Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot,
No, there are SEVERAL prevailing sets of opinions on Slashdot, some violently opposed, and each group has enough members to mod up/down any given comment to +5 or -1. Amusiong to see some comments cycle between these as each group discovers them.
The neatest tool is probably Tawkerbot2, which is a custom bot that goes through recent changes and automatically reverts vandalism- it is remarkably accurate;
How can you trust a bot to automatically detect and revert vandalism?
Wait till you get a message that it has detected your "vandalism" and reverted it, and suggests you go play in the sandbox if you want to make random edits. Following the trail, I find it controlled by some high school student who obviously never read the article I was correcting before accusing me of being a vandal, who never responded to my qustions on just what was wrong with my edits. I considered giving up Wikipedia entirely after that.
Well, when should it ask me? How exactly should the asking work? Do I get asked about the file type for every single file I get from FTP?
You said "I have made a C source file vs. a Java...". So I assumed you were writing it, so the editor would ask you when you save and name the file.
And, the magic numbers at the start of a file don't always work
Yes; but nevertheless useful for dividing files into categories, especially various forms of data or media. I really don't don't think it's a big problem whether it thinks a file is C or shell script; you should be paying close attention to the contents of an unknown program file before you execute it.
>worst of all, hide some, or all, of them by default. Thus Anna-Kournikova.jpg.exe. The old Mac OS had it right, the filetype flags were not user-created or normally visible
What, you'd rather have just "Anna-Kournikova" with no way of telling what filetype it is until you open it?
The flags were hidden, but they manifested in the icon. You could also do a "get info" on any file if you wanted to know more. Of course, you can sucker people anyway, but it wasn't as easy as on Windows.
Not quite. I still remember the pain of trying to use standard formats like JPEG across multiple applications back in the system 6/7 days.
Mac OS had a separate file type, and file creator, code. So apps could share filetypes, but have distinct creators. But egomaniacal programmers often made their apps change the codes. That's when you needed things like FileTyper.
Re:While driving? Safety?
on
Talking iPods
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· Score: 1
the best interface would probably be a 5-button remote.
Now taht I think about it, I thought the whole point of the iPod was that you loaded it with a week's worth of songs and either a playlist or randomised it. You shouldn't need to press any controls from the beginning to end of your trip.
Personally, despite a few gig of MP3, when I;m working I mostly just turn on the radio and let a DJ sort it out.
the requirement the ".3" portion be satisfied, i.e., if you didn't give a ".3" extension, it wasn't valid.
the semantic mapping of the extension to filetype, WTF?
the implied (don't remember if it was canonical) semantic that no ".3" extension meant the file was a directory
Not true. I used names with no extension for my Wordstar files back in DOS days. Since that's what most of my files were, I made that the simplest. Directories usually had no extension, but you could have if you wanted (some programs did that for their private data).
Winows 9x and above though do enforce rules on extensions; but worst of all, hide some, or all, of them by default. Thus Anna-Kournikova.jpg.exe. The old Mac OS had it right, the filetype flags were not user-created or normally visible, though you could get tools to hack them if you wanted.
While driving? Safety?
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 1
A user will have difficulty navigating the interface in "eyes-busy" situations. Such activities include, for example, driving an automobile...
And does he use his tongue to move the click wheel? Meanwhile, what about the fucking DRIVING WHEEL and "NAVIGATING" THE CAR? Creating an interface that explicitly encourages use WHILE DRIVING is insane, and probably a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.
How is skipping the commercials any different than skipping the sex scenes via an automated service?
Because it's offered by a third party; who is publishing and distributing a new edition of the work, in defiance of copyright
cleanflicks.com Option 1 - Edited DVDR: $ 10.00
Choose this option if you already own an original production DVD of the title you have chosen. Simply choose the title you'd like to purchase, click "buy now", and we'll send you your own edited copy to go along with your original.
Actually, in this case, it's not an "automated service" at all but an entirely new disc; an illegal derivative work is certainly being created and sold. And I wonder how, if at all, they verify that custonmers actually own an "original production DVD". It all sounds very much like Napster and such (back in the day) saying their files were "backups" of the CDs you supposedly owned.
From what I understand from this ruling, it would be illegal for me to buy a book, tear out every other page, and sell it to someone else. That's a pretty close analogy, seeing as both my actions and Cleanflicks' third-party video cutting are not authorized by the copyright holder.
