It is actually impossible to critique the 'writing' of something if it isn't art, at least in the sense people usually mean.
Grant, he could mean the actual literal writing, that it contains typos or something.
But the way people normally mean it is bad is because it fails in getting the artistic point across...it's too clunky, or the plot is bad. I.e., it has failed as art.
To fail as art, it has to be art.
It's like he's running around talking about microwave dinners aren't food, because they don't taste good. That's not how that works. They're certainly food, they're just bad food.
Art is any form of representation that has any other attributes than 'what it is representing'.
I.e, it is possible to encode dog as the three letters 'dog', or some sort of diagrammatic side view of a dog. That's not art.
If it invokes any feeling, it it invokes anything beyond the actual 'thing it symbolizes', it is art.
This is why some photography is art, and some is not. Some photos are intended to represent more than they are actually a picture of, like 'happiness', and those are art, whereas some photos are just pictures of a person standing there.
And Ebert is arguing that video games aren't 'art' in the same way that 'DVDs' aren't art. (Although he doesn't seem to realize this.) Of course 'video games' aren't art, they're a medium in which art exists.
The flash mob is unlikely - I don't know my neighbors, and would not risk my life for them unless I was right there in the middle of it. I'd be a witness, but I'm not going to intervene..
Well, no, this would be after the societal change after people get used to it. We're not at the tech yet, but at some point the recording devices on us will be vaguely 'aware' of what is going on, and if we're being mugged, or if we've just been in a car accident, or whatever, they'll start broadcasting a distress call. (Or, before that, I can see a 'panic button', like inside the shoe.)
After the first few times the police or EMS take fifteen minutes, someone will have the bright idea of using some sort of local broadcast signal, and letting other people get them on their cameras.(I suspect at some point it will become illegal to signal a distress in a non-emergency, like calling 911 now.)
You might, or might not, have someone show up ready for a fight, but you'd probably get some people willing to chase the mugger down, or at least follow him until the police get there.
Crimes are already mostly limited to crimes of passion. Statistically speaking, that is. You see an opportunity and take it - I'd argue this will make people think twice. Opportunistic crimes will go down, passion crimes will stay the same, and people will spend more time plotting revenge.
Yup.
The types of plotting you're talking about are rare enough, but those same types of people will go out of their way to out-wit a streaming video so everything appears innocuous. "Yes I visited his office the day he died, but here's my video of the visit..." leaving out the preparatory night before of course where you stashed items places.
I actually read a sci-fi store with a 'history viewing' device, where the police can look back in time. Premeditated murder is still illegal, but at some point it was decided that 'crimes of passion', where you just intended to harm someone and didn't mean to kill them, were nowhere near as severely punished. (As they were now 100% distinguishable from premeditated murder)
The plot revolves around murderer's years of effort playing with some innocuous thing on a man he loathed's desk, and then managing, entirely 'innocently', to have that object switched out with something a good deal more lethal but the same size and shape, and then the very next day getting that man mad at him, starting a screaming fight, so the murderer could respond by 'accidentally' hitting back with the wrong object.
But, anyway, actual planned premeditated murder, (As opposed to 'I'm getting my gun and driving over to kill him', which is legally premeditated, but not well planned.) is pretty rare, and if murder is reduced to just that, it's still a lot better than what it is now.
It actually said 'The decision also left unclear how much legal risk the press and publishers would take if someone claimed that a quote, while accurate, was taken out of context in such a way as to give a wrong meaning.'
And then continued with 'The court did say, without elaboration, that "an exact quotation out of context can distort meaning."'
Considering they just denied constitutional protection to quotes that cause a 'material change in meaning', I think the idea that an out of context quote can 'distort the meaning' is a pretty good indication they wouldn't extend first amendment protection deliberate miscontext it automatically.
I don't know why, in your universe, people will follow the law and not make recordings when it's illegal, whereas somehow in mine you assert they're going to break the law by destroying extra footage.
That's not a good reason for forbidding people from recording others.
That's a good reason to require people to turn over all footage of someone they've made to that person if they've shown anyone any of that footage. I.e., if I hear you've got video of me saying 'X', I should be able to demand you produce all video footage of me you have, which I can then use to counter your misrepresentation of me.
In fact, that should be part of libel law. Quoting people out of context is already libelous behavior.
Re:Rogue-like
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Life Recorder
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, but locking them up will reduce the number of violent stupid people on the streets.
Almost no security system beyond physical barricades works by protecting you. They work by raising the cost and consequences of committing crime in general.
And this article is 100% right. At some point, people will start transmitting audio and video of everything they do, hopefully to a server under their control.
At that point, when the number of people hit a high enough percentage that that criminals actually start running across them, crime will fundamentally change.
Sadly, it will probably change in a pretty crappy way at first, as criminal start going after poor people, who don't have such devices yet. (Criminals tend not to rob poor people much now, because, duh, they don't have any money.) In much the same way that all installing cameras does is that criminals avoid their line of sight.
