To get a story posted here, i've wondered whom i'd have to rim or suck to just ONCE not be fucked over by having a well-worn moderator ALWAYS have his/her submission 12 to 15 hours AFTER MINE get posted, and his is basically a paraphrasing of the parent website.
It's almost becoming a personal point of shame that i even grouse about it, but it sure would be nice if thunder from on high rocked and lightning shocked those who perpetuate cronyism here. One way to put an end to it is to force them to get out of their heads they're NOT going to be getting CNN or BBC or CNET positions by virtue of having a hard-on-raging, ego-as-big-as-Hoover-Dam, 3,442 published submissions. The way to do it is to make sure that when multiple people submit the same story suggestion within a few hours of each other (ESPECIALLY if the never-published person scoops the frat-rat), the scooped gets listed, but below the one scooping. It could enhance the sense of community many of us may mistakenly presume to be here. Most of us end up just shouting at a writing wall, and a handful of moderators (some good, some retaliatory) ultimately have the last laugh.
Slashdot needs:
-- a multi-submitter recognition system -- a histogrm of scoring, not "most recent score" -- a troll-/flambait-/off-topic-/ outing scheme to prevent hit-and-run whackos having anonymity -- better meta-association of comments that often get shoved around out of relation/context to their initial parent -- a term limit on standing-moderator status
To whomever marked me off-topic (regrettably,/. cannot foresee the need to create for each story a category called "unattributable anonymous frack's slights" so that responses of negative sentiment don't appear to be aimed at the thread not really responsible...)
If every one knows it's cronyism, and accepts it, then i guess it IS offtopic. I never DID think/. was anything approaching democratic. This kind of off-topic slight by someone out there (being allowed to stand as marked) just underscores it.
a Confibulating Anular (vs annular) Confinement Beam to tap into your data stream via their ODN Junction/Relay frazzletrap... Instead of "A Fistful of Data", one might doodle to "An Assload of Data Streams"...
I asked similar questions when i posted this last night, but it seems bossanovalithium had a better write-up or has connection to be posted first...
yeh, off-topic, but this kind of shit is why i don't bother to moderate. Why bother moderating when for 2 years i never see posted anything i suggest (and, no, before you ask, anyone, YES, i submit to be shared or submit as a story when this stuff has backfired on me...), and when maybe 5 times, the next day, someone ELSE gets posted. Makes me think of cronyims. But, what the hell. My fatal flaw expecting a little better. Like Slashdot posting submissions using only a single submitter name, but multiples, when multiple people submit within 2 to 4 hours of one another, especially since the moderators seem to wait long enough.
And, no, pretty much nobody here is of big-time-magazine caliber, so the cronyism should stop.
"It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."
You could go that route, (to avoid my a-hole stalker/troller, i'm making sure to say:), or substitute your server and hardware of choice and stream the log info into a database. SURELY, Open Source has software that makes this trivial.
But, to avoid non-trivial travails, the "repugnican" leaders (that superset or meta-crust other than the normal day-to-day republican civilian) need back the hell off. They are essentially telling "private" members of the population they must retain data to either incriminate themselves in ways related or not related to a specific investigation, or they are telling the public it has to tattle on people who are random, pseudo-anonymous users of a hotspot. Hotspot operators (homes or businesses) may not always have the skills to determine if a hotspot user is nefarious or innocuous.
If the law enforcement wants this information, then fucking THEY should keep on paying or coercing the telcos, and stop this stupid-ass charade the fools are trying to convince us doesn't exist. The lying jerk-ferks just want us to believe they don't have wiretap and log tracking powers that would astound us, or they want non-law enforcement entities to "boost the tractor beam" to help them fish for things that would be very tough to find.
Next, the repugnicans (and, yeh, some dumbocrats will be in that camp out of republicans and democrats) will be telling us we need to set up servers and clusters in our spare rooms they know we have....
As for the Stimulus Package, the repugnicans wish, they should not get it if they don't offer for FREE to every home & business with Wi-Fi the useful or necessary Mac OS X & Mac Mini and MySQL IT room.
"Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?"
Maybe Google could MINE (boobytrap) the path others try to take to success? But, as long as Google seems to not be making people and companies "fatal exceptions", then i don't see how Google's monopoly will be a bad one...
No, they KNOW what they are doing. It's the reach-around/reach-in-front. They've just interlocked their knuckles and are putting more effort into the arc-work. Rather, they've been so BUSY with interlocked knuckles that they have become accustomed to that stance, and any new posture just hurts too much to feel good.
moist (think: Nutty Professor/Merv Griffith makes me moist...)
Will it be the homeless person, or the rover? In any case Rover got a real shiner. And, i feel so... overcome, so excited for the thing. It's wonderful how Mother Nature can provide pleasure in so many small ways. A VOLTAGE boost. Whoda thought...
So, it sounds more and more to me that facebook, as with other sites, want to be land-grabbing, manifest-destinest assholes. They seem to be granting themselves the right to remove copyright or similar watermarks from images they or their partners/licensees/subsids may want to sell.
