Surely that depends on what the phones are doing? A couple of phones on idle will only emit a very weak signal, whereas cell phone masts emit much higher power of radiation. It could well be that the phones in the hive approximate the radiation from a phone mast some distance away.
Hilariously, I never said you passed judgement on it, only that bringing it up was "fucking stupid" in light of the fact that everyone and their mom and their dog and their mom's dog has already brought it up every time the spill hits the front page. Thanks for really driving the point home, Rambo.
No, you didn't just say there was no point in bringing it up. You specifically said I was claiming it was a solution:
Until you or someone else can provide some evidence that it would work here, bringing it up over and over again saying "this problem is already solved" is fucking stupid.
(emphasis mine)
Given that I had specifically addressed your concerns and pointed out that I was only providing information that didn't seem to be available elsewhere in the English-language coverage I don't understand why you felt the need to be aggressive and offensive, or why you're continuing to be rude when it's clear to anyone who scrolls up and reads your comment that what you're saying isn't true.
Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.
The start of my comment:
I can't help out with the viability of it
The end of my comment:
Again, not passing any comment on the possibility of using a nuclear bomb
What you wrote in your reply:
Until you or someone else can provide some evidence that it would work here, bringing it up over and over again saying "this problem is already solved" is fucking stupid.
Maybe you should read that signature once in a while?
You have made quite a few assertions as to the viability of attempting such a maneuver, could you please provide evidence in the form of a well respected news article or scientific journal? As was noted by another poster the USSR often claimed things worked when they, in fact, did not.
I can't help out with the viability of it - I'm not sure how you would really go about working that out, to be honest - but I had a read through the Russian reports of this and previous disasters and a group of their nuclear weapons experts have apparently offered to help out; they claim that under the USSR they performed this operation 6 times, using bombs of around 20 kilotonnes, and that five of the operations were a success. The exception (an attempt in 1972 to use a 4kt bomb to seal a gas 'fountain' at a depth of just over 2km in Kharkovskaya oblast') was not successfully closed by the detonation but the situation apparently wasn't made worse.
Again, not passing any comment on the possibility of using a nuclear bomb, just thought I'd provide some information from Russian sources since the English-language information is rather poor.
I don't believe you. I don't think that your pirate amounts were 10 times the amount of your sales.
I can't really help you there - blatant denying reality is the one strategy I had not expected.
Also, I think you are blaming a VERY common problem that happens on the internet on piracy. Who in the world even knew you existed? I mean that is the main problem on the internet how to even let people know you are out there. If you don't spend but a mere penitence on advertising then don't be surprised that people can't find you, but places where they hang out and new things are announced are more successful at getting notice. If you can't properly market your product to a very larger and targeted audience then that isn't anyone's problem but your own.
Getting noticed on the internet is hard, and simply throwing up a web site with e-commerce on it, isn't nearly enough anymore. Those days of build it and they will come are long gone. Sounds like you need to take some marketing classes, and some internet marketing classes to learn how to better promote your business online.
Well first of all it wasn't my business but if it was I'm sure I'd be very grateful for your pearls of wisdom.
We were - and the brand still is - extremely well known. Put the label or (as far as I can tell, I'm not going to check all the thousands of composers) any of the complications into Google and you find us, go into a CD store and you find us - often with a dedicated rack in the larger shops. Go to Virgin Mega or Amazon and you can buy CDs, if you prefer physical media to downloads. Moreover, your argument makes no sense; try discovering new music on Pirate Bay - it's not easy, torrent sites don't have descriptions of the tracks, they don't have tagging, they don't have previews. They're just a way of finding and downloading what you already know about. Maybe - maybe - there were some people who stumbled across a few of our compilations while going through page after page of material on TPB, but it seems improbable. If they were torrenting it they'd heard of it and the marketing had worked.
I hope you don't find it too unreasonable but I really find this attitude pathetic. It can't possibly be the people torrenting music that are at fault, it always has to be the content producer, there's always something they're doing wrong that makes it just fine to take what you want. I didn't post my example as an example of a company that was particularly hard done by, I posted it as an example of a company that went to considerable lengths to do everything users ask for and to cross off every reason they said they were pirating. Since I was in charge of the effort I can vouch for the thoroughness - we went through, among other things, the Slashdot discussions of music piracy, listed every sensible complaint that was made and remedied it. We wanted it to be true; we wanted people to have been forced to piracy so that when we gave them exactly what they said they wanted they would come back. But they didn't, they used the catalogue and the previewing and the search system we spent months making easy to use and then they went pirated it in huge numbers. Because in the end it wasn't the delivery method that was the problem, it was the fact that we wanted them to pay for what they wanted.
That, too, but once these kids grow up, they are already accustomed to being able to get movies quickly, conveniently, and in a format that gives them full control over how they watch them and what they do with them. A large fraction of these kids will probably gladly pay a small price for each download in a similar service, but will stick to BitTorrent if you try to take their freedom, convenience and inexpensive cost away from them.