But, eventually, it will work where security cameras failed, because a) it goes where the people are, and b) it unlike random security cameras, actual victims (Or surviving family members.) of crimes have an incentive to actually review the footage.
And that's not even getting into other aspects of this, like providing alibis. Yes, video footage can be tampered with, but that's when you look at your footage of yourself on the other side of town, find a guy who passed you, and get the police to track down him and his footage with your clearly in it. (And while video footage can be faked, it's a lot harder if it doesn't have endpoints. If it shows you wandering around your house for two hours, including past a mirror, and then the police coming in to arrest you...that requires a technical skill level that would be hard to pull off for the NSA, much less some random guy, and it would be somewhat absurd for you to do it to be able to be out robbing someone's house.)
And eventually, we're going to get smart enough computers to actually parse the scene, and realize there is a crime in progress, and alert the police, or, for even more fun, all surrounding people. (Who can now respond in relative safety because they're wearing such cameras also.) Imagine a flash mob, armed with streaming cameras, and probably a gun or two, showing up at a mugging.
At some point, crimes are going to be limited to 'crimes of passion', where an argument gets out of hand or whatever, and incredibly well plotted crimes like something out of a murder mystery movie, where people are undetectably poisoned, or an action TV show, where hired assassins snipe people. The vast majority of crimes, at least violent ones, in the middle are going away.
I'm not sure what will happen to things like cons and pickpocketing. The criminal can be photographed much easier, but I'm not sure if that will help. And I expect a rise in blackmailing.
It turns out that the importance of these addresses is not widely known amongst mail service providers.
Yes, the important of these addresses that SSL providers decided to invent out of thin air is not well known to random other people. Imagine that.
There actually are real defined role accounts. 'ssladmin@' is not one of them. Neither is, for a more surreal example of where they will send the cert, 'info@'. People can't just wander around inventing role accounts for third parties and then pretending they are authoritative.
And there's not, IIRC, some definitive 'role account' for 'people in charge of a domain'. There's not a domainmaster@ to go along with postmaster@ and webmaster@. We don't need a defined role account, as the person in charge of the domain is, duh, supposed to be the technical contact in the whois, which is the only address which should be sent the SSL cert for a domain.
Even if there actually is some 'domain management role account', (People will argue 'root' is, but that's wrong. That's not actually a defined role account.) that still doesn't mean certs should be sent to random addresses that vaguely sound 'in charge-ish'. Just to the whois tech contact and whatever the role account is.
A huge mitigating factor for this flaw is that most huge free-email services (Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo, et al) prevent the registration of typical admin-like names (root, admin, ssladmin, postmaster, webmaster, etc).
I'm sure that Jesus himself has come down from heaven and told them all the names, that every single SSL CA uses, which they need to reserve on their system. And comes down with an update when some brand new SSL CA decides that they'll send SSL certs to configssl@
Or, you know, not.
Additionally, some SSL CAs (StartCom, GoDaddy) do attempt to look up the real admin of the site and send confirmation emails there, which makes this useless.
It doesn't really matter what 'some' of them do, as attackers would presumably get certs from those who don't.
If you really want to make a honest comparison with the Netherlands, I would bet that on those Atlantic states with smaller territories and higher population density things aren't as bad as the average of the whole of the USA.
It must be pointed out, that's not a comparison with the Netherlands. You, duh, just compare some of the US to the rest of the US.
Taking Atlantic states with smaller territories and higher population density and comparing them to the Netherlands...um, yeah, the Netherlands still come out the winner.
I live in an Atlantic state...Georgia. Northeast Georgia. And while people tend to think of that as fairly rural, and it is, but it's pretty compact rural...spread out, but generally spread out along roads and whatnot, and wouldn't appear to be incredibly expensive to wire, as long as you skip, or charge extra to, the few people living two miles down a dirt road.
We're in the 13% of the country that only has one broadband provider? You know why?
Because our cable and telephone company is the same company, and, of course, DSL providers aren't required to share their lines anymore. Ergo, one company controls everything.
There are no competitors. There is no possibility of competitors. This doesn't have the slightest thing to do with 'population density'.
I think you entirely misunderstood my point. I wasn't trying to talk about ethics at all.
I was pointing out the stupidity of thinking that an 'ethics board' would care about random civil liabilities, unethical or otherwise.
College ethics boards care about violations of collegiate ethics, which usually solely relate to academic work. Although nowadays they're getting some anti-discrimination nonsense in them, too, which I find stupid for students. Being a bigot is not an academic ethic's violation.
But they don't care if you blaspheme or jaywalk or cheat at poker or even murder people in your spare time. (Although I'd like to think they'd notify some law enforcement about the 'murdering' thing.)
The person I was replying to apparently mistook them for some sort of 'ethics police' that would do something about 'generally unethical' behavior. Which is a rather disturbing idea, and is usually found under the more common name 'morality police'.
Interestingly, ethic policies often contain rules about 'intellectual property' (By which they mean copyright.) for employees to follow. But not for students.
The problem is that 90% of the workers have no idea of their rights under the law.
For example, confiscating someone's passport is illegal.
