Well, yes. A better metaphor is that car companies shouldn't be allowed to sell cars with cheap car alarms that can, in theory, be disabled in less than five minutes, and should have to either provide much more expensive ones...or they sell it with no alarms at all, like almost all cars. If they sell one with a car alarm that can be disabled in a short amount of time, they need to get the customer to do a lot of paperwork.
There's an arguable position that all car should have to come with car alarms, ones to a certain level, and that customers should be warned if they don't.
There's not really a reasonable arguments that says they can come without a car alarm, with no warning at all, but if you provide a cheap-ass one for a tiny bit more security, you have to give them all sorts of waivers to sign.
Firefox, and IE, right now, pop up enough warnings that make it seem that a web surf allowing an self-signed cert is the most dangerous thing you can do....which results in people not using any encryption at all for quite a lot of stuff. (Like, oh, the login to slashdot.)
People in favor of this talk about a 'false sense of security'. Ha. How about the false sense of insecurity browsers provide? Simply a single message 'This web site uses encryption that cannot be authenticated. Be aware it is no more secure than a standard web page.' would be more than enough. (Or, even better, no warning at all, and simply an unlocked 'lock' icon.)
Sure show a warning, show some visual cues, but there's something like too much of a good thing. If a user really can't tell the difference between a self-signed certificate after giving them a warning and using completely different icons/colours from other SSL-sites, perhaps that user needs his head examined.
More to the point, if they can't tell the difference, they're probably not looking for SSL in the first place, which means all this yammering about MiM is incredibly fucking pointless. They'll get MiMed just fine, and it won't use SSL at all, at least not on their end.
All this talk about 'users falling for MiM' is pretexted on one, very stupid idea: That people who want to use unsigned certs think they should be presented identically to signed certs in browsers.
There is, rather obviously, no one who actually thinks that. Everyone agrees they should be presented differently.
Presenting them as less secure than an unencrypted site, with huge warning messages to click past, though, is just idiotic. There's no possible way they're less secure, which means, at worst, the site should just be presented as if it's unencrypted.
THEN DON'T PUT UP THE LOCK ICON ON SELF-SIGNED CONNECTIONS.
Jesus Christ. Is almost everyone here totally stoned?
We want encryption, not authentication. Apparently, at least half the tech population is too goddamn stupid to understand how that could be possible.
Because, apparently, if a car doesn't come with a car alarm and lo-jack and onstar, car companies shouldn't be allowed to provide fucking locks on the door, because that provides 'a false sense of security'.
Additionally, you've trained them to accept self-signed certs from people who actually have real accounts. Over the next week, their Paypal account, bank information, and credit card details are stolen, all because you convinced them it's a "commercial stunt."
I believe it is you who trained them, by providing that warning.
The rest of us just want a trivial amount of protection for our fucking BB login, and we'd be happy if the browser didn't even mention it was SSL at all.
You're really not grasping this, are you? People complaining don't want to run damn bank sites or storefronts or anything you'd need signed SSL for.
We want to take things currently with no encryption at all and put a cheap SSL cert up there so that we're not sending cleartext passwords. Things like slashdot. Half the stuff is on shared IPs, so we couldn't even get a real cert for it, because we need a * one.
The joke is, for the longest time, browsers have provided visual clues that a site is SSL. Why are those clues not enough? Why not simply remove those clues for self-signed sites? Why popup bigass warnings?
The actual truth of the matter is that people don't use those clues. Half the time they don't look at their damn address bar at all. And because they don't use those clues, almost all phish attacks don't even bother with SSL, which sorta makes the whole 'people might be tricked by unsigned certs' argument look rather dumb.
God, everyone else is so stupid about car insurance. At least you reached the halfway point with 'non-profit', but you need to take it another step:
Have the state government do it. You are required to pay into a fund every year you drive. (Aka, car tags just went up by 1000%.) If your car is damaged in an auto accident that isn't your fault, the government pays for it.
And we also increase the cost of fines for such accidents, by ten times or more, payable over a few years...aka, the bad driver's insurance premium went up.
The current system is sheer nonsense. The state already collects money from drivers. The state already finds fault in car accidents and levees fines. All it needs to do is increase both of those and direct some of the money to victims of accidents.
