By hiding it, you're only protecting yourself from second rate hackers. The first rate hackers found the problem and began taking advantage of it well before the development team was aware the problem existed.
I would say by hiding the fact a bug is a security issue would only protect you from third rate hackers. If first rate ones found the problem before the devs did, second rate ones are capable of looking through all the 'innoccously' labeled bugfixes and thinking, "hmm, overflow at line #1234 is it? Let's take a look at what goes on in dumaflopper() then, perhaps it'll be useful for my evil purposes, we'll see...", tracing through the source and working out the nature of the bug and how it could be exploited (or not). Which would leave those who need it spelt out whether and how a bug is exploitable on a third tier.
(This isn't intended as a "corrective" let alone combatitive post, btw. I've noticed often on slashdot people seem to take every post that way, so I shall disclaim it's not such thing, just thinking aloud really...)
No need to apologise, I was in no way offended or bothered, just thought I'd take the opportunity to share a little local info. Sorry for the assumption you were American:)
Certainly not the case in Britain. If you were feeling generous, you could just about claim we have a 3 party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats). Certainly the Lib Dems are a more meaningful presence than any American 3rd party AIUI. At a local level, they do rather well, often pushing (Conservatives|Labour) into third place in some constituencies. Other smaller parties (eg. Greens) regularly pick up seats in local elections too, plus there are the "single-issue" type parties (for some reason in this country that single issue is generally a pack of racist shite, to be honest: see UKIP, BNP) which occasionally manage to bag a seat here and there. Plus, in Wales and Scotland you have the respective nationalist parties (Plaid Cymru, SNP) doing fairly well too, at local and national levels. But none of them, not even the Lib Dems, come anywhere particularly close to winning Parliament (Westminster) and forming the national govt. In terms of who'll actually wind up prime minister and forming a cabinet, we're as predictably 2 party as you are, and not at all comparable to "10-party countries" where coalition govts are the norm not the exception...
Market forces only work if 100% unregulated... If however there's regulation, barriers to entry, standards to be fulfilled etc., then it's "market forces" on appearance only, not in fact.
No, if it's 100% unregulated, it's not a market, it's anarchy.
A financial market only exists BECAUSE of regulations.
Let's say we both run Widget companies. Your Widgets are 5p/unit cheaper than mine. Market forces say you drive my prices down, or drive me out of business, right?
Well, no... Not if I just
Pay for a newspaper article to be published (falsely) claiming that your Widgets cause cancer.
Threaten your supplier to stop selling your Widget components or else I'll abduct his children.
Bribe Widget stockists with a higher % of profits from selling mine if they completely stopped stocking yours.
Burn down your widget factory.
Murder you.
Etc.
Suddenly your market isn't doing you a lot of good, is it? Why? Because instead of playing "through" the market, I just cheated, stepped right "around" it, and beat you by other means.
Exaggerated examples I know, but this REALLY bugs me about slashdot: all the free market fairy fantasists who insist the only thing that stops markets from solving all problems is (govt) regulation and interference.
On the contrary, if you don't enact laws and regulations to stop people beating competitors "unfairly", via means "outside of" or subverting the market, the market doesn't even get a chance to create efficiencies.
A state that does only that which only a state can do, and nothing more, is the exact definition of the "minimum state" as defended by libertarians and classic liberals.
Yeah, great, so what's the minimum? So far in my top of the head examples, there's an obvious market-related need for laws against libel, blackmail, abduction, bribery, arson... And this is just with a (rather facile) Widgets Inc example. When you get into actual, real world trade and financial systems, there are so many obscure ways to sidestep the intended operation of the market, it's dizzying. And when they're discovered, they have to be regulated, otherwise the whole market principle is undermined.
Not that overregulation isn't a problem too, just saying, this "100% unregulated" thing that libertarians spew is precisely that: spew.
Oh, and I do realise the theoretical libertarian answer to this is that you don't need no stinking laws, rather, everybody will stop buying my Widgets when they hear about what a nasty man I am.
Which is laughable libertarian myth #2 - the perfect information market. The theoretical tends-toward-perfect-efficiency market is a perfect information market. Such a thing does not, and I might argue, cannot exist. It is simply unfeasible for all actors, however casual (occasional / impulse purchasers, etc), to be fully informed on every aspect, as opposed to the companies, who have a vested interest in ensuring that you are not.
