The point is, nuclear subs are not a terror target. They're protected by the world's strongest security. An attack would probably fail to do any damage. If you had that firepower, and wanted to make a statement, you'd blow up the Houses of Parliament, or Buckingham Palace; not a military base out in the wilds of Scotland where news coverage will be restricted.
Having an interest is more than just wanting the information so you can strike back. If they have 4 nuclear subs, and all 4 are docked,
Google won't tell you that. It can be MONTHS behind. You need real-time. And they'd NEVER all be docked at the same time, same place, that would be a huge security risk. If you believe a nuclear deterrent is needed at all, you can't just take it offline for maintenance.
And anyway, nuclear subs are primarily a mobile nuclear missile platform, designed to dodge a preemptive nuclear strike (from the USSR, and really no one now is a threat on that scale). There are plenty of surface ships much more capable of supporting a conventional attack.
Propaganda is a weapon - ask Karl Rove
If you want propaganda, you can just make shit up. Worked for Adolf (and Karl Rowe, for that matter). You don't blow potentially useful military intel on a press release.
By "havng an interest in the information" I meant "having the capacity to do something with it". Not just "wanting" to strike back. I haven't heard of any Taliban or Serbian expeditionary forces invading the UK.
Sure, foreign governments probably already have assets on the ground keeping watch of the ebb and flow of traffic
Any foreign government with an interest in this information HAS IT'S OWN SURVEILLANCE SATELLITES. They are not going to use Google, which can be months out of date, when they can get real time images. Even Iran has the capacity to launch these now. And anyone else can just pay a small fee to one of several commercial satellite surveillance services, not all of which are beholden to the UK government.
Of course, TFA talks about "terrorists" targeting the subs with rockets. Right. Could terrorists get that kind of weapon into the UK and close to a nuclear weapons installation? I find it hard to believe. But there is an infinite number of soft targets they could hit with greater hope of doing damage and less risk.
The argument that "We don't host the files so we are not at fault" is extremely weak..... If we were to make all media free it would in effect kill the fish, in this case big media
The argument that TPB is responsible for "killing big media" is extremely weak. In fact, you just asserted it without any proof. And even assuming for a minute that it was true, so what? Is doing something that makes "big media" unhappy a crime? If a new technology comes along that makes your industry obsolete, that's sad, but you have no right to demand that those who sell the new technology should go to jail. Absurd? But that seems to be your argument. If you don't like this summary, please point out how it's wrong.
Certainly big media is not making the profits they could if they could veto any new technology that they weren't ready for. Fortunately, they don't have that power, try as they might.
What proportion of pirated movies are from in-theater cameras? I suspect it's minuscule, even if it seems to get a lot of attention. The video and audio quality must be way below DVDrip level, using any kind of equipment that can be "sneaked" into a theater.
I live in Hong Kong, and I often buy used DVDs at local flea markets. They're only about 50 cents each, so I pick up anything that looks vaguely interesting.
Some legit releases, lots of bootlegs. But if it's a cam bootleg, blurry picture, silhouettes passing in front of the image, rustling noise and conversation in the background, I press eject after a few seconds and bin it. I'll wait till a better version turns up.
Some have very nice packaging, boxes, etc, as good as the "real thing", but that's no guarantee of quality of the disc itself. So I would never pay much for them, especially early releases. Though you can find Oscar screeners in excellent quality before the offical launch.
Seriously, it's refreshing to know that at least when an article does get published on slashdot it will be newsworthy.
So newsworthy they ran it twice.
NASA Contest To Name ISS Module On February 26th, 2009 with 187 comments Solarch writes "NASA is holding a contest to name ISS Node 3. Being a Browncoat myself, I should hope that the choice of names would be obvious. As of the 7:30...
So the big news is now it's "Colbert" that's the joke, not "Serenity".
Next week they'll run it again, and the proposedname will be "Cowboy Neal".
Shouldn't it be an opt-in service rather than opt-out?
And what about all the orphan books, where the publisher is long out of business, the author has no contact address known, may have used a nom de plume, and may well be dead? There are many millions of books in this group, millions of authors, and "opt in" means these will never be included.
