"Several sections of the ACTA draft show that rightsholders can obtain an injunction just by showing that infringement is "imminent," even if it hasn't happened yet."
Isn't that called "prior restraint"?
Pre-crime. And your eyeballs are latent copyright infringement devices. They're gonna have to do something about that.
Exposing the name of the guy likely isn't going to change Apple's reaction to the loss of the device. But it sure harms the guy who lost it, and I think that was really, really rotten form.
It's not like they don't already know, assuming the story is true. All they have to do is see who still has their super secret trial phones. This hapless engineer is already boned.
I still blame Metallica. When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out they started screaming that the reason that Load of crap did not sell was due to piracy.
If this is the case then why is storage relevant? It's the bandwidth necessary to get the data out; doing it reliably is necessary too. An attacker could theoretically just jam the frequencies that the recorder/transmitter uses, and then attack you, steal or destroy the device, and no one would be the wiser. As a security measure, this needs to be better thought out.
Actually, the bigger risk I'm thinking of is the wearer turning it off to avoid documenting something embarrassing. If the target is having an affair, he's going to turn off the tracker or find a way to feed it bogus "safe" data to cover up the trip to the by-the-hour motel over that long lunch. When it's turned off, he's vulnerable. The technology is pretty much here to do this these days via cell. Given the risk of kidnapping and such in the crappy parts of the world like Mexico, there's bound to be a market for shrinking this stuff and getting it put in an injectable chip. So the first thing the abductors will do is get some RF shielding around the target, second step is burning out the chip. Meanwhile, the security firm knows that losing the signal is the first warning of an abduction attempt.
Of course, what I've always wanted to know is when tracking devices are put in someone in the movies, do they ever consider that the same beacon used by the good guys could have been used by the bad guys to locate the person in the first place?
Stuff that would kill your progress through the game. The patches never fully fixed it. And this is what they consider progress. I pirated heavily in my youth. With a few more bucks in my pocket, I'm willing to pay for games. But if I'm going to be disappointed like this I may as well get the game for free. Piracy is always an option you fucks.
"What motivates human beings may not be what motivates aliens." We climb mountains because they're there. We want to go out into the universe for the same reason. Maybe aliens don't.
My guess is the answer is one of the following:
1) The lifespan of civilizations is short enough that the chances of any two lasting long enough to be contemporaries is low. 2) Tech development is so rapid that the odds of any two civilizations being at the same level to interact are low. 3) There may be tons of interstellar chatting going on between far-flung civilizations but they're using something we haven't discovered, subspace radio or ansibles with QM entanglements or psychic projections through dimension Q. The radio spectrum might be considered as primitive as smoke signals. 4) Civilizations might be insular by nature and not friendly. They might not want to go larking about the galaxy looking for people.
The idea of a civilization turning decadent and inward, of indulging in pleasures and fantasy is very human. Human empires have fallen in the past due to that sort of thing and it's only likely to occur in the future.
It's actually a conundrum I had with a story setting I was working on. What would supremely high-tech societies do if they had this kind of mastery of technology and the mind? Through history we've seen kings and the obscenely wealthy create pleasure palaces, trying to recreate Eden or heaven on Earth. But wouldn't that sort of thing pale in magnificence to consensual hallucination within virtual worlds? Like they said in the Matrix, what is real? The answer I came up with is that the richest of the rich of the galactic society lived in hidden worldships. These ships stay hidden in interstellar space, locations the most closely guarded of secrets. The denizens spend their time in their dreamtime pleasure domes, the physical receptacles of their consciousness jacked into the system, kept biologically immortal. What do they occupy their time with? All sorts of esoteric plots and intrigues and arts that are incomprehensible to anyone not immersed in it from the start. To those on the outside, it would seem as foolish as a french peasant looking at the rich in the years before the revolution.
The kicker is that the demands of running these fantasy afterlives is enormous and requires an immense draw of resources from living worlds. The particulars are a little involved but what they need has to come from a living biosphere and cannot be replicated in anything so small as a space-faring habitat. It requires full-scale planets. The peasentry live dirtside and their contact with the galactic gods (which, for all intents and purposes, these people may as well be) is through their emmisaries.
While Marvel has certainly been trying to mobilize their properties, the movies for the most part have not been very good. I'm still puzzled as to how Iron Man turned out so awesome. In comparison you have the Fantastic Four failures, the Hulks, Spider-Man and sequels, X-Men and sequels, Wolverine, etc. Well, I suppose those movies may have made some money but they weren't very good. As far as fun popcorn flicks, they were too saturated with stupid to succeed. The only enjoyable comic movies of the last few years have been the two Nolan Batmans and Iron Man. Hopefully Iron Man 2 will also be good.