Just think about advertising. The people making it have decades of training in the art of persuasion, from straightforward linguistics / rhetorical devices, through to graphic design, moods of colours and shapes, to audio, the most trusted accents, music, etc, etc. They may spend weeks, months, even years building up a single advert or campaign. All this to make you take their advert's message to heart. Do you have the same level of training, do you put the same level of time into "decrypting" the advert's nuance and subtext as they put into making it? Of course not. Fact is, it's fundamentally assymetrical, so you don't have perfect information.
And even if you did - would people really stop buying my Widgets if they discovered I was a naughty boy who didn't let the market do what it was supposed to, and simply bullied my way to economic dominance anyway? Considering people happily continue to buy from companies well known for
True say. In fact, you could generalise that to any post starting "In a free market..." getting +5 insightful. Funny, for all the atheism round here, how many quaintly have total faith in the Free Market Fairy. Merely depressing, on the other hand, how many use it as a stick to beat government and regulation with, failing to realise the only thing that would make a free market (if we ever saw one) free, efficient and fair is, uh, law.
I realise you probably know about this and are making the point regardless, because most people won't know that, so it's still a fair one. Agree, just thought I'd drop this in case it helped someone who hadn't discovered it yet.
Besides that, I agree with you quite a lot. I also like the way you attack the actual problem - "shitty internet experience" resulting from widespread idiocy, rather than what I see on slashdot quite often, which is literally blaming the enabling technologies themselves (Flash, CSS, JS, XML, etc), and declaring we'd be better if we'd stuck with HTML2.0. Javascript et al can be used for some wonderfully useful, elegant, discreet enhancements, and in most domains slashdotters are keen to blame the abusers, not the technology (cf: gun control), but for some reason "Web 2.0" threads tend to get overrun by purist/zealot anti- loudmouths.
Thanks for posting, that was interesting. I have a lot of respect for humanities and classics, and I regret not studying them at school.
Yeah I suppose it would have been nice of me to note I wasn't aiming any of that at you personally in any way - just your post struck some note and made me hang that ramble off it, not putting you in that "mock liberal arts degrees" boat, that's just a general thing I've noticed over the years here.
Joking I know, but FWIW I'm another "history major" (as you'd have it over that side of the pond). I've been reading Slashdot since about 98. At the time I was doing a-levels in history, English and computer science - trying to write a sci-fi RTS in Pascal instead of the dry database normalisation coursework, etc. Hence the geek link.
I ended up following history to university, not computer science, but on graduation got into web development (a longstanding hobby), since the job market is rather more flush than "historian". So nowadays CSS/ASP/PHP/SQL/JS/RSS/IIS/TLA/ETC are a regular part of my job. And while I don't generally do all the real hardcore functional-OOP-XP-git-jvm-type programming stuff, I can keep up with it in the same sort of way I keep up with Hawking's popular science books. "Right, I suppose I can't claim to understand it, truly; but I don't not understand it..."
I think there's a slashdot tendency to assume/generalise everyone here is geeky/techy/IT so has a maths/science background. So I thought I'd pop up and add a little visibility to the "nope, history major here" poster. My maths education stopped at 16 ("high school"). But I've still soley opened this Riemann story above any other on Slashdot tonight, because even if I don't really grasp the 1% of it, I still read XKCD and Stephenson, damnit, and this sort of thing is way cooler and more interesting than the next [RI|MP]AA story with a bunch of tedious hypocrites re-explain why it's OK to pirate entertainment because it sucks so much they don't even want to pirate its sucky ass, for the fifty trillionth time;-)
Worse, there's a definite tendency to mock and disparage degrees from the "arts" side of things. Personally, I think my history studies were one of the most enormously valuable things I've experienced. In terms of teaching you to apply critical scepticism to the words and actions of politicians, media, corporations, etc via means such as deconstructing language, considering the medium, separating fact from agenda, objectivity from subjectivity, evaluating the source provenance, weighing bias, etc, and having a broadly cross-disciplinary approach incorporating economics, sociology, psychology, politics, linguistics, philosophy, etc... I'd say it's practically an invaluable life skill for existence in this crazy information-overloaded, media-rich and doublespeak-rich 21st century.
But I guess that's another whole (increasingly offtopic) post in itself.
