In that case, what does CBS mean by, "there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn't do the deal"?
Exactly what they say.
The show itself may be out of copyright, but most TV shows the world over license all sorts of other snippets to turn an idea into a show ready for broadcast.
The most obvious of these is music. Is any music used still under copyright? Does the license that was originally obtained for the music (assuming it can even be found) allow CBS to release that music or is a public broadcast over the airwaves the only release method allowed?
Then you've got the question of other material. I'm not familiar with Jack Benny myself, but if he collaborated with someone else for some of the shows and that someone is still alive (or, for that matter, only recently died) you have to deal with the work that was produced collaboratively.
What we have here is a case of "beware of unintended consequences" with copyright. So many things that we might consider modern culture are essentially under copyright protection a lot longer that was originally intended not because of all the extensions to copyright law but because it exists at all - you wind up with more licensing issues than anyone is prepared to address.
Someone needed to teach China that just because they're the biggest single market in the world doesn't mean they dictate the laws that the rest of the world has to follow. In that respect China is no better than a monopolistic company, that's abusing its monopoly position.
And when they've done with that, would they mind flying over to the US and teaching them the same thing?
Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to allow other apps to open the firewall?
UPnP allows something similar. Disabling such features wouldn't necessarily gain much because if malware does get in, it's just as easy to initiate the connection from inside the home firewall and keep it open - with the added benefit that the control server knows which nodes are online because there are connections open to them. Otherwise it'd have to keep a list of which IP addresses are compromised and contact each one whenever it wants to do something - which would be slow, and wouldn't deal very well with offline nodes or dynamically assigned addresses.
The US Gov't has successfully operated as a going concern for 220+ years, with a proven and reliable management structure. Few, if any corporations, have been able to do that.
Private corporations can go under with just a couple of bad years. Or even months, particularly if they're new businesses. Governments just have to raise taxes.
They have some very good policies but they openly admit they'd raise taxes to enact many of them. Which given that we've spent the last 13 years having the most noticeable taxes cut (Income tax is lower), every other tax has gone through the roof and this has not gone unnoticed.
Also, the areas of the UK that have traditionally been most ill-content with the way the country is governed now have devolved parliaments, and are to some degree in charge of their own affairs. Scotland, for example, has its own control over policing, crime and the legal system, and as a consequence we don't have many of the problems mentioned above. In most cases, records are removed from our DNA database if a person is found not guilty, for example.
Yet the Scottish and Welsh MPs are still able to vote in Westminster on matters that don't concern their constituents.
Can we have a parliament representing England's interests, please?
Very true. I'm not afraid of being disappeared in the middle of the night but I am afraid of the consequences they place on anyone who they even remotely consider a potential suspect - I'd wind up on the US no fly list for sure, and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if other countries start to operate similar no fly lists.
Unfortunately I'm not a US citizen so there's not a great deal I can do about US no fly lists. Our government is too busy felching the US government to make any sort of diplomatic comment about such things.
I think the problem is a lot of people don't really consider what could bring unwanted consequences.
The UK isn't the US - we don't have a great deal in the way of rights to freedom of speech enshrined in our laws. Hence, saying something like this can very easily have serious consequences and you can't start waving around a constitution as a defence.
Does it make me afraid to say some things online? Yes it does. There's lots of things I've typed up on/. only to think about it for a minute then hit "Cancel".
Does it make me feel any safer? Not really. Anyone who wants to blow up an airport is going to have more f*cking sense than to announce their intentions to the world on Twitter first.
Can I do much about it? Well, getting freedom of speech into law is something our politicians don't really consider a terribly high priority - mainly because it's hardly a vote winner. So talking a politician into making it part of policy is going to be an uphill struggle, and like most democracies the system is very heavily weighted against one person or a small group on a crusade.
Do I feel strongly enough about it to emigrate? The law as it stands in terms of freedom of speech has been much the same for centuries. It hasn't yet led to people being disappeared in the middle of the night for voicing an unpopular opinion - the fact that this is being reported is in itself a Very Good Thing. When newspapers are afraid to publish things like this because the editor would rather like to wake up in the morning, that is when you have to worry. And even if I did feel that strongly, I doubt there are many countries in the Western world today where you could say something like that on Twitter and feel perfectly safe that you'd not have any consequences to face.
