We enjoyed the rest from having to protest, for some twenty years, when life got back to being about pizza, drinks, and games.
Now we're in this really scary race to a frenzy that looks like the political oppression of other countries. And by race I mean drag car speed, not running.
Please let us have 10 years! Then I can have time to live large and die happy in middle age.
Has no one noticed that about half the targets were *FEDERAL*? We're talking about MU, and that's plenty bad, but now that Anonymous is attacking top level agencies and not just goofy little 1 man contractors, we're in for some real hurt.
Given the level of momentum turning toward the Big Brother state, there may not be that many "mature" political channels left. In case everyone missed it, they found a new weapon against "peaceful protest" - ridicule.
Occupy Wall Street was the first/best civil protest we've had in *decades*! The result? The media planted a few Laugh Off stories about some of the "Boys Will Be Boys" activities going on the sidelines and then the cops busted it all up, and we didn't have a followup. That's because they quietly destroyed B.W.B.B. those same decades ago, with the final lock as a nifty side effect of the 9-11 theme. "Oh look, ten thousand protesters aren't as orderly as school children or cowering workers!" Uh... protesters are... angry, that' the definition, right?
The interesting thing is Slashdot has chosen to let the trolls post come ill or shill, because it's part of Taco's original foresight to the abuses of over-modding TOS policies now creeping everywhere else. The mod system could use a couple more finesses, but it's *us* modding each other, not the editors. That's starting to become a Meta-Experiment in the current climate.
I'm quite lenient with my mod scores - I only mod down the absolute lowest of the vulgar offtopic junk, or the "random word generator" posts, or the shock pics. I stay out of the "Shill - Anti-Shill" wars.
Nah, not a diversion, the politicians expected the same Blase mood that let them pass every other evil bill. It would have been a counterpart piece as a matched set for ACTA (one domestic, one foreign).
We did manage to scare them *just a little* but there's just so far to go still. The current score is something like Lobbies 97 People 3.
I don't even know what to begin to think about this. The summary tried hard. So the Gov is going to...uh... release fun puzzles that analyze how weapons are tested? So what are the licenses on the games themselves? Will they be all locked down by copyright or can we chop them up and do other things with the code and make forks?
Is it all a honeypot? "Sir, Mr. X. used our game to hack into us." "Uh, well, we did ask him to look for attack points..." "Arrest him anyway!"
"by whitehatnetizen (997645) on 09:55 PM January 18th, 2012 (#38744614) If the Author does this like you suggest, I would buy a copy of his book just to congratulate him on principle. I can only speak for myself so here's my anecdote: I prefer physical books over electronic copies however, before I buy a book I always read a portion from somewhere near the beginning to get an idea of whether the authors style appeals to me. If I can't find a physical copy and amazon's preview doesn't apply to that book I would happily and without guilt download a pirated copy, and if the writing style appealed to me, I would then purchase a physical copy. I've also lost count of the number of albums that I've ended up buying after stumbling across an artist I haven't yet heard of on youtube."
I think at the moment this is only an eBook - so there's that, and I don't know / don't think it's on Amazon. I have an email pending from him about how he'll let me choose distribution promotions.
So far I've gotten some early good comments from readers glad to see something new developing in the content game.
Update: The gentleman did in fact email me a copy, so now it's my turn to decide what happens next.
A couple of notes:
A Legit issue underneath all the snow-job the **AA is churning out is that there is indeed a longer gestation period for "non-traditional sales" so on purpose I "won't pay today". (Otherwise that's just more of an inverted retail transaction.)
Also this situation is different because "the clock starts today" whereas the poster's point was that he couldn't figure out the "correlation - causation" link between unknown downloads vs. sales.
This feels like an important project for me and my stance on copyright, so everyone, watch for further posts later in other threads and we'll see where it all goes. Mr. Author, please pay extra care not to "get impatient" here. I have some ideas but the time passing is in fact part of the point, so that it doesn't just become astroturfing.
