For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this isNOTan academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I'm not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I've chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
the article states that it is neither serious, nor scientific. that doesn't make it any less interesting.
this is just my [somewhat] unsubstantiated conspiracy theory... but i think hollywood and everyone else knows that the physical format is dead. the blu/HDwhatever generation will be the last one. the future will come in two forms: digitally downloaded or streamed in some fashion. have no fear, both will come DRM'd to within an inch of their lives thanks to the PC industy's complicity.
the hardware to receive this kind of media will have to be significantly more sophisticated than the current iteration of the $35 taiwanese DVD player with questionable reigon enforcement. intel, HP, sony, MS, and countless others want to provide the hardware and software that will power those new "digitally secure set top things".
right now, the buying public has two choices, upgrade to the nascent HD/secured/broadcast flagged/DRM/fuxxored platform or continue to stay low tech. this is a swipe at the "low tech" crowd. there will be other swipes, and they will get worse as the 2009 cutoff for over the air SDTV approaches and the pressure to upgrade increases for the "low tech" crowd. if HP, intel and the rest of the gang want hollywood's cooperation to seduce the "HD secured" crowd, then they have to agree to help punish the "low tech" crowd.
when you become "made" by the mob, some families expect you to prove yourself worthy beforehand. it's almost always something personally painful that proves your loyalty, like cutting off a finger or killing a relative.
intel, HP, and the others agreeing to hamstring the DVD format on the PC looks to me like they are cutting off a finger to prove that the PC will not continue to be the tool of infringement that hollywood sees it as today.
You need to have a registered TPB account to download porn from TPB
if one is able to successfully acquire pron from TPB, registered account or not, then it's a recent development (like in the last 6 months). TPB is like every other public tracker, lots of stuff is listed but most of it ends up being useless for one reason or another (not seeded, trojan horsed, password protected, etc.)
Was copyright invented by writers and artists, to protect themselves?
No. Actually, it was invented by publishers, to preserve an information ownership monopoly based on a government censorship policy.
The first copyright law was a 1556 censorship statute in England. It granted the Company of Stationers, a London guild, exclusive rights to own and run printing presses. Company members registered books under their own name, not the author's name, and these registrations could be transferred or sold only to other Company members. In exchange for their government-granted monopoly on the book trade, the Stationers aided the government's censors, by controlling what was printed, and by searching out illegal presses and books -- they even had the right to burn unauthorized books and destroy presses. They were, in effect, a private, for-profit information police force.
the two issue are separate, but still closely related. in any free speech discussion, the issue of copyright and trademark comes up quite often.
People are going to like them a whole lot less if this turns into a big child porn site.
there is no porn on TBP. don't know why, but there isn't. if you look at the link/search/tag/cloud/thing porn is the biggest search item listed and yet there is none on the site. one would assume that the same mysterious force would cause porn to disappear from bayimg as well.
intel, HP, microsoft, and all the others want the PC/game console to take root in the livingroom. most of america already has one or two computers in the office, the only way to sell more is to create the need for a PC in another room. currently, hollywood sees the computer as a tool of infringement. if they play nice with hollywood, hollywood (the gatekeeper to the livingroom) will play nice with them.
So if fair use is legislated, then not allowing fair use would violate that law, and make the contract (agreement) or perhaps that one segment of the agreement unenforcable within the courts.
i don't think that matters in the US with the way things currently stand. that's why DRM and it's ilk, and anti-circumvention laws are so insidious.
i too am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the way things work right now, if a vendor were to put up a barrier of some sort, that barrier stands and cannot be legally circumvented regardless of the fair use or consumer rights that may be violated.
i don't agree with the practice at all, and i think that it will take much civil disobedience to force a change of any kind.
He throws up a bunch of examples, like the fact that the army is still using horses in Afganistan, because they're efficient.
how about the simple fact that a given new technology doesn't automatically eliminate the old one?
as soon as the first ford model T rolled off the assembly line, we didn't start killing off horses in droves. the radio is still here inspite of the television, people still handwrite despite the invention of the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer. the book is probably the best example of a technology that will probably never die.
