I have yet to see a dog actually bark at nothing. Now yes, a trained guard dog will bark occasionally at things they shouldn't (like squirrels, birds, or even in one case the sound of my neighbor's washing machine), but that's no reason to get rid of the dog, just because you don't entirely understand what it's thinking.
Similarly, the politicians you complain so loudly about are humans like you, with all the natural ability to make informed decisions as you have. Just because you don't see the need for a law's provisions (such as preventing frivolous adoption of animals) does not make it inherently wrong. It means you need to do some research, find out what the opposing point of view really is, and try to understand all of the complex interactions a law will affect.
No, it's not as easy as just complaining on Slashdot about how you're underrepresented by someone you've likely never contacted. Training a dog properly isn't as easy as replacing it. Life is hard and complicated. Deal with it.
With the prosecutors having a case that's pretty much botched anyway, it's a way of saying "no hard feelings, but do fuck off". The AG folks who worked on this can spin the payment to look like they didn't completely screw up, and Intel doesn't admit to any wrongdoing.
It's as close to a win-win situation as any lawsuit will reach.
I was brainwashed into thinking that the scientific method leads to fallible results, which may be disproved by later tests.
I must be a rube for thinking that we should make decisions based on the best available theories of the time, with the acceptance that policies may need to change later.
How dumb of me to think that temperature changes might be a temporary thing, but it probably wouldn't hurt to cut pollution, anyway.
To continue the analogy, it's like going up to the sausage maker, and asking why there's no cilantro in the mix, or olives, or whatever else you think should be there. Then, if the sausage maker doesn't immediately add your requested ingredient to all sausage made for everybody, stand there with a megaphone and shout about how the sausage discriminates against you.
People are, by and large, impatient and ignorant. If they don't see, in big clear letters, exactly what they want spelled out, they'll complain, and that really just makes the legislative process take longer.
I believe transparency is important, but not throughout the whole process. Give legislators a month or two to work out something reasonable, when they can offend each other without worrying much about the public. Then present the draft to the public for comment, with clear notice that it's not final. Take comments and accommodate the relevant concerns.
Please just don't trust the general public to make smart decisions as a group. We're generally even worse at that than politicians.
Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. As part of a democracy, they're supposed to have everybody's best interests at heart. That includes the carpenters working on the movie sets that lose funding if the studio collapses. That includes the ISP technician who has to implement any new policies, on top of his existing workload. That includes the artists, who are working two jobs already while trying to find time to create.
But of course, that's not good enough for any single person. Everybody wants their best interests represented, and nobody else matters.
The problem with making laws in sight of the public is that the public will not just see the proposed laws, but react to them in their unfinished form.
Laws go through many iterations and edits before anything is public, and the public at large has an annoying tendency to pick out the worst aspects, and launch protest campaigns using all the delicate tact of a stick of dynamite. If a proposed law might unintentionally offend some group, they're likely to oppose it, even though the offensive parts would be removed by the final version.
They're also seeking to increase revenue in other ways. If they make all their old good shows available, there's a smaller audience for their latest "reality" show. That means the ads for the new show bring in less revenue. As a show's viewership get higher, ad prices rise exponentially. To the distributors, it may very well be worth it to have a slightly smaller audience, but more concentrated on a few new shows.
No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Nobody is required to be a witness against himself without due process of law. The court determines what falls under due process, and here has found that the unencrypted contents are required for the trial. The fifth amendment's promise is upheld.
The fifth amendment protects against the $5-wrench solution to encryption, because that would clearly be violating due process. It tangentially protects against saying something in a courtroom against yourself, because you may not have had a chance to discuss your response with your legal advisers, and therefore may face an unjust disadvantage. It does not mean the prosecutors have to produce all of the evidence for a trial on their own.
Perfect logic only applies in the world of perfect theory, where silly things like common sense need not apply.
Yes, by having the encrypted drive, the prosecution does technically possess the documents. Of course, they do not possess the documents in any usable form.
