This is a fun exercise and all that, but really, do we need to go out of our way to create statements & lists that lawyers can enter into evidence? e.g., "Your honor, even open-source advocates largely thought this project would be shut down by the government, as I can demonstrate from the following poll..."
Ok, I'll take my "shh, They're listening" tinfoil hat off now; just wanted to ask, if one is for maximal freedom in software, is it really productive to draw this topic's sort of attention to "edgy" projects?
Though I would hate for the business world to think of OSS's probability of success (in business model terms) as synonymous with the percentage of SourceForge projects that pay off in a financial sense -- even if the denominator included only active projects that set out with that goal in the first place.:-/
Hmm... I've had the opposite experience; Netflix's streaming video has been nearly DVD quality most of the time for me. My broadband is usually ~4.5Mbps down.
With no monthly limit plans starting @ $8.99 a month, that ain't a bad deal IMO. Watch as many DVDs as you can mail back in a month, plus unlimited titles from their streaming catalog.
I wish their streaming catalog was a bit more robust, but I expect that will only improve over time.
Alternatively, how about we define a standard set of metadata to describe Copyright Status Assertions, and use those those in place of the current (lame) DMCA takedown -> counter-notice process?
The point is to give the uploader a chance to assert a Fair Use claim *beforehand*, and subsequently have the conflict automatically transferred to him/her instead of automatically taking the content down. This would still be imperfect, of course, but it would prevent some of the suppression-oriented DMCA abuse that the current setup facilitates.
In the case of Item 1 below, the clip would stay up, and the person filing the complaint would be referred to the uploader to haggle over the Fair Use claim. Item 2 would be rejected up-front, and Item 3 would get taken down and possibly land the uploader in hot water as well.
Uploaded Item 1 - item from TFA: + Track 1: Video
Copyright: 2008, Joe's Hillarious Parodies LLC
Disposition: Poster's Original Work + Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Fair Use
Assertion: Used for Parody Purposes
Uploaded Item 2 - Ripped/transcoded SNL clip, poster describes honestly: + Track 1: Video
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me + Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me
Uploaded Item 3 - same SNL video clip, uploader used bald-faced lies: + Track 1: Video
Copyright: 2008, Me
Disposition: Original Work + Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: 2008, Third Party
Disposition: Licensed, Used By Permission
I see your point, and I had considered that, but I think the less a forum's owners proactively inspect, meddle with or remove third party content, the better positioned they are if a Safe Harbor defense is ever necessary.
IANAL and I'm sure there are good arguments to the contrary of course, but I can't shake this hunch that drawing *any* line could open the owners up to being forced to draw it elsewhere, whereas drawing none might provide standing for continuing without changing. Maybe?
I think we need a new moderation. These NIMP posts aren't merely trolls, they're out to cause trouble. I second.
"Malicious"
I don't think/. should outright filter any posts server-side, but it'd be nice to be able to read stuff that's been modded troll & flamebait without risking these malevolent / malfeasant / malware-carrying posts. Please guys, give these their own category so we can assign down-modifiers in our prefs.
That's what we're dealing with here. If this thing loses enough velocity, our gravity well will suck it in. If we could give it a push as it is on it's way past us, sure, we could get rid of it, but putting things in front of it is always going to be bad for us. So we launch a couple hundred thousand Mars Rover style thingies at the front of it, each outfitted with as much explosive power as we can strap on. They land, then drive around to the backside of the thing before setting off their payload. I mean, this is saving Earth we're talking about, right?
The market *isn't* broken; there's a lot of latency to the Invisible Hand effect. In this segment as in others, things are imperfect as always, but slowly and inexorably changing to the consumer's advantage.
Who pays for it? Whoever is most confident they can profit from the investment. Unless someone else wants to volunteer.
For the sake of clarity, my comment was meant to focus on the merits using an external ranking based methodology (e.g. ADA score), and not so much to stump for the study's conclusions. Ideally, I'd like to see a composite analysis using multiple scoring methods from both viewpoints.
That said, the very authors' explanations you cite for the ACLU and RAND seem to diffuse the criticism. If there were an objective measure to quantify *why* any citation -- including those two in particular -- should be interpreted as anomalous/skewed/abnormal, that would be great, but if you read what they actually said, they did *not* exclude any data related to the ACLU. The authors' response to criticisms of the paper at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001301.html clarify the ACLU matter even further:
...our final analysis included the ACLU data. In fact, it turns out that the only analysis that we report in the paper contained the ACLU data. Our passage notes that we did the analysis both ways: with and without the ACLU data. The results with the ACLU data are reported in the main text, and the results without the ACLU data are reported in the Appendix.
[...and...]
