It's currently possible to detect this. Right now most media companies don't bother, but if this became more wide spread I can totally see a cat/mouse game of media companies inventing ways of verifying ad delivery, and consumers circumventing them.
Which is why businesses were stumbling over themselves to make their establishments accessible prior to being forced to by law?
4 is probably serious hyperbole, but the sentiment I think is correct. It's nice to think that these things pay for themselves and that businesses would be motivated to willingly make their establishments accessible as it represents an increase in profit, but this was tried (see: before ADA, countries without ADA like laws) and the free market coldly and pretty much unilaterally said "nope, not worth it".
Uh.. you don't exactly have to look too hard to find evidence of how businesses would act without the ADA.
Specifically you can look at things before the ADA came along. The ADA was created specifically _because_ people wern't decent nor empathetic.. and without a law that would force them to be, they didn't give two shits about non-profitable customers (which while poor from a humanist standpoint, from a business perspective makes perfect sense...).
My post was poorly worded. I was specifically referring to legally mandated requirements.
It's hard to draw parallels between race discrimination and <politically correct term> discrimination. One is active (specifically preventing a group from doing business with you) and one is passive (preventing a group from doing business with you due to inaction).
In the case of race discrimination, it was driven by hatred (or as you pointed out, playing the part..).. in the case of <politically correct term> discrimination, I don't think anyone really has anything against <politically correct term> people.. they don't want to take the required active steps to allow them to do business for financial reasons. I've always had a problem with this being called "discrimination". To me discrimination is active.. not passive.
Right, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect companies who are making significant profits from media to be required to pay out the money and make their content more accessible.
Unreasonable is requiring CC on every quick cellphone video on youtube (imo).
In general I agree with the "If they don't like the terms society wants, they're free to pack their businesses up and go elsewhere." sentiment.
Your analogy is a bit off though. Cost of taking down the "whites only" sign is negliable. Making a building accessible costs a small fortune and usually won't generate substantial revenue.
Taking down that sign might actually increase your profits.. making your building accessible will probably eat into them. Regardless, society has decided that this is just a cost of doing business. It sucks, but so would being blind in a society that had coldly decided you wern't worth the money.
The ADA exists (and here in Canada, the equivilant) because this won't happen. Making things accessible isn't a good business decision. It costs a lot of moeny and doesn't bring in much additional revenue. Society has decided that it's not fair to exclude the <whatever the correct term is now> from everything.. and so complying with accessibility rules just becomes a part of doing business.
Personally I think it goes too far. As usual we failed to find a reasonable medium. I'm all for society incurring some burden to help those who could easily by freak chance be us. At the same time however, we have to accept that it's impossible to make it so a <whatever the correct term is now> person can do everything in the same way that a non <whatever the correct term is now> can. If this was the case, then there'd be no problem. It sucks but it's life...
This, I believe, its also horse feces. Is the sound a separate performance from the video?
Yes!
This is a huge problem for people trying to release old TV shows on DVD. They have to re-license the sound tracks. In a lot of cases, the cost either prevents them from releasing the DVD, or forces them to (at less cost) replace the audio with soundalike music (see: Married with Children).
Some channels actually have "descriptive audio" here. It's actually exactly what it sounds like. A voice describes what is happening, overlaid onto the audio. Once in a while I'll turn it on and try watching something with my eyes closed.. surprisingly for stuff that's heavily dialog driven, it works surprisingly well.
Like everything else, we can't seem to find a happy medium. Making something (anything) accessible is almost always a financial loss. You spend thousands of dollars adding ramps, special bathrooms, etc and might gain 4 new customers.. you add CC to a video and again, you probably won't draw enough extra traffic to pay the cost of doing so.
We have decided as a society that simply having no accessibility is unacceptable. So we have to bite the bullet and call it a cost of business. Unfortunately as usual, we went to far.. and now as you said, we end up putting unreasonable burdens on people for very little benifit.
This seems to be squarely targetted to the kind of people where this level ot tracking is reasonable and justified. This seems to build on what a lot of businesses either did through other means as you said, or manually (i.e. maps on the wall with little push pins). If you've got 10 field techs _somewhere_ out in the field.. knowing where they are and what they are doing is usually pretty necessary. Reading the description page, it actually looks like an almost obvious idea with a lot of polish and some neat features. The first thing google has put out in a while that didn't make me roll my eyes.
