You know like send out two different letters to townspeople in order to play them against the local township that's seeking to put regulations on your drilling? Maybe imply that if the people who hold mineral rights don't get a huge chunk of cash from your business they can sue the township board?
Maybe refuse to meet with the township and just turn their own people against each other just so you can drill without local permission?
Because after reading about Mount Pleasant in Pennsylvania, I really have to wonder where someone gets that particular skill to be such a ruthless asshole.
"There are people who role-play zero percent; they're dull f***ers. The people who role-play 100 percent; they're mental." Alexis Kennedy on how role-playing can influence a player's experience of narrative.
Hopefully the conversation then shifted to that middle range of 0%<X<100% role-playing where 99% of their paying customers exist. It's not really a binary feature... I'm not talking like an idiot but every now and then it's fun to pretend in my mind just to get away from the real world for a few hours. Like watching a movie or reading a book, I'm not dressing up like the characters but I do enjoy reading books and imagining the story in my mind.
I think length is much less of a problem than the forced narrative. My own anecdote causes me to wonder just how much the market of gaming has shift since I was a kid. I played Gauntlet endlessly and it had little to no story arc and was nearly impossible to finish yet provided me endless entertainment. Even games that had a story arc -- like Final Fantasy -- allowed me to explore and dick around for as long as I wanted to. What I cannot comprehend is why games now have moved away from that to a relative straight jacket and lack of freedom. The most recent Final Fantasy (13) was a real eye opener for me. They simply don't make my kind of games anymore. I just figured that the market for people who like these forced story-lined games must be far larger than the market I exist in. Or maybe game developers are just lazy and a forced storyline is far easier to code and debug than an open world.
If you wonder why World of Warcraft has such a large and loyal player base, it's probably because there's not a lot of other games to satisfy the explore and dick around urges that were once filled by console or even offline single player PC games. You can have your long-form narratives but I know myself and many of my friends will just stick to games like Oblivion and Diablo.
I'll admit my enjoyment of video games seems unconventional. I could spend hours making blaster schematics and roping people into setting up buildings for me in Star Wars Galaxies and then flooding the markets with cheap blasters bearing my character's name. I didn't really make anything off of this, I just loved the concept. When you open games up to achieve some sort of tangential enjoyment like that, I think you provide more originality than any murder mystery with a surprise twist could provide for me.
The headline misled you. From the official release:
We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.
There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.
It sounds like only Google owned URLs will be available through g.co and the public will continue to use goo.gl so no need to debate this it's really a minor amount of links compared to what users produce.
“Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too.’’
So their defense is to list crimes that are worse than what they (law enforcement) are doing? I guess if you aim low, there's no chance of failure.
So if I went up to someone and said, "Hey, I know you think I'm a jerk because I call you harmful names but lots of people get raped in a parking lot and that's harmful too." They should thank their lucky stars I'm just calling them names and not raping them in a parking lot? Isn't that more of a threat than an excuse? I don't get it, is the Registry of Motor Vehicles threatening to steal or sell everyone's identity if they don't like being wrongly accused?
Facial recognition is not quite yet where it has to be. I worked on some of this stuff way back in college and the case studies we did on open face databases had abysmal recall rates. Basically it should be concluded that until your chance of a false positive is equivalent with winning the lottery, you shouldn't implement this. I say "winning the lottery" because it is such a terrible violation of rights that you should be prepared to pay out a million dollars to the poor citizen that is wrongly accused of some crime or infraction just based upon the features of their face. It's a high stakes game and if you're going to use it as a short cut, you better be prepared to accept a high amount of risk.
Reagan won out the cold war without firing a shot.
And he also ensured that our future would forever be saddled with debt. Which makes me laugh when I read the end of your original post:
Stop Iraq, Libya and Afghan wars. There is your savings and cost reductions. Keep our military strong here at home to DEFEND us.
Spend more on your military industrial complex than you take in on taxes. THERE is your ensured debt and eventual country-wide bankruptcy. Raise the debt ceiling? Sure why not? We've done it, how many times since Reagan?
You're in fantasy land where communists are nice people, just misunderstood. Never mind the hundred + million they've killed since the 1920's.
You're in a fantasy land where a large part of today's world population are mass murderers just because they live in a communist society! Put that blame on communist leaders and we'll talk. I rip China apart more than anybody on Slashdot, I don't need to hear you assume that I think they're misunderstood angels. Their leaders are human rights violators but I don't hold the citizens responsible for death. When you nuke a country do you think the leaders are the only ones that get hurt?
The only fear monger is you "Oh God we're all gonna die!"
What in the hell are you talking about? We're trying to have a discussion about possible ways to decrease our spending so we can catch up with the insane amount of debt we've been accumulating. And you totally skirted any indication that you even understand that whether we build a thousand more nukes or stick with our current numbers, the outcome is the same. We could hold the entire world hostage right now if we wanted to just by threatening to detonate all of our nuclear weapons on ourselves and I think it's time to consider that enough force if to increase that means $700 billion.
I can't cite any documents off the top of my head but the way I see it (and, no, I'm not an authority) is that we have enough nukes to blow any or all of the countries you listed to complete destruction. So what will increasing this nuclear stockpile do for us? Well, one thing it does for us is gives us yet more things to look after and keep track of. You know when the USSR fell and they were scared about "a couple nukes here or there going missing"?
We've got enough to radiate entire countries, why do we need more? Okay yeah, now Chavez has one or two... so? Does it matter that we can now blanket his country three times over instead of only once?
but this Jimmy Carter attitude
Seriously? Grow up. This isn't a "Jimmy Carter attitude", unless you associate Jimmy Carter with common sense.
