Why do people think this? This is stupid. This idea is ANTI-Freedom. "People" or "Users" shouldn't be able to dictate by force (law) that a company must make a product that has the features they want. That is ludicrous. If you don't like it don't buy Apple, geez is that so f'ing hard? It's not like you can't find out BEFORE you buy an iPhone that it doesn't run flash. Don't be an imbecile.
The iPad/iPhone are not general purpose computing devices. They are platforms to deliver content.
This is what Eben Moglen says about platforms,
"What we have are things we call platforms? The word platform, like cloud, doesn't inherently mean anything. Thrown around a lot in business talk, but basically what 'platform' means is places you can't leave, stuff your stuck to, things that don't let you off.
I hate to mention this because another crowd has co-opted the identity, but wasn't the Boston Tea Party pretty much a revolt against this kind of thing?
This is Santa Clara County. You know... Silicon Valley. Home of Google and Yahoo! and scads of other Internet companies. Maybe all the googlers and yahoos are out of the loop since they get to eat for free at work.
For all of you that keep saying "I don't post private information on the intarwebs, so I'm safe" you are missing the point.
Facebook is just the leading example but ther has been a fundamental shift in the way the Internet is being used since the 90's.
Eben Moglen:
We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage - machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal.
In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web - that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.
The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.
The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web - the server, decentralised. It becomes, instead of a lump of iron, a digital appliance, which can be running anywhere. This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control. They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron, subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.
This is a pessimal result.
read the rest here.
if you're too lazy to read watch it here.
Well, customers buy things from vendors. Do the readers buy anything from the site?
Sounds to me as if the advertisers are the customers and the readers are the product. Your product getting out of line? Ban a few as an example to keep the rest in line.
Why are so many people will to be stepped on like this? Who knows?
I love how some people are crying "censorship." These people are claiming that Apple is "oppressing" everyone and specifically Mark Fiore by not allowing him to publish his comic on in their app store.
First of all, if this were "oppression" then is would only be the "oppression" of iPhone users and Mark Fiore. No where has Apple claimed to be a platform for free speech. Some Apple customers don't seem to understand that by choosing Apple you are choosing a company that wants to CONTROL your experience with their products. Regardless of why they want that control, they still want it and do a great deal to secure it.
Second, it seems to me that these people forget an important aspect of Freedom, specifically the freedom to associate OR NOT with those whom we choose. Like it or not, Apple enjoys that freedom as well as the rest of us.
Apple's policies in this matter break no law. When you bought an iPhone you implicitly agreed to them. When you develop for the iPhone you explicitly agree to them. Stop complaining about the results of your own stupid choice. Think about shit like this before you buy a company's products.
Now on a different note, censorship. Who decided that all censorship was bad? Why shouldn't Apple be allowed to censor their platform? It is theirs after all. Why should Apple be forced to publish material that they don't want to publish? Apple censoring their products is well with their rights and a perfectly legitimate thing to do. IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU ARE FREE TO REFRAIN FROM BUYING OR USING APPLE PRODUCTS!
Suggesting that a company censoring their own platforms is equal to the government preventing the free exchange of ideas is ridiculous, therefore I ridicule it.
Equating this act of self censorship with a government policy preventing the free exchange of ideas is evil, whereas Apple not publishing this guys comic strip not.
For the record, I do not own an iPhone. The only apple product I own is an (older) iPod. I do not buy media content (music or video) from Apple. I am not an Apple fan-boy or apologist, it just really bugs me when people have these f'ed up arguments that don't really make sense.
Sexy. Yes this is not really impressive unless you find this sort of thing impressive. (I do). Unique? Not really. Difficult to duplicate? Hardly. Fun to watch? Definitely!
This subtractive method of production is pretty old. When we can actually produce in quantity parts with this same precision from a medium in an additive fashion we will have accomplished innovation.
I think his main point is not about sharing information about with your friends about what you're doing on Friday night, it is about the meta-information you leave behind when using a centralized server/client model like almost everything is now on the Internet.
