for copyright law as it stands. It is a useless, and arguably harmful vestige of previous generations. To the current generation, especially in countries without a rich history of benefiting from pre-electronic copyright law, these laws seem to be arbitrary and pointless.
This is not a defense, but an acceptance of the reality, and a suggestion: replace copyright law with something that makes sense in today's global, information-based economy or continue to fight pointless battles against entire generations of disenfranchised consumers.
Of course, given the war on (insert pointless effort to stop popular activities here), I believe I can predict what choices will be made.
Everyone I know or meet in a business context these days has two addresses: work and gmail. Sometimes they have another (like my home servers), but everyone has those two.
I haven't heard anyone use a Yahoo, MSN or Hotmail address in months.
Did you read the OP, or just decide to wax poetic?
I do love this idea. Has any one else noticed that if we reduce ourselves to voting with our dollars, then ordinary people get about 37,000 votes a year if they are lucky, while Corporations and the super rich get millions or billions of votes?
The point here is that boycotts ("voting with your dollars") aren't effective because they skew the "voting" in favor of those with more money. This is true in general, but not in the specific case of most mass entertainment, on which the poor and lower middle class tend to spend a disproportionately larger amount of their income. Thus, they do have a stronger voice than their purchasing power would imply.
I don't really disagree with what you said as a general point, but you seem to be making a non-sequitor point with which your audience (Slashdot) are almost certainly in agreement to start.
Individual employees acting with government authority in the course of government work are not government?
Of course they are.
Even if the employees are acting outside of the scope of their duties, they are still government employees, acting with government authority, billing the charges to the government, and hence, government.
If it's being paid for BY THE GOVERNMENT, and not by the individuals who work for the government, then I would agree, though it obviously might not be any sort of coordinated "plan".
This is not an isolated problem relating to a few individuals, it is systemic, and therefore a problem with government, not with individuals working in government.
I'm not sure I see how this is systemic. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees. That there were a small number of them that racked up $30m doing something doesn't really make it seem that systemic to me.
The NSA doesn't pay for this. They ask... and receive.
Again, let's be clear on the "this" we're talking about. This (as in the subject of the article) has nothing to do with the NSA or the large-scale business of gathering phone records.
That said, the NSA certainly does pay for the information that they get. They may, in some cases, not pay for it directly, but they do in other ways. For example, the USA Today story that broke the consumer phone records story said that AT&T and Verizon were promised large government contracts in return for their complicity. These contracts made the amounts talked about in this article look like a tip at the local bistro. $30m is enough, IMHO, to get the GAO involved in seeing if a better, competitive bidding process could be arranged, since clearly phone records are a valid investigative tool when obtained with a warrant. However, it's chump change under any other form of federal scrutiny. You could spend that much 10,000 times before you became a line-item on the federal budget. Think about that for a second.
Sure, eye surgery can solve these problems and it's not very likely that the surgery will "backfire". But that just is not a risk I would like to take with my eyesight.
I have to wonder how the chances compare... is it more likely that in 30 years of wearing glasses, something will go wrong that hurts you (you poke yourself in the eye with them or some other problem) or that you'll suffer a problem during surgery? It's probably worth researching.
what you really mean is inventing monetary value, since physically printing money doesn't do anything to the economy
Ah... no. Printing money can cripple an economy. Of course, you can say that it's not the printing of the money, but the distribution of it, but that's a semantic point that is widley circumnavigated in disucssion of economic policy, since it is assumed that "printing more money" doesn't involve storing it in a warehouse. Thus, someone (or many entities such as banks, foreign investors or government agencies) will be recieving this money, and they will then have increased purchasing power relative to the rest of the economy. This devalues the purchasing power of those who already hold currency and can result in near-instantaneous inflation.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be joking!
This is the first in a number of logical steps in what is sure to be dubbed the War on Junk Food!
This "food" is so horrid that we actaully call it "junk", and yet huge multi-national corporations are feeding it to YOUR KIDS! We need to stop this, and the schools are were we have to start. I'm sure that researchers will soon provide detectors that we can install in the entrances to schools for corn-based products, but until then I'd suggest random searches and corporal punishment for anyone found with any sort of chip. The punishments should scale up as well. Clearly the death penalty would be in order for anyone carrying a sugar-based snack. Sugar-free gums are OK, though, since the dentists cabal is just too powerful to fight right now.
Seriously folks, let's pass the USA APPLE PIE act and get some cops into these schools, and some wire taps on these phones that the kids are using!
This has been tried in supercomputing environments, and it doesn't work out well because it's nearly impossible to automatically generate code to take advantage of it. When I used to work at KSR (Kendall Sq. Research, a now defunct supercomputer company), these sorts of topics were common conversation, and the universal agreement at the time (and borne out now) was that homogeneity was required in order to make supercomputing (and typical computing) usable for enough people to gain a commodity of scale in materials, research, etc.
That said, I could see small, simple, slower cores being used automatically for highly constrained sorts of speculative execution that would be forced to abort if complex code were encountered. That might be useful for handling something that looked like a typical parameter marshalling and vtable-dispatch of a language like C++. Still, it would be very special-purpose, and might not work out well in general purpose use.