How does leaving us at the mercy of our enemies enhance our security?
How does your Ronald Reagan fear mongering attitude help us? See what I did there? How in the hell does this "leave us at the mercy of our enemies"?
Alright, normally I give stuff the benefit of the doubt but this is just a slashvertisement of a Chinese site trying to penetrate the American market.
Actually, I would argue Weibo is better than both.
Well, if you want to do that effectively, might I suggest actually drawing the comparisons?
Instead of having to post shortened links that direct traffic to an external site, multimedia content is integrated directly into the website’s interface, so that no one ever has to leave the Weibo ecosystem.
Facebook has done this forever with thumbnails and it even loads in a flash player if I link to something on Bandcamp (not sure about other sites). If Wiebo doesn't redirect you an external site, how does it deal with copyright issues? Twitter will soon support images on tweets if it doesn't already for you.
One of those Loyalty / Rewards Systems
Not for me, thanks.
Think of it as social networking plus Pokemon. Sounds awesome to me.
Well, enjoy it man. I am part of a large section of the population of the United States of America that does not find Pokemon cute or entertaining. Sounds like hell to me.
Logging into Weibo takes users to "Weibo Square," a portal filled with endless possible detours, including the hot topics of the day, most popular tweets, and highlighted celebrity users.
Yeah, MySpace had this. It still does now that it's been sold to a marketing firm. And that's where it belongs. Social Networking is about the users. You should spend time at someone's page and trends should be a sidebar. When I see this all I can think of is Supermarket tabloid. Again, not for me.
Okay, this section should technically be labeled “e-commerce,” but I got too excited over the prospect of being able to order food online through a social networking site.
So one of your selling points is that on a massive social network, companies market and sell shit to you. No thanks man. I don't think you understand what "social networking" means to me. Users are the center of attention, not food or ecommerce. If you want to add those Apps and APIs and they start to get intrusive to the core experience, you're going to lose users. You can keep Weibo.
If you call that a conclusive "better than Facebook and Twitter" discussion, you need to work on your sales pitch, shill.
Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?
I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."
Anytime! On a side note, I would also like to relay the comic irony I discovered in trying to copy/paste those snippets to you from the PDF report (Adobe's Reader). When I try to copy/paste "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" instead I get:
I assume this is to prevent people from easily reusing or finding via search engine this free report extolling the benefits of limiting copyright. I wish I could have shared more with you but I had to retype everything by hand.
I have not RTFA to know whether it is adopting a strict definition or not, but non-copyrightable facts are not examples of fair use - they are examples of something which falls outside the copyright regime.
In this case I would suggest you at least throw a cursory glance at the actual report (PDF warning) because from page 15 they list some examples of how "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" benefit of Fair Use and Other Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright Law (which is what this report is targeting). They list several statutory provisions like: 102(a) non-copyrightability of facts, 102(b) idea/expression dichotomy, 107 fair use: criticism; comment; news reporting; browser, cache copies; teaching; scholarship; research, 108 library uses, 109 first-sale doctrine, 512 ISP safe harbors, 302-304 copyright term and 105 no copyright in U.S. Government works. Granted, those are very brief descriptions of what are undoubtedly lengthy legalese but I hope that someone makes it clear that this report is not referring strictly to just fair use in the sense that you are speaking of. It's talking about fair use related industries that rely on provisions like the above.
I think a better description would be "All Limiting Exceptions to Copyright" than "Fair Use" for this particular study.
Side note: I think you can see how Google and others benefit from the protection under cache copies to a very large degree.
Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study.
From the report:
Fair use-related industry value added in 2008 and 2009 averaged $2.4 trillion, approximately 17 percent of total U.S. current dollar GDP. Value added equals a firm's total output minus its purchases of intermediate inputs and is the best measurement of an industry's economic contribution to national GDP.
It's the value added, not the total fair use businesses. After reading the study, I think what they're trying to say is that everyone benefits by some amount of money to be able to access -- say -- non-copyrightable facts online presents a benefit to many businesses and that added value equates to 17 percent of the total U.S. current dollar GDP by their estimates.
Are you telling me that in ~5 years I may or may not be able to play TOR after I invest tons of time into it? That could be a serious dealbreaker for something I've been following very closely. Or is this just some relatively small fee that Sony has to pay to keep a small but loyal set of fans happy (and, of course, they're in the screwing customers over business so why do that)?
Between this, the prequels and taking the license from Decipher and giving it to Wizards of the Coast who ruined it, I'm moving further and further away from Star Wars. And in my young adult years, this was my religion. Congratulations, Lucasfilm, you've done the impossible. You've made me hate and avoid something I once loved.
I don't really believe this theory about changing relationship to time, space and other people. Personally I find it more to be about understanding. I am always cautious of things I don't understand. From computer software to mechanical things to... well, anything at all. Those five hour energy drinks? Not for me. Probably safe. But I don't understand it so I'm not doing it. Do they change my relationship to time, space and other people? Not at all.
And I think that's where moral panic comes from. Why even call it "moral panic" when it's really just a matter of a large amount of change coming from something that's hard to understand sparking extreme caution and sometimes panic. World of Warcraft is really scary to older people who don't play it. Electricity is really scary to people who don't understand it. Hell, it'd look like magic to me if I had never encountered it before. And your knee-jerk reaction is caution.
I think simply informing people alleviates this and -- in some cases like cellular phones -- when you can't effectively communicate to the masses you will suffer from this panic.
