Except they're not the ones making the copies, they're simply buying a copy from what they (most likely) believe to be a reputable source. In a statutory rape case it's the one who commits the act that is responsible under the law, regardless of mental state or intent. Copyright is the same. This is just a scare tactic to make old women think they're going to be sued so they'll buy their software direct rather than shopping around for good deals.
Hehe, the irony of someone too dumb to understand what the web is meant to be entitling their own post "stupid" is not lost on me - well done, sirrah!
You see, the web was actually created as a means for sharing data. Data is essentially not tied to any one medium. That data can be taken and presented visually on a page, but it can equally be converted to sound. A VISUAL website, as you say, if it requires visuals to be used, is a badly designed website totally outside the spirit and intent of the web. It is, in essence, a STUPID website, it's broken.
Some guy called Tim Berners-Lee once said "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - but hey, what would he know about the web? I guess he's just stupid too, huh?
You raise a valid point, but there are very few instances where video is used to pass on business critical information such store locations, telephone numbers of product lines. If you are putting that kind of important information in a video, it makes sense to have a text transcript of the video contents anyway, otherwise you are committing SEO suicide (and if businesses don't care about accessibility, they will sell their own grandmothers for SEO).
I don't know what screen reader you've tried (or maybe you just ran the flat file through a text>speech conversion tool?) but modern screen readers don't work that way. They recognise good, semantic markup and have all kinds of convenient features, like being able to jump between header tags to get to content sections easily. If the web page is coded to accessibility standards it's generally pretty easy to use with a screen reader.
As for AJAX reliant websites - well, many screen readers cope pretty well with javascript too (and on that note - designers should be aware that not all disabled people have javascript turned off, so your js generated sections need to be accessible, too). Having said that, a well designed site will have redundancy built it to cope with people turning off javascript anyway (after all, it's not just disabled people who turn off javascript - many people are choosing this approach these days).
There's a bit of a difference between your "getting annoyed" and not being able to interact with the vast majority of big sites on the web no matter what OS/browser combination you use. The difference here is that you choose to run Linux - disabled people largely don't choose to be disabled. You can make an alteration in your life which will solve your problem, in other words you are empowered.
If you have a disability, you don't have the same option, many disabled people are forced to buy Windows, forced to use the nightmare of MSIE, on top of that they may be forced to buy expensive screen reader software and they still can't access many of the most popular websites. Put yourself in that situation and I guess you'd be more than "annoyed". That being the case, their only recourse if they want to change things is the court system.
On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
Unfortunately, views like that lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy of a massive proliferation of inaccessible websites in the first place. People think it's difficult to do, so they don't really try, just perpetuate the rumours of how difficult it is.
Making a website accessible just requires a little bit of forward planning and correct use of semantic html - the problem is most "design professionals" can't produce valid, semantic html and that's where the difficulties begin. If your page has a lot of graphics, what's difficult about including descriptive alt attributes or long description links to describe the content of those graphics? Or producing a page that uses clean css techniques for layout instead of a horrible mess of nested tables?
The truth is, designing for accessibility is no more difficult than designing for IE5.5/6's deficiencies, but because it's not been a business priority in the past (yes, business would rather cater to a disabled browser than help its disabled customers), designers have been allowed to ignore it (and, in some cases, forced to ignore it by near-sighted management). A few high-profile cases alerting business to how important it is to build in accessibility might help to turn the tide.
No, I definitely think they're on to something here. Quality is king and people will always go for quality even if it costs them the earth. I mean, when was the last time you ever heard of someone downloading a low-fi, shaky cam version of the latest movie release rather than shelling out £5 to see it on a huge cinema screen with full surround sound? Oh, wait... never mind.
You mean like DVD was dropped? Nope, once they commit billions to pushing a format that have to follow through.
You got the complete opposite of what the parent was actually saying. He said that if it DOESN'T get cracked, people won't adopt them. Which doesn't actually seem to likely, as DVD adoption was quite fast, long before DeCSS and css-auth came along.
True, but then DVD over VHS was a massive improvement in almost every way possible, better quality which could be enjoyed immediately with just a DVD player (no need to upgrade the TV), supposedly much longer shelf-life, smaller and lighter physical media.