I think that more than any of that they're accustomed to being able to get things for free; while a few people might genuinely want control, a certain format or whatever the majority of them just want more stuff without paying for it and won't ever pay while the free option is around. I'll explain why (I've posted this before but I think it's relevant here):
Last year I was working for a small, independent record company. We sold relaxing music and music to meditate to - not exactly the prime target for piracy. And we did everything we could to make buying it a pleasant experience! You could listen to a full-length preview before buying, there was no DRM, a wide choice of formats, you could download as many times as you wanted, we sold to anywhere in the world that the credit card company would take payment from and the price wasn't exorbitant: 0.50€ per track or either 3€/5€ per album depending on whether it was one or two discs. And guess what? The piracy rate was massive. Through the roof. It was ten times the number of actual sales we were making, sometimes even far more than that.
What's the explanation? What did we do wrong that made people pirate our music rather than buy it? They clearly wanted it since they had tracked it down on Bittorrent, which was much more work than finding it on our site.
My answer? You can't compete with free. People have got used to getting their music for free, without any real fear of legal consequences, and you can't - for the most part - get them to pay again. You see the symptoms on Slashdot: endless justifications - it used to be "I would buy it if it didn't have DRM", but music stopped having DRM so then it was "I'd buy it if the quality was better", and now that the quality's better it's "I'd buy it if it were 50c instead of $0.99". Will it end if music hits $0.50? Of course not. Because free is still better and there's always something to complain about.
I think a lot of people are assuming this would have to be a remote kill switch, when actually it would make much more sense used as an advisory: the signal tells the car's on-board computer "we recommend you switch the engine off now"/"we recommend you switch the engine on now" and the car's computer makes the actual decisions. (It would seem even more sensible if the light just told the waiting cars what was going on and left all the decisions to the car.)
If it's advisory rather than a kill signal the problems all go away: How do you start everyone's car up to let an emergency vehicle through? The driver just starts it again and moves, like they do now. Battery problems can all be avoided by the car monitoring the battery level. The car's designers can tell the computer how long the wait needs to be for it to be worth switching off. And even if they did totally fail to sign the authenticate - which would be silly - it wouldn't be much use to carjackers if the engine could only be turned off if you had stopped and put on the handbrake.
Well I wish you all the success in the world, but the article - and particularly, surprise-surprise, the/. summary - are extremely disingenuous. Let me quote from Spolsky's article:
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. [...] First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away working code.
With a few name changes that could be the story in the article and your explanation of why it was necessary. There doesn't seem to be any example here of "when rewriting makes sense" - you did exactly what Spolsky said not to do and now, well, no-one on Slashdot even seems to have heard of you.
I quite like the way that the article claims that it shows an exception to Spolsky's rule, but actually isn't at all: they claim to have started off as a successful CMS company with "big name" clients, embarked on a rewrite that took them off the market for two years and ended up as a tiny player with "more than two hundred web projects [...] in Norway".
As far as I can tell this is a project that went exactly the way Spolsky predicted: they had a decent product, they embarked on a rewrite that took longer than they expected and they lost the market by doing it.
> But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should.
Why the hell SHOULDN'T they be held to a higher standard? They are a huge corporation that has a huge amount of money therefore they are hold a huge amount of power. They should be at a MUCH higher standard. As an individual I have the power and money that I could probably ruin the environment for my neighborhood... in this case BP holds the money, power, and equipment to ruin an entire coastline.
They should, and what you're saying isn't unreasonable. I'll admit straight up that I don't know the facts of this case so I'm responding in theory when I say:
Even if they held themselves to the highest possible standards, this would still happen eventually.
There are so many things that can go wrong that it is an inevitable byproduct of drilling that at some point, no matter how much we try to avoid it, there will be an environmental disaster. This isn't to try to excuse BP, just pointing it out: there is no standard high enough to stop this happening at some point.
It's what Nassim Taleb called "black swan dynamics"; you never expect to see a black swan, so you don't plan for one - you can't plan for what is totally beyond the realm of possibility, or at least of possibility that you are aware of. But then one comes along - a tropical storm hits the rig that's just been deactivated by a misfired EMP - and you're suddenly way outside everything you've planned for and it all goes wrong.
There is a certain extent to which that is true, but note the comments I made above regarding the fact that if the accused introduces a defence of legitimate reason it is up to the prosecution to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defence does not apply. The change of the burden of proof is thus very slight, amounting really only to the idea that someone who is knowingly supplying information to terrorists to help them commit terrorist acts is doing it with the intention that they commit those acts - it would be difficult to imagine a realistic situation where that assumption was not valid.
Regarding the law on glorifying terrorism - this never actually made it through the House of Lords in its original form. It was rewritten and forms part of the Terrorism Act 2006, where it serves to make it a crime to glorify acts of terrorism in order to encourage the commission of further acts of terrorism. The second part of the law changes its extent hugely - it's now really a law on incitement. You can honour previous acts - indeed a major concern for the Lords was not preventing the Irish from honouring their resistance movement - what you cannot do is suggest that the acts be repeated.
I suspect that whether or not he sympathised with the terrorists is irrelevant; he deliberately collated and sold information to be used in the preparation of terrorist acts.
