I've never understood how targetted advertising == invasion of privacy.
When you frequent a bar regularly, the barman gets to know your favorite drink(s). You'll arrive one everning, and he'll say "Hello Dave, the usual ?". I have never felt the need to respond "How dare you invade my privacy with your targetted sales".
If we have to endure adverts on the web, then at least let them be relevant to what I enjoy.
It's not that I am against advertisement being relevant in general, but if you need to break into my house and kidnap me for an MRI to deliver a relevant ad then I will take offense.
Your barman analogy would be apt if Google did that only on their sites. That's what the original idea behind tracking cookies was supposed to be about. I'd still be concerned if todays search for Airfare, combined with yesterday's search for composting chemicals, combined with the day before that searching for a gift for my muslim girlfriend lead some overzealous data analyzer to put me on a terrorist list: but that's peanuts compared to the real issue.
The real issue is that a huge portion of the web is served by Google's ads, and Google is collecting demographic data about you EVERYWHERE YOU BROWSE where you tread past one of their ads. The huge issue is that ad publishers can elect not to display targeted ads, but they CANNOT ELECT not to collect data on Google's behalf.
This puts Google on equal footing with Facebook in terms of disregard to user privacy.
You see, it's one thing for Google to be capable of collecting this volume of data on it's users. So's my ISP, for example. However my ISP would be violating Federal Wiretapping laws if they tried to take any action based on such data, or in any way made clear they had been snooping. Google somehow skirts beyond such protection, and can ostensibly not only know nearly every website you visit (including referal data when you arive in their sphere of influence from non-participating sites) via adsense *and* urchin beacons, but openly share this data with unknown third parties to deliver their "service".
"Luckily", you can opt out of this profiling program by being branded with a special "cookie" that stores a unique hash, indexed into their black box database, which they promise only tells their data miners to stop mining. (despite the fact this is a hash, similar to a UPC code, not a simple directive such as "google_tracking=no") They also have a clearinghouse where you can view the data they (admit to) keep on you, and you can even erase or prune it... that is, if you are man enough to log into a google account, tying your activity to your Gmail account et al, and then you still can't see data tied up in cookies on browsers that have not yet been cross referenced to your google account.
So, in short, in case you don't trust their intentions with your data, you are asked to instead trust their flimsy opt-out policy and trust that they honor it, and will continue honoring it in perpetuity instead of "accidentally" forgetting and collecting your data anyhow.
I know it sounds pedantic, but it's a serious distinction that most people misunderstand and that the media companies want you to misunderstand.
Mmm, I like the cut of your jib. Note that the "limited time" you cite has not yet legally elapsed, and we can count on this administration to continue extending it interminably, I would very much like to evict all renters of copyright from their monopolies at the earliest convenience.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but THEY ARE NOT PAYING THE RENT THEY OWE by releasing their materials to enrich the public domain.
Facebook exists for the express purpose of escaping anonymity and privacy. That is just what personal publishing is.
The danger here is that people normally don't use Facebook to publish. That's what public blogs are for. They use Failbook to communicate with their (often) closely kept circle of friends.
They simply don't normally realize (until it's too late) that the service provider is always privy to these communications and connections, or often times how deep the analysis goes. It's like having a CCTV on your online life 24/7. People will not often grasp the danger until they get stalked by an ex, or the FBI ruffles them up for being 2 degrees of separation from some alleged terrorist.
I look at "Piracy" (be it infringement or swashbuckling) as opportunistic rebellion against the mercantile establishment. Even in cases where such opportunistic rebellion becomes hazardous to the innocent (present day Somalian pirates being a prime example) it is foolish to waste effort railing directly against the pirates that could be expended in starving them of circumstance to conflict with the establishment in the first place.
Lets say you have mold creeping up the walls in your bathroom. Perhaps it even endangers your children, who are allergic. Do you spend your time scrubbing the mold, which grows back faster than you can scrub? Or do you go to the root and fix the leaking pipe hidden behind the facade of your wall, and then mop up whatever mold still has the momentum to grow?
In the case of Somalia, change trade policy so that hijacking insured boats (where the boat owners and insurance companies also profit at the hazard of the crew) is no longer more lucrative for the fishermen than fishing or other endeavors might be. If there still remain knots of criminals too tough for the newly incentivized merchants and insurance companies to resist, then focus law enforcement scrubbing in that area.
In the case of copyright, we should elegantly and smoothly dismantle copyright. This would render most file sharers and even most back lot DVD peddlers into the sunlight where they would no longer need to be persecuted. All that would be left to scrub away are the plagiarizers and fraudsters, and they would be much easier to out and to prosecute without the censorship of copyright in the way.
For us infringers, "Pirate" is both a dysphemism and a romantic term. We've reclaimed it (as our founding fathers reclaimed "Capitalism" from Karl Marx), so look lively, ye scurvy scalawag!:D
save for a sliver of difference, ethics and morals are entirely congruent. And yes, they are relative.
