Reminds of Bill Clinton's 2000 quote on China censoring the web "Good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Well, Bill Clinton was wrong, and as the article note the Jell-o is now quite firmly on the wall, with hardly a single drip. Your comment is of a similar kind: "Ha, ha! I can't imagine any government/corporation/entity being able to censor the internet( that I became familiar with in the 1990s), therefore they won't be able to censor it(as it exists today)."
Well you are probably very, very, very wrong.
Remember this is the UK where 90%+ of all internet connections are censored by the Internet Watch Foundation. It's a minor step to retrofit this system to monitor urls for "infringement activity" and take steps accordingly. This was in fact the whole point of the child porn filter all along. Here's the relevant quote(the speaker is a copyright industry representative):
"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".
The IWF works. It is a perfect censor: completely inscrutable and opaque, accountable to no-one, no appeal against decisions, no overseeing body, no audits, no way of reviewing lists. It's like something right out of China or the old Soviet Union (Actually that's not really fair. Their censorship organisations were/are actually accountable). The brits embraced all this with open arms, so if you think they're going to raise a fuss about a similar system for music, I say you're living in a fantasy land.
We no longer live in a age of governments accountable to the people. We live in a age of corporations accountable to their shareholders. As such, it's no real surprise that the primary drive to control and censor people in the modern age is coming from the corporate world. The big difference between censorship systems like the IWF and this proposed copyright system is that they are, ostensibly, completely private enterprises. In other words, they are subject to no laws but those made by the corporations they serve. Ultimately, such a system will prove far more effective than anything a government could devise. The philosophy of the market and the laws of free enterprise will shield these new tools of oppression from all attempts to stop them, ironically as (the spirit of) these same laws will be what people will actually be fighting to win back.
This system is going ahead. It's going to work. Once it works in the UK, it will shortly thereafter be applied everywhere else. Once the system is in place, its remit will be extended and the internet as you know it and beleive it to be invincible will be shut down and turned into little more than a glorified cable network with a few Geocities-type sites and the odd decaying blog. Commerical copyright will ultimately prove to be the most effective force for censorship the world has ever seen. It's already more important than national security concerns. Money talks a lot louder than most people, or even states, can be bothered to.
Normally I have no time for all the cynics who rail on Idle. But for once I have to say that Idle really has hit a new low. I can't condone this tripe on the front page and neither should anyone else.
Although I disagree with most of what that company does, their MPEG licensing fee is on the order of $2 per manufactured device to use their technology. This isn't really extortion.
There are numerous other terms attached to MPEG licening, including requirements that you not facilitate the infringement of copyrights, your device respects HDCP, etc, etc. You either do as they say and pay their fee or they sue you. Sounds like extortion to me.
Re:Religious Viewers= $
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I mean, under the laws of physics and rational human reason, there's just *no way* that Barbara Eden could fit into that tiny little bottle.
The term we're looking for here is Willing Suspension of Disbelief, which itself is quite dependant on the fact that while the author's work may not be realistic, it is at least internally consistent.
However, if you break this internal consistency, turning your work into a mashed goop of misdirected literary intent, convoluted cross reference, stretched idioms, and outright lameness, you end up with a Wall Banger. It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost. It also happened to BSG. It will basically happen to any story arc centric show in which the writers make shit up as they go along. For some reason, TV producers seem to think this is a good idea. Personally, I would have fired the writers and cancelled Lost in pre-production the moment I found out the writers did not have even a basic narrative plan from day one.
An example of a show this didn't happen to was Babylon 5. Apparently the writer had a good outline of the entire series mapped out before any shooting began. That's how you tell a long story in television, or anywhere else for that matter. This is pretty basic stuff, usually figured out by most people at around age six when their favourite make believe fairy tale world of swords and sorcery is finally ruined by someones suggestion that the party destroy the orbiting space dreadnought by sabotaging its reactor core. The Lost writers need to take a basic course in how to a) write and b) how to be a GM.
If the executives knew of the fragile state of the BOP and continued, they should be put in Prison. Plain and Simple.
