I disagree with you. I think giving people the news they want is the only way this has worked. Because who else is there in the equation to please with the news? You have the newsmakers, the government and the newsreaders. And only the last one makes sense.
Allow me to point out what is wrong with your simplified explanation. Sure, news has relied on "Mycountryian Idol" and movie reviews on slow news days or even on a site where they can present a dearth of information. However, once the jaywalking impalement law is passed, some people are going to experience a loved one being impaled for jaywalking. Now what do people want to hear news about? TV or the impalement of citizens for jaywalking? The reporters understand this and know that breaking this now... even breaking the possibility in advance before the law is passed... will generate higher ratings than their competitor.
This sort of capitalistic scheme for news is not without faults but your example is down right disingenuous. A single news source breaking the story of someone passing laws to impale jaywalkers would bring down their site as people rushed to read more about where and how this is happening. Despite the lack of bad things happening resulting in crap news on TV and in print, you must understand that people (at least Americans) still are very concerned with themselves and their well being above anything or anybody else.
I particularly enjoyed how they ripped apart so many aspects of 'news' over the past years and coming years. From "Do bikinis cause cancer? More at 11" to automated journalism. But then somehow claim that the newsreader is ignorant for seeking news that is personalized to him or her. Maybe, just maybe, if a wide reaching non-specific news source treated their readers with respect, produced quality and engaged in more investigative journalism than "look at this picture" or "Ten worst/best" lists then we would all be reading it.
Until then, I guarantee you that people will prefer to seek specialized news sources because the editors and writers for that source are often experts and their biases are often exactly what we want. Just look at the blogs of Michael Geist and Bruce Schneier, way more preferable than any big name news site's 'computer security' division.
From the Amazon link, I found several reviews giving the book a thrashing for continuing to include deprecated APIs and not teaching the new paradigms of the APIs after OpenGL 3.0. One review was upset with the regurgitation and lack of new material. Another reviewer was looking for a book that concisely covers OpenGL 3.1 and the new way of coding things since 3.0 instead of the backwards compatible context and forward compatible context intricacies.
I was thinking of picking up a good OpenGL book but this one sounds like it'd be most useful to people who need to move old projects forward and have to deal with old APIs and transitioning the graphics up to 3.0. But if you're coding from scratch and want the latest OpenGL, this book might have a lot of material you shouldn't even pay attention to because it's deprecated. I guess for hobbyist meddling I'll stick to the wiki as it's a difficult task for people to write documentation books on a changing spec. Probably a good one stop shop for all versions of OpenGL but I think sometimes the spec implementers just want you to move forward and aim to ask you to do that as infrequently as possible. I guess 3.0 appears to have addressed that.
You know, I grew up right next to Minnesota, and while I had plenty of reason to hate your state (a certain professional football team with a propensity to lose important games comes to mind), I've never heard of it referred to as Communist Minnesota.
Well then you might find your state's history interesting as well as a certain Sconnie Senator from 1947 to 1958 during which it was the fashion at the time to get anyone and everyone on a particular list for being a 'Commie Sympathizer.'
Despite your idiotic sports elitism complex that runs rampant through your state and trickles into my home state (so annoying), the two are really not that different nowadays.
This should be easy enough. Hipsters are liberal, hicks are conservative. Pretty easy to identify them from facial hair amongst other cues.
There are strange boundary cases however. Like when someone becomes so hipster they're hicks [Warning, NSFW] like in the Jan 21st picture on that blog. And, like the theoretical Higgs Boson, if one traverses the hick spectrum far enough right they will eventually stumble upon some sort of strange class of so-Broke-Back-Mountain-it's-hipster... while I don't have any pictures for you the Hipsters/Hicks Research Community That Takes Money from Parents Who Are Worried about Their Youths is all abuzz with the existence of them... we're just not sure how to test for it yet without a dedicated blog sending us pictures of that particular subculture wildlife.
Factor 1 (46% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on likeability (.94) and trustworthiness (.97) and low loadings on dominance (.11) and facial maturity (.14). Factor 2 (42% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on dominance (.92) and facial maturity
If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.
And I would also like to point out for the college students that society (especially high school) often pigeonholes people and defines who they are on how they look. The individual sometimes has no choice and sometimes just accepts it and goes with it in order to belong. If you look older when you're young and people might instinctively treat you like a cold Republican. Always looked young and innocent? Then a warm Democrat.
Would be an explanation that agrees with the correlation the research drew to define the deviation from random guessing but nothing conclusive.
Same old story, you have a two party system where both parties are being funded by corporations, and God forbid you should suggest some kind of government regulation because that is "socialism" and as every patriotic American knows Socialism = Evil.
And what is social security? A mild form of socialism. What are taxes (especially those that go to public owned parks, libraries and schools)?
