"Deconstructing and disrupting the growth of genetically modified foods" might be done as a piece of performance art, but it's still vandalism and destuction of somebody else's property.
I don't care if these people's intent is to improve the American government by teaching it something the hard way and to do their best not to harm anybody seriously in the process. They're still practicing terrorism in that releasing something genetically modified into the environment is likely to cause a scare even if it's found to be harmless later. And, in a worst case, these guys could botch it all up and cause the kind of environmental harm that they're so scared Monsanto will cause.
At least Monsanto does its best to follow the laws... these people seem to have no respect for the law at all.
You cannot try to bring a contraband item past any security checkpoint in order to test it unless you have been authorized by the higher ups running that checkpoint... otherwise you're going to be punished when you're either caught at the checkpoint or brag that your test suceeded. Journalism is not a defense... activism is not a defense... art is not a defense.
Afterall, if your idea is to try to prove that such things can be done without punishment, you're just giving "the system" motivation to make an example out of you.
I don't think Microsoft would ever want to associate its brand directly with porn... but we'll know they've gotten into the industry when we start seeing them show why Windows Media should be the format of choice for the porn industry.
This is why web "traffic" is such a hard thing to quantify. It's easy to buy web hits or get people to download your content... however, if they click the close button immediately or run software that closes the window upon recognition, then those "impressions" are of zero actual value and deserve to be discounted if not ignored.
I'm ready to dismiss this story as pure flamebait because it's throwing numbers at us without any indication of what they're representing.
Just what exactly are "web traffic", "internet visits" and "web visits"? Without standardized defintions for those terms, or at least knowing what the study authors were using as their definitions, we really don't know what the numbers mean.
One of the biggest problems with comparing one website to any other, or even categories of sites, is that the easiest to measure numbers are also the most useless ones. Afterall, what advertisers really want to know is how much of an impression they're getting on the viewer's mind, and there's no real way to quantify that.
We don't know what the study authors are defining as the end point of one "visit" and the start of another "visit" by the same user. We can't just assume that "traffic" is equated to "bandwidth consumed", or if they're using some more exotic formula for traffic like Alexa uses.
We also don't know where this study is collecting its information, and what problems that introduces. Alexa admits that they will always report a biased number for Amazon.com since any user of their toolbar is exposed to links to Amazon.com inside that toolbar. Slashdot will usually be underreported in such reports because Slashdot users are more likely to be unwilling to run a data-collecting toolbar than the average user.
In short... that article says a lot but communicates nothing.
IMAX is a very interesting idea when you think about it as "copy protection" because IMAX movies are all about the 3-dimentional 180 degree presentation screen that just can't be replicated on a flat screen of any kind.
Of course, the bigger selling point for IMAX is simply that "the theater experience" is all about having the more expensive screen and sound technology that even rich people can't afford to run in their home theaters. It's a little surprising theaters haven't yet felt the survival need to deploy IMAX on a wider scale. You'd think the flat-screen at a movie theater should be extinct by now...
There's no magic bullet that solves all of the sources of an in-theaters movie leaking its way to the Internet at once. There's going to need to be a different block installed for each possible source.
Yes, however capturing anything less than 30 frames per second would lead to sub-par viewing on a TV. They don't need to get the camcorders to be recording nothing, they just need to make it so that the resulting video is too annoying to watch...
In regards to "You just can't run a non-for-profit music formated radio station unless you've got some rather deep pockets." have you ever heard of listener-supported radio? People will pay to have music without ads shoved in their ears.
Such stations require corperate gifts that are almost akin to commericals, however...
From surfing around the site, it seems to indicate that we're talking about Bristol, WA which is near Seattle... there's enough communities going by the name of "Bristol" in the USA this could get confusing.
Yet for Mac users, they're in the exact same boat.
And Linux at least somewhat gracefully degrades when running on slower computers... but the need for new hardware still gets felt around there from time to time.
No, I'm arging the grandparent poster's point that it's the FCC limiting the radio business to corperate interests by jacking up the fees, but there's fees to run a radio station payable to places other than the FCC as well. You just can't run a non-for-profit music formated radio station unless you've got some rather deep pockets.
Also, people think that there's no conflict of broadcast coverage because their radio can't get a station on that channel where they're standing... but that's more often than not a false sense of security. Just because there's no audible radio station at that point doesn't mean there is no signal present... there could be a signal that's just too weak to make any sense of.
And the little pirate station has the same effect. There's a circle around the coverage area of a radio station where some splashes of the signal is still present, even though the signal isn't good enough to be useful for listeners. And, if any part of that circle touches the actual listening area of any licensed radio station, they're impacting that licensed station's operation.