Luckily for us, they are relative to something.:3 Specifically, they are relatively beneficial and relatively practicable.
In the case of Copyright, it is demonstrable that the free flow of information is more beneficial to culture and economy than the censorship of copyright, given that a system of copyright cannot survive coexistence with a culture that freely shares information. The reach of Copyright must outstretch the reach of raw communication in order for it to be enforceable whatsoever.
Put in simpler terms, "You cannot compete with free".
One might argue that piracy is evil, but RIAA is far greater evil. I'm downloading sogs because it's the lesser evil:)
Yay! Coincidentally, I am living in harmony with my fellow man instead of going on a killing spree, because that is also less evil.:D
Anyway, I argue that Piracy is not evil and that resisting immoral laws is actually a positive thing to do. Regardless of your reasons friend, thank you for joining the march.:3
I'm cheering for an outcome that happens to coincide with Google's interests, but I would be (grudgingly) rooting for the same outcome were it Microsoft or Monsanto being attacked for the same reasons.
I agree with you, but I wouldn't grudge that much. I'll root for Microsoft or Apple or even The Chinese Goverment to win any fight they happen to accidentally find themselves on the morally positive side of, and then I'll continue to resist them on every other front they are on the wrong side of.:)
Case in point: Google continues to disrespect user privacy, most glaringly with their Behavioral Targeting program in Adsense. They appear to be slowly reversing this trend in new products (Google Wave Federation) and new PR babies (the Data Liberation Front), but they have not yet fully repented on a philosophic level. They need to learn that user privacy belongs to users, and that some problems are best left for others to solve. So, for example, don't offer me a cookie to express my wish not to be targeted by adsense, and then offer me a plugin to defend my right to clear cookies without losing your "opt-out" cookie. That is foxes guarding the hen house, and then more foxes to make sure the first foxes do their job.;P
My understanding is that the DMCA requires a copyright owner to notify the hosting site of each infringing item. Knowing in general that content is posted without a license isn't infringement.
Viacom is trying to kill the entire possibility of letting the general public post anything at all, for fear somebody somewhere might think they own it. Google's just a convenient target with deep pockets just in case a court is dumb enough to swallow.
This point is accurate. Viacom doesn't care that you can hear it's music or see it's shows on Google's services or on Youtube. Viacom knows as well as we do that it isn't losing any sales, and oftentimes even gains sales when this happens.
What Viacom cares about is that in the coming decade indies will compete against it, and indies will rely upon open services to do so. Viacom will use any means available to make it illegal for anyone to upload anything, due to the one in a zillion chance that the content might be copyrighted by someone somewhere.
Copyright law isn't good enough for the entertainment industry, they don't want the expense of dragging millions of individual infringers into court. They don't want to be on equal footing to the little guy. So they created the DMCA.
But the DMCA wasn't good enough either, because even when they ask Youtube to take down material scattershot (often opening themselves up to perjury because they do not make qualified humans check their assumptions and oft times sabotage material that clearly legal on a regular basis) many uploaders file a counter-DMCA to bring it back up, and the industry is back to the expensive process of settling matters in court one citizen at a time.
So now they would much prefer to see open media sharing die completely. They pine for the days when the entertainment oligopoly effectively controlled the global distribution of all media. When media distribution was an economy of scale.
Viacom wants nothing short of protectionism. Piracy is just a red herring to achieve this goal, and Viacom is glad that it can get some of that herring juice onto Google's brand now.
When you download movies, do you intend to profit from them? Petty piracy and real 'dollar bills' piracy are two completely different acts deserving of their own consideration, don't you think?
Actually, I disagree. When I download movies, the only reason I don't profit from them is because I am too lazy.
If the recent emergence of virtual economies in direct violation of the terms of service in games such as WoW can teach us anything, it is that there is no meaningful way to legislate against the circulation of money. So long as people can either legally or practicably do a thing, and people will pay them money to do it, then profit will inevitably be had.
Regarding copyright, if people can legally view the content then they can practicably copy it, legal or not. If people can copy it, then people may pay to obtain such a copy, legal or not.
This progression is inexorable and preventing it is astronomically impractical. The only way to keep a secret is not to publish it. Published information can and will be shared. Deal with it.
I am also in favor of entirely abolishing copyright. I do not believe that reproducing publicly available information is evil, whether or not you intend to profit and whether or not you intend to try to compete against the original authors in it's distribution. I do believe that granting authors a distribution monopoly is evil. I believe doing so harms our culture, harms the consumer and even harms the author. For example, they are strongly compelled by the market to sell off these rights to powerful marketing and distribution middlemen who clothe themselves as the extortionist gatekeepers to popular culture, indenturing the authors and fleecing the public in the process.
