A Step Toward Protecting Fair Use on YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-step-toward-protecting-fair-use-on.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> From a comment on the article, [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-step- toward...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-step-toward- protecting-fair-use- on.html?showComment=1447952666085&m=1#c8130636333639258122)

 _" … a far more effective change would be to remove the immediate monetary reward for a false claim. As it stands now, the instant a claim is made, all ad money is diverted to the claimant and is never recoverable by the creator. This is further compounded by the fact appeals go to the claimant, not a 3rd party, for review and along with the conflict of interest can take weeks to a month to be addressed during which time the claimant is still monetizing the creator's work.

A simple change would be once a claim is made against a video to hold (escrow) all revenue until the dispute is resolved or one party fails to respond in the given time. After there is a resolution, the revenue is released to the correct party."_

<comment><USER3> A legitimate problem, but the solution proposed sounds even worse. If Google said they were going to put all the money in a box when there was some dispute over who owned it, I feel that neither creators nor copyright owners would be happy.

I don't have a better solution, of course. I started typing one out and immediately realized how it could be gamed. It's not a simple problem and it doesn't have a simple solution that I can see. But it's good that it's being looked at, at least.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me. Currently, it seems like the claimants are big companies, who should have the cash reserves to absorb a few months delay in the relatively small amount of ad revenue that they are missing out on. Small creators may still face hardship as a result of the delayed income (although if they are cannot absorb this, then I think they are still spread to thin to be sustainable), but under the current system they get nothing from this time period.

<comment><USER5> > _Currently, it seems like the claimants are big companies, who should have > the cash reserves to absorb a few months delay in the relatively small > amount of ad revenue that they are missing out on._

I've found this parallel really interesting, as Facebook has now been criticized for not having Content ID and those criticisms are led by smaller creators (I guess the big media companies have given up being outspoken about piracy on video platforms that don't have Content ID-like systems).

<comment><USER6> It's pretty amazing. Facebook whole strategy seems to be encouraging people to rip YouTube videos and put them in the Facebook player. A YouTube embed share on Facebook is just not given the viral weight a Facebook video has, and Facebook is doing nothing to stop piracy. They will of course crack down... when they feel like enough creators have moved from YouTube to Facebook.

<comment><USER7> Poetic justice for YouTube, who grew off the back of willful ignorance of music copyright for the first few years before cracking down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last year I uploaded some old footage onto Youtube.. the footage was from WW2 that was filmed by US Gov. I saved it from a site that went down in 2000s and wanted to put it up for my cousin who was studying WW2 in HS.

In less than 24 hours, there were 4 different copyright claims by various companies. Over a 20 min clip. They obviously didn't own the copyright but they were claiming the clip as their own and wanted cuts of revenue.

About two years ago I uploaded an animation that I did in Apple Motion and it used stock sounds and music from Apple. Within a day of upload, I received a copyright claim by some company and they demanded I remove audio.

From my brief experience with Youtube/Google's Content ID system and the way they do business, I'm really glad I don't have to deal with this mafia on a daily basis.

<comment><USER9> Try uploading classical music as played by yourself or a computer. It will be monetized by Sony/BMG nearly instantly.

<comment><USER10> Yep. I uploaded a video of my son playing several hundred year old piano piece and it was within hours "claimed" by someone.

It doesn't seem to hurt Google's business, but I won't upload stuff anymore.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious how that would be found so quickly - presumably it would have to be the title, because performances are individual.

And why would Google even take such a claim seriously? If you're playing Bach clearly no one has a claim.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't work like that. You can take down any video instantly just by filing a copyright against it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would appear to me that that is a knife that cuts both ways.

<comment><USER13> Even John McCain's people should know this is true. [https://www.eff.org/files/mccain_youtube_copyright_letter_10...](https://www.eff.org/files/mccain_youtube_copyright_letter_10.13.08.pdf)

Although their request for special treatment shows they just want YouTube to expedite cases that they care about.

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/oct/15/john-mccain- you...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/oct/15/john-mccain-youtube)

> "But we believe it would consume few resources - and provide enormous > benefit - for YouTube to commit to a full legal review of all takedown > notices on videos posted from accounts controlled by (at least) political > candidates and campaigns."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just as video uploaders can have strikes placed against their accounts, so should users of the ContentID system.

A potential solution would be adding a "fraudulent claim" response option (requiring a detailed explanation) for people to reply to takedown/monetization notices with. When a ContentID account gets too many of these checks (verified by an actual human being working at youtube) they are cut off from the system for a period of time.

If this response is used incorrectly more than a couple of times by a given account, they would be locked out of using it in the future to prevent flagrant abuse/bogging down of the system.

Potential for liability on false copyright claims will never be added to the law because big entertainment has the government in its pocket. Thus it falls on content hosts/providers to force abusive industries to "play fair".

ContentID itself being a terrible system is beside the point, and an argument for another day.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a workable and practical solution and it almost makes you wonder why it isn't there right now, it's that simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a good start, though I think reviewing their content ID system is far more important at this point. I've seen videos claimed or taken down based on everything from outright fraud (companies and individuals claiming to own songs and video footage they don't have the rights/exclusive rights to) to weird coincidences (like songs being 'claimed' because a song they used was a bit similar to a popular pop song, even if it had nothing to do with it).

It's nice to see them stand up for their users in at least some sense though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Jim Sterling, who has been the victim of malicious copyright claims on videos which are clearly fair use, has a good video on the implications of the policy: [https://youtu.be/w-UgOXP82UI](https://youtu.be/w-UgOXP82UI)

<comment><USER17> I remember when Konami tried to silence Super Bunnyhop awhile back via DMCA abuse and Youtube stepped in, I'm glad to see that has in a way evolved into a proper policy, caveats be damned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Content ID juggernaut was devised by Google to placate the copyright holders and content creators whose backs YouTube had been built on. As it stands, 90%+ of all music played on YouTube is produced by the oligopoly of the three major music labels, so it is in YouTube's existential interest for the labels to be catered to. That means giving them a portion of the <10% revenue generated by the works of independent creators, and sometimes shutting down videos and channels.

YouTube is popular because it is cheap, user-friendly, and popular. And it is that way thanks to rampant copyright infringement, redeemed by Content ID and the associate policies.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why would you use YouTube if you care about these issues? The whole business is based on monetizing your effort without compensating you.

Sure, youtube has a big network effect, but that doesn't matter for the use case of using it as a host for videos shared on social networks or embedded in other sites.

You could try something like MediaGoblin instead. Taking these steps help ensure that we never have to worry about YouTube letting some random claimant knock our videos offline again, at least not without them filing a claim against a registrar, VPS host, etc.

From MediaGoblin.org: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc."

</comment><comment><USER20> So I visit the website, click on the link _some of the best examples of fair use on YouTube_ , and land on this: [https://i.imgur.com/ygLwM6S.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ygLwM6S.jpg)

Priceless.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for posting this.

Is it possible to change the link to the non-mobile version?

On mobile it will redirect automatically, but the mobile version is a bit janky to read on desktop. It's a pretty minor thing, and it's not that important, but here it is!

</comment><comment> pablo-massa Few years ago I see this video of a YouTube creator that usually uses copyrighted material on fair use. He explain some problems with the current (now updated) system.

YouTube's Content ID System SUCKS (2013) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuTHhtCyzLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuTHhtCyzLg)

</comment><comment><USER22> I just wish they'd help me when there's no copyright infringement at all, so there's no need for a "fair use" argument--but I still get an infringement notice.

This happens, for example, if I sit down at my own piano and record myself playing some unambiguously out-of-copyright work, for example Mozart, Chopin, or Bach.

Just last week I got a notice from a record label because their matching software identified a Beethoven piano piece as being that from one of their copyrighted recordings. It wasn't--it was me playing.

Google should stop allowing companies that do this access to their content match system.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that's their way of telling you that you are so good now that they would like to sign you to their label.</comment></comment>


Yardsale - San Francisco's Marketplace App Goes National - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/21/san-franciscos-marketplace-app-goes-national/

<comment><USER2> This really needs a way to let you at least look at the app and the items for sale without requiring a Facebook login. I declined. :-)

<comment><USER3> Try EggDrop, it does basically the same thing and has been around longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One day I hope to own a festering, global top 50 site, like Craigslist.

You could certainly make intelligent points about ways Craigslist could improve their service, but festering is an asinine thing to say about a wildly successful service that has survived every boom and bust and is still going extremely strong (not to mention it's still incredibly useful).

Festering: (of a wound or sore) Become septic; suppurate. (of food or garbage) Become rotten and offensive to the senses.</comment>


Virtual reality affects men and women differently - <AUTHOR> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/04/03/is-the-oculus-rift-sexist.html <comment><USER2> An advisor for a startup where I used to work at worked heavily with VR systems in the 80s/90s. I was having coffee with her a year or so ago, when I had just received my devkit, and she was up in arms about how terrible motion sickness was on the Rift.

"I was telling companies back then that their VR tech was doomed from the start because of nausea, and it hasn't changed at all!"