The point of discovery is to bring everything, incriminating or not, before the court, after which the prosecution and the defense will offer theories of what happened, supported by the evidence. It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court. Refusing to show information to the court, regardless of whether such information is incriminating or not, is itself a criminal act, namely one of not following the legal process. Similarly, resisting arrest is a separate crime, because you're not following due process.
demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
That's questionable. A testimony is a statement of truth regarding a matter, and the defendant is not necessarily making any such statement. Let us follow the hypothetical case of a bombing. The defendant in the trial is a chemist, asked to explain a shopping list of chemicals. The defendant chemist explains that the chemicals named would, when properly combined, explode. That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
My plans for death (though I have yet to find a good legal way to have them fulfilled) are to have all recyclable parts (joint replacements, etc.) removed and reused/recycled, all acceptable organs donated, and the remainder of my body being donated to research and/or education, with the exception of my head (sans eyeballs and/or whatever was donated), which will be involved in its own ritual.
I intend that a significant portion of my fortune (you know, once I have a fortune) will go to whomever can bring about the most absurd use of my head in a publicly-visible manner. I'm particularly fond of being shot from a cannon on a skyscraper into water. My head must also sit, preserved, in an easily visible location of the heir's primary residence for a year, either before or after the absurdity.
My goal in life is to become influential enough to make these plans legal. My goal in death is to make the world a weirder place.
While supporting labor unions may hurt a studio's bottom line a little, incurring the wrath of a union for supporting an anti-union candidate hurts more. I don't intend to dispute what the article says about bad blood between the Republicans and the MPAA, but merely to add to it.
The movie industry is deeply engaged with labor unions. The Democrats tend to favor labor unions, so the movie industry often pushes for Democrat candidates to keep their status quo union agreements.
You don't seem to understand it. The American people should exhaust every possible means of peaceful protest, repeatedly, before resorting to anything remotely violent or antagonistic. That means organizing nationwide letter-writing campaigns, protests, artistic statements, and political campaigns. Note the exclusion of things like bombing campaigns, assassinations, and significant disruptions to normal business.
The SOPA campaigns were relatively successful. The representatives backed off from SOPA, and despite the predictions of various cynics, I expect SOPA will not be returning with the same kind of Internet-crushing power. The biggest disruption I found from the blackouts was that Wikipedia was unavailable for many people, leading to many letters being sent to representatives. In contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protests caused far more disruption and damage, but didn't really accomplish much to affect any representatives' views on issues at hand.
The extremist protesters have a particularly worrying cognitive dissonance regarding their representatives being human. It is often pointed out how representatives are corruptible and will make mistakes. It is rarely mentioned that they will also get annoyed and angry.
Consider a child in a toy store. If the child wants a toy, and immediately throws a tantrum about it, they're not likely to get anything. If the child behaves well, and simply asks, the parent is more likely to buy the toy for them. Of course, the parent may still decline, but that's no reason for the child to then poison the family dinner.
Note well that last part. Protests are not guaranteed to succeed, and frankly I'd be terrified if they were. Using SOPA as an example, there are far more complex issues at hand than just whether any entity can block DNS records. There are international relations issues, because US support of Russian piracy is a major contributor to Russian organized crime. There are economic issues, because the human resources needed for major websites to comply with requests may exhaust the available talent pool for IT, stifling future innovation. There are so many more issues at stake than just what's talked about in public.
The American people should understand that modern politics involve more than just the number of signatures on a petition, and their plans for petitions should address other problems any particular action could cause. Those who express dissatisfaction with well-planned protests should be praised and looked to for more advice in the future. Those who try a few half-baked plans, fail, and jump straight to violence should be considered dangerous.
Congress is full of lawyers, not economists. Should every state representative be forced to undergo a few years of education in economics before taking office? Congress is also supposed to authorize all military action. Should the representatives have requisite training in modern military tactics? Let's not forget the many bills affecting things like health care, building codes, and technology. By the time a representative is completely educated in all subjects necessary to fulfill his duties, he'll be dead!
Relating only to the economy, I do have one other question: Who, exactly, are these true experts? Are they the ones who've managed large sums of money for decades and have shown themselves to understand the complexities of the economy reasonably well, or are they the ones who feed the hope of simplicity to a crowd of under-educated voters?
And the Nazis also came to power with much public approval, on a platform of anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rhetoric, that only turned to antisemitism as the party needed industry support.