"An immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it, at every hazard." - - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Put another way, if breaking the law is unilaterally "Evil" then you should direct your ire towards TOR for aiding Chinese citizens in routing around censorship or Twitter for helping organize "illegal" protests in the middle east.
Every government seems to favor some method of censorship or another, and Copyright just happens to be our government's favorite flavor.
it is unamerican, because it is feudal. it gives control of the intellectual life over to a few.
Yo parent, I just want to clarify your position here. Are you saying that "copyrights" are unamerican (I would agree), or that "fighting [against] copyrights" is unamerican (as GP sarcastically suggests)?:3
The founding fathers supported the patent and copyright systems, to promote industrial and artistic creativity. They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.
I could argue against you here, but I cannot hope to be more eloquant than a founding father.:P
England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Of course you're right. The only reason cost tends toward energy cost of the creation of an object is that the profit tends towards zero in a perfect market-based system, and that can of course be distorted in a myriad of ways.
Right on, I'm glad we're on the same page then.:)
TBH, in order to either index the wholesale price or to index a well-market-regulated retail price, I am now very fond of your energy utilization idea. It's very reminiscent of the work of Nikolai Kardashev, who saw the index of energy utilization as powerful enough to extrapolate and infer the capacities of hypothetical intergalactic civilizations.
Another useful application of such a measuring tool, per our discussion, might be that if energy utilization is a good index to prices in a well regulated market, then the failure of that index to describe market prices might be a good indicator of a distorted market; where such an allegation might be hotly contested.
For example, if you want a smoking gun to demonstrate to a government (or a people) that a particular industry is failing to deliver goods and services efficiently to consumers, and that some ginger regulatory action may be required (or perhaps lifted, if such action caused the imbalance to begin with) to correct the problem, an approach like this might be very generic and all-purpose: safe from any skewed industry insider perspective or consumer stockholm syndrome.
Why are you changing gears to DVD's though and talking about special effects and huge teams of people?
I do not believe you can say very much empirical energy is spent on a "brand" however, without falling down the slippery slope of baking an apple pie for Carl Sagan.
The item I was citing is a CD. So forget all of your visuals for a moment, all of your digitally rendered special effects, pyrotechnics, and location shoots, and focus on a band, no more than a handful of sound technicians and computers, and the same instruments and recording studio that are used to make dozens of other CD's before and after this one.
So why does the CD ($12-15) cost damn near as much as a new release DVD of Waterworld? ($17-19)
I'll tell you how I'm willing to accept your theory: I think your proposal makes a ton more sense when the market is not distorted by monopolistic forces, when perfect competition is allowed to commoditize the product. We could call this the "fair" price. I do concur that energy utilization is a great index for that sticker price. That retail price is also forced to remain proportionate to the wholesale price.
Remember when Ma Bell rented out Western Electric telephones for something like $2/mo, and it was illegal to connect any other product to the POTS network? Or to this day, when POTS providers charge $30/mo for a local loop of landline, with no long distance capability whatsoever, and another $7/mo for voicemail service? Look up Asterisk and then tell me how the provision of voicemail requires $7 of energy per month per capita.
Final example, someone kidnaps a relative of yours. Let's use your formula to derive the optimal price they'll ask, or you'll pay (supply demand curve intersection) for them to provide the service of returning your loved one.
Once you've derived that ransom amount, and lets say it's high enough to satisfy the kidnapper's sense of entitlement to a reward, then the kidnappers reveal they have kidnapped another person. The same age as your loved one, with the same social standing, and essentially identical in every important energy-impacting way to your loved one, but that this person is a stranger to you.
Per your formula, you'll shell out the same exorbitant sum to release the stranger, yes?
Monopolies, hostage situations and copyrighted material all distort the market in precisely the same way. They render any concept of effort providing a good or service moot, since the good cannot be had through any other avenue and the consumer is "over a barrel" so to speak.
energy input is the most highly correlated property to the price of a good
I assume you mean wholesale price. I would love someone to do the footwork to correlate the price of a CD to the energy input to producing it, for example.:P
Yes, but is it a solution to the problem of people replying to junk posts to get higher page placement? Putting things in context is a highly efficient organizational skill.
No, a solution to that problem would be allowing readers to collapse threads that wend outside the topic they want to read — squelching uncalled for political or religious flamewars so that you can get back to the subject that interests you which would otherwise be several miles down the page.
That, or sorting the replies to any article or post based on score (and aggregate score of sub-replies) so that replying to the article is not doomed to be buried under the replies to chronologically-advantaged frosty piss.
So the solution is to have their own children branded as sex offenders after they've committed the act?!?!?!
Yeah, you've thought that out well.
... Nooooo.... the solution is to have other people's children branded as sex offenders as scapegoats to put the fear of god in your own.