This is a good tale of why having a more balanced gender ratio in the tech industry is important. If 90% of Oculus designers/prototypers/engineers are male, female voices will naturally get drowned. The problem is that if your audience is potentially "all humans", the ratio is 50/50\. (although here, it seems like a) there exists prior research in the literature and b) good user testing could highlight that problem. If you're aspiring to doing any form of quality R&D, being on top of those 2 things should be a priority)

As for the title, I initially disliked it, but as I read the article I changed my opinion - I find it perfectly correct and just the right dose of irreverentious. The way I interpret it is as follows: it would be correct to label a poison which systematically kills any man who drinks it but not women as "sexist". The problem is that our culture tends to bundle intent with sexism, which is not the case - whether a process is sexist or not is completely independent from intent, or even whether there is a sentient agent behind it.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the highly substantive comment. I changed the title to be less provocative because, even though both you and the author make a reasonable case for it, I fear that it's too much for the thread to bear. Too many comments are about the title as it is—but at least we're doing ok on civility!

<comment><USER4> Thank you; while in an ideal world people would apply the principle of charity reflexively, the technology scene is occupied by too many men willing to do exactly the opposite for anything women write about sex and gender

<comment><USER5> As a man with a marginally popular blog and what I'm told is an extremely masculine writing style, I can assure you that virtually no one applies the principle of charity.

For example, consider this post I wrote criticizing my third favorite language: [http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/why_not_python.html](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/why_not_python.html) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986158)

Then go read the top comments either on the blog or HN. The top python geeks (read: core numpy contributors) in the thread had no dispute with me, yet there was a lot of clueless disagreement suggesting I never heard of multiprocessing/zeromq/twisted/etc. The entire point of the post is that multiprocessing+whatever is fundamentally slower/uses more memory/has worse cache locality than shared memory+threads.

People don't read. They don't apply the principle of charity. They don't follow your links to verify things. This is not a gendered problem.

(If you look for popular posts on my blog you can find lots of other examples, I'm just sticking to a purely technical topic.)

<comment><USER4> It's not a binary; more people apply the principle of charity more often in certain situations than others. It is not mutually exclusive that a certain amount of people don't apply the principle of charity in situations where they feel things about programming and Python specifically, and that a certain amount of men feel things about gender and don't apply it. I feel that "things women write" in my above comment probably should have been "things people write" but otherwise I still see the problem as reflexive rejection by men of tech-and-sex/gender pieces as "oh boy another feminist telling me I'm evil" instead of more rational "I'm not a woman so I should listen to what women have to say about sex/gender in tech even if it turns out I disagree."

<comment><USER6> I think men in the industry would be more willing to default to your more rational, and also more charitable, approach, had they not so much experience of feminists telling them they are evil. After a while, anyone will get gun- shy.

 _Exaggeratio ad absurdum_ is the besetting vice of identity politics. Nuance ceases to matter, and then to exist, because everyone involved comes to feel that his existence as a human being is on the line. For those who make such belief their bread and butter, that's great! For everyone else, it gets hard to take after a while.

<comment><USER4> Hm. When I made up a quote for the hypothetical man I was not actually trying to posit that this man's encounters (as representative of the tech/programming everyman's) with feminists consisted of him being told that he is evil. I actually value what feminists write, something that you didn't seem to pick up (not that I explicitly put it down).

Also you characterize my second "approach" as "charitable". This is interesting; spending time listening to women is apparently charity, with "oh boy another feminist move along" as the "[less][!] rational" baseline.

<comment><USER5> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

You misinterpret the word "charitable".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was flagged by users. On the other hand, the article is clearly substantive. As an experiment, I'm going to provisionally override the flags. The thread hasn't degenerated into a flamewar so far; let's see if we can keep it that way.

All: please take extra care to make your comments high in substance and civility, and as low as possible in flammability.

<comment><USER7> I am curious if the users who flagged this have a lot of karma, or if they clicked through or spent an appreciable amount of time before clicking a different HN link.

I can't imagine anyone who actually read this article flagging it. And I doubt the hypothesis that it was wise users trying to avoid a flame war. Occam's razor - seems more like a knee-jerk reaction to the word sexist in the title.

<comment><USER8> I read the article, and I would certainly flag it. The article is clear to focus on hormones and _biological factors_ , while most modern theories treat gender as a _social construct_ , explicitly disconnected from actual biological factors.

So the mention here is adding no value at best, at worst it uses the term in a way that no longer matches up with the research around it.

(Not to mention that Oculus is _actively working_ to reduce the factors that cause sickness (the one discussed here certainly isn't the only one))

edit: might the downvotes explain themselves? Surely it is known that _terms_ and _concepts_ don't have inherent, godgiven meaning and are at all times to be interpreted in the context they are used and the interpretations ascribed to them.

<comment><USER9> I'm trying to understand here- are you basically arguing that the use of "man" and "woman" is woefully inaccurate, and had "male" and "female" been used instead, you'd have been onboard?

Because that sounds pretty damn nitpicky to me.

<comment><USER10> The original title: "Is the Oculus Rift Sexist?"

To the GP: Which word(s) should be used to describe differences in people due to hormones and biological factors?

Using that particular word in the title does seem a bit keen on generating controversy, but the ideas presented are interesting and I don't think the article should be flagged.

To the author: If we agree that systems and institutions often include these biases and might be correctly described as "sexist" then what can or should be done in this particular case? It is probably possible to develop better technology which handles all the factors involved in 3D vision, but if for example a male researcher is testing a new VR system and he is biologically predisposed to notice/optimize for certain factors, is it unreasonable to expect that the finished product will work better for men than women on average?

And is that not a good reason for more women to develop or help develop these technologies?

<comment><USER4> People who have the chromosomes that correspond to the uterus and other related reproductive parts should be described as "female" people. People who have the chromosomes that correspond to the testes and other related reproductive parts should be described as "male" people. People who have chromosomes and reproductive parts that don't match classic sex dimorphic binary (the thing that allows humans and other mammals to breed and evolve over time) are called "intersex" by the medical community.

Queer Theorists have somewhat popularized the edgy notion that the above knowledge is socially constructed (read: in people's heads as a collective cultural meme) because, well, it sounds nice. A trend called Queer Politics takes this idea like a new toy and says people who use terms like "female biology" are bigoted. There is no need to cater to this temporal fashion produced in academia, a thing that does observably nothing to help gender- nonconforming people or explain the social forces that cause marginalization and violence against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [Preface: dang, thanks for overriding the flags on this HN posting. The discussion thus far seems to be mostly worthwhile, unless it's gone to hell in the twenty minutes or so I've just spent writing this comment, and I'm glad to see it taking place here.]

boyd's baccalaureate thesis, of which her blog post appears to be a recapitulation for a general audience, dates from 2000 and spends considerable effort talking about how, for example, the lack of normal maps results in a lack of shape-from-shading cues, which makes it difficult for a visual system prioritizing those cues over parallax cues to develop a 3-space representation of a scene.

And that's fair enough! _For 2000._ Now, though, a decade and a half later, normal maps are ubiquitous in current-gen and next-gen 3D graphics; while it's more computationally expensive to render with them than without them, the Rift's resolution is only 1280x800 overall, and even with the added overhead of parallax calculation, that's still easily within the capabilities of a modern GPU.

This is the sort of thing one might expect to be addressed in boyd's discussion of her earlier research. That said, having once read the thesis and then gone back to review the blog post, it's quite plainly a simple restatement of circa-2000 conclusions, and bears no trace of having been updated in light of the enormous advances in graphical rendering technology which have taken place between then and now.

I don't know whether there is any evidence of women having trouble with Rift- induced simulator sickness at higher rates than men. Going by boyd's blog post, I _can 't_ know, because she doesn't bother to mention whether there is or there isn't; she just rehashes her earlier research and hangs "Oculus" and "sexist" off it as search keywords.

This would be disappointing in general from someone reputed as highly as danah boyd; much worse, though, it hamstrings her entire point! Her basic thesis, in this blog post, is "This is a discussion we need to be having." But there's no knowing whether that's true, because in comparison with modern rendering technology, the research on which she bases that statement is hopelessly outdated, and she presents no evidence to suggest that people who rely on shading cues have the same problems with today's VR technology as with that of fifteen years ago.

</comment><comment><USER9> _All too often, systems get shipped with discriminatory byproducts and people throw their hands in the air and say, "oops, we didn't intend that."_

Is it just me, or is this kind of OK?

Intentional discrimination isn't, of course. But if your initial release accidentally isn't accessible to people with blue-yellow colorblindness, is that a tragedy of social justice?

No product serves every person equally, and this is especially true early in the product's (or company's) lifetime. You're a little too busy tackling the core problem to have time for fixing every accessibility problem in rev A.

Which seems OK to me. Rev A's are by nature lacking & incomplete, and I would rather they get something out the door, make a profit, and decide to make a rev B- than miss the boat and/or go bankrupt trying to make the product equally accessible all from day 1.

There are plenty of products like that, that I have been unable to enjoy in their early stages, so it isn't like getting the short end of the stick has never happened to me. One of my favorite outdoor gear companies, for example, has started making technical clothing. They don't offer sizes that fit tall, slender me, so I'm pretty much hosed for now. But that's fine. They'll get to it eventually.

