OK, I did go to read the article, thanks for the info.
Even though I might have been a little off-base, I feel my point still stands. It is silly to rant against all kinds of newer Internet developments like search engines becoming commercialized and clueless bloggers misrepresenting your position, when both of those actually add to your readership (if not directly, at least they are inevitable side effects of things which do).
He rants, but one wonders how many human people he would have expected to read his words in a world before the Web, where he wouldn't get free publicity on Slashdot by spouting anti-techno rants.
Disclaimer: I also didn't read. And unless some other poster here convinces me it's worthwhile, I probably won't.
> using the Internet without SOMEONE knowing who you are... is pretty much impossible in Germany.
International proxy and/or VPN use is illegal? I think what you meant was: "anonymity is a bit more expensive in Germany".
> where someone who "enables" you to do illegal things (not necessarily crimes) can be held > responsible for what you do if you can't be caught
Sounds weird and not well-defined. If the bank robbers flee in a vehicle identified as a Volkswagen and don't get caught, can the bank sue Volkswagen for "enabling" them?
> requiring all websites with over 100.000 (IIRC) visitors to require registration with using the national ID number.
I fail to see how this could possibly be effective. Valid national ID numbers can't be spoofed? Or is SK already at the point where breaking the ToS of a website is a heinous crime?
Besides which, personally I think I'd merely partition my website into different segments and make sure that only 99,999 people were registered at each one, providing a "mix-em up views" top-level website which does not allow for registration at all. It would seem to me that this would probably be OK with the law as you state it. And it would be an interesting challenge to do effectively, while demonstrating how technology easily bypasses artificial restrictions like this law.
Absolutely. But if global warming is not caused by mankind then our research into stopping the supposed man-based causes of it is not best directed. If we've ploughed all our efforts into reducing our Carbon Dioxide output and then we learn that it's due to some solar cycle and the effect of CO2 is minimal, then that's a huge waste of time when we could have been doing something else. Also, if we have misjudged the causes of global warming, how can we predict what is actually going to happen and plan for it?
I must thank you and Golddess, your posts have triggered an "ah-ha!" moment in my thinking about this problem. When reading your post, it became clear that we aren't going to know (as in "know scientifically") in the near future if the current global warming is caused by C02 or by some other unknown factor or both. That will take hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
I admit to being a big fan of Bruce Schneier, and realize now that his arguments about what is the best way to spend money to fight terrorism also apply to the problem of global warming. In the case of terrorism, Schneier makes the apt point that we can never outguess the next terrorist plot, so it pays to invest a lot of the money currently being wasted on "magical thinking" (i.e., prevent-the-last-plot-and-everything-will-be-OK) on contingency planning for disaster management. Since similarly to terrorism we aren't going to know all of the causes which might lead to catastrophic global warming (although CO2 seems like a good candidate as one of the causes), so we should instead focus on trying to understand how bad the problem is likely to get and how we might be able to either stop/modify it with engineering or (as Golddess points out) plan for how to adapt to new situations which might develop.
It's well-known that people overestimate risks which they feel they cannot control, and underestimate those which they feel they have some level of control. Well, it's at least well-known to those who follow Bruce Schneier:
A competent developer could mean "competent to win the Netflix challenge" but not be bothered to learn OS-specific peccadilloes. (I agree that they certainly would need to understand totally general OS concepts stuff like what a file is.)
The question to me is: is there a bigger chance of Apophis hitting Earth than the chance of catastrophic climate change due to anthropogenic global warming? Because that has the western world's attention and money, and Apophis does not.
Why does everyone focus on the anthropogenic and not on the catastrophic? I mean, isn't it worth our while to research ways to prevent/ameliorate catastrophic climate change no matter what the cause?
I remember reading in the Time/Life book on the brain that adding an appreciable delay to the auditory feedback you get makes it very difficult even to talk properly. But I'm sure that's old research.
There doesn't seem to be that much on it on the net (or maybe I'm not searching properly). The WP article on Delayed Auditory Feedback has a link to a paper with similar work but it is also from 1979.
> This is unwise, especially when Microsoft can afford the best lawyers and you cannot.
The injustice caused by the imbalance of economic power and the fact that the current legal system amplifies such imbalances (because of the high cost of defending oneself) only emphasizes the GP's point.