So, let me get this. A professional (or any for that matter) photographer can shoot pics of a wedding, get the proofs made, stamp them with his/her copyright mark, then preview to the buyer. They buyer KNOWS or should know that this work, unless sold off by the photographer under a defining contract (such as work for hire, and not the art/skill of the supplying photographer) is NOT to be illegally reproduced for any reason, whether or not monetary gain is realized.
Facebook needs to go hands off, and needs to archive works and writings only for site continuity reasons, and they need to explicitly state they are not seeking nor will they allow employees to abuse, usurp, or angle in on subscribers work. Now, facebook seems to want to use its trashy-ass lawyers to redefine or usurp copyright law, coerce subscribers/site users into arbitration, and to forefeit rights normally not surrendered. Fucking assholes.
So, they are saying that they can make derivatives of my blueprints, market them ahead of me, and then legally produce a POS (piece of shit) TOS that says their derivative works of my work can trump my original right to sell and modify my works. Their modifications might by fluke come VERY close to mine, and then who in the world would believe that my earlier, unpublished, unregistered works truly preceded their faster distribution of mine?
Don't think it can happen? Back around 2001 or 2002, an entrepreneur (of color) went to a bank (in Maryland or DC area) to obtain a loan. The bank's loan officer declined. A few months later, that customer/potential client found out his business plan was in operation. He investigated, and found out that the person running HIS BUSINESS PLAN obtained it from the bank loan officer. The two turned out to be friends. The loan officer declined a person of color and basically fucking STOLE the business plan and gave it to his friend.
Facebook, with numerous employees and lawyers (as with deviant art and other sites, such as slashdot) can take all our work and offload it to someone who can package it faster and maybe better, but the rub is not that they may incite or inspire derivative work. The rub is that their assigneed or recipient might obtain protection (legally, by lawyers and by quirks in copyright law) to prevent the originator from also benefitting.
Another example: IF you submit a business plan to a bank, they may make copies of it for purposes of surviving an audit the US Small Business Administration may perform if the applicant is trying to process an SBA business loan. The bank (or the loan officer involved) may also try to claim it needs to make for quality control or reasons to prove s/he is work. So, again your ideas might fall prey to greedy, well-funded people.
That's why you need to first PURGE or SUBSTITUTE your content before simply "cancelling" your account.
Replace the facts with nonsense, or free-domain content. That says you are rescinding their "access" and "display" of past content. Of course you can't take back email. I imagine, though, they'lll make it REALLY hard for you to dig up every post you've made, probably to make SURE it's onerous and not worth your time to "remove", say, 2,580 posts to numerous profiles.
They might end up following the Slashdot model, where once you post, you can't remove. "You should have proofread, or should have THOUGHT LONG AND HARD, YOU IDIOT/SUCKER/CASH COW"" is what they'll be thinking, or implying.
What needs to happen is someone needs to come up with a model that undermines facebook. An escrow service that holds the content, rather than a company that tries to claim ownership/access/distribution rights to it is needed. This way, when you NEED or want to remove ALL traces, or almost all traces, you should be able to simply nuke your stuff, except for matters related to criminal investigation, in which case, the law can access archives. But, for day-to-day purposes, no one lacking a court order -- not even IT -- should be able to locate the account, or resurrect it.
Also, if facebook cares about user privacy (i don't know if they offer or refer users to a tool/widget in the f/b applications portfolio), facebook would allow users to remove or alter their display name information so the users can visit the site nearly anonymously while on transit or in public places.
Second, if facebook cares, they'd allow users to sanitize/anonymize the faces and names of their friends. This would assure all IN facebook that stalkers or nosy/busybodies in the public who do NOT have a facebook account can't randomly victimize someone. ANYONE looking at facebook profiles and who is out to select a victim in that venue should be required to HAVE an account, not simply read over someone's shoulder and see a street address or cell phone number or alternate e-mail address or employer name.
I think that all the brains there in facebook are not as smart as most of us credit them to be.
Not for that. But they should be careful because they probably just pissed off a load of laptop and biometrics software manufacturers who will likely lobby for their being arrested if they land in the US, or if they commence their presentation.
Haven't they heard of Russian and other national's programmers being arrested or threatened with arrest if they land here?
But, if they are REALLY good, they've come up with a solution (for however long decent solutions can be expected to last...), and boost Vietnam's programmer prominence. They're doing not too shabby in the shipbuilding industry
Maybe they can help out with the US TSA/TWIC/Port Security algorithms?
But, if they get arrested, I don't think Vietnam will take this lightly. The US better go light on this one because if the biometric software touted as good enough for consumers is a fraud, or shoddy at best, then these programmers are nothing less and probably a little bit more than responsible whistleblowers in my book. Why stand by and watch vapor/failure/crapware enter the market if it can be headed off?
Gosh. There is always my stalker out there, looking to piss me (and others) off.
How the hell is it flamebait? In 1999, there was a battery-powered car that be the latest Porseh or Lamborghini from zero to something like 60, over a given distance. Sure, it petered out after about a quarter mile, but the point was so show that DC motor/battery cars could be used in start/stop traffic for purposes of avoiding wasting gas in the typical jack-rabbit starts.
