"He's collected information that's already been stolen"
Yes... but HOW, exactly, has he collected this information? It appears to be by using all sorts of connections all over the world, who are providing him with data and using the time and money of the State or Nation that employs them.
That has got to be a crime. It had damn well better be a crime.
We need Obama on national television to verbally put these guys in their place. Set the record straight. No one in America thinks you're doing the Right Thing. Infact most everyone thinks you're doing the wrong thing.
While I agree with your sentiment, and note that the RIAA has disgracefully had free reign in the US to do what they want, it is important to note that several of the members of the RIAA have nothing to to with the US. Sony BMG is a German / Japanese company. EMI is British.
So I'm not sure they will care one way or another what Obama thinks or says.
While restricting their ability to run a protection rackets through the courts is good, the only way to really hit them is by not buying their products.
No, you really, really don't -- and that's very clear from your comments. We are not talking about using a copystand here. You are talking about getting accurate facsimiles of maybe 40 foot high pictures in stairwells lit by mixed light of differing colour temperatures -- and possibly no way of getting light in to cover it and fix the colour temp issues.
If you think there's no creative ability needed for that, then with respect you are an arrogant, elitist, and extremely clueless idiot.
I'd stick to concentrating on commenting on graphic design issues if I were you, you know nothing about photography or film. I know you think you do. But you do not.
Manipulating light is a creative art, as well as a skill.
And damn those evil public galleries that in Wikipedia's words "restrict access" by putting them in galleries that have free entry and free guided tours!
Exactly. And that is the real crux of this. While copyright is most often a tool for greed. In this particular case it really isn't. The choice is: allow these pictures to be free copied and distributed ad high quality and not be able to raise revenue to allow FREE access to the gallery. Or, allow the status quo to continue and provide an excellent free service to all.
The fact that entry to public museums and galleries in the UK is mostly free is a really big deal. Few countries do this, and it is a great thing for everyone.
The greater good for society is to allow these images to be copyrighted. Whether wikipedia is really interested in the greater good over their own vanity is very much open to scrutiny and debate.
Mechanical reproduction, while important and valuable, is not creative.
Yes, but you are NOT a photographer. So you do NOT know what you are talking about. As a trained professional photographer, I can tell you that copying pictures on a wall in situ (in invariably awful lighting), is far from easy, and requires a great deal of skill. It is very much a creative process.
The interesting figure here isn't the 6/10. It's the 4/10. I'd have to question the sanity of that 40%.
This is not a bash at MS. It is just prudent IT policy, and good business not to use untested software in mission critical environments. No new OS, from anyone, is guaranteed to be mission critical in its first year of release.
Most business do not upgrade entire systems often. There's plenty that have only switched to XP from 200 in the past 5 years.
There's plenty of bespoke programs and macros that run on every enterprise system. It takes at least a year to figure out how a new OS will work with those. That's not even counting driver issues, hardware issues, and bugs.
Plus there's a productivity issue with switching OS. Do you really want to slow down your staff during a recession?
But specifically for Windows 7, why switch? What is the competitive advantage of doing so? There's no real performance gain. There's no real new features that aren't just bling. Sure, it's a bit more secure, but any IT dept has cobbled something together and locked down XP enough for it to work reasonably well.
No, sorry, I'd have to question the business decision of any company that is going to introduce a new OS that will cost them money, productivity, and still have kinks and bugs in it at this early stage in its release.
In 3-5 years, after much internal testing, sure it would make sense. But right now -- corporate suicide.
It's vital to their funding model, and they're just protecting their interests. Suddenly cutting off a major stream of revenue would be catastrophic. On the other hand, museums in the States manage to get by with different revenue models. It's not like it's impossible for them to continue existing, but I can understand why they'd fight to protect their model.
And that is the very important part of this story. Unlike most countries' museums and galleries, state-run institutions do not charge admission. They are free (excepting some special exhibitions). The core collections are always free.
You can also, as a photographer, photograph the exhibits. You can also get permission to photograph the exhibits professionally, using tripods and lights -- you just need to be not using them for commercial purposes to do so for free.