(Obviously in this particular case wrt. Oculus Rift & women, the point has now been raised and women are half the globe, so it would seem to be a high priority to address. I'm just addressing the quoted statement, which was much more general)

<comment><USER11> > Is it just me, or is this kind of OK?

For some values of "kind of." I would even go so far as to say on a practical matter it may be worse than intentional discrimination.

Look, the problem is really one of intent and how well something matches intent. If you want a combat flight simulator that you are marketing primarily to young men, that's not necessarily a problem. If young women are less interested in your product, you need to serve those who are going to actually buy it.

But this works the other way too. If your target market is "everybody" then inducing motion sickness in 52% of your target demographic is not "ok" from a marketing perspective anymore than inducing seizures in the photosensitive would be. You don't want possible customers to get sick from your product. So on that level it isn't "kind of" ok.

This is an area where I actually think the less intentional discrimination, the more problematic it becomes.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it's clearly a big problem from a business/marketing/profits standpoint. No question there, and I am 100% confident it will be addressed for exactly that reason. I'm just talking about _socially_ , is this something we would want to get Very Pissed Off About and break out our torches & pitchforks.

<comment><USER11> > is this something we would want to get Very Pissed Off About and break out > our torches & pitchforks.

No disagreement. But again I am not sure that all defining target market as young men ages 18 to 25 is necessarily problematic either. A lot of things really depend heavily on details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article's definitions of "motion parallax" and "shape from shading" are quite different from my understanding. Can anyone shed any light on this? Specifically:

 _" Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn't suddenly grow and concludes that it's just got closer to you."_

Whereas I believed "motion parallax" to be moving one's head so as to compare an object's displacement against a more distant background. Size is irrelevant.

 _" Shape-from-shading is a bit trickier. If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you'll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is."_

"Shape from shading" I believed to be simply recreating a 3d structure from the way light falls on it, a depth cue that occurs even without motion. The quoted description seems like it is referring to specularity, which does play a role in shape from shading, but also seems well handled by (many) rendering engines.

<comment><USER13> My understanding of both of those terms agrees with yours.

I think in the case of "motion parallax" it's nearly the same, though.... whether you're "moving your head" or "moving the object", in both cases the spatial relation of three things is changing: your Center of Projection, and two other things (e.g. the two sides of a soda can, or e.g. a cloud and the moon).

Now that I found someone to discuss the nerditude of detailed depth cues... why on earth would eye-flickering change the shading? Am I supposed to believe that it's because the CoP moves (because my pupil moves)? I find it implausible that moving the CoP one millimeter, on an object that's 100mm to 10000mm from the CoP, while also changing which center-surround is processing the photons from a point, can detect a difference in shading, even on highly highly specular surfaces. Can anyone explain this to me?

<comment><USER14> Actually, as far as I've read, the minor eye movements happen exactly to enable motion parallax (on the very edges of objects) even while the object is static relating to you - so it's kind of completely opposite what the original article was proposing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a microscopic sample size, but with the OR developer kit I got to play with, probably half women I know who tried it felt motion sick; the proportion was much much lower for men (maybe 1/10).

At the time I simply put it down to the guys having played more FPS games and being more accustomed to it, but its interesting to read this.

On the other hand, with the precise head tracking in OR, I wonder if a higher- resolution with a better lighting model would make this issue go away?

It's basically just tiny head movements, right? As you move you see minor shading differences in the scene, and use that to mentally reconstruct the 3D geometry (as I understand it from the article).

You'd think high precision head tracking with a sufficiently high frame rate would be able to catch that.

(however, the low res / poorly lit OR demos probably don't)

<comment><USER16> Does the OR account for pupillary distance? At the 5th percentile, the pupillary distance for women is 2mm smaller than men and at the 95th percentile, it's a 5mm difference. With that in mind, an OR for women may need to be designed to account for a smaller pupillary distance.

What about children? How likely are they to experience nausea? Anyone with kids and an OR dev kit have anecdotal data here?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance)

<comment><USER17> Yes, pretty sure that's configurable.

Many games don't, though. I know the TF2 Oculus Rift integration at one point had a calibrator for that. Last I heard they were pushing for a standalone calibrator that games could all pull info from, but I don't know what came of that.

<comment><USER16> Is this calibration common between users? i.e. is it likely that a girl using an OR after a guy will calibrate the device for her pupillary distance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ugh, I wish we didn't need such a rage-baiting title to talk about this. I'm not a huge fan of danah's methods [1], but then againit's hard to argue with her results.

danah is right that her findings are not at all conclusive. I'm somewhat doubtful that the root cause is what she suggests, but the problem itself seems to be very real. I'm quite excited to see if we can find a solution, as it may have broader-reaching effects. Could this allow people who get motion sick even from 2D presentations to enjoy them sickness-free?

[1] Labeling a company and its engineers as sexist for not being aware of certain, extremely obscure research is unfair to say the least. But, you know, institutional and implicit biases in subconscious power structures etc. etc.

<comment><USER5> _Labeling a company and its engineers as sexist..._

She did not do this. She assigned a label L to X and then provided an explicit definition of L. You are fallaciously taking an alternate definition of L from a different context and acting as if she used that definition.

But I suppose misunderstandings like yours are the price of cheap clickbait.

<comment><USER18> The misunderstanding was not the price of the clickbait, it was the intention. boyd does provide a very careful definition of sexism buried at the addenda to her article, but that explanation did not appear with the original article when it was published. boyd even admits this, saying that a more accurate title would have been "Is Oculus Rift unintentionally discriminating on the basis of sex?".

"Sexist" is an emotionally charged term, and when you use it out of context the reader will assume its most common meaning, not the more academically accurate one. boyd knew this and decided it was better to rile people up than let her article go unnoticed. I can't even fault her, to be honest -- I just don't like manipulative headlines (or writing in general), even when used for a justified end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. I'm at a loss to explain how hormones, in the retina of all places, would affect perceptual cues that have been built up over years and years of use and are in many ways hard coded into the many layers and blobs (yes, "blobs") of visual cortex. I certainly can't rule it out, but it seems an unlikely mechanism for me. The neural networks governing vision are a very powerful combination of nature (some blobs fire only when there are edges of a certain orientation, for instance) and nurture (motion parallax ties in closely with a physical understanding of distance, proprioception, etc). The differences have to be deeper, if you ask me. Men and women's brains are indeed different, in ways we don't fully understand (this is an understatement), but there's a lot of evidence that men have, if you will, a spaciality speciality.

I wonder if there's a whole proprioceptive feedback center that helps tally your visual input with your movements, that's fed by androgens or otherwise activated by male-dominated chemicals and structures.

However I'm also curious about controls for things like playing lots of games when younger — we're only just now starting to see female gamers approach males in proportion, and I'm not confident that near-equality is as near when you look at 5, 10, 15 year olds. Especially games like FPSes with lots of 3D movement and rectifying of a virtual space with the real one. Having grown up with the motion of gaming, I think I'm less susceptible to VR sickness. I don't have any data on this, of course, but I would be very interested to see some.

<comment><USER20> A just so story for you.

Historically male primates of the genus homo have been hunters, often operating on terrain with features at various depths passed through on the go. To construct an accurate representation of the the natural world and the relative distances of objects it would thus be beneficial for the male retina to spend more resources processing depth cues that arise from motion parallax compared to women for who survival may not have depended on being able to accurately discern distances of game moving through brush.

This story is just that, a story. But the biology underlying sexual dimorphism of the visual system is definitely real and the fact that a sex hormone is involved may not be surprising since if, for example, an androgen receptor is expressed in a certain cell type in the retina and that cell type is in the circuit for parallax depth perception and that receptor enhances the response to differential parallax by say, depolarizing that specific cell type, then only males will have that enhancement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand what "[computers can't] simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive" refers to. How can flicking your eyes affect the shading of objects?

In the linked paper[1], the shape-from-shading cue was just a static greyscale gradient, with no eye-flicking. This seems like something that standard computer graphics techniques can emulate easily.

Since the study was done in 1997, I could imagine that the environments they were working with still contained lots of flat polygons. But the modern Oculus-rift runs things like Doom III, where everything is smoothly shaded. So to me it would seem that while the CAVE might have been "sexist", the Oculus isn't anymore? (Of course, there are lots of other depth cues than shading and parallax, and there could be sex differences about how those are prioritized also, but the cited experiment did not study them.)

[1] [http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf?_ga=1.245737348.10...](http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf?_ga=1.245737348.1002921219.1392507889)

</comment><comment><USER3> The title is linkbait, which is against the guidelines, but I can't think of a better one. If any of you suggest one that's accurate and neutral, I'll change it.

<comment><USER22> The thing is, the title isn't linkbait from the perspective of modern feminist discourse and its usage of the word "sexist".

