"He was beaten severely, then hung from the nearest tree." "No, no, human beings are hanged. Dead meat is hung." "He was beaten severely, then hung from the nearest tree..."
I run a school network, and a know quite a number of staff, teaching and otherwise who:
* really can't work out the difference between left and right click (we've considered labelling her fingers)
* think there are two internets. MSN, and the one you get from our school homepage. If you can't get to by going through a series of clicks from those sites, it doesn't exist. Yes, I've showed them the address bar, they still don't get it. Yes, I've told them it's like telephone numbers or a postal address. They still don't get it.
* Keep trying to send 70MB word files via email, and complain bitterly that it's 'just a few photos' when it gets denied. Yes, I've tried to explain several times that it's 'too big to fit down the pipe'. Perhaps I'll use a tube analogy next time.
* Really, really really don't get the concept of shortcuts. "But it works on my laptop. Why doesn't it work on the school computer?" That's because you copied a link to the file, not the actual file. You've got the delivery slip, not the package. The file is still only on your laptop. Oh, and even if you do copy it over, it's some custom file that only works in that custom software on your laptop, as I told you last week. "But we had this exact conversation last week, and we're going to have this same converstion again next week, because I'm a moron and I don't understand anything about computers." OK, they didn't say that last bit. But they should have.
* Internet = google = browser = email = windows = microsoft word. It's setup that way on their computer, so all other computers must work exactly the same way. EXACTLY. Or they're lost. Even a different homepage will throw them.
* think "The internet is broken" is code for the following problems : "My laptop isn't plugged into a CAT5 cable and I have no wireless". "That block page saying I need to login to the school proxy first comes up every time when I try to load webpages, despite personally managing to follow the same instruction for the last 3 years". "My computer is off, and won't turn on". "My CDs won't play." And my personal favourite, "my mouse is unplugged".
Yes, all of them don't really understand technology, and don't want to. That's life. Even if I have to tell them how to do the same thing over and over because they just, don't, can't get it. Ted Stevens would fit quite nicely into my school. He'd probably even qualify as an advanced user.
Business process and software patents are not legal in the EU, which is why you can't patent services there. The US on the other hand, seems to have no limits of any kind on what can actually be patented.
Remember who designs and operates the machinery that builds the hardware too. Computers are designed, built and programmed by us bags of water on sticks, so they're definitely not infallible. Take a VLSI design course and find out how many bad transistors are expected in a silicon wafer, you may be surprised.
The purpose of the moderation system is that insightful, thoughtful and interesting posts get modded up and seen more easily. Having all anti-microsoft posts modded up regardless of insight or even accuracy is a bug, not a feature. (Not that I think that example happens specifically to that degree, but there's definitely a pro open-source bias here)
"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.
I would agree with you 100% - if the students are adults. When the students are not, it's a different story. In the UK at least, there is the doctrine of 'in loco parentis'. We have to act as if we were the parents, with a duty of care, roughly put. This includes the pastoral care of the students. Add in, the school network is for academic use only. Don't like it? Get your own. I run the filtering system for a boarding school (though I don't choose what gets filtered) and we filter for three reasons.
1) It has no or virtually no academic value. Pornography falls into this category, as do sites of prurient and violent content. 2) It is used as a bandwidth and time waster. We have limited bandwidth, the students have limited time in which they should usually be studying. Free access to games and video websites slows down the network for the rest of the students and staff doing legitimate study (we're out in the sticks, so bandwidth is very very expensive). Students playing games when they should be studying is something they're not allowed to do, so we enforce it with the blacklist. 3) it allows for anonymous bullying. This includes IM and webmail. Students were getting anonymously bullied by other pupils. It sucks, but cutting off non-school email systems was judged the lesser evil.
At home, what students browse is between them and their parents. When they're at school, we have to act like we're responsible parents. You obviously feel that children should have the full rights and responsibilities of adults, so any justification for blocking will fail that test. I, and the UK law, disagree. I used to be a hardcore libertarian until I worked in a school, and saw how much crap students try to get away with.
To put it very bluntly; most children won't study unless you MAKE them study. I'd rather have oppressed literate children than free illiterate ones. You don't get to exercise many of those adult rights if you're living in a gutter.
it should be relatively obvious to all concerned that the only way that DRM *CAN* work is if governments create laws that make it illegal to not use DRM.
Yeah, cos copyright law is already so well followed by the populace, I'm sure they'd be all broken up about breaking another law enforcing the use of DRM. Other than that, good post.
The AC system lowers the bar for entry. It allows people to post very easily. Which is why the vast majority of AC comments are GNAA crap, trolls and the like. Browsing at -1 is a really depressing experience. Even wikipedia, the 'bastion' of free speech has had to put limits on commenting on some articles, forcing only registered users.
The vast majority of comments should come from registered users, for one main reason - it allows conversation. If you're being commented on by two AC's, you've no way of knowing who said what. The +1 is there both as an incentive to register, and to help hide the huge flow of crap that comes from the majority of ACs. Another advantage to registering is you can choose to read at 0 if you like, or +4 or -1, and automatically upmod and downmod certain people. ACs ARE ignored mostly, because if you don't have the balls to put a name to your post, then there's a fair chance it's not worth my time to read it. Those few that are worth it should be being upmodded. As far as those comments that need real anonymity, they can register a fake one-off account to post it. After all, slashdot's got your IP whether you're an AC or a one-off user. Note, registered users don't get stories earlier, only those who've also paid a subscription fee.
