although rather articulate, I seem to rant a little.. not sure what's a worse hangover, reading that post or the headache:D Then again.. +4 Interesting? I should get some more of whatever I was having:D.. no./nokarmabonus
...you'd see a metric shit-ton of comments pointing out that -eeeeeeeeeeverybody- can take pictures of, and store into database the information relevant to, your license plates... how your car is out in public and you have no expectation of privacy there.. blablabla. No.. if Google did this, it'd be all good*. Heck, if an insurance company gave everybody who cooperated with their employees tracking their license plates in exchange for a 5% discount (that is.. raise the rates for everybody else), the vast majority would go for it. ( * okay, granted, there were actually a few people who felt Google was in the wrong with that private road thing (pending court decision, was it?).. but then the sheer number of comments saying that they should have made it gated if they didn't want anybody trespassing.. errrrr. )
But I'm not here to rant on the topic of Big Government vs Big Corporation.
"They [...] cost $25K". So two of those could employ an additional actual flesh and blood cop. Or two depending on just how bad their pay is. I'd go for the two additional cops.
Then again... "and can scan and run thousands of plates a day through the local Motor Vehicle Administration database."
If that means they catch more people who break the law* and that ends up in a net positive exceeding the 25k (presumably a one-time purchase, but who am I kidding) by a healthy margin, maybe they could also afford an additional copper or two. If nothing else, they might not have to send rookies out to collect on some fine and put those rookies to work patrolling the streets instead, and seasoned cops don't have to waste time in their patrols doing 'quick' checks on plates in the area that seem out of place. ( * I understand some laws are unjust - so get 'm changed. Guess what.. everybody speeding 5mph hasn't upped the speed limits on a large scale officially.. unofficially officers probably don't care much as long as you go with the flow of traffic.. unless they're having a bad day or have to meet a quota. Sucks to be you when that is the case. )
"The easy mission creep these devices encourage is summarized in the article" mission creep... well we all know what the mission is supposed to be (peace and safety and order and all that) and what the mission tends to be (revenue, statistics, making the mayor look good, blabla), but let's err on the side of the benign and try the next sentence...
"Initially purchased to find stolen cars, a handful of so-called tag readers are in use across the Washington region to catch not just car thieves, but also drivers who neglected or failed their emissions inspections or let their insurance policies lapse." In other words... initially purchased to [help uphold the law], but [some now] also [help uphold the law] and [help uphold the law]. Yeah, I can see how that is evil.
I'm far more worried about explicit -and- implicit loss of privacy than the throwing of the "now the cops can tell, with near-zero effort, that I let my insurance lapse! It's not fair! *stomps feet*" tantrums. I hate the "I've got nothing to hide" argument, relevant to the privacy issue, but I hate it when people who know they broke the law and then get all huffy when they get caught by a machine rather than a human even more.
Anyway - you want scary.. go to The Netherlands come 2012-2016. Apparently we are all to drive around with government-monitored GPS on-board by then. To have us pay road use taxes based on the hour of the day, which road it was, etc. I'm sure being able to track whoever they want from a Lay-Z Boy is just an added perk they'll reveal when the tech is entrenched in use and they've got a high profile case (a murderer, perhaps a pedophile, being arrested) to demonstrate that being able to track everybody is a Good Thing(TM). Ba-a-a-a-a, bleated the population, as their road use taxes were lowered ( not really - they're making up for it with a wide margin in the 'provincial tax'... which will apply to -all- citizens, not just those who actually drive cars.) But that, too, is another rant.
"I urge the colleges to satisfy the requirement of "offering alternatives" by partnering exclusively with indie, creative-commons, and public domain distributors." Which would not stop students from downloading works that the MPAA governs at the same time.
"BTW - why in the world do colleges need to be involved in "offering alternatives" when there are dozens of well known websites already offering alternatives. iTunes anyone? Rhapsody? eMusic?" Because, according to the EFF themselves: "The recording industry is already willing to offer unlimited downloads with subscription plans for $10 to $15 per month through services such as Napster and Rhapsody. But these services have been a failure on campuses, for a number of reasons, including these: They don't work with the iPod, they cause downloaded music to "expire" after students leave the school, and they don't include all the music students want." - Fred von Lohmann, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/AR2007060501761.html
"If people aren't using these already what makes anyone thing that a college offering the same will suddenly be more successful?" Because if they had a local library then students could access the library off of their campus, instead of having to download over the internet. They wouldn't have to worry about trojans, or whether the music file would even play on their player, etc. The aforementioned may make it seem like I think students are stupid - perhaps, because the Washington Post thinks university system administrators are stupid; some gems: "Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic -- and a great many universities do not" "The toolkit allows an administrator to require a username and password for access to the Web server. The problem is that the person responsible for running the toolkit is never prompted to create a username and password."
And at least Dave Taylor at the U of P agrees: "even with a firewall keeping non-university students from accessing the toolkit's Web server, any student on the network armed with the Internet address of the Web server could view all of the traffic on his or her segment of the network, said Penn's Dave Taylor." - http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/11/mpaa_university_toolkit_opens_1.html
"It is no business of a college, which people pay to attend, to be factoring into their cost model marketing and/or service costs of music/movie distribution." Apparently it is. Quoth that EFF dude again: "Universities already pay blanket fees so that student a cappella groups can perform on campus, and they also pay for cable TV subscriptions and site licenses for software."
As per the subject. Just because the following sequence of events may be likely...
1. drive onto private property 2. take pictures 3. publish them publicly en masse 4. get sued 5. Streisand Effect! 6. more people will (attempt to) drive on said private property...that doesn't mean that Step 5 makes the problem start at Step 4. The problem started at Step 1.
If we all just keep screaming "Streisand Effect!", then we would be forcing people into tacitly allowing anybody to just come onto private property (and other events leading to the aforementioned proclamations); it's almost like extortion "Allow me onto your property, or I will post to the internet that you do not allow it, and then you will see many more people like myself show up here. You don't want many more people to show up here, do you?".
If Google, or their contractors, accessed private property that they should have known they were not allowed to, then Google should suffer the full legal consequences.
