Regarding storage, then the plug would of course connect to a harddrive, if you wanted more storage. Maybe wirelessly...
Re. the web of trust, then my rules were just an example. Better one have been, and will be, written. And maybe they should just be for suggestions. And when you do need to make an exchange with someone in Brazil from Denmark, the software will find the "smallest number of handshakes" and ask you if you trust friend X to trust, etc. etc. Just another example - the basic idea is we have each other's public keys. How much you want to trust who from there is up to you - but it will be a damn sight more trustworthy than most things on the web right now, I can assure you.
The plugs would hold your personal data (and maybe your friends, encrypted, for stability, safety, etc.).
Some to be served to your own devices - email, documents, etc. (instead of keeping it in a cloud controlled, datamined and sold to those in power).
Some to be served to friends - their own data, whatever you want to share in your network (and only there, unlike FB, et al). Think Diaspora servers, wiki's, forums, whatever...
Whatever you want to share with the world - your own webpage (now entirely under your control), routing of Tor and similar traffic.
Now think synergy - you have a device which enables you to share with your friends only. So it has a public key encryption system, and a lot of keys from people you actually know and trust. This is how we get the web of trust started; only this time, we win. With a few simple rules (if 10 of my friends trust someone 90%+, I trust him 80%+, and trust accumulating over time, whatever the details), we get a pretty global (http://media.successcreeations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FacebookGlobalConnections2010.png) network of trust, which can be used for encryption of mails, torrents, transactions, you name it.
Or, in more detail, the possibility for everyone on the planet to join a communications network able to run any and all software and services - dirt cheap, outside the surveillance or control of any agent, regardless of their power or legal standing.
...And for other applications to be able to use these calls, you'd have a list of "common name"="unique name"; and only allow admin access to it, requiring you to confirm any (functional) installations. It's not working out for them so far...
If Microsoft really wants to do something helpful, they can stop marketing Windows as "the easiest thing ever!" to non-technical users.
Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.
Even if you are right - and that is a pretty big if - this has no bearing on whether the law against marijuana is just.
Regarding your personal judgement of the character of said individuals, it is trite and wrong. Yes, one reason these people might have smoked marijuana was stupidity, it might have been lack of self-control - or it could be that they did not believe in following stupid laws. Maybe enjoying themselves was more important than the ridiculous politicising and puritan ideals which created the law. Maybe they were aleviating chemotherapy symptoms? Who knows...
Your claim to know the reason behind every instance of marijuana use is, to put it mildly, unconvincing.
1) Not caused by humans (but semi-preventable through human ingenuity after a certain time and age). 2) Not necessary for free will to exist or be fully experienced. 3) Not a necessary part of the cosmos, if you're omnipotent.
And just by using Macs, they are daring to defy both Overlord Bill and Master Linus.
Don't be so conceited: computer users all bow to someone.
I have a hard time identifying who I am bowing to, when I use Free Software... Not Linus, nor Stallman, is telling me what to do with my machine.
But you are right that we cannot blame Apple for non-documented usage that leads to problems. Unless of course there is a good reason ('refusing to bow' if you will) for non-compliance (I have no clue whether this is the case, but I could think of some possible ones) - in that case, they are suffering problems for which Apple is to blame. Any comparable harm on a Free Software system is from negligence, not malice (either you did not follow documentation out of negligence, or the documentation was somehow suboptimal).
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Your entire argument is based on the premise that Apple is the sole communications company in existence in the world...
Oh dear. Your should really read it again, you would not believe how wrong you are getting it...
My argument was, and this was stated quite clearly to begin with, that Apple is _exemplifying_ the kinds of harm that the one vendor model causes. I then, apparently, had to elaborate how this harm was of a particularly nasty kind since it consists in not just harm to the individual consumer. But I can see you did not catch that one either:
There is this little thing that I like to practice, called "don't own an iphone." It helps me sleep at night.
That's because you think I am only talking about the harm to the individual. I have no clue where you got that idea... The harm done by censorship, locks on innovation, non-optimal prices, easily implemented government controls (not just your government, all of them), etc. is far more serious than. And no, it does not go away when you stop using an iPhone.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
- Thomas Jefferson
Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter.
Well, we would likely all be malnourished, due to lack of fertilizers, at least those of us who hadn't died at childbirth or soon after. There wouldn't be an Internet to talk on, but that would be okay, since we wouldn't have time to use one due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day. In short, our lives would be miserable, but due to lack of medicine, they would at least be short.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work.