As for jerks getting +2 automatically; well, that's because they have a history of being upmodded. The metamoderation system is supposed to prevent that, so only people with a history of good posts get there. Yes, it's vulnerable to a 'hivemind' of moderation, where certain types of comments always get modded up, and others down - an accusation often levelled in microsoft threads - and there probably is a bit of truth in that, but more at a general level, reflecting the generally liberal and geeky nature of the audience.
The biggest weakness of the moderation system is when comments sound good, but are actually utter crap - and get modded up insightful. Then you get several comments afterwards saying 'that's utter crap, how did this get insightful'. On the plus side, this does mean that people have an incentive to post the correct information, so the rest of us can see a common fallacy, and the debunking of it. Would be better off if neither had been upmodded, and just left at the level as the GNAA posters? I won't trot out that penny-arcade cartoon about internet+anonymity, you've probably seen it a thousand times.
Moderation, and registration aren't perfect. They're still a damn sight better than not having either, given the huge size of slashdot. I come to slashdot for the comments, the news I can get elsewhere.
Oops that should be European Convention of Human Rights; the implementation into UK law, the Human Rights Act, is here. The relevant part would be articles 4 and 5. Article 3, prohibition of torture and inhumane treatment is also a good one...
That's absolute bollocks. Magna Carta in 1215 placed major limits on the crown, and effectively established the rights of men to self-determination (well, the land-owning ones anyway). Don't forget, we had a civil war a few hundred years later that killed off the power of the crown for good.
You also forget the European constitution on human rights is now UK law; it is effectively a bill of rights. The UK might have a few priorities in law different, such as a few tighter limits on free speech such as libel and hate speech, but we have broadly the same rights as US citizens. We're certainly not all chattels (or slaves) of the Crown!
Out of interest, how has the vaunted US system protected habeas corpus? How much good is freedom of the press when all the presses are owned by a few barons in league with the government? A piece of paper is only as powerful as the will of the people to hold their government accountable to it.
Mainly because the people who oppose have given up. 2 million people marched in peaceful protest against British involvement in the Iraq war in London alone; The US equivalent in population size would be 10 million on the streets of Washington. It had absolutely zero effect.
Near 2 million people signed a petition on the governments own website opposing per-mile road charging plans (likely enforced by satellite trackers) and the government's response was basically 'you don't understand, we have to do this, so we're going to go ahead anyway'
Labour Party MPs won a significant majority of the seats, despite having only 36% of the vote; their nearest rival had 33% of the vote, and got half the number of MPs that Labour did.
The system is broken, the government doesn't care, and protest is pointless. All we can do is hang on, and try and vote the bastards out next time. Not that the tories would be any better, they're as anti-privacy as Labour.
But how do you know you have a legitimate claim if you have no reliable evidence of liability to start with? Is it fair that the RIAA (on behalf of say, Sony BMG) can basically point their finger at someone and go - "You. We think you're guilty of something, though we have no reliable evidence. Give us your hard-drives so we can find out what. And even if we don't find anything, you're going to be on the hook for $6000 for fees. Or just pay us $3000 now, admit liability, and we'll go away."
Any system which doesn't require a reasonable amount of evidence of liability before a case can go forward is broken. Any system which allows scumbags to hire scumbag lawyers to persecute people on the back of no evidence, and then drop the case before losing sets a precedent, is broken. Other professionals have to risk their certification being pulled, or fines from a professional body, or civil suits against them personally if they fail drastically in their duty to the public. Why the hell should lawyers be exempt?
Promoting a new small business is not a new challenge. Musicians can do what other businesses do; take a small business loan, and use that to pay for marketing and promotion services by a promotion company. That would be much preferable to the current system where all of a band's output is owned by the label, and they get a few pence in the pound back from sales. If they absolutely must tie themselves to a label, there are outfits like magnatune and cdbaby who don't absolutely rape the bands for every penny. Internet promotion is not to be sneezed at either (just look at the Arctic Monkeys) and that's virtually free!
The major label record companies distort so many other markets it's not funny. CD production, concert hall hire, radio play, online radio, DRM in vista, itunes etc; all these areas would be cheaper, more accessible and better value for listeners (or gone entirely when it's DRM) if the major labels and their associate corporate entities like ticketmaster and clearchannel didn't have such a death-grip on the throat of the industry. They currently act as gatekeepers, though that role is disappearing, and they desparately want to hold onto it.
Remember, the RIAA's tactics are just what is demanded by Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner. They are to blame for the piss-poor state of music today. If there's any justice, they will become as hated as the RIAA; and eventually fail and die in the marketplace because of it. Long live the indies!
People should be allowed to do harm to themselves. People should be allowed to smoke in public. Problem A; people smoking in public do not just harm themselves, they do cause harm to others. That harm isn't necessarily cancer, but it is certainly an unpleasant environment for non-smokers. Causing involuntary harm to others is one of the things government is supposed to try to prevent. Bans on smoking in public places are there to protect the staff, who often don't have the power or the financial ability to just get another job in a non-smoky business.
