Maybe, JUST maybe, Valve DOES NOT WANT TO BE NAILED DOWN TO A SPEC FOR HALF A DECADE?
If you are a company that pushes the edge, being stuck on the same hardware for more then half a decade would have to suck. Perhaps Valve is trying to pull what Google did with Chrome, accelerate console development. Sure, you can buy a hopelessly obsolete Xbox or PS4 OR you can buy a Steam Box for the same amount AND get cheaper games that are made with this years tech not last decades. The current consoles are REALLY far behind.
And the current consoles were NOT cheap, you could buy a highly respectable PC for the price of the PS3 at launch and that PC spanked it on EVERY front as evidenced by console games being released on the PC with high resolution texture packs. The new Wii U has mediocre tablet as it gadget but for its price you can buy a perfectly decent mid-range gaming PC. Sure, there are gamers with 1000 dollar videocards but these are hardly needed, a 100 dollar card will already give you performance well above that of a console.
Chrome force MS to get off its ass and also helped speed up Firefox, lets see what Valve can do for console development. And all those who prefer the same gaming hardware for ten years (but replace their phone every year)... they can keep their old shit with memory less then a cheap feature phone.
We know Apple could sell the iPhone cheaper because Apple makes massive profits. Does Lego make massive profits? No, in fact before it re-invented itself, it was like Apple in serious trouble of going the way of Meccano. Which still exists but only as a perversion of its former self.
People often seem to think all there is to a product is its physical production. THAT is easy, although Lego is a bit more accurate in its production then most plastic factories, it can be easily replicated to produce a machine to produce simple bricks. BUT that is NOT Lego. Lego is ALL the models, which in box form have often to be in stores for a year or more before hopefully being sold, constantly having to keep up with trends like hot movies because the OLD business model of outdated non-current models wasn't working. And developing Mindstorms wouldn't have been cheap either.
Lego suffers from the high cost of mass production of an INSANE number of parts that all have to be combined, they can't just let one machine run indefinite pushing out one type of brick, it is lots of different pieces in lots of colors that all have to come together in production runs from which only tiny amounts are sent out and the rest has to be stored.
It is a logistacal nightmare and quite different from how other plastic producers like say plastic bottles work, most plastic bottles arrive at the bottling plant in granular form, one machine makes a test tube and another blows it up JUST before it is filled in an constant single item production run. THAT is cheap. Lego's method is not. In fact, lego's method of selling LOTS and LOTS of different models is EXACTLY what Apple is NOT doing. Even Samsung isn't. If Lego was a phone maker, there would be 2000 current models, ALL of them with instructions how alter them completely, combine them and turn them into complex robots.
That is why Lego is expensive. Look at their profits, there is no excessive fat there. You can make cheap clones of a few boxes of lego easily but the entire product range? No. Proof? NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT! Oh you can buy 1 or 2 lego like models from China but NOT the constantly updated catalog lego catalog. You PAY for that.
Don't forget the intro, the teaser, the coming next, the recap EVERY 5 minutes so that even an American can keep up... well... the bright ones... I give it about 5 years and the TV will be just a static picture with one word repeated "BUY BUY BUY".
My god, this attitude is amazing, what primitive part of the world did you grow up in? Most normal employers realize that work and private live are not so easily seperated and simply allow the two to intertwine. If I ask someone to stay late because of deadlines, can I then deny them time to make calls during office hours to arrange private things? Hell, this must be an American thing. Do you also object to people using the company printer?
Of course, normal people realize there is a line, you can print out a form, your CV is a bit touchy and you do NOT print out a thousand copies of your novel but come on!
If your tried that master slave attitude in Europe, you would find yourself soon with no employees left.
Unless there is a VERY real need for security, everyone carries a mobile phone with them in Europe. The idea you shouldn't answer a personal call during office hours is just so 19th century. Come on, join us in the future, we got cookies!
Ten to one this gti_guy doesn't have a job, lives in a trailer on government assistance and whines about all those leeches living of the state.
People good enough at their job to have one know they are valuable and companies are willing to keep them happy.
So tell me, what is it like living in the 18th century? Ten to one odds you are going to get killed in a work related shooting and the jury will upon learning about you, release the shooter on grounds of justifiable homicide.
Meanwhile, in the modern world, work and private life are bound to intermingle and personal calls are perfectly acceptable if people do their jobs properly.
Your a nutter, this type of stuff is introduced on high end cars END it sells very well. It is just the modern version of the parking sensor or rear view camera.
You won't find this in riser cars but you WILL find it in high end mercs and north european cars.
Google made android NOT to lock people into Android but to avoid being locked out of iOS and Windows Phone and Symbian and Blackberry. Okay, so the last three ain't a threat anymore (or in one case, ever) but we saw what Apple tried to pull, lock Google Maps out and force people to use Apple Maps. Which was an amazing success story for Apple... well... this time. But next time?
Google developed Chrome to push web browser development because they didn't want to wait for IE or Firefox to get off their lazy ass. Especially IE, they made a capable fast browser designed to deal with any futuristic Google wishes to develop and the rest of the browsers either had to catch up OR be replaced.
Google KNOWS that in order to sell petrol, you need to sell cars. Well okay, that in order to sell inkjet ink, you need to sell printers. Google Maps could never have run well enough to replace Tom Tom on IE6, so Google pushed IE6.
And Google knows that on tightly controlled devices like mobile phones were it used to be the norm that the telecoms decided what was and was not available, they could all to easily be replaced. All of their services. So they rolled their own phone just to make sure they couldn't be completely locked out. Google isn't intrested in selling browsers or mobile phones, it primary interest is making its services so widely available that all who want to use it, can use it and then see the ads, that Google serves and makes it money from.
Google has given everyone a fast car, so we will buy lots of petrol. Given everyone a printer so they can sell lots of ink. Make web services supported by ads capable of replacing dedication payed for applications, so Google can sell ad space rather then software.
In order to operate in the open market space it needs to hang up its ads, it has ended up building most of the market. Quite funny if you think about it, because ANY of the other players could have had Androids market share but none did.
It first blames monsanto for creating a scare because of its out of control actions, then argues for less control by governments.
The simple fact is that if you don't have excessive restrictions, business WILL abuse its freedom, anything from DDT, tobacco, countless medicines which turned out to be worse then the disease.
The whole reason GM food is distrusted is precisely because the US government reduced restrictions and Monsanto went wild, the article even calls it Dr Frankenstein. How can you then argue that governments should reduce restrictions?
No. MORE restrictions and let the research be done in public in universities with NO pressure to produce results for the next financial quarter OR for that matter the next decade. ONLY when research is down with pressure to perform can you be reasonably certain the scientist will put safety over results.
The risk is NOT a GM monster getting away so much as that public perception will turn against the very idea and ALL research must be shelved. Public perception matters in a democracy and it should, that is what democracies are all about.
The way the Dutch government is doing it is the right way, take taxes from the food industry and use it to fund research into food away from commercial pressures. It might or might one day produce something viable but it will do so because of scientific merits, not a CEO worried about his bonus.
Every broadcaster has an agenda, every reporter has someone paying his/her bills. Many people consider news to be unbiased... an impossibility to begin with, if it agrees with their bias. "Look, they are saying what I want to hear, how unbiased of them". Bias is something that happens only to other people apparently.
Take womens rights, it is a fact that NOT everyone has the same view on this subject so ANY newssource that reports in anything but the most absolute neutral tones, has a bias. Simply put, if a newsource reports the weather with anything else then figures like using comments as "it will be a nice day", they are biased. Nice for who? By whose standards?
Take snowfall, 1 centimeter falls in Holland, DISASTER! 1 meter falls in Sweden, business as usual. But when in Sweden the snowfall is a disaster, the impact is a WHOLE lot worse then that in Holland where the trains were delayed a whole ten minutes and almost two cars had a fender bender.
Take the rape case of the Indian student, roughly at the same time, Belgian news had that rape has gone up, less then 4% of rape cases result in a conviction and there are as many as 11 rapes a day in Brussels alone. One story is international news, the other is not. Why? One to close to home perhaps? To many uncomfortable questions would need to be answered so lets just tut-tut the Indians and leave it at that. And who made that decision? Male news-readers (Belgium TV news is very old fashioned in many ways, including it being actually rather good BUT not without bias).
