Congratulations. You've just won the slashdot fuckwit of the year award. You've pulled out a quote from a different part of the article talking about a different statistic. If you actually read the thread that you were replying to then you would know that everyone apart from you was talking about the year-on-year increase from 0.37% to 0.81%.
That's right it's not exactly a 100% increase, it's slightly more. So... what's your point, or were you just ducking to get out of the way of his joke?
Wow. You really are a lawyer. You've completely ignored the main point of my post (which was that the RIAA has resoundly failed to provide evidence of anything) to focus on a tiny technicality. And unlike the poster above who simply noted that I don't know the difference between a tort and a crime (which I don't, to be fair) you've spread it out into an entire rant.
I never claimed that the DoJ was prosecuting for "making available", I pointed that the RIAA in their suit managed to swing the judge into accepting this claim. Gosh, you know, like the point of TFA. And finally, because you were so pointlessly adamant about your technicality I went and looked it up - according to the description of the '97 NETact copyright infringement (for non-commericial purposes) is a criminal offense. So although your first statement may be true in some cases, you are also guilty of getting the technicalities wrong on occasion - and unlike me you really should know better as a lawyer.
Given that it might be either how about a reply instead of a mod for a change?
Let's get something straight - sharing copyrighted material is a crime, and if the the RIAA went about prosecuting just for that they wouldn't get half the flack that they do. But so far they have failed spectacularly to do so. Part of this is down to the basic structure of the internet - proving that party A shared a copyrighted file with party B beyond all reasonable doubt is hard. As they are pursuing civil actions they are going for the much easier burden of on the balance of probabilities. Unfortunately they are using the lack of knowledge in juries and judges to do so, rather than evidence of a crime.
If you present a printout of a screenshot of a file sharing client with my ip address and the name of song - that is not evidence.
Before you reach the evidence stage you need to provide: A log of an ip transaction from a reputable source - ie a router at an ISP. Proof that the file was not mislabeled - a hash of the transfer that shows the file contained copyrighted material. Proof that the person being sued is responsible for files offered at that ip address.
Until then the RIAA is just pissing in the wind and winning temporarily until they get struck down on appeal. Even if you show infringement of copyright, the "exponential" damages being asked for are absurd. Let's see a bandwidth breakdown from the ISP being converted into a "number of cds distributed" and then converted into damages.
OK, assuming that you hadn't read the article is standard slashdot tradition:) But I don't see where you're getting that they could show somebody downloaded any tracks. The link to the analysis of the case is where I pulled the info from about Jury instruction 15, he is quite explicit that the RIAA never showed that a download occured - only that she had files available for download. He also makes the point that they based the decision on the filenames, rather than the contents. So if any of this is wrong could you point to where you're getting contrary info from?
No it wasn't, and that is the problem a lot of people are having with this ruling. On this occasion I would recommend that you make an exception and RTFA. This case was not about uploading, the RIAA never proved that she uploading anything.
Jury Instruction 15: The act of making available for download copyrighted material is in itself an act of copyright infringement with a fine of $750-$30000.
Based on a screen-shot of kazaa showing some song names against her IP address they have fined her $220000. If you can't see why this is a travesty of justice then stop and think about it for a second. They have not shown that she violated copyright. Instead they have altered the law to say that "if it looks like you were going to violate copyright" then that is now a crime.
Thank god I don't live in America, and the laws here are a little more sane.
We're using a different defintion of word:) I meant that if the presented substring didn't have "word" boundaries on either side then it would screw up the spacing in the output. I didn't mean that the symbols didn't form a dictionary word.
Wouldn't the easy solution be to present the context as part of the reCapatcha? Rather than two single words from isolated contexts, present two "lines" with a word or two either side, and a slight colour change on the target words to indicate which ones the system is after. This would make your validation easier but wouldn't aid OCR in any way.
For your other point, there should be a "not a word" button to hit in that case to flag up that the original OCR has screwed up the word boundary.
I thought it was a really novel project, reminds me of the image tagging "games" that people came up with last year, but in a new problem domain.