If charities can not raise enough money to help you, you do not deserve help. I am being callous here, but it is necessary to keep the government small.
Problem B; I disagree with your priority. I personally feel that basic humanity demands that we give assistance to provide a minimum standard of healthcare and support to people in our society is more important than small government for small governments sake. The nature of democratic societies, and the governments that we appoint to serve our will (theoretically) is that the will of the majority prevails (with some areas off limits to change in countries with constitutions). A majority of people feel that it's just that we have some humanity towards our fellow man in trouble, and that its government's duty to assist on our behalf and with some of everybodies money. Charity is for donations over and above that minimum assistance.
Now, you appear to feel that being compelled to pay for things you don't agree with is unjust. Unfortunately, you're in a minority. There's a whole bunch of things I don't agree with my government spending money on, but I don't dispute their duty to do so, as they wouldn't BE the government if it hadn't been the will of the people. We're both entitled to go form our own political party, stand as a candidate, lobby our representatives, or even just vote for politicians who agree with our views. If we end up in a minority, well, that's the cost of the living in a democratic society. Society has to cater to everyone, which means that not everyone wins 100%.
Problems where this ability of the people (as a group) to choose the path of their government are some of the most grave of all, which is why this article from missoula would be troubling for me if I lived in the US.
You know, as a European, I'd actually agree with your argument without the tags... Sex is a perfectly normal thing, and children wanting to learn more about it is also perfectly natural. Statistically, societies with much higher controls on pornography (and the repressive attitude that goes with it) also have much higher rates of teenage pregnancy, as boys work much harder to actually have sex instead of wanking to porn.
Organised religion on the other hand, is responsible for inciting many of the past - and current - wars and atrocities. Iraq can oh so easily be classified as a religious war, just look at the portrayal of muslims in the US press. There really is a good an argument for filing religous websites away on a separate section we can easily filter - as much as there is for filing away sexual websites, anyway.
Someone who lives in England, obviously;) Seriously though, it comes from Land of the Angles, named after the germanic settlers from Angeln, in what is now Germany. They, along with the saxons were the predominant cultural group* in what became England, prior to 1066; collectively called Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-saxon is now a term often used to refer to the white western world from Britain and it's former colonies; as opposed to Hispanic or Gallic - you may have heard of WASPs...
*This is disputed; some historians/geneticists argue that the people were largely neolithic settlers and celts, while only the elites were supplanted by a few percentage ruling settlers from the continent in succesive invasions by romans, angles & saxons, vikings, normans, etc.
Online Genuine Advantage checks do not appear to be related to the WGAnotify app (yet) that is being pushed as an automatic critical app. I know my organisation pcs are valid, as they're running the VLK assigned to my organisation, and they pass genuine advantage checks on the MS website despite refusing the latest WGANotify update. I see no need to install an application which sole purpose is to popup nag screens on those computers that are determined to be invalid by microsoft's super-secret formulae. I've had several perfectly valid installs fail the old wganotify check (OEM installs only ever used on their original PC), including one on the same VLK, so frankly I'm not letting it near anything I control if I can help it.
They better make damn sure people are copyright infringers before accusing them of it, because WGA so far has done a pretty piss poor job of it with false-negatives all over the shop.
Sony is pulling an EA; taking what used to come included with your original purchase, and instead micropaymenting and advertising you to death to go there. They're shipping the PS3 months later to the EU market than elsewhere They're shipping to the EU an inferior version WRT backwards compapability, and cheaper case/materials etc Despite this, they're charging a hefty price premium - £60 ($115) - over and above the tax difference to the US price. And that doesn't even mention all the other anti-customer crap the other arms of Sony have pulled.
My other half has a PS1, and used to have a PS2. We were pretty likely candidates to get a PS3 a year ago. But now? Fuck Sony, and their attitude that because I'm a European I'll take whatever crap they're pushing. They obviously don't want me as a customer, so I intend to oblige. PC and Wii for us.
And now some dollied up 2nd life wannabe with adverts, streaming video adverts, micropayments and indie developer lockout from the juicy stuff is going to tempt me back? Mii's are FREE. and funny. I don't have to suffer adverts to play with mine. Sony should concentrate on getting some good titles out, and stop trying to just to re-implement everyone else's ideas badly, and then charging through the nose for the privilege.
So you're saying we're only allowed to think about and try to come up with solutions for only one problem at a time? Guess this is the same line of thought that produces 'why do this, why aren't they working on curing cancer?'
Ohhhhhh, I get it. You think the asteroid-impact risk has gone away because hollywood isn't making any more films about it, and since we haven't all died in the last 5 years from that yet, we can forget about it. *sigh*
You haven't installed windows lately then. I've just been on a clean-up and reinstall/migrate jolly. I've installed two copies of windows XP pro on two different computers; two copies of vista on same, one 32-bit, one 64-bit, and kubuntu edgy on one of the boxes.
Kubuntu needed a one line command to install the binary nvidia drivers (I could have done it in the gui with a couple of clicks also); all else worked out of the box, apart from the 100s of MBs of updates and patches; but then windows needs that also, so that's a draw.