"True, but if people got paid for reporting vulnerabilities they would be more inclined to report them to Oracle."
Actually, I think it would make security researchers (white hat) and 'security researchers' (black hat) far more likely to not contact Oracle with full details as they may have in the past, and instead tell Oracle "we've found a vulnerability. For $100,000 we will tell you what it is. For $0 we will tell... other...interested parties." ( where other interested parties may be baddies or the public at large; either way rather undesirable. )
I'm not saying that everybody would suddenly get dollarsigns in the eyes - but certainly many would be tempted.. given that this would essentially be legal extortion.
I've got the numbers for all CS3 products in a nice little ODF. It needs updating and needs to have non-CS3 products added. But in the end, all of this is mostly the result of Europeans 'willing' to pay for the product at these prices. I put willing in single quotes because they don't have much of a choice. A dutchman can't just go to the U.S. store and order the U.S. version with a rather minimal shipping fee and be off cheaper than buying local - Adobe restricts it.
If not.. then your argument is moot; especially for software.
No, Europeans can't just go ahead and buy the much cheaper version of a CS3 product from the American store - Adobe just won't have it. Heck, if you're in Germany, you can't buy in Belgium.
So it's not just that Europeans are willing to pay it - they often don't have a choice (presuming that they have already established that the Adobe product is the only viable product).
I've looked into the numbers (I haven an ODF for the curious), and you can expect several English CS3 products to go for -more than twice- the price of the U.S. English version in Europe, if you take into account the exchange rate. Europeans used to feel shafted thanks to the "$100 -> 100" thing that was played, but now they add some extra on top.
I agree with the GPP poster, though - they get away with it because Europeans let them get away with it.
Comics can't keep their stories straight... so why bother doing so for TV/Film/cartoon*/etc. adaptations - especially given the constraints of the movie format, etc.?
* though the X-Men cartoon was quite nice, I don't think one could actually call it 'canon'.
From alternative universes to timetravel to cross-overs** to introducing new characters that are -exactly- like a previously existing (and sometimes not even dead-yet) character for the sake of furthering along a particular plot.
** I'm sorry, but why would spiderman be fighting superman, exactly - and just how would superman not actually be winning this? Please. Leave each superhero in its own little 'universe' already. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Stark.)
If you want at least a reasonably solid storyline with a beginning and an end, then comic books are one of the last places you should be looking. With Heroes being popular as it is and having a high 'X-Men'-appeal itself, I can't help but fear that it, too, will end up being dragged on and on and on.
Back on-topic.. Gambit is a hugely popular character from the comics as well as the cartoons... fans have wanted to see Gambit in the first three X-Men movies and were denied it; I'm not saying the movie studios are bending to the will of the fans, but you can't exactly blame them if they did - even if it's just because of dollarsigns in their eyes:)
...at hotels, that is. A meal the next day, tickets to a local event (though I prefer getting them at the front desk as they are often authorized to give a discount that does not appear via the in-room entertainment system, as well as offering/suggesting amenities, etc.), canceling any housekeeping the next morning if I pulled an all-nighter, etc. Oh, and of course, movies (no, not those.)
The technology has existed for ages; it's just been a matter of getting a widespread-enough set-top box into homes -not- tied to a specific cable/for-pay broadcast operator so as to prevent lock-in. If anything, it's surprising that it's taken this long for it to kick off (albeit in a small way, as I understand it) via TiVo.
Seriously, if they are in a meeting - or elsewhere where a ringing phone is frowned upon - have them silence the thing.
But I'm sure the marketing people will love this. Now they can 'call' you while circumventing a ton of provisions, including telling them to stop calling you right in the very phone call... not to mention kids and pranksters.
I'd check my contract on the services rendered by my provider to see if this can be blocked.
yeah, except when I'm working at a computer and somebody comes over and says "Hi, would you mind terribly if I plug this USB stick in and reboot your machine?", I'd probably say "why yes, I would mind terribly".
And if I'm not at the machine, quite likely, I powered the thing down... that gives the person with the fancy USB stick mere seconds to move in and quickly plug the key in and boot back up.
Don't get me wrong, I already understand that it is possible - just that the situations in which it is possible are not extremely likely to occur. Those places where they are paranoid to think that something like that might occur are also already likely to have measures in place to prevent it as a side-effect of general prevention measures. Like, say, disabling boot-from-floppy/USB and passwording the BIOS to make sure they can't just go around changing that either; which leads back to having to open the machine in order to reset the BIOS by shorting two points on the motherboard, etc. etc.
and not just the machine hardware, but rather the RAM stick itself.
Essentially the exploit relies on data that is in RAM to still exist, even if it's just for a few seconds, if you take it out of the machine.
You could add a 'write random crap to RAM' thing to your shutdown procedure, but that won't help if they simply power the machine off. The machine hardware could write random crap to RAM when it is powered down, but that won't help if they simply yank the RAM stick out while the machine is still running.
So the RAM stick itself would have to detect that it is no longer connected to any motherboard and, using a charge kept in a capacitor, for example, flash itself with random crap.. or whatever.
Keep in mind that this 'exploit' is quite difficult to execute, requiring not just physical access to the machine - but to the RAM. While the machine is running (or was running within the last N seconds, at least). In the vast majority of environments, that's going to be extremely difficult.. unless you own (or operate) that machine and you have no particular way of being caught.
There's a physical medium, the harddisk (let's ignore flash media seeing as that is fragmented as part of its entire operation, defragmenting not having much use other than for data recovery), and the best way to store data on it is sequential, one bit right behind the other, etc. Write out a ton of bits, delete some in the middle and there you have fragmentation, regardless of the filesystem used, no?
I understand UFS and various others try to *minimize* fragmentation by grouping files in a single directory together on the drive, or more fancypants things like archival files getting stuck neatly together while files that tend to expand (log files, etc.) given a bit of headroom so that they can without fragmenting as their size increases... but eventually, all of them still fragment?
At the same time, there's background defragmenters that continually work behind the scenes and I can't help but imagine are only -adding- wear&tear to the drive (even if they make the thing less fragmented, it accesses areas that may otherwise not be accessed anyway?)
