I always thought that the difference was that a deduction eliminated your tax liability on a set amount of income (just like you described), e.g. if I make $50,000 in income but have $10,000 of deductions, then I only pay taxes on $30,000. So a deduction is "worth" its face value, times your tax rate. If your tax rate is 35%, a $10k deduction is worth $3500.
A tax credit, on the other hand, is like a gift certificate to the IRS; if you have a $10,000 tax credit, you subtract that amount off of your actual bill, like a discount. So it is actually worth its face value to you.
I didn't think that you could get a "Credit" back as an actual check from the government, if you didn't have any income (then again I've never had zero income since I've paid taxes, so go figure). That sounds a bit hard to believe -- seems like there are a lot of bums that ought to be cashing in if this was the case; I'll keep my eye out come refund time, but I don't recall seeing a longer-than-usual line at the liquor store last year.
I think that would be a good idea, and a good compromise solution to the "problem" that stories like this imply people think exists. (That their kids can see porn, dear god think of the children, etc., etc.)
However, I suspect one of the reasons that ISPs do not offer such a service -- at least not that I've ever heard of -- is that they are afraid of the liability that they would take on for false negatives. That is, if you pay for filtering, you might be able to sue if something slips through the filters. And eventually something is going to slip through the filters. Especially if the service is advertised as something to "protect kids," it would be pretty easy to put together a suit that looks good in the 'Court of Public Opinion,' if nowhere else...before you know it, some scumbag attorney has got a class-action suit going, and it's either you the ISP spend $2M in court while tarnishing the company's reputation or pay $1.3M to settle. An ISP, particularly a large national one, would be a 'deep pocket,' and thus an obvious lawsuit magnet.
Given the current legal climate (at least in the US, but I have no reason to believe it's any better in Australia) I doubt that any major ISP's legal counsel would say that offering a web filtering service to "protect kids," something that is obviously nearly impossible to actually do, is advisable. Or at least, if you did have a service, it would be nearly impossible to advertise to its target market, without constantly running the risk of putting yourself in a situation where promises are being made that can't be delivered on.
If a group of politicians/parents/moralists were really serious about making Internet content filtering available, what they ought to be doing is petitioning their government to get tort protection for ISPs against lawsuits for the quality of the filtering. A sort of 'Good Samaritan Law' for ISPs who offer an opt-in filtering service, that gets them automatically off the hook for stuff that does slip through, as long as they're doing some sort of a minimal 'best effort.'
Until you see that, I doubt you'll see any major ISP offering content filtering; the risk is just too high for the profit that's there. So instead, filtering gets relegated to smaller software houses that can tolerate the risk, or don't make as attractive a target for frivolous lawsuits.
The key difference is that while a lot of people may watch those programs on TV when they're on, it becomes a whole different issue when you have to actually call up your ISP and ask for "more pornography, please!" It's hard to fault someone for watching a show that's on TV, but I can easily see someone using the fact that somebody else is on the "Porn List" to make them look like a deviant. You can't pass off your violent TV watching as "oh, I just watched it because it was on." You actually requested it, specifically -- obviously, you're into that sort of thing.
Especially if a lot of people don't immediately opt out of the censorship, it becomes more stigmatizing; the smaller the number of people on the list, the more of an oddity it becomes and the more people will want to avoid being on there.
And just having a flag on your ISP's account isn't any more secure than just having a list: it's not hard to run a query based on the flag. ("SELECT * FROM Customer_Personal_Details WHERE I_Like_Porn_Flag = TRUE") And what I'm suggesting is that, in time, a list like this could have a very high value. Investigative reporters, politicians, I can think of lots of people who'd like to get their hands on such a thing. The right amount of money in a paper bag to the right DBA somewhere, and bingo, you've got your list. The fact that a list could exist, forces anyone who values their reputation to live as if it already does exist. And that's where the chilling effect begins.
How about people who don't want to see that content call their ISP -- or specify it when they sign up for service -- rather than the other way around? It shouldn't take an action in order to receive uncensored information.
The fact that you have to call up and say "yes, please, I want to see violence and pornography" would probably cause a lot of people to never call. Who wants to end up on a list like that? People can be bribed, backup tapes can get lost, mysterious sources can furnish information to newspapers... who wouldn't want to be able to say that their political opponent is a dirty social deviant? There are whole classes of people -- anyone with a reputation and/or social standing -- that would probably do anything to stay off a list like that. Heck, there are probably lots of people who just wouldn't want to deal with the embarassment of having to call the ISP to have the filters turned off.
It shouldn't take a potentially socially stigmatizing action in order to remove government-mandated censorship; if people have kids and want to "protect" them, they're the ones who should be making the call.
I suspect most of the sites that will be blocked are the commercial ones, where you need a credit card to get 'in the front door' anyway, which blocks all but the most determined minors.
Somehow I don't think it's going to block peer-to-peer (didja notice the latest version of Azeureus has encryption and obfuscation built in?), IRC, or short term file-hosting sites.
Let's imagine the net result of this: instead of getting porn from the 'free previews' on a commercial site, Jonny instead goes and trolls around on MySpace or IRC for a while, until he finds some pedophile willing to trade him pics. The value of a few smutty photos will increase exponentially with the decreased availibility, and people who prey on children aren't going to pass up an opportunity like that.
