That does, however, break down when you say "One Yoctonewton" and then have to immediately add "that's ten to the minus 24". Words are only efficient if people actually know what they mean!
Even regularly dealing with extreme orders of magnitude, pretty much everyone I work with knows from 'nano' to 'tera' and then just automatically switches to powers of ten.
I think you must've misunderstood my post. I don't doubt that most (but not all) modchips are used for copied games, and that the same goes for custom firmwares or softmods.
I also never suggested that the 'Other OS' feature made anyone more altruistic. I was simply theorising that many of the most skilled hackers are actually those interested in homebrew, not those interested in copying. Once the security has been breached, the copiers then pick up that work for their own ends. If the homebrew community doesn't need to crack the security, it is quite possible that the copiers don't have the skill to do it alone (as is demonstrated, perhaps, by the lack of cracks for the PS3).
As soon as Sony takes out this sanctioned avenue for the homebrew community, they are forced to crack security to reinstate it, as we are seeing here with this unofficial firmware. Once the security has been cracked in one way, it makes it much easier for the copiers to pick up that exploit.
Hacking the PS3 to run 'backup' games would be a suitable punishment for sony imho
Which would be precisely the reason they made this change in the first place and does nothing but prove them right.
I'm inclined to believe that the 'Other OS' functionality did more to prevent copyright infringement than it did to assist it.
There are plenty of very skilled hackers out there who have no interest in copied games, they just want the freedom to use their hardware as they wish, or even just the challenge and the kudos for breaking a supposedly secure system. Once the work is done, however, it is often a relatively simple matter for the same exploits to be used by others to run copied discs.
By giving the hackers (used in the traditional sense of the word) what they wanted in the first place with the 'Other OS' functionality, Sony prevented them from needing to bother cracking the security, and that meant that the pirates didn't have anything to build on. As soon as Sony took that function away, we see exploits to restore it - I don't know how much this is linked to the DRM on the game discs, but my instinct would be that some of the work there has already been done now.
I believe it was the data channel, not the control (a significant difference when you're talking about the ability to launch an attack straight back on someone using their own drone rather than just passively observe). Your point still stands, though.
Your view is too black and white. In reality people need points to rally around, they need sound bites, slogans to print on T-shirts, a campaign to get them motivated to take action. In an ideal world maybe that wouldn't be the case, and I do feel a little foolish in saying that the concept of a constitution is equivalent to a T-shirt slogan, but that's what it comes down to.
One law protecting (say) the freedom of the press in the middle of some dusty legal tome is not especially likely to garner any public reaction when they try to modify or repeal it. If and when they try to do that with the constitution, people notice.
It's like comparing Asimov's three laws, on one hand, to the command "don't harm humans" on line 3,148,762 of MS Windows 7 for Robots, on the other. The effect may be the same, but it's much easier to overlook the latter.
Not directly related, but another very interesting (if disappointing) article from the BBC today about knee-jerk media reaction forcing the hand of the justice system, this time in terms of the drug trade.
Choice quotes from the latest expert resigning from the government's drug advisory board:
"We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people's behaviour.
"Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure."
He added: "As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people."
Agreed. It does look nice, but the best TFA could muster is a prototype device that may or may not even be this machine. Still might be worth it at a couple of hundred, though - I'll have to wait and see.
I do think the textbook focus in the press release seems odd, too. We passed the point where a laptop became lighter than a textbook back with the first round of netbooks. Textbooks, of all things, are fine for reading on a normal screen. You generally need them for quick reference when you're at a desk - the traditional e-reader advantages fall here. If anything I'd have though they'd be pushing these things as web pads/multimedia devices.
It still seems to me that you're putting excess value on 'religion' over any other belief. I know you specifically addressed that point, but I can't bring myself to agree, for example, that a Muslim woman's belief that what she wears is her own damn business (be that a burqa or not) is any greater than my completely non-religious belief that what I wear is my own damn business.
I see your point of pragmatism - you suggest she's more likely to win the case for freedom of dress and benefit everyone than I am. The problem, though, is that the law is likely to be codified as a religious exception and that doesn't benefit me in any way as I am not religious. I can't imagine a court buying the (IMO perfectly valid) argument that the beliefs on which I base my way of living are as important to me as religious beliefs to many of their adherents.