In the lecture he talks about how infrastructures like facebook can be used to spy on people, and he's not talking about the information that you publish, he's talking about the information that can be inferred from the analysis of your activities. (i.e facebook employees can guess with a fair degree of accuracy who has a crush on whom because they can see how many times so-and-so looked at so-and-so's page)
His problem is not that people want to have online profiles and share information with each other, his problem is that the client server model that has evolved on the Internet is inherently susceptible to misuse and the erosion of human freedom. He wants to move the Internet back to what it originally was intended to be which is a network of equal peers.
The way it works now, with big servers in the middle and all us tiny dis-empowered clients on the edge is a model that is inherently susceptible to abuse and is indeed being misused to humankind's disenfranchisement.
One step he suggests toward restoring some of our privacy is for the open/free software community to build a free software stack that will run on very small cheap hardware i.e. shevaplug that individuals will use to host their own profile in their own home. "You keep the logs" if a law enforcement agency wants to spy one you they have to get a subpoena to search your actual house (where the server actually is). With this decentralized model he suggests that it will be harder to aggregate all the data about individuals.
I'm sorry but you're wrong about punishing taxpayers. Your suggestion punishes people who voted AGAINST the officials who broke the law. The people who voted against were doing all they legally could and do not deserve to be punished. You keep saying, "people" and "taxpayers" as if everyone is unanimous which is not true. Taxpayers are not the same as stockholders who can divest anytime they don't like the performance of a company.
The officials who acted are the ones to be punished and removed if applicable, and "the people" should be required to hold another election.
Moore and Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular.com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.
Why didn't he publish the registrars that provide typo domains? There isn't any question that they profit directly from those typosquaters.
I didn't try at all, and that was my point. This being slashdot, that information should be in the header with all the other stuff I listed. I shouldn't have to go to the publishers website to find it out if it is "all rights reserved" or CC or what ever.
...or the review past the first paragraph and little table. This is slashdot right? Title, Author, Pages, Publisher, Rating, Reviewer, ISBN, Summary. Why isn't "License" on there? And if you suspect that, "The reason is obvious, because it is the same as all other dead-tree-book licenses" I still think it should be mentioned if only to pressure more authors to consider their audience when making decisions about licensing their content. If we can get details about the terms of the publishing contract even better. I'd like to know where an author stands in the copyright debate, and this can be demonstrated by how they license the content they produce.
If we are to shun musicians who cling to the RIAA, shouldn't we at least grumble at authors who cling to the old school book publishing establishment (I'm not even sure if there is a similar organization in book publishing) ?
So I'm not saying that what Optus is doing is right, but can't ppl get paid apps if they use wifi instead of the gprs or 3g or edge or what ever they have in Australia?
I got a Motorola cliq from T-mobile and wasn't able to add a data plan to my phone right away but was able to use WiFi to install anything I wanted from the Market. Do those phones not have WiFi? Once again I'm not saying that it is right what the phone company is doing, but maybe there hasn't been a huge negative reaction because it is pretty simple to get around the block.
What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flat out wrong. It isn't the small amount of time doing the job a fire fighter is paid for. It is BEING READY to do that job WHEN it is NEEDED.
Being on call when salaried is one thing. What happens when you call a plumber in the middle of the night? You pay more. No difference. If you are an independent contractor, you need to set your own rate. Being INDEPENDENT affords you the opportunity to structure that rate as you deem appropriate taking into account this ompetitive market. There is no law that says contractors can't charge different rates for different times of the day.
It's like that old joke about the engineer fixing the big machine by tapping it with a hammer*. Sometimes the CONTEXT of the work is just as important, and sometimes even more important than the actual work itself.
*There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. It shook and vibrated violently every time they started the machine. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular spot on the side component of the machine, took a sledge hammer and hit the spot a smashing blow. Instantly, the machine quit vibrating and ran smooth as silk.
The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.
They wrote him a letter saying that $50,000 for hitting the machine was outrageous as any fool could have done that. They demanded an explanation.
The engineer responded with a new bill stating: One sledge hammer blow to machinery - $1.00 Knowing where to hit machinery - $49,999.00
Seriously, if you're life is impacted so severely by an anonymous post on a college gossip site then something is wrong with your life. People debate the validity of Wikipedia posts, but trust a gossip site?
