I agree (and almost modded you up for your valid point), but you've also left out an important trend here - there's evidence to support our accusations. We've seen JT come up with all sorts of irrational nonsense that he spews into the legal system with no outcome other than wasted time, and the level of irrationality of his claims seems to increase over time (yes, I know this is subjective of course). He's facing disbarment for a reason, after all. The RIAA uses tactics that earned them their "MAFIAA" nickname and are widely regarded as illegal (even the courts are starting to agree), and certainly haven't done anything to actually stop piracy - just look at the numbers. I'm not going down the path of religion, since you can't win an argument over faith, almost by definition - but the points I've seen from those opposing it seem to be much more reasonable and logical than those supporting it. Politics/government - just look at the laws, and their failure to obey them.
Sure, it creates zealotry, but that tends to happen when you get the few going against the many. Some people will always spout nonsense, and some people will either give you facts or keep quiet. Plenty are in the middle, and mix facts with circular reasoning and faith to get across a half-truth.
The statement that you responded to, as printed, certainly lacked the explanation and logic that I like to see from people making those kind of claims. But regular readers also already know what he would have said in order to back the claim, and he wanted to give his keyboard a rest. I won't lie - that was my immediate reaction to this headline as well: JT's career is falling apart, and he's desperate for attention. Anyone with an ounce of logic left knows that no good could come of doing something like this (especially with so many hypocritical homophobic extremists in power - yes, I know what I just did; my keyboard, too, can use a rest. If you want examples, go do a search for Larry Craig).
Basically, the original statement had the evidence to back it implied. The majority of Slashdot readers know about JT and his history. Likewise for the RIAA, religion, and the government. Sure, organizations will receive blame they don't deserve at times. It happens. But in this case - and many others - we're simply calling their bullshit.
I'm counting on the ones from Half-Life 2 (which, conveniently enough, are already named Striders), but I doubt there can be too much difference between evil killer tripods so it doesn't really matter.
That's my stand on it, and I paid the $599. It's a lot to spend and I was irritated that the price dropped so much so quickly, but for me it was still worth the original price to have one device that does everything well, rather than two devices that between them have fewer features and one of them is totally worthless (ie, my old Nano plus the piece of shit phone I'd been formerly using).
I have to ask - are you genuine here, or are you trying to make a point to the Slashdot crowd (or is your dress sense really that awful)?
Of course it doesn't look anything remotely like a bomb to someone with even a day's worth of electronics experience - or at least, not the visible part. But given the state of things, and not knowing what could be hooked up to that, I understand why there was this kind of reaction. There's a sort of mental threat that people perceive when they see or are asked to deal with something unfamiliar to them - go stick a newbie in front of a terminal and follow your exact instructions and see what happens. Combine that with the general assumption that if anyone has malicious intent, there's a good chance they'd execute their plans at an airport.
Basically, the person in question should have known better. Sure, had you or I been one of the cops in the situation, we would have recognized that the chance of that being an explosive is next to nothing, but not many cops that aren't on the bomb squad are going to have a lot of electronics knowledge. Hell, had the person simply said it's a breadboard, they still wouldn't have had a clue, as the rest of the world would think "cutting board".
And, of course, hindsight is 20/20.
So yeah, I'm going to have to side with the police here. The student should have known better, and MIT students are supposed to be pretty damn smart. To cops that are trained to be on the lookout for suspicious activity, that DOES look like it could be a bomb. Even pre-9/11, wearing that kind of device in an airport would have been suspicious. I mean, who the hell WEARS electronics (excepting a digital watch) anyways?
How much of that media attention turned into sales? They may have made the allowance after everyone assumed that would kill the format, but did it really make any difference?
Rephrase: How much porn have I bought on DVD? None. How much have I downloaded? Let's... uhhh... I'm sure my mom doesn't read Slashdot, so let's say "more than none". Of that more than none, how much is already in HD? All of the pics, and with the price of HD camcorders dropping, expect video to move that way. But how much of that will even make it to an HD format once they make the change? Considering the cost of pressing discs versus bandwidth? I'd expect very little.