"Moving an e-mail to a folder" is not an information- or user-oriented need, it is a tool. It is a means not an end.
False.
I use a gmail account for signups to spammy stuff, to keep my real email clear. This includes myspace (yes, myspace; before you start your/. standard-issue "HAHAHA SOCIAL NETWORKS R LAME" rant, it's to promote music, so you have to do it where 'the kidz' go looking for that these days, hellish user CSS or no...)
They send me a lot of crap. It clutters up my view of any other messages. So I thought, let's get rid of them, into a folder. Then I thought, oh, yeah, silly me, gmail doesnt have folders, it has tags. Well, let's try it out. Tagged em all "myspace". Great. Now they're still sat there cluttering my inbox, except with a little green "myspace" appearing next to them: ie, even more cluttering.
I want rid of them. Visually. Labels don't seem to do that. OK, well, perhaps I'm not trying hard enough. Aha, create filter. That'll be it, filter everything except those labelled myspace. Oh, wait, the filter criteria box doesn't have any field for label at all, let alone !label. How about search? Oh, better - here I get a chance to search by label - but not by !label - and anyway, I don't want to search every time to see what I want to see, I just want to move these bloody emails out of my main inbox, permanently, so I can see my other shit.
Can it be done? Perhaps. I dare say some gmail expert will pop up and (condescendingly, of course) point out how. But I'm gazing around the gmail interface for a while now and I don't see it. I'm forced to conclude that all the "gmail is the ultimate bestest email interface evar" stuff I see on slashdot is, well, fanboyism.
Didn't you get the memo? It's terrorists these days, not communists. Communists are providing our bread and circuses these days. I know it's hard to keep up, but believe me, we've always been at war with Oceania.
Heh, nevermind, I read your link, it answers exactly that. Now, anyone in Warsaw feel like going and kicking the shit out of some fuckwhitted cunt called Ezhi Brozkevitsh? Also if anyone in the Ukraine wants to have a word with ukrtelegroup.com.ua, who are ultimately hosting the malware, that would be great; I emailed their abuse contact and got no response, so I'm forced to conclude they're complicit in this operation.
Yeah, I am and I know, thanks for the tip off though. In fact that's out of date, I cleaned it up a couple of weeks ago. (*MY* site was never an attack site, but I got pwnz0red by some retarded sql-injection-modifies-all-my-pages-adding-iframe-to-serve-malware exploit.) Don't suppose you know how to get taken OFF that list?:/
I enjoy the comments way more than the articles (which usually suck, tbh). For any article, there are almost always some extremely insightful comments,
You very nearly said exactly what I was going to say.
The reason I prefer to read the comments above the articles is the articles give a single point of view. Thus a single flavour of bias. To take a very crude example, the same story reported on the dailykos and foxnews is going to have a rather different spin, right? Even if the slashdot summary linked both those stories, well, that's still only 2 points of view. Read the comments and you get several dozen, even if you're only browsing at +4.
Generally (despite all the fuss about groupthink) you will kind at least one or two +4/5 comments which vehemently disagree with the article, and mercilessly deconstruct/rebut it, and at least one or two which completely agree and back it up with additional logic or evidence. As a neutral or previously uninformed reader you can quite readily find yourself agreeing with both, impossible as that may sound.
Thus after putting together the whole lot you can usually come to a "well it's somewhere in between" conclusion, far more broadly balanced than reading any one or handful of articles on the subject.
Of course, slashdot being so American-dominated and demographically limited does mean reading and 'averaging' the views of even hundreds of commentatorss still leaves you with a large amount of distinct bias, but it's still better than taking one journalists word for it.
We're more familiar these days with lifecasters Justin Kan and oh-God-look-at-how-hot-I-think-I-am Justine Ezarik. Never heard of either of them *confused*
Ah, see, now I scroll down a bit further, and see this. So they're not technically replacing ads which the charities have paid for.
Still, isn't it a tragic shame I never quite grasped that clarification, and my explanation to my colleagues about "replacing charity ads" therefore unfortunately implied that that is exactly what they did...
Frankly in my book they (Phorm) are still cunts even if they're replacing ads for Random Corporate Shitheads, and I relish the opportunity to give them some bad press.
Furthermore, BT are still cunts even if they'd never got involved with Phorm at all (anyone in the UK will know what I mean here).