The only thing the new formats really offer over and above DVD is an improvement in quality (which arguably doesn't match the jump from VHS > DVD), for which they not only need an expensive player, but a hugely expensive new television (and a lot of the hugely expensive televisions people have bought already, thinking they will work with the new disc formats, won't give the expected benefits). In order to get this improvement in quality, people will have to give up any rights to do what they like with their media just as they are getting used to the idea of movies as data and data being portable across devices/networks.
You may scoff, but there is a strong scientific reasoning behind this. Once we terraform the moon and have a society living up there, pretty soon that society is going to collapse. By hiding these scientific treasures for them to find in the distant future, we can potentially kick-start a resurgent scientific age and save ourselves a lot of trial and error.
We should also think about sticking some dinosaur fossils up there as well, just to get some heated religious/evolutionary debates underway.
I think you're maybe missing the point here. The defendant is asking the court to appoint an independent witness, rather than RIAA using an in-house expert. This is not, as you claim, the same as RIAA paying for an expert of the defendant's choosing. It is to be expected that the court would appoint a neutral expert who has no bias in favour of the defendant, but at the same time does not have ties and bias in favour of the plaintiff. In no way does it imply that the defendant gets to choose an expert who will say what they want (this is pure FUD on your part), and if the court appointed an independent witness and the defendant objected on the basis that she didn't get to choose the expert, this would no doubt play against her in the judge's decision.
Under normal circumstances, asking the court to appoint an expert might be viewed as an unreasonable request. However, considering the plaintiff's past actions I certainly can't blame the defendant for taking this stance. It would certainly be in the RIAA's interests to leak confidential information from the defendant's pc which backed up their case or showed her in a bad light. If they get a financial slap on the wrists for doing so, they'd probably consider it a fair trade. At the least the defendant would feel their privacy was violated. At the worst, their information could be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. You would hope the RIAA would be above such practices, but in light of their actions so far I find it increasingly difficult to trust them to do the right thing.
Confidential information, of course, is entirely subjective. I'm sure plaintiff, defendant and judge would all have different ideas about what was considered confidential information, which is another reason the defendant is asking for an independent witness and rules drawn up as to what data is released. After all, if the RIAA are merely looking for evidence of file copying/sharing, that should be pretty easily defined. It wouldn't include private documents, images, etc. An mp3 would be pretty easy to spot and then the defendant would have a chance to explain its existence on their system.
One final thing - you seem to be assuming the defendant has something to hide in asking for an independent witness. What you should be asking is what the RIAA has to gain by avoiding an independent witness. To me, it seems the word independent is the key here.
They're hoping they'll get a lot of people googling for the likes of "747 left wing loud creaking". They'll make the money serving insurance advertisements.
Re:Question is: Was it WORTH it?
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
The thing is, Steve's shows were never really targeted at the real enthusiast. They were always far too light on factual information to reach that audience. What he did was bring a small part of what the enthusiast feels to a much wider audience. That is the value of his videos. If you want the average guy in the street to care about animals being hunted and killed, you have to make those animals more to him than a line in an encyclopaedia. Steve brought these animals into the homes of millions of people around the world, and in doing so, helped raise awareness of their respective plights. He was a great conservationist, just a different conservationist. Making these encounters 'personal' is exactly what gets people interested. It's difficult for the masses to feel emotionally involved in the plight of an animal without that personal attachment.
As for the question of whether 'realistic videos' motivate people to hunt animals... dude, wtf? Never, never, ever did Steve advocate hunting and, in fact, he was a staunch anti-hunt lobbyist who poured tons of his own money into wildlife conservation. To suggest that people will watch one of his shows and become overwhelmed with some kind of hunter's bloodlust at the mere sight of a live croc is just ridiculous. Banning live video of animals won't stop people wanting to hunt them, it will just lead to apathy amongst the general populace as to whether they are hunted or not - which would be a lot worse.
Lighten up. Steve wasn't some boring, sombre old conservationist. He was always full of life and cracking jokes. If people choose to remember him in a similar manner, who are you to judge them or say that it's not what he would have wanted? There's no venom in the jokes people are making (and no, the pun is not intended), they're good natured and even Steve himself poked fun at the possibility of his dying doing what he loves in a commercial for FedEx. If HE can laugh at the situation, who are you to say we can't laugh with him, one last time, as we remember all he did and was?
