Is this really a problem? Before you buy a game or a movie you can read previews, reviews, walkthroughs and synopses written by professional reviewers, bloggers and users. As you point out, with games you can very often play a demo; with both films and games you can almost always watch a trailer. Is it really credible to suggest that piracy is explainable by a need for more information before you buy?
Apologies for replying to myself - "rifles" in the 4th paragraph should have been "practise rifles", since the actual competition rifles are unmodified.
If there's a need for a disabled-friendly Blackberry or iPhone or whatever... wouldn't the market invent one and sell it? Why should ALL of us pay for features we neither need nor want?
The disabled are not a uniform group, nor are they a large group; since the market only responds to factors that affect its profits they are unlikely to begin to cater for disabled users without legislative change. The changes that are needed to make devices accessible are often cheap and easy; like wheelchair ramps and hearing loops in the real world they cost very little to install but make an enormous difference to the people who need them. If the law is sensibly drafted these are the sorts of changes it will require; equivalent legislation exists in my country, requiring only what modifications are reasonable in the context. Based on other countries' experience the cost of an MP3 player might be pushed up by 50 cents - hardly an unreasonable price to pay to ensure that disabled people are not needlessly excluded from using them.
I see no disabled-friendly footballs out there. Nor hand grenades. Nor microscopes. Nor National Match quality.22 caliber rifles. Nor Porsche race cars. Perhaps might there be things the disabled should NOT be doing? Like trying to see ANYTHING on a tiny little screen, trying to punch tiny little keys and buttons?
Where the previous paragraph was reasonable, here I'm afraid that you have confused your opinions on what is a suitable activity for a disabled person with their actual activities. I suspect that the players in the blind football World Cup, for example, might be surprised to learn that the football they are playing with doesn't exist; paralympic shooters might be interested to learn that their rifles aren't real; and you should probably get in touch with the manufacturers of microscopes and adapted Porsches to explain that there is no demand for their market. Similarly I'm sure you're absolutely right that there is no reason for devices to allow text-to-speech or Braille output, since the disabled have no business trying to use a device with a small screen..
Ebooks, MP3 players, digital video, the internet - these are not privileges that should be kept only for the able bodied. The technology already exists to make them accessible; many blind people, for example, already own braille "screens" to read text, but DRM is preventing them from making use of it with downloaded books. That simple change would make an enormous difference at very little cost.
I'm not going to join either side of this argument - I've never visited America and don't know whether or not the description was apt - but I found this while reading about gun control in Japan and it sounded interesting:
The official Japanese police culture discourages use or glamorisation of guns. One poster on police walls orders: 'Don't take it out of the holster, don't put your finger on the trigger, don't point it at people'.[113] Shooting at a fleeing felon is unlawful under any circumstance. Police and civilians can both be punished for any act of self-defense in which the harm caused was greater than the harm averted.[114] In an average year, the entire Tokyo police force only fires a half-dozen or so shots.[115](p.38) [...] Comparative criminologist, David Bayley, a proponent of stricter American gun controls, suggests that American police attitudes towards guns make it impossible for gun control to be achieved. As long as the police are armed, writes Bayley, they send the implicit message that armed confrontations with civilians are the norm, and that shootings of police officers, while sad, are nothing extraordinary.[117] [Source]
The question that comes to mind is: to what extent is gun-crime self-reinforcing? Does the cultural idea that people should be constantly armed and ready to protect themselves from attack encourage violent crime? I don't have an answer but it's an interesting thought.
I'm never sure why bullshit like this is ever modded up. It should just be ignored. Look, criminals have typically always received their munitions through illegal means. It essentially doesn't matter whether you arm the population or not. If someone wants a gun, they'll get it. If they're a punk looking to cause trouble, they'll do it regardless.
Looking at gun acquisition as a simple binary - either it's possible or it isn't - is a massive oversimplification; the ease of acquisition and price are both important factors. In the US an illegal, untraceable handgun costs about $500 according to the New York Sun; compare that with Britain, where prices for handguns start at £1000 ($1588) [Source: Home Office, "Gun crime: the market in and use of illegal firearms"] or Japan, where prices reportedly start at about $2000, and you can see that tight gun control makes it uneconomical for anyone other than serious, organised criminals to use guns.
This isn't to say that gun control should be applied in America, but "if someone wants a gun, they'll get it" completely ignores the reality in countries where gun control has been in force for some time.
But it'll still be a while before someone sues for an exorbant amount of damages because of "psychological damage" and "lost job because I got angry at teasing and punched someone".
