Unless you also sell a few companies and put together a few billion as a stake to hand over to attorneys I suspect you'll fare as poorly as everyone else does.
Its purpose aside, yes, it would be a fantastic thing to be able to scan the entire web and reliably identify the context and content of any specific media file type. Video, audio, image, etc. Particularly if it could identify purposely obfuscated content.
I'm in what is almost certainly a tiny minority of Slashdotters in that I actually create copyrightable material rather than only consume it. I'm again in the minority in that I think copyrights are a good thing and again in the minority in that I can separate out the purpose of copyrights and the evil actions of the legal arms of **AA companies.
Regardless, while scanning the internet for improperly used material sounds great on paper this will probably end up being as effective as finding water with a divining rod. The current tactic of locking down things at the hardware and OS levels will get more support from the media companies, not that they seem all that good at choosing tactics when the internet is involved.
After looking around for options here in the US I was left with the impression that there were 3 or 4 ISPs, all either wholly owned subsidiaries of or limited liability companies of or conglomerized business alliances between, gigantic corporations. The same ones who try to sell me telephone and cable and water and air.
Trees are indeed renewable in any reasonable sense of the word renewable, not that there is any reason when the word is applied to energy, it having been turned into a marketing word for anything not involving fossil fuels.
Out buying the hardwood flooring I put in my bathroom a salesman was expaining the benefits of bamboo. He told me that bamboo and cork were both 'green' flooring because their production does not require the destruction of the entire plant. So it appears, at least in the flooring industry, probably driven by whole-building energy regulations and tax credits and such, that there needs to be a distinction between flooring that requires killing a tree and that which leaves it alive, the fact that trees will happily regrow from stumps has been left aside.
I guess there has to be, or has already been, a decision about the acceptable tradeoffs before it is built. For a given amount of power from wind versus coal, which method is best overall, not just to birds or the pocketbook or the ozone layer.
Typically in order to find out what the Unintended Consequences are things have to be built first, and while wind farms aren't exactly new neither are they common. As with most things the more widespread they become the more effort will be focused on correcting whatever problems they have.
A friend and I had a similar discussion about cell phone towers while hunting this weekend. He was complaining that the woodcock population has been down lately, and I mentioned that one factor might be the continued proliferation of cell phone towers in our area. Towers were going up with solid beacon lights that screwed up the navigation systems of some migratory birds. A simple change to blinking beacons seems to be fixing the problem. Of course we had to find piles of woodcocks dead around cell phone towers before we even knew it was necessary.
A company I used to work for rolled out a scheme on their mostly Windows network where everyone's password expired every 30 days. The time period was based on the idea that in the time required to crack a sniffed password (think l0phtcrack) the user may have changed it, or at least reduced the window of opportunity for it to be used. It wasn't really an attempt to prevent social engineering, or guessing.
Of course l0phtcrack would sniff and crack weak passwords in a matter of minutes, so I'm not sure how 30 days was arrived at, but I guess the ideas was that something is better than nothing.
I am actually allergic to early mornings. But I've found that deer are just as plentiful in the late afternoon. And I prefer to hunt upland game with gun dogs, and that kind of hunting is usually better in late morning, after the frost has cleared.
Natural selection can be a harsh mistress and if you can't keep up you shouldn't be suprised when something kills every last one of you. The entire world is one big killing machine. Tornados, floods, deer ticks with lyme disease, falling rocks, little globulous things you can't even see, all of it trying its damndest to kill you every day you exist. Because it wants to occupy the space you take up. Or maybe your flesh tastes good. Or your rotting corpse can be used to fertilize fields.
The world isn't fueled by rainbows and kitty purrs. Sometimes stuff dies. That is the way it is. You can either believe that invisible cloud people created everything just specifically for humans so that you can jam everything that will fit into your mouth hole with a clear conscience, or you can believe Darwin and realize that in order for Darwin to be right, stuff that isn't as well adapted has to die. Maybe some actions taken by people, or squirrels, or decaying nucleii will hasten things along for some other organism but unless those organisms learn to fight back it is curtains for them and more for us. The more sensitive among us might think this is a bad thing but it frees up resources for the fittest to become even fitter.
it seems obvious to me that in the long term the expensive-but-clean process is probably better
That might be obvious, but are you willing to pay for it? More accurately, are enough of your like minded bretheren willing to pay for it?