ALWAYS know the bias of your newssource and if you want to stay informed, WATCH the newssources that make your blood boil. NOT because they tell you the truth but by combining newsources you get a more honest exposure to the various opinions in the world. You may not agree with anything Al Jazeera has to say (it is pro-strict islam supported as said above by a dictator) but it does give you insight into a whole group of people think. Same with the BBC or Fox or for that matter the Financial Times and the Guardian. One will report a story the other will barely touch and it is the WHY of the difference where the facts about power in the world are hidden (sorry for that sentence, hope you got my gist). In between the reports, you can see how the world really is.
Take the rape news events, rape is therefor clearly bad but not so bad we actually want to stop it, just want to say it is bad when far from home but back home, well boys will be boys. 4% conviction rate in any other crime would see the people responsible fired VERY quickly. No calls for resignation have been made. In fact, reaction seems to be "oh well". In the western news, India is made out to be a place totally unsafe for women... but these attackers will either hand or serve live. In Holland, rapist have been getting away with community service, a father convicted of raping his underage daughter got community service because else he might loose his job, true case.
Which country takes protection of women more serious? One were rapist hang or one where they have to pick litter for a month?
I have had three e-readers, the first way decent but it had cheap plastic keys like on a really cheap small calculator, it did have a high rez display (iRiver device) and had a wide format support. But it was slow. So it was well suited to reading a page BUT flipping a page took a long time, PDF's were especially a nightmare, it was best for manga with high text content since it displayed those very well and then the relative slow page turning with lots to read isn't that distracting.
I have bought a very big e-reader for manga reading, it is beautiful but the device is so big (9 inches) it is not all that suitable for on the go reading. For books it is to large.
recently I bought a Odyssee HD from Bookeen. It has a build in light and is small. It is a very nice device for reading books BUT its manga support is dismal (no archive support) and its directory structure is arcana. Calibre helps but it needs to convert zip archives to epud files. It DOES have nice PDF support with a reflow option.
ALL the devices have margins in margins, it is traditional to print a page and leave a wide border BUT on a computer screen IT IS NOT because I PAYED for those bloody pixels so fucking USE THEM, I want a SMALL margin. Only the last device has tiny bit of support for it but you STILL have well over a centimeter of wasted space on either side. The device already has a wide physical border, I don't need one on the screen.
What does this rant mean?
E-Readers just ain't mature yet, they are in the state of MP3 players before the iPod when the likes of Sony found it perfectly acceptable to only support their own format which nobody else used while iRiver had support for formats you could even find on google, but used a directory format that only a unix wizard could grasp.
That a player like bookeen still doesn't support archives shows an attitude that "we do what we want and standards, fuck em, we are the standard" (the device also can't fit epub images to the screen (no zoom)). I knew this in advance, it is my book reader, not suitable for manga.
Page turns are getting really fast, almost capable of playing animation. In device lighting has made a HUGE difference (it also removes a bit of glare in bright light) but they still as said, MP3's before the iPod. Or mobile phones before standarized OS'es.
iOS en later Android STANDARIZED software behavior on a wide array of devices, especially with android you didn't need to check that it would support your media files, it would, because it was android and even Sony now supports a long list of formats.
What e-readers need is a base OS on which perhaps companies can build their own actual reader software UI but in which the basics are simply present and standard supported. Perhaps EVEN allow third party apps to be installed so the community can come up with a manga reader that is actually suited to the subtleties of manga and not comics.
Right now, (small) e-readers of the latest lighted generation offer:
Light weight (if you take them out of their cover)
Cheap content (piracy, lets be honest here, I have a LOT of bought paper books, only 1 payed for ebook, I do have more then one file on my e-readers)
Entire library on the go (see above)
In confined areas, like public transport, they are easier to hold then a larger book, mine easily slips into my pocket, a thick paperback, not so easily.
But they have downsides
Arcana usage, that a confusing program as Calibre is praised for making it so much easier to manage your device says enough. If your car became easier to drive by operating it standing it on your head, you would want a word with its designer.
Uncertain format support
Loosing the pixel race with tablets.
UI operating is slow.
SLOOOOOW searching, flipping of multiple pages, indexing.
Inconsistent operation, ctrl-c for copy on the PC is such a nice standard but handling bookmarks etc on a e-reader changes b
At least this idea isn't new in trying to use alternative means then road haulage to deliver packages. In The Hague the horse and cart was RE-introduced (we are not that backward here) to deliver packages in a shopping street because it looked nice. In Amsterdam packages can also be delivered by the canal to avoid the roads. These are old techs, re-introduced. But newer versions are in Utrecht were shops have their good delivered by large trucks to a central location from which they are then distributed to the actual shop by small electric carts pulling small wagons, this to avoid large trucks blocking the roads which are one way streets mostly (no way to pass a parked truck). The bike messenger is a feature of many a large city for a long time now.
A reverse idea is in place in some crowded areas were waste is sucked into the ground and away to be collected in a central area.
These ideas are all nice BUT they lack the flexibility that the motor car has brought to our world. I can send packages by truck that would kill a bike rider, that same truck can also carry a single envelope to its destination. The only reason to use alternatives that are never as flexible, are because trucks take up a LOT of space. But you also already need the roads anyway so it is only in the most crowded areas that alternatives spring up.
Now... what is it about inner cities that makes me worry about aerial delivery by small drones. Massive buildings of wildly varying heights which already make it an adventure to cycle or even walk, let alone fly an underpowered drone carrying god knows what. As a mailman one Christmas, I delivered bottles of mercury to a dentist. Dropping out of bag, it did no harm, dropping from 100 meters...
Please correct me if I am wrong, but ambulance helicopters do NOT land between two high-rises in NY do they? One cliff is already dangerous enough I would think. What makes you think that a far smaller device, flown by cheap electronics or an operator who connection might or might not work (again, inner cities are not known for their un-interrupted radio signals, for that matter, high-rises mess with GPS too).
This idea doesn't need new tech? I know of no drone tech that allows it to operate on its own in complex 3d environments. Military drones have an operator and fly in clear skies and land and take of in wide open areas. Search youtube for remote controlled airplanes and SEE the "state of the art" tech. Especially the landings. Whooo! I want THAT going on all around me. There is a reason these people operate on remote fields with rules like "NEVER FLY TOWARDS A PERSON" (often broken but only with other members of the pack).
It is a nice idea, small drones flying around carrying packages but it just isn't practical for a long time until AI's are a LOT better, this isn't just about landing a 747 by autopilot were the auto pilot doesn'thave to think but just follow the math rules programmed into it. An AI drone needs to fly around people, unknown obstructions, unpredictable weather and all that with a cargo shape/weight behavior that is unpredictable. Box with weights rolling around inside it, good luck stablizing that AND dealing with a sudden gust of wind.
Seriously, look at youtube and the art of drones, we are still in the steam powered car era. Someday maybe but not today and not this decade.
That is what I find missing from the story, what I remember from the group name is that they were into cams and telesyncs, not proper DVD/Blu-Ray copies. Beyond the novelty value these things are only salable in the most primitive regions of the world where people still have CRT's.
AND if he made such a huge amount of money out of it, why isn't the fine hire? The criminal justice system (this is NOT a civil case like most other cases we hear about) doesn't have high fines BUT it does like to strip criminals of their illgotten gaines since it has long become clear that doing a few years in jail while keeping your millions isn't always such a bad deal. So... where is the confescation of his fortune?
He also admitted he registered domain names for use by the IMAGiNE, and opened e-mail and PayPal accounts to receive donations and payments from persons downloading or buying IMAGiNE releases of pirated copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted works.
That doesn't sound like a pure for financial gain job to me but most groups stay well clear of any financial arrangement whatsoever precisely to avoid being seen as career criminals.
5 years with good behavior really isn't all that long, depending on what he actually did. For profit stealing to me is a whole other kettle of fish then people ripping movies and it costing them money. But I see no evidence that this guy made 6 figure profit. I know lots of companies that don't run 6 figure PROFIT. That is a LOT of money the OP claims that apparently the police missed out on on figured that the guy they are sending to jail for half a decade deserves to keep his ill-gotten gains.
