None of the above. If the cynic in me is right, it's actually worse than you think.
The proposed law would follow the heels of a more recent law that will be active on November 1st that blacklists web sites for the alleged purpose of "child welfare". Most of the businesses giving free wifi hotspots have already stated that they will use the government blacklist to filter the internet for kids (for all their patrons, not just kids), as a way to avoid checking their patron' ids and having to give each and every single one of their patrons a unique temporary password on a slip of paper (which seems to be the only legitimate and legal way to avoid checking ids if/once that second law would come into effect).
In other words, enforcement of this official government filter may have been the government's plan all along, and it won't affect just kids, it will probably affect everyone by default. And still now according to the article, it remains unclear whether the government won't try to using a similar argument for ISPs and cell phone carriers.
The majority of people that have owned a home computer don't really use it for much more than browsing the web, email, and viewing photos or videos.
I don't know. I still like to do email on a PC. The keyboard on my phone/tablet is not that great for every type of correspondence. And if I write emails on my Google TV, this means everyone in my household gets to read them. And my Chrome Box/Chrome Book are great for email, but Hulu keeps on pausing after each commercial which makes it useless for that purpose.
Either that, or version 0.0.1.0 could mean version 2 in binary, and in that case, that could help us foretell how usable the application will be for the average Joe-the-plumber on Facebook.
I thought the 'i-tunes' business model was all about building your own os and your own hardware platform, so you could have a large captive audience and shut out competitors.
In any case, I doubt that "paying less" is the argument they used to bring in their current publisher on-board. They probably sold it to them saying: "You guys could make a lot more money short-term wise, if you stopped offering your unlimited access subscriptions and switched to a metered approach. Since the researchers reading your articles are not even the ones who see the bill, that means they'll probably just keep on reading as if they still have an unlimited subscription -- thus inflating the bills for libraries to ten times the amount that they usually pay."
The WebTop used to be a $499 Firefox-driven accessory that you purchased on top of your (already very expensive) Photon/Atrix Android phone.
For $499, one would have expected a full laptop/netbook, or that it came with a free limited 2-year data plan (like you get with the Chromebook), but at that price point, the product made little sense. I actually know a couple of people that already owned Photon phones that could plug into such a device, but that were just not going to purchase a WebTop because of the high mark-up.
Now that the line has been cancelled, those existing Photon users will actually be able to purchase those WebTops at rock-bottom prices, which is actually nice for them. I doubt that many will be purchasing WebTops to hook up to their Raspberry Pis thought. The budget of the average Photon phone user is still going to be much higher than the budget of the average Raspberry Pi user.
I would have modded you up, but I have my doubts about your theory, so I'll take the moderation hit and respond instead.
The image file name suggests what exactly?
logo15_gtabin.png ??? It doesn't suggest anything to me, except that it's some type of logo that's placed on some kind of tab.
Even if the name Jack Thomson does appear within the metadata of the image, which I haven't checked, but assuming that's what you meant. I can indeed believe that such a name would appear there. Jack Thompson is indeed a very common name. Not only that, but if the person used cracked software to edit the picture, or a cracked OS underlying their image editing software, it's also very possible that they used the name of a person they didn't like when they first registered such software, or OS. For instance, I could easily see someone use the name George W. Bush to register some cracked software, or even use the name Barack Obama.
So hopefully, you were just venting, because I still don't think that banning laser pointers and licensing them out would solve the issue, and I still think that this kind of law would only backfire on society.
PS: I'm not sure why my parent post was modded down to zero. I guess someone took my sarcastic comment about killing birds as seriously I took your comment about banning/licensing laser pointers.
...and if nobody is willing to do that, then handheld lasers need to be outright banned for unlicensed individuals. This opinion is unpopular for slashdot, but shit really has gotten out of hand.
That's all we need, a new gun locker in every classroom to put away the laser pointers out of reach from children when not in use. And a massive anti-laser house-to-house search to find all the $5 laser pointers that the people will be hiding, or stockpiling, and reselling on the blackmarket, once this new law comes into effect.
