And that's the difference between US movies and British movies. Look at a UK film like St. Trinians. Comedy dog death scene (it's kicked into the bin of a large lawnmower). No way that would have happened if the film had been a mainstream US movie (not to mention the underage sex, drug use, drug manufacturing, and incidents of assault, cheating, prostitution and theft shown as having hugely turning out unconditionally well for the perpetrators). In fact, I'm curious to know if the US release of the movie (after a delay of at least a year) actually survived without butchering in the editing room. They certainly murdered the trailer.
The double-standard for animals may be to do with their innocence, but it is probably also to do with people's learned ability to discount others. Many people can quite easily cut off their empathy for other humans with an in-built prejudice (they are rich, they are a slut, they are young, they cheat or whatever), but there are no such dismissals readily available for animals. Hence empathy can persist.
In what way does combining two things of lower value never result in something of greater value? It is true of things where there is functional overlap (having two cookers in your kitchen offers minimal advantage), but it is not true where there isn't functional overlap (having a cooker and a fridge in your kitchen is useful). Clearly Wolfram Alpha and Bing have different functions so there combined value should be additive, not an overlap. There is no logic to your post.
You do realise that Google and Bing both show the same initial results for "Least Secure OS" don't you? Don't you? Try it, rather than just believing some FUD from some random Slashdot poster. It's not hard. You'll find that the first result in Google is the same "Linux is the least secure OS" result.
Or you could carry on seeing what you want to see.
If this Mark Cuban person has a love affair with Microsoft, then it's the sort of love affair where Microsoft is deeply embarrassed about their drunken one night stand and desperately wishes the other party would shut up about it. Honestly, this is terrible publicity for Microsoft: "Come to us - we're so bad that people have to be paid not to use our competitors". As if any of these big sites would accept such a bribe anyway. I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be legal in the EU either so unless these great big companies have no presence in the EU (yeah right), then the deal would be complicated anyway.
Bing is actually fine. Its problem is that Google is already there and is so successful that their name has become a verb. Displacing that is going to take either very long term and sustained effort or some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice). Bing needs a boost of some sort for certain. Pairing up with Wolfram Alpha is a good thing. Stunts like this (I sincerely hope MS had the sense not to okay this) are sooooooo not a good thing.
The financial part of that settlement is only the financial part of that settlement. There is more. And I'm sure Intel would have preferred that their profits were a billion dollars higher.
Funny, because according to the exit polls [cnn.com], 88% of African Americans voted for Kerry in 2004. I guess he must be black too!
Wow! 88% of black US citizens voted for Kerry! How could he not win? Or did you mean that 88% of black americans who voted, voted for Kerry which is very different? To make accurate statements about whether Obama being half-black got him extra votes, you have to also ask whether people who wouldn't have voted otherwise also voted for him.
I'm just trying to highlight flaws in the argument rather than reaching a verdict one way of another. Regardless of his race, I think the Democratic candidate would have won anyway. That's how US politics works. You have a party in power for a couple of terms, until they're so covered in shit that people are getting disillusioned with "the government" and might start thinking about taking care of matters themselves, dealing with the corruption, etc. And then a different party is swapped in and the old party goes away taking all the blame with them whilst the new party promise to change things. And the cycle begins again.
Economic disaster was coming. A party switch pretty much had to take place so that blame could be passed to a group that had already been "dealt with" by being deposed and thus there was no target for people who want to change things for the better.
Out of curiosity whereabouts are you, if you don't mind my asking? We actually have a, well, surplus is the wrong word but, we have a lot of upcoming osteopaths in the UK that are outpacing the number of practices in some regions. I'm just thinking that if there is a shortage over there, then it might be an opportunity for some. Though if people over there don't grasp the difference between an osteopath and a chiropractor, then that might hold things back...
That may be so. But I recall what happened with javascript where Microsoft had domination in the browser market and used that to bring in new, non-standard features which caused problems for Netscape. I still on occasion have to deal with their bloody.dat files on emails, believe it or not! Microsoft are in the same position with.NET that they were with browsers and with email. I simply don't trust them not to disregard standards and carry the application base along with them, leaving Linux hopping along behind with a buggy or incomplete implementation. Microsoft have de facto control over.NET and therefore Mono, and that simply seems a bad idea of Linux when there are better ways of developing cross-platform. This is my opinion, anyway.
Should not the response been "Prove it."? Then DMCA takes over and they have to follow all that mess, meanwhile the wifi connection would remain operable until final discovery and remediation.
