This is just like the mobile companies. One byte of email information costs x, but one byte of jpeg information costs y. etc. Complete nonsense. Just vote with your feet when they try it.
Forget google, just take a look at the BBC! They also have a forum on the Google China Censorship and they have frantically been removing any postings critical of the BBC.
I thank the BBC for making this forum "Reactively Moderated" since otherwise all the forums would have been "Fully Censored" as per usual and it would also be silly to censor a discussion on censorship. If you are going to engage in such widespread censorship of peoples views, you would be better off going back to the old system where you at least had some plausible deniability e.g. "We get so many emails, we can't look at them all". The new "automated" system is clearly geared up to allow instant postings and your artificial obstruction of this ability makes any censorship much more obvious to the people posting.
Which was quickly removed. So I posted this:
Earlier I criticized the BBC for censoring Have Your Say postings. I have now seen that they have pulled my posting. How do you all feel about that? Do you like being censored?
Which was also removed. Fortunately people started to notice. e.g.
Added: Wednesday, 25 January, 2006, 12:41 GMT 12:41 UK Interesting to see just how much censorship is taking place no "Have Your Say". Postings removed quicker than a Moderator can read! [terrybyatt] RECOMMEND Recommended by 1 person
I really think China could learn a thing or two from the BBC. I think the Chinese Government should make the BBC "Have Your Say" team some job offers. Why can't the BBC just sit back and let people speak? And why is their software so crappy compared to Slashdot when the British Public pay them millions!
I can think of a few good storylines based on my own experiences in development over the years.
For example, once I spent a week working on an RFP for a potentially big IT contract. It was a huge document, lots of people were working on it, filling out different sections and no-one had time to proof read each others work. A few days after we submited it I was typing a document and I noticed that every time I typed "project" it came out as "Prostitute". As I typed, I noticed more and more words were comming out stupidly, e.g Document was coming out as Dogbiscuit etc. I new who must be responsible and when I asked him about it, he was giggling and said he did it "weeks ago". Well, we never did get the contract and I really just dont have the courage to go back and read the RFP now.
Or how about this. My Boss spends most of the day looking up Porn. He is so blatant that one day he was using the communal internet machine and he forgot to properly shut down the browser. When we looked at the machine he was still logged into his profile page on a pervy dating site. There was a big picture of him posing in some swimming trunks. Needless to say everyone has seen the picture.
Then there was the time we were supporting a customer using PC Anywhere. The customer's desktop was on the screen, and it was quite a fast connection, so it was quite responsive. The customers were present at the other end watching what we were doing. Suddenly the technical people (me included) were called to deal with another crisis and we left the machine for a few minutes. When we came back my boss was sitting at the machine, just finishing off a Hotmail email (probably to some other pervy site or friend). We just stood there in fear as he nonchalantly got up and went back to his office. Sure enough he had using the customer's machine to send his personal email while they were all gathered aound watching at the other end.
DRM is fundamentally flawed. Certainly today's encryption methods make it virtually impossible to crack encrypted data, but that is not the situation with DRM'd content. To actually be able to enjoy the content they have to give you the key. Once that transaction has occurred the DRM is 100% compromised. You then have everything you need to remove the DRM. Doing it practically can be tricky, but because of the need to give away the key, DRM is fundamentally flawed.
It's a bit like sending an encrypted document to a friend. You explain to him that it would take longer than the age of the universe to crack the encryption. He phones you up and says "Hey I can't read it." You say "Ok, right yeah, here's the password, but please don't copy and paste the text."
Well even CD's are unreliable. About 5 years ago I had this idiotic notion that data on CDs would last for years. At work we archived the company's source code for old products on CDR's and put them all neatly in a storage box. Just three years later they were no more useful than coasters. Nowadays I just keep data on hard drives and shift it around.
Sure, you can do great effects, have a great script, even have some great locations. The problem with amateur films though, is that the actors are usually fat, spotty, ugly and can't act.
We are all number 6. We are exposed to psychedelic brainwashing TV and we go about chanting the same implanted phrases like a mantra.