How many aircrafts have actually been taking down by lasers?
Birds have taken down more aircrafts than lasers. May be, we should kill all birds too while we're at it.
$0. The same amount I've been paying directly to Craigslist.
And Craigslist does have ads, don't get me wrong. To list an apartment for rent, or to list a job opening on craigslist, you have to pay a non-trivial amount. But as users on Craigslist, we actually want those posts to be paid. Posting an apartment for rent, or posting a job, on there used to be free, but that meant those boards were flooded with posts from people who were not really serious about hiring anyone, or renting to anyone, but that just wanted to test out the market, or generate finders fees for themselves.
Also, note that Amazon (ad-Kindle excluded), Ebay, the Yellow Pages, Alibaba, could also be considered advertising web sites, but those advertisements, I actively seek them out, so I do not consider them as negatively as I consider other form of advertisements and blocking them would be a bug not a feature.
Ad agencies don't sit around dreaming of good intentions. Also, I feel bad for the employee sheep and temps that were made to do this (if you're reading this, and some of you probably are, because it's probably your job to gauge the reaction of what happened, know that no job is worth this kind of demeaning behavior. It's grand time that you find something else).
At least, if the flash mob had been a bunch of genuine volunteers, they would have had enough sense to stop before even starting, and at most just one person, the one idiot who came up with the idea, would have partaken in his one person flash mob.
...and with the Cable Companies being the majority providers of Internet Access
Cable companies may be the majority providers of internet access and they may even have a stranglehold on some markets where there are no other choices, but in their most lucrative areas, the most heavily populated metropolitan areas -- there are plenty of options.
So no, it's not going to be the end of internet video as we know it. For most of us, we'll be just fine. For the rest of you, you'll have forego internet video, or perhaps just move to a better location. It's just a trade-off decision. That's all. Internet video will survive.
"Mark Zuckerberg apparently instituted a program called Boot Camp in which engineers spend six-weeks learning every bit of Facebook's code."
Ah that's Zuckerberg's secret sauce apparently, plenty of overtime for six-weeks so that a new engineer can learn every bit of Facebook's code. This way, they can push the limits of computer science (or disregard them completely) and ignore the lessons from the Mythical Man Month.
I cringe to think that many business people will actually take BusinessWeeks' article seriously.
Interesting, the report specifies that user data is 1 of 3 types,
- Log data (user activity)
- Account data (Users emails, settings, etc)
- Third type is redacted.. Wonder what it is
If I had to take a guess, the third item would be:
$$$ value of user (Past purchases, Purchasing power, Number of years before user dies and becomes worthless, etc.)
Of course, Google wouldn't know for sure when you're going to die. It would just have a rough estimate (with a margin of error of + or - 2 hours).
We do, and the last I heard, the Internet was still slightly larger than Facebook.
With the internet, anybody can already participate online "socially" under whatever pseudonym they wish, but may be that's the problem -- the internet gives users too much freedom to be officially associated with the term "social networking" as we know it.
Our online identities and posts on the internet are too fragmented, they're not necessarily connected to our real-life identity, and by default they're not designed to easily be found by our "friends" or acquaintances (unless we actively and explicitly make them so each time).
Yes, there was one case I remember, but it wasn't some random take down. It was about a designer initiating a take down on a youtube video because she felt the movie producer/aborigin artist was still owing her money for her design work. The designer lost big in court, especially because the movie producer/artist could prove that he was receiving real income from his art pieces and her take down had a real provable effect on his loss of income at the time.
So when an employee does something great using the company's resources, the company gets the money.
His employer didn't really get the money in this case. If the employee had sold the equipment and then given all the profits to his employer, so that his employer could give him a raise or a promotion, then yes, you probably would have a point.
Or if the employer prevents you from investigating the case properly by blocking you every step of the way, then yes, then you sue the employer, you sue everybody who doesn't cooperate, this will then force people to turn on each other.