Your example makes it sound like any lawsuit following this move would necessarily be frivolous - I don't believe that to be the case. If the police have gone out of their way to publicise someone's arrest then I don't see why they shouldn't be liable if the arrest turns out to be wrongful or malicious (e.g. "driving while black"). (Note that the cause of action would be the arrest; the publishing on Facebook would serve to increase their liability, not to create it)
At the very least - and disregarding the fact that the kid pleaded guilty - the police had:
- An account of the crimes, and long justification of them, posted under his forum account and his real name. Since there's been no indication that these were falsified it seems likely that they were made by him on his computer, which could have been produced as further evidence that he made the posts. - Multiple witnesses who could testify that the kid's car was doing 100+kph in a residential area near a school - The event took place near the kid's house - Evidence suggesting that the kid habitually drives recklessly - days after this event took place he wrecked his car while speeding.
Remember that the standard of proof isn't "beyond any doubt", it's "beyond reasonable doubt". I don't think that the police would have had any trouble, based on that evidence, in proving beyond reasonable doubt that the kid was guilty.
With that said though, I cannot see how it is possible for this guy to be convicted, unless he is a TOTAL idiot and actually confessed to the police, because people post bullshit on internet forums all of the time....For example, everyone should know that I stole a police car last night and drove it exceeding speeds of 160MPH between Philly and Atlantic City and ran it right into the ocean....well, wait, maybe that was actually MY car.....I must be hallucinating from the LSD lab that I built inside of the Police car as I was flying down the parkway.
There were multiple witnesses to the crime, at least one of whom - according to the perpetrator - had a pen and paper with him to write down the man's tag number. The main function of the forum posts seems to have been to demonstrate such a reckless attitude and lack of respect for other peoples' safety that multiple forum members contacted his local police, who then investigated it.
As the AC rather more bluntly pointed out, all of this information was available to you had you stopped to read the article before making pronouncements. (I know, I must be new here..)
"Today. however, anyone can throw together a website with an email form that sends directly to a particular email address" sure, but it takes more effort than to go and buy a stamp, doesn't it.
And then you have to find voters who are bothered enough to use the said website.
If voters are using the site it's because it represents them better than the MP does.
This MP is trying to ignore voters who already have had to go to great lengths to be heard - double fail to the MP!
I'm not sure that's true. If you make the barrier to participation low enough and the consequences sufficiently remote then people will happily support almost anything, despite having no knowledge or real interest - look at some of the petitions on Facebook for example, or the official petitions on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ the petitions about the Red Arrows and Student Loans, for example, have been endorsed by hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that they are based on misunderstandings and incorrect information. The people who signed those petitions were not interested enough to actually do any reading about the issue at stake, to research it or form their own opinion; they simply clicked, because it didn't cost them anything to do so.
The petitions website is a harmless example of what I would call "pointless participation" - participation that is meaningless because it doesn't reflect any actual interest or desire on the part of the voter. Sites that send emails are very different; the user types in his or her name, perhaps a brief message, and then the site sends it to the MP. Just like the petitions, many of these sites are trumpeting a cause that exists only in the mind of the creator, or that is of no real consequence to the vast majority of people; and yet people fill in their name and click send because it costs them nothing to do it. The MP, as a result, is inundated with messages that do not necessarily reflect any real commitment or interest; the number of emails is out of proportion to any real support that there might be, and the MP ends up missing real messages that reflect real interests.
The MP's action is, I think, overly extreme - a modified spam filter would probably allow him to whittle the tide of emails down to a manageable "petition" format. But I'm not sure that I disagree with his thinking. Writing a letter costs time and money - not very much of either, but a little bit: 15 minutes of your time and a total of about 50p for materials and a stamp. Are there really issues that are important enough that they should be the focus of our MPs' attention, but not worth a couple of pounds?
This seems to me like an implementation of the micropayment method to control spam. If you want to pressure this MP you now have to spend the extra couple of minutes that it takes to print your letter and put it in an envelope, and then pay 41p for a stamp. The total marginal cost of sending the letter is a couple of pounds, at most. Is it really a sensible use of an MP's time to deal with issues that people don't consider to be worth £2?
Are the better entries as transparent? ELO's a pretty simple way do do this - add or subtract a few points from the rating based on a win or a loss based on the relative difference of the ratings. Would anyone understand (other than "It's a neural net") the ratings produced by these competitors? Would anything human be able to calculate them?
Take a look at the formulae used - Elo, particularly for tournament play, is already complicated enough that it's beyond the reach of a "back-of-the-napkin" calculation to work out your rating change. That's seen as one of the big advantages of the English Chess Federation's rating system; it's very simple, so you can just work out the change yourself.
Do you have any particular reason to believe that that's the case?
As far as I can tell, the relevant law (The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003) doesn't require that the infringement be done by hardware; neither does the ruling draw a distinction - in fact it includes the software on the marketed devices as part of the infringing apparatus.