Now, fast forward to today, where in hindsight, we can see Toyota was NOT making a bad call for offering the Prius. Ford jumped in, probably not wanting to be upstaged by a Japanese company. Hell, after all, the USA has ballistic missile and fast attack submarines in quanties even the Russians (former Soviets) cannot sustain, and the US has gas/special fuel-guzzing NASCAR and other circuit racing (which, you know, either has a good number of foreign participants or has competing events), and has other displays of might, power, speed, and what not.
Now, why someone might take umbrage to my preceding post boggles MY mind. Yeh, it might have PISSED OFF someone incapable of handling the truth. Sure, i get irritated at being marked troll and flamebait, but increasingly, the stalker i have out there is less of an annoyance compared to the crappy slashcode that doesn't reign in troll-markers/flamebait-markers, and doesn't rally others to come in and weight in on a stalker, and code which doesn't show the mod history of a post, but instead shows the final/latest score, which only exacerbates the "follow-the-herd" mentality.
Pathetic.
Anyway, even if a few things in my post are offensive to the stalker, s/he could have taken solace or comfort in the possibility that the stimulus package might help the ailing US-origin auto manufactures not shut down all number of plants. Or, maybe my stalker simply hates that i won't say "US automakers" and "foreign automakers". Hell, when Honda number of years ago surpassed the Ford Taurus in non-fleet sales (after all, Ford, it is easily arguable, CHEATED by using FLEET SALES & LEASING NUMBERS (cars sold to law enforcement, social services, taxi cab companies, or leased to rental companies and the like, which would severely skew numbers and make Ford look better than it was) to dupe the US public when it couldn't match Honda quality for a long time...), Ford and many "Merkuns" were LIVID AS HELL when we heard and saw (obviously/probably dreamt up by the Gardena/Garden Grove/Los Angeles Honda people and aided by one or more marketing companies) with:
"Honda: The number one American-Made car(/automobile)"...
The emphasis was on "American-Made" because Americans in the north -- and maybe by then Canada -- were BUILDING THE ACCORD, which finally/at one point surpassed domestic consumer-based (not FLEET-based) purchases/sales. "American-Made" threw the Big Three into a thrombosis or conniption fit, and because they sat on their asses for too long, laughing along with those who called the Honda Civic/CVCC a rice-burner, and a SoCal Surfer Car, and other disparaging names, the felt they had no competition, even despite the oil crisis of the 70s. But, Honda, Toyota, Mazda, and others (even the Europeans, paying almost 30% to 2x as much as we did/still do for auto fuel) improved on their emissions standards and fuel management better than the US' Big Three did.
Now, my stalker, (and anyone supporting my stalker by not taking him/her to task) as for the batteries, don't YOU think it would be GOOD THING for US-originated automakers to shift as fast as they can to hybridized cars in order to not idle along for too long? What is WITH you anyway. Why respond in knee-jerk fashion? Can't you accept the fact that for far too long people in the USA argued that NASA battery technology was not (easily) adaptable to the US auto market, and that once Toyota upstaged that argument, that it was a "writing on the wall moment" for the US-origin automakers.
a shitty economy to get the US-origin auto mfr's to get "charged up" over the battery issue. And, well-educated and wiser people tell us "an ounce of prevention is worth (more than) a pound of cure" and being penny-wise can make us pound foolish.
Now (according to news i heard this am), one of the big 3 US-origin automakers is so deep in trouble that the management offers to let the unions manage employee benefits is pointless because there isn't enough money for either of them to properly manage things now.
But, to me, it seems these auto companies (most if not all of them globally) operated as if the economy would chugg along without a hitch. At least Toyota smartly gambled and seems to have fared well on the plunge into battery technology despite the naysayers. I suspect Ford got in to avoid being too much of a Johnny-come-lately, and probably wisely realized Toyota HAD to have some insight most US-origin auto makers reluctantly/grudgingly accepted.
And, it seems once again, ecological/environmentally-minded (despite the issues surrounding battery disposal, energy conversion value, etc.) Californians seem to have led the way toward the perceived or real value of using/buying hybrids. Hell, i dare say that if the US-origin and US-based automakers find a way to cut the amount of gas needed without getting greedy and jacking up the cost of car acquisition for consumers, they would AT LEAST not have to shut down so many plants. Hybridize the cars, make the batteries replaceable, and don't obsolete the cars for the sake of forcing new sales.
"The spaghetti-like nightmare that forms many users' collection of phone chargers, headset connectors and data cables could be set to end after a major mobile industry forum agreed to standardise on one type of connector."
Wow! I suddenly had the bad imagery (dream in a conundrum in an enigma, wrapped in a rimming.dll file) of a prophylactic saddle (named ms) attached to my ass, and that after YEARS of riding, it just didn't HURT any more. I mean, it HURT, but it doesn't REALLY hurt. But, then i woke up from that millisecond-mare and though of Pulp Fiction/Butch, and then realized, whoaa, that's not MY dream. That's the reality of those who are too chicken shit to stand up to microsoft.
