Half the problem with these magic devices is that people with these fitted will drive more conservatively etc - measuring people changes the way they behave.
IMHO it's rather more than half of the problem.
Half the reason my new fuel efficient car gets better mileage is because it has a fuel efficiency measurement and I try to improve it. Result: I drive differently than I do in the other car.
You could probably fit this kind of thing to many cars...
The only way to see if these devices really work is to see if they improve efficiency when the people don't know they are there.
Hence you need to do a proper double blind test using multiple cars and multiple drivers. Where none of the drivers knows if they have the device (or in the case of an active device if it is switched on or not). It's rather worrying that Rongjia Tao managed to become a university professor without knowing this!
While your point is valid, I will ask that you also consider that one voice of dissent is often louder than the entire flock "baaa-ing" in agreement.
Another part of the same effect is that someone with a complaint or advocating a change can be "louder" than a majority who either disagree with the complaint or advocate the status quo. With the latter only making their point after they have heard about the former. An obvious example is that lobbiests can effectivly write a bill, even going through several drafts. When the first members of the public can even know about it is when the process of making it into a law has started.
What you fail to realize is that you will not lose your rights due to complacency, but rather you will forfeit them enthusiastically to protect yourself and your loved ones.
Were that the case it would be better than the current situation. The problem is too often most peoples rights are forfeit, regardless of their opinion. What would be far better is something a long the lines of "If you think that forfeiting your rights is a good thing. You and only you, plus anyone who agrees with you, lose those rights." (Possibly with politicans being assumed to always want to forfeit their own rights...)
Countries that aren't members of EU are usually trying to become more European so that they can join the European Union. In this sense to me it makes sense use Europe and European Union as synonyms as after all eventually all countries in Europe that are not part of EU will become part of it.
Switzerland is quite central within Europe, but dosn't show much interest in becoming part of the EU. Nor does the largest European country, Russia...
Another equally egregious offender is the insistence that a "Split Infinitive" is incorrect (IE 'To quickly run' as opposed to 'To run quickly') This is only a rule because it is actually utterly impossible to do in latin and romance languages because the infinitive is ONE WORD. In English it's two. No sense pretending it's one.
It's only even an issue when translating to/from a romance language. Compared with some of the changes which can be required to get an idiomatically correct result it's a minor issue anyway.
If you were a stickler for forcing Latin grammar upon English sentences, perhaps. But English has no such rule. A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with.
IIRC Latin dosn't have prepositions in the first place. If you attempted to use Latin grammar on any language not closely related to Latin the result would probably be nonsensical.
Does anyone besides me think it's silly that a document format that most people intend to use for reading contains so many unneeded extras that it becomes an exploit vector?
It certainly wouldn't be the first example of a format which contains "features" (which may or may not be documented) which are virtually exclusivly used maliciously.
What people really want is an easy way to share formatted documents.
Often along the lines of "it would look like this if printed". Something which sending the likes of word processor documents can easily fail to do.
We need to re-examine the PDF format itself and what we have let it become.
It probably dosn't help here that PDF is a proprietary format. With Adobe selling software for PDF creation. Many of the "features" may have come into being so that a marketer can say "it does X" rather than much in the way of user demand to be able to do X or considering if doing X is an especially good idea.
There's nowhere near as big a difference over DVD as DVD had over VHS.
Show just about anyone a recording of the best quality VHS recording or a typical DVD on a reasonable quality screen and they'll be able to tell you which it is.
So far as the average person is concerned what matters more is that tape is a linear medium and a disk is a random access medium.
Possibly something like "videophile", akin to the "audiophiles" who spend huge amounts of money on audio reproduction.
and the rest of the people either don't have that much disposable income laying around (economy sucks), don't want the DRM, or don't want to replace their whole library. Quite often people cannot tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray anyways.
Even when they can detect a difference it may not justify spending a large sum of money, the current economic situation is part of it, but possibly the bigger factor is that of "deminishing returns".