Questions, questions, questions. If only there was a sort of job for which we could employ people that would make them research stories for more details and then share them through some means or another with others.
let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.
MY door, who did they pay to let them through? Not ME. This is important because EVEN in the "free tv with commercials" scenario, there is NEVER an agreement that I must watch the commercials. No, THERE IS NOT Fox. The TV stations offers but there is NEVER an agreement made. Not in writing, verbally, implicitly or morally. Advertising sponsoring content is a one way street, the content owner and advertiser push it to the viewer who can then do ANYTHING he wishes with it.
Take for instance a promotional mug, am I free to grind the logo of it if I so choose to? Yes. The advertisers has NO more power then to combine his message with content and hope I will consume both. He can't force me to consume both. If you hand me a piece of chocolate wrapped in logo, I am free to eat the wrapper and throw away the chocolate if I choose to. I am free to wipe my ass with your logo or put you pamphlet in the cat box.
With the Internet, I pay for access and because of the way the Internet is setup, I pay my share of my ISP's bandwidth costs who uses that to create a network and then create peering contracts with other networks so that everyone can reach everyone else. It is an amazing system and worked perfectly fine for years with next to no commercial content. Hundreds of people ran their own sites at their own expense and welcomed any visitors as proof they had something interesting to say.
Some sites saw a way to turn eyeballs into money and started to sell advertising space THINKING they were the new TV. They are not. TV is unique (well radio too) in that broadcasters can stop you consuming the content while they send you ads. The Internet doesn't do that, I can read an article with a hundred imbedded ads without every looking at said ads and I can do that without an ad-blocker simply by steering my eyes around the ads. The only way to achieve the same is with those "watch this ad for 20 seconds before continuing with doing what you came here to do".
AND THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM. TV ads get in the way but we didn't have an easy way around and cheap tv is nice so we accepted it in the passive mode that watching TV promotes.
BUT when browsing, I am ACTIVELY trying to do something (find cat pictures) and advertisers get in the way, doesn't really matter how annoying their ads is or isn't, I AM ACTIVELY trying to do something ELSE then reading your ad. Ads on the internet are even worse then ads in a magazine (who opens a magazine to scan some ads, why should I spend ANY time looking at two full page ads when the articles I picked the magazine up for are on the next page) because they make websites slower and are upsetting the general simply layout of the text. If they are to the side and out of the way... GOOD... that was nice of you, now I don't even need to read around them. Take Gmails ad bar. Nice to have it so discreet but I got so used to it being total crap (I travelled to the US often but migrating there has no appeal so why keep telling me about green cards, I am a socialist, I would sing the "De nationale" and strike down the imperialist interviewer!) that I had to have it pointed out to me it doesn't appear anymore.
So ads get MORE intrusive because people don't watch them and so people block them. And that is perfectly legit, morally and legally because I never signed an agreement to the contrary.
The funny thing is that a LOT of sites, like slashdot where users make the content allow good users to turn OFF the ads. That's right, you can blocks ads on ad-revenue sites by being a good user. So annoying are ads EVEN in the eyes of those who make their living because of them, that they block ads FOR you themselves.
The biggest downloads for Chrome and Firefox and Opera are the ad-block plugins.
Shoe stores only put either the LEFT or the RIGHT shoe out on a street display, they do this because if they put both out, the police would slap them when
It could have been a device that started working because of a leaking battery, said leak corroding something else, creating heat and bam, fire in the cargo hold at 10km up.
Bombs are hardly the biggest danger to airlines, lots of crashes have been caused by cargo causing fires or exploding.
Anyway, if your suitcase causes damage to another suitcase, who has to pay? The airline.
But hey, if you are so smart you can see through baggage to see what the issue is, why don't YOU go work as a baggage handler and safe us all?
People, none of this has anything to do with terrorism, it is the US culture of making a lawsuit for billions out of EVERYTHING. It creates an atmosphere were procedures are made for everything and as long as you follow them to the letter YOU as an individual and hopefully the company are safe from the most frivilous lawsuits.
Take for instance the opening of a package. Who here is going to volunteer to be on constant call to open EVERY suspicious package, with NO gear? Just be on standby in your jeans and a t-shirt to open any and all packages that trigger an alarm. Thought so. Oh, you might think 99.99999999% are safe but I didn't put a limit on the number of times you have to be on call.
Forcing an ordinary employee to open suspicious packages COULD result in a claim for emotional stress. So policy is to ALWAYS inform the police. If the police just sends an ordinary cop without clearing the area and something DOES happen, they will be sued for billions and so a policy is made to ALWAYS clear the area AND send in the specialists.
BREAK the policy and you are not just not following the rules and disobeying the boss, the insurance companies might well use it as an excuse to cancel a policy. The media might also get on your case for being a cowboy who does whatever. Media only cares about headlines they happily rant on day about out of control bureaucracy and the next about government employees not following the rules. Same as the media want to get though on drink driving then whine about police spot checks for drink driving.
Fire drills are the most common thing ordinary people have to deal with where silly rules have to be followed and when an alarm goes of by accident and EVERYONE knows it is false, you still have to go outside because if you don't the people responsible for the evacuation plan are in trouble and they are in trouble because there have been incidents in which people stayed in a building that was really on fire because someone told them to stay because he/she thought it wasn't important.
You see, those stories you read about a factory owner locking all the doors and dozens of people dying in a fire because they couldn't go out, THAT is the result of people NOT following the silly policy of ALWAYS keeping fire exists clear. Such a nuisance when the fire marshal cites you for having a few boxes learning against the door, what a silly policy.
It would be nice if readers of slashdot who are supposed to be above average intelligence had a little bit more common sense and knowledge about HOW the world operates.
Conditions surrounding a suspicious package, once something has triggered an alarm:
The package handler should just open it: you want baggage handlers to be able to open any package they wish to and mess with stuff inside it?
You have filed with your attorney a legally binding statement that in the case of you dying an avoidable dead, no legal action is to be taken against the person(s) who didn't take appropriate action?
Modern bombs don't thick. So? Terrorists are hipsters who think bombs that worked for decades are beneath them?
What is the next thing to be dangerous: It doesn't have to be a bomb, the buzzing can be anything that could create an issue on a plane, you want a baggage handler to judge whether YOUR luggage is safe when he doesn't know what is in it?
The reason I am kinda upset with all the people who hate procedure is that this is an IT site, are the same people who hate procedure the same people who never make a backup, edit code live on the production machines, don't run test scenarios? Silly procedures are there to catch to make sure that when something odd happens, people know what to do and don't start getting creative. I have spend to much time cleaning up after creative people to think that improvisation is a good thing.
Yes it sucks when the world derails around you and you are once again reminded how easy it is for ONE tiny unthoughtful action to ruin the flow of the u
READ up on the suffragette movement you fucking insane moronic piece of shit before you try spouting your lies.
On November 15th, 1917, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, founders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were arrested along with 216 other women who had picketed the White House under the Woodrow Wilson administration, bearing signs for the right to vote. By morning, some of the incarcerated women were barely alive. Lucy Burns had been beaten. Her hands had been chained to the cell bars over her head, bleeding and gasping for air. When Alice Paul engaged in a hunger strike, guards tried to force-feed her, tying her to a chair and using a tube to pour liquids down her throat. Thirty-three women endured ongoing torture until word was finally smuggled out to the press.
No violence by the government against the movement my ass.
Is this the constitution written by slave owners who didn't allow the poor or female to vote?
The constitution was NOT written to give freedom to all, it was written to give freedom to rich white males. NEVER FORGET THIS. NEVER forget the famous Greek democracy was build on slaves.
You are acting like a stock sale is to generate cash for a business so they can invest it in improving their business generating a profit which is then shared with the share holders.
COMMIE! Everyone KNOWS a IPO is there to allow people to buy an insane amount due to being first in line and then selling it on to suckers... eh people who also want to sell it on to the next line of suckers. Speculation is the name of the game kid. Investment is for socialists.
The IPO was a success AND a failure. Some bought low and sold high for them it was a success, those who bought high and had to sell low are the ones complaining, mostly because they are upset THEY didn't manage to buy low and sell high. The only people who lost were speculators and the occasional investor who doesn't understand Wall Street.