Honestly, I think this is a symptom of a lack of integrity. Parents aren't teaching their kids to have integrity any more. If you have integrity you don't fall apart when some one gossips about you. You also don't gossip about others, or put much importance in other people who gossip.
It is more important to be popular than to have integrity, and that is a shame.
These graphics weren't used as CGI, the were put on a display that was running in the scene. Computers were not used to render the scene.
1) A computer showed graphics on a screen, that screen was filmed frame by frame (it took 2 minutes for the computer to render each frame). 2) That film was developed, and then rear projected onto what was supposed to be a computer display surface during a scene.
CGI is when a computer is used to render the final image projected in the theater.
HMD production. If it doesn't some one is asleep at the wheel. For a concept demonstration, projecting stuff onto the real world is fine, but in practice it is horrible. The missing link for effective augmented reality like this is an effective variable transparency head mounted displays. I hope something like this makes it to mass market sooner rather than later.
So now you are a terrorist if you wear antiperspirant. Because, if you're not a terrorist, then you have nothing to be afraid of, so if you are wearing antiperspirant, you must have something your hiding and you ARE afraid then you MUST be a terrorist.
From Wikipedia: Where available, aiding and abetting liability generally requires three elements: 1) an underlying violation by a principal; 2) knowledge of that violation and/or the intent to facilitate the violation; and 3) assistance to the principal in the violation.
Who is the principal? IOW if he is "aiding and abetting" who are these people and what are they being charged with? Who are his co-conspirators?
So, I wonder what this kinda stuff will look like on Google wave. I haven't received my invite yet, but I've watched their 80min video and been following several discussions about it. It seems like anyone can add anyone to a wave, so all it will take is a robot to add everyone on a server to a spam/phishing/scam wave. I wonder if you can just leave the wave? New technologies can have interesting new exploits. I don't remember Google ever addressing spam or other forms of abuse in the presentation.
Slashdot Mirror
But that should be up to the user, not Apple.
Why do people think this? This is stupid. This idea is ANTI-Freedom. "People" or "Users" shouldn't be able to dictate by force (law) that a company must make a product that has the features they want. That is ludicrous. If you don't like it don't buy Apple, geez is that so f'ing hard? It's not like you can't find out BEFORE you buy an iPhone that it doesn't run flash. Don't be an imbecile.
The iPad/iPhone are not general purpose computing devices. They are platforms to deliver content.
This is what Eben Moglen says about platforms,
"What we have are things we call platforms? The word platform, like cloud, doesn't inherently mean anything. Thrown around a lot in business talk, but basically what 'platform' means is places you can't leave, stuff your stuck to, things that don't let you off.
If you don't like that don't buy a platform.
I hate to mention this because another crowd has co-opted the identity, but wasn't the Boston Tea Party pretty much a revolt against this kind of thing?
This is what Eben Moglen calls for in his lecture about freedom in the cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
This is Santa Clara County. You know... Silicon Valley. Home of Google and Yahoo! and scads of other Internet companies. Maybe all the googlers and yahoos are out of the loop since they get to eat for free at work.
Eben Moglen:
We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage - machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal.
In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web - that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.
The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.
The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web - the server, decentralised. It becomes, instead of a lump of iron, a digital appliance, which can be running anywhere. This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control. They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron, subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.
This is a pessimal result.
read the rest here.
if you're too lazy to read watch it here.
Well, customers buy things from vendors. Do the readers buy anything from the site?
Sounds to me as if the advertisers are the customers and the readers are the product. Your product getting out of line? Ban a few as an example to keep the rest in line.
Why are so many people will to be stepped on like this? Who knows?
I love how some people are crying "censorship." These people are claiming that Apple is "oppressing" everyone and specifically Mark Fiore by not allowing him to publish his comic on in their app store.
First of all, if this were "oppression" then is would only be the "oppression" of iPhone users and Mark Fiore. No where has Apple claimed to be a platform for free speech. Some Apple customers don't seem to understand that by choosing Apple you are choosing a company that wants to CONTROL your experience with their products. Regardless of why they want that control, they still want it and do a great deal to secure it.