To rather immodestly quote from myself, the test is whether or not he provided information that:
- Would provide practical assistance in the commission of terrorist offences - Was intended to be used to assist in the preparation or perpetration of an act of terrorism
It appears that he was deliberately writing and selling bomb-making information to terrorists, and whatever his sympathies were this definitely fills both criteria.
As I explained, it criminalises the possession of information where the possession of that information is part of a deliberate attempt to assist in the commission of terrorist acts.
And the article you cite does not involve the law on knives, it involves the law on offensive weapons - these are two separate areas of law in Britain. The offensive weapon test is primarily one of behaviour; the fact that he was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon, plus that he was pulled over and that his car was searched, would imply that the reason for this was that he was being either violent or threatening violence beforehand. This is just speculation, but what is certain is that he was not convicted under knife laws.
As I've explained above, this law does not criminalise the possession of information. It is only an offence to gather information that would help in the commission of an act of terrorism with the intention that it be used to assist the commission of this act. I think we can all agree that people who are part of a plot to perpetrate acts of terrorism should be jailed.
convicted of three counts of possessing material useful for acts of terror
Can sombody explain why this is illegal? Every highschool student taking a chemistry course 'possesses material useful for acts of terror'. The fact that somebody owns something that COULD be used for some illegal activity doesn't make that person a criminal. Else, everybody would be in prison. Have you ever used a knife? A car? A computer? Thought so.
The conviction in this case was almost certainly (although I can't find confirmation) under section 57 or 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. These provide, respectively, that a person is guilty of an offence if he:
- "possesses an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that his possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism." - "collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or [...] possesses a document or record containing information of that kind."
A legitimate reason to own the information is a defence to both of these charges - so if you're studying chemistry, for example, and your research involves making explosives you aren't guilty under this act. To make it clear what we're talking about, this is the same formulation as is used for knife crime in the UK - you can carry any knife you want as long as you actually need it, but you can't just carry a knife around because you want to. The fact that most people aren't even aware that there is a legal question operating when they carry their gardening tools illustrates the fact that the distinction works quite well.
Since British law is defined largely by judicial precedent it is important to bear in mind that this act was based on the provisions of the Criminal Justice act 1994; the effect of this is to mean that the decision in Rowe (2007) is likely to be binding, i.e. that if the defendant introduces evidence of a non-terrorist motive it is up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this defence is not valid.
Note also KvR (2008) where it was held that only a document: - Providing practical assistance in the commission of terrorist offences, and - That was intended to be used to assist in the preparation or perpetration of an act of terrorism will lead to a conviction.
The effect of these precedents is that this law allows the conviction of people who deliberately gather information to aid in the commission of terrorist attacks - it does not make mere possession of the information a crime, since intent is also important. It seems to me entirely reasonable that people who abet terrorists should be guilty of an offence.
Well, compared to the US continental Europe continues to have longer holidays, cheaper per capita healthcare, a healthier, happier, more active and longer-lived population and a comparable (some countries higher, some lower) GDP per capita. And now they can add to that a lower rate of unemployment. So pretty well really.
Incidentally, unlike what the submitter seems to think, higher education in Western Europe is normally 4-years.
I can't wait to see who comes out of the woodwork to defend Amazon on this one, and what sort of faux reasoning they use to do it.
Well I will for one, because I don't see where Amazon have done anything wrong. Point out to me where the "faux reasoning is".
Here are the facts of this:
- The data is anonymized - The data is only published in aggregate - The change was publicised in the Kindle forums, by email and in a new manual being sent out - The change only sends highlights, not annotations. (The Techdirt writer seems to have misunderstood the article they cited and invented the annotations part) - The setting defaults to off.
So Amazon have offered to collect anonymized data, with the user's express permission, which would then only be published in aggregate. And to make sure the users understand what this means they are sending out an updated manual with an explanation.
This is exactly what they should have done. They want to introduce a cool new feature and they're doing it in a way that doesn't hurt anyone. This is the behaviour that we want from retailers. Unfortunately, the fact that they did everything right doesn't really matter because there are so many people - the writers of the Techdirt article, the submitter, the Slashdot editors and you - who are so keen to rant about big business violating their right to privacy that they don't even stop to check what's actually going on. If you'd clicked through the actual articles first you would know that there's nothing to be worried about.
Why should I care that Amazon builds an aggregate summary?
What if your (admittedly stupid) note said "This passage is exactly what happened to my wife, Jenny Smith, last night at our home address of 12345 Stupid street in Stupidville."? Or more likely, you annotated someone's name and address or phone number in your kindle because you had it with you by the pool, but you didn't have your phone.
Nothing. Because that scenario cannot possible happen and is simply paranoia.
Everyone is trying to come up with scenarios that turn this into an invasion of the user's privacy, but if you take a look at the facts rather than assuming the worst you'll see that there is no privacy concern at all:
- The data is anonymized - The data is only published in aggregate - The change was publicised in the Kindle forums, by email and in a new manual being sent out - The change only sends highlights, not annotations. (The Techdirt writer seems to have misunderstood the article they cited and invented the annotations part) - The setting defaults to off.
