While people were right to protest this -- and it's not the first time that Facebook has had to backtrack (probably not the last either), I can't help thinking that this is great effort, wholly misplaced.
The banks, for exampl,e have stolen billions of dollars from all of us. Where's the protest, people? Where's the effort to find out what happened? Where's the organization to make radical change there?
What a terrible waste!
Facebook protesters, learn from this -- if you can achieve this, you can actually make real change in the world -- change that actually matters, not just some trivial thing on a here-today-gone-tomorrow, insubstantial, unimportant, fad website.
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
I'd guess the odds are astronomical. The Atlantic Ocean is huge, subs aren't. They were almost definitely up to something. Maybe some kind of exercise that went wrong.
Enthusiastic uptake of some kind of "no humans were exploited in the making of this product" sticker, in the free market.
While that would be a step in the right direction. It's not quite sufficient. Fair Trade is a good example, because it doesn't mean anything -- it just sounds like it does. How do you legally define fair? And fair is culturally relative too. It's a wonderful marketing word. It allows you to mark up the price of something, by adding a perceived value that may or may not actually be there. You can interchange Fair Trade with "Environmentally Friendly" or "Green" or "Organic" or any other marketing buzzword you like -- they really don't mean anything standardized nor legal. There's no S.I. of unit of Fairtradiness.
"Exploitation" is the same. It's culturally relative to a degree. Clearly what the article describes is exploitation by most standards -- even allowing for the inevitable exaggeration in the article (since it's a pressure group who are behind the story, and pressure groups always bias a story for politics and profit). But... a company could (and WILL) argue that by relative standards in that country, they are paying above the minimum wage and working shorter hours. They will have stats to prove that too.
It's very hard to apply international standards when you don't have economic parity between countries. It's very hard to define exploitation in a way that companies won't be able to get around it.
You can only imagine the "a free haven for pirates, terrorists and kiddie porn" media campaign the RIAA/MPAA and friends will start against them.
Just a note on that. Fervert "terrorists", "pedophiles", etc, propagandists -- News Corps International -- own a significant percentage of the World's newspapers (not sure on any Swedish titles). They are also the owners of 20th Century Fox, and the organization is thus a member of the MPAA.
Expect no truth from them. It never ceases to amaze me how many entire countries allow their media controlled by one man, Rupert Murdoch.
So the many agencies that have posted videos when they have not been able to post videos have ignored that they cannot post videos or have bypassed the problem that was having them unable to post videos?
Presumably also, those who were able to watch, haven't... and won't.
if you need a handy re-cap of the fifth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
In that case, you definitely can. Most wikipedia articles on Film and TV contain stolen content from IMDB, or from labors-of-love fan sites that depend on page views and micro-ad revenue for survival. (Amazon, the owners of IMDB, really should sue Wikipedia sideways over this). By choosing wikipedia over them you are NOT helping the shows you love. Plus, most film and TV wikipedia pages contain spoilers without any warnings -- as well as synopses that breach the rights of the creators.
Joss Wheedon in particular has suffered a lot of cancellations of his work -- by working with fan sites of his shows you are showing that his work is popular. By using wikpedia you are not, as well as simply encouraging people to steal from him.
Wikipedia: a failed experiment in user generated content. Verifiable seems to mean, someone else typed it into a website..
That depends what the basis of the experiment was. If you look at Honest Jimbo's Bank account I think you'll find wikipedia to be successful. If you are a book-burning nazi hell-bent on forcing your view over others, and over truth, you'll think that wikipedia is the greatest site on Earth -- a 4th Reich for the Internet.
But yeah, if you are the average person looking for truthful answers... it's really an abject, miserable failure.
So, um, what grade do you suppose you'll get in my class?
An unfair one. It's disturbing that you are in a position of power. You are obviously discouraging open-mindedness and creative thought. Many newspapers and journals are a valid source of information in many subjects. Obviously there needs to be caution with them, as there must be with ANY source, but newspapers are legally accountable.
