That is what privacy is for: ensure that all law-abiding people are safe even IF someone chooses to ignore basic human rights by pressing their own way of life by violence and threats.
That is the basic disconnect Eric S (and less than coincidentally, the entire company) has a problem with.
Privacy's value to society is not that it protects the corrupt from the scrutiny of the just. It's that it protects the just from the scrutiny of the corrupt.
Also, it is absolutely impossible to protect one's privacy solely by controlling the dissemination of information. When you hand your credit card to the Wrapz vendor at the food court, your credit card numbers are in full, daylit view to the "public" for a fraction of a second while the card changes hands. Normally that does not matter, but with today's CCTV technology scanning every square inch of the food court 24/7 your credentials will inevitably be immortalized on video. Now make all the CCTV footage publicly searchable, throw in some helpful figure-recognition algorithms, and anyone crafty enough can just instruct their computer to extract every frame (or superframe) that includes digits grouped like credit card numbers and empty your account later the same afternoon, along with anyone else who held their card at the wrong angle while making a purchase over the previous 5 years.
You cannot control your privacy by controlling what information you share. It's good to try, but the gaps absolutely must be filled in with good faith, good policy and good manners. Google must treat citizens on the internet with reasonable dignity and deference. If there was an emergency and you had to change clothes while someone else was in the room, every civilized human would turn away and give you your grace. If Google was a person, it instead would try to film you with it's android-powered camera phone and post it immediately to boing-boing.
Google's code-of-conduct ought to reflect popularly understood morality a little better, or it will cost them in ways their flawed mathematical models cannot quantify for them. Google risks it's industry leadership if it does not alter it's stance regarding end-user privacy. The one good thing I can say about Google is that at least it's dangerous privacy stance is an honest one. Google has a code of conduct that it believes in and follows it without remorse (namely, that privacy is superfluous). So I do not blame the rules of inference, just the axiom as Eric states in this interview. They have a flaw at the core of their philosophy. If they fix that flaw, all their business logic will follow suit and Google will quiet probably every criticism I have about them in one move, and regain the trust of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
After using it for 2 minutes (the most it would give me before dumping to the login) I wanted to punch someone.
Modern operating systems (or what pass for them) annoy me as well. I made a blog post of where we should be instead. ZosX, what is your take on my assessment?
Seriously, I think that companies and organizations who purport to deliver operating systems today have fallen far outside the scope of the needs of end users or the capability of hardware and networks to maintain an ancient status quo and tow their own singular interests instead. Yes, my disappointment in this matter extends equally to Windows, MacOS, ChromeWhatever, and Linux/BSD. Those who are interested in where I feel we should be instead, honestly, check my article. I'm not selling anything.:P
I know, right? Moblin's boot time can't hold a candle to Windows 7's, but the real powerhouse is Vista -- a boot time score higher than Moblin, Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora's all *combined*... and then *squared*.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dominate a game of golf.
Did you just Colbert yourself into an informative mod on top of the funnies? Score!;D
Ethics, morality and values are matters of opinion, not fact.
Yes, Ethics are epiphenomena. That doesn't mean you won't suffer when you ignore them. Just because there are competing schools of ethical thought does not mean that you cannot draw reliable, ethical conclusions from given facts that everyone can reasonably agree upon, while those who fail to agree proceed at their own peril.
Notice how Opera doesn't clarify the ethics behind their decision? What ethical substrate are they clinging too? The best we can tell is they are merely chasing the almighty dollar and short-term profit, which implies they will sell you out to the highest bidder at the earliest opportunity as well. Do you really want to pipe all of your SSL banking connections via the Opera Mini proxy servers now? Who says they won't abuse this trust-relationship to siphon your bank account? Have they found sneaky ways to bundle key loggers into their personal computer products? If profit is all they seek, there are few ways to protect oneself against such potential chicanery. I don't know about you, but that's why I rely a lot on trust when I run a person's software on my computer or utilize their network. I could audit them 9 ways 'til Sunday, but there is always a gap you can never completely close without a measure of Trust. Opera has just broken mine.
Lacking further mitigating information, it appears wise to avoid business with Opera when alternatives exist, regardless of what perspective you look at this through. Ethics are not facts, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but many ethical constructs are widely understood. So those who ignore business decisions like this might as well watch the cook at their restaraunt leave the restroom without washing their visibly filthy hands, and then sit down to enjoy their meal anyway.
It's a dangerous world you wish for, where corporations pressure governments into taking certain actions or making certain policies.
I think it's rather naive to assume that corporations should have zero input upon governmental policies which define their operating environment. Even if the input is limited to complying or cutting ties, companies should have the freedom to either kowtow to hostile foreign governments or pan their patronage entirely. Put simply, businesses ought to have the freedom to boycott. Personally, I believe that "aiding and abetting censorship" is actually bad for business while taking the moral high ground will lead the patient to greater profits.
How would you feel if instead of demanding censored media access, the Chinese Government was requiring Opera to actively involve themselves in propaganda and insert falsified information onto the network? Or if the Chinese Government demanded Opera to use it's proxy network infrastructure to actively engage in espionage against Chinese citizens? Would it still be Opera's "duty" to comply with whatever the Chinese Government asks?
A lie of omission is still a lie. Censorship is by definition a form of deception, and no better nor worse than introducing fabricated information onto the network. Tiananmen Square denial is identical to Holocaust Denial. It is immoral and unconscionable for Opera (and Microsoft, and Google) to play Ministry of Truth at the behest of any government. We cannot stop them individually, and Google in particular is too large to meaningfully boycott, but we can and should make our voices be heard and defend basic human rights at every turn, including the right to unbiased news and information.
It makes good (long term) business sense to bet in favor of the human condition and against greedy, oppressive governments. Selling out to tyranny helps nobody.