I've been largely assembling circles these past couple days and was undecided about uploading an actual picture of me because there's no way to suppress that from being visible to people outside my circles. Sure, Google's put out an informative privacy center but I'm pretty sure in Facebook there is a way to hide nearly everything from people searching for you on the site.
Google seems to be offering me a different strategy. I found the option to make my profile unsearchable but if someone got a hold of the crazy URL for my profile, they can see my name and picture without being in my profile. I'd rather be searchable and when unknown people find my profile they don't get much (maybe my name and nothing else) until they add me to their circle and I subsequently add them to mine. I think this is the desired functionality of nearly all my friends and that's how we use Facebook.
I haven't said anything about this as when I first joined, I could not even control the access to my picasa albums as they were automatically imported. This was particularly worrisome as I had some photos of my family around Christmas so I just deleted the albums. A few days later I saw the privacy controls though so I'm guessing the above should be added. Google+ is really undergoing a lot of changes still.
One complaint I had that isn't privacy related is how taxing the UI is. I just deleted a circle this morning and the action failed twice and then worked the third time. When it worked, there was a row of circles on my screen and the circle I deleted was pushed forward and rolled to the left in front of all the other circles off my screen and then the circles closed their ranks. Cute and pretty... but not when you're on a low performance computer. Granted, it was probably a lot lighter than Flash, I'm not interested in a social network that's going to include elaborate animations for very simple actions. At least give me a way to disable that.
I assume this is going to be 99% of the suggestions. If your computer is old or slow, I suggest Xubuntu which I've switched my old P4 to after the regular Ubuntu got a little too GUI intensive. Here's the link to VMWare.
which they say offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings.
Microsoft: "It offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings."
University of Nebraska: "No it doesn't! It costs $249,999.99 more than Lotus Notes."
Microsoft: *slides check across the table* "There you go."
Microsoft likely makes more money from Android than its own Windows phone platform,
This statement just cries out for at least a small amount of supporting evidence. The article doesn't appear to make this claim - so did jbrodkin simply pull this out of his nether regions, as I suspect?
It's been the subject of recent speculation given the numbers that HTC pays them $5 for each phone and has sold 30 million sets totaling $150 million. And then compare to what WP7 makes MS:
Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million WP7 licenses, and assuming a price of $15 per license, that's $30 million in revenue.
Okay so that could be incorrect but we're just seeing more and more Android licenses resulting in payment to Microsoft. And I don't think WP7 is keeping up with that.
Is this conclusive? Not at all. The above numbers could be false. Is it probable? Well, that's for you to decide.
I think this is just more of the same. They sold China the equipment for the great firewall and you are surprised that Cisco is chomping at the bit for the next big project? The only headline newsworthy enough would be if Cisco refused to make a buck on the grounds that their product will obviously be used to repress peaceful foreign citizens or keep 1/6 of the world's population censored.
'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,'
So basically never?
Scrubbers have been required in America since the 1977 revisions to the Clean Air Act. And they're still not used in China. My understanding of the situation (although, full disclaimer I do not speak Chinese nor have I ever been to China) is that the companies simply don't follow regulation. The latest news is that they just move to non-urban areas to avoid such regulation:
Carlson Chan is in charge of air quality policy at Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department. He says companies found ways around the stricter limits.
"When we tightened the sulfur content of industrial diesel from 0.5 percent to 0.005 percent in 1998, the resistance then was not very big, mainly because many manufacturers have moved their factories across the border," he said.
Just across Hong Kong's border is Guangdong province, the center of China’s export industry. As the factories there multiplied, the air pollution returned to Hong Kong.
I found it impossibly hard to believe that it's cheaper to move your entire operation than install scrubbers -- failing that, surely a bribe is cheaper. So I dug around and as recent as 2006 the cost seems to be very high (anyone know today's rates?):
The average cost for scrubbers today (2006) is roughly $300 per kilowatt. For a 1,000-megawatt power plant, a relatively common size for coal-fired facilities, the cost for scrubbers for all boilers would be approximately $300 million.
I guess that would be a death knell for a Chinese company (and, let's face it, much of Asia is guilty of over polluting). If China introduces "regulation" that would stunt their free market, the free market simply circumvents it one way or another. It's the story time and time again in China and I think that a large part of their government is complacent with it because their economy is comparatively gangbusters.
And when a country trades with China, they're just exporting their pollution. I mean, we're all on the same planet... it's going to cost everyone eventually. But oooh, that free market fueled cheap shit at Wal-Mart is just so tantalizing! How can you not buy it? Everybody wins (except the environment)!
If you thought that LinkedIn's IPO was hyped and hyper, Zynga's going to put that all to shame.
Okay so let's take a look at the two IPOs. From Slashdot's own summary of LinkedIn's IPO we have this fact about what the shares were trading at on LinkedIn's opening day:
That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue...
So now that we can see Zynga's financials, we see that its revenues for 2010 were $600 million meaning that if the shares hold at exactly the price Zynga opens at, they will be valuing Zynga at 1 2/3 times their 2010 revenues. Now, of course, last year's revenue doesn't mean everything as growth, market cap, etc come into play. But that 1 2/3 times is substantially less than the ridiculous 39x amount that LinkedIn's IPO skyrocketed to. If the total trading volume's valuation goes from $1 billion to $23.4 billion in the first day of trading then we'd be approaching LinkedIn-levels of bubble hype. How exactly is Zynga going to "put that all to shame"? Are you in possession of some proof that the trading will once again go ape shit past $23.4 billion? I think the recent MySpace sale has shown that a company that makes games (though shaky) is nowhere near as volatiles as a company that relies upon its social network to fill its coffers.