An opinion piece in a newspaper isn't worth much, but an interview, with direct quotes for example, is. Newspapers are used all the time as sources for University level historical research. More than one newspaper is better of course.
I don't know what you teach, but you probably shouldn't be teaching. Der Spiegel is for the most part an ethical publisher, it's certainly exposed many things -- such as neo-nazism -- than other outlets have failed to find.
Totally agree. Let's worry about journalism for now, and take care of wikipedia once journalism consistently reaches wikipedia-level accuracy, balance...
Yes... mostly. Absolutely no doubt that the failure here is journalism, although Der Spiegel is normally a reliable publication. However, it is extremely disturbing that there are ANY people out there who view wikipedia as quotable -- and part of the blame for that does rest with wikipedia. Not that wikipedia is going to change that, because they take themselves more seriously than anyone ever should. Wikipedia, if they were entirely honest and fair, would publish a disclaimer at the top of every page. However, vanity and pride will prevent them from ever doing that. It astounds me that they've not been subject to a massive legal campaign -- I'm certain one day they will be.
Wikipedia is information pollution. Google's unfair and skewed page ranking of that site does more harm than good. Fundamentally some of the blame for this lies with Google artificially promoting wikipedia than anything else.
Wikipedia is a gift to anyone who wants to distort information. Especially if it's subtle, as in this case. Since journalists can't be trusted to validate facts, it seems it's very easy to get your agenda or distorted version of the truth out there by manipulating wikipedia - and we all know how trivially simple that is to do, especially if you form a cartel -- or worse, become the lowest of the low, a wikiadmin.
I notice they mention sites like Hulu and CBS on their site, but I assume this is only available to US residents? They cunningly don't mention any restrictions.
Have they got round this, or is this content still blacked out for most of the world?
I think this particular feature might be aimed more at the casual user, rather than power users familar with aliasing keywords such as your example.
Not so sure about that... Firefox seems to be slowly creeping in the direction of SeaMonkey and Netscape Navigator. These were aimed more at the casual user, loads of features -- features coming out of their ears.
I agree, the point of having an extensible browser -- surely -- is to keep the core simple and to allow users to customize what they see as necessary. Firefox has moved away from this model for some time.
In the light of Chrome's development, I'd see the Mozilla developers time be better spent on developing multi-threading for Firefox. This being the biggest problem with the browser as it is.
I want multi-threading, but I can't use Chrome on a Mac, and I won't use chrome due to the lack of adblock / flashblock anyway.
I don't want to upgrade Firefox to this new version when it comes out -- but in order to keep up to date with security I'm forced too.
I think Mozilla has really lost its way. I switched to Firefox because it was fast, secure and matched how I wanted to browse. It's decreasingly so.
No thanks. I'll stick with BitTorrent, if only because I live outside the US, and it won't be available outside the US, for some reason.
Yes, and that's exactly why Bittorrent is the mechanism of choice for many. What CBS is doing is the future, and it's a pretty good future, where Bittorent isn't needed -- once they figure out that they can solve so many problems by making shows available to the entire world.
Low ratings in the US? Not such a problem, if your show is available globally instantly. Plus, your ratings aren't based on a Neilsen sample, they are based on hard numbers from actual views. You can make more than 100 times the revenue from advertising to a global audience -- there's plenty of global companies (and I'm sure it's possible to have local ad partners providing local feeds by reading IP addresses). There is no reason whatsoever that CBS is not a Network that broadcasts to every English speaker in the World simultaneously.
Yes, there are rights and distribution issues with the current system that prevent that from happening. Which is why that system is outdated and must be changed. Just as the world no longer needs record companies, the world really no longer needs distributors.
Once the Networks eventually figure this -- very obvious -- fact out, then we will see not only real progress, but perhaps we might actually get to see complete seasons of the shows we love. Firefly, for example, would never have been canceled if it was distributed under this model.
That is a very valid point. "Sustainable" is a buzzword that actually has very little defined meaning. It's a wonderful marketing word because it sound like something we naturally agree with, and all understand. However, it's vague enough to mean what you want it to mean. Or mean what a Government or Corporation wants it to mean.