Windows XP doesn't properly recognise either sound card, my mouse, my graphics cards, my tv-tuners, some of the onboard motherboard devices, my gig network cards, hell I even need a boot floppy for the sata drivers to install it; I had to dig a floppy drive out of storage especially. I had to manually track down and install the drivers from half a dozen different websites, which is tricky when your network card doesn't work yet. And before you complain it's an old OS, it's entirely microsoft's fault they haven't issued SP3 with updated drivers and all the patches; I believe we get to wait until 2008 for that.
Vista needs updated motherboard drivers and graphics card drivers, sound card drivers and mouse drivers, most of which aren't available at all yet, or are 'technology previews' and don't work yet. I'm looking at you, Mr Nvidia SLI, and Mr Razer, we don't do signed vista 64 drivers yet.
Out of the box compatibility SUCKS for windows, and always has. Why most people don't encounter this is because their OEM does all the hard work for them and provide an installed finished product. They could do so with linux, and have just a slick a product. What linux lacks is application support these days, not drivers out of the box. Even wireless is very slick on ubuntu last time I tried it.
Not yet. I've played with it, and it's basically an alternative to the qemu closed-source module, it's using a modified qemu userland. The advantage of using a VT/SVM capable processor with KVM means you can run an unmodified guest OS; i.e. no paravirtualised custom drivers needed.
Its biggest weakness is speed. VMware have had years of tweaking and finetuning, while kvm is very very new, and slow in certain areas. General desktop is fine, but network speed was painfully bad - for example - when I tried version 10. Plenty of work coming down the pipe, and it looks like it could be a powerful opensource virtualisation tool - in time. Right now, it is a bit fiddly to get running, and not quite ready for a production environment.
For now I'd stick to VMWare or virtualbox, but definitely have another look at KVM in say, 6 months time.
We already have direct mileage based taxation. It's petrol duty (+VAT on both). Black box recording to enforce an additional per mile tax is a huge invasion of privacy; especially if they did tie it to using satellites. Yes, for some motorists it would work out a net saving - those that drive hardly at all, but I would imagine for the average motorist, overall tax would go up - after all, someone would have to pay for the system and the management and the enforcement to make sure nobody was tampering, and what's the point of doing it at all if the government gets no more revenue out of it?
It would be a massively over complex and expensive IT solution to a problem that is fixable by other means.
As for a no-sign petition; create a counter petition in favour of the plans. If your 700k in favour of this scheme exist, that will also inform government policy.
When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?".
Fair prices, treat your customers like honest people, and don't sweat the piracy. iTunes succeeds because it's simple, cheap and the DRM doesn't get in the way, much. You could remove the DRM from iTMS entirely, and the only people that would be unhappy would be the big labels. You also get MORE sales from the anti-DRM crowd; I won't buy from any DRM service. Convenience and quality are worth money, and that's something P2P doesn't provide. You have to compete with free by providing a better, faster quality service, not by producing ad-laden products which don't work on people's existing hardware due to artificial restrictions and are overpriced.
Baen books succeed despite 0 DRM. Galactic Civ II succeeded despite having 0 DRM, and so has Company of Heroes, though admittedly the latter uses CD keys for online play. AllofMp3 does a roaring trade - imagine if it was backed by the big labels instead of being prosecuted by them. Magnatune and CDBaby do pretty well too.
We're adults here. We realise you don't get quality material for free. If we're treated like honest people, i.e. no DRM, if the price is a reasonable one, or we even set our own, you can make a reasonable profit. The days of obscene profits for some might be at threat, but frankly I don't care. DRM is much more about control, lock-in and segmenting the market to maximise profit in each area than it is about preventing piracy; which it's rubbish at anyway, and always will be. You cannot give someone a locked chest, the lock and the key, and not expect someone to figure out how to put them together in a way you don't approve of. DRM doesn't, and cannot work. Reasonable prices and treating your customers like well, customers and not a marketing demographic already works and works well.
Well, at least it's not 50%. From about 3/4 of the way down the article,
"Fox's Snyder is particularly irked at the persistent amount of camcording he and his distribution team have been able to track directly back to several of Cineplex's Montreal theatres. (Fox and other studios use forensic watermarking to know the exact time, date and auditorium where a copy was made.) "The reality is in 2005, 20 per cent of all identified camcordings occurred in Canada," says Frith. "That's a huge number. And it's growing."
Basically, canada is the largest individual entry, but doesn't have an overall majority. Still, it seems possible. Canada does have much more sane laws regarding camcording, and their release dates are usually about the same as the US. Much of the rest of the world doesn't get movies till much later. I remember introducing my projectionist friend to bittorrent; Finding Nemo was out as a DVD-rip - as it was on DVD in the US - before it even had hit the cinema screens in the UK. That DVD-rip was available for 2 MONTHS before it even hit the cinema here.
Agree entirely about the MPAA and the studios though. At what point did a damn company get to tell governments what to do? Aren't governments formed for the rights of the people, not the corporations?
Slashdot Mirror
"He was beaten severely, then hung from the nearest tree."
