This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 5, Informative
Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect, it is illegal to buy or sell votes in the United States. If you do it, eBay will pull your auction and you will likely be charged by your local authorities to the tune of thousands of dollars in fines, possibly even jail time.
The funny thing is that the most insidious vote-buying in the country isn't politicians (or other citizens) buying citizens' votes, it's corporations buying politicians' votes. If they outlawed THAT, then we might start making some progress.
Look, whether or not you agree with gambling, surely any reasonable person can see that the situation as it is now is simply untenable.
Gambling is allowed in some places (Las Vegas, Atlantic Ctiy, etc.) but not in others. Worse, in yet more places some forms of gambling is allowed (Bingo, horse racing, dog racing) but not others (blackjack, poker, etc.). Worst of all, in some places, such as the place where I happen to live, some gambling is allowed in the form of lotteries, but it is completely owned and run by the state government monopoly.
And to add to the madness, we now have laws on the book that say that online gambling is okay, but only on horse racing (thanks to a strong lobby) and within state lines?
I'm not averse to some sort of regulation to ensure that online casinos aren't cheating, but this sham of acting like gambling is an issue of morality so that government can use it as an excuse for avoiding competition is ridiculous. As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws based on outdated concepts of how people should and shouldn't live, we deserve to pay what amounts to a $100 billion annual Stupid Tax.
I still think that they ought to be allowed to violate US copyrights as an appropriate punishment. When the government (i.e. you and I, incidentally) is paying the $100 billion, people won't really care. But if corporate America starts losing money, I think you'll start seeing some rather dramatic changes very quickly.
I think the responses so far are missing the OP's point.
I didn't read his post thinking, "OMG, no more DNA evidence within a few years!" I'm guessing he meant that eventually through the use of various technologies for various reasons, it will be possible for criminals to be genetically altered in such a way that making identifying them using DNA will be difficult. It may be 50 years, 100 years, or 200 years, but as we get better and better at munging up our DNA, it is possible.
Also, that totally neglects that at some point in the future, when the technology behind this kind of stuff becomes pervasive enough, high tech criminals may deliberately have their DNA altered for the specific purpose of thwarting identification.
It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court. —John Adams, President and Signer of the Declaration of Independence
It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. —John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
[Juries] function as circuitbreaker[s] in the State's machinery of justice. —Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice
The condemnation of jury nullification is a relatively recent event in the nation's history. In the North around the time of the Civil War, juries often use nullification in order to protect runaway slaves, which were required by law to be returned to their so-called "owners." Now, though, we've gone from jurists encouraging nullification when needed, through active discouraging using nullification, through dismissing potential jurors who even know what nullification is, all the way to fellow jurors being encouraged to rat you out for dismissal if they suspect that you might be making decisions based on nullification.
Nullification at one time was thought of a person's last best defense against bad laws. This case is a perfect example of why we still need it, so that people can affect the outcome of such cases in a just and equitable manner, not merely in a way that lobbyists have paid politicians for.
Oh well, chalk it up to yet one more noble goal of our system that's gone down the drain. However, people need to know that in spite of anything the courts tell you, you do have the right of nullification. As a juror, you need to make decisions not only on the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well. As has already been pointed out, though, don't give any indication that you're smart to know that or you will be immediately dismissed.
She used an e-mail address that is the same e-mail address that she used for her screen name on a bunch of other sites. (Even match.com, which had her profile that was shown in court.) She also had one and only one computer on her network, and it was password-protected with a password that only she knew. (No "someone else was using my computer" defense.) The songs that showed up on KaZaa were, lo and behold, the exact same songs that were on her computer.
I mean, seriously, I can't think of any plausible defense that she could have had. When the judge decided to include jury instruction 14, where he said that making files available for download was infringement, that was it, game over.
Reading over the summary of testimony at Ars Technica, they have Jammie Thomas dead to rights. The fact is, she was downloading and sharing music over Kazaa, and unless the jury is made up of idiots, they're going to find for the RIAA.
The RIAA aren't idiots, they deliberately chose this case because it was extremely low-risk. They're looking to get some momentum back in their sue-everyone campaign, and by winning this case, they may very well do it. Of course, the down side is that if they had lost this case that is about as slam-dunk as it can get, they never would have been able to win another, period, but given how unlikely that outcome is, I think they acted correctly. ("Correctly" meaning in the interest of their idiotic short-term near-sighted goals, that is, not correct in a moral or ethical sense.)