Oh I'm not disagreeing with consumers deciding how much goods are worth (although they seem to be doing a shoddy job in everything else that they find 'expensive'. That whole 'tangible vs intangible' thing again.
I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
As for your specific points... 1. Except that most people don't care about that. 2. That's an idea, but then what was it again about adblock and the like? If I put out a movie and puts ads in front of it that you can't skip... can we say "ads hacked out in 3... 2... 1..."? Or do you suggest that the entire movie be product-placement'ed up the wazoo? And don't forget that Coca~Cola expects returns from their sponsoring Lost - returns in terms of selling their drinks. If they did market research and found that nobody's buying any additional drinks from them, and dropping the ads wouldn't result in a drop in sales of their drinks, they would pull the ads immediately.
3. Woo, I'll cover this in two parts.
3.1. Are you saying that singing, drumming, playing the violin, acting, being a cameraman, etc. are not 'real jobs'? If so, is that based on the idea that you are producing intangible goods - because then you should tell the plurality of coders on Slashdot to please go and be a mechanic for their code is worth $0.00 as well.
3.2. Nice. I make a $1,000 movie and automatically I'm snorting coke off of hookers. Are you just a tad biased? As I said before, I'm no fan of multi-million, or even multi-hundred-thousand actors; which tend to be a large part of the budget for a movie these days. How they spend those millions I couldn't care less about. But I am taking issue with your stating that every actor/etc. must just be spending their money, however much it might be, on unseemly things. Perhaps they're feeding a family. I know, feeding themselves while performing a job that isn't real - the audacity, eh?
That said... I'm all for it. Let all intangible goods be $0.00. Then we can live in the utopian Star Trek world where TV and the like have been abolished and we spend our lives doing other things that entertain us. Of course we can also get food on demand from a replicator and dabble in virtual worlds on the holodeck, chapters of which we'll pay for with our gold-laced latinum. Oh, shit, I forgot, intangible goods are supposed to be worth exactly zero gold-laced latinum bars as well. Oh well. You know what I meant.
Again, I'm sure the masses feel that music/videos/etc. are worth $0.00 - that does not, however, make it -reasonable-. That's the only problem I had with the original poster's stance:)
I know Apple allows free apps, period - that's not the question.
Are you saying that there is a commercial Mandarin phrasebook on there as well? If so - is it essentially the same product, or does it offer more phrases, a better UI, etc. - anything that would make it added value and thus worth shelling out the $$ for? -That- lies at the heart of my question. If the two products are essentially the same, then what happens? Apple gets to say 'yay' or 'nay', so who do they say yay/nay to, and how do they make that work in the business workings of their store, the developer symbiosis, etc.?
"Seriously, the proper organization to monitor copyright infringement here is Viacom. YouTube presumably doesn't have a complete list of Viacom's copyrights, and can't tell if something from that list was posted legitimately or not."
You completely ignored the section about using audio/video-identification techniques.
Yes, some of those rights holders would like YouTube to pre-screen all uploaded content and find out whether somebody else holds the rights to it, etc. Those rights holders are utterly stupid and I will side with YouTube/Google on that *immediately*.
But if somebody uploads video "ABC", and the rights holder says "Oi, that's ours, and only we have the right to distribute that, so please remove it", then YouTube/Google are just being pricks when they laugh and point at the DMCA provisions when the rights holder goes "Say, didn't I ask you to remove video 'ABC' just yesterday? It's back up again." or "I told you nobody but us has the rights to distribute that, so why is 'ABC' still available under users X, Y and Z as well?".
I don't know how much more clear I can make this... but essentially.. once 1 (one, a single, etc.) video has been slapped at with a DMCA takedown, then loop over *all* videos on YouTube to find videos that are essentially the same, and automatically drop those as well. In addition, for every new upload, check if it matches the magic code for taken down videos, and prevent those. Drop a line to the account holders saying the video was automatically removed and how they can contest that removal, etc. That's technically feasible and would make plenty of rights holders perfectly happy as they don't keep having to shell out $$$ to their legal department to adjust the DMCA takedown notices with the correct account name, URL, etc. and have that mailed off to Google.
If you honestly believe that that means YouTube is 'going down', you haven't seen the majority of videos on YouTube. Most -are- the 'cat doing silly things' and 'laughing baby' and whatnot bits. Others are official channels. Other videos are wholly endorsed by the rights holders; see for example Daft Punk's endorsement of all the Daft Hands/Bodies/etc. videos, even requesting that they be allowed to put some of them under their own YouTube channel. Not every rights holder is a Viacom, and not even Viacom is looking to bring down YouTube. Au contraire - they know that if they take down YouTube they'll have a much less centralized place to try and make act according to their ideals.
"As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records, a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."
The site in this case being YouTube... the site-generation is entirely YouTube's. The user-generated content are the videos, descriptions, tags, comments, etc. Let's limit ourselves to the videos. Viacom and rights holders couldn't give less of a shit about your user-generated content - where that be your laughing baby or your cat saying "hello" or, heck, Star Trek parody. What they care about is the content that isn't user-generated at all - the content that at... worst is just a straight capture of one of their productions uploaded verbatim and at best is things like an MP3 set to a still image or a slideshow. That is not user-generated content no matter which way you want to twist the laws that existed even way before the DMCA.
The law isn't 'increasingly siding with rights owners', it's increasingly applying pre-existing laws. Just because we've all enjoyed being free from those laws for so long due to inattention from rights holders doesn't mean those laws magically went away. Sucks for us - but then we should get the existing laws changed.
That said.. Viacom et al blundered when they left the safe harbor provisions in as they are, instead of stipulating that all content that matches the infringing content's description (probably more technically detailed as being done via audio/video recognition algorithms) to be removed and future content being provided to the site being blocked. Then they wouldn't have to go completely overboard and try to find out what percentage of views go to unlicensed content to... to what, anyway? Declare YouTube a 'pirate haven'?
Price Drop? He just said 'free'
on
IPhone 2.0 Jailbroke
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for software developers making a buck on their application if it's worth it (see related rant on media from a previous slashdot story).