In radical feminism (the ideology that the term "feminism" most frequently refers to in contemporary usage), virtually the entirety of human interaction is viewed from the lens of the patriarchy model, the notion that society is governed by "a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy oppresses women" (Wikipedia). Such feminists define any act as "sexist" if it reinforces, or even if it is the product of, what they see as the patriarchy. Similarly, liberal sociologists and critical race theorists define "racism" as the characteristic of any action that results from the oppressive power the dominant group (most contiguous with the class of straight white males, at least in Western society) has over minorities. (This is why those on the far left often make statements like "there's no such thing as reverse racism/sexism." They're right based on their usage--it's just a matter of definition.)

So anyway, when feminists use the term "sexist", they're not usually using it in the colloquial sense of "you're a bad person" but rather in the sense of "you're saying or doing something that results from the patriarchal society that governed your upbringing, and it would be really good if you start questioning the assumptions that led you to this action." In fact, I've heard quite a few feminists describe an action of their own doing as "sexist" and immediately set out to unlearn whatever caused them to say or do that. If only more feminists were as open to entertaining discussion regarding alternatives to their patriarchy hypothesis, but I digress!

<comment><USER22> Having attended a very left wing liberal arts college and, therefore, being very familiar with the terminology used by sociologists, I intended the above to be explanatory rather than either an advocacy of or an attack on the leftist definition. Could some of the downvoters please explain which side they're coming from and what aspect of my post they found problematic?

<comment><USER23> I know I didn't upvote your comment because of:

> This is why those on the far left often make statements like "there's no > such thing as reverse racism/sexism." They're right based on their usage-- > it's just a matter of definition.

Don't know enough about it but I think "there's no such thing as reverse racism" is true because it would be just... racism. Or just sexism. Actually the definition given before ("sexism is sexism by the privileged") would allow for "reverse sexism" ("sexism by the non-privileged"). So it seemed kind of inconsistent to me.

<comment><USER22> > Don't know enough about it but I think "there's no such thing as reverse > racism" is true because it would be just... racism. Or just sexism. Actually > the definition given before ("sexism is sexism by the privileged") would > allow for "reverse sexism" ("sexism by the non-privileged"). So it seemed > kind of inconsistent to me.

As I said in my original post, most feminists assert that society is a patriarchy that is fundamentally oppressive to women. They use the term "sexist" for an act that results from the patriarchy. Because their model of power dynamics does not allow for the notion of males being structurally oppressed, it is by their very definition impossible for one to be "sexist" (or "reverse sexist" as some people say) towards males.

> I know I didn't upvote your comment because of:

I'm not sure I really follow. Are you saying that (1) you disliked that I attempted to clarify that feminists use the term "sexist" differently from how a lot of us use it or that (2) I didn't do a good job in making that clarification or (3) something else entirely?

If the first or third, I don't get why. If the second, what I meant is that a lot of commenters on this thread found the title misleading. I wanted to clarify to them that there are two commonly used usages of "sexism", one in mainstream English and one in academia, especially in left wing contexts. As a linguist, I don't find value in prescribing one definition as "better" to use than another. I just wanted to point out that people were really just having a debate about definitions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The title of the blog/article almost ruined the whole point trying to be made.

I read the entire article waiting for justification of a clearly provocative title. I got to the end, felt Danah Boyd didn't justify the title and felt the blog/article was weak. Only when I took a step away and thought about the it did I realize the reason I had such a bad taste in my mouth - it was the title. The article itself brings up a good point and one that should be explored by Oculus and others doing VR. I don't think anyone expected that men and women would react different to VR or the techniques we use to render VR worlds.

<comment><USER25> The article is a good read with the assumption that Oculus is not aware of these facts and is not trying to solve the problem she poses. The problem with that assumption is that nowhere in article does she mention talking to anyone at Oculus. She doesn't even mention if she has even used the Rift. For all we know Oculus could be at the forefront of this issue. We don't know because she didn't ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is Nature sexist? To maintain a consistent argument, the author would have to answer yes.

Nature is many things, but fair is not one of them.

<comment><USER23> From all I know about the period, I'm pretty sure no women would pretend that nature treats men and women the same.

<comment><USER26> Sure, but lumping all gender based unfairness under the label "sexism" muddles things.

Businesses make money selling products for periods and pregnancy, because females want them, not because of any "se ism". Similarly if it's true that some people don't jive with the oculus rift, because of a _biological_ difference, Oculus can create a different device for that market.

They certainly shouldn't be charged with "sexism" or delay releasing their product simply because it's better suited to males than females (if the authors contentions hold).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a > soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your > visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn't suddenly grow and > concludes that it's just got closer to you._

> _Shape-from-shading is a bit trickier. If you stare at a point on an object > in front of you and then move your head around, you'll notice that the > shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting > around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, > recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that > information to judge how far away the object is._

I need help understanding the mechanics here.

What exactly is the flicker described? What does it have to do with shading being recalculated? If hypothetically our eyes did not flicker, how would that affect our depth perception?

As a follow up - what would be involved in emulating this in a virtual system?

<comment><USER6> [Edit: Removed discussion not relevant to parent's question for reposting as a top-level comment.]

I've been assuming that this bit about "eye flickers" is boyd's way of describing for a general audience the phenomenon of optical saccades, which are automatic and very fast eyeball twitches which allow the brain to gather enough information to construct a visual scene through an eyeball with a (usually) very narrow area of focus.

I'm not sure how that affects shape-from-shading, though, because saccades are movements of the eyeballs only, not of the head. Saccades therefore don't affect angles of reflection or refraction, which would seem to make it impossible for them to change the shading of a given scene.

<comment><USER28> The fact is that for VR to be accurate, we'd have to do very fast tracking of the eye movement and even the change of the focus of the eye. Both are certainly used by our brains to unconsciously calculate the distance of an object. Both can happen independently of our head movements.

I can easily recognize that such adjustments of the picture aren't present in immersive 3D projections. Add to that that we males are much less aware of the incorrectness of the shades, it's easy for me to imagine that women have bigger problems under given conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This doesn't sound like the Oculus is sexist, so much as that men are more predisposed to experience the 3D effect biologically. How is that sexist?

<comment><USER30> Sexism as in discriminatory based on sex in some manner, not necessarily intentionally or maliciously discriminatory. That is defined in the article itself, by the way, so there isn't really much to add here. Maybe I can help make the point more explicit.

The hypothesis is that VR tech uses depth cues that work better for one sex (seems the more appropriate term than gender in this case) than the other. This would make the tech discriminatory, hence sexist as defined in the article.

The important part is that sexism as defined in the article does not ascribe intent or maliciousness to those who made the tech. It does not accuse those who made the tech of being intentionally or maliciously sexist, it just describes the tech as sexist. The author even makes it explicit that in her opinion there is no intention at all to be sexist by those who made the tech, no intention to make the tech work worse for women.

Now, some people who use the world sexist mean to strongly imply intention and many people who read it understand it as assigning blame. However, that is not necessarily how all people use the word. I certainly don't use it that way and I know many other people who don't. These two uses of the word – one ascribing intention, one not – is potentially confusing, so it's good that she explicitly defined the word in her article and explicitly excludes intent from the definition.

You could argue that this is a very exotic use of the word. I can't speak to how common the different uses are, but I do know that for many people it has long been important to divorce intent from effect because in many ways the effect is the only thing that matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reading this article I'm not convinced this is the fault of the Rift. Motion parallax happens naturally when a game engine uses two cameras to render a scene (the 3D effect). Shape-from-shading is dependent on the lighting system the engine uses, and because developers haven't needed to program for VR they've never implemented it.

There are many changes in both game design and engine features that we'll start to see as virtual reality becomes mainstream. It's very likely we'll see a stall in graphics improvements as game engine programmers begin to enhance other systems like physics and lighting to work more realistically.

<comment><USER13> I initially agreed. It really depends on how this purported shape-from- shading-due-to-eye-flickering thing works. I don't at all understand danah's claims about how eye flickering gives you extra data, and my first-principles impulse is to say it sounds implausible to me... but supposing she's right, depending on what she means, maybe eye trackers would be required to produce proper depth cues. In which case it's a hardware problem too (though of course the game engines would also be required to support it, blah blah).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> With her definition of sexist a bra, a urinal or anything that is only usable by one gender is sexist.

Interesting data, strange conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a > soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your > visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn't suddenly grow and > concludes that it's just got closer to you.

While parallax does play a part in perception of size and distance, we still perceive the size of objects without stereoscopy (that is, with one eye closed, or on a flat image). When shown an upclose photo of a can, people can figure out it didn't just grew because 1) we have previous knowledge of the shape and size of a can and 2) it's image gets distorted as it gets closer [1].

You can trick someone by making an object with an unfamiliar shape to look familiar when viewed with the right angle / FOV [2]. Similarly, making miniatures appear realistically-sized in photos involves careful FOV control to not trigger the signals in our perception [3].

This is a mechanism that, I think, would be interesting to study w.r.t. gender differences, more than rotating 3D objects.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photogr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_\(photography\))

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective#Forced_persp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective#Forced_perspective_in_architecture)

[3] [http://petapixel.com/2013/10/14/life-like-miniature- scenes-s...](http://petapixel.com/2013/10/14/life-like-miniature-scenes-shot- using-model-cars-forced-perspective-250-ps/)

</comment><comment><USER34> lousy title, but fascinating piece of research. please do go back and read it if you skipped it due to the title.

