PrometheeFeu 's BestNetTech Comments

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  • On the post: Al Gore Comes Out Against SOPA/PIPA

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 06 Jan, 2012 @ 07:38am

    Now all the Internet's inventors oppose SOPA!

  • On the post: Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against eBay Because Of The Way Its Auctions Work

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 06 Jan, 2012 @ 07:33am

    Re: Second-price auction

    No. Ebay is actually a traditional English Auction. In a second price auction, if I bid 12 and you bid 15, you will pay 12 and get the item. In an English Auction, the auctioneer, starts at a low price and slowly increments it by a fixed amount until only one person is willing to pay the offered price at which point the auction is over. So in the ebay system, you set your max at 15, I set my max at 12 and the auctioneer raises the price until 12. At that point, 2 of us are still willing to pay for the item, so he raises it to 12.50 where I drop out and you pay 12.50. It's the standard economic outcome you would expect under perfect competition.

  • On the post: It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 05 Jan, 2012 @ 10:25am

    Let's just look at this from an economic point of view. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of music, movies, books etc... Every year, the amount of music, movies and books increases despite ever-growing piracy. As an economist, I can come to only one conclusion: we don't need copyrights. Content creators are finding some ways to get paid without copyright. How? We don't even need to know that. All we need to know is that with widespread infringement, we still get movies, music and books. The only problem is that companies are sued out of existence and people are sued into the poor house using copyright. The conclusion is obvious. Copyright is a net economic loss. Let's get rid of it once and for all.

  • On the post: Who Wants To Own Righthaven.com? Domain Seized, About To Be Auctioned

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 22 Dec, 2011 @ 02:17pm

    If somebody puts together a kickstart project to buy that domain and do something fun, I will contribute. Two ideas:

    1) Put an FBI-style warning about being a copyright troll
    2) Redirect to The Pirate Bay
    3) Put together a detailed story of the failure of Righthaven as a warning to future copyright trolls.
    4) Redirect to the server which serves ICE's message about having stolen a domain name.

  • On the post: ICE Admits That It Just Wants To 'Put People In Jail' With Operation In Our Sites

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 21 Dec, 2011 @ 10:03am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "His job starts when the law is broken"

    Actually that is false. His job stops when there is a suspicion of the law being broken. In other words, when his job starts, he doesn't know for sure whether the law was broken and even if it was, it could be broken such that the person in question does not deserve a jail sentence. Also, his job is to bring evidence to justice. It is then the job of the justice system to put people in jail. His statement implies that his job is to put people in jail regardless of their guilt. That's a very narrow and stupid reading of his duty.

  • On the post: ICE Admits That It Just Wants To 'Put People In Jail' With Operation In Our Sites

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 21 Dec, 2011 @ 09:53am

    It should be possible for taxpayers to withhold taxes from individual government employees or departments. Given the grief ICE and the DHS in general has caused me personally over the years for no good reason, I find it perverted that I have to keep paying their salary. I want a box on my taxes that says: "Divert my taxes that would be spent on the DHS to ______" where I could fill in a charity or other public interest group.

  • On the post: TSA Continues To Embarass The Elderly With Unnecessarily Degrading Search Procedures

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 12 Dec, 2011 @ 02:22pm

    I'm thinking of putting a sticker on my suitcase. A TSA logo surrounded by the words: "Fire the scum"

  • On the post: RIAA Claims It Succeeded In Getting Piracy Under Control Years Ago

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 06 Dec, 2011 @ 10:30am

    "Our legal efforts served as an essential educational tool: Fans know far more now about copyright laws and the legal consequences of stealing music than ever before. Before initiating lawsuits in 2003, only 35 percent of people knew file-sharing on P2P was illegal; afterward, awareness grew to 70 percent."

    I think he's right. Since people can't see anything wrong with file sharing, they all simply trusted their moral compass and did what we all know is right: They had something they could share without causing any pain to themselves or anyone and so they did. After all, we all reasoned that if what we are doing is ethical and reasonable, it must also be legal. Little did we know that a corrupt political process was at work here and had banned this perfectly normal activity. If it wasn't for how many lives the RIAA has destroyed through their lawsuits, we would all hear about copyright laws through those funny websites where you read that in some crappy little town in the middle of Nebraska, there is still a city ordinance on the books which prohibits wearing orange on the first Thursday of every month. We would all go double-check the existence of copyright law to make sure it's not just an absurd urban legend. Really, the RIAA has rendered us a service. They've exposed the corruption in Washington.

  • On the post: Self-Regulation: Should Online Companies Police The Internet?

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 06 Dec, 2011 @ 10:11am

    Re: Re:

    Don't take this the wrong way, but you really don't understand the underlying infrastructure of the internet. DNS affects all services where users commonly use name resolution including the web, IRC, FTP, SSH, email, and really just about any other service. Using DNS to resolve the IP address, is definitely the norm, knowing the IP address beforehand is the exception.

  • On the post: Self-Regulation: Should Online Companies Police The Internet?