People cannot legally transfer the ownership of their passport to someone else. No country allows this, with their own or anyone else's passport. It is not possible to legally own a passport issued to someone else, with possibly the exception of a minor or getting one from a deceased person's estate. People can, of course, let some else possess it, but they still own it. (Technically, their issuing country may own it, but they are in charge of it.)
And, hence, the temporary possessor must give it back when asked, just like they have to give back a car they've been loaned. (Which applies despite who the legal owner is...the employee at the car rental place doesn't own the car, but he can lend it to you, and he can demand you give it back.)
If they do not, they have committed theft by misappropriation. If someone loans you something of theirs (or someone else's they are in charge of), and then wants you to give it back, you, duh, have to give it back. It's not even debatable.
And that's just the common sense law.
On top of that, there are plenty of laws in general about:
a) What employers can do. Namely, they cannot demand you loan them your property, even if they give it back. That's a wrongful termination suit just waiting to happen.
b) Passports. I suspect it's not legal to ask to see someone's passport at all. Employees should be asking to see US work permits, aka, a green card or a work visa or whatever, not documents issued by some other country that have no bearing on whether or not someone can be employed in the US. In fact, it's illegal to base hiring decisions on someone's country of origin.
We really need to stop letting companies abuse people. It's bad for the abused, it's bad for everyone else who now has to put up with depressed wages, it's bad for the economy in general. But it's very very good for companies, and it's very very good for any Congressentities they own.
The fact information has to be 'buried' or 'kept' secret really just disproved the point you were trying to make. That's like saying 'Prisoners don't want to be free, plenty of people are kept locked in prison right now.' No one said information succeeded at being free.;)
But, yes, information that people make an active effort that others do not know can be suppressed. Likewise, information that no one cares about can just vanish on its own.
Sadly, that fact doesn't really help people trying to make their living selling information. They can't run around 'secretifying' their information.
The question isn't whether information can been kept out of anyone's hands...the question is, can be it be placed in people's hands but those people somehow stopped from passing it to others?
And 'information wants to be free' is simply anthropomorphizing. It's like saying 'liquids want find a level'. Liquids don't 'want' anything, but gravity makes them 'act' as if they're 'trying' to be flattened out. Likewise, humans spread information as if it wants to be free, when that isn't the goal of the information or even the people!
Perhaps more important, almost no one smokes pot around other people who are not smoking pot. It being illegal and all.
The exposure to unwanted second-hand smoke from pot is so microscopic that I suspect people having an allergic reaction to other people's perfumes has killed more people. I suspect allergic reactions to pollen have killed more people. When someone says 'Your cigarette smoking is bothering me, please stop', people can say no. When someone says 'Your pot smoking is bothering, stop or I'll call the police', it's a lot harder to refuse.
Of course, the dangers of secondhand smoke at, at this point, grossly overestimated by the public. Secondhand smoke is an issue if you're operating for more than an hour a day in a room with smokers, like bars and stuff. I'm all for banning it indoors if anyone has to be in that environment.
But secondhand smoke is not an issue when someone is smoking outside next to the doors you have to walk through four times a day, for a grand total of being within ten feet for them for five seconds while outside, and attempting to banish smokers halfway across the street or entirely from the property is just assholery. You're more likely to get cancer from the commute or the PCBs in the paint in your wall.
And I say this as someone who has never smoked in his entire life, but is willing to say 'Okay, fellow non-smokers, we stopped our risk from that shit. They can't smoke in the room I'm in and fill it with smoke. And now we're just doing stuff to smokers out of spite.'
I've never see any ethics board that suggested you should wander up and report people for random crimes, much less hypothetical random civil offensives against random other people.
'Hi, yes, ethics board? I'd like to report Alpha Sigma Pi for ethics violations. They have an ankle deep hole in their front yard.... No, I'm not trying to call plant maintenance, I'm trying to report unethical behavior.... Why is it unethical? Well, if someone goes to knock on their door and gets hurt in they can sue, duh. So that makes it unethical... Hello? Hello?'
Ethic boards, and the law, are entirely unrelated to each other.
When there is mass counterfeiting of music, software, or games, it has the potential to destroy the original business. If piracy is not prevented, people get the idea that it's okay to just get your stuff for free. Over time, this will devalue it because most IP is only worth what people are willing to pay.
Um, and by the same logic, giving things away for free, when other people are trying to sell stuff like it, is counterfeiting, or at least unethical.
The community won't be happy until there are no restrictions on all music, books, software, and games and it's all free (costing $0), which is pretty fucking selfish.
'The community' does not exist, so please stop attributing things to them. (That's counterfeiting. Or at least closer to counterfeiting than your 'immorally giving things away for free' concept is.)
I, OTOH, am on neither 'side', but think copyright is dead. Not that it 'should' be...that it is.
The practical fact is, without some degradation per copy, and/or high costs to copy, there can be no such thing as copyright
If things are infinitely copyable over 'free' channels, with no work per copier, and almost no work to originally copy...that's it. it's over.