The question here is... If -I- were to make a *free* French-English dictionary... what are my odds of getting approved as a developer, getting my app approved in the store, and so forth and so on. Keeping in mind that this conflicts with a for-pay product also listed, and of which Apple gets a greater share (as in > $0). I'm sure Apple would allow it, but then there's the case of TomTom (google them) still not being approved for the program, while a competitor (google them also, forgot their name - they're better known in the U.S. I think) is.
"I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day" 1. Get hunderds, thousands, perhaps millions to see value in your sleeping all day. 2. Let that value be enough to make a living 3. done
"but that's not a reasonable expectation" I don't see why not.
Let's say I make a movie - let's say it costs me a mere $1,000 to make. That $1,000 has to come from somewhere. Now a hundred thousand people watch that movie and are entertained, the value they found in it being said entertainment. Now comes the difficult part... turning that entertainment value into monetary value. Presume it was a regular movie ticket... $8 or so. That's $800,000 that would've been mine. But alright, I'm sure I'm not entitled to $800,000 when the thing only cost $1,000 to make... (and yes, I find $5,000,000 actors unreasonable - same as I find multi-million dollar baseball players unreasonable, but that's not stopping people getting baseball tickets to a single event that they can't even tape with their own HD cameras and... I digress) so let's say I price the thing at $0.10. That's still $10,000 but what the hey, I can use that $9,000 to make 9 more movies, or maybe 3 more with better quality props.. or I'll donate the $9,000 to charity.. whatever. I would say that $0.25 for a full length movie is not just *reasonable*, it's ludicrously cheap.. you won't even find scratched-up mangled rental-place DVDs for that price.
And yet... somehow... the mindset of the masses is that that's not reasonable at all - they feel that the only reasonable price for intangible goods is $0. And that is what I find unreasonable. Paying $50 at a restaurant for foodstuffs that will just come out as fecal matter... that's unreasonable. Paying $4/gallon gas to drive 5 miles back and forth every day... that's unreasonable.
I'm all for reform and getting media creators to get with the program (some do - opening their own YouTube channels and sharing in ad revenue, for example)... I'm not for the mindset that media creators will just have to find a job making tangible goods which magically -are- worth actual cash, and do 'that media thing' in their spare time as a hobby for zilch. If enthusiasts do want to make free media - go for it, that's nothing new - but that doesn't mean that we should all be forcing others to do the same just because we're cheapskates.
So as for the grandparent... the technical solution is simple - offer the things in online stores for cheap. The mindset problem is another one altogether.. and the genie may be out of the bottle on that one.
Yeah, I know, there's streaming audio rippers.. of sorts. Some of them actually -using- the stereo mix recording method themselves! The ones that don't aren't exactly user-friendly... and yes, from the viewpoint of my folks, hitting record in one app (Audacity, for the curious), then hitting 'play' in the streaming audio component on a website, makes tons of sense and is easy enough to understand. From there they can save to MP3, OGG, whatever.. without having, say, a nice copy of a realmedia file in realmedia proprietary format that then has to be fed through some command-line conversion utility and... I lost them at 'rip the audio', really.
Oh, and I've used it to record two-way voice communications in the past; nowadays apps tend to have functionality for that built-in.
"My aversion to homosexuality has nothing to do with Christianity. My aversion is rooted in evolution; the "yuck" factor maintains reproduction. Evolution depends entirely on reproduction!"
alright, your stance and all that...
But how do you reconcile that with: "A lot of Christians make too much noise about a minor sin [...] while ignoring major sins like [...] adultery"
Surely the adultering person would be much more adapt at furthering evolution? Whether it be the a guy impregnating multiple womens or a woman getting pregnant from different men (and thus a larger gene pool).
Something tells me the foundation for your aversion is on.. well not shaky ground, perhaps, but have you heard of the tower of Pisa?
... from clients, here's a quick rundown of what people name their machines.
At #1: brand names: hp-xxxxxxxx,DELLxxxxxxx; These are probably default-ish names as set up by their respective server/workstation installs. At #2: unimaginative computer task names; workstation01 through workstation 67, server, fileserver, notebook, and so on. At #3: user types / names; administrator, JohnDoe, etc. At #4: television personalities of the non-human kind; Chairface being one of the more obscure. At #5: random english words; frustrator, biatch, soprano, atlantic, colossus, coffee, dragon, etc. At #6: indecipherable stuff; B36Y321, for example. It may be some manner of encoding scheme known only to the SysAdmin at the places, but it definitely make trouble-shooting with an end-user more difficult. "Are you running this on B36Y321?" -"Yes." "Are you sure?" -"Oh, sorry, I'm on B36Y312. Let me go find B36Y132" "..." "..." "..." At #7: norse gods; The top three: Thor, Freyr, Loki
Beyond that it gets a little mixed.. TV characters are somewhat popular - though I must say there are a lot of girls' names in there that don't fit into #3; i.e. the name is not the name of the (primary) user.
Now, whether going by the above is sound advice for YOUR business, I wouldn't know. I will say this, however, names are -much- easier than cryptic encodings. I can understand some encoding for differentiation between offices, departments, all that; Beyond that, however, finding the machine named "-Thor" is a lot easier than finding machine "-23" in a long list of other "-##"-numbered machines for most places; I guess because numbering only makes sense if you physically have them in a row of sorts; moving machines would automatically break that.
Slashdot Mirror
although rather articulate, I seem to rant a little.. not sure what's a worse hangover, reading that post or the headache :D :D .. no. /nokarmabonus
Then again.. +4 Interesting? I should get some more of whatever I was having
...you'd see a metric shit-ton of comments pointing out that -eeeeeeeeeeverybody- can take pictures of, and store into database the information relevant to, your license plates... how your car is out in public and you have no expectation of privacy there.. blablabla. No.. if Google did this, it'd be all good*. Heck, if an insurance company gave everybody who cooperated with their employees tracking their license plates in exchange for a 5% discount (that is.. raise the rates for everybody else), the vast majority would go for it.
