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Comment Re:Non-story (Score 2) 268

Right. If you have enough copyright claims against you that are not disputed, youtube will simply remove your account.

This guy pissed off some folks who are making claims in bad faith, but if you're sure you're not violating the law you need to state so in a counter claim. At that point, it's no longer legal to file further DMCA takedown notices on the same material, and they have to take you to court to proceed. Multiple claims on the same clip are considered misrepresentation. This is why it's suspicious to me that he received multiple takedown requests from one source, but maybe it was for different episodes.

Youtube is threatening to remove his account due to multiple unresolved dmca claims. Resolve them, and it goes away. It has little to do with AIDS deniers, except that they're tertiarily involved.

Comment Who spends their own time causing bugs?! (Score 1) 716

That's what the workweek is for :-)

If you expect to get a working chunk of software from an employee for a fixed cost, that employee is essentially a contractor paid per working project. He definitely doesn't need his contract payment to support a needless manager who may very well be the cause of the bugs. Thus, he'll get that portion of what would go to the manager. And he doesn't need to pay for your billing department's building -- after all, that doesn't contribute anything to the success of his contract.

Load the employee at only 1.1x (the extra 10% to be used to pay for his office and some networking), and give him the additional 1.9x or so (effectively doubling or tripling his wages -- many employees are loaded at 2.0-3.0x), get rid of his managers, and give him a design document as accurate as a blueprint for building a wall, and the analogy might fit.

Basically, employee wages are "loaded" to account for this type of infrastructure, including having to do rewrites. Hopefully, hiring and management practices will work to minimize rewrites and bugs, and less time spent taking from the slush funds to do rewrites is more profit the company made.

TFA's analogy is like saying "why do we need network support? If it was installed correctly, it will never break."

Comment copyright unlikely to help (Score 1) 157

First, the candidate is a public figure, so that closes a lot of avenues.
Second, the sites were only copied once, and were lookalikes; it's not clear they were actually copied. Not copied means it's not a copyright violation.
Third, it's unlikely that it's registered at the copyright office, which limits the liability.

It might be able to be used, but I have doubts it can recover the money fraudulently received. If the candidates had trademarked their names, it might be a possible avenue, but I don't think these people who made the sites would care much.

Comment Re:Q: How many characters lost in Tomb of Horrors? (Score 1) 218

One of Gygax's hallmarks as DM was the killing of players and deadly traps. I'd never seen him run in person, but heard many stories. At cons, the players loved the creative ways he'd make them reroll.

Personally, I never enjoyed that much, but that said I actually ran a Tomb of Horrors campaign (sprung on unwitting players), but added a catch... they had the Groundhog Day curse, and woke up every morning exactly the same until they reached a certain part of the dungeon and flipped a switch which progressed them to the next day. They died a lot and it was hilarious, but they never had to reroll characters. Of course, one guy got eaten by the demilich, which was stuffed into a bag of holding, and tossed into a sphere of annihilation. It doesn't get much more "dead" than that.

Comment Re:"Please don't adblock us" (Score 1) 731

If you don't buy, you're not paying for it. If you never click on ads (like me), you're not only getting served content you don't want, but it's taking you longer to load pages and so forth.

There's no guilt in it if you would otherwise never click and never buy. While I love (e.g. fark), I have never clicked one of their ads ever unless by accident. Being served ads is not somehow paying for anything, unless money actually comes out of your pocket.

Comment You own your computer (Score 1) 731

You do own your computer, but zero tolerance is stupid. You have a choice to click or not. Content providers have a right to display on your computer when YOU request their site. If it's a malware site, it gets blacklisted by multiple entities and browsers. Since you're on slashdot, zero tolerance by an anonymous coward means you're getting fed ads. If you're not getting ads, you installed some software to prevent that, and that activity means you tolerated it more than zero. If you truly believe in zero tolerance, gtfo slashdot and nearly every other popular website out there including google search, youtube, yahoo, etc.

I will state that if a website uses anti-adblock software that bypasses my blocking in any way, I immediately close the page. I do not need their service enough that I will suffer their bullshit. This, in contrast to "zero tolerance" is my balking rate to annoying manipulation and my curiosity never gets the best of me. If I'm reading an article, and 15 seconds later an opaque ad comes up, I close the page and blacklist the site. Some sites even bypass noscript or make it unreadable without javascript, and noscript comes with its own set of problems making many web pages unusable (even with "temporarily allow all on this page") due to xss protection among other things.

You have that choice of what to browse, and content providers have a choice of how to market. Forcing ads onto people unwilling to view ads is a very low percentage market, therefore there is no reason to pretend there's some sort of arms race. There isn't.

The overall point is that spending money to market to people who not only don't want your ads, but will actively blacklist your entire website if it's too obnoxious (*cough*upworthy*cough*) means marketing money poorly spent. If adblock software is intentionally rendered ineffective, those websites will get far fewer visitors. They will lose money.

Comment What if it murders? (Score 1) 514

Will the programmer be held responsible for murder?

Will the programmer be guilty of creating a WMD if it goes crazy?

What if it gets hacked?

Unlike creating a firearm where the human controls all usage (thus, freeing the manufacturers from liability), this entire scenario is a lot less scary simply by holding the creators and operators guilty of any crimes it commits, including war crimes.

Comment They will claim it's a mistake (Score 3, Interesting) 171

I claim, preemptively, that such claims are bullshit. The censorship is intentional, and will get reversed, but it will be cited as a mistake. Mark my words.

Smaller sites that are just as innocent will get blocked, but won't get unblocked because not enough people will complain. This causes real damage. It costs site owners real money.

Comment Re: There must be a very good reason... (Score 1) 579

That makes some sense, and I concede that if the substation is saturated by solar generation, there are additional costs that (for now), the generating solar stations should subsidize upgrading. It should not be a full 100% subsidy.

Or perhaps pay for storage devices (e.g. huge flywheels) that are used by the substation at night and for smoothing.

I also submit that all new substations in sunny or windy areas should be built with this eventuality in mind. I live in a very sunny area, and new housing is required to have roof wiring for future solar installations done by the homeowner. We're still at a point where there is no way substations are saturated, however the marketing attitude that somehow these generating stations are "freeloaders" needs to be nipped in the bud. That's simply a lie. At a 90% efficiency from the generating station, I can get electrons to a neighbor at 97% efficiency with zero emissions. No, it's the power companies that are freeloading MY clean air (and yours!).

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