This about this for a second. The corporate executive officers at BP--even those at quite modest management levels--probably didn't(and still don't) know what a Blow out Preventer even was. I doubt they even really understood what oil is, apart from being a black liquid worth lots of money. If you tried to explain to them what a valve was or what it did, their heads would likely implode.
Ignorance is a great defence in the face of charges of negligence.
Perhaps you meant "scream like someone having an orgasm". Or perhaps, more fitting in the context of this story, "scream like someone who an orgasm is being had at the expense of"?
Judges and lawyers are beholden to the law as it is written. If the law is unfair, then it is the fault of the legislators...you know, the people you elected to represent you fairly and reasonably.
And so, the day the law and legislators say that you are undesirable and must be taken away and gassed, I hope it will comfort you to know that the Judges and Lawyers did their duty and adhered so properly to the written word of the law.
So there you have it. A court of law gets you equal treatment for everyone, even if you hate the outcome. A court of equity gets you unequal treatment, but a potential for a 'fair' outcome on a case-by-case basis.
The Australian government has no more legitimate authority to outlaw art, then it does to cutoff the artist's hand, or to enslave the artist.
Depends on what you mean by legitimate. The Australian government has the full backing of a righteous mob hungry for blood. What do you have? A few pieces of paper and faith in the rule of law? Then I suggest you make sure you leave your laptop behind when visiting. Push it, and you may yet find out just how much of a right the Australian Government has to cut pieces off your flesh.
People need to understand that in most western countries, the judiciary is a kind of priesthood utterly divorced from reality or common sense. What matters to lawyers and judges are not concepts like "justice", "equity" or "reason". What matters to them is the written rule of the law, and how it is best spun into ways that benefit both the priesthood and its patrons--the wealthy and powerful. The courts have no interest in the effects of their judgements. They have interest only in which lawyers arguments were more pleasing in the eyes of legal dogma.
This is a very, very serious problem which has only gotten worse in recent decades. The fact that most politicians are drawn from this clique has only accelerated the utter divorce of the courts from reality. Decisions like these are symptomatic of a judicial system that has broken down at a basic level. There are more across the legal spectrum: lenient corporate fines, excessive tort compensation, stringent libel fines, patents in general, children being convicted of child sex abuse, the rollback of habeas corpus, excess cost of legal defence, battery, etc, etc. The court system is entirely broken.
We live in an age of the misrule of law. If things get any worse, we'll be better off with no legal system at all.
Well, western democracies block cartoon image of children, so I guess the great karma circle is now complete. Or else it's a death spiral of censorship. Either way, the outrage brigade gets what they want and the rest of us will just have to accept a more restricted web whether we live in Karachi or California.
Most video codec patents revolve around implementations of the discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, chroma sub-sampling, and bilinear interpolation. All of these techniques are older than the patent examiners who approved the patents and indeed the judges who will try the cases. It's all mathematics, every last bit. These patents are all essentially equivalent to patenting the tetrahedron.
There is nothing the USPTO will not give a patent for. As such, there is absolutely nothing in the universe past or present which can be declared patent free wherever the authority of the USPTO is recognised.
Is an ultraviolet catastrophe a math term, or a physics one?
A mathematical one. The simplest example would be something like the solution to the equation dy/dx=y^2, with y=1 at x=0. This has the solution 1/(1-x), which "blows up" at x=1. Technically, you would say the solution has a singularity at x=1. The singularity is characteristic of the differential equation itself, and not really of the initial conditions or the methods used to solve it. Inherently, you're going to face this problem when attempting to solve the differential equation.
A "blow" up or pole is just one kind of singularity. There are many others. In the context of physical equations, their presence suggests that the assumptions of your equation break down as the solution approaches the singularity, or that your assumptions were flawed to begin with. In the context of mathematics, it means that any numerical system you use to solve the equation is going to break down horribly as it gets close to the singularity. This is a huge problem as if you're using a numerical solver, you typically have no idea where the singularities are anyway. What's worse, most numerical methods will actually continue along happily after they have passed the singularity, the only problem being every number they return after that point is more than likely totally wrong.