I really kind of wish that Toder (Thomas's lawyer) had gone for jury nullification instead. He really didn't have that much to lose. Anyone remotely technically competent will know that she is guilty of infringement, and anyone who isn't remotely technically competent will believe so even more. At least with nullification, problems with the law itself could be addressed instead.
The BEST we can hope for out of this is that the jury awards the RIAA some token amount of damage like a dollar. Something that says that they are technically correct, but that the rules that they've exploited fly in the spirit of what the law is intended to do.
Please, don't be discouraged when Ms. Thomas loses this case. That's exactly what the RIAA wants to happen. Keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully someday, this stupidity will end. Just because they may win this battle doesn't mean that they have to win the war.
First of all, it's not just "checking a box." It's clicking to toggle a checkmark, and dragging across a bunch of other checkboxes to toggle them all on (or off, depending on the state of the first one you clicked).
Second of all, I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, it really bothers me in a cosmic sense that there was a patent granted for something so patently stupid. (Pun slightly intended.) I'm sorry, but this falls squarely in the realm of obvious to me. I mean, really, are programmers expected to patent every single frickin' thing they do out of fear that someone else might? Because that's the world we're living in, and I'd really like for it to change.
On the other hand, I'm sorry, but the Lotus Notes selection model is one of the most frustratingly stupid things I've ever encountered in my life. Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) It's been in use since... Well, as long as I can remember using a GUI, and I'm really hard-pressed to think of any other way that selections work. Except for Lotus Notes, where they use this asinine system of selecting messages which means that if I have several pages of stuff to select, I have to scroll past each. and. every. one. Frankly, if IBM is the only company that can do this and it prevents any other company that has the bright idea from implementing something like this, then I can almost bring myself to say that this is a good thing.
Wow, you are a piece of work. I don't even know why I'm jumping in this little argument, but...
So you're telling me one story of The Way Things Are. If I go talk to Jews, I'll get another. If I talk to followers of Islam, yet another. Buddhists, another. Hindus, another. Ancient Greeks, another. Native Americans, another. And so on, and so on, and so on.
You have faith that the future is reasonably predicted by the past, but you can never be sure. Your whole life operates on faith.
So which one is right? Given that religion requires faith, which by definition is something you can't prove, what is the deciding factor of which one to pick over another? What if I don't find your particular religion compelling enough, but some other is more in line with what works with my life? Who's to decide which one of us is right or wrong?
My point is that arguing over religion is silly. Killing people over religion is even sillier. (And please, if you think your religion is blameless, look to Oklahoma City, where followers of your religion blew up a federal building; to Birmingham, Alabama, where followers of your religion blew up an abortion clinic; to hooded white men during the civil rights movement; I could go on...) If you to believe in something that has no basis in fact or truth, that's your business, and I won't stop you.
However...
What really irritates me is when the followers of your religion try to impose their will on me. When they defiantly put monuments of your book on public land paid for with my tax dollars. When they also give my tax dollars to charities that spread their faith. When they try to put stickers our children's textbooks designed to undermine the credibility of science that has been rigorously tested and observed.
You didn't answer my question about what God would have to to do, to give you enough evidence so you would WANT to believe and obey Him.
Okay, I'll take a shot at it. I merely ask for being given the benefit that Thomas was. When he doubted, Jesus came to him and allowed him to physically test what he was seeing. How about a miracle? I'm not talking about what people are passing off as miracles today, I'm talking about a doozy. Split the sky open. Want me to not think it's just a hallucination? Then split it open for all to see.
Or raise the dead. That's a good one, too, and probably more appropriate since that's the one that Thomas actually got. We're talking about under controlled circumstances, where medical professionals can certify that there's complete brain death, and no chance of return barring some supernatural phenomenon. You get the idea, this isn't rocket science. Give me something that I can see, touch, and evaluate. Thomas is presumably in heaven right now because he had the evidence. Why am I going to hell when the same evidence would convince me?
I heard this story on NPR yesterday. I'm inclined to believe that it was...
Absolutely nothing.
It happened one time, six years ago, for less than five milliseconds, and no one else in the world can corroborate that it happened. To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.