(Yehe, yeh, i expect my stalker out there to mod me 0, offtopic or 0, flamebait..., but that fire up my ass doesn't REALLY hurt... it itches, it burns, not unlike s/he's playing veritable Ben-Gay... )
Officials and their employees NEED TO LEARN TO LIVE within the means imposed by budgets. If they can't then they need to be FIRST in line to take a pay cut. Every frackin' business that starts up, even teenages selling lemonade, have to endure myriad laws, rules, regulations, ordinances, taxes, fees, fines...
Why don't they quit the fiction of the power of money and print currency to provide pubic work and print separate currency to promote commerce between non-government parties?
Oh, i know why, because it will QUICKLY cause long-overdue insurrection or incite coups when the public realizes they bought a bill of goods that is really a pyramid scheme to let government and wealthy oligarch suppress the people on the bottom... A "supercurrency" could somehow be pegged to the "non-government" currency.
Instead of using a tag, people might want to consider using a watermark or ribbon across their photos. Something along the lines of "I, (name) shot this photo, retain all perpetual rights, and deny and activey refuse to share with or give to facebook or any of its partners, subsidiaries, etc, ANY rights that are beyond preserving the content for purposes of site/profile/friend-link continuity. ALL other rights remain mine, and I will SUE YOU TO NO END if you redistribute my work for gain or not for gain to any party when there is intent to usurp my ownership right and income earning potential..."
Now, that would be so long as to obsure the photo, but it would send facebook and the deviantart sites the message that their hand-grabbing of peoples art is NOT to extend beyond presentation on behalf of the SUBMITTER.
If fb and da could legally grab our work, that means that they are via the TOS creating a preemptive strike to deprive artists of in the future using their own work. Theoretically, i could post drawings of my ships. Someone chummy with fb or da could say, "Hey, that David guy is doing a SHITTY job of presenting and gaining money from his work. Why not we take and repackage it and put OUR name on it?"
Hell, in that situation, it would only be a matter of time before fb and da say, "We don't like you putting such marks on your photos and besides many users of the site are complaining about the photo being hard to see..." But, to that, fuck 'em. It's that way to prove a point, that 1:) they do NOT have the right to expect ownership or derivatives rights without or without compensation (reasonable or unreasonable compensation) and 2:) the pics are not necessarily for the enjoyment of any and all who stumble upon them.
I would imagine that the fbs and da sites would resort to killing the accounts, or digitizing away the copyright notices.
They might take a dim view on people going through and watermarking all previous content, not just newly uploaded content.
Also, it's possible they might take a dim view on placeholders. Imagine you decide to kill your account with fb or da or the likes of them. You systematically remove your pics and substitute horrendous or innocuous pics and then after allowing for them to have a full month of archiving of pics you could care less about, you THEN terminate your account. That leaves them with what you could legally say was the LAST and FINAL set of your work they could archive. If they dig DEEPER into the archives, remove your watermarks, and then you find out your re-touched photos were retouched by again, but by them to anonymize your work, they should suffer the wrath of the law.
In some jurisdictions, aspiring and even professional photographers cannot make money by trying to ride on the composition of works by, say, Ansel Adams. Some tried to compose their pics just like his, then sell them but not attribute Ansel Adams, arguing that he composed from easily reproducible vantage points, and that what he shot was of natural landmarks in the public, whether or not the public shot similar or identical framings, whether or not for money. Some of those people lost. Some could get away with if it not under the jurisdiction, or if the AA estated didn't pursue them.
How many of you readers realize that the Mori Tower in Tokyo is aggressively protected by "Old Man Mori", who considers his construction to be globally copyright protected? If you have a website making prominent use of his building, he'll come after you. I've not tried to test him, but i certainly DID take pics with my Sharp phone. To me, it's in the public, its' not a floor plan for a given project, it's not a tool. It's a BUILDING. Sailboats/yachts and numerous ship designs not paid for by public money get some protection, but buildings and even whole cities (recall that Slashdot ran a story around 07 or 08 about NY requiring professional photographers and film crews to obtain shooting permits, even if no police or public services were required, meaning anyone even using a Steadycam and gathering background imagery unobtrusively, not even tipping off anyone that this footage would end up in a film would be subject to sancion by NY if they chose to pursue the shooters of the footage...)
Slashdot Mirror
moderators.
To get a story posted here, i've wondered whom i'd have to rim or suck to just ONCE not be fucked over by having a well-worn moderator ALWAYS have his/her submission 12 to 15 hours AFTER MINE get posted, and his is basically a paraphrasing of the parent website.
It's almost becoming a personal point of shame that i even grouse about it, but it sure would be nice if thunder from on high rocked and lightning shocked those who perpetuate cronyism here. One way to put an end to it is to force them to get out of their heads they're NOT going to be getting CNN or BBC or CNET positions by virtue of having a hard-on-raging, ego-as-big-as-Hoover-Dam, 3,442 published submissions. The way to do it is to make sure that when multiple people submit the same story suggestion within a few hours of each other (ESPECIALLY if the never-published person scoops the frat-rat), the scooped gets listed, but below the one scooping. It could enhance the sense of community many of us may mistakenly presume to be here. Most of us end up just shouting at a writing wall, and a handful of moderators (some good, some retaliatory) ultimately have the last laugh.