It depends on what the authors mean by "classical solutions", but my reading of it is that they mean solutions without singularities and which decay quickly, both of which are reasonable solutions for the equation in question. Since the paper (at the arXiv) is 50 pages long, I'm not entirely sure. Their solution might allow certain other types of singularity or govern the propagation of singularities. I honestly have no idea, which I understand is fairly common these days.
It's worth noting that someone says that an equation has been "solved" in modern mathematics, they typically don't mean that you plug in the initial conditions and then get a formulae for your answer. Generally what they mean is that you can apply some other--probably numerical or approximate--techniques in an effort to solve the equation, and as long as you are careful, use enough computational resources, and don't go to far out, your solutions will be reasonably accurate.
This appears to be more or less what the team has done. They've proven the "the global existence of classical solutions and rapid time decay to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions". In other words, they've proven that the equation has "well behaved" solutions and not solutions for which something goes horribly wrong at some distance from your starting point.
While it doesn't sound like much, this is actually a very big deal. If the proof had gone the other way, it would mean that the equation would produce something akin to "ultraviolet catastrophes" under certain conditions, which means that the equation did not properly describe physical systems. With this proof, that's not an issue anymore and we now know that the equation will always produce reasonable solutions when given reasonable (i.e. physical) initial conditions.
Perhaps they've gone farther than just existence proofs and also provided a formula or technique for obtaining or approximating solutions. However, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal is a closed publisher and the article is locked behind a paywall, so I guess the vast majority of us will never know.
Move out of the sad little town you live in and finally realize that majority rules, regardless of your personal preferences.
We're not talking about majority rules here. We're talking about one company deciding what's right and wrong for the web, and the billions of people on it. Perhaps you're fine with this, but some of us are worried about where this is inevitably leading; back to the pre-web days where a handful of companies controlled the majority of our media and all the opinions on it.
Get some god damn perspective, you don't always get your way. You aren't entitled to tell other people what to do.
Unless of course I'm a multi-billion dollar company. Then I can tell millions of other people what and what not to do, say and read.
Facebook is the world's worst gossip. You tell them anything, they will tell it to every one of your friends, their friends (marketers), and probably anyone else who so much as passes by.
All these tools essentially do is add a "and please don't tell anyone" onto your data entries. The real solution is not to tell the gossip anything in the first place.
There ARE sugar-daddy style sites that have slipped through, by being surreptitious about it. They call it "arrangements" and "friendship deals" and all kinds of other things.
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Basically, Google is the insatiable voyeur, we are all the neighbourhood children, and Chrome is the delicious sweety used to entice us into giving the smiling man what he really wants.
Slashdot Mirror
High density and diversity in fast food delivery, for example.
Reminds of Bill Clinton's 2000 quote on China censoring the web "Good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Well, Bill Clinton was wrong, and as the article note the Jell-o is now quite firmly on the wall, with hardly a single drip. Your comment is of a similar kind: "Ha, ha! I can't imagine any government/corporation/entity being able to censor the internet( that I became familiar with in the 1990s), therefore they won't be able to censor it(as it exists today)."
Well you are probably very, very, very wrong.
Remember this is the UK where 90%+ of all internet connections are censored by the Internet Watch Foundation. It's a minor step to retrofit this system to monitor urls for "infringement activity" and take steps accordingly. This was in fact the whole point of the child porn filter all along. Here's the relevant quote(the speaker is a copyright industry representative):
The IWF works. It is a perfect censor: completely inscrutable and opaque, accountable to no-one, no appeal against decisions, no overseeing body, no audits, no way of reviewing lists. It's like something right out of China or the old Soviet Union (Actually that's not really fair. Their censorship organisations were/are actually accountable). The brits embraced all this with open arms, so if you think they're going to raise a fuss about a similar system for music, I say you're living in a fantasy land.
We no longer live in a age of governments accountable to the people. We live in a age of corporations accountable to their shareholders. As such, it's no real surprise that the primary drive to control and censor people in the modern age is coming from the corporate world. The big difference between censorship systems like the IWF and this proposed copyright system is that they are, ostensibly, completely private enterprises. In other words, they are subject to no laws but those made by the corporations they serve. Ultimately, such a system will prove far more effective than anything a government could devise. The philosophy of the market and the laws of free enterprise will shield these new tools of oppression from all attempts to stop them, ironically as (the spirit of) these same laws will be what people will actually be fighting to win back.
