I'd just like to point out (and I should have made this clear earlier) that this is about a lot more than profanity. FCC regulations cover all sorts of supposedly "adult" content, and not just that which is directly profane or sexual -- even certain implications and double entendres can be considered out of bounds. This also isn't just about comedy or trashy shows -- in fact, there is a huge issue of context that is a big part of the problem. Sometimes context is considered -- networks have aired Schindler's List uncut, for example, and not been fined, though the same nudity and profanity would draw huge fines in most shows. It's easy to say "well, it's Schindler's List" -- but there is nothing in the FCC rules that actually draws a line or explains the distinction (nor would we want the FCC playing that kind of art critic role anyway).
Making this a simple debate about whether it's okay to say "fuck" on TV is reductive (and I accept some of the blame for not offering more examples off the bat)
The same philosophy applies very much to domestic law enforcement too. A society built on liberty can never be a society where crime is impossible -- it has to aim for the much more difficult, and ultimately much more rewarding, ideal of a society where crime is possible, even easy, but still rare. Moreover, while the core punishment in a free society can be a loss of your freedom, that should be extended only as far as is just, not used as a bludgeon and a threat with zero tolerance policies and three strikes programs to the point that even minor crimes can mean a near-total sacrifice of citizenship.
PDFs actually are images, and to make them searchable they have a text underneath which is parsed using special codes, depending on the version of Adobe tools or converter it gets those codes wrong.
I think.
Not quite -- PDFs can contain all sorts of stuff (images, actual text, vector shapes, embedded fonts, and anything else supported by the PostScript format plus some extra stuff) but only a PDF properly exported from the source document will include real text (e.g. machine-readable, copy-pastable text). This doc looks to be a scan that someone simply saved as a PDF -- basically no different from some jpegs -- so in order to create text the embedding service is attempting optical character recognition. Normally we turn off text conversion on such PDFs because it rarely works well -- but I guess we forgot to here.
Anyway, your answer was functionally correct, but that's my The-More-You-Know fact about PDFs for the day :)
Yup, I had the wrong Trent Reznor album. Looks like he had a good experience working with Columbia and sees benefit in continuing to do so -- which is great, and reinforces our point that record labels and artists can work together to their mutual benefit so long as they do so in an innovative and non-exploitative way. So er, discography knowledge point to you, all the rest of the points to me, I guess.
I thought whiskey stones looked awesome, but according to basically every single Amazon review of them or similar products, they are useless... The guy at Worst Things For Sale actually crunched the numbers to show why they suck for cooling drinks down: http://theworstthingsforsale.com/2013/05/27/whiskey-stones/
Re: Meanwhile... the stories that didn't get covered:
Hey Blue, you're a little late to the game -- we covered the fact that Trent Reznor was going to Columbia last year, and even interviewed him about it:
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations, Techdirt engineers -- once again you've broken something.
In order to drive pageviews and lower the bounce rate, we'd need to actually trim the articles and thus force people to click through to the post pages -- which is exactly what the expand feature avoids. The expandable posts mean all reading can still happen on the main page, so it has no impact on pageviews or bounce rate...
Re: Re: Re: Congratulations, Techdirt engineers -- once again you've broken something.
If you saw "Read More" instead of "Expand" it's because the javascript failed to run for whatever reason (people with JS disabled get Read More links instead, since the expansion feature relies on javascript) -- probably just a connection hiccup
Sentence diagrams are potentially good but, like most things in education, they are way overused and/or used completely wrongly by the school.
Doing a couple sentence diagrams throughout the course of learning about grammar would be fine -- but the focus should be on developing a keen intuitive sense for English grammar, and knowing the basic idea of how to do things more scientifically only when needed (which it rarely will be for most people). But, of course, you can't test intuition...
It's very similar to what's wrong with math class. Students are given a solution upfront, then made to use it over and over and over again until they memorize it, without ever checking to see if they understand it. And nothing is more baffling to a student than being forced to prove or solve the obvious -- tools, like a sentence diagram or a piece of mathematical notation, should emerge from problems. That's how we created them. No human being ever diagrammed a sentence until someone was faced with some really complex language and had a reason to want to parse it out in detail, just like no human being did long division until they had some numbers they couldn't divide with their brain and a few fingers.
If anything, the best way to teach sentence diagrams would be to first get students to spend a day examining sentences of increasing complexity, and encourage them to use pen & paper to help separate out the elements and draw it all out in a way that makes sense. Then, after they've developed a dozen of their own quick methods for sentence diagramming and are discovering the limitations of them, show them the standardized solution (but let them keep using their own if they like it better). Of course, such a process wouldn't fit into a standardized testing model at all.
Re: Will Mike welcome The Debate On GOOGLE'S Surveillance?
Has anyone else noticed that when you see a report flag, based on the content of the post and the timing of the comment you can always guess it's going to be ootb before clicking?