If you can come up with a possible invasion of the user's privacy based on the actual change Amazon have made I'll be impressed.
I think you're deliberately ignoring the point he's making. While there are some people who want to buy the music and can't that isn't a factor for the vast majority of people. If you go to piratebay right now you'll find that there are 8,000 people seeding Lady Gaga's latest album. Don't let's be silly: if one in every hundred of them had even considered buying the music then I would be amazed, and yet the album is widely available, including on iTunes with no DRM.
I personally don't think there's any setup or any price point that will get people who want the music for free to pay for it. I'll explain why.
Last year I was working for a small, independent record company. We sold relaxing music and music to meditate to - not exactly the prime target for piracy. And we did everything we could to make buying it a pleasant experience! You could listen to a full-length preview before buying, there was no DRM, you could download as many times as you wanted, we sold to anywhere in the world that the credit card company would take payment from and the price wasn't exorbitant: 0.50€ per track or either 3€/5€ per album depending on whether it was one or two discs. And guess what? The piracy rate was massive. Through the roof. It was ten times the number of actual sales we were making, sometimes even far more than that.
What's the explanation? What did we do wrong that made people pirate our music rather than buy it? They clearly wanted it since they had tracked it down on Bittorrent, which was much more work than finding it on our site.
My answer? You can't compete with free. People have got used to getting their music for free, without any real fear of legal consequences, and you can't - for the most part - get them to pay again. You see the symptoms on Slashdot: endless justifications - it used to be "I would buy it if it didn't have DRM", but music stopped having DRM so then it was "I'd buy it if the quality was better", and now that the quality's better it's "I'd buy it if it were 50c instead of $0.99". Will it end if music hits $0.50? Of course not. Because free is still better and there's always something to complain about.
This isn't to say that you, or any particular person, is downloading illegally for purely selfish reasons. You may well be acting totally reasonably, I don't know. But I do know - from personal experience as well as just through basic reasoning - that that isn't the case for all, or even many of the pirates. The main motivator, as always, is selfishness.
This does raise a good question: What is a necessary amount of porn?
For Wikimedia surely it is the same as the necessary amount of anything: the amount that is required to support its mission:
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. Uploaded files can be used as local files by other projects on the Wikimedia servers, including Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary.
I don't think the problem of unnecessary images is limited to porn - although I do think that the number of pornographic images is particularly high in comparison to the number that are used in any meaningful way by the Wikimedia sites, so it's perhaps not a bad place to start "trimming down".
I don't think this has to turn into a discussion about morality unless people want it to. Wikimedia is not a free image host and so there is no reason for it to host swathes of images with only nominal involvement in its mission.
Notably the jurors weren't given a definition of authorized persons. I'd say that's pretty substantial to his own defence as I recall.
If you don't feel that anyone is properly authorized to receive the information you possess or that it will cause harm, then "just do it, its your employer" isn't good enough.
Should they have been given a definition though? What does and doesn't constitute authorization in a particular case seems like a question of fact not of law, and it is the jury's role to determine facts - they only have to receive instruction regarding what the law says.
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
While his analogy is far from perfect I think it does a better job than you give it credit for. I certainly don't agree at all with your suggestion that because electronic books are not consumed to the same degree as printed ones it shows that they value the cost of production, and I've highlighted in the quote above where I think you go slightly wide of the mark.
You see, demand is not just a function of the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives; one very important factor is the complements of the product - this refers to those things that you usually buy to use in conjunction with the product; cars and petrol are complements, as are computer hardware and computer software. One massive problem for ebooks is that the complements of ebooks are expensive - really you need a dedicated ebook reader, and these are expensive and not widely owned. This has the effect of depressing demand.
Of course this doesn't mean that the cost of production has absolutely no effect - people don't like to feel like they're being ripped off and will avoid buying things if they think the markup is excessive. But the GP's point is sound - people don't base purchasing decisions on the cost of production; they generally don't have any idea what that is.
There is particle-per-million level below which the Boeing bulletin fails to be applicable
There's a reason that that bulletin doesn't mention the level - it was only agreed halfway through last week. So you have to ask yourself two things:
- Was it really "unwarranted" to halt flights before there was a figure available for a safe concentration of ash?
- Could the fact that your otherwise extremely (some would say overly) decisive answer weasles the concentration levels by saying that it "appears" that "most" of Europe was at safe levels have anything to do with the fact that mapping the concentration of the particles, which don't show up on radar, requires specially equipped planes making regular flights through the ash to detect the concentration levels, and that the slow and fairly short-range nature of this process leaves a large margin-of-error?
When they took the decision they: - Didn't know what level was safe - Didn't know what the ash concentration was - Knew that they could not map the cloud, which was changing rapidly, in real-time.
Fortunately I'm sure they were fully aware that ill-informed Slashdotters would make blanket pronouncements about how they were wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely that depends on what the phones are doing? A couple of phones on idle will only emit a very weak signal, whereas cell phone masts emit much higher power of radiation. It could well be that the phones in the hive approximate the radiation from a phone mast some distance away.