This isn't some 'Copyright should be dead', it's not any sort of moral judgment at all. Hell, for all I know, the death of copyright will cause a cultural disaster. It's just a fact.
Copyright was created to stop people from taking a work, spending time and money, and reselling it. That's the point, that's what it manages to stop. It stops the business of copying, when copying had to be a business because no one was out there making their own 35mm film copies, and even if they were, the echos of those copies would quickly disappear as the copies got worse over time...and no one would fund that without any sort of profit possibility, which exposed them to legal sanctions as any illegal business would be.
Without that effort required...well...
Imagine a hypothetical world where sex was a heavily regulated industry, and, for some reason, took an amazing amount of prep work and skill. Certain people were allowed to charge for it, and did.
Others operated outside the law. Sometimes large illegal brothels would spring up and provide mostly identical sex (Piracy rings.), and eventually get shut down by the law, and sometimes people would setting up crappy locations and manage to provide really bad sex. (Aka, analog copies.)
And now imagine someone figured out how to provide 100% identical sex using a standard bed everyone had in their house, as long as someone who had had sex at some time showed them how.
And now imagine someone figured out how to copy stuff exactly using the standard computer everyone had in their house, as long as someone had a copy on a computer somewhere.
Copyright is dead, or at least has been fatally wounded and will be dead soon. It's coasting right now on the fact that a) they own congressmen, and b) citizens are amazingly apathetic. But I suspect in, very soon, the laws will change, simply because people are not following them. I am not, in any sense, arguing this is a 'good' thing, just a 'true' thing.
Why would Nintendo do that? Wouldn't it be more logical to simply come up with a new controller for a Wii and have games developed that require that?
Nintendo is doing amazingly well in sales with the Wii. I can see them looking around and attempting to recapture some of the gamer crowd (although they hardly need to), but the simplest way to do that is to just keep making Wiis, but come out with some new controller as a 'gamer' addon, and some new name like 'Wii+' or something to stick on games that require it.
Alternately, if they need more power, I can see this being a quasi-separate product, but still with the Wii name and all the stuff, but some added CPU and a new controller on top of that. But that takes a lot more development then bringing Gamecube controllers back to the Wii.
The crippled hard-drive less X-Box 260 can be found for the same price as a Wii, but that's a pretty dumb thing to buy.
And, um, yes, something that is tied for the lowest price is, in fact, 'pretty cheap' by any sane person's conception of 'pretty cheap'.
And you will notice I pointed out two reasons to get a a Wii. They are priced 'pretty cheap' and they have the kind of games that you can't get on a PC or other consoles, casual multi-player games. (Whereas you can get the same kind of games on the PS3, Xbox, and the PC, although not always the exact same game. The exception might be Guitar Hero style games, which are only on consoles, but, hey, only need one of those.)
Yeah, and even the 'You need a license to install it because that's a copy' is bogus because you're explicitly allowed to do that under copyright law. You are allowed to make as many copies as necessary to actually use the software, you can copy it to the hard drive, memory, disk caches, whatever is needed to run it, as an explicitly granted right by copyright law for software.
But that's exceptionally bogus in this case, as, um, you didn't install the software, nor did you copy it at all. (The software itself might be copying itself around in memory, but that's hardly under your control, and, as I said, explicitly allowed under law anyway.)
And the whole 'Oh, you really licensed it at purchase' just becomes hilariously obviously bogus (As opposed to be less obvious, but just as bogus) when you actually purchase a device. So, magically, every device that you purchase with software in it is not sold? Shouldn't there be, like, warning labels or something? 'Warning, device cannot actually be purchased.'
The bankers that think they own everyone's car (With included computer and software) are going to have a fucking heart attack. 'Holy shit, we...what? We licensed those cars? The car manufacturers still own them? And can legally disable them at any time they want? What the hell does that mean? So...all those cars are worthless? I...I...my arm is numb...I...can't... billions of dollars of assets...I...*thud*'
I don't know exactly how game engines are designed, but if you can't just copy the entire project, dike out 90% of it, and recompile, you've probably designed your game engine stupidly.
Yeah, winetasting is akin to something like PAX. You pay money to get in, and hang out with similar minded people, and, oh yeah, get to preview stuff. The analogy isn't exact, but you get the idea.
If you actually want to taste wine, at least specific types, if you go to a winery and take a tour, you can actually get a free sample or two. Aka, a game demo. Or, heck, you can in many bars, too. Which is, to continue the analogy, like playing games in stores.
I don't know who the heck would buy a game without at least looking at it. There are very few games I'd be willing to do that with. I'd buy a Bioware RPG untested, for example, as I've never had a bad experience with them. And probably the newest Civ. But that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is actually impossible to critique the 'writing' of something if it isn't art, at least in the sense people usually mean.
Grant, he could mean the actual literal writing, that it contains typos or something.
But the way people normally mean it is bad is because it fails in getting the artistic point across...it's too clunky, or the plot is bad. I.e., it has failed as art.
To fail as art, it has to be art.