There are people who actually don't drink, do drugs, or cheat on their spouses, you know.
No, but the vast majority of people have at some point in their life (most often high school and/or college) done a few things that right now would be considered embarrassing or scandalous for a public figure. Drinking, drugs and adultery are certainly among the most common, but there are plenty of others like questionable activism/affiliation, "deviant" sexual behaviour of some brand or another, an outburst of violence, cheating at a test or a game...
Personally, I'm not sure someone who has lived their life without any missteps is capable of understanding, much less leading, a populace made up mostly of imperfect people.
Well said. It's a bit of an awkward transition now, but I've always felt it's going to adjust our norms for the better. Often I think of this in terms of the people who freak out that kids are racking up so much incriminating evidence of their behaviour that nobody will be able to get jobs, much less run for office, in the future.
But in reality, the norms should adjust. When every candidate for a job or for office, every actor and singer and olympic athlete, has a few photos of them holding a whiskey bottle and a bong, society simply won't be able to condemn such activity so harshly. Indeed, people who don't have a little colour showing through their facade will probably seem eerily suspect (as they do already in extreme cases)
I do see your point, but on digging further into the numbers, it seems to me that the premise still holds. We don't have netflix ratings for the show unfortunately, but lets compare it to some other shows using TV ratings and piracy numbers, plus AD's ratings from when it was on Fox:
- Arrested Development ratings on fox: 6.2-million average in first season, lower by the end with 3.43-million watching the finale -- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrested_Development_(TV_series)#Television_ratings
- Some selections from the top pirated shows of 2012 (when GoT was #1), with both piracy & tv numbers (all based on a single popular episode):
Hit shows on broadcast networks:
Big Bang Theory - 3.2-mil DL, 15.8-mil TV
How I Met Your Mother - 2.9-mil DL, 10.1-mil TV
House - 2.3-mil DL, 9.7-mil TV
Hit shows on specialty cable networks:
Game of Thrones - 4.2-mil downloaders, 4.2-mil TV viewers
Breaking Bad - 2.5-mil DL, 2.9-mil TV
Homeland - 2.4-mil DL, 2.3-mil TV
Dexter - 3.8-mil DL, 2.7-mil TV
So the pattern is fairly clear: broadcast networks still have far more TV viewers than downloaders, whereas cable networks have number that are close, or sometimes even fewer viewers than downloaders.
Now, we don't know how many people watched AD on Netflix... but we do know that Netflix has almost 30-million subscribers, which is about the same as HBO's audience in the U.S. -- HBO's global audience is about 115-million.
Obviously, we are lacking some of the key data points that would let us draw a *solid* conclusion about piracy rates -- but when you look at the audience size numbers and compare it to some other shows, it still seems highly likely that
On the post: Broadcasters To FCC: Now That Our Audience Is Gone, Can We Swear More?
Making this a simple debate about whether it's okay to say "fuck" on TV is reductive (and I accept some of the blame for not offering more examples off the bat)
On the post: Shameful: Other Journalists Now A Part Of Ridiculous Smear Campaign Against Glenn Greenwald
Re: Re:
On the post: Trading Lives For Freedom Is The American Way
On the post: Epic Response To A Bogus Cease And Desist Letter: Bravo For Your Legal Satire!
Re: Re:
I think.
Not quite -- PDFs can contain all sorts of stuff (images, actual text, vector shapes, embedded fonts, and anything else supported by the PostScript format plus some extra stuff) but only a PDF properly exported from the source document will include real text (e.g. machine-readable, copy-pastable text). This doc looks to be a scan that someone simply saved as a PDF -- basically no different from some jpegs -- so in order to create text the embedding service is attempting optical character recognition. Normally we turn off text conversion on such PDFs because it rarely works well -- but I guess we forgot to here.
Anyway, your answer was functionally correct, but that's my The-More-You-Know fact about PDFs for the day :)
On the post: Hollywood Studios Keep Saying Its Employees Must Get Paid, And Now May Be Forced To Pay Its Interns
Re: Re: Re: @"PaulT", compulsive yapper.
Well, for one thing, that's not true -- but, er, even if it were, how would that be hypocritical? Wouldn't it, in fact, be perfectly consistent?
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: The true best one of the week
On the post: NSA's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Re: Re: Meanwhile... the stories that didn't get covered:
On the post: Awesome Stuff: Have A Cool Drink This Weekend
Re: ChillBottles - Just like ...
So maybe the steel does a better job...
On the post: NSA's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Meanwhile... the stories that didn't get covered:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121022/00013120781/trent-reznor-talks-to-techdirt-about-hi s-unconventional-new-record-deal-why-he-still-loves-diy.shtml
Maybe you should actually read Techdirt instead of going straight to the comments to complain that we didn't write what you wanted us to write...
On the post: How Do You Effectively Manage Customers & Fans Online?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations, Techdirt engineers -- once again you've broken something.