To further derail things, what constitutes 'better'? In the long term is it better to kill all the buffalo to help the natives die so we can drive them off the land we want to develop for the debatable overall improvement of humanity? Better to test snail toxins on rabbits so we can one day keep humans from having to live with pain? Better for that one specific rabbit we use to see how high a dosage a rabbit can tolerate before it flatlines?
Better is not even easy to define in hindsight. I'm firmly in the Aldo Leopold school of conservationism and I like the work I see Quail Unlimited doing, convincing farmers to maintain grass transitions around their fields to provide quail habitat, but is that a 'better' tradeoff compared with the food that could have been grown there? No idea, but I like shooting quail, so thats where my money goes.
People are more or less self serving. They might buy into the 'better world for your kids' ideal, but they need a whole lot of convincing.
I thought the internet ideal was that there were no ideals? Or at least none anyone was obligated to follow.
While people often make attempts to prevert the internet into what they want it to be, a place to advertise, a place to argue, to publish information about yourself that no one wants to read, it continues to resist shoves in any particular direction. When something new is added the old stuff is not displaced. YouTube can make thousands of videos available and everyone can get really excited about the coming Web 2.0 apocalypse, but all the old stuff is still right where it was and just as useful.
If Craigslist wants to give stuff away, they can. If someone wants to charge for the exact same service, they can. If a guy can convince a VC to give him a couple of hundred million dollars to build a web site that tries to ship 50 lb bags of dog food across the country, and he has a time machine to take him back to the early 90s, he can.
The mid range digital camera market is growing at the moment, Sony in particular has launched a revamped version of a previously launched consumer level Konica Minolta DSLR. They changed the outside a little and added a minor feature or two.
I'm a professional photographer and I tend to use pro level cameras, but it happens that I was comped one of the Sonys with a kit lens. The camera itself was a big piece of crap (the lens was worse) but it does have some novel features that make it look good on paper comapred with the other entry level offerings from other manufacturers. It also has a Sony logo stamped on it. Other than that Canon and Nikon both sell similarly priced DSLRs that are significantly better than the Sony.
Imagine my suprise when I saw that the Sony fumbled with for a few hours then gave away was declared to be the 'Camera of the Year' by a popular photography magazine. in their estimation it 'redefines photography'. While they undoubtably got paid by Sony to publish that a whole lot of people will now go buy a Sony Alpha.
What the hell any of this has to do with simplicity is beyond me, pro DSLRs are more complex than consumer ones, but it does say something about how powerful and pervasive marketing can be and how much influence it has over what kind of product people prefer to buy.
Marketing wins because very few people buy things without letting their emotions have some say in the matter. Marketing pitches to your emotions, imparting to you the feeling that more is better, that the mere presence of that whizzy little button on the mirror means that Car A is better than Car B. Heated or cooled cupholders. A confounding array of buttons on the steering wheel.
I'm just as susceptible to gadgetry marketing as most people, but I still value simplicity in some things. Good old boring Filson Tin Cloth beats any of the overhyped synthetics, no matter how many laminated layers of petrochemicals they figure out how to laminate together.
And neither will help with fire, unless you ship your offline stuff offsite.
I use a RAID both at home and at my studio. At the studio, mostly empty warehouse but good fire supression, I also back up to tape. At home I have a wireless NAS inside a safe, but your comment just made me realize that lightining could actually set a fire inside the safe. Unlikely but possible I guess.
We, not 'reporters' we but people with cameras who sometimes think of themselves as photjournalists and have toted them around Darfur, have published loads of photographs. It doesn't seem to be helping much quite yet and I don't think videos would either.
The people with the muscle to actually do something about it have placed much of Africa into the 'let them solve their own problems' column on their spreadsheet.
Do you really think that what he would have written would be so immensely incredible that we should hold up society and destroy people's lives because someone might download an MP3?
Probably not, but this kind of argument ignores the culpability of the person who downloaded the file. They very well knew, or should have known, the consequences of their actions but they did it anyway. It also ignores that fact that downloading that MP3 is directly opposed to the content creator's wishes, as evidenced by the fact that he chose to sign a distribution contract with an **AA company. If we are actualy concerned about protecting the artist rather than securing free content for ourselves it might be wise to let him choose how to deliver his product.
The idea that an artist can't be motivated by money and still produce decent art always seems to come up in submissions like these, as if it is a binary choice. I make a nice living shooting photographs. If you'd like me to take pictures of your new model automobile for use in an ad campaign, you are going to have to pay me. Want me to go to Bolivia and follow one of your writers around? Pay me. Afghanistan? I'm going to need some cash for that. Yet I can still give stuff away when the situation warrants.