The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence
Right in the summary. They know, they just don't care.
The most worrying impact of the rise of the blog, I've long thought, is the idea that a person is under no obligation to check whether something is true before they republish it. This goes doubly for the Slashdot editors, who should have checked that the summary was accurate, but it also goes for you.
In this case the quotation has been taken from its context and truncated, with no indication that any alteration has been made, in order to change the meaning of the judge's statement. The full quotation reads:
"The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence, provided one of the conditions in section 296ZD(1)(b) (considered below) is satisfied".
Section 296ZD of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2003 makes a defendant liable as a copyright infringer if he produces or markets a device which has for its only or primary purpose, or has only limited commercial application other than, the removal of "effective technological measures [that] have been applied to a copyright work other than a computer program".
It is important also to note that the judge, when explaining why this case did not require a trial, considered the economic impact on the claimant. Had the defendant, in fact, been creating devices to play homebrew games they would, presumably, have challenged this point. Moreover, since the defendants specifically marketed their products based on the ability to download and play hundreds of official DS games it would be farcical to pretend that homebrew was anything other than an excuse to them: they were simply seeking to obtain a commercial advantage by helping people to infringe on Nintendo's copyright.
It is worth also noting that the following section of the 2003 act specifically provides for circumvention of technological measures in order to carry out "permitted acts". The fact that the defendants at no point made use of this section is further proof of the fact that copyright infringement, not the facilitation of homebrew, was their primary motive.
I don't think you need to actually download the file to check the number of peers - just connect to the tracker. As for fake files, is that really such a big issue? Particularly if you used popular torrents as your survey material I don't think the number of fakes will be significant.
I don't normally bother to reply to people who've cherry-picked quotes rather than replying to my post as a whole; I wrote a post, not a collection of stand-alone sentences. On this occasion I'll make an exception, but I'm not going to go into any detail because I don't think you've addressed my actual point.
Unless you are claiming that needing someone to explain to you what software will and won't work is easier, that not being able to buy software at the shop is easier, that having to check your hardware for compatibility before you buy it is easier, and that having to make do with imitations rather than the software that people expect is easier then we're in agreement. For the most part, it's not hard to use Ubuntu, even if there are still far too many things that require the command line or config-file editing or technical knowledge. But to claim from that that it's easier to use than Windows is ridiculous.
As for Dell's claim of reducing complexity... it's a single link on the side of the page! At the risk of sounding cliche, I think it's more reasonable to assume that there is some supplier exclusivity contract in play from Microsoft.
I'm not so sure. It would take very few people ordering Ubuntu because they hadn't understood the difference for the support costs to outweigh the extra sales; this would explain their move to sell Ubuntu only over then phone, since it allows people to buy Ubuntu PCs if they really want to while preventing any possible misunderstandings.
Microsoft Windows is really so much harder to use than Ubuntu. Everything on Ubuntu just works, and you have to fuss with windows to get it to do what you want, keep it from getting a virus, hunt all over the web to get software updates.....
I think the only reason Dell does this is because Windows is setup like a toll booth where you have to pay extra to get it to do anything useful or keep it running. With the Ubuntu Boxes they don't sell any add-on software because Ubuntu already has everything it needs to work.
I've been using Ubuntu since 2006 and this claim is, frankly, laughable. Go to the shop and buy some shrinkwrap software - chances are it won't work on Ubuntu. Now buy yourself a new webcam, printer and scanner; unless you checked beforehand at least one of these is likely not to work, and it's unlikely that any of them will work perfectly. These issues might seem trivial to someone who's used Ubuntu for a long time and either knows what works or at least knows to check, but for a new user it's a big deal.
Second, Ubuntu users are generally assumed to be computer-literate and to have deliberately chosen Ubuntu, which implies that they know the ins and outs of Linux distributions and technologies. This leads to help files that are unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know a thing about Linux - amarok is "a qt media player based on the KDE 4 technology platform", for example, and if you want to install a new chess program you can choose between "X11" and "Gnome" versions. (What does that even mean?). Similarly, help files and forums have people running shell commands and editing configuration files - that's just voodoo to a totally new computer user, and if nothing else ingraining a "just run whatever the forum tells you as administrator" mindset is not good.
Contrast this with Windows: if you go to the shop and buy new software or hardware it's almost certain to run on your computer with nothing more than a few clicks to install it. And if you run into problems the instructions and help files assume no computer literacy - and every man and his dog knows how to use Windows, so there's no shortage of people to help you.