</comment><comment><USER35> So would having separate male and female versions of the Oculus be considered more sexist or less sexist? No snark intended.

<comment><USER36> The article isn't really referring to the Oculus Rift in particular, so much as the gender-linked nature of depth perception. That's an underlying technological issue, and not something you can fix by dropping a few grams and giving it a paint job.

It's a bit of a linkbait title, because it's quite misleading in that it suggests (especially to the large fraction of people who read the title without opening the article) that Oculus is engaging in some institutional gender-discriminatory behavior (an amusing perhaps autoantonym is that an equivalent title might be "Women don't use Oculus Rift, but it's not sexist!").

Just as easily, the title could have been "Is Avatar sexist?" (I'm actually really curious if 3D movies also induce nausea that differs in rate along sex/hormonal lines, and I would have expected, given its mass-market nature).

From a pretty shallow search, I found [http://www.pacificu.edu/vpi/publications/documents/OVS.3DVie...](http://www.pacificu.edu/vpi/publications/documents/OVS.3DViewing.Yangetal.pdf) which claims that there isn't a link between gender and anything (nausea, dizziness, disorientation, blurring were all found to not correlate) except for "involvement in the movie".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> CAVEs make me nauseous too, I'm a dude and I used to help build them

</comment><comment><USER38> Being a man and an oculus tinkerer. How would I go about testing this?

<comment><USER39> the whole thing is: in her preliminary study, people with more male-hormones (layman term) identify depth by shapes in motion. people with less (or female- hormones, again, very layman terms) get sick when there is no light hinting on that 3d body movement.

You don't even need an oculus to test the hypothesis. it can probably be tested by:

\- showing that spinning woman shadow that everyone sees spinning to a different direction, see if women get sick/annoyed/react in any manner faster than men. or;

\- put lots of people in a room with a hanging light as the only light source, kick that light in a large pendulum movement. check if the women get sick faster than the men.

<comment><USER40> The spinning woman mentioned above: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pretty cool article / research. I kind of wish the author hadn't intentionally brought sexism into it because I think the research is interesting enough on its own and it just distracts from the actual information. She does address this a bit at the end though.

</comment><comment><USER42> The words Oculus Rift sound like a sexually transmitted disease, so who knows?</comment>


Israel Calls a Man a "Terrorist" Until They Realized He Was an Israeli Jew - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/10/22/israel-calls-a-man-its-soldiers-killed-a-terrorist-until-they-realized-he-was-an-israeli-jew/ <comment><USER2> This is the definition of "terrorism" from the FBI web site:

[https://www.fbi.gov/about- us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism...](https://www.fbi.gov/about- us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism-definition)

Note that whether something is classified as terrorism depends on the intent or purpose of the act, not the act, the number of people killed, weapons used, or other measurable characteristics of the act. Thus a mentally ill person who murders a large number of people as sacrifices to the great god Cthulhu would not be classified as a terrorist because he lacks the political intent, even though the actual crime might be identical in all other respects to the actions of a "terrorist".

Incidentally, Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and surely well aware of the legal definitions of terrorist.

Definitions of Terrorism in the U.S. Code

18 U.S.C. § 2331 defines "international terrorism" and "domestic terrorism" for purposes of Chapter 113B of the Code, entitled "Terrorism":

"International terrorism" means activities with the following three characteristics:

        Involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
        Appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
        Occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.*

"Domestic terrorism" means activities with the following three characteristics:

        Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
        Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and
        Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

18 U.S.C. § 2332b defines the term "federal crime of terrorism" as an offense that:

        Is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct; and
        Is a violation of one of several listed statutes, including § 930(c) (relating to killing or attempted killing during an attack on a federal facility with a dangerous weapon); and § 1114 (relating to killing or attempted killing of officers and employees of the U.S.).

* FISA defines "international terrorism" in a nearly identical way, replacing "primarily" outside the U.S. with "totally" outside the U.S. 50 U.S.C. § 1801(c).

Some other definitions of terrorism from different sources:

[http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror...](http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terrordef.html)

Note again that in nearly all definitions the political intent or purpose of the act is critical.</comment>


Is the Apple iPad really the best browsing experience? - <AUTHOR> http://thehenry.net/2010/01/is-the-apple-ipad-really-the-best-browsing-experience.html

<comment><USER2> What is browsing? Is flash included in your definition? Some users will suffer, but for most people flash is used for annoying advertisements.

Two things could happen here: the iPad eventually supports some form of flash due to user outcry or sites adopt h.264.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many of these 10 sites do you visit daily, TheHenry?</comment>


NASA's test of Ares 1-X a success - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/28/nasa.ares.rocket/index.html

<comment><USER2> Brilliant launch, on track through to separation.

Loss of telemetry signal after separation, apparently successful splash-downs of upper and lower stages.

See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=907961>

It's pretty brave to stream these things live - it makes it tough to put positive spin on anything going wrong.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mission page: [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/flightt...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/flighttests/aresIx/index.html)

Congrats all around on a beautiful launch!</comment>


The RIAA? Amateurs. Here's how you sue 14,000+ P2P users - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/the-riaa-amateurs-heres-how-you-sue-p2p-users.ars <comment><USER3> These lawsuits rely on what the lawyers call the "in terrorem" effect.

On the one side: people who are all set up for the fight, who have done the detailed research, who have drafted the key documents, and who are familiar and comfortable with a legal setting in which they hold all the advantages.

On the other side: an individual who gets a complete packet up front (detailed letter, draft complaint) in the form of a certified letter, who learns from his lawyer that he has no good defenses, and who discovers that it will take many thousands (if not tens of thousands of dollars) to defend this, and who ultimately has no stake in putting good money after bad to launch a major fight over a stupid download of what was likely a crappy movie anyway.

Basically, one who becomes a target here is like a chess player left only with his king to try to resist an opponent who has a range of big pieces. He could make a few futile moves before checkmate or he can resign immediately and accept the inevitable.

That is why it is a no-brainer to just pay the $1,500 and be done with it. Even with an arguably good defense, it just is not worth it for an average person to step into the fight.

<comment><USER4> You may be suggesting an answer to this in your posting, but I'm still curious: Do you think that any of these cases will actually be brought forth?

It seems to me that none will be, and to bring one to trial would be a very bad idea. The only way that it would be an easy case is if the defendant did not have wireless, was the leasee of the internet service, and was the only one on the network. Change any one of these variables, or add countless other things (VPN, etc.), and the case becomes progressively harder. Let's say that a case is brought forward: It will have widespread national media attention and everybody will be watching. Attorneys will be lining up to represent the defendant. Most importantly: The whole business model of the firm representing the complainant will hinge on the decision of the case.

<comment><USER3> RIAA messed up its litigation strategy by pushing its cases to the extreme and drawing headlines such as "$4.2 million verdict for downloading 28 songs" and the like. That strategy was clearly a bullying strategy but it was a stupid bullying strategy. It was stupid because it caused the public to recoil at the thought that a poor student (or some such person) would be ruthlessly crushed at the hands of a bunch of greedy record labels for having done something that didn't seem to deserve anywhere near such punishment. Eventually, the courts themselves came to the same position and dramatically reduced the damages awarded in such cases. RIAA had to abandon this strategy once it became clear that it would not really deter such downloading that much and, if it did, it would not be worth the price of the public relations disaster it was causing.

One thing to note about the RIAA strategy, however, is that, whatever the caliber of the legal talent on the defense side, RIAA still managed to _win_ most of the cases on their merits. In other words, however much a defendant resisted, liability tended to be imposed at some level. Thus, it was primarily the excessive damage claims that got RIAA into trouble, not the legal merits of its claims as such.

Given that background, in this current spate of cases, you still have nothing more than institutional bullying, just as with RIAA but it is a low-level type of bullying of the "pay us $1,500 and we will forget this ever happened" variety and not of the "we will crush you and take your last penny" variety. This means that anyone who wants to fight this - even with good defense help from quality lawyers - will be at risk of incurring costs and liabilities that will easily exceed the walk-away payout that would simply allow them to put a bad episode behind them. And, if even a quality defense will not likely spare you from liability of some sort in the average case, it just isn't worth fighting for the average person. Thus, by not overreaching, the plaintiffs in these suits have actually strengthened their position. In effect, they are playing the numbers - by intimidating thousands of individuals into paying small amounts, they are ultimately gaining a significant payout in the aggregate.

Of course, this would not necessarily hold in more doubtful cases where a real defense might exist. But for the average user who simply did an improper download, there is no percentage in fighting it.

It might be that EFF has a good answer and their hearts are in the right place - but, unless there is radical change made to existing copyright laws, basically there is no good _institutional_ response to this pattern of low- level bullying. Yes, an individual case might be successfully fought but, even if that case is won, it will only be for some failure of proof to show liability in that case alone. This does nothing to change the template for the mass of cases. And, if the plaintiffs in such cases can't be shamed into dropping them (as RIAA was), I don't see that they will.

Sorry to sound a down note but I think this is a realistic assessment. I would love to be wrong on this.