This system is going ahead. It's going to work. Once it works in the UK, it will shortly thereafter be applied everywhere else. Once the system is in place, its remit will be extended and the internet as you know it and beleive it to be invincible will be shut down and turned into little more than a glorified cable network with a few Geocities-type sites and the odd decaying blog. Commerical copyright will ultimately prove to be the most effective force for censorship the world has ever seen. It's already more important than national security concerns. Money talks a lot louder than most people, or even states, can be bothered to.
And for anyone neither from China or America, then either systems have backdoors it's called spying.
Normally I have no time for all the cynics who rail on Idle. But for once I have to say that Idle really has hit a new low. I can't condone this tripe on the front page and neither should anyone else.
There are numerous other terms attached to MPEG licening, including requirements that you not facilitate the infringement of copyrights, your device respects HDCP, etc, etc. You either do as they say and pay their fee or they sue you. Sounds like extortion to me.
The term we're looking for here is Willing Suspension of Disbelief, which itself is quite dependant on the fact that while the author's work may not be realistic, it is at least internally consistent.
However, if you break this internal consistency, turning your work into a mashed goop of misdirected literary intent, convoluted cross reference, stretched idioms, and outright lameness, you end up with a Wall Banger. It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost. It also happened to BSG. It will basically happen to any story arc centric show in which the writers make shit up as they go along. For some reason, TV producers seem to think this is a good idea. Personally, I would have fired the writers and cancelled Lost in pre-production the moment I found out the writers did not have even a basic narrative plan from day one.
An example of a show this didn't happen to was Babylon 5. Apparently the writer had a good outline of the entire series mapped out before any shooting began. That's how you tell a long story in television, or anywhere else for that matter. This is pretty basic stuff, usually figured out by most people at around age six when their favourite make believe fairy tale world of swords and sorcery is finally ruined by someones suggestion that the party destroy the orbiting space dreadnought by sabotaging its reactor core. The Lost writers need to take a basic course in how to a) write and b) how to be a GM.
This about this for a second. The corporate executive officers at BP--even those at quite modest management levels--probably didn't(and still don't) know what a Blow out Preventer even was. I doubt they even really understood what oil is, apart from being a black liquid worth lots of money. If you tried to explain to them what a valve was or what it did, their heads would likely implode.
Ignorance is a great defence in the face of charges of negligence.
Perhaps you meant "scream like someone having an orgasm". Or perhaps, more fitting in the context of this story, "scream like someone who an orgasm is being had at the expense of"?
And so, the day the law and legislators say that you are undesirable and must be taken away and gassed, I hope it will comfort you to know that the Judges and Lawyers did their duty and adhered so properly to the written word of the law.
Then what is the point of either one of them?
Anything that makes the censoring officer aroused.
Don't worry. They're smart enough to know that the law is only really for plebs.
Not true. Often you can frighten people into living by the moral standards you set. Some people consider that well worth the time and effort.
Depends on what you mean by legitimate. The Australian government has the full backing of a righteous mob hungry for blood. What do you have? A few pieces of paper and faith in the rule of law? Then I suggest you make sure you leave your laptop behind when visiting. Push it, and you may yet find out just how much of a right the Australian Government has to cut pieces off your flesh.
People need to understand that in most western countries, the judiciary is a kind of priesthood utterly divorced from reality or common sense. What matters to lawyers and judges are not concepts like "justice", "equity" or "reason". What matters to them is the written rule of the law, and how it is best spun into ways that benefit both the priesthood and its patrons--the wealthy and powerful. The courts have no interest in the effects of their judgements. They have interest only in which lawyers arguments were more pleasing in the eyes of legal dogma.
This is a very, very serious problem which has only gotten worse in recent decades. The fact that most politicians are drawn from this clique has only accelerated the utter divorce of the courts from reality. Decisions like these are symptomatic of a judicial system that has broken down at a basic level. There are more across the legal spectrum: lenient corporate fines, excessive tort compensation, stringent libel fines, patents in general, children being convicted of child sex abuse, the rollback of habeas corpus, excess cost of legal defence, battery, etc, etc. The court system is entirely broken.