There's a reason teachers don't teach details. It's because very few people can understand all the details of every field. Teachers and textbooks present simplified overviews of a field, so that interested students have a basic level of understanding to move on to further education later.
This applies at every level. An elementary school teacher says "Congress makes laws". A High school teacher says "the committees of the House and Senate make bills, which are passes to become laws". A college professor says "The committees are influenced by lobbyists representing industries and activists who have interest in the bill" and in the real world, a politician finds that the committees are influenced by lobbyists, activists, legal precedent, and international treaties (which are themselves subject to a complicated procedure), and myriad other sources.
This applies to every field. As more casual observers choose not to continue their education in a particular field, the study gets into more complex subjects. Knowing everything about everything is simply not possible today. There are too many fields with too much to know.
Then, there's the Internet, with its vast availability of information. Surely, this will allow everyone to fully understand the complexities and nuances of every field, right? Absolutely not. There are few resources on the Web where one can go to study in adequate depth, and those arcane details are incomprehensible without the prior years of study to understand how all the details work together. Very few people want to devote that much time to studying online, so they'll abandon learning the complexity, and will simply follow the advice of some person or website they trust.
Today, it appears that such trusted websites are predominantly social networks, where people hear the opinions of their peers, read a one-page summary of an issue, and instantly believe themselves qualified to debate it. This is why candidates with simple plans to fix everything get so much support from Internet-based grassroots movements, but can never gather support from the big corporations (who employ economic and political specialists who understand the complex consequences of the simple plans).
People hear that the Federal Reserve Bank loaned out $16 trillion dollars without any special announcement, and they start rallying against the Fed for this policy of handing out money to banks. They flock to Ron Paul's banner, calling to eliminate the Federal Reserve Bank. The real story is that the $16 trillion figure was the cumulative total of one-day loans, meaning that a $100 loan for one month would be recorded as $3000, even though only $100 was loaned out, and $100 was paid back.
The people in charge now understand the complexities of their fields, and the people in charge in the future will continue to understand the complexities of their fields. Hopefully, they will continue to ignore the uninformed masses, and take their short-sighted quick-fix plans with significant doses of salt.
This is not to say that the Internet is useless. There is great potential for legitimate change to be effected via websites like the EFF's, where organizations with particular (and publicly-stated) goals can state their view on an issue, and the masses can donate their voice (by way of a petition signature and/or a monetary donation) to support the experts of the organization, who do understand the complexities involved.
One major goal of government, including the United States' government, is to maintain peace. People who stir up calls of violence, rather than peaceful protests, should be watched and discouraged. It is unacceptable for that discouragement to involve censorship, just as it is unacceptable for a petition to involve explosives.
Unfortunately, the mere mention of any investigation makes the short-fuse radicals even more enraged. Nevermind that the goal is usually "see if this guy's dangerous", the person in question will often see it as a terrible threat, and will actively antagonize the police. The anti-establishment culture is as much responsible for our recent loss of freedoms as the legislature who sees increasing threats of violence.
Nothing to be done except, of course, for calling representatives and writing letters until a suitable about of attention is garnered to show that them opposition to a law is greater than what the RIAA/MPAA claims its support is.
True, but the last several comments I've seen bring up deficits have all been followed by various rants about balancing the budget perfectly, and how all debt is terrible, and China's going to own us, et cetera. I'm hoping to help avoid the same misinformation.
Slashdot Mirror
I do sincerely hope you've never had a dog.
I have yet to see a dog actually bark at nothing. Now yes, a trained guard dog will bark occasionally at things they shouldn't (like squirrels, birds, or even in one case the sound of my neighbor's washing machine), but that's no reason to get rid of the dog, just because you don't entirely understand what it's thinking.
Similarly, the politicians you complain so loudly about are humans like you, with all the natural ability to make informed decisions as you have. Just because you don't see the need for a law's provisions (such as preventing frivolous adoption of animals) does not make it inherently wrong. It means you need to do some research, find out what the opposing point of view really is, and try to understand all of the complex interactions a law will affect.
No, it's not as easy as just complaining on Slashdot about how you're underrepresented by someone you've likely never contacted. Training a dog properly isn't as easy as replacing it. Life is hard and complicated. Deal with it.
