Well said. Except I'd make the following corrections:
s/[(]yes.*exam.//;
s/.flawed.//;
$d
I'd add that sometimes the "end" may be pointless, though you might not see it as such while working toward it; years later, in hindsight you might realise it was the "means", i.e., the process of working toward it, i.e. the "hard work", that was the point.
Interestingly, there's no "hard work" in taking a test you do not prepare for, e.g., an IQ test.
Maybe they fixate on maximums because those are what are used plea bargaining? Would you leave the possibility of 20 years in a federal prison (no matter how remote) to chance?
I think there's two villains. It's impossible for both of them to lose, but you can't blame people for being opposed to someone "winning" by being a villain.
Why was Zuckerberg going to Craigslist looking for work? Why did Zuckerberg want to do work for "known criminals"? The project Ceglia was trying to set up was an image database. Much like Facebook. I think if Paul Ceglia had a cleaner past and better judgment, he'd be collecting his (unearned?) share from Facebook in the same way that others, Winklevoss, etc., have collected.
The reason is the trail that Zuckerberg left behind him, screwing people over one after another, betraying their trust. The only person who could keep the damage under control is Zuckerberg. As others have said, other internet billionaires don't seem to have as many "forgotten co-founders" showing up for their "cut". The problem is particularly acute with Facebook. That's no coincidence.
The lesson here is you reap what you sow. Both Ceglia and Zuckerberg.
Except that this is not about Zuckerberg. Regardless of what Zuckerberg has done or has not done this guy tried to defraud others to the tune of several billion bucks. It doesn't require any other elements than him and his actions.
I thought the exception for DVD ripping was interesting. There are many references to "video quality" as a persuasive factor. This point might be useful in further requests for exceptions sent the Register.^1 Strategy: Complain about low quality. Apparently, screen captures are "not good enough" but Blu-Ray is "too good".
Under the exception individuals are entitled to extract a small portion of the DVD for commentary, criticism or educational purposes. What if enough individuals independently choose unique excerpts, so that together they cover the entire motion picture? Sites could be set up to catalog which portions of a DVD have already been extracted and reviewed. Commentary might be something as simple as subtitles of the type vlc or mplayer can handle; these are nothing more than text files - removing subtitles is a matter of not loading the text file. Then one simply downloads all the clips and combines them into the full film using ffmpeg.
Implausible? What do you think?
1. Why are people not organising mass mailing campaigns to the Register to seek DMCA exceptions? Am I missing something here? It seems like she only receives a relatively small number of requests for exceptions considering the large audience of people affected by her decisions.
re: 1. I work at Public Knowledge, the group that requested the general DVD ripping exception. We did organize a campaign around our exemption request and included the response in our reply comments. Going forward, our plan is to push Congress to pass laws that make it explicitly clear that "space shifting" is fair use. Of course, for that we will need the help of a broad coalition of people, including here at HN.
When I was typing out 1. I was thinking of the response that SOPA got. It seemed like it mobilised people to make phone calls and send emails. I think that had an impact. I'm just guessing here. In any case, it would be very interesting to see how LOC would respond to a surge in constituent participation in the DMCA exception process.
So, you make that sound hypothetical, but if you look, the EFF actually did something like that for the tablet and video game console exemptions: the number of comments filed this year was thereby staggering (sufficiently many that they missed their deadline on publishing them and had to simply put up an apology for a few days as they continued to go through it all).
I have no idea whether many or even any of these individual comments were thereby read: many were from people not even in the US, many were difficult to understand in broken English... some were blank, and one was actually "the wrong PDF" (someone's University parking pass). Before seeing the pile that was sent in, I had made it my goal this year to read everything published, but when I got through the C's I just couldn't do it anymore and stopped.
They seem to have responded to it quite well, in that it wasn't a major issue in either direction: I didn't hear anything (although I was fairly disconnected and only indirectly getting information, so I might just not know) of any complaints; it didn't seem to help, however (in that neither of those exemptions were accepted).
"that they missed their deadline" <- For the belated record, when I said "they" in this phrase I meant "the copyright office" (not the EFF, for example).
The key is to mobilize people in a way that makes an impact without going to the well too often. In the case of this proceeding, we knew that the Copyright Office does not necessarily respond to numbers of people simply saying "do this do this." When we put out a call, we asked for (and received) specific stories from people explaining why they themselves wanted this exemption.
That is very different from the kind of action you want to take when Congress is considering something. As I mentioned before, the next step in this process is to push Congress to make it absolutely crystal clear to everyone - including the Copyright Office - that non-commercial personal copies of media are well within the bounds of fair use. We need to wait until after the election and the new Congress is in session next year, but once that happens we are going to be making a big push to get just that type of legislation. At that point I hope that you will rally around the push. Unlike the Copyright Office, Congress tends to be much more responsive to numbers of people simply telling them to act.
This sounds like interesting work. Indeed I think those submitting requests need to thnk carefully about how to make compelling arguments. I'm thankful for the work you and your team are doing. saurik: As I asked "Am I missing something here?", the answer is of course "I am", but I continue to learn. I'm glad to hear you're getting involved with this.
"... it sells premium products at premium prices, and it never discounts."
Yeah, but the prices of those "products" (=Asian factory-made electronics, smaller form factor and reduced functionality) keep dropping. That is the nature of the computer business. And there's nothing Apple can do to stop it. Eventually we will reach "zero", or very close to it.
Maybe what this journalist is realising is that Apple the company may finally be seeing real competition in the "sexy hardware" space. They have historically been the only company to mass produce computers that "look cool" sitting on a desktop, even when they're turned off. They have never had any real competition in that space (=opinion). But now, as the price point and form factor have been significantly reduced (the price to own an Apple computer used to be a lot higher, I can recall it being over $1000 in the not-so-distant past), other companies might finally also be able to mass produce sexy-looking hardware that can compete.
Assuming that's true, and we're headed for "disposable" computers (i.e. ridiculously cheap), then what's left of Apple's reality distortion field? Maybe it's "Apple, the brand" that the journalist observes.
And what is that brand? Maybe it's partly "easy to use", as he suggests is a known characteristic of Apple products.
So, who can possibly compete with Apple on ease-of-use in a handheld computer? No one?
Hmmm, we'll see about that. Imagine a company that can offer the same simplicity, without greedy control freak attitude and imposing incessant hoop-jumping on its customers. And their computers look cool.
And the way to game it is by posting "middlebrow dismissals".
As a poster I am often surprised by what gets upvoted. Everyone surely can see this: negativity is rewarded. It only reinforces in my mind that "karma" means little anymore.
You can get karma just by being dismissive. Look at the tone of some of the posters who consistently jump into the top spot, thanks to their "karma". I get tired of seeing those same monikers over and over^1; the comments are often rubbish. No matter how articulate and cogent their commetns may have been in the past, no one is 100% consistent; we should not have to read _everything_ they say. But it doesn't matter if they are on the mark from day to day because they get a top spot no matter what they contribute, based on accumulated karma. You are forced to read what they've said, no matter how silly it is.
1. Unless you need to contact someone, I find usernames and profiles to be about as useful as karma (=not very), but I doubt many others would share my view. My interest is in quality comments that offer useful information, not "reputations". People with great "reputations" often make some very dumb comments. Judging the quality of a comment by the author's username instead of its content is a fool's game. It's also a basis for the HN algorithm.
Many of the things he says I agree with, others I don't. I think that's the thing with computing. Everyone's tastes are at least slightly different. We don't all want exactly the same things.
I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs.
We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?)
We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency.
Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.
It's funny how the KISSMetrics guy thinks (thought?) he was doing absolutely nothing wrong. Let's go out to the internet-using public and ask random people, "Do you mind of KISSMetrics tracks you across the web, even if you have cookies turned off?"
Alas, it seems in this case the only people who are aware of KISSMetrics' wrongdoing are security researchers (i.e., curious nerds), lawyers and some journalists. Perhaps if the general public knew, there would be a law.
The point was they are tracking you, whether you want to be tracked or not. He seemed to think that's OK as long as the tracking wasn't "across the web".
In any event
slacross the weblunti\l you do something \like od -An -tx1 /dev/urandom| of=/dev/urhdd bs=bignuml
Interestingly, there's no "hard work" in taking a test you do not prepare for, e.g., an IQ test.