Slashdot needs:
-- a multi-submitter recognition system
-- a histogrm of scoring, not "most recent score"
-- a troll-/flambait-/off-topic-/ outing scheme to prevent hit-and-run whackos having anonymity
-- better meta-association of comments that often get shoved around out of relation/context to their initial parent
-- a term limit on standing-moderator status
You and i agree. But, Phroggy seems to counter us. (More of my musings/thoughts in my thread which i submitted as a story last night.)
But, does anyone think there is any truth to the phone being a REAL prototype? And what about any NSA angles on it?
To whomever marked me off-topic (regrettably, /. cannot foresee the need to create for each story a category called "unattributable anonymous frack's slights" so that responses of negative sentiment don't appear to be aimed at the thread not really responsible...)
If every one knows it's cronyism, and accepts it, then i guess it IS offtopic. I never DID think /. was anything approaching democratic. This kind of off-topic slight by someone out there (being allowed to stand as marked) just underscores it.
a Confibulating Anular (vs annular) Confinement Beam to tap into your data stream via their ODN Junction/Relay frazzletrap... Instead of "A Fistful of Data", one might doodle to "An Assload of Data Streams"...
Don't say mean things. She may become ... furious. But, if you send her a McFlur(r)y, she might be ensweetened.
I asked similar questions when i posted this last night, but it seems bossanovalithium had a better write-up or has connection to be posted first...
yeh, off-topic, but this kind of shit is why i don't bother to moderate. Why bother moderating when for 2 years i never see posted anything i suggest (and, no, before you ask, anyone, YES, i submit to be shared or submit as a story when this stuff has backfired on me...), and when maybe 5 times, the next day, someone ELSE gets posted. Makes me think of cronyims. But, what the hell. My fatal flaw expecting a little better. Like Slashdot posting submissions using only a single submitter name, but multiples, when multiple people submit within 2 to 4 hours of one another, especially since the moderators seem to wait long enough.
And, no, pretty much nobody here is of big-time-magazine caliber, so the cronyism should stop.
"It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."
You could go that route, (to avoid my a-hole stalker/troller, i'm making sure to say:), or substitute your server and hardware of choice and stream the log info into a database. SURELY, Open Source has software that makes this trivial.
But, to avoid non-trivial travails, the "repugnican" leaders (that superset or meta-crust other than the normal day-to-day republican civilian) need back the hell off. They are essentially telling "private" members of the population they must retain data to either incriminate themselves in ways related or not related to a specific investigation, or they are telling the public it has to tattle on people who are random, pseudo-anonymous users of a hotspot. Hotspot operators (homes or businesses) may not always have the skills to determine if a hotspot user is nefarious or innocuous.
If the law enforcement wants this information, then fucking THEY should keep on paying or coercing the telcos, and stop this stupid-ass charade the fools are trying to convince us doesn't exist. The lying jerk-ferks just want us to believe they don't have wiretap and log tracking powers that would astound us, or they want non-law enforcement entities to "boost the tractor beam" to help them fish for things that would be very tough to find.
Next, the repugnicans (and, yeh, some dumbocrats will be in that camp out of republicans and democrats) will be telling us we need to set up servers and clusters in our spare rooms they know we have....
As for the Stimulus Package, the repugnicans wish, they should not get it if they don't offer for FREE to every home & business with Wi-Fi the useful or necessary Mac OS X & Mac Mini and MySQL IT room.
Dumbasses!
Enpossiblized, the way things can be "embiggened"...
But, i am sure that while the databased was "enlightened", Halff was fully "enlightened"...
The EYES have it...
But, will they be HUMAN or remanufactured to spec eyes?
If these eyes become sentry features, then approaching enemies might fear "Hills have eyes"... signs posted around the perimeter...
"Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?"
Maybe Google could MINE (boobytrap) the path others try to take to success? But, as long as Google seems to not be making people and companies "fatal exceptions", then i don't see how Google's monopoly will be a bad one...
No, they KNOW what they are doing. It's the reach-around/reach-in-front. They've just interlocked their knuckles and are putting more effort into the arc-work. Rather, they've been so BUSY with interlocked knuckles that they have become accustomed to that stance, and any new posture just hurts too much to feel good.
Twister in the shower... Just don't DROP this phone in the shower... it might require mental AND physical gymnastics to use it properly...
moist (think: Nutty Professor/Merv Griffith makes me moist...)
Will it be the homeless person, or the rover? In any case Rover got a real shiner. And, i feel so... overcome, so excited for the thing. It's wonderful how Mother Nature can provide pleasure in so many small ways. A VOLTAGE boost. Whoda thought...
So, it sounds more and more to me that facebook, as with other sites, want to be land-grabbing, manifest-destinest assholes. They seem to be granting themselves the right to remove copyright or similar watermarks from images they or their partners/licensees/subsids may want to sell.