It's like "biodiversity" too -- sounds good, has no agreed practical meaning. "Heritage" is another. There's plenty of them. "fairtrade" "organic" etc etc.
I think we are all agreed we need to be more sustainable. Now we just need to figure out a definition of sustainable that we all agree on -- not just Government and Corporate definitions of it. It actually is a big part of the problem.
I think if you live in the UK -- as obviously this Privacy group does -- you might see the negative in anything that remotely looks like it might invade your privacy, because that is the daily norm in the UK. If you're being watched everywhere you go by security cameras, you are likely to be much more concerned than those in countries where that would be illegal. Especially when you can also be detained without charge in the UK for longer than anywhere in the western world, where the government wants to monitor all your internet traffic, and store your DNA on a national database. Among many other pieces of totalitarianesque legislation.
The other problem with this is one of desensitization. If it's ok for Google, friends and family to always know where you are. Maybe in 5 years fewer people have a problem when a government insists on always knowing where you are.
Those who are inclined towards fascism aren't going to declare it blatantly and change things in one big sweep. It's little steps, slowly and surely. Applications like this make those steps much, much easier to make. No one piece of the puzzle looks harmful by itself, and some minor good may come of it -- but when you thread it all together... good night and good luck!
The timing of Windows 7's release being sped up may not help it.
Look at the economy in most countries right now. Many people have either lost their jobs or are fearful for their security. Most firms need maximum productivity with minimum overheads to survive the storm.
Could there be a worse time to launch a new product? Especially when said product is a dubious, at best, improvement on XP. As a home user, and not a gamer, I see no reason whatsoever to switch from XP. For business users, I'm thinking it must be corporate suicide to introduce a new operating system that adds little extra features, and yet has such a different interface that it will require some extra training, and a noticeable decrease in productivity. Never mind the additional cost of licensing and installation.
I simply do not understand how they can possibly think Windows 7 will be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
While people were right to protest this -- and it's not the first time that Facebook has had to backtrack (probably not the last either), I can't help thinking that this is great effort, wholly misplaced.
The banks, for exampl,e have stolen billions of dollars from all of us. Where's the protest, people? Where's the effort to find out what happened? Where's the organization to make radical change there?
What a terrible waste!
Facebook protesters, learn from this -- if you can achieve this, you can actually make real change in the world -- change that actually matters, not just some trivial thing on a here-today-gone-tomorrow, insubstantial, unimportant, fad website.
Soma -- Praise be to Ford.
I'd guess the odds are astronomical. The Atlantic Ocean is huge, subs aren't. They were almost definitely up to something. Maybe some kind of exercise that went wrong.
Yeah, it'll be fine to have this kind of internet once they start putting drugs like these in to the food chain.
While that would be a step in the right direction. It's not quite sufficient. Fair Trade is a good example, because it doesn't mean anything -- it just sounds like it does. How do you legally define fair? And fair is culturally relative too. It's a wonderful marketing word. It allows you to mark up the price of something, by adding a perceived value that may or may not actually be there. You can interchange Fair Trade with "Environmentally Friendly" or "Green" or "Organic" or any other marketing buzzword you like -- they really don't mean anything standardized nor legal. There's no S.I. of unit of Fairtradiness.
"Exploitation" is the same. It's culturally relative to a degree. Clearly what the article describes is exploitation by most standards -- even allowing for the inevitable exaggeration in the article (since it's a pressure group who are behind the story, and pressure groups always bias a story for politics and profit). But... a company could (and WILL) argue that by relative standards in that country, they are paying above the minimum wage and working shorter hours. They will have stats to prove that too.
It's very hard to apply international standards when you don't have economic parity between countries. It's very hard to define exploitation in a way that companies won't be able to get around it.
Just a note on that. Fervert "terrorists", "pedophiles", etc, propagandists -- News Corps International -- own a significant percentage of the World's newspapers (not sure on any Swedish titles). They are also the owners of 20th Century Fox, and the organization is thus a member of the MPAA.