And instead of worrying about the 'likelihood' of an accident, something that is unfair and discriminatory towards different ages, genders, and races, it will be fining people for actual crimes committed.
Independent insurance companies, of course, could still provide comprehensive coverage, for damage caused by drivers to their own vehicles or damages incurred while not driving. (Hail damage and whatnot.) Heck, they could even insure against the state-levied fines if they want.
'Mandatory insurance that everyone has that is provided by private industry' is possibly the stupidest rip-off-ist idea that has even been invented.
(Someone here is going to mention 'but what about the cost of health care'. Yeah, guess who I think should be providing that.)
Problem is that your "2" doesn't exist... the way SSL (and most other secure protocols, as SSH) is designed, having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up.
Um, dude. Perhaps you should pay a little more attention. SSH operates via '2'. There's not even such a thing as a signed SSH key. Granted, you can use PPK to keep someone from forwarding the connection, but good luck getting the PPK on without logging in with the password once.
With SSH, the trick is to make the first connection over an internet connection that you trust, and it stores the fingerprint for future reference.
SSL sites that didn't need authentication, that just wanted password protection against cleartext sniffing on login, could trivially operate the same way.
Like it or not, there actually is a very wide range of websites that, right now, use no encryption at all, but would use SSL if it was free, and there is absolutely no way that could make them more insecure. Likewise, there are a variety of circumstances where it is easy to sniff on a user but difficult to intercept and replace their transmission.
Almost all cars can be broken into in about 60 seconds, using a slim jim on the door. However, people still lock their doors. Basically, you're arguing that it shouldn't be possible to lock a car unless it has a full-fledged car alarm, which is a rather...stupid...argument.
There is no fucking blind spot. Learn to adjust your mirrors correctly.
Some cars actually have blind spots no matter how you adjust the mirrors. However, those people need to learn to turn their fucking head. I still turn my head when changing lanes, and I know I don't have a blind spot, and I keep track of cars in the first place so I know where they are.
I don't drive a motorcycle, I don't even know how, but I know exactly what you mean about drivers.
I almost got frontended stopped at a stop sign. It was a four-way stop, and a complete moron pulled up on the right at the same time as me, while yammering on a cell phone. We both stopped, and like the rules say, I waited for her to go first, which did, turning left...straight into me, cutting the corner. I kid you not. She stopped about a foot from my front bumper, looking shocked there was a car stopped at the stop sign.
I actually saw her coming, but didn't manage to hit reverse in time. All I could think was 'Well, this is going to be interesting for her to explain to the police, how she pegged a car from the front which was stopped at a stop sign'
The thing that then made me laugh afterwards was that she looked at me, right after she stopped, like she expected me to back up. Um, no. After a moment or two, she realized she was in a completely absurd position, backed up, and drove off. I then actually looked out the window and checked to make sure I was behind the white line. Yup.
She's incredibly lucky I wasn't on her right, or I would have probably gone at the same time as her and rammed straight into her. Because she apparently stopped at a stop sign, and then went forward without looking for other cars stopped there.
If, tomorrow, every single person was charged and convicted of every single crime they'd ever committed...we'd live in a free country by Friday. You can't fine the entire driving population of the country tens of thousands of dollar each. You can't arrest 20% of the population for drug use. (And if the RIAA is right that ripping a CD to computer is illegal...)
Letting the police enforce the law to whatever level they want is absurd. It just means the police enforce the law against whoever they want. I'm all for introducing automated means into the police's work, because then they have to actually account for who they gave tickets to and who they didn't.
A few months ago I pulled over for 'weaving'. 'Weaving', which is defined as your tires touching either the white lines or the yellow lines, is something that every single person does every time they drive anywhere. Period. There are intersections that you do it every time at. There are turnoffs where, to take them without 'weaving', you'd have to fully stop and execute a perfect right turn, because the dashed turn area starts exactly at the road. (Who here even notices the dashed breaks in the yellow and white lines when they turn, much less aims between them?) No one can drive without 'weaving'.
They pulled me over because they wanted to look in my car. I have long hair, I have a beard and mustache, I have bumper stickers on my car saying 'Support our troops, bring them home' and 'If they can torture terrorists, they can torture you', and the car has a partially bashed-in front and is somewhat dirty, and I was driving around in the middle of the day on a route that drugs take from here to Atlanta. Who knows what triggered their 'He might be running drugs' or whatever made them decide to pull me over?