That doesn't quite apply in this case. The provision of the DMCA you're talking about is about providing content. I.e. if YouTube has your movie on it, you send them a DMCA take down request. In this case, it was about the users of their network downloading without permission rather than hosting without permission. You could apply it to Bit Torrent technically, though I'm not sure anyone has mounted that defense in that case. We don't know for certain what technology was used to download so can't say for certain in this case whether it would be usable. In any case however, there are other reasons you wouldn't do that. For a start, the downloading had presumably finished by this point, being downloading of individual work(s) rather than sustained distribution. Secondly, it would be no bother at all for Sony Pictures to prove that they were the owners of movie X which puts the ball right back in the customer's court. All it achieves is a momentary delay. But the biggest point is that the providers of the wifi access point don't actually want to facilitate piracy. They're offering the service, as far as I can see, for people to do a bit of emailing and for some people to verify credit cards (I know, I know) during a local fair. If they can find who the culprit is, they'll probably want to give him a smack round the head - the pirate has, after all, pissed in the public well. And that's really the biggest consideration here. They don't see Sony Pictures or their ISP as the bad guys. They're probably fine with people protecting their property. Their interest is in preventing their public network from being misused, rather than fighting it. There's an even chance they might actually appreciate being informed that their connection had been misused.
Mono isn't a language per se. Mono is an import of the.Net framework. The trouble is that this framework is controlled by Microsoft. Firstly, the Windows version will always be ahead of other platforms relegating other platforms to inferior, buggy or feature incomplete versions. This could result in security vulnerabilities and lagging behind in version availability. More dangerous however, is that Microsoft can withdraw approval for Mono at any time, if they wish. If Mono became a popular basis for running software on Linux, then Microsoft could bring it all crashing down whenever they felt Linux had grown to be enough of a threat. Or they can start charging licence fees. Once a software base is installed, it can be very hard to move away from it *cough*Office*cough*.
Basically, rather than true cross-platform compatability, what you get is Microsoft controlling a framework that Linux apps would become dependent on. A bad, vulnerable situation, imo. That's why I dislike proprietary systems such as Moonlight that are built on it. If we overhauled software patent law then it would be less of a threat, but it remains a technical advantage to Windows.
I don't think he was calling your post horseshit. I think he was referring to the original story / coryrant. His post doesn't seem to quite follow on from yours so he might have just been posting somewhere visible in rough agreement with my post, or hit reply to yours instead of mine. At anyrate, I don't think he intended to denigrate your post.
That's a very good idea. Any people with a legitimate need for more can go and request it. In fact, it's a *really* good idea. You'd still have the potential for the odd song to be downloaded and someone like you or I could script something to get "a piece an hour" if we happened to live in range of it, but in practical terms, that would solve the issue. I wonder what the chances of their admin reading Slashdot are? Probably pretty good on this story, actually.;) They should try this. It would also be a (very) rough way of spotting illegal downloads if they cared to look.
If they do get another attempt at illegal downloading with this system in place, they'd at least have tried some measure which should hopefully prevent immediate legal action from the rights holders.
You've got me curious. I don't know much about BoingBoing. Who are the big sponsors that they dislike criticism of and I've heard of Violet Blue the porn star (she sounds quite entertaining, actually, what with the wicca and the "No Name" stuff), but I don't know if you're referring to her or the authoress that sued her for having the same name. Any chance you could spare Slashdot a few minutes to talk a bit more about these things?:)
Not to be an ass or anything, but if you just dug up this information in the time since your previous posting, perhaps you could share the links with the rest of us?
No offense is taken by a request for citations. The Coshocton Tribune has a much more detailed article here. It details the area covered by the wifi point (the block containing the County Courthouse), the typical usage of the open network (from around a dozen people a day surging up to a hundred during county fairs held there) and the facts that they had no direct connection with the MPAA, but that Sony Pictures sent a notification of illegal usage to their ISP which then passed it on to the customer who decided to shut the network down. They're response - for a small town, under-resourced considering a network that is a useful but hardly critical public resource, actually seems reasonable. "Let's turn it off and think about what we can do." They're considering whether they need to spend a few thousand dollars (a lot of money for them) on filtering software. (I'd personally counsel them against that as it's merely throwing good money after an unguaranteed solution) Who's to blame for this? Well certainly not the council, and to be honest, not really Sony Pictures which sounds like they just sent one of their standard "you're doing illegal stuff, we know it, please stop and play nice" letters. So really, I think the most to blame for the withdrawal of the free service is the twat that decided to abuse their free service by helping himself to some copyrighted material.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. As you can see, a lot more facts and a strikingly different conclusion to the original "OMG! MPAA are depriving towns of Internet and Geneva Conventions are being violated" blog post.