The other anomaly was the ACLU. Our method ranked it (just barely) among the most conservative half of the think tanks. As we mention in the paper, the reason is due to one person, Senator Mitch McConnell. After the ACLU announced that it opposed McCain Feingold, McConnell seemed to mention this at every opportunity he had. In fact, he alone accounted for half of the total congressional citations to the ACLU. No other think tank had such an odd distribution of citations. And on the RAND matter:
It turns out that out of 200 think tanks in our sample, there seem to be only two anomalous rankings. First is the Rand Corporation, which our method places to the left of center. We have mentioned this finding to four scholars at Rand. None were surprised, and each agreed that the result is due to the fact that most of the conservative scholars at Rand focus primarily on military research, and these studies tend not to be cited very frequently by the media and members of Congress. Part of the reason is because these studies are often classified. I'm sorry, but that looks more like hasty criticism than "right-wing bias of the study's authors including or excluding data" to me. Beyond that, I'll leave it to others to debate the merits and flaws of the paper's methodology and authors.
I can't stand the name "awesomebar," but IMO it does have better sorting and filtering logic than the history sidebar, and its performance is a bit more nimble, so it's starting to win me over.
How about this... instead of using subjective definitions of Left and Right and trying to compare media outlets' similarities with same, why not take a less subjective approach like the following:
In this paper we estimate ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News' Special Report, and all three network television news shows. Our estimates allow us to answer such questions as "Is the average article in the New York Times more liberal than the average speech by Tom Daschle?" or "Is the average story on Fox News more conservative than the average speech by Bill Frist?" To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we construct an ADA score.
From:
A Measure of Media Bias
Tim Groseclose
Department of Political Science
UCLA
Jeff Milyo
Department of Economics
University of Missouri
December 2004
Unfortunately there are a few orders of magnitude in the difference of power between the Chinese government and the RIAA. That may be true at the moment, but the Chinese are catching up pretty quickly.
There is no "just an oversight" when it comes to legal documents, as a good lawyer once drummed into my skull. The stupid, obvious thing you don't correct before you sign a legal document is the stupid, obvious thing you're legally liable for afterward. IANAL, but I'd bet that the fact that Apple installed it on one's system might be a defense for the violation, but in and of itself wouldn't really seem to nullify the EULA. Who is to say which the oversight is... one of not changing the EULA to include PCs, or not changing the updater program to exclude them?
Since this is an EULA, it is perhaps not a proper signed contract per se, and its enforceability is more dubious.
Also, in fairness, TFA is about both the EULA and the security vulnerability, so OP is on-topic.
...with the difference that they [China] actually have the manpower to enforce it. It's not just the official enforcement manpower that gets the job done, either; China has fostered a culture where many people will report their acquaintances, friends, or family for "subversive" activities. As 1984-ish as domestic initiatives like the one discussed in TFA can look, I don't think that same "turn-in-the-agitator" cultural phenomenon has a strong chance of manifesting itself here.
1) Make lawyers work pro-bono (as they do in many countries). That is they can only charge so much. 2) Make lawyers pay if the lawsuit fails. For example, if say somebody brought up a lawsuit where they wanted 50 billion say, "if you loose you need to come up with say 1%". That way you can still sue, but you better have a good case. Otherwise it is going to cost you quite a bit. Problem is, laws are written by lawyers, and they generally don't like to skewer their own cash cows. Patent reform, you might see. Tort reform, and/or the kind of thing you're talking about... not likely, unfortunately.
Downloading and installing software can be significantly more intimidating on Linux for the average user, as can getting many peripherals to work. It's getting better all the time, but I would still rank Linux just slightly better than Windows NT in terms of user friendliness in these areas.
On XP, to install software you download an.msi and run it. To add a peripheral, you plug it in and perhaps load a manufacturer-supplied CD-ROM and click Next a few times. If I had to guess, the year of the Linux Desktop will probably be whenever the same processes become roughly as simple and foolproof as on XP. Linux is making strides, sure, but it could make bigger ones. Make things easy on the Average PC User who wants to plug in his all-in-one inkjet/fax/scanner, do some video chatting with his Yahoo and AIM girlfriends, use his modest mp3 collection and manage his photo library.
So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge.
Wait, did you actually get your bank to undo a completed PayPal transaction?...and PayPal in turn to pass the chargeback on to the bad seller? If so, wow... I didn't know this was possible. How long after the transaction was it, and did you have to plead, beg or yell to make it happen?
The media and entertainment companies' stranglehold on a dying business model is hardly a stockholders' dream.
Warner Music (WMG) stock, 2006: ~$30, Today, ~$8.00; DreamWorks SKG (DWA), 2005: ~$40, Today, ~$25; CBS Broadcasting (CBS) 2000: ~$45, Today: ~$25.