You illustrated my point perfectly. Instead of waiting 3 days with a spiral plastic bind, it should be printed right there while you wait. My aformentioned paperbacks complete with covers were about $8 each via Google Books.
The runner up story is Susan Boyle. When Wikipedia comes off blackout, go look her up and check the sales records - some such highest selling new artist in X years.
But let's do your story.
If you're gutsy, you'll post a link to your book and dedicate it "A gift to protest SOPA". Pick a CC license, I suggest "Attribution Only" (So that people can't replace your name, but all told, people are usually pretty good at keeping original artist names on their copies.) Put a rider in "Since this copy originated on a special post, please let me know if this copy inspires you to buy it". Give us an address to send checks/payments to, etc.
Or, if you are still a little squeamish, send *me* all that info which I won't re-share, but I'll report my results. My email is "not obfuscated" so send it along!
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Let's get it out in the open. Let's thrash it out. Ebooks kinda suk. They're stuck there on your device, and they're all digitally-slimy. You can't (easily!) draw notes and fold down pages and get pizza grease all over them. I'm not even going to get into Formats and DRM and Backups etc.
Sometimes you just want an Honest to Goodness Book. But we were so wowed with Amazon's selection we drank something REALLY worse than kool-aid. (Boilermaker? Skullgrinder? NecroAtomic ZombieMaker? Oh sorry, Kids, don't read that last sentence.) The crushing future is in Print On Demand.
There are a couple of legit tech hurdles - but big picture they're cake. (Glue quality, page shear, assembly speed, blah blah.) But I have in my hand, complete with generic non-SOPA-offensive blue and white covers, three paperbacks on religious theory that are at least 75% of "Professional Quality". The binding is still intact after about 2 years, the pages are the same size within X milimeters, the ink is solid, etc.
ANY book - in one hour. (I'm being generous counting for stuff like lines, staff, etc.) Screw that wait 3 days for ship junk.
But - what is this mysterious silence? The machines are "not that expensive" (topside $100,000, peanuts for a 70,000 SF retail outlet).
So mighty Slashdot, how have the Book people managed to TOTALLY elude entire chains like Borders? Was it REALLY that much fun to go bankrupt??? Was there NO-ONE among all 19,500 employees that bothered to try to get digital rights to POD? Not a single title? Not a single attempt at getting a machine in the store? Really???
Talk about an Elephant in the Room. I am annoyed because I cannot be smarter than 100 Borders Senior Managers.
Sorry, it's a nice question but it risks red-herring us away from real reform.
Basically "Works are Copyrighted the moment they come into existence" - as such that's clear enough. So the audience is COMPLETELY irrelevant. Your thunder-case is a Live Concert. The really good musicians will throw extra trills and riffs all over the "classic studio" mix arrangement, thus making Live concerts that special thing worth the extra bucks and tshirts etc. The band (and X middlemen) absolutely own the rights to that Live version.
So yes, human nature says that 100 people of the 30,000 people concert will make bootlegs, but those are the top of the infringement case list.
"Speeches for goodwill" like MLK's don't suddenly become "Public Domain" just because they're about civil rights and not music.
"Best yet, it would make it nearly impossible for the MSM to ignore the blackout/SOPA/PIPA. Then watch as they tiptoe around the elephant in the living room: why they haven't been covering SOPA/PIPA up until this point."
Hey everyone, between the post above and the slightly typo'ed article below, they just told us how to really beat these bills.
"The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills.... Until now, the Obama administration had not taken a position on the issue.... Though the administration did not issue a formal veto threat, the White Houseâ(TM)s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form."
So (sorta) forget your fifth-grade teacher's advice to write to congress. (Mods, that's rhetoric, not literal.) Though the exact timing is a little fuzzy, here's how it really worked:
1. Mainstream Media ignores the issue, because the bill is in its favor. 2. Grassroots movement to excite the Big Players. 3. Big Players excite the general public. 4. Listen to what the President is *not saying*. 5. Tell the *President* (via staff etc) that *he or his party* will not get re-elected if he signs the bill! 6. President issues veto threat. MainStream Media *has to report on the President* (usually!) 7. Bill dies because it's a dare that it would require an Over-ride.