To be perfectly honest, I'd rather (and think it's healthier in the long run) they just stocked Playboy down at the Public Library so that kids can get their fix -- which they're going to get somewhere, anyway; take away enough stuff and they'll be ogling the bra ads in the Sears catalog -- without exposing themselves to the real dangers of the Internet, namely predators and cyber-criminals who want their personal information.
All a ban like this is going to do is create a new black market, giving value to something that right now is basically free, and where the demand right now is filled by semi-legitimate businesses and free sources, tomorrow it could easily be filled by less savory folks.
And will the list of people who "opt out" be kept confidential? How confidential? How do people know that by opting to receive porn, they won't end up on a list somewhere -- since obviously by definition there has to be a list at their ISP -- of "Social Deviants who Like Violence and Pornography"? Just the fact that such a list could or might exist, could easily cause people to not want to opt out. Everyone has a price; how long before some overzealous investigative reporter or tabloid journalist bribes someone at an ISP for the list, just to see what interesting people are on there? I can't think of a better story than revealing which government officals are on the "Porn List."
The way to do it is to make the system opt-in, not opt-out. If people have kids, all they need to do is make a phone call to their ISP; various ISPs can even market the feature as a selling point of their service if they wanted to. But any scheme that automatically filters everything and requires you to put yourself on a list in order to get uncensored access is inherently a bad idea.
I don't know of any adblocker -- certainly not the ones that I use -- that block text based ads. In fact, if I had the option to block Google-style ads, I probably wouldn't turn it on, since I find the ones on the search results page and on GMail to be occasionally useful. (Or at least amusing -- the ones that it shows next to emailed logs from cron jobs are a bit schizophrenic.)
My objection isn't to ads per se, but against the ones that are intrusive or irrelevant. If a company wants my attention, they can put some thought into designing something that actually gets it via some method besides the 'abrupt onset' reflex to look at anything that flashes.
Frankly, I think an "arms race" between consumers and advertisers might not be a bad thing; the advertisers (in general, not just internet ones) have become far too complacent in just assuming that people will look at their tripe because they can insert it in between two halves of a mildly interesting TV program or web article.
If some new online advertiser came out, and only ran really subtle and/or interesting, funny ads, I probably wouldn't block them. I'm not blacklisting everything by default, every ad-serving company has one chance to make an impression before they get blocked. I probably add one or two new things to the block list a day, and so far nothing has come through that has convinced me I'm missing a thing.
Your argument strikes me as the same one that people make against using TiVo to skip ads, and I respond similarly. If the ads didn't suck so much, people wouldn't block or skip them. And if in the end, if so many people end up blocking or skipping ads that the entire ad-supported business model that drives commercial television and web content collapses, then the public will have spoken. The technical infrastructure and the public demand for quality content will still be there, and I have faith that someone will come up with a better compromise solution, in that situation.
How much do you want to bet that one of DoubleClick's "50 metrics" isn't 'number of customers driven to using AdBlock because of our ads?'
Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore. Safari has PithHelmet, Firefox has AdBlock, and Konqueror has... whatever it is they call its ad-blocking feature.
I suspect it is from Distrowatch, but if their statistics are based on downloads, then naturally they're going to lean in favor of the free (beer) distros and not represent the commercial ones very well. For example, you're not going to see RHEL represented very well on Distrowatch, because you can't download it. You can download Fedora, and CentOS, but not RHEL -- at least to the best of my knowledge. And there are quite a few installations of RHEL out there.
Maybe the statistics are accurate or representative of the home user market, but they're certainly not of the corporate desktop.
Agreed; the GUI configuration utilities never seemed to help me accomplish anything in Ubuntu. Maybe it was just the WL card I'm using (some piece of shit Marvell-based one -- thanks a bunch Linksys for not changing the model number), but every time I tried to use the control panels either in Gnome or KDE, it was a crap-shoot as to whether the changes would get applied, or whether the system would hang, or none of the above.
I don't find installing a new distro to be something enjoyable or entertaining, thus I'll probably stick with Ubuntu until I find a very compelling reason to change to something else, but I think if I was going to do it all over again I probably would have picked SuSE or RedHat. All in all, running Ubuntu has been an interesting experience -- I've discovered that the "spit and polish" aspect of an OS counts for a lot more to me than I thought it would.
So I suppose I'll keep coughing up $2.5k every few years for a new shiny thing from Apple, since so far they're the only company that I've found that does it right.
Well said. I'm out of mod points (and have been for a while -- I must have displeased someone, somewhere), but you really deserve someone.
The only way we could possibly EVER LOSE the conflict in Iraq, are if a lot of people believe what the GP is saying, namely that we're already losing. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, based on emotion-laden drivel.
That'll work well, until the injunction on infringing on my patent for "An Apparatus and Process for Extracting Oxygen from a Low-Density Fluid Using Positive and Negative Pressure Differentials" comes into effect.
I think this is a feature, not a bug. Let's say I go through and start re-ripping my CDs at 256kb/s AAC, and I want to selectively remove the old 128kb/s MP3 versions; I use the check for duplicate songs feature and can remove the MP3 versions easily. (By displaying the file size or bit rate column in the view, and sorting by it.) In combination with the columns and views, Show Duplicates can be a pretty useful feature. I remember versions of iTunes before it was added, and it was sorely needed.
This isn't true -- Quicktime the media framework, quite different from Quicktime Player -- will play back full screen. You just need to get a different player.