So they both deserve all the stick they can get, even if it's undeserved. If you see what I mean.
(random off-topic aside: why does slashdot feel the need to render my bog-standard <p>paragraph</p> markup with triple line breaks between each paragraph?)
I work for a charity -- not one of the three listed, but one fairly well known within the UK -- and when I get to work tomorrow I intend to spread the news about this, urging my colleagues to write and express their disgust.
Were I to send an email around saying "Phorm... hijacking... ISPs... advertisments... privacy issues... yadda yadda" I expect everybody would shrug and say, "Eh, I don't really see the big deal." Now I get to send an email around saying "Phorm... hijacking... advertisments... STEALING advertising that charities have paid good money for from their highly limited budgets..." and I fully expect everybody to say "WTF? That's despicable!"
Wow. Disturbing that this gets to +5 informative, despite being almost completely incorrect.
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission from the first other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack). But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate (determined by the number of listeners in the venue's capacity, not necessarily those actually hearing the performance, though webcasting is per actual listener). The mechanical rate is low, like under $0.001 per listener, designed for repeated broadcast at rates recoverable by whatever commerce is operated using the performance.
OK... There are basically two sets of copyright in play when a band (or person, etc) writes and records a song. The publishing rights, covering "the song" in abstract (notes, chords, lyrics, etc) and the mechanical rights, covering the concrete instance of that particular recording. In this paragraph you seem to have confused the two so thoroughly I struggle to begin to unpick it.
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission... [for]... a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments...
You appear to be saying that because Radiohead own the mechanical rights to the original recording of Creep, this is what gives them publishing rights. Now, even forgetting the fact they almost certainly don't own the mechanical rights to the original recording of Creep (irrelevant to this point), this is not the case. Their publishing rights come from writing the song. This is clearly the case since in many areas of the music industry (production-line pop, showtunes, etc), the composers/lyricists never record the songs they have written, let alone be the first person to record them. Britney's songwriting team keep their songwriters' rights because they wrote the song, Britney doesn't get them because she was the artist who first recorded their song.
other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack).
These two instances are not an interchangeable either/or as you have it, they are covered differently by the two different types of rights. Somebody covering / performing the track with new instruments has no relation to their first recording, so no relation to the mechnical copyright on that first recording; it is, however, a use of "the song" in abstract, so it does fall under their publishing rights. On the other hand, somebody playing back the original recording falls under both.
But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate
No, the right (or not) to cover (perform) the song has nothing to do with the mechanical royalties. As above, the mechanical royalties are only relevant when mechanical recording is involved, which, in the case of a live cover, it is clearly not. What you appear to be getting confused with is this, "Mechanical Licensing (licensing of copyrighted musical compositions for use on CDs, records, tapes, and certain d
The genius of Blade Runner (and this seems to fly over the heads of the average)
Ah, classic slashdot. Disagree with someone's post? Simply drop a snide implication that they're too intellectually inferior to "get it"!
Thanks for that. You're right of course. I can't have opinions on what makes a good novella adaption, it all just goes right over my tiny average little mind.
To be honest I think Totall Recall is about the truest PKD film adaption there is. Yes, including Blade Runner.
The spirit of "We can remember it for you wholesale" was basically "guy has his memories messed with to think he went to Mars - or maybe it was that he did go to Mars and memories were messed with to think he didnt - etc". The film just made it longer and stacked more 'rug-pulled-from-your-under-your-feet' twists on top of each other.
Also, although it's schlocky, so was PKD. Seriously, if you think PKD was a literary master with elegant dialogue and profound characterisation... er... read more widely? And to be clear, I'm a massive PKD fan. The value of PKD is in the brainfucking ideas, but the actual "texture" of them is fairly pulp. Like Total Recall.
Blade Runner OTOH was verging on Hollywoodisation at it's worst. The spirit of "...Electric Sheep" was not "catch the replicant", it was far more broadly philosophical: hence all the stuff about android pets, social class, Mercerism, etc, which basically vanished from the film. Instead we got a simplified Cop Chases Bad Guy affair, with the MTV-esque depth you'd expect from an ex-advertisement director.
So, yeah, for my money Total Recall is a way more PKDish film than Blade Runner, which I consider perhaps the most overrated sci-fi film going...
Slashdot Mirror
By hiding it, you're only protecting yourself from second rate hackers. The first rate hackers found the problem and began taking advantage of it well before the development team was aware the problem existed.