Insurgents
Foreign Fighters
War on Terror
etc
The newspapers are just as brainwashed. When was the last time a paper showed some independent thought and said Resistance instead of Insurgents? or that "War is Terror"?
Part of the prisoner was about how technology in the future would be used against us. Those fears certainly weren't ungrounded. The government tells us they have to spy on us for our own protection. They also seem to think they have the right to lie to us. When people try to protest they are beaten up by riot police and/or arrested, assuming they can get a permit to protest at all.
Be seeing you....
This argument has already being raised by the Commissioner of Police in the UK and was publicly shown to be bogus on-air on Questiontime. An opposition politician pointed out that if you fail to produce an encryption key when asked, you can already be charged with that as an offence. It is therefore completely unnecessary to generally extend the detention to 90 days.
All pocket computers suffer from the screen size issue. The Scopo
or something like it, could solve that problem. The headset may look stupid now, but back in '97, I used to think people using mobile phones looked stupid.
If you want some serious storage and it's really video you're interested in, the Archos Av500 is a much better idea. The Archos Screen is only a little bit smaller (4 vs 4.2 inches) but the 30GB storage makes up for it. It can also record TV directly and supports more video formats than the PSP.
Well, if the only form of violence is that you can shoot or throw grenades at people, that's fine for me. I live in the UK and we never have guns or grenades in real life. So if I find myself with a machine gun and a bazooka, I'll know it's ok to kill everyone.
What I wouldn't like to see is realistic knifing and killing with bare hands. I think that would be far too horrible, even to experience in a game. Anyway, combat studies have shown that soldiers are very reluctant to actually kill during combat. Perhaps this will occur in video games. The more reallistic they become, the more uneasy we will become doing bad things.
The screen is only 2.5 inches! I hope they are going to supply a free magnifying glass in the pack.
My PSP has a superb 4.2 inch widescreen screen. I could never downgrade to 2.5 inches. Granted there's no Hard Drive, but I can just copy a few episodes of Farscape onto a 1GB memory stick ready for the morning commute.
Of course, none of these video devices ever seem to support the formats you want. Either it doesn't support AC3 sound, or it doesn't support Div3.11 or a dozen other problems. You have to re-encode what you want to watch, particularly with the PSP, which is pretty proprietary.
If you want a portable video player, I would recomend the PSP for its lovely screen. But if you really need to store tens of gigabytes of video, go for the Archos AV500. The screen is only a little bit smaller and it has a lot of video features the PSP doesn't.
(The Creative Zen Vision looks interesting with its high res 640x480 screen, but its not a widescreen, which is a no-no for me)
We have two competing formats, Bluray and HD-DVD, both of which may soon be Betamaxed by HVD (Holographic
Versatile Disc). HVD disks should be able to hold one or more TB of data, which amounts to a lot of DivX movies. HVD has backing from many companies including Mitsubishi and Fujifilm.
I think this highlights a real danger in investing in new technologies. Suddenly some new company comes along with something 10 times better and you stand to lose billions.
I originally though we might be able to download the programmes and keep them, since I paid for the programme with my licence fee. Then I heard there was a royalties problem. Every time a program is shown, the actors have to be paid royalties.
Why should that be the case? When I leave my current job as a software developer, I don't expect to be paid royalties every time someone uses something I made. Surely it's not right to be paid forever for some work they were paid to do in the first place. If only we could all cut deals like this, we'd be rich.
The important thing to realise is that the media does not just adapt to the requirements of foreign governments, but also to those of your own government and particularly big business. You should never solely rely on domestic media for your information as it's really full of distortions and deliberate omissions. You need to take an average, and unfortunately this can be time consuming.
Right, here's a disk with the film BladeRunner on it.
It's encrypted with algorithms that would take 400 Thousand years of computer time to crack. Oh, and by the way, here's the key so you can actually watch it.
Why do people think web apps are so great?
It might make the Operating System less relevant, but it will also give vendors much more control over us, particularly if we decide to have them host our data along with the applications.