> There are times when you have concerns other than how much you can justify without violating your morality
Depending on the volume of information involved, it might be trivial to use Tor to reveal it without being exposed to significant risk (assuming that the information is not interesting to the NSA and its ilk). OTOH, it is idiotic to reveal information for which there is even a tenuous legal argument that you, and only you, could have revealed it.
Or if they do have a news site that they like, they subscribe to its headlines via RSS and only actually visit it to read articles which seem worthwhile.
The only problem with this is when the newspapers compare it with their old business model, where everyone had to buy a whole newspaper in order to be able to skim it for the interesting stuff.
A bit similar to "the album is dead" phenomenon which has hit the music industry.
> The addiction to DRM came as a response to piracy
No, I rather think it came as a response to widespread change in the form of technological advancement. This change includes making piracy much easier (it never was impossible, just harder), but also includes equally important, if not more important changes:
The content industry's product has changed (or can be changed) to pure information which can be backed up and doesn't have to be bought over and over again as books, vinyl records, or tapes physically degrade.
The costs of entering the marketplace for content have, for most forms of content, dropped dramatically, enabling most small-time content producers to attempt to sell their product in competition with the large content providers.
The means of advertising for content have diversified and the large players in the content industry no longer control some possible means for getting exposure for small-time content producers.
DRM is a response to change. A stupid and ineffective response. The content industry will have to change and perhaps will need to downsize dramatically and/or change its marketing and sales models. Up to now, instead of learning to swim, the content industry has been flailing like someone hysterically afraid of drowning, and the waves it's been producing have been affecting society only negatively (in the form of bad laws which are another futile attempt to prevent change).
Just like with music, the publishers have to be convinced that DRM is worthless (as it actually is for the vast majority of text) so that we will eventually be able to buy non-DRMed ebooks.
This is just one tiny step on that path. The publishers haven't even gotten to the "if we sue them piracy will be controlled" stage yet. One wonders if they will understand its futility and skip it.
I find it unlikely that the national protection that would be afforded the US National Icons could successfully be extended by treaty to other countries. Once it was mutual, one would only have to find a small enough country to bribe to make your IP into a National Icon.
Anyway, another poster has astutely pointed out that trademarks already don't expire, and companies already use them for this purpose.
pretty much all of the stuff that happens in a kernel is logic-heavy tasks that only deal with single pieces of data at a time, and thus can't really take advantage of these instructions in any way.
There is one SSEx function which is useful for the kernel, namely, load/store of 128-bit registers for copying and moving memory around.
You really believe that I can't go on Vimeo right now and find a video lipsync with audio owned by Capitol Records? Care to put money on that claim?
No, I call your one song by Capitol Records and raise you two by EMI. I haven't checked, but I'm perfectly willing to take your word for it that Vimeo is chock full of videos with Capitol Records music. It has nothing to do with the point of my post.
My post has nothing to do with the actual videos which are on Vimeo, and everything to do with the legal filing by the record labels. My post is only about one specific legal argument which is presented in the filing, which claims that because an employee of Vimeo has stated the Vimeo is about "original video, not original music", this means that Vimeo is actively encouraging the infringement of copyrights on Capitol Records/RIAA music. Making that logical equivalence in the legal argument, in my eyes, is making the statement that most/all non-original music is music which belongs to Capitol Records/RIAA.
The MPAA have nothing to do with this litigation, since the video content in question are original works ("lip dubs").
Even if the MPAA were involved, they would have little trouble cooperating with RIAA. If someone were to post a clip of MPAA video redubbed with new RIAA audio, both organizations could sue independently. In other words, there would be no need for them to cooperate in the first place.
You are greatly confused, but I found your post highly imaginative (and terrifically wishful thinking)...
TFA makes the point that the record companies already lost a similar suit against Veoh, when Veoh claimed safe harbor under the DMCA. The only reason Vimeo would not be similarly protected is if the labels can show that Vimeo is actively encouraging the infringements of their copyrighted works.
So even if it is clear that lots of Vimeo videos use unlicensed music owned by the labels, it is not clear that the suit is valid.
Slashdot Mirror
> i assume he is the shadow minister for fascism then?
Sorry, I don't have "root" for Australia, so I can't read /etc/shadow to find out...
OK, I did go to read the article, thanks for the info.
Even though I might have been a little off-base, I feel my point still stands. It is silly to rant against all kinds of newer Internet developments like search engines becoming commercialized and clueless bloggers misrepresenting your position, when both of those actually add to your readership (if not directly, at least they are inevitable side effects of things which do).