Exactly. Blu-Ray may just be "better than DVD" in the same way that Beta was "better than VHS" -- ie, in a way that consumers don't give a flying fsck about.
The average person dosn't care care too much about the technical quality of both audio and video. So long as these are "good enough" they will be happy. One way in which Blu-Ray could be made "better" in a way that the average person could understand would be if there was more "content" on the disk. In the same was that VHS was better than Beta because the record/play time of a single tape.
If rocks and sticks are just as lethal and effective as guns and knives, as you claim, then why do you Americans insist you have to have the right to carry handguns, assault rifles, etc, etc? Just put a pointy stick in your back pocket.
People in the US have the right because the US Consitutution (which is the highest "law of the land") explicitally says so. Actually the word used is "arms". Which includes pikes (not that you could fit one in pocket), arrows, missile launchers, etc. (In other words any weapons technology from the Paelolithic onwards.) Also criminals have little problem getting hold of whatever weapons they want.
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Brick Epidemic,
There is a weapon known as the "Milwall Brick" made from a newspaper. Football hooligans being just as capable when it comes to improvised weapons as prisoners.
the following Cobblestone Conundrum, and finally the Pointy-stick Problem.
Variations on the latter including "branch with a sharp piece of stone in the end" and the "2m 10x5cm" (known as the "six foot 4 by 2" to the older generation) piece of wood. So long as nobody realises that even without deliberate attempts to use them as weapons vehicles kill more people than guns, knives, clubs, etc combined.
It's Nielsen's extensive use of extremely questionable surveying methods that causes Firefly's viewers to be undercounted in the first place. Few people in the Firefly demographic actually respond to Nielsen's phone surveys, and those who do are *not* representative of that demographic.
It's been known for decades that phone surveys have all sorts of problems. Even as basic as not everyone has a phone. Not all telephone numbers listed. Start calling numbers at random and you have no way of knowing if you are going to get a home, business, payphone, not in service, etc. In addition you have no way of knowing if you will be answered by a machine or a human. Add in the likes that you can't call "callee pays" numbers, modern telephone systems do not impose any simple mapping of numbers to lines and there being several technical means used to prevent/discourage unsolicited calls...
Only if anyone can actually be bothered to prosecute. Even "witnesses" who maliciously manage to get innocent people sent to jail can get off without anything happening. There are even cases where these lowlives have their identity protected after their deception has been discovered. Consider that this is with people who have lied in a court after having sworn an oath to be truthful. Typically along the lines of "The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Which is much more serious than the words in a DMCA notice.
Because of the perjury clause, it is in fact illegal to file a DCMA notice for a work you don't own, or on an work that doesn't infringe something you own.
Probably also illegal if you are acting on behalf of someone you know full well isn't actually the copyright holder. What's lacking here is law enforcement
The trick is, while outright fraudulent notices are illegal, weak ones are not.
Nothing much happens even with outright fraudulent ones. The problem is a lack of "cops". If there were even one FBI agent in the whole of the US working on this it would qualify as a "huge improvment".
"Fair use" arguments fall under question of whether your right to use a work is permitted under the law. Unfortunately, all the copyright owner has to swear to is "I don't think that your usage falls under fair use." How flimsy that belief is allowed to be is debatable.
This would probably be reasonable if someone could say in response "I think it does, if you really think otherwise then you'll need to convince a judge, at your expense."
Someone at Microsoft could submit a DMCA takedown to Slashdot to remove this very comment on the basis that it infringes on their Windows copyright.
Actually they need only think that they were acting on behalf of Microsoft. With the standard of "good faith" apparently being that of the most gullible, possibly including the self deluded.
The claim would be totally absurd, and we can plainly see that the allegation would be false, but it is not perjury, because MS is indeed authorized to act on behalf of the owner (themselves) of an exclusive right (the right to distribute their various software products).
There appear to be plenty of cases where even the most absurd allegation has the result of information being pulled.
