I will start with the assumption that this data center must be non-homogeneous. Get an assessment of all the projects that are using the current system you're going to replace (you know, the one with 36 million lines of COBOL code?). Because the number one priority of the customer (other projects) is going to be the lengthy transition from that to current technology. Prepare yourselves for this: Some of the projects aren't going to have any funding to do jackshit. Which means that the awesome spaghetti coded current system that's held together with COBOL duct tape needs to remain intact in some form. Not ideal situation but an uncomfortable truth. I'm thinking you would want to set aside 10% or $50 million or so for this (just throwing out a figure).
Well, if you're a fan of the original game, this news might be good. Instead of the port of a game you've already played they seem to imply they've refocused on The Witcher 2:
According to a number of reports, a separate spinoff game in the Witcher franchise has also been canceled, although the main followup, The Witcher 2, remains on track for PC and consoles, with CD Projekt dedicating more staff to the game.
So depending on your view of how enjoyable spin-offs and ports to consoles are to play/replay, this could be positive news. It also might be one of those rare signs that CD Projekt isn't just concerned about money money money and are willing to sack a port for fear of quality or schedule slippages. It's rare to see that, as the port is a pretty sure bet for some income on something you've already done. I also sympathize with CD Projekt as they've probably got little cash to afford a schedule slip and it's better they kill it now than later.
Ugh, very well. They're referred to as "portion limits" and the safe range has always been 10%-ish. Check out what Stanford advises it's students (and this is in academia, mind you):
up to 10% or 1,000 words, whichever is less, of a copyrighted text work. For example, an entire poem of less than 250 words may be used, but no more than three poems by one poet, or five poems by different poets from any anthology.
up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work.
up to 10% or three minutes, whichever is less, of a copyrighted motion media work (for example, an animation, video or film image).
a photograph or illustration may be used in its entirety but no more than five images by an artist or photographer may be reproduced. When using photographs and illustrations from a published collective work, no more than 10% or 15 images, whichever is less. Or,
up to 10% or 2,500 fields or cell entries, whichever is less, from a copyrighted database or data table may be reproduced. A field entry is defined as a specific item of information, such as a name or Social Security number in a record of a database file. A cell entry is defined as the intersection where a row and a column meet on a spreadsheet.
I'm sorry but what Mr. Lessig did from 11:00-11:49 was in my mind a ballsy use of a song... about 35% of that song was used. That's a big warning bell to me.
Good luck to him, I hope there aren't other infractions later on. Wikipedia uses the 10% rule, that's how I know about it. I'm not a lawyer and I'll punch you if you call me one but I fear he's going to run into trouble on this one.
He uses a 50 second clip of The Muppet Show's "Ma Na Ma Na" which is a very short skit track of about 2:29 minutes. He shows it being set to an Anime Music video mash up of Vampire Hunter D Blood Lust. I can't seem to track down who would be the rights holder of this track but I'm guessing it's Warner. I have only seen 15 minutes of his presentation so it's possible there are other violations.
Larry: Non-free Audio Fair Use for music constitutes 10% or 30 seconds of a song (which ever is shorter) and it must be in a low enough quality (didn't investigate the audio on this video to find out if it satisfied Ogg quality of 0 rule). For the rest of the 15 minutes I saw you looked fine but this stuck out at me. Pick your battles wisely and adhere to this rule next time.
Prohibition doesn't work. Proxies make censorship such as this woefully ineffective at doing what they want it to. Free speech trumps their nanny state. Waste of money during a recession. The flaws are numerous and the sheer quantity of capital likely diverted from productive uses in order to enforce morality is offensive.
There are very powerful Native American tribes in Minnesota--particularly around the Twin Cities. I should state that having lived there for 21 years, I never once heard of anything negative from them... until now. I think this may have more to do with ensuring that their clientele (casino gambling is only legal on Reservations and Native American run businesses) remain faithful to their facilities. Having played a little Full Tilt poker myself, I think they may have noticed a tiny drop in profits in the past decade due to the internet.
I have no evidence linking this but I think that everyone knows this won't stop online gambling in the state. I think this may just be effective lobbying of another interest group to protect its profits.
To give you an idea, every adult member of the tribe (Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota) that owns Mystic Lake near the twin cities was paid out $400k in 1994. It would be in their interests to keep the surrounding area contributing to that sum.
There are casinos in Minnesota only on Native American Reservations or run by Native American Tribes. Look up Mystic Lake Casino, Jackpot Junction, etc. See here.
Does the state even have the authority to do this?
Once upon a time, when power was distributed more to the state (you know, how the founders wanted it) I'm sure it would have been possible. Not so certain now...