Re:The idiot endangered his son
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
He was only raising his kids the way he was raised. People take "calculated risks" all the damn time - your children have a much, much greater chance of dying in a car crash than being eaten by a croc, even if you live in a croc area, but are people who drive their kids to school idiots, endangering their children?
Wrapping kids in cotton wool doesn't do them any good in the long run. Knowing how much Steve loved his kids, he wouldn't have endangered them in a situation he thought he couldn't handle, and if it came to the worst and the croc did attack, you'd better believe Steve would happily let it take his leg in order to save his kid. That's just the kind of guy he was. If this incident proves anything it's that accidents can and will happen. His kid would be in as much danger on an outing to the beach as it was being near a croc in the care of a crocodile expert.
Re:Honestly, this was a long time coming
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Well, an awful lot of people are saying that they have similar issues, so maybe you're just one of the incredibly lucky ones never to have a problem.
For the record, I use win2k on my work Dell laptop which has a pretty restricted set of pre-installed apps (and nothing in the realm of p2p/spy/malware on there) and on my Vaio with XP at home I only have (apart from the basic windows stuff) Firefox (with adblock, no other extensions) and a belkin wireless pcmcia network card, and I have massive problems with hibernating either of them.
The Vaio will (as another user has experienced) intermittently fail to detect the pcmcia card when it wakes up (about 8 out of 10 start ups result in a failure to recognise the card, whereas if I do a shutdown, the card is picked up every time without fail). In addition it takes a long time to start (as long if not longer that just doing a restart from a full shutdown) and once or twice has refused to hibernate at all. It's so bad that I don't even try now, I've conditioned myself to just do a full shutdown knowing that it will save me hassle.
The Dell is even worse. I use hibernate a lot as I usually have several apps/documents open at once which I'm often using over the course of several days and it's annoying to have to close them all down and re-open them. The amount of time it takes the system to wake up is ridiculous, and about once a week it will refuse to wake up, it just sits at a black screen until I do a hard reset, and then any tabs I had open are lost and I have to go through opening all my apps/documents again.
I also use a Macbook at work and, although I don't really use it for anything more advanced that checking sites in Safari, it really is blazingly fast to wake up. I've never had that with Windows, even immediately after a full, clean install. So, I guess you need to learn how to not jump to conclusions, or not assume that your trouble-free experience means anyone who claims to have trouble is either doing something wrong or just plain FUD-spreading.
Duke Nukem Forever is the perfect game for dormant gamers. A game that never comes out for people who never play. Now if only developers could nail a way to get them to pay for the privilege of not playing their non-existent game...
Social Gamers, Leisure Gamers, and Dormant Gamers account for 53% of the Internet gamer population and 56% of the retail revenue
So apparently these groups are buying games. It's likely that there are just a hell of a lot of them but they only buy a few games each, which accounts for how they're spending more as a whole than traditional gamers.
Of course, what the article then goes on to do is jump to the conclusion that the reason this huge group is only buying a few games is because games aren't being designed which target them. What it doesn't consider is that, if these people are only playing socially, or are "dormant", maybe they only buy a handful of games because that is all they need. In which case they aren't going to buy more games. I'm not sure how a games developer targets that... probably by selling them content with a recurring charge, or games that are less fulfilling so that you're left wanting more.
The Wavebird is very comfortable, the 360 controller I find to be even more so. MS seem to be able to hit the mark with their user input devices, I've always found their Mice and Keyboards excellent (even at the much higher prices they charge) and the joypads (with the exception of the initial Xbox pad - which was a step in the right direction but way too big and heavy) are spot on.
Not just the positioning of the buttons and sticks, the quality is great and the weighting is perfect. A wireless controller with a (fairly heavy) rechargable battery pack could have been a disaster if the weighting was wrong, if it was off centre it would put unecessary strain on the hand, but the 360 controller is a joy to use wirelessly, for hours at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the analog reproduction process is a lot more fun than the average SQL query.
You forgot to get excited about a beowulf cluster of these things, damnit!