And there are even more extreme positions than that - such as that as soon as a copyrighted work is sold once, then anybody else can make money from it, the copyright holder losing any exclusive right to it.
No, this point is about as extreme as you can get without first violating privacy rights. Artist can make money on first sale. How else would the work make it into the public to begin with? You cannot P2P what's physically not available to you.
Once it is in the public however, then whomsoever chooses may share the data with the rest of the world at virtually zero cost and it takes the enforcement of global treaties and suspension of civil liberties to stop them.
In any event, this is the hill I defend. Artists should make money *creating* things, not selling copies of them or saying who anywhere in the world can or cannot make money re-selling or re-mixing the work they have already released into the public. The entire corpus of human knowledge is presently copyrighted, and no new creative work can be constructed save from elements that already exist; virtually all of which are already copyrighted or trademarked. It's simply time for this to stop.
Besides, how do artists make money from copy rights anyway? By selling their rights to litigious big media, of course, and becoming debt-bonded "celebrities".
But I'll head back to your original point. Perhaps royalties aren't immoral, and hourly wages really are an insult. I'll bet McDonalds workers would love that, instead of buying the burger you pay royalties to everyone who helped make the burger: grill person, person who assembled the sandwhich, wrapped it, and person who presented it to you on a tray. Let's not forget the farmers who raised the cows and the wheat, the slaughterhouse that turned the cow into ground beef and the mill that processed the wheat and lord knows what else into a bun. Read off the big mac song to see who else you have to pay. And they all earn a percentage cut on everything you do with the underwhelming boost of energy you get after eating the burger.
Suddenly, there is so much more incentive for these lowly employees to make better food; they profit directly from it! I'll bet the would all invest more TLC (and methamphetamines;D) into your daily meal.
They want us to follow the UK and Australia into blaclisting parts of the internet.
We've done just fine until now without having to do this, but notice how this suddenly becomes a "public hazard" when a scam site pretends to be some podunk government agency nobody has ever heard about.
I guess nothing really matters to our elected officials until it either impacts their wallet or their ability to COVER THEIR OWN ASS.
Now they'll draft and pass a law requiring ISP's to block any traffic the government doesn't like. Maybe they'll maintain a block list, but that sounds too much like work for the powers that be. I'm certain they'll just retroactively fine whatever ISP passed any traffic they come not to like after the fact, for any reason whatsoever. "Is it true that you passed the internet traffic which allowed this chat conversation to happen which allowed one person to learn that another wasn't going to be home, leading to their house being robbed? According to our shiny new law, you should have closed this chat with a friendly error message before it even began. $1.79million dollar fine. Next case!"
And yes, if your neighbors leach your wifi you WILL be classified as an ISP and held to the same standard, fined for every spam your neighbor gets when he's at WORK.:P
I know several people who live in an area not served by cable or DSL. Almost nobody will stay connected to dial-up for one hour just to download a 30-minute music podcast.
Hello tepples, my name is Jesse. I am the systems administrator for a wireless high speed internet service provider in Oregon who at present count guarantees broadband service to just under 1,100 households and businesses that either cannot or choose not to subscribe to the local DSL (Qwest) or Cable (BendBroadband) duopoly.
While there are people without internet service for any of a laundry list of reasons (expense in their area, computer illiteracy/luddite, etc) that number is decimated on a regular basis. I would wager that at present the number of people in the US lacking internet is smaller than the number of people who never listen to broadcast radio; not least of which because the only channels you get are Clearchoice, religious, and foreign language.
Again, my argument is not that "FM is (entirely) dead (yet)", nor that an insufficient number of people listen to FM, only that we drown in perfectly market worthy alternatives many of which are only complicated to take advantage of thanks to the chilling effects of copyright.
Is the ability to download music standard equipment on recent cars, or is it an expensive aftermarket option? I've seen a lot of car radios with a CD player and a radio and no line in, or a CD player, a radio, and a tape player that ejects all line-in adapters.
If you were an auto-maker, would you chance flirting with business models that run afoul copyright and the current power of big media? I say "eliminate copyright and embrace open innovation" and you come back with "whanh, the corporate overlords and automakers keep PURPOSELY SPITTING OUT my line-in adapters because they want me to cling to the teat of whatever they feed me via FM".
Presently, being a pirate (including listening to music in your car when you've probably only been "licensed" to listen to it on your desktop computer) takes a modicum of effort. Maybe an aftermarket stereo (who cares about music and doesn't get one of those, again?) or maybe a $20 FM tuner when you can't get a line-in to work. I can't believe this country used to thrive fixing their own stage coach wheels, and now you feel uncomfortable controlling what sound comes out of your oem tape deck.
In any event, never fear. Where there is market demand and safety from legal repercussion, there will be droves of businesses seeking to make a dime helping you listen to podcasts in your car. Again, help us clear the path or go back to the teat.
Do you know of any firm that specializes in administering such assurance contracts?
Shout out to the Contingency Market! Keep in mind they are not Your Lawyer, but then again nobody is but Your Lawyer. Contingency Market is a web service that allows individuals to easily maintain, automate, and keep track of contracts and commitments including assurance contracts. The legalese of the contract itself is outside the scope of this service, but this is an important step in the right direction.
It is more challenging to build a critical mass of demand in order to underwrite a financing infrastructure independent of copyright while the antiquated law still looms, stacking the deck in favor of whoever can afford the least scrupulous legal teams. But that is one of my goals: to illustrate life beyond copyright so that those who may benefit from exploring it will let go their death hold over a tradition that presently does them (not to mention everyone else) inestimable harm.
I value my ability to communicate whatever I please with whomever I please. I value my communication and transaction channels being private and tamper-resistant. One of the few excuses that government and big busin
I recently wrote an article about my thoughts on filesystems and operating systems by way of a fictional reference OS mentioning ZFS in a positive light for reasons including the dedupe feature mentioned in today's article:
In practice, until mobile broadband becomes much cheaper, FM radio stations will continue to have all the market power over this sort of promotion.