So yeah, the parent is pretty safe in saying that porn will have very little or no impact this time around.
Come to where I'm soon to be no longer working and say that with a straight face. Probably 60% of our employees are smokers, and many of them spend a good two or three HOURS out of the day on smoke breaks. I've been told straight-up by the VP of operations, along with a fellow non-smoker, that we can't hang around on the loading dock for a few minutes to chat unless we have a cigarette lit up in our hands/mouth.
But what else could you expect from a chain-smoking VPOps?
Unfortunately, the DMCA makes that illegal. Providing software to bypass a copy protection system is against the law (in the US); I believe this applies to even your own products. But regardless, it doesn't matter as they'd have to go to every single content publisher and get their permission to remove the copy protection rather than just pull the license and give a refund, which is logistically insane.
And as an unintended side effect, it makes it that much more obvious that the pointer was using his or her middle finger in the first place, in an offensive manner or not.
I'm not saying that it can't be used nefariously, but watermarks don't phone home (and are completely transparent and ignored unless you or someone with access to your media leaks the files) and don't impede my playback of the media. They're not perfect, but I'd take them over DRM any day.
Sounds good enough to me, even if I'd be forced into the 1TB plan. I just checked my usage, and apparently I've burned through over 50GB of bandwidth in the past four days (and all I've downloaded from Bit-torrent is a couple TV shows). Although come to think of it, that includes local network traffic as well as internet, and I offload almost all of my media to a fileserver which means at least the complete file size in and out. That said, seeding rules couldn't hurt, as I think 6:1-9:1 is probably a bit wasteful if I had anything else to do with my bandwidth.
Absolutely. The people ripping and uploading are doing it with pre-release CDs, not with their latest iTunes that they burned and ripped. I'll buy music if I can play it wherever I like, and watermarking doesn't stop me from doing that. It conceptually deters piracy since your name is attached, but doesn't lock things down to prevent it and stop people from legitimately using their purchases. Everyone has a valid reason to worry about DRM; only people who are doing things that (theoretically) harm profits by uploading might worry about the watermarking.
How so? If I search for local businesses in Google Maps (either for directions or to see what's in the area), I usually get awful results. I can find a Best Buy or a Barnes and Noble easily enough, but even decent sized chain stores often aren't listed and local stores are rare at best even if I know the name of the business. If this program will allow me to find more relevant businesses in my area, then I'll have all my options laid out. And I'm generally much more inclined to go with local stores as compared to the retail giants, if nothing else to support local business regardless of how they almost always have much better service.
In short, I'd welcome with open arms anything that would allow me to find local stores with greater ease. I might be able to pull up the location of fifty Starbucks shops within 400 feet of my location, but I've been hard pressed to find even fairly mainstream photography stores, for instance. If I can get better search results, support local businesses in a small way, AND get paid to do it - I'm all for it.
About freakin' time. You have no idea how long I've been praying for an update to the long-since antiquated DVD-RAM icon. 32x32px just doesn't cut it anymore! I'd really like a 256px update, though I'll settle for 192px if need be.
Floppies may have used 1024 notation for size, I couldn't say - it's been years since I've used one, and have no intention of digging one out to try proving a point (you know what they say about winning an online argument). But DVDs most definitely use SI notation, as hard drives do, for storage space: "4.7GB" is 4,700,000,000 bytes - 4.37"GB" as reported by the OS.
You're correct about RAM - "1GB" of physical RAM is reported as "1GB". Technically speaking, both are labeled wrong (as they're both binary, not decimal), but you're getting what you paid for and it's showing up as advertised, so no harm's done. This is what should happen with hard drives and optical media. I wouldn't give a rat's behind if they patched it so all files get "bigger" and the hard drive shows up as the amount that you bought (even if it isn't) just so you feel better. The inconsistency is incredibly annoying, but it's absolutely the fault of the software designers and not of the hard drive manufacturers.
