The fact that this is modded Insightful makes it that much better.
I guess it's time for me to fetch that cup of coffee and test my theory.;)
In all honesty, I think it's okay to fail every now and then when testing and experimenting with things. We learn mostly by doing, and the most valuable experiences are always the ones where we fail and learned something in the process. There are scenarios where failure is not an option, and at those times it's for the best to have the experience of knowing what won't work. The thing is, it's part of the "creative/innovative process", and I don't believe your employer should pay special attention to it other than giving you the opportunity to do so every now and then where it doesn't really impact anything critical.
The whole sharepoint thing seems like one of those management decisions in a company where "innovation" has become a buzzword. A few months ago I attended a meeting where management had suggested that we should make room for innovative projects. They decided that people were free to come up with ideas and suggest them to management, providing there would be an acceptable planning and feasibility study, etc etc. Sounds like common sense right?
The whole thing got bogged down in red tape of course. The few ideas that bubbled up in "creativity workshops" have become so twisted and bloated in scope that they would require several manyears to achieve, which is impossible on the shoestring budget they set aside for it. I'm not lamenting the whole budget thing, nor the fact that management kind of wants to track the process itself, it's just the way they're doing it.
They've got the sharepoint thing, and they've added tons of overhead, including documenting and reporting your progress in a fashion that would make bureaucrats roll their eyes (similar to ECSS standards for those familiar, which is way overkill for the whole thing anyway). For every hour you're spending on trying something you're faced with at least an hour of paperwork. So most people who had this small interesting idea, are now saddled with a full blown project that exceeds the scope of "scratching an itch" and working from there, up to a point where it's interfering with actually getting stuff done.
So the end result will most likely be (fairly costly) failure. It's more than okay to shoot yourself in the foot sometimes when trying out something in an environment where you can't do any harm. But people are going to be far less inclined to pull the trigger if everyone sees it giving opportunity for people to use it against you with an extremely well documented failure. I hope that explains why my previous post was rather cynical.
I personally tend to experiment a lot in the early stages of projects where we are considering various solutions to a problem. And I do so most of the times by breaking the stuff I've built several times, fixing it and in the end picking the solution I feel most confident with. While I'm experimenting I just take short notes, instead of documenting everything. Fully document the solution you pick and the reasons why you feel it's the best solution, not the minute details of the process of experimenting itself. So far that approach has worked for me and I don't think adding more oversight or overhead to that initial process contributes anything useful.
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
Hey, it takes hard work to get into the Hall Of Shame page on the company sharepoint. Not only do you need to shoot yourself in the foot, but you need to do so in public for everyone to see.
That moment you go for a cup of coffee and all the people around the watercooler stop talking, that's the moment you know they've seen the Hall Of Shame page. You should bask in the glory of your achievement at that moment.
Some of the videos just haven't gelled, to put it lightly
You mean the slashvertisments? Yeah, those are terrible. I understand that you guys want to generate additional revenue from the site, but really you've been pushing the boundaries of what some of your audience will consider as an appropriate story.
You've got a mostly technically inclined audience, and trying to sell them a "database proxy" that prevents SQL Injections will pretty much put off anyone who's done serious work in that area. You're not exactly catering to the easiest audience, but you managed to do so for the most part in the past 10 years. If you suddenly forgot how to pander to your audience, I really think you should have a look at your community and its roots and see where exactly you've lost touch.
We're also planning to start finding and documenting some creative means of destruction for naughty hardware
No, please... We've got the will it blend guy pimping his blenders, the will it fry guys with their tesla coils, and more enough kids with fireworks or hammers on youtube. Do something neat, something geeky. Do something that makes me go "Oh cool, I want to build one too" and grab my soldering iron or favourite editor of choice. Don't build a "death ray" out of a giant magnifying glass (remember that horrible story?) and burn yet another iphone/ipod. It's been done to death, and is extremely not geeky.
Perhaps he believes Autism is made up. It is likely psychological diseases are over diagnosed.
