India, like many European countries and unlike the US, has no absolute right to free speech; even according to the Article 14 (which defines the Fundamental Right to free speech), there are many conditions under which the right to exercise speech may be abrogated. In an ideological sense, you could say that the Indian Constitution is actually libertarian in spirit, but liberal in character; so within the parameters of Indian legal tradition, it is very much the Government's prerogative to censor certain texts if it deems them to be detrimental to public order.
However, and I think Indian bloggers should sufficiently understand this, the IT Act is still very much draconian, in that there is no way you can even know that a certain website has been blocked, or indeed, why it has been blocked. Currently, the situation is that if you go to a certain URL, there is no way you'll ever know if the site was inaccessible for technical, or political, reasons. At the very least, I think DoT or the ISP's should put up a notice saying that a website has been blocked for reason X, whether it is national security, inciting communal violence or using an outrageous shade of pink.
Arguing for an absolute right to free speech is, I believe, a long-drawn fight and will need us to look back on 56 years of abuse and such. Transparency in governance is, otoh, a much more immediate fight; we're just bringing the RTI Act to the cyber-age.
But what due process did they use in choosing what sites to block?
Many of the good folk at the BloggersCollective have filed Right to Information requests; we should copies of the exact files in thirty days' time. Suffice it to say, though, that the IT Act, 2000, allows for just this; there is no due process when it comes to blocking websites. The PIL, presumably, exists to get this clarified in the Supreme Court.
You won't believe how accurately your post describes me, down to the movie as well, 21 grams [assuming you meant it to be 21 grams:-) ].
Although, must say that I neither have a sister, nor do I know anyone with a theater system better than my beanbag + comp + 5.1 speaker system shack.:-D
You see multiple units, I see one SI (not "merely" metric) unit for length, metre. That is, most scientific measurements are seen in terms of metres; when someone says "1 km", therefore, I only see 10^3 m.
I'm not sure why you blame the metric (or SI) system here; surely, even if you use the imperial system to make your calculations, you'd end up with constants such as this. Otoh, if you were saying we should define a new unit of length, say, 1 cyd = distance travelled by light in one sec, then it's a different matter. I suppose it is easier for people doing scientific calculations to deal with the number 299,792,458, than it is for the general public (who would be faced with that option when they convert to and from the already defined metre).
Right. I suppose we agree more than we disagree, in that case.
While I would agree that we ought to have the right to make modifications to our own copies, I'm not sure I would agree on the right to re-distribute the said modifications without the original copyright owner's permission. Or in other words, I would concur with the judgement in when it says that not all derived works would warrant fair-use.
"transformative" - contributing to a larger body of work, for example, using a few quotes from one source to create a larger essay of your own. A previous court case which the judge cites says tranformative means it "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message."
This is a very interesting point, and to me, makes artistic sense. The way I read it is, if the derived work of art can stand on its own merits without a necessary association, or identification, with the original work, then the said derived work is "transformative", and therefore, fair use. Mere editting of a movie's dialogues cannot pass this test (that is, the new work cannot be said to stand on its own as another work of art), this usage is not fair-use.
Wonder what the good judge thinks of the po-mo notion of a simulacrum.:-)
I used the following dead-tree analogy to form my opinion: suppose someone was reading Shakespeare, for example, and was offended by the usage of the words "cock" and "bastard" in the drama, As You Like It [look it up, they exist:-) ]. He, therefore, decided to publish a new edition with those lines editted out. The edition, naturally, clearly mentions that there was some editting done, but doesn't state where the lines have been excised; you'd have to compare editions to sort those out. Would you support the publication of such a text? I know I wouldn't.
Note that, unlike the original case, there are no copyright issues in my analogy; Shakespeare is long dead, so there are no copyright concerns, DMCA doesn't really apply to dead-tree publications, so I'm really trying to frame the debate in a moral sense.
This is someone choosing to view it the way they want it, without infringing on your right to view the unedited version.
Nope. Someone's choosing to view the movies in a way that ClearFlix deems is inoffensive. We are not talking about the end-user making any modifications to his or her own copy.
It's not just the names, cheesy as they sound, but also the function encapsulated here.
Logically speaking, any email from my CEO (for example) would probably be a mass-mailer, and therefore, would not be that important to me; emails from my immediate boss, OTOH, will be of much greater value because they would have immediate operational information. In short, emails have absolutely no relation to the actual pecking order in any organization.