Angry? You should be wary of reading emotional context into written word as it's often wrong. Perhaps you're confusing me being angry with pointing out to you where you don't know as much as you think that you do. We've started to go round in circles here so I'll run down where you are wrong.
why Apple went out of business years ago
Apple are a high-end niche market always have been. Just because Ferrari can find a luxury car markey doesn't mean that Ford/Toyota/etc aren't battling it out at the commodity end - yes cars aren't quite a commodity yet but it is an analogy for you.
People aren't going to switch to Linux because it's cheaper. They already wouldn't done that
NO. The whole point is that it is a falling market and so these price effects will be amplified. People don't care about $150 in $1500, they do care about $150/$400.
People aren't going to switch to Linux because it's more stable, or because it's F/OSS, or any of that.
Nobody is arguing that.
People are going to continue to buy what they buy unless 1) external factors force a major realignment or 2) they're given a good reason to switch.
Well spotted, and the fact that the desktop market is entering commodity status is 1) and external factor and 2) going to hammer home that a Windows box will have a 100% markup. Both conditions for a change fulfilled.
Your final point - no, you've just shown that you really don't a) understand or b) want to admit what a commodity market is.
Have you really got your head that far in the sand?
Given product A and product B with identical features and a nearly 100% difference in price, how much of the market do you think is made up of value shoppers, and how much is brand shoppers? With the crap that you are spewing you are making out that the computer market (like the market for mp3 players) is mostly made up of brand conscious shoppers. What have you got to back this up now that you've pulled it out of your arse?
Computers are a commodity. The cheaper they get, the more of a commodity they will become. Tell me something, after you've ranted about the anti-marketing bias, why don't you explain the difference between a commodity item and a luxury item. In particular how brand aware are buyers in both markets.
So the original article was about how computers are sliding into commodity territory, and how as they do so the value of having a Windows brand on there will become much less to the consumer. You ignored that in your first post and ranted about linux needing proper marketing. Now you're comparing desktops to mp3 players (very apples and oranges) and complaining about a lack of "narrative" in linux.
Do you know jack-shit about a) marketing or b) economics? Here is a simple question for you. Picture a commodity market, if box A does web browsing, email blah blah blah (as you pointed out in you original post) and box B does the same + shiney Windows sticker + 100% retail markup. Will the majority of consumers in this commodity market chose their box by brand, or by value?
For the love of god slashdot, for once be brave and do NOT under any circumstances RTFA. It never stops loading! There are cycling video ads in strips own the side and it uses that horrific ad-word shit. It was like a view into hell itself...
The gist of your post seems to be: an average user doesn't care - there is no incentive to use linux. So going back to the point in TFA, when a linux desktop for $250 can do all that the average user cares about, and the exact same hardware with Windows costs $400 - isn't that going to be all the marketing that will be needed?
Yes, you've phrased this much better than the way that I hashed it together. Good correction, but is it not true that by a wikipedian's definition a POV backed up by a reliable citation is a fact worth reporting on?
If you believe that we have significant differences in our understanding of length and speed then my comment would seem like that to you. But the answer to your Cartesian dilemma is to open your eyes. Only in theory it is impossible to reach an objective level - in practice we take for granted the idea that we all live in the same universe for the simple reason that nobody has ever seen evidence of a contradiction to that. So while you can chase this theoretical hole, shouting but it's turtles all the way down, most of us accept that an objective universe exists. It's an idea that works well in practice, although it cannot be be proven in theory. You have to ask yourself if that is really because everything is subjective - or is it because the tools of logic that you are using are not powerful enough to ground themselves?
But sure, that would just be me and my fallacies. My apologies, I thought that you were capable of getting the literary reference.
No (and quite appropriately) you are simply wrong. Only a sociologist would think that an ontology is required to determine an objective measure.
Numerous scientists perform the same procedure, observe some sort of results, and then get together and decide that they observed the same thing
Here is your flaw. Scientist never observe a result - they observe a measurement of a result. Something that can be performed objectively - unless you disagree with common definitions of length, breadth, speed etc. The distinction between the humanties and the sciences is specifically that objective measures exist of scientific processes, where-as the humanties are concerned with subjects for which there is no objective measure, and hence only debate.
First is customization. Put a spring in the mechanics of an engine, and I can replace it with a shorter/longer/stronger/weaker spring. I can heat it up to weaken it, grind it down, etc... With software, you are given a black box, binary-only, with no documentation on how it works, and definitely no common interface to access and modify it.