Also, people might not realize that the "capture effect" may cause their station to overpower a station that's up or down one or two ticks of the dial from them. So, even if there's no station on the exact channel they picked for 100 miles, there might be one that's +/-.2MHz from them that they're putting a dent in.
In short, it's nearly impossible to put up a pirate stick and have it not interfere with something. If you can pull it off, then you oughta file the paperwork with the FCC to prove that you figured it out and make your operation legal...
Anything you own but forget to mention in your will becomes a matter for the probate court. For most people, their information assets are thought of as worthless so nobody bothers to fight over them, but everything does have to be accounted for somehow or the probate case isn't really over with.
It's very interesting that many of the complaints people have about Microsoft Products are actually addressed in later releases, but if the customer never upgrades to that new release they'll never see the changes.
Open source has a much easier time convincing people to upgrade to the most current release because in most cases it costs nothing but a little time to move to the latest stable release.
They get a better deal than we do...
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.
But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.
I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?
If Toshiba can't manage to sell the 60 GB model to Apple, clearly somebody else will gladly buy those drives and put them in iPod competitors. Maybe Apple will play in this generation of drives, maybe they'll skip 60 GB and hold out for 80 GB.
Since the iPod has a reputation of being willing to be used as a general-purpose hard drive, I don't see any limit to how high they'll go. As long as they keep making bigger HDs, we'll keep making bigger data files for them.
I don't think this is a business model. I'd see SpamHaus as closer to a non-profit that will gracefully close up shop if the disease it's out to get rid of is ever cured. Until then, however, there's bills to pay and they need to post a table of suggested donations.
This seems a lot like the donation box at a museum. No reqired payment for walking through, but there's a table of suggested donations based on how much you should be able to pay, and most people are going to pay it because how else does the museum stay in business...
AllAdvantage.com was one of those late-90s.com's with an incredible business plan that turned out to in fact not be credible enough to last. For those who never heard of it, it was the idea that users would run a "toolbar" on the bottom of their screen at all times, and then the company would send the users a monthly check for their cut of the ad revenue for the ads they were exposed to.
Sure, this was adware to the nth degree... but all of the users either knew or should have known what they were getting themselves into and they were on the financial take for their part in the scheme.
Of course, the major anti-malware products weren't around back then to weigh in on their opinions on these things. But, it's an interesting call. Nobody was ever tricked into installing this program, so would it be the duty of an anti-malware program to attack such a program, or just let it be?
And we also know that Claria is very agressive in suing anybody who dares classify them as "spyware"... so PestPatrol's decision is likely one of lawsuit-avoidance than an in-the-pocket protection.
How exactly would having the source being readable change this situation. Claria/Gator is in the settings ready to be blocked... it just starts unblocked in the default setup.
I think this is just a side effect of Claria's lawsuits going after any body who calls them bad names such as "spyware". Yahoo's willing to block them, but they don't exactly want to take on this legal fight.
Maybe the best compromise is to leave everything unblocked by default... and then the start-up wizard can allow users to click on the blocks one-by-one with a nice easy "select all" available if they'd rather bypass that step. Something along the lines of "Submitted for your approval... these are the programs that in our opinion are worth blocking, do you agree?"
Really, this opens up a question of "Just what, exactly, is adware/spyware/malware?"
I remember a day when WeatherBug was a cool application being sponsored by local TV stations who basically used it to promote the WeatherNet equipment that they had invested in. No popups, just a few ads that mostly linked you to the TV station's website and sometimes had a picture of the station's weather team. Of course, now that thing is a pop-up crazy monster. But how can you say on which day was the day that this program suddenly turned "evil"... it's not exactly a binary state.
It's hard to ban software such as WhenU because the users end up agreeing somewhere along the line to a AUP/TOS/EULA that lays out exactly what WhenU is going to do. We need better standards for how such documents are displayed, but we can't exactly prevent people from agreeing to them if they really want to without taking out some programs that we like such as ad-blockers in the process.
Spammers are likely including that paragraph because mimics one that is likely to appear in messages that a lot of people are marking non-spam in their bayesian filters.
Whenever any line of text becomes too popular in e-mail, I'm sure we'll see spammers there to capitalize.
On the first mis-transmitted message, I'm inclined to agree with you.
However, if you continue to get e-mails that you're not supposed to get and you don't take a pro-active action to stop them, then you are accepting the information that you're being given... and in financial land if that's insider information and you take action on it, that's insider trading.
I think that's the real point of such disclaimers. If you're not the person this e-mail was supposed to go to, you've intercepted it and if you continue to keep catching that information, you're on notice that the company isn't responsible for what happens with what you do with that info.