Isn't PageRank based on a voting system? OK, in an intranet full of PDFs and Word docs, who votes? Yup, that's right, PageRank doesn't work in an enterprise context.
I think it is fairly obvious that Google does not use PageRank for some of its specialized searches, such as for gmail, Google video and so on; they simply use some text-matching algorithm in those apps. Not that hard to imagine that this would be the case with Google Enterprise (or whatever they call their app).
Come to think of it, why do they need that many? Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, and everyone else index the web with far fewer I'll bet
Unless you're trolling, (or think Google should be a search engine alone), you would know that Google does a lot more than plain-vanilla web search.
Don't get me started. 5,000 PhDs and their efforts to combat Click Fraud amount to -erm- not a whole hill o'beans.
Try reading that ZDNet article, instead of forming opinions just by looking at headlines.
.. and before TV rights and corporate sponsorships, it was all about length comparisons for racial (Berlin 1936), ideological (Moscow '80, LA '84), and jingoistic reasons.
I suppose the last time it was a competition for free-willing amateurs was the only other time the Olympics was played in a non-leap year, 1900. That is also the last time my country won a medal for athletics, so perhaps, it wasn't as non-jingoistic as I made it out to be.
I think the point that India's extreme left (Pankaj Mishra, Arundati Roy etc) misses, and misses completely, is how inherently course-correcting the system has become. Two years ago, we had major infrastructure problems; now we have the world's cheapest telephone system, the Railways has a surplus, most electricity boards are making a profit, etc. We've had massive population growth in our urban areas, but look at the predicted growth levels from now to 2015; most of it will taper off to a trickle.
That, as a summary, is my major beef with Pankaj Mishra's Op-Ed; he seems to be looking at current problems and thinks things are either stagnant, or will become worse. Yes we seem to have intractable governance issues, yes there's no coherent political leadership to address them, but no, that's no reason not to be optimistic. I don't know if India will be a superpower or not, but I think it is very reasonable to suggest that in twenty years time, the majority of Indians will be living in conditions that can approach international standards.
You know, this is interesting, and all of this is conjecture, but I notice that the tsunami is 'beaten' only by earthquakes and tropical cyclones which, co-incidentally, occurred in the same region as the tsunami. Considering that most deaths in 'quakes and, possibly, cyclones, are post-disaster, and after the actual event, would it be possible to say that the maximum number of deaths ever occurred in those 40 minutes?
In either case, 26th December will be a gruesome date for me from now on. I don't think I'll ever get again get drunk, for example, on the night of 25th December.
I'm sorry, but that was completely misinformed and totally unnecessary. After Bangladesh, the Coramandal Coast (the south-eastern coastlines at Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) face the second greatest number of cyclones in the world, and you should know this, we have a fair cyclone warning system, with radios, satellite phones and so on. Not perfect, but works. Nothing to prevent the Tsunami Warning system from using the same communications infrastructure.
I should know; my grandfather survived a cyclone in 1990 mostly for the fact that he had enough warning to move away from a certain remote village in the Krishna Delta region.
As above, racism is only really a problem because some people won't let it die. They're too concerned about appearing perfect rather than being perfect.
One of the bigger points that Malcolm Gladwell makes in his book, Blink, is on how race comes into our implicit judgement. We might not be cognizant of our own prejudices, but we certainly implicitly use race in our decisions.
Leave race alone for a moment; there's this other study (and I say this from memory; could be wrong on details) that Gladwell quotes, but seemingly, the vast majority of CEO's in the US are not just white, but also above 6 feet tall. Apparently, people have an implicit, irrational preference for someone taller than themselves to lead them in their jobs.
Put simply, race, height, sex, colour of your hair all matter; people are sheep, they're easily influenced by Shiny Bright Noses, and as a society, there needs to be at least an awareness of these factors.
A commentor pointed out that this is, in fact, 11.4% of their income in 2005. To which, I suppose, you'd retort by pointing out the difference between income and turnover, which, save from a clinical distinction in definition, is something uniquely ignorant of.
With all due respects, I think we're talking about two different things here.