They already do this for serving adverts, and restricting Iplayer to UK only people. It doesn't work flawlessly (I get ads when I view from work).
IME, the most common reason for GeoIP code to fail is not because it's broken but because your Internet connection is being routed through an IP address which is registered as being based in another country.
Either it really is in another country (you work for a multinational who has centralised how Internet traffic gets out so they can control it easily) or they have one block of IP addresses which is all registered as being based at their head office.
What do you think an 11 year old who clearly has the brains to build something like this now and has been put through the trauma will feel like doing when he is a little older and has more brains and means to get other materials... Perhaps this was why the counseling was recommended... To make sure this boy's life is not forever altered for worse from this point on... Scary stuff.
I doubt it. That would be tantamount to the people responsible saying "You've got a bright kid there and there's every possibility that our insane overreaction will scar him for life. Better get him some counselling."
I think it's far more likely they meant "You've got a dangerous kid there".
Yes, that's the most shocking part of the story to me as well. I'm not sure I'd be very cooperative with the authorities if I were the parents. I think I'd turn it into yet another learning moment, showing the kid how not to bow unquestioningly to authority. I'd have called an attorney, and politely declined the search until a proper warrant was served.
Do you honestly think that if the authorities really believed a bomb was being put together there and the parents had refused the search, the police would have shown up a couple of hours later and gently knocked on the door to say "Excuse me, madam, I have a warrant to search this house for explosives, please allow me to execute it peacefully"?
Once, when I was a student, I tried to get a copy of the school's policy manual. I was politely but firmly told to sit down and shut up. To be honest, I don't believe that such things even exist, or if they are they are so broadly defined as to be useless for informing behaviour.
I did the same thing - with little more success.
There certainly wasn't an official policy manual or anything like that and the set of rules I was able to get hold of was very brief and easy to read - and seldom bore any resemblance to anything I was likely to get in trouble for. I did on at least one occasion ask "So where's this rule written down? If it's a rule it must be written somewhere - where is it?".
It didn't take very long to work out that there wasn't a rule book - if a teacher decided that something was against the rules it automatically was. Teachers have a tendency to publicly defend their colleagues however asinine so any teacher doing that could be fairly confident that anyone complaining to some other teacher would be assured that such a rule did exist.
There isn't anything in the policy which states "Students shall not bring a hungry, ill-tempered crocodile to class - even if they have all necessary permits to keep such an animal".
But I bet you the first student who did this would be in trouble.
encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data
That just hurts my brain.
Actually, that is possible. Encrypted data doesn't generally compress as well as plaintext, and it's quite common for web servers to compress data before sending it to the client.
It's not quite as simple as that in the UK. While it's two-tier, it's strictly two-tier. Basically, unless you can afford to put yourself firmly in the upper tier you're stuck in the lower tier and there is no middle ground.
Let me explain what I mean.
There was a recent article about a woman (IIRC she had cancer) who wanted a drug which isn't prescribed by the National Health Service.
She could afford to pay for that one single drug privately. But the response from the NHS was "do that and you must get all your treatment privately - including the treatment that would normally be covered under the NHS" - the argument being that it was "unfair" that people who could afford to pay for some treatment privately should be allowed to do so.
(By that argument one could equally suggest that children going to private schools shouldn't be allowed to visit government-operated libraries, museums or art galleries - but I probably shouldn't give the government ideas).
100% Agree. The simple fact is if I encrypt it here I can't un-encrypt it there. Translation. My hard disk uses version 1.5.3.6.3.222.43..56666.333 of software BLOTZO.supersafe.org and nothing else I own does. My HD goes cactus I'm screwed.
I simply can't trust that I can recover from a failure. Even if I carry the magic secret key to the encryption.
It'll cost "me" more to recover than to have stolen.
P.S. I will go down on assault charges the next time some moron un-plugs my usb drive without safely ejecting it.