I believe that we've slowly warmed up to the idea that the best economic system lies somewhere between pure capitalism and pure socialism. And even on a state by state basis you will find a wide array of where each state sits. Take Minnesota versus Texas, in Texas it might be well known to all the patriotic 'wing-nut conservatives' that Socialism is Evil but in Minnesota I can tell you that the patriotic 'bleeding heart liberals' that Socialist programs are necessary to protect the poor and sick. I know that the political winds of politics are different because I grew up in Minnesota under the poverty line on Minnesota Care and received college grants based on need. Everyone around me loved it. I now live in Northern Virginia where I leave that out of conversations after listening to a few folks rail on "Communist Minnesota." Fine.
Decentralization of power back to the states is good. And shows that many models can work for many different people. I speculate that socialism is evil locally to you. Please don't extrapolate it to a national scale.
One of my problems with regulation is that big business actually welcomes it. Why do you suppose that is? Because they know that it's easier to shut out small businesses that might challenge their business model when you put regulatory hurdles in the marketplace. A large company will have no problem complying with whatever regulations are imposed on it.
I think you're oversimplifying things with that statement. Take for instance a new regulation in healthcare which states that every healthcare provider shall audit their records daily by hand (no machine automation) in order to reduce the number of errors in prescriptions. It's an outrageous regulation but certainly a small highly specialized practice would have less of a problem implementing than a big behemoth county hospital sitting precariously atop an urban population in downtown metropolis.
They have legions of lawyers working on compliance and lobbyists in DC working to ensure that the regulations protect their existing business while shutting out competitors.
I kind of agree with you. However, if you can provide names and conclusive proof and evidence of this, I urge you to submit a complaint to the FTC with said details falling under the Sherman Antitrust Act. They actually do take that stuff very seriously.
The small start up has neither of those advantages.
They also don't have that overhead or those complications and so should be able to find a niche in the market where people would like a lower priced product and are not afraid of litigation and licensing headaches.
Man Shot Dead By Saloon
Wild Bill Hickok and those two guys that stole downstairs to save the squarehead kid; tell Ned to stick around so they see what the kid has to say about him. Then he throws down against Hickok and this other cocksucker who draws almost as fast, so it's a toss-up who blew Ned's head off.... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
Opinion: On the Existence of Whiskey Some goddamn point a man's due to stop arguing with his-self and feeling twice the goddamn fool he knows he is 'cause he can't be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime and fucking it up. I don't want to fight it anymore, understand me reader? And I don't want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
Does anyone have a before and after screen shot? Honestly, the site doesn't look half bad. Reduce/condense the amount of information you're throwing on the frontpage and you've got a good site. I don't even see an unnecessarily egregious use of Flash that mars so many news sites. It's a hell of a lot better than 75% of the news sites I come across (even Reuters has this annoying script that runs endlessly). I should note that with my bandwidth here it loaded pretty much instantly. I could see this taking forever on ma and pa's dialup.
I agree. Right now I'm training an army of American hackers that are going to roll over China. Check out this video of my protege at work. That madd h4xx iz a freebie for you, the more advanced stuff (like photoshopping a cat's head onto a dog's body) will cost ya. USA #1 baby.
This CRC-16 implementation seems to be virtually unknown outside of China, as shown by a Google search for one of the key variables, "crc_ta[16]". At the time of this writing, almost every page with meaningful content concerning the algorithm is Chinese:
Oh. My. God. I justreran the search and it's changed. The top results are in English! It's the British that are attacking Google! Wait, one of the links is to a Blogspot site. Sweet Jesus, the attacks are coming from inside Google's own employee base! But wait, if you click crc_ta[16] enough times then Slashdot will show up in the list. Meaning Slashdot is the attacker on Google!
Oh Great Britain, Slashdot and even Google themselves, why have you forsaken us?
Google's pageranking engine returns a good enough set of available crawable webpages. It does not indicate guilt or scan all of human knowledge. Using it as any sort of evidence in a huge international scandal is less than prudent.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Emphasis mine. Nowhere is he talking about a CRC algorithm or even fingerprinting the attack to a particular country. Instead, the obvious question is simply this: Who else would hack one of the most successful companies in the world only to read the e-mails of Human Rights Activists in China? What possible gain could anyone else have from this information?
I'm not saying hard evidence has been provided one way or the other (I'm not even sure it could be proven one way or the other unless someone claims ownership) but the only evidence the accuser offered up was this. Not that the "algorithm was only known to Chinese" nor anything as simpleton.
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
The the real priority that is clearly disparate between Western countries and China is purely what percent of our GDP we dump into science versus defense on a federal level. Do a budget comparison between the United States and China for defense spending. I think you'll find that that leaves China with much more resources to dump into education, their growing economy, building infrastructure and science.