My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around.
I don't mean to attack you or your father (or even the region as a whole) but how self sustaining is strip mining? I mean, has a generation or two of jobs and income been worth something that will forever be exposed rock? It's plain to me that even the timber industry would have lasted longer.
I don't want to sound preachy a la The Giving Tree (I realize I do) but our ancestors saw those mountain top ecosystems as worthless... and now maybe we see them differently. Bolivia should be wary of losing their salt flats and deserts even if they think they are wastelands. Limit strip mining and plan for the future, even if it's just setting aside funds to deal with inevitable environmental impacts. Even if it's using 10% of your strip mining income to plant/repair forests in other parts of your state.
The money is drying up for West Virginia and what is left? West Virginia has many areas where there once were trees and snow and water runoff but for the sake of a few decades of jobs there is nothing ow but heavy metals in their drinking water... possibly nothing for a long time. The world has been making poor decisions for far too long, think about your future.
Support is good. But maybe you should also be sending them a warning of what coal mining has done to your area?
If you're from Virginia, have you had a chance to witness any of the mountain top removal strip mining operations in West Virginia? There's an informative series on it at VBS.tv. Don't worry, they don't leave the non-fertile shale rock bare after they're done. They spray a grass seed in mutant green nitrogen fertilizer shit all over it so it can look unnatural for a year before transforming back into a Martian landscape.
"The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia," said Saul Villegas, head of a division in Comibol that oversees lithium extraction. "Maybe there could be the possibility of foreigners accepted as minority partners, or better yet, as our clients."
Well, I'm glad somebody's thinking with their head.
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator. All too often third world countries squander their resources on some nationalistic project in their capital or some aggressive military campaign when they don't even have electricity, utilities, law enforcement or running water in half their country.
Neither articles seemed to mention much about pollution. I also hope that they move forward with the caution of the scars of pollution that mining has left on other countries--even Canada. My coworker once commented at lunch (around the time of the Olympics) that we aren't exporting jobs or industry to China but rather just our pollution. Because it's cheaper to pollute there and the government doesn't care. Take precautions, Bolivia, develop standards now! Don't squander your resources!
Yes, this is a very difficult thing to overcome with providing content--especially high bandwidth content like video.
But maybe the third world should be looked at more like consumers with a lot of time and little money? I know it's horribly ridiculous for me to think that I work more than a poor Chinese man working 15 hours a day because I don't. But if you want to think of it as a viable market, these people have time to offer a business. So the obstacle becomes not how we can get them to click on our Amazon.com link and buy overpriced shoes like we do with fatass Americans (calm down, I am one)? But instead how can we ask them to perform some very menial task on the computer with a reward of our services?
So maybe your company would like image or video corpora tagged with words in a different language and background of a different culture? Those are becoming more of an asset. Or perhaps you want to boost a wiki in a particular language? Or perhaps you could offer premiums on translations and bother to attempt teach them a second language through cheap software? Ontology building services? Or treating each small region as a zone by population and blocking IPs until someone or some team completes rent-a-coder like challenges? Then you could host their name(s) on sites where people now have access as a kind of local hero style recognition? I mean, there are a number of things you could do with simple peer review that would keep a steady income of services which equate to time from these people. Some are more realistic than others. Who knows, you could inadvertently better their lives by doing some of the above?
Why not just change the name and the story and release it?
Maybe because they were counting on the realism? And, dare I say it, the controversial attention was its biggest guarantee to sell?
I haven't read any of the articles linked above but I submitted it this morning and found a quote from a developer making it sound like information had been gathered for the game from all parties involved in the conflict.
Also, Dan Rosenthal, a blogger and veteran of the Iraq War, gave this insightful analysis of Konami's situation:
In order to make the game fun... it simply has to sacrifice some amount of realism for fun factor. When you do that with a war game based on a real war, with real people, you run the risk of dishonoring their memories and sacrifices, and I think that this game has a dangerous potential to do that.
But are there any plausible and non-nefarious explanations for this turn of events? I mean, is meeting with the defendant's attorneys privately, sealing the record of what went on there, and then sealing the plaintiff's motion a relatively normal thing? Or is it as weird and skeezy as it sounds?
Allow me to explain. It's like a child who has a new toy. The child must take the toy everywhere and show it to everyone and make the toy do everything it can to impress everyone. Similarly the RIAA has a new toy (the court) that they recently acquired... and to show it off they have made it censor just about everything. Even briefs of motions for class action when you can find the full complaint in its entirety online.
Why? Because they can. Remember, they lost to her last year so they've got some face to save in this class action. Or at the least just keep it out of the eye of the public--don't want those sheep getting all uppity.