There's absolutely no need for the power-of-two notation anymore, at least not when you're viewing the drive properties to check free space. The "mega", "giga", "tera", et al prefixes are globally defined to be powers-of-ten - 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12 respectively. If you want to keep with the old-school notation of 2^20, 2^30, and 2^40 respectively, be my guest, but don't complain when your numbers come up short.
It's the operating systems - Windows, Mac OS and the *nixes alike that are mis-reporting drive size (or, rather, the units). I don't care who changes at the end of the day so long as the two are in parity so a "1TB" drive (be it 1TB or 1TiB) shows up as 1TB for my drive size in the OS. Sure, I'd prefer having extra space on the hard drive, but it's the OS writers that are truly at fault.
I agree - the notation of the SI and binary units is completely moronic. But until someone changes, be it the OSs or the HDD manufacturers, don't expect things to start matching up.
Oh big deal. In a big fit of irony, the SDK will hit Bit-torrent within minutes. At the end of the day, Bit-torrent is mostly used for piracy, so Bit-torrent, Inc, of all organizations, should realize that this is an absolutely useless attempt at who-knows-what.
Alternately, all of the open-source clients could develop a separate protocol that they would all implement in parallel to the official one. A fork of sorts, but expect all clients to end up supporting both/all when all is said and done.
And I'd expect that people's risk-taking habits tend to drop off once they have to provide for a kid. It won't stop you getting sick, but you might be deterred from the next round of base jumping.
* A video game platform
* The dawn of a new revolution of electronic communications which will render all devices before it obsolete and bring eternal enlightenment to all those who lay their eyes upon its glory.
Fine, I'll give you it not being a game platform. But my right pocket, at least, is feeling pretty enlightened, thank you very much.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have one?
(by the way, the 'metered' bit seems to have been missed, going by your response)
I agree (and almost modded you up for your valid point), but you've also left out an important trend here - there's evidence to support our accusations. We've seen JT come up with all sorts of irrational nonsense that he spews into the legal system with no outcome other than wasted time, and the level of irrationality of his claims seems to increase over time (yes, I know this is subjective of course). He's facing disbarment for a reason, after all. The RIAA uses tactics that earned them their "MAFIAA" nickname and are widely regarded as illegal (even the courts are starting to agree), and certainly haven't done anything to actually stop piracy - just look at the numbers. I'm not going down the path of religion, since you can't win an argument over faith, almost by definition - but the points I've seen from those opposing it seem to be much more reasonable and logical than those supporting it. Politics/government - just look at the laws, and their failure to obey them.
Sure, it creates zealotry, but that tends to happen when you get the few going against the many. Some people will always spout nonsense, and some people will either give you facts or keep quiet. Plenty are in the middle, and mix facts with circular reasoning and faith to get across a half-truth.
The statement that you responded to, as printed, certainly lacked the explanation and logic that I like to see from people making those kind of claims. But regular readers also already know what he would have said in order to back the claim, and he wanted to give his keyboard a rest. I won't lie - that was my immediate reaction to this headline as well: JT's career is falling apart, and he's desperate for attention. Anyone with an ounce of logic left knows that no good could come of doing something like this (especially with so many hypocritical homophobic extremists in power - yes, I know what I just did; my keyboard, too, can use a rest. If you want examples, go do a search for Larry Craig).
Basically, the original statement had the evidence to back it implied. The majority of Slashdot readers know about JT and his history. Likewise for the RIAA, religion, and the government. Sure, organizations will receive blame they don't deserve at times. It happens. But in this case - and many others - we're simply calling their bullshit.
I'm counting on the ones from Half-Life 2 (which, conveniently enough, are already named Striders), but I doubt there can be too much difference between evil killer tripods so it doesn't really matter.
Wouldn't that apply to 65,536, rather than 65,535? 65,535 is 0xFFFF, not 0x10000.