<comment><USER4> No need to apologize, because while this seems to mostly be an issue of ethics and social factors, I am not very interested in these issues and more in the specific legal issues that this practice and these potential trials bring about.

To be more specific: As we all know, one IP address does not equal one user (in many instances). So let's say that a case regarding the matter at hand is brought to trial. Could a potential ruling be that the lessee or provider of the IP address is the one liable for damages? It is my opinion that it is a necessity for this issue to be decided upon because we are not dealing with Kazaa and any individually distinguishing characteristics (such as a username) really other than the IP address. If the lessee or provider is found to be the one liable, the consequences of this decision would be massive. And I feel that this is an understatement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went to torrentfreak to double check the Hurt Locker numbers, because I could have sworn they were going after 'tens of thousands.'

[http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-will-earn-hurt-locker-more- th...](http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-will-earn-hurt-locker-more-th..).

Looks like this 5,000 for Hurt Locker was just the first batch, with more to come. I was surprised to see that 'thousands' of people are still downloading the movie. Somebody should tell those people :/.

I guess I'm glad I stopped running a TOR exit node. Ran one for a while, and always expected to eventually get a DMCA letter. Never did. Looks like these guys really don't care if the Does are innocent or not, they just need the money.

</comment><comment><USER6> Please bear with me for a while.

A proposition: let's just start splitting our P2P downloads, initially and for simplicitly, in two counterparts of equal size that are XORed together to form the actual work whose copyright we want to infringe.

Downloading random data _can't possibly be illegal_ —oh wait, despite of this naive scheme (that is almost out of Applied Cryptography and one that almost smells of a one-time pad), wouldn't my download still be non-random because it somehow must contain a kind of a half of a copyrighted work or something? Wouldn't it still infringing? Mere lawsuit-fodder?

It happens that if we have any blob of data of, say 700MB in size, then no matter what you do, someone can always construct another 700MB that—when XORed together—yields a copy of a recent movie.

If I legally download a Ubuntu live CD image, I can't possibly be infringing any copyright, right? Even if someone has constructed another image of the same size, that when XORed with the Ubuntu live CD yields a copy of Die Hard? Duh, easy: it's obviously _the other 700M blob of data_ that's infringing copyright! Off to prosecute me if I do that, then.

Now, if I do happen to be downloading the other blob, what exactly would I be infringing? Again, the blob I'm downloading contains random bits and can contain—depending on the other half—any movie you can think of, under copyright or not. Or no movie. If someone gives me a suitable set of ten other halves, then I can get exactly ten movies out of the single 700M blob. But you can't possibly fit ten high-quality movies into a single 700M blob, so obviously the _other blobs_ , again, must contain the actual payload and be illegal copies, and not this particular one...

If neither of the blobs is a public, recognized piece of data, how can you tell which is which? They're just both random data. If I individually XOR these blobs with other blobs and happen to get Ubuntu live CDs, Fedora installation CDs, WinXP corporate installer CDs, Die Hard and other movies, and memtest diagnostics CDs popping out of them, it's obvious that _someone_ has been XORing these blobs with copyrighted works.

But you can't tell who exactly infringed the copyright; you can't tell who exactly downloaded the copyrighted works; and you can't tell who exactly uploaded them, either.

The infringing will eventually happen, should one choose to do so, in the privacy of one person's home. But how could anyone know? Especially MPAA/RIAA/<insert_goons>? Besides, fair use says that personal copies can be made, doesn't it. Or something like that.

Lawyers would of course, at this point, laugh at this feeble technicality and start aiming their prosecution guns at me, drooling off all the way. But as long as they could only observe IP numbers logged off a BitTorrent tracker or magnet swarm, what would they produce as evidence? They could try to convince the court that because I was downloading a 700MB blob named b8501756a0db1fc96a79920c30edd29e40a050b4 I was downloading and sharing a particular movie? Possibly, but how could they prove that?

They could carefully examine the logs and try to find out whether I've also downloaded and shared the particular XOR counterpart of this first part. But what if I got it off a website? They can't track direct downloads. Or what if there were three counterparts? Two of them available on torrents and a third counterpart of public data that I could legally and separately download somewhere or have it delivered over with an USB stick. Or I got some of them from FreeNet?

I guess they would have to show that I first had all the required parts and then actually assembled the files together in order to prove that I did, in fact, infringe the copyright of one work. If they don't, then why would downloading _anything_ from internet not infringe the copyrights of all copyrighted works there are.

Please, someone tell me why this wouldn't work. Convenience? The maneuvers here do sound complicated but they could be mostly automated away.

I'm not stupid enough to think that this would somehow hold water, otherwise we'd be doing this already; I'm just stupid enough to not figure out _why_ exactly would it fail, and I mean fail totally. Not just "yaa, they'd probably try to sue you anyway".

Because paying 2x or 3x bandwidth for the freedom to download and seed as much as you can would be a bargain. (And, yes, I would legally buy the best of all the warez I would download.)

<comment><USER7> It doesn't matter if you really downloaded a movie in this case or not. In the US the lawsuit handling costs are likely >= the requested fine. Even if you're right, you've lost. They would have to prove something only if you wanted to challenge their claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like a reasonable amount compared to what RIAA is trying to get in a full suit.

Here the penalty for taking public transportation without a valid ticket is roughly 50 times the cost of the ticket (and the excuse that you wouldn't have bought the ticket anyway is not a valid defense here either), and this ($1500 vs $20 cost of a new movie) is of similar scale.

Perhaps this will encourage movie viewers to use alternative modern distribution channels a la Netflix. Personally I do not bother with full- priced DVDs; Lovefilm (netflix.eu) is enough for me, together with older discounted DVDs. There's enough backlog of good movies that I don't need to buy Transfomers 2 on DVD for a long, long while.

<comment><USER9> Where do you live? In Seattle it's around 8x the cost.

<comment><USER10> Do people bother buying tickets? It seems like with those sort of fines it would be cheaper to simply pay the fine the few times you get caught. Unless of course Seattle have some very active ticket checks.

<comment><USER11> My ticket gets checked less then monthly and I commute to work daily. The monthly ticket costs at least 50€, the penalty is 40€. From a mathematical point of view, it makes no sense to buy a ticket.

There are a couple of caveats. When I don't have a ticket, e.g. because I forgot my wallet, I'm on a constant lookout and the train ride becomes really stressful. If you get caught several times they might press charges against you, so it is not feasible to go without ticket on a regular basis anyway. And last but not least, I'm using a service, so I pay for it.

<comment><USER12> > There are a couple of caveats. When I don't have a ticket, e.g. because I > forgot my wallet, I'm on a constant lookout and the train ride becomes > really stressful. If you get caught several times they might press charges > against you, so it is not feasible to go without ticket on a regular basis > anyway. And last but not least, I'm using a service, so I pay for it.

I used to ride without a ticket a lot when I was in school. You are right about the stress. (On the other hand, riding with a ticket afterwards is much more boring.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If enough people are paying, then they won't take you at a court, because it's just work for them without giving them a lot more.

If nobody pays, they don't have a business, because it wouldn't pay out for them, if they've to take everyone at the court.

</comment><comment><USER14> Aside: what the hell happend to Val Kilmer? _The Steam Experiment_?

<comment><USER15> Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man. - - - - Leon Trotsky

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article states:

 _Data from the recording industry lawsuits, revealed in a court case, showed that 11,000 of the 18,000 Does settled immediately or had their cases dropped by the labels_

And:

 _Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver generally asks for $1,500 to $2,500, threatening to sue for $150,000 if no settlement payment is forthcoming. Assuming that 90 percent of the current targets settle for $1,500, this means that the lawyers, studios, and P2P detection company would split $19.7 million._

I accept that I could be missing something here and would welcome enlightenment from someone better informed than me, but I find it difficult to believe that the lawyers have downloaded 18,000 copies (i.e. one for each John Doe) of the infringing material.

Without doing this, how can they have a case that actually stands up in court, and one that successfully proves that the John Doe actually made the material available? Surely it would only take a few hundred people to successfully challenge them for the profits to be lost?

<comment><USER17> You don't need to download a complete copy to convince a judge/jury of copyright infringement. Don't forget that these are civil cases. It's not that hard to write a custom bittorrent client that automatically searches torrent sites for the media you're after, gathers lists of ip addresses, feeds it into your case management system and have that spit out the paperwork. You come into your office in the morning, run the software, and you can file 500 cases before lunch.

Actually I was describing this setup just a few weeks ago to my girlfriend. It's an awesome money machine, and it's what's going to eradicate 80% of todays user base of p2p programs over the next few years. Once a few high- profile publications publish stories of people paying thousands and Oprah runs an item 'how to prevent your kids from bankrupting you with p2p software', most casual infringers will become too scared to use illicit sources of media.

<comment><USER16> Ok, I get that civil court cases have a much lower standard of proof required, but this still gets me:

 _You don't need to download a complete copy to convince a judge/jury of copyright infringement_

Why on earth not? If the burden of proof is that low, why not defend along the lines of "I put a file on my computer with that name as a joke."