Well... the internet is like one big happy family... so you're just sharing with a few billion close friends.
Except they're not the ones making the copies, they're simply buying a copy from what they (most likely) believe to be a reputable source. In a statutory rape case it's the one who commits the act that is responsible under the law, regardless of mental state or intent. Copyright is the same. This is just a scare tactic to make old women think they're going to be sued so they'll buy their software direct rather than shopping around for good deals.
Hehe, the irony of someone too dumb to understand what the web is meant to be entitling their own post "stupid" is not lost on me - well done, sirrah!
You see, the web was actually created as a means for sharing data. Data is essentially not tied to any one medium. That data can be taken and presented visually on a page, but it can equally be converted to sound. A VISUAL website, as you say, if it requires visuals to be used, is a badly designed website totally outside the spirit and intent of the web. It is, in essence, a STUPID website, it's broken.
Some guy called Tim Berners-Lee once said "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - but hey, what would he know about the web? I guess he's just stupid too, huh?
You raise a valid point, but there are very few instances where video is used to pass on business critical information such store locations, telephone numbers of product lines. If you are putting that kind of important information in a video, it makes sense to have a text transcript of the video contents anyway, otherwise you are committing SEO suicide (and if businesses don't care about accessibility, they will sell their own grandmothers for SEO).
I don't know what screen reader you've tried (or maybe you just ran the flat file through a text>speech conversion tool?) but modern screen readers don't work that way. They recognise good, semantic markup and have all kinds of convenient features, like being able to jump between header tags to get to content sections easily. If the web page is coded to accessibility standards it's generally pretty easy to use with a screen reader.
As for AJAX reliant websites - well, many screen readers cope pretty well with javascript too (and on that note - designers should be aware that not all disabled people have javascript turned off, so your js generated sections need to be accessible, too). Having said that, a well designed site will have redundancy built it to cope with people turning off javascript anyway (after all, it's not just disabled people who turn off javascript - many people are choosing this approach these days).
There's a bit of a difference between your "getting annoyed" and not being able to interact with the vast majority of big sites on the web no matter what OS/browser combination you use. The difference here is that you choose to run Linux - disabled people largely don't choose to be disabled. You can make an alteration in your life which will solve your problem, in other words you are empowered.
If you have a disability, you don't have the same option, many disabled people are forced to buy Windows, forced to use the nightmare of MSIE, on top of that they may be forced to buy expensive screen reader software and they still can't access many of the most popular websites. Put yourself in that situation and I guess you'd be more than "annoyed". That being the case, their only recourse if they want to change things is the court system.
On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
Unfortunately, views like that lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy of a massive proliferation of inaccessible websites in the first place. People think it's difficult to do, so they don't really try, just perpetuate the rumours of how difficult it is.
Making a website accessible just requires a little bit of forward planning and correct use of semantic html - the problem is most "design professionals" can't produce valid, semantic html and that's where the difficulties begin. If your page has a lot of graphics, what's difficult about including descriptive alt attributes or long description links to describe the content of those graphics? Or producing a page that uses clean css techniques for layout instead of a horrible mess of nested tables?
The truth is, designing for accessibility is no more difficult than designing for IE5.5/6's deficiencies, but because it's not been a business priority in the past (yes, business would rather cater to a disabled browser than help its disabled customers), designers have been allowed to ignore it (and, in some cases, forced to ignore it by near-sighted management). A few high-profile cases alerting business to how important it is to build in accessibility might help to turn the tide.
No, I definitely think they're on to something here. Quality is king and people will always go for quality even if it costs them the earth. I mean, when was the last time you ever heard of someone downloading a low-fi, shaky cam version of the latest movie release rather than shelling out £5 to see it on a huge cinema screen with full surround sound? Oh, wait... never mind.
True, but then DVD over VHS was a massive improvement in almost every way possible, better quality which could be enjoyed immediately with just a DVD player (no need to upgrade the TV), supposedly much longer shelf-life, smaller and lighter physical media.