That's my stand on it, and I paid the $599. It's a lot to spend and I was irritated that the price dropped so much so quickly, but for me it was still worth the original price to have one device that does everything well, rather than two devices that between them have fewer features and one of them is totally worthless (ie, my old Nano plus the piece of shit phone I'd been formerly using).
Well the good news is that when you're an organization like Creative Commons, you're basically a team of lawyers with a marketing department.
I have to ask - are you genuine here, or are you trying to make a point to the Slashdot crowd (or is your dress sense really that awful)?
Of course it doesn't look anything remotely like a bomb to someone with even a day's worth of electronics experience - or at least, not the visible part. But given the state of things, and not knowing what could be hooked up to that, I understand why there was this kind of reaction. There's a sort of mental threat that people perceive when they see or are asked to deal with something unfamiliar to them - go stick a newbie in front of a terminal and follow your exact instructions and see what happens. Combine that with the general assumption that if anyone has malicious intent, there's a good chance they'd execute their plans at an airport.
Basically, the person in question should have known better. Sure, had you or I been one of the cops in the situation, we would have recognized that the chance of that being an explosive is next to nothing, but not many cops that aren't on the bomb squad are going to have a lot of electronics knowledge. Hell, had the person simply said it's a breadboard, they still wouldn't have had a clue, as the rest of the world would think "cutting board".
And, of course, hindsight is 20/20.
So yeah, I'm going to have to side with the police here. The student should have known better, and MIT students are supposed to be pretty damn smart. To cops that are trained to be on the lookout for suspicious activity, that DOES look like it could be a bomb. Even pre-9/11, wearing that kind of device in an airport would have been suspicious. I mean, who the hell WEARS electronics (excepting a digital watch) anyways?
How much of that media attention turned into sales? They may have made the allowance after everyone assumed that would kill the format, but did it really make any difference?
Rephrase: How much porn have I bought on DVD? None. How much have I downloaded? Let's... uhhh... I'm sure my mom doesn't read Slashdot, so let's say "more than none". Of that more than none, how much is already in HD? All of the pics, and with the price of HD camcorders dropping, expect video to move that way. But how much of that will even make it to an HD format once they make the change? Considering the cost of pressing discs versus bandwidth? I'd expect very little.
So yeah, the parent is pretty safe in saying that porn will have very little or no impact this time around.
It's also GAAP, not GAP. I'd strongly question this guy's credibility.
Come to where I'm soon to be no longer working and say that with a straight face. Probably 60% of our employees are smokers, and many of them spend a good two or three HOURS out of the day on smoke breaks. I've been told straight-up by the VP of operations, along with a fellow non-smoker, that we can't hang around on the loading dock for a few minutes to chat unless we have a cigarette lit up in our hands/mouth.
But what else could you expect from a chain-smoking VPOps?
Exactly. Hence this Friday being my last day. Oh well.
Unfortunately, the DMCA makes that illegal. Providing software to bypass a copy protection system is against the law (in the US); I believe this applies to even your own products. But regardless, it doesn't matter as they'd have to go to every single content publisher and get their permission to remove the copy protection rather than just pull the license and give a refund, which is logistically insane.
And as an unintended side effect, it makes it that much more obvious that the pointer was using his or her middle finger in the first place, in an offensive manner or not.
I'm not saying that it can't be used nefariously, but watermarks don't phone home (and are completely transparent and ignored unless you or someone with access to your media leaks the files) and don't impede my playback of the media. They're not perfect, but I'd take them over DRM any day.
Sounds good enough to me, even if I'd be forced into the 1TB plan. I just checked my usage, and apparently I've burned through over 50GB of bandwidth in the past four days (and all I've downloaded from Bit-torrent is a couple TV shows). Although come to think of it, that includes local network traffic as well as internet, and I offload almost all of my media to a fileserver which means at least the complete file size in and out. That said, seeding rules couldn't hurt, as I think 6:1-9:1 is probably a bit wasteful if I had anything else to do with my bandwidth.