I think it's very likely that certain autism spectrum disorders are overdiagnosed, most commonly asperger's syndrome. It's like it is the latest trend in psychology to classify introvert intelligent people as having asperger's syndrome. I've come across more than a few people who function quite well in social scenarios that have been labeled as having aspergers where I seriously want to ask the question "Isn't (s)he just shy or introverted?".
The only person that I was quite convinced he had Asperger's was a man who really showed problems interacting in social scenarios. He wasn't a bad person, but he would sometimes make remarks that were inappropriate to the situation or the mood. He would often come off as rude and arrogant, insult people without realizing it, obsess over small details and maintained a very strict schedule that was nearly mechanical. I know that this sounds a bit condescending over the person, since the above factors alone don't necessarily give you Asperger's, after all he could just be a rude person who overly focused on the details, but if you worked with him for a couple of days you would get this feeling that something was slightly off.
I believe that in many cases people who go take an ASD test do so convinced that they've got Asperger's and will answer questions to skew the results in favor of what they were expecting. Any person intelligent enough can fairly easily subvert standardized psychological testing, and the people typically wondering about Asperger's syndrome are introvert intelligent people. As a part of a discussion about this topic I've done the first diagnostic tests myself twice, once normally and once with the intention of being diagnosed as having Asperger's, and it's needless to say that I got the results I was expecting in both cases. I think we have a lot more hypochondriacs than we have people with Asperger's Syndrome, and the initial diagnostic tests (often found online by the way) play into that by having people visit psychologists for at least 3 times to do an extensive test. The extensive testing here consists of a standardized series of questions (which are often the same questions worded differently for verification purposes), a logical test (including once again the tower of hanoi problem, which every programmer is familiar with) and another test, but I forgot what the third part was, each in a seperate session, followed by a session where the psychologist tells you the results. That's 4 visist guaranteed for everyone who takes the introduction test and manages to score high enough and become worried.
I also believe that it currently is a trend among psychologists to overdiagnose relatively harmless conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. The sale of Ritalin (for treatment of ADHD) has gone through the roof in the past 10 years here, with students starting a black market in schools because the drug supposedly helps you study better during exams. Many parents with kids that are underperforming in school take their children to psychologists expecting an answer among the lines of a psychological disorder instead of asking themselves the question if their child would rather study something different. After all some people just don't care about Latin or math, so it's no wonder they perform badly when their parents force them in that direction because of their own desires.
It's become all too common to hear people say "Well, he's not performing well in school, but it's because of ADHD", while he's been sitting there real quietly reading a comic book in the background for the past 20 minutes. It just reeks of "I pushed my kid in the wrong direction, and now I don't want to admit it, so I get a psychologist who told me it wasn't my fault. If he pops these pills he'll be fine."
Having said that, I don't want to downplay Asperger's Syndrome (or ADHD) or the standardized testing for it. I've certainly c
It rather reminds me of that Belgian newspaper who brought suit against Google to stop linking to any of their pages... and complained when Google did that and their traffic dropped through the floor.
If I remember correctly the lawsuit was not about linking, it was about the use of their content on google news. However, the court ordered ALL content to be removed, and google complied with exactly that. But it was a wonderful case of biting the hand that feeds.
Before the whole scientology thing there was plenty of people on 4chan busy with hacking, they just didn't style themselves as "Anonymous". It's the scientology protests which started the whole "Anonymous is legion" thing. Their offline activities before that were mostly benign flashmobs dressed up in various types of topical (for 4chan at least) getup and in far smaller numbers simply "for the lulz".
You can argue about "Anonymous predating 4chan" as much as you like, but the culture of the collective is drenched in the memes and culture of that site and was so since it's inception. This however doesn't mean that they are exclusive to 4chan, just that if you go back in time you'll find the roots of the collective there. Note that I'm not saying that all of 4chan is the collective "Anonymous", as the opinions on the group there are divided.
handful of geniuses and legion of idiots or any other ludicrous mass media distortions.