I hate Zynga with a passion and am convinced that Words with Friends has completely destroyed my Android phone's battery life (all the while showing me ads to improve my battery life) but I think they're a far better bet than LinkedIn. I've commented on Zynga's 7 Eleven partnership long ago and I think that market penetration is massive and gives them an upper hand that I cannot fathom how the competition will beat -- especially if that's an exclusive contract.
For many years my employer stuck to IE6 while I used Firefox in my home. Why was this? Was it because one browser was superior to the other?
After raising questions, it turned out that for the longest time (although it should be changing soon if not already) there were enterprise controls like group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc. that were actually considered better on Internet Explorer (even IE6) than Firefox.
The fact is that at some point, there are some features that matter much more to large corporations. Will I ever use any of the above in my home? Never. But that was the sole reasoning behind a Fortune 500 company clinging to IE6 for a dangerously long time. Your assumption that "better" for a user is "better" for an enterprise is often false (though I'm not claiming the two are mutually exclusive). Further improvements for the enterprise are likely to be far outside a home user's need. Hell, making the settings tabs more confusing is probably detrimental to mom and dad configuring their cookie settings or cleaning up their cache.
Three years ago or so I decided to try to upload clips to classic rock songs that I had on CD that had their own pages on Wikipedia. They were constantly deleted. If a song had a page, I figured it'd be notable enough to have a fair use clip of it and so for about twenty songs I carefully selected the best 10% of the song (or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter) and turned it into the lowest quality ogg in Audacity. Two bots were particularly brutal (DASHBot and FileBot). Months later someone would seemingly voluntarily orphan the fair use examples I had uploaded and one by one they disappeared. Well screw that, I'm done investing my time into something that just gets deleted by a bot whose owner does not respond when I comment on their talk page asking for help and justification. It'd be one thing if someone would explain to me what I'm doing wrong but it appears what I'm doing wrong is volunteering my time to Wikipedia in the first place. It's not like my examples are being improved or adjusted -- just deleted. So forget it, I have better projects to invest my time in.
Wikipedia uses a non-pixelated version and accepts donations and distributes them to the people that work on Wikipedia. Why aren't they targeted by Jay Maisel?
I'm not a fan of chiptunes and I value my music collection in its unadulterated entirety but Mr. Maisel has provided his business mailing address so I believe I will take both my CD liner and vinyl covering and mail them back to Mr. Maisel. I'll probably write something very graphic on the front of them in regards to greed and fornication. I will include a letter explaining how I thought these were derivative works but he clearly owns them and as such I am returning his property.
On appeal, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the defendant. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the above-mentioned four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution like the original artwork was. Second, the fact that the photographs had already been published diminished the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a "full" replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Lastly, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by the creation of the thumbnails.
Emphasis mine. Was there some concern about the market for Maisel's original Kind of Blue image being diminished?
In regards to the question on illegal purchases with BTC he said:
However, I really want people to understand one thing. The criminalization of Bitcoin would not stop the illegal activity that surrounds it.
Well, I think you're jumping to conclusions if you thought that the idea is to halt the drug trade and prostitution rings by illegalizing BitCoins. I think the question was really asking how you feel about BitCoins enticing and extending illegal activities. Allow me to provide a real world example. A person I knew in a small town high school was making yearly trips to the nearest metropolis with his stash of cash, purchasing drugs from many sources and then driving back and dealing them. At some point this stash became $15,000 and on his last trip he made his first stop to pick up some mushrooms from a woman who had been compromised by police. As he pulled away, they picked him up and found some shrooms but also $14,000. Now, he went to jail for six months for drug possession but also the very large sum of money. They were able to prove that he was a dealer and was en route to make more purchases. If he had had BitCoins, he merely would have kept a wallet on his phone then transferred the cash to the woman and could have denied the whole transaction had taken place and was clueless about the shrooms in his car. Would they have been able to make anything stick?
Criminalization would only stop people from enjoying the tremendous and fruitful benefits of such a system, it would hinder the social good.
Not if the bad elements of society enjoy those "fruitful benefits" much more than the rest of society. All the old organized crime tactics like protection rackets suddenly become virtually untraceable when you can demand the money be sent to an anonymous BTC handle and then move it again. The flow of cash is a seriously important element in detecting and prosecuting crime and the anonymity of a currency destroys that. Corporate embezzlement becomes easier, drug dealing becomes easier, funding terrorism becomes easier, etc. Someone could steal my bank account information and pilfer money from me tomorrow but at least the bank would be able to trace it. Who traces the stolen wallet files? Sure the bank charges an overhead but they provide a service that is more secure than a mattress store.
You seemingly sweep the bad under the carpet and talk about only the good. This is a double edged sword and it's insulting for you to deny it.
We are aggressively advocating and promoting the legalization and regulation of the exchanges.
You keep saying this but you fail to provide any details on how this will be done. When transactions are anonymous, how in the hell does this happen?
Kings used to raise capital in order to wage wars. They required popular support before they were able to fund their wars. A common tool in modern day authoritarian regimes is currency manipulation in order to fund their wars of genocide (e.g Milosevic in the 90s). Bitcoin democratises governments.
That is so bizarre, you're all for the regulation and legalization of exchanges... are you seriously that daft that you don't think the government is going to tax that which it regulates? You can't eat your cake and have it too. How will we fund schools and libraries and roads if everyone's going through BTC? How will we even know that everyone's going through BTC? I cannot fathom how you expect this to work!