I mean, imagine if all your word documents were hosted on a Microsoft server. You log into your account and discover that WebWord 2008 is no longer available and it has all been upgraded to WebWord 2009. Suddenly you find that your documents are no longer readable and WebWord 2008 is gone forever. Ok, you may hope that someone will create a WebWord 2008 document reader, and they might, but what about things that are not so easy to convert.
e.g. My company has spent about £500,000 developing a large VB6 application over many years. Microsoft has effectively dumped VB6, but we have the VB6 software, so we can keep using it. That might not be the case if our tools were provided as a service from some remote web server. They could just say "It's far too expensive for us to keep hosting something as old as VB6. Just rewrite everything in.NET." We'd immediately have to kiss goodbye to £500,000 worth of work, whereas at the moment we are able to bury our heads in the sand and kiss goodbye to it at a later date.
Also it seems to me that this model is ultimately a bad thing for open source/free software. If you have to have big powerful servers to host applications, it's a lot more difficult to have them for free. Someone has to pay for all the server time.
I don't really like the idea of losing control of the software I use. I'm sure I'm not alone.
In the company where I work at, the initial enthusiasm for.NET is dying in the upper management. The initial projects implemented with.NET have been near catastrophes in engineering productivity and quality
Yup. And once you've created 5 man-years of.NET code they will dump it and launch Microsoft.HahaYouHaveToStartAllOverAgain, a revolutionary new development platform. Proprietary languages are great aren't they?
Re:This is just one more reason...
on
Sorry, Wrong Wiretap
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Governments are often incompetent, yet they are quite capable of "conspiracy crap". See COINTELPRO and ECHELON for example. The fact that conspiracy crap sounds like conspiracy crap, counts in their favour.
I've have a 250Gb Maxtor OneTouch for some time and it has never failed on me despite lots of punishment and accidentally unplugging it etc etc. They have a sturdy thick solid metal case and I would certainly recommend it to any US Marines that need some extra protection for their Humvees.
Yes of course. The notion that the government wants to engage in mass surveillance of the public is ludicrous, ranking along side alien abduction and the existance of Santa Claus. Such a thing has never occured in any country and anyone who suggests such a thing is obviously a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot.
I have to stop now. Nurse is coming to take my crayons away.
Ask yourself why the government has never tried to open everyones letters, photocopy them and then reseal and post them?
It's not because they wouldn't like to, it's just too much hassle to do it. Even if they did try to do it, the public would be outraged, yet far less noise is being made just because the medium is electronic rather than paper.
Computers make it possible to snoop on people cheaply and that is the problem. As technology progresses, more and more snooping abilities will become economical.
They would like you to believe that this is to thwart terrorists, but terrorists will of course use the strongest encryption and will not play by the rules. I believe the general public are the real target here. If you suspect a certain person is a terrorist, there are already many ways you can put them under surveillance. You can install keyloggers on their computer, bug them, bounce lasers of windows etc etc. If you don't know who the terrorists are you have to perform mass surveillance of eveyones mail looking for keywords. The problem is that terrorists won't say "Meet me by the Bank of America with the Semtex" they will say something like "See you at the pub on Wednesday. Bring that new playstation game.".
Recent freedom of information releases in the UK (my country) have shown that the police have in the past infiltrated groups such as the anti-apartheid movement and other legitimate and non-threatening political groups. That's the sort of behaviour I expect in Uzbekistan not the UK. We must also not forget Echlon , which has been used to spy on European businesses. Our governments have shown that they cannot be trusted time and time again. We must not allow them to use the fear of terrorism to rob us of our rights and privacy.
Anyway. I have a counter proposal. We now know that politicians are making important decisions in face to face meetings so that there are no electronic records. I propose that all politicians be required to wear head mounted video cameras that record everything they say and do. The tapes must be handed in and stored in the event of any enquiry. We can explain that we have to do this because of the terrible threat of CORRUPTION. Anyone in the government could be involved in CORRUPTION and innocent politicians will have nothing to fear in these new measures. We have to balance the need for government secrecy with the important fight against CORRUPTION. We cannot allow CORRUPTION to win.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just like the mobile companies. One byte of email information costs x, but one byte of jpeg information costs y. etc. Complete nonsense. Just vote with your feet when they try it.