They actually got really disinterested after I got out of my car wearing a theatre t-shirt and had a laptop in the back. I guess meth-heads don't volunteer to do tech for musicals or have laptops, and they correctly reclassified me as 'nerd' and didn't bother with more than looking in the windows.
Oddly enough, if they actually wanted to cite me for an actual real offense, my left front turn signal is missing the cover and hence illegally flashes white instead of amber. They looked right at my frontend, which is bashed in and has a plexiglass cover over the headlight, and an obviously uncovered turn signal, and didn't even comment. (Legally, though, I'm not sure they can make you demonstrate that your car lights work.)
The idea that buses should ever stop running is just idiotic on the face of it.
Yes, running buses at those times loses money, but failing to run buses at all times means people won't take the bus at other times. It's just pure stupidity.
I used to go to college in Marretta, which had a very suck bus transport system, but it did work. I used it for a year, and then got a car, and rarely used it after that.
Why? Because it shut down at 11, and the main place I wanted to go was to a nearby mall, where I'd wander for a while, go to the bookstore, and then go see a movie. Movies often end past 11, and the sheer crappiness of their bus system means I would start getting worried if I didn't catch their 10 o'clock bus. (And I was a lucky one, my school being directly before the bus terminal, on that bus route, so if I caught a bus it would always reach home.)
Of course, half the stores closed at 11 also, at least on Fridays and weekends, which meant that the workers stayed until at least 11:30, which meant they couldn't get a bus.
Even if the store closed at 10, they'd stay until 10:30, which meant they could possibly get one bus, but heaven forbid if they had to transfer to another bus line to get home.
The correct solution to 'loses money' is to switch to vans at a certain point in the night, and switch back in the morning. Not to just shut the whole damn route off, which means that unless people are positive they'll be able to catch a bus before that point, they won't take it to get there either.
The way to fix law enforcement is not to make law enforcement harder. That's just stupid.
The way to fix law enforcement is to make it easier and more transparent.
If we could magically find and convict everyone of every crime they'd every committed, tomorrow, I'd be all for it. It might get rid of some of the bullshit laws out there.
Until then, I have no problem with the police knowing everywhere I'm at, everything I do, every second of the day...and them rotting in prison if they decide to reveal any of that to anyone else, outside the bounds of prosecuting me for a crime.
Works have to be registered with the copyright office to bring suit over them anyway, so, in a sense, what I already proposed exists. Except the cost is much much less, about $45.
I just propose upping it to, maybe, $1000 so that people will have to ask themselves: Do I really expect to make $1000 dollars off this over the next 14 years?
It would keep the 'automatic copyright' feature that we like, in case a work becomes popular, but mean that works that don't make money others can can copy without much worry.
Concert tickets are too expensive - that means there's more demand than supply. So even if you don't go to concerts and buy $40 T-shirts, that has no bearing on the music economy in general. Seriously, if a band you liked was in town playing the local theatre for $10 a seat you wouldn't go?
No kidding. The real problem is how the industry is structured...they like to make megastars, as promotion is cheaper for the studios.
The problem is that megastars, obviously, can't give anywhere near the amount of concerts that people want. You can say 'Up the supply', but in actuality there is a limit to the number of concerts a band can give, or wants to give.
We'd be a lot better off if the popularity of the top 100 bands and acts were distributed to the top 1000, and tickets were a tenth the price and venues were a tenth the size and only 3/4rds full.
As it is, I've accepted that there are people and bands I'm simply never going to see (Like the Barenaked Ladies), as I don't want to drive four hours and pay 100 dollars to see a band I love in a football stadium, when I have no problem seeing bands I just mildy like playing in a nearby venue the size of a movie theater for 10-20 dollars.
Support your local music scene. You don't have to be an 'independent music snob' and hate the big guys. You can still buy their CDs and whatnot.
But instead of spending huge amounts of time and money to see them in concert, consider spending half that money to see half a dozen of the smaller guys and seeing if there's someone you like.
