Yeah, you're AC and a troll, but if you feel brave, tell me what's bogus. I only really mentioned two basic facts:
1) Protestors in NYC getting into trouble with the cops. For the record, the sibling poster is correct, this was at RNC 2004, in the Flatiron neighborhood somewhere in the vicinity of 5th Avenue and 16th Street. The events of the convention were pretty heavily documented, both in the maintream media and the more... unconventional press. The vast majority of charges against civilians for street incidents were dropped, before trial, a lot of it due to the documentary video evidence that the cops didn't realize, or didn't care, was being shot. A few people sued, or threatened to sue, and settled out of court with the city--some lawsuits might have gone to trial, too, but I don't remember for sure. Now, I don't need to prove any of that, because it's all a matter of public record, and you can do your own damn homework.
I was protesting, I know a lot of people who were protesting, and many of them were hassled by the cops, to varying degrees. I have a lot of fringe-political friends, and there are even more of us with sympathies in that direction who aren't so active about it, having day jobs. I can't prove any of that to anybody, at least not here on Slashdot, without giving up a lot of privacy that I'd rather not. So, tough shit and fuck off.
2) Advanced digital video enhancement techniques. Google for it. Lots of proprietary stuff, some has been commercial for years and other stuff is using newer techniques. There is a lot of unlicensed or OSS-licensed, non-comercialized code available, too: MIT's media lab has a whole working group on the subject, and some even more interesting things are coming out of Russia and Eastern European grad schools.
You have to at least know enough about information theory to recognize that the concept is on solid theoretical ground, right? Lossy compression (like MPEG used to compress cell phone video) is using DCT to remove visually redundant image bits, and again to remove visually redundant frame info, because it's fast and easy to implement on most processors, NOT because it efficiently packs data to a near-minimum message size. It's not trying to approach the Shannon limit or the Nyquist limit (both of which deal with lossless compression, anyway, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax), it's trying to make some quick cuts in data stream size that aren't necessarily pulling information out in the most efficient way. In other words, it's leaving more bits in the message that absolutely need to be there, meaning there's more information to be extracted if you have the time and technique.
There are other "intelligent" video compression methods that require much more processing power, but which provide significant size gains for the same quality--those would probably be resistant to the kind of analysis that I described in the GP post. But I don't know for sure--I've only used the stuff, I didn't design it or code it. Again, do your homework, and fuck off.
I don't think I made any other claims, and I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground with those two, so what gives? Your boyfriend's been cheating on you, or something?
Yep. I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on. When I started getting calls from friends to help get bail money together, I was pretty worried about some of the folks that I knew had been popped, but it mostly turned out fine in the end. The cops weren't even that rough--only a few serious injuries, most of the physical incidents just left bruises. I didn't know anybody in Times Square, though--I heard that was worse than around MSG and in the village.
I've always said, the cops are effective not because of guns and uniforms, but because of their radios--you're never just messing with one cop, there are always dozens just a call for backup away. Now, we have the civilian answer to that: a population armed with cellphone camera and other hand-held video, waaay to many to just smash and ignore.
And honestly, I think that anything that makes the cops think twice about busting heads is better for them, too, in the long run. People are more likely to support the police and cooperate with them if they perceive cops as good guys, a point that seems lost on many in the American law-enforcement community.
...image processing software that takes a poor quality security camera image, and 'enhances' it so you can see the villains face reflected in the sunglasses of the victim...
While your point is well-made (I love the CSI episode where they "rotate" the security camera still to see the front of the guy's face, when the camera caught him from the back), you'd be surprised what can be done with heavy math and a LOT of processing power to improve the quality of digital images.
Depending on the type of images (stills versus video), and whether compression has been used, it's potentially possible to extract more information from the datastream than was intended. There's a neat trick that can be used on video, where the algorithm enhances one frame by analyzing the preceding and succeeding frames, recognizing the actual objects in the picture. It combines several seconds' worth of video information to provide a much clearer image of what's in a single frame. Of course, this doesn't always work, it depends on what you have to work with.
A guy I sometimes work with got hold of a cellphone camera video, shot freehand during a demonstration in New York City, of some cops pulling people down and roughing them up. Because of the crappy camera work, and the fact that the cellphone was such a horrible source, and the video had been compressed to hell, it wasn't possible initially to make out the faces of the cops or protesters. After tweaking the algorithm parameters and running the original stream through a LOT of processing, he had the video clear enough to identify most of the people present, AND read an officer's badge number.
This was originally prompted by the cops charging the protesters with resisting arrest and assult, all of which were thrown out of court for other reasons. But a couple of people won civil suits against the city on account of the video enhancement, and I think at least one cop lost his job.
I love telling people this story when they complain that higher math is useless except in theoretical physics. Power to the people, man!
I love Ace bar--I'm in there 1-2 nights a week playing pool. Claire is the cutest bartender in all of Manhattan.
Re:Those are just the ones you hear about.
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The BlackBerry Orphans
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I was out playing pool last night with a friend, in a bar called Ace in the East Village, in Manhattan. (That's New York City.) There's a crowd of khakis-and-blue-oxford-shirt dudes hanging out, pretty loaded, with one woman in the group, early 40s, maybe.
One of the guys comes over and introduces himself, and says he'll buy me a beer if I compliment the woman on her rack. This is a little wierd, but I want to get him off my back, so I strike up a conversation with the woman and ask her where she got her fantastic outfit. (Armani.) We start talking a little, since she IS pretty cute for a cougar, and that she's a investment banker. Her and her partner (also in the crew, nice silver-haired guy) are responsbile for a couple billion in funds.
Then she tells me that she just got divorced a few months back, and she has an 8-year-old daughter at home. We play a couple games of pool, and she's all over my friend and I. We're kind of flattered, but not really in love. At some point, she drifts back to her friends, perhaps sensing our lack of interest. She keeps drinking with her pals, and next thing you know she's dancing on a table.
About an hour later, we're hanging out with the bartender, K., another friend of mine. The bouncer calls K. over the women's rest room because the banker chick is head first in the toilet. K. and the bouncer pull her out, and manage to round up one of her pals to call a car for her and get her home. On the way out, barely coherent and covered with vomit, she sidles past me and tries to give me her phone number. I politely declined.