I don't think Jedi was even included as an option by the organisers, it was a write in response. That said, it was given an official designation when the census was processed (recognising it as a 'common response' without explicitly stating that it is a valid religious choice).
It's not just a warning, it's a button that reports "suspicious activity" directly to CEOP. I'm assuming that said report must include some identifying information of the parties involved or it would be no use to anyone.
I know Facebook are not exactly the bastions of privacy and security that we might like, but bowing to the pressure of a country other than the one in which they are based, and in doing so firing off arbitrary personal information about their users, is an understandable place to draw the line.
Points 2,3 & 4 I completely agree with. I'd add that the potential for the DRM to self destruct at some arbitrary point in the future further devalues the purchase.
I disagree with your first point, though. If they sort out DRM issues and pricing I'd find downloads to be a very convenient way of purchasing movies. Even going on a 7.5GB file size and allowing for network congestion that's a 30 minute download on my connection, and 50Mbps is not that unusual any more. Even living in a big city you're doing well if you can manage a round trip to the shops in that time. Add to that the fact that downloads are available 24/7 and I think it's a definite winner in convenience terms.
If you are going to call the penetration rate in Canada dire, look on a map. Canada is fucking huge. Total area of Canada is about the same size as ALL of Europe.
You seem to have missed my point quite significantly.
I was saying there are two questions to be answered: (1) Are Canada and the US lacking compared to Europe in various measures of broadband infrastructure or not? (2) Why is this the case?
When I called 70% "dire", I was talking in terms of question 1. People seem to be trying to use answers to question 2 in place of answers to question 1, just as you did, when the article is actually far more related to question 1.
I know your post was intended to pre-empt the stupid comments that will quite possibly come up, but still, I get the impression that the study was intended to look at overall quality of service. At the end of the day customers care much more about the service they receive than the relative ease or difficulty of bringing that service to them. The argument is a fair one to make when talking about why the US and Canada are (or aren't) lacking in broadband tech, but it's irrelevant if the question is simply "Are they lacking or not?".
I have to say, 70% penetration sounds pretty dire, whether or not that cost the industry 5x more than getting 95%+ in the UK. Comparing advertised speeds rather than actual speeds, on the other hand, does sound like a severe weakness of the study and certainly deserves to be looked into.
I think it's more apathy than ignorance. To an extent we're wired to go for the short term pay off anyway, so considering what might happen to the site's revenues in the long term, when we see no immediate consequence, takes an effort to do. There's nothing really pushing us to make that effort so we just ignore the possible future problems.
I don't block ads for precisely the reasons you (and the author of the article) outlined. I have no problem with text ads, or non-invasive image or flash ads provided they remain confined to their section of the page. Pop ups, javascript rollover things on the links, interstitials or those flash ads that cover up part of the article all push it too far, but I've found that sites which resort to these tactics are generally not worth my time anyway. The one thing that continues to surprise me, however, is just how much money there is in advertising - just because I don't block them with technology, doesn't mean I don't ignore them.
Yes, and he committed an easily traceable crime in broad daylight, and was caught soon after in possession of fairly solid evidence (the stolen machine itself). All this was done for the potential profit of, at most, the few thousand that you might find in a cash machine - in this case it was only about $800. I'm going to guess that perhaps a little more intelligence would have done him good after all.
Easy to use as it is, Handbrake is still a 'geek market' product. Hollywood knows we're already lost causes in the PR battle, that we know our fair use rights better than most, and that for every OSS program they try to shut down two more will spring up in its place. Not only that, Handbrake has no US presence (AFAIK) and even if it did I can see the EFF (who are experts in precisely this kind of field, and who fight on principle rather than just profit) stepping up to the plate if they did get sued, leading to a potentially messy and drawn out case and PR war for little to no benefit.
RealNetworks, on the other hand, has some (although probably small) measure of brand recognition among the general public. They care about profit and are quite happy to throw the case to the other side if it looks like it'll be the cheapest option. Net result: the entertainment industry gets to put out headlines saying "American company told to stop selling all that nasty illegal DVD copying software", and the general public takes home the message that "DVD copying is illegal". Seems like a fairly deft PR move to me, at least within the context of the Hollywood studio mindset.