BTW, this exact same situation exists for both Windows and Mac, it's not as though Apple is doing something special to gouge PC users. Most Mac users who don't want to pay just use a different player application. The player itself is just a frontend to the Quicktime architecture and libraries, which aren't crippled or require payment in any way. (iTunes is the same thing, it's a frontend to Quicktime also, which it uses to play audio and video.)
Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal?
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The Story of Tron
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I was kinda hoping for an entirely text-based, CLI version.
The soundtrack would be performed entirely on 300 baud modem.
I think you would get a lot more "compromise" candidates that way, although I wonder whether that's really not what we have right now -- candidates that are almost identical to each other and struggling to be inoffensive rather than supportable, because voters tend to cast their ballots 'against the person they dislike more.'
To put that amount in perspective, it would've been cheaper to give every single Iraqi man, woman and child a bit over $70,000 in cash, which would allow pretty much every family there to live in relative comfort for the rest of their lives. Just airlift in the money, in singles, and dump it out the hatch. (Not sure how many cargo planes it'd take to hold two trillion dollars in singles, but I bet it'd be pretty many!) They'd be so busy running around amassing (our) wealth that there'd be no time for planting bombs or killing us or each other. In fact, after that, why would they WANT to kill us?
I understand your point, but you also have to understand the political realities of the US. You'd sooner get the voters to agree to kill every person in Iraq, then give them all cash handouts. That's how much opposition you'd have to some sort of plan like that. Call it a sad commentary or whatever you want, but war is far more acceptable to a broad section of the American citizenry than giving a bunch of "towel heads" their hard-earned tax dollars. People will support a war, they won't support a give-money-to-foreigners program. Not to mention the corporations that prefer a war, because it's better business than building democracy in the short run, and the short run is all that anyone seems concerned about right now.
(Incidentally, it also would have been possible to buy all of the oil that's underneath Iraq at market price for less than the cost of the war and rebuilding efforts; just something to keep in mind when people argue that the only reason for going to war was to get the oil. Saddam was more than willing to sell oil to the US, in fact he was doing it illegally already through intermediaries, I'm sure he would have only been too happy to take our money. So to find the real reasoning behind the war you have to look elsewhere than straight energy politics. I have my own theories on the matter -- principally, that a whole lot of Americans just wanted to see somebody with brown skin getting the living shit kicked out of them on CNN, and the politicians just pandered to this base desire -- but to each their own.)
my main concern was not simply being arrested, or found guilty.
it would be: "big surprise" -- actually helping to host child porn. actually helping to encourage the molestation of kids. it doesn't matter if you are never prosecuted.
Ah, understood. I suppose in that case I don't have a solution for you, nor do I think there really is a solution. And I think the problem you are describing could be extended not just to DIBS, but to almost any file-storage technology, and perhaps to any communications technology. If I work for an ISP, am I indirectly facilitating the exploitation of children? I suppose I am, in a way, since there are undoubtedly people using their connections for that purpose.
Although I respect your feelings and see where you're coming from, I believe in this case that the good of such a technology outweighs the bad. I would say the same thing about FreeNet, or the Internet in general. I suppose that comes down to a matter of faith, since I'm not sure it's possible to prove that the amount of good gained from any form of anonymous/psuedonymous communication outweighs the evil that people will undoubtedly do with it (not to mention relative standards of evil, although I certainly agree with you on child porn, there are other areas that are more grey; e.g. "hate speech").
I do have to admit you caught me off-guard; the typical objections to FreeNet, et al, are less altruistic and more self-interested.
You are incorrect. You cannot trademark the sans-serif font (I believe that would be copywritten by the font foundry), but you can definitely trademark a particular word, written in a particular font. It's called a "Typed Drawing" in USPTOese.
Apple has half a dozen different trademarks on the "iPod" name, for various uses, but the 'Typed Drawing' trademark, as opposed to the trademark just on the word itself (the "standard character mark"), is 78089144. Here is a link, although I'm not sure if it will work. If it doesn't, you can also just search the USPTO's site for the trademark number.
And in looking at the iUpload's logo again, even if this weren't the case they might still be infringing, since when you look at their logo, becase of the font difference, "iPod" is readable almost as a distinct word from the rest of the letters; even if they just changed the font I think they'd still run into Apple's standard character mark.
At the end of the day, you also have to consider how much money Apple has, and how much cash they could burn protecting their trademarks. They've done it before -- with the vague iMac lookalikes a few years back -- and eventually won. So even if their case was lacking in merit, they could probably bankrupt a small firm through aggressive legal action (although in this case I think they'd have more than enough grounds).
(As for colors, you can trademark them also. Kodak, for example, has a trademark on a very distinct shade of yellow, when used in particular contexts. More on trade dress at Nolo.com.)
Now, I know I'm probably going to get slammed for this, but what the hell. I'm going to play the Devil's Advocate here for a minute, call me the Ugly American, if you will.
The fact that it's going to be useless to poor people doesn't make me support the project any more than I otherwise would, but it doesn't make me support it any less, either.