Which is why the correct response to "Oh dear my OS has failed and I now can't recover any of the encrypted data that was on the hard disk" is NOT "I'll have to crack out the bootable USB rescue disk that has never been properly tested and cannot possibly work in all circumstances".
The correct response is "Oh well, that's what the backup is there for".
(How easy it is to enforce your users not storing data on their laptops - or if they must do so guaranteeing they have a working backup facility in place - is another issue altogether).
Teddy Ruxbin? Kids love technology like this. A net enabled doll that could tell stories downloaded from the interent or created from parents sounds like the next xmas hot toy.
Already been done - though the item in the article was just an iPod dock built into a cuddly toy, something more akin to what you describe was on the UK version of Dragon's Den a couple of years back. ISTR it was backed by Peter Jones.
Why does a microwave need to know the time in the first place?
Not to say they don't exist, but I have yet to meet anyone on the planet who has ever used the "Start cooking at 18:00" feature of any cooking appliance more than once.
How about: 4. Each SKU has to be built and tested by the same group, and each SKU takes a certain amount of time. MS decided to concentrate on some combination of the biggest volume/biggest revenue SKUs and leave the lesser used ones to the end.
I thought that, but seeing as each SKU is a superset of the one beneath it it seems odd that the packaging and testing isn't to a greater or lesser extent automated. It's not like Microsoft couldn't manage the resources to do that.
Having said that, seeing how anti-automation everything Microsoft has historically churned out is (powershell notwithstanding), perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised.
Which is why original gameplay tends to come from small games without masses of fancy (read: expensive) CGI.
Or, to put it another way: How is this year's football/American football/driving/basketball game any different from last years apart from slightly updated graphics, minor tweaks to the engine and they renamed the players/teams/cars to account for changes in the last year?
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, what does CBS mean by, "there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn't do the deal"?
Exactly what they say.
The show itself may be out of copyright, but most TV shows the world over license all sorts of other snippets to turn an idea into a show ready for broadcast.
The most obvious of these is music. Is any music used still under copyright? Does the license that was originally obtained for the music (assuming it can even be found) allow CBS to release that music or is a public broadcast over the airwaves the only release method allowed?
Then you've got the question of other material. I'm not familiar with Jack Benny myself, but if he collaborated with someone else for some of the shows and that someone is still alive (or, for that matter, only recently died) you have to deal with the work that was produced collaboratively.
What we have here is a case of "beware of unintended consequences" with copyright. So many things that we might consider modern culture are essentially under copyright protection a lot longer that was originally intended not because of all the extensions to copyright law but because it exists at all - you wind up with more licensing issues than anyone is prepared to address.
Someone needed to teach China that just because they're the biggest single market in the world doesn't mean they dictate the laws that the rest of the world has to follow. In that respect China is no better than a monopolistic company, that's abusing its monopoly position.
And when they've done with that, would they mind flying over to the US and teaching them the same thing?
http://xkcd.com/538/
Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to allow other apps to open the firewall?
UPnP allows something similar. Disabling such features wouldn't necessarily gain much because if malware does get in, it's just as easy to initiate the connection from inside the home firewall and keep it open - with the added benefit that the control server knows which nodes are online because there are connections open to them. Otherwise it'd have to keep a list of which IP addresses are compromised and contact each one whenever it wants to do something - which would be slow, and wouldn't deal very well with offline nodes or dynamically assigned addresses.
You'd better tell all the ISPs that. I know of at least one that thinks they can safely reconfigure a router remotely.
The US Gov't has successfully operated as a going concern for 220+ years, with a proven and reliable management structure. Few, if any corporations, have been able to do that.
Private corporations can go under with just a couple of bad years. Or even months, particularly if they're new businesses. Governments just have to raise taxes.
Lib Dems haven't a hope of getting in.
They have some very good policies but they openly admit they'd raise taxes to enact many of them. Which given that we've spent the last 13 years having the most noticeable taxes cut (Income tax is lower), every other tax has gone through the roof and this has not gone unnoticed.