My experience has not been that the music has been incredibly loud, it's been quite pleasant in fact.
Agreed. They often have classical music piped into certain tube stations, and I always thought it was just a nice attempt to improve that atmosphere of the place, rather than any nefarious ploy to scare off young people. It's not what I'd choose to listen to at home, but even as a teenager (only a few years ago) I found it quite enjoyable.
That said 'youth' tends to be used by much (but not all) of the media as shorthand: it's a subset of people aged around 12-20 or so from a given socio-economic group with a given set of interests. Either that or they think young people all form an undifferentiated mass of of people with the aforementioned characteristics, anyway. It seems to be taken as gospel by these news sources that no person under this definition of 'youth' could possibly stand more than 20 seconds anything other than death metal or blaring rap music.
Admittedly the submitter said tape would be impractical, but my nerdly curiosity has been piqued: how reliable are relatively cheap tape systems?
The price crossover point seems fairly reasonable even for a small-ish operation, if you're looking at a few TB per customer. A quick look on Google puts drives at about £700 and 800GB tapes at ~£20, compared to ~£55 for 1TB hard drives.
Going on £0.055/GB for hard drives and £0.025/GB for tapes, my quick back of the envelope calculation says that the investment in the drive amortizes after around 23.3TB for 800GB tapes.
Out of interest, is it in the UK or the US that this applies?
In either case, are there limits on how much they can mislead you? I assume that questions like "Are you lying to me?" or even "Are you permitted to lie to me?" would be about as useful as the apocryphal drug dealer favourite of "You're not a cop, are you?", but what about "Am I being treated as a suspect?". I would imagine that there are rules, as there are for informing people when they're being arrested and why (although we've lost a few of them recently too...), and it'd be interesting to know what the submitter might've been able to do to protect himself.
Fair point, but there's still a significant difference between "Your data still exists on a backup tape which is currently in storage, half way through it's five-year retention period" and "Your data still exists in a live, searchable database".
I'd consider the former to be a reasonable, but imperfect, effort to comply with the spirit of their promise. The latter, however, is a knowing and outright lie, for which the police should (due to the inherent imbalance of power) be more severely punished than an equivalent 'guy on the street'.
They've got a published table of caps here. Note that the 50Mb/s service is completely uncapped according to the website, and my experience supports this - it's pretty much always at full speed, and even when the network's congested I've never seen the connection drop below ~35Mb/s. The uptime was atrocious when it was first installed (several 24+ hour outages in a single month) but they seem to have sorted it out now.
They're still asshats for many reasons enumerated in other posts, not least their rather mercenary attitude to customers' private data as it transits their network, but they're upfront about the service that they provide and they're one of the few left in the UK that do offer a completely unlimited package.
Honestly I would've preferred to go with Be Broadband - DSL at half the speed, but still unlimited and a bit cheaper from a company who seem to give a little more of a shit about my privacy. Unfortunately BT make it prohibitively expensive to have your line reconnected - as I understand it the charge isn't for installing the line (it's already installed), simply for an engineer to hook it back up at the exchange, and it costs £125. That's what they charge you for the privilege of then going on to pay them line rental every month. Virgin, on the other hand, gave free installation (for which they did need to send an engineer to the house) and a £30 referral bonus to a friend. It would've been nice for principles to win out, but unfortunately it just wasn't financially justifiable.
That's exactly the point - you only use IETab for the crappy apps that depend on the IE6 engine. They will still work in that tab, but you're not left with the limitations of actually using IE6 to browse the rest of the internet.
Yes, that makes perfect sense, but there's no need for the hostility. It also makes perfect sense (within the context of their anti-nuke policies) that NZ's only available option is to ban all US Navy ships. Even though the impact is the same as having outright banned the US Navy, the fact that there are different reasons behind the move (and that they would be willing to accommodate them if they took the - admittedly stupid - move of identifying their nuke-armed ships) is significant.
I'm not remotely informed enough to comment on whether NZ's "no nuclear-armed ships" policy is sensible or not, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly my point, but put much more succinctly. Thank you!