If Cleanflicks were using a laser to burn off the offending scenes from a DVD it might be analogous. But I think they're actually making their own copies. So no analogy.
You do often see a statement on the copyright page of a book that "this book may not, by way of trade, be sold in any cover other than that of the original publisher". I don't know if that actually has any legal weight; and I suspect it's to do with the practice of tearing the covers off unsold (paperback) books to save freight when returning unsold copies, as they'll just be pulped. Some used book shops have piles of such stripped books that escaped disposal.
Is that not what a lot of IT companies do, i.e. customize something for the end user?
Try selling your customised versions of Windows XP, with that pesky activation cut out; Internet Explorer replaced by Firefox, etc.; see how long you stay in business regardless of whether you bought a regular copy for each copy you sell.
This does not hurt the copyright holder, they still receive the full purchase price for all the movies that Cleanflix uses. Their revenue is not altered in any way by this editing.
It's not (just) about money. The "cleaned" movies are bootlegs, and unauthorised derivative works. You can't just reedit and publish your own version of someone else's books, movies, music, regardless of your motives. But getting back to money; if they allowed they could hardly forbid people making backups of their own DVDs, format shifting, etc; practices which they are busily trying to criminalise. You may well assume the studios are against it for the latter reason, supported by the directors and other creative people for the former. You may remember the outcries when Ted Turner started "colorising" black and white movies.
Prior to this, if you wanted backwards compatability, you needed a second lens.
Is a second lens really that expensive? Comapard to the presumably extra expense and complication of this method? I believe my (cheap) DVD burner has two lenses, to burn CDRs (I might be wrong about that).
And the GP is right - Jetfuel burns at around 550C on up to 800C if properly contained, so it can't melt steel,
A minute with Google finds lots of discussion of this, mostly by conspiracy nuts, (It was the Jews! Aliens! Mormons! Opus Dei! Dick Cheney!) some by real metallurgists, eg: The "Deep Mystery" of Melted Steel:
A eutectic compound is a mixture of two or more substances that melts at the lowest temperature of any mixture of its components. Blacksmiths took advantage of this property by welding over fires of sulfur-rich charcoal, which lowers the melting point of iron. In the World Trade Center fire, the presence of oxygen, sulfur and heat caused iron oxide and iron sulfide to form at the surface of structural steel members. This liquid slag corroded through intergranular channels into the body of the metal, causing severe erosion and a loss of structural integrity.
Yes, it's "mysterious". But it was a unique situation, no one had really crashed a jumbo into a skyscraper before. Also, I saw some documentaries on the WTC's construction; it was very carefully designed, to build it at all required they not have any unnecessary weight. Which would have been fine in the normal course of events.
i doubt SBC even screwed up, why would a DSL technician be deleting user files unless the guy saved his scripts in c/windows/drivers or something like that.
I have to wonder... There may have been a lot of orphaned files, broken downloads, cluttering up the desktop and he was just trying to tidy it up. Did the writer have a folder called "scripts", and the tech thought these were installer scripts, or something similar left over from a failed install, and helpfully cleaned them up? Though personally, I would have made a folder called "crap" and stuffed them all in there, out of sight rather than delete them (unless the writer later deleted the "crap"). Too bad we don't have the technician's testimony.
I only write short stories for the interweb, and even losing a day or two of work (much less a whole novel) would be devastating....He could redo it, maybe even come up with something better. But it would never be the same.
Scripts are always rewritten, often dozens of times, by several writers, committees, the producers, the director, the actors. What ends up being shot can be unrecognisable from the original script. Hollywood is full of stories of sometimes great writers who were lured there and were paid huge amounts to do a script treatment; then more to rewrite a dozen times; then it was handed over to a hack who completely rewrote it; then the financing fell through and it was shelved. If redoing a day's work would devastate you, don't even think about Hollywood.
I don't think it would have been material to the case even if he did have a written deal memo, if there wasn't financing to back it up.
If he'd actually been anywhere to close to making a deal, the backers would have seen, and have hard copies, of the scripts. Who is going to commit almost a million dollars to a script from an unknown writer without seeing it, just based on a one paragraph outline?
Anyway, if any of the scripts ahd been bought, they'd have gone through many, many rewrites before cameras rolled, one more wouldn't have made much difference.
It was not a "car analogy" per se - I was merely substituting one object for another to prove a point
My point was that it's not just an object you're buying. Every manufactired good has an intellectual property component -- design, research; but a game CD that's virtually the entire cost. For a car, it's mostly hardware.