As far as I'm concerned, my government has absolutely zero mandate to help non-citizens. Zip, zero, nada. I've never been clear on what the benefit to the US taxpayer is of helping starving people in Africa; I can see the benefit of disease eradication and hygiene (having a whole continent that's a giant breeding ground for new and nasty microbes isn't healthy for anyone) but why I should be responsible for their education I'm not sure. Sure, helping people gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but only if I choose to do it. Having my government take my tax money (that I never had a big choice about giving in the first place) and spend it on a whole lot of people on the other side of the world doesn't please me a whole lot. Maybe there are arguments that could be made to justify it in terms of preventing terrorism and weapons proliferation by increasing standards of living ('people with jobs don't usually become terrorists,' etc.), but I rarely see those arguments being made, so I'm unconvinced.
So, with that said, I'm happier to have my tax dollars being spent on OLPC than on bags of rice. Those bags of rice are never going to help me any. Spending a few billion bucks on developing a cheap, minature computer might. Possibly directly (I have a feeling a lot of them will end up on eBay) but certainly indirectly; the economy of scale required to produce a $100 laptop is going to decrease component costs on things like OLED screens and RAM, which eventually I'm going to see at Newegg, and when I go to buy a real computer.
So what's the net effect of the whole project? You end up with a regressive tax in industrialized countries, because the majority of the indirect benefits go to the rich -- people who buy computers and who work at the big multinational tech companies who are going to get the contracts to build them.
What's the point of my saying this? Even if it's absolutely provable that these devices are going to be an absolute flop in the Third World, it's exactly the sort of "charity" that First World corporations (and purely self-interested citizens) love, because it gets them more of their tax dollar back in indirect benefits than if that money was actually spent bettering someone poor, where the ROI is low and very long-term.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I think it's a waste of time to teach students a particular set of applications or even a partiuclar OS while they're in school; those skills just aren't worth much, and they're likely going to be uselessly out of date by the time they get to the job market. Computer applications and operating systems are fast-moving targets, and by the time you developed teaching materials and lesson plans, disseminated them to instructors, taught students, and then waited for them to actually reach the job market, the skills they would have been tought would be useless.
That said, I do think that we would be doing a disservice to students to not teach them about computers. Not "how to use MS Word" (or OpenOffice, or pick your favorite application), but develop in them the analytical skills so that when they do get that first job, they'll have the mental flexibility to sit down and figure out whatever is the state-of-the-art at that time.
In that vein, I'd rather that middle-school teachers spent time on things like reading and writing skills, so that students can read technical documentation and formulate concise questions, than on whatever today's app-of-the-week is.
An intelligent, well-educated person ought to be able to sit down behind a computer system running a well-designed and -documented operating system and application suite, and figure out how to use it based on the interface and the documentation. (Assuming they have the requisite background knowledge of whatever the application is designed to do; a musician shouldn't necessarily have to be able to figure out a engineer's numeric-simulation system, but an engineer or draughtsman should.) This requires a commitment on both the part of the user, to be open-minded and ready to learn, and on the part of the software designer, to use a sensible and obvious interface, and create clear and easily-understandable documentation.
That skill -- being able to "figure things out" -- is what we ought to be fostering through technology education. The actual technologies that are used in the classroom are only useful insofar as they contribute to this and give the students the right background.
This is very true. I've met my share of guys (and a few gals) from the Point, and they were consistently among the brightest people I've met.
However -- and this is by necessity a broad and perhaps unfair generalization -- I think the education there gears people to what I'd call the "best practices" approach to problem solving, and not necessarily a "novel solution" one. Whether that is a strength or a liability depends on the situation. But the people that I met are not what I would call hugely 'outside the box'-type thinkers, compared to say, people from MIT or other top engineering schools that I've met.
Feel free to call that a biased judgement; I was ROTC after all, and there is something of a competitve aspect between ROTCers and folks from the Point. But it would be unfair not to give them their due, and this is too often the case.
Probably, although I'm not sure whether most underwater cables give off electrical "gradients." Seems like most of them are probably fiber-optic; although maybe they have integrated electrical conductors to power in-line amplifiers or repeaters.
I wonder what the range on this sense is, if in fact it exists, and whether it could be useful in detecting submarines. (Not that there are a whole lot of countries fielding large submarine fleets besides the US anymore.)
In terms of de-mining operations I think that sonar would probably be more useful than an electrical-field sense, since I don't think a mine would necessarily have any electrical signature. This is the purpose of the Navy's trained dolphins, I believe.
I was watching a program not that long ago about the use of carrier pigeons in World War II, as a communication method for spies. Both the Germans and the British made use of them, and at one point the British -- attempting to reduce the loss rate due to native predatory birds -- put a bounty on hawks and other birds of prey on the Southern coast of England. The Germans went the other way, and supposedly investigated using falcons to intercept and kill pigeons in occupied France. I'm not sure how much they were playing up this aspect in the show, but it was fairly interesting.
It also gave the only description of how carrier pigeons are trained that I've ever seen on TV (you train them to fly in a particular general direction by taking them gradually further from their home base in that direction, then releasing them; when they're released in a far-away and unfamiliar location, they'll "default" to going in that direction, until they recognize the land features).
The program doesn't seem to have a web site but as I recall it was a Discovery Channel production. Here's the IMDB entry for it: "War of the Birds." For anyone with even a passing interest in the history of animals in combat, it's worth watching if you ever catch it on late-night TV.
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I always thought that the difference was that a deduction eliminated your tax liability on a set amount of income (just like you described), e.g. if I make $50,000 in income but have $10,000 of deductions, then I only pay taxes on $30,000. So a deduction is "worth" its face value, times your tax rate. If your tax rate is 35%, a $10k deduction is worth $3500.