Hilariously, I never said you passed judgement on it, only that bringing it up was "fucking stupid" in light of the fact that everyone and their mom and their dog and their mom's dog has already brought it up every time the spill hits the front page. Thanks for really driving the point home, Rambo.
No, you didn't just say there was no point in bringing it up. You specifically said I was claiming it was a solution:
Until you or someone else can provide some evidence that it would work here, bringing it up over and over again saying "this problem is already solved" is fucking stupid.
(emphasis mine)
Given that I had specifically addressed your concerns and pointed out that I was only providing information that didn't seem to be available elsewhere in the English-language coverage I don't understand why you felt the need to be aggressive and offensive, or why you're continuing to be rude when it's clear to anyone who scrolls up and reads your comment that what you're saying isn't true.
Your signature:
Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.
The start of my comment:
I can't help out with the viability of it
The end of my comment:
Again, not passing any comment on the possibility of using a nuclear bomb
What you wrote in your reply:
Until you or someone else can provide some evidence that it would work here, bringing it up over and over again saying "this problem is already solved" is fucking stupid.
Maybe you should read that signature once in a while?
You have made quite a few assertions as to the viability of attempting such a maneuver, could you please provide evidence in the form of a well respected news article or scientific journal? As was noted by another poster the USSR often claimed things worked when they, in fact, did not.
I can't help out with the viability of it - I'm not sure how you would really go about working that out, to be honest - but I had a read through the Russian reports of this and previous disasters and a group of their nuclear weapons experts have apparently offered to help out; they claim that under the USSR they performed this operation 6 times, using bombs of around 20 kilotonnes, and that five of the operations were a success. The exception (an attempt in 1972 to use a 4kt bomb to seal a gas 'fountain' at a depth of just over 2km in Kharkovskaya oblast') was not successfully closed by the detonation but the situation apparently wasn't made worse.
Again, not passing any comment on the possibility of using a nuclear bomb, just thought I'd provide some information from Russian sources since the English-language information is rather poor.
I don't believe you. I don't think that your pirate amounts were 10 times the amount of your sales.
I can't really help you there - blatant denying reality is the one strategy I had not expected.
Also, I think you are blaming a VERY common problem that happens on the internet on piracy. Who in the world even knew you existed? I mean that is the main problem on the internet how to even let people know you are out there. If you don't spend but a mere penitence on advertising then don't be surprised that people can't find you, but places where they hang out and new things are announced are more successful at getting notice. If you can't properly market your product to a very larger and targeted audience then that isn't anyone's problem but your own.
Getting noticed on the internet is hard, and simply throwing up a web site with e-commerce on it, isn't nearly enough anymore. Those days of build it and they will come are long gone. Sounds like you need to take some marketing classes, and some internet marketing classes to learn how to better promote your business online.
Well first of all it wasn't my business but if it was I'm sure I'd be very grateful for your pearls of wisdom.
We were - and the brand still is - extremely well known. Put the label or (as far as I can tell, I'm not going to check all the thousands of composers) any of the complications into Google and you find us, go into a CD store and you find us - often with a dedicated rack in the larger shops. Go to Virgin Mega or Amazon and you can buy CDs, if you prefer physical media to downloads. Moreover, your argument makes no sense; try discovering new music on Pirate Bay - it's not easy, torrent sites don't have descriptions of the tracks, they don't have tagging, they don't have previews. They're just a way of finding and downloading what you already know about. Maybe - maybe - there were some people who stumbled across a few of our compilations while going through page after page of material on TPB, but it seems improbable. If they were torrenting it they'd heard of it and the marketing had worked.
I hope you don't find it too unreasonable but I really find this attitude pathetic. It can't possibly be the people torrenting music that are at fault, it always has to be the content producer, there's always something they're doing wrong that makes it just fine to take what you want. I didn't post my example as an example of a company that was particularly hard done by, I posted it as an example of a company that went to considerable lengths to do everything users ask for and to cross off every reason they said they were pirating. Since I was in charge of the effort I can vouch for the thoroughness - we went through, among other things, the Slashdot discussions of music piracy, listed every sensible complaint that was made and remedied it. We wanted it to be true; we wanted people to have been forced to piracy so that when we gave them exactly what they said they wanted they would come back. But they didn't, they used the catalogue and the previewing and the search system we spent months making easy to use and then they went pirated it in huge numbers. Because in the end it wasn't the delivery method that was the problem, it was the fact that we wanted them to pay for what they wanted.
Essentially, broke teenage kids want free stuff.
That, too, but once these kids grow up, they are already accustomed to being able to get movies quickly, conveniently, and in a format that gives them full control over how they watch them and what they do with them. A large fraction of these kids will probably gladly pay a small price for each download in a similar service, but will stick to BitTorrent if you try to take their freedom, convenience and inexpensive cost away from them.