"No, no, human beings are hanged. Dead meat is hung."
"He was beaten severely, then hung from the nearest tree..."
I run a school network, and a know quite a number of staff, teaching and otherwise who:
* really can't work out the difference between left and right click (we've considered labelling her fingers)
* think there are two internets. MSN, and the one you get from our school homepage. If you can't get to by going through a series of clicks from those sites, it doesn't exist. Yes, I've showed them the address bar, they still don't get it. Yes, I've told them it's like telephone numbers or a postal address. They still don't get it.
* Keep trying to send 70MB word files via email, and complain bitterly that it's 'just a few photos' when it gets denied. Yes, I've tried to explain several times that it's 'too big to fit down the pipe'. Perhaps I'll use a tube analogy next time.
* Really, really really don't get the concept of shortcuts. "But it works on my laptop. Why doesn't it work on the school computer?" That's because you copied a link to the file, not the actual file. You've got the delivery slip, not the package. The file is still only on your laptop. Oh, and even if you do copy it over, it's some custom file that only works in that custom software on your laptop, as I told you last week. "But we had this exact conversation last week, and we're going to have this same converstion again next week, because I'm a moron and I don't understand anything about computers." OK, they didn't say that last bit. But they should have.
* Internet = google = browser = email = windows = microsoft word. It's setup that way on their computer, so all other computers must work exactly the same way. EXACTLY. Or they're lost. Even a different homepage will throw them.
* think "The internet is broken" is code for the following problems : "My laptop isn't plugged into a CAT5 cable and I have no wireless". "That block page saying I need to login to the school proxy first comes up every time when I try to load webpages, despite personally managing to follow the same instruction for the last 3 years". "My computer is off, and won't turn on". "My CDs won't play." And my personal favourite, "my mouse is unplugged".
Yes, all of them don't really understand technology, and don't want to. That's life. Even if I have to tell them how to do the same thing over and over because they just, don't, can't get it. Ted Stevens would fit quite nicely into my school. He'd probably even qualify as an advanced user.
Business process and software patents are not legal in the EU, which is why you can't patent services there. The US on the other hand, seems to have no limits of any kind on what can actually be patented.
Remember who designs and operates the machinery that builds the hardware too. Computers are designed, built and programmed by us bags of water on sticks, so they're definitely not infallible. Take a VLSI design course and find out how many bad transistors are expected in a silicon wafer, you may be surprised.
The purpose of the moderation system is that insightful, thoughtful and interesting posts get modded up and seen more easily. Having all anti-microsoft posts modded up regardless of insight or even accuracy is a bug, not a feature. (Not that I think that example happens specifically to that degree, but there's definitely a pro open-source bias here)
"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.
I would agree with you 100% - if the students are adults. When the students are not, it's a different story. In the UK at least, there is the doctrine of 'in loco parentis'. We have to act as if we were the parents, with a duty of care, roughly put. This includes the pastoral care of the students. Add in, the school network is for academic use only. Don't like it? Get your own.
I run the filtering system for a boarding school (though I don't choose what gets filtered) and we filter for three reasons.
1) It has no or virtually no academic value. Pornography falls into this category, as do sites of prurient and violent content.
2) It is used as a bandwidth and time waster. We have limited bandwidth, the students have limited time in which they should usually be studying. Free access to games and video websites slows down the network for the rest of the students and staff doing legitimate study (we're out in the sticks, so bandwidth is very very expensive). Students playing games when they should be studying is something they're not allowed to do, so we enforce it with the blacklist.
3) it allows for anonymous bullying. This includes IM and webmail. Students were getting anonymously bullied by other pupils. It sucks, but cutting off non-school email systems was judged the lesser evil.
At home, what students browse is between them and their parents. When they're at school, we have to act like we're responsible parents. You obviously feel that children should have the full rights and responsibilities of adults, so any justification for blocking will fail that test. I, and the UK law, disagree. I used to be a hardcore libertarian until I worked in a school, and saw how much crap students try to get away with.
To put it very bluntly; most children won't study unless you MAKE them study. I'd rather have oppressed literate children than free illiterate ones. You don't get to exercise many of those adult rights if you're living in a gutter.
it should be relatively obvious to all concerned that the only way that DRM *CAN* work is if governments create laws that make it illegal to not use DRM.
Yeah, cos copyright law is already so well followed by the populace, I'm sure they'd be all broken up about breaking another law enforcing the use of DRM. Other than that, good post.
The AC system lowers the bar for entry. It allows people to post very easily. Which is why the vast majority of AC comments are GNAA crap, trolls and the like. Browsing at -1 is a really depressing experience. Even wikipedia, the 'bastion' of free speech has had to put limits on commenting on some articles, forcing only registered users.
The vast majority of comments should come from registered users, for one main reason - it allows conversation. If you're being commented on by two AC's, you've no way of knowing who said what. The +1 is there both as an incentive to register, and to help hide the huge flow of crap that comes from the majority of ACs. Another advantage to registering is you can choose to read at 0 if you like, or +4 or -1, and automatically upmod and downmod certain people. ACs ARE ignored mostly, because if you don't have the balls to put a name to your post, then there's a fair chance it's not worth my time to read it. Those few that are worth it should be being upmodded. As far as those comments that need real anonymity, they can register a fake one-off account to post it. After all, slashdot's got your IP whether you're an AC or a one-off user. Note, registered users don't get stories earlier, only those who've also paid a subscription fee.