That does, however, break down when you say "One Yoctonewton" and then have to immediately add "that's ten to the minus 24". Words are only efficient if people actually know what they mean!
Even regularly dealing with extreme orders of magnitude, pretty much everyone I work with knows from 'nano' to 'tera' and then just automatically switches to powers of ten.
I think you must've misunderstood my post. I don't doubt that most (but not all) modchips are used for copied games, and that the same goes for custom firmwares or softmods.
I also never suggested that the 'Other OS' feature made anyone more altruistic. I was simply theorising that many of the most skilled hackers are actually those interested in homebrew, not those interested in copying. Once the security has been breached, the copiers then pick up that work for their own ends. If the homebrew community doesn't need to crack the security, it is quite possible that the copiers don't have the skill to do it alone (as is demonstrated, perhaps, by the lack of cracks for the PS3).
As soon as Sony takes out this sanctioned avenue for the homebrew community, they are forced to crack security to reinstate it, as we are seeing here with this unofficial firmware. Once the security has been cracked in one way, it makes it much easier for the copiers to pick up that exploit.
Hacking the PS3 to run 'backup' games would be a suitable punishment for sony imho
Which would be precisely the reason they made this change in the first place and does nothing but prove them right.
I'm inclined to believe that the 'Other OS' functionality did more to prevent copyright infringement than it did to assist it.
There are plenty of very skilled hackers out there who have no interest in copied games, they just want the freedom to use their hardware as they wish, or even just the challenge and the kudos for breaking a supposedly secure system. Once the work is done, however, it is often a relatively simple matter for the same exploits to be used by others to run copied discs.
By giving the hackers (used in the traditional sense of the word) what they wanted in the first place with the 'Other OS' functionality, Sony prevented them from needing to bother cracking the security, and that meant that the pirates didn't have anything to build on. As soon as Sony took that function away, we see exploits to restore it - I don't know how much this is linked to the DRM on the game discs, but my instinct would be that some of the work there has already been done now.
I believe it was the data channel, not the control (a significant difference when you're talking about the ability to launch an attack straight back on someone using their own drone rather than just passively observe). Your point still stands, though.
Your view is too black and white. In reality people need points to rally around, they need sound bites, slogans to print on T-shirts, a campaign to get them motivated to take action. In an ideal world maybe that wouldn't be the case, and I do feel a little foolish in saying that the concept of a constitution is equivalent to a T-shirt slogan, but that's what it comes down to.
One law protecting (say) the freedom of the press in the middle of some dusty legal tome is not especially likely to garner any public reaction when they try to modify or repeal it. If and when they try to do that with the constitution, people notice.
It's like comparing Asimov's three laws, on one hand, to the command "don't harm humans" on line 3,148,762 of MS Windows 7 for Robots, on the other. The effect may be the same, but it's much easier to overlook the latter.
Not directly related, but another very interesting (if disappointing) article from the BBC today about knee-jerk media reaction forcing the hand of the justice system, this time in terms of the drug trade.
Choice quotes from the latest expert resigning from the government's drug advisory board:
Agreed. It does look nice, but the best TFA could muster is a prototype device that may or may not even be this machine. Still might be worth it at a couple of hundred, though - I'll have to wait and see.
I do think the textbook focus in the press release seems odd, too. We passed the point where a laptop became lighter than a textbook back with the first round of netbooks. Textbooks, of all things, are fine for reading on a normal screen. You generally need them for quick reference when you're at a desk - the traditional e-reader advantages fall here. If anything I'd have though they'd be pushing these things as web pads/multimedia devices.
It still seems to me that you're putting excess value on 'religion' over any other belief. I know you specifically addressed that point, but I can't bring myself to agree, for example, that a Muslim woman's belief that what she wears is her own damn business (be that a burqa or not) is any greater than my completely non-religious belief that what I wear is my own damn business.
I see your point of pragmatism - you suggest she's more likely to win the case for freedom of dress and benefit everyone than I am. The problem, though, is that the law is likely to be codified as a religious exception and that doesn't benefit me in any way as I am not religious. I can't imagine a court buying the (IMO perfectly valid) argument that the beliefs on which I base my way of living are as important to me as religious beliefs to many of their adherents.
