I use Google to find most of my questionable material... I'm wondering what the actual difference is, besides billions of dollars and a stable of lawyers.
I work in IT in Juneau, Alaska and when the google street view car came through our town the users at work started freaking out. I heard a lot of "What if..." scenereos, but the most common one was from parents worried a pedophile could use Google street view to find houses with kids toys out front that they could target. I tried to explain that it was all shot from public property and that it was perfectly legal and the most common response I would get was that we need laws to make this kind of thing illegal. Regardless of how potentially useful, and legal it is.
What did I learn from all this? People will ignore facts and laws and lean on emotional pleas and "it's for the children" to try get their way regardless of the legality of the situation. So tired of B.S. moral panics for uptight fearful people trying to force their will/fears onto everyone else.
I'm gonna go grab some coffee and try to get back to work. I'm surprisingly annoyed and cranky for 3:30 in the afternoon.
I'm pretty sure the patent office's "quality" really hasn't changed any in years. With that said, it has pretty much always sucked. Now there sucktatude is just faster.
I was going to say it was a step in the right direction, but it looks more like a knee jerk reaction by them to try and address some of the issues people keep bringing up with digital books, while not actually addressing the issues.
I generally don't buy hard covers of books unless it's something I know I want to hold onto for a long time and will use a lot. Most of the time I buy paperbacks so looking at the prices of many of the books on kindle my thoughts are it's still cheaper to buy the book in paperback to read it and I have the option of giving it away to a friend once I'm done reading it. So cheaper, far more versatile and I don't have to pay a premium to read it on my "e" device. Guess I'll check back in a few years to see if anything changes, until then I'm okay reading most of my books the old fashioned way. Plus I can act all smug on the airplane while I keep reading my book during take off.
I love reading, but so far ebooks have come across as underwhelming and a totally immature format. I get a lot of my books from the local library and there doesn't appear to be any option to be able to check an ebook out at my local libraries. Then there is the fact that I rarely buy hardcover, unless I know it's an amazing book and will be reading it over and over. I own less than 10 hard cover books in my entire library. So I'm a $5 - $10 soft cover buyer most of the time and thats generally only if I really need a book and can't wait for the library to get it. Also, if I'm really passionate about a book I have read I'll usually end up passing it on to a friend once I've finished it to get them hooked on it as well. With most ebooks once you've read it you can't give it to someone else to read, unless you're willing to loan them your ereader. Thing is a lot of the books I really like that I've gone out and bought the whole collection (or what's currently available) was due to getting the first book in the series from a friend who was a big fan. Many of my favorite books only came to me from friends who passed on a book to me and I wound up loving the story which then caused me to actively go out and find the rest of the books in the series.
My only "testing of the waters" for ebooks has come from loading up a free ebook reader on my iPhone and downloading a bunch of free older books (public domain?) from Project Guttenberg. That works pretty well when I'm on a trip and don't have another book to read I can use it as a stop gap. I have a friend who swears by her Kindle, and the screen is really easy on the eyes, but their pricing and DRM leave me wholly disinterested in the format for the time being.
While reading is often considered a solo activity, those of us passionate about books tend to give our books away in the hopes of getting someone else into a series or exposed to new ideas, or just to see something from a whole new angle. One of my fondest memories was when I was a kid and on a family vacation we went to visit my moms sister who had recently gotten married. When I met my new uncle he was showing me some game on his new Apple ][ computer and he asked me if I like reading then he showed me his library and said I could take any two books from it I wanted. I looked through the books and ended up taking Robert A Heinlin's The Cat who Walks through Walls (I liked the cover) and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game I'm pretty sure I turned into a lifelong Sci-Fi fan that summer and have since spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the years buying all kinds of books, but that all happened because someone who loved reading on a whim gave some snot nosed kid a couple books from his library. That's not something that could happen with our current ebooks, and that is a damn shame.
Crap, sorry this post was long and I started to sound like a curmudgeon at the end of it. Now get the hell off my lawn, ya damn kids listening to your records all day and wearing those fancy dungarees... eh? I'm.. going .. back ... to sleep... now...
...seems like the people screaming loudest about this are either in it to make some serious cash or to gain a lot of power or influence over web securities.
Like so many other "panics" of our time it seems like certain aspects of it are being blown out of proportion to try and create a panic that feeds back into the problem with the hope that a snowball effect will cause it to gain enough momentum. The problem is creating overblown panics about certain aspects of a problem or using outright falsehoods only damage the arguments in the long run.
Yeah, but your best security guys that may have previously worn black hats were probably the ones that were also writing from scratch those kinds of scripts. So they understood the architecture of both operating systems and networks and had an intimate knowledge of all the hardware and software too. It's kind of like someone who is a wiz in word and plays around with macros thinking they can program their own OS.
BTW: We have White Hat and Black Hat Hackers. Think of script kiddies as Ass Hat Hackers.
When Google Street view had a car come through my home town Juneau, Alaska USA there was a huge uproar. I work in IT and I had a lot of people coming up to me freaking out because they could see their house on the internet I would then explain to the people the process of what Google does to collect the imagery and how it's not really any different from people walking along the street seeing their house and taking a picture of it from public property. It might not "feel" right, but it's legal.