While copyright is often used for greed and evil. This is one occasion where it seems perfectly reasonable. By charging for postcards, books, t-shirts, tea and cakes Museums can reduce their dependency on the tax payer and continue to open for free to all. That seems like a good thing.
The decent thing for Wikimedia to do is remove those images. But I'm not sure anyone can really trust the Wiki Foundation to do the right thing. They have a vain, overblown sense of their own importance and relevance.
When you are in customer service, it makes a huge difference, and belive it or not, it often makes a huge difference to customers who expect that you don't care about them and are just jockeying the time clock. Perception is everything.
No. I do not believe this. I want empathy from customer service employees. If I'm having a real problem, and some cretin is smiling at me, all that will happen is that I will be tempted to punch the smile off their face.
To be fair to him... He has done a LOT of good for the Independent Film Industry. He's produced a lot of good, and some great, movies (Good Night and Good Luck, for example). There's a lot of indie filmmakers wouldn't have had a break if it were not for Cuban.
But yes, I don't agree with his position on this either, and he is more of a very lucky guy than an insightful and gifted individual.
There's so much wrong with this young, arrogant fool touting his ageism. Young people are not necessarily the crux of innovation.
Working in the creative industries, it's easy to see that the arrogance and folly of youth might get you noticed and the attention of other young people -- but most great art is done by people with decades of experience. Compare the early work of any artist to their later work and you will see that in most cases.
The trouble with technology and the internet in particular -- is that it is seen as a "young person's medium". It's often just a get rich quick scheme for investors. Many of the new internet ideas have made a great deal of money for a small number of people, but they all have limited shelf life, and their users grow up and mature and seek other things. Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, are dwindling. Geocities, Altavista, Netscape, and many, many more are all but gone. Twitter will follow them shortly.
The problem is, these innovations are shallow and mostly only appeal to young people. Nobody under 25 is looking at sustainable, reliable, usable services for the over 30s. It's all just fad and fashion and plugging a gap to get rich quick. This is not really innovation.
I've seen very little innovation on the internet in the past 10 years. Google came, changed search, and stayed the same. Social networking and blogs are easier to use and more marketed, but not significantly different from many BBS and similar at the beginning of the web. Google Earth is innovative, bittorrent is innovative, and perhaps there are a few other things. But on the whole the legacy of developers and entrepreneurs in their 20s is just using the same old tech with lots of hype and buzzwords.
DaVinci, Edison, Tesla, and many, many, many, many more, kept truly innovating late into life. As their experience grew, they made better inventions.
Sorry, but this precocious, silly little boy needs slapped. He does not know as much as he thinks he knows. Maybe he will get rich. But it is not likely he will really do anything of any importance to future generations for many years to come.
You are right to be skeptical. That's healthy. However, there is a greater good than one's career or chosen job field. That is where sites like Wikileaks are great -- as long as they are functioning effectively.
It seems very unfair however, to mention Jimmy Wales and Schmitt in the same breath. As these are two very different types of people. Jimmy Wales' interesting and dubious background (and present for that matter), and many failings, have been well covered here, and on many other sites. Schmitt isn't that bad in comparison.
Whenever someone stick their head over the parapet they can expect exposure. This is a good thing. We should know who is providing us with information, and why. And still be skeptical.
When you manage to gather enough gullible people together in one service, it's inevitable that they are going to be exploited. What, after all, is even the point of twitter if you weren't going to somehow make money off its users?
The twitter audience is ripe for exploitation: not overly bright, slaves to peer pressure, naive, shallow, celebutard-obsessed, narcissistic and self-obsessed. That's pure gold, right there.
It was only a question of time before someone started farming those sheeple.
If there choice were only: install Symantec or get a virus, then that's a really difficult choice. I'd be inclined to risk the virus, since Symantec invades and slows your system in a worse way than many infections.
Fortunately, there are many free anti-virus products that work better than Symantec. It's a no-brainer choice. Free is cheaper and better.
I have no understanding of how Symantec remains in business. There's something deeply wrong with that.
I'm not sure these benchmarks make much difference. The advantage of Chrome and IE is that they are multi-threaded.
Sure for one or two tabs open maybe Firefox does well. But if you are someone who opens 5 or 6 tabs routinely, and those tabs reload in the background, then Firefox is a total dog. Not to mention the whole not releasing memory thing that makes it unusable after a long browsing session.