Hmm, is this because pre-recorded media has to be delivered to me in realtime? If my car radio or Ipod downloads days or even weeks worth of podcasts of great music for me when docked or near my home wifi, it's just not as enjoyable? I can't download what looks interesting and play it on shuffle when I want? Ipods (and most other digital music products) got pretty crazy popular before any sort of FM tuners were made available for them.
For example, say I develop video games in genres not ideal for PC (that is, not RTS or an M-rated FPS), and the console makers don't want to deal with me because I'm small potatoes.
I don't see how that is any different with or without copyright. Either the console maker controls the bits so heavily piracy isn't possible to begin with and lack of copyright is a non-issue to their business model, or if copying is possible then you can use assurance contracts to market to the would-be pirates. In either case, any requirement to go through a gatekeeper means they may not like you. Having copyright doesn't make that any easier on small developers, neither does lacking it.
Unless the genre of music appeals to kids or teens, and most of the venues that allow indie bands are bars, which in some states don't allow even accompanied minors in the door.
Don't weep about chicken and the egg to me, there isn't money in indie music because of the public blowing it's budget on copyrighted albums. There aren't venues available because there is no money to fund them. Release the revenue that big media presently has control over and there will be tons of fans in whatever genre with cash who want to spend it hearing live music. There will be tons of cash available to justify the real estate and management needed to keep the venues open. Hell, big media would probably even finance it if they've recently lost copyright and expect to keep any of their infrastructure intact.:P
Let me put it this way: Big media makes billions annually. They do this selling canned content that should have no resale value. Stop the price fixing and you get billions in the hands of fans who can begin spending that money on something it takes real value to provide (live music at venues, merchandise, financing new music) instead of mylar disks that get stamped at less than a penny a pop.
You also get more people getting out more often to do more socializing, financing more opportunities to do so. You get new artists doing more mixing of existing media to create more media less expensively without running afoul of counterproductive laws. More content, less expensive, lower bars to entry, lower upkeep to produce and distribute. Anyone can participate in whatever capacity they would like.
Or we can just sit back and allow the powerful to consolidate greater power by laying property claims over the sum of all human knowledge while we continue passively clinging to the corporate teat. That approach has it's merits too, I guess.:/
The original 1790 Copyright Act was saner. 14 years with possibility of renewal, for 28 years max. That's reasonable length of time for a monopoly, and it gives the artist plenty of opportunity to recoup his labor costs via sale of the book/song.
So... Rickrolling should remain illegal in the US until my kids start college, gotcha. And what happens when different countries or localles do not apply the same copyright dates? Do you have to register for renewal in every major country? I could see someone writing a song, renewing at 14 years, but it goes public domain elsewhere.. someone else remixes it. Is the remix illegal to sell or own in the US?
The facts are simple, and the berne convention flouts the facts. Thanks to the internet, all media is globally distributable at condiment cost. More importantly than "how do you globally guarantee a monopoly" is "how do you prevent a globally-protected monopoly from running amok"? Telling big media it only gets to monopolize a slice of global mindshare for 28 or 14 or 2 years is like telling a mugger he can only have your wallet, not your car keys.
Let me ask you this: What value is the public domain? Why enrich it at all? If you're only going to dump 30 year old material into it, it must not be worth very much to you. Once you support copyright for a short period, it is bureaucratic folly not to support it perpetually. Who cares if today's boy band music leaves copyright in 2037 or 2129?
Abolish copyright. Artists can publish their work and use it's popularity to gain exposure instead of hypodermicly injecting it into the global cultural pantheon and then laying financial claim to everything it touches and charging to licence fleeting control to consumers over and how and when it is replayed. Artists can make money by marketing directly to fans and constructing dominant assurance contracts to have their work financed for original release. Once released, it is free for anyone in possession to share on their own terms. Word spreads about the agreeable material, hooking more fans into ponying up to finance the next album, or go to the next show in their area, buy physical merchandise, etc etc.
Claiming you need copyright to finance costs you incur today is a form of speculative temporal bargaining just as bad debt financing: speculating that enough money will come in to cover todays costs you charge to a credit card or a gambling addiction: speculating that you'll hit the jackpot to cover the quarters you're putting in the machine now. It's equally as habit-forming and dangerous too. Artists must learn to live within their means and finance todays costs today. You should arrange to be paid for completing the work, not for fleecing the global public for chances to share in hearing your canned, now zero-cost to redistribute product.
In the meantime I refuse to co-sign for your bad business model and I'll bittorrent whatever god damned content I see fit, because I and arbitrary third parties on the internet have every right to share whatever generic digital data we choose.
Wanna talk playground safety though, and I did have a friend when I was in high school whose 5 year old brother accidentally and fatally hung himself on a swing set. My brother broke his leg and my cousin his arm on trampolines.
Hey, I love to talk about playground safety!;D I fell off a monkey bars in sixth grade and got a concussion, and I know two other kids who did. I also know 2-3 kids who fell off our (12' high) swingset and got concussions. 7 years at that small elementary school with 80-100 kids at a time, and those were the only injuries I was made privy to. Then literally as soon as I migrated to the next school, they tore out all metal equipment and replaced it with interconnected plastic bubbles. Now that I am a parent it is unheard of for children under the age of.. what, 30? to attend playgrounds unsupervised. Being that time is money and parents don't have enough of that to run the house, kids plop in front of video games eating the only food most people can afford (chock full of PHVO + HFCS) and get diabetes.
If we've traded a <1% childhood possibility of concussion with a >20% childhood obesity rate, and school standards slipping in every metric as our children care less to learn about the world they no longer participate in, then I see that as the wrong direction to go in. It's not that we shouldn't want our children to be safe, it's just that safety has diminishing returns. Our kids must face some marginal level of risk in their lives or they will never reap rewards. That is one more metric as a culture and as a global community where we need to establish some reasonable balance.