I would love to see what evidence they use to prosecute, if it's only hashes or checksums alone, surely it'd be easy enough to write a fake client that lies?

<comment><USER18> I've helped defend victims in a few of these cases (in the UK) so this is my best guess.

Ultimately the evidence they have is pretty good. They grab a torrent and begin to download the file, they watch which IPs connect - both seeds and peers - and record them. They then apply for a subpheona from the courts.

The argument (for peers) is that the user has connected to the P2P network and is trying to download copyrighted material. Under civil law this is a reasonable burden of proof (and, honestly, I can't really argue with it). With seeds it is an even stronger argument; because the seed has at least a partial copy of the copyrighted work and is facilitating the sharing of it.

This will stand up in court; and, to be honest, I don't think it is disputable under current law.

What we _should_ be disputing (and I have helped with successes here in the past) is that the damages are _completely disproportionate_. The way I've managed this is by explaining how P2P really works to judges/courts - <USER2> usually they start to come round to the idea.

We also should, outside of the cases, be working to promote the idea of copyright reform so that this becomes less of a cash cow.

<comment><USER19> I've got a theory about this, maybe you can enlighten me.

Suppose that the movie/song/whatever being downloaded is actually wrapped in a ZIP or RAR -- even better, suppose that it's encrypted (granting that the downloader would have the decrypt key). And suppose that somebody downloads a chunk of it (say 10%) from me.

That 10% chunk alone is absolutely useless. As it stands, it's effectively random data that cannot be used to recover any of the intellectual property that's inside the archive.

One might claim, then, that I did not actually give the downloader any copyrighted materials. It's only his action, in combining it with the other chunks, that allows the IP to be extracted. Thus, neither I nor the 9 other people who hypothetically provided chunks of the file could be blamed individually for providing copyrighted materials to the downloader. At most, each of us aided and abetted the downloader by providing a necessary _but insufficient_ piece.

Obviously IANAL, but those are my thoughts. How do they strike you?

<comment><USER18> This is actually a pretty common "idea" (not a bad one, just it comes up a lot :)) that an accused comes up with when I meet them. The same argument, really, applies to anything transmitted over P2P - you usually only download a small chunk from one person, encrypted or not.

My response is usually: "were you uploading copyrighted stuff?". Answer: "yes". Me: "well then..."

Saying "but I only gave him a small piece of data - what he does with it is his own business" doesn't stand up because clearly your intent was to give him part of the file so he could construct the file (this argument has been used for centuries to try and get out of things and almost always fails :P)

Seriously? I think people should just suck it up, admit they did something wrong (currently wrong anyway...) and then fight the idiotic fine.

Ultimately the law is not really about the exact bits you exchange (one of the few things I agree with, actually) but about your intent and facilitation of the shared file.

EDIT: to clarify/extend something. I think it is a dangerous road to bring the idea of what the individual bits you send mean - because that starts to open up the idea the a certain ordering of bits could be illegal (take a CP case - if a certain ordering of bits makes up the left breast of a child if interpreted as part of a Jpeg is that illegal if randomly occurs within a music file you own. Or perhaps the bits in an MP3 appear by random occurrence in a video file you own. This is a dangerous weapon to hand people :P)

<comment><USER19> Upvoted because you partially answered my question -- but I'm not quite satisfied.

My point isn't that "it's just a little piece". Like being "a little bit pregnant", I don't think that "infringing a little bit" could amount to much of an argument.

It's that with certain methods of encoding, a piece is entirely worthless without the rest of the file. That is, I could give a chunk to the IP owner to inspect, and there's no way that he could tell me if it represented a part of his work.

 _if a certain ordering of bits makes up the left breast of a child if interpreted as part of a Jpeg is that illegal if randomly occurs within..._

This makes me think of the Judas Priest "back masking" trial way back when [1]. The wikipedia article notes "The case was dismissed by the judge for insufficient evidence of Judas Priest's placement of subliminal messages on the record", and that's a little ambiguous: do we read that to refer to the _existence_ of the message, or to the _intent_ to put the message on the record?

Anyway, for the danger that you outline, I would think that if it's possible to transform a data stream into a different context in which it could be construed as illegal, then the evidence would also need to include possession of, or access to, a means of accomplishing that transform.

Without some kind of consideration of this, steganography would throw a wrench into everything.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking#Court_cases>

<comment><USER18> _It's that with certain methods of encoding, a piece is entirely worthless without the rest of the file. That is, I could give a chunk to the IP owner to inspect, and there's no way that he could tell me if it represented a part of his work._

Surely, even without encoding, the piece is pretty worthless without the remainder of the file.

But I see what you mean though (you couldn't even reconstruct a portion of the file).

Im not sure it matters; the point is definitely the intent to supply the copyrighted media in whatever form. It's similar to the persons idea not long ago of supplying obfuscated MP3's by encoding them as Tweets and then supplying the code or algorithm to recover and reconstruct the file. It's all part and parcel of the same thing. It's just obfuscating the delivery method not the actual package/intent.

More importantly I don't think the court will be sympathetic to the idea; and if that is the case it risks invalidating other arguments you may bring.

(there is a similar thing in money laundering; many launderers try and get away with it by rotating very small parcels of money from lots of different batches through legitimate transfers. The idea is twofold; it's difficult to reconstruct the original larger packets of illegal money and b) they can claim, for various reasons, they had no idea of the origin of the money. This argument, as you can imagine, doesn't last long in court :))

I think, ultimately, it is not currently possible to fight the idea that distributing copyright materials _in any form_ could be legal (or at least not illegal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a bit surprised that this seems to be a new development in the United States. In Germany this is the prevailing mechanism to make money from filesharing. They use cease and desist letters instead of subpoenas, but the principle is the same: Pay us and we don't take you to court.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised that the extortion angle hasn't been used against them, yet. Wasn't a RICO suit filed against the RIAA for this behavior?

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting - I wonder how they are getting people's identities. They gloss over it in the article saying they can subpoena for it, but I assume that is rather difficult with bitorrents and tiny pieces coming from hundreds of ISPs. How are they getting a list of people who downloaded a particular movie?

<comment><USER23> The BitTorrent tracker contains a list of IPs of people connected to each individual torrent. Everyone that connects to the tracker obtains the list for that torrent so that you can find other peers with pieces of the file. All they have to do is connect to the tracker and record the IPs. Then they file Joe Doe lawsuits to find out who those IPs belong to.

{update} I assume that they have to wait for a connection from someone to exchange a piece of the movie though. It is possible to connect to a tracker, falsely advertise the percentage of the file that you have, and just sit there disallowing connections. Unless you transfer something other than communication w/ the tracker I don't know how they could find that you've infringed copyright. [Maybe someone should purposely do this to try and get sued by them.]

Is it illegal to set up a shop that purports to sell illegal devices, even though you don't actually have any illegal devices and never buy or sell an illegal device?

<comment><USER24> Logic experiment:

AFAIK, you can't download a torrent without participating in seeding it (at least _while_ you're downloading it). Assuming that whomever is gathering the IP addresses is an authorized representative of the copyright holder, they are actively involved in distributing the video (at least while they're collecting IP addresses).

So, a defendant could claim "At the time you caught me downloading it, an authorized representative of the copyright holder was publishing the content on BitTorrent".

Of course, the problem is that the law isn't logical ;)

<comment><USER23> > _So, a defendant could claim "At the time you caught me downloading it, an > authorized representative of the copyright holder was publishing the content > on BitTorrent"._

They could be publishing data, but you'd have to prove that they weren't just uploading bogus data into the stream. BitTorrent hashes all of the chunks it downloads, but that doesn't prevent someone from constantly uploading bogus data that is only rejected once you've downloaded it. [IIRC, there are clients that will blacklist peers that consistently send corrupt chunks though.] They could just claim that they were uploading random data, and you would have to have some way to refute that (which you wouldn't unless you keep an audit trail of all peers you connect to over BitTorrent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good thing I live in Canada, where they will slavishly adopt this practice maybe two or three years from now.

</comment><comment><USER26> "monetizing infringement" ... a wonderfully cromulent idea!</comment>


My Startup: Keyword based link shortener/ad earner. Any feedback appreciated - <AUTHOR> http://www.deplnk.com

<comment><USER2> I like the idea but my opinion is that you need to clarify how the action of shrinking a link gets monetized.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I'm thinking, maybe a little info-graphic...

Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


ScienceGist - science in simple English  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencegist.com

<comment><USER2> That is such a fantastic idea! I enjoy browsing science papers on the internet, especially physics, so it is very cool concept to have a site where they are boiled down into non-specialist terms. Awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's going to be a difficult task, but probably a very worthy one. Even for scientists getting into a new field it would be useful to get an overview of some things first, before drilling down into the details.

We're working on a way to get existing plain english summaries from various places on the web and combine them with ScienceGist's database, to make ScienceGist a central, all-encompassing, permalinkable repository of simplified science.</comment></comment>


Woolf University: college courses literally on the Ethereum blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/03/24/woolf-university-college-courses-literally-on-the-ethereum-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> Wow! That's the worst ICO distribution ratio I've seen in a while.