Personally in this case, I'd sue the girlfriend to try to recover from her, since she's the one who received most of the profits and the gifts from the stolen property (even if she didn't know it was stolen), but then I don't know how civil law would work in that case (assuming it can't be proven that she was an accomplice, if it can be proven that she was an accomplice, then this point would be moot anyway).
Get everybody a cheap mobile phone with a business plan or agree to pay $50/month if they use their own phone (most people will).
This is not a bad suggestion.
Just make sure the business owns the phone numbers at the very least. If somebody leaves for some reason, you don't want him/her to leave with the phone number that everybody has in their rolodex.
If they want to convince me that there is something to do this, show me a study in Brazil where there aren't very many blue eyed people and they drink a lot of coffee too.
Or conversely, they could compare the Scandinavian people who drink coffee with the Scandinavian people who do not drink coffee, as they actually have done this in this study. Not that this is perfect either, the Scandinavian people who actually do not drink coffee have already pre-self-selected themselves, so those people could be unusually attentive health-wise with the things they put in their body and it could be another factor that could affect their lack of Glaucoma precursors.
Compared with participants whose cumulatively updated total caffeine consumption was <125 mg/day, participants who consumed 500 mg/day had a trend toward increased risk of EG/EGS that was not statistically significant (RR = 1.43; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.98–2.08); P trend = 0.06).
If it's not statistically significant, then how can we take this seriously?
Can someone translate the next phrase for me?
Compared to abstainers, those who drank 3 cups of caffeinated coffee daily were at increased risk of EG/EGS (RR = 1.66; 95% CI, 1.09–2.54; P trend = 0.02).
Does this mean that compared to the abstainers of coffee, the results are indeed significant?? Can someone tell me what those numbers mean, and how they compare to the previous numbers.
Because in their conclusions, they seem to imply that they found something:
Conclusions. We observed a positive association between heavier coffee consumption with risk of EG/EGS in this large prospective study.
Does it really look that bad? It seems to me like the iPhone5 is snapping a larger portion of the sun than the other devices. And the clouds are different in each picture, so it's difficult to tell if the person taking the picture wasn't purposefully misframing it.
And no, I'm not an iPhone fan boy, my Android phone has a 12 MegaPixels back-facing camera, not a measly 8 MegaPixels. 8 MegaPixels is so 2009. I would never get caught with such a cheap phone.
Wait until you guys discover doodling... Doodling is my secret competitive advantage.
And unlike mind mapping, you don't need some fancy software to do it with, I doodle my ideas on paper napkins, pizza boxes, and unopened envelopes all the time.
Sandia Labs has the #82 supercomputer in the world, and use that computing power to simulate nuclear explosions and,IIRC, large meteor strikes (Tunguska I think). They probably have the horsepower to handle this.
That's only because they're running Android headless.
Ask them to run the emulators again with the emulator windows opened and the layouts fully inflated with decent-sized emulated screens, and the supercomputer that could simulate a million nuclear explosions in a few microseconds will be on its knees and non-responding after having spinned off just 2 or 3 instances.
The US is absurd: you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorbike, but you need one on a pedal bike ?!?
I can't speak for the rest of the US, but in California, you are indeed required to wear a helmet on a motorbike. It's been that way since the late 80s, or 90s. It's just that the Hollywood movie making industry does not like to depict Motorcyclists with helmets on.
And in California at least, helmets are not required for adult bicyclists, but they are required for teenagers and kids below 16 years of age. Of course, some University towns and some communities may have their own local ordinances regarding helmets for bicyclists. And if you are a parent, you may not be required to wear a helmet, but you may feel the need to wear one anyhow to set a good example for your kid(s).
And I can't speak about the example given in New York, I've never been there, but I would expect New York to be an extreme example when it comes bicycling compared to the rest of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to know the magnitude of the monitoring, so that I know the government is still part of "me and my country" instead of the evil people.
Please stop badmouthing the US. If your country's government is cooperating with us, there are probably good freedom-related reasons they're doing so.
None of the above. If the cynic in me is right, it's actually worse than you think.