Ha, screw IRC and run a google Wave server once the code is released to the public. Way easier than IRC to set up, more flexible, only browsers needed to log in, SSL is a snap.
Email already needs to die a horrible, fiery, spammish death.. this is just one more reason why.;3
Chuck Norris is the answer to the chicken and the egg problem. Any real number divided by zero = Chuck Norris. You're obviously new here, move 'long.:3
Well, they're _already_ T-Mo customers - they must be used to suckage by now, right?
Not really. I live in a place called "Oregon". Neither Verizon nor AT&T do anything remotely confusable with providing service here. T-mobile does, and I mean in the tiniest corners of nowhere even. My unlimited/everything plan costs me $84/mo. Any Android 2.0 exclusivity with Verizon or Rogers or whoever you like the best doesn't really do us any good here, bucko.
I don't know if GP has his heels dug in or not, but the core point he makes is valid. Grabbing links from a cherry picked collection of events deemed to be sexist is a form of data searching. When you come back with 5 links, it sounds very much as though you are saying "look, 5 out of 5 of these examples are sexist", and you are certainly ignoring tens of millions of publicly archived mailing list, forum, and irc comments.
I hear your impassioned plea that if there is a problem, we should have the courage to fix it. I actually don't see GP explicitly disagreeing. He is posing no alternate explanation as to the low figure of female representation in our community. What he is asking is "if female participation is at 1.5%, and anti-female speech is at 0.1%, then what action do you expect us to take?" also, implicitly: "If you disagree with my figure of 0.1%, then show me a fairly picked sample where more than one out of a thousand communications are sexist in nature." Free communication does mean that trolls will be able to open their mouths as well. The best we can do is decry them or mod them down, try to keep them banned from our lists, but erasing them from existence is beyond our power. You can't sway them and you can't "make up" for them. The only thing anyone can do (within my knowledge of present policy and technology) is to try and ignore them and starve them.
I think someone above made reference to Stallman being sexist, too. Yep, I would certainly believe that. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to excise him from the community short of putting GNU out of business, and I've been wanting to do that long before the topic of sexism ever came across my desk. Still, allegations of Henry Ford being anti-semite (damn me if I can't find a reliable citation for that just now) will have an equally difficult time changing the name of the company he founded today.
So, let us recouch GP's question in an actionable form. Can we have any/some of the following:
* Examples of > 0.1% by posting volume sexism from a fair sample pool?
* Examples of the community favoring sexist behavior anywhere, as opposed to communal opposition to nut-job comments
* What community members can do (or what policies can change at the community admin level) to alleviate sexism. (We cannot clearly see what to do in response to allegations like this if we cannot comprehend in what way we are being sexist)
I, for one, think you've met your quota for about a decade. ( ?< )
I think the point being made is that GP is asking for examples which are not already one-offs shunned by the community.
This is open source, after all. Most of our communications, be it mailing list or irc, are publicly archived.
Hell, even rough communal approval of comments is public knowledge. Take Slashdot's mod system for example. You get thousands of sexist and racist comments here, even more than 0.1%.. however they get modded into the trash can. Call me politically incorrect, but I think that is a fair way for a forum to proceed. We are not suggesting that a 0.1% failure rate must be tolerated simply because we want to lean upon that personally, but because there will always be trolls and morons. No amount of penitence from the innocent will shut up the lunatic fringe.
FOSS does not live by the same rules as the professional world, either. Sexism (ideally) gets you fired in big business. What can be done about trolls here, ban them from the internet? (gawd, I know the link that will bring up..) I really think more people need to be in harmony with the forest and tune out the obnoxious trees on this one.
So please do not confuse "I want some examples, btw one-offs do not count" with the No Real Scotsman fallacy. We all know the alleged problem is systemic, so we want systemic examples that have shown some amount of looking-the-other-way from the community. Slashdot comments modded up, conferences with sexist slides where the presenter's reputation didn't get trashed, you know. That sort of thing. Lestwise, how can communal attitudes be faulted?
I can't get "photosketch.exe" to run either, and I am using the 1.10 version of OpenCV.
What I want to know is where do I get the app shown in the vimeo video where they are actually sketching and adding tags? That's not photoshop, and it has a pared down UI one might expect to come alongside an app such as this. From the transcript: "The user interface of our system is intuitive". Alright, so shoooow meeee the UI?;D
UPDATE: before hitting submit, I tried commenting out the ini lines mentioned above in this thread. I must have the right MS DLL as well, because now PhotoSketch runs, but it just spits out some stuff in my terminal about obtaining crap from one folder and spitting it out into another. I haven't sketched anything yet, and I'm not clear on what form of input it wants.
In related news, I checked out the comments to the Vimeo video on Vimeo's site. Tao there explains that (beyond the obvious and helpful name change to "sketch2photo"), the input UI I was hoping for has not yet been released, but they are targeting that being a web-based app. *shrug?*
I lost my link and closed that tab, but it's the only comment from Tao in the Vimeo comments of that video, circa Oct 7.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what privacy is for: ensure that all law-abiding people are safe even IF someone chooses to ignore basic human rights by pressing their own way of life by violence and threats.
That is the basic disconnect Eric S (and less than coincidentally, the entire company) has a problem with.
Privacy's value to society is not that it protects the corrupt from the scrutiny of the just. It's that it protects the just from the scrutiny of the corrupt.