For the most part art criticism methods that require some knowledge of the artists motivation or intent when creating a work have been rejected on the basis that the art object itself should be judged on its own merits.
Regardless, virtually all artists seek a reward of some kind. Often it is financial but just as often it is something less quantifiable. Recognition, fame, self expression.
If all you mean is that more money can be made by selling minor variations of the same crap over and over again versus new original stuff, I'd have to agree.
Indeed true, apart from the one guy who took the quick way out. But those people are the sacrificial lambs, sacrificed to convince people that the system still works just fine and that justice will indeed be meted out no matter how much money you have. It keeps people from flipping over cars and setting their own homes on fire in protest, which is fine but not something you want happening every other day.
For every Martha Stewart and Enron exec you have a thousand faceless men who, despite having committed all manner of crimes against humanity, die with their reputations intact, gold star sill next to their names, their life history free of any indication of wrongdoing.
Since the New York bar exam is offered only in Elglish it is also possible, even likely, that the submitter not only understands English but is one of the one people who does not have to type IANAL in every response he makes on this topic because he actually is a lawyer who actually participates in the defense of people sued by the RIAA.
And it is possible that you, an imbecile, misunderstand the RIAA's assertion. Maybe if you read this you will discover that the RIAA asserted that AOL confirmed that the defendant was the owner of an account through which copyrighted material was downloaded and distributed. While that assertion does indeed have two parts as you suggest the language is quite plain in attempting to indicate that AOL confirms both parts. Since the AOL letter indeed does not confirm both parts, only (1), the assertion is false.
While I'm sure that this particular set of power hungry control freak millionaires will prefer a type of intrusion different from that of the previous set of power hungry control freak millionaires, why look a gift horse in the mouth?
The previous set did most of the dirty work, all that talk about frogmen plotting to poison our water supplies or how some guy somewhere might be thinking about trying to blow up or otherwise damage or hijack an aircraft using maybe a gel or liquid possibly concealed in some everyday container like a toothpaste tube or shaving cream or water bottle. Continuously thinking up increasingly frightening scenarios of how terrorists could bring us harm is tough work, especially if you have to do it one handed because your other hand is busying stuffing cash in your pockets as fast as possible before someone else gets it.
So these guys will probably be content to just pile on yet more intrusion into our lives wihtout pruning any of the old, because you never know when some little tidbit of information you've collected might prove useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you also sell a few companies and put together a few billion as a stake to hand over to attorneys I suspect you'll fare as poorly as everyone else does.
Its purpose aside, yes, it would be a fantastic thing to be able to scan the entire web and reliably identify the context and content of any specific media file type. Video, audio, image, etc. Particularly if it could identify purposely obfuscated content.
I'm in what is almost certainly a tiny minority of Slashdotters in that I actually create copyrightable material rather than only consume it. I'm again in the minority in that I think copyrights are a good thing and again in the minority in that I can separate out the purpose of copyrights and the evil actions of the legal arms of **AA companies.
Regardless, while scanning the internet for improperly used material sounds great on paper this will probably end up being as effective as finding water with a divining rod. The current tactic of locking down things at the hardware and OS levels will get more support from the media companies, not that they seem all that good at choosing tactics when the internet is involved.
There are small ISPs left?
After looking around for options here in the US I was left with the impression that there were 3 or 4 ISPs, all either wholly owned subsidiaries of or limited liability companies of or conglomerized business alliances between, gigantic corporations. The same ones who try to sell me telephone and cable and water and air.
Trees are indeed renewable in any reasonable sense of the word renewable, not that there is any reason when the word is applied to energy, it having been turned into a marketing word for anything not involving fossil fuels.
Out buying the hardwood flooring I put in my bathroom a salesman was expaining the benefits of bamboo. He told me that bamboo and cork were both 'green' flooring because their production does not require the destruction of the entire plant. So it appears, at least in the flooring industry, probably driven by whole-building energy regulations and tax credits and such, that there needs to be a distinction between flooring that requires killing a tree and that which leaves it alive, the fact that trees will happily regrow from stumps has been left aside.
I guess there has to be, or has already been, a decision about the acceptable tradeoffs before it is built. For a given amount of power from wind versus coal, which method is best overall, not just to birds or the pocketbook or the ozone layer.