I would say by hiding the fact a bug is a security issue would only protect you from third rate hackers. If first rate ones found the problem before the devs did, second rate ones are capable of looking through all the 'innoccously' labeled bugfixes and thinking, "hmm, overflow at line #1234 is it? Let's take a look at what goes on in dumaflopper() then, perhaps it'll be useful for my evil purposes, we'll see...", tracing through the source and working out the nature of the bug and how it could be exploited (or not). Which would leave those who need it spelt out whether and how a bug is exploitable on a third tier.
(This isn't intended as a "corrective" let alone combatitive post, btw. I've noticed often on slashdot people seem to take every post that way, so I shall disclaim it's not such thing, just thinking aloud really...)
No need to apologise, I was in no way offended or bothered, just thought I'd take the opportunity to share a little local info. Sorry for the assumption you were American :)
Certainly not the case in Britain. If you were feeling generous, you could just about claim we have a 3 party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats). Certainly the Lib Dems are a more meaningful presence than any American 3rd party AIUI. At a local level, they do rather well, often pushing (Conservatives|Labour) into third place in some constituencies. Other smaller parties (eg. Greens) regularly pick up seats in local elections too, plus there are the "single-issue" type parties (for some reason in this country that single issue is generally a pack of racist shite, to be honest: see UKIP, BNP) which occasionally manage to bag a seat here and there. Plus, in Wales and Scotland you have the respective nationalist parties (Plaid Cymru, SNP) doing fairly well too, at local and national levels. But none of them, not even the Lib Dems, come anywhere particularly close to winning Parliament (Westminster) and forming the national govt. In terms of who'll actually wind up prime minister and forming a cabinet, we're as predictably 2 party as you are, and not at all comparable to "10-party countries" where coalition govts are the norm not the exception...
Market forces only work if 100% unregulated... If however there's regulation, barriers to entry, standards to be fulfilled etc., then it's "market forces" on appearance only, not in fact.
No, if it's 100% unregulated, it's not a market, it's anarchy.
A financial market only exists BECAUSE of regulations.
Let's say we both run Widget companies. Your Widgets are 5p/unit cheaper than mine. Market forces say you drive my prices down, or drive me out of business, right?
Well, no... Not if I just
Etc.
Suddenly your market isn't doing you a lot of good, is it? Why? Because instead of playing "through" the market, I just cheated, stepped right "around" it, and beat you by other means.
Exaggerated examples I know, but this REALLY bugs me about slashdot: all the free market fairy fantasists who insist the only thing that stops markets from solving all problems is (govt) regulation and interference.
On the contrary, if you don't enact laws and regulations to stop people beating competitors "unfairly", via means "outside of" or subverting the market, the market doesn't even get a chance to create efficiencies.
A state that does only that which only a state can do, and nothing more, is the exact definition of the "minimum state" as defended by libertarians and classic liberals.
Yeah, great, so what's the minimum? So far in my top of the head examples, there's an obvious market-related need for laws against libel, blackmail, abduction, bribery, arson... And this is just with a (rather facile) Widgets Inc example. When you get into actual, real world trade and financial systems, there are so many obscure ways to sidestep the intended operation of the market, it's dizzying. And when they're discovered, they have to be regulated, otherwise the whole market principle is undermined.
Not that overregulation isn't a problem too, just saying, this "100% unregulated" thing that libertarians spew is precisely that: spew.
Oh, and I do realise the theoretical libertarian answer to this is that you don't need no stinking laws, rather, everybody will stop buying my Widgets when they hear about what a nasty man I am.
Which is laughable libertarian myth #2 - the perfect information market. The theoretical tends-toward-perfect-efficiency market is a perfect information market. Such a thing does not, and I might argue, cannot exist. It is simply unfeasible for all actors, however casual (occasional / impulse purchasers, etc), to be fully informed on every aspect, as opposed to the companies, who have a vested interest in ensuring that you are not.
Just think about advertising. The people making it have decades of training in the art of persuasion, from straightforward linguistics / rhetorical devices, through to graphic design, moods of colours and shapes, to audio, the most trusted accents, music, etc, etc. They may spend weeks, months, even years building up a single advert or campaign. All this to make you take their advert's message to heart. Do you have the same level of training, do you put the same level of time into "decrypting" the advert's nuance and subtext as they put into making it? Of course not. Fact is, it's fundamentally assymetrical, so you don't have perfect information.