Also, it is absolutely impossible to protect one's privacy solely by controlling the dissemination of information. When you hand your credit card to the Wrapz vendor at the food court, your credit card numbers are in full, daylit view to the "public" for a fraction of a second while the card changes hands. Normally that does not matter, but with today's CCTV technology scanning every square inch of the food court 24/7 your credentials will inevitably be immortalized on video. Now make all the CCTV footage publicly searchable, throw in some helpful figure-recognition algorithms, and anyone crafty enough can just instruct their computer to extract every frame (or superframe) that includes digits grouped like credit card numbers and empty your account later the same afternoon, along with anyone else who held their card at the wrong angle while making a purchase over the previous 5 years.
You cannot control your privacy by controlling what information you share. It's good to try, but the gaps absolutely must be filled in with good faith, good policy and good manners. Google must treat citizens on the internet with reasonable dignity and deference. If there was an emergency and you had to change clothes while someone else was in the room, every civilized human would turn away and give you your grace. If Google was a person, it instead would try to film you with it's android-powered camera phone and post it immediately to boing-boing.
Google's code-of-conduct ought to reflect popularly understood morality a little better, or it will cost them in ways their flawed mathematical models cannot quantify for them. Google risks it's industry leadership if it does not alter it's stance regarding end-user privacy. The one good thing I can say about Google is that at least it's dangerous privacy stance is an honest one. Google has a code of conduct that it believes in and follows it without remorse (namely, that privacy is superfluous). So I do not blame the rules of inference, just the axiom as Eric states in this interview. They have a flaw at the core of their philosophy. If they fix that flaw, all their business logic will follow suit and Google will quiet probably every criticism I have about them in one move, and regain the trust of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
After using it for 2 minutes (the most it would give me before dumping to the login) I wanted to punch someone.
Modern operating systems (or what pass for them) annoy me as well. I made a blog post of where we should be instead. ZosX, what is your take on my assessment?
Seriously, I think that companies and organizations who purport to deliver operating systems today have fallen far outside the scope of the needs of end users or the capability of hardware and networks to maintain an ancient status quo and tow their own singular interests instead. Yes, my disappointment in this matter extends equally to Windows, MacOS, ChromeWhatever, and Linux/BSD. Those who are interested in where I feel we should be instead, honestly, check my article. I'm not selling anything. :P
Thank you for your time.
I know, right? Moblin's boot time can't hold a candle to Windows 7's, but the real powerhouse is Vista -- a boot time score higher than Moblin, Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora's all *combined*... and then *squared*.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dominate a game of golf.
Did you just Colbert yourself into an informative mod on top of the funnies? Score! ;D
Ethics, morality and values are matters of opinion, not fact.
Yes, Ethics are epiphenomena. That doesn't mean you won't suffer when you ignore them. Just because there are competing schools of ethical thought does not mean that you cannot draw reliable, ethical conclusions from given facts that everyone can reasonably agree upon, while those who fail to agree proceed at their own peril.
Notice how Opera doesn't clarify the ethics behind their decision? What ethical substrate are they clinging too? The best we can tell is they are merely chasing the almighty dollar and short-term profit, which implies they will sell you out to the highest bidder at the earliest opportunity as well. Do you really want to pipe all of your SSL banking connections via the Opera Mini proxy servers now? Who says they won't abuse this trust-relationship to siphon your bank account? Have they found sneaky ways to bundle key loggers into their personal computer products? If profit is all they seek, there are few ways to protect oneself against such potential chicanery. I don't know about you, but that's why I rely a lot on trust when I run a person's software on my computer or utilize their network. I could audit them 9 ways 'til Sunday, but there is always a gap you can never completely close without a measure of Trust. Opera has just broken mine.
Lacking further mitigating information, it appears wise to avoid business with Opera when alternatives exist, regardless of what perspective you look at this through. Ethics are not facts, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but many ethical constructs are widely understood. So those who ignore business decisions like this might as well watch the cook at their restaraunt leave the restroom without washing their visibly filthy hands, and then sit down to enjoy their meal anyway.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Say Rocket, that is a choice sig. Traced it down to it's source, which is equally choice.
Thanks fer the light! :)
It's a dangerous world you wish for, where corporations pressure governments into taking certain actions or making certain policies.
I think it's rather naive to assume that corporations should have zero input upon governmental policies which define their operating environment. Even if the input is limited to complying or cutting ties, companies should have the freedom to either kowtow to hostile foreign governments or pan their patronage entirely. Put simply, businesses ought to have the freedom to boycott. Personally, I believe that "aiding and abetting censorship" is actually bad for business while taking the moral high ground will lead the patient to greater profits.
How would you feel if instead of demanding censored media access, the Chinese Government was requiring Opera to actively involve themselves in propaganda and insert falsified information onto the network? Or if the Chinese Government demanded Opera to use it's proxy network infrastructure to actively engage in espionage against Chinese citizens? Would it still be Opera's "duty" to comply with whatever the Chinese Government asks?
A lie of omission is still a lie. Censorship is by definition a form of deception, and no better nor worse than introducing fabricated information onto the network. Tiananmen Square denial is identical to Holocaust Denial. It is immoral and unconscionable for Opera (and Microsoft, and Google) to play Ministry of Truth at the behest of any government. We cannot stop them individually, and Google in particular is too large to meaningfully boycott, but we can and should make our voices be heard and defend basic human rights at every turn, including the right to unbiased news and information.
It makes good (long term) business sense to bet in favor of the human condition and against greedy, oppressive governments. Selling out to tyranny helps nobody.
Fish und Potatoes! And lunch packet, with frozhen bread with Yellow Cheese on it. \o/
Its the perfect country, the problem is that its infested by smug norwegians.. /love from sweden
Wait, I thought Norway was the CAPITOL of Sweden? </confused>
Yummiest thing you can have only* in Norway
Ah, but Where can you see Lions?
And there are even more extreme positions than that - such as that as soon as a copyrighted work is sold once, then anybody else can make money from it, the copyright holder losing any exclusive right to it.
No, this point is about as extreme as you can get without first violating privacy rights. Artist can make money on first sale. How else would the work make it into the public to begin with? You cannot P2P what's physically not available to you.