"I'm not sure what's more offensive: That they're so used to ignoring the democratic process in the US they ACTUALLY think this way, that ANY government thinks ACTA/DMCA helps further scientific progress and the arts, or that Corporations can throw their weight around in the political arena without being boycotted into oblivion. "
We're getting to the point "don't assume ignorance when the answer might involve malice instead". So for your comment above, "points 1 and 3". The lobbies used to be at least a little clever with their wink & nod bribery, and at least a little modest with their perks. Very rapidly, on an accelerating curve, we're getting tons of stories about "**AA has successfully bullied ______ *country*. Countries?! We're blackmailing entire countries on their copyright policy?!
Then of course it's the "two punch" of the one-two surveillance combo. (The other being the Terrorist-Kiddie Safety meme.) So that makes your point 2 the lie, in service of the corruption of points 1 and 3. Like Division By Zero in Math, once you start getting blatant lies and ignoring the entire constitution, then reality sinks down into Wonderland very very fast. (Did you ever see those 1+1=3 proofs in grade school number theory books? They all work with division by zero tricks.)
Re:But those kittens NEED copyright protection NOW
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 1
Re:It COULD be brought back
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In saner years you'd be right that it would be stopped. But there's something wrong this time - the push for the bill vs the content was so strong, the strongest I've seen in years. It's beyond "they got caught" - of course they knew they'd be hated for it. But they'd already stated "we want to pass this anyway despite your opposition". So if you'll allow me to go all Monty Python, "it's not dead, it's resting!" Let's assume the senate version rests too.
This situation reeks of a Meta-Campaign. So they'll either rename it, or worse, split the components among other bills so that there's nothing to rally against.
Try this - they're introducing it this time before this election round. Then once the people are re-elected "now they have nothing to lose" so they'll resurrect it next year. Or some such variations on a theme. The point is, just because it's sleeping, it's definitely going to wake up. Except for some surprise fallout, thousands of companies were drooling at how much fun power they stood to gain from this.
Re:timing of this shelving is just perfect
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's January 18 right? So they can still do the campaign, just replace the letters to read PIPA... unless the Senate version gets pulled tomorrow, also in time to be ahead of the protests.
(Do we still do the protests? Or will people whine "well we already won, so why bother protesting?")
I may have figured out the answer, if only they'd implement it:
Limit the number of times you can mod any particular user. Borrowing phrasing from another site: "You have downmodded hairyfeet too many times lately. Please moderate other users instead." Then if he keeps downmodding against meta-mod checks, he simply loses his mod points entirely.
I agree that those "crude words" you used would draw downmods, because it's like when a bully tires you out and tricks you to use coarse language out of exhaustion, then that "justifies" their downmods. I know, I wish we could get off the playground, but if them's the games, ya gotta try to sidestep them.
Tip - find a scientific phrasing. Buried beneath copyright woes, scientists *have* studied tons of stuff in those little projects that aren't sexy enough to draw page clicks. So for the words you were using, try also "Perceptual Bubble". The entire rest of your post then works, but it's got Secret Sauce that makes the mods happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't some part of Internet Security (of ____, I'll leave that to my betters to explain) rely on Fourier properties?
So if we can bust those "Faster than Fast", what next?
In before _____.
Key phrase:
"smartphones to wirelessly transmit large video files without ... consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments."
Everyone see the connection to the Copyright Mayhem this week?
Bueller?
We enjoyed the rest from having to protest, for some twenty years, when life got back to being about pizza, drinks, and games.
Now we're in this really scary race to a frenzy that looks like the political oppression of other countries. And by race I mean drag car speed, not running.