Now, having said that, I think it's probably worthwhile to see if it happens again. As the article says, "The astronomers estimate on the basis of their results that hundreds of similar events should occur over the sky each day." If that is the case, then get to looking, and maybe I'll change my mind once they have more evidence.
Until then, though, let's not get so caught up in the coolness of the possibility of something we've never seen before that we don't do due diligence and make good science.
So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB
At $30/GB, that would make an 80GB drive around $2,400. Hopefully the price will eventually come down, as "He even hinted that the company is looking into some gaming applications, but didn't want to give any further details."
Ray, I've gotta say, I listened to these segments with great interest.
I'd like to shake your hand for all you've done to promote the hell out of this cause. But I probably won't, because you're probably hundreds of miles away from me, and that's a long way to drive just to shake someone's hand. Still, you've done a fantastic job, and when all of this is looked on as a shameful part of digital music's past, I'm personally giving you a lot of credit for it with your excellent blog and tireless efforts.
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
I.e. "Install software on your computer to do something you shouldn't need to."
edit out the commercial
I.e. "Install more software on your computer to do something you shouldn't need to, and spend at least as long as the show is futzing around with editing it."
Frankly, I'd rather just not watch the show than to go through all of this trouble. Other people will probably be downloading it illegally to avoid the trouble and still watch the show. I like my solution better, though, because 1) I get to do other more interesting things, and 2) I don't help perpetuate the popularity of shows that are made by companies that want to control when, where, and how I watch stuff that I'm willing to pay for.
You know, I hope people keep this incident in mind if they are considering going to work for a disreputable company, a company whose primary missions is screwing people, especially when those people that are being screwed have a Robin Hood-like reputation and are a lot smarter than you. The sad fact is that there will undoubtedly be a lot of collateral damage due to this episode. As pointed out in the Ars Technica article, a secretary who happened to be working for MediaDefender whose worst crime was answering phones and getting coffee for his or her bosses now has the social security number, home address and phone number, and salary information out there for everyone to download and look at.
I think that an even worse fallout of all this is that companies are going to be even more anal about stuff like e-mail policies and such. At my company now, they content-block us from accessing Gmail. I'll be that companies will start doing crap like blocking employees from even sending e-mail to Gmail now, the attack vector that allowed these e-mails to get leaked.
But still, even after having said all that, I love it when an evil company doing evil things gets their due like this. It's entirely possible that MediaDefender might go out of business because of this. If you're one of their customers whose detailed contract information got leaked, how likely are you to do business with them again? Although it occurred in a totally scummy way that I just can't endorse, I can't deny the end result of big media companies being a little more skittish to hiring these outfits to do their dirty work is a Good Thing.
However, there was another solution, to start taking voluntary collections from the community.
I considered this, but if there's anything I hate worse than being a salesman, it's being a panhandler. I don't like the idea of providing something with my hand out, hoping that donations this month would be enough to sustain my hosting bill. I also don't like the idea of users of the wiki feeling that they're obligated to give something in exchange for it.
Or yet another solution, although I suspect it would involve quite a bit of development work -- spreading the wiki server and support activities across the community.
Not a bad idea, thought it would require a lot of development work to ensure that it's redundant enough to account for people who shut their sites down and such. At any rate, I'm a pretty smart cookie, but the last thing I have time for right now is taking on a complicated development project like this, so it's not really an option.
the game company doesn't need a TOS for protection anyway
True, but it never hurts to have it anyway.
But the real purpose of the ToS isn't to protect the company (thought that's probably part of it). These companies for the most part want people to use their content. Without allowable use like this, then there would not only be no game wikis, but no fansites, no fan art, etc. This is one of the rare cases where a ToS is more about what you can do than what you can't.
Have you read most of the articles on these wikis? The vast majority of them are not critiques. They are, as I said, verbatim copies of texts and screenshots of images found within the games, or on official websites or within the game publishers' manuals. As such, the fair use protection doesn't apply.
At best, you might be able to come up with some kind of claim if you've used some sort of clever presentation of the information, but if you're just copied it over into a wiki, you most certainly have no claim on it.
Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.
First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.
Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes, and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:
Put ads on the wiki myself.
Transfer the site to someone else who will run ads.
Shut the site down.
Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.
Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.
Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr
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Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect, it is illegal to buy or sell votes in the United States. If you do it, eBay will pull your auction and you will likely be charged by your local authorities to the tune of thousands of dollars in fines, possibly even jail time.
The funny thing is that the most insidious vote-buying in the country isn't politicians (or other citizens) buying citizens' votes, it's corporations buying politicians' votes. If they outlawed THAT, then we might start making some progress.
Good!
Look, whether or not you agree with gambling, surely any reasonable person can see that the situation as it is now is simply untenable.
Gambling is allowed in some places (Las Vegas, Atlantic Ctiy, etc.) but not in others. Worse, in yet more places some forms of gambling is allowed (Bingo, horse racing, dog racing) but not others (blackjack, poker, etc.). Worst of all, in some places, such as the place where I happen to live, some gambling is allowed in the form of lotteries, but it is completely owned and run by the state government monopoly.
And to add to the madness, we now have laws on the book that say that online gambling is okay, but only on horse racing (thanks to a strong lobby) and within state lines?
I'm not averse to some sort of regulation to ensure that online casinos aren't cheating, but this sham of acting like gambling is an issue of morality so that government can use it as an excuse for avoiding competition is ridiculous. As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws based on outdated concepts of how people should and shouldn't live, we deserve to pay what amounts to a $100 billion annual Stupid Tax.
I still think that they ought to be allowed to violate US copyrights as an appropriate punishment. When the government (i.e. you and I, incidentally) is paying the $100 billion, people won't really care. But if corporate America starts losing money, I think you'll start seeing some rather dramatic changes very quickly.
Google United States v. Renfroe. Renfroe was a lawyer who went to jail for arguing jury nullification. Also look up Laura Kriho.
I think the responses so far are missing the OP's point.
I didn't read his post thinking, "OMG, no more DNA evidence within a few years!" I'm guessing he meant that eventually through the use of various technologies for various reasons, it will be possible for criminals to be genetically altered in such a way that making identifying them using DNA will be difficult. It may be 50 years, 100 years, or 200 years, but as we get better and better at munging up our DNA, it is possible.
Also, that totally neglects that at some point in the future, when the technology behind this kind of stuff becomes pervasive enough, high tech criminals may deliberately have their DNA altered for the specific purpose of thwarting identification.
I'd rather believe these guys:
The condemnation of jury nullification is a relatively recent event in the nation's history. In the North around the time of the Civil War, juries often use nullification in order to protect runaway slaves, which were required by law to be returned to their so-called "owners." Now, though, we've gone from jurists encouraging nullification when needed, through active discouraging using nullification, through dismissing potential jurors who even know what nullification is, all the way to fellow jurors being encouraged to rat you out for dismissal if they suspect that you might be making decisions based on nullification.
Nullification at one time was thought of a person's last best defense against bad laws. This case is a perfect example of why we still need it, so that people can affect the outcome of such cases in a just and equitable manner, not merely in a way that lobbyists have paid politicians for.
Oh well, chalk it up to yet one more noble goal of our system that's gone down the drain. However, people need to know that in spite of anything the courts tell you, you do have the right of nullification. As a juror, you need to make decisions not only on the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well. As has already been pointed out, though, don't give any indication that you're smart to know that or you will be immediately dismissed.
This was one of the least of her worries.
She used an e-mail address that is the same e-mail address that she used for her screen name on a bunch of other sites. (Even match.com, which had her profile that was shown in court.) She also had one and only one computer on her network, and it was password-protected with a password that only she knew. (No "someone else was using my computer" defense.) The songs that showed up on KaZaa were, lo and behold, the exact same songs that were on her computer.
I mean, seriously, I can't think of any plausible defense that she could have had. When the judge decided to include jury instruction 14, where he said that making files available for download was infringement, that was it, game over.
Don't get too excited.
Reading over the summary of testimony at Ars Technica, they have Jammie Thomas dead to rights. The fact is, she was downloading and sharing music over Kazaa, and unless the jury is made up of idiots, they're going to find for the RIAA.
The RIAA aren't idiots, they deliberately chose this case because it was extremely low-risk. They're looking to get some momentum back in their sue-everyone campaign, and by winning this case, they may very well do it. Of course, the down side is that if they had lost this case that is about as slam-dunk as it can get, they never would have been able to win another, period, but given how unlikely that outcome is, I think they acted correctly. ("Correctly" meaning in the interest of their idiotic short-term near-sighted goals, that is, not correct in a moral or ethical sense.)