Once it is in the public however, then whomsoever chooses may share the data with the rest of the world at virtually zero cost and it takes the enforcement of global treaties and suspension of civil liberties to stop them.
In any event, this is the hill I defend. Artists should make money *creating* things, not selling copies of them or saying who anywhere in the world can or cannot make money re-selling or re-mixing the work they have already released into the public. The entire corpus of human knowledge is presently copyrighted, and no new creative work can be constructed save from elements that already exist; virtually all of which are already copyrighted or trademarked. It's simply time for this to stop.
Besides, how do artists make money from copy rights anyway? By selling their rights to litigious big media, of course, and becoming debt-bonded "celebrities".
But I'll head back to your original point. Perhaps royalties aren't immoral, and hourly wages really are an insult. I'll bet McDonalds workers would love that, instead of buying the burger you pay royalties to everyone who helped make the burger: grill person, person who assembled the sandwhich, wrapped it, and person who presented it to you on a tray. Let's not forget the farmers who raised the cows and the wheat, the slaughterhouse that turned the cow into ground beef and the mill that processed the wheat and lord knows what else into a bun. Read off the big mac song to see who else you have to pay. And they all earn a percentage cut on everything you do with the underwhelming boost of energy you get after eating the burger.
Suddenly, there is so much more incentive for these lowly employees to make better food; they profit directly from it! I'll bet the would all invest more TLC (and methamphetamines ;D) into your daily meal.
They want us to follow the UK and Australia into blaclisting parts of the internet.
We've done just fine until now without having to do this, but notice how this suddenly becomes a "public hazard" when a scam site pretends to be some podunk government agency nobody has ever heard about.
I guess nothing really matters to our elected officials until it either impacts their wallet or their ability to COVER THEIR OWN ASS.
Now they'll draft and pass a law requiring ISP's to block any traffic the government doesn't like. Maybe they'll maintain a block list, but that sounds too much like work for the powers that be. I'm certain they'll just retroactively fine whatever ISP passed any traffic they come not to like after the fact, for any reason whatsoever. "Is it true that you passed the internet traffic which allowed this chat conversation to happen which allowed one person to learn that another wasn't going to be home, leading to their house being robbed? According to our shiny new law, you should have closed this chat with a friendly error message before it even began. $1.79million dollar fine. Next case!"
And yes, if your neighbors leach your wifi you WILL be classified as an ISP and held to the same standard, fined for every spam your neighbor gets when he's at WORK. :P
I know several people who live in an area not served by cable or DSL. Almost nobody will stay connected to dial-up for one hour just to download a 30-minute music podcast.
Hello tepples, my name is Jesse. I am the systems administrator for a wireless high speed internet service provider in Oregon who at present count guarantees broadband service to just under 1,100 households and businesses that either cannot or choose not to subscribe to the local DSL (Qwest) or Cable (BendBroadband) duopoly.
While there are people without internet service for any of a laundry list of reasons (expense in their area, computer illiteracy/luddite, etc) that number is decimated on a regular basis. I would wager that at present the number of people in the US lacking internet is smaller than the number of people who never listen to broadcast radio; not least of which because the only channels you get are Clearchoice, religious, and foreign language.
Again, my argument is not that "FM is (entirely) dead (yet)", nor that an insufficient number of people listen to FM, only that we drown in perfectly market worthy alternatives many of which are only complicated to take advantage of thanks to the chilling effects of copyright.
Is the ability to download music standard equipment on recent cars, or is it an expensive aftermarket option? I've seen a lot of car radios with a CD player and a radio and no line in, or a CD player, a radio, and a tape player that ejects all line-in adapters.
If you were an auto-maker, would you chance flirting with business models that run afoul copyright and the current power of big media? I say "eliminate copyright and embrace open innovation" and you come back with "whanh, the corporate overlords and automakers keep PURPOSELY SPITTING OUT my line-in adapters because they want me to cling to the teat of whatever they feed me via FM".
Presently, being a pirate (including listening to music in your car when you've probably only been "licensed" to listen to it on your desktop computer) takes a modicum of effort. Maybe an aftermarket stereo (who cares about music and doesn't get one of those, again?) or maybe a $20 FM tuner when you can't get a line-in to work. I can't believe this country used to thrive fixing their own stage coach wheels, and now you feel uncomfortable controlling what sound comes out of your oem tape deck.
In any event, never fear. Where there is market demand and safety from legal repercussion, there will be droves of businesses seeking to make a dime helping you listen to podcasts in your car. Again, help us clear the path or go back to the teat.
Do you know of any firm that specializes in administering such assurance contracts?
Shout out to the Contingency Market! Keep in mind they are not Your Lawyer, but then again nobody is but Your Lawyer. Contingency Market is a web service that allows individuals to easily maintain, automate, and keep track of contracts and commitments including assurance contracts. The legalese of the contract itself is outside the scope of this service, but this is an important step in the right direction.
It is more challenging to build a critical mass of demand in order to underwrite a financing infrastructure independent of copyright while the antiquated law still looms, stacking the deck in favor of whoever can afford the least scrupulous legal teams. But that is one of my goals: to illustrate life beyond copyright so that those who may benefit from exploring it will let go their death hold over a tradition that presently does them (not to mention everyone else) inestimable harm.
I value my ability to communicate whatever I please with whomever I please. I value my communication and transaction channels being private and tamper-resistant. One of the few excuses that government and big busin
I recently wrote an article about my thoughts on filesystems and operating systems by way of a fictional reference OS mentioning ZFS in a positive light for reasons including the dedupe feature mentioned in today's article:
IRON/Cloud — the outline of what a modern OS should be
I link back to the (yes, slashdot) article wherein I first learned about ZFS, and a rundown of the features I like about ZFS.
But no, I checked and our article texts do not hash to the same value, so I do not believe we would be stored at the same location on disk. ;D
In practice, until mobile broadband becomes much cheaper, FM radio stations will continue to have all the market power over this sort of promotion.
Hmm, is this because pre-recorded media has to be delivered to me in realtime? If my car radio or Ipod downloads days or even weeks worth of podcasts of great music for me when docked or near my home wifi, it's just not as enjoyable? I can't download what looks interesting and play it on shuffle when I want? Ipods (and most other digital music products) got pretty crazy popular before any sort of FM tuners were made available for them.
For example, say I develop video games in genres not ideal for PC (that is, not RTS or an M-rated FPS), and the console makers don't want to deal with me because I'm small potatoes.
I don't see how that is any different with or without copyright. Either the console maker controls the bits so heavily piracy isn't possible to begin with and lack of copyright is a non-issue to their business model, or if copying is possible then you can use assurance contracts to market to the would-be pirates. In either case, any requirement to go through a gatekeeper means they may not like you. Having copyright doesn't make that any easier on small developers, neither does lacking it.
Unless the genre of music appeals to kids or teens, and most of the venues that allow indie bands are bars, which in some states don't allow even accompanied minors in the door.
Don't weep about chicken and the egg to me, there isn't money in indie music because of the public blowing it's budget on copyrighted albums. There aren't venues available because there is no money to fund them. Release the revenue that big media presently has control over and there will be tons of fans in whatever genre with cash who want to spend it hearing live music. There will be tons of cash available to justify the real estate and management needed to keep the venues open. Hell, big media would probably even finance it if they've recently lost copyright and expect to keep any of their infrastructure intact. :P
Let me put it this way: Big media makes billions annually. They do this selling canned content that should have no resale value. Stop the price fixing and you get billions in the hands of fans who can begin spending that money on something it takes real value to provide (live music at venues, merchandise, financing new music) instead of mylar disks that get stamped at less than a penny a pop.
You also get more people getting out more often to do more socializing, financing more opportunities to do so. You get new artists doing more mixing of existing media to create more media less expensively without running afoul of counterproductive laws. More content, less expensive, lower bars to entry, lower upkeep to produce and distribute. Anyone can participate in whatever capacity they would like.
Or we can just sit back and allow the powerful to consolidate greater power by laying property claims over the sum of all human knowledge while we continue passively clinging to the corporate teat. That approach has it's merits too, I guess. :/
The original 1790 Copyright Act was saner. 14 years with possibility of renewal, for 28 years max. That's reasonable length of time for a monopoly, and it gives the artist plenty of opportunity to recoup his labor costs via sale of the book/song.
So... Rickrolling should remain illegal in the US until my kids start college, gotcha. And what happens when different countries or localles do not apply the same copyright dates? Do you have to register for renewal in every major country? I could see someone writing a song, renewing at 14 years, but it goes public domain elsewhere.. someone else remixes it. Is the remix illegal to sell or own in the US?
The facts are simple, and the berne convention flouts the facts. Thanks to the internet, all media is globally distributable at condiment cost. More importantly than "how do you globally guarantee a monopoly" is "how do you prevent a globally-protected monopoly from running amok"? Telling big media it only gets to monopolize a slice of global mindshare for 28 or 14 or 2 years is like telling a mugger he can only have your wallet, not your car keys.
Let me ask you this: What value is the public domain? Why enrich it at all? If you're only going to dump 30 year old material into it, it must not be worth very much to you. Once you support copyright for a short period, it is bureaucratic folly not to support it perpetually. Who cares if today's boy band music leaves copyright in 2037 or 2129?
Abolish copyright. Artists can publish their work and use it's popularity to gain exposure instead of hypodermicly injecting it into the global cultural pantheon and then laying financial claim to everything it touches and charging to licence fleeting control to consumers over and how and when it is replayed. Artists can make money by marketing directly to fans and constructing dominant assurance contracts to have their work financed for original release. Once released, it is free for anyone in possession to share on their own terms. Word spreads about the agreeable material, hooking more fans into ponying up to finance the next album, or go to the next show in their area, buy physical merchandise, etc etc.
Claiming you need copyright to finance costs you incur today is a form of speculative temporal bargaining just as bad debt financing: speculating that enough money will come in to cover todays costs you charge to a credit card or a gambling addiction: speculating that you'll hit the jackpot to cover the quarters you're putting in the machine now. It's equally as habit-forming and dangerous too. Artists must learn to live within their means and finance todays costs today. You should arrange to be paid for completing the work, not for fleecing the global public for chances to share in hearing your canned, now zero-cost to redistribute product.
In the meantime I refuse to co-sign for your bad business model and I'll bittorrent whatever god damned content I see fit, because I and arbitrary third parties on the internet have every right to share whatever generic digital data we choose.
Wanna talk playground safety though, and I did have a friend when I was in high school whose 5 year old brother accidentally and fatally hung himself on a swing set. My brother broke his leg and my cousin his arm on trampolines.
Hey, I love to talk about playground safety! ;D I fell off a monkey bars in sixth grade and got a concussion, and I know two other kids who did. I also know 2-3 kids who fell off our (12' high) swingset and got concussions. 7 years at that small elementary school with 80-100 kids at a time, and those were the only injuries I was made privy to. Then literally as soon as I migrated to the next school, they tore out all metal equipment and replaced it with interconnected plastic bubbles. Now that I am a parent it is unheard of for children under the age of.. what, 30? to attend playgrounds unsupervised. Being that time is money and parents don't have enough of that to run the house, kids plop in front of video games eating the only food most people can afford (chock full of PHVO + HFCS) and get diabetes.