I like Ubuntu; I use it every day and have done for four years. But denying its faults - and it has plenty - is enormously counterproductive. For you, Ubuntu's lack of available software has turned into "[w]ith the Ubuntu Boxes they don't sell any add-on software because Ubuntu already has everything it needs to work"; for one of the replying ACs the lack of hardware support has become "[t]he 'my wi-fi doesn't work under linux crowd' just need to be more careful and not buy shitty wi-fi cards". These are legitimate problems, and denying them can only set Ubuntu development back and alienate people who have tried the OS and had problems.
Good points. I think what the study was intended to show - certainly how I read it - was the uses of Bittorrent clients (that is to say, what users choose to download when the choice of files is theirs); this would make automatic uses like WoW irrelevant.
It would be interesting to know how significant the numbers of legal downloads are including exclusively legal sites like Jamendo, therefore giving a picture of what people use BT for when they can choose to use it for whatever they want. I rather suspect, if you counted all the uses of Bittorrent where the user is choosing files to download, that the 1% figure given above would be a very optimistic estimate for the proportion of the content that doesn't infringe on copyright. But then I have very little faith in peoples' ability to resist their greed.
The argument is that it's pretty damn hard to get a "random sample" form trackers, so these guys found the piratebay et al style trackers, and took "1000 MOST ACTIVE" torrents.
Why is this +5 Insightful?
Firstly, it's not even true for the study cited by the GGP, which was not weighted by number of downloads. Secondly, surely weighting it by number of downloads would give a truer picture of the use of Bittorrent - if you found that 50% of the files available were non-infringing, but none of them had ever been downloaded, it would be disingenuous to infer that BT is a tool for legitimate content distribution.
I'm no fan of being tracked, but I think it would be worth it. Automatic cars would be an incredible step forward in quality of life: people who commute would suddenly have an hour or two more each day to pursue their interests; parents would be freed from the drudgery of ferrying children to school, sports and hobbies; children would be able to take up more varied activities since they could be assured of transport there and back; and the elderly would be able to get around safely and easily - in our ageing society this is a big deal that's only going to get more important.
This is without mentioning the economic impact. Make it easier and quicker for people to get to work and they can take jobs farther from their homes, allowing companies to grow up much more easily - anyone who's visited the developing world can testify to the enormous difference it makes when you makes it easier for people to move around.
Surely with automatic cars deadlocks would be no problem. For three reasons:
1) Automatic cars wouldn't enter the junction with no way out, so the only people that could cause deadlocks would be the human drivers, whose numbers would progressively shrink. 2) If you did get a deadlock, inter-car communication makes it easy to fix - an entire lane of traffic can move backwards to let people out. 3) Even if that option were not available (maybe if a car had broken down) the same inter-car communication can fill the role of a police officer to sort the deadlock out by directing traffic, but without having to wait for a cop to arrive.
I'd love to see the studies that found that bad drivers improve traffic, by the way. Sounds like an interesting read.
Absolutely. What I want isn't an ad-blocker, just an "ad-controller"; I don't mind the adverts, I even understand that they're necessary - but I don't want them to completely stop me from doing what I came to do. If they could just load after (or concurrently with) the content instead of before, and not do anything that intercepts my mouse movements or slows my browser to a crawl I would be happy.
Some website owners don't seem to understand this. I recently emailed armorgames.com to explain that, while I understand their need for advertising and thoroughly support it as a business model, I was being forced to block the ads because they had become so aggressive that I couldn't play the games - they were so "busy" that they sometimes slowed the games down to a crawl, and if for a second your mouse strayed out of the game itself that was their cue to pop up massive, full-page videos with no way to close them until they'd fully loaded.
Their response: no reply, and they deleted my account. Really mature.
Well, maybe I need to "open my eyes", so perhaps you can help me. I still just don't see where the data got fudged. Here's what happened:
1995: First peer-reviewed article discussing the problem with tree ring temperature measurement is published. 1998: Mike Mann publishes in Nature, the most widely-cited journal in the world, an article setting out the "trick". 1998-2004: Multiple peer-reviewed articles supporting the technique are published. No dissenting articles are published. The technique appears to be accepted. 2001: The IPCC publishes its third report on climate change. This report, which is available online in its unedited entirety (as certified by UNEP), contains the following image: Image: variations in the Earth's surface temperature. The image clearly differentiates between different sources of data. 2009: "Climategate". The email is found, removed from its context and used to attack climate change scientists.
So please, explain to me exactly "how badly these scientists were behaving in plain sight" when they published peer-reviewed articles explaining exactly what they were going to do, confirmed those with more peer-reviewed articles and then published a graph that clearly shows the different sources of data. What were they fudging when they repeatedly published their methodology and data?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this really a problem? Before you buy a game or a movie you can read previews, reviews, walkthroughs and synopses written by professional reviewers, bloggers and users. As you point out, with games you can very often play a demo; with both films and games you can almost always watch a trailer. Is it really credible to suggest that piracy is explainable by a need for more information before you buy?
"Lord Chief Justice" is his position in the legal system, "Lord" is his title, and "Judge" is, fittingly, his surname.
Apologies for replying to myself - "rifles" in the 4th paragraph should have been "practise rifles", since the actual competition rifles are unmodified.
If there's a need for a disabled-friendly Blackberry or iPhone or whatever ... wouldn't the market invent one and sell it? Why should ALL of us pay for features we neither need nor want?
The disabled are not a uniform group, nor are they a large group; since the market only responds to factors that affect its profits they are unlikely to begin to cater for disabled users without legislative change. The changes that are needed to make devices accessible are often cheap and easy; like wheelchair ramps and hearing loops in the real world they cost very little to install but make an enormous difference to the people who need them. If the law is sensibly drafted these are the sorts of changes it will require; equivalent legislation exists in my country, requiring only what modifications are reasonable in the context. Based on other countries' experience the cost of an MP3 player might be pushed up by 50 cents - hardly an unreasonable price to pay to ensure that disabled people are not needlessly excluded from using them.
I see no disabled-friendly footballs out there. Nor hand grenades. Nor microscopes. Nor National Match quality .22 caliber rifles. Nor Porsche race cars. Perhaps might there be things the disabled should NOT be doing? Like trying to see ANYTHING on a tiny little screen, trying to punch tiny little keys and buttons?
Where the previous paragraph was reasonable, here I'm afraid that you have confused your opinions on what is a suitable activity for a disabled person with their actual activities. I suspect that the players in the blind football World Cup, for example, might be surprised to learn that the football they are playing with doesn't exist; paralympic shooters might be interested to learn that their rifles aren't real; and you should probably get in touch with the manufacturers of microscopes and adapted Porsches to explain that there is no demand for their market. Similarly I'm sure you're absolutely right that there is no reason for devices to allow text-to-speech or Braille output, since the disabled have no business trying to use a device with a small screen..
Ebooks, MP3 players, digital video, the internet - these are not privileges that should be kept only for the able bodied. The technology already exists to make them accessible; many blind people, for example, already own braille "screens" to read text, but DRM is preventing them from making use of it with downloaded books. That simple change would make an enormous difference at very little cost.
I'm not going to join either side of this argument - I've never visited America and don't know whether or not the description was apt - but I found this while reading about gun control in Japan and it sounded interesting:
The official Japanese police culture discourages use or glamorisation of guns. One poster on police walls orders: 'Don't take it out of the holster, don't put your finger on the trigger, don't point it at people'.[113] Shooting at a fleeing felon is unlawful under any circumstance. Police and civilians can both be punished for any act of self-defense in which the harm caused was greater than the harm averted.[114] In an average year, the entire Tokyo police force only fires a half-dozen or so shots.[115](p.38)
[...]
Comparative criminologist, David Bayley, a proponent of stricter American gun controls, suggests that American police attitudes towards guns make it impossible for gun control to be achieved. As long as the police are armed, writes Bayley, they send the implicit message that armed confrontations with civilians are the norm, and that shootings of police officers, while sad, are nothing extraordinary.[117]
[Source]
The question that comes to mind is: to what extent is gun-crime self-reinforcing? Does the cultural idea that people should be constantly armed and ready to protect themselves from attack encourage violent crime? I don't have an answer but it's an interesting thought.
I'm never sure why bullshit like this is ever modded up. It should just be ignored. Look, criminals have typically always received their munitions through illegal means. It essentially doesn't matter whether you arm the population or not. If someone wants a gun, they'll get it. If they're a punk looking to cause trouble, they'll do it regardless.
Looking at gun acquisition as a simple binary - either it's possible or it isn't - is a massive oversimplification; the ease of acquisition and price are both important factors. In the US an illegal, untraceable handgun costs about $500 according to the New York Sun; compare that with Britain, where prices for handguns start at £1000 ($1588) [Source: Home Office, "Gun crime: the market in and use of illegal firearms"] or Japan, where prices reportedly start at about $2000, and you can see that tight gun control makes it uneconomical for anyone other than serious, organised criminals to use guns.
This isn't to say that gun control should be applied in America, but "if someone wants a gun, they'll get it" completely ignores the reality in countries where gun control has been in force for some time.
But it'll still be a while before someone sues for an exorbant amount of damages because of "psychological damage" and "lost job because I got angry at teasing and punched someone".
Your example makes it sound like any lawsuit following this move would necessarily be frivolous - I don't believe that to be the case. If the police have gone out of their way to publicise someone's arrest then I don't see why they shouldn't be liable if the arrest turns out to be wrongful or malicious (e.g. "driving while black").