I don't think Jedi was even included as an option by the organisers, it was a write in response. That said, it was given an official designation when the census was processed (recognising it as a 'common response' without explicitly stating that it is a valid religious choice).
It's not just a warning, it's a button that reports "suspicious activity" directly to CEOP. I'm assuming that said report must include some identifying information of the parties involved or it would be no use to anyone.
I know Facebook are not exactly the bastions of privacy and security that we might like, but bowing to the pressure of a country other than the one in which they are based, and in doing so firing off arbitrary personal information about their users, is an understandable place to draw the line.
Points 2,3 & 4 I completely agree with. I'd add that the potential for the DRM to self destruct at some arbitrary point in the future further devalues the purchase.
I disagree with your first point, though. If they sort out DRM issues and pricing I'd find downloads to be a very convenient way of purchasing movies. Even going on a 7.5GB file size and allowing for network congestion that's a 30 minute download on my connection, and 50Mbps is not that unusual any more. Even living in a big city you're doing well if you can manage a round trip to the shops in that time. Add to that the fact that downloads are available 24/7 and I think it's a definite winner in convenience terms.
If you are going to call the penetration rate in Canada dire, look on a map. Canada is fucking huge. Total area of Canada is about the same size as ALL of Europe.
You seem to have missed my point quite significantly.
I was saying there are two questions to be answered:
(1) Are Canada and the US lacking compared to Europe in various measures of broadband infrastructure or not?
(2) Why is this the case?
When I called 70% "dire", I was talking in terms of question 1. People seem to be trying to use answers to question 2 in place of answers to question 1, just as you did, when the article is actually far more related to question 1.
I know your post was intended to pre-empt the stupid comments that will quite possibly come up, but still, I get the impression that the study was intended to look at overall quality of service. At the end of the day customers care much more about the service they receive than the relative ease or difficulty of bringing that service to them. The argument is a fair one to make when talking about why the US and Canada are (or aren't) lacking in broadband tech, but it's irrelevant if the question is simply "Are they lacking or not?".
I have to say, 70% penetration sounds pretty dire, whether or not that cost the industry 5x more than getting 95%+ in the UK. Comparing advertised speeds rather than actual speeds, on the other hand, does sound like a severe weakness of the study and certainly deserves to be looked into.
I think it's more apathy than ignorance. To an extent we're wired to go for the short term pay off anyway, so considering what might happen to the site's revenues in the long term, when we see no immediate consequence, takes an effort to do. There's nothing really pushing us to make that effort so we just ignore the possible future problems.
I don't block ads for precisely the reasons you (and the author of the article) outlined. I have no problem with text ads, or non-invasive image or flash ads provided they remain confined to their section of the page. Pop ups, javascript rollover things on the links, interstitials or those flash ads that cover up part of the article all push it too far, but I've found that sites which resort to these tactics are generally not worth my time anyway. The one thing that continues to surprise me, however, is just how much money there is in advertising - just because I don't block them with technology, doesn't mean I don't ignore them.
Yes, and he committed an easily traceable crime in broad daylight, and was caught soon after in possession of fairly solid evidence (the stolen machine itself). All this was done for the potential profit of, at most, the few thousand that you might find in a cash machine - in this case it was only about $800. I'm going to guess that perhaps a little more intelligence would have done him good after all.
Easy to use as it is, Handbrake is still a 'geek market' product. Hollywood knows we're already lost causes in the PR battle, that we know our fair use rights better than most, and that for every OSS program they try to shut down two more will spring up in its place. Not only that, Handbrake has no US presence (AFAIK) and even if it did I can see the EFF (who are experts in precisely this kind of field, and who fight on principle rather than just profit) stepping up to the plate if they did get sued, leading to a potentially messy and drawn out case and PR war for little to no benefit.
RealNetworks, on the other hand, has some (although probably small) measure of brand recognition among the general public. They care about profit and are quite happy to throw the case to the other side if it looks like it'll be the cheapest option. Net result: the entertainment industry gets to put out headlines saying "American company told to stop selling all that nasty illegal DVD copying software", and the general public takes home the message that "DVD copying is illegal". Seems like a fairly deft PR move to me, at least within the context of the Hollywood studio mindset.