> Basically, as far as I understand it, there is no anonymity allowed.
And that sounds like a good business opportunity for non-SK-citizen Korean speakers in the US to set up websites which do allow anonymity.
Too bad I don't speak Korean...
He rants, but one wonders how many human people he would have expected to read his words in a world before the Web, where he wouldn't get free publicity on Slashdot by spouting anti-techno rants.
Disclaimer: I also didn't read. And unless some other poster here convinces me it's worthwhile, I probably won't.
> using the Internet without SOMEONE knowing who you are ... is pretty much impossible in Germany.
International proxy and/or VPN use is illegal? I think what you meant was: "anonymity is a bit more expensive in Germany".
> where someone who "enables" you to do illegal things (not necessarily crimes) can be held
> responsible for what you do if you can't be caught
Sounds weird and not well-defined. If the bank robbers flee in a vehicle identified as a Volkswagen and don't get caught, can the bank sue Volkswagen for "enabling" them?
> requiring all websites with over 100.000 (IIRC) visitors to require registration with using the national ID number.
I fail to see how this could possibly be effective. Valid national ID numbers can't be spoofed? Or is SK already at the point where breaking the ToS of a website is a heinous crime?
Besides which, personally I think I'd merely partition my website into different segments and make sure that only 99,999 people were registered at each one, providing a "mix-em up views" top-level website which does not allow for registration at all. It would seem to me that this would probably be OK with the law as you state it. And it would be an interesting challenge to do effectively, while demonstrating how technology easily bypasses artificial restrictions like this law.
Sherman Dyslexie, eh?
Cute....
Absolutely. But if global warming is not caused by mankind then our research into stopping the supposed man-based causes of it is not best directed. If we've ploughed all our efforts into reducing our Carbon Dioxide output and then we learn that it's due to some solar cycle and the effect of CO2 is minimal, then that's a huge waste of time when we could have been doing something else. Also, if we have misjudged the causes of global warming, how can we predict what is actually going to happen and plan for it?
I must thank you and Golddess, your posts have triggered an "ah-ha!" moment in my thinking about this problem. When reading your post, it became clear that we aren't going to know (as in "know scientifically") in the near future if the current global warming is caused by C02 or by some other unknown factor or both. That will take hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
I admit to being a big fan of Bruce Schneier, and realize now that his arguments about what is the best way to spend money to fight terrorism also apply to the problem of global warming. In the case of terrorism, Schneier makes the apt point that we can never outguess the next terrorist plot, so it pays to invest a lot of the money currently being wasted on "magical thinking" (i.e., prevent-the-last-plot-and-everything-will-be-OK) on contingency planning for disaster management. Since similarly to terrorism we aren't going to know all of the causes which might lead to catastrophic global warming (although CO2 seems like a good candidate as one of the causes), so we should instead focus on trying to understand how bad the problem is likely to get and how we might be able to either stop/modify it with engineering or (as Golddess points out) plan for how to adapt to new situations which might develop.
It's well-known that people overestimate risks which they feel they cannot control, and underestimate those which they feel they have some level of control. Well, it's at least well-known to those who follow Bruce Schneier:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-155.html (see section "Conventional Wisdom About Risk")
I'd be more worried about accidentally building in dependencies on "hundreds of small programs" that won't be there in the final environment.
This is why you also have a QA department which is in charge of installing the dev's work in a "final environment" and checking it.
(Ironically, we don't have a QA department where I work. /facepalm)
A competent developer could mean "competent to win the Netflix challenge" but not be bothered to learn OS-specific peccadilloes. (I agree that they certainly would need to understand totally general OS concepts stuff like what a file is.)
The question to me is: is there a bigger chance of Apophis hitting Earth than the chance of catastrophic climate change due to anthropogenic global warming? Because that has the western world's attention and money, and Apophis does not.
Why does everyone focus on the anthropogenic and not on the catastrophic? I mean, isn't it worth our while to research ways to prevent/ameliorate catastrophic climate change no matter what the cause?
Nope, it'll just wake up at exactly the right time and strangle, er, someone.
Damn, I hate it when I can't tell a joke because it's too much of a spoiler....
I remember reading in the Time/Life book on the brain that adding an appreciable delay to the auditory feedback you get makes it very difficult even to talk properly. But I'm sure that's old research.