(Note that the cause of action would be the arrest; the publishing on Facebook would serve to increase their liability, not to create it)
No, it's a genitive - the location of the photo.
Bullshit?
At the very least - and disregarding the fact that the kid pleaded guilty - the police had:
- An account of the crimes, and long justification of them, posted under his forum account and his real name. Since there's been no indication that these were falsified it seems likely that they were made by him on his computer, which could have been produced as further evidence that he made the posts.
- Multiple witnesses who could testify that the kid's car was doing 100+kph in a residential area near a school
- The event took place near the kid's house
- Evidence suggesting that the kid habitually drives recklessly - days after this event took place he wrecked his car while speeding.
Remember that the standard of proof isn't "beyond any doubt", it's "beyond reasonable doubt". I don't think that the police would have had any trouble, based on that evidence, in proving beyond reasonable doubt that the kid was guilty.
With that said though, I cannot see how it is possible for this guy to be convicted, unless he is a TOTAL idiot and actually confessed to the police, because people post bullshit on internet forums all of the time....For example, everyone should know that I stole a police car last night and drove it exceeding speeds of 160MPH between Philly and Atlantic City and ran it right into the ocean....well, wait, maybe that was actually MY car.....I must be hallucinating from the LSD lab that I built inside of the Police car as I was flying down the parkway.
There were multiple witnesses to the crime, at least one of whom - according to the perpetrator - had a pen and paper with him to write down the man's tag number. The main function of the forum posts seems to have been to demonstrate such a reckless attitude and lack of respect for other peoples' safety that multiple forum members contacted his local police, who then investigated it.
As the AC rather more bluntly pointed out, all of this information was available to you had you stopped to read the article before making pronouncements. (I know, I must be new here..)
"Today. however, anyone can throw together a website with an email form that sends directly to a particular email address"
sure, but it takes more effort than to go and buy a stamp, doesn't it.
And then you have to find voters who are bothered enough to use the said website.
If voters are using the site it's because it represents them better than the MP does.
This MP is trying to ignore voters who already have had to go to great lengths to be heard - double fail to the MP!
I'm not sure that's true. If you make the barrier to participation low enough and the consequences sufficiently remote then people will happily support almost anything, despite having no knowledge or real interest - look at some of the petitions on Facebook for example, or the official petitions on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ the petitions about the Red Arrows and Student Loans, for example, have been endorsed by hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that they are based on misunderstandings and incorrect information. The people who signed those petitions were not interested enough to actually do any reading about the issue at stake, to research it or form their own opinion; they simply clicked, because it didn't cost them anything to do so.
The petitions website is a harmless example of what I would call "pointless participation" - participation that is meaningless because it doesn't reflect any actual interest or desire on the part of the voter. Sites that send emails are very different; the user types in his or her name, perhaps a brief message, and then the site sends it to the MP. Just like the petitions, many of these sites are trumpeting a cause that exists only in the mind of the creator, or that is of no real consequence to the vast majority of people; and yet people fill in their name and click send because it costs them nothing to do it. The MP, as a result, is inundated with messages that do not necessarily reflect any real commitment or interest; the number of emails is out of proportion to any real support that there might be, and the MP ends up missing real messages that reflect real interests.
The MP's action is, I think, overly extreme - a modified spam filter would probably allow him to whittle the tide of emails down to a manageable "petition" format. But I'm not sure that I disagree with his thinking. Writing a letter costs time and money - not very much of either, but a little bit: 15 minutes of your time and a total of about 50p for materials and a stamp. Are there really issues that are important enough that they should be the focus of our MPs' attention, but not worth a couple of pounds?
This seems to me like an implementation of the micropayment method to control spam. If you want to pressure this MP you now have to spend the extra couple of minutes that it takes to print your letter and put it in an envelope, and then pay 41p for a stamp. The total marginal cost of sending the letter is a couple of pounds, at most. Is it really a sensible use of an MP's time to deal with issues that people don't consider to be worth £2?
Are the better entries as transparent? ELO's a pretty simple way do do this - add or subtract a few points from the rating based on a win or a loss based on the relative difference of the ratings. Would anyone understand (other than "It's a neural net") the ratings produced by these competitors? Would anything human be able to calculate them?
Take a look at the formulae used - Elo, particularly for tournament play, is already complicated enough that it's beyond the reach of a "back-of-the-napkin" calculation to work out your rating change. That's seen as one of the big advantages of the English Chess Federation's rating system; it's very simple, so you can just work out the change yourself.
Do you have any particular reason to believe that that's the case?