The loophole is actually embedded in that statement. What is certified under penalty of perjury is that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, NOT your good faith belief. So the notices are usually worded in such a manner as to be accurate, even in the case that they don't actually don't own the copyright. That just makes their good faith belief mistaken.
Possibly they would even claim this if the alleged copyright holder was was something they had just made up. Anyway it appears to be the case that "under penalty of perjury" is a meaningless piece of boilerplate. Indeed they might be taking more of a risk to state "under penalty of cute fluffy kittens" on the basis that some people are allergic to cats, even kittens have claws and are often able to call upon the help of at least one adult cat...
Thank you, Senator Brownback. The intent of the DMCA is certainly good - to protect public forums from thousands of copyright lawsuits by providing simple guidelines for removing material.
Good intentions alone are not always enough. Especially given the cliché about them being used to pave the road to Hell. Indeed one of the jobs of a legislator is to activly seek to find (and eliminate) ways in which legislation can be misused.
If the penalties for false takedown notices were pursued as zealously as the penalties for copyright infringement, then it would have met that intent and been fair. Unfortunately, the weight is completely on the side of the DMCA abuser.
At least part of the problem is that "copyright fraud". Has not historically been treated as "copyright infringement". Possibly because it has most often involved falsely claiming copyright over public domain material in ways where there is little risk of a counterclaim.
To counter a DMCA takedown notice, you have to counter-claim that you are not infringing, put your material back up and risk a $150,000 penalty for willful infringement, whereas the other side risks what?
If the information is time critical the damage may already have been done. Also hosting entities do not always follow the rules completely. They may be quicker to act on the original notice than any counterclaim. Or forget that once a counterclaim has been filed they should ignore future takedown notices in relation to the parties involved.
whereas the other side risks what? Harsh language? Penalties for false notices are few, although the EFF is pursuing some suits.
There is also the problem that a malicious entity could simply claim to be many entities. Since a hoster can face penalties for ignoring a valid takdown notice, but not for acting on an invalid one, the result is effectivly "shoot first, ask questions later". Without any attempt being made to even validate the identity of the sender of a takedown notice, even if they actually exist, let alone if their complaint is meaningful. It would be perfectly possible to create bogus takedown notices to censor material where the poster could easily prove that they were the copyright holder. Legislators have more or less failed here because they have apparently forgotten that criminals care not how many laws they break. Someone who will lie about being a copyright holder isn't going to be concerned about also pretending to be a fictional entity, especially when it means that they are even less likely to face any consequences. Much the same applies when these same fools insist on passing new laws against something which is already illegal.
Now it may be true that this notice isn't valid, and therefore doesn't have the actual force of the government behind it (the article is sort of short on details there so I don't know), but the fact that the DMCA is constructed such that companies have every incentive to obey take down notices whether valid or not means that the law, and hence the government is responsible for the restraint of free speech, at least indirectly.
Given that the actual text of the the US Constitution is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." then any use of such a law to perform any of these things would appear to be null and void. Even if the law is otherwise "Constitutional". Quite possibly the wording is deliberate so as to avoid loopholes along the lines of "side effects" of legislation. Something which would have been apparent in the 18th century. Never mind the complex (and often passed unread) pieces of legislation drafted by unrepresentative interest groups which exist now.
Or maybe something crazy like, oh... lets see... one set of laws that covers how federal elections should be run, maybe passed at a federal level.
AFAIK there are no federal elections in the US. On the other hand if the US Government was creating such (pointless) laws they might be too busy to do worst things.
Slashdot Mirror
Half the problem with these magic devices is that people with these fitted will drive more conservatively etc - measuring people changes the way they behave.
IMHO it's rather more than half of the problem.
Half the reason my new fuel efficient car gets better mileage is because it has a fuel efficiency measurement and I try to improve it. Result: I drive differently than I do in the other car.
You could probably fit this kind of thing to many cars...
The only way to see if these devices really work is to see if they improve efficiency when the people don't know they are there.