If we've traded a <1% childhood possibility of concussion with a >20% childhood obesity rate, and school standards slipping in every metric as our children care less to learn about the world they no longer participate in, then I see that as the wrong direction to go in. It's not that we shouldn't want our children to be safe, it's just that safety has diminishing returns. Our kids must face some marginal level of risk in their lives or they will never reap rewards. That is one more metric as a culture and as a global community where we need to establish some reasonable balance.
Ha, screw IRC and run a google Wave server once the code is released to the public. Way easier than IRC to set up, more flexible, only browsers needed to log in, SSL is a snap.
Email already needs to die a horrible, fiery, spammish death.. this is just one more reason why. ;3
I would not classify Chuck Norris as a "Jock". :P
Chuck Norris is the answer to the chicken and the egg problem. Any real number divided by zero = Chuck Norris. You're obviously new here, move 'long. :3
Well, they're _already_ T-Mo customers - they must be used to suckage by now, right?
Not really. I live in a place called "Oregon". Neither Verizon nor AT&T do anything remotely confusable with providing service here. T-mobile does, and I mean in the tiniest corners of nowhere even. My unlimited/everything plan costs me $84/mo. Any Android 2.0 exclusivity with Verizon or Rogers or whoever you like the best doesn't really do us any good here, bucko.
None of it will matter unless the 1 month waiting period applies to p2p networks as well.
The real motive is the studios want to shut out the "competition", given that "buying is the new renting".
Next on agenda: Studios begin charging customers late fees for DVD's they've already bought and have not yet responsibly incinerated.
Ah ha, but you can't trick me into modding this comment as you'd like.
It's a trap! Don't mod the article as the author urges you to! ;3
FYI: yes, I am stacking more double negatives just to see if you'll react in an amusing manner. :3
I don't know if GP has his heels dug in or not, but the core point he makes is valid. Grabbing links from a cherry picked collection of events deemed to be sexist is a form of data searching. When you come back with 5 links, it sounds very much as though you are saying "look, 5 out of 5 of these examples are sexist", and you are certainly ignoring tens of millions of publicly archived mailing list, forum, and irc comments.
I hear your impassioned plea that if there is a problem, we should have the courage to fix it. I actually don't see GP explicitly disagreeing. He is posing no alternate explanation as to the low figure of female representation in our community. What he is asking is "if female participation is at 1.5%, and anti-female speech is at 0.1%, then what action do you expect us to take?" also, implicitly: "If you disagree with my figure of 0.1%, then show me a fairly picked sample where more than one out of a thousand communications are sexist in nature." Free communication does mean that trolls will be able to open their mouths as well. The best we can do is decry them or mod them down, try to keep them banned from our lists, but erasing them from existence is beyond our power. You can't sway them and you can't "make up" for them. The only thing anyone can do (within my knowledge of present policy and technology) is to try and ignore them and starve them.
I think someone above made reference to Stallman being sexist, too. Yep, I would certainly believe that. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to excise him from the community short of putting GNU out of business, and I've been wanting to do that long before the topic of sexism ever came across my desk. Still, allegations of Henry Ford being anti-semite (damn me if I can't find a reliable citation for that just now) will have an equally difficult time changing the name of the company he founded today.
So, let us recouch GP's question in an actionable form. Can we have any/some of the following:
* Examples of > 0.1% by posting volume sexism from a fair sample pool?
* Examples of the community favoring sexist behavior anywhere, as opposed to communal opposition to nut-job comments
* What community members can do (or what policies can change at the community admin level) to alleviate sexism. (We cannot clearly see what to do in response to allegations like this if we cannot comprehend in what way we are being sexist)
I, for one, think you've met your quota for about a decade. ( ?< )
I think the point being made is that GP is asking for examples which are not already one-offs shunned by the community.
This is open source, after all. Most of our communications, be it mailing list or irc, are publicly archived.
Hell, even rough communal approval of comments is public knowledge. Take Slashdot's mod system for example. You get thousands of sexist and racist comments here, even more than 0.1%.. however they get modded into the trash can. Call me politically incorrect, but I think that is a fair way for a forum to proceed. We are not suggesting that a 0.1% failure rate must be tolerated simply because we want to lean upon that personally, but because there will always be trolls and morons. No amount of penitence from the innocent will shut up the lunatic fringe.
FOSS does not live by the same rules as the professional world, either. Sexism (ideally) gets you fired in big business. What can be done about trolls here, ban them from the internet? (gawd, I know the link that will bring up..) I really think more people need to be in harmony with the forest and tune out the obnoxious trees on this one.
So please do not confuse "I want some examples, btw one-offs do not count" with the No Real Scotsman fallacy. We all know the alleged problem is systemic, so we want systemic examples that have shown some amount of looking-the-other-way from the community. Slashdot comments modded up, conferences with sexist slides where the presenter's reputation didn't get trashed, you know. That sort of thing. Lestwise, how can communal attitudes be faulted?
If this becomes a trend, then at least, here is one solution to the airbrushing phenomenon. :P
I can't get "photosketch.exe" to run either, and I am using the 1.10 version of OpenCV.
What I want to know is where do I get the app shown in the vimeo video where they are actually sketching and adding tags? That's not photoshop, and it has a pared down UI one might expect to come alongside an app such as this. From the transcript: "The user interface of our system is intuitive". Alright, so shoooow meeee the UI? ;D
UPDATE: before hitting submit, I tried commenting out the ini lines mentioned above in this thread. I must have the right MS DLL as well, because now PhotoSketch runs, but it just spits out some stuff in my terminal about obtaining crap from one folder and spitting it out into another. I haven't sketched anything yet, and I'm not clear on what form of input it wants.
In related news, I checked out the comments to the Vimeo video on Vimeo's site. Tao there explains that (beyond the obvious and helpful name change to "sketch2photo"), the input UI I was hoping for has not yet been released, but they are targeting that being a web-based app. *shrug?*
I lost my link and closed that tab, but it's the only comment from Tao in the Vimeo comments of that video, circa Oct 7.