Anyway, the way they would really have to work a crossover movie is to actually make a few good stand-alone movies. Make them as good as Iron Man. Then the crossover movie would mean something. You have a good Hulk movie, a good Iron Man movie, a good Spider-Man movie, and then you have all three of those guys in one movie? Then you have something.
In the mess that is Heroes, it's easy to overlook how good the first season was. Television provides more space for storytelling and the budgets are allowing some very interesting work. You typically need a movie's budget to get the city-smashing fights but you'd need a television series' length to do complicated storylines. With the popularity of DVD's and the rise of online distribution, not to mention the lowered cost of digital effects, I wonder if it might not be possible to put out movie-quality work on a serial basis.
Wait a second. They're saying there's no market and then they're saying cheaper competitors are snapping up all the business? Fellas, I think the invisible hand of the market is flipping you off.
I've been dabbling with these products for years now and it just never seems like the extra bloat and resource hogging provides enough additional return to make it worth the effort.
The Xbox 360 seems to be the one exception. What's really surprising is that people keep going back to it even after their 360 breaks.
I suppose they have a vested interest due to their game libraries.
Interesting observation. But I think it's because the games are there any Sony screwed the pooch on the PS3. The PS2 beat the pants out of the Xbox 1 hands down. But when the PS3 came in so expensive and with the Wii seemingly so underpowered, console gamers were stuck with the 360 as default. But I don't think there's anything compelling about the Microsoft experience, anything that would make people want to stay. I happen to have a 360. I got it to play games on my HDTV I'd just picked up, my way of celebrating the retirement of a 15 yr old 27" tube. Overall, the 360 experience is a mixed bag. The games are fun but the hardware had massive teething problems and with all the bells and whistles cost as much as a midrange computer.
In my opinion, the Xbox is about like the PC. People kept their PC's for years while bitching about Microsoft. Why? No good games on Linux. People want their games. The 360 wasn't great but it had games.
We'll have to wait for the next generation of consoles to see what people will do but if the PS4 can manage to not suck, I don't think the Xbox 720 or whatever the fuck they call it will do as well. And remember, Microsoft is still massively in the hole on the console front. I don't think they've even yet broke even on their investment here, going all the way back to the first dollar spent on Xbox development. The Xbox is still a loss leader with the goal of giving Microsoft a foothold in the entertainment center.
They really just need to go on a diet. Hey guys; remember how it was supposed to be a fast browser?
Firefox stresses my machine more than the games I play on it. I know browsers aren't simple pieces of code anymore but goddamn do they eat a ton of resources (said me with twenty tabs open.) Yeah, we're asking them to do a lot but they still fall on their faces quite a bit with memory leaks. Firefox is awful about that, hands down. The next release should be less about doing new things and doing the old things better.
Wow. I can't believe that MS wasted three years and $millions on this. MS really needs to take a look at what is going on and do something about it:
* MS Tablet PCs fail * Windows Mobile fails * MS ISO Standard file format fails * Windows Live fails * Zune fails
The bodies are getting stacked deep, there MS. Time to get back to what made you great and become hacker friendly again... and not in the sense that your OS and software have lots of security holes.
Nobody looks forward to using Microsoft products. They use them because they have to. Even if you think that all the hype around Apple products is just advertising brainwashing and the fans are just drooling zombies, here's a thought: Microsoft has even more money to spend on branding and they can't even manage to inspire lukewarm enthusiasm.
I have to say, I've gotten some pretty (ahem) creative responses, too. And for all you job hunters out there, if you put "C/C++" on your resume, I guarantee my first technical question is going to be, "What's the difference between C and C++?" All the while knowing that there is a >50% chance I'm about to get a "creative" answer.
It's two plusses or "one" better than regular old C. *witless smirk*
This CEO is smarter and harder working than you as evidenced by the fact that he makes more money than you. You think you know better than your betters? If there was anything wrong with what he said, the magic of the Free Market would have prevented him from saying it! If you want the nannystate to do everything for you, move to a communist country like Canada or Europe with all the other collectivist socialists!!!!!!11!1!1oneone [/conservative]
You forgot to mention welfare sponges, liberals, jews, the global warming hoax, and water fluoridation. Other than that, 9/10.:)
So, after being a drill instructor, aircraft mechanic, and working in the IC industry for awhile, John Glenn goes back into space and I start thinking, "Hell, the way things are going, my fifth career could be as an astronaut!" But, nooooo, they go and cancel the shuttle and damn near kill the follow on.
