Hollywood was founded on industrialised copyright infringement.
It was actually patent infringement, but your point is well taken; It is indeed ironic than an industry dependent upon copyright as a legal protection against infringement was founded by infringing upon Edison's motion picture camera patents. Of course, Hollywood will argue that the statue of limitations on such violations has long since expired; even if that doesn't exactly inspire admiration for their stated principles (i.e. they still look like hypocrites).
We should be slowing down their scientists if we can; it will buy the United States extra time to prepare for future threats from China. They have been stealing our best research for years anyway so why make it easy for them? Let the Chinese fund their own damn research for a change.
The best thing we can do is ensure as much media coverage as possible.
It would probably be more effective if some of the ex-employees, who could do so anonymously, began giving tips on their blogs about which companies' stocks to short-sell. Granted, this would probably be more effective against mid or small sized companies, but someone has to call these companies out when their Indian operations are delivering crap products. The only way that these companies take notice is when their stock price takes a hit.
All kidding aside, the gp is correct; the op needs to get his priorities straight. Why does the op even need an iPhone while he is still a student? When I was going to school I sure as hell couldn't afford a $300 phone with a $100 per month bill. This is doubly irritating when students complain about how expensive their textbooks are or how much the food and rent cost while yaking away on their iPhone and paying $100 a month to text their friends when they should be listening in lecture or studying. IMHO, the students who do this are either demonstrating their own financial stupidity OR loudly proclaiming that mommy and daddy are paying for everything. If I were the op, I would get the cheapest international GSM phone that I could find and use prepaid SIM cards. If any other students are reading this thread, don't be like the op with his fancy-pants "smart" phone and don't fall for the credit card companies hawking you plastic on campus either. Graduating with piles of student loans, maxed out plastic and one slightly used "smart" phone is not the best way to start out in the real world.
This requires more government regulation, not less.
If you knew how the sausage is made in government, perhaps you wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic. There are government regulators who could easily screw up a cup of coffee, never mind complex regulatory schemes. Giving them real power to regulate the marketplace very often causes more problems than it solves.
Being someone that works for a major ISP in the department in which we receive and act on copyright complaints, I can tell you... we hate it.
The summary missed that one, but the commenters hit upon the real motivation almost immediately. The cable ISPs (not sure if the telcos care quite as much) care about bitorrent to the extent that "heavy users" cost more money to accommodate than they generate in monthly subscription fees; obviously the cable ISP would be better off financially if they could boot the "high cost/low value" customer and use the recovered bandwidth to sell a few more subscriptions to "good" customers (i.e. the ones who almost never use all of what they have paid for).
Note: The ISPs have had their revenge against the RIAA and Hollywood by setting up standard menus with prices for discovery that signal their displeasure. The prices are just high enough to discourage too much discovery from occurring while still being plausible (i.e. thousands of dollars per hour, but not millions). Attorneys may like to collect thousands of dollars per billable hour from their clients, but they really hate it when someone else charges them the same extortionate rates (turnabout is fair play after all) for their services.
Going after bittorrenters, and especially "bad" bittorrent from a copyright perspective, means only pissing off customers (which is apparently many ISPs' #1 priority)
From the standpoint of the ISP, there are "good" and "bad" customers. The "bad" customers are the ones who saturate their connections and use most or all of their available bandwidth most or all of the time. If a customer is a cost center rather than a profit center, an incentive is create to "encourage" that customer to take their "business" elsewhere (preferably to a competitor). Compare this to the classic rent control scenario where landlords are incentivized to "encourage" (aka harass) a money losing tenant into moving on. Of course, the ISP will want to keep these rearguard actions quiet so as to prevent bad press and uncomfortable questions from their "good" customers; the ones who pay for the high bandwidth but very seldom use it for extended periods at high levels.
Not only that but lawsuits and discovery cost money. If the ISP can more easily cough up the evidence when asked by formalizing the procedures, it will probably limit their liability and reduce their compliance costs.
At least that's the theory. We'll see if he can make any difference in practice.
In practice, political operatives will maneuver behind the scenes to ensure that whatever information the commission receives is carefully selected, filtered and sanitized so that the "right" conclusions are reached. The stakes are so high in this case that it is incredibly naïve to think that there won't be skullduggery.
but does it tell us anything useful about medicine in the US?