The proposed law would follow the heels of a more recent law that will be active on November 1st that blacklists web sites for the alleged purpose of "child welfare". Most of the businesses giving free wifi hotspots have already stated that they will use the government blacklist to filter the internet for kids (for all their patrons, not just kids), as a way to avoid checking their patron' ids and having to give each and every single one of their patrons a unique temporary password on a slip of paper (which seems to be the only legitimate and legal way to avoid checking ids if/once that second law would come into effect).
In other words, enforcement of this official government filter may have been the government's plan all along, and it won't affect just kids, it will probably affect everyone by default. And still now according to the article, it remains unclear whether the government won't try to using a similar argument for ISPs and cell phone carriers.
The majority of people that have owned a home computer don't really use it for much more than browsing the web, email, and viewing photos or videos.
I don't know. I still like to do email on a PC. The keyboard on my phone/tablet is not that great for every type of correspondence. And if I write emails on my Google TV, this means everyone in my household gets to read them. And my Chrome Box/Chrome Book are great for email, but Hulu keeps on pausing after each commercial which makes it useless for that purpose.
Either that, or version 0.0.1.0 could mean version 2 in binary, and in that case, that could help us foretell how usable the application will be for the average Joe-the-plumber on Facebook.
I thought the 'i-tunes' business model was all about building your own os and your own hardware platform, so you could have a large captive audience and shut out competitors.
In any case, I doubt that "paying less" is the argument they used to bring in their current publisher on-board. They probably sold it to them saying: "You guys could make a lot more money short-term wise, if you stopped offering your unlimited access subscriptions and switched to a metered approach. Since the researchers reading your articles are not even the ones who see the bill, that means they'll probably just keep on reading as if they still have an unlimited subscription -- thus inflating the bills for libraries to ten times the amount that they usually pay."
The WebTop used to be a $499 Firefox-driven accessory that you purchased on top of your (already very expensive) Photon/Atrix Android phone.
For $499, one would have expected a full laptop/netbook, or that it came with a free limited 2-year data plan (like you get with the Chromebook), but at that price point, the product made little sense. I actually know a couple of people that already owned Photon phones that could plug into such a device, but that were just not going to purchase a WebTop because of the high mark-up.
Now that the line has been cancelled, those existing Photon users will actually be able to purchase those WebTops at rock-bottom prices, which is actually nice for them. I doubt that many will be purchasing WebTops to hook up to their Raspberry Pis thought. The budget of the average Photon phone user is still going to be much higher than the budget of the average Raspberry Pi user.
I would have modded you up, but I have my doubts about your theory, so I'll take the moderation hit and respond instead.
The image file name suggests what exactly?
logo15_gtabin.png ???
It doesn't suggest anything to me, except that it's some type of logo that's placed on some kind of tab.
Even if the name Jack Thomson does appear within the metadata of the image, which I haven't checked, but assuming that's what you meant. I can indeed believe that such a name would appear there. Jack Thompson is indeed a very common name. Not only that, but if the person used cracked software to edit the picture, or a cracked OS underlying their image editing software, it's also very possible that they used the name of a person they didn't like when they first registered such software, or OS. For instance, I could easily see someone use the name George W. Bush to register some cracked software, or even use the name Barack Obama.
Birds do not demonstrate mens rea.
So hopefully, you were just venting, because I still don't think that banning laser pointers and licensing them out would solve the issue, and I still think that this kind of law would only backfire on society.
PS: I'm not sure why my parent post was modded down to zero. I guess someone took my sarcastic comment about killing birds as seriously I took your comment about banning/licensing laser pointers.
...and if nobody is willing to do that, then handheld lasers need to be outright banned for unlicensed individuals. This opinion is unpopular for slashdot, but shit really has gotten out of hand.
That's all we need, a new gun locker in every classroom to put away the laser pointers out of reach from children when not in use. And a massive anti-laser house-to-house search to find all the $5 laser pointers that the people will be hiding, or stockpiling, and reselling on the blackmarket, once this new law comes into effect.
How many aircrafts have actually been taking down by lasers?