I understand the good points of this experiment but I'm insulted by how quickly you try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Do any of the simulations let you decide how to rip apart the township where you're mining?
You know like send out two different letters to townspeople in order to play them against the local township that's seeking to put regulations on your drilling? Maybe imply that if the people who hold mineral rights don't get a huge chunk of cash from your business they can sue the township board?
Maybe refuse to meet with the township and just turn their own people against each other just so you can drill without local permission?
Because after reading about Mount Pleasant in Pennsylvania, I really have to wonder where someone gets that particular skill to be such a ruthless asshole.
"There are people who role-play zero percent; they're dull f***ers. The people who role-play 100 percent; they're mental." Alexis Kennedy on how role-playing can influence a player's experience of narrative.
Hopefully the conversation then shifted to that middle range of 0%<X<100% role-playing where 99% of their paying customers exist. It's not really a binary feature ... I'm not talking like an idiot but every now and then it's fun to pretend in my mind just to get away from the real world for a few hours. Like watching a movie or reading a book, I'm not dressing up like the characters but I do enjoy reading books and imagining the story in my mind.
I think length is much less of a problem than the forced narrative. My own anecdote causes me to wonder just how much the market of gaming has shift since I was a kid. I played Gauntlet endlessly and it had little to no story arc and was nearly impossible to finish yet provided me endless entertainment. Even games that had a story arc -- like Final Fantasy -- allowed me to explore and dick around for as long as I wanted to. What I cannot comprehend is why games now have moved away from that to a relative straight jacket and lack of freedom. The most recent Final Fantasy (13) was a real eye opener for me. They simply don't make my kind of games anymore. I just figured that the market for people who like these forced story-lined games must be far larger than the market I exist in. Or maybe game developers are just lazy and a forced storyline is far easier to code and debug than an open world.
If you wonder why World of Warcraft has such a large and loyal player base, it's probably because there's not a lot of other games to satisfy the explore and dick around urges that were once filled by console or even offline single player PC games. You can have your long-form narratives but I know myself and many of my friends will just stick to games like Oblivion and Diablo.
I'll admit my enjoyment of video games seems unconventional. I could spend hours making blaster schematics and roping people into setting up buildings for me in Star Wars Galaxies and then flooding the markets with cheap blasters bearing my character's name. I didn't really make anything off of this, I just loved the concept. When you open games up to achieve some sort of tangential enjoyment like that, I think you provide more originality than any murder mystery with a surprise twist could provide for me.
We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service. There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.
It sounds like only Google owned URLs will be available through g.co and the public will continue to use goo.gl so no need to debate this it's really a minor amount of links compared to what users produce.
“Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too.’’
So their defense is to list crimes that are worse than what they (law enforcement) are doing? I guess if you aim low, there's no chance of failure.
So if I went up to someone and said, "Hey, I know you think I'm a jerk because I call you harmful names but lots of people get raped in a parking lot and that's harmful too." They should thank their lucky stars I'm just calling them names and not raping them in a parking lot? Isn't that more of a threat than an excuse? I don't get it, is the Registry of Motor Vehicles threatening to steal or sell everyone's identity if they don't like being wrongly accused?
Facial recognition is not quite yet where it has to be. I worked on some of this stuff way back in college and the case studies we did on open face databases had abysmal recall rates. Basically it should be concluded that until your chance of a false positive is equivalent with winning the lottery, you shouldn't implement this. I say "winning the lottery" because it is such a terrible violation of rights that you should be prepared to pay out a million dollars to the poor citizen that is wrongly accused of some crime or infraction just based upon the features of their face. It's a high stakes game and if you're going to use it as a short cut, you better be prepared to accept a high amount of risk.
Reagan won out the cold war without firing a shot.
And he also ensured that our future would forever be saddled with debt. Which makes me laugh when I read the end of your original post:
Stop Iraq, Libya and Afghan wars. There is your savings and cost reductions. Keep our military strong here at home to DEFEND us.
Spend more on your military industrial complex than you take in on taxes. THERE is your ensured debt and eventual country-wide bankruptcy. Raise the debt ceiling? Sure why not? We've done it, how many times since Reagan?
You're in fantasy land where communists are nice people, just misunderstood. Never mind the hundred + million they've killed since the 1920's.
You're in a fantasy land where a large part of today's world population are mass murderers just because they live in a communist society! Put that blame on communist leaders and we'll talk. I rip China apart more than anybody on Slashdot, I don't need to hear you assume that I think they're misunderstood angels. Their leaders are human rights violators but I don't hold the citizens responsible for death. When you nuke a country do you think the leaders are the only ones that get hurt?
The only fear monger is you "Oh God we're all gonna die!"
What in the hell are you talking about? We're trying to have a discussion about possible ways to decrease our spending so we can catch up with the insane amount of debt we've been accumulating. And you totally skirted any indication that you even understand that whether we build a thousand more nukes or stick with our current numbers, the outcome is the same. We could hold the entire world hostage right now if we wanted to just by threatening to detonate all of our nuclear weapons on ourselves and I think it's time to consider that enough force if to increase that means $700 billion.
We've got enough to radiate entire countries, why do we need more? Okay yeah, now Chavez has one or two
but this Jimmy Carter attitude
Seriously? Grow up. This isn't a "Jimmy Carter attitude", unless you associate Jimmy Carter with common sense.
How does leaving us at the mercy of our enemies enhance our security?
How does your Ronald Reagan fear mongering attitude help us? See what I did there? How in the hell does this "leave us at the mercy of our enemies"?
Actually, I would argue Weibo is better than both.