It's like he's running around talking about microwave dinners aren't food, because they don't taste good. That's not how that works. They're certainly food, they're just bad food.
Art is actually incredibly easy to define.
Art is any form of representation that has any other attributes than 'what it is representing'.
I.e, it is possible to encode dog as the three letters 'dog', or some sort of diagrammatic side view of a dog. That's not art.
If it invokes any feeling, it it invokes anything beyond the actual 'thing it symbolizes', it is art.
This is why some photography is art, and some is not. Some photos are intended to represent more than they are actually a picture of, like 'happiness', and those are art, whereas some photos are just pictures of a person standing there.
And Ebert is arguing that video games aren't 'art' in the same way that 'DVDs' aren't art. (Although he doesn't seem to realize this.) Of course 'video games' aren't art, they're a medium in which art exists.
The flash mob is unlikely - I don't know my neighbors, and would not risk my life for them unless I was right there in the middle of it. I'd be a witness, but I'm not going to intervene..
Well, no, this would be after the societal change after people get used to it. We're not at the tech yet, but at some point the recording devices on us will be vaguely 'aware' of what is going on, and if we're being mugged, or if we've just been in a car accident, or whatever, they'll start broadcasting a distress call. (Or, before that, I can see a 'panic button', like inside the shoe.)
After the first few times the police or EMS take fifteen minutes, someone will have the bright idea of using some sort of local broadcast signal, and letting other people get them on their cameras.(I suspect at some point it will become illegal to signal a distress in a non-emergency, like calling 911 now.)
You might, or might not, have someone show up ready for a fight, but you'd probably get some people willing to chase the mugger down, or at least follow him until the police get there.
Crimes are already mostly limited to crimes of passion. Statistically speaking, that is. You see an opportunity and take it - I'd argue this will make people think twice. Opportunistic crimes will go down, passion crimes will stay the same, and people will spend more time plotting revenge.
Yup.
The types of plotting you're talking about are rare enough, but those same types of people will go out of their way to out-wit a streaming video so everything appears innocuous. "Yes I visited his office the day he died, but here's my video of the visit..." leaving out the preparatory night before of course where you stashed items places.
I actually read a sci-fi store with a 'history viewing' device, where the police can look back in time. Premeditated murder is still illegal, but at some point it was decided that 'crimes of passion', where you just intended to harm someone and didn't mean to kill them, were nowhere near as severely punished. (As they were now 100% distinguishable from premeditated murder)
The plot revolves around murderer's years of effort playing with some innocuous thing on a man he loathed's desk, and then managing, entirely 'innocently', to have that object switched out with something a good deal more lethal but the same size and shape, and then the very next day getting that man mad at him, starting a screaming fight, so the murderer could respond by 'accidentally' hitting back with the wrong object.
But, anyway, actual planned premeditated murder, (As opposed to 'I'm getting my gun and driving over to kill him', which is legally premeditated, but not well planned.) is pretty rare, and if murder is reduced to just that, it's still a lot better than what it is now.
Erm, did you read that link?
It actually said 'The decision also left unclear how much legal risk the press and publishers would take if someone claimed that a quote, while accurate, was taken out of context in such a way as to give a wrong meaning.'
And then continued with 'The court did say, without elaboration, that "an exact quotation out of context can distort meaning."'
Considering they just denied constitutional protection to quotes that cause a 'material change in meaning', I think the idea that an out of context quote can 'distort the meaning' is a pretty good indication they wouldn't extend first amendment protection deliberate miscontext it automatically.
Which, as I said, should be illegal.
I don't know why, in your universe, people will follow the law and not make recordings when it's illegal, whereas somehow in mine you assert they're going to break the law by destroying extra footage.
That's not a good reason for forbidding people from recording others.
That's a good reason to require people to turn over all footage of someone they've made to that person if they've shown anyone any of that footage. I.e., if I hear you've got video of me saying 'X', I should be able to demand you produce all video footage of me you have, which I can then use to counter your misrepresentation of me.
In fact, that should be part of libel law. Quoting people out of context is already libelous behavior.
Yeah, but locking them up will reduce the number of violent stupid people on the streets.
Almost no security system beyond physical barricades works by protecting you. They work by raising the cost and consequences of committing crime in general.
And this article is 100% right. At some point, people will start transmitting audio and video of everything they do, hopefully to a server under their control.
At that point, when the number of people hit a high enough percentage that that criminals actually start running across them, crime will fundamentally change.
Sadly, it will probably change in a pretty crappy way at first, as criminal start going after poor people, who don't have such devices yet. (Criminals tend not to rob poor people much now, because, duh, they don't have any money.) In much the same way that all installing cameras does is that criminals avoid their line of sight.
But, eventually, it will work where security cameras failed, because a) it goes where the people are, and b) it unlike random security cameras, actual victims (Or surviving family members.) of crimes have an incentive to actually review the footage.