So, fine, 3.5 is an improvement. But until Firefox is multi-threaded it's still not good enough. It's still far behind the competition on this.
No really, they are publicly scrapping the ID card compulsion
Yep. And the key word there is "publicly". There are plenty of ways of making it extremely difficult for people to get products and services without ID cards. Compulsory by stealth, in effect. This is even easier where one of the principal areas where people need ID is banking -- especially when your Government owns most of the banks -- which they currently do. It's very easy to make it hard for anyone who doesn't have an ID card to get any services.
Considering also the nefarious ties that Government has with large corporations, you can make it virtually impossible for anyone to function without an ID Card.
Sure, Government isn't apparently or legally the one mandating you have one, but you'll still have to have one.
They all said that about Windows 2000 as well. Most of them ended up switching to XP anyway.
Most, not all. Some still use 2000. And many large business only switched to XP within the past couple of years. This is no surprise. No pre SP1 version of Windows can be trusted in mission critical environments. It's unlikely that any large firm will fully switch to Windows 7 in the first 5 years of its lifetime.
There remains no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. XP will be around for a good few years yet.
"The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated."
I think current events prove it can be. Or at least overhyped. He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein. His contribution to society is really not that significant.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
I like music as much as anyone, but it's important to put it into perspective. It's important always to remember it a commercial product and owned by one of the most unethical industries on Earth. All commercial music is overhyped. Most musicians are overrated. You may like them, I may like them, but most of them are only good at what they do and are far from masters of their instruments. Most music does not stand the test of time.
Jackson's music will last longer than most of his peers. But he isn't Wyld Stallions, he won't be creating world peace and new harmony. It's just music.
It's truly astonishing that (considering his legal history too) he has created this much hype in death. So much so that, even/. is cashing in on it.
It makes me realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with how things are valued, and how page views and impressions are the currency of the net. Waves of hype like this are not truly as valuable as people seem to think they are.
It's great that these tapes are found (and shocking that they were ever lost). But I find it a remarkable and wholly unbelievable coincidence that they were found just before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Yeah, no wonder NASA is pissed at it leaking now. Their marketing droids must be furious.
Sounds very much like the Right to a fair trial is being violated -- which specifically is mentioned in the Council of Europe's "Convention on Human Rights" in 3.6 article 6.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... but HOW, exactly, has he collected this information? It appears to be by using all sorts of connections all over the world, who are providing him with data and using the time and money of the State or Nation that employs them.
That has got to be a crime. It had damn well better be a crime.
I can't see any Whalers in the pics! Maybe the Whalers live on the dark side?
While I agree with your sentiment, and note that the RIAA has disgracefully had free reign in the US to do what they want, it is important to note that several of the members of the RIAA have nothing to to with the US. Sony BMG is a German / Japanese company. EMI is British.
So I'm not sure they will care one way or another what Obama thinks or says.
While restricting their ability to run a protection rackets through the courts is good, the only way to really hit them is by not buying their products.
No, you really, really don't -- and that's very clear from your comments. We are not talking about using a copystand here. You are talking about getting accurate facsimiles of maybe 40 foot high pictures in stairwells lit by mixed light of differing colour temperatures -- and possibly no way of getting light in to cover it and fix the colour temp issues.
If you think there's no creative ability needed for that, then with respect you are an arrogant, elitist, and extremely clueless idiot.
I'd stick to concentrating on commenting on graphic design issues if I were you, you know nothing about photography or film. I know you think you do. But you do not.
Manipulating light is a creative art, as well as a skill.
Exactly. And that is the real crux of this. While copyright is most often a tool for greed. In this particular case it really isn't. The choice is: allow these pictures to be free copied and distributed ad high quality and not be able to raise revenue to allow FREE access to the gallery. Or, allow the status quo to continue and provide an excellent free service to all.
The fact that entry to public museums and galleries in the UK is mostly free is a really big deal. Few countries do this, and it is a great thing for everyone.
The greater good for society is to allow these images to be copyrighted. Whether wikipedia is really interested in the greater good over their own vanity is very much open to scrutiny and debate.