No, but it does generate higher ratings, more viewers and more advertising dollars by appealing to viewers' emotions. Besides, the broadcast and cable "news" is mostly just for entertainment anymore here in the United States; what did you expect, real journalism? Maybe in some parallel reality, but not in this one.
starting with a massive markup on medicine which isn't seen elsewhere
It isn't seen elsewhere because most other countries have slapped price controls on prescription drugs. However, before you wax poetic about how wonderful those crafty Canadians and Europeans and their health care systems are, it might be interesting to consider where better than 90% of new drug research and development occurs. If you guessed 'the United States' then you were right. Other countries have been free riding off the benefits of US research and development in cutting edge drugs; financed by high prices for American consumers. It will be very interesting to see what happens when and if the United States also slaps priced controls on prescription drugs. If nobody is left to pay premium drug prices to support new research then these drugs simply won't be developed unless the governments of the world step in to make up the difference currently being funded by the generosity of US health care consumers. I doubt that the various socialized health care systems around the world would be successful at that; even if they tried.
How about we geeks make a deal with Ars? We will agree to whitelist them on our Adblock plugins and in return they will agree to run TEXT ONLY ads clearly marked as such, ala Google sponsored links, that are relevant to the content actually being viewed. How about that Ars? Sounds reasonable doesn't it? No more flash and no more bullshit pop culture nonsense ads. Sounds fair to me.
Do you work in software development? Most of your tedious diatribe leads me to believe that the answer to that question is 'no'. Spend a few years working as a programmer and software designer and then come back to this subject when you know more; because right now, judging by what you have said, you don't know enough about programming or software design to even have an opinion.
He's Japanese, just give him some used electronics, a paper clip, and some used panties
All of which can be found or purchased at any train platform in Japan; they have vending machines there for things you didn't even think it was possible to vend.
Well, for starters it might be tough to get a trademark on the term "booklet". The term "booklet" is too generic and not distinctive enough that people would associate it with only the Microsoft product of the same name; iPad is a distinctive trademarked term whereas "booklet" is not.
The parent has made the most lucid, well though out and insightful distillation of effective project management that I have ever heard here on Slashdot. The problem, as the parent so eloquently puts it, is leadership or rather lack thereof in many organizations.
mod parent up please, this is exactly what it's about: budget and turf.
Re:Firefox + NoScript + Adblock Plus + FlashBlocke
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1
FlashBlock adds a bit more control.
I agree. For example, sometimes you want to load one particular flash object on a per instance basis while still blocking all of the rest. Flashblock allows one to pick and choose cafeteria-style which flash objects, even on an otherwise trusted site, will load and run and which ones will not. This is the sort of fine-grained and configurable control that geeks like us recognize and appreciate in our web browsing and computing experiences.
No, you don't get it. This is not a matter of taking sides, it is about answering a threat posed by our common enemies. Americans, Europeans, Russians and even the Chinese all have a shared interest in crushing the Islamists, despite whatever else we may or may not agree upon. It would best for all of us to pursue that goal without further delay.
In the non-fiction book Freakonomics, the author rather convincingly narrowed the single most important cause of the observed drop in violence to widespread availability of safe and legal abortions; which makes sense when you think about it. Children who were at high risk of growing up poor, abused and unwanted were more frequently aborted before birth beginning in the mid to late 1970s. As the 1990s rolled around and the children of that generation became ever more capable of committing violent crimes a funny thing happened; the crimes we expected them to commit were not committed. Safe and legal access to routine abortions had selected those with the greatest potential for violence out of our generation, hence the overall drop in the violent crime rate.
We live in a hyper-competitive world where the strong survive and the weak are defeated. If playing video games instills a more competitive or aggressive spirit then perhaps that is a good thing. We should be teaching our children about the real world where there are winners and losers and competition is the rule of the day instead of coddling them and giving everyone awards for "participation". Instead we are too worried about "self-esteem" and ruffling peoples' feathers whereas the Chinese and Indians have no such qualms. Indeed, many of our children today are going to lose out to aggressive, smart and hungry kids growing up tough in China and India if we sit on our hands and do nothing to change the situation.
Mossad has used two to four people in the past, even for much higher profile targets (we know this from the few botched missions)
Perhaps generally, but not always. For example, in Operation Spring of Youth there were probably at least one dozen (a few zodiac boats filled with special forces types; the exact number has never been publicly disclosed) shooters. I will grant you that Mossad was probably not as experienced back then, but it does serve as an early counter example to the small team argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Hollywood was founded on industrialised copyright infringement.