Hence you need to do a proper double blind test using multiple cars and multiple drivers. Where none of the drivers knows if they have the device (or in the case of an active device if it is switched on or not). It's rather worrying that Rongjia Tao managed to become a university professor without knowing this!
While your point is valid, I will ask that you also consider that one voice of dissent is often louder than the entire flock "baaa-ing" in agreement.
Another part of the same effect is that someone with a complaint or advocating a change can be "louder" than a majority who either disagree with the complaint or advocate the status quo. With the latter only making their point after they have heard about the former. An obvious example is that lobbiests can effectivly write a bill, even going through several drafts. When the first members of the public can even know about it is when the process of making it into a law has started.
What you fail to realize is that you will not lose your rights due to complacency, but rather you will forfeit them enthusiastically to protect yourself and your loved ones.
Were that the case it would be better than the current situation. The problem is too often most peoples rights are forfeit, regardless of their opinion. What would be far better is something a long the lines of "If you think that forfeiting your rights is a good thing. You and only you, plus anyone who agrees with you, lose those rights." (Possibly with politicans being assumed to always want to forfeit their own rights...)
Countries that aren't members of EU are usually trying to become more European so that they can join the European Union. In this sense to me it makes sense use Europe and European Union as synonyms as after all eventually all countries in Europe that are not part of EU will become part of it.
Switzerland is quite central within Europe, but dosn't show much interest in becoming part of the EU. Nor does the largest European country, Russia...
He could have started on a runway but he has a problem with not being able to run fast enough to get the thing flying.
In which case he needs more thrust. i.e. have the thrust greater than the weight of him plus machine. Then running ceases to become an issue.
$10KUS. F model rocket engines are much cheaper (if you can still find one).
Since he's starting by leaving a plane at about 8,000 feet he could probably manage with no engines. Just a half decent hang glider.
Power. Extreme!
Except that he can't take off by himself and isn't expecting to fly faster than about 95 knots.
Another equally egregious offender is the insistence that a "Split Infinitive" is incorrect (IE 'To quickly run' as opposed to 'To run quickly') This is only a rule because it is actually utterly impossible to do in latin and romance languages because the infinitive is ONE WORD. In English it's two. No sense pretending it's one.
It's only even an issue when translating to/from a romance language. Compared with some of the changes which can be required to get an idiomatically correct result it's a minor issue anyway.
If you were a stickler for forcing Latin grammar upon English sentences, perhaps. But English has no such rule. A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with.
IIRC Latin dosn't have prepositions in the first place. If you attempted to use Latin grammar on any language not closely related to Latin the result would probably be nonsensical.
Does anyone besides me think it's silly that a document format that most people intend to use for reading contains so many unneeded extras that it becomes an exploit vector?
It certainly wouldn't be the first example of a format which contains "features" (which may or may not be documented) which are virtually exclusivly used maliciously.
What people really want is an easy way to share formatted documents.
Often along the lines of "it would look like this if printed". Something which sending the likes of word processor documents can easily fail to do.
We need to re-examine the PDF format itself and what we have let it become.
It probably dosn't help here that PDF is a proprietary format. With Adobe selling software for PDF creation. Many of the "features" may have come into being so that a marketer can say "it does X" rather than much in the way of user demand to be able to do X or considering if doing X is an especially good idea.
I was wondering whether there was any hope of getting websites to start saying "requires a PDF reader" instead of "requires Adobe's PDF reader".
This is only going to happen after this kind of thing is called an "Acrobat Reader exploit" rather than a "PDF exploit" though.
There's nowhere near as big a difference over DVD as DVD had over VHS.
Show just about anyone a recording of the best quality VHS recording or a typical DVD on a reasonable quality screen and they'll be able to tell you which it is.
So far as the average person is concerned what matters more is that tape is a linear medium and a disk is a random access medium.