The fear about tracking employees outside work has always confused me. I can understand the facebook stuff.. misguided as it is. Some scummy employers see it as a low effort way of picking up on potential employee issues. That "low effort" bit is key. Getting any useful info by watching employee location info is certainly not low effort. I mean unless they are spending a lot of time at their competitions place there's not much usable info there. It just doesn't seem like a logical thing for even the most evil employer to do...
The primary usage of this seems to be for employees where location is important.
If your writing code, then yeah where you are doesn't matter. However if you're a field technician or repairman or anyone else who goes from site to site.. I can see the value of this tool. I know this goes against the hive mind here, but ignoring all the various slippery slope arguments, I think this kind of thing is reasonable.
Surely you can see why such a requirement is problematic at best.
Of course, which is why I included that "unless" business in there.. the whole point of my post was that it's a bad idea with no means of doing so that wouldn't instantly become abused..
If a choice is not serious then why is it on the ballot?
It's not so much what they pick as why they pick it. Someone wants to vote for the nazi party, much as I think they are an ignorant fuck, at least they've made a (bad) decision about their views and chosen a party that fits in with them. Compare that to some kid who couldn't tell you who runs the country he/she lives in, but goes into a voting booth anyway and picks the guy with the coolest name because everyone from his parents, to teachers, to popular celebrities, tv, radio, etc is telling him it's his duty to do so. Not his duty to stay somewhat informed on what the hell is going on around him, or to spend a little time thinking about his political views, or anything like that.. just as long as he makes an appearance
I'd rather a small turnout of people making an actual decision.
Voting isn't what's important. Having an opinion is. 100% voter turnout isn't worth much if 70% of that turnout picked randomly.
Unless they figure a good way to validate that someone is making a serious choice (and force them to do so), all this does is dilute the already very thin pool of educated voters.
I’ve always hated this push to get people to go out and vote. That’s not what’s important. The message that should be going out is to educate yourself enough to make an actual decision, THEN vote! Going into a booth (or online) and selecting a random choice because MTV told you it’s your duty to vote is only going to make things worse.
If someone won’t vote unless they can do it in less than 10 seconds... their opinion is probably worth very little, and would rather not have it diluting the already thin pool.
Seems a little dubious. Phishing would certainly become an even bigger problem.
Domains also provide a really good way of pointing to resources whos location may change. I'd hate to feel tied to a host for my minecraft server because everyone has my IP bookmarked. Those web devs would also bitch about all their links to my site breaking.. Businesses who rely on links from other pages would again, be tied to a host forever. Not to mention search engines, while a lot faster on the update cycle then in the past, certainly don't bean dns for update speed. If I move to a new host, the record change propegates pretty damn fast. Maybe my site won't be reachable in eastern Europe for a few hours.. but locally the change is pretty damn near instant. Google searches for "some buried page" may return my old ip for weeks...
This is largely the problem with law. You can just keep on trying, until the public runs out of energy fighting it or it succeeds by fluke. If this hadn’t passed we’d be reading stores about the 5’th attempt, then the 6’th. In a weird way I’m glad it’s finally over.
And the digital locks thing sucks big time. I mean practically speaking, I’d still feel safe ripping a DVD at home it’s the guys writing the software that enables me to do this that are going to be hit. Just in principle it annoys me that it is no longer legal in many cases for me to make backups (or realistically make copies and keep the original media as backup) of media I purchased.
It’s infuriating, because I buy media to rip it onto my computer where I ultimately watch/listen to it. I do this despite it being considerably _less_ convenient then downloading it for _free_ because despite my hatred of big media, I still don’t think it entitles me to just grab their stuff for free. I (figuratively) have money, sitting in my pocket, that I would happily spend on high quality DRM free downloads if anyone would offer them to me. They don’t. So I do it the hard way.. and now they are making that somewhat illegal, in some pretend effort to prevent me from going the absolute easiest and quickest route (just downloading the damn thing).. which is exactly what it will drive me to! I still don't feel I am somehow entitled to media on my terms.. but I've just stopped caring.
TheOatmeal: a somewhat funny and extremely popular (but in my opinion overrated) comic site. FunnyJunk: classic application of the user submitted content ad farm concept.