I really kind of wish that Toder (Thomas's lawyer) had gone for jury nullification instead. He really didn't have that much to lose. Anyone remotely technically competent will know that she is guilty of infringement, and anyone who isn't remotely technically competent will believe so even more. At least with nullification, problems with the law itself could be addressed instead.
The BEST we can hope for out of this is that the jury awards the RIAA some token amount of damage like a dollar. Something that says that they are technically correct, but that the rules that they've exploited fly in the spirit of what the law is intended to do.
Please, don't be discouraged when Ms. Thomas loses this case. That's exactly what the RIAA wants to happen. Keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully someday, this stupidity will end. Just because they may win this battle doesn't mean that they have to win the war.
First of all, it's not just "checking a box." It's clicking to toggle a checkmark, and dragging across a bunch of other checkboxes to toggle them all on (or off, depending on the state of the first one you clicked).
Second of all, I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, it really bothers me in a cosmic sense that there was a patent granted for something so patently stupid. (Pun slightly intended.) I'm sorry, but this falls squarely in the realm of obvious to me. I mean, really, are programmers expected to patent every single frickin' thing they do out of fear that someone else might? Because that's the world we're living in, and I'd really like for it to change.
On the other hand, I'm sorry, but the Lotus Notes selection model is one of the most frustratingly stupid things I've ever encountered in my life. Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) It's been in use since... Well, as long as I can remember using a GUI, and I'm really hard-pressed to think of any other way that selections work. Except for Lotus Notes, where they use this asinine system of selecting messages which means that if I have several pages of stuff to select, I have to scroll past each. and. every. one. Frankly, if IBM is the only company that can do this and it prevents any other company that has the bright idea from implementing something like this, then I can almost bring myself to say that this is a good thing.
Wow, you are a piece of work. I don't even know why I'm jumping in this little argument, but...
So you're telling me one story of The Way Things Are. If I go talk to Jews, I'll get another. If I talk to followers of Islam, yet another. Buddhists, another. Hindus, another. Ancient Greeks, another. Native Americans, another. And so on, and so on, and so on.
So which one is right? Given that religion requires faith, which by definition is something you can't prove, what is the deciding factor of which one to pick over another? What if I don't find your particular religion compelling enough, but some other is more in line with what works with my life? Who's to decide which one of us is right or wrong?
My point is that arguing over religion is silly. Killing people over religion is even sillier. (And please, if you think your religion is blameless, look to Oklahoma City, where followers of your religion blew up a federal building; to Birmingham, Alabama, where followers of your religion blew up an abortion clinic; to hooded white men during the civil rights movement; I could go on...) If you to believe in something that has no basis in fact or truth, that's your business, and I won't stop you.
However...
What really irritates me is when the followers of your religion try to impose their will on me. When they defiantly put monuments of your book on public land paid for with my tax dollars. When they also give my tax dollars to charities that spread their faith. When they try to put stickers our children's textbooks designed to undermine the credibility of science that has been rigorously tested and observed.
Okay, I'll take a shot at it. I merely ask for being given the benefit that Thomas was. When he doubted, Jesus came to him and allowed him to physically test what he was seeing. How about a miracle? I'm not talking about what people are passing off as miracles today, I'm talking about a doozy. Split the sky open. Want me to not think it's just a hallucination? Then split it open for all to see.
Or raise the dead. That's a good one, too, and probably more appropriate since that's the one that Thomas actually got. We're talking about under controlled circumstances, where medical professionals can certify that there's complete brain death, and no chance of return barring some supernatural phenomenon. You get the idea, this isn't rocket science. Give me something that I can see, touch, and evaluate. Thomas is presumably in heaven right now because he had the evidence. Why am I going to hell when the same evidence would convince me?
I heard this story on NPR yesterday. I'm inclined to believe that it was...
Absolutely nothing.
It happened one time, six years ago, for less than five milliseconds, and no one else in the world can corroborate that it happened. To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.
Now, having said that, I think it's probably worthwhile to see if it happens again. As the article says, "The astronomers estimate on the basis of their results that hundreds of similar events should occur over the sky each day." If that is the case, then get to looking, and maybe I'll change my mind once they have more evidence.