Now, my mom got divorced in her mid-30s, with three kids to take care of. She'd been out of the work force for 15 years, but she pulled her shit together, went back to school for a masters' degree, and became a teacher. She managed to meet a really nice guy at church, and got re-married, and made a solid home for us and sent us all to college--I never had to work for my tuition. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how my mother put herself aside, focused on a plan, and never, ever made me sorry that I was her son. She probably had some pretty dark moments, in there, too.
In short, as the banker chick was stumbling out the bar and heading home to her daughter, I couldn't think of anything uglier than that. Parents who forget that they're supposed to be parents first, who feel sorry for themselves and get drunk and slobber on people 20 years younger, are making themselves into something that their kids will not respect. And that's a horrible, horrible thing to do to a kid.
Yeah, but there are advantages I don't want to lose. The women are gorgeous, the jobs are plentiful and high-paying, and you never, ever get bored.
Plus, it's home. I grew up in LA, and when I leave to visit family for more than a week, I start to get homesick for the Big Apple. I never once missed Los Angeles like that.
Most people come here for a short time and either hate it or fall head-over-heels in love. Living in New York for an extended period is a constant superposition of the two. Kind of unavoidable, unless you have shitloads of money and no conscience about spending it.
I've heard this from a lot of people, but I still get a kick out of the big screen. Sure, I watch a lot of movies at home, too, but the phenomenon of the theater still has its good points. It's a way to get out of the house and hang out with people--go see a movie, have some dinner or get drinks, and dissect the film or just laugh about it. It's an opportunity for being sociable that doesn't seem to come together the same way at home.
I live in New York, though. Your choices for most other nights out are pretty similarly priced--pounding brewskies on a pub crawl through the East Village is fun as hell, but it costs an arm and a leg since the beers start at $5 or $6 (and I'm Irish). And clubbing? $20 cover charge, standard at anyplace worth going, with drinks that start at $7 and climb fast. Oh, and they hit you up for $5 coat checks, too, to hold onto the $300 threads you have to buy to look sharp.
It's insane--even the fucking museum costs $20. Maybe I'm the crazy one, for living here. Entertainment is my biggest bill, besides rent (don't even ask)--and I run a couple hundred watts worth of servers 24/7 in my apartment.
Maybe I should just stay home more often and get baked... Oh, wait--my delivery service charges $60 for an eighth, now. Fucking A.
If you can't see why, you don't know anything about the debate over the pros and cons of Canadian/European-style health care systems. You probably don't even know that there IS a debate.
Let me shortcut you: Check the sibling post to your own that describes the different experiences with chemotherapy waiting list times for cancer patients in the USA and Canada. THERE ARE DOWNSIDES TO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. (The chemo story is one of dozens of similiar examples of ways in which socialized medicine is inferior to privately-operated health care, like we have in the US. Google it.)
Now, are the downsides worth the upsides? Maybe, maybe not--that's a debatable policy question, and there is certainly room on both sides for intelligent, reasonable people who disagree.
HOWEVER... We're not talking, here, about who's right about health care--we're talking about whether the grandparent post is a troll. Is he:
- Inflammatory, derogatory, and judgemental in tone
- Cherry-picking one side of contentious, long-running debate
- Totally dismissive of the idea that reasonable ground exists for disagreement
DUH!! Group decision making is different from individual decision making?!! OMGWTF!! WHat a shocker!!
We KNEW that already, and anybody who missed it in the last 3,000 years of human history is a complete idiot. I didn't need 'The Corporatation' to tell me that.
BTW: If you thought 'The Corporation' was good, you probably:
- live in Seattle, or San Franciso;
- have long hair, sandles, and lots of ticket stubs from Phish concerts;
- have had a lobotomy or traumatic brain injury (TBI) at some point;
- drool on your keyboard;
It's propaganda-shlock, barely distinguishable from the Michael Moore variety. Read any undergraduate-level business or microeconomics textbook, and you'll learn many more or capitalism's dirty little secrets.
You make me almost sorry to call myself a Liberal. People like you are the Left's version of Rush Limbaugh: an embarrasment to the reasonable adults who don't want to fellate Karl Marx.
companies that don't host their own e-mail, particularly smaller companies
This is a no-brainer, right? If you're the kind of company that is subject to these retention rules, having a shared email server that immediately deletes DL'd messages, with no user policy at the local level, either, is illegal. You'd have to immediately move your email in-house and implement appropriate policies, or find a 3rd-party that can handle it, or some mixture.
If you're not the kind of company that is subject to these rules, who the fuck cares?
If you don't already know that your company is subject to these rules, and it turns out you do need to follow them, fire your in-house counsel because they're incompetent.
However, there's a whole lot of less than ethical things that can be done within the boundaries of the law. There are, for instance, no laws against lying, except under circumstances such as a sworn oath.
I still stand by my belief that corporations lie all the time, just like politicians. I'll refrain from dragging the Friedman quote into the argument in the future, though.
I don't get how you believe that corporations are so fundamentally different from any other collection of people in society. Corporations, and all businesses, generally, are just a group of people making decisions within a management and ownership structure. It shouldn't be surprising when they behave like, well, people. People lie all the time, and act unethically. If a corporation does, it's because the people running it and owning it have decided, AS HUMAN BEINGS, to engage in that behavior.
There are arguments that the most common corporate governance structures change human decision-making behavior, by misdirecting the feeling of responsibility that comes with certain actions, or distributing responsibility amongst enough people that each one feels too little guilt to prevent bad actions, or encouraging an "I was just following orders" mentality. In my experience, these are sometimes true and sometimes not true. But to the extent that they exist and influence corporate decision-making, it's only to the extent that any other self-interested collection of humans does, also. Every corporation, company, government agency, non-profit, club, and party in society has the same issues.
So saying that corporations can be unethical, or that corporations should be more tightly controlled and watched, is silly because it singles them out. If you feel that a behavior is harmful and should be regulated, just have the guts to make the statement that it should be regulated throughout society.
I believe the point was that corporations should be held to some moral standard, since outlawing every possible antisocial action a corporation can take is a Sisyphean task.
A good check on your logic is to try substituting "person" for "corporation" every time you make a statement about corporations. How Sisyphean of a task is it to outlaw every possible antisocial action that a PERSON can take? Why is this a different question for people than corporations?