Typically in order to find out what the Unintended Consequences are things have to be built first, and while wind farms aren't exactly new neither are they common. As with most things the more widespread they become the more effort will be focused on correcting whatever problems they have.
A friend and I had a similar discussion about cell phone towers while hunting this weekend. He was complaining that the woodcock population has been down lately, and I mentioned that one factor might be the continued proliferation of cell phone towers in our area. Towers were going up with solid beacon lights that screwed up the navigation systems of some migratory birds. A simple change to blinking beacons seems to be fixing the problem. Of course we had to find piles of woodcocks dead around cell phone towers before we even knew it was necessary.
A company I used to work for rolled out a scheme on their mostly Windows network where everyone's password expired every 30 days. The time period was based on the idea that in the time required to crack a sniffed password (think l0phtcrack) the user may have changed it, or at least reduced the window of opportunity for it to be used. It wasn't really an attempt to prevent social engineering, or guessing.
Of course l0phtcrack would sniff and crack weak passwords in a matter of minutes, so I'm not sure how 30 days was arrived at, but I guess the ideas was that something is better than nothing.
While you may be referring to yourself, the situation described in the submission is happening in Honk Kong..
Not in the cartoon version, they'll just be made out of pixels arranged to look like velour.
I am actually allergic to early mornings. But I've found that deer are just as plentiful in the late afternoon. And I prefer to hunt upland game with gun dogs, and that kind of hunting is usually better in late morning, after the frost has cleared.
So what?
Natural selection can be a harsh mistress and if you can't keep up you shouldn't be suprised when something kills every last one of you. The entire world is one big killing machine. Tornados, floods, deer ticks with lyme disease, falling rocks, little globulous things you can't even see, all of it trying its damndest to kill you every day you exist. Because it wants to occupy the space you take up. Or maybe your flesh tastes good. Or your rotting corpse can be used to fertilize fields.
The world isn't fueled by rainbows and kitty purrs. Sometimes stuff dies. That is the way it is. You can either believe that invisible cloud people created everything just specifically for humans so that you can jam everything that will fit into your mouth hole with a clear conscience, or you can believe Darwin and realize that in order for Darwin to be right, stuff that isn't as well adapted has to die. Maybe some actions taken by people, or squirrels, or decaying nucleii will hasten things along for some other organism but unless those organisms learn to fight back it is curtains for them and more for us. The more sensitive among us might think this is a bad thing but it frees up resources for the fittest to become even fitter.
The bogus part is that there is no bogus claimant.
That might be obvious, but are you willing to pay for it? More accurately, are enough of your like minded bretheren willing to pay for it?
To further derail things, what constitutes 'better'? In the long term is it better to kill all the buffalo to help the natives die so we can drive them off the land we want to develop for the debatable overall improvement of humanity? Better to test snail toxins on rabbits so we can one day keep humans from having to live with pain? Better for that one specific rabbit we use to see how high a dosage a rabbit can tolerate before it flatlines?
Better is not even easy to define in hindsight. I'm firmly in the Aldo Leopold school of conservationism and I like the work I see Quail Unlimited doing, convincing farmers to maintain grass transitions around their fields to provide quail habitat, but is that a 'better' tradeoff compared with the food that could have been grown there? No idea, but I like shooting quail, so thats where my money goes.
People are more or less self serving. They might buy into the 'better world for your kids' ideal, but they need a whole lot of convincing.
You forgot about these penniless asshats?
While people often make attempts to prevert the internet into what they want it to be, a place to advertise, a place to argue, to publish information about yourself that no one wants to read, it continues to resist shoves in any particular direction. When something new is added the old stuff is not displaced. YouTube can make thousands of videos available and everyone can get really excited about the coming Web 2.0 apocalypse, but all the old stuff is still right where it was and just as useful.
If Craigslist wants to give stuff away, they can. If someone wants to charge for the exact same service, they can. If a guy can convince a VC to give him a couple of hundred million dollars to build a web site that tries to ship 50 lb bags of dog food across the country, and he has a time machine to take him back to the early 90s, he can.
I'm a professional photographer and I tend to use pro level cameras, but it happens that I was comped one of the Sonys with a kit lens. The camera itself was a big piece of crap (the lens was worse) but it does have some novel features that make it look good on paper comapred with the other entry level offerings from other manufacturers. It also has a Sony logo stamped on it. Other than that Canon and Nikon both sell similarly priced DSLRs that are significantly better than the Sony.