Absolutely. The people ripping and uploading are doing it with pre-release CDs, not with their latest iTunes that they burned and ripped. I'll buy music if I can play it wherever I like, and watermarking doesn't stop me from doing that. It conceptually deters piracy since your name is attached, but doesn't lock things down to prevent it and stop people from legitimately using their purchases. Everyone has a valid reason to worry about DRM; only people who are doing things that (theoretically) harm profits by uploading might worry about the watermarking.
How so? If I search for local businesses in Google Maps (either for directions or to see what's in the area), I usually get awful results. I can find a Best Buy or a Barnes and Noble easily enough, but even decent sized chain stores often aren't listed and local stores are rare at best even if I know the name of the business. If this program will allow me to find more relevant businesses in my area, then I'll have all my options laid out. And I'm generally much more inclined to go with local stores as compared to the retail giants, if nothing else to support local business regardless of how they almost always have much better service.
In short, I'd welcome with open arms anything that would allow me to find local stores with greater ease. I might be able to pull up the location of fifty Starbucks shops within 400 feet of my location, but I've been hard pressed to find even fairly mainstream photography stores, for instance. If I can get better search results, support local businesses in a small way, AND get paid to do it - I'm all for it.
About freakin' time. You have no idea how long I've been praying for an update to the long-since antiquated DVD-RAM icon. 32x32px just doesn't cut it anymore! I'd really like a 256px update, though I'll settle for 192px if need be.
But the problem IS the drive properties label.
Floppies may have used 1024 notation for size, I couldn't say - it's been years since I've used one, and have no intention of digging one out to try proving a point (you know what they say about winning an online argument). But DVDs most definitely use SI notation, as hard drives do, for storage space: "4.7GB" is 4,700,000,000 bytes - 4.37"GB" as reported by the OS.
You're correct about RAM - "1GB" of physical RAM is reported as "1GB". Technically speaking, both are labeled wrong (as they're both binary, not decimal), but you're getting what you paid for and it's showing up as advertised, so no harm's done. This is what should happen with hard drives and optical media. I wouldn't give a rat's behind if they patched it so all files get "bigger" and the hard drive shows up as the amount that you bought (even if it isn't) just so you feel better. The inconsistency is incredibly annoying, but it's absolutely the fault of the software designers and not of the hard drive manufacturers.
True, though it's not as though shit hit the fan here. People aren't getting excess charges, just excess paperwork.
There's absolutely no need for the power-of-two notation anymore, at least not when you're viewing the drive properties to check free space. The "mega", "giga", "tera", et al prefixes are globally defined to be powers-of-ten - 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12 respectively. If you want to keep with the old-school notation of 2^20, 2^30, and 2^40 respectively, be my guest, but don't complain when your numbers come up short.
It's the operating systems - Windows, Mac OS and the *nixes alike that are mis-reporting drive size (or, rather, the units). I don't care who changes at the end of the day so long as the two are in parity so a "1TB" drive (be it 1TB or 1TiB) shows up as 1TB for my drive size in the OS. Sure, I'd prefer having extra space on the hard drive, but it's the OS writers that are truly at fault.
I agree - the notation of the SI and binary units is completely moronic. But until someone changes, be it the OSs or the HDD manufacturers, don't expect things to start matching up.
That's 100% AT&T's fault. Apple did their part; if AT&T can't get their shit together, it's their own problem.
Oh big deal. In a big fit of irony, the SDK will hit Bit-torrent within minutes. At the end of the day, Bit-torrent is mostly used for piracy, so Bit-torrent, Inc, of all organizations, should realize that this is an absolutely useless attempt at who-knows-what.
Alternately, all of the open-source clients could develop a separate protocol that they would all implement in parallel to the official one. A fork of sorts, but expect all clients to end up supporting both/all when all is said and done.
And I'd expect that people's risk-taking habits tend to drop off once they have to provide for a kid. It won't stop you getting sick, but you might be deterred from the next round of base jumping.
Fine, I'll give you it not being a game platform. But my right pocket, at least, is feeling pretty enlightened, thank you very much.