Please let us have 10 years! Then I can have time to live large and die happy in middle age.
Has no one noticed that about half the targets were *FEDERAL*? We're talking about MU, and that's plenty bad, but now that Anonymous is attacking top level agencies and not just goofy little 1 man contractors, we're in for some real hurt.
Given the level of momentum turning toward the Big Brother state, there may not be that many "mature" political channels left. In case everyone missed it, they found a new weapon against "peaceful protest" - ridicule.
Occupy Wall Street was the first/best civil protest we've had in *decades*! The result? The media planted a few Laugh Off stories about some of the "Boys Will Be Boys" activities going on the sidelines and then the cops busted it all up, and we didn't have a followup. That's because they quietly destroyed B.W.B.B. those same decades ago, with the final lock as a nifty side effect of the 9-11 theme. "Oh look, ten thousand protesters aren't as orderly as school children or cowering workers!" Uh... protesters are ... angry, that' the definition, right?
The interesting thing is Slashdot has chosen to let the trolls post come ill or shill, because it's part of Taco's original foresight to the abuses of over-modding TOS policies now creeping everywhere else. The mod system could use a couple more finesses, but it's *us* modding each other, not the editors. That's starting to become a Meta-Experiment in the current climate.
I'm quite lenient with my mod scores - I only mod down the absolute lowest of the vulgar offtopic junk, or the "random word generator" posts, or the shock pics. I stay out of the "Shill - Anti-Shill" wars.
Nah, not a diversion, the politicians expected the same Blase mood that let them pass every other evil bill. It would have been a counterpart piece as a matched set for ACTA (one domestic, one foreign).
We did manage to scare them *just a little* but there's just so far to go still. The current score is something like Lobbies 97 People 3.
I don't even know what to begin to think about this. The summary tried hard. So the Gov is going to ...uh... release fun puzzles that analyze how weapons are tested? So what are the licenses on the games themselves? Will they be all locked down by copyright or can we chop them up and do other things with the code and make forks?
Is it all a honeypot?
"Sir, Mr. X. used our game to hack into us."
"Uh, well, we did ask him to look for attack points..."
"Arrest him anyway!"
Plus it's usually a thundering Terms of Service violation.
"by whitehatnetizen (997645) on 09:55 PM January 18th, 2012 (#38744614)
If the Author does this like you suggest, I would buy a copy of his book just to congratulate him on principle. I can only speak for myself so here's my anecdote: I prefer physical books over electronic copies however, before I buy a book I always read a portion from somewhere near the beginning to get an idea of whether the authors style appeals to me. If I can't find a physical copy and amazon's preview doesn't apply to that book I would happily and without guilt download a pirated copy, and if the writing style appealed to me, I would then purchase a physical copy. I've also lost count of the number of albums that I've ended up buying after stumbling across an artist I haven't yet heard of on youtube."
I think at the moment this is only an eBook - so there's that, and I don't know / don't think it's on Amazon. I have an email pending from him about how he'll let me choose distribution promotions.
So far I've gotten some early good comments from readers glad to see something new developing in the content game.
What if Slashdot permanently went back to the OMG! Ponies! Theme until those bills truly died?
Hi AC!
I'll find out more ways we can give him funds! Stay tuned!
Update: The gentleman did in fact email me a copy, so now it's my turn to decide what happens next.
A couple of notes:
A Legit issue underneath all the snow-job the **AA is churning out is that there is indeed a longer gestation period for "non-traditional sales" so on purpose I "won't pay today". (Otherwise that's just more of an inverted retail transaction.)
Also this situation is different because "the clock starts today" whereas the poster's point was that he couldn't figure out the "correlation - causation" link between unknown downloads vs. sales.
This feels like an important project for me and my stance on copyright, so everyone, watch for further posts later in other threads and we'll see where it all goes. Mr. Author, please pay extra care not to "get impatient" here. I have some ideas but the time passing is in fact part of the point, so that it doesn't just become astroturfing.