And that "huge" innovations, like the V-2 rocket in WWII weren't as pivotal as people think they were (no mention of, you know, the tank).
yes, no mention of the tank, and also, no mention of the role that computers and cryptography played either.
screw the economics. they say it can help the environment, help the energy crisis, help reduce global military conflict, help solve unemployment problems, and improve the economies of the third world. if it has a shot at accomplishing just 3 of those things there is no way on planet earth that it will be allowed to succeed.
they were founded in 2005. that means that the very first 3 year warranty they ever sold has not yet expired. they haven't had time to stand the test of time. how do i know that they will still be around in two years to honor my warranty?
emperor has been around significantly longer, which means that they have presumably come up with a working formula. too bad that formula puts them out of my price range.
don't get me wrong, i fully plan on taking a chance on them when i start back to school, but for my users at work i think i will stick with dell for laptops.
DHS was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, and responds to potential terrorist threats and attacks on US soil. They're not a group of IT guys or white hats.
exactly. since terrorists only target mosques, open air markets, train stations, and airplanes, clearly information security is someone else's job. i nominate the NSA since they do so much to protect our rights and liberties.
it's not like all that sensitive private information that they keep on citizens and badguys alike could be mis-appropriated in some way anyhow. if a list of all the people they have under surveillance were to leak, i am sure no ill would come of it.
our economy is based on manufactured goods like cars and electronics, not information and intellectual property, so there is no need to protect information or the infrastructure that enables the exchange of it in any fashion.
besides, it's not like we are slowly trading privacy and freedom for the illusion of security. if we were, this incident would have very serious PR implications.
you know, the more i think about it, the more i believe that "homeland security" is a misnomer. perhaps "ministry of truth" or "ministry of love" might be more applicable. that way we citizens are not distracted by these minor incidents and can go back to watching american idol.
Except if you're looking for FOSS OS laptop, where do you take it?
figuratively? you take it in the ass. litterally? you take it in the pocketbook. places like emperor linux are hella expensive and system76 is affordable but too young to be considered bankable, yet.
the question isn't was the guy guilty, he totally was. the question isn't did guy deserve something. he totally did. the question isn't even did the cop do anything illegal. i am sure the search was perfectly legal. the hypothetical question is would the situation have escalated to the point of arrest if the driver was white?
if the driver was white, would the cop have pulled him out of the car or just told him to watch where he was going? if he was white, would the cop have lectured the guy and let him go? if he was white would the cop have tossed his car? if he was white and the cop tossed him, would he have looked hard enough to find a single roach? if he was white, would the judge have thrown the book at him the way she did? the case certainly isn't clear cut, but it still seems kind of fishy to me.
i am sure the office was well within all the guidelines for the whole incident, but would that incident have played out at all if the guy was white?
my problem in this case isn't that the cops use probable cause to find illegal things to bust people on... that's what probable cause is for. my problem is that they don't use probable cause as often on middle class white people.
The training and pressure under which they must do their work means it has to attract people with confidence in abundance and the ability to make snap decisions.
i don't know about paramedics, but i work with surgeons, and i have to say that while the surgical field may attract confident types, it's mostly those with obsessive, competitive, and/or perfectionist personalities that end up surviving the program. one does not complete a surgical residency. you have to survive it. i say this because the handful of washouts from the program that i have seen looked like they had suffered some sort of trauma.
the process is pretty simple: take a super over-achiever and run them thru a brutal course that qualifies them to make life and death decisions and you have the recipe for arrogance on a stick.
don't get me wrong... if i need a heart transplant, don't hand me over to just anybody... sign me up for the obsessive perfectionist that has outclassed all of his peers. if he reminds his peers of this fact on a daily basis... what do i care?
getting back on topic, i think that cops, paramedics, and ER types hear and see the same situations over and over and they probably can't see each person as unique anymore and aren't as likely to be compassionate. your car accident/fire/assualt is unique to you, but just part of the daily grind to people who handle that stuff for a living. you can only bust so many real gangbangers before you start to think that all minority teens are in drug gangs. you can only treat so many junkies before you start to think that every one is just trying to score pain meds.