There doesn't seem to be that much on it on the net (or maybe I'm not searching properly). The WP article on Delayed Auditory Feedback has a link to a paper with similar work but it is also from 1979.
> This is unwise, especially when Microsoft can afford the best lawyers and you cannot.
The injustice caused by the imbalance of economic power and the fact that the current legal system amplifies such imbalances (because of the high cost of defending oneself) only emphasizes the GP's point.
> There are times when you have concerns other than how much you can justify without violating your morality
Depending on the volume of information involved, it might be trivial to use Tor to reveal it without being exposed to significant risk (assuming that the information is not interesting to the NSA and its ilk). OTOH, it is idiotic to reveal information for which there is even a tenuous legal argument that you, and only you, could have revealed it.
Or if they do have a news site that they like, they subscribe to its headlines via RSS and only actually visit it to read articles which seem worthwhile.
The only problem with this is when the newspapers compare it with their old business model, where everyone had to buy a whole newspaper in order to be able to skim it for the interesting stuff.
A bit similar to "the album is dead" phenomenon which has hit the music industry.
> The addiction to DRM came as a response to piracy
No, I rather think it came as a response to widespread change in the form of technological advancement. This change includes making piracy much easier (it never was impossible, just harder), but also includes equally important, if not more important changes:
DRM is a response to change. A stupid and ineffective response. The content industry will have to change and perhaps will need to downsize dramatically and/or change its marketing and sales models. Up to now, instead of learning to swim, the content industry has been flailing like someone hysterically afraid of drowning, and the waves it's been producing have been affecting society only negatively (in the form of bad laws which are another futile attempt to prevent change).
Just like with music, the publishers have to be convinced that DRM is worthless (as it actually is for the vast majority of text) so that we will eventually be able to buy non-DRMed ebooks.
This is just one tiny step on that path. The publishers haven't even gotten to the "if we sue them piracy will be controlled" stage yet. One wonders if they will understand its futility and skip it.
I find it unlikely that the national protection that would be afforded the US National Icons could successfully be extended by treaty to other countries. Once it was mutual, one would only have to find a small enough country to bribe to make your IP into a National Icon.
Anyway, another poster has astutely pointed out that trademarks already don't expire, and companies already use them for this purpose.
So your idea is both superfluous and impractical.
Since my reply is one big spoiler for the story, you can find it behind this link.
pretty much all of the stuff that happens in a kernel is logic-heavy tasks that only deal with single pieces of data at a time, and thus can't really take advantage of these instructions in any way.
There is one SSEx function which is useful for the kernel, namely, load/store of 128-bit registers for copying and moving memory around.
I was sure you were joking until I checked the WP article. Oops, forgot to check the article history. Ah, yup, you're OK (or clairvoyant)....
Someone should invent a word for the weird feeling you get when you do research to understand a joke and it turns out not to be one.
You really believe that I can't go on Vimeo right now and find a video lipsync with audio owned by Capitol Records? Care to put money on that claim?
No, I call your one song by Capitol Records and raise you two by EMI. I haven't checked, but I'm perfectly willing to take your word for it that Vimeo is chock full of videos with Capitol Records music. It has nothing to do with the point of my post.
My post has nothing to do with the actual videos which are on Vimeo, and everything to do with the legal filing by the record labels. My post is only about one specific legal argument which is presented in the filing, which claims that because an employee of Vimeo has stated the Vimeo is about "original video, not original music", this means that Vimeo is actively encouraging the infringement of copyrights on Capitol Records/RIAA music. Making that logical equivalence in the legal argument, in my eyes, is making the statement that most/all non-original music is music which belongs to Capitol Records/RIAA.
More clear now?
The MPAA have nothing to do with this litigation, since the video content in question are original works ("lip dubs").
Even if the MPAA were involved, they would have little trouble cooperating with RIAA. If someone were to post a clip of MPAA video redubbed with new RIAA audio, both organizations could sue independently. In other words, there would be no need for them to cooperate in the first place.
You are greatly confused, but I found your post highly imaginative (and terrifically wishful thinking)...
TFA makes the point that the record companies already lost a similar suit against Veoh, when Veoh claimed safe harbor under the DMCA. The only reason Vimeo would not be similarly protected is if the labels can show that Vimeo is actively encouraging the infringements of their copyrighted works.
So even if it is clear that lots of Vimeo videos use unlicensed music owned by the labels, it is not clear that the suit is valid.