See, everybody's always forgetting that corporations are just groups of people. They don't actually have an independent moral or ethical existence--legally, we treat them as such in a limited manner because it makes the law work better. But really, the rights and responsibilities or a business are understood by society to be an expression of the rights and responsibilities of their employees and owners.
You're just insisting that we hold certain groups of people responsible to a moral standard other than the law. WTF? If you want a law against lying, ask for a law against lying. If you don't want to accept the horrendous social consequences of it, don't ask for it. It's the same whether you talk about corporations or people: the law is what we're required to follow, nothing else.
Taken to the limit, this means that a company will take any action neccessary to secure and guard profits.
You totally misunderstood Friedman's point, probably because you never read Friedman, but instead took the quote out of context.
First of all, in the section of his book where he makes the quote you pulled, he's not talking about how companies do behave, he's talking about how he thinks the should behave. Friedman argues that corporations engage in all kinds of frivolous charity, making donations to causes and such, and that they should stop. Instead, corporations should return those profits to their shareholders, and let the shareholders make charitable donations as they wish.
Second of all, Friedman didn't believe that corporations should take any action necessary to secure profit. His understanding of corporate responsibility is the commonly-accepted, rational one: corporate businesses, like all businesses, individuals, non-profits, clubs, or other human agencies, should obey the law equally. In other words, if corporations take less-than-optimal actions, and they're not breaking the law, you need to change the law, not the corporation.
Your interpretation is akin to saying that Winston Churchill was a big supporter of Hitler--it's the exact opposite of the facts.
while CIO's and other tech professionals can deny the validity of his statement, it will be a matter for the courts to decide at some point.
In theory... but in theory, Microsoft could patent swinging sideways on a tire swing and start suing kids on playgrounds. And kindergarden teachers can deny the validity of that statement, but it will be a matter for the courts to decide at some point.
Balmer is posturing. Microsoft's lawyers have assuredly already told the big hothead that there is slim to none chance that Microsoft could possibly win any such lawsuit. Why do we know that? Because they haven't sued anybody.
If MS thought it could have won such a lawsuit, it would have sued years ago, before or during the height of the SCO fiasco, when the public's perception that Linux might contain compromising intellectual property was strongest. They didn't, though, for all of their talk and FUD and veiled threats.
Think of what a successful MS lawsuit would have done to Linux market penetration, too. Even an unsuccessful, or settled lawsuit that dragged on long enough, would have sent CIOs and execs running scared from Linux... Right into the arms of Windows.
The first ones will burn up. The last ones will hit the ground.
True, but this same effect happens with a larger asteroid--it enters the earth's atmosphere and loses a lot of velocity due to drag, and a lot of mass due to vaporization from the heat of friction. The overall kinetic energy is severely diminished by the time it hits the ground, which is when we calculate the impact effects. So the important question is: does a single large object or a cloud of smaller objects get slowed down and vaporized more by the atmosphere?
The latter is potentially more important than the former. If an asteroid loses 40% of its mass due to frictional heating (and subsequent vaporization), that lost mass no longer contributes to its kinetic energy. Exactly how much loss to expect would have to be modeled by the process of vaporization--it's not necessarily a simple linear relationship.
Compare the behavior of one large object with a given mass and velocity to the behavior of a cloud of many smaller object that collectively have the same mass and the same (averaged) velocity--they'll have the same kinetic energy before entering the atmosphere:
- The larger object will experience less slowing due to drag than the cloud of smaller objects will. The smaller objects will generally have a greater ratio of "sail area" (the surface profile in the direction of motion) to mass. This means that they'll collectively slow down more than the larger object.
- Because of the greater ratio of surface area to mass, the remaining mass in the cloud of smaller objects will be less than the remaining mass of the single large object, at the time of impact.
So it's pretty obvious that the kinetic energy will be lessened if we break up the asteroid, which should translate into a more survivable impact. But that's not even the whole story: the cloud of fragments will distribute its mass and kinetic energy over a larger area than the intact asteroid. This has a couple of effects:
- The wider "flight path" encompassed by the edges of the cloud means that less of the mass will actually impact the Earth. Consider how long before impact we detonate our nuke, and how efficient the explosion is, and realize that the fragments will be moving constantly outward from the center of the explosion in the time between our nuclear detonation and impact. If we do it right, much of the cloud may miss us entirely.
- The wider flight path also means that many of the fragments that do impact earth will have a much less damaging angle of impact. If a fragment comes straight down vertically, it will be more destructive than if it comes in at an oblique angle, because it will spend less time in the atmosphere slowing down and burning up. So by spreading the fragments out a lot, we guarantee that many of them will hit obliquely.
- Finally, for all the remaining mass that does impact, it will be spread out across a very wide area instead of being concentrated in a single impact point. Less energy is dissapated at any one point on Earth's surface, which I think is probably going to be helpful.
So, considering that the asteroid is going to hit us, I'd much rather that we blow it to tiny pieces first.
Eh? U.S. Presidents are limited to two terms of office. You can't run, after that. That's OK, though--I couldn't tell you the details of terms of office for anywhere in Europe.
I think you take me for a liberal. A mistaken impression, but I may have left it while trying to quickly make a point. Government isn't necessarily resposible for providing education and health positively, unless you're a commie, but it shouldn't be actively preventing people from having them. Unfortunately, that's exactly the case in much of Africa.
The complicated version of Africa's politics and sufferings is that decades of awful governments have made corruption and authoritarianism the dominant political mechanisms. Without dependable state actors and a trustworthy rule of law, it's impossible for any nation to grow economically--that's basic market economics. Commerce and investment, the blood of healthy market systems, need guarantees in order to thrive.
This leaves much of Africa in a situation where there citizens have little hope of bettering themselves economically. The same factors discourage foreign investment as well as domestic entrepreneurship--nobody trusts circumstances enough to make long-term investments, and it's hard to succeed honestly when you have to know the right people and pay big bribes in order to conduct basic business.
The early American pioneers DID have a huge advantage on their side when they set out to explore and build: they all shared a common English/American heritage of laws and ideals of government. On the frontier or in rural Virginia, the basic psychological, cultural, and social mechanisms of property rights, contracts, and basic justice were a given. Not so many Africans can count themselves so lucky.