And even if you did - would people really stop buying my Widgets if they discovered I was a naughty boy who didn't let the market do what it was supposed to, and simply bullied my way to economic dominance anyway? Considering people happily continue to buy from companies well known for
True say. In fact, you could generalise that to any post starting "In a free market..." getting +5 insightful. Funny, for all the atheism round here, how many quaintly have total faith in the Free Market Fairy. Merely depressing, on the other hand, how many use it as a stick to beat government and regulation with, failing to realise the only thing that would make a free market (if we ever saw one) free, efficient and fair is, uh, law.
It doesn't make any fucking sense that our own damn web clients allow the developer to disable right-click on a page.
Bookmarklet:
javascript:void(document.onmousedown=null);void(document.onclick=null);void(document.oncontextmenu=null)
I realise you probably know about this and are making the point regardless, because most people won't know that, so it's still a fair one. Agree, just thought I'd drop this in case it helped someone who hadn't discovered it yet.
Besides that, I agree with you quite a lot. I also like the way you attack the actual problem - "shitty internet experience" resulting from widespread idiocy, rather than what I see on slashdot quite often, which is literally blaming the enabling technologies themselves (Flash, CSS, JS, XML, etc), and declaring we'd be better if we'd stuck with HTML2.0. Javascript et al can be used for some wonderfully useful, elegant, discreet enhancements, and in most domains slashdotters are keen to blame the abusers, not the technology (cf: gun control), but for some reason "Web 2.0" threads tend to get overrun by purist/zealot anti- loudmouths.
Thanks for posting, that was interesting. I have a lot of respect for humanities and classics, and I regret not studying them at school.
Yeah I suppose it would have been nice of me to note I wasn't aiming any of that at you personally in any way - just your post struck some note and made me hang that ramble off it, not putting you in that "mock liberal arts degrees" boat, that's just a general thing I've noticed over the years here.
Joking I know, but FWIW I'm another "history major" (as you'd have it over that side of the pond). I've been reading Slashdot since about 98. At the time I was doing a-levels in history, English and computer science - trying to write a sci-fi RTS in Pascal instead of the dry database normalisation coursework, etc. Hence the geek link.
I ended up following history to university, not computer science, but on graduation got into web development (a longstanding hobby), since the job market is rather more flush than "historian". So nowadays CSS/ASP/PHP/SQL/JS/RSS/IIS/TLA/ETC are a regular part of my job. And while I don't generally do all the real hardcore functional-OOP-XP-git-jvm-type programming stuff, I can keep up with it in the same sort of way I keep up with Hawking's popular science books. "Right, I suppose I can't claim to understand it, truly; but I don't not understand it..."
I think there's a slashdot tendency to assume/generalise everyone here is geeky/techy/IT so has a maths/science background. So I thought I'd pop up and add a little visibility to the "nope, history major here" poster. My maths education stopped at 16 ("high school"). But I've still soley opened this Riemann story above any other on Slashdot tonight, because even if I don't really grasp the 1% of it, I still read XKCD and Stephenson, damnit, and this sort of thing is way cooler and more interesting than the next [RI|MP]AA story with a bunch of tedious hypocrites re-explain why it's OK to pirate entertainment because it sucks so much they don't even want to pirate its sucky ass, for the fifty trillionth time ;-)
Worse, there's a definite tendency to mock and disparage degrees from the "arts" side of things. Personally, I think my history studies were one of the most enormously valuable things I've experienced. In terms of teaching you to apply critical scepticism to the words and actions of politicians, media, corporations, etc via means such as deconstructing language, considering the medium, separating fact from agenda, objectivity from subjectivity, evaluating the source provenance, weighing bias, etc, and having a broadly cross-disciplinary approach incorporating economics, sociology, psychology, politics, linguistics, philosophy, etc... I'd say it's practically an invaluable life skill for existence in this crazy information-overloaded, media-rich and doublespeak-rich 21st century.
But I guess that's another whole (increasingly offtopic) post in itself.
"Moving an e-mail to a folder" is not an information- or user-oriented need, it is a tool. It is a means not an end.
False.