You seem to be arguing that hardware is more flexible than software - but surely you are not that stupid? A) How many cellphones now have user customizable parts like "springs"? B) How do you know the software will be a closed-source binary blob? C) Have you heard of an advanced software concept known as a "variable"? In your example we can assume that spring_length and spring_tension will be variables in the code. This either leads to something that can be user modified, or to a company selling different versions of the code for separate parameterizations.
Well, anyone who reads self-help books has a problem with understanding reality, let alone truth. Let's examine this wishy-washy new age idea that truth is a consensus consisting of a lot of compromises. I think that this idea is completely flawed on every level. You obviously do not. What consensus do we reach; that it's only partly a bunch of shit?
To back your point up you mention that things like "history" work less well than things like "thermodynamics". Do you really believe this is because people understand each other's views on science subjects more than arts subjects? That a consensus position can more easily be reached?
The basic problem with this theory of truth by consensus is that it assumes that truth is not discrete, and it can be reached by majority voting. In many subjects truth is discrete, and the voting model is closer to winner-takes-all. The reason that the truth crystallizes in this manner is because it is objectively testable. This is why we refer to the set of things that behaves in this manner - science. That which can be studied by the scientific method.
Furthermore, I think that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia's purpose is. It has very explicit design goals, using your terms, it attempts to construct articles that have all of the known facts. That it, is ignores "understanding" as you put it, or POV as wiki puts it. If a fact can be attributed to a respectable source then it goes in. Understanding is left as an exercise for the reader.
You miss the point that wiki is better for science, because in terms of establishing what the facts are, science subjects are the low hanging fruit. History (for example) is harder because the facts are not always in an objectively testable form, and usually have to pried from subjective observation. An ideal wikipedia article is not a "compromise" between all of the opinions that went into it - it is a collection of all of the facts that could be verified regardless of whether or not the contributors agreed upon them.
Splicing is not actually necessary. No cable has perfect internal reflection and so some light escapes naturally. A tap can sample this light without disrupting the cable, or being detectable. There was also a method a few years ago that involved encasing the cable in something that reduces the refractive index of the glass at the boundary and so allows the signal to be read - but this can be detected by the network operator. Newer methods are undetectable.
Few European wireless carriers offer flat-rate data plans, although their pay-per-kilobyte prices are typically far cheaper than U.S. pay-per-KB prices
Well apart from Verizon of course. I heard they had a deal for 0.002 cent/MB which seems amazingly cheap. And you get fantastic customer support to back it up...
Unless I missed something it doesn't state that the inclusive minutes aren't X-network. Given that almost all bundled minutes are X-network in the UK what is the submitter talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations. You've just won the slashdot fuckwit of the year award. You've pulled out a quote from a different part of the article talking about a different statistic. If you actually read the thread that you were replying to then you would know that everyone apart from you was talking about the year-on-year increase from 0.37% to 0.81%.
So, are you joining the editorial team?
That's right it's not exactly a 100% increase, it's slightly more. So... what's your point, or were you just ducking to get out of the way of his joke?
Wow. You really are a lawyer. You've completely ignored the main point of my post (which was that the RIAA has resoundly failed to provide evidence of anything) to focus on a tiny technicality. And unlike the poster above who simply noted that I don't know the difference between a tort and a crime (which I don't, to be fair) you've spread it out into an entire rant.
I never claimed that the DoJ was prosecuting for "making available", I pointed that the RIAA in their suit managed to swing the judge into accepting this claim. Gosh, you know, like the point of TFA. And finally, because you were so pointlessly adamant about your technicality I went and looked it up - according to the description of the '97 NETact copyright infringement (for non-commericial purposes) is a criminal offense. So although your first statement may be true in some cases, you are also guilty of getting the technicalities wrong on occasion - and unlike me you really should know better as a lawyer.
PS Do you charge by the post on slashdot?
Given that it might be either how about a reply instead of a mod for a change?
Let's get something straight - sharing copyrighted material is a crime, and if the the RIAA went about prosecuting just for that they wouldn't get half the flack that they do. But so far they have failed spectacularly to do so. Part of this is down to the basic structure of the internet - proving that party A shared a copyrighted file with party B beyond all reasonable doubt is hard. As they are pursuing civil actions they are going for the much easier burden of on the balance of probabilities. Unfortunately they are using the lack of knowledge in juries and judges to do so, rather than evidence of a crime.