6.5 million dollars ? What's that, again?
Pocket change for Intel.
With the prosecutors having a case that's pretty much botched anyway, it's a way of saying "no hard feelings, but do fuck off". The AG folks who worked on this can spin the payment to look like they didn't completely screw up, and Intel doesn't admit to any wrongdoing.
It's as close to a win-win situation as any lawsuit will reach.
Number 2, I guess.
I was brainwashed into thinking that the scientific method leads to fallible results, which may be disproved by later tests.
I must be a rube for thinking that we should make decisions based on the best available theories of the time, with the acceptance that policies may need to change later.
How dumb of me to think that temperature changes might be a temporary thing, but it probably wouldn't hurt to cut pollution, anyway.
This is Slashdot. Balanced positions mean you're obviously a shill for whatever the argument's opposing.
You're obviously a shill for the rational-thought camp. Most likely Consumers Union, the NHTSA, or maybe PBS. Probably PBS.
To continue the analogy, it's like going up to the sausage maker, and asking why there's no cilantro in the mix, or olives, or whatever else you think should be there. Then, if the sausage maker doesn't immediately add your requested ingredient to all sausage made for everybody, stand there with a megaphone and shout about how the sausage discriminates against you.
People are, by and large, impatient and ignorant. If they don't see, in big clear letters, exactly what they want spelled out, they'll complain, and that really just makes the legislative process take longer.
I believe transparency is important, but not throughout the whole process. Give legislators a month or two to work out something reasonable, when they can offend each other without worrying much about the public. Then present the draft to the public for comment, with clear notice that it's not final. Take comments and accommodate the relevant concerns.
Please just don't trust the general public to make smart decisions as a group. We're generally even worse at that than politicians.
Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. As part of a democracy, they're supposed to have everybody's best interests at heart. That includes the carpenters working on the movie sets that lose funding if the studio collapses. That includes the ISP technician who has to implement any new policies, on top of his existing workload. That includes the artists, who are working two jobs already while trying to find time to create.
But of course, that's not good enough for any single person. Everybody wants their best interests represented, and nobody else matters.
The problem with making laws in sight of the public is that the public will not just see the proposed laws, but react to them in their unfinished form.
Laws go through many iterations and edits before anything is public, and the public at large has an annoying tendency to pick out the worst aspects, and launch protest campaigns using all the delicate tact of a stick of dynamite. If a proposed law might unintentionally offend some group, they're likely to oppose it, even though the offensive parts would be removed by the final version.
They're also seeking to increase revenue in other ways. If they make all their old good shows available, there's a smaller audience for their latest "reality" show. That means the ads for the new show bring in less revenue. As a show's viewership get higher, ad prices rise exponentially. To the distributors, it may very well be worth it to have a slightly smaller audience, but more concentrated on a few new shows.
Entrapment? I do not think it means what you think it means.
No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Nobody is required to be a witness against himself without due process of law. The court determines what falls under due process, and here has found that the unencrypted contents are required for the trial. The fifth amendment's promise is upheld.
The fifth amendment protects against the $5-wrench solution to encryption, because that would clearly be violating due process. It tangentially protects against saying something in a courtroom against yourself, because you may not have had a chance to discuss your response with your legal advisers, and therefore may face an unjust disadvantage. It does not mean the prosecutors have to produce all of the evidence for a trial on their own.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
Perfect logic only applies in the world of perfect theory, where silly things like common sense need not apply.
Yes, by having the encrypted drive, the prosecution does technically possess the documents. Of course, they do not possess the documents in any usable form.
The point of discovery is to bring everything, incriminating or not, before the court, after which the prosecution and the defense will offer theories of what happened, supported by the evidence. It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court. Refusing to show information to the court, regardless of whether such information is incriminating or not, is itself a criminal act, namely one of not following the legal process. Similarly, resisting arrest is a separate crime, because you're not following due process.
demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
That's questionable. A testimony is a statement of truth regarding a matter, and the defendant is not necessarily making any such statement. Let us follow the hypothetical case of a bombing. The defendant in the trial is a chemist, asked to explain a shopping list of chemicals. The defendant chemist explains that the chemicals named would, when properly combined, explode. That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
My plans for death (though I have yet to find a good legal way to have them fulfilled) are to have all recyclable parts (joint replacements, etc.) removed and reused/recycled, all acceptable organs donated, and the remainder of my body being donated to research and/or education, with the exception of my head (sans eyeballs and/or whatever was donated), which will be involved in its own ritual.