I chose philosophy as a field because it seemed the only one that did punish sloppy work. My original field of study turned out to hinge on theories that were unassailable (for us freshmen), and wrong (in my opinion). Philosophy was were I was allowed and encouraged to criticise the theories we learned - _provided I could argue for said criticism! The sloppy ones dropped out as soon as we started on formal logic (which is very close to mathematics, not incidentally). There might be philosophy departments were you can get by with sloppy work and vague formulations of personal opinions. Mine wasn't one of those.
And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Exactly the criticism I, and loads of philosophers before us, offered (yup, you are doing philosophy when you criticise philosophy, weird, hu?! Which raises new questions about whether such a system works the same way as our internal one (which, this time incidentally, was the stupid assumption that had me leavning English Lit.). If a person internalised all the trappings of the Chinese Room, does he understand Chinese (as the Chinese do?) The thought experiment is useful for studying our concepts of syntax and semantics, and what constitutes understanding and consciousnes.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition.
It really, really doesn't. Not at all. It means you study it, whether with a mind to change it or not has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Technorcacy means you try to do something about it.
Yes. With a certain toolset and a certain idea about the initial conditions and a certain idea about the kinds of improvements that can be made. I'm all for those, but I like the fact that we have fields that come up with alternative ways than technology, to change the human condition. That's how we discover new fields (of improvement) - no constitutional democracy without Locke and Montesquieu, no analytical engines without Frege and Leibniz, no reformation of the jail system with Bentham, etc. etc.
I do sincerely believe that our society is in peril, and that a monopoly over communication between all levels of society is a Bad Thing. I don't think you will be able to come up with any ideology that agrees with the latter - except types of fascism.
And you do not get to decide what my posts are about, sorry. I was asking you to stay on the topic, or not respond, and now you are asking me to stay off the topic. Sorry, doesn't work that way.
The topic was the harm Apple's model is doing. That one person cannot view porn is not the problem, as I suspect you know. But of course, they are also hurting consumer choice (cf. the people of Syndey who are not allowed to look up the non-copyrightable facts of bus times through apps, because Apple sided with the bus company claiming copyright over said facts).
That was an example, btw. Not the entire problem. So no, you can't just sarcastically hand-wave it away as if the part is the whole.
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
Yes, curse Apple. Curse them for their mass appeal and constantly growing popularity. How dare they be successful in the midst of people who don't like their development process...
I was talking about the censorship and vendor-tie-in. About letting one company and their fear of lawsuits decide what we can access and how. What the hell are you talking about?
Android is withering on the vine. Sure there are new handsets coming out all the time, but anyone with a handset from just six months ago is lumped in with the "legacy old-timers" and they get infrequent/unstable software updates while the handset makers and carriers chase new customers with brand new handsets. This business model is headed for mediocrity. Apples business model (as painful as it is to admit) of presenting one front end, one platform to develop for, and stable, reliable legacy updates is only getting stronger.
Uhm... Check your statistics, Android is doing quite well. And even if you are proven right in five years time, and there was no market model for an open development ecosystem, you still have not begun to address the point you quoted; Apple is showing us the dangers of the one-vendor model quite consistently.
Please do not respond again if you are unable to differentiate this criticism from "I hate Apple because they are succcessful".
All these complaints are really about fragmentation. Your criticism is not about Android, but about whether we should have more than a handful of different phones to develop on. I say we should. Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
The question then is, whether Android is good for such a fragmented market. Technically, I have no idea. And its ecosystem of development could be more open - but I am sure that the basic openness of the platform is doing/will do a lot of good.
If no medical testimony is given, the jury has a duty to inform itself otherwise it'll be participating in a possible miscarriage of justice.
I presume they are allowed to ask for such information. And I surmise from this case that they are not allowed to collect it themselves - or maybe they are just not allowed to disseminate such self-collected evidence/testimony in deliberation. The choice is not between no information allowed and allowing jurors to hand out anything they find relevant amongst themselves.
As it has come out in the comments below, the headline is plain wrong.
The judge declared a mistrial because a juror did something jurors are not allowed to do; bring outside information into deliberation. That the information in this case happened to be a wikipedia article is hardly relevant. In fact, it is a poor attempt to make a common "illegal stuff deemed illegal"-case interesting for it computer.literate.
Interesting. Do I have to tell you when I convert, then? Would it be illegal not to? Should we check the mosque records, or just let the police keep an eye on them?
And if it is more cost-efficient to simply do random house checks of converts/resident muslims, would that be ok? How about bugging said houses and mosques?
Paper check to buy certain items (printer toner, fertilizer)? Extra background check on dark-hued farmers?
Starting to sound like discrimination yet?
(And no, this is not a slippery slope argument, all the examples above either follow from your idea or can be based on the same premises as it has to).
