OK, I see where you're coming from now, but I disagree with your conclusion. I'm not making a point in either direction about government control in general, I'm talking about dishonesty - if they introduced a net neutrality bill and their actions remained within its remit, that's fine, if their actions go beyond that remit, even in a manner that I happen to agree with, that's unacceptable. If they introduce a security bill and stay within its remit, same applies - I might object to the bill itself, but I would respect their integrity in creating it.
It's not that complicated to realise that one can object to something on general principle even if it happens to be beneficial in that specific case. To do otherwise would be to exhibit exactly the hypocrisy that I am decrying.
I may be missing something obvious here, but I don't see what you're getting at regarding net neutrality; are you saying 'we' broke a promise made about that?
So why aren't we all phoning a random number in Egypt once a day and asking if there's anything they want us to put on the interwebs for them?
If you actually meant unsolicited calls to random numbers, aside from the language issues, do you really think that in the midst of the violence and suspicion, they'll trust some caller they've never met before?
If you meant why aren't phones being used in general to pass info to those outside the country, well, they are:
Groups like We Rebuild have scrambled to keep Egypt connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country.
That has to do in the event of a cyber attack from Russia, Al Quada, or China on our nation's infrastructure. It is not a tool to censor but rather a way to stop something from spreading.
It would be disingenuous to imply that the US government is on the same level as Egypt, but do you really think that the Egyptian government didn't put forward similar plausible-sounding reasoning? The difference between "censoring protesters' communication" and "preventing dangerous revolutionaries from co-ordinating attacks on the state" is simply one of perspective.
I'm honestly interested to know, why do you trust the government to only use this power against "Russia, Al Quada, or China"? The patriot act was only intended for use against terrorists, and look how that turned out. Hell, just look one story up and you'll see evidence of serious and systematic lawbreaking by the FBI. Again, I'm not saying that things in the US are going to be as bad as Egypt, or China for that matter, but I can't possibly see how we can be asked to believe the politicians when they have broken their promises time and again on similar issues.
What we need is a long, continuously updated list of every time our concerns have been assuaged by a promise that "the new powers will only be used in these specific and necessary circumstances". Then we add to the list documentary evidence of those promises being broken. Start reading it out every time a politician tries to make a new promise to that effect, and see how long it is before people get the point.
I've noticed the same, on occasion. The strange thing is that, except for titles that have long been out of print, they must have a source file somewhere or they'd be unable to produce the paperbacks - I can understand (although wouldn't condone) skipping the proof-reader to save costs, but why are they using OCR in the first place?
Running out of battery mid-journey is a legitimate drawback (although my nook handles transatlantic flights fine, even with a few extra hours reading in the terminal waiting for delayed connections, so really you're talking over a day without access to somewhere to charge before it's an issue), and I suppose if you do happen to break your eReader then it's likely to be more of a catastrophic failure than if you damage a paperback, but the way you say it seems to be based on the idea that the reader contains your only copy of each book, and once it's broken they're gone forever. Even War & Peace is only a bit more than a megabyte, most other books are much less - backing up your collection is not exactly onerous. DRM is an extreme annoyance, and I try to avoid giving money to those publishers who choose to use it, but even for those who do tolerate it it doesn't tie purchases to a specific serial number or anything (and, in its current incarnation, is trivially removed).
Paper books certainly have their advantages, but so do ebooks - that article does touch on the issue by pointing out that new tech tends to supplement rather than replace - the ideal circumstance would be for paperbacks to come with a non-DRMed electronic copy (maybe for a $1 extra charge or so - even at that rate they'd be profiting significantly), giving the best of both worlds.
I see your point, but I don't think it too far fetched that, when more-or-less given carte blanche to mark certain emails as 'not for release', those doing the marking will choose to use that power for a little pre-emptive damage limitation. Sure, there are probably strict rules, but in reality nobody with clearance to see the un-redacted archive will ever bother checking, and on the off chance that something is noticed as mis-marked it's easy to put down to human error.