These obscure books are exactly those that make such a project valuable (and by "valuable" I mean contributing to the culture, not Google's stock price).
Sure google could probably make me more money through exposure that I might not otherwise have, but shouldn't that be my choice?
No. Once you publish a book, you've lost some control. People who obtain copies of the book have rights too. Even while it's under copyright, you cannot prevent people using the text under "fair comment". You can't stop people or libraries loaning out copies. And Google is not making the entire text available, that's only for books that have passed out of copyright, it is not competing with the sale of the original book.
I'm not so keen on the idea of google making a copy for the entire world to readily view a large chunk of it all.
It's a "small" chunk. That's important, it CANNOT replace the sale in any format of the entire book. And if you're so shy, don't publish.
You could for example get some sort of unique radar response from the plane, telling you the location of the helicopter
"Some sort of unique response"? Is there a magic "president aboard" radar beacon? That sounds like an excellent security measure. Anyway "program a sidewinder"? They're HEAT SEEKING missiles. They just look for anything with a hot engine. Presumably including AF1 or M1. Having "detailed plans" won't make these more likely to find or hit their target. And as for "air force 1. If you had the specs of it's fof tranceiver you could wait until it's crossing the atlantic"... Rubbish. And the exact frequecies used and such would certainly not be in the blueprints, but determined at a later date, and probably changed frequently. Not that I think it would be useful to anyone. If you can hit a fast-moving aircraft in mid-Atlantic surrounded by a fighter escort, it's a lot simpler and more reliable to hit the pres when he's on the ground, just target the White House.
So "they" have plans of the pres's chopper. So what? I'm sure I could get plans of his limo, and Airforce 1 (basically, a 747). And I could find detailed diagrams of the White House!
Just how does this make a real difference to the president's security? Who can get close enough to any presidential vehicle, residence, etc to make use of this?
then they have to make that decision on a choice by
choice basis.
Not really a big distinction. A publisher will simply print out a list of ALL their titles and send it to Amazon.
The question is, do the publishers really want to? So far, it's the Authors' Guild. And that's because spoken word rights have traditionally been negotiated separately. But these have been much, much smaller than the conventional book market, so no one has really cared about the terms, except for a few bestsellers. Now any book can be made available in audio format (though synthetic, not by a human speaker), so all those who never could have expected an audio edition think they deserve an extra cut. Maybe they do. But that should lead to a renegotiation of author's contracts with publishers, not silly DRM on devices.
This is rather like the Hollywood writers' strike last year. Studios (ie, publishers) had been creaming off income from DVD and Internet that had been unimagined in the original standard contracts. The writers had to strike to get a fair cut. However, book authors are too disorganised and don't have the same leverage. They should concentrate on getting all these new media specified in their contracts.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????
If you want a bootleg text file, there are much easier ways to get them. Look at the "ebooks" section of your favourite P2P forum.
And OCR is not an exact science. DIY and you have to do spellchecking and a lot of other corrections to get a clean text (eg, mixed up "1", "l", "I").
Microsoft being forced to bundle competing browsers with their product: ALSO BAD.
Maybe. But despite that being the headline, that IS NOT what is being mandated. From TFA:
"To this end, Microsoft will be obliged to design Windows in a way that allows users "to choose which competing web browser(s) instead of, or in addition to, Internet Explorer they want to install and which one they want to have as default".
So, the final result - Microsoft eventually just removes all browsers from Windows, including IE.
Though this is never, ever going to happen, it would be fine with me. Then the OEMs can install whatever browser they like when they sell the PC. Or none, as not every PC actually needs to be online.
Let the OEMs add what they want.
That is EXACTLY what is supposed to happen from this ruling. But sadly, Microsoft FUD seems to be effective, judging from posts like yours, in obscuring the facts.
Freedom of the people to choose a different browser is great. Somewhere, however, the line has to be drawn. Microsoft is clearly not limiting the ability of other browsers to work with Windows, and is not stopping anyone from downloading and installing a different browser. What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference?