Slashdot Mirror
"Deconstructing and disrupting the growth of genetically modified foods" might be done as a piece of performance art, but it's still vandalism and destuction of somebody else's property.
I don't care if these people's intent is to improve the American government by teaching it something the hard way and to do their best not to harm anybody seriously in the process. They're still practicing terrorism in that releasing something genetically modified into the environment is likely to cause a scare even if it's found to be harmless later. And, in a worst case, these guys could botch it all up and cause the kind of environmental harm that they're so scared Monsanto will cause.
At least Monsanto does its best to follow the laws... these people seem to have no respect for the law at all.
You cannot try to bring a contraband item past any security checkpoint in order to test it unless you have been authorized by the higher ups running that checkpoint... otherwise you're going to be punished when you're either caught at the checkpoint or brag that your test suceeded. Journalism is not a defense... activism is not a defense... art is not a defense.
Afterall, if your idea is to try to prove that such things can be done without punishment, you're just giving "the system" motivation to make an example out of you.
I don't think Microsoft would ever want to associate its brand directly with porn... but we'll know they've gotten into the industry when we start seeing them show why Windows Media should be the format of choice for the porn industry.
This is why web "traffic" is such a hard thing to quantify. It's easy to buy web hits or get people to download your content... however, if they click the close button immediately or run software that closes the window upon recognition, then those "impressions" are of zero actual value and deserve to be discounted if not ignored.
I'm ready to dismiss this story as pure flamebait because it's throwing numbers at us without any indication of what they're representing.
Just what exactly are "web traffic", "internet visits" and "web visits"? Without standardized defintions for those terms, or at least knowing what the study authors were using as their definitions, we really don't know what the numbers mean.
One of the biggest problems with comparing one website to any other, or even categories of sites, is that the easiest to measure numbers are also the most useless ones. Afterall, what advertisers really want to know is how much of an impression they're getting on the viewer's mind, and there's no real way to quantify that.
We don't know what the study authors are defining as the end point of one "visit" and the start of another "visit" by the same user. We can't just assume that "traffic" is equated to "bandwidth consumed", or if they're using some more exotic formula for traffic like Alexa uses.
We also don't know where this study is collecting its information, and what problems that introduces. Alexa admits that they will always report a biased number for Amazon.com since any user of their toolbar is exposed to links to Amazon.com inside that toolbar. Slashdot will usually be underreported in such reports because Slashdot users are more likely to be unwilling to run a data-collecting toolbar than the average user.
In short... that article says a lot but communicates nothing.
IMAX is a very interesting idea when you think about it as "copy protection" because IMAX movies are all about the 3-dimentional 180 degree presentation screen that just can't be replicated on a flat screen of any kind.
Of course, the bigger selling point for IMAX is simply that "the theater experience" is all about having the more expensive screen and sound technology that even rich people can't afford to run in their home theaters. It's a little surprising theaters haven't yet felt the survival need to deploy IMAX on a wider scale. You'd think the flat-screen at a movie theater should be extinct by now...
There's no magic bullet that solves all of the sources of an in-theaters movie leaking its way to the Internet at once. There's going to need to be a different block installed for each possible source.
Yes, however capturing anything less than 30 frames per second would lead to sub-par viewing on a TV. They don't need to get the camcorders to be recording nothing, they just need to make it so that the resulting video is too annoying to watch...
In regards to "You just can't run a non-for-profit music formated radio station unless you've got some rather deep pockets." have you ever heard of listener-supported radio? People will pay to have music without ads shoved in their ears. Such stations require corperate gifts that are almost akin to commericals, however...
From surfing around the site, it seems to indicate that we're talking about Bristol, WA which is near Seattle... there's enough communities going by the name of "Bristol" in the USA this could get confusing.
Yet for Mac users, they're in the exact same boat.
And Linux at least somewhat gracefully degrades when running on slower computers... but the need for new hardware still gets felt around there from time to time.
No, I'm arging the grandparent poster's point that it's the FCC limiting the radio business to corperate interests by jacking up the fees, but there's fees to run a radio station payable to places other than the FCC as well. You just can't run a non-for-profit music formated radio station unless you've got some rather deep pockets.
Also, people think that there's no conflict of broadcast coverage because their radio can't get a station on that channel where they're standing... but that's more often than not a false sense of security. Just because there's no audible radio station at that point doesn't mean there is no signal present... there could be a signal that's just too weak to make any sense of.
And the little pirate station has the same effect. There's a circle around the coverage area of a radio station where some splashes of the signal is still present, even though the signal isn't good enough to be useful for listeners. And, if any part of that circle touches the actual listening area of any licensed radio station, they're impacting that licensed station's operation.