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 06 Dec, 2011 @ 10:03am

    I find it is always hypocritical when the government asks an industry to self-regulate. It's a bit like a mugger coming to your house and asking for a donation. Sure, the mugger didn't actually steal your money. But there is an implied threat that he will if you don't donate. Also, as you point out, "self-regulation" bypasses constitutional and legal safeguards since it's not officially state action. Any statements by state officials should be held to be executing the powers of their office and subject to the same scrutiny as when they openly use their coercive powers.

  • On the post: White House's Totally Clueless Response To Copyright Infringement: Call In McGruff The Crime Dog

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2011 @ 11:48am

    OK, last comment on the NCPC. Why the heck do so many of their videos start with a test pattern? It's on YouTube! You don't need a test pattern. It doesn't do anything!

  • On the post: White House's Totally Clueless Response To Copyright Infringement: Call In McGruff The Crime Dog

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2011 @ 11:44am

    So the message of the first video appears to be that people with an Eastern European accent are criminals and black people are gang members. Way to be racist McGruff. Not to mention a lying scumbag...

  • On the post: White House's Totally Clueless Response To Copyright Infringement: Call In McGruff The Crime Dog

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2011 @ 11:41am

    That's it! I'm getting the spray bottle.

  • On the post: E-Publishing The Chinese Way: Very Fast And Very Cheap

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2011 @ 10:21am

    I've really liked the idea of such a system. For a while, I thought of doing something similar. Except that instead of putting the work behind a paywall once you hit a certain threshold, print a thousand copies of the work, have the author autograph it and auction them off. Ideally, you might want to create an "online store" where the author could then sell anything. Including a sort of "kickstarter" style system where fans tip and you release the next installment once enough have tipped. I wish I had tried to execute on that.

  • On the post: The Real 'Scandal' Over Zynga Stock Options Is Over Misleading Reporting

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2011 @ 08:13am

    I think the facts really are at issue. If indeed it is a case of underperforming employees being moved to a lower role with fewer stock options, then I don't see anything wrong. It's basically being fired and re-hired lower in the hierarchy. You loose unvested options and get fewer upon re-hire. It sucks, but in certain circumstances it's the fair thing to do. On the other hand, if the issue is that they wanted the stock options back, that's a very crass and dishonest thing to do. Either way, they handled this very poorly. They should have waited until after the IPO when things wouldn't have looked anywhere near as bad.

  • On the post: Learning From Beethoven: Speeding Up The Exchange Of Scientific Knowledge

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2011 @ 08:19am

    I think this could solve the problem on unpublishable results. I have a friend who does research. He was telling me how after 6 months working on a very promising project that everyone around him was excited about, he randomly mentioned it to some fellow scientist who immediately pulled out a stack of papers a mile high and said something along the lines of: "Yeah, we tried that about 5 years ago. Took us 2 years to figure out it was a dead end." Since the result was negative, it was unpublishable. I cringe at the number of scientists that must be right now working on something that has already been demonstrated false by somebody else somewhere. Having research come out more in real time could help alleviate that problem.

  • On the post: Learning From Beethoven: Speeding Up The Exchange Of Scientific Knowledge

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2011 @ 08:12am

    Re: Re:

    Given what I've heard from some people it seems to be:

    Do some research
    get a grant unrelated to your research
    continue doing original research using grant money
    suddenly realize your grant is about to expire,
    quickly slap together something vaguely related to the grant
    get the grant renewed
    go back to original research
    publish original research

    It's a bit of a caricature obviously...

  • On the post: Don't Say YUUUP! Or You Might Get Sued

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2011 @ 10:38pm

    Re: Yuup

    I don't care that it's what "Middle America" does. I'm a software engineer in the Bay Area. And "Software Engineer Wars" would be equally stupid. Oh my god! We are shipping in 3 days and a major bug was just discovered! **Engineer runs to the screen and spends next 8 hours typing with brief breaks to refill a water glass or hit the bathroom** Of course, you could always do the standard provoking on conflicts. But alpha-geeks tend to war over emails, so it's still 8 hours of watching a person type... Very boring...

    Also, I just don't see why the fact that Middle America does what these people are doing (highly doubtful that any more than a tiny fraction of americans trade in abandonned storage lockers) that doesn't make it interesting. In fact, that makes it boring.

    Am I being stuck up and elitist? You bet. It's also known as having standards. And with this diatribe, I shall retire to bed.

  • On the post: DOJ Two Step: It Should Be A Criminal Offense To Lie About Your Age On Facebook… But We Probably Won't Go After You For It

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2011 @ 02:01pm

    It's high time the Supremes reversed Whren. Or maybe we should get a different government.

  • On the post: Pelosi: We Need To Find A Better Solution Than SOPA

    PrometheeFeu ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2011 @ 01:48pm

    Re:

    Look at the bottom left of your keyboard. You will see a key labeled "Ctrl". Right above should be a key called "Shift". Right above is a key called "Caps Lock". "Caps Lock" when toggled on makes you stupid. (Or at least it helps in that direction) Pressing it again might help make you look a bit less stupid. I suggest you press that button.

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