That is EXACTLY the issue. Microsoft makes it impossible for other browser vendors to make deals with OEMS. MS will then either not sell to them, or increase the cost. When you have a monopoly, that's an abuse of power. It's not theoretical. That's how they killed Netscape (for 10 years at least).
Of course there are. It gives you a specific and presumably permanent location that Person or Company X may always be found at.
We have an effectively infinite number of "specific and presumably permanent locations" NOW. Adding an indefinite number of TLDs to that does not give you any advantage over the current "limited" number of TLDs. But I can think of a lot of confusion and malicious use that could be made of confusingly similar TLDs.
I don't see how it's that bad of a thing. Any company that worries about their brand is going to buy every related brand under the sun. So long as the approval process is very rigorous I don't have such a big problem with it.
If you had a brand name you wanted to protect and had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to register all these extra domain names you don't want and will never use, just to prevent squatters or spammers or phishers taking them, you might.
What GOOD does it do anyone, aside from the assholes selling them?
None of your examples require new TLDs. They can all easily, and virtually freely, be done within the current system, without any hassle or registration. Just create as many second, third, fourth... level names as you want on your.com (or.co.uk, etc, etc.). No cost. No profit to the registrars, sadly.
Don't be silly. There is a difference between a jpg (or whatever) and a link to that jpg. The link is not the file
And I might point out that looking at a jpeg of an act of, say, rape is not itself rape. But it seems to be treated as if it were. Viewing sites like the Smoking Gun and Rotten should be equivalent to murder by the same theory.
If you're truly interested in ad-supported media content, you should applaud Hulu's successes and be patient with its failures. Raise a stink if you want, but don't wish for its failure. Your perfect alternative will not crop up in its place.
I'm not interested in watching full TV shows as streams on my PC. Especailly not with ads. So I don't really care what Hulu is doing there. I have a TV set (and DVD player) for that. I'm talking about snippets, promos, and the like. Up till a few months ago, if a blog or news article included a video link, I could just click on it and watch it. Now, half the time, I'm locked out. There WERE and ARE plenty of alternatives, (Youtube and its clones, for instance) but Hulu is replacing them in many places, because of pressure or convenience, I don't know. So it's not a limited service pioneering a new format; it's a restrictive format replacing an existing freer one.
Law must be something other than the dictates of the toughest
Of course it is. It's what the legislature says it is, after going through its specifed procedures. And at the time, that legislature was the (British) parliament.
For us to feel that any rebellion is ever justified...
I give up. You are AGAIN talking about morality. Law is not morality.
So far, evidence shows that Hulu has made the right choices.
Yes, it's great for me to see blogs with embedded videos saying "FUCK OFF IF YOU'RE NOT AMERICAN". Great choice. (Since most of the blog posters are blissfully unaware that's what we, outside the chosen land, see.)
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, nuclear subs are not a terror target. They're protected by the world's strongest security. An attack would probably fail to do any damage. If you had that firepower, and wanted to make a statement, you'd blow up the Houses of Parliament, or Buckingham Palace; not a military base out in the wilds of Scotland where news coverage will be restricted.
Google "Commercial satellite imagery" for more.
Google won't tell you that. It can be MONTHS behind. You need real-time. And they'd NEVER all be docked at the same time, same place, that would be a huge security risk. If you believe a nuclear deterrent is needed at all, you can't just take it offline for maintenance.
And anyway, nuclear subs are primarily a mobile nuclear missile platform, designed to dodge a preemptive nuclear strike (from the USSR, and really no one now is a threat on that scale). There are plenty of surface ships much more capable of supporting a conventional attack.
Propaganda is a weapon - ask Karl Rove
If you want propaganda, you can just make shit up. Worked for Adolf (and Karl Rowe, for that matter). You don't blow potentially useful military intel on a press release.
By "havng an interest in the information" I meant "having the capacity to do something with it". Not just "wanting" to strike back. I haven't heard of any Taliban or Serbian expeditionary forces invading the UK.