On the post: How Do You Effectively Manage Customers & Fans Online?
Re: Re: Re: Congratulations, Techdirt engineers -- once again you've broken something.
On the post: DailyDirt: English Curiosities
Re: Waste of my time in 9th grade
Doing a couple sentence diagrams throughout the course of learning about grammar would be fine -- but the focus should be on developing a keen intuitive sense for English grammar, and knowing the basic idea of how to do things more scientifically only when needed (which it rarely will be for most people). But, of course, you can't test intuition...
It's very similar to what's wrong with math class. Students are given a solution upfront, then made to use it over and over and over again until they memorize it, without ever checking to see if they understand it. And nothing is more baffling to a student than being forced to prove or solve the obvious -- tools, like a sentence diagram or a piece of mathematical notation, should emerge from problems. That's how we created them. No human being ever diagrammed a sentence until someone was faced with some really complex language and had a reason to want to parse it out in detail, just like no human being did long division until they had some numbers they couldn't divide with their brain and a few fingers.
If anything, the best way to teach sentence diagrams would be to first get students to spend a day examining sentences of increasing complexity, and encourage them to use pen & paper to help separate out the elements and draw it all out in a way that makes sense. Then, after they've developed a dozen of their own quick methods for sentence diagramming and are discovering the limitations of them, show them the standardized solution (but let them keep using their own if they like it better). Of course, such a process wouldn't fit into a standardized testing model at all.
On the post: President Obama 'Welcomes' The Debate On Surveillance That He's Avoided For Years Until It Was Forced Upon Him
Re: Will Mike welcome The Debate On GOOGLE'S Surveillance?
On the post: Utah Sheriff Claims Copyright On Mugshot Photos To Avoid Releasing Them
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No, but the vast majority of people have at some point in their life (most often high school and/or college) done a few things that right now would be considered embarrassing or scandalous for a public figure. Drinking, drugs and adultery are certainly among the most common, but there are plenty of others like questionable activism/affiliation, "deviant" sexual behaviour of some brand or another, an outburst of violence, cheating at a test or a game...
Personally, I'm not sure someone who has lived their life without any missteps is capable of understanding, much less leading, a populace made up mostly of imperfect people.
On the post: Utah Sheriff Claims Copyright On Mugshot Photos To Avoid Releasing Them
Re: Re: Re: Re:
But in reality, the norms should adjust. When every candidate for a job or for office, every actor and singer and olympic athlete, has a few photos of them holding a whiskey bottle and a bong, society simply won't be able to condemn such activity so harshly. Indeed, people who don't have a little colour showing through their facade will probably seem eerily suspect (as they do already in extreme cases)
On the post: Help Explain Why Phone Unlocking Is Important To You And Why It Should Be Legal
Re: Has anyone been sued or prosecuted for this?
For violating the DMCA anti-circumvention clause? Yes, absolutely. See: George Hotz.
On the post: Help Explain Why Phone Unlocking Is Important To You And Why It Should Be Legal
Re:
On the post: Once Again, Convenience Trumps Free, As Few People Pirate Arrested Development
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: But....the numbers
...highly likely that [ less than 200,000 downloaders is a very low number ]
On the post: Once Again, Convenience Trumps Free, As Few People Pirate Arrested Development
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: But....the numbers
- Arrested Development ratings on fox: 6.2-million average in first season, lower by the end with 3.43-million watching the finale -- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrested_Development_(TV_series)#Television_ratings
- Some selections from the top pirated shows of 2012 (when GoT was #1), with both piracy & tv numbers (all based on a single popular episode):
Hit shows on broadcast networks:
Big Bang Theory - 3.2-mil DL, 15.8-mil TV
How I Met Your Mother - 2.9-mil DL, 10.1-mil TV
House - 2.3-mil DL, 9.7-mil TV
Hit shows on specialty cable networks:
Game of Thrones - 4.2-mil downloaders, 4.2-mil TV viewers
Breaking Bad - 2.5-mil DL, 2.9-mil TV
Homeland - 2.4-mil DL, 2.3-mil TV
Dexter - 3.8-mil DL, 2.7-mil TV
So the pattern is fairly clear: broadcast networks still have far more TV viewers than downloaders, whereas cable networks have number that are close, or sometimes even fewer viewers than downloaders.
Now, we don't know how many people watched AD on Netflix... but we do know that Netflix has almost 30-million subscribers, which is about the same as HBO's audience in the U.S. -- HBO's global audience is about 115-million.
Obviously, we are lacking some of the key data points that would let us draw a *solid* conclusion about piracy rates -- but when you look at the audience size numbers and compare it to some other shows, it still seems highly likely that
On the post: France Tells Apple To Pay Giant 'You Must Be A Pirate' Tax On iPads
Re: The Maginot Line
German or German. Take your pick. Those are your choices without Russian involvement in WWII (scary or not).
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