i know something similar happened to me... when i worked on a helpdesk i vowed i wouldn't be one of those "reboot your computer" types and that i would actually try to fix things for people and not treat everyone like they were an idiot when they called. after a year of telling 90% of the idiots that called to reboot their computers, i became just that.
i am confused on the aspect of race in this instance.
in every encounter i have ever had with the police, in a car or on foot, i have never had my car or my person searched, even when i was a passenger in a car that was pulled over for drag racing in I5 in seattle. white people's encounters with the police often go swimmingly. black people'sencounters... not so often.
a better question would be why are they called potholes? if it's a hole in the road, why not call it a "roadhole". the hole in your ass is called and asshole for that very reason. a "pothole" sounds like a term for a hole in a pot.
Just be a polite human being and I bet you find that the police do the same. That's been my experience, anyway.
let me guess... you are white?
when my wife and i were dating, she was in a pretty bad car accident. she slid on some rainslick pavement early in the morning and rear ended a car, which in turn rear ended another car. she was cited and had to appear in court. she was nervous about the appearance so i went with her to the courthouse.
on her court date, they heard all of the cases for things that happened on that day. her maiden name began with a W so she was one of the last to be heard so we got to sit there thru all of the other cases on the docket for that day. she pleaded no contest and had to pay some fines and court fees, but there the judge gave her nothing severe for causing the accident.
one interesting case was this black guy who was at the scene of the accident and not paying attention to the cop directing traffic (rubbernecking the accident presumably) and didn't stop when the cop told him to. the cop says he had to jump out of the way of the car (the black dude says he couldn't have been going more that 5mph) and so the cop has the guy get out of the car. then the cop says he smelled weed and so he searches the car and finds a roach in the ash tray.
the guy gets a 30 day suspended sentence for posession, his license revoked for 6 months, and has to attend a drug treatment program. he also can't apply for any work-related driving priviledges until he has completed the program and passes a urine test for drugs.
my wife remembered the guy because he was on the hood of his car getting cuffed and patted down when she got out of the ambulance after being check by the paramedics. so, the guy is clearly not the smartest dude on earth if he's smoking weed in his car and not paying attention to the cops, but i am not sure he needs a police record or to suffer for 6 months. it's not like he crashed into two other people or anything.
so that day, a white woman gets a fine and some court costs for causing a 3 car collsion that could have killed herself and at least two other people, and a black man loses his license and gets a drug conviction for not paying attention to a cop directing traffic at the sccident caused by the white woman.
that's why there is so much conflict between african americans and the police in cincinnati. that's why most people hate cops and the legal system in general.
The amount of fun you could have in a game was determined by how high a certain attribute was, as opposed to the interaction you had between the players and the GM?
that's like 50% of the game, dude. there are *TONS* of gaming syles besides ROLE-playing. story teller type games where you work with the GM to tell a story are fun, but so are rules heavy games where you square off against the GM. min/maxing is what you do to survive in those hack and slash campaigns. and don't get me started on the "evil party" PVP type games.
The GM's not out to get you, and if he is, he's a bad GM.
not all GM's are out to get you, but it can be really fun to play against the GM, provided you are both friendly and mature about it. out foxing an unbeatable trap is very rewarding.
"That's it," spoken like it's really simple. Simple in comparison to cross-referencing the results of four die rolls on six tables, sure, but that's still needlessly complex.
two words: THAC0. it really is *much* simpler compared the the ancient ways.
Yes, of course, there's no one way to play a RPG, who am I to tell people how to have fun in a game, but it seems all too often people misspell the first word in the abbreviation: it's role, not roll.
i agree that d20 was in improvement because it lightened the load of rules that stood in the way of getting people to play compared to 1st and 2nd edition AD&D or many other rules systems. it also paved the way for more social and RP centric players (i.e. girls). however, for a good many people, especially introverted types, trolling the rules was a way for not exactly social creatures to play and be an effective part of the game.