Pardon me as I break with Slashdot tradition for a moment and come to the defense of the cops.
He might well have been obstructing an investigation, though you may or may not feel that it's a legitimate obstruction. That is, if one of the arresting officers were an undercover detective, then his identity might well have been blown. It's not unreasonable for the police to think, "hey, he's going to blow the detective's cover!"
On the other hand, there's clearly a fine line here, and I'm not sure that arresting him was the correct response.
The other case depends on the situation. You do have to inform people that your property is under survalance, which they guy in NH may or may not have done (usually with a sign). If he did, then the cop knew he was on film and that changes the legal status of the case tremendously. If he didn't, then he's breaking the law, AFAIK. Someone want to tell me how it works in NH/federal law for certain?
No, knowing the loopback address doesn't help you in exploring the local intranet. If there's a call that tells you "my address is 10.1.2.3", then it's a pretty sure bet that you can find some goodies in the rest of 10.1.2.0/24, including a fairly high probability that 10.1.2.1 is going to be a router or switch.
Of course, a clever program could just probe a half dozen typical addresses, but why do that when JavaScript is happy to tell you?
I was under the impression that no one was willing to insure payloads because the risk was too high.
He's right. Current desktops don't need 8 cores. However, as four cores become widely available, desktops will begin to change. They will become more threaded, and more processing that would have been avoided previously will begin to happen passively. Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars, stronger and more pervasive encryption on everything that enters or leaves the machine, smarter background filtering on multiple RSS sources, MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc), these will all start to become more practical for constant use. Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now will also spring up. By the time 8-core systems are available, the market will already be over-taxing 4-core systems.
Please, cite a source. Any source.
I'm in full agreement with you on the theory that this is the RIAA and MPAA's motivation (though I think it goes deeper than that, and gets a bit darker as they don't merely wish to preseve, but expand their control over distribution), but this is still just what we think the RIAA and MPAA think. It harms our case when we say that this is "a fact".
Flash's accessibility features are not terribly helpful. They don't adhere to any standards, and require you to run particular software (they rely on Microsoft Active Accessibility, for example) to be compatible with them.
No, before you go around spouting "STFU" at other folks, make sure you're able to back up your claims. Just becuase a company says "our stuff has accessibility features" doesn't mean they DO, or that they are useful to people who would need them.
PS: I just tried to find out more about their accessibility features, but they use Flash to explain that, and I don't have sound on this machine... kind of useless.
This is all relatively moot right now, as it is hard to tell what the impact of the new generation of Intel (and presumably, soon, AMD) processors will have. As languages have evolved, so have processors. When C became popular, it was possible to optimize the common case of C-style function call conventions. As C++ and other langauges that used vtables became popular, processors had to re-align their optimization strategies (and in fact, were defeating compiler optimizations for years with respect to C++). Now that high-level virtual machines are the norm, another wave of processor optimization is about to kick in. From what I've heard, high-level languages such as Perl, Java and Lisp are substantially improved by the newest round of Intel processors, but it will be a while longer before we have enough experience with these new processors to be sure of what impact they have had.
Sutherland's voice credits: The Wild, 24: The Game, The Flight That Fought Back, The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration, Watership Down TV series, Armitage III: Poly Matrix (a dub, I presume), The Nutcracker Prince, NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience.
He's not new to voice acting, so I don't see why his work in non-voice roles should disqualify him.
Certainly the screenwriter is a key player, but I don't think you can judge this guy. It's not that his "best" work was on Hercules/Xena, it's that his only work was on Hercules/Xena. He's essentially an unknown that got a break on a rather cartoony series and it's related shows. That doesn't mean he's a waste of hydrocarbons.
I'd wait and see what he does with it, and what the director does with it.
Though, keep in mind that those books weren't exactly Lord of the Rings. I'm expecting a movie that's going to have to have kender (sigh) and a plethora of posturing mages. The only thing that will be really interesting is to see what the take on the dragons will be. Anything else that's good about it will be cream.
You're falling into a typical trap with respect to typecasting. Sutherland is a fine actor, and he's done some very good work in fantasy and SF. He'll play Raistlin just fine, and no, you don't need "that guy that played that other wizard" to play every wizard ever depicted on the screen. What's more, I'm not sure that Sir Ian would make a very good voice actor. He has a fine voice, but he's also a very physical actor. Sutherland, on the other hand has done a fair amount of voice work, and he does an excellent job.
Then again, you could argue that everyone in Hollywood these days is a voice actor, given the amount of dubbing your average movie has.
With respect to Raistlin, I'd be far more concerned about the screenwriter's and/or director's take on the story and characters than the choice for one particular actor.
Doesn't work. Been tried in the U.S. and other countries.
Usually, there's precident going back hundreds of years on how religions can be constrained. You're not allowed to use "sacrements" in the U.S. if they're controled substances; you're not allowed to kill people in any country I know of, even if your religion requires ritual sacrifice (even if the sacrificee is consenting); most countries will take children away from parents if their treatment is seen as "abuse", even if the abuse in question is in keeping with the religious practices of the parents. Just like speech, no country that I know of offers a universal freedom of religion. You may consider this a good or bad thing, but it is what it is.