The only thing the new formats really offer over and above DVD is an improvement in quality (which arguably doesn't match the jump from VHS > DVD), for which they not only need an expensive player, but a hugely expensive new television (and a lot of the hugely expensive televisions people have bought already, thinking they will work with the new disc formats, won't give the expected benefits). In order to get this improvement in quality, people will have to give up any rights to do what they like with their media just as they are getting used to the idea of movies as data and data being portable across devices/networks.
I wouldn't like to call the outcome either way...
You may scoff, but there is a strong scientific reasoning behind this. Once we terraform the moon and have a society living up there, pretty soon that society is going to collapse. By hiding these scientific treasures for them to find in the distant future, we can potentially kick-start a resurgent scientific age and save ourselves a lot of trial and error.
We should also think about sticking some dinosaur fossils up there as well, just to get some heated religious/evolutionary debates underway.
I think you're maybe missing the point here. The defendant is asking the court to appoint an independent witness, rather than RIAA using an in-house expert. This is not, as you claim, the same as RIAA paying for an expert of the defendant's choosing. It is to be expected that the court would appoint a neutral expert who has no bias in favour of the defendant, but at the same time does not have ties and bias in favour of the plaintiff. In no way does it imply that the defendant gets to choose an expert who will say what they want (this is pure FUD on your part), and if the court appointed an independent witness and the defendant objected on the basis that she didn't get to choose the expert, this would no doubt play against her in the judge's decision.
Under normal circumstances, asking the court to appoint an expert might be viewed as an unreasonable request. However, considering the plaintiff's past actions I certainly can't blame the defendant for taking this stance. It would certainly be in the RIAA's interests to leak confidential information from the defendant's pc which backed up their case or showed her in a bad light. If they get a financial slap on the wrists for doing so, they'd probably consider it a fair trade. At the least the defendant would feel their privacy was violated. At the worst, their information could be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. You would hope the RIAA would be above such practices, but in light of their actions so far I find it increasingly difficult to trust them to do the right thing.
Confidential information, of course, is entirely subjective. I'm sure plaintiff, defendant and judge would all have different ideas about what was considered confidential information, which is another reason the defendant is asking for an independent witness and rules drawn up as to what data is released. After all, if the RIAA are merely looking for evidence of file copying/sharing, that should be pretty easily defined. It wouldn't include private documents, images, etc. An mp3 would be pretty easy to spot and then the defendant would have a chance to explain its existence on their system.
One final thing - you seem to be assuming the defendant has something to hide in asking for an independent witness. What you should be asking is what the RIAA has to gain by avoiding an independent witness. To me, it seems the word independent is the key here.
Or "If RIAA had their way they'd take this shirt from my back".
They're hoping they'll get a lot of people googling for the likes of "747 left wing loud creaking". They'll make the money serving insurance advertisements.
The thing is, Steve's shows were never really targeted at the real enthusiast. They were always far too light on factual information to reach that audience. What he did was bring a small part of what the enthusiast feels to a much wider audience. That is the value of his videos. If you want the average guy in the street to care about animals being hunted and killed, you have to make those animals more to him than a line in an encyclopaedia. Steve brought these animals into the homes of millions of people around the world, and in doing so, helped raise awareness of their respective plights. He was a great conservationist, just a different conservationist. Making these encounters 'personal' is exactly what gets people interested. It's difficult for the masses to feel emotionally involved in the plight of an animal without that personal attachment.
As for the question of whether 'realistic videos' motivate people to hunt animals... dude, wtf? Never, never, ever did Steve advocate hunting and, in fact, he was a staunch anti-hunt lobbyist who poured tons of his own money into wildlife conservation. To suggest that people will watch one of his shows and become overwhelmed with some kind of hunter's bloodlust at the mere sight of a live croc is just ridiculous. Banning live video of animals won't stop people wanting to hunt them, it will just lead to apathy amongst the general populace as to whether they are hunted or not - which would be a lot worse.
Lighten up. Steve wasn't some boring, sombre old conservationist. He was always full of life and cracking jokes. If people choose to remember him in a similar manner, who are you to judge them or say that it's not what he would have wanted? There's no venom in the jokes people are making (and no, the pun is not intended), they're good natured and even Steve himself poked fun at the possibility of his dying doing what he loves in a commercial for FedEx. If HE can laugh at the situation, who are you to say we can't laugh with him, one last time, as we remember all he did and was?