In any case, analogies can't prove anything; they can only suggest. People start with "think of X as a sportscar..." and before you know it, you're not talking about X, but sportscars.
(And your car analogy is possibly the worst I have seen in a while...)
Thank you. I'm hoping to wipe them out by showing how absurd they are. Sadly, people never realise how absurd their own analogies are.
"I bought a new car and kids/brothers/whatever scratched it up. I believe I am entitled to have my car replaced."
Whenever I see a car analogy explaining a digital concept I reach for my gun. The point is that the cost of the physical media (of a CD or DVD) is trivial, a few cents. 90% at least of the money you pay is for the use of the information encoded on it. The cost of manufacturing a car is a large part of what you paid. But if you love car analogies, it's like they've made it illegal to paint your car; and have got selling touch up paint made illegal as well. So you can't mix up a pot and touch up the scratches yourself, you have to live with it or buy a new car.
If they succeed in lobbying the PC industry and others and get this hole blocked, all of a sudden a long-accepted practice, i.e., screen printing, becomes suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating.
Note what has has already happened for Adobe PDFs. If the author is paranoid enough, he can set the security level so you can't print, can't select text in the normal way, etc. Which is a pain whern you actually need to quote a few lines, or copy a string exactly. There are ways around it, of course, the print-screen discussed here for instance; and the notorious AEPBR to strip hte restrictions away, that got Dimitri Sklyarov in trouble, but the latter fails on newer versions.
Who would even consider doing that? You'd have carpal tunnel in no time
RTFA.
Such a screenshot function could then be automated to produce copies of HD movies both from Blu-ray Discs and from HD DVDs picture by picture. As c't calculated, the performance of current PC systems is sufficient for a clean recording using this procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there are SEVERAL prevailing sets of opinions on Slashdot, some violently opposed, and each group has enough members to mod up/down any given comment to +5 or -1. Amusiong to see some comments cycle between these as each group discovers them.
How can you trust a bot to automatically detect and revert vandalism?
Wait till you get a message that it has detected your "vandalism" and reverted it, and suggests you go play in the sandbox if you want to make random edits. Following the trail, I find it controlled by some high school student who obviously never read the article I was correcting before accusing me of being a vandal, who never responded to my qustions on just what was wrong with my edits. I considered giving up Wikipedia entirely after that.
You said "I have made a C source file vs. a Java...". So I assumed you were writing it, so the editor would ask you when you save and name the file.
And, the magic numbers at the start of a file don't always work
Yes; but nevertheless useful for dividing files into categories, especially various forms of data or media. I really don't don't think it's a big problem whether it thinks a file is C or shell script; you should be paying close attention to the contents of an unknown program file before you execute it.
What, you'd rather have just "Anna-Kournikova" with no way of telling what filetype it is until you open it?
The flags were hidden, but they manifested in the icon. You could also do a "get info" on any file if you wanted to know more. Of course, you can sucker people anyway, but it wasn't as easy as on Windows.
Text, surely?
The system doesn't have any easy way to identify that I have made a C source file vs. a Java source file vs. a python file
Well, it should ask you then. Of course, in Unix there are the "magic" characters at the begining of the file.
Mac OS had a separate file type, and file creator, code. So apps could share filetypes, but have distinct creators. But egomaniacal programmers often made their apps change the codes. That's when you needed things like FileTyper.
Now taht I think about it, I thought the whole point of the iPod was that you loaded it with a week's worth of songs and either a playlist or randomised it. You shouldn't need to press any controls from the beginning to end of your trip.
Personally, despite a few gig of MP3, when I;m working I mostly just turn on the radio and let a DJ sort it out.
Winows 9x and above though do enforce rules on extensions; but worst of all, hide some, or all, of them by default. Thus Anna-Kournikova.jpg.exe. The old Mac OS had it right, the filetype flags were not user-created or normally visible, though you could get tools to hack them if you wanted.
Because it's offered by a third party; who is publishing and distributing a new edition of the work, in defiance of copyright
Actually, in this case, it's not an "automated service" at all but an entirely new disc; an illegal derivative work is certainly being created and sold. And I wonder how, if at all, they verify that custonmers actually own an "original production DVD". It all sounds very much like Napster and such (back in the day) saying their files were "backups" of the CDs you supposedly owned.If Cleanflicks were using a laser to burn off the offending scenes from a DVD it might be analogous. But I think they're actually making their own copies. So no analogy.