( * okay, granted, there were actually a few people who felt Google was in the wrong with that private road thing (pending court decision, was it?).. but then the sheer number of comments saying that they should have made it gated if they didn't want anybody trespassing.. errrrr. )
But I'm not here to rant on the topic of Big Government vs Big Corporation.
"They [...] cost $25K". So two of those could employ an additional actual flesh and blood cop. Or two depending on just how bad their pay is. I'd go for the two additional cops.
Then again...
"and can scan and run thousands of plates a day through the local Motor Vehicle Administration database."
If that means they catch more people who break the law* and that ends up in a net positive exceeding the 25k (presumably a one-time purchase, but who am I kidding) by a healthy margin, maybe they could also afford an additional copper or two. If nothing else, they might not have to send rookies out to collect on some fine and put those rookies to work patrolling the streets instead, and seasoned cops don't have to waste time in their patrols doing 'quick' checks on plates in the area that seem out of place.
( * I understand some laws are unjust - so get 'm changed. Guess what.. everybody speeding 5mph hasn't upped the speed limits on a large scale officially.. unofficially officers probably don't care much as long as you go with the flow of traffic.. unless they're having a bad day or have to meet a quota. Sucks to be you when that is the case. )
"The easy mission creep these devices encourage is summarized in the article"
mission creep... well we all know what the mission is supposed to be (peace and safety and order and all that) and what the mission tends to be (revenue, statistics, making the mayor look good, blabla), but let's err on the side of the benign and try the next sentence...
"Initially purchased to find stolen cars, a handful of so-called tag readers are in use across the Washington region to catch not just car thieves, but also drivers who neglected or failed their emissions inspections or let their insurance policies lapse."
In other words... initially purchased to [help uphold the law], but [some now] also [help uphold the law] and [help uphold the law].
Yeah, I can see how that is evil.
I'm far more worried about explicit -and- implicit loss of privacy than the throwing of the "now the cops can tell, with near-zero effort, that I let my insurance lapse! It's not fair! *stomps feet*" tantrums. I hate the "I've got nothing to hide" argument, relevant to the privacy issue, but I hate it when people who know they broke the law and then get all huffy when they get caught by a machine rather than a human even more.
Anyway - you want scary.. go to The Netherlands come 2012-2016. Apparently we are all to drive around with government-monitored GPS on-board by then. To have us pay road use taxes based on the hour of the day, which road it was, etc. I'm sure being able to track whoever they want from a Lay-Z Boy is just an added perk they'll reveal when the tech is entrenched in use and they've got a high profile case (a murderer, perhaps a pedophile, being arrested) to demonstrate that being able to track everybody is a Good Thing(TM). Ba-a-a-a-a, bleated the population, as their road use taxes were lowered ( not really - they're making up for it with a wide margin in the 'provincial tax'... which will apply to -all- citizens, not just those who actually drive cars.)
But that, too, is another rant.
"I urge the colleges to satisfy the requirement of "offering alternatives" by partnering exclusively with indie, creative-commons, and public domain distributors."
Which would not stop students from downloading works that the MPAA governs at the same time.
"BTW - why in the world do colleges need to be involved in "offering alternatives" when there are dozens of well known websites already offering alternatives. iTunes anyone? Rhapsody? eMusic?"
Because, according to the EFF themselves:
"The recording industry is already willing to offer unlimited downloads with subscription plans for $10 to $15 per month through services such as Napster and Rhapsody. But these services have been a failure on campuses, for a number of reasons, including these: They don't work with the iPod, they cause downloaded music to "expire" after students leave the school, and they don't include all the music students want." - Fred von Lohmann, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/AR2007060501761.html
"If people aren't using these already what makes anyone thing that a college offering the same will suddenly be more successful?"
Because if they had a local library then students could access the library off of their campus, instead of having to download over the internet. They wouldn't have to worry about trojans, or whether the music file would even play on their player, etc. The aforementioned may make it seem like I think students are stupid - perhaps, because the Washington Post thinks university system administrators are stupid; some gems:
"Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic -- and a great many universities do not"
"The toolkit allows an administrator to require a username and password for access to the Web server. The problem is that the person responsible for running the toolkit is never prompted to create a username and password."
And at least Dave Taylor at the U of P agrees: "even with a firewall keeping non-university students from accessing the toolkit's Web server, any student on the network armed with the Internet address of the Web server could view all of the traffic on his or her segment of the network, said Penn's Dave Taylor."
- http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/11/mpaa_university_toolkit_opens_1.html
"It is no business of a college, which people pay to attend, to be factoring into their cost model marketing and/or service costs of music/movie distribution."
Apparently it is. Quoth that EFF dude again:
"Universities already pay blanket fees so that student a cappella groups can perform on campus, and they also pay for cable TV subscriptions and site licenses for software."
Moreover, the EFF dude thinks that's an excellent thing to apply to music downloads as well:
"By the same token, they could collect a reasonable amount from their students for "all you can eat" downloading." - Fred von Lohmann, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/AR2007060501761.html
As per the subject. Just because the following sequence of events may be likely...
1. drive onto private property ...that doesn't mean that Step 5 makes the problem start at Step 4. The problem started at Step 1.
2. take pictures
3. publish them publicly en masse
4. get sued
5. Streisand Effect!
6. more people will (attempt to) drive on said private property
If we all just keep screaming "Streisand Effect!", then we would be forcing people into tacitly allowing anybody to just come onto private property (and other events leading to the aforementioned proclamations); it's almost like extortion "Allow me onto your property, or I will post to the internet that you do not allow it, and then you will see many more people like myself show up here. You don't want many more people to show up here, do you?".
If Google, or their contractors, accessed private property that they should have known they were not allowed to, then Google should suffer the full legal consequences.
"True, but if people got paid for reporting vulnerabilities they would be more inclined to report them to Oracle."
Actually, I think it would make security researchers (white hat) and 'security researchers' (black hat) far more likely to not contact Oracle with full details as they may have in the past, and instead tell Oracle "we've found a vulnerability. For $100,000 we will tell you what it is. For $0 we will tell... other ...interested parties." ( where other interested parties may be baddies or the public at large; either way rather undesirable. )
I'm not saying that everybody would suddenly get dollarsigns in the eyes - but certainly many would be tempted.. given that this would essentially be legal extortion.