I honestly believe the guy behind The Oatmeal is sincere in his wish to just keep doing what he's doing. I don't know what funnyjunk's involvement in this round of suing is (it's the funnyjunk lawyer suing, not funnyjunk).. but I suspect funnyjunk is perfectly happy with the PR this is bringing (it's an ad farm.. best thing you can do for them is hit their website, even if to write a nasty comment). Even with adblock enabled you are still inflating their traffic stats!
It's an interesting yet terrifying time. The limitations of law enforcement are becoming less technical and more social. Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom. As a society we have to figure out where we want to draw that line. How much safety do we want to trade for how much privacy.
The terrifying part is that society isn't really deciding so much as certain interested parties pushing in one direction and people en mass shrugging and going about their day.
The detailed article didn't specify.. but I hope they provide a way for regular players to visit. Maybe even allow regular players to cheat in the cheating environment without losing their right to play in the regular (assuming they don't cheat there).
I can however see that used as an excuse. "Oops, was playing in the cheater realm and forgot to disable cheat mode..".
That works for legal standing, not for public standing.
When these things are looked into, and after all the evidence is considered the police are found to be justified... you hear words like "slap on the wrist" and "old boys club" thrown around a lot.
This is true not just in cases of law enforcement, but in just about every civil matter. When you are accused of something it is all over the news. If they decide to paint you as a monster, you are screwed.. because when they find you innocent, it will be a tiny subnote somewhere if mentioned at all.
Legal and PR are two seperate arenas. You fight legal with legal. You fight PR with PR.
Have something you can demo. A personal project that you put serious time into. Have it well presented (a good website or document that highlights what you are trying to show off).
That's the easy part. The hard part is getting in the door. Focus on smaller companies as most big ones will just bin your resume. Go in there and apply in person. Easy to delete a document when you see there is no degree. If you make the effort and go in there in person, usually they'll at least talk to you.
The fact that he has _a_ degree is good. To many, a degree has little to do with proving you know computers and more to do with proving your character.
Slashdot Mirror
It's currently possible to detect this. Right now most media companies don't bother, but if this became more wide spread I can totally see a cat/mouse game of media companies inventing ways of verifying ad delivery, and consumers circumventing them.
If it's such a great business move, they'd probably be doing it on their own without needing to be forced by law...
I suspect right off the bat those subtitles are probably licensed seperately and that alone probably eats up any potential profit.
Which is why businesses were stumbling over themselves to make their establishments accessible prior to being forced to by law?
4 is probably serious hyperbole, but the sentiment I think is correct. It's nice to think that these things pay for themselves and that businesses would be motivated to willingly make their establishments accessible as it represents an increase in profit, but this was tried (see: before ADA, countries without ADA like laws) and the free market coldly and pretty much unilaterally said "nope, not worth it".
Uh.. you don't exactly have to look too hard to find evidence of how businesses would act without the ADA.
Specifically you can look at things before the ADA came along. The ADA was created specifically _because_ people wern't decent nor empathetic .. and without a law that would force them to be, they didn't give two shits about non-profitable customers (which while poor from a humanist standpoint, from a business perspective makes perfect sense...).
My post was poorly worded. I was specifically referring to legally mandated requirements.
It's hard to draw parallels between race discrimination and <politically correct term> discrimination. One is active (specifically preventing a group from doing business with you) and one is passive (preventing a group from doing business with you due to inaction).
In the case of race discrimination, it was driven by hatred (or as you pointed out, playing the part..) .. in the case of <politically correct term> discrimination, I don't think anyone really has anything against <politically correct term> people .. they don't want to take the required active steps to allow them to do business for financial reasons. I've always had a problem with this being called "discrimination". To me discrimination is active.. not passive.
Right, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect companies who are making significant profits from media to be required to pay out the money and make their content more accessible.
Unreasonable is requiring CC on every quick cellphone video on youtube (imo).
In general I agree with the "If they don't like the terms society wants, they're free to pack their businesses up and go elsewhere." sentiment.
Your analogy is a bit off though. Cost of taking down the "whites only" sign is negliable. Making a building accessible costs a small fortune and usually won't generate substantial revenue.
Taking down that sign might actually increase your profits.. making your building accessible will probably eat into them. Regardless, society has decided that this is just a cost of doing business. It sucks, but so would being blind in a society that had coldly decided you wern't worth the money.
that we should let economics figure this out.