As for jerks getting +2 automatically; well, that's because they have a history of being upmodded. The metamoderation system is supposed to prevent that, so only people with a history of good posts get there. Yes, it's vulnerable to a 'hivemind' of moderation, where certain types of comments always get modded up, and others down - an accusation often levelled in microsoft threads - and there probably is a bit of truth in that, but more at a general level, reflecting the generally liberal and geeky nature of the audience.
The biggest weakness of the moderation system is when comments sound good, but are actually utter crap - and get modded up insightful. Then you get several comments afterwards saying 'that's utter crap, how did this get insightful'. On the plus side, this does mean that people have an incentive to post the correct information, so the rest of us can see a common fallacy, and the debunking of it. Would be better off if neither had been upmodded, and just left at the level as the GNAA posters? I won't trot out that penny-arcade cartoon about internet+anonymity, you've probably seen it a thousand times.
Moderation, and registration aren't perfect. They're still a damn sight better than not having either, given the huge size of slashdot. I come to slashdot for the comments, the news I can get elsewhere.
Oops that should be European Convention of Human Rights; the implementation into UK law, the Human Rights Act, is here. The relevant part would be articles 4 and 5. Article 3, prohibition of torture and inhumane treatment is also a good one...
That's absolute bollocks. Magna Carta in 1215 placed major limits on the crown, and effectively established the rights of men to self-determination (well, the land-owning ones anyway). Don't forget, we had a civil war a few hundred years later that killed off the power of the crown for good.
You also forget the European constitution on human rights is now UK law; it is effectively a bill of rights. The UK might have a few priorities in law different, such as a few tighter limits on free speech such as libel and hate speech, but we have broadly the same rights as US citizens. We're certainly not all chattels (or slaves) of the Crown!
Out of interest, how has the vaunted US system protected habeas corpus? How much good is freedom of the press when all the presses are owned by a few barons in league with the government? A piece of paper is only as powerful as the will of the people to hold their government accountable to it.
Mainly because the people who oppose have given up. 2 million people marched in peaceful protest against British involvement in the Iraq war in London alone; The US equivalent in population size would be 10 million on the streets of Washington. It had absolutely zero effect.
Near 2 million people signed a petition on the governments own website opposing per-mile road charging plans (likely enforced by satellite trackers) and the government's response was basically 'you don't understand, we have to do this, so we're going to go ahead anyway'
Labour Party MPs won a significant majority of the seats, despite having only 36% of the vote; their nearest rival had 33% of the vote, and got half the number of MPs that Labour did.
The system is broken, the government doesn't care, and protest is pointless. All we can do is hang on, and try and vote the bastards out next time. Not that the tories would be any better, they're as anti-privacy as Labour.
But how do you know you have a legitimate claim if you have no reliable evidence of liability to start with? Is it fair that the RIAA (on behalf of say, Sony BMG) can basically point their finger at someone and go -
"You. We think you're guilty of something, though we have no reliable evidence. Give us your hard-drives so we can find out what. And even if we don't find anything, you're going to be on the hook for $6000 for fees. Or just pay us $3000 now, admit liability, and we'll go away."
Any system which doesn't require a reasonable amount of evidence of liability before a case can go forward is broken. Any system which allows scumbags to hire scumbag lawyers to persecute people on the back of no evidence, and then drop the case before losing sets a precedent, is broken. Other professionals have to risk their certification being pulled, or fines from a professional body, or civil suits against them personally if they fail drastically in their duty to the public. Why the hell should lawyers be exempt?
Promoting a new small business is not a new challenge. Musicians can do what other businesses do; take a small business loan, and use that to pay for marketing and promotion services by a promotion company. That would be much preferable to the current system where all of a band's output is owned by the label, and they get a few pence in the pound back from sales. If they absolutely must tie themselves to a label, there are outfits like magnatune and cdbaby who don't absolutely rape the bands for every penny. Internet promotion is not to be sneezed at either (just look at the Arctic Monkeys) and that's virtually free!
The major label record companies distort so many other markets it's not funny. CD production, concert hall hire, radio play, online radio, DRM in vista, itunes etc; all these areas would be cheaper, more accessible and better value for listeners (or gone entirely when it's DRM) if the major labels and their associate corporate entities like ticketmaster and clearchannel didn't have such a death-grip on the throat of the industry. They currently act as gatekeepers, though that role is disappearing, and they desparately want to hold onto it.
Remember, the RIAA's tactics are just what is demanded by Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner. They are to blame for the piss-poor state of music today. If there's any justice, they will become as hated as the RIAA; and eventually fail and die in the marketplace because of it. Long live the indies!
People should be allowed to do harm to themselves. People should be allowed to smoke in public.
Problem A; people smoking in public do not just harm themselves, they do cause harm to others. That harm isn't necessarily cancer, but it is certainly an unpleasant environment for non-smokers. Causing involuntary harm to others is one of the things government is supposed to try to prevent. Bans on smoking in public places are there to protect the staff, who often don't have the power or the financial ability to just get another job in a non-smoky business.