But even theater can be a deterrance, as in WWII when they used sets of false tanks and things to make the Germans think we had materials we really didn't have.
Non sequitur, sorry. This theatre is for the common audience, not the terrorists. A fitting analogy would be saying that fooling steel workers into thinking they were building parts for ships when they were really building a giant statue of America pissing itself was a help in the war effort.
But there's a chance to cannot as well because of all these measures, and why would someone attack if there was a decent chance they'd never get a chance to actually do anything?
I think the chance of something going wrong is there right when you start planning. I'd go further and speculate that your average turn-a-plane-into-a-flying-bomb-terrorist is just slightly more fanatical to be quite so worrisome and rather prone to risk-seeking behaviour in the first place.
But to me it's absurd to claim that we should drop security measures that may be preventing terrorist attacks because of the rate of said attacks being so low.
Not if coupled with an argument against spending the people's money stupidly,
And you could make an interesting case that the government should not try to circumvent every possible threat, especially not one that takes policing when said police have a higher death rate than what you are trying to stop.
So lets make sound arguments for rolling them back to things that make the most sense. But don't pretend you know exactly what risks will be like after you change the whole system.
Agreed. But noone is pretending anything - sound arguments are already being made that the risk avoided now are laughable or even negative.
Please mod up insightful (since we have no "succint")!
Let's take this just a bit further, btw:
Say a terrorist for some reason decides to take over a plane with a bomb, either for traditions sake, or because he is misinformed. If he manages to get on the plane, his death toll will be rather low - the chance of killing more people than are at the plane are miniscule. If he is discovered, he can detonate where he is and kill more people. So, the TSA procedures are far more likely to help the terrorist kill more people.
Wow, I can see why he traded it in. What a hazzle.
Me, I'm pretty tech-savy, got a linux geek I know to help me, and in the end we managed to find both my email address AND my password, and from then on everything synced, including calendar and contacts. Then we spent another day putting in my FB password, that was a real job, I tell you.
How did her Apple get around this exactly, what clever, innovative function made the iPhone so much easier to set up?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, this is more insightful than funny.
Way to get the thread back on track :-)
Nice save!
Regarding storage, then the plug would of course connect to a harddrive, if you wanted more storage. Maybe wirelessly...
Re. the web of trust, then my rules were just an example. Better one have been, and will be, written. And maybe they should just be for suggestions. And when you do need to make an exchange with someone in Brazil from Denmark, the software will find the "smallest number of handshakes" and ask you if you trust friend X to trust, etc. etc.
Just another example - the basic idea is we have each other's public keys. How much you want to trust who from there is up to you - but it will be a damn sight more trustworthy than most things on the web right now, I can assure you.
The plugs would hold your personal data (and maybe your friends, encrypted, for stability, safety, etc.).
Some to be served to your own devices - email, documents, etc. (instead of keeping it in a cloud controlled, datamined and sold to those in power).
Some to be served to friends - their own data, whatever you want to share in your network (and only there, unlike FB, et al). Think Diaspora servers, wiki's, forums, whatever...
Whatever you want to share with the world - your own webpage (now entirely under your control), routing of Tor and similar traffic.
Now think synergy - you have a device which enables you to share with your friends only. So it has a public key encryption system, and a lot of keys from people you actually know and trust. This is how we get the web of trust started; only this time, we win. With a few simple rules (if 10 of my friends trust someone 90%+, I trust him 80%+, and trust accumulating over time, whatever the details), we get a pretty global (http://media.successcreeations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FacebookGlobalConnections2010.png) network of trust, which can be used for encryption of mails, torrents, transactions, you name it.
Hence, freedom.
Freedom.
Or, in more detail, the possibility for everyone on the planet to join a communications network able to run any and all software and services - dirt cheap, outside the surveillance or control of any agent, regardless of their power or legal standing.
Sort of a hobby project of Moglen's it appears...
...And for other applications to be able to use these calls, you'd have a list of "common name"="unique name"; and only allow admin access to it, requiring you to confirm any (functional) installations. It's not working out for them so far...
If Microsoft really wants to do something helpful, they can stop marketing Windows as "the easiest thing ever!" to non-technical users.
Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.
Also; +1 Insightful!
Even if you are right - and that is a pretty big if - this has no bearing on whether the law against marijuana is just.
Regarding your personal judgement of the character of said individuals, it is trite and wrong. Yes, one reason these people might have smoked marijuana was stupidity, it might have been lack of self-control - or it could be that they did not believe in following stupid laws. Maybe enjoying themselves was more important than the ridiculous politicising and puritan ideals which created the law. Maybe they were aleviating chemotherapy symptoms? Who knows...