The ADA exists (and here in Canada, the equivilant) because this won't happen. Making things accessible isn't a good business decision. It costs a lot of moeny and doesn't bring in much additional revenue. Society has decided that it's not fair to exclude the <whatever the correct term is now> from everything .. and so complying with accessibility rules just becomes a part of doing business.
Personally I think it goes too far. As usual we failed to find a reasonable medium. I'm all for society incurring some burden to help those who could easily by freak chance be us. At the same time however, we have to accept that it's impossible to make it so a <whatever the correct term is now> person can do everything in the same way that a non <whatever the correct term is now> can. If this was the case, then there'd be no problem. It sucks but it's life...
This, I believe, its also horse feces. Is the sound a separate performance from the video?
Yes!
This is a huge problem for people trying to release old TV shows on DVD. They have to re-license the sound tracks. In a lot of cases, the cost either prevents them from releasing the DVD, or forces them to (at less cost) replace the audio with soundalike music (see: Married with Children).
Knowing the fucked up way media licensing works, they probably have to license the subtitle data seperately or something (see also: theme music).
Some channels actually have "descriptive audio" here. It's actually exactly what it sounds like. A voice describes what is happening, overlaid onto the audio. Once in a while I'll turn it on and try watching something with my eyes closed.. surprisingly for stuff that's heavily dialog driven, it works surprisingly well.
Probably because they wouldn't do it at all.
Like everything else, we can't seem to find a happy medium. Making something (anything) accessible is almost always a financial loss. You spend thousands of dollars adding ramps, special bathrooms, etc and might gain 4 new customers.. you add CC to a video and again, you probably won't draw enough extra traffic to pay the cost of doing so.
We have decided as a society that simply having no accessibility is unacceptable. So we have to bite the bullet and call it a cost of business. Unfortunately as usual, we went to far.. and now as you said, we end up putting unreasonable burdens on people for very little benifit.
Totally agree.
This seems to be squarely targetted to the kind of people where this level ot tracking is reasonable and justified. This seems to build on what a lot of businesses either did through other means as you said, or manually (i.e. maps on the wall with little push pins). If you've got 10 field techs _somewhere_ out in the field.. knowing where they are and what they are doing is usually pretty necessary. Reading the description page, it actually looks like an almost obvious idea with a lot of polish and some neat features. The first thing google has put out in a while that didn't make me roll my eyes.
The fear about tracking employees outside work has always confused me. I can understand the facebook stuff.. misguided as it is. Some scummy employers see it as a low effort way of picking up on potential employee issues. That "low effort" bit is key. Getting any useful info by watching employee location info is certainly not low effort. I mean unless they are spending a lot of time at their competitions place there's not much usable info there. It just doesn't seem like a logical thing for even the most evil employer to do...
The primary usage of this seems to be for employees where location is important.
If your writing code, then yeah where you are doesn't matter. However if you're a field technician or repairman or anyone else who goes from site to site .. I can see the value of this tool. I know this goes against the hive mind here, but ignoring all the various slippery slope arguments, I think this kind of thing is reasonable.
Surely you can see why such a requirement is problematic at best.
Of course, which is why I included that "unless" business in there.. the whole point of my post was that it's a bad idea with no means of doing so that wouldn't instantly become abused..
If a choice is not serious then why is it on the ballot?
It's not so much what they pick as why they pick it. Someone wants to vote for the nazi party, much as I think they are an ignorant fuck, at least they've made a (bad) decision about their views and chosen a party that fits in with them. Compare that to some kid who couldn't tell you who runs the country he/she lives in, but goes into a voting booth anyway and picks the guy with the coolest name because everyone from his parents, to teachers, to popular celebrities, tv, radio, etc is telling him it's his duty to do so. Not his duty to stay somewhat informed on what the hell is going on around him, or to spend a little time thinking about his political views, or anything like that.. just as long as he makes an appearance
Ugh.
I'd rather a small turnout of people making an actual decision.
Voting isn't what's important. Having an opinion is. 100% voter turnout isn't worth much if 70% of that turnout picked randomly.
Unless they figure a good way to validate that someone is making a serious choice (and force them to do so), all this does is dilute the already very thin pool of educated voters.
Good!
I’ve always hated this push to get people to go out and vote. That’s not what’s important. The message that should be going out is to educate yourself enough to make an actual decision, THEN vote! Going into a booth (or online) and selecting a random choice because MTV told you it’s your duty to vote is only going to make things worse.