As far as I can tell, the relevant law (The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003) doesn't require that the infringement be done by hardware; neither does the ruling draw a distinction - in fact it includes the software on the marketed devices as part of the infringing apparatus.
The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence
Right in the summary. They know, they just don't care.
The most worrying impact of the rise of the blog, I've long thought, is the idea that a person is under no obligation to check whether something is true before they republish it. This goes doubly for the Slashdot editors, who should have checked that the summary was accurate, but it also goes for you.
In this case the quotation has been taken from its context and truncated, with no indication that any alteration has been made, in order to change the meaning of the judge's statement. The full quotation reads:
"The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence, provided one of the conditions in section 296ZD(1)(b) (considered below) is satisfied".
Section 296ZD of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2003 makes a defendant liable as a copyright infringer if he produces or markets a device which has for its only or primary purpose, or has only limited commercial application other than, the removal of "effective technological measures [that] have been applied to a copyright work other than a computer program".
It is important also to note that the judge, when explaining why this case did not require a trial, considered the economic impact on the claimant. Had the defendant, in fact, been creating devices to play homebrew games they would, presumably, have challenged this point. Moreover, since the defendants specifically marketed their products based on the ability to download and play hundreds of official DS games it would be farcical to pretend that homebrew was anything other than an excuse to them: they were simply seeking to obtain a commercial advantage by helping people to infringe on Nintendo's copyright.
It is worth also noting that the following section of the 2003 act specifically provides for circumvention of technological measures in order to carry out "permitted acts". The fact that the defendants at no point made use of this section is further proof of the fact that copyright infringement, not the facilitation of homebrew, was their primary motive.
I don't think you need to actually download the file to check the number of peers - just connect to the tracker. As for fake files, is that really such a big issue? Particularly if you used popular torrents as your survey material I don't think the number of fakes will be significant.
I don't normally bother to reply to people who've cherry-picked quotes rather than replying to my post as a whole; I wrote a post, not a collection of stand-alone sentences. On this occasion I'll make an exception, but I'm not going to go into any detail because I don't think you've addressed my actual point.
Unless you are claiming that needing someone to explain to you what software will and won't work is easier, that not being able to buy software at the shop is easier, that having to check your hardware for compatibility before you buy it is easier, and that having to make do with imitations rather than the software that people expect is easier then we're in agreement. For the most part, it's not hard to use Ubuntu, even if there are still far too many things that require the command line or config-file editing or technical knowledge. But to claim from that that it's easier to use than Windows is ridiculous.
As for Dell's claim of reducing complexity... it's a single link on the side of the page! At the risk of sounding cliche, I think it's more reasonable to assume that there is some supplier exclusivity contract in play from Microsoft.
I'm not so sure. It would take very few people ordering Ubuntu because they hadn't understood the difference for the support costs to outweigh the extra sales; this would explain their move to sell Ubuntu only over then phone, since it allows people to buy Ubuntu PCs if they really want to while preventing any possible misunderstandings.
Microsoft Windows is really so much harder to use than Ubuntu. Everything on Ubuntu just works, and you have to fuss with windows to get it to do what you want, keep it from getting a virus, hunt all over the web to get software updates.....
I think the only reason Dell does this is because Windows is setup like a toll booth where you have to pay extra to get it to do anything useful or keep it running. With the Ubuntu Boxes they don't sell any add-on software because Ubuntu already has everything it needs to work.
I've been using Ubuntu since 2006 and this claim is, frankly, laughable. Go to the shop and buy some shrinkwrap software - chances are it won't work on Ubuntu. Now buy yourself a new webcam, printer and scanner; unless you checked beforehand at least one of these is likely not to work, and it's unlikely that any of them will work perfectly. These issues might seem trivial to someone who's used Ubuntu for a long time and either knows what works or at least knows to check, but for a new user it's a big deal.
Second, Ubuntu users are generally assumed to be computer-literate and to have deliberately chosen Ubuntu, which implies that they know the ins and outs of Linux distributions and technologies. This leads to help files that are unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know a thing about Linux - amarok is "a qt media player based on the KDE 4 technology platform", for example, and if you want to install a new chess program you can choose between "X11" and "Gnome" versions. (What does that even mean?). Similarly, help files and forums have people running shell commands and editing configuration files - that's just voodoo to a totally new computer user, and if nothing else ingraining a "just run whatever the forum tells you as administrator" mindset is not good.
Contrast this with Windows: if you go to the shop and buy new software or hardware it's almost certain to run on your computer with nothing more than a few clicks to install it. And if you run into problems the instructions and help files assume no computer literacy - and every man and his dog knows how to use Windows, so there's no shortage of people to help you.