If charities can not raise enough money to help you, you do not deserve help. I am being callous here, but it is necessary to keep the government small.
Problem B; I disagree with your priority. I personally feel that basic humanity demands that we give assistance to provide a minimum standard of healthcare and support to people in our society is more important than small government for small governments sake. The nature of democratic societies, and the governments that we appoint to serve our will (theoretically) is that the will of the majority prevails (with some areas off limits to change in countries with constitutions). A majority of people feel that it's just that we have some humanity towards our fellow man in trouble, and that its government's duty to assist on our behalf and with some of everybodies money. Charity is for donations over and above that minimum assistance.
Now, you appear to feel that being compelled to pay for things you don't agree with is unjust. Unfortunately, you're in a minority. There's a whole bunch of things I don't agree with my government spending money on, but I don't dispute their duty to do so, as they wouldn't BE the government if it hadn't been the will of the people. We're both entitled to go form our own political party, stand as a candidate, lobby our representatives, or even just vote for politicians who agree with our views. If we end up in a minority, well, that's the cost of the living in a democratic society. Society has to cater to everyone, which means that not everyone wins 100%.
Problems where this ability of the people (as a group) to choose the path of their government are some of the most grave of all, which is why this article from missoula would be troubling for me if I lived in the US.
You know, as a European, I'd actually agree with your argument without the tags... Sex is a perfectly normal thing, and children wanting to learn more about it is also perfectly natural. Statistically, societies with much higher controls on pornography (and the repressive attitude that goes with it) also have much higher rates of teenage pregnancy, as boys work much harder to actually have sex instead of wanking to porn.
Organised religion on the other hand, is responsible for inciting many of the past - and current - wars and atrocities. Iraq can oh so easily be classified as a religious war, just look at the portrayal of muslims in the US press. There really is a good an argument for filing religous websites away on a separate section we can easily filter - as much as there is for filing away sexual websites, anyway.
WTF is an Eng?
;) Seriously though, it comes from Land of the Angles, named after the germanic settlers from Angeln, in what is now Germany. They, along with the saxons were the predominant cultural group* in what became England, prior to 1066; collectively called Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-saxon is now a term often used to refer to the white western world from Britain and it's former colonies; as opposed to Hispanic or Gallic - you may have heard of WASPs...
Someone who lives in England, obviously
*This is disputed; some historians/geneticists argue that the people were largely neolithic settlers and celts, while only the elites were supplanted by a few percentage ruling settlers from the continent in succesive invasions by romans, angles & saxons, vikings, normans, etc.
No, it means your ISP can't artificially make your VoIP run like shit or even block it entirely, while making their own offering run smoothly.
Online Genuine Advantage checks do not appear to be related to the WGAnotify app (yet) that is being pushed as an automatic critical app. I know my organisation pcs are valid, as they're running the VLK assigned to my organisation, and they pass genuine advantage checks on the MS website despite refusing the latest WGANotify update. I see no need to install an application which sole purpose is to popup nag screens on those computers that are determined to be invalid by microsoft's super-secret formulae. I've had several perfectly valid installs fail the old wganotify check (OEM installs only ever used on their original PC), including one on the same VLK, so frankly I'm not letting it near anything I control if I can help it.
They better make damn sure people are copyright infringers before accusing them of it, because WGA so far has done a pretty piss poor job of it with false-negatives all over the shop.
Sony is pulling an EA; taking what used to come included with your original purchase, and instead micropaymenting and advertising you to death to go there.
They're shipping the PS3 months later to the EU market than elsewhere
They're shipping to the EU an inferior version WRT backwards compapability, and cheaper case/materials etc
Despite this, they're charging a hefty price premium - £60 ($115) - over and above the tax difference to the US price.
And that doesn't even mention all the other anti-customer crap the other arms of Sony have pulled.
My other half has a PS1, and used to have a PS2. We were pretty likely candidates to get a PS3 a year ago.
But now? Fuck Sony, and their attitude that because I'm a European I'll take whatever crap they're pushing. They obviously don't want me as a customer, so I intend to oblige.
PC and Wii for us.
And now some dollied up 2nd life wannabe with adverts, streaming video adverts, micropayments and indie developer lockout from the juicy stuff is going to tempt me back?
Mii's are FREE. and funny. I don't have to suffer adverts to play with mine. Sony should concentrate on getting some good titles out, and stop trying to just to re-implement everyone else's ideas badly, and then charging through the nose for the privilege.
So you're saying we're only allowed to think about and try to come up with solutions for only one problem at a time? Guess this is the same line of thought that produces 'why do this, why aren't they working on curing cancer?'
Ohhhhhh, I get it. You think the asteroid-impact risk has gone away because hollywood isn't making any more films about it, and since we haven't all died in the last 5 years from that yet, we can forget about it. *sigh*
You haven't installed windows lately then. I've just been on a clean-up and reinstall/migrate jolly. I've installed two copies of windows XP pro on two different computers; two copies of vista on same, one 32-bit, one 64-bit, and kubuntu edgy on one of the boxes.