Until then, though, let's not get so caught up in the coolness of the possibility of something we've never seen before that we don't do due diligence and make good science.
At $30/GB, that would make an 80GB drive around $2,400. Hopefully the price will eventually come down, as "He even hinted that the company is looking into some gaming applications, but didn't want to give any further details."
Ray, I've gotta say, I listened to these segments with great interest.
I'd like to shake your hand for all you've done to promote the hell out of this cause. But I probably won't, because you're probably hundreds of miles away from me, and that's a long way to drive just to shake someone's hand. Still, you've done a fantastic job, and when all of this is looked on as a shameful part of digital music's past, I'm personally giving you a lot of credit for it with your excellent blog and tireless efforts.
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
Okay, I'll bite. Which, pray tell, "real language" would be better?
I.e. "Install software on your computer to do something you shouldn't need to."
I.e. "Install more software on your computer to do something you shouldn't need to, and spend at least as long as the show is futzing around with editing it."
Frankly, I'd rather just not watch the show than to go through all of this trouble. Other people will probably be downloading it illegally to avoid the trouble and still watch the show. I like my solution better, though, because 1) I get to do other more interesting things, and 2) I don't help perpetuate the popularity of shows that are made by companies that want to control when, where, and how I watch stuff that I'm willing to pay for.
Not continually improving both feature- and UI-wise, yes, no, around 3/5, yes, yes, probably, and both.
Now that we've cleared that up, anything else I can help with?
Whoops, editors screwed up. They're not MP3s, they're WMAs. I take it back.
(Money's now on 72 or so hours. Not for lack of technical know-how, but for sheer apathy.)
My money is on less than twelve.
Kind of depends on who you ask, doesn't it?
AC's right. They block all of the major web e-mail providers.
You know, I hope people keep this incident in mind if they are considering going to work for a disreputable company, a company whose primary missions is screwing people, especially when those people that are being screwed have a Robin Hood-like reputation and are a lot smarter than you. The sad fact is that there will undoubtedly be a lot of collateral damage due to this episode. As pointed out in the Ars Technica article, a secretary who happened to be working for MediaDefender whose worst crime was answering phones and getting coffee for his or her bosses now has the social security number, home address and phone number, and salary information out there for everyone to download and look at.
I think that an even worse fallout of all this is that companies are going to be even more anal about stuff like e-mail policies and such. At my company now, they content-block us from accessing Gmail. I'll be that companies will start doing crap like blocking employees from even sending e-mail to Gmail now, the attack vector that allowed these e-mails to get leaked.
But still, even after having said all that, I love it when an evil company doing evil things gets their due like this. It's entirely possible that MediaDefender might go out of business because of this. If you're one of their customers whose detailed contract information got leaked, how likely are you to do business with them again? Although it occurred in a totally scummy way that I just can't endorse, I can't deny the end result of big media companies being a little more skittish to hiring these outfits to do their dirty work is a Good Thing.
I considered this, but if there's anything I hate worse than being a salesman, it's being a panhandler. I don't like the idea of providing something with my hand out, hoping that donations this month would be enough to sustain my hosting bill. I also don't like the idea of users of the wiki feeling that they're obligated to give something in exchange for it.
Not a bad idea, thought it would require a lot of development work to ensure that it's redundant enough to account for people who shut their sites down and such. At any rate, I'm a pretty smart cookie, but the last thing I have time for right now is taking on a complicated development project like this, so it's not really an option.
True, but it never hurts to have it anyway.
But the real purpose of the ToS isn't to protect the company (thought that's probably part of it). These companies for the most part want people to use their content. Without allowable use like this, then there would not only be no game wikis, but no fansites, no fan art, etc. This is one of the rare cases where a ToS is more about what you can do than what you can't.
Have you read most of the articles on these wikis? The vast majority of them are not critiques. They are, as I said, verbatim copies of texts and screenshots of images found within the games, or on official websites or within the game publishers' manuals. As such, the fair use protection doesn't apply.
At best, you might be able to come up with some kind of claim if you've used some sort of clever presentation of the information, but if you're just copied it over into a wiki, you most certainly have no claim on it.
Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.
First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.
Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes, and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:
Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.
Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.
Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr