lostalaska 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (54) comment rss

  • On the post: Italian Prosecutor Still Wants To Put Google Execs In Jail Because Of A Video Uploaded By Some Kids

    lostalaska ( profile ), 13 Dec, 2012 @ 05:20pm

    Re: Italian Liability

    This just in... Italian courts and the politics it plays hates scientists, science and all technology! It's a shame they've had some great thinkers in that country in the past

  • On the post: Judge Suggests Apple Is 'Smoking Crack' With Its Witness List In Samsung Dispute

    lostalaska ( profile ), 16 Aug, 2012 @ 01:24pm

    Crackheads!?

    Apple said "We want a crack team of lawyers on this case!" instead they got a team of crackhead lawyers....

  • On the post: Company That Issued Bogus Takedown Says It Was All A Mistake, Apologizes

    lostalaska ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2012 @ 01:26pm

    So in your converstaion did they ever say what "flagged" the post?

    Just curious if they ever said what might of flagged the page as being under their license that would give them the 'right' to take it down?

    One other question, on a DMCA takedown does it require they point out the link/image/video/text that was the basis of the takedown or can they just say you had something of ours on your site and that's enough....

  • On the post: Senators Ramp Up Fear Mongering To Try To Rush Through Cybersecurity Bill

    lostalaska ( profile ), 17 Feb, 2012 @ 11:36am

    Hey Maybe Congress will....

    ...call in Micheal Bay to help them dream up ridiculous scenarios of hacking causing fireballs to erupt from the internet killing "literally" trillions of internet users.

    This reminds me so much of the overhyped doomsday scenerio's of Y2k where the people yelling loudest about it were coincidentally the same ones offering the expensive(lucrative?)solutions to a more or less non-problem that programmers had been quietly fixing for nearly a decade beforehand. It's like someone Netflixed Die Hard 2 and couldn't fall asleep afterward, what if they hack all the planes!

  • On the post: Is The US Meddling In Polish ACTA Voting?

    lostalaska ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2012 @ 03:16pm

    Re: I am part Polish...

    Don't worry at the rate things are going in the USA we'll just change the words polish or Poland to american or America.

    America... the most technologically advanced backwards thinking country in the world. It used to anger me how much of a decline we Americans have seen in our science programs and progress often at the behest of congress so we can continue all our "ideological wars" be it on terrorism, drugs and copyright. Looking at how we laud and embrace idiocy I feel like our decline as a world power can't come soon enough. We've gotten fat, lazy and far too self entitled for our own good. Let another country have it's golden age as we slide into our self induced technological dark age.

  • On the post: Kansas Governor Apologizes After Staff Gets High School Student In Trouble For Tweet About The Governor

    lostalaska ( profile ), 28 Nov, 2011 @ 03:31pm

    Re:

    My school district just outright tells students that they have no rights if they want to go to public school. Students that point this out as patently wrong are labeled as trouble makers and malcontents and tend to find themselves spending more and more time in Saturday school and the principals office. Strange thing is we had an awfully high rate of "social misfits" as the administration calls them that are honor students and social activists that when told outright lies tend to stand up and say "NO you are the one who is wrong".

  • On the post: British Transport Police: Illegal Downloading Kills Babies [Updated]

    lostalaska ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2011 @ 01:40pm

    Re: Priest

    Where do I sign up! ...to go against the church that is.

  • On the post: Will TV Providers Finally Realize That People Really Are Cutting The Cord — And Not Just Because Of The Economy

    lostalaska ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2011 @ 11:55am

    I wish I could cut the cord... but it's packaged

    I live in Juneau, Alaska and we have 3 options here. WiMAX (~$50, 2Mbit, no caps) which I tried, but it constantly disconnected and anything I tried to stream would constantly be buffering. So I canceled that after a month. Then I tried DSL (~$80, 4Mbit ,no caps) bundled with phone but for some reason I had horrible pings in excess of 1000ms on pretty much everything, although I was generally able to stream netflix or hulu without too many pauses for buffering. So after a few months I tried the 3rd internet option which is our local cable company (~$80, 10Mbit, 100GB cap). The problem is you can't just get internet access. They have it bundled with phone and TV, so to get a 10MB connection with a 100GB cap I'm paying over $200 month with a little over $120 of that for services I don't care about or use. Now the internet charge is only about $80 a month, but I'm also forced to pay for TV and phone because they only offer "convenience" bundles where it's all lumped together and I rarely ever watch TV since I use Netflix and Hulu when I want to watch a show.