The word "geniuses" is clearly oversensational, but I would say that the analogy is mostly apt. What better a way to describe a few kids smart enough not to get caught (YMMV, see lulzsec) while egging on other kids voluntarily running DoS tools on their computers? It's mob mentality on the internet, nothing more and nothing less. Hell, if you gather enough of the "legion of idiots" in a room you'll get the same mentality, which is why 4chan is no longer welcome at conventions.
Whether it's a dead tree work by a short run minor publisher and a desperate author or a web site eventually you just start to ignore them as pointless.
I find it amusing that in this day and age people (especially journalists) still don't "get" how online communities work. Take real world behavior, add a layer of "anonymity", et voila instant greater internet fuckwad theory to a certain extent. Sure, not every online community is like this, but if it is convinced it can act without impunity you will get the exact same phenomenon as "Anonymous" eventually.
No need to show footage of a van exploding, no terrorist cells, just people being dicks.
The only thing that should ever be challenged is, government investigative agents seeking to gain promotion by destroying the lives of unskilled teenagers with claims of terrorism and threats to vital infrastructure with the hoodoo of "Anonymous".
I agree that the reaction to this whole thing is drawn out of proportion, but the reaction to most things seems drawn out of proportion these days. While I don't think that just being a dick warrants punishment, there's obvious cases where the law can step in: harassment phonecalls (often including death threats), participating in DDoS attacks, actually hacking servers, etc... I think that the justice system should use common sense in their approach to the lesser things (eg. community service), and for the more egregious offenses a more severe punishment. But letting it slide just because they are "unskilled teenagers" is simply silly, because the last thing these unskilled kids need is confirmation that they can actually do these things without impunity.
I refuse to believe that the average 15 year old downloading LOIC doesn't stop to think about what they're doing and make a moral choice. But I also refuse to believe that we should punish them beyond a (albeit serious) slap on the wrist.
6. User then posts the link to a forum, and happily describes them as "All nintendo roms evarrrrr"
7. Google indexes said forum
8. Joe Average gets his free roms
9. Lawyer time
It's the North Koreans. They're up to something, sure as eggs is eggs.
It is space saying mourning the honorable half-god Kim Jong Il's departure. Spontaneous radio broadcasts from space are known to happen when the heavens weep.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002,
It's quite common to attribute the existing attitude about copyright enfringement to Napster, but in reality the attitude already existed way before Napster existed. Before Napster it was CD-burners, and before that it was copying floppies and tapes. The biggest shift was the fact that content could be copied easily and without a significant loss of quality. Napster (or rather peer 2 peer networks) were just the next logical step in an increasingly networked world.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed,
The content industry has been preaching that message long before Napster, but the difference is that due to successful lobbying they've been far more successful with the legislative branch than in the era before that. The message in general has always fallen on deaf ears with the public, after all those mixtapes didn't make themselves.
I would argue that copyright infringement in most cases hasn't changed over those years in essence: people still buy music, video games and movies, and people still share. What has changed is how visible it has become thanks to the Internet. Sure, you'll have a few people who won't buy anything and simply copy everything, but it's safe to say that those type people existed way before the internet existed and did the exact same thing.
What has more significantly changed over the years is that consumption has taken on a new form. People are much more interested in digital downloads than owning a physical copy. Convenience has become more of a priority than it used to, and this is something where some parts of the content industry have learned their lesson (most notably video games). Take a look at the success of Steam, despite it being a form of DRM, Steam is wildly popular because it's extremely convenient. They rely on impulse shopping for the most part, and the customers they don't get with impulse shopping they'll get with bargain deals. Despite some people on slashdot being vehemently opposed to Steam, it's very popular and most people find this form of DRM very acceptable. (I myself am not arguing for or against DRM here, that is beside the issue of this post)
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
I've noticed an exciting trend in the past year or so, and it has probably been growing for a while longer. More and more beginning artists are embracing the internet on their own, and skipping the traditional content industry all together. I've noticed that a lot of DJs have begun setting up streams to promote themselves, bands are using social media and networks to promote themselves, and a lot of people are actively making their own "TV shows". Examples of this are for instance eSports events like Starcraft 2 broadcasts (tournaments such as MLG, casters on youtube, or even in depth analysis such as Day[9]) and even fighting game tournaments (such as the teamsp00ky streams). The technological barrier of entry to do so has become so small that practically anyone with an average non-technical understanding of how internet works can setup their own platform for promoting themselves or others. Having an average of 5000 to 15000 live viewers for an amateur show in what's likely to be a very niche market is a lot.