We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out.
Huh, apparently some of us learned about it differently than others. I seem to recall it having to do with water and carbon dioxide in and some extra oxygen left over?
-Building tall buildings underground, instead of above.
They're a coffin if there's a fire on the ground floor and you're on floor -50? Flooding and water damage? More work to displace 50 stories of earth, rock and shale than 50 stories of air?
-Requiring high altitudes for all planes, military or civilian
I think these are in place. Last time I saw a flight map for a city, there were huge no fly circles around it. I'm not a pilot but I think that's been around for a while.
producing auto-shoot auto-aim turrets around the ciy with no warning shots.
Is this a joke?
Include parashoots as standard emergency materials for skyscrapers?
There are no easy exits from a skyscraper nor should there be. This wouldn't have saved many lives... if any at all. People would be too scared to jump until absolutely sure the planes are going to hit them.
I do not think these people were overreacting. Although I feel that their fears were statistically misplaced, I more than likely would have opted to "take a brisk walk in the park" upon seeing that uncommon event out my window.
"This could be the next generation of low-cost storage," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts.
So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data.
You guys remember that cool new technology that was going to revolutionize the way we store data? The one that was just 11 years away? Well we could be one year closer to that realization today perhaps maybe.
People that know more than you and might even be experts possibly speculated that this might be a reality within some amount of time. It brings me great joy to announce to you that now we're maybe in the ballpark. You yourself have the chance to be alive when this thing hits. And it could be big.
Perhaps tomorrow it will be in my computer or the fabrication process might not ever be cheaply implemented and then we could wait longer than five years possibly. "It's so tantalizingly exciting but still just over that next hill we think," is what I said last year and now look. I may have been correct or at least within one standard deviation of time for this product.
This is exciting to the point that I very well may scream. I think now is the time to possibly ask yourself: are you ready for what might turn into something big? Because it could be around the corner.
To the Catsouras family, I am deeply sorry for your loss, but your score to settle is not with the nebulous force of users that are the internet but with the Orange County Police Department.
The family filed a formal complaint about the photos' release, and three months later, they received a letter of apology from the California Highway Patrol. An investigation had revealed that the images, taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response, had been leaked by two CHP dispatchers: Thomas O'Donnell, 39, and Aaron Reich, 30. O'Donnell, a 19-year CHP veteran, had been suspended for 25 days without pay. Reich quit soon after -- for unrelated reasons, says his lawyer. Both men declined requests for comment, but Jon Schlueter, Reich's attorney, says his client sent the images to relatives and friends to warn them of the dangers of the road. "It was a cautionary tale," Schlueter says. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly -- that's a public service."
If that does not satisfy you, I'm not sure what will. Sue your police department for large sums of money but it won't take the pictures off the internet.
Today the entire family is in therapy, and they've taken out a second mortgage to cover the costs of their legal battle.
Your life up until this accident has sounded fairly idyllic and easy. Apparently this has been a very rude wake up call. Your daughter took your hundred thousand dollar car for a 100mph tirade through town with cocaine in her system. We all do stupid things, some more stupid than others. She made a series of very serious mistakes and luckily no one else was killed or badly hurt.
If you do not put this behind you, it will consume you and your lives and her mistakes will end up ruining not just her life but yours. Mourn her, celebrate her life, remember her but in the end move on.
In my opinion, it would be more heroic of you not to spend a second mortgage suing your police department but instead using that money to create awareness of hazardous driving, starting a college fund in her name, donating that money to charity in her name or doing something less destructive with it in her name. Right now, the public's memory of your daughter is for the wrong reasons and you're just exacerbating the situation. Be above that. Change things for the better and remember her fondly, not as a never ending court case.
Disclaimer: I have an account on Wikipedia by the same name as my Slashdot username and have contributed fair use music clips.
You may be able to point to Wikipedia not being open-minded. From the purging of webcomics to being attacked by the co-founder, you may be able to point to things they've done that seem really really controlling and closed minded.
They have established a totally free online encyclopedia. No ads. They have had to balance quality with quantity. They have established rules that define what is encyclopedic. I would wager that in the past year they are more linked to than any other domain on Slashdot. Their Google rankings reflect this.
If you are criticizing them because they are not as free and open as Richard Stallman, fine. But know that I have downloaded their articles and put them into a MySQL database at home and you are free to access them online and use them as an invaluable resource. Would they have been as successful if they had taken a more open and free stance? They walk a fine line between their control and community control and I think they've done a fine job with their success as evidence.
iI is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter but easy to see how they lose.
It is easy to see how they lose if they don't defend it also.