On a more practical note, I personally refuse to pay more than about 100 dollars an hour to be entertained, and every hour of prep work and driving counts as -15 minutes of entertainment. (And gas costs too, of course.) Many concerts would actually manage to exceed this.
And, as a bonus, less works will be lost because no one can figure out the copyright holder. There are thousands of hours of film in the basement of studios and whatnot that no one can figure out the copyright on.
All you'd have to do is hold them for 14 years, and presto, if no one's renewed them, they're public domain.
Actually, a smarter start might be to only give everyone age_of_materials/14 years to renew them. Hence works under 28 years, you have to renew within two years of that change passing, within 42 you have three, within 56 you have four, etc. This means that, the older the work, the more time you have to build up money for the renewal. (You'd only have to pay a proportional amount of the renewal to cover it until the next 14-year scheduled one.)
This is opposed to someone running smack into the wall by having a 55.9 years old work they need to renew but don't have the cash. They'd get four years of revenue from the work, and then have to pay for 10 years of a renewal at the '56 year' cost. So it's not an undue burden. (And it means people with 56.1 year-old works can't coast for another 13.9 years.)
And, additionally, it means that all works must be originally renewed within the first six or seven years (There are no copyrights older then that.), so old stuff that no one wants, or even knows who owns, ends up in the public domain much faster.
Incidentally, I don't think we should give the first 14 years for free, either. I think we should have a fee, but you only have to pay it if you want to challenge someone in court. (I.e., you only have to pay it if it's profitable enough that someone tries to steal it, and you want to stop them.) And if you do prove infringement, they should have to pay it for you.:)
I have yet to see a single thing that Disney created even mostly from scratch.
No shit. Anyone who thinks Disney somehow deserves their characters not falling into public domain needs to look at what they did with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Pinnochio.
In both cases, the copyright was 56 years.
'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland': published 1865, Disney produced 'Alice's Wonderland', a rather forgotten mix of animation and live action shorts, in 1923, 58 years later.
'Pinocchio': final version published 1883, Disney produced animated film 'Pinocchio' in 1940, 57 years later. (Actually, more like 56.25 years, which rather implies they were working on the film while the book was still under copyright.)
I don't think QuantumG was proposing no copyright at all. I think everyone agrees that if someone spends a lot of time and money actually, for example, filming a movie, they ought to, for some amount of time, be able to charge people to see it.
However, there's a difference between 'a literal copy' and other people 'using characters and the fictional world and whatnot'.
The character of Superman should be public domain at this point in time. The movie Superman Returns should not be, at least not yet.
Some people out there, and I'm close to being one of them, think the character of Superman should have never been copyrightable, and that society would be better off if people could have always used that character. (But not directly copied the comic books, or movies, or TV shows, and sold them, not for a specific amount of time.)
Or look at this way: Harry Potter is done. The series is done, and it's been stated that no more books are forthcoming. That means there will not be another Harry Potter book for, probably, 100 years.
Are we really going to claim that helps 'promotes the Progress of useful Arts'?
For every mother you scare into "shielding" her child from the nasty filesharing networks, there will be 4 more enlightened parents who lived through napster and teach their kids how to circumvent the controls.
No shit. Things might get more draconian with copyright law for the next decade...but people have been trading MP3s for more than a decade at this point. And it started at colleges.
That means that all those college kids in the late 90s are 'responsible' adults now. They probably do buy their music, now that they have money, but they sure as hell aren't going to support fining people who are, in essence, them a decade ago, ten thousand dollars. They remember being broke, and their music collection, even if now they have a huge legal CD or iTunes collection.
The sole advantage the music industry has at this point is that there isn't anyone speaking for 'the pirates'. Just wait...within a decade laxer punishments for copyright infringement will be a campaign issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the proxy generate a certificate on the fly with a matching hostname? If yes, just import the proxy root certificate.
Wouldn't that, in fact, be incredibly dangerous?
Well, yes. A better metaphor is that car companies shouldn't be allowed to sell cars with cheap car alarms that can, in theory, be disabled in less than five minutes, and should have to either provide much more expensive ones...or they sell it with no alarms at all, like almost all cars. If they sell one with a car alarm that can be disabled in a short amount of time, they need to get the customer to do a lot of paperwork.