I use a gmail account for signups to spammy stuff, to keep my real email clear. This includes myspace (yes, myspace; before you start your /. standard-issue "HAHAHA SOCIAL NETWORKS R LAME" rant, it's to promote music, so you have to do it where 'the kidz' go looking for that these days, hellish user CSS or no...)
They send me a lot of crap. It clutters up my view of any other messages. So I thought, let's get rid of them, into a folder. Then I thought, oh, yeah, silly me, gmail doesnt have folders, it has tags. Well, let's try it out. Tagged em all "myspace". Great. Now they're still sat there cluttering my inbox, except with a little green "myspace" appearing next to them: ie, even more cluttering.
I want rid of them. Visually. Labels don't seem to do that. OK, well, perhaps I'm not trying hard enough. Aha, create filter. That'll be it, filter everything except those labelled myspace. Oh, wait, the filter criteria box doesn't have any field for label at all, let alone !label. How about search? Oh, better - here I get a chance to search by label - but not by !label - and anyway, I don't want to search every time to see what I want to see, I just want to move these bloody emails out of my main inbox, permanently, so I can see my other shit.
Can it be done? Perhaps. I dare say some gmail expert will pop up and (condescendingly, of course) point out how. But I'm gazing around the gmail interface for a while now and I don't see it. I'm forced to conclude that all the "gmail is the ultimate bestest email interface evar" stuff I see on slashdot is, well, fanboyism.
What do you store antimatter in if it explodes on contact with matter?
Antimatter containment fields... DUH!
Sheesh, it's like Geordie taught you NOTHING.
Didn't you get the memo? It's terrorists these days, not communists. Communists are providing our bread and circuses these days. I know it's hard to keep up, but believe me, we've always been at war with Oceania.
Off topic, but when you have elephants that recognise themselves in the mirror, apes that can plan tool usage ahead of time, parrots that grasp the concept of zero, and so on, I'm personally honestly no longer convinced claims like this can be made so easily.
In Soviet Russia, binoculars focus you?
Heh, nevermind, I read your link, it answers exactly that. Now, anyone in Warsaw feel like going and kicking the shit out of some fuckwhitted cunt called Ezhi Brozkevitsh? Also if anyone in the Ukraine wants to have a word with ukrtelegroup.com.ua, who are ultimately hosting the malware, that would be great; I emailed their abuse contact and got no response, so I'm forced to conclude they're complicit in this operation.
Yeah, I am and I know, thanks for the tip off though. In fact that's out of date, I cleaned it up a couple of weeks ago. (*MY* site was never an attack site, but I got pwnz0red by some retarded sql-injection-modifies-all-my-pages-adding-iframe-to-serve-malware exploit.) Don't suppose you know how to get taken OFF that list? :/
Actually, I don't think they'll be satisfied with anything short of dragons.
You very nearly said exactly what I was going to say.
The reason I prefer to read the comments above the articles is the articles give a single point of view. Thus a single flavour of bias. To take a very crude example, the same story reported on the dailykos and foxnews is going to have a rather different spin, right? Even if the slashdot summary linked both those stories, well, that's still only 2 points of view. Read the comments and you get several dozen, even if you're only browsing at +4.
Generally (despite all the fuss about groupthink) you will kind at least one or two +4/5 comments which vehemently disagree with the article, and mercilessly deconstruct/rebut it, and at least one or two which completely agree and back it up with additional logic or evidence. As a neutral or previously uninformed reader you can quite readily find yourself agreeing with both, impossible as that may sound.
Thus after putting together the whole lot you can usually come to a "well it's somewhere in between" conclusion, far more broadly balanced than reading any one or handful of articles on the subject.
Of course, slashdot being so American-dominated and demographically limited does mean reading and 'averaging' the views of even hundreds of commentatorss still leaves you with a large amount of distinct bias, but it's still better than taking one journalists word for it.
It's #666, actually :)
Ah, see, now I scroll down a bit further, and see this. So they're not technically replacing ads which the charities have paid for.
Still, isn't it a tragic shame I never quite grasped that clarification, and my explanation to my colleagues about "replacing charity ads" therefore unfortunately implied that that is exactly what they did...
Frankly in my book they (Phorm) are still cunts even if they're replacing ads for Random Corporate Shitheads, and I relish the opportunity to give them some bad press.
Furthermore, BT are still cunts even if they'd never got involved with Phorm at all (anyone in the UK will know what I mean here).