Forget google, just take a look at the BBC! They also have a forum on the Google China Censorship and they have frantically been removing any postings critical of the BBC.
d ID=824&&&edition=1&ttl=20060125134243
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threa
First I posted this:
I thank the BBC for making this forum "Reactively Moderated" since otherwise all the forums would have been "Fully Censored" as per usual and it would also be silly to censor a discussion on censorship. If you are going to engage in such widespread censorship of peoples views, you would be better off going back to the old system where you at least had some plausible deniability e.g. "We get so many emails, we can't look at them all". The new "automated" system is clearly geared up to allow instant postings and your artificial obstruction of this ability makes any censorship much more obvious to the people posting.
Which was quickly removed. So I posted this:
Earlier I criticized the BBC for censoring Have Your Say postings. I have now seen that they have pulled my posting. How do you all feel about that? Do you like being censored?
Which was also removed. Fortunately people started to notice. e.g.
Added: Wednesday, 25 January, 2006, 12:41 GMT 12:41 UK
Interesting to see just how much censorship is taking place no "Have Your Say". Postings removed quicker than a Moderator can read!
[terrybyatt]
RECOMMEND
Recommended by 1 person
I really think China could learn a thing or two from the BBC. I think the Chinese Government should make the BBC "Have Your Say" team some job offers. Why can't the BBC just sit back and let people speak? And why is their software so crappy compared to Slashdot when the British Public pay them millions!
I can think of a few good storylines based on my own experiences in development over the years. For example, once I spent a week working on an RFP for a potentially big IT contract. It was a huge document, lots of people were working on it, filling out different sections and no-one had time to proof read each others work. A few days after we submited it I was typing a document and I noticed that every time I typed "project" it came out as "Prostitute". As I typed, I noticed more and more words were comming out stupidly, e.g Document was coming out as Dogbiscuit etc. I new who must be responsible and when I asked him about it, he was giggling and said he did it "weeks ago". Well, we never did get the contract and I really just dont have the courage to go back and read the RFP now. Or how about this. My Boss spends most of the day looking up Porn. He is so blatant that one day he was using the communal internet machine and he forgot to properly shut down the browser. When we looked at the machine he was still logged into his profile page on a pervy dating site. There was a big picture of him posing in some swimming trunks. Needless to say everyone has seen the picture. Then there was the time we were supporting a customer using PC Anywhere. The customer's desktop was on the screen, and it was quite a fast connection, so it was quite responsive. The customers were present at the other end watching what we were doing. Suddenly the technical people (me included) were called to deal with another crisis and we left the machine for a few minutes. When we came back my boss was sitting at the machine, just finishing off a Hotmail email (probably to some other pervy site or friend). We just stood there in fear as he nonchalantly got up and went back to his office. Sure enough he had using the customer's machine to send his personal email while they were all gathered aound watching at the other end.
DRM is fundamentally flawed. Certainly today's encryption methods make it virtually impossible to crack encrypted data, but that is not the situation with DRM'd content. To actually be able to enjoy the content they have to give you the key. Once that transaction has occurred the DRM is 100% compromised. You then have everything you need to remove the DRM. Doing it practically can be tricky, but because of the need to give away the key, DRM is fundamentally flawed. It's a bit like sending an encrypted document to a friend. You explain to him that it would take longer than the age of the universe to crack the encryption. He phones you up and says "Hey I can't read it." You say "Ok, right yeah, here's the password, but please don't copy and paste the text."
Well even CD's are unreliable. About 5 years ago I had this idiotic notion that data on CDs would last for years. At work we archived the company's source code for old products on CDR's and put them all neatly in a storage box. Just three years later they were no more useful than coasters. Nowadays I just keep data on hard drives and shift it around.
Sure, you can do great effects, have a great script, even have some great locations. The problem with amateur films though, is that the actors are usually fat, spotty, ugly and can't act.