If you present a printout of a screenshot of a file sharing client with my ip address and the name of song - that is not evidence.
Before you reach the evidence stage you need to provide:
A log of an ip transaction from a reputable source - ie a router at an ISP.
Proof that the file was not mislabeled - a hash of the transfer that shows the file contained copyrighted material.
Proof that the person being sued is responsible for files offered at that ip address.
Until then the RIAA is just pissing in the wind and winning temporarily until they get struck down on appeal.
Even if you show infringement of copyright, the "exponential" damages being asked for are absurd. Let's see a bandwidth breakdown from the ISP being converted into a "number of cds distributed" and then converted into damages.
The rest of the interview could be summarised as:
Q4) What's happening with the lawsuit?
I can't tell you because it's a legal matter
Q5..Qn) What's up with X?
See my answer to question 4.
The entire interview is just vapor.
OK, assuming that you hadn't read the article is standard slashdot tradition :) But I don't see where you're getting that they could show somebody downloaded any tracks. The link to the analysis of the case is where I pulled the info from about Jury instruction 15, he is quite explicit that the RIAA never showed that a download occured - only that she had files available for download. He also makes the point that they based the decision on the filenames, rather than the contents. So if any of this is wrong could you point to where you're getting contrary info from?
No it wasn't, and that is the problem a lot of people are having with this ruling. On this occasion I would recommend that you make an exception and RTFA. This case was not about uploading, the RIAA never proved that she uploading anything.
Jury Instruction 15: The act of making available for download copyrighted material is in itself an act of copyright infringement with a fine of $750-$30000.
Based on a screen-shot of kazaa showing some song names against her IP address they have fined her $220000. If you can't see why this is a travesty of justice then stop and think about it for a second. They have not shown that she violated copyright. Instead they have altered the law to say that "if it looks like you were going to violate copyright" then that is now a crime.
Thank god I don't live in America, and the laws here are a little more sane.
We're using a different defintion of word :) I meant that if the presented substring didn't have "word" boundaries on either side then it would screw up the spacing in the output. I didn't mean that the symbols didn't form a dictionary word.
Wouldn't the easy solution be to present the context as part of the reCapatcha? Rather than two single words from isolated contexts, present two "lines" with a word or two either side, and a slight colour change on the target words to indicate which ones the system is after. This would make your validation easier but wouldn't aid OCR in any way.
For your other point, there should be a "not a word" button to hit in that case to flag up that the original OCR has screwed up the word boundary.
I thought it was a really novel project, reminds me of the image tagging "games" that people came up with last year, but in a new problem domain.
On a similar vein:
// This is a random number chosen by a fair method
int numCheckpointsToday()
{
return 0;
}
(With apologies to xkcd).
Both your points are valid, but I was thinking of retailers who have pre-installed a distro for you, rather than a blank OS-free machine.
Your final point - no, you've just shown that you really don't a) understand or b) want to admit what a commodity market is.
Have you really got your head that far in the sand?
Given product A and product B with identical features and a nearly 100% difference in price, how much of the market do you think is made up of value shoppers, and how much is brand shoppers? With the crap that you are spewing you are making out that the computer market (like the market for mp3 players) is mostly made up of brand conscious shoppers. What have you got to back this up now that you've pulled it out of your arse?
Computers are a commodity. The cheaper they get, the more of a commodity they will become. Tell me something, after you've ranted about the anti-marketing bias, why don't you explain the difference between a commodity item and a luxury item. In particular how brand aware are buyers in both markets.
So the original article was about how computers are sliding into commodity territory, and how as they do so the value of having a Windows brand on there will become much less to the consumer. You ignored that in your first post and ranted about linux needing proper marketing. Now you're comparing desktops to mp3 players (very apples and oranges) and complaining about a lack of "narrative" in linux.
Do you know jack-shit about a) marketing or b) economics? Here is a simple question for you. Picture a commodity market, if box A does web browsing, email blah blah blah (as you pointed out in you original post) and box B does the same + shiney Windows sticker + 100% retail markup. Will the majority of consumers in this commodity market chose their box by brand, or by value?