I've also noticed that so called "netlabels" are becoming more popular (especially in Japan), where artists release their works on the web partly for free for promotion and release a few commercial tracks on sites such as beatport, etc. It's all very amateurish compared to the big established content industry, but it's certainly a powerful tool for promotion as more and more people are becoming aware of these things.
While I'm not going to argue that the traditional content industry is finished, or predict the dea
First the shear amount of dumb laser jokes is astounding.
Someone replaced the sugar for your coffee with salt this morning, right? I hate it when that happens.
maybe someone else on Shashdot had ever seen Austin Powers. Or Star Trek.
Really? You don't say. I thought I was the only one who knew about Star Trek. I'll need to find a new thing... Maybe I'll go watch that Star Wars thing I read about. That death star thing should prove to be quite the hilarious joke.
I am surprised by this level of technical ignorance
Are you new here?
badly written publicity piece
By all means, write a better article. I BEG of you, write a better article. I couldn't agree more with you that lousy science articles need to go. But how many scientists are willing to write an article that a layman can understand? There's no time, writing articles doesn't bring back any funding, the public doesn't care, and your peers care even less since they read the paper. Thus you get pseudo-science articles. Hi Reality, nice to meet you. FYI, most people here won't even read the article, and it's been that way for a long time.
shear amount of hostility shown towards science
Have you been sleeping for the past 20 years or so? Science needs to be deliver immediate results to be cool these days. The only people who care about the nature of the universe these days are theologists and to a lesser extent theoretical physicists. Sad, but true.
This is the kind of anti-intellectual crap I expect from Fox News, not Slashdot readers
Slashdot was never the meeting grounds of the intellectuals its readers so gladly say it is. It's always been what it is : a news aggregator with geeks and their terrible terrible jokes. Sure, you've got a few people that are (studying) in this field, and they'll post a meaningful comment every now and then, but most of it is bored geeks with laser jokes. Anything you might think it was in the past is overly optimistic nostalgia.
true nerds surrounded by a bunch of fakes
OMG! Fake nerds. Quick, someone grab the Monty Python tapes. We'll weed 'm out by seeing who falls asleep after we watch quest for the holy grail umpteen times!
Leave now before you post yourself into a heart attack. That's the best advice I'm going to give you. Go read the paper, do something interesting, and spend the time you'd spend here arguing doing something that you feel is productive. You'll probably end up feeling much better that way.
And we feel good about letting Europeans man the switch?
The ploy here is that we claim it's all in the name of science, but the truth is we're pretty tired of having our credit rating lowered all the time. Next time Standard&Poors has something to say, we'll have our answer ready for them.
The electricity bill is going to be a pain though, but we'll worry about that later.
Slashdot Mirror
Demoscene? Demoparty? 64kb executable?
Here is a nice article on the subject. Now hand in your geek card.
The fact that this is modded Insightful makes it that much better.
I guess it's time for me to fetch that cup of coffee and test my theory. ;)
In all honesty, I think it's okay to fail every now and then when testing and experimenting with things. We learn mostly by doing, and the most valuable experiences are always the ones where we fail and learned something in the process. There are scenarios where failure is not an option, and at those times it's for the best to have the experience of knowing what won't work. The thing is, it's part of the "creative/innovative process", and I don't believe your employer should pay special attention to it other than giving you the opportunity to do so every now and then where it doesn't really impact anything critical.
The whole sharepoint thing seems like one of those management decisions in a company where "innovation" has become a buzzword. A few months ago I attended a meeting where management had suggested that we should make room for innovative projects. They decided that people were free to come up with ideas and suggest them to management, providing there would be an acceptable planning and feasibility study, etc etc. Sounds like common sense right?