It was actually patent infringement, but your point is well taken; It is indeed ironic than an industry dependent upon copyright as a legal protection against infringement was founded by infringing upon Edison's motion picture camera patents. Of course, Hollywood will argue that the statue of limitations on such violations has long since expired; even if that doesn't exactly inspire admiration for their stated principles (i.e. they still look like hypocrites).
We should be slowing down their scientists if we can; it will buy the United States extra time to prepare for future threats from China. They have been stealing our best research for years anyway so why make it easy for them? Let the Chinese fund their own damn research for a change.
The best thing we can do is ensure as much media coverage as possible.
It would probably be more effective if some of the ex-employees, who could do so anonymously, began giving tips on their blogs about which companies' stocks to short-sell. Granted, this would probably be more effective against mid or small sized companies, but someone has to call these companies out when their Indian operations are delivering crap products. The only way that these companies take notice is when their stock price takes a hit.
All kidding aside, the gp is correct; the op needs to get his priorities straight. Why does the op even need an iPhone while he is still a student? When I was going to school I sure as hell couldn't afford a $300 phone with a $100 per month bill. This is doubly irritating when students complain about how expensive their textbooks are or how much the food and rent cost while yaking away on their iPhone and paying $100 a month to text their friends when they should be listening in lecture or studying. IMHO, the students who do this are either demonstrating their own financial stupidity OR loudly proclaiming that mommy and daddy are paying for everything. If I were the op, I would get the cheapest international GSM phone that I could find and use prepaid SIM cards. If any other students are reading this thread, don't be like the op with his fancy-pants "smart" phone and don't fall for the credit card companies hawking you plastic on campus either. Graduating with piles of student loans, maxed out plastic and one slightly used "smart" phone is not the best way to start out in the real world.
Another misleading summary intended to promote controversy.
You must be new here...
This requires more government regulation, not less.
If you knew how the sausage is made in government, perhaps you wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic. There are government regulators who could easily screw up a cup of coffee, never mind complex regulatory schemes. Giving them real power to regulate the marketplace very often causes more problems than it solves.
Being someone that works for a major ISP in the department in which we receive and act on copyright complaints, I can tell you... we hate it.
The summary missed that one, but the commenters hit upon the real motivation almost immediately. The cable ISPs (not sure if the telcos care quite as much) care about bitorrent to the extent that "heavy users" cost more money to accommodate than they generate in monthly subscription fees; obviously the cable ISP would be better off financially if they could boot the "high cost/low value" customer and use the recovered bandwidth to sell a few more subscriptions to "good" customers (i.e. the ones who almost never use all of what they have paid for).
Note: The ISPs have had their revenge against the RIAA and Hollywood by setting up standard menus with prices for discovery that signal their displeasure. The prices are just high enough to discourage too much discovery from occurring while still being plausible (i.e. thousands of dollars per hour, but not millions). Attorneys may like to collect thousands of dollars per billable hour from their clients, but they really hate it when someone else charges them the same extortionate rates (turnabout is fair play after all) for their services.
Going after bittorrenters, and especially "bad" bittorrent from a copyright perspective, means only pissing off customers (which is apparently many ISPs' #1 priority)
From the standpoint of the ISP, there are "good" and "bad" customers. The "bad" customers are the ones who saturate their connections and use most or all of their available bandwidth most or all of the time. If a customer is a cost center rather than a profit center, an incentive is create to "encourage" that customer to take their "business" elsewhere (preferably to a competitor). Compare this to the classic rent control scenario where landlords are incentivized to "encourage" (aka harass) a money losing tenant into moving on. Of course, the ISP will want to keep these rearguard actions quiet so as to prevent bad press and uncomfortable questions from their "good" customers; the ones who pay for the high bandwidth but very seldom use it for extended periods at high levels.
Not only that but lawsuits and discovery cost money. If the ISP can more easily cough up the evidence when asked by formalizing the procedures, it will probably limit their liability and reduce their compliance costs.
Probably not much until IE supports it...
At least that's the theory. We'll see if he can make any difference in practice.
In practice, political operatives will maneuver behind the scenes to ensure that whatever information the commission receives is carefully selected, filtered and sanitized so that the "right" conclusions are reached. The stakes are so high in this case that it is incredibly naïve to think that there won't be skullduggery.
but does it tell us anything useful about medicine in the US?