While pedophiles aren't going to congregate on youtube (for instance), I can imagine they do congregate on other places and scour youtube for saucy videos and pictures. Ordinary webbased boards contain enough links to youtubes jailbait dancing in its underwear in front of a webcam, and I highly doubt that those boards are full of teenage males (even though the local inhabitants may act like it).
Yeah, but who's harmed by the pedos scouring YouTube for videos? It's not like they can actually contact the kids through them. It's gross, right, but I bet these guys are getting their jollies checking out teenage models in swimsuit ads, too. We both agree that legislation is a bad idea (I think), but can you even really call it a "harm"? I don't think so. Where is the threat of which you speak?
As opposed to MySpace, where it's possible for someone to contact a kid, engage them, and possibly arrange to meet offline. THAT can be rightly called a harm. Whether you think regulatory legislation is the right idea or not, it is a real risk.
Hate speech and naughty content can occur equally as well via the media of text and pictures. Video doesn't necessarily add anything to either one. In fact, any smart, savvy Holocaust denier will tell you that text is a far more efficient and cost-effective method of defaming Jews.
To be honest, most hatespeech I have bumped into on the internet is by the means of websites posting articles accompanied by pictures. I'd be very surprised if a streaming video service would have more than a handful of videos. People who make hatespeech usually have a strong desire to remain anonymous, and videos make that harder to do.
Um, this was mostly a joke. I have never really heard of hate-speech sites using any other than text/pictures, either.
Broadcast license fees open up a new revenue source for the government, which can be used to directly tax internet content (which so far is nearly unheard of).
Not as nearly unheard of as you might think. Where I live I've heard 3 proposals in the past 5 years for taxing the internet, either nation-wide or EU-wide, and this would make 4 (although very sneakily). I doubt that this proposal is anything less than a sneaky way to introduce an internet tax under the guise of "protecting the children" amongst other things.
I'm not talking about "taxing the internet", whatever that means. The Internet is already taxed in a variety of ways: sales/VAT taxes for online purchases, corporate/personal income taxes for companies doing business online, etc. But so far, I have never heard of a single proposal to tax people based on the mere fact that they have a website, or a particular type of website.
Think of it like a movie theater: they tax the popcorn sales, they tax the ticket sales, they tax the income of the company running the theater, and they tax the property on which the theater is built. But they have a "reel tax" where the theater company pays for the right to show movies, or pays on a per-screening basis.
To paraphrase the late, great, Sam Kinison, why don't we just give them Winnebagos so they can go where the water is?
But seriously... Most of Africa's population ISN'T living in the desert, like you're imagining. Africa has lots of other climates, and most of the populated areas get plenty of rainfall. (That makes sense, doesn't it? People tend to congregate in areas where they don't DIE OF THIRST.)
Honestly, Africa has suffered its droughts and famines, but rarely is it the case that there is no food. It's like the Irish during their famines: people are too poor to buy food, too poor to afford high-tech irrigation and fertilizer, etc. And generally, the poverty comes from bad government--they don't have access to education, health care, and the other niceties that us Slashdot posters take for granted.
So here's the REAL plan: give them Winnebagos so they can go where the good government is.
Online, there are no such limitations. And such, licensing makes no sense.
This comment got me thinking about the relationship between regulatory regimes (of any kind) and censorship. Your historical point about broadcasting and spectrum exclusivity is right on, but I think there's a corresponding form of regulation on the Internet: domain name registration.
DNS doesn't provide exclusive transmission to the WWW, but it does provide exclusive identity. It's pretty much a given that without a sensible domain name, you really aren't going to see much traffic online (I'm sure you could try, but it would be tougher). We could have the WWW without DNS, but it wouldn't be as economically useful because it would be harder to navigate. So, we created a government-backed body that coordinates domain name registrations and makes sure that domain name registrations are unique, handed out on a first-come-first-serve basis, and thereby create a kind of property right.
There's no coercive force requiring that people use the official DNS root servers--alternate root systems do exist. But there's a huge networking effect at work, what with the offical system having an almost complete monopoly on site registrations, and so the requirement is effective.
Why is all this relevant? Because the government (or several governments in concert) could add domain registration taxes, or they could impose censorship on domains, with the penalty being de-registration. I think these issues have come up, in the debates over whether to create a ".xxx" TLD as a red-light district for adult sites. This could be an effective means for governments to enforce regulatory regimes over site content--if you don't follow the rules, it's bye-bye domain name, which would be a problem for most sites.
Not that I think they SHOULD do any of this, just that it's possible given the realities of the system.
That would be like me saying we don't need gun control laws because, come on, knives kill poeple too
I don't think you understood my argument correctly. I'm not saying that video hate speech is like guns, and text hate speech is like knives. Quite the opposite--I think that text hate speech, because of the specificity and argumentative power of rhetoric, at least as damaging as video hate speech. A better analogy with guns (if you must have one) is the video hate speech and text hate speech are both guns, and that video hate speech is a revolver with a four-inch barrel, and text hate speech is a revolver with a six-inch barrel. There is not enough functional difference between them to justify banning one but not the other.
If you follow, understand that I'm calling them our for a contradiction: if they don't feel that it's necessary to regulate text speech, why do they want to regulate video speech?
This question is critically important to the debate: You say: If anything that kind of a statement is an argument for cracking down more on text and pictures, not less on video. EXACTLY. In order to justify using the power of government to impose a regulatory regime on video speech, they (logically) must also justify to us imposing the same regime on text speech. At which point all of their weasel-words about protecting children, etc. go right out the goddamn window, and the essential evil of this idea is exposed.
As one of the Jesuits that taught me used to point out, you can often win arguments without ever stating a position of your own. If you can lead the opposition into phrasing their argument differently, the flaws of their position may become obvious to anyone listening.
(FWIW, I'm a gun-rights fan, but that's totally beside the point.)
Today, it will also be used to justify modding down this post. Tomorrow, it will be used against you to place you in prison.
I don't think that's necessarily true, historically. Look at the history of free speech in the United States: in the last century, we've seen net progress in the scope of what people can say and write without fear of government interference. The obvious example that comes to mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be vigilant about our rights--support the ACLU, and don't vote for Joe Lieberman.
Slashdot Mirror
this card is for the gamer that needs two clocks: one set to tomorrow and one set to Tokyo time, so he knows when to drift race.
(sorry for mangling to PA quote)
Seriously, $200? WTF?