We are all number 6. We are exposed to psychedelic brainwashing TV and we go about chanting the same implanted phrases like a mantra. Insurgents Foreign Fighters War on Terror etc The newspapers are just as brainwashed. When was the last time a paper showed some independent thought and said Resistance instead of Insurgents? or that "War is Terror"? Part of the prisoner was about how technology in the future would be used against us. Those fears certainly weren't ungrounded. The government tells us they have to spy on us for our own protection. They also seem to think they have the right to lie to us. When people try to protest they are beaten up by riot police and/or arrested, assuming they can get a permit to protest at all. Be seeing you....
This argument has already being raised by the Commissioner of Police in the UK and was publicly shown to be bogus on-air on Questiontime. An opposition politician pointed out that if you fail to produce an encryption key when asked, you can already be charged with that as an offence. It is therefore completely unnecessary to generally extend the detention to 90 days.
All pocket computers suffer from the screen size issue. The Scopo or something like it, could solve that problem. The headset may look stupid now, but back in '97, I used to think people using mobile phones looked stupid.
The PSP has a glorious 4.2" Wide-screen and it fits into my jacket pocket just fine. The video Ipod screen is a postage stamp by comparison.
If you want some serious storage and it's really video you're interested in, the Archos Av500 is a much better idea. The Archos Screen is only a little bit smaller (4 vs 4.2 inches) but the 30GB storage makes up for it. It can also record TV directly and supports more video formats than the PSP.
Well, if the only form of violence is that you can shoot or throw grenades at people, that's fine for me. I live in the UK and we never have guns or grenades in real life. So if I find myself with a machine gun and a bazooka, I'll know it's ok to kill everyone.
What I wouldn't like to see is realistic knifing and killing with bare hands. I think that would be far too horrible, even to experience in a game. Anyway, combat studies have shown that soldiers are very reluctant to actually kill during combat. Perhaps this will occur in video games. The more reallistic they become, the more uneasy we will become doing bad things.
The screen is only 2.5 inches! I hope they are going to supply a free magnifying glass in the pack.
My PSP has a superb 4.2 inch widescreen screen. I could never downgrade to 2.5 inches. Granted there's no Hard Drive, but I can just copy a few episodes of Farscape onto a 1GB memory stick ready for the morning commute.
Of course, none of these video devices ever seem to support the formats you want. Either it doesn't support AC3 sound, or it doesn't support Div3.11 or a dozen other problems. You have to re-encode what you want to watch, particularly with the PSP, which is pretty proprietary.
If you want a portable video player, I would recomend the PSP for its lovely screen. But if you really need to store tens of gigabytes of video, go for the Archos AV500. The screen is only a little bit smaller and it has a lot of video features the PSP doesn't.
(The Creative Zen Vision looks interesting with its high res 640x480 screen, but its not a widescreen, which is a no-no for me)
The link is dead. Try this http://www.oldamericancentury.org/boltonun.mov
Perhaps the opinions expressed by the US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, have in some way lead to distrust of American intentions.
I wonder how many UN ambassadors have seen the video. Bolton gets quite Hitlarian at the end.
We have two competing formats, Bluray and HD-DVD, both of which may soon be Betamaxed by HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc). HVD disks should be able to hold one or more TB of data, which amounts to a lot of DivX movies. HVD has backing from many companies including Mitsubishi and Fujifilm.
I think this highlights a real danger in investing in new technologies. Suddenly some new company comes along with something 10 times better and you stand to lose billions.
I originally though we might be able to download the programmes and keep them, since I paid for the programme with my licence fee. Then I heard there was a royalties problem. Every time a program is shown, the actors have to be paid royalties.
Why should that be the case? When I leave my current job as a software developer, I don't expect to be paid royalties every time someone uses something I made. Surely it's not right to be paid forever for some work they were paid to do in the first place. If only we could all cut deals like this, we'd be rich.
The important thing to realise is that the media does not just adapt to the requirements of foreign governments, but also to those of your own government and particularly big business. You should never solely rely on domestic media for your information as it's really full of distortions and deliberate omissions. You need to take an average, and unfortunately this can be time consuming.
Right, here's a disk with the film BladeRunner on it. It's encrypted with algorithms that would take 400 Thousand years of computer time to crack. Oh, and by the way, here's the key so you can actually watch it.
Case closed.
Why do people think web apps are so great? It might make the Operating System less relevant, but it will also give vendors much more control over us, particularly if we decide to have them host our data along with the applications.