Also, the areas of the UK that have traditionally been most ill-content with the way the country is governed now have devolved parliaments, and are to some degree in charge of their own affairs. Scotland, for example, has its own control over policing, crime and the legal system, and as a consequence we don't have many of the problems mentioned above. In most cases, records are removed from our DNA database if a person is found not guilty, for example.
Yet the Scottish and Welsh MPs are still able to vote in Westminster on matters that don't concern their constituents.
Can we have a parliament representing England's interests, please?
Very true. I'm not afraid of being disappeared in the middle of the night but I am afraid of the consequences they place on anyone who they even remotely consider a potential suspect - I'd wind up on the US no fly list for sure, and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if other countries start to operate similar no fly lists.
Unfortunately I'm not a US citizen so there's not a great deal I can do about US no fly lists. Our government is too busy felching the US government to make any sort of diplomatic comment about such things.
I think the problem is a lot of people don't really consider what could bring unwanted consequences.
The UK isn't the US - we don't have a great deal in the way of rights to freedom of speech enshrined in our laws. Hence, saying something like this can very easily have serious consequences and you can't start waving around a constitution as a defence.
Does it make me afraid to say some things online? Yes it does. There's lots of things I've typed up on /. only to think about it for a minute then hit "Cancel".
Does it make me feel any safer? Not really. Anyone who wants to blow up an airport is going to have more f*cking sense than to announce their intentions to the world on Twitter first.
Can I do much about it? Well, getting freedom of speech into law is something our politicians don't really consider a terribly high priority - mainly because it's hardly a vote winner. So talking a politician into making it part of policy is going to be an uphill struggle, and like most democracies the system is very heavily weighted against one person or a small group on a crusade.
Do I feel strongly enough about it to emigrate? The law as it stands in terms of freedom of speech has been much the same for centuries. It hasn't yet led to people being disappeared in the middle of the night for voicing an unpopular opinion - the fact that this is being reported is in itself a Very Good Thing. When newspapers are afraid to publish things like this because the editor would rather like to wake up in the morning, that is when you have to worry. And even if I did feel that strongly, I doubt there are many countries in the Western world today where you could say something like that on Twitter and feel perfectly safe that you'd not have any consequences to face.
They already do this for serving adverts, and restricting Iplayer to UK only people. It doesn't work flawlessly (I get ads when I view from work).
IME, the most common reason for GeoIP code to fail is not because it's broken but because your Internet connection is being routed through an IP address which is registered as being based in another country.
Either it really is in another country (you work for a multinational who has centralised how Internet traffic gets out so they can control it easily) or they have one block of IP addresses which is all registered as being based at their head office.
What do you think an 11 year old who clearly has the brains to build something like this now and has been put through the trauma will feel like doing when he is a little older and has more brains and means to get other materials... Perhaps this was why the counseling was recommended... To make sure this boy's life is not forever altered for worse from this point on... Scary stuff.
I doubt it. That would be tantamount to the people responsible saying "You've got a bright kid there and there's every possibility that our insane overreaction will scar him for life. Better get him some counselling."
I think it's far more likely they meant "You've got a dangerous kid there".
Yes, that's the most shocking part of the story to me as well. I'm not sure I'd be very cooperative with the authorities if I were the parents. I think I'd turn it into yet another learning moment, showing the kid how not to bow unquestioningly to authority. I'd have called an attorney, and politely declined the search until a proper warrant was served.
Do you honestly think that if the authorities really believed a bomb was being put together there and the parents had refused the search, the police would have shown up a couple of hours later and gently knocked on the door to say "Excuse me, madam, I have a warrant to search this house for explosives, please allow me to execute it peacefully"?
Once, when I was a student, I tried to get a copy of the school's policy manual. I was politely but firmly told to sit down and shut up. To be honest, I don't believe that such things even exist, or if they are they are so broadly defined as to be useless for informing behaviour.
I did the same thing - with little more success.
There certainly wasn't an official policy manual or anything like that and the set of rules I was able to get hold of was very brief and easy to read - and seldom bore any resemblance to anything I was likely to get in trouble for. I did on at least one occasion ask "So where's this rule written down? If it's a rule it must be written somewhere - where is it?".