The other way to go would be to have some very short domain name that everyone comes to recognize as a gateway (sort of a tinyurl for financial institutions), and have every bank interaction start with something like this:or the like. That way, the user knows that any site NOT asking them to do this is phishing, and any site that gives them a URL to any other domain name is bogus.
It would have to be universal though. Citibank asking you to type in their own domain, Bank of America doing the same, etc. would not lead to enough consumer awareness to the protocol. Everyone needs to go through the same redirecting site, so that they all recognize the URL. Of course, this leads to very high availability concerns and the need to protect the hell out of that domain, but we already rely on DNS to be secure for finance on the Web, and if a consortium of banks can't keep a server farm up 24/7, they have bigger problems.
In case you didn't realize (yes, I got the sarcasm), YRO is about the legal system as it affects the Internet and other topics of interest to Slashdot readers. This story is a bit of a reach, since it's a simple legal matter that happens to involved Google, but still, if you thought that articles in YRO were just about matters directly affecting your own personal rights, then you'll be sorely dissapointed when you go back and review the history of YRO. It's much more general than that.
They're trying to take our guns!
Appologies to The Colbert Report.
No.
No. That's how it's been re-interpreted by copyright holders who currently have enough power to get laws like the DMCA pushed through congress. Read up on common law and the addition of copyright to the constitution. Copyright exists to, and I quote, "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Please note that, "don't copy my shit," isn't in there. Please, also note that the stated goal is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to allow people to make money. Allowing you control over the works isn't the goal, it's the carrot. It's the incentive that we, the people, give to those who can enrich and improve our lives. If they're not actually doing that, then the system has failed, and should be re-structured so that it accomplishes the stated goal.
Others have commented (quite well) on the piracy vs. theft angle, but I'd just like to point out that your question is too simplistic.
The question should be: has the return on investment for granting copyright begun to wane, and if so what should be done to revitalize it? Now you have a whole other beast. The question is not: what can we do to help these poor international corporations, but the fundamental questions of why there is copyright in the first place. Copyright was a tool, invented before the age of electronic information, to enrich the body of public knowledge and cultural heritage while, in turn, benefiting those who produced copyrightable works.
With functionally infinite copyright periods; low-cost electronic publication; and an explosion of commercial applications for information, there is a real case to be made that copyright no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact serves to stifle the commons that it was meant to enrich.
Once you see that this is the case, it is easy to understand why piracy is so wide-spread: there is literally no defensible argument for copyright law as it stands. It is a useless, and arguably harmful vestige of previous generations. To the current generation, especially in countries without a rich history of benefiting from pre-electronic copyright law, these laws seem to be arbitrary and pointless.
This is not a defense, but an acceptance of the reality, and a suggestion: replace copyright law with something that makes sense in today's global, information-based economy or continue to fight pointless battles against entire generations of disenfranchised consumers.
Of course, given the war on (insert pointless effort to stop popular activities here), I believe I can predict what choices will be made.
Everyone I know or meet in a business context these days has two addresses: work and gmail. Sometimes they have another (like my home servers), but everyone has those two.
I haven't heard anyone use a Yahoo, MSN or Hotmail address in months.
Not a leader?! Please.
The point here is that boycotts ("voting with your dollars") aren't effective because they skew the "voting" in favor of those with more money. This is true in general, but not in the specific case of most mass entertainment, on which the poor and lower middle class tend to spend a disproportionately larger amount of their income. Thus, they do have a stronger voice than their purchasing power would imply.
I don't really disagree with what you said as a general point, but you seem to be making a non-sequitor point with which your audience (Slashdot) are almost certainly in agreement to start.
Actually, if poor people stopped buying music, I think the music companies would be terribly, terribly screwed.
Purchasing power is not always proportional to purchasing, especially with respect to entertainment.
If it's being paid for BY THE GOVERNMENT, and not by the individuals who work for the government, then I would agree, though it obviously might not be any sort of coordinated "plan".
I'm not sure I see how this is systemic. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees. That there were a small number of them that racked up $30m doing something doesn't really make it seem that systemic to me.
Again, let's be clear on the "this" we're talking about. This (as in the subject of the article) has nothing to do with the NSA or the large-scale business of gathering phone records.
That said, the NSA certainly does pay for the information that they get. They may, in some cases, not pay for it directly, but they do in other ways. For example, the USA Today story that broke the consumer phone records story said that AT&T and Verizon were promised large government contracts in return for their complicity. These contracts made the amounts talked about in this article look like a tip at the local bistro. $30m is enough, IMHO, to get the GAO involved in seeing if a better, competitive bidding process could be arranged, since clearly phone records are a valid investigative tool when obtained with a warrant. However, it's chump change under any other form of federal scrutiny. You could spend that much 10,000 times before you became a line-item on the federal budget. Think about that for a second.
I thought that digital backs were considered OK for low-end, poster-quality work, but weren't up to the big challenges yet?