I will, first, agree with you that animated movies often are indeed funnier when we see them in our native tongues, than in their original languages. In Disney's Alladin, for example, there's a scene where the Genie asks Alladin to wish for the Nile. When Alladin wishes for the Nile, the Genie says no (and thus demonstrates his independence). When they dubbed the movie into Telugu, my mother tongue, they changed this line to a very snarky political comment; the Genie, in Telugu, asks Alladin to wish for Telugu Ganga, an (a water) irrigation project subject to much political controversy and ethnic backlash. Hidden gems that aren't quite there in the original; something that I suppose would happen with greater frequency in Spanish, considering that the speed at which you speak the language is closer to that of (American) English, than it is for Telugu.
However, the reason for that to happen isn't because the actors are voice-professionals; rather, it is because they're focussing on a significantly less complex challenge with a narrower audience; the dialogue writers won't, for example, have to cater for a bored Indian kid;-). You see, an Eddie Murphy or a Cameron Diaz provide more than mere (English) voice for their characters; they are, in fact, giving them expressions and body-language. It is those finer nuances that the article is talking about, and it is these things that voice-only actors can't deliver.
Bud, I now this might be a troubling thing for you to know, and try as I might, I can't think of a better way to put this, but
NOT FUNNY. NOT EVEN CLOSE. DONT EVER AGAIN TRY TO GO FOR THAT +5, FUNNY MOD COZ YOU ARE NOT FUNNY AND ARE SO NOT FUNNY THAT IF THERE EVER WAS A NEW WORD FOR NOT-FUNNY, THAT WOULD BE YOUR NICK, BUT BECAUSE IT WOULDNT BE FUNNY,
Bad perceptions, it seems, change slower than good perceptions. I admit I found linkfarms irritating for sometime, I don't think there have been a prominent problem. That is to say, while they exist, they don't come in the way of Google becoming dehabilitating, if you will; it is still extremely useable.
This argument of "sticking with pure search and nothing else", though, has some other significant problems that whiners out here don't seem to realize. You see, in the past 2-2.5 years, the web has made some significant progress in organizing itself into something less un-structured than what it was in, say, 2002.
What do I mean by that? As an example, consider this: you have this huuuge adoration for anything to do with, let's say, the movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Alarmed by the general lack of information about the movie, you decide to do something about it. If this was 2002, you have one clear choice:- you signup at GeoCities (or get your own hosting), and fill it with trivia, photographs, details on every shot, etc. If you happen to pickup other fans as well on the way, you'd probably put up a GuestBook, or a YahooGroups mailing list. The only way someone could stumble upon your site is if they were linked to from a high-traffic site (like Slashdot), or through a search engine.
Now fast forward to 2006. You're faced with the same dilemma again; you're the world's greatest fan for Plan Neuf d'espace extra-atmosphérique, that po-mo French tribute to the original, which broke new ground in French New Wave cinema, and later inspired an aging French team to win against Spain in an obscure football match. While you can still go through that GeoCities route even now, this time around though, you have much better choices; you can also put it up Wikipedia, if you wish (and actively interact with other fans through edit-wars). You could also put up a site, discussion fora etc. Or you could put up a blog somewhere, write articles and post it up to Technocrati and so on. Whatever way you choose, the bottomline remains this:- Google, or any search engine, need not necessarily be the primary way your users could come. The web has become organized now; with a better public transportation choices, you could plausibly avoid taking that taxi you're used to taking.
Now, I'm not saying Google isn't poking in every possible pie. Some of its projects are, even to my Google-fanboi-mind, rather ridiculous; even if it has all that AJAX-mojo, why in the world should Google come up with a shoddy spreadsheet program, for example, and actually take a beating on its brand? That said, and it's important to understand this, this, and most of Google's projects (specifically things like Google Coop), are actually efforts at tackling the increasing Semanticization, if you will, of the Web. The search engine will exist for a lot more time, but as a concept, it can and will be made extinct at some point in time. It might stumble along, it might pick up a few duds on the way, but essentially, Google is bracing itself for that future.
That's complete BS! I mean, don't you guys get season passes or something? Back in my alma mater, we had a choice of getting a three-month pass, or parking in two very inaccessible parking lots. We had free shuttle buses running every five minutes from the parking lots.
Slashdot Mirror
India, like many European countries and unlike the US, has no absolute right to free speech; even according to the Article 14 (which defines the Fundamental Right to free speech), there are many conditions under which the right to exercise speech may be abrogated. In an ideological sense, you could say that the Indian Constitution is actually libertarian in spirit, but liberal in character; so within the parameters of Indian legal tradition, it is very much the Government's prerogative to censor certain texts if it deems them to be detrimental to public order.