At the time I think the most common fear I heard from people complaining about Google Street View was that they had their kids toys in the front yard and a pedophile could use street view to target their child. Oh, crazy parents now days watching too much news in the summer when news is slow and child kidnappings headlines are all the rage.
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I think working in IT has had an adverse effect on me, I just had to do a search and replace of this post; users to people.
It would be interesting to see their web site statistics and to what extent they drop off over the course of this experiment. Of course I could have awoken this morning in bizarro world and Murdoch's plan totally takes off because people know the value of news. Nevermind, even in bizarro world people know better than that.
On the post: Torrent-Finder Plans To Fight Domain Seizure
Google?
On the post: MIT's Tech Review Comes Out In Favor Of Patent Trolls
Re: Re:
On the post: Google Begins Blurring German Houses In Street View On Request
Knee jerk reaction?
What did I learn from all this? People will ignore facts and laws and lean on emotional pleas and "it's for the children" to try get their way regardless of the legality of the situation. So tired of B.S. moral panics for uptight fearful people trying to force their will/fears onto everyone else.
I'm gonna go grab some coffee and try to get back to work. I'm surprisingly annoyed and cranky for 3:30 in the afternoon.
On the post: Can Handing Out 'Txting Kills' Thumb Bands Stop People From Texting While Driving?
Can we just simplify it to...
OR
Stupidity Kills, don't be stupid.
On the post: Colgate Patents Traditional Indian Tooth-cleaning Powder Despite It Being Used For Thousands Of Years
Re:
On the post: Kindle To Let You Lend Books, Just Like A Real Book... Except Not
Baby step in the right direction?
I generally don't buy hard covers of books unless it's something I know I want to hold onto for a long time and will use a lot. Most of the time I buy paperbacks so looking at the prices of many of the books on kindle my thoughts are it's still cheaper to buy the book in paperback to read it and I have the option of giving it away to a friend once I'm done reading it. So cheaper, far more versatile and I don't have to pay a premium to read it on my "e" device. Guess I'll check back in a few years to see if anything changes, until then I'm okay reading most of my books the old fashioned way. Plus I can act all smug on the airplane while I keep reading my book during take off.
On the post: Ebook Publishers Never Learned: DRM & Ridiculous Prices
I love reading, but ebooks so far...
My only "testing of the waters" for ebooks has come from loading up a free ebook reader on my iPhone and downloading a bunch of free older books (public domain?) from Project Guttenberg. That works pretty well when I'm on a trip and don't have another book to read I can use it as a stop gap. I have a friend who swears by her Kindle, and the screen is really easy on the eyes, but their pricing and DRM leave me wholly disinterested in the format for the time being.
While reading is often considered a solo activity, those of us passionate about books tend to give our books away in the hopes of getting someone else into a series or exposed to new ideas, or just to see something from a whole new angle. One of my fondest memories was when I was a kid and on a family vacation we went to visit my moms sister who had recently gotten married. When I met my new uncle he was showing me some game on his new Apple ][ computer and he asked me if I like reading then he showed me his library and said I could take any two books from it I wanted. I looked through the books and ended up taking Robert A Heinlin's The Cat who Walks through Walls (I liked the cover) and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game I'm pretty sure I turned into a lifelong Sci-Fi fan that summer and have since spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the years buying all kinds of books, but that all happened because someone who loved reading on a whim gave some snot nosed kid a couple books from his library. That's not something that could happen with our current ebooks, and that is a damn shame.
Crap, sorry this post was long and I started to sound like a curmudgeon at the end of it. Now get the hell off my lawn, ya damn kids listening to your records all day and wearing those fancy dungarees... eh? I'm.. going .. back ... to sleep... now...
On the post: Starbucks Staffer Claims He Was Fired For Turning Off WiFi To Block Porn Watchers
The new tagline could be...
On the post: Schneier Picks Apart Cyberwar Hype
It's like the Y2K "bug's" second coming...
Like so many other "panics" of our time it seems like certain aspects of it are being blown out of proportion to try and create a panic that feeds back into the problem with the hope that a snowball effect will cause it to gain enough momentum. The problem is creating overblown panics about certain aspects of a problem or using outright falsehoods only damage the arguments in the long run.
On the post: Script Kiddie Botnet Operators Ask For Jobs From Security Company That Shut Them Down
Re: Re:
BTW: We have White Hat and Black Hat Hackers. Think of script kiddies as Ass Hat Hackers.
On the post: Germany "Horrified" That Google's Collecting Publicly-Available Data
when google street view came through my town...
At the time I think the most common fear I heard from people complaining about Google Street View was that they had their kids toys in the front yard and a pedophile could use street view to target their child. Oh, crazy parents now days watching too much news in the summer when news is slow and child kidnappings headlines are all the rage.
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I think working in IT has had an adverse effect on me, I just had to do a search and replace of this post; users to people.
On the post: As Murdoch Puts Times Online Behind A Paywall, Competitors Happily Plan To Stay Free
It would be interesting to see their web site statistics and to what extent they drop off over the course of this experiment. Of course I could have awoken this morning in bizarro world and Murdoch's plan totally takes off because people know the value of news. Nevermind, even in bizarro world people know better than that.
On the post: Rupert Murdoch Doesn't Recognize That There's Competition Online
Paywalls are the way to go...
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