My background and cultural heritage is Japanese, and I concur... manga is the entire continuum between 20-page kiddy pulps and glossy books full of a variety of subjects (romance, superhero, tentacle pr0n, etc.)
I think you're right. There's a large element of "comic book store guy" elitism in the "graphic novel" crowd. And generally speaking, it's based on fallacious distinctions.
(i.e., digitally-projected advertising hoardings in the video background,
I guess my point is that now this'll be accessible to anyone with a video and any motive whatsoever to alter it.
I guess I was naive to think that digital video was ever trustworthy.
Does anyone remember the huge critical attention and praise garnered by Woody Allen inserting his moving image into historical film footage in Zelig? I understand that the movie post-processing was painstaking and expensive, and notable for that reason and quality of its execution. Now any schmuck will be able to do pretty much the same thing, and it will take a critical eye to see it. The bar on deceptive video is lowering.
When American football television broadcasts started featuring real-time "underlays" of such play-by-play landmarks as line of scrimmage and first down mark, a worried little voice at the back of my head wondered if someone would use this technology to underlay advertising. I think I've seen just such things (i.e., digitally-projected advertising hoardings in the video background, even logos "projected" into the playing field). Now this kind of stuff will be easy and ubiquitous.
As little as we can trust digital visual media now, it'll be even less trustworthy.
Well, this is a valid test in at least one sense. If you wish to check their competence at search engine optimization, you look at how well their own search engine results are optimized. Kinda like checking out the quality of a sign-painting place by examining their own signage.
Of course, that's based on the possibly unsupportable assumptions that (A) They did their own SEO ("ate their own dog food"), and (B) that they'll work as hard for you as they did for themselves.
Ok, enough offtopic. This is actually pretty cool, considering our development environment is clusters and clusters of IBM P-Series LPARS, and our codebase is (A) disgustingly huge, and (B) actually pretty amenable to parallelized make.
FINALLY, I can justify to my boss that browsing/. is research! (Now if I could just make a good case for 4chan...)
If by "compete" you mean defeat your opponent by any means necessary, including lobbying and protective rule-making, I'd say the bus company is competing just fine.
Did you mean something like "compete on the merits"? How quaint.
The rule of business is, "Don't get caught doing anything illegal. Preferably by making what you're doing legal and what your competition is doing illegal."
Really, if you think about it, the bus guys are winning at the metagame. That's competition. The carpoolers are losing because they're playing the wrong game.
(No, I'm not happy about, and I'm sure as Hell not trying to justify, this ruling. I simply point out that this is the way it is, and that the concepts of "fairness" and "merit" as we learned them as children appear to have no meaning in business.)
Well if you're gonna go for sheer exotic exuberant overkill... "negaspheres of planetary anti-mass" come to mind.
Although where the Galactic Patrol found entire planets made of organized antimatter*, I'll never figure out. That's one of those little things that "Doc" didn't even bother to hand-wave. You need to suspend disbelief with a Bergenholm inertialess drive to buy the entire hurried ending of the series.
*Not our conception of antimatter, but the older "Dirac sea" vacuum anti-energy. But I still liked them.
The Loonies were using mass-driver bombardment (albeit from the Moon) in 1966.
I don't know if that's the first occurrance of orbital bombardment by mass driver in SF history; I'm trying to do a quick Google survey between interruptions, but I'm not making any progress. (Too many interruptions, too little "between".)
And there, you see, is the point...nay, the TRIUMPH... of the Linux Standard Base. Linux binaries which are compatible* with the Linux Kernel!
*for compatible hardware architectures, library file locations and versioning, configuration settings, and other dependencies... YMMV. Take only as directed. May cause drowsiness; please do not drive or operate heavy equipment while executing Linux binaries.
Common carrier laws apply to ISP's because they are providing a neutral gateway, and is no more aware of the details of what is going on their network than the Highway service knows what I'm keeping in the trunk of my car.
Common carrier laws apply to ISPs because court cases and FCC rulings say they apply.
No, wait, that never happened.
I suppose we can give you the benefit of the doubt and say that, perhaps, common carrier laws should apply to ISPs. But it's contrafactual to claim they do.
Deep packet inspection technology in conjunction with "targeted advertising", protocol interception (like DNS lookup failure replacement web pages), and service-provider-sanctioned (or -provided) content proves that ISPs don't act as common carriers. By both practice and current precedent, they are information providers, not carriers.
The sorts of numbers you're talking about -- technical numbers like incorrectly banned webpages, number of missed blocks, reduced access throughput, etc., -- or even less technical numbers like counts of frustrated users, money lost on canceled subscriptions -- probably don't matter to the "people pushing this". The real numbers that matter are things like "pro-family lobbyists made happy", "number of wicked evil pr0n websites cut off", etc. (I don't know the technicalities of the Australian political process, so I don't know if one of those critical numbers may in fact be "number of megabux of campaign contributions we can sell Freedom of Expression and the Right to Privacy for"... I know that'd be a factor here in the Good Ol' US of A.)
