One reason we moan about lawyers is the artificially protected fees. For simple filings the level of knowledge "should cost" some $50 an hour tops, and small cases could escape under a grand.
Then Orgs. like the RIAA reverse-leverage this fact to pull their copyright stunts.
That would be great. IAAL. Would you mind getting all of my clients to agree not to sue me if they lose their cases and it is not my fault? Please bear in mind that some of these people may be angry and bitter, not to mention in desperate need of cash. Thanks, I appreciate it.
I also venture to suggest that you have never drafted a "simple filing" in your life. Pleadings are a complex artform, and a good lawyer will take many years to perfect their drafting style. Because they serve the technical purpose of identifying the issues in dispute, a good pleading can mean the difference between years of costly litigation and a quickly resolved dispute.
Lawyers do charge too much money. But $50/hour is not even close to adequate to cover the insane risk of being sued by your clients when they lose, nor does it reflect the extremely complex skills which are required to practice law properly.
Clearly, using hyphens went out of style a) long before he was born or b) they're such a new invention that someone so old shouldn't be forced to learn new things.
Please, enlighten us.
I assume you are referring to this. However, there is no need for a hyphen in "next generation" because it is clear to which noun "next" refers. To quote Wikipedia (not exactly an authoritative source, of course):
Hyphens should not normally be used in adverbâ"adjective modifiers such as wholly owned subsidiary and quickly moving vehicle (because the adverbs clearly modify the adjectives; "quickly" does not apply to "vehicle" as "quickly vehicle" would be meaningless). However, if the adverb can also function as an adjective, then a hyphen may be required for clarity.
If anything, (mis)use of hyphens is growing in popularity. They should only be used where absolutely essential - unfortunately, they are often used in PHB-type office gibberish when they are completely superfluous.
In any event, be careful shooting your mouth off about hyphenation: entire countries have been destroyed before now for that precise reason.
Yeah, there are so many variables that it's nigh-on impossible to get them all right on every computer. For unknown reasons wireless seems to screw things up even more severely...
I went through a phase in my late teens where I would get up on a sunny Saturday morning at about 11am, turn on my computer, and fire up Civ II. At 3am on Sunday I would realise that I was still wearing my dressing gown, hadn't showered, hadn't eaten or drunk anything, and in most cases hadn't moved except to go to the toilet.
On the other hand, I have conquered Europe more times than most people...
While I don't disagree with you in any way, I'm always curious why people are upset when their RAM is being used. As I understand it, Vista pre-loads into RAM applications that you use often, thus (ideally) speeding up load time. RAM is there to be used; why do we get upset when we see near-100% usage? Personally, I don't care what XP's RAM usage is when I boot up, as long as it's responsive. If increasing XP's RAM usage to 1.5GB on bootup by loading stuff I use regularly would make my applications load faster, I would beg for it to be done.
Anyone have any ideas about this?
Just picking an easy to quote metric, I guess.
You should read up on Vista's "helpful" pre-fetching though. It basically works so that if you play Quake III at 9pm on a Tuesday a couple of weeks in a row, then it "predicts" that you will want to do so the following Tuesday and starts loading the data into memory in anticipation.
It seems to have two major overheads: (1) watching what you are doing so it can predict what you might be doing later; and (2) churning all that data from your hard disk into memory constantly.
The machine is startlingly faster and more responsive running XP - I realise this is not purely RAM-related, but it is a reflection that the OS isn't absolutely pumping the system's resources for a benefit which is lost in the overall loss of performance.
I spent last night installing XP on a Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop for a friend who has tolerated Vista for about 6 months now.
Not surprisingly, Toshiba (like Dell and many others) has signed a deal with the devil not to provide support for anything other than Vista (honestly, I can see why they might do a deal to pre-install Vista, but why stop loyal Toshiba customers from installing XP if they want to? Crazy).
However, what is truly impressive is the hatred for Vista out there on the net, and the lengths that it inspires people to go to to get rid of it and, in the spirit of the net, help others get rid of it. Googling for info about getting XP up and running on this particular machine yielded pages and pages of helpful information about exactly what must be done to round up the necessary drivers (many from the OEM's who supplied the various components of the machine). Even better, a few heroes had actually compiled zip files containing every driver and distributed them via Rapidshare and the like.