For a lawyer, John Steele both as a speaker in public and in normal conversation is more the bully coach/preacher type, he talks so loudly and without pause nobody gets a chance to say anything in return. He tries to win customers in the porn industry and knows that there are a LOT of geeks in the porn industry advising the porn producers who know his record, just see above. He has been losing cases for years but he doesn't tell you that and the porn peddlers don't know to ask. It is only when they come home to their IT guy they get the links to all his failed cases.
As I pointed out above, most in the industry leave him well alone. His clients are a handful in an industry where there are thousands in the US alone. His number of cases are tiny while finding large scale commercial copyright infringement for porn is trivial.
If he was a GOOD lawyer, he wouldn't bother with tiny settlements for a handful of clients, he would have gone after the porn tube business before the porn industry itself sorted it out (most are now hosting ad content) and gone after the hundreds of millions in that form of copyright infringement.
He hasn't. John Steele sells lawsuits at the bottom end to those who don't have someone to advice them not to deal with rats.
I have worked for the porn industry and seen this guy preaching at industry conventions, once supposedly on a forum that was to discuss how to approach copyright infringement as a porn company/copyright holder. (there are other approaches the best working focusing on having your customers become loyal fans of your brand, so they want to pay, beg you to pay)
It wasn't a discussion really, as I sat by as 3rd party (I do servers for whatever reason you might have and I make the same amount whether those servers are payed for by copyright owners, commercial pirates, amateurs or cat pictures) and was amazed to see him preach to the converted... well... up until the point you start asking for numbers. There are a LOT of porn producers, a shit load more content and a near infinite amount of downloaders. The internet may consist of cat pictures but torrents are for porn. Yet he has done at the time only a few thousand cases. That is NOTHING! It ain't even a drop in the bucket. The RIAA was doing fastly more cases.
While the audience was agreeing with him, you could see most didn't have a clue as to the real issues and the developments with regards to copyrights and enforcing them. The porn industry likes to pride itself on being cutting edge, VHS, online payments but really that is just a tiny segment, the rest are slobs who figured out sex sells. The moment the forum was over, I talked to some porn producers and asked what they though considering judgements like the then current claim of movie copyright infringenment costing several times more then the entire world economy.
Or the cases of sueing children, veterans and other people who might get the sympathy of the public. If the public chooses the side of dirty pirates against wholesome music executives... what chance does a porn peddler stand? Most porn producers are well aware that they are skirting the edge of public acceptance, they know they can only accept credit cards if they meet the decency requirements of the processing company, can only host with parties that accept adult content. They didn't like it one bit when I linked them on my tablet to some John Steele publicity stunts, no porn company wants attention from Fox News about harrasing some grandma who left her wifi open as it was installed by her grandson who died in Afghanistan. No thank you sirree, that is NOT worth gathering a few bucks, especially when all the lawyer fees have been payed you end up owing the lawyer for bad publicity.
That I wasn't the only doom spreader for dealing with John Steele is proven by the fact only a handful of companies deal with him. When you talk to him, he does his name justice google his picture, say his name and what you think he will be like is how he is. A boisterous overconfidant man who speaks so loud that he doesn't hear anyone asking him to explain some details about cases thrown out of court and how does not QUITE work on a contingency basis (he gets more if he wins but he ALWAYS get payed), how a settlement doesn't include paying lawyer fees. If you lose in court and are ordered to pay 5000 in damages you often ALSO have to pay lawyer fees. If you settle for 1000, that is it, the lawyer still wants paying. John Steele certainly does.
It is no secret that copyright infringement happens, on a MASSIVE scale. And porn has an issue the mainstream media does not have. I once came up with a nice way to put but we are all males here so here it is "You can cum on a trailer".
Some Hollywood movies have trailers that tell you the entire movie and a few where the trailer is better then the movie but on the whole, the trailer make you hungry for more.
In porn, the trailer is enough for most and just makes you sleepy. Watching a full movie on youtube is a hassle (well it was until they removed the ten minute limit) but for porn tubes... how many minutes do you need? Oh wait, I forgot my audience. Seconds?
Sharing the entire movie on a torrent is far less of an issue to the industry then all those porn tube sites that contain
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Thou shalt not kill. That is easy. No exceptions, no moderation, thou shalt not kill, so if you do, you break the law and must be fully punished. Anything from euthanisia, to drink driver killing to murder spree, the same thing. Simple.
oh, you want degrees of homicide. Sorry, that is extra pages of text.
You want all the laws reduced to a hundred pages? Sharia law is nice and short, why don't you go life in a Sharia country.
On the whole, the larger the law books the more pleasant a place is to live in as shown by migration routes. Nobody wants to live in lawless places. Proof me wrong, EMIGRATE.
So, you’ve got to balance, I guess you could say church and state, you got to balance that user experience, so that, in our case, we try to do one for 24 hours, no more, if it’s a real intrusive ad, and then we measure, you measure.
Well, I will try to torture Mark Westlake for 24 hours if it REALLY hurts.
My god... and the "none of our readers will be using adblockers" crap further down... WHY DO YOU THINK ANYONE WITH A BRAIN RUNS AN AD BLOCKER?
Because it is the only way to keep some fucking sanity! READ the quote again. For 24 hours... what is MISSING is per what? He tries to run a really intrusive ad only 24 hours per day? Wow, well that is protecting the user experience alright, if said user experience is absolute horror.
Not this guy does NOT state that they only test a potential new ad for how intrusive it is for 24 hours max and then measure the response to this new idea and then decide for or against using it again. That is NOT what he is saying. He is saying that if a really intrusive ad comes his way, he will run it BUT only for 24 hours because he knows that if he does it longer EVERYONE will leave. He does not limit how many DIFFERENT really intrusive ads he runs, just that any singular REALLY intrusive ad gets run for a maximum of 24 hours so that for a news site, EVERYONE who visits will have seen it... nice guy eh?
I first looked into ad blocking when the ISP I was using at the time ran a banner add that was a blinking nightmare for a service I was already using (UPC Cable) it was REALLY annoying and so I searched in how to block it proxy level so it would work on all my computers and browsers. I never went back but I do routinely update it to catch the new ads.
The reason is simple, give an advertising the finger and they will rape your children and sell their organs. It is NEVER enough for advertisers, the ads will always be more in your face, more jarring, more of them and getting more and more in the way of the content. TV ads are a prime example. Nobody really minded "this program brought to you by" messages. And interupting a 1 hour program three times gives those of us with bladder issues time to relieve themselves. And 4 times an hour, well why not. And 5 times an hour helps those with really bad bladders. And overlying ads over the closing credits hurts nobody. And overlaying ads over the actual program itself... FUCK IT! ENOUGH! NO MORE!
Much the same can be said for the web browsing experience of those with and without an adblocker. Occasionaly I have to use a non-blocked browser and ARGH! The HORROR, the SLOWNESS, the virusses served by unchecked 3rd party ad servers.
The STUPIDITY of advertisers is such they are their own worst enemy. So... you want to serve me a video ad before I can see the video I want... okay... I am slightly irritated and will associate that irritation with the product you are about to show me but hey, irritation is good in trying to get me to buy something... then I wait for it to load... slowly and the ad is TOTALLY irrelevant to me (some car ad for a SUV that is only available in the US, I don't drive cars, don't like SUV's and am in the EU). Then the real video refuses to load, I reload the page. Same ad again. NOT GOING TO BUY! Want to watch another video, same ad. Another video. Same ad. Week later another video. Same ad... I NOW LOATH THAT CAR AND BRAND WITH A FIERCENESS MOST PEOPLE RESERVE FOR... well other ads to be honest. Dog poo on the sidewalk you just stepped in when you took off your shoe to remove a piece of glass that just boar straight into your big toe you just stumped against something? HAS GOT NOTHING ON THAT CAR AD!
Enjoy your slide into obsolesce. If you remove all the emotionalism from those proposing pure capitalism, your are left holding a big, empty, "I don't want to spend any more" motto. It is religious fanaticism.