In the United States, military spending does foster more science and education but still not as much as dumping that new joint strike fighter contract into college educations for everyone. It ain't going to change but it's a very real difference that can be felt.
This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?
Not with copyright and fair use. Fair use is deliberately ambiguous. This is the reason why huge legal bills can be generated over it. Because it is ill defined. No amount of logical, sane Markov modeled state diagrams could convince some people that they are now entering a state of expected loss on a case.
Allow me to present what will undoubtedly be a very unpopular viewpoint here.
"Let's Go Crazy" is a 279 second track off of Purple Rain. Most Copyright lawyers consider 'safe harbor' for fair use to be one tenth of a song or, if longer than five minutes, thirty seconds (even Wikipedia implements this). In a very pedantic analysis, had she used 27.9 seconds of the song instead of the quoted 30 then there would be no grounds for take down, let alone a court case.
Now lets say you have a huge catalog of songs you'd like to defend. You're a big mega corporation so what you do is you hire developers to analyze songs for fingerprints and -- funny how pedantic algorithms get to be -- submit anything over the 'safe harbor' limit to Control Gate C (that being the legal arm which churns out thousands of take down notices).
I'd like to see Universal burned by their mechanization of this process but there's your unpopular defense of having to take this to court based entirely around popular 'safe harbor' limits and deliberate ambiguity of the law. And I guess this could be seen as Universal having to try to draw the real line with precedence for court case established 'safe harbor.' Universal could fear popular 'safe harbor' limits expanding if they don't fight these things.
"knowingly materially misrepresents under this section..."
The question is -- given the above -- were they really?
Real free-thinkers don't start out with an set ideology, and they certainly don't have a cult leader or product line that they worship.
From the summary:
the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity.
I think what the article was trying to say is that it's as close to 'free-thinking' as one can get when describing a company or product line. You are painfully correct in that this is a ridiculous use of words but if you think back to Apple's marketing past and present, I think you'd agree that the company sought to enter the market by appealing to people who need something to feel different. And they did and that's why it's 'almost synonymous' and not equivalent. I almost appreciate the fact that they use 'free-thinking' because that title is almost always self appointed... whether it be to imply that everyone else is 'jailed' but you or the simple fact that no one but yourself can truly know what you are thinking so to describe how you think, only you are the de facto expert.
The funny thing is that every music studio (of five) that I've been in hinge on Mac hardware and Mac software. It's hilariously uniform. Sometimes they even have the same model of Mac with the same (ProTools) hardware and software setup. The 'free-thinking' and creativity comes from what the people do with it and not the fact that they are going against the grain in a hardware and software manner.
Her statements here appear contradictory. She says that electronic books should be available as books are available in libraries, but goes on to say that copyright holders must control their dissemination. But copyright holders have no control over the dissemination of books in public libraries!
You're right but the biggest problem is the phrase 'information and literature.' I have a bigger problem with her logic that information should be controlled. Had she said 'arts and literature' I would have written a lengthy response attempting to identify with her or at least asking what her desired end state is. But when you start to advocate control of information, you kind of lose me on pure principle.
Now I'm not naive enough to think that fiction and nonfiction are a pure dichotomy and would open dialogues of the works of great historians. But I agree that capitalism (especially current implementations) have flaws when rewarding artists versus -- say -- an engineer. I would also agree that they are not always fairly reimbursed for their contributions to society. And that's a subjective thing so of course you will never get it right. But if you purchasing books used to be their major income and now -- if what she fears is true -- you can get a lot online for less cash, how is she reimbursed? I guess we'd need major clarifications on the Google book deal. Like who will set the prices? Google? The publisher? The author? She, of course, fears for this control and I hope she contacted Google about clarifications on this before speaking publicly as this could just be a misunderstanding.
In the end, she has a right to her opinion. She should never have joined the Authors Guild as they turned out to be horrid representatives for her. I don't know what effects -- if any -- her open resignation had in that community but she made a poor choice in joining. She has a right to express her opinion, I'm curious to see how many authors agree with her. As you pointed out, books are available for my lending in a library so what if an online scheme could do the same thing? Especially for out of print books and the agonizingly slowly growing population of those in the public domain.
So here's my problem: More frequently Schneier acts as a reputable news source 'breaking' a story without citing the originator of the information. This is fine when it's a big paper like the New York Times but Schneier runs a blog on security. That's it.
So what makes it ok for a "big paper like the New York Times" to publish unsubstantiated claims? We shouldn't disengage our critical thinking regardless of the source.
That's not at all what I meant. I meant it was okay because they get caught. Take for instance the CBS Dan Rather screw up with Bush's documents. Because they didn't authenticate they got some serious negative press. Do you think that Schneier faces the same sort of name-through-the-mud charges if he prints something unauthenticated? It's the journalistic integrity that the Times must uphold to remain a viable newspaper that Schneier is not facing. He's just a blog, after all.