No, but it does generate higher ratings, more viewers and more advertising dollars by appealing to viewers' emotions. Besides, the broadcast and cable "news" is mostly just for entertainment anymore here in the United States; what did you expect, real journalism? Maybe in some parallel reality, but not in this one.
starting with a massive markup on medicine which isn't seen elsewhere
It isn't seen elsewhere because most other countries have slapped price controls on prescription drugs. However, before you wax poetic about how wonderful those crafty Canadians and Europeans and their health care systems are, it might be interesting to consider where better than 90% of new drug research and development occurs. If you guessed 'the United States' then you were right. Other countries have been free riding off the benefits of US research and development in cutting edge drugs; financed by high prices for American consumers. It will be very interesting to see what happens when and if the United States also slaps priced controls on prescription drugs. If nobody is left to pay premium drug prices to support new research then these drugs simply won't be developed unless the governments of the world step in to make up the difference currently being funded by the generosity of US health care consumers. I doubt that the various socialized health care systems around the world would be successful at that; even if they tried.
Sorry Ars, back to the block list.
How about we geeks make a deal with Ars? We will agree to whitelist them on our Adblock plugins and in return they will agree to run TEXT ONLY ads clearly marked as such, ala Google sponsored links, that are relevant to the content actually being viewed. How about that Ars? Sounds reasonable doesn't it? No more flash and no more bullshit pop culture nonsense ads. Sounds fair to me.
Do you work in software development? Most of your tedious diatribe leads me to believe that the answer to that question is 'no'. Spend a few years working as a programmer and software designer and then come back to this subject when you know more; because right now, judging by what you have said, you don't know enough about programming or software design to even have an opinion.
He's Japanese, just give him some used electronics, a paper clip, and some used panties
All of which can be found or purchased at any train platform in Japan; they have vending machines there for things you didn't even think it was possible to vend.
What's wrong with booklet though?
Well, for starters it might be tough to get a trademark on the term "booklet". The term "booklet" is too generic and not distinctive enough that people would associate it with only the Microsoft product of the same name; iPad is a distinctive trademarked term whereas "booklet" is not.
The parent has made the most lucid, well though out and insightful distillation of effective project management that I have ever heard here on Slashdot. The problem, as the parent so eloquently puts it, is leadership or rather lack thereof in many organizations.
But then again I'm one of those filthy Commies who wants a single-payer healthcare system in the US, so feel free to disregard anything I say.
Well then, I trust you won't be too disappointed if some of us decide to take you up on your generous offer.
mod parent up please, this is exactly what it's about: budget and turf.
FlashBlock adds a bit more control.
I agree. For example, sometimes you want to load one particular flash object on a per instance basis while still blocking all of the rest. Flashblock allows one to pick and choose cafeteria-style which flash objects, even on an otherwise trusted site, will load and run and which ones will not. This is the sort of fine-grained and configurable control that geeks like us recognize and appreciate in our web browsing and computing experiences.
No, you don't get it. This is not a matter of taking sides, it is about answering a threat posed by our common enemies. Americans, Europeans, Russians and even the Chinese all have a shared interest in crushing the Islamists, despite whatever else we may or may not agree upon. It would best for all of us to pursue that goal without further delay.
In the non-fiction book Freakonomics, the author rather convincingly narrowed the single most important cause of the observed drop in violence to widespread availability of safe and legal abortions; which makes sense when you think about it. Children who were at high risk of growing up poor, abused and unwanted were more frequently aborted before birth beginning in the mid to late 1970s. As the 1990s rolled around and the children of that generation became ever more capable of committing violent crimes a funny thing happened; the crimes we expected them to commit were not committed. Safe and legal access to routine abortions had selected those with the greatest potential for violence out of our generation, hence the overall drop in the violent crime rate.
We live in a hyper-competitive world where the strong survive and the weak are defeated. If playing video games instills a more competitive or aggressive spirit then perhaps that is a good thing. We should be teaching our children about the real world where there are winners and losers and competition is the rule of the day instead of coddling them and giving everyone awards for "participation". Instead we are too worried about "self-esteem" and ruffling peoples' feathers whereas the Chinese and Indians have no such qualms. Indeed, many of our children today are going to lose out to aggressive, smart and hungry kids growing up tough in China and India if we sit on our hands and do nothing to change the situation.
Mossad has used two to four people in the past, even for much higher profile targets (we know this from the few botched missions)
Perhaps generally, but not always. For example, in Operation Spring of Youth there were probably at least one dozen (a few zodiac boats filled with special forces types; the exact number has never been publicly disclosed) shooters. I will grant you that Mossad was probably not as experienced back then, but it does serve as an early counter example to the small team argument.