Countries thrive when they invest, undertake massive projects, improve themselves. They slide into nothingness when the accountants take over as their infrastructure falls apart and all the bright people find themselves working abroad.
The ultimate failure of religious fantatics like the parent is that they think the race ends. That once you won, that is it. The race never ends. And China right now is winning by default because everyone else has stopped. You can smirk about North-Korea's rocket attempts but at least they are trying. In the west, people worry about the costs to much to do ANYTHING anymore. Great nations were not build by accountants.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, JUST maybe, Valve DOES NOT WANT TO BE NAILED DOWN TO A SPEC FOR HALF A DECADE?
If you are a company that pushes the edge, being stuck on the same hardware for more then half a decade would have to suck. Perhaps Valve is trying to pull what Google did with Chrome, accelerate console development. Sure, you can buy a hopelessly obsolete Xbox or PS4 OR you can buy a Steam Box for the same amount AND get cheaper games that are made with this years tech not last decades. The current consoles are REALLY far behind.
And the current consoles were NOT cheap, you could buy a highly respectable PC for the price of the PS3 at launch and that PC spanked it on EVERY front as evidenced by console games being released on the PC with high resolution texture packs. The new Wii U has mediocre tablet as it gadget but for its price you can buy a perfectly decent mid-range gaming PC. Sure, there are gamers with 1000 dollar videocards but these are hardly needed, a 100 dollar card will already give you performance well above that of a console.
Chrome force MS to get off its ass and also helped speed up Firefox, lets see what Valve can do for console development. And all those who prefer the same gaming hardware for ten years (but replace their phone every year)... they can keep their old shit with memory less then a cheap feature phone.
We know Apple could sell the iPhone cheaper because Apple makes massive profits. Does Lego make massive profits? No, in fact before it re-invented itself, it was like Apple in serious trouble of going the way of Meccano. Which still exists but only as a perversion of its former self.
People often seem to think all there is to a product is its physical production. THAT is easy, although Lego is a bit more accurate in its production then most plastic factories, it can be easily replicated to produce a machine to produce simple bricks. BUT that is NOT Lego. Lego is ALL the models, which in box form have often to be in stores for a year or more before hopefully being sold, constantly having to keep up with trends like hot movies because the OLD business model of outdated non-current models wasn't working. And developing Mindstorms wouldn't have been cheap either.
Lego suffers from the high cost of mass production of an INSANE number of parts that all have to be combined, they can't just let one machine run indefinite pushing out one type of brick, it is lots of different pieces in lots of colors that all have to come together in production runs from which only tiny amounts are sent out and the rest has to be stored.
It is a logistacal nightmare and quite different from how other plastic producers like say plastic bottles work, most plastic bottles arrive at the bottling plant in granular form, one machine makes a test tube and another blows it up JUST before it is filled in an constant single item production run. THAT is cheap. Lego's method is not. In fact, lego's method of selling LOTS and LOTS of different models is EXACTLY what Apple is NOT doing. Even Samsung isn't. If Lego was a phone maker, there would be 2000 current models, ALL of them with instructions how alter them completely, combine them and turn them into complex robots.
That is why Lego is expensive. Look at their profits, there is no excessive fat there. You can make cheap clones of a few boxes of lego easily but the entire product range? No. Proof? NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT! Oh you can buy 1 or 2 lego like models from China but NOT the constantly updated catalog lego catalog. You PAY for that.
Don't forget the intro, the teaser, the coming next, the recap EVERY 5 minutes so that even an American can keep up... well... the bright ones... I give it about 5 years and the TV will be just a static picture with one word repeated "BUY BUY BUY".
My god, this attitude is amazing, what primitive part of the world did you grow up in? Most normal employers realize that work and private live are not so easily seperated and simply allow the two to intertwine. If I ask someone to stay late because of deadlines, can I then deny them time to make calls during office hours to arrange private things? Hell, this must be an American thing. Do you also object to people using the company printer?
Of course, normal people realize there is a line, you can print out a form, your CV is a bit touchy and you do NOT print out a thousand copies of your novel but come on!
If your tried that master slave attitude in Europe, you would find yourself soon with no employees left.
Unless there is a VERY real need for security, everyone carries a mobile phone with them in Europe. The idea you shouldn't answer a personal call during office hours is just so 19th century. Come on, join us in the future, we got cookies!
Ten to one this gti_guy doesn't have a job, lives in a trailer on government assistance and whines about all those leeches living of the state.
People good enough at their job to have one know they are valuable and companies are willing to keep them happy.
So tell me, what is it like living in the 18th century? Ten to one odds you are going to get killed in a work related shooting and the jury will upon learning about you, release the shooter on grounds of justifiable homicide.
Meanwhile, in the modern world, work and private life are bound to intermingle and personal calls are perfectly acceptable if people do their jobs properly.
Your a nutter, this type of stuff is introduced on high end cars END it sells very well. It is just the modern version of the parking sensor or rear view camera.
You won't find this in riser cars but you WILL find it in high end mercs and north european cars.
Google made android NOT to lock people into Android but to avoid being locked out of iOS and Windows Phone and Symbian and Blackberry. Okay, so the last three ain't a threat anymore (or in one case, ever) but we saw what Apple tried to pull, lock Google Maps out and force people to use Apple Maps. Which was an amazing success story for Apple... well... this time. But next time?
Google developed Chrome to push web browser development because they didn't want to wait for IE or Firefox to get off their lazy ass. Especially IE, they made a capable fast browser designed to deal with any futuristic Google wishes to develop and the rest of the browsers either had to catch up OR be replaced.
Google KNOWS that in order to sell petrol, you need to sell cars. Well okay, that in order to sell inkjet ink, you need to sell printers. Google Maps could never have run well enough to replace Tom Tom on IE6, so Google pushed IE6.
And Google knows that on tightly controlled devices like mobile phones were it used to be the norm that the telecoms decided what was and was not available, they could all to easily be replaced. All of their services. So they rolled their own phone just to make sure they couldn't be completely locked out. Google isn't intrested in selling browsers or mobile phones, it primary interest is making its services so widely available that all who want to use it, can use it and then see the ads, that Google serves and makes it money from.
Google has given everyone a fast car, so we will buy lots of petrol. Given everyone a printer so they can sell lots of ink. Make web services supported by ads capable of replacing dedication payed for applications, so Google can sell ad space rather then software.
In order to operate in the open market space it needs to hang up its ads, it has ended up building most of the market. Quite funny if you think about it, because ANY of the other players could have had Androids market share but none did.
It first blames monsanto for creating a scare because of its out of control actions, then argues for less control by governments.
The simple fact is that if you don't have excessive restrictions, business WILL abuse its freedom, anything from DDT, tobacco, countless medicines which turned out to be worse then the disease.
The whole reason GM food is distrusted is precisely because the US government reduced restrictions and Monsanto went wild, the article even calls it Dr Frankenstein. How can you then argue that governments should reduce restrictions?
No. MORE restrictions and let the research be done in public in universities with NO pressure to produce results for the next financial quarter OR for that matter the next decade. ONLY when research is down with pressure to perform can you be reasonably certain the scientist will put safety over results.
The risk is NOT a GM monster getting away so much as that public perception will turn against the very idea and ALL research must be shelved. Public perception matters in a democracy and it should, that is what democracies are all about.
The way the Dutch government is doing it is the right way, take taxes from the food industry and use it to fund research into food away from commercial pressures. It might or might one day produce something viable but it will do so because of scientific merits, not a CEO worried about his bonus.
Every broadcaster has an agenda, every reporter has someone paying his/her bills. Many people consider news to be unbiased... an impossibility to begin with, if it agrees with their bias. "Look, they are saying what I want to hear, how unbiased of them". Bias is something that happens only to other people apparently.
Take womens rights, it is a fact that NOT everyone has the same view on this subject so ANY newssource that reports in anything but the most absolute neutral tones, has a bias. Simply put, if a newsource reports the weather with anything else then figures like using comments as "it will be a nice day", they are biased. Nice for who? By whose standards?
Take snowfall, 1 centimeter falls in Holland, DISASTER! 1 meter falls in Sweden, business as usual. But when in Sweden the snowfall is a disaster, the impact is a WHOLE lot worse then that in Holland where the trains were delayed a whole ten minutes and almost two cars had a fender bender.