Expect no truth from them. It never ceases to amaze me how many entire countries allow their media controlled by one man, Rupert Murdoch.
Yeah it reads like: "China, China, China, boring stuff about China. CHUMBY CHUMBY CHUMBY. China, China China."
Would it perhaps be a leap to suggest that this is nothing more than poorly-crafted, viral-marketing for some lame-named new product?
So do we really need to have a Windows 7 article every day? It's in beta, it changes -- and it's not exactly eagerly awaited anyway.
So, other than MS promoting this as much as the possibly can -- is there any need to have any articles on it at all, unless there's a major change?
Presumably also, those who were able to watch, haven't... and won't.
Is a bear catholic?
In that case, you definitely can. Most wikipedia articles on Film and TV contain stolen content from IMDB, or from labors-of-love fan sites that depend on page views and micro-ad revenue for survival. (Amazon, the owners of IMDB, really should sue Wikipedia sideways over this). By choosing wikipedia over them you are NOT helping the shows you love. Plus, most film and TV wikipedia pages contain spoilers without any warnings -- as well as synopses that breach the rights of the creators.
Joss Wheedon in particular has suffered a lot of cancellations of his work -- by working with fan sites of his shows you are showing that his work is popular. By using wikpedia you are not, as well as simply encouraging people to steal from him.
That depends what the basis of the experiment was. If you look at Honest Jimbo's Bank account I think you'll find wikipedia to be successful. If you are a book-burning nazi hell-bent on forcing your view over others, and over truth, you'll think that wikipedia is the greatest site on Earth -- a 4th Reich for the Internet.
But yeah, if you are the average person looking for truthful answers... it's really an abject, miserable failure.
An unfair one. It's disturbing that you are in a position of power. You are obviously discouraging open-mindedness and creative thought. Many newspapers and journals are a valid source of information in many subjects. Obviously there needs to be caution with them, as there must be with ANY source, but newspapers are legally accountable.
An opinion piece in a newspaper isn't worth much, but an interview, with direct quotes for example, is. Newspapers are used all the time as sources for University level historical research. More than one newspaper is better of course.
I don't know what you teach, but you probably shouldn't be teaching. Der Spiegel is for the most part an ethical publisher, it's certainly exposed many things -- such as neo-nazism -- than other outlets have failed to find.
Yes... mostly. Absolutely no doubt that the failure here is journalism, although Der Spiegel is normally a reliable publication. However, it is extremely disturbing that there are ANY people out there who view wikipedia as quotable -- and part of the blame for that does rest with wikipedia. Not that wikipedia is going to change that, because they take themselves more seriously than anyone ever should. Wikipedia, if they were entirely honest and fair, would publish a disclaimer at the top of every page. However, vanity and pride will prevent them from ever doing that. It astounds me that they've not been subject to a massive legal campaign -- I'm certain one day they will be.
Wikipedia is information pollution. Google's unfair and skewed page ranking of that site does more harm than good. Fundamentally some of the blame for this lies with Google artificially promoting wikipedia than anything else.
Wikipedia is a gift to anyone who wants to distort information. Especially if it's subtle, as in this case. Since journalists can't be trusted to validate facts, it seems it's very easy to get your agenda or distorted version of the truth out there by manipulating wikipedia - and we all know how trivially simple that is to do, especially if you form a cartel -- or worse, become the lowest of the low, a wikiadmin.
I notice they mention sites like Hulu and CBS on their site, but I assume this is only available to US residents? They cunningly don't mention any restrictions.
Have they got round this, or is this content still blacked out for most of the world?
Not so sure about that... Firefox seems to be slowly creeping in the direction of SeaMonkey and Netscape Navigator. These were aimed more at the casual user, loads of features -- features coming out of their ears.
Trouble is -- nobody really wanted them.
I agree, the point of having an extensible browser -- surely -- is to keep the core simple and to allow users to customize what they see as necessary. Firefox has moved away from this model for some time.