There's an arguable position that all car should have to come with car alarms, ones to a certain level, and that customers should be warned if they don't.
There's not really a reasonable arguments that says they can come without a car alarm, with no warning at all, but if you provide a cheap-ass one for a tiny bit more security, you have to give them all sorts of waivers to sign.
Firefox, and IE, right now, pop up enough warnings that make it seem that a web surf allowing an self-signed cert is the most dangerous thing you can do....which results in people not using any encryption at all for quite a lot of stuff. (Like, oh, the login to slashdot.)
People in favor of this talk about a 'false sense of security'. Ha. How about the false sense of insecurity browsers provide? Simply a single message 'This web site uses encryption that cannot be authenticated. Be aware it is no more secure than a standard web page.' would be more than enough. (Or, even better, no warning at all, and simply an unlocked 'lock' icon.)
Sure show a warning, show some visual cues, but there's something like too much of a good thing. If a user really can't tell the difference between a self-signed certificate after giving them a warning and using completely different icons/colours from other SSL-sites, perhaps that user needs his head examined.
More to the point, if they can't tell the difference, they're probably not looking for SSL in the first place, which means all this yammering about MiM is incredibly fucking pointless. They'll get MiMed just fine, and it won't use SSL at all, at least not on their end.
All this talk about 'users falling for MiM' is pretexted on one, very stupid idea: That people who want to use unsigned certs think they should be presented identically to signed certs in browsers.
There is, rather obviously, no one who actually thinks that. Everyone agrees they should be presented differently.
Presenting them as less secure than an unencrypted site, with huge warning messages to click past, though, is just idiotic. There's no possible way they're less secure, which means, at worst, the site should just be presented as if it's unencrypted.
THEN DON'T PUT UP THE LOCK ICON ON SELF-SIGNED CONNECTIONS.
Jesus Christ. Is almost everyone here totally stoned?
We want encryption, not authentication. Apparently, at least half the tech population is too goddamn stupid to understand how that could be possible.
Because, apparently, if a car doesn't come with a car alarm and lo-jack and onstar, car companies shouldn't be allowed to provide fucking locks on the door, because that provides 'a false sense of security'.
Additionally, you've trained them to accept self-signed certs from people who actually have real accounts. Over the next week, their Paypal account, bank information, and credit card details are stolen, all because you convinced them it's a "commercial stunt."
I believe it is you who trained them, by providing that warning.
The rest of us just want a trivial amount of protection for our fucking BB login, and we'd be happy if the browser didn't even mention it was SSL at all.
You're really not grasping this, are you? People complaining don't want to run damn bank sites or storefronts or anything you'd need signed SSL for.
We want to take things currently with no encryption at all and put a cheap SSL cert up there so that we're not sending cleartext passwords. Things like slashdot. Half the stuff is on shared IPs, so we couldn't even get a real cert for it, because we need a * one.
The joke is, for the longest time, browsers have provided visual clues that a site is SSL. Why are those clues not enough? Why not simply remove those clues for self-signed sites? Why popup bigass warnings?
The actual truth of the matter is that people don't use those clues. Half the time they don't look at their damn address bar at all. And because they don't use those clues, almost all phish attacks don't even bother with SSL, which sorta makes the whole 'people might be tricked by unsigned certs' argument look rather dumb.
God, everyone else is so stupid about car insurance. At least you reached the halfway point with 'non-profit', but you need to take it another step:
Have the state government do it. You are required to pay into a fund every year you drive. (Aka, car tags just went up by 1000%.) If your car is damaged in an auto accident that isn't your fault, the government pays for it.
And we also increase the cost of fines for such accidents, by ten times or more, payable over a few years...aka, the bad driver's insurance premium went up.
The current system is sheer nonsense. The state already collects money from drivers. The state already finds fault in car accidents and levees fines. All it needs to do is increase both of those and direct some of the money to victims of accidents.
And instead of worrying about the 'likelihood' of an accident, something that is unfair and discriminatory towards different ages, genders, and races, it will be fining people for actual crimes committed.
Independent insurance companies, of course, could still provide comprehensive coverage, for damage caused by drivers to their own vehicles or damages incurred while not driving. (Hail damage and whatnot.) Heck, they could even insure against the state-levied fines if they want.