Ok, not to defend them but just to get you thinking about their perspective, they are attempting to protect their name. Not profits or anything really evil, just their name.
What would you say if I wrote a mischievous program and hosted it at iwikipedia.org? Wouldn't you want them to be able to go after me and shut me down?
Ok, so that's an extreme case... now imagine I use that same domain to host a mirror of Wikipedia.org and push to steal their market share. I advertise and insert tiny little advertisements and I am commercial. And suddenly the good folks at Wikipedia are out of luck. Wouldn't you want them to be able to protect that which they've established?
So for malicious intent or even just to protect what they've created, I think they should be able to sue wikipediaart.org but I would hope they could just ask them to change the name to wikiartrights.org or artonwikis.org?
They probably would qualify for fair use if the site wasn't a wikimedia site. In this case, Wikipedia is concerned about people misunderstanding that the site is hosted and part of the wikipedia suite (or commons or whatever they call it). I think they would have no problem with the name if it had a different layout/format or if the name was different and it looked just like that. I don't know how this qualifies as fair use and Wikipedia may have a point in their fear that people would misunderstand the site.
When Watchmen shot out of the blocks to an opening weekend of $55m in the US back at the start of March, there were some mutterings of discontent that this wasn't quite the kind of number that Warner Bros was looking for.
Well, to be fair, stateside that puts it at #6 for opening weekend for a Rated R movie. And 64th overall. Worldwide so far it's sitting at $180+ million and, like the article said, DVD and Blu-Ray sales often make a big difference.
I've heard that the estimated budget was $100 million. So they've made $80 million over that... so what is the problem exactly? You've made the #6 most popular R rated movie by opening weekend in the United States. Job well done. I assure you that DVD and Blu-Ray sales will net you a lot of money. Especially with that Curse of the Black Freighter stuff you withheld from the movie.
It was always going to be a harder sell than a Batman or Spider-man movie...
For the love of all things binary, I thought it was common knowledge that you cannot compare rated R movies to PG-13 movies. Every single Batman & Spider-man movie has been rated below R.
This raises the larger question of who really owns a commercial open software application: the corporate copyright holders, or the community?
No one. Or, perhaps, everyone. That's kind of the point, isn't it? It isn't locked into anyone's individual grip.
"Open source" is just too broad a term to address this way. You would have to look at individual licenses. On top of that, you have things like Open Office, which is "open source" but clearly controlled by Sun (or Oracle now I guess).
While you claim you can always fork an open source project, it's not always that simple. Especially in massive open source efforts (like Linux) where they have contacts and knowledge that are vital to the project. It isn't possession or control or fiscal ownership but instead a name you've made for yourself as the Father of some project that gives you "ownership" or "rights." And usually the market share of your user base reflects that.
You'd be surprised how many of your open source solutions are actually controlled and operated by a single entity. And this is great for those products because the entity is usually donating a lot of time and money to it. Should the entity ever drop out, that's when someone can pick up the cross and take it a new direction with everyone helping.
At BYU. That's not a respectable title for this kind of speculation in my opinion. From his homepage:
* BFA, Music (Vocal Performance), Marshall University, 1997. (Voice Teacher: Paul Balshaw)
* PhD, Instructional Psychology and Technology, Brigham Young University, 2000.
* Postdoctoral Fellowship, Instructional Technology, Utah State University, 2001.
Judging from his brief bio, this is something he'd like to see with little or no evidence to back it up. Good luck, man, I didn't find much backing this up other than you would like it.
Wiley is one part Nostradamus and nine parts revolutionary, an educational evangelist who preaches...
You see, Ballmer was supposed to get up at 3am and bid $7,400,000,001.00 for Sun on CorporateBay.com. Instead he just threw a chair at his alarm clock and went back to sleep.
Same thing happened to me with a $1.5 thousand Rickenbacker 4003 bass two weeks ago. And now I regret not having that sweet sweet axe in my hands right now just as much as Ballmer regrets not being able to fire whole divisions when their managers don't know the entire lyrics to American Pie by Don McLean. We're both only human, buddy.
What exactly are the "pirates" pirating? Does mere communications count as "piracy" now?
They may be extending an older term referred to as Pirate Radio which referred to the 'piracy' of radio frequencies. But how can you steal a frequency?:)
Keep in mind this term was around long before internet piracy and I'm guessing they are extending this concept to illicit satellite usage that is very much like a broadcasting communication technology. The military might not be needing these satellites to remain silent just like the FCC doesn't absolutely need silence on all non-allocated radio bands.