In the light of Chrome's development, I'd see the Mozilla developers time be better spent on developing multi-threading for Firefox. This being the biggest problem with the browser as it is.
I want multi-threading, but I can't use Chrome on a Mac, and I won't use chrome due to the lack of adblock / flashblock anyway.
I don't want to upgrade Firefox to this new version when it comes out -- but in order to keep up to date with security I'm forced too.
I think Mozilla has really lost its way. I switched to Firefox because it was fast, secure and matched how I wanted to browse. It's decreasingly so.
I misread the title as Anne Hathaway (wishful thinking). Agent 99 as head of cyber-security -- he could do much worse.
Yes, and that's exactly why Bittorrent is the mechanism of choice for many. What CBS is doing is the future, and it's a pretty good future, where Bittorent isn't needed -- once they figure out that they can solve so many problems by making shows available to the entire world.
Low ratings in the US? Not such a problem, if your show is available globally instantly. Plus, your ratings aren't based on a Neilsen sample, they are based on hard numbers from actual views. You can make more than 100 times the revenue from advertising to a global audience -- there's plenty of global companies (and I'm sure it's possible to have local ad partners providing local feeds by reading IP addresses). There is no reason whatsoever that CBS is not a Network that broadcasts to every English speaker in the World simultaneously.
Yes, there are rights and distribution issues with the current system that prevent that from happening. Which is why that system is outdated and must be changed. Just as the world no longer needs record companies, the world really no longer needs distributors.
Once the Networks eventually figure this -- very obvious -- fact out, then we will see not only real progress, but perhaps we might actually get to see complete seasons of the shows we love. Firefly, for example, would never have been canceled if it was distributed under this model.
Cabal-o-meter. That's a better name for the tool.
That is a very valid point. "Sustainable" is a buzzword that actually has very little defined meaning. It's a wonderful marketing word because it sound like something we naturally agree with, and all understand. However, it's vague enough to mean what you want it to mean. Or mean what a Government or Corporation wants it to mean.
It's like "biodiversity" too -- sounds good, has no agreed practical meaning. "Heritage" is another. There's plenty of them. "fairtrade" "organic" etc etc.
I think we are all agreed we need to be more sustainable. Now we just need to figure out a definition of sustainable that we all agree on -- not just Government and Corporate definitions of it. It actually is a big part of the problem.
I think if you live in the UK -- as obviously this Privacy group does -- you might see the negative in anything that remotely looks like it might invade your privacy, because that is the daily norm in the UK. If you're being watched everywhere you go by security cameras, you are likely to be much more concerned than those in countries where that would be illegal. Especially when you can also be detained without charge in the UK for longer than anywhere in the western world, where the government wants to monitor all your internet traffic, and store your DNA on a national database. Among many other pieces of totalitarianesque legislation.
The other problem with this is one of desensitization. If it's ok for Google, friends and family to always know where you are. Maybe in 5 years fewer people have a problem when a government insists on always knowing where you are.
Those who are inclined towards fascism aren't going to declare it blatantly and change things in one big sweep. It's little steps, slowly and surely. Applications like this make those steps much, much easier to make. No one piece of the puzzle looks harmful by itself, and some minor good may come of it -- but when you thread it all together... good night and good luck!
Not to mention the van drivers will be surprised when they encounter the sharks with frickin lasers.
If you look closely at the edges of this map it says: "here be Whalers"
The timing of Windows 7's release being sped up may not help it.
Look at the economy in most countries right now. Many people have either lost their jobs or are fearful for their security. Most firms need maximum productivity with minimum overheads to survive the storm.
Could there be a worse time to launch a new product? Especially when said product is a dubious, at best, improvement on XP. As a home user, and not a gamer, I see no reason whatsoever to switch from XP. For business users, I'm thinking it must be corporate suicide to introduce a new operating system that adds little extra features, and yet has such a different interface that it will require some extra training, and a noticeable decrease in productivity. Never mind the additional cost of licensing and installation.
I simply do not understand how they can possibly think Windows 7 will be successful.