The other really startling thing was how many non-expert users were doing this. There were heaps of messageboard posts where inexperienced users basically begged for help to get XP working on their laptops. Due to the bod of Vista-hatred, the more tech savvy users were generally walking people through the process with a level of patience rarely seen on-line.
I had the same experience installing XP on my Dell XPS 1530 (great computer, once you disinfect it) - there is basically a community dedicated to purging it of Vista.
When you are inspiring legions of both expert users and ordinary non-techy people to go through the pain of installing an operating system using an ad hoc collection of unsupported drivers, something is badly, badly awry. I am critical not of MS so much as Toshiba, Dell and co - they are the ones who have made the key decision to support nothing but Vista. I wonder if they realise the lengths their users are going to to get around this choice?
Incidentally, my friend's reaction was priceless when XP booted up quickly and quietly - "holy shit... you mean it's done? it's so... responsive! It's beautiful!" He then checked the memory usage and noted with awe that it was 120 megs after booting rather than 1 to 1.5 gigs for Vista.
I agree. It also raises the very significant question of imposing criminal penalties in relation to what is in reality a civil offence.
This type of penalty is the direct result of the sustained campaign to impose extraordinarily severe penalties in relation to 'crimes' which in reality carry few of the hallmarks of what is traditionally regarded as criminal activity.
When you send someone to prison for that long for a crime which is trivially easy to commit, is of debatable morality, and which has a tenuous impact, at best, on anyone or on "society", then I think there is something very wrong.
Yep. However, most of those conspiracies were found out. It's incredibly hard to keep a conspiracy quiet for any amount of time. These conspiracies usually fall apart as soon as they've enacted their plans. People are incompetent.
Logically you don't know about the ones which didn't get "found out", do you? You have no idea if 1% or 100% of national-level conspiracies get uncovered.
Except that we aren't throwing them in jail. Just mocking them.
As you should know, 'mocking' people - isolating them socially and professionally - was one of the most powerful weapons used in the McCarthy era. Relatively few people were tried for supposed offences - far more were blacklisted in one way or another, and, more importantly, a climate was created where the average person on the street would never dream of expressing certain views. That is the real tool of control - the trials and prisons are just a way of achieving it.
And not one of these people would gladly go to the press to guarantee their name going down in history as the one who blew the lid off the conspiracy?
Counter-example - are you saying not one US intelligence agency has ever run a sophisticated propaganda operation which has not been 'exposed'? In addition, such things can be done via relatively subtle means of control, not everyone involved in such an operation would know the details or even the purpose of it.
In the end I think the OP's point is this: many things which have happened throughout history would be regarded as 'crazy conspiracy theories' if they had not been demonstrated to be real. Why, then, are so many people here so quick to jump on anyone who suggests anything resembling such a theory in relation to contemporary events?
A mere 60 years ago, the German government burnt down its parliament in order to seize absolute power. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US Government deliberately and systematically tested 'mind control' techniques on its own citizens without their knowledge or consent (look up MKULTRA). Even in starting the current Iraq war the US Government flat-out lied about 'intelligence' it had which has justified a war which has killed tens of thousands, possibly more.
None of this is causally related to proving any other 'conspiracy theory' - but it does prove that very strange and elaborate schemes can and will be executed by the elites in power for their own purposes, and a wise society would insist on asking very uncomfortable questions about events such as September 11.
They should have just slapped the Aero GUI on XP and called it Vista. It'd Just Work(tm) and it would still consume much less resources than Vista does now. Vista didn't even deliver most of the stuff like WinFS that was supposed to make the upgrade headache worthwhile. It did, however, include the latest and most virulent DRM as well as other non-critical crap.
Again, Microsoft, just put Aero on Windows XP as service pack 4, and then you can pretend that your customers really, really do prefer Vista over XP.
They don't even need Aero - the content already exists for XP. I just installed the phenomenal Area o4.2 Visual Style on an installation of XP SP2, and it looks and runs wonderfully. This is a reasonably helpful explanation of how to install non-MS visual styles in XP.* There are also various packages around to add widgets and other bits and pieces to give XP a convincingly Vista/Aero feel in terms of the desktop (Rainmeter or Samurize, for example).