The market conditions surrounding the film, music and broadcasting industries are incredibly volatile right now. I'll grant you that they're pursuing mostly counterproductive strategies in their efforts to stabilize themselves, and DRM + consumer abuse is hardly helping matters. Still in all, mere perception that (Is Media Corporation) == (Rolling in Money and Laughing Maniacally) is a gratifying mental image, but it isn't exactly the case.
The power key was fully functional and placed just below del. I switched the computer off 4 times before I learned not to use del. Similarly frustrating to me is the vertically-stacked [Home End Delete PgUp PgDown] cluster with a 2-line Delete, which seems increasingly hard to escape lately. I use those keys enough to have a strong muscle-memory associated with the standard 3 x 2 layout, so the vertical cluster causes many unintentional page-downs and deletions.
Does anyone favor that vertical cluster over the 3 x 2 horizontal layout?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a fun exercise and all that, but really, do we need to go out of our way to create statements & lists that lawyers can enter into evidence? e.g., "Your honor, even open-source advocates largely thought this project would be shut down by the government, as I can demonstrate from the following poll..."
Ok, I'll take my "shh, They're listening" tinfoil hat off now; just wanted to ask, if one is for maximal freedom in software, is it really productive to draw this topic's sort of attention to "edgy" projects?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Though I would hate for the business world to think of OSS's probability of success (in business model terms) as synonymous with the percentage of SourceForge projects that pay off in a financial sense -- even if the denominator included only active projects that set out with that goal in the first place. :-/
Hmm... I've had the opposite experience; Netflix's streaming video has been nearly DVD quality most of the time for me. My broadband is usually ~4.5Mbps down.
With no monthly limit plans starting @ $8.99 a month, that ain't a bad deal IMO. Watch as many DVDs as you can mail back in a month, plus unlimited titles from their streaming catalog.
I wish their streaming catalog was a bit more robust, but I expect that will only improve over time.
Alternatively, how about we define a standard set of metadata to describe Copyright Status Assertions, and use those those in place of the current (lame) DMCA takedown -> counter-notice process?
The point is to give the uploader a chance to assert a Fair Use claim *beforehand*, and subsequently have the conflict automatically transferred to him/her instead of automatically taking the content down. This would still be imperfect, of course, but it would prevent some of the suppression-oriented DMCA abuse that the current setup facilitates.
In the case of Item 1 below, the clip would stay up, and the person filing the complaint would be referred to the uploader to haggle over the Fair Use claim. Item 2 would be rejected up-front, and Item 3 would get taken down and possibly land the uploader in hot water as well.
Uploaded Item 1 - item from TFA:
+ Track 1: Video
Copyright: 2008, Joe's Hillarious Parodies LLC
Disposition: Poster's Original Work
+ Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Fair Use
Assertion: Used for Parody Purposes
Uploaded Item 2 - Ripped/transcoded SNL clip, poster describes honestly:
+ Track 1: Video
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me
+ Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: Third Party
Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me
Uploaded Item 3 - same SNL video clip, uploader used bald-faced lies:
+ Track 1: Video
Copyright: 2008, Me
Disposition: Original Work
+ Track 2: Audio Track
Copyright: 2008, Third Party
Disposition: Licensed, Used By Permission
I see your point, and I had considered that, but I think the less a forum's owners proactively inspect, meddle with or remove third party content, the better positioned they are if a Safe Harbor defense is ever necessary.
IANAL and I'm sure there are good arguments to the contrary of course, but I can't shake this hunch that drawing *any* line could open the owners up to being forced to draw it elsewhere, whereas drawing none might provide standing for continuing without changing. Maybe?
"Malicious"
I don't think
The market *isn't* broken; there's a lot of latency to the Invisible Hand effect. In this segment as in others, things are imperfect as always, but slowly and inexorably changing to the consumer's advantage.
Who pays for it? Whoever is most confident they can profit from the investment. Unless someone else wants to volunteer.
That said, the very authors' explanations you cite for the ACLU and RAND seem to diffuse the criticism. If there were an objective measure to quantify *why* any citation -- including those two in particular -- should be interpreted as anomalous/skewed/abnormal, that would be great, but if you read what they actually said, they did *not* exclude any data related to the ACLU. The authors' response to criticisms of the paper at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001301.html clarify the ACLU matter even further:
...our final analysis included the ACLU data. In fact, it turns out that the only analysis that we report in the paper contained the ACLU data. Our passage notes that we did the analysis both ways: with and without the ACLU data. The results with the ACLU data are reported in the main text, and the results without the ACLU data are reported in the Appendix.[...and...]