Birds have taken down more aircrafts than lasers. May be, we should kill all birds too while we're at it.
Didn't he "pay out" for files that brought a lot of traffic? With "pirated" content bringing the most traffic?
Suspicious behavior, yes.
An actual crime, no (at least not in the US at the time, or not unless they can actually get more evidence, than what is already publicly known).
how much have you paid to slashdot today?
$0. The same amount I've been paying directly to Craigslist.
And Craigslist does have ads, don't get me wrong. To list an apartment for rent, or to list a job opening on craigslist, you have to pay a non-trivial amount. But as users on Craigslist, we actually want those posts to be paid. Posting an apartment for rent, or posting a job, on there used to be free, but that meant those boards were flooded with posts from people who were not really serious about hiring anyone, or renting to anyone, but that just wanted to test out the market, or generate finders fees for themselves.
Also, note that Amazon (ad-Kindle excluded), Ebay, the Yellow Pages, Alibaba, could also be considered advertising web sites, but those advertisements, I actively seek them out, so I do not consider them as negatively as I consider other form of advertisements and blocking them would be a bug not a feature.
Best intentions! My ass.
Ad agencies don't sit around dreaming of good intentions. Also, I feel bad for the employee sheep and temps that were made to do this (if you're reading this, and some of you probably are, because it's probably your job to gauge the reaction of what happened, know that no job is worth this kind of demeaning behavior. It's grand time that you find something else).
At least, if the flash mob had been a bunch of genuine volunteers, they would have had enough sense to stop before even starting, and at most just one person, the one idiot who came up with the idea, would have partaken in his one person flash mob.
...and with the Cable Companies being the majority providers of Internet Access
Cable companies may be the majority providers of internet access and they may even have a stranglehold on some markets where there are no other choices, but in their most lucrative areas, the most heavily populated metropolitan areas -- there are plenty of options.
So no, it's not going to be the end of internet video as we know it. For most of us, we'll be just fine. For the rest of you, you'll have forego internet video, or perhaps just move to a better location. It's just a trade-off decision. That's all. Internet video will survive.
"Mark Zuckerberg apparently instituted a program called Boot Camp in which engineers spend six-weeks learning every bit of Facebook's code."
Ah that's Zuckerberg's secret sauce apparently, plenty of overtime for six-weeks so that a new engineer can learn every bit of Facebook's code. This way, they can push the limits of computer science (or disregard them completely) and ignore the lessons from the Mythical Man Month.
I cringe to think that many business people will actually take BusinessWeeks' article seriously.
Interesting, the report specifies that user data is 1 of 3 types,
- Log data (user activity)
- Account data (Users emails, settings, etc)
- Third type is redacted.. Wonder what it is
If I had to take a guess, the third item would be:
$$$ value of user (Past purchases, Purchasing power, Number of years before user dies and becomes worthless, etc.)
Of course, Google wouldn't know for sure when you're going to die. It would just have a rough estimate (with a margin of error of + or - 2 hours).
We do, and the last I heard, the Internet was still slightly larger than Facebook.
With the internet, anybody can already participate online "socially" under whatever pseudonym they wish, but may be that's the problem -- the internet gives users too much freedom to be officially associated with the term "social networking" as we know it.
Our online identities and posts on the internet are too fragmented, they're not necessarily connected to our real-life identity, and by default they're not designed to easily be found by our "friends" or acquaintances (unless we actively and explicitly make them so each time).
Yes, there was one case I remember, but it wasn't some random take down. It was about a designer initiating a take down on a youtube video because she felt the movie producer/aborigin artist was still owing her money for her design work. The designer lost big in court, especially because the movie producer/artist could prove that he was receiving real income from his art pieces and her take down had a real provable effect on his loss of income at the time.
So when an employee does something great using the company's resources, the company gets the money.
His employer didn't really get the money in this case. If the employee had sold the equipment and then given all the profits to his employer, so that his employer could give him a raise or a promotion, then yes, you probably would have a point.