Microsoft should absolutely get a few visual styles along these lines, integrate as many good known fixes and up to date drivers as possible into the base installation package, and release XP SP4 as a standalone product. If it makes them feel better, they can call it Windows Classic 08 or something and release it as a new product at a reasonable price (say, under $100). Hell, I'd buy it.
* NB - if you actually try installing the theme above following the instructions on the second site, note that you need to rename the.msstyles files to match the folder names (or vice-versa), it wouldn't work for me until I did this.
Let the purists have their purity, and let the pragmatists have their pragmatism. The nice part about technology is that both can coexist peacefully, ignoring a the artistic equivalent of "get off my lawn."
I agree with you as regards purely artistic photography. Plenty of the techniques there - fish-eye lenses, long or multiple exposures, colored lenses, etc - already distort reality for artistic purposes.
What I wonder is this: is there a way to take photos as reliable documentary evidence anymore? How can you prove that something has not been altered?
Exactly. The 'live and let live' attitude to manipulated photos ignores the fact that it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference between a manipulated and authentic photograph, and yet they are materially different in terms of what they embody.
That is true in a hand-wavy, philosophical sense. But it doesn't change the fact that, without manipulation, a camera mechanically captures exactly what was present in reality at the moment a picture was taken.
Obviously there are physical limitations, everything from lighting to the lens, to where the camera was actually pointed, to the camera's ability to reduce the input it receives to an accurate record of colours and tones.
Nevertheless, that record, imperfect though it may be, is accurate: with the limitations of the mechanical process understood, a photograph still reflects what was actually present in front of the lens.
So in a very real sense, something is lost with ubiquitous photo manipulation, something far greater than the whole grizzled-old-photographer philosophy that images are inherently subjective blah blah blah - not only must we deal with the age old problem of interpreting what was happening in real life through the limitations of the mechanical process, we must now deal with the very active and deliberate interference of intelligent agents whose sole aim is to alter the apparent record of reality. No longer can we rely on the fact that rays of light actually bounced off the subject and through the lense to produce the image we see before us.
I put it to you another way: we would not ascribe the same value to photographs unless they made us feel that what they depicted was an accurate record of reality. Intentional manipulation amounts to a deliberate use/abuse of that assumption.
I for one would like Flicke and similar sites to mandate a tag which discriminates between unmanipulated, globally retouched, and manually retouched images.
Photographs, until relatively recently, were a highly reliable record of what happened when photons IN REALITY hit objects IN REALITY, were reflected and then focused IN REALITY through the lens of a REAL camera. Yes, you could manipulate photographs at great expense, but even those could generally be detected as fakes without too much trouble.
We are now reaching a point where that assumption can no longer be relied upon. Photographs are no longer a reliable record of what happened in reality.
You will note that Uncle Ugg was being recorded via someone painting on the cave wall - not a reliable record of anything other than the artist's decision making process. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, and writing - none of these ever had that automatic authenticity that photographs had. Now photos have lost it too.
I was thinking the same thing - maybe I should buy one of this guy's games to support him. But this part of his response changed my mind about that:
I got a few people churning out long arguments about whether or not intellectual property is valid, and claiming that it was censorship, or fascism and other variations on this theme. I'm used to reading all this, and find it completely unconvincing, and to be honest, silly.
Some people may have a 'silly' attitude, but there are some very real questions about the nature of intellectual property which cannot be dismissed so easily. I accept that this does not justify piracy (it really only justifies non-participation in the IP system, in my mind) but to dismiss out of hand any argument which raises political/intellectual questions about the validity of IP rights is equally silly.
"Protected" is a prohibition, not a positive right - no-one can stop you from saying certain things, but by the same token you can't force others to listen to you or carry your message.
Well the issue here is if the speech is "protected," which I believe it is, then YouTube gets the benefit of that protection; they are not liable for trademark infringement or whatever legal cause of action the IOC claims to have. Yes, it's their network and they can refuse to carry whatever they want, but it's pretty cowardly. The IOC's legal threats are baseless.