Take the rape case of the Indian student, roughly at the same time, Belgian news had that rape has gone up, less then 4% of rape cases result in a conviction and there are as many as 11 rapes a day in Brussels alone. One story is international news, the other is not. Why? One to close to home perhaps? To many uncomfortable questions would need to be answered so lets just tut-tut the Indians and leave it at that. And who made that decision? Male news-readers (Belgium TV news is very old fashioned in many ways, including it being actually rather good BUT not without bias).
ALWAYS know the bias of your newssource and if you want to stay informed, WATCH the newssources that make your blood boil. NOT because they tell you the truth but by combining newsources you get a more honest exposure to the various opinions in the world. You may not agree with anything Al Jazeera has to say (it is pro-strict islam supported as said above by a dictator) but it does give you insight into a whole group of people think. Same with the BBC or Fox or for that matter the Financial Times and the Guardian. One will report a story the other will barely touch and it is the WHY of the difference where the facts about power in the world are hidden (sorry for that sentence, hope you got my gist). In between the reports, you can see how the world really is.
Take the rape news events, rape is therefor clearly bad but not so bad we actually want to stop it, just want to say it is bad when far from home but back home, well boys will be boys. 4% conviction rate in any other crime would see the people responsible fired VERY quickly. No calls for resignation have been made. In fact, reaction seems to be "oh well". In the western news, India is made out to be a place totally unsafe for women... but these attackers will either hand or serve live. In Holland, rapist have been getting away with community service, a father convicted of raping his underage daughter got community service because else he might loose his job, true case.
Which country takes protection of women more serious? One were rapist hang or one where they have to pick litter for a month?
Know your bias.
I have had three e-readers, the first way decent but it had cheap plastic keys like on a really cheap small calculator, it did have a high rez display (iRiver device) and had a wide format support. But it was slow. So it was well suited to reading a page BUT flipping a page took a long time, PDF's were especially a nightmare, it was best for manga with high text content since it displayed those very well and then the relative slow page turning with lots to read isn't that distracting.
I have bought a very big e-reader for manga reading, it is beautiful but the device is so big (9 inches) it is not all that suitable for on the go reading. For books it is to large.
recently I bought a Odyssee HD from Bookeen. It has a build in light and is small. It is a very nice device for reading books BUT its manga support is dismal (no archive support) and its directory structure is arcana. Calibre helps but it needs to convert zip archives to epud files. It DOES have nice PDF support with a reflow option.
ALL the devices have margins in margins, it is traditional to print a page and leave a wide border BUT on a computer screen IT IS NOT because I PAYED for those bloody pixels so fucking USE THEM, I want a SMALL margin. Only the last device has tiny bit of support for it but you STILL have well over a centimeter of wasted space on either side. The device already has a wide physical border, I don't need one on the screen.
What does this rant mean?
E-Readers just ain't mature yet, they are in the state of MP3 players before the iPod when the likes of Sony found it perfectly acceptable to only support their own format which nobody else used while iRiver had support for formats you could even find on google, but used a directory format that only a unix wizard could grasp.
That a player like bookeen still doesn't support archives shows an attitude that "we do what we want and standards, fuck em, we are the standard" (the device also can't fit epub images to the screen (no zoom)). I knew this in advance, it is my book reader, not suitable for manga.
Page turns are getting really fast, almost capable of playing animation. In device lighting has made a HUGE difference (it also removes a bit of glare in bright light) but they still as said, MP3's before the iPod. Or mobile phones before standarized OS'es.
iOS en later Android STANDARIZED software behavior on a wide array of devices, especially with android you didn't need to check that it would support your media files, it would, because it was android and even Sony now supports a long list of formats.
What e-readers need is a base OS on which perhaps companies can build their own actual reader software UI but in which the basics are simply present and standard supported. Perhaps EVEN allow third party apps to be installed so the community can come up with a manga reader that is actually suited to the subtleties of manga and not comics.
Right now, (small) e-readers of the latest lighted generation offer:
But they have downsides
At least this idea isn't new in trying to use alternative means then road haulage to deliver packages. In The Hague the horse and cart was RE-introduced (we are not that backward here) to deliver packages in a shopping street because it looked nice. In Amsterdam packages can also be delivered by the canal to avoid the roads. These are old techs, re-introduced. But newer versions are in Utrecht were shops have their good delivered by large trucks to a central location from which they are then distributed to the actual shop by small electric carts pulling small wagons, this to avoid large trucks blocking the roads which are one way streets mostly (no way to pass a parked truck). The bike messenger is a feature of many a large city for a long time now.
A reverse idea is in place in some crowded areas were waste is sucked into the ground and away to be collected in a central area.
These ideas are all nice BUT they lack the flexibility that the motor car has brought to our world. I can send packages by truck that would kill a bike rider, that same truck can also carry a single envelope to its destination. The only reason to use alternatives that are never as flexible, are because trucks take up a LOT of space. But you also already need the roads anyway so it is only in the most crowded areas that alternatives spring up.
Now... what is it about inner cities that makes me worry about aerial delivery by small drones. Massive buildings of wildly varying heights which already make it an adventure to cycle or even walk, let alone fly an underpowered drone carrying god knows what. As a mailman one Christmas, I delivered bottles of mercury to a dentist. Dropping out of bag, it did no harm, dropping from 100 meters...
Please correct me if I am wrong, but ambulance helicopters do NOT land between two high-rises in NY do they? One cliff is already dangerous enough I would think. What makes you think that a far smaller device, flown by cheap electronics or an operator who connection might or might not work (again, inner cities are not known for their un-interrupted radio signals, for that matter, high-rises mess with GPS too).
This idea doesn't need new tech? I know of no drone tech that allows it to operate on its own in complex 3d environments. Military drones have an operator and fly in clear skies and land and take of in wide open areas. Search youtube for remote controlled airplanes and SEE the "state of the art" tech. Especially the landings. Whooo! I want THAT going on all around me. There is a reason these people operate on remote fields with rules like "NEVER FLY TOWARDS A PERSON" (often broken but only with other members of the pack).
It is a nice idea, small drones flying around carrying packages but it just isn't practical for a long time until AI's are a LOT better, this isn't just about landing a 747 by autopilot were the auto pilot doesn'thave to think but just follow the math rules programmed into it. An AI drone needs to fly around people, unknown obstructions, unpredictable weather and all that with a cargo shape/weight behavior that is unpredictable. Box with weights rolling around inside it, good luck stablizing that AND dealing with a sudden gust of wind.
Seriously, look at youtube and the art of drones, we are still in the steam powered car era. Someday maybe but not today and not this decade.
That is what I find missing from the story, what I remember from the group name is that they were into cams and telesyncs, not proper DVD/Blu-Ray copies. Beyond the novelty value these things are only salable in the most primitive regions of the world where people still have CRT's.
AND if he made such a huge amount of money out of it, why isn't the fine hire? The criminal justice system (this is NOT a civil case like most other cases we hear about) doesn't have high fines BUT it does like to strip criminals of their illgotten gaines since it has long become clear that doing a few years in jail while keeping your millions isn't always such a bad deal. So... where is the confescation of his fortune?
He also admitted he registered domain names for use by the IMAGiNE, and opened e-mail and PayPal accounts to receive donations and payments from persons downloading or buying IMAGiNE releases of pirated copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted works.
That doesn't sound like a pure for financial gain job to me but most groups stay well clear of any financial arrangement whatsoever precisely to avoid being seen as career criminals.
5 years with good behavior really isn't all that long, depending on what he actually did. For profit stealing to me is a whole other kettle of fish then people ripping movies and it costing them money. But I see no evidence that this guy made 6 figure profit. I know lots of companies that don't run 6 figure PROFIT. That is a LOT of money the OP claims that apparently the police missed out on on figured that the guy they are sending to jail for half a decade deserves to keep his ill-gotten gains.
Questions, questions, questions. If only there was a sort of job for which we could employ people that would make them research stories for more details and then share them through some means or another with others.
let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.