I admire iiNet, and I hope what they contribute to the fight helps for as much as it's gonna cost them. But I believe they'll be arguing right past the people on the other side of this issue.
This happens a lot. We geeks tend to argue facts; our counterparts in politics or management have another agenda, and our "facts" don't matter compared to their "Values" and "Truths" and "Great Ideas". iiNet's approach runs the risk of solving the wrong problem: why the Great Australian Firewall is a bad technical idea. The real problem, the only approach that has a chance of winning, is to argue why the Great Australian Firewall is a bad political idea.
Let us stipulate, then, that iiNet's aboveboard and that agreeing to this trial is, essentially, a demonstration of the futility of the government's proposal. Even with iiNet's principled and participatory opposition (i.e., not just sitting there pouting, but doing something about it), this may have unintended consequences.
[Comms Ministry]: The trial was a smash success; iiNet's endorsement guarantees we have good PR and can steamroll this out. All we have to do is invoke the name of our ally in the industry.
[iiNet]: "Endorsement"? WTF are you talking about! We signed up to prove just how stupid the idea was.
[Comms Ministry]: You signed up. That's endorsement. Your participation gives us all the credibility we need, and the rollout will proceed on schedule.
Trying to change stupidity from the inside has risks, one of which is that you get stupidity all over yourself.
Complex admins were taught to type at age 7...on a mechanical typewriter...because their teachers wisely saw that their handwriting would never be legible.
Oh, well, at least the keyboarding style I learned on that ancient Olympic served me well at my first programmingterminals.
That's been one of my longstanding sysadmin mottos: "If you haven't had to reload a production system from release media, you aren't trying hard enough."
My own "Oh shit" moment was with this command (as, of course, root, and at the system root):
rm -rf/Rubbish"
Why is that bad? Well... on QWERTY keyboards, the right SHIFT key is disconcertingly close to the ENTER key... so shift-R turned into "<ENTER>r", which turned into deleting most of/bin in the 10 or so seconds that I was frozen in blind panic.
Yeah, not really catastrophic; "rm" responded to ^C quickly enough, but it still had that potential.
Slashdot Mirror
My background and cultural heritage is Japanese, and I concur... manga is the entire continuum between 20-page kiddy pulps and glossy books full of a variety of subjects (romance, superhero, tentacle pr0n, etc.)
I think you're right. There's a large element of "comic book store guy" elitism in the "graphic novel" crowd. And generally speaking, it's based on fallacious distinctions.
Until they get half-pony half-monkey monsters and hordes of hungry wolves all over the grounds.
Trust me, I have this on good authority.
Dude, there are many much better things to be connoisseur of than soda.
Celery soda? /shudder
I did mention that....
I guess my point is that now this'll be accessible to anyone with a video and any motive whatsoever to alter it.
I guess I was naive to think that digital video was ever trustworthy.
Does anyone remember the huge critical attention and praise garnered by Woody Allen inserting his moving image into historical film footage in Zelig ? I understand that the movie post-processing was painstaking and expensive, and notable for that reason and quality of its execution. Now any schmuck will be able to do pretty much the same thing, and it will take a critical eye to see it. The bar on deceptive video is lowering.
When American football television broadcasts started featuring real-time "underlays" of such play-by-play landmarks as line of scrimmage and first down mark, a worried little voice at the back of my head wondered if someone would use this technology to underlay advertising. I think I've seen just such things (i.e., digitally-projected advertising hoardings in the video background, even logos "projected" into the playing field). Now this kind of stuff will be easy and ubiquitous.
As little as we can trust digital visual media now, it'll be even less trustworthy.
Which volcano did you insure?
Well, this is a valid test in at least one sense. If you wish to check their competence at search engine optimization, you look at how well their own search engine results are optimized. Kinda like checking out the quality of a sign-painting place by examining their own signage.
Of course, that's based on the possibly unsupportable assumptions that (A) They did their own SEO ("ate their own dog food"), and (B) that they'll work as hard for you as they did for themselves.
He's using TCSH! That's BAD FOR YOU!
Ok, enough offtopic. This is actually pretty cool, considering our development environment is clusters and clusters of IBM P-Series LPARS, and our codebase is (A) disgustingly huge, and (B) actually pretty amenable to parallelized make.
FINALLY, I can justify to my boss that browsing /. is research! (Now if I could just make a good case for 4chan...)
If by "compete" you mean defeat your opponent by any means necessary, including lobbying and protective rule-making, I'd say the bus company is competing just fine.
Did you mean something like "compete on the merits"? How quaint.
The rule of business is, "Don't get caught doing anything illegal. Preferably by making what you're doing legal and what your competition is doing illegal."
Really, if you think about it, the bus guys are winning at the metagame. That's competition. The carpoolers are losing because they're playing the wrong game.
(No, I'm not happy about, and I'm sure as Hell not trying to justify, this ruling. I simply point out that this is the way it is, and that the concepts of "fairness" and "merit" as we learned them as children appear to have no meaning in business.)
