> When broken down by age group, an unexpected trend emerges: teenagers are generally more likely to change their behavior than older Internet users.'"
When broken down by who's paying the bills, an obvious trend emerges: People who have to answer to Mom and Dad as to why nobody in the family can get their email anymore are generally more likely to change their behavior than people can just buy another throwaway account.
We got your Peaks of Eternal Light, right here!
on
New Radar Maps of Moon
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Boston! I hope you can see this, because I'm doing it as hard as I can!
Paul ain't due much respect. U2 has been on the forefront of anti-fair-use since the incident involving Negativland in 1991: The Letter U and the Numeral 2
The track parodies the whole top-40 industry by sampling the backbeat of "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and punches in bits of Casey Kasem going apeshit!. It's not just hilarious, it's one of the single most important cases in the history of sample-based music. Long story short, after a multiyear legal battle, Negativland won. By this time, most physical copies had been recalled and/or destroyed, but you can download the MP3 from their website.
In 1998, the last few chapters of the legal battle played out, also to Negativland's favor, and RIAA rewrote its rewrote its guidelines on sampling, fair use, and parody.
Which brings us back to our next top-40 hit - it's no surprise that U2 and RIAA are back in bed with each other, working ever diligently against any form of fair use: they still haven't found what they're looking for.
> I've got a huge DVD library, and it keeps growing. I'll happily pay premium prices for Criterion editions, I'm a hardcore movie geek who's always loved going to the cinema, sometimes even repeat fucking viewings for movies I really like.
If we could only find someone like Casey Kasem ranting like that off-mike, the war for fair use would be over, and we geeks would finally have won.
> The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent
"The polling firm found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver only 0.54% of the voter cast in the states capable of producing it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can yield around 24% of the votes cast in the states that produce it."
It's not about EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment), it's about PEOPI (Politicians Elected On Pork Invested).
> I once had to help a user because she had accidentally rearranged the icons on her desktop and didn't know how to do her job. She had meticulously documented her job as follows:
> >
Step 1: Click the third icon from the top in the second column [...]
That wasn't just any know-nothing. That was the team lead for your company's ISO 9000 programme!
He has no time to survive! Make his time! (Move Zune! For great injustice!)
Sorry. I had to.
Since we've all seen and we all know Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." quote, and Rand's "There's no way to rule innocent man..." quote, let's go for something a little closer to home in US jurisprudence.
"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."
-Former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson, April 1, 1940
Close, but those aren't the right laws. Here are laws.
MONKEYDOME!
0) Who run Microtown? STEVIE BALLMER RUN MICROTOWN!
1) Two competitors enter, ONE MONOPOLIST LEAVES!
2) Agree to the deal, or YOUR IP WE'LL STEAL!
3) Laissez-faire? FACE THE CHAIR!
> Yahoo said the company has been 'working with the families, and we're working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance.' Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide 'humanitarian relief' to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out."
Has one of your loved ones been shot for treason? Disappeared for thoughtcrime? Or just had one of those spur-of-the-moment fits of altruism and volunteered to donate any and all needed organs to help a wealthy Party official?
Well, Yahoo! is here to help! Yahoo! has set up a humanitarian relief fund that to fund the families' share of the burden. For every family member shot, Yahoo! will supply your family with two cents to cover the cost of the bullet, and for every organ harvested, Yahoo! will reimburse your family for the costs of the surgery.
On the Internet, they came first for Zimmerman and PGP, and I didn't speak up because nobody could figure out how to integrate it into an email client anyway;
And then they came for the warez d00dz, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a pirate;
And then they came for Napster, and I didn't speak up because I had.torrents;
And then they came for my traffic, and by that time Request timed out.
An optical splitter is like a piece of wire; in order to intercept any traffic off a fiber cable, you need to look at the information carried by all the photons.
What hasn't (and never will) been established is to what extent the boxen in the s00per-s33kr1t room dumped petabytes the domestic-origin-to-domestic-endpoint packets on the floor before logging the terabytes of foreign-to-domestic (or domestic-to-foreign) traffic to storage, or if No Such Agency is filling up yottabytes of storage somewhere.
Not that it matters; there is no "case". The precendent for anything illegal over the past decade has been that anything illegal and not plausibly deniable will be retroactively legalized, rendering the legal question moot.
But it's an interesting philosophical question, and for organizations and people who are subject to laws, it's also an interesting legal one: If a thousand gallons of water runs down the drain while you're drinking from a firehose, did you really drink it all?
My name is Stephen Ballmer I am the Chair Executive of William Gates of Redmond in the United State of America. I am contacting you with regard to transfer of a huge sum of laptops from the OLPC project. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that everything has been taken care off, and all will be well at the end of the day. I decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction.
> In episode 3 Echo downloads a music track and spends the rest of the episode evading the RIAA.
For bonus points, the track is "Still Alive", but because this is a Joss Whedon series, there's at least one invocation of Rule 34 with "Eliza Dushku, the Companion Cube, and the Portal Gun".
"How old is the Earth? How old is the Universe? Answer both questions with a number."
Jesus freaks can vote for the guy who says "6,000 years".
Scientists can vote for the guy who says "4.5 billion years, 13.7 billion years, respectively, give or take a few hundred million"
And both the Jesus freaks and the scientists can agree on one thing: that any candidate who answers "they're both the same age, 4.5 billion years", or "both the same age, 13.7 billion years", or who splutters out something on the order of "millions" of years was so ignorant as to be wrong by at least three orders of magnitude.
From TFA: > Compared to the same months in 2006, hourly wages for techies in 2007 rose 6 percent in July, 4.64 percent in August, and 5.79 percent in September.
Compared to the value of the US dollar against every major currency in 2006, hourly wages for US-based techies are still down 5-10% year over year.
> I am a consumer and I am not screwed in the slightest.
...yet.
But, I didn't try to screw Valve by buying a copy sold for cheap through another distribution channel. I like Steam and would like it to stick around.
I'd like Valve to stick around -- they make great games. But Steam is a deal-breaker for me. To the point that I'd pay more for a retail box without Steam than one with it, if that's what it takes to make sure that Valve gets its $XX per sale.
Speaking of sticking around, it seems we're also forgetting about what happened to "customers" of Google Video. When Valve goes away (either by business failure or, more likely, by merger/acquisition), will we be able to install (or even continue playing) "their" games?
Companies don't live forever, and the problem is that "when they're dying, the DRM will be still alive."
Goes back to my original point: Sure, HL2 is Valve's property in a way in which Star Wars is the property of Lucasarts, but not MPAA. So MPAA's a middleman, and Valve isn't, and so the parallels to region-coded DVDs doesn't apply... wait, wasn't part of the "good part" of Steam the fact that third-party developers could distribute through Steam? Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Valve acting as the middleman? (Disclaimer: Doesn't apply if Valve isn't collecting royalties. It's been a long time since I looked at the terms under which third party developers could distribute via Steam.)
But even ignoring the region-coding parallel, it doesn't explain the double standard on Microsoft's (WPA/WGA) DRM schemes. Microsoft certainly isn't acting as a middleman in the WPA/WGA scheme. They're doing the exact same thing as Valve is, and they're vilified for it. What makes Valve so special?
I'm not defending Microsoft here - I'm all for such vilification. I just don't get why (other than the fact that, unlike Microsoft's, Valve's products really are delicious and moist!:) Valve gets a pass for doing things for which we roundly condemn Microsoft, Adobe, and all the other "we control the content, you run our content at the pleasure of our DRM scheme, and yes, we can pull the plug on you at any moment."
Ah, the Steam/Valve Reality Distortion Field rears its head again.
It doesn't matter how evil the DRM, when Valve does it, it's OK!
More than a decade after MPAA invented region-coded DVDs explicitly to protect deals with distributors, it's still an affront to us. But when Valve does it, hey, it's "just something they put something in to protect deals with distributors".
Product activation and phone-homeware is just as bad an idea when it's called "Steam" as when it's called "Windows Genuine Advantage".
Cozy deals to fuck over the consumers in favor of artificial segregation of distribution channels are just as defective by design whether they're called "Steam" as when they were called "Region-coded DVDs".
The Steam may be delicious and moist, but it's still a lie.
Steam is no triumph.
I'm making a note here - EPIC FAIL.
It's hard to overstate dissatisfaction...
Valve's DRM scheme,
It does what it must, because it can.
For the good of none of us, (except the ones who wear suits.)
But there's no use crying over software that breaks
You just keep on paying 'till you run out of cake
And the damage gets done, and the DRM's won
For the people who are selling lies.
> CmdrTaco's in the basement mixing up the medicine,
>KDawson's on the Pavement, posting about the government.
>CowboyNeal's in the trench coat, poll out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, likes his job at Slashdot.
Look out kid, it's somethin' you did.
God knows when, but we're filkin' it again.
You better page down the thread a ways, linkin' to a new Friend,
The link to the Goatse site, in the big pen
He's eleven inches 'round, you only got ten.
Natalie's big tits, naked, hot grits
Talkin' that CALEA puttin' plants in the bed but
The net's tapped anyway, Natalie's right, many say
They bust Bush in early May, orders from the NSA
You must be new here, kid, don't matter what you did,
Mod up and down the Firehose, eatin' lotsa No-Doz,
Better stay away from those that decrypt with a rubberhose,
Make a clean post, watch the plainclothes,
You don't need mod points to know which way the wind blows.
Get sick, get well, hang around a inkwell,
Ring bell, hard to tell if anything is goin' to sell,
Troll hard, IP barred, get back, post Braille
Chroot-jailed, jump bail, postin' pics captioned "FAIL".
Look out kid, you're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters, six-digit users hangin' around the theaters,
GLaDOS's chortle, make another Portal,
Don't follow leaders, watch the karma meters.
Youtubes, pwn n00bs, post b00bs, series of tubes,
Ain't fair, thow chairs, Al Gore's pig and man and bear,
Copy files, not abuse, fair use, don't steal, don't lift
Ten years of workin' and I'm postin' from my day shift
Look out kid, at -1 it's all hid,
Better jump down a manhole, Super Mario's Candle,
Don't wear sandals, post funny 'bout the scandals,
Gum's chewin' bums, in Soviet Union,
And the server's down 'cause it's outa file handles.
> With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft has unleashed something quite new on the Web -- the "C" fonts; Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.'
Furthermore, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" shall heretofore be referred to as "Collar, Consolidate, and Choke."
> Considering that we live in a country where electronic records are considered "documents," I don't think anyone can actually claim that internet communications are not protected by the 4th amendment. Alas, it falls on deaf ears.
Alas, if only that were so.
In Sov^H^H^HPost-9/11 America, it falls on listening ears.
"If AT&T has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear!"
What's the over/under on cliches from tired totalitarian regimes for this session of testimony? I've got $10 riding in today's "Totalitarian Bingo" game and I still need a "Papers Please", "(n, canonically Five)-Year Plan" and a "Little (colored, canonically Red) Book" to win.
> "In a perfect world, spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship."
Hey, if the spammer didn't want his ass distended to Goatse-like proportions by a 300-lb ex-con nicknamed "Coke can", he should have opted out.
And we're talking about the Direct Marketing Association's definition of "opt-out", namely "of course he has to opt-out separately for every pelvic thrust, otherwise there's a prior PHITA relationship..."
> Elder said service leaders will stage fake threats to practice using the cyber sidearm. Service members will receive points when they use the tool appropriately...
Welcome to Slashdot, Lt. General! Around here we call that "Friday night."
Slashdot Mirror
When broken down by who's paying the bills, an obvious trend emerges: People who have to answer to Mom and Dad as to why nobody in the family can get their email anymore are generally more likely to change their behavior than people can just buy another throwaway account.
Boston! I hope you can see this, because I'm doing it as hard as I can!
Paul ain't due much respect. U2 has been on the forefront of anti-fair-use since the incident involving Negativland in 1991: The Letter U and the Numeral 2
The track parodies the whole top-40 industry by sampling the backbeat of "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and punches in bits of Casey Kasem going apeshit!. It's not just hilarious, it's one of the single most important cases in the history of sample-based music. Long story short, after a multiyear legal battle, Negativland won. By this time, most physical copies had been recalled and/or destroyed, but you can download the MP3 from their website.
In 1998, the last few chapters of the legal battle played out, also to Negativland's favor, and RIAA rewrote its rewrote its guidelines on sampling, fair use, and parody.
Which brings us back to our next top-40 hit - it's no surprise that U2 and RIAA are back in bed with each other, working ever diligently against any form of fair use: they still haven't found what they're looking for.
> I've got a huge DVD library, and it keeps growing. I'll happily pay premium prices for Criterion editions, I'm a hardcore movie geek who's always loved going to the cinema, sometimes even repeat fucking viewings for movies I really like.
If we could only find someone like Casey Kasem ranting like that off-mike, the war for fair use would be over, and we geeks would finally have won.
"The polling firm found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver only 0.54% of the voter cast in the states capable of producing it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can yield around 24% of the votes cast in the states that produce it."
It's not about EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment), it's about PEOPI (Politicians Elected On Pork Invested).
>
> Step 1: Click the third icon from the top in the second column [...]
That wasn't just any know-nothing. That was the team lead for your company's ISO 9000 programme!
He has no time to survive! Make his time! (Move Zune! For great injustice!)
Sorry. I had to.
Since we've all seen and we all know Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." quote, and Rand's "There's no way to rule innocent man..." quote, let's go for something a little closer to home in US jurisprudence.
Unfortunately, it wasn't an April Fool's joke.
Close, but those aren't the right laws. Here are laws.
MONKEYDOME!
0) Who run Microtown? STEVIE BALLMER RUN MICROTOWN!
1) Two competitors enter, ONE MONOPOLIST LEAVES!
2) Agree to the deal, or YOUR IP WE'LL STEAL!
3) Laissez-faire? FACE THE CHAIR!
A statistic that is neither a lie nor a damn lie.
They appear very sporadically. (For values of "sporadically" approaching epsilon, at least 19 times out of 20)
Has one of your loved ones been shot for treason? Disappeared for thoughtcrime? Or just had one of those spur-of-the-moment fits of altruism and volunteered to donate any and all needed organs to help a wealthy Party official?
Well, Yahoo! is here to help! Yahoo! has set up a humanitarian relief fund that to fund the families' share of the burden. For every family member shot, Yahoo! will supply your family with two cents to cover the cost of the bullet, and for every organ harvested, Yahoo! will reimburse your family for the costs of the surgery.
It's all in this Little Red "Y". Yahoooooooooo!
Silence, Pinky, or I shall have to hurt you.
On the Internet, they came first for Zimmerman and PGP, and I didn't speak up because nobody could figure out how to integrate it into an email client anyway; .torrents;
And then they came for the warez d00dz, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a pirate;
And then they came for Napster, and I didn't speak up because I had
And then they came for my traffic, and by that time Request timed out.
An optical splitter is like a piece of wire; in order to intercept any traffic off a fiber cable, you need to look at the information carried by all the photons.
What hasn't (and never will) been established is to what extent the boxen in the s00per-s33kr1t room dumped petabytes the domestic-origin-to-domestic-endpoint packets on the floor before logging the terabytes of foreign-to-domestic (or domestic-to-foreign) traffic to storage, or if No Such Agency is filling up yottabytes of storage somewhere.
Not that it matters; there is no "case". The precendent for anything illegal over the past decade has been that anything illegal and not plausibly deniable will be retroactively legalized, rendering the legal question moot.
But it's an interesting philosophical question, and for organizations and people who are subject to laws, it's also an interesting legal one: If a thousand gallons of water runs down the drain while you're drinking from a firehose, did you really drink it all?
My name is Stephen Ballmer I am the Chair Executive of William Gates of Redmond in the United State of America. I am contacting you with regard to transfer of a huge sum of laptops from the OLPC project. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that everything has been taken care off, and all will be well at the end of the day. I decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction.
For bonus points, the track is "Still Alive", but because this is a Joss Whedon series, there's at least one invocation of Rule 34 with "Eliza Dushku, the Companion Cube, and the Portal Gun".
"How old is the Earth? How old is the Universe? Answer both questions with a number."
Jesus freaks can vote for the guy who says "6,000 years".
Scientists can vote for the guy who says "4.5 billion years, 13.7 billion years, respectively, give or take a few hundred million"
And both the Jesus freaks and the scientists can agree on one thing: that any candidate who answers "they're both the same age, 4.5 billion years", or "both the same age, 13.7 billion years", or who splutters out something on the order of "millions" of years was so ignorant as to be wrong by at least three orders of magnitude.
> Compared to the same months in 2006, hourly wages for techies in 2007 rose 6 percent in July, 4.64 percent in August, and 5.79 percent in September.
Compared to the value of the US dollar against every major currency in 2006, hourly wages for US-based techies are still down 5-10% year over year.
But, I didn't try to screw Valve by buying a copy sold for cheap through another distribution channel. I like Steam and would like it to stick around.
I'd like Valve to stick around -- they make great games. But Steam is a deal-breaker for me. To the point that I'd pay more for a retail box without Steam than one with it, if that's what it takes to make sure that Valve gets its $XX per sale.
Speaking of sticking around, it seems we're also forgetting about what happened to "customers" of Google Video. When Valve goes away (either by business failure or, more likely, by merger/acquisition), will we be able to install (or even continue playing) "their" games?
Companies don't live forever, and the problem is that "when they're dying, the DRM will be still alive."
Goes back to my original point: Sure, HL2 is Valve's property in a way in which Star Wars is the property of Lucasarts, but not MPAA. So MPAA's a middleman, and Valve isn't, and so the parallels to region-coded DVDs doesn't apply... wait, wasn't part of the "good part" of Steam the fact that third-party developers could distribute through Steam? Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Valve acting as the middleman? (Disclaimer: Doesn't apply if Valve isn't collecting royalties. It's been a long time since I looked at the terms under which third party developers could distribute via Steam.)