If the New York Times broke this and said they had a source but were protecting their anonymity, I'd buy it. I'd buy it right up until they were caught relaying lies and then I'd take their news with a grain of salt from that point on.
It's the reason why I don't anything from Fox News affiliates and avoid them altogether. They proved they have no (maybe even negative if that's possible) journalistic integrity. When providing the news is your source of income you should protect that at all costs.
So Google is afraid to reveal what the law (CALEA) forces them to do?
We already know the telephone and cellular companies have found a way to monetize state surveillance by law enforcement, so they're not complaining.
That's funny. If they didn't charge for it, the consumer would be paying for the overhead of them being spied on. Would you like that scenario better? Get out, get vocal, tell people, tell average people on the street when they hang up their phone that all that information just got logged for the government. And do it with some tact so you don't look like a goddamn crazy.
If US government want and have these, why wouldn't China? It's not that far fetched, and it's probably better for Google to say it was some virus planted on their system rather than have news all over the internet that China has such in place too. And it could be that US operations didn't know about it, Google China is its independent operation after all and why they're maybe pulling off.
This supposition just raises more questions in my mind though. 1) What do you mean by "independent operation" because it's still a subsidiary of Google and I'm sure utilizes much of the exact replicated technology. 2) Why in the world would Google enforce an American law in China? 3) If Google were providing this intercept data as access to the Chinese government then why in the hell would the Chinese government break in to steal email data from human rights activists? (From the original source, they suspect it was the government because the target was 'accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists') Why would the government need to gain malware access to the system that's put in place for them to access?
It just doesn't add up in so many ways. Every explanation seems to have more questions behind it. I'm almost tempted to say this was someone from Baidu or a criminal element in China or Russia that covered up all their tracks except those deliberately left to be political. But I'm getting into tin foil hat territory there.
I think it was AT&T or Verizon that we had/. article recently about how US government used their backdoor tons of times to gather info and that it would had been impossible to handle manually. Why wouldn't Google, one of the largest US companies, have similar system?
All big time communications operations have to worry about this. It sucks but it's the law. The question remains, however, what is that doing in China and if they're doing it for Chinese law, why did the government need to hack their own system set up to serve them?
Agreed so I visited his blog and a recent post is equally scant. He points back to another blog post with a little more but really he's just pointing out the irony of a new proposed bill outlawing Google's collaboration with China in violating human rights issues. The irony being that the US has asked for similar backdoors from Google already.
So here's my problem: More frequently Schneier acts as a reputable news source 'breaking' a story without citing the originator of the information. This is fine when it's a big paper like the New York Times but Schneier runs a blog on security. That's it. He might be a first hand expert but if so why isn't he showing and describing his conclusive evidence that the US mandated backdoor is how Chinese hackers gained entry? There's no doubt the software is less secure with a backdoor -- by definition -- but when he says:
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
He better be able to back it up. And he reiterates:
China's hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders.
I just want to caution everyone that you're reading an opinion piece by a security blogger with no corroborating evidence. And on top of that, he has zero accountability. In fact, he says none of this on his blog, he leaves it as an op-ed on CNN. Read it like a strange click generating opinion piece and nothing more.
I have respect for the man but this certainly shakes that. Any concrete proof of this would be welcomed. The problem is I'm not sure how one would prove it one way or the other since I believe all the source in question is closed source to begin with.
Outlook found that only 10 percent of those surveyed would be willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access.
The article says the same thing but what they probably messed up is that it's Outsell not Outlook:
With a number of US newspaper owners considering charging online, Outlook found that only 10 percent of those surveyed would be willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access.
For its annual News Users' survey, Outsell asked 2,787 US news consumers in July about their online and offline news preferences. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percent.
Outsell found that 57 percent of news users looking for "news right now" go to digital sources, up from 33 percent a few years ago.
I'm guessing that was a spell checking/slip up. Not to be blamed on the submitter or slashdot editors but instead the IB Times.
There's another old article going as far back as 2000 from Courtney Love. Although I find her and her music distasteful she sure does open up a lot of numbers that -- although larger -- probably work the same way today. If that isn't condemnation of the music executives milking artists like animals and then dumping them, I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with you. I think giving people the news they want is the only way this has worked. Because who else is there in the equation to please with the news? You have the newsmakers, the government and the newsreaders. And only the last one makes sense.
... even breaking the possibility in advance before the law is passed ... will generate higher ratings than their competitor.