      20% will be sold immediately / 30% to fund immediate development / 50% released over time to fund development

I thought hilariously imbalanced/overvalued ICOs were going to be _so_ 2017, but with Woolf's 20/80 split, it looks like we're just getting started!

<comment><USER3> Are you objecting to the high amount held by the developers? Why wouldn't you want to incentivize development? An actual bad ICO split would be where they sell 100% of the token and have no more incentive to build the app.

<comment><USER2> I'm objecting to all sorts of things.

1\. 20% in a token sale and 30% to fund immediate development are basically the same thing, except it seems like the designers (I won't call them developers yet because I haven't seen any development) are trying to make more money by waiting until their token is on an exchange, then selling the remaining 30% for what the hope is a higher price. If your goal is to be fair and fund development, at least make it 50% ICO and 50% ongoing dev at an emission rate, but don't muddy the waters by pretending the whole point of a token sale isn't to fund immediate development.

2\. As mentioned above, I don't see any actual development work, plans, or roadmap, so what justification to they have for the claim that they will need 125,000,000 WOOLF to fund ongoing dev? ICOs right now are the real bubble in cryptocurrency, as it's literally another dotcom bubble. People who have no idea what they actually need or are actually worth are just throwing out random numbers _because they can_ and people are buying into it. They don't know what their ongoing development is going to involve at this point. This is a bunch of guys getting together at Oxford saying "let's have an ICO, what can we get away with?" Just look at their backgrounds!

3\. And finally, the truth is that you really don't need a "Token Fund" to fund ongoing development. 100% distribution in an ICO should be fine. What encourages you to continue development is people actually _using_ the platform in the future, and you can _charge them for it_. This is supposed to be a University, right? So students are already paying educators for their time, why shouldn't they pay developers? If you have a website that is creating these smart contracts (presumably yes) and needs to be maintained, then charge an access fee for the website which covers development. Then, if people want to negotiate or write the smart contracts between themselves and educators without paying the platform fee, they can. Most people won't, but they could. That's kinda the point of doing this on the blockchain. Otherwise you might as well have a "SQL database powered university".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I strongly object to the name of the university.

<comment><USER5> I must be out of the loop - why exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> The really objectionable part is that it contains the term "University", implying it is one in any way.

<comment><USER5> Ah. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Woolf.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support <comment><USER2> I've been hammering on this issue for a while.

While I can't stand Trump personally and many of the things he stands for, the fact is that the American left has enclosed itself in a small number of alpha cities (look at the county election map) and effectively written off the rest of the country.

The objective fact is that it is _impossible_ for American industry to the American worker to compete with industry in countries with no EPA, no OSHA, no workers comp, no unions, an artificially low currency, and artificially depressed wages. This isn't about being globally "competitive." It's just not a fair fight. If this is the reality of globalization then it means the working class in developed nations is permanently relegated to poverty and dependence. The latter goes radically against these peoples' values. They don't want welfare. They want jobs.

Both liberals and old-guard conservatives have completely ignored this issue. Too many people are getting rich off labor arbitrage for one, but the more immediate reason is that it doesn't affect them very much. They tend to be urban, wealthy, and disconnected from the places and the people this issue does affect. Case in point: Orange County California (where I am sitting) is historically a Republican enclave but this year it went for Hillary. It's also very wealthy, educated, and fairly urban (and becoming more so). Meanwhile historically Democratic rural areas went Trump. You do the math.

You can't write off your entire working class and rural population in a democracy. This is the result.

<comment><USER3> The urban bubble is definitely a problem. There are so many people who simply do not understand life outside of that bubble and who dismiss anyone not part of it. Their solution for most problems rural people have is "move to a city", which rural people who enjoy their way of life but may still suffer from some challenges understandably find offensive and dismissive. I say this as a somewhat left-leaning person who lives in an extremely rural area, in my own little bubble of mostly liberal people.

The thing is, however, that there _are_ a lot of ignorant, racist and proud people in rural areas. Some of them are people I know. It can be overwhelmingly offensive being around them in groups as they reveal just how racist they actually are, with a smile and a laugh, either not caring how others might think about them or not realizing why what they just said is offensive. Go to a gas station or small store or mechanic around where I live and you'll encounter people standing around and talking about how Trump's going to round up all the Mexicans and Muslims and kick them out finally, or celebrating the fact that "Trump's going to finally lock up Hillary". So, I'm torn. It's a stereotype of rural life that people are ignorant and racist, but it does in fact describe a lot of people. And post-Trump, they've been emboldened to speak their mind more openly.

<comment><USER4> >Their solution for most problems rural people have is "move to a city", which rural people who enjoy their way of life but may still suffer from some challenges understandably find offensive and dismissive.

At some point you need to accept reality and move on

<comment><USER3> And that's the attitude many rural voters are revolting against, right there. Tired of being told how to live their lives by arrogant city dwellers who don't understand or have any experience with rural life at all, yet see themselves as smarter and better and qualified to tell rural people what to do and assuming _their_ way of life is suitable for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Haven't we had enough of this topic, _especially_ here?

<comment><USER6> I still see people blaming Trump voters instead of the Democrats, so no?</comment></comment>


Ask HN - Small cool niche conferences worth attending - <AUTHOR>

Any cool conferences out there?
Let's assemble a list without the usual suspects  (TED, E3 or SXSW)<p>Small cool niche conferences that you think are interesting. <comment><USER2> Strange Loop in St. Louis - <https://thestrangeloop.com/>

Big Omaha - <http://www.bigomaha.com/>

<comment><USER3> Thanks to my previous employer, in St. Louis, I attended the first two Strange Loop conferences. Although I wasn't able to go the third year (2011) I saw it's been growing by leaps and bounds. I think Strange Loop has the potential to be one of the big professional software conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the UK, the annual conference of the ACCU ( <http://accu.org/> ) is usually worth attending. Next one won't be for another year though. Here's the schedule for the last conference, if anyone is interested in the sort of stuff that usually gets covered: [http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2012/a...](http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2012/accu2012_schedule)

(What counts as small in this context btw?)

</comment><comment><USER5> For iOS development, 360iDev (<http://360idev.com>, Denver, September) is very good. World class speakers, great community feel, and quite affordable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Surge Conference in Baltimore is pretty good. And it's cheap. I call it "Velocity w/out Javascript"

<http://omniti.com/surge/2012>

</comment><comment><USER7> Top of my list: MicroConf

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I was there a few days ago, hands down the best conference I've been to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> in Germany : Chemnitz Linux Days / Chemnitzer Linux Tage. Happen usually on a weekend in March. Entrance fee is 8 Euros. Great value, very nerdy, never sold out,

[http://chemnitzer.linux- tage.de/2012/info/index?cookielang=e...](http://chemnitzer.linux- tage.de/2012/info/index?cookielang=en)

</comment><comment><USER10> Front end conf in Tampa bay is great <http://frontendconf.com></comment>


+1week: What I got from startupschool that you missed - <AUTHOR> http://www.oliyiptong.com/blog/2008/04/25/just-do-it/ It was great meeting the YC crowd. Here's my takeaway that people on HN seem to have missed. <comment><USER2> Because this isn't warfare. War is pretty serious: massive armies fighting to the death and all. Very little is analogous to war, so lets find a new metaphor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its true that the analogy is different from war, but what really got me thinking is that in the grand scheme of things, trying to get things right the first time is overrated.

It may be obvious to some, but for me, it was a salient point.

What do you think makes the metaphor different?</comment></comment>


Kindle Fire estimated cost to manufacture about $10 above retail - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220471/_Kindle_Fire_virtual_teardown_puts_cost_at_209.63_about_10_above_retail

<comment><USER2> If you look at the estimates for each item they seem relatively high so I was not surprised when I read that they could easily be making a $50 profit instead:

[http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4228505/Kindle- Fire-...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4228505/Kindle-Fire- profitable-at-estimated--150-BoM)

</comment><comment><USER3> How many times does this need to be posted on here? Seriously about the 5th time I think I've seen this.

I doubt even Amazon would sell it under the cost to manufacture, these studies are stupid since they are taking a pricing guide and then estimating how many they're going to sell and coming up with a number. I'm sure they're relatively close, but the only way to tell for sure is to be Amazon and look at their books. Simple as that.

Cost to replace defective units, cost for support… all those little costs add up and make me think there's no way in hell amazon is selling it at a loss.

Don't try to kid yourself into thinking they expect to make up for it in media sales either. That just isn't good business sense. Particularly when your product is different enough from the iPad that you don't need to hit that magic $200 price tag unless you are going to actually make money on it.

They're making money on it with every sale. It may not be a lot, but they're making money.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a loss leader for media.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was only one study. Another study said it is $10 under. And none of it takes into account people purchasing apps, the $29 covers, etc. The bigger risk to their bottom line would be the SNL episode newscast that disses the Fire. Apple must have seriously paid NBC off for that. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3058207></comment>


DevOps Reactions (humor) - <AUTHOR> http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> All the ones I saw apply pretty well to the dark ages before devops when it was just called ops. You know, ancient history like 2013 and earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't expect to get any work done today if you click on the link...</comment>