However, and I think Indian bloggers should sufficiently understand this, the IT Act is still very much draconian, in that there is no way you can even know that a certain website has been blocked, or indeed, why it has been blocked. Currently, the situation is that if you go to a certain URL, there is no way you'll ever know if the site was inaccessible for technical, or political, reasons. At the very least, I think DoT or the ISP's should put up a notice saying that a website has been blocked for reason X, whether it is national security, inciting communal violence or using an outrageous shade of pink.
Arguing for an absolute right to free speech is, I believe, a long-drawn fight and will need us to look back on 56 years of abuse and such. Transparency in governance is, otoh, a much more immediate fight; we're just bringing the RTI Act to the cyber-age.
Although, must say that I neither have a sister, nor do I know anyone with a theater system better than my beanbag + comp + 5.1 speaker system shack. :-D
I'm not sure why you blame the metric (or SI) system here; surely, even if you use the imperial system to make your calculations, you'd end up with constants such as this. Otoh, if you were saying we should define a new unit of length, say, 1 cyd = distance travelled by light in one sec, then it's a different matter. I suppose it is easier for people doing scientific calculations to deal with the number 299,792,458, than it is for the general public (who would be faced with that option when they convert to and from the already defined metre).
Right. I suppose we agree more than we disagree, in that case.
While I would agree that we ought to have the right to make modifications to our own copies, I'm not sure I would agree on the right to re-distribute the said modifications without the original copyright owner's permission. Or in other words, I would concur with the judgement in when it says that not all derived works would warrant fair-use.
This is a very interesting point, and to me, makes artistic sense. The way I read it is, if the derived work of art can stand on its own merits without a necessary association, or identification, with the original work, then the said derived work is "transformative", and therefore, fair use. Mere editting of a movie's dialogues cannot pass this test (that is, the new work cannot be said to stand on its own as another work of art), this usage is not fair-use.
Wonder what the good judge thinks of the po-mo notion of a simulacrum. :-)
I used the following dead-tree analogy to form my opinion: suppose someone was reading Shakespeare, for example, and was offended by the usage of the words "cock" and "bastard" in the drama, As You Like It [look it up, they exist :-) ]. He, therefore, decided to publish a new edition with those lines editted out. The edition, naturally, clearly mentions that there was some editting done, but doesn't state where the lines have been excised; you'd have to compare editions to sort those out. Would you support the publication of such a text? I know I wouldn't.
Note that, unlike the original case, there are no copyright issues in my analogy; Shakespeare is long dead, so there are no copyright concerns, DMCA doesn't really apply to dead-tree publications, so I'm really trying to frame the debate in a moral sense.
Nope. Someone's choosing to view the movies in a way that ClearFlix deems is inoffensive. We are not talking about the end-user making any modifications to his or her own copy.
Logically speaking, any email from my CEO (for example) would probably be a mass-mailer, and therefore, would not be that important to me; emails from my immediate boss, OTOH, will be of much greater value because they would have immediate operational information. In short, emails have absolutely no relation to the actual pecking order in any organization.
I suppose the last time it was a competition for free-willing amateurs was the only other time the Olympics was played in a non-leap year, 1900. That is also the last time my country won a medal for athletics, so perhaps, it wasn't as non-jingoistic as I made it out to be.
That, as a summary, is my major beef with Pankaj Mishra's Op-Ed; he seems to be looking at current problems and thinks things are either stagnant, or will become worse. Yes we seem to have intractable governance issues, yes there's no coherent political leadership to address them, but no, that's no reason not to be optimistic. I don't know if India will be a superpower or not, but I think it is very reasonable to suggest that in twenty years time, the majority of Indians will be living in conditions that can approach international standards.
In either case, 26th December will be a gruesome date for me from now on. I don't think I'll ever get again get drunk, for example, on the night of 25th December.
I should know; my grandfather survived a cyclone in 1990 mostly for the fact that he had enough warning to move away from a certain remote village in the Krishna Delta region.
Leave race alone for a moment; there's this other study (and I say this from memory; could be wrong on details) that Gladwell quotes, but seemingly, the vast majority of CEO's in the US are not just white, but also above 6 feet tall. Apparently, people have an implicit, irrational preference for someone taller than themselves to lead them in their jobs.