So, as of about a month ago, I've bought a ranch in Idaho...
I might be movin' to Montana soon Just to raise me up a crop of Dental Floss Raisin' it up Waxen it down In a little white box I can sell uptown By myself I wouldn't Have no boss, But I'd be raisin' my lonely Dental Floss Raisin' my lonely Dental Floss Well I just might grow me some bees But I'd leave the sweet stuff For somebody else... but then, on the other hand I'd Keep the wax N' melt it down Pluck some Floss N' swish it aroun' I'd have me a crop An' it'd be on top
Just saw the episode. Seldom have I seen someone with such a displeasing assemblage of facial features. From certain angles, he looks like the love child of Tucker Carlson and that creature from the Mask movie with Cher.
The whole episode was confusing rubbish. Granted, I have a very difficult time with British accents when they're running the words together but the BBC tends to make it all worse with crowding loud music in there so you can't make sense of anything. They do the same stuff on the Sarah Jane series. It's awful.
The story was a jumble of one or two good ideas mixed with a load of tosh. I like the idea of a little girl meeting the Doctor and thinking him a childhood fantasy only to run into him later. I like the idea of a cute redhead in general and this particular one is pleasing to the eye. But the man cast as the Doctor is awful. He keeps trying to do manic in a pastiche of the past two Doctors. It just doesn't work. There's always supposed to be a sense of whimsy and wizardry to the character but it's more like Jim Carrey schtick. It's affected and wearisome. And as for the prisoner zero thing, it made no sense going in and made no sense going out. And the writer is Moffat, the man responsible for some of the best episodes of the past two Doctors? What the hell happened? A bad Russell T. Davies script holds together better than this mess. And don't even get me started on the redesigned RETARDIS.
Here's hoping they can do something to salvage the mess.
Slashdot Mirror
"Several sections of the ACTA draft show that rightsholders can obtain an injunction just by showing that infringement is "imminent," even if it hasn't happened yet."
Isn't that called "prior restraint"?
Pre-crime. And your eyeballs are latent copyright infringement devices. They're gonna have to do something about that.
Exposing the name of the guy likely isn't going to change Apple's reaction to the loss of the device.
But it sure harms the guy who lost it, and I think that was really, really rotten form.
It's not like they don't already know, assuming the story is true. All they have to do is see who still has their super secret trial phones. This hapless engineer is already boned.
I still blame Metallica. When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out they started screaming that the reason that Load of crap did not sell was due to piracy.
I blame shitty bus drivers.
If this is the case then why is storage relevant? It's the bandwidth necessary to get the data out; doing it reliably is necessary too. An attacker could theoretically just jam the frequencies that the recorder/transmitter uses, and then attack you, steal or destroy the device, and no one would be the wiser. As a security measure, this needs to be better thought out.
Actually, the bigger risk I'm thinking of is the wearer turning it off to avoid documenting something embarrassing. If the target is having an affair, he's going to turn off the tracker or find a way to feed it bogus "safe" data to cover up the trip to the by-the-hour motel over that long lunch. When it's turned off, he's vulnerable. The technology is pretty much here to do this these days via cell. Given the risk of kidnapping and such in the crappy parts of the world like Mexico, there's bound to be a market for shrinking this stuff and getting it put in an injectable chip. So the first thing the abductors will do is get some RF shielding around the target, second step is burning out the chip. Meanwhile, the security firm knows that losing the signal is the first warning of an abduction attempt.
Of course, what I've always wanted to know is when tracking devices are put in someone in the movies, do they ever consider that the same beacon used by the good guys could have been used by the bad guys to locate the person in the first place?
Stuff that would kill your progress through the game. The patches never fully fixed it. And this is what they consider progress. I pirated heavily in my youth. With a few more bucks in my pocket, I'm willing to pay for games. But if I'm going to be disappointed like this I may as well get the game for free. Piracy is always an option you fucks.
"What motivates human beings may not be what motivates aliens." We climb mountains because they're there. We want to go out into the universe for the same reason. Maybe aliens don't.
My guess is the answer is one of the following:
1) The lifespan of civilizations is short enough that the chances of any two lasting long enough to be contemporaries is low.
2) Tech development is so rapid that the odds of any two civilizations being at the same level to interact are low.
3) There may be tons of interstellar chatting going on between far-flung civilizations but they're using something we haven't discovered, subspace radio or ansibles with QM entanglements or psychic projections through dimension Q. The radio spectrum might be considered as primitive as smoke signals.