Keep in mind, to a conservative, throwing other people under the bus is the most effective means of propulsion available. What leaves me truly transfixed from one day to the next is how imaginatively they invent new buses out of thin air for the purpose of conveniently throwing people under them.:D
Mod nleaf up, it's not often you get simple explanations of quantum experiments into this kind of an article instead of just penis jokes. 8I
If it can be seen with the naked eye, then what does it look like when it's "in two places at once"? Or does the whole thing collapse if you look at it?
The latter: though an important misunderstanding while learning quantum physics is the idea that "looking at it" or "knowing the result" matters. The subject can't tell if you are "looking", but it's waveform is collapsed by interacting with the world outside of the subject at all. Put in the most practical terms, "information cannot leave the system" without collapsing the waveform. You can't "see" it without bouncing a photon off of it, and that act in turn would either collapse the waveform or (in some rare cases) include the photon within the eigenstate, which would still screw up the waveform beyond reasonable recognition.
How such a phenomenon could help in computing relates to the fact that while you cannot observe the state (remove information) directly, you can direct the system to perform certain "calculations" by adding input into the state. Such a system can perform exotic calculations which are the equivalent of astronomical numbers of certain kinds of "classical" calculations, but can only output a relatively small (but normally difficult to arrive at) value once you collapse the waveform. Such a quantum nodule of computing power is normally referred to as a "qubit", and this experiment is very similar to working with one, very "duplo" sized qubit.
In order to really flex the muscles of quantum computing and compete with, and quickly surpass the number crunching capabilities of classical computers, one must use many (perhaps several thousand) qubits all sharing the same tricky to isolate quantum ground state and interacting with one another in complicated ways. Because they are so small, and calculational error is inevitable for many many reasons, it is also helpful to mass produce such arrangements of qubit-groups as many times as you can to either corroborate results, or to perform a "classical" layer of parallel processing.
Perhaps they don't index that data (although not necessarily true for some engines). That doesn't mean it's not crawled (and kept for another reasons).
That is exactly what it means. They can't crawl the data without exhaustively visiting the website. If a webmaster sees a bot hitting their restrictive robots.txt, and then continuing to hepelumph through the rest of the site grabbing crap, the webmaster can let his attorney decide which of a thousand roads to take next.
Google may be big, but they pay heed to the possibility of negative PR from spidering where they are not welcome.
The point TFA explored was: which is more accurate and reliable, onscreen (with or without feedback) or physical?
TFA's punchline:
How should we interpret the results of this barely-scientific test? First, physical keyboards would appear still to be significantly faster and more accurate than on-screen keyboards, and second, fancy new screen technologies offering haptic feedback don’t necessarily improve typing speed and accuracy, although they feel nicer in use.
My generalization: Iphone users sacrifice function for form. Period. I suppose that is their choice, but it is still appropriate to call a hat a hat. I maintain that arbitrary individuals have a more difficult time writing things out (be it emails, IM's, SMS, twitter, restaraunt reviews or anything else that's drug us away from the 10-key pad) on an Iphone or other on-screen solution than they do on a phone with a physical keyboard.
If you wish to directly refute this point, please at least take the time to cite a source no less lazy than this one, or just round up some phones and reproduce the test yourself.
Firstly Bob, I'd like to thank you for leading me to the insightful (if tangential) Broken Window Fallacy above, I've bookmarked that. But..
Second, and most importantly, it isn't real money. People get these things called 'student loans'. It isn't as if you can get those and invest the funds into the stock market. You kind of need to be a student.
I beg to differ. The only kind of "money" that can ever be called "not real" is that which does not circulate. These Student Loans represent real money, the real money you have to pay them back with. The real money that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. The real money you have to earn in addition to living expenses over the few decades after graduation. Plus a little bit more real money which represents the interest.
Why would "paying for college in cash" matter? You will eventually pay for it. Nothing aside from Grants, Scholarships, Charity or Wealthy Relatives will influence that equation. I should know: I just finished paying off mine.
Find me the high school guidance counselor that recommends skipping college.
Find me the state employee who is allowed to keep his job by offering official advice to clients that doesn't pump money back into the state.
The fact of the matter is that, at this time, university education is simply not cost effective: the average college graduate will not earn enough marginal salary throughout the remainder of his life to pay off the debts they will incur: unless someone else is literally paying for them to attend. [1]
You might say "good luck finding a job", but it's easier to find a job which covers your living expenses when you aren't nursing a quarter million dollars of debt, without even owning a house to justify it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood how targetted advertising == invasion of privacy.
When you frequent a bar regularly, the barman gets to know your favorite drink(s). You'll arrive one everning, and he'll say "Hello Dave, the usual ?". I have never felt the need to respond "How dare you invade my privacy with your targetted sales".
If we have to endure adverts on the web, then at least let them be relevant to what I enjoy.