Your claim to know the reason behind every instance of marijuana use is, to put it mildly, unconvincing.
More than that, think about how a "mesh" would break down with human nature. We need only look at what happens with most torrent peers...
Bittorrent actually works, I think we should draw conclusion from that...
In Soviet Russia, rambles
Tooth-ache!
1) Not caused by humans (but semi-preventable through human ingenuity after a certain time and age).
2) Not necessary for free will to exist or be fully experienced.
3) Not a necessary part of the cosmos, if you're omnipotent.
That is all.
And just by using Macs, they are daring to defy both Overlord Bill and Master Linus.
Don't be so conceited: computer users all bow to someone.
I have a hard time identifying who I am bowing to, when I use Free Software... Not Linus, nor Stallman, is telling me what to do with my machine.
But you are right that we cannot blame Apple for non-documented usage that leads to problems. Unless of course there is a good reason ('refusing to bow' if you will) for non-compliance (I have no clue whether this is the case, but I could think of some possible ones) - in that case, they are suffering problems for which Apple is to blame. Any comparable harm on a Free Software system is from negligence, not malice (either you did not follow documentation out of negligence, or the documentation was somehow suboptimal).
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Your entire argument is based on the premise that Apple is the sole communications company in existence in the world...
Oh dear. Your should really read it again, you would not believe how wrong you are getting it...
My argument was, and this was stated quite clearly to begin with, that Apple is _exemplifying_ the kinds of harm that the one vendor model causes. I then, apparently, had to elaborate how this harm was of a particularly nasty kind since it consists in not just harm to the individual consumer. But I can see you did not catch that one either:
There is this little thing that I like to practice, called "don't own an iphone." It helps me sleep at night.
That's because you think I am only talking about the harm to the individual. I have no clue where you got that idea... The harm done by censorship, locks on innovation, non-optimal prices, easily implemented government controls (not just your government, all of them), etc. is far more serious than. And no, it does not go away when you stop using an iPhone.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
- Thomas Jefferson
Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter.
Well, we would likely all be malnourished, due to lack of fertilizers, at least those of us who hadn't died at childbirth or soon after. There wouldn't be an Internet to talk on, but that would be okay, since we wouldn't have time to use one due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day. In short, our lives would be miserable, but due to lack of medicine, they would at least be short.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work.
I chose philosophy as a field because it seemed the only one that did punish sloppy work. My original field of study turned out to hinge on theories that were unassailable (for us freshmen), and wrong (in my opinion). Philosophy was were I was allowed and encouraged to criticise the theories we learned - _provided I could argue for said criticism! The sloppy ones dropped out as soon as we started on formal logic (which is very close to mathematics, not incidentally).
There might be philosophy departments were you can get by with sloppy work and vague formulations of personal opinions. Mine wasn't one of those.
And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Exactly the criticism I, and loads of philosophers before us, offered (yup, you are doing philosophy when you criticise philosophy, weird, hu?! Which raises new questions about whether such a system works the same way as our internal one (which, this time incidentally, was the stupid assumption that had me leavning English Lit.). If a person internalised all the trappings of the Chinese Room, does he understand Chinese (as the Chinese do?) The thought experiment is useful for studying our concepts of syntax and semantics, and what constitutes understanding and consciousnes.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition.
It really, really doesn't. Not at all. It means you study it, whether with a mind to change it or not has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Technorcacy means you try to do something about it.
Yes. With a certain toolset and a certain idea about the initial conditions and a certain idea about the kinds of improvements that can be made. I'm all for those, but I like the fact that we have fields that come up with alternative ways than technology, to change the human condition. That's how we discover new fields (of improvement) - no constitutional democracy without Locke and Montesquieu, no analytical engines without Frege and Leibniz, no reformation of the jail system with Bentham, etc. etc.
I do sincerely believe that our society is in peril, and that a monopoly over communication between all levels of society is a Bad Thing. I don't think you will be able to come up with any ideology that agrees with the latter - except types of fascism.
And you do not get to decide what my posts are about, sorry. I was asking you to stay on the topic, or not respond, and now you are asking me to stay off the topic. Sorry, doesn't work that way.
The topic was the harm Apple's model is doing. That one person cannot view porn is not the problem, as I suspect you know. But of course, they are also hurting consumer choice (cf. the people of Syndey who are not allowed to look up the non-copyrightable facts of bus times through apps, because Apple sided with the bus company claiming copyright over said facts).
That was an example, btw. Not the entire problem. So no, you can't just sarcastically hand-wave it away as if the part is the whole.
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
Yes, curse Apple. Curse them for their mass appeal and constantly growing popularity. How dare they be successful in the midst of people who don't like their development process...