Personally, this would annoy me. I hate trailers on discs. I (and I assume most people) only buy discs because we'll want to keep the movie and watch it again in time. And when I do, it's very irritating to see trailers for old movies pop up or (with the early Blu-Rays) a feature piece telling me how great Blu-Ray is. I would feel the same way about demos for games.
On top of this, a producer would be shooting itself in the foot by not making a demo available elsewhere, e.g. for download online. So if it's already available, then why would the people getting the Blu-Ray need a second source?
But mainly, I just want my movie collection to be a collection of the things I actually want. Not littered with rapidly out of date ads. If I wanted an ad-supported model, I'd find one. People who pay for content always resent finding the seller trying to make a quick buck by subjecting them to ads as well.
Yeah - typical Greek view. He seduced her like she got no say in the matter. More likely she was just tired of being married to some old king who obviously wasn't a very nice person as he was willing to kill his own daughter to please Poseidon. Personally I just attribute the whole affair to Eris, she of the Golden Apple (Hail Eris!);)
Anyway, we should enjoy our Greek Myth while we can. Hollywood is about to butcher them yet again.
I don't want a lecture from my local government on what I should be watching every time I buy a ticket to something I do want to see. Local government wastes enough tax money without taking it upon themselves to start cultural policing. If I want to watch a film, it's not wise for anyone to lecture me about it. I expect you would feel the same if you thought about it.
I've found more information on this as well, actually. Far from being a whole town, the wireless network was a free network broadcast for ONE BLOCK around the county courthouse.
So real situation: Someone opens up a wireless network with open access in one block of the town. Someone (very probably) did something illegal with it. The people who pay for the connection get a letter saying there is illegal usage being made of it and decide to shut it down.
The Slashdot Headline and Doctorow Blog:MPAA shut down entire town's Municipal WiFi against their will. Contravention of Geneva Conventions.
This is utter garbage and the editors if they were doing their job would post an update on the story right now.
Actually, it's more a case of something less. This is another Cory Doctorow nonsense-piece. What appears to have happened is that the town had a set up a single shared wifi network running from a single connection which they allowed anyone to use. The MPAA sent a letter saying that this connection was being used for downloading copyrighted material without permission and the Sheriff's office panicked and shut it down.
FOX News doesn't distort the facts for their agenda as much as this guy has. (Well, not all the time, anyway).
Actually, maybe it isn't a nice idea. How could you accomplish this without creating something that was forced to make hundreds or even a thousand little separate requests the first time you loaded a popular story, instead of one, admittedly large, HTML page?
Slashdot Mirror
And that's the difference between US movies and British movies. Look at a UK film like St. Trinians. Comedy dog death scene (it's kicked into the bin of a large lawnmower). No way that would have happened if the film had been a mainstream US movie (not to mention the underage sex, drug use, drug manufacturing, and incidents of assault, cheating, prostitution and theft shown as having hugely turning out unconditionally well for the perpetrators). In fact, I'm curious to know if the US release of the movie (after a delay of at least a year) actually survived without butchering in the editing room. They certainly murdered the trailer.
The double-standard for animals may be to do with their innocence, but it is probably also to do with people's learned ability to discount others. Many people can quite easily cut off their empathy for other humans with an in-built prejudice (they are rich, they are a slut, they are young, they cheat or whatever), but there are no such dismissals readily available for animals. Hence empathy can persist.
£2 + £2 = £4.
£4 is better than £2.
In what way does combining two things of lower value never result in something of greater value? It is true of things where there is functional overlap (having two cookers in your kitchen offers minimal advantage), but it is not true where there isn't functional overlap (having a cooker and a fridge in your kitchen is useful). Clearly Wolfram Alpha and Bing have different functions so there combined value should be additive, not an overlap. There is no logic to your post.
You do realise that Google and Bing both show the same initial results for "Least Secure OS" don't you? Don't you? Try it, rather than just believing some FUD from some random Slashdot poster. It's not hard. You'll find that the first result in Google is the same "Linux is the least secure OS" result.
Or you could carry on seeing what you want to see.
If this Mark Cuban person has a love affair with Microsoft, then it's the sort of love affair where Microsoft is deeply embarrassed about their drunken one night stand and desperately wishes the other party would shut up about it. Honestly, this is terrible publicity for Microsoft: "Come to us - we're so bad that people have to be paid not to use our competitors". As if any of these big sites would accept such a bribe anyway. I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be legal in the EU either so unless these great big companies have no presence in the EU (yeah right), then the deal would be complicated anyway.