Allow me to point out what is wrong with your simplified explanation. Sure, news has relied on "Mycountryian Idol" and movie reviews on slow news days or even on a site where they can present a dearth of information. However, once the jaywalking impalement law is passed, some people are going to experience a loved one being impaled for jaywalking. Now what do people want to hear news about? TV or the impalement of citizens for jaywalking? The reporters understand this and know that breaking this now
This sort of capitalistic scheme for news is not without faults but your example is down right disingenuous. A single news source breaking the story of someone passing laws to impale jaywalkers would bring down their site as people rushed to read more about where and how this is happening. Despite the lack of bad things happening resulting in crap news on TV and in print, you must understand that people (at least Americans) still are very concerned with themselves and their well being above anything or anybody else.
I particularly enjoyed how they ripped apart so many aspects of 'news' over the past years and coming years. From "Do bikinis cause cancer? More at 11" to automated journalism. But then somehow claim that the newsreader is ignorant for seeking news that is personalized to him or her. Maybe, just maybe, if a wide reaching non-specific news source treated their readers with respect, produced quality and engaged in more investigative journalism than "look at this picture" or "Ten worst/best" lists then we would all be reading it.
Until then, I guarantee you that people will prefer to seek specialized news sources because the editors and writers for that source are often experts and their biases are often exactly what we want. Just look at the blogs of Michael Geist and Bruce Schneier, way more preferable than any big name news site's 'computer security' division.
From the Amazon link, I found several reviews giving the book a thrashing for continuing to include deprecated APIs and not teaching the new paradigms of the APIs after OpenGL 3.0. One review was upset with the regurgitation and lack of new material. Another reviewer was looking for a book that concisely covers OpenGL 3.1 and the new way of coding things since 3.0 instead of the backwards compatible context and forward compatible context intricacies.
I was thinking of picking up a good OpenGL book but this one sounds like it'd be most useful to people who need to move old projects forward and have to deal with old APIs and transitioning the graphics up to 3.0. But if you're coding from scratch and want the latest OpenGL, this book might have a lot of material you shouldn't even pay attention to because it's deprecated. I guess for hobbyist meddling I'll stick to the wiki as it's a difficult task for people to write documentation books on a changing spec. Probably a good one stop shop for all versions of OpenGL but I think sometimes the spec implementers just want you to move forward and aim to ask you to do that as infrequently as possible. I guess 3.0 appears to have addressed that.
You know, I grew up right next to Minnesota, and while I had plenty of reason to hate your state (a certain professional football team with a propensity to lose important games comes to mind), I've never heard of it referred to as Communist Minnesota.
Well then you might find your state's history interesting as well as a certain Sconnie Senator from 1947 to 1958 during which it was the fashion at the time to get anyone and everyone on a particular list for being a 'Commie Sympathizer.'
Despite your idiotic sports elitism complex that runs rampant through your state and trickles into my home state (so annoying), the two are really not that different nowadays.
This should be easy enough. Hipsters are liberal, hicks are conservative. Pretty easy to identify them from facial hair amongst other cues.
There are strange boundary cases however. Like when someone becomes so hipster they're hicks [Warning, NSFW] like in the Jan 21st picture on that blog. And, like the theoretical Higgs Boson, if one traverses the hick spectrum far enough right they will eventually stumble upon some sort of strange class of so-Broke-Back-Mountain-it's-hipster ... while I don't have any pictures for you the Hipsters/Hicks Research Community That Takes Money from Parents Who Are Worried about Their Youths is all abuzz with the existence of them ... we're just not sure how to test for it yet without a dedicated blog sending us pictures of that particular subculture wildlife.
Factor 1 (46% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on likeability (.94) and trustworthiness (.97) and low loadings on dominance (.11) and facial maturity (.14). Factor 2 (42% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on dominance (.92) and facial maturity
My grandmother used to tell me something along the lines of what is often misattributed to Churchill:
If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.
And I would also like to point out for the college students that society (especially high school) often pigeonholes people and defines who they are on how they look. The individual sometimes has no choice and sometimes just accepts it and goes with it in order to belong. If you look older when you're young and people might instinctively treat you like a cold Republican. Always looked young and innocent? Then a warm Democrat.
Would be an explanation that agrees with the correlation the research drew to define the deviation from random guessing but nothing conclusive.
Same old story, you have a two party system where both parties are being funded by corporations, and God forbid you should suggest some kind of government regulation because that is "socialism" and as every patriotic American knows Socialism = Evil.
And what is social security? A mild form of socialism. What are taxes (especially those that go to public owned parks, libraries and schools)?
I believe that we've slowly warmed up to the idea that the best economic system lies somewhere between pure capitalism and pure socialism. And even on a state by state basis you will find a wide array of where each state sits. Take Minnesota versus Texas, in Texas it might be well known to all the patriotic 'wing-nut conservatives' that Socialism is Evil but in Minnesota I can tell you that the patriotic 'bleeding heart liberals' that Socialist programs are necessary to protect the poor and sick. I know that the political winds of politics are different because I grew up in Minnesota under the poverty line on Minnesota Care and received college grants based on need. Everyone around me loved it. I now live in Northern Virginia where I leave that out of conversations after listening to a few folks rail on "Communist Minnesota." Fine.