If someone won’t vote unless they can do it in less than 10 seconds... their opinion is probably worth very little, and would rather not have it diluting the already thin pool.
Seems a little dubious. Phishing would certainly become an even bigger problem.
Domains also provide a really good way of pointing to resources whos location may change. I'd hate to feel tied to a host for my minecraft server because everyone has my IP bookmarked. Those web devs would also bitch about all their links to my site breaking.. Businesses who rely on links from other pages would again, be tied to a host forever. Not to mention search engines, while a lot faster on the update cycle then in the past, certainly don't bean dns for update speed. If I move to a new host, the record change propegates pretty damn fast. Maybe my site won't be reachable in eastern Europe for a few hours.. but locally the change is pretty damn near instant. Google searches for "some buried page" may return my old ip for weeks...
I'd look silly without a nose...
But still sucks.
This is largely the problem with law. You can just keep on trying, until the public runs out of energy fighting it or it succeeds by fluke. If this hadn’t passed we’d be reading stores about the 5’th attempt, then the 6’th. In a weird way I’m glad it’s finally over.
And the digital locks thing sucks big time. I mean practically speaking, I’d still feel safe ripping a DVD at home it’s the guys writing the software that enables me to do this that are going to be hit. Just in principle it annoys me that it is no longer legal in many cases for me to make backups (or realistically make copies and keep the original media as backup) of media I purchased.
It’s infuriating, because I buy media to rip it onto my computer where I ultimately watch/listen to it. I do this despite it being considerably _less_ convenient then downloading it for _free_ because despite my hatred of big media, I still don’t think it entitles me to just grab their stuff for free. I (figuratively) have money, sitting in my pocket, that I would happily spend on high quality DRM free downloads if anyone would offer them to me. They don’t. So I do it the hard way.. and now they are making that somewhat illegal, in some pretend effort to prevent me from going the absolute easiest and quickest route (just downloading the damn thing) .. which is exactly what it will drive me to! I still don't feel I am somehow entitled to media on my terms.. but I've just stopped caring.
TheOatmeal: a somewhat funny and extremely popular (but in my opinion overrated) comic site.
FunnyJunk: classic application of the user submitted content ad farm concept.
I honestly believe the guy behind The Oatmeal is sincere in his wish to just keep doing what he's doing. I don't know what funnyjunk's involvement in this round of suing is (it's the funnyjunk lawyer suing, not funnyjunk) .. but I suspect funnyjunk is perfectly happy with the PR this is bringing (it's an ad farm.. best thing you can do for them is hit their website, even if to write a nasty comment). Even with adblock enabled you are still inflating their traffic stats!
Indeed.
It's an interesting yet terrifying time. The limitations of law enforcement are becoming less technical and more social. Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom. As a society we have to figure out where we want to draw that line. How much safety do we want to trade for how much privacy.
The terrifying part is that society isn't really deciding so much as certain interested parties pushing in one direction and people en mass shrugging and going about their day.
That actually sounds like a lot of fun.
The detailed article didn't specify.. but I hope they provide a way for regular players to visit. Maybe even allow regular players to cheat in the cheating environment without losing their right to play in the regular (assuming they don't cheat there).
I can however see that used as an excuse. "Oops, was playing in the cheater realm and forgot to disable cheat mode..".
That works for legal standing, not for public standing.
When these things are looked into, and after all the evidence is considered the police are found to be justified... you hear words like "slap on the wrist" and "old boys club" thrown around a lot.
This is true not just in cases of law enforcement, but in just about every civil matter. When you are accused of something it is all over the news. If they decide to paint you as a monster, you are screwed.. because when they find you innocent, it will be a tiny subnote somewhere if mentioned at all.
Legal and PR are two seperate arenas. You fight legal with legal. You fight PR with PR.
Have something you can demo. A personal project that you put serious time into. Have it well presented (a good website or document that highlights what you are trying to show off).
That's the easy part. The hard part is getting in the door. Focus on smaller companies as most big ones will just bin your resume. Go in there and apply in person. Easy to delete a document when you see there is no degree. If you make the effort and go in there in person, usually they'll at least talk to you.
The fact that he has _a_ degree is good. To many, a degree has little to do with proving you know computers and more to do with proving your character.