'Mandatory insurance that everyone has that is provided by private industry' is possibly the stupidest rip-off-ist idea that has even been invented.
(Someone here is going to mention 'but what about the cost of health care'. Yeah, guess who I think should be providing that.)
Problem is that your "2" doesn't exist... the way SSL (and most other secure protocols, as SSH) is designed, having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up.
Um, dude. Perhaps you should pay a little more attention. SSH operates via '2'. There's not even such a thing as a signed SSH key. Granted, you can use PPK to keep someone from forwarding the connection, but good luck getting the PPK on without logging in with the password once.
With SSH, the trick is to make the first connection over an internet connection that you trust, and it stores the fingerprint for future reference.
SSL sites that didn't need authentication, that just wanted password protection against cleartext sniffing on login, could trivially operate the same way.
Like it or not, there actually is a very wide range of websites that, right now, use no encryption at all, but would use SSL if it was free, and there is absolutely no way that could make them more insecure. Likewise, there are a variety of circumstances where it is easy to sniff on a user but difficult to intercept and replace their transmission.
Almost all cars can be broken into in about 60 seconds, using a slim jim on the door. However, people still lock their doors. Basically, you're arguing that it shouldn't be possible to lock a car unless it has a full-fledged car alarm, which is a rather...stupid...argument.
Except, honestly, people are so damn stupid that most 'attacks' are just done without any SSL at all.
How is that worse then a no choice at all?
At least there new customers have options, so companies at least have to pretend to keep customers slightly satisfied.
My local phone company, OTOH, is my local cable company. :)
There is no fucking blind spot. Learn to adjust your mirrors correctly.
Some cars actually have blind spots no matter how you adjust the mirrors. However, those people need to learn to turn their fucking head. I still turn my head when changing lanes, and I know I don't have a blind spot, and I keep track of cars in the first place so I know where they are.
I don't drive a motorcycle, I don't even know how, but I know exactly what you mean about drivers.
I almost got frontended stopped at a stop sign. It was a four-way stop, and a complete moron pulled up on the right at the same time as me, while yammering on a cell phone. We both stopped, and like the rules say, I waited for her to go first, which did, turning left...straight into me, cutting the corner. I kid you not. She stopped about a foot from my front bumper, looking shocked there was a car stopped at the stop sign.
I actually saw her coming, but didn't manage to hit reverse in time. All I could think was 'Well, this is going to be interesting for her to explain to the police, how she pegged a car from the front which was stopped at a stop sign'
The thing that then made me laugh afterwards was that she looked at me, right after she stopped, like she expected me to back up. Um, no. After a moment or two, she realized she was in a completely absurd position, backed up, and drove off. I then actually looked out the window and checked to make sure I was behind the white line. Yup.
She's incredibly lucky I wasn't on her right, or I would have probably gone at the same time as her and rammed straight into her. Because she apparently stopped at a stop sign, and then went forward without looking for other cars stopped there.
Bingo. I'm glad someone else grasps this.
If, tomorrow, every single person was charged and convicted of every single crime they'd ever committed...we'd live in a free country by Friday. You can't fine the entire driving population of the country tens of thousands of dollar each. You can't arrest 20% of the population for drug use. (And if the RIAA is right that ripping a CD to computer is illegal...)
Letting the police enforce the law to whatever level they want is absurd. It just means the police enforce the law against whoever they want. I'm all for introducing automated means into the police's work, because then they have to actually account for who they gave tickets to and who they didn't.
A few months ago I pulled over for 'weaving'. 'Weaving', which is defined as your tires touching either the white lines or the yellow lines, is something that every single person does every time they drive anywhere. Period. There are intersections that you do it every time at. There are turnoffs where, to take them without 'weaving', you'd have to fully stop and execute a perfect right turn, because the dashed turn area starts exactly at the road. (Who here even notices the dashed breaks in the yellow and white lines when they turn, much less aims between them?) No one can drive without 'weaving'.
They pulled me over because they wanted to look in my car. I have long hair, I have a beard and mustache, I have bumper stickers on my car saying 'Support our troops, bring them home' and 'If they can torture terrorists, they can torture you', and the car has a partially bashed-in front and is somewhat dirty, and I was driving around in the middle of the day on a route that drugs take from here to Atlanta. Who knows what triggered their 'He might be running drugs' or whatever made them decide to pull me over?