Yes, but you are NOT a photographer. So you do NOT know what you are talking about. As a trained professional photographer, I can tell you that copying pictures on a wall in situ (in invariably awful lighting), is far from easy, and requires a great deal of skill. It is very much a creative process.
What? Don't you want to know what Demi Moore thinks about this?
The interesting figure here isn't the 6/10. It's the 4/10. I'd have to question the sanity of that 40%.
This is not a bash at MS. It is just prudent IT policy, and good business not to use untested software in mission critical environments. No new OS, from anyone, is guaranteed to be mission critical in its first year of release.
Most business do not upgrade entire systems often. There's plenty that have only switched to XP from 200 in the past 5 years.
There's plenty of bespoke programs and macros that run on every enterprise system. It takes at least a year to figure out how a new OS will work with those. That's not even counting driver issues, hardware issues, and bugs.
Plus there's a productivity issue with switching OS. Do you really want to slow down your staff during a recession?
But specifically for Windows 7, why switch? What is the competitive advantage of doing so? There's no real performance gain. There's no real new features that aren't just bling. Sure, it's a bit more secure, but any IT dept has cobbled something together and locked down XP enough for it to work reasonably well.
No, sorry, I'd have to question the business decision of any company that is going to introduce a new OS that will cost them money, productivity, and still have kinks and bugs in it at this early stage in its release.
In 3-5 years, after much internal testing, sure it would make sense. But right now -- corporate suicide.
And that is the very important part of this story. Unlike most countries' museums and galleries, state-run institutions do not charge admission. They are free (excepting some special exhibitions). The core collections are always free.
You can also, as a photographer, photograph the exhibits. You can also get permission to photograph the exhibits professionally, using tripods and lights -- you just need to be not using them for commercial purposes to do so for free.
While copyright is often used for greed and evil. This is one occasion where it seems perfectly reasonable. By charging for postcards, books, t-shirts, tea and cakes Museums can reduce their dependency on the tax payer and continue to open for free to all. That seems like a good thing.
The decent thing for Wikimedia to do is remove those images. But I'm not sure anyone can really trust the Wiki Foundation to do the right thing. They have a vain, overblown sense of their own importance and relevance.
Now all they need to do is train the sharks not to eat the old people during the procedure.
No. I do not believe this. I want empathy from customer service employees. If I'm having a real problem, and some cretin is smiling at me, all that will happen is that I will be tempted to punch the smile off their face.
To be fair to him... He has done a LOT of good for the Independent Film Industry. He's produced a lot of good, and some great, movies (Good Night and Good Luck, for example). There's a lot of indie filmmakers wouldn't have had a break if it were not for Cuban.
But yes, I don't agree with his position on this either, and he is more of a very lucky guy than an insightful and gifted individual.
There's so much wrong with this young, arrogant fool touting his ageism. Young people are not necessarily the crux of innovation.
Working in the creative industries, it's easy to see that the arrogance and folly of youth might get you noticed and the attention of other young people -- but most great art is done by people with decades of experience. Compare the early work of any artist to their later work and you will see that in most cases.
The trouble with technology and the internet in particular -- is that it is seen as a "young person's medium". It's often just a get rich quick scheme for investors. Many of the new internet ideas have made a great deal of money for a small number of people, but they all have limited shelf life, and their users grow up and mature and seek other things. Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, are dwindling. Geocities, Altavista, Netscape, and many, many more are all but gone. Twitter will follow them shortly.
The problem is, these innovations are shallow and mostly only appeal to young people. Nobody under 25 is looking at sustainable, reliable, usable services for the over 30s. It's all just fad and fashion and plugging a gap to get rich quick. This is not really innovation.
I've seen very little innovation on the internet in the past 10 years. Google came, changed search, and stayed the same. Social networking and blogs are easier to use and more marketed, but not significantly different from many BBS and similar at the beginning of the web. Google Earth is innovative, bittorrent is innovative, and perhaps there are a few other things. But on the whole the legacy of developers and entrepreneurs in their 20s is just using the same old tech with lots of hype and buzzwords.
DaVinci, Edison, Tesla, and many, many, many, many more, kept truly innovating late into life. As their experience grew, they made better inventions.