You do often see a statement on the copyright page of a book that "this book may not, by way of trade, be sold in any cover other than that of the original publisher". I don't know if that actually has any legal weight; and I suspect it's to do with the practice of tearing the covers off unsold (paperback) books to save freight when returning unsold copies, as they'll just be pulped. Some used book shops have piles of such stripped books that escaped disposal.
Try selling your customised versions of Windows XP, with that pesky activation cut out; Internet Explorer replaced by Firefox, etc.; see how long you stay in business regardless of whether you bought a regular copy for each copy you sell.
It's not (just) about money. The "cleaned" movies are bootlegs, and unauthorised derivative works. You can't just reedit and publish your own version of someone else's books, movies, music, regardless of your motives. But getting back to money; if they allowed they could hardly forbid people making backups of their own DVDs, format shifting, etc; practices which they are busily trying to criminalise. You may well assume the studios are against it for the latter reason, supported by the directors and other creative people for the former. You may remember the outcries when Ted Turner started "colorising" black and white movies.
Is a second lens really that expensive? Comapard to the presumably extra expense and complication of this method? I believe my (cheap) DVD burner has two lenses, to burn CDRs (I might be wrong about that).
Try posting some "leftist" sentiments and you'll discover there are at least as many in the right-wing junta who will mod you down.
A minute with Google finds lots of discussion of this, mostly by conspiracy nuts, (It was the Jews! Aliens! Mormons! Opus Dei! Dick Cheney!) some by real metallurgists, eg: The "Deep Mystery" of Melted Steel:
Yes, it's "mysterious". But it was a unique situation, no one had really crashed a jumbo into a skyscraper before. Also, I saw some documentaries on the WTC's construction; it was very carefully designed, to build it at all required they not have any unnecessary weight. Which would have been fine in the normal course of events.I have to wonder... There may have been a lot of orphaned files, broken downloads, cluttering up the desktop and he was just trying to tidy it up. Did the writer have a folder called "scripts", and the tech thought these were installer scripts, or something similar left over from a failed install, and helpfully cleaned them up? Though personally, I would have made a folder called "crap" and stuffed them all in there, out of sight rather than delete them (unless the writer later deleted the "crap"). Too bad we don't have the technician's testimony.
Scripts are always rewritten, often dozens of times, by several writers, committees, the producers, the director, the actors. What ends up being shot can be unrecognisable from the original script. Hollywood is full of stories of sometimes great writers who were lured there and were paid huge amounts to do a script treatment; then more to rewrite a dozen times; then it was handed over to a hack who completely rewrote it; then the financing fell through and it was shelved. If redoing a day's work would devastate you, don't even think about Hollywood.
If he'd actually been anywhere to close to making a deal, the backers would have seen, and have hard copies, of the scripts. Who is going to commit almost a million dollars to a script from an unknown writer without seeing it, just based on a one paragraph outline?
Anyway, if any of the scripts ahd been bought, they'd have gone through many, many rewrites before cameras rolled, one more wouldn't have made much difference.
My point was that it's not just an object you're buying. Every manufactired good has an intellectual property component -- design, research; but a game CD that's virtually the entire cost. For a car, it's mostly hardware.
In any case, analogies can't prove anything; they can only suggest. People start with "think of X as a sportscar..." and before you know it, you're not talking about X, but sportscars.
(And your car analogy is possibly the worst I have seen in a while...)
Thank you. I'm hoping to wipe them out by showing how absurd they are. Sadly, people never realise how absurd their own analogies are.
Station wagons.
Whenever I see a car analogy explaining a digital concept I reach for my gun. The point is that the cost of the physical media (of a CD or DVD) is trivial, a few cents. 90% at least of the money you pay is for the use of the information encoded on it. The cost of manufacturing a car is a large part of what you paid. But if you love car analogies, it's like they've made it illegal to paint your car; and have got selling touch up paint made illegal as well. So you can't mix up a pot and touch up the scratches yourself, you have to live with it or buy a new car.
Note what has has already happened for Adobe PDFs. If the author is paranoid enough, he can set the security level so you can't print, can't select text in the normal way, etc. Which is a pain whern you actually need to quote a few lines, or copy a string exactly. There are ways around it, of course, the print-screen discussed here for instance; and the notorious AEPBR to strip hte restrictions away, that got Dimitri Sklyarov in trouble, but the latter fails on newer versions.
RTFA.