Kubuntu needed a one line command to install the binary nvidia drivers (I could have done it in the gui with a couple of clicks also); all else worked out of the box, apart from the 100s of MBs of updates and patches; but then windows needs that also, so that's a draw.
Windows XP doesn't properly recognise either sound card, my mouse, my graphics cards, my tv-tuners, some of the onboard motherboard devices, my gig network cards, hell I even need a boot floppy for the sata drivers to install it; I had to dig a floppy drive out of storage especially. I had to manually track down and install the drivers from half a dozen different websites, which is tricky when your network card doesn't work yet. And before you complain it's an old OS, it's entirely microsoft's fault they haven't issued SP3 with updated drivers and all the patches; I believe we get to wait until 2008 for that.
Vista needs updated motherboard drivers and graphics card drivers, sound card drivers and mouse drivers, most of which aren't available at all yet, or are 'technology previews' and don't work yet. I'm looking at you, Mr Nvidia SLI, and Mr Razer, we don't do signed vista 64 drivers yet.
Out of the box compatibility SUCKS for windows, and always has. Why most people don't encounter this is because their OEM does all the hard work for them and provide an installed finished product. They could do so with linux, and have just a slick a product. What linux lacks is application support these days, not drivers out of the box. Even wireless is very slick on ubuntu last time I tried it.
Not yet. I've played with it, and it's basically an alternative to the qemu closed-source module, it's using a modified qemu userland. The advantage of using a VT/SVM capable processor with KVM means you can run an unmodified guest OS; i.e. no paravirtualised custom drivers needed.
Its biggest weakness is speed. VMware have had years of tweaking and finetuning, while kvm is very very new, and slow in certain areas. General desktop is fine, but network speed was painfully bad - for example - when I tried version 10. Plenty of work coming down the pipe, and it looks like it could be a powerful opensource virtualisation tool - in time. Right now, it is a bit fiddly to get running, and not quite ready for a production environment.
For now I'd stick to VMWare or virtualbox, but definitely have another look at KVM in say, 6 months time.
We already have direct mileage based taxation. It's petrol duty (+VAT on both). Black box recording to enforce an additional per mile tax is a huge invasion of privacy; especially if they did tie it to using satellites. Yes, for some motorists it would work out a net saving - those that drive hardly at all, but I would imagine for the average motorist, overall tax would go up - after all, someone would have to pay for the system and the management and the enforcement to make sure nobody was tampering, and what's the point of doing it at all if the government gets no more revenue out of it?
It would be a massively over complex and expensive IT solution to a problem that is fixable by other means.
As for a no-sign petition; create a counter petition in favour of the plans. If your 700k in favour of this scheme exist, that will also inform government policy.
When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?".
Fair prices, treat your customers like honest people, and don't sweat the piracy. iTunes succeeds because it's simple, cheap and the DRM doesn't get in the way, much. You could remove the DRM from iTMS entirely, and the only people that would be unhappy would be the big labels. You also get MORE sales from the anti-DRM crowd; I won't buy from any DRM service. Convenience and quality are worth money, and that's something P2P doesn't provide. You have to compete with free by providing a better, faster quality service, not by producing ad-laden products which don't work on people's existing hardware due to artificial restrictions and are overpriced.
Baen books succeed despite 0 DRM. Galactic Civ II succeeded despite having 0 DRM, and so has Company of Heroes, though admittedly the latter uses CD keys for online play. AllofMp3 does a roaring trade - imagine if it was backed by the big labels instead of being prosecuted by them. Magnatune and CDBaby do pretty well too.
We're adults here. We realise you don't get quality material for free. If we're treated like honest people, i.e. no DRM, if the price is a reasonable one, or we even set our own, you can make a reasonable profit. The days of obscene profits for some might be at threat, but frankly I don't care. DRM is much more about control, lock-in and segmenting the market to maximise profit in each area than it is about preventing piracy; which it's rubbish at anyway, and always will be. You cannot give someone a locked chest, the lock and the key, and not expect someone to figure out how to put them together in a way you don't approve of. DRM doesn't, and cannot work. Reasonable prices and treating your customers like well, customers and not a marketing demographic already works and works well.
Well, at least it's not 50%. From about 3/4 of the way down the article,
"Fox's Snyder is particularly irked at the persistent amount of camcording he and his distribution team have been able to track directly back to several of Cineplex's Montreal theatres. (Fox and other studios use forensic watermarking to know the exact time, date and auditorium where a copy was made.) "The reality is in 2005, 20 per cent of all identified camcordings occurred in Canada," says Frith. "That's a huge number. And it's growing."
Basically, canada is the largest individual entry, but doesn't have an overall majority. Still, it seems possible. Canada does have much more sane laws regarding camcording, and their release dates are usually about the same as the US. Much of the rest of the world doesn't get movies till much later. I remember introducing my projectionist friend to bittorrent; Finding Nemo was out as a DVD-rip - as it was on DVD in the US - before it even had hit the cinema screens in the UK. That DVD-rip was available for 2 MONTHS before it even hit the cinema here.
Agree entirely about the MPAA and the studios though. At what point did a damn company get to tell governments what to do? Aren't governments formed for the rights of the people, not the corporations?