Remember, almost every word has baggage before you pick it up and use it. Even worse is the fact that that baggage is very much subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
I will start with the assumption that this data center must be non-homogeneous. Get an assessment of all the projects that are using the current system you're going to replace (you know, the one with 36 million lines of COBOL code?). Because the number one priority of the customer (other projects) is going to be the lengthy transition from that to current technology. Prepare yourselves for this: Some of the projects aren't going to have any funding to do jackshit. Which means that the awesome spaghetti coded current system that's held together with COBOL duct tape needs to remain intact in some form. Not ideal situation but an uncomfortable truth. I'm thinking you would want to set aside 10% or $50 million or so for this (just throwing out a figure).
According to a number of reports, a separate spinoff game in the Witcher franchise has also been canceled, although the main followup, The Witcher 2, remains on track for PC and consoles, with CD Projekt dedicating more staff to the game.
So depending on your view of how enjoyable spin-offs and ports to consoles are to play/replay, this could be positive news. It also might be one of those rare signs that CD Projekt isn't just concerned about money money money and are willing to sack a port for fear of quality or schedule slippages. It's rare to see that, as the port is a pretty sure bet for some income on something you've already done. I also sympathize with CD Projekt as they've probably got little cash to afford a schedule slip and it's better they kill it now than later.
Ugh, very well. They're referred to as "portion limits" and the safe range has always been 10%-ish. Check out what Stanford advises it's students (and this is in academia, mind you):
up to 10% or 1,000 words, whichever is less, of a copyrighted text work. For example, an entire poem of less than 250 words may be used, but no more than three poems by one poet, or five poems by different poets from any anthology.
up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work.
up to 10% or three minutes, whichever is less, of a copyrighted motion media work (for example, an animation, video or film image).
a photograph or illustration may be used in its entirety but no more than five images by an artist or photographer may be reproduced. When using photographs and illustrations from a published collective work, no more than 10% or 15 images, whichever is less. Or,
up to 10% or 2,500 fields or cell entries, whichever is less, from a copyrighted database or data table may be reproduced. A field entry is defined as a specific item of information, such as a name or Social Security number in a record of a database file. A cell entry is defined as the intersection where a row and a column meet on a spreadsheet.
I'm sorry but what Mr. Lessig did from 11:00-11:49 was in my mind a ballsy use of a song ... about 35% of that song was used. That's a big warning bell to me.
Good luck to him, I hope there aren't other infractions later on. Wikipedia uses the 10% rule, that's how I know about it. I'm not a lawyer and I'll punch you if you call me one but I fear he's going to run into trouble on this one.
Best of luck to you Larry.
He uses a 50 second clip of The Muppet Show's "Ma Na Ma Na" which is a very short skit track of about 2:29 minutes. He shows it being set to an Anime Music video mash up of Vampire Hunter D Blood Lust. I can't seem to track down who would be the rights holder of this track but I'm guessing it's Warner. I have only seen 15 minutes of his presentation so it's possible there are other violations.
Larry: Non-free Audio Fair Use for music constitutes 10% or 30 seconds of a song (which ever is shorter) and it must be in a low enough quality (didn't investigate the audio on this video to find out if it satisfied Ogg quality of 0 rule). For the rest of the 15 minutes I saw you looked fine but this stuck out at me. Pick your battles wisely and adhere to this rule next time.
Too soon?
Prohibition doesn't work. Proxies make censorship such as this woefully ineffective at doing what they want it to. Free speech trumps their nanny state. Waste of money during a recession. The flaws are numerous and the sheer quantity of capital likely diverted from productive uses in order to enforce morality is offensive.
There are very powerful Native American tribes in Minnesota--particularly around the Twin Cities. I should state that having lived there for 21 years, I never once heard of anything negative from them ... until now. I think this may have more to do with ensuring that their clientele (casino gambling is only legal on Reservations and Native American run businesses) remain faithful to their facilities. Having played a little Full Tilt poker myself, I think they may have noticed a tiny drop in profits in the past decade due to the internet.
I have no evidence linking this but I think that everyone knows this won't stop online gambling in the state. I think this may just be effective lobbying of another interest group to protect its profits.
To give you an idea, every adult member of the tribe (Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota) that owns Mystic Lake near the twin cities was paid out $400k in 1994. It would be in their interests to keep the surrounding area contributing to that sum.
Does the state even have the authority to do this?
Once upon a time, when power was distributed more to the state (you know, how the founders wanted it) I'm sure it would have been possible. Not so certain now ...
My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around.
I don't mean to attack you or your father (or even the region as a whole) but how self sustaining is strip mining? I mean, has a generation or two of jobs and income been worth something that will forever be exposed rock? It's plain to me that even the timber industry would have lasted longer.