I was talking about the censorship and vendor-tie-in. About letting one company and their fear of lawsuits decide what we can access and how. What the hell are you talking about?
Android is withering on the vine. Sure there are new handsets coming out all the time, but anyone with a handset from just six months ago is lumped in with the "legacy old-timers" and they get infrequent/unstable software updates while the handset makers and carriers chase new customers with brand new handsets. This business model is headed for mediocrity. Apples business model (as painful as it is to admit) of presenting one front end, one platform to develop for, and stable, reliable legacy updates is only getting stronger.
Uhm... Check your statistics, Android is doing quite well. And even if you are proven right in five years time, and there was no market model for an open development ecosystem, you still have not begun to address the point you quoted; Apple is showing us the dangers of the one-vendor model quite consistently.
Please do not respond again if you are unable to differentiate this criticism from "I hate Apple because they are succcessful".
All these complaints are really about fragmentation. Your criticism is not about Android, but about whether we should have more than a handful of different phones to develop on. I say we should. Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
The question then is, whether Android is good for such a fragmented market. Technically, I have no idea. And its ecosystem of development could be more open - but I am sure that the basic openness of the platform is doing/will do a lot of good.
If no medical testimony is given, the jury has a duty to inform itself otherwise it'll be participating in a possible miscarriage of justice.
I presume they are allowed to ask for such information. And I surmise from this case that they are not allowed to collect it themselves - or maybe they are just not allowed to disseminate such self-collected evidence/testimony in deliberation. The choice is not between no information allowed and allowing jurors to hand out anything they find relevant amongst themselves.
As it has come out in the comments below, the headline is plain wrong.
The judge declared a mistrial because a juror did something jurors are not allowed to do; bring outside information into deliberation. That the information in this case happened to be a wikipedia article is hardly relevant. In fact, it is a poor attempt to make a common "illegal stuff deemed illegal"-case interesting for it computer.literate.
Interesting. Do I have to tell you when I convert, then? Would it be illegal not to? Should we check the mosque records, or just let the police keep an eye on them?
And if it is more cost-efficient to simply do random house checks of converts/resident muslims, would that be ok? How about bugging said houses and mosques?
Paper check to buy certain items (printer toner, fertilizer)? Extra background check on dark-hued farmers?
Starting to sound like discrimination yet?
(And no, this is not a slippery slope argument, all the examples above either follow from your idea or can be based on the same premises as it has to).
But even theater can be a deterrance, as in WWII when they used sets of false tanks and things to make the Germans think we had materials we really didn't have.
Non sequitur, sorry. This theatre is for the common audience, not the terrorists. A fitting analogy would be saying that fooling steel workers into thinking they were building parts for ships when they were really building a giant statue of America pissing itself was a help in the war effort.
But there's a chance to cannot as well because of all these measures, and why would someone attack if there was a decent chance they'd never get a chance to actually do anything?
I think the chance of something going wrong is there right when you start planning. I'd go further and speculate that your average turn-a-plane-into-a-flying-bomb-terrorist is just slightly more fanatical to be quite so worrisome and rather prone to risk-seeking behaviour in the first place.
But to me it's absurd to claim that we should drop security measures that may be preventing terrorist attacks because of the rate of said attacks being so low.
Not if coupled with an argument against spending the people's money stupidly,
And you could make an interesting case that the government should not try to circumvent every possible threat, especially not one that takes policing when said police have a higher death rate than what you are trying to stop.
So lets make sound arguments for rolling them back to things that make the most sense. But don't pretend you know exactly what risks will be like after you change the whole system.
Agreed. But noone is pretending anything - sound arguments are already being made that the risk avoided now are laughable or even negative.
Please mod up insightful (since we have no "succint")!
Let's take this just a bit further, btw:
Say a terrorist for some reason decides to take over a plane with a bomb, either for traditions sake, or because he is misinformed.
If he manages to get on the plane, his death toll will be rather low - the chance of killing more people than are at the plane are miniscule.
If he is discovered, he can detonate where he is and kill more people.
So, the TSA procedures are far more likely to help the terrorist kill more people.
...with a 900-number in a blinking font...
(Almost) avoided the bait, got the bear! Nice one ;-)
He had to put in his email and password?????
Wow, I can see why he traded it in. What a hazzle.
Me, I'm pretty tech-savy, got a linux geek I know to help me, and in the end we managed to find both my email address AND my password, and from then on everything synced, including calendar and contacts. Then we spent another day putting in my FB password, that was a real job, I tell you.
How did her Apple get around this exactly, what clever, innovative function made the iPhone so much easier to set up?