It's not that I am against advertisement being relevant in general, but if you need to break into my house and kidnap me for an MRI to deliver a relevant ad then I will take offense.
Your barman analogy would be apt if Google did that only on their sites. That's what the original idea behind tracking cookies was supposed to be about. I'd still be concerned if todays search for Airfare, combined with yesterday's search for composting chemicals, combined with the day before that searching for a gift for my muslim girlfriend lead some overzealous data analyzer to put me on a terrorist list: but that's peanuts compared to the real issue.
The real issue is that a huge portion of the web is served by Google's ads, and Google is collecting demographic data about you EVERYWHERE YOU BROWSE where you tread past one of their ads. The huge issue is that ad publishers can elect not to display targeted ads, but they CANNOT ELECT not to collect data on Google's behalf.
This puts Google on equal footing with Facebook in terms of disregard to user privacy. You see, it's one thing for Google to be capable of collecting this volume of data on it's users. So's my ISP, for example. However my ISP would be violating Federal Wiretapping laws if they tried to take any action based on such data, or in any way made clear they had been snooping. Google somehow skirts beyond such protection, and can ostensibly not only know nearly every website you visit (including referal data when you arive in their sphere of influence from non-participating sites) via adsense *and* urchin beacons, but openly share this data with unknown third parties to deliver their "service".
"Luckily", you can opt out of this profiling program by being branded with a special "cookie" that stores a unique hash, indexed into their black box database, which they promise only tells their data miners to stop mining. (despite the fact this is a hash, similar to a UPC code, not a simple directive such as "google_tracking=no") They also have a clearinghouse where you can view the data they (admit to) keep on you, and you can even erase or prune it... that is, if you are man enough to log into a google account, tying your activity to your Gmail account et al, and then you still can't see data tied up in cookies on browsers that have not yet been cross referenced to your google account.
So, in short, in case you don't trust their intentions with your data, you are asked to instead trust their flimsy opt-out policy and trust that they honor it, and will continue honoring it in perpetuity instead of "accidentally" forgetting and collecting your data anyhow.
I know it sounds pedantic, but it's a serious distinction that most people misunderstand and that the media companies want you to misunderstand.
Mmm, I like the cut of your jib. Note that the "limited time" you cite has not yet legally elapsed, and we can count on this administration to continue extending it interminably, I would very much like to evict all renters of copyright from their monopolies at the earliest convenience.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but THEY ARE NOT PAYING THE RENT THEY OWE by releasing their materials to enrich the public domain.
Facebook exists for the express purpose of escaping anonymity and privacy. That is just what personal publishing is.
The danger here is that people normally don't use Facebook to publish. That's what public blogs are for. They use Failbook to communicate with their (often) closely kept circle of friends.
They simply don't normally realize (until it's too late) that the service provider is always privy to these communications and connections, or often times how deep the analysis goes. It's like having a CCTV on your online life 24/7. People will not often grasp the danger until they get stalked by an ex, or the FBI ruffles them up for being 2 degrees of separation from some alleged terrorist.
gp may or may not have posted in sarcasm. i cant tell.
Pro tip: textual transliteration of a hillbilly accent strongly indicates sarcasm. xD
Otherwise, since I fight copyright and you are not calling me unamerican, I am left to agree with you wholeheartedly. Friend'd. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"
Sir, your sig dizzies me. I'm going to be thinking "whom cares" all day now and not get any work done. x3
I look at "Piracy" (be it infringement or swashbuckling) as opportunistic rebellion against the mercantile establishment. Even in cases where such opportunistic rebellion becomes hazardous to the innocent (present day Somalian pirates being a prime example) it is foolish to waste effort railing directly against the pirates that could be expended in starving them of circumstance to conflict with the establishment in the first place.
Lets say you have mold creeping up the walls in your bathroom. Perhaps it even endangers your children, who are allergic. Do you spend your time scrubbing the mold, which grows back faster than you can scrub? Or do you go to the root and fix the leaking pipe hidden behind the facade of your wall, and then mop up whatever mold still has the momentum to grow?
In the case of Somalia, change trade policy so that hijacking insured boats (where the boat owners and insurance companies also profit at the hazard of the crew) is no longer more lucrative for the fishermen than fishing or other endeavors might be. If there still remain knots of criminals too tough for the newly incentivized merchants and insurance companies to resist, then focus law enforcement scrubbing in that area.
In the case of copyright, we should elegantly and smoothly dismantle copyright. This would render most file sharers and even most back lot DVD peddlers into the sunlight where they would no longer need to be persecuted. All that would be left to scrub away are the plagiarizers and fraudsters, and they would be much easier to out and to prosecute without the censorship of copyright in the way.
For us infringers, "Pirate" is both a dysphemism and a romantic term. We've reclaimed it (as our founding fathers reclaimed "Capitalism" from Karl Marx), so look lively, ye scurvy scalawag! :D
Mod parent +1000
I also have no mod points, but friend'd 8I
If YouTube wasn't owned by an influential firm with deep pockets, its almost certain they would have been sued off the net years ago.