See you all In Another Thread!
Hi AC.
You illustrated my point perfectly. Instead of waiting 3 days with a spiral plastic bind, it should be printed right there while you wait. My aformentioned paperbacks complete with covers were about $8 each via Google Books.
You do now. Actually, I'll give you two.
The runner up story is Susan Boyle. When Wikipedia comes off blackout, go look her up and check the sales records - some such highest selling new artist in X years.
But let's do your story.
If you're gutsy, you'll post a link to your book and dedicate it "A gift to protest SOPA". Pick a CC license, I suggest "Attribution Only" (So that people can't replace your name, but all told, people are usually pretty good at keeping original artist names on their copies.) Put a rider in "Since this copy originated on a special post, please let me know if this copy inspires you to buy it". Give us an address to send checks/payments to, etc.
Or, if you are still a little squeamish, send *me* all that info which I won't re-share, but I'll report my results. My email is "not obfuscated" so send it along!
Heh - "Shelved" - that's an awesome word.
"Look! It's on a shelf! Look again! We took it OFF the shelf!"
What were we thinking, that they threw it in a pit of flames and burned all the copies?
Check out Google's own page!
Big evil bar across their logo.
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Let's get it out in the open. Let's thrash it out. Ebooks kinda suk. They're stuck there on your device, and they're all digitally-slimy. You can't (easily!) draw notes and fold down pages and get pizza grease all over them. I'm not even going to get into Formats and DRM and Backups etc.
Sometimes you just want an Honest to Goodness Book. But we were so wowed with Amazon's selection we drank something REALLY worse than kool-aid. (Boilermaker? Skullgrinder? NecroAtomic ZombieMaker? Oh sorry, Kids, don't read that last sentence.) The crushing future is in Print On Demand.
There are a couple of legit tech hurdles - but big picture they're cake. (Glue quality, page shear, assembly speed, blah blah.) But I have in my hand, complete with generic non-SOPA-offensive blue and white covers, three paperbacks on religious theory that are at least 75% of "Professional Quality". The binding is still intact after about 2 years, the pages are the same size within X milimeters, the ink is solid, etc.
ANY book - in one hour. (I'm being generous counting for stuff like lines, staff, etc.) Screw that wait 3 days for ship junk.
But - what is this mysterious silence? The machines are "not that expensive" (topside $100,000, peanuts for a 70,000 SF retail outlet).
So mighty Slashdot, how have the Book people managed to TOTALLY elude entire chains like Borders? Was it REALLY that much fun to go bankrupt??? Was there NO-ONE among all 19,500 employees that bothered to try to get digital rights to POD? Not a single title? Not a single attempt at getting a machine in the store? Really???
Talk about an Elephant in the Room. I am annoyed because I cannot be smarter than 100 Borders Senior Managers.
Sorry, it's a nice question but it risks red-herring us away from real reform.
Basically "Works are Copyrighted the moment they come into existence" - as such that's clear enough. So the audience is COMPLETELY irrelevant. Your thunder-case is a Live Concert. The really good musicians will throw extra trills and riffs all over the "classic studio" mix arrangement, thus making Live concerts that special thing worth the extra bucks and tshirts etc. The band (and X middlemen) absolutely own the rights to that Live version.
So yes, human nature says that 100 people of the 30,000 people concert will make bootlegs, but those are the top of the infringement case list.
"Speeches for goodwill" like MLK's don't suddenly become "Public Domain" just because they're about civil rights and not music.
"Best yet, it would make it nearly impossible for the MSM to ignore the blackout/SOPA/PIPA. Then watch as they tiptoe around the elephant in the living room: why they haven't been covering SOPA/PIPA up until this point."
Hey everyone, between the post above and the slightly typo'ed article below, they just told us how to really beat these bills.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/putting_sopa_on_a_shelf034765.php
Key quote:
"The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. ... ...