4) Civilizations might be insular by nature and not friendly. They might not want to go larking about the galaxy looking for people.
The idea of a civilization turning decadent and inward, of indulging in pleasures and fantasy is very human. Human empires have fallen in the past due to that sort of thing and it's only likely to occur in the future.
It's actually a conundrum I had with a story setting I was working on. What would supremely high-tech societies do if they had this kind of mastery of technology and the mind? Through history we've seen kings and the obscenely wealthy create pleasure palaces, trying to recreate Eden or heaven on Earth. But wouldn't that sort of thing pale in magnificence to consensual hallucination within virtual worlds? Like they said in the Matrix, what is real? The answer I came up with is that the richest of the rich of the galactic society lived in hidden worldships. These ships stay hidden in interstellar space, locations the most closely guarded of secrets. The denizens spend their time in their dreamtime pleasure domes, the physical receptacles of their consciousness jacked into the system, kept biologically immortal. What do they occupy their time with? All sorts of esoteric plots and intrigues and arts that are incomprehensible to anyone not immersed in it from the start. To those on the outside, it would seem as foolish as a french peasant looking at the rich in the years before the revolution.
The kicker is that the demands of running these fantasy afterlives is enormous and requires an immense draw of resources from living worlds. The particulars are a little involved but what they need has to come from a living biosphere and cannot be replicated in anything so small as a space-faring habitat. It requires full-scale planets. The peasentry live dirtside and their contact with the galactic gods (which, for all intents and purposes, these people may as well be) is through their emmisaries.
Great, we've got a variable constant now.
While Marvel has certainly been trying to mobilize their properties, the movies for the most part have not been very good. I'm still puzzled as to how Iron Man turned out so awesome. In comparison you have the Fantastic Four failures, the Hulks, Spider-Man and sequels, X-Men and sequels, Wolverine, etc. Well, I suppose those movies may have made some money but they weren't very good. As far as fun popcorn flicks, they were too saturated with stupid to succeed. The only enjoyable comic movies of the last few years have been the two Nolan Batmans and Iron Man. Hopefully Iron Man 2 will also be good.
Anyway, the way they would really have to work a crossover movie is to actually make a few good stand-alone movies. Make them as good as Iron Man. Then the crossover movie would mean something. You have a good Hulk movie, a good Iron Man movie, a good Spider-Man movie, and then you have all three of those guys in one movie? Then you have something.
In the mess that is Heroes, it's easy to overlook how good the first season was. Television provides more space for storytelling and the budgets are allowing some very interesting work. You typically need a movie's budget to get the city-smashing fights but you'd need a television series' length to do complicated storylines. With the popularity of DVD's and the rise of online distribution, not to mention the lowered cost of digital effects, I wonder if it might not be possible to put out movie-quality work on a serial basis.
Wait a second. They're saying there's no market and then they're saying cheaper competitors are snapping up all the business? Fellas, I think the invisible hand of the market is flipping you off.
I've been dabbling with these products for years now and it just never seems like the extra bloat and resource hogging provides enough additional return to make it worth the effort.
I guess I'll have to bittorrent the shows instead of recording them off the cable I'm not paying for either.
The Xbox 360 seems to be the one exception. What's really surprising is that people keep going back to it even after their 360 breaks.
I suppose they have a vested interest due to their game libraries.
Interesting observation. But I think it's because the games are there any Sony screwed the pooch on the PS3. The PS2 beat the pants out of the Xbox 1 hands down. But when the PS3 came in so expensive and with the Wii seemingly so underpowered, console gamers were stuck with the 360 as default. But I don't think there's anything compelling about the Microsoft experience, anything that would make people want to stay. I happen to have a 360. I got it to play games on my HDTV I'd just picked up, my way of celebrating the retirement of a 15 yr old 27" tube. Overall, the 360 experience is a mixed bag. The games are fun but the hardware had massive teething problems and with all the bells and whistles cost as much as a midrange computer.
In my opinion, the Xbox is about like the PC. People kept their PC's for years while bitching about Microsoft. Why? No good games on Linux. People want their games. The 360 wasn't great but it had games.
We'll have to wait for the next generation of consoles to see what people will do but if the PS4 can manage to not suck, I don't think the Xbox 720 or whatever the fuck they call it will do as well. And remember, Microsoft is still massively in the hole on the console front. I don't think they've even yet broke even on their investment here, going all the way back to the first dollar spent on Xbox development. The Xbox is still a loss leader with the goal of giving Microsoft a foothold in the entertainment center.
They really just need to go on a diet.
Hey guys; remember how it was supposed to be a fast browser?