A tax credit, on the other hand, is like a gift certificate to the IRS; if you have a $10,000 tax credit, you subtract that amount off of your actual bill, like a discount. So it is actually worth its face value to you.
I didn't think that you could get a "Credit" back as an actual check from the government, if you didn't have any income (then again I've never had zero income since I've paid taxes, so go figure). That sounds a bit hard to believe -- seems like there are a lot of bums that ought to be cashing in if this was the case; I'll keep my eye out come refund time, but I don't recall seeing a longer-than-usual line at the liquor store last year.
I think that would be a good idea, and a good compromise solution to the "problem" that stories like this imply people think exists. (That their kids can see porn, dear god think of the children, etc., etc.)
However, I suspect one of the reasons that ISPs do not offer such a service -- at least not that I've ever heard of -- is that they are afraid of the liability that they would take on for false negatives. That is, if you pay for filtering, you might be able to sue if something slips through the filters. And eventually something is going to slip through the filters. Especially if the service is advertised as something to "protect kids," it would be pretty easy to put together a suit that looks good in the 'Court of Public Opinion,' if nowhere else...before you know it, some scumbag attorney has got a class-action suit going, and it's either you the ISP spend $2M in court while tarnishing the company's reputation or pay $1.3M to settle. An ISP, particularly a large national one, would be a 'deep pocket,' and thus an obvious lawsuit magnet.
Given the current legal climate (at least in the US, but I have no reason to believe it's any better in Australia) I doubt that any major ISP's legal counsel would say that offering a web filtering service to "protect kids," something that is obviously nearly impossible to actually do, is advisable. Or at least, if you did have a service, it would be nearly impossible to advertise to its target market, without constantly running the risk of putting yourself in a situation where promises are being made that can't be delivered on.
If a group of politicians/parents/moralists were really serious about making Internet content filtering available, what they ought to be doing is petitioning their government to get tort protection for ISPs against lawsuits for the quality of the filtering. A sort of 'Good Samaritan Law' for ISPs who offer an opt-in filtering service, that gets them automatically off the hook for stuff that does slip through, as long as they're doing some sort of a minimal 'best effort.'
Until you see that, I doubt you'll see any major ISP offering content filtering; the risk is just too high for the profit that's there. So instead, filtering gets relegated to smaller software houses that can tolerate the risk, or don't make as attractive a target for frivolous lawsuits.
The key difference is that while a lot of people may watch those programs on TV when they're on, it becomes a whole different issue when you have to actually call up your ISP and ask for "more pornography, please!" It's hard to fault someone for watching a show that's on TV, but I can easily see someone using the fact that somebody else is on the "Porn List" to make them look like a deviant. You can't pass off your violent TV watching as "oh, I just watched it because it was on." You actually requested it, specifically -- obviously, you're into that sort of thing.
Especially if a lot of people don't immediately opt out of the censorship, it becomes more stigmatizing; the smaller the number of people on the list, the more of an oddity it becomes and the more people will want to avoid being on there.
And just having a flag on your ISP's account isn't any more secure than just having a list: it's not hard to run a query based on the flag. ("SELECT * FROM Customer_Personal_Details WHERE I_Like_Porn_Flag = TRUE") And what I'm suggesting is that, in time, a list like this could have a very high value. Investigative reporters, politicians, I can think of lots of people who'd like to get their hands on such a thing. The right amount of money in a paper bag to the right DBA somewhere, and bingo, you've got your list. The fact that a list could exist, forces anyone who values their reputation to live as if it already does exist. And that's where the chilling effect begins.
Looking at satellite TV receiver
Marge: Isn't it expensive?
Homer: Marge, we can't skimp on the thing that's going to be raising our children!
(Paraphrased because I can't find it written anywhere. It's from "Bart vs. Lisa vs. Third Grade".)
How about people who don't want to see that content call their ISP -- or specify it when they sign up for service -- rather than the other way around? It shouldn't take an action in order to receive uncensored information.
... who wouldn't want to be able to say that their political opponent is a dirty social deviant? There are whole classes of people -- anyone with a reputation and/or social standing -- that would probably do anything to stay off a list like that. Heck, there are probably lots of people who just wouldn't want to deal with the embarassment of having to call the ISP to have the filters turned off.
The fact that you have to call up and say "yes, please, I want to see violence and pornography" would probably cause a lot of people to never call. Who wants to end up on a list like that? People can be bribed, backup tapes can get lost, mysterious sources can furnish information to newspapers
It shouldn't take a potentially socially stigmatizing action in order to remove government-mandated censorship; if people have kids and want to "protect" them, they're the ones who should be making the call.
I suspect most of the sites that will be blocked are the commercial ones, where you need a credit card to get 'in the front door' anyway, which blocks all but the most determined minors.
Somehow I don't think it's going to block peer-to-peer (didja notice the latest version of Azeureus has encryption and obfuscation built in?), IRC, or short term file-hosting sites.
Let's imagine the net result of this: instead of getting porn from the 'free previews' on a commercial site, Jonny instead goes and trolls around on MySpace or IRC for a while, until he finds some pedophile willing to trade him pics. The value of a few smutty photos will increase exponentially with the decreased availibility, and people who prey on children aren't going to pass up an opportunity like that.