The whole thing got bogged down in red tape of course. The few ideas that bubbled up in "creativity workshops" have become so twisted and bloated in scope that they would require several manyears to achieve, which is impossible on the shoestring budget they set aside for it. I'm not lamenting the whole budget thing, nor the fact that management kind of wants to track the process itself, it's just the way they're doing it.
They've got the sharepoint thing, and they've added tons of overhead, including documenting and reporting your progress in a fashion that would make bureaucrats roll their eyes (similar to ECSS standards for those familiar, which is way overkill for the whole thing anyway). For every hour you're spending on trying something you're faced with at least an hour of paperwork. So most people who had this small interesting idea, are now saddled with a full blown project that exceeds the scope of "scratching an itch" and working from there, up to a point where it's interfering with actually getting stuff done.
So the end result will most likely be (fairly costly) failure. It's more than okay to shoot yourself in the foot sometimes when trying out something in an environment where you can't do any harm. But people are going to be far less inclined to pull the trigger if everyone sees it giving opportunity for people to use it against you with an extremely well documented failure. I hope that explains why my previous post was rather cynical.
I personally tend to experiment a lot in the early stages of projects where we are considering various solutions to a problem. And I do so most of the times by breaking the stuff I've built several times, fixing it and in the end picking the solution I feel most confident with. While I'm experimenting I just take short notes, instead of documenting everything. Fully document the solution you pick and the reasons why you feel it's the best solution, not the minute details of the process of experimenting itself. So far that approach has worked for me and I don't think adding more oversight or overhead to that initial process contributes anything useful.
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
Hey, it takes hard work to get into the Hall Of Shame page on the company sharepoint. Not only do you need to shoot yourself in the foot, but you need to do so in public for everyone to see.
That moment you go for a cup of coffee and all the people around the watercooler stop talking, that's the moment you know they've seen the Hall Of Shame page. You should bask in the glory of your achievement at that moment.
Some of the videos just haven't gelled, to put it lightly
You mean the slashvertisments? Yeah, those are terrible. I understand that you guys want to generate additional revenue from the site, but really you've been pushing the boundaries of what some of your audience will consider as an appropriate story.
You've got a mostly technically inclined audience, and trying to sell them a "database proxy" that prevents SQL Injections will pretty much put off anyone who's done serious work in that area. You're not exactly catering to the easiest audience, but you managed to do so for the most part in the past 10 years. If you suddenly forgot how to pander to your audience, I really think you should have a look at your community and its roots and see where exactly you've lost touch.
We're also planning to start finding and documenting some creative means of destruction for naughty hardware
No, please... We've got the will it blend guy pimping his blenders, the will it fry guys with their tesla coils, and more enough kids with fireworks or hammers on youtube. Do something neat, something geeky. Do something that makes me go "Oh cool, I want to build one too" and grab my soldering iron or favourite editor of choice. Don't build a "death ray" out of a giant magnifying glass (remember that horrible story?) and burn yet another iphone/ipod. It's been done to death, and is extremely not geeky.
Perhaps he believes Autism is made up. It is likely psychological diseases are over diagnosed.
I think it's very likely that certain autism spectrum disorders are overdiagnosed, most commonly asperger's syndrome. It's like it is the latest trend in psychology to classify introvert intelligent people as having asperger's syndrome. I've come across more than a few people who function quite well in social scenarios that have been labeled as having aspergers where I seriously want to ask the question "Isn't (s)he just shy or introverted?".
The only person that I was quite convinced he had Asperger's was a man who really showed problems interacting in social scenarios. He wasn't a bad person, but he would sometimes make remarks that were inappropriate to the situation or the mood. He would often come off as rude and arrogant, insult people without realizing it, obsess over small details and maintained a very strict schedule that was nearly mechanical. I know that this sounds a bit condescending over the person, since the above factors alone don't necessarily give you Asperger's, after all he could just be a rude person who overly focused on the details, but if you worked with him for a couple of days you would get this feeling that something was slightly off.