The other anomaly was the ACLU. Our method ranked it (just barely) among the most conservative half of the think tanks. As we mention in the paper, the reason is due to one person, Senator Mitch McConnell. After the ACLU announced that it opposed McCain Feingold, McConnell seemed to mention this at every opportunity he had. In fact, he alone accounted for half of the total congressional citations to the ACLU. No other think tank had such an odd distribution of citations. And on the RAND matter: It turns out that out of 200 think tanks in our sample, there seem to be only two anomalous rankings. First is the Rand Corporation, which our method places to the left of center. We have mentioned this finding to four scholars at Rand. None were surprised, and each agreed that the result is due to the fact that most of the conservative scholars at Rand focus primarily on military research, and these studies tend not to be cited very frequently by the media and members of Congress. Part of the reason is because these studies are often classified. I'm sorry, but that looks more like hasty criticism than "right-wing bias of the study's authors including or excluding data" to me. Beyond that, I'll leave it to others to debate the merits and flaws of the paper's methodology and authors.
4. Close history sidebar.
I can't stand the name "awesomebar," but IMO it does have better sorting and filtering logic than the history sidebar, and its performance is a bit more nimble, so it's starting to win me over.
From: A Measure of Media Bias
Tim Groseclose
Department of Political Science
UCLA
Jeff Milyo
Department of Economics
University of Missouri
December 2004
There is no "just an oversight" when it comes to legal documents, as a good lawyer once drummed into my skull. The stupid, obvious thing you don't correct before you sign a legal document is the stupid, obvious thing you're legally liable for afterward. IANAL, but I'd bet that the fact that Apple installed it on one's system might be a defense for the violation, but in and of itself wouldn't really seem to nullify the EULA. Who is to say which the oversight is... one of not changing the EULA to include PCs, or not changing the updater program to exclude them?
Since this is an EULA, it is perhaps not a proper signed contract per se, and its enforceability is more dubious.
Also, in fairness, TFA is about both the EULA and the security vulnerability, so OP is on-topic.
Way to go, sir. Had I mod points, they would be yours.
...with the difference that they [China] actually have the manpower to enforce it. It's not just the official enforcement manpower that gets the job done, either; China has fostered a culture where many people will report their acquaintances, friends, or family for "subversive" activities. As 1984-ish as domestic initiatives like the one discussed in TFA can look, I don't think that same "turn-in-the-agitator" cultural phenomenon has a strong chance of manifesting itself here.1) Make lawyers work pro-bono (as they do in many countries). That is they can only charge so much.
2) Make lawyers pay if the lawsuit fails. For example, if say somebody brought up a lawsuit where they wanted 50 billion say, "if you loose you need to come up with say 1%". That way you can still sue, but you better have a good case. Otherwise it is going to cost you quite a bit. Problem is, laws are written by lawyers, and they generally don't like to skewer their own cash cows. Patent reform, you might see. Tort reform, and/or the kind of thing you're talking about... not likely, unfortunately.
Downloading and installing software can be significantly more intimidating on Linux for the average user, as can getting many peripherals to work. It's getting better all the time, but I would still rank Linux just slightly better than Windows NT in terms of user friendliness in these areas.
.msi and run it. To add a peripheral, you plug it in and perhaps load a manufacturer-supplied CD-ROM and click Next a few times. If I had to guess, the year of the Linux Desktop will probably be whenever the same processes become roughly as simple and foolproof as on XP. Linux is making strides, sure, but it could make bigger ones. Make things easy on the Average PC User who wants to plug in his all-in-one inkjet/fax/scanner, do some video chatting with his Yahoo and AIM girlfriends, use his modest mp3 collection and manage his photo library.
On XP, to install software you download an
Wait, did you actually get your bank to undo a completed PayPal transaction? ...and PayPal in turn to pass the chargeback on to the bad seller? If so, wow... I didn't know this was possible. How long after the transaction was it, and did you have to plead, beg or yell to make it happen?
The media and entertainment companies' stranglehold on a dying business model is hardly a stockholders' dream.
Warner Music (WMG) stock, 2006: ~$30, Today, ~$8.00; DreamWorks SKG (DWA), 2005: ~$40, Today, ~$25; CBS Broadcasting (CBS) 2000: ~$45, Today: ~$25.
The market conditions surrounding the film, music and broadcasting industries are incredibly volatile right now. I'll grant you that they're pursuing mostly counterproductive strategies in their efforts to stabilize themselves, and DRM + consumer abuse is hardly helping matters. Still in all, mere perception that (Is Media Corporation) == (Rolling in Money and Laughing Maniacally) is a gratifying mental image, but it isn't exactly the case.
I use Comcast, and so far this is one thing they have not interfered with, at least in my area.
I for one welcome our new prevaricating overlords.
My XP laptop takes longer to bring back from hibernation than it does to boot.
Sure, this might not be The Wave of The Future®, but managed correctly, this sort of thing could carve a nontrivial niche in the market.