Thank god? xD
Are like morals, they are relative.
save for a sliver of difference, ethics and morals are entirely congruent. And yes, they are relative.
Luckily for us, they are relative to something. :3 Specifically, they are relatively beneficial and relatively practicable.
In the case of Copyright, it is demonstrable that the free flow of information is more beneficial to culture and economy than the censorship of copyright, given that a system of copyright cannot survive coexistence with a culture that freely shares information. The reach of Copyright must outstretch the reach of raw communication in order for it to be enforceable whatsoever.
Put in simpler terms, "You cannot compete with free".
One might argue that piracy is evil, but RIAA is far greater evil. I'm downloading sogs because it's the lesser evil :)
Yay! Coincidentally, I am living in harmony with my fellow man instead of going on a killing spree, because that is also less evil. :D
Anyway, I argue that Piracy is not evil and that resisting immoral laws is actually a positive thing to do. Regardless of your reasons friend, thank you for joining the march. :3
Actually, the code for "Evil Not Found" error is 0666.
No, that's the code for "owner, group, and everyone has read and write access". No sticky bits. :P
I'm cheering for an outcome that happens to coincide with Google's interests, but I would be (grudgingly) rooting for the same outcome were it Microsoft or Monsanto being attacked for the same reasons.
I agree with you, but I wouldn't grudge that much. I'll root for Microsoft or Apple or even The Chinese Goverment to win any fight they happen to accidentally find themselves on the morally positive side of, and then I'll continue to resist them on every other front they are on the wrong side of. :)
Case in point: Google continues to disrespect user privacy, most glaringly with their Behavioral Targeting program in Adsense. They appear to be slowly reversing this trend in new products (Google Wave Federation) and new PR babies (the Data Liberation Front), but they have not yet fully repented on a philosophic level. They need to learn that user privacy belongs to users, and that some problems are best left for others to solve. So, for example, don't offer me a cookie to express my wish not to be targeted by adsense, and then offer me a plugin to defend my right to clear cookies without losing your "opt-out" cookie. That is foxes guarding the hen house, and then more foxes to make sure the first foxes do their job. ;P
My understanding is that the DMCA requires a copyright owner to notify the hosting site of each infringing item. Knowing in general that content is posted without a license isn't infringement.
Viacom is trying to kill the entire possibility of letting the general public post anything at all, for fear somebody somewhere might think they own it. Google's just a convenient target with deep pockets just in case a court is dumb enough to swallow.
This point is accurate. Viacom doesn't care that you can hear it's music or see it's shows on Google's services or on Youtube. Viacom knows as well as we do that it isn't losing any sales, and oftentimes even gains sales when this happens.
What Viacom cares about is that in the coming decade indies will compete against it, and indies will rely upon open services to do so. Viacom will use any means available to make it illegal for anyone to upload anything, due to the one in a zillion chance that the content might be copyrighted by someone somewhere.
Copyright law isn't good enough for the entertainment industry, they don't want the expense of dragging millions of individual infringers into court. They don't want to be on equal footing to the little guy. So they created the DMCA.
But the DMCA wasn't good enough either, because even when they ask Youtube to take down material scattershot (often opening themselves up to perjury because they do not make qualified humans check their assumptions and oft times sabotage material that clearly legal on a regular basis) many uploaders file a counter-DMCA to bring it back up, and the industry is back to the expensive process of settling matters in court one citizen at a time.
So now they would much prefer to see open media sharing die completely. They pine for the days when the entertainment oligopoly effectively controlled the global distribution of all media. When media distribution was an economy of scale.
Viacom wants nothing short of protectionism. Piracy is just a red herring to achieve this goal, and Viacom is glad that it can get some of that herring juice onto Google's brand now.
When you download movies, do you intend to profit from them? Petty piracy and real 'dollar bills' piracy are two completely different acts deserving of their own consideration, don't you think?
Actually, I disagree. When I download movies, the only reason I don't profit from them is because I am too lazy.
If the recent emergence of virtual economies in direct violation of the terms of service in games such as WoW can teach us anything, it is that there is no meaningful way to legislate against the circulation of money. So long as people can either legally or practicably do a thing, and people will pay them money to do it, then profit will inevitably be had.
Regarding copyright, if people can legally view the content then they can practicably copy it, legal or not. If people can copy it, then people may pay to obtain such a copy, legal or not.
This progression is inexorable and preventing it is astronomically impractical. The only way to keep a secret is not to publish it. Published information can and will be shared. Deal with it.