So, let me get this. A professional (or any for that matter) photographer can shoot pics of a wedding, get the proofs made, stamp them with his/her copyright mark, then preview to the buyer. They buyer KNOWS or should know that this work, unless sold off by the photographer under a defining contract (such as work for hire, and not the art/skill of the supplying photographer) is NOT to be illegally reproduced for any reason, whether or not monetary gain is realized.
Facebook needs to go hands off, and needs to archive works and writings only for site continuity reasons, and they need to explicitly state they are not seeking nor will they allow employees to abuse, usurp, or angle in on subscribers work.
Now, facebook seems to want to use its trashy-ass lawyers to redefine or usurp copyright law, coerce subscribers/site users into arbitration, and to forefeit rights normally not surrendered. Fucking assholes.
So, they are saying that they can make derivatives of my blueprints, market them ahead of me, and then legally produce a POS (piece of shit) TOS that says their derivative works of my work can trump my original right to sell and modify my works. Their modifications might by fluke come VERY close to mine, and then who in the world would believe that my earlier, unpublished, unregistered works truly preceded their faster distribution of mine?
Don't think it can happen? Back around 2001 or 2002, an entrepreneur (of color) went to a bank (in Maryland or DC area) to obtain a loan. The bank's loan officer declined. A few months later, that customer/potential client found out his business plan was in operation. He investigated, and found out that the person running HIS BUSINESS PLAN obtained it from the bank loan officer. The two turned out to be friends. The loan officer declined a person of color and basically fucking STOLE the business plan and gave it to his friend.
Facebook, with numerous employees and lawyers (as with deviant art and other sites, such as slashdot) can take all our work and offload it to someone who can package it faster and maybe better, but the rub is not that they may incite or inspire derivative work. The rub is that their assigneed or recipient might obtain protection (legally, by lawyers and by quirks in copyright law) to prevent the originator from also benefitting.
Another example: IF you submit a business plan to a bank, they may make copies of it for purposes of surviving an audit the US Small Business Administration may perform if the applicant is trying to process an SBA business loan. The bank (or the loan officer involved) may also try to claim it needs to make for quality control or reasons to prove s/he is work. So, again your ideas might fall prey to greedy, well-funded people.
That's why you need to first PURGE or SUBSTITUTE your content before simply "cancelling" your account.
Replace the facts with nonsense, or free-domain content. That says you are rescinding their "access" and "display" of past content. Of course you can't take back email. I imagine, though, they'lll make it REALLY hard for you to dig up every post you've made, probably to make SURE it's onerous and not worth your time to "remove", say, 2,580 posts to numerous profiles.
They might end up following the Slashdot model, where once you post, you can't remove. "You should have proofread, or should have THOUGHT LONG AND HARD, YOU IDIOT/SUCKER/CASH COW"" is what they'll be thinking, or implying.
What needs to happen is someone needs to come up with a model that undermines facebook. An escrow service that holds the content, rather than a company that tries to claim ownership/access/distribution rights to it is needed. This way, when you NEED or want to remove ALL traces, or almost all traces, you should be able to simply nuke your stuff, except for matters related to criminal investigation, in which case, the law can access archives. But, for day-to-day purposes, no one lacking a court order -- not even IT -- should be able to locate the account, or resurrect it.
Also, if facebook cares about user privacy (i don't know if they offer or refer users to a tool/widget in the f/b applications portfolio), facebook would allow users to remove or alter their display name information so the users can visit the site nearly anonymously while on transit or in public places.
Second, if facebook cares, they'd allow users to sanitize/anonymize the faces and names of their friends. This would assure all IN facebook that stalkers or nosy/busybodies in the public who do NOT have a facebook account can't randomly victimize someone. ANYONE looking at facebook profiles and who is out to select a victim in that venue should be required to HAVE an account, not simply read over someone's shoulder and see a street address or cell phone number or alternate e-mail address or employer name.
I think that all the brains there in facebook are not as smart as most of us credit them to be.
OK, I wonder how well those fancy-ass facial recognition systems work on these faces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jem'Hadar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jem'Hadar
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Dreman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut_(Voyager_episode)
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Vidiian
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Pakled
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Kaelon
If the biometrics can pass on these, then maybe they could begin work on testing for hyoo-mons?
But, then, these probably would all pass for each other...
Not for that. But they should be careful because they probably just pissed off a load of laptop and biometrics software manufacturers who will likely lobby for their being arrested if they land in the US, or if they commence their presentation.
Haven't they heard of Russian and other national's programmers being arrested or threatened with arrest if they land here?
But, if they are REALLY good, they've come up with a solution (for however long decent solutions can be expected to last...), and boost Vietnam's programmer prominence. They're doing not too shabby in the shipbuilding industry
Vinashin:
http://www.vinashin.com.vn/english/Capacity.asp
Hyundai-Vinashin:
http://www.hyundai-vinashin.com/
Maybe they can help out with the US TSA/TWIC/Port Security algorithms?
But, if they get arrested, I don't think Vietnam will take this lightly. The US better go light on this one because if the biometric software touted as good enough for consumers is a fraud, or shoddy at best, then these programmers are nothing less and probably a little bit more than responsible whistleblowers in my book. Why stand by and watch vapor/failure/crapware enter the market if it can be headed off?
http://www.primidi.com/2004/11/26.html
"3D Biometric Facial Recognition Comes To UK"
(2004)
Gosh. There is always my stalker out there, looking to piss me (and others) off.