    Honestly the cable companies "bundle's" is IMHO propping up the numbers of people who haven't cut the cord yet.

  • On the post: Police Claim That Allowing People To Film Them In Public Creates 'Chilling Effects'

    lostalaska ( profile ), 16 May, 2011 @ 03:50pm

    If you're up in the cops space as he's trying to do his job (especially if you're not part of the "situation" that brought the cops), then yes I think they should be able to detain you since your interfering with police work and it's one of the common ways to get arrested for "technically" doing nothing wrong. On the other hand if the cop has to walk across the street and tell you to put your camera away then it's just a cop being a douche since you were well outside their "sphere of control".

    The few times I've dealt with officers it's been about 50/50 some have been super nice and talkative even able to relate to, while others have been all about trying to put the fear of the police into you and threatening to arrest you for obstructions of justice, or interfering with police work when you've done nothing wrong and aren't holding back any info. I'm of the opinion that going to jail or being detained is literally a coin toss as to what kind of officer you are going to be dealing with.

    NOTE: most of my experience has been as a witness to a crime (fender benders, 1 robbery while living in PHX) or for a very short span of renting a room in a house where the landlords (a couple on the rocks) would get get into huge verbal fights and throwing all of each others stuff out the windows and on the lawn. The cops would come out for domestic that a neighbor would call in... I got the hell out of there fast both of the owners were sociopaths that cops apparently knew by first name. (sometime saving a few hundred a month just isn't worth it).

  • On the post: The PROTECT IP Act Is About The Old Media Industry Going To War With The Internet

    lostalaska ( profile ), 16 May, 2011 @ 12:55pm

    Re: It's funny

    Yeah, JFK died in 1963 so it's closing in on 50 years since his death. Interestingly the drumbeat for less secrecy and censorship has been going on long before JFK, sad so few people actually realize this has been going on for generations with little to nothing actually being changed.

  • On the post: The Music Industry Is Desperate For A Few Good Technologists

    lostalaska ( profile ), 10 May, 2011 @ 05:41pm

    I would rather jump into a swimming pool of razer blades then.......

    Having worked in IT for 15 years now I would rather spend the rest of my life demoted to doing phone support hell for clueless users then ever have to deal in any way with the music industry.

    I had a friend making a documentary (late 90's) and wanted to be above board with the whole thing so he started looking into what it takes to license an obscure jazz song from the early 1940's. He wound up with two different companies and an estranged relative all claiming rights to the music all wanting vastly different sums of money for him to use a 30 second clip during some montage scene in his documentary. After months of wrangling back and forth over it he finally just gave up on the idea of licensing that song and instead used some old blues recordings from the turn of the century that claimed to be in the public domain, most likely less than 500 people ever saw his documentary.

    BTW, I think a lot of "techies" are into music and making it. I play bass, a little guitar and used to be able to keep a few basic rhythms/beats going on the drums. I generally enjoyed the audio engineering (recording) end of the whole thing. The ill will created over the years by the music industry trying to proclaim that all the fans are thieves and exaggerating the impact of the internet's impact on the decline of music. The basic point is the music industry can't ever look toward the future because they're only ever focused on the next fiscal quarter. That and try and do anything revolutionary with technology and music and their distribution systems and you'll get stonewalled. Remember all the gnashing of teeth by the music industry when iTunes (a legit way to download music) was trying to take off. Apple literally had to bribe the music companies to get them on board. What's the point of working for someone who will fight you tooth and nail if you want to innovate?

  • On the post: Surprise: NY Times Doesn't Think Osama Bin Laden's Death Warrants Taking Down The Paywall

    lostalaska ( profile ), 03 May, 2011 @ 03:13pm

    Devils Advocate, really... I'm not Trolling.

    Just playing the devils advocate here not meaning to be a Troll. NYTimes probably would only be willing to take down the paywall if there were major attacks on our nation (i.e. 9/11). Not for finding and killing the man accused of being behind the attacks.

    Now with that said, I'll just sit and wait for the Times to die a slow and agonizing death as their content suffocates behind that joke of a paywall. Funny thing is with their paywall in place I don't think anyone would even really consider using the NYTimes as their goto place for news during a crisis unless you're one of hundreds (or is it dozens) with an account. The rest of us have pretty easily found other solid resources for our news, which we would go to first.