Any foreign government with an interest in this information HAS IT'S OWN SURVEILLANCE SATELLITES. They are not going to use Google, which can be months out of date, when they can get real time images. Even Iran has the capacity to launch these now. And anyone else can just pay a small fee to one of several commercial satellite surveillance services, not all of which are beholden to the UK government.
Of course, TFA talks about "terrorists" targeting the subs with rockets. Right. Could terrorists get that kind of weapon into the UK and close to a nuclear weapons installation? I find it hard to believe. But there is an infinite number of soft targets they could hit with greater hope of doing damage and less risk.
The argument that TPB is responsible for "killing big media" is extremely weak. In fact, you just asserted it without any proof. And even assuming for a minute that it was true, so what? Is doing something that makes "big media" unhappy a crime? If a new technology comes along that makes your industry obsolete, that's sad, but you have no right to demand that those who sell the new technology should go to jail. Absurd? But that seems to be your argument. If you don't like this summary, please point out how it's wrong.
Certainly big media is not making the profits they could if they could veto any new technology that they weren't ready for. Fortunately, they don't have that power, try as they might.
I live in Hong Kong, and I often buy used DVDs at local flea markets. They're only about 50 cents each, so I pick up anything that looks vaguely interesting.
Some legit releases, lots of bootlegs. But if it's a cam bootleg, blurry picture, silhouettes passing in front of the image, rustling noise and conversation in the background, I press eject after a few seconds and bin it. I'll wait till a better version turns up.
Some have very nice packaging, boxes, etc, as good as the "real thing", but that's no guarantee of quality of the disc itself. So I would never pay much for them, especially early releases. Though you can find Oscar screeners in excellent quality before the offical launch.
Seriously, it's refreshing to know that at least when an article does get published on slashdot it will be newsworthy.
So newsworthy they ran it twice.
NASA Contest To Name ISS Module
On February 26th, 2009 with 187 comments
Solarch writes "NASA is holding a contest to name ISS Node 3. Being a Browncoat myself, I should hope that the choice of names would be obvious. As of the 7:30...
So the big news is now it's "Colbert" that's the joke, not "Serenity".
Next week they'll run it again, and the proposedname will be "Cowboy Neal".
And what about all the orphan books, where the publisher is long out of business, the author has no contact address known, may have used a nom de plume, and may well be dead? There are many millions of books in this group, millions of authors, and "opt in" means these will never be included.
These obscure books are exactly those that make such a project valuable (and by "valuable" I mean contributing to the culture, not Google's stock price).
Sure google could probably make me more money through exposure that I might not otherwise have, but shouldn't that be my choice?
No. Once you publish a book, you've lost some control. People who obtain copies of the book have rights too. Even while it's under copyright, you cannot prevent people using the text under "fair comment". You can't stop people or libraries loaning out copies. And Google is not making the entire text available, that's only for books that have passed out of copyright, it is not competing with the sale of the original book.
I'm not so keen on the idea of google making a copy for the entire world to readily view a large chunk of it all.
It's a "small" chunk. That's important, it CANNOT replace the sale in any format of the entire book. And if you're so shy, don't publish.
"Some sort of unique response"? Is there a magic "president aboard" radar beacon? That sounds like an excellent security measure. Anyway "program a sidewinder"? They're HEAT SEEKING missiles. They just look for anything with a hot engine. Presumably including AF1 or M1. Having "detailed plans" won't make these more likely to find or hit their target. And as for "air force 1. If you had the specs of it's fof tranceiver you could wait until it's crossing the atlantic"... Rubbish. And the exact frequecies used and such would certainly not be in the blueprints, but determined at a later date, and probably changed frequently. Not that I think it would be useful to anyone. If you can hit a fast-moving aircraft in mid-Atlantic surrounded by a fighter escort, it's a lot simpler and more reliable to hit the pres when he's on the ground, just target the White House.
Just how does this make a real difference to the president's security? Who can get close enough to any presidential vehicle, residence, etc to make use of this?
Not really a big distinction. A publisher will simply print out a list of ALL their titles and send it to Amazon.