Ah, I misunderstood the point slightly. Yes, that would follow.
Legal issues aside, it is pathetic how eager these companies are to appease one of the worst regimes in the world (and China too).
IAAL too (albeit non-American), but my understanding is there is a difference between saying something is "protected speech" and saying that a private entity cannot choose not to publish it in its absolute discretion.
"Protected" is a prohibition, not a positive right - no-one can stop you from saying certain things, but by the same token you can't force others to listen to you or carry your message.
Keeping copyrighted material on your site, knowing you will be sued and almost certainly lose would surely come under the term willful.
By the same token, removing user-supplied content on the basis of frivolous threats of legal action by corrupt and malevolent third parties might also be regarded as being contrary to the best interests of the company. This would:
1. reduce the willingness of users to post content in future 2. reduce the range of content currently available 3. encourage and invite future frivolous threats of legal action 4. reduce traffic to the site and thus advertising revenue (all the people who would have watched this video)
There would be a strong argument that YouTube is acting in the best interests of the company as a whole (which is the actual test, not simply "what the shareholders want") by telling the IOC and friends to shove it.
Also, companies can make any statement to their customers they like. They don't have to live by them. Their only nod they make to the customer is via the marketplace and a few trading standards costraints. If the customer stops buying, they change what they are doing.
Completely incorrect. Making representations to customers or potential customers which you know or suspect are false can create legal liability depending on the circumstances.
Doesn't the principle that all people have a right to self-determination tell us that we should favour a repressive and backwards Tibetan government over a repressive and backwards Chinese government in Tibet?
All of these people citing how bad things apparently were in Tibet pre-occupation also seem to forget that invading other people's countries to forcibly and undemocratically "improve" them as you see fit went out the door with the death of colonialism.
...the user could decide for him/herself whether that application is worth running notwithstanding its relatively poor performance. Amazingly, the user may even have a better idea of his or her personal requirements than a large corporation which does not actually own the device in question.
The willingness of people to defend Apple in situations where they would be prepared to hunt down and kill the equivalent executives at Microsoft or Sony continues to stun me.
It's like enacting a tax to benefit the factory worker.
Damn straight it is. A tax to benefit the factory worker for precisely the reasons raised by this discussion, namely, that we as a society have decided that there are certain minimum conditions of employment, and that employers should be required to uphold them.
I personally see no problem whatsoever with placing tariffs on imports which are exactly equivalent to the cost of upholding domestic labour, safety, environmental and other laws in respect of the production of those jobs. This permits competition from imports in ways which we regard as socially acceptable and beneficial (i.e. efficiency) but forbids competition in ways which are regarded as unacceptable (not paying for basic safety standards, for instance).
At the moment the prevailing capitalist ethos seems to dictate that we should permit China and co to destroy our domestic economies by having no respect for human rights, the environment and so on, while we go bust upholding our principles domestically.
Unions are antithetical to Libertarianism. It doesn't really have anything to do with political or social freedom. Unions are by design the antithesis of free markets since they seek to set labor rates not based on supply and demand of workers but artificially by the threat of strikes and by depriving employers of workers unless they pay artificially inflated wages.
Translation: In a "free" market, corporations can build trusts, but workers can't.
Precisely. I am yet to hear (to put it in suitably Marxist terms) an explanation of why those who control the means of production are allowed to aggregate their power (i.e. shareholders in companies), but those who do the actual work are not. One "distorts the market", the other apparently doesn't.
In addition, the above example fails (as many poorly thought out 'libertarian' positions do) to take into account the well-recognised imbalance in power between the worker and the employer. When you have no unions whatsoever, what you end up with is pretty much Chinese labour conditions. People seem to forget that the reason the West has such a high employment standards is not that the benevolent government (acting, of course, in the best interests of all citizens) decided to simply give them a whole swag of rights - it's because workers collectivised in order to exert genuine market power.
In any event, if workers freely choose to aggregate their power, how is this in any sense anti-libertarian? It is only so if either the government forces them to do so, or if the union forces them to do so. Otherwise they are merely a collection of individuals who choose to act in concert for a common goal.*
* I am not American. Believe it or not, there are places where union membership or non-membership is entirely voluntary.