Yeah, you're AC and a troll, but if you feel brave, tell me what's bogus. I only really mentioned two basic facts:
1) Protestors in NYC getting into trouble with the cops. For the record, the sibling poster is correct, this was at RNC 2004, in the Flatiron neighborhood somewhere in the vicinity of 5th Avenue and 16th Street. The events of the convention were pretty heavily documented, both in the maintream media and the more... unconventional press. The vast majority of charges against civilians for street incidents were dropped, before trial, a lot of it due to the documentary video evidence that the cops didn't realize, or didn't care, was being shot. A few people sued, or threatened to sue, and settled out of court with the city--some lawsuits might have gone to trial, too, but I don't remember for sure. Now, I don't need to prove any of that, because it's all a matter of public record, and you can do your own damn homework.
I was protesting, I know a lot of people who were protesting, and many of them were hassled by the cops, to varying degrees. I have a lot of fringe-political friends, and there are even more of us with sympathies in that direction who aren't so active about it, having day jobs. I can't prove any of that to anybody, at least not here on Slashdot, without giving up a lot of privacy that I'd rather not. So, tough shit and fuck off.
2) Advanced digital video enhancement techniques. Google for it. Lots of proprietary stuff, some has been commercial for years and other stuff is using newer techniques. There is a lot of unlicensed or OSS-licensed, non-comercialized code available, too: MIT's media lab has a whole working group on the subject, and some even more interesting things are coming out of Russia and Eastern European grad schools.
You have to at least know enough about information theory to recognize that the concept is on solid theoretical ground, right? Lossy compression (like MPEG used to compress cell phone video) is using DCT to remove visually redundant image bits, and again to remove visually redundant frame info, because it's fast and easy to implement on most processors, NOT because it efficiently packs data to a near-minimum message size. It's not trying to approach the Shannon limit or the Nyquist limit (both of which deal with lossless compression, anyway, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax), it's trying to make some quick cuts in data stream size that aren't necessarily pulling information out in the most efficient way. In other words, it's leaving more bits in the message that absolutely need to be there, meaning there's more information to be extracted if you have the time and technique.
There are other "intelligent" video compression methods that require much more processing power, but which provide significant size gains for the same quality--those would probably be resistant to the kind of analysis that I described in the GP post. But I don't know for sure--I've only used the stuff, I didn't design it or code it. Again, do your homework, and fuck off.
I don't think I made any other claims, and I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground with those two, so what gives? Your boyfriend's been cheating on you, or something?
I was expecting somebody to claim the mother for their own, by now.
Yours was funny, though.
Yep. I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on. When I started getting calls from friends to help get bail money together, I was pretty worried about some of the folks that I knew had been popped, but it mostly turned out fine in the end. The cops weren't even that rough--only a few serious injuries, most of the physical incidents just left bruises. I didn't know anybody in Times Square, though--I heard that was worse than around MSG and in the village.
I've always said, the cops are effective not because of guns and uniforms, but because of their radios--you're never just messing with one cop, there are always dozens just a call for backup away. Now, we have the civilian answer to that: a population armed with cellphone camera and other hand-held video, waaay to many to just smash and ignore.
And honestly, I think that anything that makes the cops think twice about busting heads is better for them, too, in the long run. People are more likely to support the police and cooperate with them if they perceive cops as good guys, a point that seems lost on many in the American law-enforcement community.
...image processing software that takes a poor quality security camera image, and 'enhances' it so you can see the villains face reflected in the sunglasses of the victim...
While your point is well-made (I love the CSI episode where they "rotate" the security camera still to see the front of the guy's face, when the camera caught him from the back), you'd be surprised what can be done with heavy math and a LOT of processing power to improve the quality of digital images.
Depending on the type of images (stills versus video), and whether compression has been used, it's potentially possible to extract more information from the datastream than was intended. There's a neat trick that can be used on video, where the algorithm enhances one frame by analyzing the preceding and succeeding frames, recognizing the actual objects in the picture. It combines several seconds' worth of video information to provide a much clearer image of what's in a single frame. Of course, this doesn't always work, it depends on what you have to work with.
A guy I sometimes work with got hold of a cellphone camera video, shot freehand during a demonstration in New York City, of some cops pulling people down and roughing them up. Because of the crappy camera work, and the fact that the cellphone was such a horrible source, and the video had been compressed to hell, it wasn't possible initially to make out the faces of the cops or protesters. After tweaking the algorithm parameters and running the original stream through a LOT of processing, he had the video clear enough to identify most of the people present, AND read an officer's badge number.
This was originally prompted by the cops charging the protesters with resisting arrest and assult, all of which were thrown out of court for other reasons. But a couple of people won civil suits against the city on account of the video enhancement, and I think at least one cop lost his job.
I love telling people this story when they complain that higher math is useless except in theoretical physics. Power to the people, man!
I love Ace bar--I'm in there 1-2 nights a week playing pool. Claire is the cutest bartender in all of Manhattan.
I was out playing pool last night with a friend, in a bar called Ace in the East Village, in Manhattan. (That's New York City.) There's a crowd of khakis-and-blue-oxford-shirt dudes hanging out, pretty loaded, with one woman in the group, early 40s, maybe.
One of the guys comes over and introduces himself, and says he'll buy me a beer if I compliment the woman on her rack. This is a little wierd, but I want to get him off my back, so I strike up a conversation with the woman and ask her where she got her fantastic outfit. (Armani.) We start talking a little, since she IS pretty cute for a cougar, and that she's a investment banker. Her and her partner (also in the crew, nice silver-haired guy) are responsbile for a couple billion in funds.
Then she tells me that she just got divorced a few months back, and she has an 8-year-old daughter at home. We play a couple games of pool, and she's all over my friend and I. We're kind of flattered, but not really in love. At some point, she drifts back to her friends, perhaps sensing our lack of interest. She keeps drinking with her pals, and next thing you know she's dancing on a table.
About an hour later, we're hanging out with the bartender, K., another friend of mine. The bouncer calls K. over the women's rest room because the banker chick is head first in the toilet. K. and the bouncer pull her out, and manage to round up one of her pals to call a car for her and get her home. On the way out, barely coherent and covered with vomit, she sidles past me and tries to give me her phone number. I politely declined.