I like Ubuntu; I use it every day and have done for four years. But denying its faults - and it has plenty - is enormously counterproductive. For you, Ubuntu's lack of available software has turned into "[w]ith the Ubuntu Boxes they don't sell any add-on software because Ubuntu already has everything it needs to work"; for one of the replying ACs the lack of hardware support has become "[t]he 'my wi-fi doesn't work under linux crowd' just need to be more careful and not buy shitty wi-fi cards". These are legitimate problems, and denying them can only set Ubuntu development back and alienate people who have tried the OS and had problems.
Good points. I think what the study was intended to show - certainly how I read it - was the uses of Bittorrent clients (that is to say, what users choose to download when the choice of files is theirs); this would make automatic uses like WoW irrelevant.
It would be interesting to know how significant the numbers of legal downloads are including exclusively legal sites like Jamendo, therefore giving a picture of what people use BT for when they can choose to use it for whatever they want. I rather suspect, if you counted all the uses of Bittorrent where the user is choosing files to download, that the 1% figure given above would be a very optimistic estimate for the proportion of the content that doesn't infringe on copyright.
But then I have very little faith in peoples' ability to resist their greed.
The argument is that it's pretty damn hard to get a "random sample" form trackers, so these guys found the piratebay et al style trackers, and took "1000 MOST ACTIVE" torrents.
Why is this +5 Insightful?
Firstly, it's not even true for the study cited by the GGP, which was not weighted by number of downloads.
Secondly, surely weighting it by number of downloads would give a truer picture of the use of Bittorrent - if you found that 50% of the files available were non-infringing, but none of them had ever been downloaded, it would be disingenuous to infer that BT is a tool for legitimate content distribution.
I'm no fan of being tracked, but I think it would be worth it. Automatic cars would be an incredible step forward in quality of life: people who commute would suddenly have an hour or two more each day to pursue their interests; parents would be freed from the drudgery of ferrying children to school, sports and hobbies; children would be able to take up more varied activities since they could be assured of transport there and back; and the elderly would be able to get around safely and easily - in our ageing society this is a big deal that's only going to get more important.
This is without mentioning the economic impact. Make it easier and quicker for people to get to work and they can take jobs farther from their homes, allowing companies to grow up much more easily - anyone who's visited the developing world can testify to the enormous difference it makes when you makes it easier for people to move around.
Surely with automatic cars deadlocks would be no problem. For three reasons:
1) Automatic cars wouldn't enter the junction with no way out, so the only people that could cause deadlocks would be the human drivers, whose numbers would progressively shrink.
2) If you did get a deadlock, inter-car communication makes it easy to fix - an entire lane of traffic can move backwards to let people out.
3) Even if that option were not available (maybe if a car had broken down) the same inter-car communication can fill the role of a police officer to sort the deadlock out by directing traffic, but without having to wait for a cop to arrive.
I'd love to see the studies that found that bad drivers improve traffic, by the way. Sounds like an interesting read.
Absolutely. What I want isn't an ad-blocker, just an "ad-controller"; I don't mind the adverts, I even understand that they're necessary - but I don't want them to completely stop me from doing what I came to do. If they could just load after (or concurrently with) the content instead of before, and not do anything that intercepts my mouse movements or slows my browser to a crawl I would be happy.
Some website owners don't seem to understand this. I recently emailed armorgames.com to explain that, while I understand their need for advertising and thoroughly support it as a business model, I was being forced to block the ads because they had become so aggressive that I couldn't play the games - they were so "busy" that they sometimes slowed the games down to a crawl, and if for a second your mouse strayed out of the game itself that was their cue to pop up massive, full-page videos with no way to close them until they'd fully loaded.
Their response: no reply, and they deleted my account. Really mature.
Well, maybe I need to "open my eyes", so perhaps you can help me. I still just don't see where the data got fudged. Here's what happened:
1995: First peer-reviewed article discussing the problem with tree ring temperature measurement is published.
1998: Mike Mann publishes in Nature, the most widely-cited journal in the world, an article setting out the "trick".
1998-2004: Multiple peer-reviewed articles supporting the technique are published. No dissenting articles are published. The technique appears to be accepted.
2001: The IPCC publishes its third report on climate change. This report, which is available online in its unedited entirety (as certified by UNEP), contains the following image: Image: variations in the Earth's surface temperature. The image clearly differentiates between different sources of data.
2009: "Climategate". The email is found, removed from its context and used to attack climate change scientists.
So please, explain to me exactly "how badly these scientists were behaving in plain sight" when they published peer-reviewed articles explaining exactly what they were going to do, confirmed those with more peer-reviewed articles and then published a graph that clearly shows the different sources of data. What were they fudging when they repeatedly published their methodology and data?