I think that more than any of that they're accustomed to being able to get things for free; while a few people might genuinely want control, a certain format or whatever the majority of them just want more stuff without paying for it and won't ever pay while the free option is around. I'll explain why (I've posted this before but I think it's relevant here):
Last year I was working for a small, independent record company. We sold relaxing music and music to meditate to - not exactly the prime target for piracy. And we did everything we could to make buying it a pleasant experience! You could listen to a full-length preview before buying, there was no DRM, a wide choice of formats, you could download as many times as you wanted, we sold to anywhere in the world that the credit card company would take payment from and the price wasn't exorbitant: 0.50€ per track or either 3€/5€ per album depending on whether it was one or two discs. And guess what? The piracy rate was massive. Through the roof. It was ten times the number of actual sales we were making, sometimes even far more than that.
What's the explanation? What did we do wrong that made people pirate our music rather than buy it? They clearly wanted it since they had tracked it down on Bittorrent, which was much more work than finding it on our site.
My answer? You can't compete with free. People have got used to getting their music for free, without any real fear of legal consequences, and you can't - for the most part - get them to pay again. You see the symptoms on Slashdot: endless justifications - it used to be "I would buy it if it didn't have DRM", but music stopped having DRM so then it was "I'd buy it if the quality was better", and now that the quality's better it's "I'd buy it if it were 50c instead of $0.99". Will it end if music hits $0.50? Of course not. Because free is still better and there's always something to complain about.
I think a lot of people are assuming this would have to be a remote kill switch, when actually it would make much more sense used as an advisory: the signal tells the car's on-board computer "we recommend you switch the engine off now"/"we recommend you switch the engine on now" and the car's computer makes the actual decisions. (It would seem even more sensible if the light just told the waiting cars what was going on and left all the decisions to the car.)
If it's advisory rather than a kill signal the problems all go away: How do you start everyone's car up to let an emergency vehicle through? The driver just starts it again and moves, like they do now. Battery problems can all be avoided by the car monitoring the battery level. The car's designers can tell the computer how long the wait needs to be for it to be worth switching off. And even if they did totally fail to sign the authenticate - which would be silly - it wouldn't be much use to carjackers if the engine could only be turned off if you had stopped and put on the handbrake.
Well I wish you all the success in the world, but the article - and particularly, surprise-surprise, the /. summary - are extremely disingenuous. Let me quote from Spolsky's article:
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
[...]
First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away working code.
With a few name changes that could be the story in the article and your explanation of why it was necessary. There doesn't seem to be any example here of "when rewriting makes sense" - you did exactly what Spolsky said not to do and now, well, no-one on Slashdot even seems to have heard of you.
People forget that "Russia" is a fairly recent construct, spanning very diverse geographic areas and many ethnicities (at least originally).
Russia as a country, yes - but the area that is now Russia has been inhabited for a very long time and has not been peaceful for much of it.
I quite like the way that the article claims that it shows an exception to Spolsky's rule, but actually isn't at all: they claim to have started off as a successful CMS company with "big name" clients, embarked on a rewrite that took them off the market for two years and ended up as a tiny player with "more than two hundred web projects [...] in Norway".
As far as I can tell this is a project that went exactly the way Spolsky predicted: they had a decent product, they embarked on a rewrite that took longer than they expected and they lost the market by doing it.
> But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should.
Why the hell SHOULDN'T they be held to a higher standard? They are a huge corporation that has a huge amount of money therefore they are hold a huge amount of power. They should be at a MUCH higher standard. As an individual I have the power and money that I could probably ruin the environment for my neighborhood... in this case BP holds the money, power, and equipment to ruin an entire coastline.
They should, and what you're saying isn't unreasonable. I'll admit straight up that I don't know the facts of this case so I'm responding in theory when I say:
Even if they held themselves to the highest possible standards, this would still happen eventually.
There are so many things that can go wrong that it is an inevitable byproduct of drilling that at some point, no matter how much we try to avoid it, there will be an environmental disaster. This isn't to try to excuse BP, just pointing it out: there is no standard high enough to stop this happening at some point.
It's what Nassim Taleb called "black swan dynamics"; you never expect to see a black swan, so you don't plan for one - you can't plan for what is totally beyond the realm of possibility, or at least of possibility that you are aware of. But then one comes along - a tropical storm hits the rig that's just been deactivated by a misfired EMP - and you're suddenly way outside everything you've planned for and it all goes wrong.
There is a certain extent to which that is true, but note the comments I made above regarding the fact that if the accused introduces a defence of legitimate reason it is up to the prosecution to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defence does not apply. The change of the burden of proof is thus very slight, amounting really only to the idea that someone who is knowingly supplying information to terrorists to help them commit terrorist acts is doing it with the intention that they commit those acts - it would be difficult to imagine a realistic situation where that assumption was not valid.
Regarding the law on glorifying terrorism - this never actually made it through the House of Lords in its original form. It was rewritten and forms part of the Terrorism Act 2006, where it serves to make it a crime to glorify acts of terrorism in order to encourage the commission of further acts of terrorism. The second part of the law changes its extent hugely - it's now really a law on incitement. You can honour previous acts - indeed a major concern for the Lords was not preventing the Irish from honouring their resistance movement - what you cannot do is suggest that the acts be repeated.