These are numbers for The Netherlands, as of July 14th, 2008.
The exchange rate for USD -> EUR was at that time: 0.629019
The following prices are EXCLUDING VAT/Sales Tax (BTW in NL).
The products are the English editions of the products. Note: only a handful of the Adobe products have Dutch localization.
USD = US Dollar
EUR = Euro
CNV = Euro price if simply doing a currency conversion
MUP = MarkUp in percent
CS3 Design Standard
USD: 1199
EUR: 1269
CNV: 754.19
MUP: 68%
Photoshop CS3 Extended
USD: 999
EUR: 1069
CNV: 628.39
MUP: 70%
InCopy CS3
USD: 249
EUR: 419
CNV: 156.63
MUP: 168%
I've got the numbers for all CS3 products in a nice little ODF. It needs updating and needs to have non-CS3 products added. But in the end, all of this is mostly the result of Europeans 'willing' to pay for the product at these prices. I put willing in single quotes because they don't have much of a choice. A dutchman can't just go to the U.S. store and order the U.S. version with a rather minimal shipping fee and be off cheaper than buying local - Adobe restricts it.
If not.. then your argument is moot; especially for software.
No, Europeans can't just go ahead and buy the much cheaper version of a CS3 product from the American store - Adobe just won't have it. Heck, if you're in Germany, you can't buy in Belgium.
So it's not just that Europeans are willing to pay it - they often don't have a choice (presuming that they have already established that the Adobe product is the only viable product).
I've looked into the numbers (I haven an ODF for the curious), and you can expect several English CS3 products to go for -more than twice- the price of the U.S. English version in Europe, if you take into account the exchange rate. Europeans used to feel shafted thanks to the "$100 -> 100" thing that was played, but now they add some extra on top.
I agree with the GPP poster, though - they get away with it because Europeans let them get away with it.
See also:
http://www.amanwithapencil.com/adobe.html
Comics can't keep their stories straight... so why bother doing so for TV/Film/cartoon*/etc. adaptations - especially given the constraints of the movie format, etc.?
* though the X-Men cartoon was quite nice, I don't think one could actually call it 'canon'.
From alternative universes to timetravel to cross-overs** to introducing new characters that are -exactly- like a previously existing (and sometimes not even dead-yet) character for the sake of furthering along a particular plot.
** I'm sorry, but why would spiderman be fighting superman, exactly - and just how would superman not actually be winning this? Please. Leave each superhero in its own little 'universe' already. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Stark.)
If you want at least a reasonably solid storyline with a beginning and an end, then comic books are one of the last places you should be looking. With Heroes being popular as it is and having a high 'X-Men'-appeal itself, I can't help but fear that it, too, will end up being dragged on and on and on.
Back on-topic.. Gambit is a hugely popular character from the comics as well as the cartoons... fans have wanted to see Gambit in the first three X-Men movies and were denied it; I'm not saying the movie studios are bending to the will of the fans, but you can't exactly blame them if they did - even if it's just because of dollarsigns in their eyes :)
nor does a "sent" e-mail mean a "received" let alone "read and understood" e-mail.
For anything and everything highly official - use dead trees and signatures.. and then some.
...at hotels, that is. A meal the next day, tickets to a local event (though I prefer getting them at the front desk as they are often authorized to give a discount that does not appear via the in-room entertainment system, as well as offering/suggesting amenities, etc.), canceling any housekeeping the next morning if I pulled an all-nighter, etc. Oh, and of course, movies (no, not those.)
The technology has existed for ages; it's just been a matter of getting a widespread-enough set-top box into homes -not- tied to a specific cable/for-pay broadcast operator so as to prevent lock-in. If anything, it's surprising that it's taken this long for it to kick off (albeit in a small way, as I understand it) via TiVo.
Seriously, if they are in a meeting - or elsewhere where a ringing phone is frowned upon - have them silence the thing.
But I'm sure the marketing people will love this. Now they can 'call' you while circumventing a ton of provisions, including telling them to stop calling you right in the very phone call. .. not to mention kids and pranksters.
I'd check my contract on the services rendered by my provider to see if this can be blocked.
yeah, except when I'm working at a computer and somebody comes over and says "Hi, would you mind terribly if I plug this USB stick in and reboot your machine?", I'd probably say "why yes, I would mind terribly".
And if I'm not at the machine, quite likely, I powered the thing down... that gives the person with the fancy USB stick mere seconds to move in and quickly plug the key in and boot back up.
Don't get me wrong, I already understand that it is possible - just that the situations in which it is possible are not extremely likely to occur. Those places where they are paranoid to think that something like that might occur are also already likely to have measures in place to prevent it as a side-effect of general prevention measures. Like, say, disabling boot-from-floppy/USB and passwording the BIOS to make sure they can't just go around changing that either; which leads back to having to open the machine in order to reset the BIOS by shorting two points on the motherboard, etc. etc.
and not just the machine hardware, but rather the RAM stick itself.
Essentially the exploit relies on data that is in RAM to still exist, even if it's just for a few seconds, if you take it out of the machine.
You could add a 'write random crap to RAM' thing to your shutdown procedure, but that won't help if they simply power the machine off.
The machine hardware could write random crap to RAM when it is powered down, but that won't help if they simply yank the RAM stick out while the machine is still running.
So the RAM stick itself would have to detect that it is no longer connected to any motherboard and, using a charge kept in a capacitor, for example, flash itself with random crap.. or whatever.
Keep in mind that this 'exploit' is quite difficult to execute, requiring not just physical access to the machine - but to the RAM. While the machine is running (or was running within the last N seconds, at least). In the vast majority of environments, that's going to be extremely difficult.. unless you own (or operate) that machine and you have no particular way of being caught.
How would any file system prevent fragmentation?
There's a physical medium, the harddisk (let's ignore flash media seeing as that is fragmented as part of its entire operation, defragmenting not having much use other than for data recovery), and the best way to store data on it is sequential, one bit right behind the other, etc. Write out a ton of bits, delete some in the middle and there you have fragmentation, regardless of the filesystem used, no?