  • On the post: The Ridiculous Demands The Record Labels Want For Music Lockers

    lostalaska ( profile ), 29 Apr, 2011 @ 05:24pm

    MP3 to Tapes... OMG I'm ooooooold

    Back in the Mid to late 90's when MP3's were just starting to show up on the primitive internet (B.N. before napster) I remember spending an entire evening on a dial up connection to barely download 60 minutes worth of music. Then I'd plug my cassette deck into my headphone output on my computer and record the MP3's to tapes to listen to in my car.

    Even before that I used to take CD's or tapes over to friends places and we'd copy them to blank tapes to share and listen to. According to the music industry and their views on piracy the entire music industry should have died out when blank tapes and dual high speed dubbing tape decks came out. I remember them raising holy hell back then in the early 80's about tape copying killing the music industry. I remember I used to do my homework with my tape deck next to me listening to the radio and I'd quickly hit record when a good song came on so i'd "have it" for listening to whenever.

  • On the post: Michigan State Police Say It'll Cost $545k To Discover What Info It's Copying Off Mobile Phones During Traffic Stops [Updated]

    lostalaska ( profile ), 20 Apr, 2011 @ 01:33pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: phone snooping

    Yeah, my understanding was the extended search is done under the argument that the officer is making sure you don't have knives, guns or anything that could be used as deadly force against an officer. Locked compartments like trunk or glovebox means the pulled over driver couldn't easily grab a weapon from them.

    I'm still unsure of the point of searching a phone is beyond the cops going on a fishing expedition to arrest you for something completely unrelated to the traffic stop.

  • On the post: Irony? Righthaven Accuses One Of The 239 Sites It has Sued Of 'Litigation Overkill'

    lostalaska ( profile ), 11 Mar, 2011 @ 04:40pm

    Poetic...

    I guess they're finding it less than fun to be on the receiving end of litigation thats only point is to utterly screw you over.

  • On the post: If The US Wants To Have Any Credibility On Internet Freedom It Should Drop The Attempt To Prosecute Assange

    lostalaska ( profile ), 07 Feb, 2011 @ 02:14pm

    We (the USA) have a long history of this...

    Be it dropping atomic bombs on another country and then pushing for nuclear disarmament. Or talking about a free and open internet and then trying to block something they don't agree with. Seems like we have a long history of shooting ourselves in the foot. I kind of doubt this is going to change anytime soon.

  • On the post: Techno-Panic Reporting: The Media Deserves No Mercy

    lostalaska ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2011 @ 02:16pm

    It drives me crazy watching the lazy coverage

    I'm not that heavy into politics and finance, but I have been working in IT for the last 15 years and keep up to date with all the tech news I can via RSS feeds and a few aggregators. So when I watch news programs where they talk about technology and are so incredibly wrong in what they're reporting it makes me wonder if they actually do any kind of research for any of their reports.

    The majority of the news nowadays just seems to pander to the lowest common denominator, which means at best it's mediocre and at it's worst it's just the mouthpiece for whatever organization sent them the "hot tip" of the day. Then they just parrot the talking points without actually looking into any of it. Lazy reporting and a lack of integrity is whats killing the "big" news media IMHO, and the whole head in the sand about how the market is changing.. but that's like beating a dead horse on this site.

  • On the post: Why Are US Publications Downplaying The Significance Of Some Of Wikileaks' Leaks?

    lostalaska ( profile ), 21 Dec, 2010 @ 12:01pm

    Reaction to Leaks similar to the stages of grief?

    Similar to the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think for the Wikileak's we're somewhere between the anger and bargaining stages. Curious to see how the depression stage is handled.

  • On the post: Congressional Hearing On Wikileaks Surprisingly Focuses More On Gov't Overly Secretive Actions

    lostalaska ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2010 @ 05:45pm

    Every 108 minutes...

    I like to think Assange has a small device on his persons and he has to enter a code every 108 minutes or a script is run that dumps the "insurance" file's contents onto wikileaks and other random sites.

  • On the post: Dutch Anti-Piracy Group, With MPAA's Help, Able To Grab 29 US-Hosted Domains… With No Trial Or Notice

    lostalaska ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 01:38pm

    Legal Basis of this law?

    Guess I'm gonna have to do some reading on this. I'm trying to figure out what legal basis they used to claim this was totally legal thing to do.

Next >>