My experience has not been that the music has been incredibly loud, it's been quite pleasant in fact.
Agreed. They often have classical music piped into certain tube stations, and I always thought it was just a nice attempt to improve that atmosphere of the place, rather than any nefarious ploy to scare off young people. It's not what I'd choose to listen to at home, but even as a teenager (only a few years ago) I found it quite enjoyable.
That said 'youth' tends to be used by much (but not all) of the media as shorthand: it's a subset of people aged around 12-20 or so from a given socio-economic group with a given set of interests. Either that or they think young people all form an undifferentiated mass of of people with the aforementioned characteristics, anyway. It seems to be taken as gospel by these news sources that no person under this definition of 'youth' could possibly stand more than 20 seconds anything other than death metal or blaring rap music.
Tape storage does store better.
Admittedly the submitter said tape would be impractical, but my nerdly curiosity has been piqued: how reliable are relatively cheap tape systems?
The price crossover point seems fairly reasonable even for a small-ish operation, if you're looking at a few TB per customer. A quick look on Google puts drives at about £700 and 800GB tapes at ~£20, compared to ~£55 for 1TB hard drives.
Going on £0.055/GB for hard drives and £0.025/GB for tapes, my quick back of the envelope calculation says that the investment in the drive amortizes after around 23.3TB for 800GB tapes.
Out of interest, is it in the UK or the US that this applies?
In either case, are there limits on how much they can mislead you? I assume that questions like "Are you lying to me?" or even "Are you permitted to lie to me?" would be about as useful as the apocryphal drug dealer favourite of "You're not a cop, are you?", but what about "Am I being treated as a suspect?". I would imagine that there are rules, as there are for informing people when they're being arrested and why (although we've lost a few of them recently too...), and it'd be interesting to know what the submitter might've been able to do to protect himself.
Fair point, but there's still a significant difference between "Your data still exists on a backup tape which is currently in storage, half way through it's five-year retention period" and "Your data still exists in a live, searchable database".
I'd consider the former to be a reasonable, but imperfect, effort to comply with the spirit of their promise. The latter, however, is a knowing and outright lie, for which the police should (due to the inherent imbalance of power) be more severely punished than an equivalent 'guy on the street'.
They've got a published table of caps here. Note that the 50Mb/s service is completely uncapped according to the website, and my experience supports this - it's pretty much always at full speed, and even when the network's congested I've never seen the connection drop below ~35Mb/s. The uptime was atrocious when it was first installed (several 24+ hour outages in a single month) but they seem to have sorted it out now.
They're still asshats for many reasons enumerated in other posts, not least their rather mercenary attitude to customers' private data as it transits their network, but they're upfront about the service that they provide and they're one of the few left in the UK that do offer a completely unlimited package.
Honestly I would've preferred to go with Be Broadband - DSL at half the speed, but still unlimited and a bit cheaper from a company who seem to give a little more of a shit about my privacy. Unfortunately BT make it prohibitively expensive to have your line reconnected - as I understand it the charge isn't for installing the line (it's already installed), simply for an engineer to hook it back up at the exchange, and it costs £125. That's what they charge you for the privilege of then going on to pay them line rental every month. Virgin, on the other hand, gave free installation (for which they did need to send an engineer to the house) and a £30 referral bonus to a friend. It would've been nice for principles to win out, but unfortunately it just wasn't financially justifiable.
Brilliant!
That's exactly the point - you only use IETab for the crappy apps that depend on the IE6 engine. They will still work in that tab, but you're not left with the limitations of actually using IE6 to browse the rest of the internet.
Yes, that makes perfect sense, but there's no need for the hostility. It also makes perfect sense (within the context of their anti-nuke policies) that NZ's only available option is to ban all US Navy ships. Even though the impact is the same as having outright banned the US Navy, the fact that there are different reasons behind the move (and that they would be willing to accommodate them if they took the - admittedly stupid - move of identifying their nuke-armed ships) is significant.
I'm not remotely informed enough to comment on whether NZ's "no nuclear-armed ships" policy is sensible or not, however.