Now, my mom got divorced in her mid-30s, with three kids to take care of. She'd been out of the work force for 15 years, but she pulled her shit together, went back to school for a masters' degree, and became a teacher. She managed to meet a really nice guy at church, and got re-married, and made a solid home for us and sent us all to college--I never had to work for my tuition. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how my mother put herself aside, focused on a plan, and never, ever made me sorry that I was her son. She probably had some pretty dark moments, in there, too.
In short, as the banker chick was stumbling out the bar and heading home to her daughter, I couldn't think of anything uglier than that. Parents who forget that they're supposed to be parents first, who feel sorry for themselves and get drunk and slobber on people 20 years younger, are making themselves into something that their kids will not respect. And that's a horrible, horrible thing to do to a kid.
Yeah, but there are advantages I don't want to lose. The women are gorgeous, the jobs are plentiful and high-paying, and you never, ever get bored.
Plus, it's home. I grew up in LA, and when I leave to visit family for more than a week, I start to get homesick for the Big Apple. I never once missed Los Angeles like that.
Most people come here for a short time and either hate it or fall head-over-heels in love. Living in New York for an extended period is a constant superposition of the two. Kind of unavoidable, unless you have shitloads of money and no conscience about spending it.
I've heard this from a lot of people, but I still get a kick out of the big screen. Sure, I watch a lot of movies at home, too, but the phenomenon of the theater still has its good points. It's a way to get out of the house and hang out with people--go see a movie, have some dinner or get drinks, and dissect the film or just laugh about it. It's an opportunity for being sociable that doesn't seem to come together the same way at home.
I live in New York, though. Your choices for most other nights out are pretty similarly priced--pounding brewskies on a pub crawl through the East Village is fun as hell, but it costs an arm and a leg since the beers start at $5 or $6 (and I'm Irish). And clubbing? $20 cover charge, standard at anyplace worth going, with drinks that start at $7 and climb fast. Oh, and they hit you up for $5 coat checks, too, to hold onto the $300 threads you have to buy to look sharp.
It's insane--even the fucking museum costs $20. Maybe I'm the crazy one, for living here. Entertainment is my biggest bill, besides rent (don't even ask)--and I run a couple hundred watts worth of servers 24/7 in my apartment.
Maybe I should just stay home more often and get baked... Oh, wait--my delivery service charges $60 for an eighth, now. Fucking A.
How is this a troll?
If you can't see why, you don't know anything about the debate over the pros and cons of Canadian/European-style health care systems. You probably don't even know that there IS a debate.
Let me shortcut you: Check the sibling post to your own that describes the different experiences with chemotherapy waiting list times for cancer patients in the USA and Canada. THERE ARE DOWNSIDES TO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. (The chemo story is one of dozens of similiar examples of ways in which socialized medicine is inferior to privately-operated health care, like we have in the US. Google it.)
Now, are the downsides worth the upsides? Maybe, maybe not--that's a debatable policy question, and there is certainly room on both sides for intelligent, reasonable people who disagree.
HOWEVER... We're not talking, here, about who's right about health care--we're talking about whether the grandparent post is a troll. Is he:
- Inflammatory, derogatory, and judgemental in tone
- Cherry-picking one side of contentious, long-running debate
- Totally dismissive of the idea that reasonable ground exists for disagreement
If so, he's a troll. You decide, smary guy.
DUH!! Group decision making is different from individual decision making?!! OMGWTF!! WHat a shocker!!
We KNEW that already, and anybody who missed it in the last 3,000 years of human history is a complete idiot. I didn't need 'The Corporatation' to tell me that.
BTW: If you thought 'The Corporation' was good, you probably:
- live in Seattle, or San Franciso;
- have long hair, sandles, and lots of ticket stubs from Phish concerts;
- have had a lobotomy or traumatic brain injury (TBI) at some point;
- drool on your keyboard;
It's propaganda-shlock, barely distinguishable from the Michael Moore variety. Read any undergraduate-level business or microeconomics textbook, and you'll learn many more or capitalism's dirty little secrets.
You make me almost sorry to call myself a Liberal. People like you are the Left's version of Rush Limbaugh: an embarrasment to the reasonable adults who don't want to fellate Karl Marx.
companies that don't host their own e-mail, particularly smaller companies
This is a no-brainer, right? If you're the kind of company that is subject to these retention rules, having a shared email server that immediately deletes DL'd messages, with no user policy
at the local level, either, is illegal. You'd have to immediately move your email in-house and implement appropriate policies, or find a 3rd-party that can handle it, or some mixture.
If you're not the kind of company that is subject to these rules, who the fuck cares?
If you don't already know that your company is subject to these rules, and it turns out you do need to follow them, fire your in-house counsel because they're incompetent.
However, there's a whole lot of less than ethical things that can be done within the boundaries of the law. There are, for instance, no laws against lying, except under circumstances such as a sworn oath.
I still stand by my belief that corporations lie all the time, just like politicians. I'll refrain from dragging the Friedman quote into the argument in the future, though.
I don't get how you believe that corporations are so fundamentally different from any other collection of people in society. Corporations, and all businesses, generally, are just a group of people making decisions within a management and ownership structure. It shouldn't be surprising when they behave like, well, people. People lie all the time, and act unethically. If a corporation does, it's because the people running it and owning it have decided, AS HUMAN BEINGS, to engage in that behavior.
There are arguments that the most common corporate governance structures change human decision-making behavior, by misdirecting the feeling of responsibility that comes with certain actions, or distributing responsibility amongst enough people that each one feels too little guilt to prevent bad actions, or encouraging an "I was just following orders" mentality. In my experience, these are sometimes true and sometimes not true. But to the extent that they exist and influence corporate decision-making, it's only to the extent that any other self-interested collection of humans does, also. Every corporation, company, government agency, non-profit, club, and party in society has the same issues.
So saying that corporations can be unethical, or that corporations should be more tightly controlled and watched, is silly because it singles them out. If you feel that a behavior is harmful and should be regulated, just have the guts to make the statement that it should be regulated throughout society.
I believe the point was that corporations should be held to some moral standard, since outlawing every possible antisocial action a corporation can take is a Sisyphean task.
A good check on your logic is to try substituting "person" for "corporation" every time you make a statement about corporations. How Sisyphean of a task is it to outlaw every possible antisocial action that a PERSON can take? Why is this a different question for people than corporations?