Until now, the Obama administration had not taken a position on the issue.
Though the administration did not issue a formal veto threat, the White Houseâ(TM)s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form."
So (sorta) forget your fifth-grade teacher's advice to write to congress. (Mods, that's rhetoric, not literal.) Though the exact timing is a little fuzzy, here's how it really worked:
1. Mainstream Media ignores the issue, because the bill is in its favor.
2. Grassroots movement to excite the Big Players.
3. Big Players excite the general public.
4. Listen to what the President is *not saying*.
5. Tell the *President* (via staff etc) that *he or his party* will not get re-elected if he signs the bill!
6. President issues veto threat. MainStream Media *has to report on the President* (usually!)
7. Bill dies because it's a dare that it would require an Over-ride.
"I'm not sure what's more offensive: That they're so used to ignoring the democratic process in the US they ACTUALLY think this way, that ANY government thinks ACTA/DMCA helps further scientific progress and the arts, or that Corporations can throw their weight around in the political arena without being boycotted into oblivion. "
We're getting to the point "don't assume ignorance when the answer might involve malice instead". So for your comment above, "points 1 and 3". The lobbies used to be at least a little clever with their wink & nod bribery, and at least a little modest with their perks. Very rapidly, on an accelerating curve, we're getting tons of stories about "**AA has successfully bullied ______ *country*. Countries?! We're blackmailing entire countries on their copyright policy?!
Then of course it's the "two punch" of the one-two surveillance combo. (The other being the Terrorist-Kiddie Safety meme.) So that makes your point 2 the lie, in service of the corruption of points 1 and 3. Like Division By Zero in Math, once you start getting blatant lies and ignoring the entire constitution, then reality sinks down into Wonderland very very fast. (Did you ever see those 1+1=3 proofs in grade school number theory books? They all work with division by zero tricks.)
What is IcanHasCheezburger think of the bill?
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/funny-pictures-neighborhood-watch-committee-of-one.jpg
In saner years you'd be right that it would be stopped. But there's something wrong this time - the push for the bill vs the content was so strong, the strongest I've seen in years. It's beyond "they got caught" - of course they knew they'd be hated for it. But they'd already stated "we want to pass this anyway despite your opposition". So if you'll allow me to go all Monty Python, "it's not dead, it's resting!" Let's assume the senate version rests too.
This situation reeks of a Meta-Campaign. So they'll either rename it, or worse, split the components among other bills so that there's nothing to rally against.
Try this - they're introducing it this time before this election round. Then once the people are re-elected "now they have nothing to lose" so they'll resurrect it next year. Or some such variations on a theme. The point is, just because it's sleeping, it's definitely going to wake up. Except for some surprise fallout, thousands of companies were drooling at how much fun power they stood to gain from this.
It's January 18 right? So they can still do the campaign, just replace the letters to read PIPA ... unless the Senate version gets pulled tomorrow, also in time to be ahead of the protests.
(Do we still do the protests? Or will people whine "well we already won, so why bother protesting?")
Now you know why they want to shut down the Internet!
Let's even presume they shut down the Senate version.
How can we stop the "sneak it in later" effect?
I may have figured out the answer, if only they'd implement it:
Limit the number of times you can mod any particular user. Borrowing phrasing from another site: "You have downmodded hairyfeet too many times lately. Please moderate other users instead." Then if he keeps downmodding against meta-mod checks, he simply loses his mod points entirely.
I agree that those "crude words" you used would draw downmods, because it's like when a bully tires you out and tricks you to use coarse language out of exhaustion, then that "justifies" their downmods. I know, I wish we could get off the playground, but if them's the games, ya gotta try to sidestep them.
Tip - find a scientific phrasing. Buried beneath copyright woes, scientists *have* studied tons of stuff in those little projects that aren't sexy enough to draw page clicks. So for the words you were using, try also "Perceptual Bubble". The entire rest of your post then works, but it's got Secret Sauce that makes the mods happy.