They actually got really disinterested after I got out of my car wearing a theatre t-shirt and had a laptop in the back. I guess meth-heads don't volunteer to do tech for musicals or have laptops, and they correctly reclassified me as 'nerd' and didn't bother with more than looking in the windows.
Oddly enough, if they actually wanted to cite me for an actual real offense, my left front turn signal is missing the cover and hence illegally flashes white instead of amber. They looked right at my frontend, which is bashed in and has a plexiglass cover over the headlight, and an obviously uncovered turn signal, and didn't even comment. (Legally, though, I'm not sure they can make you demonstrate that your car lights work.)
How do you run in a disguise like that?
Which, if you've ever driven in the US, you might be surprised to learn that, yes, roads are occasionally repaired around here.
Cite, please.
The idea that buses should ever stop running is just idiotic on the face of it.
Yes, running buses at those times loses money, but failing to run buses at all times means people won't take the bus at other times. It's just pure stupidity.
I used to go to college in Marretta, which had a very suck bus transport system, but it did work. I used it for a year, and then got a car, and rarely used it after that.
Why? Because it shut down at 11, and the main place I wanted to go was to a nearby mall, where I'd wander for a while, go to the bookstore, and then go see a movie. Movies often end past 11, and the sheer crappiness of their bus system means I would start getting worried if I didn't catch their 10 o'clock bus. (And I was a lucky one, my school being directly before the bus terminal, on that bus route, so if I caught a bus it would always reach home.)
Of course, half the stores closed at 11 also, at least on Fridays and weekends, which meant that the workers stayed until at least 11:30, which meant they couldn't get a bus.
Even if the store closed at 10, they'd stay until 10:30, which meant they could possibly get one bus, but heaven forbid if they had to transfer to another bus line to get home.
The correct solution to 'loses money' is to switch to vans at a certain point in the night, and switch back in the morning. Not to just shut the whole damn route off, which means that unless people are positive they'll be able to catch a bus before that point, they won't take it to get there either.
Yet we'd legitimately call that a police state.
No we wouldn't. A police state is where the police make the laws. (Either actually passing laws or enforcing laws they just made up.)
Of course, exactly the same thing could be done by a corrupt policeman, which is why we shouldn't have corrupt policemen in the first place.
Fixed that for you.
Exactly.
The way to fix law enforcement is not to make law enforcement harder. That's just stupid.
The way to fix law enforcement is to make it easier and more transparent.
If we could magically find and convict everyone of every crime they'd every committed, tomorrow, I'd be all for it. It might get rid of some of the bullshit laws out there.
Until then, I have no problem with the police knowing everywhere I'm at, everything I do, every second of the day...and them rotting in prison if they decide to reveal any of that to anyone else, outside the bounds of prosecuting me for a crime.
Ah, you must live in that part of the world where there's actually more than one company providing DSL over an area.
Works have to be registered with the copyright office to bring suit over them anyway, so, in a sense, what I already proposed exists. Except the cost is much much less, about $45.
I just propose upping it to, maybe, $1000 so that people will have to ask themselves: Do I really expect to make $1000 dollars off this over the next 14 years?
It would keep the 'automatic copyright' feature that we like, in case a work becomes popular, but mean that works that don't make money others can can copy without much worry.
Concert tickets are too expensive - that means there's more demand than supply. So even if you don't go to concerts and buy $40 T-shirts, that has no bearing on the music economy in general. Seriously, if a band you liked was in town playing the local theatre for $10 a seat you wouldn't go?
No kidding. The real problem is how the industry is structured...they like to make megastars, as promotion is cheaper for the studios.
The problem is that megastars, obviously, can't give anywhere near the amount of concerts that people want. You can say 'Up the supply', but in actuality there is a limit to the number of concerts a band can give, or wants to give.
We'd be a lot better off if the popularity of the top 100 bands and acts were distributed to the top 1000, and tickets were a tenth the price and venues were a tenth the size and only 3/4rds full.