You're telling a story together, you're solving puzzles together, you're (get this) role-playing together.
about half of the campaigns i have played in have been run by "story tellers"... or GM's that value the role play experience (unfolding a story, watching players interact, seeing characters develop) but the other half are hack and slash dungeon crawls where survival is the primary goal. both ways are fun and equally important. like i said before, optimization is like half the game. if you focus on one half, to the exclusion of the other, you're only playing half the game.
Along those lines, instead of paying $30k on a new car, I can just look in the newspaper and buy 20 crummy used cars for $1,500 a piece.
twenty cars? that is ridiculous! you shouldn't need more than 3. 4 if you are married. think of the environments!
i was mistaken. it was gabe with the discman wrapped in money. also, he keeps it wrapped in only $380 in cash. i guess my extra $20 is superfluous.
Your idea is dumb for most people. If my computer craps out, a new computer straight out of the box is not a good replacement because it won't have all the software/files that I need. But even if I sort that out, then I'm still stuck with my other broken computer that needs to be fixed/replaced, which is going to cost me more time and/or money and hassle.
my idea isn't dumb. it's ludicrous. so is refuting an argument that uses a comic strip to support it's position.
Slashdot Mirror
the article states that it is neither serious, nor scientific. that doesn't make it any less interesting.
this is just my [somewhat] unsubstantiated conspiracy theory... but i think hollywood and everyone else knows that the physical format is dead. the blu/HDwhatever generation will be the last one. the future will come in two forms: digitally downloaded or streamed in some fashion. have no fear, both will come DRM'd to within an inch of their lives thanks to the PC industy's complicity.
the hardware to receive this kind of media will have to be significantly more sophisticated than the current iteration of the $35 taiwanese DVD player with questionable reigon enforcement. intel, HP, sony, MS, and countless others want to provide the hardware and software that will power those new "digitally secure set top things".
right now, the buying public has two choices, upgrade to the nascent HD/secured/broadcast flagged/DRM/fuxxored platform or continue to stay low tech. this is a swipe at the "low tech" crowd. there will be other swipes, and they will get worse as the 2009 cutoff for over the air SDTV approaches and the pressure to upgrade increases for the "low tech" crowd. if HP, intel and the rest of the gang want hollywood's cooperation to seduce the "HD secured" crowd, then they have to agree to help punish the "low tech" crowd.
when you become "made" by the mob, some families expect you to prove yourself worthy beforehand. it's almost always something personally painful that proves your loyalty, like cutting off a finger or killing a relative.
intel, HP, and the others agreeing to hamstring the DVD format on the PC looks to me like they are cutting off a finger to prove that the PC will not continue to be the tool of infringement that hollywood sees it as today.
like i said, that's just my conspiracy theory.
if one is able to successfully acquire pron from TPB, registered account or not, then it's a recent development (like in the last 6 months). TPB is like every other public tracker, lots of stuff is listed but most of it ends up being useless for one reason or another (not seeded, trojan horsed, password protected, etc.)
copyright began as censorship:
the two issue are separate, but still closely related. in any free speech discussion, the issue of copyright and trademark comes up quite often.
there is no porn on TBP. don't know why, but there isn't. if you look at the link/search/tag/cloud/thing porn is the biggest search item listed and yet there is none on the site. one would assume that the same mysterious force would cause porn to disappear from bayimg as well.
intel, HP, microsoft, and all the others want the PC/game console to take root in the livingroom. most of america already has one or two computers in the office, the only way to sell more is to create the need for a PC in another room. currently, hollywood sees the computer as a tool of infringement. if they play nice with hollywood, hollywood (the gatekeeper to the livingroom) will play nice with them.
i don't think that matters in the US with the way things currently stand. that's why DRM and it's ilk, and anti-circumvention laws are so insidious.
i too am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the way things work right now, if a vendor were to put up a barrier of some sort, that barrier stands and cannot be legally circumvented regardless of the fair use or consumer rights that may be violated.
i don't agree with the practice at all, and i think that it will take much civil disobedience to force a change of any kind.
how about the simple fact that a given new technology doesn't automatically eliminate the old one?