To be perfectly honest, I'd rather (and think it's healthier in the long run) they just stocked Playboy down at the Public Library so that kids can get their fix -- which they're going to get somewhere, anyway; take away enough stuff and they'll be ogling the bra ads in the Sears catalog -- without exposing themselves to the real dangers of the Internet, namely predators and cyber-criminals who want their personal information.
All a ban like this is going to do is create a new black market, giving value to something that right now is basically free, and where the demand right now is filled by semi-legitimate businesses and free sources, tomorrow it could easily be filled by less savory folks.
And will the list of people who "opt out" be kept confidential? How confidential? How do people know that by opting to receive porn, they won't end up on a list somewhere -- since obviously by definition there has to be a list at their ISP -- of "Social Deviants who Like Violence and Pornography"? Just the fact that such a list could or might exist, could easily cause people to not want to opt out. Everyone has a price; how long before some overzealous investigative reporter or tabloid journalist bribes someone at an ISP for the list, just to see what interesting people are on there? I can't think of a better story than revealing which government officals are on the "Porn List."
The way to do it is to make the system opt-in, not opt-out. If people have kids, all they need to do is make a phone call to their ISP; various ISPs can even market the feature as a selling point of their service if they wanted to. But any scheme that automatically filters everything and requires you to put yourself on a list in order to get uncensored access is inherently a bad idea.
I don't know of any adblocker -- certainly not the ones that I use -- that block text based ads. In fact, if I had the option to block Google-style ads, I probably wouldn't turn it on, since I find the ones on the search results page and on GMail to be occasionally useful. (Or at least amusing -- the ones that it shows next to emailed logs from cron jobs are a bit schizophrenic.)
My objection isn't to ads per se, but against the ones that are intrusive or irrelevant. If a company wants my attention, they can put some thought into designing something that actually gets it via some method besides the 'abrupt onset' reflex to look at anything that flashes.
Frankly, I think an "arms race" between consumers and advertisers might not be a bad thing; the advertisers (in general, not just internet ones) have become far too complacent in just assuming that people will look at their tripe because they can insert it in between two halves of a mildly interesting TV program or web article.
If some new online advertiser came out, and only ran really subtle and/or interesting, funny ads, I probably wouldn't block them. I'm not blacklisting everything by default, every ad-serving company has one chance to make an impression before they get blocked. I probably add one or two new things to the block list a day, and so far nothing has come through that has convinced me I'm missing a thing.
Your argument strikes me as the same one that people make against using TiVo to skip ads, and I respond similarly. If the ads didn't suck so much, people wouldn't block or skip them. And if in the end, if so many people end up blocking or skipping ads that the entire ad-supported business model that drives commercial television and web content collapses, then the public will have spoken. The technical infrastructure and the public demand for quality content will still be there, and I have faith that someone will come up with a better compromise solution, in that situation.
How much do you want to bet that one of DoubleClick's "50 metrics" isn't 'number of customers driven to using AdBlock because of our ads?'
... whatever it is they call its ad-blocking feature.
Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore. Safari has PithHelmet, Firefox has AdBlock, and Konqueror has
I suspect it is from Distrowatch, but if their statistics are based on downloads, then naturally they're going to lean in favor of the free (beer) distros and not represent the commercial ones very well. For example, you're not going to see RHEL represented very well on Distrowatch, because you can't download it. You can download Fedora, and CentOS, but not RHEL -- at least to the best of my knowledge. And there are quite a few installations of RHEL out there.
Maybe the statistics are accurate or representative of the home user market, but they're certainly not of the corporate desktop.
Agreed; the GUI configuration utilities never seemed to help me accomplish anything in Ubuntu. Maybe it was just the WL card I'm using (some piece of shit Marvell-based one -- thanks a bunch Linksys for not changing the model number), but every time I tried to use the control panels either in Gnome or KDE, it was a crap-shoot as to whether the changes would get applied, or whether the system would hang, or none of the above.
I don't find installing a new distro to be something enjoyable or entertaining, thus I'll probably stick with Ubuntu until I find a very compelling reason to change to something else, but I think if I was going to do it all over again I probably would have picked SuSE or RedHat. All in all, running Ubuntu has been an interesting experience -- I've discovered that the "spit and polish" aspect of an OS counts for a lot more to me than I thought it would.
So I suppose I'll keep coughing up $2.5k every few years for a new shiny thing from Apple, since so far they're the only company that I've found that does it right.
Well said. I'm out of mod points (and have been for a while -- I must have displeased someone, somewhere), but you really deserve someone.
The only way we could possibly EVER LOSE the conflict in Iraq, are if a lot of people believe what the GP is saying, namely that we're already losing. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, based on emotion-laden drivel.
That'll work well, until the injunction on infringing on my patent for "An Apparatus and Process for Extracting Oxygen from a Low-Density Fluid Using Positive and Negative Pressure Differentials" comes into effect.
Seventeen years is a long time.
I think this is a feature, not a bug. Let's say I go through and start re-ripping my CDs at 256kb/s AAC, and I want to selectively remove the old 128kb/s MP3 versions; I use the check for duplicate songs feature and can remove the MP3 versions easily. (By displaying the file size or bit rate column in the view, and sorting by it.) In combination with the columns and views, Show Duplicates can be a pretty useful feature. I remember versions of iTunes before it was added, and it was sorely needed.