Blu-Ray already got the gotta-have-it-tech market
Possibly something like "videophile", akin to the "audiophiles" who spend huge amounts of money on audio reproduction.
and the rest of the people either don't have that much disposable income laying around (economy sucks), don't want the DRM, or don't want to replace their whole library. Quite often people cannot tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray anyways.
Even when they can detect a difference it may not justify spending a large sum of money, the current economic situation is part of it, but possibly the bigger factor is that of "deminishing returns".
Exactly. Blu-Ray may just be "better than DVD" in the same way that Beta was "better than VHS" -- ie, in a way that consumers don't give a flying fsck about.
The average person dosn't care care too much about the technical quality of both audio and video. So long as these are "good enough" they will be happy. One way in which Blu-Ray could be made "better" in a way that the average person could understand would be if there was more "content" on the disk. In the same was that VHS was better than Beta because the record/play time of a single tape.
If rocks and sticks are just as lethal and effective as guns and knives, as you claim, then why do you Americans insist you have to have the right to carry handguns, assault rifles, etc, etc? Just put a pointy stick in your back pocket.
People in the US have the right because the US Consitutution (which is the highest "law of the land") explicitally says so. Actually the word used is "arms". Which includes pikes (not that you could fit one in pocket), arrows, missile launchers, etc. (In other words any weapons technology from the Paelolithic onwards.)
Also criminals have little problem getting hold of whatever weapons they want.
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Brick Epidemic,
There is a weapon known as the "Milwall Brick" made from a newspaper. Football hooligans being just as capable when it comes to improvised weapons as prisoners.
the following Cobblestone Conundrum, and finally the Pointy-stick Problem.
Variations on the latter including "branch with a sharp piece of stone in the end" and the "2m 10x5cm" (known as the "six foot 4 by 2" to the older generation) piece of wood.
So long as nobody realises that even without deliberate attempts to use them as weapons vehicles kill more people than guns, knives, clubs, etc combined.
It's Nielsen's extensive use of extremely questionable surveying methods that causes Firefly's viewers to be undercounted in the first place. Few people in the Firefly demographic actually respond to Nielsen's phone surveys, and those who do are *not* representative of that demographic.
It's been known for decades that phone surveys have all sorts of problems. Even as basic as not everyone has a phone. Not all telephone numbers listed. Start calling numbers at random and you have no way of knowing if you are going to get a home, business, payphone, not in service, etc. In addition you have no way of knowing if you will be answered by a machine or a human. Add in the likes that you can't call "callee pays" numbers, modern telephone systems do not impose any simple mapping of numbers to lines and there being several technical means used to prevent/discourage unsolicited calls...
Perjury is a criminal offense, and it is serious.
Only if anyone can actually be bothered to prosecute. Even "witnesses" who maliciously manage to get innocent people sent to jail can get off without anything happening. There are even cases where these lowlives have their identity protected after their deception has been discovered.
Consider that this is with people who have lied in a court after having sworn an oath to be truthful. Typically along the lines of "The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Which is much more serious than the words in a DMCA notice.
Because of the perjury clause, it is in fact illegal to file a DCMA notice for a work you don't own, or on an work that doesn't infringe something you own.
Probably also illegal if you are acting on behalf of someone you know full well isn't actually the copyright holder.
What's lacking here is law enforcement
The trick is, while outright fraudulent notices are illegal, weak ones are not.
Nothing much happens even with outright fraudulent ones. The problem is a lack of "cops". If there were even one FBI agent in the whole of the US working on this it would qualify as a "huge improvment".
"Fair use" arguments fall under question of whether your right to use a work is permitted under the law. Unfortunately, all the copyright owner has to swear to is "I don't think that your usage falls under fair use." How flimsy that belief is allowed to be is debatable.
This would probably be reasonable if someone could say in response "I think it does, if you really think otherwise then you'll need to convince a judge, at your expense."
Someone at Microsoft could submit a DMCA takedown to Slashdot to remove this very comment on the basis that it infringes on their Windows copyright.