For the love of god slashdot, for once be brave and do NOT under any circumstances RTFA. It never stops loading! There are cycling video ads in strips own the side and it uses that horrific ad-word shit. It was like a view into hell itself...
The gist of your post seems to be: an average user doesn't care - there is no incentive to use linux. So going back to the point in TFA, when a linux desktop for $250 can do all that the average user cares about, and the exact same hardware with Windows costs $400 - isn't that going to be all the marketing that will be needed?
If you try and take all sides to an argument then you're still wrong at least once.
Yes, you've phrased this much better than the way that I hashed it together. Good correction, but is it not true that by a wikipedian's definition a POV backed up by a reliable citation is a fact worth reporting on?
If you believe that we have significant differences in our understanding of length and speed then my comment would seem like that to you. But the answer to your Cartesian dilemma is to open your eyes. Only in theory it is impossible to reach an objective level - in practice we take for granted the idea that we all live in the same universe for the simple reason that nobody has ever seen evidence of a contradiction to that. So while you can chase this theoretical hole, shouting but it's turtles all the way down, most of us accept that an objective universe exists. It's an idea that works well in practice, although it cannot be be proven in theory. You have to ask yourself if that is really because everything is subjective - or is it because the tools of logic that you are using are not powerful enough to ground themselves?
But sure, that would just be me and my fallacies. My apologies, I thought that you were capable of getting the literary reference.
In theory what you say is entirely correct. However in practice it is not.
Here is your flaw. Scientist never observe a result - they observe a measurement of a result. Something that can be performed objectively - unless you disagree with common definitions of length, breadth, speed etc. The distinction between the humanties and the sciences is specifically that objective measures exist of scientific processes, where-as the humanties are concerned with subjects for which there is no objective measure, and hence only debate.
You seem to be arguing that hardware is more flexible than software - but surely you are not that stupid?
A) How many cellphones now have user customizable parts like "springs"?
B) How do you know the software will be a closed-source binary blob?
C) Have you heard of an advanced software concept known as a "variable"? In your example we can assume that spring_length and spring_tension will be variables in the code. This either leads to something that can be user modified, or to a company selling different versions of the code for separate parameterizations.
Well, anyone who reads self-help books has a problem with understanding reality, let alone truth. Let's examine this wishy-washy new age idea that truth is a consensus consisting of a lot of compromises. I think that this idea is completely flawed on every level. You obviously do not. What consensus do we reach; that it's only partly a bunch of shit?
To back your point up you mention that things like "history" work less well than things like "thermodynamics". Do you really believe this is because people understand each other's views on science subjects more than arts subjects? That a consensus position can more easily be reached?
The basic problem with this theory of truth by consensus is that it assumes that truth is not discrete, and it can be reached by majority voting. In many subjects truth is discrete, and the voting model is closer to winner-takes-all. The reason that the truth crystallizes in this manner is because it is objectively testable. This is why we refer to the set of things that behaves in this manner - science. That which can be studied by the scientific method.
Furthermore, I think that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia's purpose is. It has very explicit design goals, using your terms, it attempts to construct articles that have all of the known facts. That it, is ignores "understanding" as you put it, or POV as wiki puts it. If a fact can be attributed to a respectable source then it goes in. Understanding is left as an exercise for the reader.
You miss the point that wiki is better for science, because in terms of establishing what the facts are, science subjects are the low hanging fruit. History (for example) is harder because the facts are not always in an objectively testable form, and usually have to pried from subjective observation. An ideal wikipedia article is not a "compromise" between all of the opinions that went into it - it is a collection of all of the facts that could be verified regardless of whether or not the contributors agreed upon them.
Splicing is not actually necessary. No cable has perfect internal reflection and so some light escapes naturally. A tap can sample this light without disrupting the cable, or being detectable. There was also a method a few years ago that involved encasing the cable in something that reduces the refractive index of the glass at the boundary and so allows the signal to be read - but this can be detected by the network operator. Newer methods are undetectable.
Well apart from Verizon of course. I heard they had a deal for 0.002 cent/MB which seems amazingly cheap. And you get fantastic customer support to back it up...
Unless I missed something it doesn't state that the inclusive minutes aren't X-network. Given that almost all bundled minutes are X-network in the UK what is the submitter talking about?