Second, it seems to me that these people forget an important aspect of Freedom, specifically the freedom to associate OR NOT with those whom we choose. Like it or not, Apple enjoys that freedom as well as the rest of us.
Apple's policies in this matter break no law. When you bought an iPhone you implicitly agreed to them. When you develop for the iPhone you explicitly agree to them. Stop complaining about the results of your own stupid choice. Think about shit like this before you buy a company's products.
Now on a different note, censorship.
Who decided that all censorship was bad? Why shouldn't Apple be allowed to censor their platform? It is theirs after all. Why should Apple be forced to publish material that they don't want to publish? Apple censoring their products is well with their rights and a perfectly legitimate thing to do. IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU ARE FREE TO REFRAIN FROM BUYING OR USING APPLE PRODUCTS!
Suggesting that a company censoring their own platforms is equal to the government preventing the free exchange of ideas is ridiculous, therefore I ridicule it.
Equating this act of self censorship with a government policy preventing the free exchange of ideas is evil, whereas Apple not publishing this guys comic strip not.
For the record, I do not own an iPhone. The only apple product I own is an (older) iPod. I do not buy media content (music or video) from Apple. I am not an Apple fan-boy or apologist, it just really bugs me when people have these f'ed up arguments that don't really make sense.
Sexy. Yes this is not really impressive unless you find this sort of thing impressive. (I do). Unique? Not really. Difficult to duplicate? Hardly. Fun to watch? Definitely!
This subtractive method of production is pretty old. When we can actually produce in quantity parts with this same precision from a medium in an additive fashion we will have accomplished innovation.
Watch the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
I think his main point is not about sharing information about with your friends about what you're doing on Friday night, it is about the meta-information you leave behind when using a centralized server/client model like almost everything is now on the Internet.
In the lecture he talks about how infrastructures like facebook can be used to spy on people, and he's not talking about the information that you publish, he's talking about the information that can be inferred from the analysis of your activities. (i.e facebook employees can guess with a fair degree of accuracy who has a crush on whom because they can see how many times so-and-so looked at so-and-so's page)
His problem is not that people want to have online profiles and share information with each other, his problem is that the client server model that has evolved on the Internet is inherently susceptible to misuse and the erosion of human freedom. He wants to move the Internet back to what it originally was intended to be which is a network of equal peers.
The way it works now, with big servers in the middle and all us tiny dis-empowered clients on the edge is a model that is inherently susceptible to abuse and is indeed being misused to humankind's disenfranchisement.
One step he suggests toward restoring some of our privacy is for the open/free software community to build a free software stack that will run on very small cheap hardware i.e. shevaplug that individuals will use to host their own profile in their own home. "You keep the logs" if a law enforcement agency wants to spy one you they have to get a subpoena to search your actual house (where the server actually is). With this decentralized model he suggests that it will be harder to aggregate all the data about individuals.
Niney you know kinda like sevenish.
That may be true, but govt contracts must be public.
I'm sorry but you're wrong about punishing taxpayers. Your suggestion punishes people who voted AGAINST the officials who broke the law. The people who voted against were doing all they legally could and do not deserve to be punished. You keep saying, "people" and "taxpayers" as if everyone is unanimous which is not true. Taxpayers are not the same as stockholders who can divest anytime they don't like the performance of a company.
The officials who acted are the ones to be punished and removed if applicable, and "the people" should be required to hold another election.
The guy who did the "study" is a douche.
Moore and Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.
Why didn't he publish the registrars that provide typo domains? There isn't any question that they profit directly from those typosquaters.
So I'm a monomaniac because I want to make an informed decision about who I give money to?
You didn't try very hard...
I didn't try at all, and that was my point. This being slashdot, that information should be in the header with all the other stuff I listed. I shouldn't have to go to the publishers website to find it out if it is "all rights reserved" or CC or what ever.
...or the review past the first paragraph and little table. This is slashdot right? Title, Author, Pages, Publisher, Rating, Reviewer, ISBN, Summary. Why isn't "License" on there? And if you suspect that, "The reason is obvious, because it is the same as all other dead-tree-book licenses" I still think it should be mentioned if only to pressure more authors to consider their audience when making decisions about licensing their content. If we can get details about the terms of the publishing contract even better. I'd like to know where an author stands in the copyright debate, and this can be demonstrated by how they license the content they produce.