I don't see it as some great Orwellian cover up, but I do see people with motive, opportunity and almost no risk being given the ability to limit the release of data.
I don't really see what can be taking this long other than censoring them; just locating the relevant files and dropping the few gigs of data on a flash drive would take a few days, at most. If it's taking years, it means that something is being done with the actual content. According to TFA there are rules allowing certain messages to remain private, so some of the censorship will be legal, but I imagine that they'll just stamp a big red "privileged" restriction on anything that's too embarrassing to Palin.
I dunno, it seems to be in the arse end of nowhere (well, an hour and a half out of Edinburgh, anyway...) - I'd like my super awesome party bunker to be a little more centrally located.
I spend much more time in the UK than the US, so I don't have examples to hand from the latter, but there are definitely some from the former, and I'd say the two cultures shares more similarities than differences. Iraq war protests were pretty pervasive, culminating in somewhere around a million people marching in London. Admittedly they've died down, but I think it's fair to say that after the government ignored the people and went to war anyway, the questions changed - many people (myself included) fought against the idea of going to war, but accept that since it did happen it's better to remain and stabilise than leave a chaotic power vacuum.
If you want to see the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of pent-up anger, just look at what happened a few months ago when the government decided to triple university fees. That's the point at which the people of my generation really seemed to say "fuck this, we deserve better". Even so, though, the government gets away scot-free with far too many abuses of their power.
I guess my point is that the young/old dynamic doesn't (from what I understand of history) seem to be changing that drastically - some of you guys protested, and so did some of us. Plenty more sat around and did nothing, in both generations, but those people are the ones who get forgotten about as time passes. In both times there were some victories but the powers that be still got away with far more than they ever should.
Even at my age, I'm a cynical bastard. My generation sucks. I just get the impression that yours was probably no better!
I was thinking the same. Group photos are a problem, too - if five of my friends are in a picture, how am I supposed to know whose profile it came from?
Kudos to Facebook for the SSL option, though - I know they'll sell out my privacy at the drop of a hat, but any gesture that pushes pervasive SSL further into the mainstream (thus thwarting ISP-level tracking) is only a good thing.
Yep, it seems the the two major long-standing problems (broken comment expansion in idle and no pasting in Chrome/Safari) are fixed, but now it doesn't look like there's any indication of the difference between a long thread and a single comment. Visually I like it a lot, and the fixes were much needed - I'd call it a big improvement, but it definitely needs some top-level representation of the threading to handle the number of comments Slashdot stories tend to provoke.
What kind of commercial uses does the iPad have? TFA doesn't really mention. I imagine it's pretty good for showing designs to clients - slicker than a laptop, in a situation where impressions matter, even if it would be performing the same function - but I can't think of that many other corporate functions that it fulfils better than the existing tech.
You're giving a little too much credit there. The UK may not be as puritanical as the States, but there are still plenty of people who wouldn't want their particular porn-viewing choices made public (or to be publicly linked to porn titles that they didn't actually even download, for that matter). I'm imagining the porn tactic worked particularly well against older, married types - higher disposable income, more likely to feel that sex carries some negative stigma, more likely to raise uncomfortable questions with their families, etc.
Even for younger people I imagine the willingness to be associated with this would vary - some might laugh it off, maybe get a few jokes from their mates along the lines of "What's the matter, couldn't get laid in real life?", while others (particularly those from a religious background) would still find it very embarrassing.
I don't see any real activism at all with your generation; you kids seem to not give a shit about anything but what the celebrities are doing and what the next shiny toy will be.
How much was that serious and how much was it playing the 'curmudgeonly old man' character? If you did mean it genuinely, I can assure you that we decry the actions of these morons in our peer group just as you do. That said, was there ever really a time in history when a significant proportion (perhaps even the majority) of a given generation weren't morons (or, if you're feeling charitable, 'people disinclined to question the status quo, or to try to improve the world around them')? The old 'bread and circuses' quote seems particularly appropriate here.
I didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that Google should take technological steps to prevent it (although a strong but non-binding recommendation to that effect would be a nice thing to point out to companies who do choose to go for the more extreme lockdown), I was just pointing out that it's not a theoretical future issue, it's something that's happening now.
I basically agree with you - it's a totally different situation to Apple's 'app store or nothing' way of doing things, so it bothers me far less - but a single distributor with a big enough market share can become very dangerous. Just look at what WalMart can do - making certain movie and game ratings commercially non-viable is the first example that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are more.
There are already totally locked down Android devices out there. I'd very much like the ability to install a half-way functional MP3 player on my B&N Nook, for example.
I was actually thinking more of non-diegetic audio, but you make a fair point. To an extent, even for diegetic sound, it can still be believable to have a character listening to music within the right genre despite the audience not having heard the particular song, but I agree that it's more likely to appear natural if it is a popular song contemporary to the period.
Depends if your story demands that you license already well known songs or not, I guess. If a talented film-maker happens to have talented musician friends, problem solved - even paying them at full rate would cost a lot less than the huge chunks going to labels and other bureaucracy. If not I'm sure there are good, small bands who would be happy to license songs directly at a much lower rate than 'industry standard'.
In either case, technology helps - these small bands and individual composers/producers have access to the tech on one laptop that a whole studio would've been lucky to have managed 20 years ago.
That's not an absolute mark against them - if they really were trying to do something different and the thing just started kicking out power inexplicably then their paper may well look like crap. Not to say I believe them - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that - I won't be satisfied until (as the article heading says) I see one powering my toaster, but I have more respect for guys saying "Shit, we haven't got a clue, it just happened" than ones spouting demonstrably false pseudoscience like so many before have.
Of course, the better way to go about this would perhaps have been to send detailed plans and experimental records to colleagues at other universities and ask that they try to replicate it. Maybe steer clear of mentioning 'cold fusion' at all and simply ask if they get unusual excess energy readings.
It's probably junk, but hey, I'm holding on to the glimmer of hope that this could be a game-changer, just for a little longer!
Mostly word of mouth - often just in conversation, but a non-trivial amount is posted on Facebook just to say "Guys, awesome new song, you'll probably like this" or whatever; that's an advertisers wet dream, I'm sure: distribution to a few hundred people with the added impact of it being from a 'friend' whose opinion you actually respect, but it's a win-win since I actually do tend to like my friends' recommendations. Obviously the chain needs to start somewhere, and that may well be traditional advertising, but it's just as likely to be an unheard-of support band at a gig, or a song played in a club, or even something kicked up by a "you might also like..." algorithm. A small start goes a long way when everyone can broadcast their opinion to an (admittedly somewhat overlapping) group of several hundred mates.
I'd also add that the only reason this works at all is instant, 'free' music - nothing invested, nothing to get round to later, just see a link, click, and listen. I don't download illegally, but the industry seems to have finally caught on and offers it either ad-supported or subscription based through Spotify; everybody I know uses it, and for an awful lot of us it's the primary source of music - it contains the vast majority of what I look for if I'm in the mood to listen to 'X', and I personally use my friends' shared playlists just like you probably used the radio, too. Come to think of it, YouTube links are fairly prevalent too, but they're only really useful if you're linking someone to a single, specific song.
As I said, it's an extreme example and a product of obsession - $7k per full-length movie is by no means a sustainable model - but it shows that quality needn't necessarily be expensive. Same goes for Clerks, come to think of it; I wouldn't want to see every film made like that, but it still worked for that particular story.
Even at, say, $150k, which would've allowed those involved to get paid a quite reasonable wage for the time spent shooting, the films would be at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the lowest end of the mainstream. I'm sure there will always be a place for million dollar blockbusters, but I'm happy that technology is making it viable for us to see more and more of something other than that as well, where we couldn't really have done before. The cheaper and easier production becomes, the more chances people will have to get good stories out there without going to insane lengths like Kevin Smith did - seems like a win to me!