If there were more work than workers, workers could dictate their hours, their pay, and their benefits. Make sense?
Or, for example, if they had some sort of minimum rights protecting them, and taking the harshest effects away from your supply and demand example. Like has happened in, oh, the whole of the Western world, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo.
One reason we moan about lawyers is the artificially protected fees. For simple filings the level of knowledge "should cost" some $50 an hour tops, and small cases could escape under a grand.
Then Orgs. like the RIAA reverse-leverage this fact to pull their copyright stunts.
That would be great. IAAL. Would you mind getting all of my clients to agree not to sue me if they lose their cases and it is not my fault? Please bear in mind that some of these people may be angry and bitter, not to mention in desperate need of cash. Thanks, I appreciate it.
I also venture to suggest that you have never drafted a "simple filing" in your life. Pleadings are a complex artform, and a good lawyer will take many years to perfect their drafting style. Because they serve the technical purpose of identifying the issues in dispute, a good pleading can mean the difference between years of costly litigation and a quickly resolved dispute.
Lawyers do charge too much money. But $50/hour is not even close to adequate to cover the insane risk of being sued by your clients when they lose, nor does it reflect the extremely complex skills which are required to practice law properly.
Clearly, using hyphens went out of style a) long before he was born or b) they're such a new invention that someone so old shouldn't be forced to learn new things.
Please, enlighten us.
I assume you are referring to this. However, there is no need for a hyphen in "next generation" because it is clear to which noun "next" refers. To quote Wikipedia (not exactly an authoritative source, of course):
If anything, (mis)use of hyphens is growing in popularity. They should only be used where absolutely essential - unfortunately, they are often used in PHB-type office gibberish when they are completely superfluous.
In any event, be careful shooting your mouth off about hyphenation: entire countries have been destroyed before now for that precise reason.
Yeah, there are so many variables that it's nigh-on impossible to get them all right on every computer. For unknown reasons wireless seems to screw things up even more severely...
Trying to get Red Alert 2 working on a network is a bitch because it uses IPX and wasn't made in a time when PCs typically had 2-3 networking devices.
Is Red Alert 2 any better, or (as I imagine) is it worse? Has anyone written a program to trick it into working properly via the Internet?
I went through a phase in my late teens where I would get up on a sunny Saturday morning at about 11am, turn on my computer, and fire up Civ II. At 3am on Sunday I would realise that I was still wearing my dressing gown, hadn't showered, hadn't eaten or drunk anything, and in most cases hadn't moved except to go to the toilet.
On the other hand, I have conquered Europe more times than most people...
While I don't disagree with you in any way, I'm always curious why people are upset when their RAM is being used. As I understand it, Vista pre-loads into RAM applications that you use often, thus (ideally) speeding up load time. RAM is there to be used; why do we get upset when we see near-100% usage? Personally, I don't care what XP's RAM usage is when I boot up, as long as it's responsive. If increasing XP's RAM usage to 1.5GB on bootup by loading stuff I use regularly would make my applications load faster, I would beg for it to be done.
Anyone have any ideas about this?
Just picking an easy to quote metric, I guess.
You should read up on Vista's "helpful" pre-fetching though. It basically works so that if you play Quake III at 9pm on a Tuesday a couple of weeks in a row, then it "predicts" that you will want to do so the following Tuesday and starts loading the data into memory in anticipation.
It seems to have two major overheads: (1) watching what you are doing so it can predict what you might be doing later; and (2) churning all that data from your hard disk into memory constantly.
The machine is startlingly faster and more responsive running XP - I realise this is not purely RAM-related, but it is a reflection that the OS isn't absolutely pumping the system's resources for a benefit which is lost in the overall loss of performance.
I do realise that, but playing games is a priority so we need one of XP or Vista on there.
I spent last night installing XP on a Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop for a friend who has tolerated Vista for about 6 months now.
Not surprisingly, Toshiba (like Dell and many others) has signed a deal with the devil not to provide support for anything other than Vista (honestly, I can see why they might do a deal to pre-install Vista, but why stop loyal Toshiba customers from installing XP if they want to? Crazy).