.NET." We'd immediately have to kiss goodbye to £500,000 worth of work, whereas at the moment we are able to bury our heads in the sand and kiss goodbye to it at a later date.
I mean, imagine if all your word documents were hosted on a Microsoft server. You log into your account and discover that WebWord 2008 is no longer available and it has all been upgraded to WebWord 2009. Suddenly you find that your documents are no longer readable and WebWord 2008 is gone forever. Ok, you may hope that someone will create a WebWord 2008 document reader, and they might, but what about things that are not so easy to convert.
e.g. My company has spent about £500,000 developing a large VB6 application over many years. Microsoft has effectively dumped VB6, but we have the VB6 software, so we can keep using it. That might not be the case if our tools were provided as a service from some remote web server. They could just say "It's far too expensive for us to keep hosting something as old as VB6. Just rewrite everything in
Also it seems to me that this model is ultimately a bad thing for open source/free software. If you have to have big powerful servers to host applications, it's a lot more difficult to have them for free. Someone has to pay for all the server time.
I don't really like the idea of losing control of the software I use. I'm sure I'm not alone.
In the company where I work at, the initial enthusiasm for .NET is dying in the upper management. The initial projects implemented with .NET have been near catastrophes in engineering productivity and quality
.NET code they will dump it and launch Microsoft .HahaYouHaveToStartAllOverAgain, a revolutionary new development platform. Proprietary languages are great aren't they?
Yup. And once you've created 5 man-years of
Governments are often incompetent, yet they are quite capable of "conspiracy crap". See COINTELPRO and ECHELON for example. The fact that conspiracy crap sounds like conspiracy crap, counts in their favour.
I've have a 250Gb Maxtor OneTouch for some time and it has never failed on me despite lots of punishment and accidentally unplugging it etc etc. They have a sturdy thick solid metal case and I would certainly recommend it to any US Marines that need some extra protection for their Humvees.
Yes of course. The notion that the government wants to engage in mass surveillance of the public is ludicrous, ranking along side alien abduction and the existance of Santa Claus. Such a thing has never occured in any country and anyone who suggests such a thing is obviously a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot.
I have to stop now. Nurse is coming to take my crayons away.
Ask yourself why the government has never tried to open everyones letters, photocopy them and then reseal and post them?
It's not because they wouldn't like to, it's just too much hassle to do it. Even if they did try to do it, the public would be outraged, yet far less noise is being made just because the medium is electronic rather than paper. Computers make it possible to snoop on people cheaply and that is the problem. As technology progresses, more and more snooping abilities will become economical.
They would like you to believe that this is to thwart terrorists, but terrorists will of course use the strongest encryption and will not play by the rules. I believe the general public are the real target here. If you suspect a certain person is a terrorist, there are already many ways you can put them under surveillance. You can install keyloggers on their computer, bug them, bounce lasers of windows etc etc. If you don't know who the terrorists are you have to perform mass surveillance of eveyones mail looking for keywords. The problem is that terrorists won't say "Meet me by the Bank of America with the Semtex" they will say something like "See you at the pub on Wednesday. Bring that new playstation game.".
Recent freedom of information releases in the UK (my country) have shown that the police have in the past infiltrated groups such as the anti-apartheid movement and other legitimate and non-threatening political groups. That's the sort of behaviour I expect in Uzbekistan not the UK. We must also not forget Echlon , which has been used to spy on European businesses. Our governments have shown that they cannot be trusted time and time again. We must not allow them to use the fear of terrorism to rob us of our rights and privacy.
Anyway. I have a counter proposal. We now know that politicians are making important decisions in face to face meetings so that there are no electronic records. I propose that all politicians be required to wear head mounted video cameras that record everything they say and do. The tapes must be handed in and stored in the event of any enquiry. We can explain that we have to do this because of the terrible threat of CORRUPTION. Anyone in the government could be involved in CORRUPTION and innocent politicians will have nothing to fear in these new measures. We have to balance the need for government secrecy with the important fight against CORRUPTION. We cannot allow CORRUPTION to win.