But even ignoring the region-coding parallel, it doesn't explain the double standard on Microsoft's (WPA/WGA) DRM schemes. Microsoft certainly isn't acting as a middleman in the WPA/WGA scheme. They're doing the exact same thing as Valve is, and they're vilified for it. What makes Valve so special?
I'm not defending Microsoft here - I'm all for such vilification. I just don't get why (other than the fact that, unlike Microsoft's, Valve's products really are delicious and moist! :) Valve gets a pass for doing things for which we roundly condemn Microsoft, Adobe, and all the other "we control the content, you run our content at the pleasure of our DRM scheme, and yes, we can pull the plug on you at any moment."
It doesn't matter how evil the DRM, when Valve does it, it's OK!
More than a decade after MPAA invented region-coded DVDs explicitly to protect deals with distributors, it's still an affront to us. But when Valve does it, hey, it's "just something they put something in to protect deals with distributors".
Product activation and phone-homeware is just as bad an idea when it's called "Steam" as when it's called "Windows Genuine Advantage".
Cozy deals to fuck over the consumers in favor of artificial segregation of distribution channels are just as defective by design whether they're called "Steam" as when they were called "Region-coded DVDs".
The Steam may be delicious and moist, but it's still a lie.
Steam is no triumph.
I'm making a note here - EPIC FAIL.
It's hard to overstate dissatisfaction...
Valve's DRM scheme,
It does what it must, because it can.
For the good of none of us, (except the ones who wear suits.)
But there's no use crying over software that breaks
You just keep on paying 'till you run out of cake
And the damage gets done, and the DRM's won
For the people who are selling lies.
> CmdrTaco's in the basement mixing up the medicine,
>KDawson's on the Pavement, posting about the government.
>CowboyNeal's in the trench coat, poll out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, likes his job at Slashdot.
Look out kid, it's somethin' you did.
God knows when, but we're filkin' it again.
You better page down the thread a ways, linkin' to a new Friend,
The link to the Goatse site, in the big pen
He's eleven inches 'round, you only got ten.
Natalie's big tits, naked, hot grits
Talkin' that CALEA puttin' plants in the bed but
The net's tapped anyway, Natalie's right, many say
They bust Bush in early May, orders from the NSA
You must be new here, kid, don't matter what you did,
Mod up and down the Firehose, eatin' lotsa No-Doz,
Better stay away from those that decrypt with a rubberhose,
Make a clean post, watch the plainclothes,
You don't need mod points to know which way the wind blows.
Get sick, get well, hang around a inkwell,
Ring bell, hard to tell if anything is goin' to sell,
Troll hard, IP barred, get back, post Braille
Chroot-jailed, jump bail, postin' pics captioned "FAIL".
Look out kid, you're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters, six-digit users hangin' around the theaters,
GLaDOS's chortle, make another Portal,
Don't follow leaders, watch the karma meters.
Youtubes, pwn n00bs, post b00bs, series of tubes,
Ain't fair, thow chairs, Al Gore's pig and man and bear,
Copy files, not abuse, fair use, don't steal, don't lift
Ten years of workin' and I'm postin' from my day shift
Look out kid, at -1 it's all hid,
Better jump down a manhole, Super Mario's Candle,
Don't wear sandals, post funny 'bout the scandals,
Gum's chewin' bums, in Soviet Union,
And the server's down 'cause it's outa file handles.
Furthermore, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" shall heretofore be referred to as "Collar, Consolidate, and Choke."
Alas, if only that were so.
In Sov^H^H^HPost-9/11 America, it falls on listening ears.
"If AT&T has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear!"
What's the over/under on cliches from tired totalitarian regimes for this session of testimony? I've got $10 riding in today's "Totalitarian Bingo" game and I still need a "Papers Please", "(n, canonically Five)-Year Plan" and a "Little (colored, canonically Red) Book" to win.
Hey, if the spammer didn't want his ass distended to Goatse-like proportions by a 300-lb ex-con nicknamed "Coke can", he should have opted out.
And we're talking about the Direct Marketing Association's definition of "opt-out", namely "of course he has to opt-out separately for every pelvic thrust, otherwise there's a prior PHITA relationship..."
Welcome to Slashdot, Lt. General! Around here we call that "Friday night."
(Aight, he puts on his robe and cyber sidearm...)