Put simply, race, height, sex, colour of your hair all matter; people are sheep, they're easily influenced by Shiny Bright Noses, and as a society, there needs to be at least an awareness of these factors.
I don't know if this is relevant, but a quick google search brought Windows Automative up.
A commentor pointed out that this is, in fact, 11.4% of their income in 2005. To which, I suppose, you'd retort by pointing out the difference between income and turnover, which, save from a clinical distinction in definition, is something uniquely ignorant of.
With all due respects, I think we're talking about two different things here.
I will, first, agree with you that animated movies often are indeed funnier when we see them in our native tongues, than in their original languages. In Disney's Alladin, for example, there's a scene where the Genie asks Alladin to wish for the Nile. When Alladin wishes for the Nile, the Genie says no (and thus demonstrates his independence). When they dubbed the movie into Telugu, my mother tongue, they changed this line to a very snarky political comment; the Genie, in Telugu, asks Alladin to wish for Telugu Ganga, an (a water) irrigation project subject to much political controversy and ethnic backlash. Hidden gems that aren't quite there in the original; something that I suppose would happen with greater frequency in Spanish, considering that the speed at which you speak the language is closer to that of (American) English, than it is for Telugu.
However, the reason for that to happen isn't because the actors are voice-professionals; rather, it is because they're focussing on a significantly less complex challenge with a narrower audience; the dialogue writers won't, for example, have to cater for a bored Indian kid ;-). You see, an Eddie Murphy or a Cameron Diaz provide more than mere (English) voice for their characters; they are, in fact, giving them expressions and body-language. It is those finer nuances that the article is talking about, and it is these things that voice-only actors can't deliver.
If a chair is thrown in the middle of a Redmond campus, does anyone make a sound?
On second thought, err, I don't know what came over me. My unreserved apologies, but I really meant to preview and submit anonymously.
This argument of "sticking with pure search and nothing else", though, has some other significant problems that whiners out here don't seem to realize. You see, in the past 2-2.5 years, the web has made some significant progress in organizing itself into something less un-structured than what it was in, say, 2002.
What do I mean by that? As an example, consider this: you have this huuuge adoration for anything to do with, let's say, the movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Alarmed by the general lack of information about the movie, you decide to do something about it. If this was 2002, you have one clear choice:- you signup at GeoCities (or get your own hosting), and fill it with trivia, photographs, details on every shot, etc. If you happen to pickup other fans as well on the way, you'd probably put up a GuestBook, or a YahooGroups mailing list. The only way someone could stumble upon your site is if they were linked to from a high-traffic site (like Slashdot), or through a search engine.
Now fast forward to 2006. You're faced with the same dilemma again; you're the world's greatest fan for Plan Neuf d'espace extra-atmosphérique, that po-mo French tribute to the original, which broke new ground in French New Wave cinema, and later inspired an aging French team to win against Spain in an obscure football match. While you can still go through that GeoCities route even now, this time around though, you have much better choices; you can also put it up Wikipedia, if you wish (and actively interact with other fans through edit-wars). You could also put up a site, discussion fora etc. Or you could put up a blog somewhere, write articles and post it up to Technocrati and so on. Whatever way you choose, the bottomline remains this:- Google, or any search engine, need not necessarily be the primary way your users could come. The web has become organized now; with a better public transportation choices, you could plausibly avoid taking that taxi you're used to taking.
Now, I'm not saying Google isn't poking in every possible pie. Some of its projects are, even to my Google-fanboi-mind, rather ridiculous; even if it has all that AJAX-mojo, why in the world should Google come up with a shoddy spreadsheet program, for example, and actually take a beating on its brand? That said, and it's important to understand this, this, and most of Google's projects (specifically things like Google Coop), are actually efforts at tackling the increasing Semanticization, if you will, of the Web. The search engine will exist for a lot more time, but as a concept, it can and will be made extinct at some point in time. It might stumble along, it might pick up a few duds on the way, but essentially, Google is bracing itself for that future.
That's complete BS! I mean, don't you guys get season passes or something? Back in my alma mater, we had a choice of getting a three-month pass, or parking in two very inaccessible parking lots. We had free shuttle buses running every five minutes from the parking lots.
I thought it was well-intended humour. :-)