I understand UFS and various others try to *minimize* fragmentation by grouping files in a single directory together on the drive, or more fancypants things like archival files getting stuck neatly together while files that tend to expand (log files, etc.) given a bit of headroom so that they can without fragmenting as their size increases... but eventually, all of them still fragment?
At the same time, there's background defragmenters that continually work behind the scenes and I can't help but imagine are only -adding- wear&tear to the drive (even if they make the thing less fragmented, it accesses areas that may otherwise not be accessed anyway?)
Oh I'm not disagreeing with consumers deciding how much goods are worth (although they seem to be doing a shoddy job in everything else that they find 'expensive'. That whole 'tangible vs intangible' thing again.
I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
As for your specific points...
1. Except that most people don't care about that.
2. That's an idea, but then what was it again about adblock and the like? If I put out a movie and puts ads in front of it that you can't skip... can we say "ads hacked out in 3... 2... 1..."? Or do you suggest that the entire movie be product-placement'ed up the wazoo? And don't forget that Coca~Cola expects returns from their sponsoring Lost - returns in terms of selling their drinks. If they did market research and found that nobody's buying any additional drinks from them, and dropping the ads wouldn't result in a drop in sales of their drinks, they would pull the ads immediately.
3. Woo, I'll cover this in two parts.
3.1. Are you saying that singing, drumming, playing the violin, acting, being a cameraman, etc. are not 'real jobs'? If so, is that based on the idea that you are producing intangible goods - because then you should tell the plurality of coders on Slashdot to please go and be a mechanic for their code is worth $0.00 as well.
3.2. Nice. I make a $1,000 movie and automatically I'm snorting coke off of hookers. Are you just a tad biased? As I said before, I'm no fan of multi-million, or even multi-hundred-thousand actors; which tend to be a large part of the budget for a movie these days. How they spend those millions I couldn't care less about. But I am taking issue with your stating that every actor/etc. must just be spending their money, however much it might be, on unseemly things. Perhaps they're feeding a family. I know, feeding themselves while performing a job that isn't real - the audacity, eh?
That said... I'm all for it. Let all intangible goods be $0.00. Then we can live in the utopian Star Trek world where TV and the like have been abolished and we spend our lives doing other things that entertain us. Of course we can also get food on demand from a replicator and dabble in virtual worlds on the holodeck, chapters of which we'll pay for with our gold-laced latinum. Oh, shit, I forgot, intangible goods are supposed to be worth exactly zero gold-laced latinum bars as well. Oh well. You know what I meant.
Again, I'm sure the masses feel that music/videos/etc. are worth $0.00 - that does not, however, make it -reasonable-. That's the only problem I had with the original poster's stance :)
I know Apple allows free apps, period - that's not the question.
Are you saying that there is a commercial Mandarin phrasebook on there as well?
If so - is it essentially the same product, or does it offer more phrases, a better UI, etc. - anything that would make it added value and thus worth shelling out the $$ for?
-That- lies at the heart of my question. If the two products are essentially the same, then what happens? Apple gets to say 'yay' or 'nay', so who do they say yay/nay to, and how do they make that work in the business workings of their store, the developer symbiosis, etc.?
"Seriously, the proper organization to monitor copyright infringement here is Viacom. YouTube presumably doesn't have a complete list of Viacom's copyrights, and can't tell if something from that list was posted legitimately or not."
You completely ignored the section about using audio/video-identification techniques.
Yes, some of those rights holders would like YouTube to pre-screen all uploaded content and find out whether somebody else holds the rights to it, etc. Those rights holders are utterly stupid and I will side with YouTube/Google on that *immediately*.
But if somebody uploads video "ABC", and the rights holder says "Oi, that's ours, and only we have the right to distribute that, so please remove it", then YouTube/Google are just being pricks when they laugh and point at the DMCA provisions when the rights holder goes "Say, didn't I ask you to remove video 'ABC' just yesterday? It's back up again." or "I told you nobody but us has the rights to distribute that, so why is 'ABC' still available under users X, Y and Z as well?".
I don't know how much more clear I can make this... but essentially.. once 1 (one, a single, etc.) video has been slapped at with a DMCA takedown, then loop over *all* videos on YouTube to find videos that are essentially the same, and automatically drop those as well. In addition, for every new upload, check if it matches the magic code for taken down videos, and prevent those. Drop a line to the account holders saying the video was automatically removed and how they can contest that removal, etc.
That's technically feasible and would make plenty of rights holders perfectly happy as they don't keep having to shell out $$$ to their legal department to adjust the DMCA takedown notices with the correct account name, URL, etc. and have that mailed off to Google.
If you honestly believe that that means YouTube is 'going down', you haven't seen the majority of videos on YouTube. Most -are- the 'cat doing silly things' and 'laughing baby' and whatnot bits. Others are official channels. Other videos are wholly endorsed by the rights holders; see for example Daft Punk's endorsement of all the Daft Hands/Bodies/etc. videos, even requesting that they be allowed to put some of them under their own YouTube channel. Not every rights holder is a Viacom, and not even Viacom is looking to bring down YouTube. Au contraire - they know that if they take down YouTube they'll have a much less centralized place to try and make act according to their ideals.
"As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records, a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."
The site in this case being YouTube... the site-generation is entirely YouTube's. The user-generated content are the videos, descriptions, tags, comments, etc. Let's limit ourselves to the videos. Viacom and rights holders couldn't give less of a shit about your user-generated content - where that be your laughing baby or your cat saying "hello" or, heck, Star Trek parody. What they care about is the content that isn't user-generated at all - the content that at... worst is just a straight capture of one of their productions uploaded verbatim and at best is things like an MP3 set to a still image or a slideshow. That is not user-generated content no matter which way you want to twist the laws that existed even way before the DMCA.
The law isn't 'increasingly siding with rights owners', it's increasingly applying pre-existing laws. Just because we've all enjoyed being free from those laws for so long due to inattention from rights holders doesn't mean those laws magically went away. Sucks for us - but then we should get the existing laws changed.