Sorry, but this precocious, silly little boy needs slapped. He does not know as much as he thinks he knows. Maybe he will get rich. But it is not likely he will really do anything of any importance to future generations for many years to come.
Now get off my lawn...
You are right to be skeptical. That's healthy. However, there is a greater good than one's career or chosen job field. That is where sites like Wikileaks are great -- as long as they are functioning effectively.
It seems very unfair however, to mention Jimmy Wales and Schmitt in the same breath. As these are two very different types of people. Jimmy Wales' interesting and dubious background (and present for that matter), and many failings, have been well covered here, and on many other sites. Schmitt isn't that bad in comparison.
Whenever someone stick their head over the parapet they can expect exposure. This is a good thing. We should know who is providing us with information, and why. And still be skeptical.
When you manage to gather enough gullible people together in one service, it's inevitable that they are going to be exploited. What, after all, is even the point of twitter if you weren't going to somehow make money off its users?
The twitter audience is ripe for exploitation: not overly bright, slaves to peer pressure, naive, shallow, celebutard-obsessed, narcissistic and self-obsessed. That's pure gold, right there.
It was only a question of time before someone started farming those sheeple.
If there choice were only: install Symantec or get a virus, then that's a really difficult choice. I'd be inclined to risk the virus, since Symantec invades and slows your system in a worse way than many infections.
Fortunately, there are many free anti-virus products that work better than Symantec. It's a no-brainer choice. Free is cheaper and better.
I have no understanding of how Symantec remains in business. There's something deeply wrong with that.
Yay! That just opens up a whole new world of sex toys...
Yep. This "feature" sounds as welcome as the Awesome Bar. Can it be disabled? Cos it's definitely a deal breaker.
I'm not sure these benchmarks make much difference. The advantage of Chrome and IE is that they are multi-threaded.
Sure for one or two tabs open maybe Firefox does well. But if you are someone who opens 5 or 6 tabs routinely, and those tabs reload in the background, then Firefox is a total dog. Not to mention the whole not releasing memory thing that makes it unusable after a long browsing session.
So, fine, 3.5 is an improvement. But until Firefox is multi-threaded it's still not good enough. It's still far behind the competition on this.
Yep. And the key word there is "publicly". There are plenty of ways of making it extremely difficult for people to get products and services without ID cards. Compulsory by stealth, in effect. This is even easier where one of the principal areas where people need ID is banking -- especially when your Government owns most of the banks -- which they currently do. It's very easy to make it hard for anyone who doesn't have an ID card to get any services.
Considering also the nefarious ties that Government has with large corporations, you can make it virtually impossible for anyone to function without an ID Card.
Sure, Government isn't apparently or legally the one mandating you have one, but you'll still have to have one.
Most, not all. Some still use 2000. And many large business only switched to XP within the past couple of years. This is no surprise. No pre SP1 version of Windows can be trusted in mission critical environments. It's unlikely that any large firm will fully switch to Windows 7 in the first 5 years of its lifetime.
There remains no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. XP will be around for a good few years yet.
Nah, Jimbo probably just censored it.
I think current events prove it can be. Or at least overhyped. He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein. His contribution to society is really not that significant.
/. is cashing in on it.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
I like music as much as anyone, but it's important to put it into perspective. It's important always to remember it a commercial product and owned by one of the most unethical industries on Earth. All commercial music is overhyped. Most musicians are overrated. You may like them, I may like them, but most of them are only good at what they do and are far from masters of their instruments. Most music does not stand the test of time.
Jackson's music will last longer than most of his peers. But he isn't Wyld Stallions, he won't be creating world peace and new harmony. It's just music.
It's truly astonishing that (considering his legal history too) he has created this much hype in death. So much so that, even
It makes me realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with how things are valued, and how page views and impressions are the currency of the net. Waves of hype like this are not truly as valuable as people seem to think they are.
It's great that these tapes are found (and shocking that they were ever lost). But I find it a remarkable and wholly unbelievable coincidence that they were found just before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Yeah, no wonder NASA is pissed at it leaking now. Their marketing droids must be furious.
Sounds very much like the Right to a fair trial is being violated -- which specifically is mentioned in the Council of Europe's "Convention on Human Rights" in 3.6 article 6.
So no, they are not being pussies.