I suspect that whether or not he sympathised with the terrorists is irrelevant; he deliberately collated and sold information to be used in the preparation of terrorist acts.
To rather immodestly quote from myself, the test is whether or not he provided information that:
- Would provide practical assistance in the commission of terrorist offences
- Was intended to be used to assist in the preparation or perpetration of an act of terrorism
It appears that he was deliberately writing and selling bomb-making information to terrorists, and whatever his sympathies were this definitely fills both criteria.
As I explained, it criminalises the possession of information where the possession of that information is part of a deliberate attempt to assist in the commission of terrorist acts.
And the article you cite does not involve the law on knives, it involves the law on offensive weapons - these are two separate areas of law in Britain. The offensive weapon test is primarily one of behaviour; the fact that he was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon, plus that he was pulled over and that his car was searched, would imply that the reason for this was that he was being either violent or threatening violence beforehand. This is just speculation, but what is certain is that he was not convicted under knife laws.
As I've explained above, this law does not criminalise the possession of information. It is only an offence to gather information that would help in the commission of an act of terrorism with the intention that it be used to assist the commission of this act. I think we can all agree that people who are part of a plot to perpetrate acts of terrorism should be jailed.
convicted of three counts of possessing material useful for acts of terror
Can sombody explain why this is illegal? Every highschool student taking a chemistry course 'possesses material useful for acts of terror'. The fact that somebody owns something that COULD be used for some illegal activity doesn't make that person a criminal. Else, everybody would be in prison. Have you ever used a knife? A car? A computer? Thought so.
The conviction in this case was almost certainly (although I can't find confirmation) under section 57 or 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. These provide, respectively, that a person is guilty of an offence if he:
- "possesses an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that his possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism."
- "collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or [...] possesses a document or record containing information of that kind."
A legitimate reason to own the information is a defence to both of these charges - so if you're studying chemistry, for example, and your research involves making explosives you aren't guilty under this act. To make it clear what we're talking about, this is the same formulation as is used for knife crime in the UK - you can carry any knife you want as long as you actually need it, but you can't just carry a knife around because you want to. The fact that most people aren't even aware that there is a legal question operating when they carry their gardening tools illustrates the fact that the distinction works quite well.
Since British law is defined largely by judicial precedent it is important to bear in mind that this act was based on the provisions of the Criminal Justice act 1994; the effect of this is to mean that the decision in Rowe (2007) is likely to be binding, i.e. that if the defendant introduces evidence of a non-terrorist motive it is up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this defence is not valid.
Note also KvR (2008) where it was held that only a document:
- Providing practical assistance in the commission of terrorist offences, and
- That was intended to be used to assist in the preparation or perpetration of an act of terrorism
will lead to a conviction.
The effect of these precedents is that this law allows the conviction of people who deliberately gather information to aid in the commission of terrorist attacks - it does not make mere possession of the information a crime, since intent is also important. It seems to me entirely reasonable that people who abet terrorists should be guilty of an offence.
Well, compared to the US continental Europe continues to have longer holidays, cheaper per capita healthcare, a healthier, happier, more active and longer-lived population and a comparable (some countries higher, some lower) GDP per capita. And now they can add to that a lower rate of unemployment. So pretty well really.
Incidentally, unlike what the submitter seems to think, higher education in Western Europe is normally 4-years.
I can't wait to see who comes out of the woodwork to defend Amazon on this one, and what sort of faux reasoning they use to do it.
Well I will for one, because I don't see where Amazon have done anything wrong. Point out to me where the "faux reasoning is".
Here are the facts of this:
- The data is anonymized
- The data is only published in aggregate
- The change was publicised in the Kindle forums, by email and in a new manual being sent out
- The change only sends highlights, not annotations. (The Techdirt writer seems to have misunderstood the article they cited and invented the annotations part)
- The setting defaults to off.
So Amazon have offered to collect anonymized data, with the user's express permission, which would then only be published in aggregate. And to make sure the users understand what this means they are sending out an updated manual with an explanation.
This is exactly what they should have done. They want to introduce a cool new feature and they're doing it in a way that doesn't hurt anyone. This is the behaviour that we want from retailers. Unfortunately, the fact that they did everything right doesn't really matter because there are so many people - the writers of the Techdirt article, the submitter, the Slashdot editors and you - who are so keen to rant about big business violating their right to privacy that they don't even stop to check what's actually going on. If you'd clicked through the actual articles first you would know that there's nothing to be worried about.
Why should I care that Amazon builds an aggregate summary?
What if your (admittedly stupid) note said "This passage is exactly what happened to my wife, Jenny Smith, last night at our home address of 12345 Stupid street in Stupidville."? Or more likely, you annotated someone's name and address or phone number in your kindle because you had it with you by the pool, but you didn't have your phone.
Nothing. Because that scenario cannot possible happen and is simply paranoia.
Everyone is trying to come up with scenarios that turn this into an invasion of the user's privacy, but if you take a look at the facts rather than assuming the worst you'll see that there is no privacy concern at all:
- The data is anonymized
- The data is only published in aggregate
- The change was publicised in the Kindle forums, by email and in a new manual being sent out
- The change only sends highlights, not annotations. (The Techdirt writer seems to have misunderstood the article they cited and invented the annotations part)
- The setting defaults to off.