... and now maybe we see them differently. Bolivia should be wary of losing their salt flats and deserts even if they think they are wastelands. Limit strip mining and plan for the future, even if it's just setting aside funds to deal with inevitable environmental impacts. Even if it's using 10% of your strip mining income to plant/repair forests in other parts of your state.
... possibly nothing for a long time. The world has been making poor decisions for far too long, think about your future.
I don't want to sound preachy a la The Giving Tree (I realize I do) but our ancestors saw those mountain top ecosystems as worthless
The money is drying up for West Virginia and what is left? West Virginia has many areas where there once were trees and snow and water runoff but for the sake of a few decades of jobs there is nothing ow but heavy metals in their drinking water
Support is good. But maybe you should also be sending them a warning of what coal mining has done to your area?
If you're from Virginia, have you had a chance to witness any of the mountain top removal strip mining operations in West Virginia? There's an informative series on it at VBS.tv. Don't worry, they don't leave the non-fertile shale rock bare after they're done. They spray a grass seed in mutant green nitrogen fertilizer shit all over it so it can look unnatural for a year before transforming back into a Martian landscape.
"The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia," said Saul Villegas, head of a division in Comibol that oversees lithium extraction. "Maybe there could be the possibility of foreigners accepted as minority partners, or better yet, as our clients."
Well, I'm glad somebody's thinking with their head.
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator. All too often third world countries squander their resources on some nationalistic project in their capital or some aggressive military campaign when they don't even have electricity, utilities, law enforcement or running water in half their country.
Neither articles seemed to mention much about pollution. I also hope that they move forward with the caution of the scars of pollution that mining has left on other countries--even Canada. My coworker once commented at lunch (around the time of the Olympics) that we aren't exporting jobs or industry to China but rather just our pollution. Because it's cheaper to pollute there and the government doesn't care. Take precautions, Bolivia, develop standards now! Don't squander your resources!
Yes, this is a very difficult thing to overcome with providing content--especially high bandwidth content like video.
But maybe the third world should be looked at more like consumers with a lot of time and little money? I know it's horribly ridiculous for me to think that I work more than a poor Chinese man working 15 hours a day because I don't. But if you want to think of it as a viable market, these people have time to offer a business. So the obstacle becomes not how we can get them to click on our Amazon.com link and buy overpriced shoes like we do with fatass Americans (calm down, I am one)? But instead how can we ask them to perform some very menial task on the computer with a reward of our services?
So maybe your company would like image or video corpora tagged with words in a different language and background of a different culture? Those are becoming more of an asset. Or perhaps you want to boost a wiki in a particular language? Or perhaps you could offer premiums on translations and bother to attempt teach them a second language through cheap software? Ontology building services? Or treating each small region as a zone by population and blocking IPs until someone or some team completes rent-a-coder like challenges? Then you could host their name(s) on sites where people now have access as a kind of local hero style recognition? I mean, there are a number of things you could do with simple peer review that would keep a steady income of services which equate to time from these people. Some are more realistic than others. Who knows, you could inadvertently better their lives by doing some of the above?
Why not just change the name and the story and release it?
Maybe because they were counting on the realism? And, dare I say it, the controversial attention was its biggest guarantee to sell?
I haven't read any of the articles linked above but I submitted it this morning and found a quote from a developer making it sound like information had been gathered for the game from all parties involved in the conflict.
Also, Dan Rosenthal, a blogger and veteran of the Iraq War, gave this insightful analysis of Konami's situation:
In order to make the game fun... it simply has to sacrifice some amount of realism for fun factor. When you do that with a war game based on a real war, with real people, you run the risk of dishonoring their memories and sacrifices, and I think that this game has a dangerous potential to do that.
But are there any plausible and non-nefarious explanations for this turn of events? I mean, is meeting with the defendant's attorneys privately, sealing the record of what went on there, and then sealing the plaintiff's motion a relatively normal thing? Or is it as weird and skeezy as it sounds?
Allow me to explain. It's like a child who has a new toy. The child must take the toy everywhere and show it to everyone and make the toy do everything it can to impress everyone. Similarly the RIAA has a new toy (the court) that they recently acquired ... and to show it off they have made it censor just about everything. Even briefs of motions for class action when you can find the full complaint in its entirety online.
Why? Because they can. Remember, they lost to her last year so they've got some face to save in this class action. Or at the least just keep it out of the eye of the public--don't want those sheep getting all uppity.
We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out.
Huh, apparently some of us learned about it differently than others. I seem to recall it having to do with water and carbon dioxide in and some extra oxygen left over?