Or if the employer prevents you from investigating the case properly by blocking you every step of the way, then yes, then you sue the employer, you sue everybody who doesn't cooperate, this will then force people to turn on each other.
Personally in this case, I'd sue the girlfriend to try to recover from her, since she's the one who received most of the profits and the gifts from the stolen property (even if she didn't know it was stolen), but then I don't know how civil law would work in that case (assuming it can't be proven that she was an accomplice, if it can be proven that she was an accomplice, then this point would be moot anyway).
Get everybody a cheap mobile phone with a business plan or agree to pay $50/month if they use their own phone (most people will).
This is not a bad suggestion.
Just make sure the business owns the phone numbers at the very least. If somebody leaves for some reason, you don't want him/her to leave with the phone number that everybody has in their rolodex.
If they want to convince me that there is something to do this, show me a study in Brazil where there aren't very many blue eyed people and they drink a lot of coffee too.
Or conversely, they could compare the Scandinavian people who drink coffee with the Scandinavian people who do not drink coffee, as they actually have done this in this study. Not that this is perfect either, the Scandinavian people who actually do not drink coffee have already pre-self-selected themselves, so those people could be unusually attentive health-wise with the things they put in their body and it could be another factor that could affect their lack of Glaucoma precursors.
From the abstract:
Compared with participants whose cumulatively updated total caffeine consumption was <125 mg/day, participants who consumed 500 mg/day had a trend toward increased risk of EG/EGS that was not statistically significant (RR = 1.43; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.98–2.08); P trend = 0.06).
If it's not statistically significant, then how can we take this seriously?
Can someone translate the next phrase for me?
Compared to abstainers, those who drank 3 cups of caffeinated coffee daily were at increased risk of EG/EGS (RR = 1.66; 95% CI, 1.09–2.54; P trend = 0.02).
Does this mean that compared to the abstainers of coffee, the results are indeed significant??
Can someone tell me what those numbers mean, and how they compare to the previous numbers.
Because in their conclusions, they seem to imply that they found something:
Conclusions. We observed a positive association between heavier coffee consumption with risk of EG/EGS in this large prospective study.
Does it really look that bad? It seems to me like the iPhone5 is snapping a larger portion of the sun than the other devices. And the clouds are different in each picture, so it's difficult to tell if the person taking the picture wasn't purposefully misframing it.
And no, I'm not an iPhone fan boy, my Android phone has a 12 MegaPixels back-facing camera, not a measly 8 MegaPixels. 8 MegaPixels is so 2009. I would never get caught with such a cheap phone.
Slashdot discovers mind maps. News at 11.
Wait until you guys discover doodling... Doodling is my secret competitive advantage.
And unlike mind mapping, you don't need some fancy software to do it with, I doodle my ideas on paper napkins, pizza boxes, and unopened envelopes all the time.
Sandia Labs has the #82 supercomputer in the world, and use that computing power to simulate nuclear explosions and ,IIRC, large meteor strikes (Tunguska I think). They probably have the horsepower to handle this.
That's only because they're running Android headless.
Ask them to run the emulators again with the emulator windows opened and the layouts fully inflated with decent-sized emulated screens, and the supercomputer that could simulate a million nuclear explosions in a few microseconds will be on its knees and non-responding after having spinned off just 2 or 3 instances.
The US is absurd: you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorbike, but you need one on a pedal bike ?!?
I can't speak for the rest of the US, but in California, you are indeed required to wear a helmet on a motorbike. It's been that way since the late 80s, or 90s. It's just that the Hollywood movie making industry does not like to depict Motorcyclists with helmets on.
And in California at least, helmets are not required for adult bicyclists, but they are required for teenagers and kids below 16 years of age. Of course, some University towns and some communities may have their own local ordinances regarding helmets for bicyclists. And if you are a parent, you may not be required to wear a helmet, but you may feel the need to wear one anyhow to set a good example for your kid(s).
And I can't speak about the example given in New York, I've never been there, but I would expect New York to be an extreme example when it comes bicycling compared to the rest of the United States.