However, what is truly impressive is the hatred for Vista out there on the net, and the lengths that it inspires people to go to to get rid of it and, in the spirit of the net, help others get rid of it. Googling for info about getting XP up and running on this particular machine yielded pages and pages of helpful information about exactly what must be done to round up the necessary drivers (many from the OEM's who supplied the various components of the machine). Even better, a few heroes had actually compiled zip files containing every driver and distributed them via Rapidshare and the like.
The other really startling thing was how many non-expert users were doing this. There were heaps of messageboard posts where inexperienced users basically begged for help to get XP working on their laptops. Due to the bod of Vista-hatred, the more tech savvy users were generally walking people through the process with a level of patience rarely seen on-line.
I had the same experience installing XP on my Dell XPS 1530 (great computer, once you disinfect it) - there is basically a community dedicated to purging it of Vista.
When you are inspiring legions of both expert users and ordinary non-techy people to go through the pain of installing an operating system using an ad hoc collection of unsupported drivers, something is badly, badly awry. I am critical not of MS so much as Toshiba, Dell and co - they are the ones who have made the key decision to support nothing but Vista. I wonder if they realise the lengths their users are going to to get around this choice?
Incidentally, my friend's reaction was priceless when XP booted up quickly and quietly - "holy shit... you mean it's done? it's so... responsive! It's beautiful!" He then checked the memory usage and noted with awe that it was 120 megs after booting rather than 1 to 1.5 gigs for Vista.
I agree. It also raises the very significant question of imposing criminal penalties in relation to what is in reality a civil offence.
This type of penalty is the direct result of the sustained campaign to impose extraordinarily severe penalties in relation to 'crimes' which in reality carry few of the hallmarks of what is traditionally regarded as criminal activity.
When you send someone to prison for that long for a crime which is trivially easy to commit, is of debatable morality, and which has a tenuous impact, at best, on anyone or on "society", then I think there is something very wrong.
Logically you don't know about the ones which didn't get "found out", do you? You have no idea if 1% or 100% of national-level conspiracies get uncovered.
As you should know, 'mocking' people - isolating them socially and professionally - was one of the most powerful weapons used in the McCarthy era. Relatively few people were tried for supposed offences - far more were blacklisted in one way or another, and, more importantly, a climate was created where the average person on the street would never dream of expressing certain views. That is the real tool of control - the trials and prisons are just a way of achieving it.
Counter-example - are you saying not one US intelligence agency has ever run a sophisticated propaganda operation which has not been 'exposed'? In addition, such things can be done via relatively subtle means of control, not everyone involved in such an operation would know the details or even the purpose of it.
In the end I think the OP's point is this: many things which have happened throughout history would be regarded as 'crazy conspiracy theories' if they had not been demonstrated to be real. Why, then, are so many people here so quick to jump on anyone who suggests anything resembling such a theory in relation to contemporary events?
A mere 60 years ago, the German government burnt down its parliament in order to seize absolute power. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US Government deliberately and systematically tested 'mind control' techniques on its own citizens without their knowledge or consent (look up MKULTRA). Even in starting the current Iraq war the US Government flat-out lied about 'intelligence' it had which has justified a war which has killed tens of thousands, possibly more.
None of this is causally related to proving any other 'conspiracy theory' - but it does prove that very strange and elaborate schemes can and will be executed by the elites in power for their own purposes, and a wise society would insist on asking very uncomfortable questions about events such as September 11.
What I like is this:
Would it not, perhaps, be better to invest time and energy into robots which "make distinctions" between armed troops and unarmed civilians?
They should have just slapped the Aero GUI on XP and called it Vista. It'd Just Work(tm) and it would still consume much less resources than Vista does now. Vista didn't even deliver most of the stuff like WinFS that was supposed to make the upgrade headache worthwhile. It did, however, include the latest and most virulent DRM as well as other non-critical crap.
Again, Microsoft, just put Aero on Windows XP as service pack 4, and then you can pretend that your customers really, really do prefer Vista over XP.