How the hell is it flamebait? In 1999, there was a battery-powered car that be the latest Porseh or Lamborghini from zero to something like 60, over a given distance. Sure, it petered out after about a quarter mile, but the point was so show that DC motor/battery cars could be used in start/stop traffic for purposes of avoiding wasting gas in the typical jack-rabbit starts.
Now, fast forward to today, where in hindsight, we can see Toyota was NOT making a bad call for offering the Prius. Ford jumped in, probably not wanting to be upstaged by a Japanese company. Hell, after all, the USA has ballistic missile and fast attack submarines in quanties even the Russians (former Soviets) cannot sustain, and the US has gas/special fuel-guzzing NASCAR and other circuit racing (which, you know, either has a good number of foreign participants or has competing events), and has other displays of might, power, speed, and what not.
Now, why someone might take umbrage to my preceding post boggles MY mind. Yeh, it might have PISSED OFF someone incapable of handling the truth. Sure, i get irritated at being marked troll and flamebait, but increasingly, the stalker i have out there is less of an annoyance compared to the crappy slashcode that doesn't reign in troll-markers/flamebait-markers, and doesn't rally others to come in and weight in on a stalker, and code which doesn't show the mod history of a post, but instead shows the final/latest score, which only exacerbates the "follow-the-herd" mentality.
Pathetic.
Anyway, even if a few things in my post are offensive to the stalker, s/he could have taken solace or comfort in the possibility that the stimulus package might help the ailing US-origin auto manufactures not shut down all number of plants. Or, maybe my stalker simply hates that i won't say "US automakers" and "foreign automakers". Hell, when Honda number of years ago surpassed the Ford Taurus in non-fleet sales (after all, Ford, it is easily arguable, CHEATED by using FLEET SALES & LEASING NUMBERS (cars sold to law enforcement, social services, taxi cab companies, or leased to rental companies and the like, which would severely skew numbers and make Ford look better than it was) to dupe the US public when it couldn't match Honda quality for a long time...), Ford and many "Merkuns" were LIVID AS HELL when we heard and saw (obviously/probably dreamt up by the Gardena/Garden Grove/Los Angeles Honda people and aided by one or more marketing companies) with:
"Honda: The number one American-Made car(/automobile)"...
The emphasis was on "American-Made" because Americans in the north -- and maybe by then Canada -- were BUILDING THE ACCORD, which finally/at one point surpassed domestic consumer-based (not FLEET-based) purchases/sales. "American-Made" threw the Big Three into a thrombosis or conniption fit, and because they sat on their asses for too long, laughing along with those who called the Honda Civic/CVCC a rice-burner, and a SoCal Surfer Car, and other disparaging names, the felt they had no competition, even despite the oil crisis of the 70s. But, Honda, Toyota, Mazda, and others (even the Europeans, paying almost 30% to 2x as much as we did/still do for auto fuel) improved on their emissions standards and fuel management better than the US' Big Three did.
Now, my stalker, (and anyone supporting my stalker by not taking him/her to task) as for the batteries, don't YOU think it would be GOOD THING for US-originated automakers to shift as fast as they can to hybridized cars in order to not idle along for too long? What is WITH you anyway. Why respond in knee-jerk fashion? Can't you accept the fact that for far too long people in the USA argued that NASA battery technology was not (easily) adaptable to the US auto market, and that once Toyota upstaged that argument, that it was a "writing on the wall moment" for the US-origin automakers.
Sheesh.
a shitty economy to get the US-origin auto mfr's to get "charged up" over the battery issue. And, well-educated and wiser people tell us "an ounce of prevention is worth (more than) a pound of cure" and being penny-wise can make us pound foolish.
Now (according to news i heard this am), one of the big 3 US-origin automakers is so deep in trouble that the management offers to let the unions manage employee benefits is pointless because there isn't enough money for either of them to properly manage things now.
But, to me, it seems these auto companies (most if not all of them globally) operated as if the economy would chugg along without a hitch. At least Toyota smartly gambled and seems to have fared well on the plunge into battery technology despite the naysayers. I suspect Ford got in to avoid being too much of a Johnny-come-lately, and probably wisely realized Toyota HAD to have some insight most US-origin auto makers reluctantly/grudgingly accepted.
And, it seems once again, ecological/environmentally-minded (despite the issues surrounding battery disposal, energy conversion value, etc.) Californians seem to have led the way toward the perceived or real value of using/buying hybrids. Hell, i dare say that if the US-origin and US-based automakers find a way to cut the amount of gas needed without getting greedy and jacking up the cost of car acquisition for consumers, they would AT LEAST not have to shut down so many plants. Hybridize the cars, make the batteries replaceable, and don't obsolete the cars for the sake of forcing new sales.
2 isolinear chips, an ODN, and an optronic interface, hehehehe....
This way, you can program yourself for a variet of pleasure techniques, and possibly rival LCDR Data...