Well, if you want to do that effectively, might I suggest actually drawing the comparisons?
Instead of having to post shortened links that direct traffic to an external site, multimedia content is integrated directly into the website’s interface, so that no one ever has to leave the Weibo ecosystem.
Facebook has done this forever with thumbnails and it even loads in a flash player if I link to something on Bandcamp (not sure about other sites). If Wiebo doesn't redirect you an external site, how does it deal with copyright issues? Twitter will soon support images on tweets if it doesn't already for you.
One of those Loyalty / Rewards Systems
Not for me, thanks.
Think of it as social networking plus Pokemon. Sounds awesome to me.
Well, enjoy it man. I am part of a large section of the population of the United States of America that does not find Pokemon cute or entertaining. Sounds like hell to me.
Logging into Weibo takes users to "Weibo Square," a portal filled with endless possible detours, including the hot topics of the day, most popular tweets, and highlighted celebrity users.
Yeah, MySpace had this. It still does now that it's been sold to a marketing firm. And that's where it belongs. Social Networking is about the users. You should spend time at someone's page and trends should be a sidebar. When I see this all I can think of is Supermarket tabloid. Again, not for me.
Okay, this section should technically be labeled “e-commerce,” but I got too excited over the prospect of being able to order food online through a social networking site.
So one of your selling points is that on a massive social network, companies market and sell shit to you. No thanks man. I don't think you understand what "social networking" means to me. Users are the center of attention, not food or ecommerce. If you want to add those Apps and APIs and they start to get intrusive to the core experience, you're going to lose users. You can keep Weibo.
If you call that a conclusive "better than Facebook and Twitter" discussion, you need to work on your sales pitch, shill.
Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?
I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."
That's odd he's off the top of the list, maybe given special status or I'm following an impostor? Because he's still in my dbag circle ...
Appreciated - thank you.
Anytime! On a side note, I would also like to relay the comic irony I discovered in trying to copy/paste those snippets to you from the PDF report (Adobe's Reader). When I try to copy/paste "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" instead I get:
I assume this is to prevent people from easily reusing or finding via search engine this free report extolling the benefits of limiting copyright. I wish I could have shared more with you but I had to retype everything by hand.
I have not RTFA to know whether it is adopting a strict definition or not, but non-copyrightable facts are not examples of fair use - they are examples of something which falls outside the copyright regime.
In this case I would suggest you at least throw a cursory glance at the actual report (PDF warning) because from page 15 they list some examples of how "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" benefit of Fair Use and Other Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright Law (which is what this report is targeting). They list several statutory provisions like: 102(a) non-copyrightability of facts, 102(b) idea/expression dichotomy, 107 fair use: criticism; comment; news reporting; browser, cache copies; teaching; scholarship; research, 108 library uses, 109 first-sale doctrine, 512 ISP safe harbors, 302-304 copyright term and 105 no copyright in U.S. Government works. Granted, those are very brief descriptions of what are undoubtedly lengthy legalese but I hope that someone makes it clear that this report is not referring strictly to just fair use in the sense that you are speaking of. It's talking about fair use related industries that rely on provisions like the above.
I think a better description would be "All Limiting Exceptions to Copyright" than "Fair Use" for this particular study. Side note: I think you can see how Google and others benefit from the protection under cache copies to a very large degree.
Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study.
From the report:
Fair use-related industry value added in 2008 and 2009 averaged $2.4 trillion, approximately 17 percent of total U.S. current dollar GDP. Value added equals a firm's total output minus its purchases of intermediate inputs and is the best measurement of an industry's economic contribution to national GDP.
It's the value added, not the total fair use businesses. After reading the study, I think what they're trying to say is that everyone benefits by some amount of money to be able to access -- say -- non-copyrightable facts online presents a benefit to many businesses and that added value equates to 17 percent of the total U.S. current dollar GDP by their estimates.
That's the problem with licenses: they end.
Are you telling me that in ~5 years I may or may not be able to play TOR after I invest tons of time into it? That could be a serious dealbreaker for something I've been following very closely. Or is this just some relatively small fee that Sony has to pay to keep a small but loyal set of fans happy (and, of course, they're in the screwing customers over business so why do that)?
Between this, the prequels and taking the license from Decipher and giving it to Wizards of the Coast who ruined it, I'm moving further and further away from Star Wars. And in my young adult years, this was my religion. Congratulations, Lucasfilm, you've done the impossible. You've made me hate and avoid something I once loved.
I don't really believe this theory about changing relationship to time, space and other people. Personally I find it more to be about understanding. I am always cautious of things I don't understand. From computer software to mechanical things to ... well, anything at all. Those five hour energy drinks? Not for me. Probably safe. But I don't understand it so I'm not doing it. Do they change my relationship to time, space and other people? Not at all.
And I think that's where moral panic comes from. Why even call it "moral panic" when it's really just a matter of a large amount of change coming from something that's hard to understand sparking extreme caution and sometimes panic. World of Warcraft is really scary to older people who don't play it. Electricity is really scary to people who don't understand it. Hell, it'd look like magic to me if I had never encountered it before. And your knee-jerk reaction is caution.
I think simply informing people alleviates this and -- in some cases like cellular phones -- when you can't effectively communicate to the masses you will suffer from this panic.
I've been largely assembling circles these past couple days and was undecided about uploading an actual picture of me because there's no way to suppress that from being visible to people outside my circles. Sure, Google's put out an informative privacy center but I'm pretty sure in Facebook there is a way to hide nearly everything from people searching for you on the site.