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OK, I see where you're coming from now, but I disagree with your conclusion. I'm not making a point in either direction about government control in general, I'm talking about dishonesty - if they introduced a net neutrality bill and their actions remained within its remit, that's fine, if their actions go beyond that remit, even in a manner that I happen to agree with, that's unacceptable. If they introduce a security bill and stay within its remit, same applies - I might object to the bill itself, but I would respect their integrity in creating it.
It's not that complicated to realise that one can object to something on general principle even if it happens to be beneficial in that specific case. To do otherwise would be to exhibit exactly the hypocrisy that I am decrying.
I may be missing something obvious here, but I don't see what you're getting at regarding net neutrality; are you saying 'we' broke a promise made about that?
So why aren't we all phoning a random number in Egypt once a day and asking if there's anything they want us to put on the interwebs for them?
If you actually meant unsolicited calls to random numbers, aside from the language issues, do you really think that in the midst of the violence and suspicion, they'll trust some caller they've never met before?
If you meant why aren't phones being used in general to pass info to those outside the country, well, they are:
Groups like We Rebuild have scrambled to keep Egypt connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country.
That has to do in the event of a cyber attack from Russia, Al Quada, or China on our nation's infrastructure. It is not a tool to censor but rather a way to stop something from spreading.
It would be disingenuous to imply that the US government is on the same level as Egypt, but do you really think that the Egyptian government didn't put forward similar plausible-sounding reasoning? The difference between "censoring protesters' communication" and "preventing dangerous revolutionaries from co-ordinating attacks on the state" is simply one of perspective.
I'm honestly interested to know, why do you trust the government to only use this power against "Russia, Al Quada, or China"? The patriot act was only intended for use against terrorists, and look how that turned out. Hell, just look one story up and you'll see evidence of serious and systematic lawbreaking by the FBI. Again, I'm not saying that things in the US are going to be as bad as Egypt, or China for that matter, but I can't possibly see how we can be asked to believe the politicians when they have broken their promises time and again on similar issues.
What we need is a long, continuously updated list of every time our concerns have been assuaged by a promise that "the new powers will only be used in these specific and necessary circumstances". Then we add to the list documentary evidence of those promises being broken. Start reading it out every time a politician tries to make a new promise to that effect, and see how long it is before people get the point.
I've noticed the same, on occasion. The strange thing is that, except for titles that have long been out of print, they must have a source file somewhere or they'd be unable to produce the paperbacks - I can understand (although wouldn't condone) skipping the proof-reader to save costs, but why are they using OCR in the first place?
Running out of battery mid-journey is a legitimate drawback (although my nook handles transatlantic flights fine, even with a few extra hours reading in the terminal waiting for delayed connections, so really you're talking over a day without access to somewhere to charge before it's an issue), and I suppose if you do happen to break your eReader then it's likely to be more of a catastrophic failure than if you damage a paperback, but the way you say it seems to be based on the idea that the reader contains your only copy of each book, and once it's broken they're gone forever. Even War & Peace is only a bit more than a megabyte, most other books are much less - backing up your collection is not exactly onerous. DRM is an extreme annoyance, and I try to avoid giving money to those publishers who choose to use it, but even for those who do tolerate it it doesn't tie purchases to a specific serial number or anything (and, in its current incarnation, is trivially removed).
Paper books certainly have their advantages, but so do ebooks - that article does touch on the issue by pointing out that new tech tends to supplement rather than replace - the ideal circumstance would be for paperbacks to come with a non-DRMed electronic copy (maybe for a $1 extra charge or so - even at that rate they'd be profiting significantly), giving the best of both worlds.
I see your point, but I don't think it too far fetched that, when more-or-less given carte blanche to mark certain emails as 'not for release', those doing the marking will choose to use that power for a little pre-emptive damage limitation. Sure, there are probably strict rules, but in reality nobody with clearance to see the un-redacted archive will ever bother checking, and on the off chance that something is noticed as mis-marked it's easy to put down to human error.
I don't see it as some great Orwellian cover up, but I do see people with motive, opportunity and almost no risk being given the ability to limit the release of data.