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39289524,00.htm
"The spaghetti-like nightmare that forms many users' collection of phone chargers, headset connectors and data cables could be set to end after a major mobile industry forum agreed to standardise on one type of connector."
What else will we hear about?
"Universal charger for phones plan"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7894763.stm
"Mobile phone makers agree to create standard charger "
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090217/technology/spain_telecom_equip_technology_charger_consumer
Wow! I suddenly had the bad imagery (dream in a conundrum in an enigma, wrapped in a rimming.dll file) of a prophylactic saddle (named ms) attached to my ass, and that after YEARS of riding, it just didn't HURT any more. I mean, it HURT, but it doesn't REALLY hurt. But, then i woke up from that millisecond-mare and though of Pulp Fiction/Butch, and then realized, whoaa, that's not MY dream. That's the reality of those who are too chicken shit to stand up to microsoft.
(Yehe, yeh, i expect my stalker out there to mod me 0, offtopic or 0, flamebait..., but that fire up my ass doesn't REALLY hurt... it itches, it burns, not unlike s/he's playing veritable Ben-Gay... )
(NO, you cannot smave what i am hoking...)
Officials and their employees NEED TO LEARN TO LIVE within the means imposed by budgets. If they can't then they need to be FIRST in line to take a pay cut. Every frackin' business that starts up, even teenages selling lemonade, have to endure myriad laws, rules, regulations, ordinances, taxes, fees, fines...
Why don't they quit the fiction of the power of money and print currency to provide pubic work and print separate currency to promote commerce between non-government parties?
Oh, i know why, because it will QUICKLY cause long-overdue insurrection or incite coups when the public realizes they bought a bill of goods that is really a pyramid scheme to let government and wealthy oligarch suppress the people on the bottom... A "supercurrency" could somehow be pegged to the "non-government" currency.
Instead of using a tag, people might want to consider using a watermark or ribbon across their photos. Something along the lines of "I, (name) shot this photo, retain all perpetual rights, and deny and activey refuse to share with or give to facebook or any of its partners, subsidiaries, etc, ANY rights that are beyond preserving the content for purposes of site/profile/friend-link continuity. ALL other rights remain mine, and I will SUE YOU TO NO END if you redistribute my work for gain or not for gain to any party when there is intent to usurp my ownership right and income earning potential..."
Now, that would be so long as to obsure the photo, but it would send facebook and the deviantart sites the message that their hand-grabbing of peoples art is NOT to extend beyond presentation on behalf of the SUBMITTER.
If fb and da could legally grab our work, that means that they are via the TOS creating a preemptive strike to deprive artists of in the future using their own work. Theoretically, i could post drawings of my ships. Someone chummy with fb or da could say, "Hey, that David guy is doing a SHITTY job of presenting and gaining money from his work. Why not we take and repackage it and put OUR name on it?"
Hell, in that situation, it would only be a matter of time before fb and da say, "We don't like you putting such marks on your photos and besides many users of the site are complaining about the photo being hard to see..." But, to that, fuck 'em. It's that way to prove a point, that 1:) they do NOT have the right to expect ownership or derivatives rights without or without compensation (reasonable or unreasonable compensation) and 2:) the pics are not necessarily for the enjoyment of any and all who stumble upon them.
I would imagine that the fbs and da sites would resort to killing the accounts, or digitizing away the copyright notices.
They might take a dim view on people going through and watermarking all previous content, not just newly uploaded content.
Also, it's possible they might take a dim view on placeholders. Imagine you decide to kill your account with fb or da or the likes of them. You systematically remove your pics and substitute horrendous or innocuous pics and then after allowing for them to have a full month of archiving of pics you could care less about, you THEN terminate your account. That leaves them with what you could legally say was the LAST and FINAL set of your work they could archive. If they dig DEEPER into the archives, remove your watermarks, and then you find out your re-touched photos were retouched by again, but by them to anonymize your work, they should suffer the wrath of the law.
In some jurisdictions, aspiring and even professional photographers cannot make money by trying to ride on the composition of works by, say, Ansel Adams. Some tried to compose their pics just like his, then sell them but not attribute Ansel Adams, arguing that he composed from easily reproducible vantage points, and that what he shot was of natural landmarks in the public, whether or not the public shot similar or identical framings, whether or not for money. Some of those people lost. Some could get away with if it not under the jurisdiction, or if the AA estated didn't pursue them.
How many of you readers realize that the Mori Tower in Tokyo is aggressively protected by "Old Man Mori", who considers his construction to be globally copyright protected? If you have a website making prominent use of his building, he'll come after you. I've not tried to test him, but i certainly DID take pics with my Sharp phone. To me, it's in the public, its' not a floor plan for a given project, it's not a tool. It's a BUILDING. Sailboats/yachts and numerous ship designs not paid for by public money get some protection, but buildings and even whole cities (recall that Slashdot ran a story around 07 or 08 about NY requiring professional photographers and film crews to obtain shooting permits, even if no police or public services were required, meaning anyone even using a Steadycam and gathering background imagery unobtrusively, not even tipping off anyone that this footage would end up in a film would be subject to sancion by NY if they chose to pursue the shooters of the footage...)