It didn't take very long to work out that there wasn't a rule book - if a teacher decided that something was against the rules it automatically was. Teachers have a tendency to publicly defend their colleagues however asinine so any teacher doing that could be fairly confident that anyone complaining to some other teacher would be assured that such a rule did exist.
There isn't anything in the policy which states "Students shall not bring a hungry, ill-tempered crocodile to class - even if they have all necessary permits to keep such an animal".
But I bet you the first student who did this would be in trouble.
encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data
That just hurts my brain.
Actually, that is possible. Encrypted data doesn't generally compress as well as plaintext, and it's quite common for web servers to compress data before sending it to the client.
It's not quite as simple as that in the UK. While it's two-tier, it's strictly two-tier. Basically, unless you can afford to put yourself firmly in the upper tier you're stuck in the lower tier and there is no middle ground.
Let me explain what I mean.
There was a recent article about a woman (IIRC she had cancer) who wanted a drug which isn't prescribed by the National Health Service.
She could afford to pay for that one single drug privately. But the response from the NHS was "do that and you must get all your treatment privately - including the treatment that would normally be covered under the NHS" - the argument being that it was "unfair" that people who could afford to pay for some treatment privately should be allowed to do so.
(By that argument one could equally suggest that children going to private schools shouldn't be allowed to visit government-operated libraries, museums or art galleries - but I probably shouldn't give the government ideas).
100% Agree. The simple fact is if I encrypt it here I can't un-encrypt it there. Translation. My hard disk uses version 1.5.3.6.3.222.43..56666.333 of software BLOTZO.supersafe.org and nothing else I own does. My HD goes cactus I'm screwed.
I simply can't trust that I can recover from a failure. Even if I carry the magic secret key to the encryption.
It'll cost "me" more to recover than to have stolen.
P.S. I will go down on assault charges the next time some moron un-plugs my usb drive without safely ejecting it.
Which is why the correct response to "Oh dear my OS has failed and I now can't recover any of the encrypted data that was on the hard disk" is NOT "I'll have to crack out the bootable USB rescue disk that has never been properly tested and cannot possibly work in all circumstances".
The correct response is "Oh well, that's what the backup is there for".
(How easy it is to enforce your users not storing data on their laptops - or if they must do so guaranteeing they have a working backup facility in place - is another issue altogether).
Teddy Ruxbin? Kids love technology like this. A net enabled doll that could tell stories downloaded from the interent or created from parents sounds like the next xmas hot toy.
Already been done - though the item in the article was just an iPod dock built into a cuddly toy, something more akin to what you describe was on the UK version of Dragon's Den a couple of years back. ISTR it was backed by Peter Jones.
Why does a microwave need to know the time in the first place?
Not to say they don't exist, but I have yet to meet anyone on the planet who has ever used the "Start cooking at 18:00" feature of any cooking appliance more than once.
Google doesn't seem to think so - it asks "Did you mean: tiananmen square".
At least, I assume that's what the chinese is saying.
Are you suggesting that Google is wrong?! Unthinkable!
Erm... Google images search for tiananmen square tank man in china:
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=en&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tiananmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&start=0
And on google.co.uk:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tiananmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&start=0
Good question. I'd imagine they're being ruled by finance guys, who want the lowest risk ROI they can think of.
If SuperFootball 2007, 2008 and 2009 were huge sellers, it seems logical to put the effort towards 2010.
How about:
4. Each SKU has to be built and tested by the same group, and each SKU takes a certain amount of time. MS decided to concentrate on some combination of the biggest volume/biggest revenue SKUs and leave the lesser used ones to the end.
I thought that, but seeing as each SKU is a superset of the one beneath it it seems odd that the packaging and testing isn't to a greater or lesser extent automated. It's not like Microsoft couldn't manage the resources to do that.
Having said that, seeing how anti-automation everything Microsoft has historically churned out is (powershell notwithstanding), perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised.
Which is why original gameplay tends to come from small games without masses of fancy (read: expensive) CGI.
Or, to put it another way: How is this year's football/American football/driving/basketball game any different from last years apart from slightly updated graphics, minor tweaks to the engine and they renamed the players/teams/cars to account for changes in the last year?