Well if you're gonna go for sheer exotic exuberant overkill... "negaspheres of planetary anti-mass" come to mind.
Although where the Galactic Patrol found entire planets made of organized antimatter*, I'll never figure out. That's one of those little things that "Doc" didn't even bother to hand-wave. You need to suspend disbelief with a Bergenholm inertialess drive to buy the entire hurried ending of the series.
*Not our conception of antimatter, but the older "Dirac sea" vacuum anti-energy. But I still liked them.
The Loonies were using mass-driver bombardment (albeit from the Moon) in 1966.
I don't know if that's the first occurrance of orbital bombardment by mass driver in SF history; I'm trying to do a quick Google survey between interruptions, but I'm not making any progress. (Too many interruptions, too little "between".)
Good call, but at least get the nomenclature right.
"Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator"
Call it the wrong thing and there won't be "an Earth-shattering KABOOM!"
At least we know now why the Martians were so keen on securing the last supply in the universe of illudium phosdex.
And there, you see, is the point...nay, the TRIUMPH... of the Linux Standard Base. Linux binaries which are compatible* with the Linux Kernel!
*for compatible hardware architectures, library file locations and versioning, configuration settings, and other dependencies... YMMV. Take only as directed. May cause drowsiness; please do not drive or operate heavy equipment while executing Linux binaries.
Well, Comrade, the industrial design trademark was based on the red 2x4 bloc. You tell me.
(Cue the "in Soviet Europe" jokes...)
Common carrier laws apply to ISP's because they are providing a neutral gateway, and is no more aware of the details of what is going on their network than the Highway service knows what I'm keeping in the trunk of my car.
Common carrier laws apply to ISPs because court cases and FCC rulings say they apply.
No, wait, that never happened.
I suppose we can give you the benefit of the doubt and say that, perhaps, common carrier laws should apply to ISPs. But it's contrafactual to claim they do.
Deep packet inspection technology in conjunction with "targeted advertising", protocol interception (like DNS lookup failure replacement web pages), and service-provider-sanctioned (or -provided) content proves that ISPs don't act as common carriers. By both practice and current precedent, they are information providers, not carriers.
Ah pity th' FOO' that doesn't trust a conman with a mustache!
The sorts of numbers you're talking about -- technical numbers like incorrectly banned webpages, number of missed blocks, reduced access throughput, etc., -- or even less technical numbers like counts of frustrated users, money lost on canceled subscriptions -- probably don't matter to the "people pushing this". The real numbers that matter are things like "pro-family lobbyists made happy", "number of wicked evil pr0n websites cut off", etc. (I don't know the technicalities of the Australian political process, so I don't know if one of those critical numbers may in fact be "number of megabux of campaign contributions we can sell Freedom of Expression and the Right to Privacy for"... I know that'd be a factor here in the Good Ol' US of A.)
I admire iiNet, and I hope what they contribute to the fight helps for as much as it's gonna cost them. But I believe they'll be arguing right past the people on the other side of this issue.
This happens a lot. We geeks tend to argue facts; our counterparts in politics or management have another agenda, and our "facts" don't matter compared to their "Values" and "Truths" and "Great Ideas". iiNet's approach runs the risk of solving the wrong problem: why the Great Australian Firewall is a bad technical idea. The real problem, the only approach that has a chance of winning, is to argue why the Great Australian Firewall is a bad political idea.
There is an upside, though. You can learn to spell. AC will still be an ass, now and forever.
No, he con-creates. And then he makes sidewalks out of it.
Let us stipulate, then, that iiNet's aboveboard and that agreeing to this trial is, essentially, a demonstration of the futility of the government's proposal. Even with iiNet's principled and participatory opposition (i.e., not just sitting there pouting, but doing something about it), this may have unintended consequences.
[Comms Ministry]: The trial was a smash success; iiNet's endorsement guarantees we have good PR and can steamroll this out. All we have to do is invoke the name of our ally in the industry.
[iiNet]: "Endorsement"? WTF are you talking about! We signed up to prove just how stupid the idea was.
[Comms Ministry]: You signed up. That's endorsement. Your participation gives us all the credibility we need, and the rollout will proceed on schedule.
Trying to change stupidity from the inside has risks, one of which is that you get stupidity all over yourself.
Slashvertising. Classic.
Nothing wrong with this
You must be new here.
Oh, well, at least the keyboarding style I learned on that ancient Olympic served me well at my first programming terminals.
That's been one of my longstanding sysadmin mottos: "If you haven't had to reload a production system from release media, you aren't trying hard enough."
My own "Oh shit" moment was with this command (as, of course, root, and at the system root):
Why is that bad? Well... on QWERTY keyboards, the right SHIFT key is disconcertingly close to the ENTER key... so shift-R turned into "<ENTER>r", which turned into deleting most of /bin in the 10 or so seconds that I was frozen in blind panic.
Yeah, not really catastrophic; "rm" responded to ^C quickly enough, but it still had that potential.
Milliseconds of fun!