I am also in favor of entirely abolishing copyright. I do not believe that reproducing publicly available information is evil, whether or not you intend to profit and whether or not you intend to try to compete against the original authors in it's distribution. I do believe that granting authors a distribution monopoly is evil. I believe doing so harms our culture, harms the consumer and even harms the author. For example, they are strongly compelled by the market to sell off these rights to powerful marketing and distribution middlemen who clothe themselves as the extortionist gatekeepers to popular culture, indenturing the authors and fleecing the public in the process.
"An immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it, at every hazard." - - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Put another way, if breaking the law is unilaterally "Evil" then you should direct your ire towards TOR for aiding Chinese citizens in routing around censorship or Twitter for helping organize "illegal" protests in the middle east.
Every government seems to favor some method of censorship or another, and Copyright just happens to be our government's favorite flavor.
I reckon fighting copyrights is un'merican.
it is unamerican, because it is feudal. it gives control of the intellectual life over to a few.
Yo parent, I just want to clarify your position here. Are you saying that "copyrights" are unamerican (I would agree), or that "fighting [against] copyrights" is unamerican (as GP sarcastically suggests)? :3
The founding fathers supported the patent and copyright systems, to promote industrial and artistic creativity. They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.
I could argue against you here, but I cannot hope to be more eloquant than a founding father. :P
England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- - Thomas Jefferson
13 Aug. 1813
Of course you're right. The only reason cost tends toward energy cost of the creation of an object is that the profit tends towards zero in a perfect market-based system, and that can of course be distorted in a myriad of ways.
Right on, I'm glad we're on the same page then. :)
TBH, in order to either index the wholesale price or to index a well-market-regulated retail price, I am now very fond of your energy utilization idea. It's very reminiscent of the work of Nikolai Kardashev, who saw the index of energy utilization as powerful enough to extrapolate and infer the capacities of hypothetical intergalactic civilizations.
Another useful application of such a measuring tool, per our discussion, might be that if energy utilization is a good index to prices in a well regulated market, then the failure of that index to describe market prices might be a good indicator of a distorted market; where such an allegation might be hotly contested.
For example, if you want a smoking gun to demonstrate to a government (or a people) that a particular industry is failing to deliver goods and services efficiently to consumers, and that some ginger regulatory action may be required (or perhaps lifted, if such action caused the imbalance to begin with) to correct the problem, an approach like this might be very generic and all-purpose: safe from any skewed industry insider perspective or consumer stockholm syndrome.
Why are you changing gears to DVD's though and talking about special effects and huge teams of people?
I do not believe you can say very much empirical energy is spent on a "brand" however, without falling down the slippery slope of baking an apple pie for Carl Sagan.
The item I was citing is a CD. So forget all of your visuals for a moment, all of your digitally rendered special effects, pyrotechnics, and location shoots, and focus on a band, no more than a handful of sound technicians and computers, and the same instruments and recording studio that are used to make dozens of other CD's before and after this one.
So why does the CD ($12-15) cost damn near as much as a new release DVD of Waterworld? ($17-19)
I'll tell you how I'm willing to accept your theory: I think your proposal makes a ton more sense when the market is not distorted by monopolistic forces, when perfect competition is allowed to commoditize the product. We could call this the "fair" price. I do concur that energy utilization is a great index for that sticker price. That retail price is also forced to remain proportionate to the wholesale price.
Remember when Ma Bell rented out Western Electric telephones for something like $2/mo, and it was illegal to connect any other product to the POTS network? Or to this day, when POTS providers charge $30/mo for a local loop of landline, with no long distance capability whatsoever, and another $7/mo for voicemail service? Look up Asterisk and then tell me how the provision of voicemail requires $7 of energy per month per capita.
Final example, someone kidnaps a relative of yours. Let's use your formula to derive the optimal price they'll ask, or you'll pay (supply demand curve intersection) for them to provide the service of returning your loved one.
Once you've derived that ransom amount, and lets say it's high enough to satisfy the kidnapper's sense of entitlement to a reward, then the kidnappers reveal they have kidnapped another person. The same age as your loved one, with the same social standing, and essentially identical in every important energy-impacting way to your loved one, but that this person is a stranger to you.
Per your formula, you'll shell out the same exorbitant sum to release the stranger, yes?
Monopolies, hostage situations and copyrighted material all distort the market in precisely the same way. They render any concept of effort providing a good or service moot, since the good cannot be had through any other avenue and the consumer is "over a barrel" so to speak.
energy input is the most highly correlated property to the price of a good
I assume you mean wholesale price. I would love someone to do the footwork to correlate the price of a CD to the energy input to producing it, for example. :P
Yes, but is it a solution to the problem of people replying to junk posts to get higher page placement? Putting things in context is a highly efficient organizational skill.
No, a solution to that problem would be allowing readers to collapse threads that wend outside the topic they want to read — squelching uncalled for political or religious flamewars so that you can get back to the subject that interests you which would otherwise be several miles down the page.