The question is, do the publishers really want to? So far, it's the Authors' Guild. And that's because spoken word rights have traditionally been negotiated separately. But these have been much, much smaller than the conventional book market, so no one has really cared about the terms, except for a few bestsellers. Now any book can be made available in audio format (though synthetic, not by a human speaker), so all those who never could have expected an audio edition think they deserve an extra cut. Maybe they do. But that should lead to a renegotiation of author's contracts with publishers, not silly DRM on devices.
This is rather like the Hollywood writers' strike last year. Studios (ie, publishers) had been creaming off income from DVD and Internet that had been unimagined in the original standard contracts. The writers had to strike to get a fair cut. However, book authors are too disorganised and don't have the same leverage. They should concentrate on getting all these new media specified in their contracts.
If you want a bootleg text file, there are much easier ways to get them. Look at the "ebooks" section of your favourite P2P forum.
And OCR is not an exact science. DIY and you have to do spellchecking and a lot of other corrections to get a clean text (eg, mixed up "1", "l", "I").
Who's on first?
Maybe. But despite that being the headline, that IS NOT what is being mandated. From TFA:
"To this end, Microsoft will be obliged to design Windows in a way that allows users "to choose which competing web browser(s) instead of, or in addition to, Internet Explorer they want to install and which one they want to have as default".
So, the final result - Microsoft eventually just removes all browsers from Windows, including IE.
Though this is never, ever going to happen, it would be fine with me. Then the OEMs can install whatever browser they like when they sell the PC. Or none, as not every PC actually needs to be online.
Let the OEMs add what they want.
That is EXACTLY what is supposed to happen from this ruling. But sadly, Microsoft FUD seems to be effective, judging from posts like yours, in obscuring the facts.
That is EXACTLY the issue. Microsoft makes it impossible for other browser vendors to make deals with OEMS. MS will then either not sell to them, or increase the cost. When you have a monopoly, that's an abuse of power. It's not theoretical. That's how they killed Netscape (for 10 years at least).
No one is blaming the submitter. But the editors are American. Editors are supposed to "edit" the text that submitters give them.
We have an effectively infinite number of "specific and presumably permanent locations" NOW. Adding an indefinite number of TLDs to that does not give you any advantage over the current "limited" number of TLDs. But I can think of a lot of confusion and malicious use that could be made of confusingly similar TLDs.
If you had a brand name you wanted to protect and had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to register all these extra domain names you don't want and will never use, just to prevent squatters or spammers or phishers taking them, you might.
What GOOD does it do anyone, aside from the assholes selling them?
None of your examples require new TLDs. They can all easily, and virtually freely, be done within the current system, without any hassle or registration. Just create as many second, third, fourth... level names as you want on your .com (or .co.uk, etc, etc.). No cost. No profit to the registrars, sadly.
And I might point out that looking at a jpeg of an act of, say, rape is not itself rape. But it seems to be treated as if it were. Viewing sites like the Smoking Gun and Rotten should be equivalent to murder by the same theory.
You put words in my mouth and then argue with them. So just go ahead and make up the answers too. You don't need me at all.
I NEVER SAID THAT.
I'm not interested in watching full TV shows as streams on my PC. Especailly not with ads. So I don't really care what Hulu is doing there. I have a TV set (and DVD player) for that. I'm talking about snippets, promos, and the like. Up till a few months ago, if a blog or news article included a video link, I could just click on it and watch it. Now, half the time, I'm locked out. There WERE and ARE plenty of alternatives, (Youtube and its clones, for instance) but Hulu is replacing them in many places, because of pressure or convenience, I don't know. So it's not a limited service pioneering a new format; it's a restrictive format replacing an existing freer one.
Of course it is. It's what the legislature says it is, after going through its specifed procedures. And at the time, that legislature was the (British) parliament.
For us to feel that any rebellion is ever justified...
I give up. You are AGAIN talking about morality. Law is not morality.
Yes, it's great for me to see blogs with embedded videos saying "FUCK OFF IF YOU'RE NOT AMERICAN". Great choice. (Since most of the blog posters are blissfully unaware that's what we, outside the chosen land, see.)
Back to grotty old Youtube.