We live in an age of the misrule of law. If things get any worse, we'll be better off with no legal system at all.
Well, western democracies block cartoon image of children, so I guess the great karma circle is now complete. Or else it's a death spiral of censorship. Either way, the outrage brigade gets what they want and the rest of us will just have to accept a more restricted web whether we live in Karachi or California.
Most video codec patents revolve around implementations of the discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, chroma sub-sampling, and bilinear interpolation. All of these techniques are older than the patent examiners who approved the patents and indeed the judges who will try the cases. It's all mathematics, every last bit. These patents are all essentially equivalent to patenting the tetrahedron.
There is nothing the USPTO will not give a patent for. As such, there is absolutely nothing in the universe past or present which can be declared patent free wherever the authority of the USPTO is recognised.
For the present.
A mathematical one. The simplest example would be something like the solution to the equation dy/dx=y^2, with y=1 at x=0. This has the solution 1/(1-x), which "blows up" at x=1. Technically, you would say the solution has a singularity at x=1. The singularity is characteristic of the differential equation itself, and not really of the initial conditions or the methods used to solve it. Inherently, you're going to face this problem when attempting to solve the differential equation.
A "blow" up or pole is just one kind of singularity. There are many others. In the context of physical equations, their presence suggests that the assumptions of your equation break down as the solution approaches the singularity, or that your assumptions were flawed to begin with. In the context of mathematics, it means that any numerical system you use to solve the equation is going to break down horribly as it gets close to the singularity. This is a huge problem as if you're using a numerical solver, you typically have no idea where the singularities are anyway. What's worse, most numerical methods will actually continue along happily after they have passed the singularity, the only problem being every number they return after that point is more than likely totally wrong.
It depends on what the authors mean by "classical solutions", but my reading of it is that they mean solutions without singularities and which decay quickly, both of which are reasonable solutions for the equation in question. Since the paper (at the arXiv) is 50 pages long, I'm not entirely sure. Their solution might allow certain other types of singularity or govern the propagation of singularities. I honestly have no idea, which I understand is fairly common these days.
It's worth noting that someone says that an equation has been "solved" in modern mathematics, they typically don't mean that you plug in the initial conditions and then get a formulae for your answer. Generally what they mean is that you can apply some other--probably numerical or approximate--techniques in an effort to solve the equation, and as long as you are careful, use enough computational resources, and don't go to far out, your solutions will be reasonably accurate.
This appears to be more or less what the team has done. They've proven the "the global existence of classical solutions and rapid time decay to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions". In other words, they've proven that the equation has "well behaved" solutions and not solutions for which something goes horribly wrong at some distance from your starting point.
While it doesn't sound like much, this is actually a very big deal. If the proof had gone the other way, it would mean that the equation would produce something akin to "ultraviolet catastrophes" under certain conditions, which means that the equation did not properly describe physical systems. With this proof, that's not an issue anymore and we now know that the equation will always produce reasonable solutions when given reasonable (i.e. physical) initial conditions.
Perhaps they've gone farther than just existence proofs and also provided a formula or technique for obtaining or approximating solutions. However, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal is a closed publisher and the article is locked behind a paywall, so I guess the vast majority of us will never know.
We're not talking about majority rules here. We're talking about one company deciding what's right and wrong for the web, and the billions of people on it. Perhaps you're fine with this, but some of us are worried about where this is inevitably leading; back to the pre-web days where a handful of companies controlled the majority of our media and all the opinions on it.
Unless of course I'm a multi-billion dollar company. Then I can tell millions of other people what and what not to do, say and read.
Facebook is the world's worst gossip. You tell them anything, they will tell it to every one of your friends, their friends (marketers), and probably anyone else who so much as passes by.
All these tools essentially do is add a "and please don't tell anyone" onto your data entries. The real solution is not to tell the gossip anything in the first place.
At least the phone company didn't listen in on your every call.
A better way of saying it is "Fascist friendly internet".
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Surreptitious. Riiight.
Basically, Google is the insatiable voyeur, we are all the neighbourhood children, and Chrome is the delicious sweety used to entice us into giving the smiling man what he really wants.