I believe that in many cases people who go take an ASD test do so convinced that they've got Asperger's and will answer questions to skew the results in favor of what they were expecting. Any person intelligent enough can fairly easily subvert standardized psychological testing, and the people typically wondering about Asperger's syndrome are introvert intelligent people. As a part of a discussion about this topic I've done the first diagnostic tests myself twice, once normally and once with the intention of being diagnosed as having Asperger's, and it's needless to say that I got the results I was expecting in both cases. I think we have a lot more hypochondriacs than we have people with Asperger's Syndrome, and the initial diagnostic tests (often found online by the way) play into that by having people visit psychologists for at least 3 times to do an extensive test. The extensive testing here consists of a standardized series of questions (which are often the same questions worded differently for verification purposes), a logical test (including once again the tower of hanoi problem, which every programmer is familiar with) and another test, but I forgot what the third part was, each in a seperate session, followed by a session where the psychologist tells you the results. That's 4 visist guaranteed for everyone who takes the introduction test and manages to score high enough and become worried.
I also believe that it currently is a trend among psychologists to overdiagnose relatively harmless conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. The sale of Ritalin (for treatment of ADHD) has gone through the roof in the past 10 years here, with students starting a black market in schools because the drug supposedly helps you study better during exams. Many parents with kids that are underperforming in school take their children to psychologists expecting an answer among the lines of a psychological disorder instead of asking themselves the question if their child would rather study something different. After all some people just don't care about Latin or math, so it's no wonder they perform badly when their parents force them in that direction because of their own desires.
It's become all too common to hear people say "Well, he's not performing well in school, but it's because of ADHD", while he's been sitting there real quietly reading a comic book in the background for the past 20 minutes. It just reeks of "I pushed my kid in the wrong direction, and now I don't want to admit it, so I get a psychologist who told me it wasn't my fault. If he pops these pills he'll be fine."
Having said that, I don't want to downplay Asperger's Syndrome (or ADHD) or the standardized testing for it. I've certainly c
FoxNews is covering the story:
I'm impressed.
Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day
My basem^H^H^H^H^H hacker cave simply doesn't have any room for a storage array in the PB order.
It rather reminds me of that Belgian newspaper who brought suit against Google to stop linking to any of their pages... and complained when Google did that and their traffic dropped through the floor.
If I remember correctly the lawsuit was not about linking, it was about the use of their content on google news. However, the court ordered ALL content to be removed, and google complied with exactly that. But it was a wonderful case of biting the hand that feeds.
"Anonymous" has a whole history of legal public protest prior https://whyweprotest.net/anonymous-scientology/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology prior to any yarns about 4chan,
Before the whole scientology thing there was plenty of people on 4chan busy with hacking, they just didn't style themselves as "Anonymous". It's the scientology protests which started the whole "Anonymous is legion" thing. Their offline activities before that were mostly benign flashmobs dressed up in various types of topical (for 4chan at least) getup and in far smaller numbers simply "for the lulz".
You can argue about "Anonymous predating 4chan" as much as you like, but the culture of the collective is drenched in the memes and culture of that site and was so since it's inception. This however doesn't mean that they are exclusive to 4chan, just that if you go back in time you'll find the roots of the collective there. Note that I'm not saying that all of 4chan is the collective "Anonymous", as the opinions on the group there are divided.
handful of geniuses and legion of idiots or any other ludicrous mass media distortions.
The word "geniuses" is clearly oversensational, but I would say that the analogy is mostly apt. What better a way to describe a few kids smart enough not to get caught (YMMV, see lulzsec) while egging on other kids voluntarily running DoS tools on their computers? It's mob mentality on the internet, nothing more and nothing less. Hell, if you gather enough of the "legion of idiots" in a room you'll get the same mentality, which is why 4chan is no longer welcome at conventions.
Whether it's a dead tree work by a short run minor publisher and a desperate author or a web site eventually you just start to ignore them as pointless.