Actually they need only think that they were acting on behalf of Microsoft. With the standard of "good faith" apparently being that of the most gullible, possibly including the self deluded.
The claim would be totally absurd, and we can plainly see that the allegation would be false, but it is not perjury, because MS is indeed authorized to act on behalf of the owner (themselves) of an exclusive right (the right to distribute their various software products).
There appear to be plenty of cases where even the most absurd allegation has the result of information being pulled.
The loophole is actually embedded in that statement. What is certified under penalty of perjury is that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, NOT your good faith belief. So the notices are usually worded in such a manner as to be accurate, even in the case that they don't actually don't own the copyright. That just makes their good faith belief mistaken.
Possibly they would even claim this if the alleged copyright holder was was something they had just made up. Anyway it appears to be the case that "under penalty of perjury" is a meaningless piece of boilerplate. Indeed they might be taking more of a risk to state "under penalty of cute fluffy kittens" on the basis that some people are allergic to cats, even kittens have claws and are often able to call upon the help of at least one adult cat...
Thank you, Senator Brownback. The intent of the DMCA is certainly good - to protect public forums from thousands of copyright lawsuits by providing simple guidelines for removing material.
Good intentions alone are not always enough. Especially given the cliché about them being used to pave the road to Hell. Indeed one of the jobs of a legislator is to activly seek to find (and eliminate) ways in which legislation can be misused.
If the penalties for false takedown notices were pursued as zealously as the penalties for copyright infringement, then it would have met that intent and been fair. Unfortunately, the weight is completely on the side of the DMCA abuser.
At least part of the problem is that "copyright fraud". Has not historically been treated as "copyright infringement". Possibly because it has most often involved falsely claiming copyright over public domain material in ways where there is little risk of a counterclaim.
To counter a DMCA takedown notice, you have to counter-claim that you are not infringing, put your material back up and risk a $150,000 penalty for willful infringement, whereas the other side risks what?
If the information is time critical the damage may already have been done. Also hosting entities do not always follow the rules completely. They may be quicker to act on the original notice than any counterclaim. Or forget that once a counterclaim has been filed they should ignore future takedown notices in relation to the parties involved.
whereas the other side risks what? Harsh language? Penalties for false notices are few, although the EFF is pursuing some suits.
There is also the problem that a malicious entity could simply claim to be many entities. Since a hoster can face penalties for ignoring a valid takdown notice, but not for acting on an invalid one, the result is effectivly "shoot first, ask questions later". Without any attempt being made to even validate the identity of the sender of a takedown notice, even if they actually exist, let alone if their complaint is meaningful.
It would be perfectly possible to create bogus takedown notices to censor material where the poster could easily prove that they were the copyright holder.
Legislators have more or less failed here because they have apparently forgotten that criminals care not how many laws they break. Someone who will lie about being a copyright holder isn't going to be concerned about also pretending to be a fictional entity, especially when it means that they are even less likely to face any consequences. Much the same applies when these same fools insist on passing new laws against something which is already illegal.
Now it may be true that this notice isn't valid, and therefore doesn't have the actual force of the government behind it (the article is sort of short on details there so I don't know), but the fact that the DMCA is constructed such that companies have every incentive to obey take down notices whether valid or not means that the law, and hence the government is responsible for the restraint of free speech, at least indirectly.
Given that the actual text of the the US Constitution is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." then any use of such a law to perform any of these things would appear to be null and void. Even if the law is otherwise "Constitutional".
Quite possibly the wording is deliberate so as to avoid loopholes along the lines of "side effects" of legislation. Something which would have been apparent in the 18th century. Never mind the complex (and often passed unread) pieces of legislation drafted by unrepresentative interest groups which exist now.
Well we (Americans) lost our own Civil War.
Can a civil war end in any other way?
Or maybe something crazy like, oh... lets see... one set of laws that covers how federal elections should be run, maybe passed at a federal level.
AFAIK there are no federal elections in the US. On the other hand if the US Government was creating such (pointless) laws they might be too busy to do worst things.