Decentralization of power back to the states is good. And shows that many models can work for many different people. I speculate that socialism is evil locally to you. Please don't extrapolate it to a national scale.
One of my problems with regulation is that big business actually welcomes it. Why do you suppose that is? Because they know that it's easier to shut out small businesses that might challenge their business model when you put regulatory hurdles in the marketplace. A large company will have no problem complying with whatever regulations are imposed on it.
I think you're oversimplifying things with that statement. Take for instance a new regulation in healthcare which states that every healthcare provider shall audit their records daily by hand (no machine automation) in order to reduce the number of errors in prescriptions. It's an outrageous regulation but certainly a small highly specialized practice would have less of a problem implementing than a big behemoth county hospital sitting precariously atop an urban population in downtown metropolis.
They have legions of lawyers working on compliance and lobbyists in DC working to ensure that the regulations protect their existing business while shutting out competitors.
I kind of agree with you. However, if you can provide names and conclusive proof and evidence of this, I urge you to submit a complaint to the FTC with said details falling under the Sherman Antitrust Act. They actually do take that stuff very seriously.
The small start up has neither of those advantages.
They also don't have that overhead or those complications and so should be able to find a niche in the market where people would like a lower priced product and are not afraid of litigation and licensing headaches.
Dear Sir, Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. What?! $5? ...Forget it then.
It's probably for the better. Distance yourself as far from Deadwood, SD as possible. Since watching it, I've become considerably more abrasive.
$5 a week? How much for a dead-wood version?
Man Shot Dead By Saloon ... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
Wild Bill Hickok and those two guys that stole downstairs to save the squarehead kid; tell Ned to stick around so they see what the kid has to say about him. Then he throws down against Hickok and this other cocksucker who draws almost as fast, so it's a toss-up who blew Ned's head off.
Opinion: On the Existence of Whiskey
Some goddamn point a man's due to stop arguing with his-self and feeling twice the goddamn fool he knows he is 'cause he can't be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime and fucking it up. I don't want to fight it anymore, understand me reader? And I don't want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?
In October, the web site relaunched and was redesigned. One of the principals behind the redesign is Mr. Mancini's replacement, editor Debby Krenek.
To say the least, the project has not been a newsroom favorite. "The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks," said one staffer.
"It's an abomination," said another.
W3C agrees.
Does anyone have a before and after screen shot? Honestly, the site doesn't look half bad. Reduce/condense the amount of information you're throwing on the frontpage and you've got a good site. I don't even see an unnecessarily egregious use of Flash that mars so many news sites. It's a hell of a lot better than 75% of the news sites I come across (even Reuters has this annoying script that runs endlessly). I should note that with my bandwidth here it loaded pretty much instantly. I could see this taking forever on ma and pa's dialup.
Screw them.
I agree. Right now I'm training an army of American hackers that are going to roll over China. Check out this video of my protege at work. That madd h4xx iz a freebie for you, the more advanced stuff (like photoshopping a cat's head onto a dog's body) will cost ya. USA #1 baby.
This CRC-16 implementation seems to be virtually unknown outside of China, as shown by a Google search for one of the key variables, "crc_ta[16]". At the time of this writing, almost every page with meaningful content concerning the algorithm is Chinese:
Oh. My. God. I just reran the search and it's changed. The top results are in English! It's the British that are attacking Google! Wait, one of the links is to a Blogspot site. Sweet Jesus, the attacks are coming from inside Google's own employee base! But wait, if you click crc_ta[16] enough times then Slashdot will show up in the list. Meaning Slashdot is the attacker on Google!
Oh Great Britain, Slashdot and even Google themselves, why have you forsaken us?
Google's pageranking engine returns a good enough set of available crawable webpages. It does not indicate guilt or scan all of human knowledge. Using it as any sort of evidence in a huge international scandal is less than prudent.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Emphasis mine. Nowhere is he talking about a CRC algorithm or even fingerprinting the attack to a particular country. Instead, the obvious question is simply this: Who else would hack one of the most successful companies in the world only to read the e-mails of Human Rights Activists in China? What possible gain could anyone else have from this information?
I'm not saying hard evidence has been provided one way or the other (I'm not even sure it could be proven one way or the other unless someone claims ownership) but the only evidence the accuser offered up was this. Not that the "algorithm was only known to Chinese" nor anything as simpleton.
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
The the real priority that is clearly disparate between Western countries and China is purely what percent of our GDP we dump into science versus defense on a federal level. Do a budget comparison between the United States and China for defense spending. I think you'll find that that leaves China with much more resources to dump into education, their growing economy, building infrastructure and science.