... but not when you're on a low performance computer. Granted, it was probably a lot lighter than Flash, I'm not interested in a social network that's going to include elaborate animations for very simple actions. At least give me a way to disable that.
Google seems to be offering me a different strategy. I found the option to make my profile unsearchable but if someone got a hold of the crazy URL for my profile, they can see my name and picture without being in my profile. I'd rather be searchable and when unknown people find my profile they don't get much (maybe my name and nothing else) until they add me to their circle and I subsequently add them to mine. I think this is the desired functionality of nearly all my friends and that's how we use Facebook.
I haven't said anything about this as when I first joined, I could not even control the access to my picasa albums as they were automatically imported. This was particularly worrisome as I had some photos of my family around Christmas so I just deleted the albums. A few days later I saw the privacy controls though so I'm guessing the above should be added. Google+ is really undergoing a lot of changes still.
One complaint I had that isn't privacy related is how taxing the UI is. I just deleted a circle this morning and the action failed twice and then worked the third time. When it worked, there was a row of circles on my screen and the circle I deleted was pushed forward and rolled to the left in front of all the other circles off my screen and then the circles closed their ranks. Cute and pretty
I assume this is going to be 99% of the suggestions. If your computer is old or slow, I suggest Xubuntu which I've switched my old P4 to after the regular Ubuntu got a little too GUI intensive. Here's the link to VMWare.
which they say offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings.
Microsoft: "It offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings."
University of Nebraska: "No it doesn't! It costs $249,999.99 more than Lotus Notes."
Microsoft: *slides check across the table* "There you go."
Microsoft likely makes more money from Android than its own Windows phone platform,
This statement just cries out for at least a small amount of supporting evidence. The article doesn't appear to make this claim - so did jbrodkin simply pull this out of his nether regions, as I suspect?
It's been the subject of recent speculation given the numbers that HTC pays them $5 for each phone and has sold 30 million sets totaling $150 million. And then compare to what WP7 makes MS:
Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million WP7 licenses, and assuming a price of $15 per license, that's $30 million in revenue.
Okay so that could be incorrect but we're just seeing more and more Android licenses resulting in payment to Microsoft. And I don't think WP7 is keeping up with that.
Is this conclusive? Not at all. The above numbers could be false. Is it probable? Well, that's for you to decide.
In 2008 it was revealed that The Great Firewall of China was just a huge opportunity to them to sell more routers. In May, Falun Gong sued them. Even shareholders have been uneasy with Cisco's fervent complacency and complete lack of human rights doctrine. I think as far back as 2004 we've discussed the Amnesty report naming Cisco.
I think this is just more of the same. They sold China the equipment for the great firewall and you are surprised that Cisco is chomping at the bit for the next big project? The only headline newsworthy enough would be if Cisco refused to make a buck on the grounds that their product will obviously be used to repress peaceful foreign citizens or keep 1/6 of the world's population censored.
'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,'
So basically never?
Scrubbers have been required in America since the 1977 revisions to the Clean Air Act. And they're still not used in China. My understanding of the situation (although, full disclaimer I do not speak Chinese nor have I ever been to China) is that the companies simply don't follow regulation. The latest news is that they just move to non-urban areas to avoid such regulation:
Carlson Chan is in charge of air quality policy at Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department. He says companies found ways around the stricter limits.
"When we tightened the sulfur content of industrial diesel from 0.5 percent to 0.005 percent in 1998, the resistance then was not very big, mainly because many manufacturers have moved their factories across the border," he said.
Just across Hong Kong's border is Guangdong province, the center of China’s export industry. As the factories there multiplied, the air pollution returned to Hong Kong.
I found it impossibly hard to believe that it's cheaper to move your entire operation than install scrubbers -- failing that, surely a bribe is cheaper. So I dug around and as recent as 2006 the cost seems to be very high (anyone know today's rates?):
The average cost for scrubbers today (2006) is roughly $300 per kilowatt. For a 1,000-megawatt power plant, a relatively common size for coal-fired facilities, the cost for scrubbers for all boilers would be approximately $300 million.
I guess that would be a death knell for a Chinese company (and, let's face it, much of Asia is guilty of over polluting). If China introduces "regulation" that would stunt their free market, the free market simply circumvents it one way or another. It's the story time and time again in China and I think that a large part of their government is complacent with it because their economy is comparatively gangbusters.
... it's going to cost everyone eventually. But oooh, that free market fueled cheap shit at Wal-Mart is just so tantalizing! How can you not buy it? Everybody wins (except the environment)!
And when a country trades with China, they're just exporting their pollution. I mean, we're all on the same planet
If you thought that LinkedIn's IPO was hyped and hyper, Zynga's going to put that all to shame.
Okay so let's take a look at the two IPOs. From Slashdot's own summary of LinkedIn's IPO we have this fact about what the shares were trading at on LinkedIn's opening day:
That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue ...
So now that we can see Zynga's financials, we see that its revenues for 2010 were $600 million meaning that if the shares hold at exactly the price Zynga opens at, they will be valuing Zynga at 1 2/3 times their 2010 revenues. Now, of course, last year's revenue doesn't mean everything as growth, market cap, etc come into play. But that 1 2/3 times is substantially less than the ridiculous 39x amount that LinkedIn's IPO skyrocketed to. If the total trading volume's valuation goes from $1 billion to $23.4 billion in the first day of trading then we'd be approaching LinkedIn-levels of bubble hype. How exactly is Zynga going to "put that all to shame"? Are you in possession of some proof that the trading will once again go ape shit past $23.4 billion? I think the recent MySpace sale has shown that a company that makes games (though shaky) is nowhere near as volatiles as a company that relies upon its social network to fill its coffers.