Also, I think someone beat you to the punch back in 2007 when we covered this story the first time and we covered that part about the birds using quantum effects in 2008.
-Building tall buildings underground, instead of above.
They're a coffin if there's a fire on the ground floor and you're on floor -50? Flooding and water damage? More work to displace 50 stories of earth, rock and shale than 50 stories of air?
-Requiring high altitudes for all planes, military or civilian
I think these are in place. Last time I saw a flight map for a city, there were huge no fly circles around it. I'm not a pilot but I think that's been around for a while.
producing auto-shoot auto-aim turrets around the ciy with no warning shots.
Is this a joke?
Include parashoots as standard emergency materials for skyscrapers?
There are no easy exits from a skyscraper nor should there be. This wouldn't have saved many lives ... if any at all. People would be too scared to jump until absolutely sure the planes are going to hit them.
I do not think these people were overreacting. Although I feel that their fears were statistically misplaced, I more than likely would have opted to "take a brisk walk in the park" upon seeing that uncommon event out my window.
Just a simple flash game where a yeti can send my head flying with a spiked mace will suffice.
"This could be the next generation of low-cost storage," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts.
So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data.
You guys remember that cool new technology that was going to revolutionize the way we store data? The one that was just 11 years away? Well we could be one year closer to that realization today perhaps maybe.
People that know more than you and might even be experts possibly speculated that this might be a reality within some amount of time. It brings me great joy to announce to you that now we're maybe in the ballpark. You yourself have the chance to be alive when this thing hits. And it could be big.
Perhaps tomorrow it will be in my computer or the fabrication process might not ever be cheaply implemented and then we could wait longer than five years possibly. "It's so tantalizingly exciting but still just over that next hill we think," is what I said last year and now look. I may have been correct or at least within one standard deviation of time for this product.
This is exciting to the point that I very well may scream. I think now is the time to possibly ask yourself: are you ready for what might turn into something big? Because it could be around the corner.
The family filed a formal complaint about the photos' release, and three months later, they received a letter of apology from the California Highway Patrol. An investigation had revealed that the images, taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response, had been leaked by two CHP dispatchers: Thomas O'Donnell, 39, and Aaron Reich, 30. O'Donnell, a 19-year CHP veteran, had been suspended for 25 days without pay. Reich quit soon after -- for unrelated reasons, says his lawyer. Both men declined requests for comment, but Jon Schlueter, Reich's attorney, says his client sent the images to relatives and friends to warn them of the dangers of the road. "It was a cautionary tale," Schlueter says. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly -- that's a public service."
If that does not satisfy you, I'm not sure what will. Sue your police department for large sums of money but it won't take the pictures off the internet.
Today the entire family is in therapy, and they've taken out a second mortgage to cover the costs of their legal battle.
Your life up until this accident has sounded fairly idyllic and easy. Apparently this has been a very rude wake up call. Your daughter took your hundred thousand dollar car for a 100mph tirade through town with cocaine in her system. We all do stupid things, some more stupid than others. She made a series of very serious mistakes and luckily no one else was killed or badly hurt.
If you do not put this behind you, it will consume you and your lives and her mistakes will end up ruining not just her life but yours. Mourn her, celebrate her life, remember her but in the end move on.
In my opinion, it would be more heroic of you not to spend a second mortgage suing your police department but instead using that money to create awareness of hazardous driving, starting a college fund in her name, donating that money to charity in her name or doing something less destructive with it in her name. Right now, the public's memory of your daughter is for the wrong reasons and you're just exacerbating the situation. Be above that. Change things for the better and remember her fondly, not as a never ending court case.
Am I the only one who laughed after reading this?
Disclaimer: I have an account on Wikipedia by the same name as my Slashdot username and have contributed fair use music clips.
You may be able to point to Wikipedia not being open-minded. From the purging of webcomics to being attacked by the co-founder, you may be able to point to things they've done that seem really really controlling and closed minded.
But look at what they've done and accomplished. Look at how they've come under attack themselves for fair use or having 1/5 of the world's population blocked from you.
They have established a totally free online encyclopedia. No ads. They have had to balance quality with quantity. They have established rules that define what is encyclopedic. I would wager that in the past year they are more linked to than any other domain on Slashdot. Their Google rankings reflect this.
If you are criticizing them because they are not as free and open as Richard Stallman, fine. But know that I have downloaded their articles and put them into a MySQL database at home and you are free to access them online and use them as an invaluable resource. Would they have been as successful if they had taken a more open and free stance? They walk a fine line between their control and community control and I think they've done a fine job with their success as evidence.
iI is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter but easy to see how they lose.
It is easy to see how they lose if they don't defend it also.