In the United States, military spending does foster more science and education but still not as much as dumping that new joint strike fighter contract into college educations for everyone. It ain't going to change but it's a very real difference that can be felt.
thrown into mental hospitals where they were forced onto medication or beaten with electric batons
Whereas in America they just do it to you in public.
This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?
Not with copyright and fair use. Fair use is deliberately ambiguous. This is the reason why huge legal bills can be generated over it. Because it is ill defined. No amount of logical, sane Markov modeled state diagrams could convince some people that they are now entering a state of expected loss on a case.
Allow me to present what will undoubtedly be a very unpopular viewpoint here.
"Let's Go Crazy" is a 279 second track off of Purple Rain. Most Copyright lawyers consider 'safe harbor' for fair use to be one tenth of a song or, if longer than five minutes, thirty seconds (even Wikipedia implements this). In a very pedantic analysis, had she used 27.9 seconds of the song instead of the quoted 30 then there would be no grounds for take down, let alone a court case.
Now lets say you have a huge catalog of songs you'd like to defend. You're a big mega corporation so what you do is you hire developers to analyze songs for fingerprints and -- funny how pedantic algorithms get to be -- submit anything over the 'safe harbor' limit to Control Gate C (that being the legal arm which churns out thousands of take down notices).
I'd like to see Universal burned by their mechanization of this process but there's your unpopular defense of having to take this to court based entirely around popular 'safe harbor' limits and deliberate ambiguity of the law. And I guess this could be seen as Universal having to try to draw the real line with precedence for court case established 'safe harbor.' Universal could fear popular 'safe harbor' limits expanding if they don't fight these things.
"knowingly materially misrepresents under this section..."
The question is -- given the above -- were they really?
Real free-thinkers don't start out with an set ideology, and they certainly don't have a cult leader or product line that they worship.
From the summary:
the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity.
I think what the article was trying to say is that it's as close to 'free-thinking' as one can get when describing a company or product line. You are painfully correct in that this is a ridiculous use of words but if you think back to Apple's marketing past and present, I think you'd agree that the company sought to enter the market by appealing to people who need something to feel different. And they did and that's why it's 'almost synonymous' and not equivalent. I almost appreciate the fact that they use 'free-thinking' because that title is almost always self appointed ... whether it be to imply that everyone else is 'jailed' but you or the simple fact that no one but yourself can truly know what you are thinking so to describe how you think, only you are the de facto expert.
The funny thing is that every music studio (of five) that I've been in hinge on Mac hardware and Mac software. It's hilariously uniform. Sometimes they even have the same model of Mac with the same (ProTools) hardware and software setup. The 'free-thinking' and creativity comes from what the people do with it and not the fact that they are going against the grain in a hardware and software manner.
Her statements here appear contradictory. She says that electronic books should be available as books are available in libraries, but goes on to say that copyright holders must control their dissemination. But copyright holders have no control over the dissemination of books in public libraries!
You're right but the biggest problem is the phrase 'information and literature.' I have a bigger problem with her logic that information should be controlled. Had she said 'arts and literature' I would have written a lengthy response attempting to identify with her or at least asking what her desired end state is. But when you start to advocate control of information, you kind of lose me on pure principle.
Now I'm not naive enough to think that fiction and nonfiction are a pure dichotomy and would open dialogues of the works of great historians. But I agree that capitalism (especially current implementations) have flaws when rewarding artists versus -- say -- an engineer. I would also agree that they are not always fairly reimbursed for their contributions to society. And that's a subjective thing so of course you will never get it right. But if you purchasing books used to be their major income and now -- if what she fears is true -- you can get a lot online for less cash, how is she reimbursed? I guess we'd need major clarifications on the Google book deal. Like who will set the prices? Google? The publisher? The author? She, of course, fears for this control and I hope she contacted Google about clarifications on this before speaking publicly as this could just be a misunderstanding.
In the end, she has a right to her opinion. She should never have joined the Authors Guild as they turned out to be horrid representatives for her. I don't know what effects -- if any -- her open resignation had in that community but she made a poor choice in joining. She has a right to express her opinion, I'm curious to see how many authors agree with her. As you pointed out, books are available for my lending in a library so what if an online scheme could do the same thing? Especially for out of print books and the agonizingly slowly growing population of those in the public domain.
So here's my problem: More frequently Schneier acts as a reputable news source 'breaking' a story without citing the originator of the information. This is fine when it's a big paper like the New York Times but Schneier runs a blog on security. That's it.
So what makes it ok for a "big paper like the New York Times" to publish unsubstantiated claims? We shouldn't disengage our critical thinking regardless of the source.