So they both deserve all the stick they can get, even if it's undeserved. If you see what I mean.
(random off-topic aside: why does slashdot feel the need to render my bog-standard <p>paragraph</p> markup with triple line breaks between each paragraph?)
Indeed.
I work for a charity -- not one of the three listed, but one fairly well known within the UK -- and when I get to work tomorrow I intend to spread the news about this, urging my colleagues to write and express their disgust.
Were I to send an email around saying "Phorm... hijacking... ISPs... advertisments... privacy issues... yadda yadda" I expect everybody would shrug and say, "Eh, I don't really see the big deal." Now I get to send an email around saying "Phorm... hijacking... advertisments... STEALING advertising that charities have paid good money for from their highly limited budgets..." and I fully expect everybody to say "WTF? That's despicable!"
Bullet, meet foot.
Also... agreed: CUNTS.
Wow. Disturbing that this gets to +5 informative, despite being almost completely incorrect.
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission from the first other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack). But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate (determined by the number of listeners in the venue's capacity, not necessarily those actually hearing the performance, though webcasting is per actual listener). The mechanical rate is low, like under $0.001 per listener, designed for repeated broadcast at rates recoverable by whatever commerce is operated using the performance.
OK... There are basically two sets of copyright in play when a band (or person, etc) writes and records a song. The publishing rights, covering "the song" in abstract (notes, chords, lyrics, etc) and the mechanical rights, covering the concrete instance of that particular recording. In this paragraph you seem to have confused the two so thoroughly I struggle to begin to unpick it.
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission... [for]... a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments...
You appear to be saying that because Radiohead own the mechanical rights to the original recording of Creep, this is what gives them publishing rights. Now, even forgetting the fact they almost certainly don't own the mechanical rights to the original recording of Creep (irrelevant to this point), this is not the case. Their publishing rights come from writing the song. This is clearly the case since in many areas of the music industry (production-line pop, showtunes, etc), the composers/lyricists never record the songs they have written, let alone be the first person to record them. Britney's songwriting team keep their songwriters' rights because they wrote the song, Britney doesn't get them because she was the artist who first recorded their song.
other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack).
These two instances are not an interchangeable either/or as you have it, they are covered differently by the two different types of rights. Somebody covering / performing the track with new instruments has no relation to their first recording, so no relation to the mechnical copyright on that first recording; it is, however, a use of "the song" in abstract, so it does fall under their publishing rights. On the other hand, somebody playing back the original recording falls under both.
But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate
No, the right (or not) to cover (perform) the song has nothing to do with the mechanical royalties. As above, the mechanical royalties are only relevant when mechanical recording is involved, which, in the case of a live cover, it is clearly not. What you appear to be getting confused with is this, "Mechanical Licensing (licensing of copyrighted musical compositions for use on CDs, records, tapes, and certain d
Ah, classic slashdot. Disagree with someone's post? Simply drop a snide implication that they're too intellectually inferior to "get it"!
Thanks for that. You're right of course. I can't have opinions on what makes a good novella adaption, it all just goes right over my tiny average little mind.
To be honest I think Totall Recall is about the truest PKD film adaption there is. Yes, including Blade Runner.
The spirit of "We can remember it for you wholesale" was basically "guy has his memories messed with to think he went to Mars - or maybe it was that he did go to Mars and memories were messed with to think he didnt - etc". The film just made it longer and stacked more 'rug-pulled-from-your-under-your-feet' twists on top of each other.
Also, although it's schlocky, so was PKD. Seriously, if you think PKD was a literary master with elegant dialogue and profound characterisation... er... read more widely? And to be clear, I'm a massive PKD fan. The value of PKD is in the brainfucking ideas, but the actual "texture" of them is fairly pulp. Like Total Recall.
Blade Runner OTOH was verging on Hollywoodisation at it's worst. The spirit of "...Electric Sheep" was not "catch the replicant", it was far more broadly philosophical: hence all the stuff about android pets, social class, Mercerism, etc, which basically vanished from the film. Instead we got a simplified Cop Chases Bad Guy affair, with the MTV-esque depth you'd expect from an ex-advertisement director.
So, yeah, for my money Total Recall is a way more PKDish film than Blade Runner, which I consider perhaps the most overrated sci-fi film going...