And that's not even getting into other aspects of this, like providing alibis. Yes, video footage can be tampered with, but that's when you look at your footage of yourself on the other side of town, find a guy who passed you, and get the police to track down him and his footage with your clearly in it. (And while video footage can be faked, it's a lot harder if it doesn't have endpoints. If it shows you wandering around your house for two hours, including past a mirror, and then the police coming in to arrest you...that requires a technical skill level that would be hard to pull off for the NSA, much less some random guy, and it would be somewhat absurd for you to do it to be able to be out robbing someone's house.)
And eventually, we're going to get smart enough computers to actually parse the scene, and realize there is a crime in progress, and alert the police, or, for even more fun, all surrounding people. (Who can now respond in relative safety because they're wearing such cameras also.) Imagine a flash mob, armed with streaming cameras, and probably a gun or two, showing up at a mugging.
At some point, crimes are going to be limited to 'crimes of passion', where an argument gets out of hand or whatever, and incredibly well plotted crimes like something out of a murder mystery movie, where people are undetectably poisoned, or an action TV show, where hired assassins snipe people. The vast majority of crimes, at least violent ones, in the middle are going away.
I'm not sure what will happen to things like cons and pickpocketing. The criminal can be photographed much easier, but I'm not sure if that will help. And I expect a rise in blackmailing.
It turns out that the importance of these addresses is not widely known amongst mail service providers.
Yes, the important of these addresses that SSL providers decided to invent out of thin air is not well known to random other people. Imagine that.
There actually are real defined role accounts. 'ssladmin@' is not one of them. Neither is, for a more surreal example of where they will send the cert, 'info@'. People can't just wander around inventing role accounts for third parties and then pretending they are authoritative.
And there's not, IIRC, some definitive 'role account' for 'people in charge of a domain'. There's not a domainmaster@ to go along with postmaster@ and webmaster@. We don't need a defined role account, as the person in charge of the domain is, duh, supposed to be the technical contact in the whois, which is the only address which should be sent the SSL cert for a domain.
Even if there actually is some 'domain management role account', (People will argue 'root' is, but that's wrong. That's not actually a defined role account.) that still doesn't mean certs should be sent to random addresses that vaguely sound 'in charge-ish'. Just to the whois tech contact and whatever the role account is.
A huge mitigating factor for this flaw is that most huge free-email services (Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo, et al) prevent the registration of typical admin-like names (root, admin, ssladmin, postmaster, webmaster, etc).
I'm sure that Jesus himself has come down from heaven and told them all the names, that every single SSL CA uses, which they need to reserve on their system. And comes down with an update when some brand new SSL CA decides that they'll send SSL certs to configssl@
Or, you know, not.
Additionally, some SSL CAs (StartCom, GoDaddy) do attempt to look up the real admin of the site and send confirmation emails there, which makes this useless.
It doesn't really matter what 'some' of them do, as attackers would presumably get certs from those who don't.
If you really want to make a honest comparison with the Netherlands, I would bet that on those Atlantic states with smaller territories and higher population density things aren't as bad as the average of the whole of the USA.
It must be pointed out, that's not a comparison with the Netherlands. You, duh, just compare some of the US to the rest of the US.
Taking Atlantic states with smaller territories and higher population density and comparing them to the Netherlands...um, yeah, the Netherlands still come out the winner.
I live in an Atlantic state...Georgia. Northeast Georgia. And while people tend to think of that as fairly rural, and it is, but it's pretty compact rural...spread out, but generally spread out along roads and whatnot, and wouldn't appear to be incredibly expensive to wire, as long as you skip, or charge extra to, the few people living two miles down a dirt road.
We're in the 13% of the country that only has one broadband provider? You know why?
Because our cable and telephone company is the same company, and, of course, DSL providers aren't required to share their lines anymore. Ergo, one company controls everything.
There are no competitors. There is no possibility of competitors. This doesn't have the slightest thing to do with 'population density'.
I think you entirely misunderstood my point. I wasn't trying to talk about ethics at all.
I was pointing out the stupidity of thinking that an 'ethics board' would care about random civil liabilities, unethical or otherwise.
College ethics boards care about violations of collegiate ethics, which usually solely relate to academic work. Although nowadays they're getting some anti-discrimination nonsense in them, too, which I find stupid for students. Being a bigot is not an academic ethic's violation.
But they don't care if you blaspheme or jaywalk or cheat at poker or even murder people in your spare time. (Although I'd like to think they'd notify some law enforcement about the 'murdering' thing.)
The person I was replying to apparently mistook them for some sort of 'ethics police' that would do something about 'generally unethical' behavior. Which is a rather disturbing idea, and is usually found under the more common name 'morality police'.
Interestingly, ethic policies often contain rules about 'intellectual property' (By which they mean copyright.) for employees to follow. But not for students.
There is a supply of workers that are as qualified as they need to be that will work for far less.
Yes, if by 'will work', you mean 'can be threatened into working'.
Did you even read the fucking summary?
The problem is that 90% of the workers have no idea of their rights under the law.
For example, confiscating someone's passport is illegal.