Firefox stresses my machine more than the games I play on it. I know browsers aren't simple pieces of code anymore but goddamn do they eat a ton of resources (said me with twenty tabs open.) Yeah, we're asking them to do a lot but they still fall on their faces quite a bit with memory leaks. Firefox is awful about that, hands down. The next release should be less about doing new things and doing the old things better.
Wow. I can't believe that MS wasted three years and $millions on this. MS really needs to take a look at what is going on and do something about it:
* MS Tablet PCs fail
* Windows Mobile fails
* MS ISO Standard file format fails
* Windows Live fails
* Zune fails
The bodies are getting stacked deep, there MS. Time to get back to what made you great and become hacker friendly again... and not in the sense that your OS and software have lots of security holes.
Nobody looks forward to using Microsoft products. They use them because they have to. Even if you think that all the hype around Apple products is just advertising brainwashing and the fans are just drooling zombies, here's a thought: Microsoft has even more money to spend on branding and they can't even manage to inspire lukewarm enthusiasm.
I have to say, I've gotten some pretty (ahem) creative responses, too. And for all you job hunters out there, if you put "C/C++" on your resume, I guarantee my first technical question is going to be, "What's the difference between C and C++?" All the while knowing that there is a >50% chance I'm about to get a "creative" answer.
It's two plusses or "one" better than regular old C. *witless smirk*
Plutoids ain't got no reason to live.
This CEO is smarter and harder working than you as evidenced by the fact that he makes more money than you. You think you know better than your betters? If there was anything wrong with what he said, the magic of the Free Market would have prevented him from saying it! If you want the nannystate to do everything for you, move to a communist country like Canada or Europe with all the other collectivist socialists!!!!!!11!1!1oneone [/conservative]
You forgot to mention welfare sponges, liberals, jews, the global warming hoax, and water fluoridation. Other than that, 9/10. :)
such as, the FACT that the "civilians" were actually enemy combatants. For more details:
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php
So Reuters is now considered to be the journalistic branch of Al Qaeda?
My god, the summary leads you to believe they actually made a designer "space-suit", you know, for EVAs
For EVAs? No, those are called plug suits. And they're pretty hawt if you're into underage girls drawn with sexually disproportionate bodies.
Who drew that, an anorexic Rob Liefeld?
Not a troll. Downmodding != I disagree with what you said.
Sometimes a record stands the test of time because none can approach it, other times it stands because nobody feels like bothering to try.
So, after being a drill instructor, aircraft mechanic, and working in the IC industry for awhile, John Glenn goes back into space and I start thinking, "Hell, the way things are going, my fifth career could be as an astronaut!" But, nooooo, they go and cancel the shuttle and damn near kill the follow on.
So, as of about a month ago, I've bought a ranch in Idaho...
I might be movin' to Montana soon
Just to raise me up a crop of Dental Floss Raisin' it up
Waxen it down
In a little white box
I can sell uptown
By myself I wouldn't
Have no boss,
But I'd be raisin' my lonely Dental Floss
Raisin' my lonely Dental Floss
Well I just might grow me some bees
But I'd leave the sweet stuff
For somebody else...
but then, on the other hand
I'd Keep the wax N' melt it down
Pluck some Floss N' swish it aroun'
I'd have me a crop
An' it'd be on top
Just saw the episode. Seldom have I seen someone with such a displeasing assemblage of facial features. From certain angles, he looks like the love child of Tucker Carlson and that creature from the Mask movie with Cher.
The whole episode was confusing rubbish. Granted, I have a very difficult time with British accents when they're running the words together but the BBC tends to make it all worse with crowding loud music in there so you can't make sense of anything. They do the same stuff on the Sarah Jane series. It's awful.
The story was a jumble of one or two good ideas mixed with a load of tosh. I like the idea of a little girl meeting the Doctor and thinking him a childhood fantasy only to run into him later. I like the idea of a cute redhead in general and this particular one is pleasing to the eye. But the man cast as the Doctor is awful. He keeps trying to do manic in a pastiche of the past two Doctors. It just doesn't work. There's always supposed to be a sense of whimsy and wizardry to the character but it's more like Jim Carrey schtick. It's affected and wearisome. And as for the prisoner zero thing, it made no sense going in and made no sense going out. And the writer is Moffat, the man responsible for some of the best episodes of the past two Doctors? What the hell happened? A bad Russell T. Davies script holds together better than this mess. And don't even get me started on the redesigned RETARDIS.
Here's hoping they can do something to salvage the mess.
This is what they've been doing instead of fixing the CSS problems on Idle (or simply removing it.)