If you can come up with a possible invasion of the user's privacy based on the actual change Amazon have made I'll be impressed.
A reasonable person? Did I mistype the URL...?!
Good points well made.
I think you're deliberately ignoring the point he's making. While there are some people who want to buy the music and can't that isn't a factor for the vast majority of people. If you go to piratebay right now you'll find that there are 8,000 people seeding Lady Gaga's latest album. Don't let's be silly: if one in every hundred of them had even considered buying the music then I would be amazed, and yet the album is widely available, including on iTunes with no DRM.
I personally don't think there's any setup or any price point that will get people who want the music for free to pay for it. I'll explain why.
Last year I was working for a small, independent record company. We sold relaxing music and music to meditate to - not exactly the prime target for piracy. And we did everything we could to make buying it a pleasant experience! You could listen to a full-length preview before buying, there was no DRM, you could download as many times as you wanted, we sold to anywhere in the world that the credit card company would take payment from and the price wasn't exorbitant: 0.50€ per track or either 3€/5€ per album depending on whether it was one or two discs. And guess what? The piracy rate was massive. Through the roof. It was ten times the number of actual sales we were making, sometimes even far more than that.
What's the explanation? What did we do wrong that made people pirate our music rather than buy it? They clearly wanted it since they had tracked it down on Bittorrent, which was much more work than finding it on our site.
My answer? You can't compete with free. People have got used to getting their music for free, without any real fear of legal consequences, and you can't - for the most part - get them to pay again. You see the symptoms on Slashdot: endless justifications - it used to be "I would buy it if it didn't have DRM", but music stopped having DRM so then it was "I'd buy it if the quality was better", and now that the quality's better it's "I'd buy it if it were 50c instead of $0.99". Will it end if music hits $0.50? Of course not. Because free is still better and there's always something to complain about.
This isn't to say that you, or any particular person, is downloading illegally for purely selfish reasons. You may well be acting totally reasonably, I don't know. But I do know - from personal experience as well as just through basic reasoning - that that isn't the case for all, or even many of the pirates. The main motivator, as always, is selfishness.
This does raise a good question: What is a necessary amount of porn?
For Wikimedia surely it is the same as the necessary amount of anything: the amount that is required to support its mission:
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. Uploaded files can be used as local files by other projects on the Wikimedia servers, including Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary.
I don't think the problem of unnecessary images is limited to porn - although I do think that the number of pornographic images is particularly high in comparison to the number that are used in any meaningful way by the Wikimedia sites, so it's perhaps not a bad place to start "trimming down".
I don't think this has to turn into a discussion about morality unless people want it to. Wikimedia is not a free image host and so there is no reason for it to host swathes of images with only nominal involvement in its mission.
Notably the jurors weren't given a definition of authorized persons. I'd say that's pretty substantial to his own defence as I recall.
If you don't feel that anyone is properly authorized to receive the information you possess or that it will cause harm, then "just do it, its your employer" isn't good enough.
Should they have been given a definition though? What does and doesn't constitute authorization in a particular case seems like a question of fact not of law, and it is the jury's role to determine facts - they only have to receive instruction regarding what the law says.
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
While his analogy is far from perfect I think it does a better job than you give it credit for. I certainly don't agree at all with your suggestion that because electronic books are not consumed to the same degree as printed ones it shows that they value the cost of production, and I've highlighted in the quote above where I think you go slightly wide of the mark.
You see, demand is not just a function of the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives; one very important factor is the complements of the product - this refers to those things that you usually buy to use in conjunction with the product; cars and petrol are complements, as are computer hardware and computer software. One massive problem for ebooks is that the complements of ebooks are expensive - really you need a dedicated ebook reader, and these are expensive and not widely owned. This has the effect of depressing demand.
Of course this doesn't mean that the cost of production has absolutely no effect - people don't like to feel like they're being ripped off and will avoid buying things if they think the markup is excessive. But the GP's point is sound - people don't base purchasing decisions on the cost of production; they generally don't have any idea what that is.
There is particle-per-million level below which the Boeing bulletin fails to be applicable
There's a reason that that bulletin doesn't mention the level - it was only agreed halfway through last week. So you have to ask yourself two things:
- Was it really "unwarranted" to halt flights before there was a figure available for a safe concentration of ash?
- Could the fact that your otherwise extremely (some would say overly) decisive answer weasles the concentration levels by saying that it "appears" that "most" of Europe was at safe levels have anything to do with the fact that mapping the concentration of the particles, which don't show up on radar, requires specially equipped planes making regular flights through the ash to detect the concentration levels, and that the slow and fairly short-range nature of this process leaves a large margin-of-error?
When they took the decision they:
- Didn't know what level was safe
- Didn't know what the ash concentration was
- Knew that they could not map the cloud, which was changing rapidly, in real-time.
Fortunately I'm sure they were fully aware that ill-informed Slashdotters would make blanket pronouncements about how they were wrong.