People cannot legally transfer the ownership of their passport to someone else. No country allows this, with their own or anyone else's passport. It is not possible to legally own a passport issued to someone else, with possibly the exception of a minor or getting one from a deceased person's estate. People can, of course, let some else possess it, but they still own it. (Technically, their issuing country may own it, but they are in charge of it.)
And, hence, the temporary possessor must give it back when asked, just like they have to give back a car they've been loaned. (Which applies despite who the legal owner is...the employee at the car rental place doesn't own the car, but he can lend it to you, and he can demand you give it back.)
If they do not, they have committed theft by misappropriation. If someone loans you something of theirs (or someone else's they are in charge of), and then wants you to give it back, you, duh, have to give it back. It's not even debatable.
And that's just the common sense law.
On top of that, there are plenty of laws in general about:
a) What employers can do. Namely, they cannot demand you loan them your property, even if they give it back. That's a wrongful termination suit just waiting to happen.
b) Passports. I suspect it's not legal to ask to see someone's passport at all. Employees should be asking to see US work permits, aka, a green card or a work visa or whatever, not documents issued by some other country that have no bearing on whether or not someone can be employed in the US. In fact, it's illegal to base hiring decisions on someone's country of origin.
We really need to stop letting companies abuse people. It's bad for the abused, it's bad for everyone else who now has to put up with depressed wages, it's bad for the economy in general. But it's very very good for companies, and it's very very good for any Congressentities they own.
The fact information has to be 'buried' or 'kept' secret really just disproved the point you were trying to make. That's like saying 'Prisoners don't want to be free, plenty of people are kept locked in prison right now.' No one said information succeeded at being free. ;)
But, yes, information that people make an active effort that others do not know can be suppressed. Likewise, information that no one cares about can just vanish on its own.
Sadly, that fact doesn't really help people trying to make their living selling information. They can't run around 'secretifying' their information.
The question isn't whether information can been kept out of anyone's hands...the question is, can be it be placed in people's hands but those people somehow stopped from passing it to others?
And 'information wants to be free' is simply anthropomorphizing. It's like saying 'liquids want find a level'. Liquids don't 'want' anything, but gravity makes them 'act' as if they're 'trying' to be flattened out. Likewise, humans spread information as if it wants to be free, when that isn't the goal of the information or even the people!
Perhaps more important, almost no one smokes pot around other people who are not smoking pot. It being illegal and all.
The exposure to unwanted second-hand smoke from pot is so microscopic that I suspect people having an allergic reaction to other people's perfumes has killed more people. I suspect allergic reactions to pollen have killed more people. When someone says 'Your cigarette smoking is bothering me, please stop', people can say no. When someone says 'Your pot smoking is bothering, stop or I'll call the police', it's a lot harder to refuse.
Of course, the dangers of secondhand smoke at, at this point, grossly overestimated by the public. Secondhand smoke is an issue if you're operating for more than an hour a day in a room with smokers, like bars and stuff. I'm all for banning it indoors if anyone has to be in that environment.
But secondhand smoke is not an issue when someone is smoking outside next to the doors you have to walk through four times a day, for a grand total of being within ten feet for them for five seconds while outside, and attempting to banish smokers halfway across the street or entirely from the property is just assholery. You're more likely to get cancer from the commute or the PCBs in the paint in your wall.
And I say this as someone who has never smoked in his entire life, but is willing to say 'Okay, fellow non-smokers, we stopped our risk from that shit. They can't smoke in the room I'm in and fill it with smoke. And now we're just doing stuff to smokers out of spite.'
Why would file sharing be an ethics violation?
I've never see any ethics board that suggested you should wander up and report people for random crimes, much less hypothetical random civil offensives against random other people.
'Hi, yes, ethics board? I'd like to report Alpha Sigma Pi for ethics violations. They have an ankle deep hole in their front yard. ... No, I'm not trying to call plant maintenance, I'm trying to report unethical behavior. ... Why is it unethical? Well, if someone goes to knock on their door and gets hurt in they can sue, duh. So that makes it unethical ... Hello? Hello?'
Ethic boards, and the law, are entirely unrelated to each other.
Why would you copy to a 'analog cassette tape'? Why not to one of those 'albums'?
Surely have two separate physical mediums was confusing. You'd need two players.
Oh, was it because those foot-wide pieces of plastic were hard to manage? I bet they didn't fit in your CD rack.
When there is mass counterfeiting of music, software, or games, it has the potential to destroy the original business. If piracy is not prevented, people get the idea that it's okay to just get your stuff for free. Over time, this will devalue it because most IP is only worth what people are willing to pay.
Um, and by the same logic, giving things away for free, when other people are trying to sell stuff like it, is counterfeiting, or at least unethical.
The community won't be happy until there are no restrictions on all music, books, software, and games and it's all free (costing $0), which is pretty fucking selfish.
'The community' does not exist, so please stop attributing things to them. (That's counterfeiting. Or at least closer to counterfeiting than your 'immorally giving things away for free' concept is.)
I, OTOH, am on neither 'side', but think copyright is dead. Not that it 'should' be...that it is.