... now imagine I use that same domain to host a mirror of Wikipedia.org and push to steal their market share. I advertise and insert tiny little advertisements and I am commercial. And suddenly the good folks at Wikipedia are out of luck. Wouldn't you want them to be able to protect that which they've established?
Ok, not to defend them but just to get you thinking about their perspective, they are attempting to protect their name. Not profits or anything really evil, just their name.
What would you say if I wrote a mischievous program and hosted it at iwikipedia.org? Wouldn't you want them to be able to go after me and shut me down?
Ok, so that's an extreme case
So for malicious intent or even just to protect what they've created, I think they should be able to sue wikipediaart.org but I would hope they could just ask them to change the name to wikiartrights.org or artonwikis.org?
They probably would qualify for fair use if the site wasn't a wikimedia site. In this case, Wikipedia is concerned about people misunderstanding that the site is hosted and part of the wikipedia suite (or commons or whatever they call it). I think they would have no problem with the name if it had a different layout/format or if the name was different and it looked just like that. I don't know how this qualifies as fair use and Wikipedia may have a point in their fear that people would misunderstand the site.
When Watchmen shot out of the blocks to an opening weekend of $55m in the US back at the start of March, there were some mutterings of discontent that this wasn't quite the kind of number that Warner Bros was looking for.
Well, to be fair, stateside that puts it at #6 for opening weekend for a Rated R movie. And 64th overall. Worldwide so far it's sitting at $180+ million and, like the article said, DVD and Blu-Ray sales often make a big difference.
... so what is the problem exactly? You've made the #6 most popular R rated movie by opening weekend in the United States. Job well done. I assure you that DVD and Blu-Ray sales will net you a lot of money. Especially with that Curse of the Black Freighter stuff you withheld from the movie.
I've heard that the estimated budget was $100 million. So they've made $80 million over that
It was always going to be a harder sell than a Batman or Spider-man movie ...
For the love of all things binary, I thought it was common knowledge that you cannot compare rated R movies to PG-13 movies. Every single Batman & Spider-man movie has been rated below R.
The movie did well and I'm sure it was worth it.
This raises the larger question of who really owns a commercial open software application: the corporate copyright holders, or the community?
No one. Or, perhaps, everyone. That's kind of the point, isn't it? It isn't locked into anyone's individual grip.
"Open source" is just too broad a term to address this way. You would have to look at individual licenses. On top of that, you have things like Open Office, which is "open source" but clearly controlled by Sun (or Oracle now I guess).
While you claim you can always fork an open source project, it's not always that simple. Especially in massive open source efforts (like Linux) where they have contacts and knowledge that are vital to the project. It isn't possession or control or fiscal ownership but instead a name you've made for yourself as the Father of some project that gives you "ownership" or "rights." And usually the market share of your user base reflects that.
You'd be surprised how many of your open source solutions are actually controlled and operated by a single entity. And this is great for those products because the entity is usually donating a lot of time and money to it. Should the entity ever drop out, that's when someone can pick up the cross and take it a new direction with everyone helping.
* BFA, Music (Vocal Performance), Marshall University, 1997. (Voice Teacher: Paul Balshaw)
* PhD, Instructional Psychology and Technology, Brigham Young University, 2000.
* Postdoctoral Fellowship, Instructional Technology, Utah State University, 2001.
Judging from his brief bio, this is something he'd like to see with little or no evidence to back it up. Good luck, man, I didn't find much backing this up other than you would like it.
Wiley is one part Nostradamus and nine parts revolutionary, an educational evangelist who preaches ...
You said it, not me.
You see, Ballmer was supposed to get up at 3am and bid $7,400,000,001.00 for Sun on CorporateBay.com. Instead he just threw a chair at his alarm clock and went back to sleep.
Same thing happened to me with a $1.5 thousand Rickenbacker 4003 bass two weeks ago. And now I regret not having that sweet sweet axe in my hands right now just as much as Ballmer regrets not being able to fire whole divisions when their managers don't know the entire lyrics to American Pie by Don McLean. We're both only human, buddy.
What exactly are the "pirates" pirating? Does mere communications count as "piracy" now?
They may be extending an older term referred to as Pirate Radio which referred to the 'piracy' of radio frequencies. But how can you steal a frequency? :)
Keep in mind this term was around long before internet piracy and I'm guessing they are extending this concept to illicit satellite usage that is very much like a broadcasting communication technology. The military might not be needing these satellites to remain silent just like the FCC doesn't absolutely need silence on all non-allocated radio bands.
Remember, almost every word has baggage before you pick it up and use it. Even worse is the fact that that baggage is very much subjective.