That said.. Viacom et al blundered when they left the safe harbor provisions in as they are, instead of stipulating that all content that matches the infringing content's description (probably more technically detailed as being done via audio/video recognition algorithms) to be removed and future content being provided to the site being blocked. Then they wouldn't have to go completely overboard and try to find out what percentage of views go to unlicensed content to... to what, anyway? Declare YouTube a 'pirate haven'?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for software developers making a buck on their application if it's worth it (see related rant on media from a previous slashdot story).
The question here is... If -I- were to make a *free* French-English dictionary... what are my odds of getting approved as a developer, getting my app approved in the store, and so forth and so on. Keeping in mind that this conflicts with a for-pay product also listed, and of which Apple gets a greater share (as in > $0). I'm sure Apple would allow it, but then there's the case of TomTom (google them) still not being approved for the program, while a competitor (google them also, forgot their name - they're better known in the U.S. I think) is.
"I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day"
1. Get hunderds, thousands, perhaps millions to see value in your sleeping all day.
2. Let that value be enough to make a living
3. done
"but that's not a reasonable expectation"
I don't see why not.
Let's say I make a movie - let's say it costs me a mere $1,000 to make. That $1,000 has to come from somewhere. ... I digress) so let's say I price the thing at $0.10. That's still $10,000 but what the hey, I can use that $9,000 to make 9 more movies, or maybe 3 more with better quality props.. or I'll donate the $9,000 to charity.. whatever.
Now a hundred thousand people watch that movie and are entertained, the value they found in it being said entertainment. Now comes the difficult part... turning that entertainment value into monetary value. Presume it was a regular movie ticket... $8 or so. That's $800,000 that would've been mine. But alright, I'm sure I'm not entitled to $800,000 when the thing only cost $1,000 to make... (and yes, I find $5,000,000 actors unreasonable - same as I find multi-million dollar baseball players unreasonable, but that's not stopping people getting baseball tickets to a single event that they can't even tape with their own HD cameras and
I would say that $0.25 for a full length movie is not just *reasonable*, it's ludicrously cheap.. you won't even find scratched-up mangled rental-place DVDs for that price.
And yet... somehow... the mindset of the masses is that that's not reasonable at all - they feel that the only reasonable price for intangible goods is $0. And that is what I find unreasonable. Paying $50 at a restaurant for foodstuffs that will just come out as fecal matter... that's unreasonable. Paying $4/gallon gas to drive 5 miles back and forth every day... that's unreasonable.
I'm all for reform and getting media creators to get with the program (some do - opening their own YouTube channels and sharing in ad revenue, for example)... I'm not for the mindset that media creators will just have to find a job making tangible goods which magically -are- worth actual cash, and do 'that media thing' in their spare time as a hobby for zilch. If enthusiasts do want to make free media - go for it, that's nothing new - but that doesn't mean that we should all be forcing others to do the same just because we're cheapskates.
So as for the grandparent... the technical solution is simple - offer the things in online stores for cheap. The mindset problem is another one altogether.. and the genie may be out of the bottle on that one.
Yeah, I know, there's streaming audio rippers.. of sorts. Some of them actually -using- the stereo mix recording method themselves! ... I lost them at 'rip the audio', really.
The ones that don't aren't exactly user-friendly... and yes, from the viewpoint of my folks, hitting record in one app (Audacity, for the curious), then hitting 'play' in the streaming audio component on a website, makes tons of sense and is easy enough to understand. From there they can save to MP3, OGG, whatever.. without having, say, a nice copy of a realmedia file in realmedia proprietary format that then has to be fed through some command-line conversion utility and
Oh, and I've used it to record two-way voice communications in the past; nowadays apps tend to have functionality for that built-in.
"Oddly enough the screenshot feature of Mac OS X is disabled when you are playing a DVD"
Indeed he did. What's with the all the Windows XP work-arounds? They're valid, mind you.. for Windows XP; but that's not going to help for OS X?
"My aversion to homosexuality has nothing to do with Christianity. My aversion is rooted in evolution; the "yuck" factor maintains reproduction. Evolution depends entirely on reproduction!"
alright, your stance and all that...
But how do you reconcile that with:
"A lot of Christians make too much noise about a minor sin [...] while ignoring major sins like [...] adultery"
Surely the adultering person would be much more adapt at furthering evolution? Whether it be the a guy impregnating multiple womens or a woman getting pregnant from different men (and thus a larger gene pool).
Something tells me the foundation for your aversion is on.. well not shaky ground, perhaps, but have you heard of the tower of Pisa?
my point exactly - welcome to tech support hell :(
... from clients, here's a quick rundown of what people name their machines.
At #1: brand names: hp-xxxxxxxx,DELLxxxxxxx; These are probably default-ish names as set up by their respective server/workstation installs.
At #2: unimaginative computer task names; workstation01 through workstation 67, server, fileserver, notebook, and so on.
At #3: user types / names; administrator, JohnDoe, etc.
At #4: television personalities of the non-human kind; Chairface being one of the more obscure.
At #5: random english words; frustrator, biatch, soprano, atlantic, colossus, coffee, dragon, etc.
At #6: indecipherable stuff; B36Y321, for example. It may be some manner of encoding scheme known only to the SysAdmin at the places, but it definitely make trouble-shooting with an end-user more difficult. "Are you running this on B36Y321?" -"Yes." "Are you sure?" -"Oh, sorry, I'm on B36Y312. Let me go find B36Y132" "..." "..." "..."
At #7: norse gods; The top three: Thor, Freyr, Loki
Beyond that it gets a little mixed.. TV characters are somewhat popular - though I must say there are a lot of girls' names in there that don't fit into #3; i.e. the name is not the name of the (primary) user.
Now, whether going by the above is sound advice for YOUR business, I wouldn't know. I will say this, however, names are -much- easier than cryptic encodings. I can understand some encoding for differentiation between offices, departments, all that; Beyond that, however, finding the machine named "-Thor" is a lot easier than finding machine "-23" in a long list of other "-##"-numbered machines for most places; I guess because numbering only makes sense if you physically have them in a row of sorts; moving machines would automatically break that.