as soon as the first ford model T rolled off the assembly line, we didn't start killing off horses in droves. the radio is still here inspite of the television, people still handwrite despite the invention of the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer. the book is probably the best example of a technology that will probably never die.
yes, no mention of the tank, and also, no mention of the role that computers and cryptography played either.
screw the economics. they say it can help the environment, help the energy crisis, help reduce global military conflict, help solve unemployment problems, and improve the economies of the third world. if it has a shot at accomplishing just 3 of those things there is no way on planet earth that it will be allowed to succeed.
you left off the yet in the quote.
they were founded in 2005. that means that the very first 3 year warranty they ever sold has not yet expired. they haven't had time to stand the test of time. how do i know that they will still be around in two years to honor my warranty?
emperor has been around significantly longer, which means that they have presumably come up with a working formula. too bad that formula puts them out of my price range.
don't get me wrong, i fully plan on taking a chance on them when i start back to school, but for my users at work i think i will stick with dell for laptops.
exactly. since terrorists only target mosques, open air markets, train stations, and airplanes, clearly information security is someone else's job. i nominate the NSA since they do so much to protect our rights and liberties.
it's not like all that sensitive private information that they keep on citizens and badguys alike could be mis-appropriated in some way anyhow. if a list of all the people they have under surveillance were to leak, i am sure no ill would come of it.
our economy is based on manufactured goods like cars and electronics, not information and intellectual property, so there is no need to protect information or the infrastructure that enables the exchange of it in any fashion.
besides, it's not like we are slowly trading privacy and freedom for the illusion of security. if we were, this incident would have very serious PR implications.
you know, the more i think about it, the more i believe that "homeland security" is a misnomer. perhaps "ministry of truth" or "ministry of love" might be more applicable. that way we citizens are not distracted by these minor incidents and can go back to watching american idol.
you should go buy vista right now. you will be greeted as a liberator.
figuratively? you take it in the ass. litterally? you take it in the pocketbook. places like emperor linux are hella expensive and system76 is affordable but too young to be considered bankable, yet.
because double digit annual growth doesn't happen on it's own.
everyone does... those are the states where it's the most fun :-)
the question isn't was the guy guilty, he totally was. the question isn't did guy deserve something. he totally did. the question isn't even did the cop do anything illegal. i am sure the search was perfectly legal. the hypothetical question is would the situation have escalated to the point of arrest if the driver was white?
if the driver was white, would the cop have pulled him out of the car or just told him to watch where he was going? if he was white, would the cop have lectured the guy and let him go? if he was white would the cop have tossed his car? if he was white and the cop tossed him, would he have looked hard enough to find a single roach? if he was white, would the judge have thrown the book at him the way she did? the case certainly isn't clear cut, but it still seems kind of fishy to me.
i am sure the office was well within all the guidelines for the whole incident, but would that incident have played out at all if the guy was white?
my problem in this case isn't that the cops use probable cause to find illegal things to bust people on... that's what probable cause is for. my problem is that they don't use probable cause as often on middle class white people.
i don't know about paramedics, but i work with surgeons, and i have to say that while the surgical field may attract confident types, it's mostly those with obsessive, competitive, and/or perfectionist personalities that end up surviving the program. one does not complete a surgical residency. you have to survive it. i say this because the handful of washouts from the program that i have seen looked like they had suffered some sort of trauma.
the process is pretty simple: take a super over-achiever and run them thru a brutal course that qualifies them to make life and death decisions and you have the recipe for arrogance on a stick.
don't get me wrong... if i need a heart transplant, don't hand me over to just anybody... sign me up for the obsessive perfectionist that has outclassed all of his peers. if he reminds his peers of this fact on a daily basis... what do i care?
getting back on topic, i think that cops, paramedics, and ER types hear and see the same situations over and over and they probably can't see each person as unique anymore and aren't as likely to be compassionate. your car accident/fire/assualt is unique to you, but just part of the daily grind to people who handle that stuff for a living. you can only bust so many real gangbangers before you start to think that all minority teens are in drug gangs. you can only treat so many junkies before you start to think that every one is just trying to score pain meds.