This isn't true -- Quicktime the media framework, quite different from Quicktime Player -- will play back full screen. You just need to get a different player.
r eenMoviePlayer.shtml
I can't vouch for it personally but this one is less than 600kB with source code:
http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/Fullsc
BTW, this exact same situation exists for both Windows and Mac, it's not as though Apple is doing something special to gouge PC users. Most Mac users who don't want to pay just use a different player application. The player itself is just a frontend to the Quicktime architecture and libraries, which aren't crippled or require payment in any way. (iTunes is the same thing, it's a frontend to Quicktime also, which it uses to play audio and video.)
I was kinda hoping for an entirely text-based, CLI version.
The soundtrack would be performed entirely on 300 baud modem.
Very interesting. I went and looked up the Condorcet system, if anyone else was unfamiliar with it, here's a page with a good (IMO, anyway) example:
http://condorcet.org/rp/intro.shtml
I think you would get a lot more "compromise" candidates that way, although I wonder whether that's really not what we have right now -- candidates that are almost identical to each other and struggling to be inoffensive rather than supportable, because voters tend to cast their ballots 'against the person they dislike more.'
To put that amount in perspective, it would've been cheaper to give every single Iraqi man, woman and child a bit over $70,000 in cash, which would allow pretty much every family there to live in relative comfort for the rest of their lives. Just airlift in the money, in singles, and dump it out the hatch. (Not sure how many cargo planes it'd take to hold two trillion dollars in singles, but I bet it'd be pretty many!) They'd be so busy running around amassing (our) wealth that there'd be no time for planting bombs or killing us or each other. In fact, after that, why would they WANT to kill us?
I understand your point, but you also have to understand the political realities of the US. You'd sooner get the voters to agree to kill every person in Iraq, then give them all cash handouts. That's how much opposition you'd have to some sort of plan like that. Call it a sad commentary or whatever you want, but war is far more acceptable to a broad section of the American citizenry than giving a bunch of "towel heads" their hard-earned tax dollars. People will support a war, they won't support a give-money-to-foreigners program. Not to mention the corporations that prefer a war, because it's better business than building democracy in the short run, and the short run is all that anyone seems concerned about right now.
(Incidentally, it also would have been possible to buy all of the oil that's underneath Iraq at market price for less than the cost of the war and rebuilding efforts; just something to keep in mind when people argue that the only reason for going to war was to get the oil. Saddam was more than willing to sell oil to the US, in fact he was doing it illegally already through intermediaries, I'm sure he would have only been too happy to take our money. So to find the real reasoning behind the war you have to look elsewhere than straight energy politics. I have my own theories on the matter -- principally, that a whole lot of Americans just wanted to see somebody with brown skin getting the living shit kicked out of them on CNN, and the politicians just pandered to this base desire -- but to each their own.)
Ah, understood. I suppose in that case I don't have a solution for you, nor do I think there really is a solution. And I think the problem you are describing could be extended not just to DIBS, but to almost any file-storage technology, and perhaps to any communications technology. If I work for an ISP, am I indirectly facilitating the exploitation of children? I suppose I am, in a way, since there are undoubtedly people using their connections for that purpose.
Although I respect your feelings and see where you're coming from, I believe in this case that the good of such a technology outweighs the bad. I would say the same thing about FreeNet, or the Internet in general. I suppose that comes down to a matter of faith, since I'm not sure it's possible to prove that the amount of good gained from any form of anonymous/psuedonymous communication outweighs the evil that people will undoubtedly do with it (not to mention relative standards of evil, although I certainly agree with you on child porn, there are other areas that are more grey; e.g. "hate speech").
I do have to admit you caught me off-guard; the typical objections to FreeNet, et al, are less altruistic and more self-interested.
You are incorrect. You cannot trademark the sans-serif font (I believe that would be copywritten by the font foundry), but you can definitely trademark a particular word, written in a particular font. It's called a "Typed Drawing" in USPTOese.
Apple has half a dozen different trademarks on the "iPod" name, for various uses, but the 'Typed Drawing' trademark, as opposed to the trademark just on the word itself (the "standard character mark"), is 78089144. Here is a link, although I'm not sure if it will work. If it doesn't, you can also just search the USPTO's site for the trademark number.
And in looking at the iUpload's logo again, even if this weren't the case they might still be infringing, since when you look at their logo, becase of the font difference, "iPod" is readable almost as a distinct word from the rest of the letters; even if they just changed the font I think they'd still run into Apple's standard character mark.
At the end of the day, you also have to consider how much money Apple has, and how much cash they could burn protecting their trademarks. They've done it before -- with the vague iMac lookalikes a few years back -- and eventually won. So even if their case was lacking in merit, they could probably bankrupt a small firm through aggressive legal action (although in this case I think they'd have more than enough grounds).
(As for colors, you can trademark them also. Kodak, for example, has a trademark on a very distinct shade of yellow, when used in particular contexts. More on trade dress at Nolo.com.)
Very true.
Now, I know I'm probably going to get slammed for this, but what the hell. I'm going to play the Devil's Advocate here for a minute, call me the Ugly American, if you will.
The fact that it's going to be useless to poor people doesn't make me support the project any more than I otherwise would, but it doesn't make me support it any less, either.