I find it amusing that in this day and age people (especially journalists) still don't "get" how online communities work. Take real world behavior, add a layer of "anonymity", et voila instant greater internet fuckwad theory to a certain extent. Sure, not every online community is like this, but if it is convinced it can act without impunity you will get the exact same phenomenon as "Anonymous" eventually.
No need to show footage of a van exploding, no terrorist cells, just people being dicks.
The only thing that should ever be challenged is, government investigative agents seeking to gain promotion by destroying the lives of unskilled teenagers with claims of terrorism and threats to vital infrastructure with the hoodoo of "Anonymous".
I agree that the reaction to this whole thing is drawn out of proportion, but the reaction to most things seems drawn out of proportion these days. While I don't think that just being a dick warrants punishment, there's obvious cases where the law can step in: harassment phonecalls (often including death threats), participating in DDoS attacks, actually hacking servers, etc... I think that the justice system should use common sense in their approach to the lesser things (eg. community service), and for the more egregious offenses a more severe punishment. But letting it slide just because they are "unskilled teenagers" is simply silly, because the last thing these unskilled kids need is confirmation that they can actually do these things without impunity.
I refuse to believe that the average 15 year old downloading LOIC doesn't stop to think about what they're doing and make a moral choice. But I also refuse to believe that we should punish them beyond a (albeit serious) slap on the wrist.
How long until The Tetris Company fires its next round of takedowns?
They'll start once the lawyers stop salivating on the license included with the javascript.
They're seeing dollar sings already.
Expect when he runs away from his pain in the nexus? :D
You... misunderstand... That was... only to hide... bad writing... and terrible acting... in the quest for ... milking a dry cow...
I will write a glowing tweet about him on twitter.
He'll probably just buy twitter if he wants that.
Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's
Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?
6. User then posts the link to a forum, and happily describes them as "All nintendo roms evarrrrr"
7. Google indexes said forum
8. Joe Average gets his free roms
9. Lawyer time
So much for that plan
It's the North Koreans. They're up to something, sure as eggs is eggs.
It is space saying mourning the honorable half-god Kim Jong Il's departure. Spontaneous radio broadcasts from space are known to happen when the heavens weep.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002,
It's quite common to attribute the existing attitude about copyright enfringement to Napster, but in reality the attitude already existed way before Napster existed. Before Napster it was CD-burners, and before that it was copying floppies and tapes. The biggest shift was the fact that content could be copied easily and without a significant loss of quality. Napster (or rather peer 2 peer networks) were just the next logical step in an increasingly networked world.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed,
The content industry has been preaching that message long before Napster, but the difference is that due to successful lobbying they've been far more successful with the legislative branch than in the era before that. The message in general has always fallen on deaf ears with the public, after all those mixtapes didn't make themselves.
I would argue that copyright infringement in most cases hasn't changed over those years in essence: people still buy music, video games and movies, and people still share. What has changed is how visible it has become thanks to the Internet. Sure, you'll have a few people who won't buy anything and simply copy everything, but it's safe to say that those type people existed way before the internet existed and did the exact same thing.
What has more significantly changed over the years is that consumption has taken on a new form. People are much more interested in digital downloads than owning a physical copy. Convenience has become more of a priority than it used to, and this is something where some parts of the content industry have learned their lesson (most notably video games). Take a look at the success of Steam, despite it being a form of DRM, Steam is wildly popular because it's extremely convenient. They rely on impulse shopping for the most part, and the customers they don't get with impulse shopping they'll get with bargain deals. Despite some people on slashdot being vehemently opposed to Steam, it's very popular and most people find this form of DRM very acceptable. (I myself am not arguing for or against DRM here, that is beside the issue of this post)
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
I've noticed an exciting trend in the past year or so, and it has probably been growing for a while longer. More and more beginning artists are embracing the internet on their own, and skipping the traditional content industry all together. I've noticed that a lot of DJs have begun setting up streams to promote themselves, bands are using social media and networks to promote themselves, and a lot of people are actively making their own "TV shows". Examples of this are for instance eSports events like Starcraft 2 broadcasts (tournaments such as MLG, casters on youtube, or even in depth analysis such as Day[9]) and even fighting game tournaments (such as the teamsp00ky streams). The technological barrier of entry to do so has become so small that practically anyone with an average non-technical understanding of how internet works can setup their own platform for promoting themselves or others. Having an average of 5000 to 15000 live viewers for an amateur show in what's likely to be a very niche market is a lot.