They don't even need Aero - the content already exists for XP. I just installed the phenomenal Area o4.2 Visual Style on an installation of XP SP2, and it looks and runs wonderfully. This is a reasonably helpful explanation of how to install non-MS visual styles in XP.* There are also various packages around to add widgets and other bits and pieces to give XP a convincingly Vista/Aero feel in terms of the desktop (Rainmeter or Samurize, for example).
Microsoft should absolutely get a few visual styles along these lines, integrate as many good known fixes and up to date drivers as possible into the base installation package, and release XP SP4 as a standalone product. If it makes them feel better, they can call it Windows Classic 08 or something and release it as a new product at a reasonable price (say, under $100). Hell, I'd buy it.
* NB - if you actually try installing the theme above following the instructions on the second site, note that you need to rename the .msstyles files to match the folder names (or vice-versa), it wouldn't work for me until I did this.
I agree with you as regards purely artistic photography. Plenty of the techniques there - fish-eye lenses, long or multiple exposures, colored lenses, etc - already distort reality for artistic purposes.
What I wonder is this: is there a way to take photos as reliable documentary evidence anymore? How can you prove that something has not been altered?
Exactly. The 'live and let live' attitude to manipulated photos ignores the fact that it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference between a manipulated and authentic photograph, and yet they are materially different in terms of what they embody.
That is true in a hand-wavy, philosophical sense. But it doesn't change the fact that, without manipulation, a camera mechanically captures exactly what was present in reality at the moment a picture was taken.
Obviously there are physical limitations, everything from lighting to the lens, to where the camera was actually pointed, to the camera's ability to reduce the input it receives to an accurate record of colours and tones.
Nevertheless, that record, imperfect though it may be, is accurate: with the limitations of the mechanical process understood, a photograph still reflects what was actually present in front of the lens.
So in a very real sense, something is lost with ubiquitous photo manipulation, something far greater than the whole grizzled-old-photographer philosophy that images are inherently subjective blah blah blah - not only must we deal with the age old problem of interpreting what was happening in real life through the limitations of the mechanical process, we must now deal with the very active and deliberate interference of intelligent agents whose sole aim is to alter the apparent record of reality. No longer can we rely on the fact that rays of light actually bounced off the subject and through the lense to produce the image we see before us.
I put it to you another way: we would not ascribe the same value to photographs unless they made us feel that what they depicted was an accurate record of reality. Intentional manipulation amounts to a deliberate use/abuse of that assumption.
I for one would like Flicke and similar sites to mandate a tag which discriminates between unmanipulated, globally retouched, and manually retouched images.
It is news, or at least 'current affairs'.
Photographs, until relatively recently, were a highly reliable record of what happened when photons IN REALITY hit objects IN REALITY, were reflected and then focused IN REALITY through the lens of a REAL camera. Yes, you could manipulate photographs at great expense, but even those could generally be detected as fakes without too much trouble.
We are now reaching a point where that assumption can no longer be relied upon. Photographs are no longer a reliable record of what happened in reality.
You will note that Uncle Ugg was being recorded via someone painting on the cave wall - not a reliable record of anything other than the artist's decision making process. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, and writing - none of these ever had that automatic authenticity that photographs had. Now photos have lost it too.
I was thinking the same thing - maybe I should buy one of this guy's games to support him. But this part of his response changed my mind about that:
Some people may have a 'silly' attitude, but there are some very real questions about the nature of intellectual property which cannot be dismissed so easily. I accept that this does not justify piracy (it really only justifies non-participation in the IP system, in my mind) but to dismiss out of hand any argument which raises political/intellectual questions about the validity of IP rights is equally silly.
"Protected" is a prohibition, not a positive right - no-one can stop you from saying certain things, but by the same token you can't force others to listen to you or carry your message.
Well the issue here is if the speech is "protected," which I believe it is, then YouTube gets the benefit of that protection; they are not liable for trademark infringement or whatever legal cause of action the IOC claims to have. Yes, it's their network and they can refuse to carry whatever they want, but it's pretty cowardly. The IOC's legal threats are baseless.
Ah, I misunderstood the point slightly. Yes, that would follow.
Legal issues aside, it is pathetic how eager these companies are to appease one of the worst regimes in the world (and China too).