That's not at all what I meant. I meant it was okay because they get caught. Take for instance the CBS Dan Rather screw up with Bush's documents. Because they didn't authenticate they got some serious negative press. Do you think that Schneier faces the same sort of name-through-the-mud charges if he prints something unauthenticated? It's the journalistic integrity that the Times must uphold to remain a viable newspaper that Schneier is not facing. He's just a blog, after all.
If the New York Times broke this and said they had a source but were protecting their anonymity, I'd buy it. I'd buy it right up until they were caught relaying lies and then I'd take their news with a grain of salt from that point on.
It's the reason why I don't anything from Fox News affiliates and avoid them altogether. They proved they have no (maybe even negative if that's possible) journalistic integrity. When providing the news is your source of income you should protect that at all costs.
Ask Google for the documentation that admits they cooperated with a secret government program to spy on Americans?
What 'secret government program to spy on Americans'? Read the article. They mention the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA). Here is Wikipedia's summary if you don't have the stomach for legalese. You can read all about how it went in during Clinton's administration and has been enjoyed by every administration since (a lost freedom is rarely won back) and will continue to be enjoyed for a long time coming.
So Google is afraid to reveal what the law (CALEA) forces them to do?
We already know the telephone and cellular companies have found a way to monetize state surveillance by law enforcement, so they're not complaining.
That's funny. If they didn't charge for it, the consumer would be paying for the overhead of them being spied on. Would you like that scenario better? Get out, get vocal, tell people, tell average people on the street when they hang up their phone that all that information just got logged for the government. And do it with some tact so you don't look like a goddamn crazy.
If US government want and have these, why wouldn't China? It's not that far fetched, and it's probably better for Google to say it was some virus planted on their system rather than have news all over the internet that China has such in place too. And it could be that US operations didn't know about it, Google China is its independent operation after all and why they're maybe pulling off.
This supposition just raises more questions in my mind though. 1) What do you mean by "independent operation" because it's still a subsidiary of Google and I'm sure utilizes much of the exact replicated technology. 2) Why in the world would Google enforce an American law in China? 3) If Google were providing this intercept data as access to the Chinese government then why in the hell would the Chinese government break in to steal email data from human rights activists? (From the original source, they suspect it was the government because the target was 'accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists') Why would the government need to gain malware access to the system that's put in place for them to access?
It just doesn't add up in so many ways. Every explanation seems to have more questions behind it. I'm almost tempted to say this was someone from Baidu or a criminal element in China or Russia that covered up all their tracks except those deliberately left to be political. But I'm getting into tin foil hat territory there.
I think it was AT&T or Verizon that we had /. article recently about how US government used their backdoor tons of times to gather info and that it would had been impossible to handle manually. Why wouldn't Google, one of the largest US companies, have similar system?
All big time communications operations have to worry about this. It sucks but it's the law. The question remains, however, what is that doing in China and if they're doing it for Chinese law, why did the government need to hack their own system set up to serve them?
His article is short on sources
Agreed so I visited his blog and a recent post is equally scant. He points back to another blog post with a little more but really he's just pointing out the irony of a new proposed bill outlawing Google's collaboration with China in violating human rights issues. The irony being that the US has asked for similar backdoors from Google already.
So here's my problem: More frequently Schneier acts as a reputable news source 'breaking' a story without citing the originator of the information. This is fine when it's a big paper like the New York Times but Schneier runs a blog on security. That's it. He might be a first hand expert but if so why isn't he showing and describing his conclusive evidence that the US mandated backdoor is how Chinese hackers gained entry? There's no doubt the software is less secure with a backdoor -- by definition -- but when he says:
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
He better be able to back it up. And he reiterates:
China's hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders.
I just want to caution everyone that you're reading an opinion piece by a security blogger with no corroborating evidence. And on top of that, he has zero accountability. In fact, he says none of this on his blog, he leaves it as an op-ed on CNN. Read it like a strange click generating opinion piece and nothing more.
I have respect for the man but this certainly shakes that. Any concrete proof of this would be welcomed. The problem is I'm not sure how one would prove it one way or the other since I believe all the source in question is closed source to begin with.
Outlook found that only 10 percent of those surveyed would be willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access.
The article says the same thing but what they probably messed up is that it's Outsell not Outlook:
With a number of US newspaper owners considering charging online, Outlook found that only 10 percent of those surveyed would be willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access.
For its annual News Users' survey, Outsell asked 2,787 US news consumers in July about their online and offline news preferences. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percent.
Outsell found that 57 percent of news users looking for "news right now" go to digital sources, up from 33 percent a few years ago.
I'm guessing that was a spell checking/slip up. Not to be blamed on the submitter or slashdot editors but instead the IB Times.
There's another old article going as far back as 2000 from Courtney Love. Although I find her and her music distasteful she sure does open up a lot of numbers that -- although larger -- probably work the same way today. If that isn't condemnation of the music executives milking artists like animals and then dumping them, I don't know what is.