I've also noticed that so called "netlabels" are becoming more popular (especially in Japan), where artists release their works on the web partly for free for promotion and release a few commercial tracks on sites such as beatport, etc. It's all very amateurish compared to the big established content industry, but it's certainly a powerful tool for promotion as more and more people are becoming aware of these things.
While I'm not going to argue that the traditional content industry is finished, or predict the dea
but for email and web-surfing one page at a time it would work.
*click* DAMN! Missed my window. Oh well, I'll try again in 9 hours.
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
Thus only punishing customers who paid, not the people downloading the game illegally and applying a crack.
Makes perfect sense
How could he be? Every new years eve he's busy changing his passwords
If you make a mistake the world will say you broke Stephen Hawking.
cmdr-taco-sucks-cock-for-crack-money
And here I was wondering what he was up to lately...
She's alive? I felt sure being a probe it had to be part of a male.
It got lost in our solar system and phoned home for directions... What gender do you think it has?
I'd make a joke about reading maps, but I'd feel old, so I'll skip that... Damn kids and their GPS shinies...
We all agree that it sucks. There is minor disagreement about the degree to which it sucks.
Remember when we had arguments about X being better than Y? I miss those days...
Does that really stop anyone from writing Linux applications?
I'm actually writing an application that makes Unity hate posts on slashdot. It works in Linux.
First the shear amount of dumb laser jokes is astounding.
Someone replaced the sugar for your coffee with salt this morning, right? I hate it when that happens.
maybe someone else on Shashdot had ever seen Austin Powers. Or Star Trek.
Really? You don't say. I thought I was the only one who knew about Star Trek. I'll need to find a new thing... Maybe I'll go watch that Star Wars thing I read about. That death star thing should prove to be quite the hilarious joke.
I am surprised by this level of technical ignorance
Are you new here?
badly written publicity piece
By all means, write a better article. I BEG of you, write a better article. I couldn't agree more with you that lousy science articles need to go. But how many scientists are willing to write an article that a layman can understand? There's no time, writing articles doesn't bring back any funding, the public doesn't care, and your peers care even less since they read the paper. Thus you get pseudo-science articles. Hi Reality, nice to meet you. FYI, most people here won't even read the article, and it's been that way for a long time.
shear amount of hostility shown towards science
Have you been sleeping for the past 20 years or so? Science needs to be deliver immediate results to be cool these days. The only people who care about the nature of the universe these days are theologists and to a lesser extent theoretical physicists. Sad, but true.
This is the kind of anti-intellectual crap I expect from Fox News, not Slashdot readers
Slashdot was never the meeting grounds of the intellectuals its readers so gladly say it is. It's always been what it is : a news aggregator with geeks and their terrible terrible jokes. Sure, you've got a few people that are (studying) in this field, and they'll post a meaningful comment every now and then, but most of it is bored geeks with laser jokes. Anything you might think it was in the past is overly optimistic nostalgia.
true nerds surrounded by a bunch of fakes
OMG! Fake nerds. Quick, someone grab the Monty Python tapes. We'll weed 'm out by seeing who falls asleep after we watch quest for the holy grail umpteen times!
Leave now before you post yourself into a heart attack. That's the best advice I'm going to give you. Go read the paper, do something interesting, and spend the time you'd spend here arguing doing something that you feel is productive. You'll probably end up feeling much better that way.
And we feel good about letting Europeans man the switch?
The ploy here is that we claim it's all in the name of science, but the truth is we're pretty tired of having our credit rating lowered all the time. Next time Standard&Poors has something to say, we'll have our answer ready for them.
The electricity bill is going to be a pain though, but we'll worry about that later.