That, or sorting the replies to any article or post based on score (and aggregate score of sub-replies) so that replying to the article is not doomed to be buried under the replies to chronologically-advantaged frosty piss.
So the solution is to have their own children branded as sex offenders after they've committed the act?!?!?!
Yeah, you've thought that out well.
... Nooooo.... the solution is to have other people's children branded as sex offenders as scapegoats to put the fear of god in your own.
Keep in mind, to a conservative, throwing other people under the bus is the most effective means of propulsion available. What leaves me truly transfixed from one day to the next is how imaginatively they invent new buses out of thin air for the purpose of conveniently throwing people under them. :D
Mod nleaf up, it's not often you get simple explanations of quantum experiments into this kind of an article instead of just penis jokes. 8I
If it can be seen with the naked eye, then what does it look like when it's "in two places at once"? Or does the whole thing collapse if you look at it?
The latter: though an important misunderstanding while learning quantum physics is the idea that "looking at it" or "knowing the result" matters. The subject can't tell if you are "looking", but it's waveform is collapsed by interacting with the world outside of the subject at all. Put in the most practical terms, "information cannot leave the system" without collapsing the waveform. You can't "see" it without bouncing a photon off of it, and that act in turn would either collapse the waveform or (in some rare cases) include the photon within the eigenstate, which would still screw up the waveform beyond reasonable recognition.
How such a phenomenon could help in computing relates to the fact that while you cannot observe the state (remove information) directly, you can direct the system to perform certain "calculations" by adding input into the state. Such a system can perform exotic calculations which are the equivalent of astronomical numbers of certain kinds of "classical" calculations, but can only output a relatively small (but normally difficult to arrive at) value once you collapse the waveform. Such a quantum nodule of computing power is normally referred to as a "qubit", and this experiment is very similar to working with one, very "duplo" sized qubit.
In order to really flex the muscles of quantum computing and compete with, and quickly surpass the number crunching capabilities of classical computers, one must use many (perhaps several thousand) qubits all sharing the same tricky to isolate quantum ground state and interacting with one another in complicated ways. Because they are so small, and calculational error is inevitable for many many reasons, it is also helpful to mass produce such arrangements of qubit-groups as many times as you can to either corroborate results, or to perform a "classical" layer of parallel processing.
Ref: Wikipedia article on Quantum Computing
Perhaps they don't index that data (although not necessarily true for some engines). That doesn't mean it's not crawled (and kept for another reasons).
That is exactly what it means. They can't crawl the data without exhaustively visiting the website. If a webmaster sees a bot hitting their restrictive robots.txt, and then continuing to hepelumph through the rest of the site grabbing crap, the webmaster can let his attorney decide which of a thousand roads to take next.
Google may be big, but they pay heed to the possibility of negative PR from spidering where they are not welcome.
How should we interpret the results of this barely-scientific test? First, physical keyboards would appear still to be significantly faster and more accurate than on-screen keyboards, and second, fancy new screen technologies offering haptic feedback don’t necessarily improve typing speed and accuracy, although they feel nicer in use.
My generalization: Iphone users sacrifice function for form. Period. I suppose that is their choice, but it is still appropriate to call a hat a hat. I maintain that arbitrary individuals have a more difficult time writing things out (be it emails, IM's, SMS, twitter, restaraunt reviews or anything else that's drug us away from the 10-key pad) on an Iphone or other on-screen solution than they do on a phone with a physical keyboard.
If you wish to directly refute this point, please at least take the time to cite a source no less lazy than this one, or just round up some phones and reproduce the test yourself.
Thank you.
Firstly Bob, I'd like to thank you for leading me to the insightful (if tangential) Broken Window Fallacy above, I've bookmarked that. But..
Second, and most importantly, it isn't real money. People get these things called 'student loans'. It isn't as if you can get those and invest the funds into the stock market. You kind of need to be a student.
I beg to differ. The only kind of "money" that can ever be called "not real" is that which does not circulate. These Student Loans represent real money, the real money you have to pay them back with. The real money that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. The real money you have to earn in addition to living expenses over the few decades after graduation. Plus a little bit more real money which represents the interest.
Why would "paying for college in cash" matter? You will eventually pay for it. Nothing aside from Grants, Scholarships, Charity or Wealthy Relatives will influence that equation. I should know: I just finished paying off mine.
Find me the high school guidance counselor that recommends skipping college.
Find me the state employee who is allowed to keep his job by offering official advice to clients that doesn't pump money back into the state.
The fact of the matter is that, at this time, university education is simply not cost effective: the average college graduate will not earn enough marginal salary throughout the remainder of his life to pay off the debts they will incur: unless someone else is literally paying for them to attend. [1]
You might say "good luck finding a job", but it's easier to find a job which covers your living expenses when you aren't nursing a quarter million dollars of debt, without even owning a house to justify it.