The practical fact is, without some degradation per copy, and/or high costs to copy, there can be no such thing as copyright
If things are infinitely copyable over 'free' channels, with no work per copier, and almost no work to originally copy...that's it. it's over.
This isn't some 'Copyright should be dead', it's not any sort of moral judgment at all. Hell, for all I know, the death of copyright will cause a cultural disaster. It's just a fact.
Copyright was created to stop people from taking a work, spending time and money, and reselling it. That's the point, that's what it manages to stop. It stops the business of copying, when copying had to be a business because no one was out there making their own 35mm film copies, and even if they were, the echos of those copies would quickly disappear as the copies got worse over time...and no one would fund that without any sort of profit possibility, which exposed them to legal sanctions as any illegal business would be.
Without that effort required...well...
Imagine a hypothetical world where sex was a heavily regulated industry, and, for some reason, took an amazing amount of prep work and skill. Certain people were allowed to charge for it, and did.
Others operated outside the law. Sometimes large illegal brothels would spring up and provide mostly identical sex (Piracy rings.), and eventually get shut down by the law, and sometimes people would setting up crappy locations and manage to provide really bad sex. (Aka, analog copies.)
And now imagine someone figured out how to provide 100% identical sex using a standard bed everyone had in their house, as long as someone who had had sex at some time showed them how.
And now imagine someone figured out how to copy stuff exactly using the standard computer everyone had in their house, as long as someone had a copy on a computer somewhere.
Copyright is dead, or at least has been fatally wounded and will be dead soon. It's coasting right now on the fact that a) they own congressmen, and b) citizens are amazingly apathetic. But I suspect in, very soon, the laws will change, simply because people are not following them. I am not, in any sense, arguing this is a 'good' thing, just a 'true' thing.
Why would Nintendo do that? Wouldn't it be more logical to simply come up with a new controller for a Wii and have games developed that require that?
Nintendo is doing amazingly well in sales with the Wii. I can see them looking around and attempting to recapture some of the gamer crowd (although they hardly need to), but the simplest way to do that is to just keep making Wiis, but come out with some new controller as a 'gamer' addon, and some new name like 'Wii+' or something to stick on games that require it.
Alternately, if they need more power, I can see this being a quasi-separate product, but still with the Wii name and all the stuff, but some added CPU and a new controller on top of that. But that takes a lot more development then bringing Gamecube controllers back to the Wii.
The crippled hard-drive less X-Box 260 can be found for the same price as a Wii, but that's a pretty dumb thing to buy.
And, um, yes, something that is tied for the lowest price is, in fact, 'pretty cheap' by any sane person's conception of 'pretty cheap'.
And you will notice I pointed out two reasons to get a a Wii. They are priced 'pretty cheap' and they have the kind of games that you can't get on a PC or other consoles, casual multi-player games. (Whereas you can get the same kind of games on the PS3, Xbox, and the PC, although not always the exact same game. The exception might be Guitar Hero style games, which are only on consoles, but, hey, only need one of those.)
Yeah, and even the 'You need a license to install it because that's a copy' is bogus because you're explicitly allowed to do that under copyright law. You are allowed to make as many copies as necessary to actually use the software, you can copy it to the hard drive, memory, disk caches, whatever is needed to run it, as an explicitly granted right by copyright law for software.
But that's exceptionally bogus in this case, as, um, you didn't install the software, nor did you copy it at all. (The software itself might be copying itself around in memory, but that's hardly under your control, and, as I said, explicitly allowed under law anyway.)
And the whole 'Oh, you really licensed it at purchase' just becomes hilariously obviously bogus (As opposed to be less obvious, but just as bogus) when you actually purchase a device. So, magically, every device that you purchase with software in it is not sold? Shouldn't there be, like, warning labels or something? 'Warning, device cannot actually be purchased.'
The bankers that think they own everyone's car (With included computer and software) are going to have a fucking heart attack. 'Holy shit, we...what? We licensed those cars? The car manufacturers still own them? And can legally disable them at any time they want? What the hell does that mean? So...all those cars are worthless? I...I...my arm is numb...I...can't... billions of dollars of assets...I...*thud*'
Oh, I'm sure it will attract a metric ton of people.
That's like, what? 2,200 pounds? Fifteen people? Often gamers tend to be slightly overweight, so maybe even less?
It's not even a copy and paste.
I don't know exactly how game engines are designed, but if you can't just copy the entire project, dike out 90% of it, and recompile, you've probably designed your game engine stupidly.
Yeah, winetasting is akin to something like PAX. You pay money to get in, and hang out with similar minded people, and, oh yeah, get to preview stuff. The analogy isn't exact, but you get the idea.
If you actually want to taste wine, at least specific types, if you go to a winery and take a tour, you can actually get a free sample or two. Aka, a game demo. Or, heck, you can in many bars, too. Which is, to continue the analogy, like playing games in stores.
I don't know who the heck would buy a game without at least looking at it. There are very few games I'd be willing to do that with. I'd buy a Bioware RPG untested, for example, as I've never had a bad experience with them. And probably the newest Civ. But that's about it.