See, everybody's always forgetting that corporations are just groups of people. They don't actually have an independent moral or ethical existence--legally, we treat them as such in a limited manner because it makes the law work better. But really, the rights and responsibilities or a business are understood by society to be an expression of the rights and responsibilities of their employees and owners.
You're just insisting that we hold certain groups of people responsible to a moral standard other than the law. WTF? If you want a law against lying, ask for a law against lying. If you don't want to accept the horrendous social consequences of it, don't ask for it. It's the same whether you talk about corporations or people: the law is what we're required to follow, nothing else.
Taken to the limit, this means that a company will take any action neccessary to secure and guard profits.
You totally misunderstood Friedman's point, probably because you never read Friedman, but instead took the quote out of context.
First of all, in the section of his book where he makes the quote you pulled, he's not talking about how companies do behave, he's talking about how he thinks the should behave. Friedman argues that corporations engage in all kinds of frivolous charity, making donations to causes and such, and that they should stop. Instead, corporations should return those profits to their shareholders, and let the shareholders make charitable donations as they wish.
Second of all, Friedman didn't believe that corporations should take any action necessary to secure profit. His understanding of corporate responsibility is the commonly-accepted, rational one: corporate businesses, like all businesses, individuals, non-profits, clubs, or other human agencies, should obey the law equally. In other words, if corporations take less-than-optimal actions, and they're not breaking the law, you need to change the law, not the corporation.
Your interpretation is akin to saying that Winston Churchill was a big supporter of Hitler--it's the exact opposite of the facts.
while CIO's and other tech professionals can deny the validity of his statement, it will be a matter for the courts to decide at some point.
In theory... but in theory, Microsoft could patent swinging sideways on a tire swing and start suing kids on playgrounds. And kindergarden teachers can deny the validity of that statement, but it will be a matter for the courts to decide at some point.
Balmer is posturing. Microsoft's lawyers have assuredly already told the big hothead that there is slim to none chance that Microsoft could possibly win any such lawsuit. Why do we know that? Because they haven't sued anybody.
If MS thought it could have won such a lawsuit, it would have sued years ago, before or during the height of the SCO fiasco, when the public's perception that Linux might contain compromising intellectual property was strongest. They didn't, though, for all of their talk and FUD and veiled threats.
Think of what a successful MS lawsuit would have done to Linux market penetration, too. Even an unsuccessful, or settled lawsuit that dragged on long enough, would have sent CIOs and execs running scared from Linux... Right into the arms of Windows.
Even Balmer listens to his lawyers.
The first ones will burn up. The last ones will hit the ground.
True, but this same effect happens with a larger asteroid--it enters the earth's atmosphere and loses a lot of velocity due to drag, and a lot of mass due to vaporization from the heat of friction. The overall kinetic energy is severely diminished by the time it hits the ground, which is when we calculate the impact effects. So the important question is: does a single large object or a cloud of smaller objects get slowed down and vaporized more by the atmosphere?
The latter is potentially more important than the former. If an asteroid loses 40% of its mass due to frictional heating (and subsequent vaporization), that lost mass no longer contributes to its kinetic energy. Exactly how much loss to expect would have to be modeled by the process of vaporization--it's not necessarily a simple linear relationship.
Compare the behavior of one large object with a given mass and velocity to the behavior of a cloud of many smaller object that collectively have the same mass and the same (averaged) velocity--they'll have the same kinetic energy before entering the atmosphere:
- The larger object will experience less slowing due to drag than the cloud of smaller objects will. The smaller objects will generally have a greater ratio of "sail area" (the surface profile in the direction of motion) to mass. This means that they'll collectively slow down more than the larger object.
- Because of the greater ratio of surface area to mass, the remaining mass in the cloud of smaller objects will be less than the remaining mass of the single large object, at the time of impact.
So it's pretty obvious that the kinetic energy will be lessened if we break up the asteroid, which should translate into a more survivable impact. But that's not even the whole story: the cloud of fragments will distribute its mass and kinetic energy over a larger area than the intact asteroid. This has a couple of effects:
- The wider "flight path" encompassed by the edges of the cloud means that less of the mass will actually impact the Earth. Consider how long before impact we detonate our nuke, and how efficient the explosion is, and realize that the fragments will be moving constantly outward from the center of the explosion in the time between our nuclear detonation and impact. If we do it right, much of the cloud may miss us entirely.
- The wider flight path also means that many of the fragments that do impact earth will have a much less damaging angle of impact. If a fragment comes straight down vertically, it will be more destructive than if it comes in at an oblique angle, because it will spend less time in the atmosphere slowing down and burning up. So by spreading the fragments out a lot, we guarantee that many of them will hit obliquely.
- Finally, for all the remaining mass that does impact, it will be spread out across a very wide area instead of being concentrated in a single impact point. Less energy is dissapated at any one point on Earth's surface, which I think is probably going to be helpful.
So, considering that the asteroid is going to hit us, I'd much rather that we blow it to tiny pieces first.
Eh? U.S. Presidents are limited to two terms of office. You can't run, after that. That's OK, though--I couldn't tell you the details of terms of office for anywhere in Europe.
I think you take me for a liberal. A mistaken impression, but I may have left it while trying to quickly make a point. Government isn't necessarily resposible for providing education and health positively, unless you're a commie, but it shouldn't be actively preventing people from having them. Unfortunately, that's exactly the case in much of Africa.
The complicated version of Africa's politics and sufferings is that decades of awful governments have made corruption and authoritarianism the dominant political mechanisms. Without dependable state actors and a trustworthy rule of law, it's impossible for any nation to grow economically--that's basic market economics. Commerce and investment, the blood of healthy market systems, need guarantees in order to thrive.
This leaves much of Africa in a situation where there citizens have little hope of bettering themselves economically. The same factors discourage foreign investment as well as domestic entrepreneurship--nobody trusts circumstances enough to make long-term investments, and it's hard to succeed honestly when you have to know the right people and pay big bribes in order to conduct basic business.
The early American pioneers DID have a huge advantage on their side when they set out to explore and build: they all shared a common English/American heritage of laws and ideals of government. On the frontier or in rural Virginia, the basic psychological, cultural, and social mechanisms of property rights, contracts, and basic justice were a given. Not so many Africans can count themselves so lucky.