Bing is actually fine. Its problem is that Google is already there and is so successful that their name has become a verb. Displacing that is going to take either very long term and sustained effort or some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice). Bing needs a boost of some sort for certain. Pairing up with Wolfram Alpha is a good thing. Stunts like this (I sincerely hope MS had the sense not to okay this) are sooooooo not a good thing.
Muppet!
The financial part of that settlement is only the financial part of that settlement. There is more. And I'm sure Intel would have preferred that their profits were a billion dollars higher.
Wow! 88% of black US citizens voted for Kerry! How could he not win? Or did you mean that 88% of black americans who voted, voted for Kerry which is very different? To make accurate statements about whether Obama being half-black got him extra votes, you have to also ask whether people who wouldn't have voted otherwise also voted for him.
I'm just trying to highlight flaws in the argument rather than reaching a verdict one way of another. Regardless of his race, I think the Democratic candidate would have won anyway. That's how US politics works. You have a party in power for a couple of terms, until they're so covered in shit that people are getting disillusioned with "the government" and might start thinking about taking care of matters themselves, dealing with the corruption, etc. And then a different party is swapped in and the old party goes away taking all the blame with them whilst the new party promise to change things. And the cycle begins again.
Economic disaster was coming. A party switch pretty much had to take place so that blame could be passed to a group that had already been "dealt with" by being deposed and thus there was no target for people who want to change things for the better.
The bill is over a thousand pages long. Not even the people who voted on it know what's in there!
Out of curiosity whereabouts are you, if you don't mind my asking? We actually have a, well, surplus is the wrong word but, we have a lot of upcoming osteopaths in the UK that are outpacing the number of practices in some regions. I'm just thinking that if there is a shortage over there, then it might be an opportunity for some. Though if people over there don't grasp the difference between an osteopath and a chiropractor, then that might hold things back...
Try an osteopath - they've really studied their subject and are practically specialist doctors. Chiropractors are masseurs that like to take risks.
That may be so. But I recall what happened with javascript where Microsoft had domination in the browser market and used that to bring in new, non-standard features which caused problems for Netscape. I still on occasion have to deal with their bloody
That doesn't quite apply in this case. The provision of the DMCA you're talking about is about providing content. I.e. if YouTube has your movie on it, you send them a DMCA take down request. In this case, it was about the users of their network downloading without permission rather than hosting without permission. You could apply it to Bit Torrent technically, though I'm not sure anyone has mounted that defense in that case. We don't know for certain what technology was used to download so can't say for certain in this case whether it would be usable. In any case however, there are other reasons you wouldn't do that. For a start, the downloading had presumably finished by this point, being downloading of individual work(s) rather than sustained distribution. Secondly, it would be no bother at all for Sony Pictures to prove that they were the owners of movie X which puts the ball right back in the customer's court. All it achieves is a momentary delay. But the biggest point is that the providers of the wifi access point don't actually want to facilitate piracy. They're offering the service, as far as I can see, for people to do a bit of emailing and for some people to verify credit cards (I know, I know) during a local fair. If they can find who the culprit is, they'll probably want to give him a smack round the head - the pirate has, after all, pissed in the public well. And that's really the biggest consideration here. They don't see Sony Pictures or their ISP as the bad guys. They're probably fine with people protecting their property. Their interest is in preventing their public network from being misused, rather than fighting it. There's an even chance they might actually appreciate being informed that their connection had been misused.
Mono isn't a language per se. Mono is an import of the .Net framework. The trouble is that this framework is controlled by Microsoft. Firstly, the Windows version will always be ahead of other platforms relegating other platforms to inferior, buggy or feature incomplete versions. This could result in security vulnerabilities and lagging behind in version availability. More dangerous however, is that Microsoft can withdraw approval for Mono at any time, if they wish. If Mono became a popular basis for running software on Linux, then Microsoft could bring it all crashing down whenever they felt Linux had grown to be enough of a threat. Or they can start charging licence fees. Once a software base is installed, it can be very hard to move away from it *cough*Office*cough*.
Basically, rather than true cross-platform compatability, what you get is Microsoft controlling a framework that Linux apps would become dependent on. A bad, vulnerable situation, imo. That's why I dislike proprietary systems such as Moonlight that are built on it. If we overhauled software patent law then it would be less of a threat, but it remains a technical advantage to Windows.
I don't think he was calling your post horseshit. I think he was referring to the original story / coryrant. His post doesn't seem to quite follow on from yours so he might have just been posting somewhere visible in rough agreement with my post, or hit reply to yours instead of mine. At anyrate, I don't think he intended to denigrate your post.
Not if they use Mono.