As far as I'm concerned, my government has absolutely zero mandate to help non-citizens. Zip, zero, nada. I've never been clear on what the benefit to the US taxpayer is of helping starving people in Africa; I can see the benefit of disease eradication and hygiene (having a whole continent that's a giant breeding ground for new and nasty microbes isn't healthy for anyone) but why I should be responsible for their education I'm not sure. Sure, helping people gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but only if I choose to do it. Having my government take my tax money (that I never had a big choice about giving in the first place) and spend it on a whole lot of people on the other side of the world doesn't please me a whole lot. Maybe there are arguments that could be made to justify it in terms of preventing terrorism and weapons proliferation by increasing standards of living ('people with jobs don't usually become terrorists,' etc.), but I rarely see those arguments being made, so I'm unconvinced.
So, with that said, I'm happier to have my tax dollars being spent on OLPC than on bags of rice. Those bags of rice are never going to help me any. Spending a few billion bucks on developing a cheap, minature computer might. Possibly directly (I have a feeling a lot of them will end up on eBay) but certainly indirectly; the economy of scale required to produce a $100 laptop is going to decrease component costs on things like OLED screens and RAM, which eventually I'm going to see at Newegg, and when I go to buy a real computer.
So what's the net effect of the whole project? You end up with a regressive tax in industrialized countries, because the majority of the indirect benefits go to the rich -- people who buy computers and who work at the big multinational tech companies who are going to get the contracts to build them.
What's the point of my saying this? Even if it's absolutely provable that these devices are going to be an absolute flop in the Third World, it's exactly the sort of "charity" that First World corporations (and purely self-interested citizens) love, because it gets them more of their tax dollar back in indirect benefits than if that money was actually spent bettering someone poor, where the ROI is low and very long-term.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I think it's a waste of time to teach students a particular set of applications or even a partiuclar OS while they're in school; those skills just aren't worth much, and they're likely going to be uselessly out of date by the time they get to the job market. Computer applications and operating systems are fast-moving targets, and by the time you developed teaching materials and lesson plans, disseminated them to instructors, taught students, and then waited for them to actually reach the job market, the skills they would have been tought would be useless.
That said, I do think that we would be doing a disservice to students to not teach them about computers. Not "how to use MS Word" (or OpenOffice, or pick your favorite application), but develop in them the analytical skills so that when they do get that first job, they'll have the mental flexibility to sit down and figure out whatever is the state-of-the-art at that time.
In that vein, I'd rather that middle-school teachers spent time on things like reading and writing skills, so that students can read technical documentation and formulate concise questions, than on whatever today's app-of-the-week is.
An intelligent, well-educated person ought to be able to sit down behind a computer system running a well-designed and -documented operating system and application suite, and figure out how to use it based on the interface and the documentation. (Assuming they have the requisite background knowledge of whatever the application is designed to do; a musician shouldn't necessarily have to be able to figure out a engineer's numeric-simulation system, but an engineer or draughtsman should.) This requires a commitment on both the part of the user, to be open-minded and ready to learn, and on the part of the software designer, to use a sensible and obvious interface, and create clear and easily-understandable documentation.
That skill -- being able to "figure things out" -- is what we ought to be fostering through technology education. The actual technologies that are used in the classroom are only useful insofar as they contribute to this and give the students the right background.
This is very true. I've met my share of guys (and a few gals) from the Point, and they were consistently among the brightest people I've met.
However -- and this is by necessity a broad and perhaps unfair generalization -- I think the education there gears people to what I'd call the "best practices" approach to problem solving, and not necessarily a "novel solution" one. Whether that is a strength or a liability depends on the situation. But the people that I met are not what I would call hugely 'outside the box'-type thinkers, compared to say, people from MIT or other top engineering schools that I've met.
Feel free to call that a biased judgement; I was ROTC after all, and there is something of a competitve aspect between ROTCers and folks from the Point. But it would be unfair not to give them their due, and this is too often the case.
Probably, although I'm not sure whether most underwater cables give off electrical "gradients." Seems like most of them are probably fiber-optic; although maybe they have integrated electrical conductors to power in-line amplifiers or repeaters.
I wonder what the range on this sense is, if in fact it exists, and whether it could be useful in detecting submarines. (Not that there are a whole lot of countries fielding large submarine fleets besides the US anymore.)
In terms of de-mining operations I think that sonar would probably be more useful than an electrical-field sense, since I don't think a mine would necessarily have any electrical signature. This is the purpose of the Navy's trained dolphins, I believe.
Funny you should mention birds.
I was watching a program not that long ago about the use of carrier pigeons in World War II, as a communication method for spies. Both the Germans and the British made use of them, and at one point the British -- attempting to reduce the loss rate due to native predatory birds -- put a bounty on hawks and other birds of prey on the Southern coast of England. The Germans went the other way, and supposedly investigated using falcons to intercept and kill pigeons in occupied France. I'm not sure how much they were playing up this aspect in the show, but it was fairly interesting.
It also gave the only description of how carrier pigeons are trained that I've ever seen on TV (you train them to fly in a particular general direction by taking them gradually further from their home base in that direction, then releasing them; when they're released in a far-away and unfamiliar location, they'll "default" to going in that direction, until they recognize the land features).
The program doesn't seem to have a web site but as I recall it was a Discovery Channel production. Here's the IMDB entry for it: "War of the Birds." For anyone with even a passing interest in the history of animals in combat, it's worth watching if you ever catch it on late-night TV.