MY door, who did they pay to let them through? Not ME. This is important because EVEN in the "free tv with commercials" scenario, there is NEVER an agreement that I must watch the commercials. No, THERE IS NOT Fox. The TV stations offers but there is NEVER an agreement made. Not in writing, verbally, implicitly or morally. Advertising sponsoring content is a one way street, the content owner and advertiser push it to the viewer who can then do ANYTHING he wishes with it.
Take for instance a promotional mug, am I free to grind the logo of it if I so choose to? Yes. The advertisers has NO more power then to combine his message with content and hope I will consume both. He can't force me to consume both. If you hand me a piece of chocolate wrapped in logo, I am free to eat the wrapper and throw away the chocolate if I choose to. I am free to wipe my ass with your logo or put you pamphlet in the cat box.
With the Internet, I pay for access and because of the way the Internet is setup, I pay my share of my ISP's bandwidth costs who uses that to create a network and then create peering contracts with other networks so that everyone can reach everyone else. It is an amazing system and worked perfectly fine for years with next to no commercial content. Hundreds of people ran their own sites at their own expense and welcomed any visitors as proof they had something interesting to say.
Some sites saw a way to turn eyeballs into money and started to sell advertising space THINKING they were the new TV. They are not. TV is unique (well radio too) in that broadcasters can stop you consuming the content while they send you ads. The Internet doesn't do that, I can read an article with a hundred imbedded ads without every looking at said ads and I can do that without an ad-blocker simply by steering my eyes around the ads. The only way to achieve the same is with those "watch this ad for 20 seconds before continuing with doing what you came here to do".
AND THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM. TV ads get in the way but we didn't have an easy way around and cheap tv is nice so we accepted it in the passive mode that watching TV promotes.
BUT when browsing, I am ACTIVELY trying to do something (find cat pictures) and advertisers get in the way, doesn't really matter how annoying their ads is or isn't, I AM ACTIVELY trying to do something ELSE then reading your ad. Ads on the internet are even worse then ads in a magazine (who opens a magazine to scan some ads, why should I spend ANY time looking at two full page ads when the articles I picked the magazine up for are on the next page) because they make websites slower and are upsetting the general simply layout of the text. If they are to the side and out of the way... GOOD... that was nice of you, now I don't even need to read around them. Take Gmails ad bar. Nice to have it so discreet but I got so used to it being total crap (I travelled to the US often but migrating there has no appeal so why keep telling me about green cards, I am a socialist, I would sing the "De nationale" and strike down the imperialist interviewer!) that I had to have it pointed out to me it doesn't appear anymore.
So ads get MORE intrusive because people don't watch them and so people block them. And that is perfectly legit, morally and legally because I never signed an agreement to the contrary.
The funny thing is that a LOT of sites, like slashdot where users make the content allow good users to turn OFF the ads. That's right, you can blocks ads on ad-revenue sites by being a good user. So annoying are ads EVEN in the eyes of those who make their living because of them, that they block ads FOR you themselves.
The biggest downloads for Chrome and Firefox and Opera are the ad-block plugins.
Shoe stores only put either the LEFT or the RIGHT shoe out on a street display, they do this because if they put both out, the police would slap them when
It could have been a device that started working because of a leaking battery, said leak corroding something else, creating heat and bam, fire in the cargo hold at 10km up.
Bombs are hardly the biggest danger to airlines, lots of crashes have been caused by cargo causing fires or exploding.
Anyway, if your suitcase causes damage to another suitcase, who has to pay? The airline.
But hey, if you are so smart you can see through baggage to see what the issue is, why don't YOU go work as a baggage handler and safe us all?
People, none of this has anything to do with terrorism, it is the US culture of making a lawsuit for billions out of EVERYTHING. It creates an atmosphere were procedures are made for everything and as long as you follow them to the letter YOU as an individual and hopefully the company are safe from the most frivilous lawsuits.
Take for instance the opening of a package. Who here is going to volunteer to be on constant call to open EVERY suspicious package, with NO gear? Just be on standby in your jeans and a t-shirt to open any and all packages that trigger an alarm. Thought so. Oh, you might think 99.99999999% are safe but I didn't put a limit on the number of times you have to be on call.
Forcing an ordinary employee to open suspicious packages COULD result in a claim for emotional stress. So policy is to ALWAYS inform the police. If the police just sends an ordinary cop without clearing the area and something DOES happen, they will be sued for billions and so a policy is made to ALWAYS clear the area AND send in the specialists.
BREAK the policy and you are not just not following the rules and disobeying the boss, the insurance companies might well use it as an excuse to cancel a policy. The media might also get on your case for being a cowboy who does whatever. Media only cares about headlines they happily rant on day about out of control bureaucracy and the next about government employees not following the rules. Same as the media want to get though on drink driving then whine about police spot checks for drink driving.
Fire drills are the most common thing ordinary people have to deal with where silly rules have to be followed and when an alarm goes of by accident and EVERYONE knows it is false, you still have to go outside because if you don't the people responsible for the evacuation plan are in trouble and they are in trouble because there have been incidents in which people stayed in a building that was really on fire because someone told them to stay because he/she thought it wasn't important.
You see, those stories you read about a factory owner locking all the doors and dozens of people dying in a fire because they couldn't go out, THAT is the result of people NOT following the silly policy of ALWAYS keeping fire exists clear. Such a nuisance when the fire marshal cites you for having a few boxes learning against the door, what a silly policy.
It would be nice if readers of slashdot who are supposed to be above average intelligence had a little bit more common sense and knowledge about HOW the world operates.
Conditions surrounding a suspicious package, once something has triggered an alarm:
The reason I am kinda upset with all the people who hate procedure is that this is an IT site, are the same people who hate procedure the same people who never make a backup, edit code live on the production machines, don't run test scenarios? Silly procedures are there to catch to make sure that when something odd happens, people know what to do and don't start getting creative. I have spend to much time cleaning up after creative people to think that improvisation is a good thing.
Yes it sucks when the world derails around you and you are once again reminded how easy it is for ONE tiny unthoughtful action to ruin the flow of the u
My god, your grasp of history is fucking flawed.
READ up on the suffragette movement you fucking insane moronic piece of shit before you try spouting your lies.
On November 15th, 1917, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, founders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were arrested along with 216 other women who had picketed the White House under the Woodrow Wilson administration, bearing signs for the right to vote. By morning, some of the incarcerated women were barely alive. Lucy Burns had been beaten. Her hands had been chained to the cell bars over her head, bleeding and gasping for air. When Alice Paul engaged in a hunger strike, guards tried to force-feed her, tying her to a chair and using a tube to pour liquids down her throat. Thirty-three women endured ongoing torture until word was finally smuggled out to the press.
No violence by the government against the movement my ass.
You are scum.
Is this the constitution written by slave owners who didn't allow the poor or female to vote?
The constitution was NOT written to give freedom to all, it was written to give freedom to rich white males. NEVER FORGET THIS. NEVER forget the famous Greek democracy was build on slaves.
You are acting like a stock sale is to generate cash for a business so they can invest it in improving their business generating a profit which is then shared with the share holders.
COMMIE! Everyone KNOWS a IPO is there to allow people to buy an insane amount due to being first in line and then selling it on to suckers... eh people who also want to sell it on to the next line of suckers. Speculation is the name of the game kid. Investment is for socialists.
The IPO was a success AND a failure. Some bought low and sold high for them it was a success, those who bought high and had to sell low are the ones complaining, mostly because they are upset THEY didn't manage to buy low and sell high. The only people who lost were speculators and the occasional investor who doesn't understand Wall Street.
For a lawyer, John Steele both as a speaker in public and in normal conversation is more the bully coach/preacher type, he talks so loudly and without pause nobody gets a chance to say anything in return. He tries to win customers in the porn industry and knows that there are a LOT of geeks in the porn industry advising the porn producers who know his record, just see above. He has been losing cases for years but he doesn't tell you that and the porn peddlers don't know to ask. It is only when they come home to their IT guy they get the links to all his failed cases.
As I pointed out above, most in the industry leave him well alone. His clients are a handful in an industry where there are thousands in the US alone. His number of cases are tiny while finding large scale commercial copyright infringement for porn is trivial.