He was only raising his kids the way he was raised. People take "calculated risks" all the damn time - your children have a much, much greater chance of dying in a car crash than being eaten by a croc, even if you live in a croc area, but are people who drive their kids to school idiots, endangering their children?
Wrapping kids in cotton wool doesn't do them any good in the long run. Knowing how much Steve loved his kids, he wouldn't have endangered them in a situation he thought he couldn't handle, and if it came to the worst and the croc did attack, you'd better believe Steve would happily let it take his leg in order to save his kid. That's just the kind of guy he was. If this incident proves anything it's that accidents can and will happen. His kid would be in as much danger on an outing to the beach as it was being near a croc in the care of a crocodile expert.
They're being raised by wolves, of course.
I've seen him have a very close encounter with a spitting cobra amongst others (luckily he was wearing glasses, even though he didn't realise it spat)
The clue, of course, being in the name.
Well, an awful lot of people are saying that they have similar issues, so maybe you're just one of the incredibly lucky ones never to have a problem.
For the record, I use win2k on my work Dell laptop which has a pretty restricted set of pre-installed apps (and nothing in the realm of p2p/spy/malware on there) and on my Vaio with XP at home I only have (apart from the basic windows stuff) Firefox (with adblock, no other extensions) and a belkin wireless pcmcia network card, and I have massive problems with hibernating either of them.
The Vaio will (as another user has experienced) intermittently fail to detect the pcmcia card when it wakes up (about 8 out of 10 start ups result in a failure to recognise the card, whereas if I do a shutdown, the card is picked up every time without fail). In addition it takes a long time to start (as long if not longer that just doing a restart from a full shutdown) and once or twice has refused to hibernate at all. It's so bad that I don't even try now, I've conditioned myself to just do a full shutdown knowing that it will save me hassle.
The Dell is even worse. I use hibernate a lot as I usually have several apps/documents open at once which I'm often using over the course of several days and it's annoying to have to close them all down and re-open them. The amount of time it takes the system to wake up is ridiculous, and about once a week it will refuse to wake up, it just sits at a black screen until I do a hard reset, and then any tabs I had open are lost and I have to go through opening all my apps/documents again.
I also use a Macbook at work and, although I don't really use it for anything more advanced that checking sites in Safari, it really is blazingly fast to wake up. I've never had that with Windows, even immediately after a full, clean install. So, I guess you need to learn how to not jump to conclusions, or not assume that your trouble-free experience means anyone who claims to have trouble is either doing something wrong or just plain FUD-spreading.
You're right, but they're market researchers so it's to be expected. Just be grateful they didn't refer to the long tail of gamers...
Duke Nukem Forever is the perfect game for dormant gamers. A game that never comes out for people who never play. Now if only developers could nail a way to get them to pay for the privilege of not playing their non-existent game...
According to TFA
Social Gamers, Leisure Gamers, and Dormant Gamers account for 53% of the Internet gamer population and 56% of the retail revenue
So apparently these groups are buying games. It's likely that there are just a hell of a lot of them but they only buy a few games each, which accounts for how they're spending more as a whole than traditional gamers.
Of course, what the article then goes on to do is jump to the conclusion that the reason this huge group is only buying a few games is because games aren't being designed which target them. What it doesn't consider is that, if these people are only playing socially, or are "dormant", maybe they only buy a handful of games because that is all they need. In which case they aren't going to buy more games. I'm not sure how a games developer targets that... probably by selling them content with a recurring charge, or games that are less fulfilling so that you're left wanting more.
The Wavebird is very comfortable, the 360 controller I find to be even more so. MS seem to be able to hit the mark with their user input devices, I've always found their Mice and Keyboards excellent (even at the much higher prices they charge) and the joypads (with the exception of the initial Xbox pad - which was a step in the right direction but way too big and heavy) are spot on.
Not just the positioning of the buttons and sticks, the quality is great and the weighting is perfect. A wireless controller with a (fairly heavy) rechargable battery pack could have been a disaster if the weighting was wrong, if it was off centre it would put unecessary strain on the hand, but the 360 controller is a joy to use wirelessly, for hours at a time.