Also, people might not realize that the "capture effect" may cause their station to overpower a station that's up or down one or two ticks of the dial from them. So, even if there's no station on the exact channel they picked for 100 miles, there might be one that's +/-.2MHz from them that they're putting a dent in.
In short, it's nearly impossible to put up a pirate stick and have it not interfere with something. If you can pull it off, then you oughta file the paperwork with the FCC to prove that you figured it out and make your operation legal...
Anything you own but forget to mention in your will becomes a matter for the probate court. For most people, their information assets are thought of as worthless so nobody bothers to fight over them, but everything does have to be accounted for somehow or the probate case isn't really over with.
It's very interesting that many of the complaints people have about Microsoft Products are actually addressed in later releases, but if the customer never upgrades to that new release they'll never see the changes.
Open source has a much easier time convincing people to upgrade to the most current release because in most cases it costs nothing but a little time to move to the latest stable release.
The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.
But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.
I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?
If Toshiba can't manage to sell the 60 GB model to Apple, clearly somebody else will gladly buy those drives and put them in iPod competitors. Maybe Apple will play in this generation of drives, maybe they'll skip 60 GB and hold out for 80 GB.
Since the iPod has a reputation of being willing to be used as a general-purpose hard drive, I don't see any limit to how high they'll go. As long as they keep making bigger HDs, we'll keep making bigger data files for them.
I don't think this is a business model. I'd see SpamHaus as closer to a non-profit that will gracefully close up shop if the disease it's out to get rid of is ever cured. Until then, however, there's bills to pay and they need to post a table of suggested donations.
With "Free" also in existance...
This seems a lot like the donation box at a museum. No reqired payment for walking through, but there's a table of suggested donations based on how much you should be able to pay, and most people are going to pay it because how else does the museum stay in business...
AllAdvantage.com was one of those late-90s .com's with an incredible business plan that turned out to in fact not be credible enough to last. For those who never heard of it, it was the idea that users would run a "toolbar" on the bottom of their screen at all times, and then the company would send the users a monthly check for their cut of the ad revenue for the ads they were exposed to.
Sure, this was adware to the nth degree... but all of the users either knew or should have known what they were getting themselves into and they were on the financial take for their part in the scheme.
Of course, the major anti-malware products weren't around back then to weigh in on their opinions on these things. But, it's an interesting call. Nobody was ever tricked into installing this program, so would it be the duty of an anti-malware program to attack such a program, or just let it be?
And we also know that Claria is very agressive in suing anybody who dares classify them as "spyware"... so PestPatrol's decision is likely one of lawsuit-avoidance than an in-the-pocket protection.
How exactly would having the source being readable change this situation. Claria/Gator is in the settings ready to be blocked... it just starts unblocked in the default setup.
I think this is just a side effect of Claria's lawsuits going after any body who calls them bad names such as "spyware". Yahoo's willing to block them, but they don't exactly want to take on this legal fight.
Maybe the best compromise is to leave everything unblocked by default... and then the start-up wizard can allow users to click on the blocks one-by-one with a nice easy "select all" available if they'd rather bypass that step. Something along the lines of "Submitted for your approval... these are the programs that in our opinion are worth blocking, do you agree?"
Really, this opens up a question of "Just what, exactly, is adware/spyware/malware?"
I remember a day when WeatherBug was a cool application being sponsored by local TV stations who basically used it to promote the WeatherNet equipment that they had invested in. No popups, just a few ads that mostly linked you to the TV station's website and sometimes had a picture of the station's weather team. Of course, now that thing is a pop-up crazy monster. But how can you say on which day was the day that this program suddenly turned "evil"... it's not exactly a binary state.
It's hard to ban software such as WhenU because the users end up agreeing somewhere along the line to a AUP/TOS/EULA that lays out exactly what WhenU is going to do. We need better standards for how such documents are displayed, but we can't exactly prevent people from agreeing to them if they really want to without taking out some programs that we like such as ad-blockers in the process.
Really, this is a game of blury definitions...
Spammers are likely including that paragraph because mimics one that is likely to appear in messages that a lot of people are marking non-spam in their bayesian filters. Whenever any line of text becomes too popular in e-mail, I'm sure we'll see spammers there to capitalize.
On the first mis-transmitted message, I'm inclined to agree with you.
However, if you continue to get e-mails that you're not supposed to get and you don't take a pro-active action to stop them, then you are accepting the information that you're being given... and in financial land if that's insider information and you take action on it, that's insider trading.
I think that's the real point of such disclaimers. If you're not the person this e-mail was supposed to go to, you've intercepted it and if you continue to keep catching that information, you're on notice that the company isn't responsible for what happens with what you do with that info.