As it is, I've accepted that there are people and bands I'm simply never going to see (Like the Barenaked Ladies), as I don't want to drive four hours and pay 100 dollars to see a band I love in a football stadium, when I have no problem seeing bands I just mildy like playing in a nearby venue the size of a movie theater for 10-20 dollars.
Support your local music scene. You don't have to be an 'independent music snob' and hate the big guys. You can still buy their CDs and whatnot.
But instead of spending huge amounts of time and money to see them in concert, consider spending half that money to see half a dozen of the smaller guys and seeing if there's someone you like.
On a more practical note, I personally refuse to pay more than about 100 dollars an hour to be entertained, and every hour of prep work and driving counts as -15 minutes of entertainment. (And gas costs too, of course.) Many concerts would actually manage to exceed this.
And, as a bonus, less works will be lost because no one can figure out the copyright holder. There are thousands of hours of film in the basement of studios and whatnot that no one can figure out the copyright on.
All you'd have to do is hold them for 14 years, and presto, if no one's renewed them, they're public domain.
Actually, a smarter start might be to only give everyone age_of_materials/14 years to renew them. Hence works under 28 years, you have to renew within two years of that change passing, within 42 you have three, within 56 you have four, etc. This means that, the older the work, the more time you have to build up money for the renewal. (You'd only have to pay a proportional amount of the renewal to cover it until the next 14-year scheduled one.)
This is opposed to someone running smack into the wall by having a 55.9 years old work they need to renew but don't have the cash. They'd get four years of revenue from the work, and then have to pay for 10 years of a renewal at the '56 year' cost. So it's not an undue burden. (And it means people with 56.1 year-old works can't coast for another 13.9 years.)
And, additionally, it means that all works must be originally renewed within the first six or seven years (There are no copyrights older then that.), so old stuff that no one wants, or even knows who owns, ends up in the public domain much faster.
Incidentally, I don't think we should give the first 14 years for free, either. I think we should have a fee, but you only have to pay it if you want to challenge someone in court. (I.e., you only have to pay it if it's profitable enough that someone tries to steal it, and you want to stop them.) And if you do prove infringement, they should have to pay it for you. :)
I have yet to see a single thing that Disney created even mostly from scratch.
No shit. Anyone who thinks Disney somehow deserves their characters not falling into public domain needs to look at what they did with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Pinnochio.
In both cases, the copyright was 56 years.
'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland': published 1865, Disney produced 'Alice's Wonderland', a rather forgotten mix of animation and live action shorts, in 1923, 58 years later.
'Pinocchio': final version published 1883, Disney produced animated film 'Pinocchio' in 1940, 57 years later. (Actually, more like 56.25 years, which rather implies they were working on the film while the book was still under copyright.)
And, frankly, that's a little stupid anyway.
I don't think QuantumG was proposing no copyright at all. I think everyone agrees that if someone spends a lot of time and money actually, for example, filming a movie, they ought to, for some amount of time, be able to charge people to see it.
However, there's a difference between 'a literal copy' and other people 'using characters and the fictional world and whatnot'.
The character of Superman should be public domain at this point in time. The movie Superman Returns should not be, at least not yet.
Some people out there, and I'm close to being one of them, think the character of Superman should have never been copyrightable, and that society would be better off if people could have always used that character. (But not directly copied the comic books, or movies, or TV shows, and sold them, not for a specific amount of time.)
Or look at this way: Harry Potter is done. The series is done, and it's been stated that no more books are forthcoming. That means there will not be another Harry Potter book for, probably, 100 years.
Are we really going to claim that helps 'promotes the Progress of useful Arts'?
For every mother you scare into "shielding" her child from the nasty filesharing networks, there will be 4 more enlightened parents who lived through napster and teach their kids how to circumvent the controls.
No shit. Things might get more draconian with copyright law for the next decade...but people have been trading MP3s for more than a decade at this point. And it started at colleges.
That means that all those college kids in the late 90s are 'responsible' adults now. They probably do buy their music, now that they have money, but they sure as hell aren't going to support fining people who are, in essence, them a decade ago, ten thousand dollars. They remember being broke, and their music collection, even if now they have a huge legal CD or iTunes collection.
The sole advantage the music industry has at this point is that there isn't anyone speaking for 'the pirates'. Just wait...within a decade laxer punishments for copyright infringement will be a campaign issue.