I don't really see what can be taking this long other than censoring them; just locating the relevant files and dropping the few gigs of data on a flash drive would take a few days, at most. If it's taking years, it means that something is being done with the actual content. According to TFA there are rules allowing certain messages to remain private, so some of the censorship will be legal, but I imagine that they'll just stamp a big red "privileged" restriction on anything that's too embarrassing to Palin.
I dunno, it seems to be in the arse end of nowhere (well, an hour and a half out of Edinburgh, anyway...) - I'd like my super awesome party bunker to be a little more centrally located.
I spend much more time in the UK than the US, so I don't have examples to hand from the latter, but there are definitely some from the former, and I'd say the two cultures shares more similarities than differences. Iraq war protests were pretty pervasive, culminating in somewhere around a million people marching in London. Admittedly they've died down, but I think it's fair to say that after the government ignored the people and went to war anyway, the questions changed - many people (myself included) fought against the idea of going to war, but accept that since it did happen it's better to remain and stabilise than leave a chaotic power vacuum.
If you want to see the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of pent-up anger, just look at what happened a few months ago when the government decided to triple university fees. That's the point at which the people of my generation really seemed to say "fuck this, we deserve better". Even so, though, the government gets away scot-free with far too many abuses of their power.
I guess my point is that the young/old dynamic doesn't (from what I understand of history) seem to be changing that drastically - some of you guys protested, and so did some of us. Plenty more sat around and did nothing, in both generations, but those people are the ones who get forgotten about as time passes. In both times there were some victories but the powers that be still got away with far more than they ever should.
Even at my age, I'm a cynical bastard. My generation sucks. I just get the impression that yours was probably no better!
I was thinking the same. Group photos are a problem, too - if five of my friends are in a picture, how am I supposed to know whose profile it came from?
Kudos to Facebook for the SSL option, though - I know they'll sell out my privacy at the drop of a hat, but any gesture that pushes pervasive SSL further into the mainstream (thus thwarting ISP-level tracking) is only a good thing.
Yep, it seems the the two major long-standing problems (broken comment expansion in idle and no pasting in Chrome/Safari) are fixed, but now it doesn't look like there's any indication of the difference between a long thread and a single comment. Visually I like it a lot, and the fixes were much needed - I'd call it a big improvement, but it definitely needs some top-level representation of the threading to handle the number of comments Slashdot stories tend to provoke.
What kind of commercial uses does the iPad have? TFA doesn't really mention. I imagine it's pretty good for showing designs to clients - slicker than a laptop, in a situation where impressions matter, even if it would be performing the same function - but I can't think of that many other corporate functions that it fulfils better than the existing tech.
You're giving a little too much credit there. The UK may not be as puritanical as the States, but there are still plenty of people who wouldn't want their particular porn-viewing choices made public (or to be publicly linked to porn titles that they didn't actually even download, for that matter). I'm imagining the porn tactic worked particularly well against older, married types - higher disposable income, more likely to feel that sex carries some negative stigma, more likely to raise uncomfortable questions with their families, etc.
Even for younger people I imagine the willingness to be associated with this would vary - some might laugh it off, maybe get a few jokes from their mates along the lines of "What's the matter, couldn't get laid in real life?", while others (particularly those from a religious background) would still find it very embarrassing.
I don't see any real activism at all with your generation; you kids seem to not give a shit about anything but what the celebrities are doing and what the next shiny toy will be.
How much was that serious and how much was it playing the 'curmudgeonly old man' character? If you did mean it genuinely, I can assure you that we decry the actions of these morons in our peer group just as you do. That said, was there ever really a time in history when a significant proportion (perhaps even the majority) of a given generation weren't morons (or, if you're feeling charitable, 'people disinclined to question the status quo, or to try to improve the world around them')? The old 'bread and circuses' quote seems particularly appropriate here.
I didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that Google should take technological steps to prevent it (although a strong but non-binding recommendation to that effect would be a nice thing to point out to companies who do choose to go for the more extreme lockdown), I was just pointing out that it's not a theoretical future issue, it's something that's happening now.
I basically agree with you - it's a totally different situation to Apple's 'app store or nothing' way of doing things, so it bothers me far less - but a single distributor with a big enough market share can become very dangerous. Just look at what WalMart can do - making certain movie and game ratings commercially non-viable is the first example that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are more.
There are already totally locked down Android devices out there. I'd very much like the ability to install a half-way functional MP3 player on my B&N Nook, for example.
I was actually thinking more of non-diegetic audio, but you make a fair point. To an extent, even for diegetic sound, it can still be believable to have a character listening to music within the right genre despite the audience not having heard the particular song, but I agree that it's more likely to appear natural if it is a popular song contemporary to the period.
Depends if your story demands that you license already well known songs or not, I guess. If a talented film-maker happens to have talented musician friends, problem solved - even paying them at full rate would cost a lot less than the huge chunks going to labels and other bureaucracy. If not I'm sure there are good, small bands who would be happy to license songs directly at a much lower rate than 'industry standard'.
In either case, technology helps - these small bands and individual composers/producers have access to the tech on one laptop that a whole studio would've been lucky to have managed 20 years ago.
That's not an absolute mark against them - if they really were trying to do something different and the thing just started kicking out power inexplicably then their paper may well look like crap. Not to say I believe them - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that - I won't be satisfied until (as the article heading says) I see one powering my toaster, but I have more respect for guys saying "Shit, we haven't got a clue, it just happened" than ones spouting demonstrably false pseudoscience like so many before have.
Of course, the better way to go about this would perhaps have been to send detailed plans and experimental records to colleagues at other universities and ask that they try to replicate it. Maybe steer clear of mentioning 'cold fusion' at all and simply ask if they get unusual excess energy readings.
It's probably junk, but hey, I'm holding on to the glimmer of hope that this could be a game-changer, just for a little longer!
Mostly word of mouth - often just in conversation, but a non-trivial amount is posted on Facebook just to say "Guys, awesome new song, you'll probably like this" or whatever; that's an advertisers wet dream, I'm sure: distribution to a few hundred people with the added impact of it being from a 'friend' whose opinion you actually respect, but it's a win-win since I actually do tend to like my friends' recommendations. Obviously the chain needs to start somewhere, and that may well be traditional advertising, but it's just as likely to be an unheard-of support band at a gig, or a song played in a club, or even something kicked up by a "you might also like..." algorithm. A small start goes a long way when everyone can broadcast their opinion to an (admittedly somewhat overlapping) group of several hundred mates.
I'd also add that the only reason this works at all is instant, 'free' music - nothing invested, nothing to get round to later, just see a link, click, and listen. I don't download illegally, but the industry seems to have finally caught on and offers it either ad-supported or subscription based through Spotify; everybody I know uses it, and for an awful lot of us it's the primary source of music - it contains the vast majority of what I look for if I'm in the mood to listen to 'X', and I personally use my friends' shared playlists just like you probably used the radio, too. Come to think of it, YouTube links are fairly prevalent too, but they're only really useful if you're linking someone to a single, specific song.
As I said, it's an extreme example and a product of obsession - $7k per full-length movie is by no means a sustainable model - but it shows that quality needn't necessarily be expensive. Same goes for Clerks, come to think of it; I wouldn't want to see every film made like that, but it still worked for that particular story.
Even at, say, $150k, which would've allowed those involved to get paid a quite reasonable wage for the time spent shooting, the films would be at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the lowest end of the mainstream. I'm sure there will always be a place for million dollar blockbusters, but I'm happy that technology is making it viable for us to see more and more of something other than that as well, where we couldn't really have done before. The cheaper and easier production becomes, the more chances people will have to get good stories out there without going to insane lengths like Kevin Smith did - seems like a win to me!
The corollary would perhaps be that when everyone has access to a Steinway, it's a lot easier for the next Beethoven to shine.