If he was a GOOD lawyer, he wouldn't bother with tiny settlements for a handful of clients, he would have gone after the porn tube business before the porn industry itself sorted it out (most are now hosting ad content) and gone after the hundreds of millions in that form of copyright infringement.
He hasn't. John Steele sells lawsuits at the bottom end to those who don't have someone to advice them not to deal with rats.
I have worked for the porn industry and seen this guy preaching at industry conventions, once supposedly on a forum that was to discuss how to approach copyright infringement as a porn company/copyright holder. (there are other approaches the best working focusing on having your customers become loyal fans of your brand, so they want to pay, beg you to pay)
It wasn't a discussion really, as I sat by as 3rd party (I do servers for whatever reason you might have and I make the same amount whether those servers are payed for by copyright owners, commercial pirates, amateurs or cat pictures) and was amazed to see him preach to the converted... well... up until the point you start asking for numbers. There are a LOT of porn producers, a shit load more content and a near infinite amount of downloaders. The internet may consist of cat pictures but torrents are for porn. Yet he has done at the time only a few thousand cases. That is NOTHING! It ain't even a drop in the bucket. The RIAA was doing fastly more cases.
While the audience was agreeing with him, you could see most didn't have a clue as to the real issues and the developments with regards to copyrights and enforcing them. The porn industry likes to pride itself on being cutting edge, VHS, online payments but really that is just a tiny segment, the rest are slobs who figured out sex sells. The moment the forum was over, I talked to some porn producers and asked what they though considering judgements like the then current claim of movie copyright infringenment costing several times more then the entire world economy.
Or the cases of sueing children, veterans and other people who might get the sympathy of the public. If the public chooses the side of dirty pirates against wholesome music executives... what chance does a porn peddler stand? Most porn producers are well aware that they are skirting the edge of public acceptance, they know they can only accept credit cards if they meet the decency requirements of the processing company, can only host with parties that accept adult content. They didn't like it one bit when I linked them on my tablet to some John Steele publicity stunts, no porn company wants attention from Fox News about harrasing some grandma who left her wifi open as it was installed by her grandson who died in Afghanistan. No thank you sirree, that is NOT worth gathering a few bucks, especially when all the lawyer fees have been payed you end up owing the lawyer for bad publicity.
That I wasn't the only doom spreader for dealing with John Steele is proven by the fact only a handful of companies deal with him. When you talk to him, he does his name justice google his picture, say his name and what you think he will be like is how he is. A boisterous overconfidant man who speaks so loud that he doesn't hear anyone asking him to explain some details about cases thrown out of court and how does not QUITE work on a contingency basis (he gets more if he wins but he ALWAYS get payed), how a settlement doesn't include paying lawyer fees. If you lose in court and are ordered to pay 5000 in damages you often ALSO have to pay lawyer fees. If you settle for 1000, that is it, the lawyer still wants paying. John Steele certainly does.
It is no secret that copyright infringement happens, on a MASSIVE scale. And porn has an issue the mainstream media does not have. I once came up with a nice way to put but we are all males here so here it is "You can cum on a trailer".
Some Hollywood movies have trailers that tell you the entire movie and a few where the trailer is better then the movie but on the whole, the trailer make you hungry for more.
In porn, the trailer is enough for most and just makes you sleepy. Watching a full movie on youtube is a hassle (well it was until they removed the ten minute limit) but for porn tubes... how many minutes do you need? Oh wait, I forgot my audience. Seconds?
Sharing the entire movie on a torrent is far less of an issue to the industry then all those porn tube sites that contain
So, you are claiming the industry isn't risk averse by listing games that are nearly all sequels?
And a LOT of them are also crappy consolfied monstrosities?
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Thou shalt not kill. That is easy. No exceptions, no moderation, thou shalt not kill, so if you do, you break the law and must be fully punished. Anything from euthanisia, to drink driver killing to murder spree, the same thing. Simple.
oh, you want degrees of homicide. Sorry, that is extra pages of text.
You want all the laws reduced to a hundred pages? Sharia law is nice and short, why don't you go life in a Sharia country.
On the whole, the larger the law books the more pleasant a place is to live in as shown by migration routes. Nobody wants to live in lawless places. Proof me wrong, EMIGRATE.
Put your accepted kernel contribution on your CV and your CV will command a higher salary.
So, you’ve got to balance, I guess you could say church and state, you got to balance that user experience, so that, in our case, we try to do one for 24 hours, no more, if it’s a real intrusive ad, and then we measure, you measure.
Well, I will try to torture Mark Westlake for 24 hours if it REALLY hurts.
My god... and the "none of our readers will be using adblockers" crap further down... WHY DO YOU THINK ANYONE WITH A BRAIN RUNS AN AD BLOCKER?
Because it is the only way to keep some fucking sanity! READ the quote again. For 24 hours... what is MISSING is per what? He tries to run a really intrusive ad only 24 hours per day? Wow, well that is protecting the user experience alright, if said user experience is absolute horror.
Not this guy does NOT state that they only test a potential new ad for how intrusive it is for 24 hours max and then measure the response to this new idea and then decide for or against using it again. That is NOT what he is saying. He is saying that if a really intrusive ad comes his way, he will run it BUT only for 24 hours because he knows that if he does it longer EVERYONE will leave. He does not limit how many DIFFERENT really intrusive ads he runs, just that any singular REALLY intrusive ad gets run for a maximum of 24 hours so that for a news site, EVERYONE who visits will have seen it... nice guy eh?
I first looked into ad blocking when the ISP I was using at the time ran a banner add that was a blinking nightmare for a service I was already using (UPC Cable) it was REALLY annoying and so I searched in how to block it proxy level so it would work on all my computers and browsers. I never went back but I do routinely update it to catch the new ads.
The reason is simple, give an advertising the finger and they will rape your children and sell their organs. It is NEVER enough for advertisers, the ads will always be more in your face, more jarring, more of them and getting more and more in the way of the content. TV ads are a prime example. Nobody really minded "this program brought to you by" messages. And interupting a 1 hour program three times gives those of us with bladder issues time to relieve themselves. And 4 times an hour, well why not. And 5 times an hour helps those with really bad bladders. And overlying ads over the closing credits hurts nobody. And overlaying ads over the actual program itself... FUCK IT! ENOUGH! NO MORE!
Someone made a nice graph of the DVD experience for pirates vs saps who buy their DVD's in the shops. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/19/experience-dvd-pirate-vs-paying-customer/
Much the same can be said for the web browsing experience of those with and without an adblocker. Occasionaly I have to use a non-blocked browser and ARGH! The HORROR, the SLOWNESS, the virusses served by unchecked 3rd party ad servers.
The STUPIDITY of advertisers is such they are their own worst enemy. So... you want to serve me a video ad before I can see the video I want... okay... I am slightly irritated and will associate that irritation with the product you are about to show me but hey, irritation is good in trying to get me to buy something... then I wait for it to load... slowly and the ad is TOTALLY irrelevant to me (some car ad for a SUV that is only available in the US, I don't drive cars, don't like SUV's and am in the EU). Then the real video refuses to load, I reload the page. Same ad again. NOT GOING TO BUY! Want to watch another video, same ad. Another video. Same ad. Week later another video. Same ad... I NOW LOATH THAT CAR AND BRAND WITH A FIERCENESS MOST PEOPLE RESERVE FOR... well other ads to be honest. Dog poo on the sidewalk you just stepped in when you took off your shoe to remove a piece of glass that just boar straight into your big toe you just stumped against something? HAS GOT NOTHING ON THAT CAR AD!
So... I block and... life is wonderful, I get
Enjoy your slide into obsolesce. If you remove all the emotionalism from those proposing pure capitalism, your are left holding a big, empty, "I don't want to spend any more" motto. It is religious fanaticism.
Countries thrive when they invest, undertake massive projects, improve themselves. They slide into nothingness when the accountants take over as their infrastructure falls apart and all the bright people find themselves working abroad.
The ultimate failure of religious fantatics like the parent is that they think the race ends. That once you won, that is it. The race never ends. And China right now is winning by default because everyone else has stopped. You can smirk about North-Korea's rocket attempts but at least they are trying. In the west, people worry about the costs to much to do ANYTHING anymore. Great nations were not build by accountants.