Remember, some folks estimate that Farmville alone is now worth more than EA.
I hate Zynga with a passion and am convinced that Words with Friends has completely destroyed my Android phone's battery life (all the while showing me ads to improve my battery life) but I think they're a far better bet than LinkedIn. I've commented on Zynga's 7 Eleven partnership long ago and I think that market penetration is massive and gives them an upper hand that I cannot fathom how the competition will beat -- especially if that's an exclusive contract.
For many years my employer stuck to IE6 while I used Firefox in my home. Why was this? Was it because one browser was superior to the other?
After raising questions, it turned out that for the longest time (although it should be changing soon if not already) there were enterprise controls like group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc. that were actually considered better on Internet Explorer (even IE6) than Firefox.
The fact is that at some point, there are some features that matter much more to large corporations. Will I ever use any of the above in my home? Never. But that was the sole reasoning behind a Fortune 500 company clinging to IE6 for a dangerously long time. Your assumption that "better" for a user is "better" for an enterprise is often false (though I'm not claiming the two are mutually exclusive). Further improvements for the enterprise are likely to be far outside a home user's need. Hell, making the settings tabs more confusing is probably detrimental to mom and dad configuring their cookie settings or cleaning up their cache.
Three years ago or so I decided to try to upload clips to classic rock songs that I had on CD that had their own pages on Wikipedia. They were constantly deleted. If a song had a page, I figured it'd be notable enough to have a fair use clip of it and so for about twenty songs I carefully selected the best 10% of the song (or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter) and turned it into the lowest quality ogg in Audacity. Two bots were particularly brutal (DASHBot and FileBot). Months later someone would seemingly voluntarily orphan the fair use examples I had uploaded and one by one they disappeared. Well screw that, I'm done investing my time into something that just gets deleted by a bot whose owner does not respond when I comment on their talk page asking for help and justification. It'd be one thing if someone would explain to me what I'm doing wrong but it appears what I'm doing wrong is volunteering my time to Wikipedia in the first place. It's not like my examples are being improved or adjusted -- just deleted. So forget it, I have better projects to invest my time in.
I'm not a fan of chiptunes and I value my music collection in its unadulterated entirety but Mr. Maisel has provided his business mailing address so I believe I will take both my CD liner and vinyl covering and mail them back to Mr. Maisel. I'll probably write something very graphic on the front of them in regards to greed and fornication. I will include a letter explaining how I thought these were derivative works but he clearly owns them and as such I am returning his property.
How is this any different from what we've already seen:
On appeal, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the defendant. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the above-mentioned four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution like the original artwork was. Second, the fact that the photographs had already been published diminished the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a "full" replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Lastly, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by the creation of the thumbnails.
Emphasis mine. Was there some concern about the market for Maisel's original Kind of Blue image being diminished?
However, I really want people to understand one thing. The criminalization of Bitcoin would not stop the illegal activity that surrounds it.
Well, I think you're jumping to conclusions if you thought that the idea is to halt the drug trade and prostitution rings by illegalizing BitCoins. I think the question was really asking how you feel about BitCoins enticing and extending illegal activities. Allow me to provide a real world example. A person I knew in a small town high school was making yearly trips to the nearest metropolis with his stash of cash, purchasing drugs from many sources and then driving back and dealing them. At some point this stash became $15,000 and on his last trip he made his first stop to pick up some mushrooms from a woman who had been compromised by police. As he pulled away, they picked him up and found some shrooms but also $14,000. Now, he went to jail for six months for drug possession but also the very large sum of money. They were able to prove that he was a dealer and was en route to make more purchases. If he had had BitCoins, he merely would have kept a wallet on his phone then transferred the cash to the woman and could have denied the whole transaction had taken place and was clueless about the shrooms in his car. Would they have been able to make anything stick?
Criminalization would only stop people from enjoying the tremendous and fruitful benefits of such a system, it would hinder the social good.
Not if the bad elements of society enjoy those "fruitful benefits" much more than the rest of society. All the old organized crime tactics like protection rackets suddenly become virtually untraceable when you can demand the money be sent to an anonymous BTC handle and then move it again. The flow of cash is a seriously important element in detecting and prosecuting crime and the anonymity of a currency destroys that. Corporate embezzlement becomes easier, drug dealing becomes easier, funding terrorism becomes easier, etc. Someone could steal my bank account information and pilfer money from me tomorrow but at least the bank would be able to trace it. Who traces the stolen wallet files? Sure the bank charges an overhead but they provide a service that is more secure than a mattress store.
You seemingly sweep the bad under the carpet and talk about only the good. This is a double edged sword and it's insulting for you to deny it.
We are aggressively advocating and promoting the legalization and regulation of the exchanges.
You keep saying this but you fail to provide any details on how this will be done. When transactions are anonymous, how in the hell does this happen?
Kings used to raise capital in order to wage wars. They required popular support before they were able to fund their wars. A common tool in modern day authoritarian regimes is currency manipulation in order to fund their wars of genocide (e.g Milosevic in the 90s). Bitcoin democratises governments.
That is so bizarre, you're all for the regulation and legalization of exchanges ... are you seriously that daft that you don't think the government is going to tax that which it regulates? You can't eat your cake and have it too. How will we fund schools and libraries and roads if everyone's going through BTC? How will we even know that everyone's going through BTC? I cannot fathom how you expect this to work!
I understand the good points of this experiment but I'm insulted by how quickly you try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.