IAAL too (albeit non-American), but my understanding is there is a difference between saying something is "protected speech" and saying that a private entity cannot choose not to publish it in its absolute discretion.
"Protected" is a prohibition, not a positive right - no-one can stop you from saying certain things, but by the same token you can't force others to listen to you or carry your message.
Keeping copyrighted material on your site, knowing you will be sued and almost certainly lose would surely come under the term willful.
By the same token, removing user-supplied content on the basis of frivolous threats of legal action by corrupt and malevolent third parties might also be regarded as being contrary to the best interests of the company. This would:
1. reduce the willingness of users to post content in future
2. reduce the range of content currently available
3. encourage and invite future frivolous threats of legal action
4. reduce traffic to the site and thus advertising revenue (all the people who would have watched this video)
There would be a strong argument that YouTube is acting in the best interests of the company as a whole (which is the actual test, not simply "what the shareholders want") by telling the IOC and friends to shove it.
Completely incorrect. Making representations to customers or potential customers which you know or suspect are false can create legal liability depending on the circumstances.
Doesn't the principle that all people have a right to self-determination tell us that we should favour a repressive and backwards Tibetan government over a repressive and backwards Chinese government in Tibet?
All of these people citing how bad things apparently were in Tibet pre-occupation also seem to forget that invading other people's countries to forcibly and undemocratically "improve" them as you see fit went out the door with the death of colonialism.
You can turn off an antivirus program?
An antivirus program will tell/ask you before removing things from your system?
You can choose which antivirus program to use?
...the user could decide for him/herself whether that application is worth running notwithstanding its relatively poor performance. Amazingly, the user may even have a better idea of his or her personal requirements than a large corporation which does not actually own the device in question.
The willingness of people to defend Apple in situations where they would be prepared to hunt down and kill the equivalent executives at Microsoft or Sony continues to stun me.
It's like enacting a tax to benefit the factory worker.
Damn straight it is. A tax to benefit the factory worker for precisely the reasons raised by this discussion, namely, that we as a society have decided that there are certain minimum conditions of employment, and that employers should be required to uphold them.
I personally see no problem whatsoever with placing tariffs on imports which are exactly equivalent to the cost of upholding domestic labour, safety, environmental and other laws in respect of the production of those jobs. This permits competition from imports in ways which we regard as socially acceptable and beneficial (i.e. efficiency) but forbids competition in ways which are regarded as unacceptable (not paying for basic safety standards, for instance).
At the moment the prevailing capitalist ethos seems to dictate that we should permit China and co to destroy our domestic economies by having no respect for human rights, the environment and so on, while we go bust upholding our principles domestically.
Unions are antithetical to Libertarianism. It doesn't really have anything to do with political or social freedom. Unions are by design the antithesis of free markets since they seek to set labor rates not based on supply and demand of workers but artificially by the threat of strikes and by depriving employers of workers unless they pay artificially inflated wages.
Translation: In a "free" market, corporations can build trusts, but workers can't.
Precisely. I am yet to hear (to put it in suitably Marxist terms) an explanation of why those who control the means of production are allowed to aggregate their power (i.e. shareholders in companies), but those who do the actual work are not. One "distorts the market", the other apparently doesn't.
In addition, the above example fails (as many poorly thought out 'libertarian' positions do) to take into account the well-recognised imbalance in power between the worker and the employer. When you have no unions whatsoever, what you end up with is pretty much Chinese labour conditions. People seem to forget that the reason the West has such a high employment standards is not that the benevolent government (acting, of course, in the best interests of all citizens) decided to simply give them a whole swag of rights - it's because workers collectivised in order to exert genuine market power.
In any event, if workers freely choose to aggregate their power, how is this in any sense anti-libertarian? It is only so if either the government forces them to do so, or if the union forces them to do so. Otherwise they are merely a collection of individuals who choose to act in concert for a common goal.*
* I am not American. Believe it or not, there are places where union membership or non-membership is entirely voluntary.
If there were more work than workers, workers could dictate their hours, their pay, and their benefits. Make sense?
Or, for example, if they had some sort of minimum rights protecting them, and taking the harshest effects away from your supply and demand example. Like has happened in, oh, the whole of the Western world, for instance.