That's a very good idea. Any people with a legitimate need for more can go and request it. In fact, it's a *really* good idea. You'd still have the potential for the odd song to be downloaded and someone like you or I could script something to get "a piece an hour" if we happened to live in range of it, but in practical terms, that would solve the issue. I wonder what the chances of their admin reading Slashdot are? Probably pretty good on this story, actually.
If they do get another attempt at illegal downloading with this system in place, they'd at least have tried some measure which should hopefully prevent immediate legal action from the rights holders.
You've got me curious. I don't know much about BoingBoing. Who are the big sponsors that they dislike criticism of and I've heard of Violet Blue the porn star (she sounds quite entertaining, actually, what with the wicca and the "No Name" stuff), but I don't know if you're referring to her or the authoress that sued her for having the same name. Any chance you could spare Slashdot a few minutes to talk a bit more about these things?
No offense is taken by a request for citations. The Coshocton Tribune has a much more detailed article here. It details the area covered by the wifi point (the block containing the County Courthouse), the typical usage of the open network (from around a dozen people a day surging up to a hundred during county fairs held there) and the facts that they had no direct connection with the MPAA, but that Sony Pictures sent a notification of illegal usage to their ISP which then passed it on to the customer who decided to shut the network down. They're response - for a small town, under-resourced considering a network that is a useful but hardly critical public resource, actually seems reasonable. "Let's turn it off and think about what we can do." They're considering whether they need to spend a few thousand dollars (a lot of money for them) on filtering software. (I'd personally counsel them against that as it's merely throwing good money after an unguaranteed solution) Who's to blame for this? Well certainly not the council, and to be honest, not really Sony Pictures which sounds like they just sent one of their standard "you're doing illegal stuff, we know it, please stop and play nice" letters. So really, I think the most to blame for the withdrawal of the free service is the twat that decided to abuse their free service by helping himself to some copyrighted material.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. As you can see, a lot more facts and a strikingly different conclusion to the original "OMG! MPAA are depriving towns of Internet and Geneva Conventions are being violated" blog post.
Shhh... Don't tell Dan Brown!
Personally, this would annoy me. I hate trailers on discs. I (and I assume most people) only buy discs because we'll want to keep the movie and watch it again in time. And when I do, it's very irritating to see trailers for old movies pop up or (with the early Blu-Rays) a feature piece telling me how great Blu-Ray is. I would feel the same way about demos for games.
On top of this, a producer would be shooting itself in the foot by not making a demo available elsewhere, e.g. for download online. So if it's already available, then why would the people getting the Blu-Ray need a second source?
But mainly, I just want my movie collection to be a collection of the things I actually want. Not littered with rapidly out of date ads. If I wanted an ad-supported model, I'd find one. People who pay for content always resent finding the seller trying to make a quick buck by subjecting them to ads as well.
Yeah - typical Greek view. He seduced her like she got no say in the matter. More likely she was just tired of being married to some old king who obviously wasn't a very nice person as he was willing to kill his own daughter to please Poseidon. Personally I just attribute the whole affair to Eris, she of the Golden Apple (Hail Eris!)
Anyway, we should enjoy our Greek Myth while we can. Hollywood is about to butcher them yet again.
I don't want a lecture from my local government on what I should be watching every time I buy a ticket to something I do want to see. Local government wastes enough tax money without taking it upon themselves to start cultural policing. If I want to watch a film, it's not wise for anyone to lecture me about it. I expect you would feel the same if you thought about it.
And what sort of punishment do you think would be appropriate for you after you'd deprived someone of water for expressing an opinion you didn't like?
I've found more information on this as well, actually. Far from being a whole town, the wireless network was a free network broadcast for ONE BLOCK around the county courthouse.
So real situation: Someone opens up a wireless network with open access in one block of the town. Someone (very probably) did something illegal with it. The people who pay for the connection get a letter saying there is illegal usage being made of it and decide to shut it down.
The Slashdot Headline and Doctorow Blog:MPAA shut down entire town's Municipal WiFi against their will. Contravention of Geneva Conventions.
This is utter garbage and the editors if they were doing their job would post an update on the story right now.
Actually, it's more a case of something less. This is another Cory Doctorow nonsense-piece. What appears to have happened is that the town had a set up a single shared wifi network running from a single connection which they allowed anyone to use. The MPAA sent a letter saying that this connection was being used for downloading copyrighted material without permission and the Sheriff's office panicked and shut it down.
FOX News doesn't distort the facts for their agenda as much as this guy has. (Well, not all the time, anyway).
Actually, maybe it isn't a nice idea. How could you accomplish this without creating something that was forced to make hundreds or even a thousand little separate requests the first time you loaded a popular story, instead of one, admittedly large, HTML page?