If we are to shun musicians who cling to the RIAA, shouldn't we at least grumble at authors who cling to the old school book publishing establishment (I'm not even sure if there is a similar organization in book publishing) ?
So I'm not saying that what Optus is doing is right, but can't ppl get paid apps if they use wifi instead of the gprs or 3g or edge or what ever they have in Australia?
I got a Motorola cliq from T-mobile and wasn't able to add a data plan to my phone right away but was able to use WiFi to install anything I wanted from the Market. Do those phones not have WiFi? Once again I'm not saying that it is right what the phone company is doing, but maybe there hasn't been a huge negative reaction because it is pretty simple to get around the block.
What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flat out wrong. It isn't the small amount of time doing the job a fire fighter is paid for. It is BEING READY to do that job WHEN it is NEEDED.
Being on call when salaried is one thing. What happens when you call a plumber in the middle of the night? You pay more. No difference. If you are an independent contractor, you need to set your own rate. Being INDEPENDENT affords you the opportunity to structure that rate as you deem appropriate taking into account this ompetitive market. There is no law that says contractors can't charge different rates for different times of the day.
It's like that old joke about the engineer fixing the big machine by tapping it with a hammer*. Sometimes the CONTEXT of the work is just as important, and sometimes even more important than the actual work itself.
*There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. It shook and vibrated violently every time they started the machine. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular spot on the side component of the machine, took a sledge hammer and hit the spot a smashing blow. Instantly, the machine quit vibrating and ran smooth as silk.
The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.
They wrote him a letter saying that $50,000 for hitting the machine was outrageous as any fool could have done that. They demanded an explanation.
The engineer responded with a new bill stating:
One sledge hammer blow to machinery - $1.00
Knowing where to hit machinery - $49,999.00
Seriously, if you're life is impacted so severely by an anonymous post on a college gossip site then something is wrong with your life. People debate the validity of Wikipedia posts, but trust a gossip site?
Honestly, I think this is a symptom of a lack of integrity. Parents aren't teaching their kids to have integrity any more. If you have integrity you don't fall apart when some one gossips about you. You also don't gossip about others, or put much importance in other people who gossip.
It is more important to be popular than to have integrity, and that is a shame.
These graphics weren't used as CGI, the were put on a display that was running in the scene. Computers were not used to render the scene.
1) A computer showed graphics on a screen, that screen was filmed frame by frame (it took 2 minutes for the computer to render each frame).
2) That film was developed, and then rear projected onto what was supposed to be a computer display surface during a scene.
CGI is when a computer is used to render the final image projected in the theater.
starting in 3... 2.... 1....
HMD production. If it doesn't some one is asleep at the wheel. For a concept demonstration, projecting stuff onto the real world is fine, but in practice it is horrible. The missing link for effective augmented reality like this is an effective variable transparency head mounted displays. I hope something like this makes it to mass market sooner rather than later.
...to America!
So now you are a terrorist if you wear antiperspirant. Because, if you're not a terrorist, then you have nothing to be afraid of, so if you are wearing antiperspirant, you must have something your hiding and you ARE afraid then you MUST be a terrorist.
Antiperspirant, the latest terrorist threat.
From Wikipedia:
Where available, aiding and abetting liability generally requires three elements: 1) an underlying violation by a principal; 2) knowledge of that violation and/or the intent to facilitate the violation; and 3) assistance to the principal in the violation.
Who is the principal? IOW if he is "aiding and abetting" who are these people and what are they being charged with? Who are his co-conspirators?
So, I wonder what this kinda stuff will look like on Google wave. I haven't received my invite yet, but I've watched their 80min video and been following several discussions about it. It seems like anyone can add anyone to a wave, so all it will take is a robot to add everyone on a server to a spam/phishing/scam wave. I wonder if you can just leave the wave? New technologies can have interesting new exploits. I don't remember Google ever addressing spam or other forms of abuse in the presentation.