i know something similar happened to me... when i worked on a helpdesk i vowed i wouldn't be one of those "reboot your computer" types and that i would actually try to fix things for people and not treat everyone like they were an idiot when they called. after a year of telling 90% of the idiots that called to reboot their computers, i became just that.
in every encounter i have ever had with the police, in a car or on foot, i have never had my car or my person searched, even when i was a passenger in a car that was pulled over for drag racing in I5 in seattle. white people's encounters with the police often go swimmingly. black people's encounters... not so often.
also, he didn't get a DUI.
a better question would be why are they called potholes? if it's a hole in the road, why not call it a "roadhole". the hole in your ass is called and asshole for that very reason. a "pothole" sounds like a term for a hole in a pot.
let me guess... you are white?
when my wife and i were dating, she was in a pretty bad car accident. she slid on some rainslick pavement early in the morning and rear ended a car, which in turn rear ended another car. she was cited and had to appear in court. she was nervous about the appearance so i went with her to the courthouse.
on her court date, they heard all of the cases for things that happened on that day. her maiden name began with a W so she was one of the last to be heard so we got to sit there thru all of the other cases on the docket for that day. she pleaded no contest and had to pay some fines and court fees, but there the judge gave her nothing severe for causing the accident.
one interesting case was this black guy who was at the scene of the accident and not paying attention to the cop directing traffic (rubbernecking the accident presumably) and didn't stop when the cop told him to. the cop says he had to jump out of the way of the car (the black dude says he couldn't have been going more that 5mph) and so the cop has the guy get out of the car. then the cop says he smelled weed and so he searches the car and finds a roach in the ash tray.
the guy gets a 30 day suspended sentence for posession, his license revoked for 6 months, and has to attend a drug treatment program. he also can't apply for any work-related driving priviledges until he has completed the program and passes a urine test for drugs.
my wife remembered the guy because he was on the hood of his car getting cuffed and patted down when she got out of the ambulance after being check by the paramedics. so, the guy is clearly not the smartest dude on earth if he's smoking weed in his car and not paying attention to the cops, but i am not sure he needs a police record or to suffer for 6 months. it's not like he crashed into two other people or anything.
so that day, a white woman gets a fine and some court costs for causing a 3 car collsion that could have killed herself and at least two other people, and a black man loses his license and gets a drug conviction for not paying attention to a cop directing traffic at the sccident caused by the white woman.
that's why there is so much conflict between african americans and the police in cincinnati. that's why most people hate cops and the legal system in general.
that's just sick.
that's like 50% of the game, dude. there are *TONS* of gaming syles besides ROLE-playing. story teller type games where you work with the GM to tell a story are fun, but so are rules heavy games where you square off against the GM. min/maxing is what you do to survive in those hack and slash campaigns. and don't get me started on the "evil party" PVP type games.
not all GM's are out to get you, but it can be really fun to play against the GM, provided you are both friendly and mature about it. out foxing an unbeatable trap is very rewarding.
two words: THAC0. it really is *much* simpler compared the the ancient ways.
i agree that d20 was in improvement because it lightened the load of rules that stood in the way of getting people to play compared to 1st and 2nd edition AD&D or many other rules systems. it also paved the way for more social and RP centric players (i.e. girls). however, for a good many people, especially introverted types, trolling the rules was a way for not exactly social creatures to play and be an effective part of the game.
about half of the campaigns i have played in have been run by "story tellers"... or GM's that value the role play experience (unfolding a story, watching players interact, seeing characters develop) but the other half are hack and slash dungeon crawls where survival is the primary goal. both ways are fun and equally important. like i said before, optimization is like half the game. if you focus on one half, to the exclusion of the other, you're only playing half the game.
twenty cars? that is ridiculous! you shouldn't need more than 3. 4 if you are married. think of the environments!
i was mistaken. it was gabe with the discman wrapped in money. also, he keeps it wrapped in only $380 in cash. i guess my extra $20 is superfluous.
my idea isn't dumb. it's ludicrous. so is refuting an argument that uses a comic strip to support it's position.
funny, it sounds like some of the net neutrality satire that's out there.