Dammit, scooped. I was going to go with:
Slashdotters can finally get the level of friction they need!
But yours is OK, too, I guess.
While pedophiles aren't going to congregate on youtube (for instance), I can imagine they do congregate on other places and scour youtube for saucy videos and pictures. Ordinary webbased boards contain enough links to youtubes jailbait dancing in its underwear in front of a webcam, and I highly doubt that those boards are full of teenage males (even though the local inhabitants may act like it).
Yeah, but who's harmed by the pedos scouring YouTube for videos? It's not like they can actually contact the kids through them. It's gross, right, but I bet these guys are getting their jollies checking out teenage models in swimsuit ads, too. We both agree that legislation is a bad idea (I think), but can you even really call it a "harm"? I don't think so. Where is the threat of which you speak?
As opposed to MySpace, where it's possible for someone to contact a kid, engage them, and possibly arrange to meet offline. THAT can be rightly called a harm. Whether you think regulatory legislation is the right idea or not, it is a real risk.
Hate speech and naughty content can occur equally as well via the media of text and pictures. Video doesn't necessarily add anything to either one. In fact, any smart, savvy Holocaust denier will tell you that text is a far more efficient and cost-effective method of defaming Jews.
To be honest, most hatespeech I have bumped into on the internet is by the means of websites posting articles accompanied by pictures. I'd be very surprised if a streaming video service would have more than a handful of videos. People who make hatespeech usually have a strong desire to remain anonymous, and videos make that harder to do.
Um, this was mostly a joke. I have never really heard of hate-speech sites using any other than text/pictures, either.
Broadcast license fees open up a new revenue source for the government, which can be used to directly tax internet content (which so far is nearly unheard of).
Not as nearly unheard of as you might think. Where I live I've heard 3 proposals in the past 5 years for taxing the internet, either nation-wide or EU-wide, and this would make 4 (although very sneakily). I doubt that this proposal is anything less than a sneaky way to introduce an internet tax under the guise of "protecting the children" amongst other things.
I'm not talking about "taxing the internet", whatever that means. The Internet is already taxed in a variety of ways: sales/VAT taxes for online purchases, corporate/personal income taxes for companies doing business online, etc. But so far, I have never heard of a single proposal to tax people based on the mere fact that they have a website, or a particular type of website.
Think of it like a movie theater: they tax the popcorn sales, they tax the ticket sales, they tax the income of the company running the theater, and they tax the property on which the theater is built. But they have a "reel tax" where the theater company pays for the right to show movies, or pays on a per-screening basis.
To paraphrase the late, great, Sam Kinison, why don't we just give them Winnebagos so they can go where the water is?
But seriously... Most of Africa's population ISN'T living in the desert, like you're imagining. Africa has lots of other climates, and most of the populated areas get plenty of rainfall. (That makes sense, doesn't it? People tend to congregate in areas where they don't DIE OF THIRST.)
Honestly, Africa has suffered its droughts and famines, but rarely is it the case that there is no food. It's like the Irish during their famines: people are too poor to buy food, too poor to afford high-tech irrigation and fertilizer, etc. And generally, the poverty comes from bad government--they don't have access to education, health care, and the other niceties that us Slashdot posters take for granted.
So here's the REAL plan: give them Winnebagos so they can go where the good government is.
Online, there are no such limitations. And such, licensing makes no sense.
This comment got me thinking about the relationship between regulatory regimes (of any kind) and censorship. Your historical point about broadcasting and spectrum exclusivity is right on, but I think there's a corresponding form of regulation on the Internet: domain name registration.
DNS doesn't provide exclusive transmission to the WWW, but it does provide exclusive identity. It's pretty much a given that without a sensible domain name, you really aren't going to see much traffic online (I'm sure you could try, but it would be tougher). We could have the WWW without DNS, but it wouldn't be as economically useful because it would be harder to navigate. So, we created a government-backed body that coordinates domain name registrations and makes sure that domain name registrations are unique, handed out on a first-come-first-serve basis, and thereby create a kind of property right.
There's no coercive force requiring that people use the official DNS root servers--alternate root systems do exist. But there's a huge networking effect at work, what with the offical system having an almost complete monopoly on site registrations, and so the requirement is effective.
Why is all this relevant? Because the government (or several governments in concert) could add domain registration taxes, or they could impose censorship on domains, with the penalty being de-registration. I think these issues have come up, in the debates over whether to create a ".xxx" TLD as a red-light district for adult sites. This could be an effective means for governments to enforce regulatory regimes over site content--if you don't follow the rules, it's bye-bye domain name, which would be a problem for most sites.
Not that I think they SHOULD do any of this, just that it's possible given the realities of the system.
That would be like me saying we don't need gun control laws because, come on, knives kill poeple too
I don't think you understood my argument correctly. I'm not saying that video hate speech is like guns, and text hate speech is like knives. Quite the opposite--I think that text hate speech, because of the specificity and argumentative power of rhetoric, at least as damaging as video hate speech. A better analogy with guns (if you must have one) is the video hate speech and text hate speech are both guns, and that video hate speech is a revolver with a four-inch barrel, and text hate speech is a revolver with a six-inch barrel. There is not enough functional difference between them to justify banning one but not the other.
If you follow, understand that I'm calling them our for a contradiction: if they don't feel that it's necessary to regulate text speech, why do they want to regulate video speech?
This question is critically important to the debate: You say: If anything that kind of a statement is an argument for cracking down more on text and pictures, not less on video. EXACTLY. In order to justify using the power of government to impose a regulatory regime on video speech, they (logically) must also justify to us imposing the same regime on text speech. At which point all of their weasel-words about protecting children, etc. go right out the goddamn window, and the essential evil of this idea is exposed.
As one of the Jesuits that taught me used to point out, you can often win arguments without ever stating a position of your own. If you can lead the opposition into phrasing their argument differently, the flaws of their position may become obvious to anyone listening.
(FWIW, I'm a gun-rights fan, but that's totally beside the point.)
Today, it will also be used to justify modding down this post. Tomorrow, it will be used against you to place you in prison.
I don't think that's necessarily true, historically. Look at the history of free speech in the United States: in the last century, we've seen net progress in the scope of what people can say and write without fear of government interference. The obvious example that comes to mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be vigilant about our rights--support the ACLU, and don't vote for Joe Lieberman.