Imagine my suprise when I saw that the Sony fumbled with for a few hours then gave away was declared to be the 'Camera of the Year' by a popular photography magazine. in their estimation it 'redefines photography'. While they undoubtably got paid by Sony to publish that a whole lot of people will now go buy a Sony Alpha.
What the hell any of this has to do with simplicity is beyond me, pro DSLRs are more complex than consumer ones, but it does say something about how powerful and pervasive marketing can be and how much influence it has over what kind of product people prefer to buy.
I'm just as susceptible to gadgetry marketing as most people, but I still value simplicity in some things. Good old boring Filson Tin Cloth beats any of the overhyped synthetics, no matter how many laminated layers of petrochemicals they figure out how to laminate together.
And neither will help with fire, unless you ship your offline stuff offsite.
I use a RAID both at home and at my studio. At the studio, mostly empty warehouse but good fire supression, I also back up to tape. At home I have a wireless NAS inside a safe, but your comment just made me realize that lightining could actually set a fire inside the safe. Unlikely but possible I guess.
This is new? The people from Xerox Parc are going to disagree.
We, not 'reporters' we but people with cameras who sometimes think of themselves as photjournalists and have toted them around Darfur, have published loads of photographs. It doesn't seem to be helping much quite yet and I don't think videos would either.
The people with the muscle to actually do something about it have placed much of Africa into the 'let them solve their own problems' column on their spreadsheet.
Yes, it would.
Probably not, but this kind of argument ignores the culpability of the person who downloaded the file. They very well knew, or should have known, the consequences of their actions but they did it anyway. It also ignores that fact that downloading that MP3 is directly opposed to the content creator's wishes, as evidenced by the fact that he chose to sign a distribution contract with an **AA company. If we are actualy concerned about protecting the artist rather than securing free content for ourselves it might be wise to let him choose how to deliver his product.
The idea that an artist can't be motivated by money and still produce decent art always seems to come up in submissions like these, as if it is a binary choice. I make a nice living shooting photographs. If you'd like me to take pictures of your new model automobile for use in an ad campaign, you are going to have to pay me. Want me to go to Bolivia and follow one of your writers around? Pay me. Afghanistan? I'm going to need some cash for that. Yet I can still give stuff away when the situation warrants.
For the most part art criticism methods that require some knowledge of the artists motivation or intent when creating a work have been rejected on the basis that the art object itself should be judged on its own merits.
Regardless, virtually all artists seek a reward of some kind. Often it is financial but just as often it is something less quantifiable. Recognition, fame, self expression.
If all you mean is that more money can be made by selling minor variations of the same crap over and over again versus new original stuff, I'd have to agree.
For every Martha Stewart and Enron exec you have a thousand faceless men who, despite having committed all manner of crimes against humanity, die with their reputations intact, gold star sill next to their names, their life history free of any indication of wrongdoing.
Since the New York bar exam is offered only in Elglish it is also possible, even likely, that the submitter not only understands English but is one of the one people who does not have to type IANAL in every response he makes on this topic because he actually is a lawyer who actually participates in the defense of people sued by the RIAA.
And it is possible that you, an imbecile, misunderstand the RIAA's assertion. Maybe if you read this you will discover that the RIAA asserted that AOL confirmed that the defendant was the owner of an account through which copyrighted material was downloaded and distributed. While that assertion does indeed have two parts as you suggest the language is quite plain in attempting to indicate that AOL confirms both parts. Since the AOL letter indeed does not confirm both parts, only (1), the assertion is false.
While I'm sure that this particular set of power hungry control freak millionaires will prefer a type of intrusion different from that of the previous set of power hungry control freak millionaires, why look a gift horse in the mouth?
The previous set did most of the dirty work, all that talk about frogmen plotting to poison our water supplies or how some guy somewhere might be thinking about trying to blow up or otherwise damage or hijack an aircraft using maybe a gel or liquid possibly concealed in some everyday container like a toothpaste tube or shaving cream or water bottle. Continuously thinking up increasingly frightening scenarios of how terrorists could bring us harm is tough work, especially if you have to do it one handed because your other hand is busying stuffing cash in your pockets as fast as possible before someone else gets it.
So these guys will probably be content to just pile on yet more intrusion into our lives wihtout pruning any of the old, because you never know when some little tidbit of information you've collected might prove useful.