I intend that a significant portion of my fortune (you know, once I have a fortune) will go to whomever can bring about the most absurd use of my head in a publicly-visible manner. I'm particularly fond of being shot from a cannon on a skyscraper into water. My head must also sit, preserved, in an easily visible location of the heir's primary residence for a year, either before or after the absurdity.
My goal in life is to become influential enough to make these plans legal. My goal in death is to make the world a weirder place.
Not all politics happen in D.C.
While supporting labor unions may hurt a studio's bottom line a little, incurring the wrath of a union for supporting an anti-union candidate hurts more. I don't intend to dispute what the article says about bad blood between the Republicans and the MPAA, but merely to add to it.
There's labor unions there, too?
The movie industry is deeply engaged with labor unions. The Democrats tend to favor labor unions, so the movie industry often pushes for Democrat candidates to keep their status quo union agreements.
You don't seem to understand it. The American people should exhaust every possible means of peaceful protest, repeatedly, before resorting to anything remotely violent or antagonistic. That means organizing nationwide letter-writing campaigns, protests, artistic statements, and political campaigns. Note the exclusion of things like bombing campaigns, assassinations, and significant disruptions to normal business.
The SOPA campaigns were relatively successful. The representatives backed off from SOPA, and despite the predictions of various cynics, I expect SOPA will not be returning with the same kind of Internet-crushing power. The biggest disruption I found from the blackouts was that Wikipedia was unavailable for many people, leading to many letters being sent to representatives. In contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protests caused far more disruption and damage, but didn't really accomplish much to affect any representatives' views on issues at hand.
The extremist protesters have a particularly worrying cognitive dissonance regarding their representatives being human. It is often pointed out how representatives are corruptible and will make mistakes. It is rarely mentioned that they will also get annoyed and angry.
Consider a child in a toy store. If the child wants a toy, and immediately throws a tantrum about it, they're not likely to get anything. If the child behaves well, and simply asks, the parent is more likely to buy the toy for them. Of course, the parent may still decline, but that's no reason for the child to then poison the family dinner.
Note well that last part. Protests are not guaranteed to succeed, and frankly I'd be terrified if they were. Using SOPA as an example, there are far more complex issues at hand than just whether any entity can block DNS records. There are international relations issues, because US support of Russian piracy is a major contributor to Russian organized crime. There are economic issues, because the human resources needed for major websites to comply with requests may exhaust the available talent pool for IT, stifling future innovation. There are so many more issues at stake than just what's talked about in public.
The American people should understand that modern politics involve more than just the number of signatures on a petition, and their plans for petitions should address other problems any particular action could cause. Those who express dissatisfaction with well-planned protests should be praised and looked to for more advice in the future. Those who try a few half-baked plans, fail, and jump straight to violence should be considered dangerous.
Congress is full of lawyers, not economists. Should every state representative be forced to undergo a few years of education in economics before taking office? Congress is also supposed to authorize all military action. Should the representatives have requisite training in modern military tactics? Let's not forget the many bills affecting things like health care, building codes, and technology. By the time a representative is completely educated in all subjects necessary to fulfill his duties, he'll be dead!
Relating only to the economy, I do have one other question: Who, exactly, are these true experts? Are they the ones who've managed large sums of money for decades and have shown themselves to understand the complexities of the economy reasonably well, or are they the ones who feed the hope of simplicity to a crowd of under-educated voters?
Or a Ron Paul supporter
And the Nazis also came to power with much public approval, on a platform of anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rhetoric, that only turned to antisemitism as the party needed industry support.
More informed, really?
There's a reason teachers don't teach details. It's because very few people can understand all the details of every field. Teachers and textbooks present simplified overviews of a field, so that interested students have a basic level of understanding to move on to further education later.
This applies at every level. An elementary school teacher says "Congress makes laws". A High school teacher says "the committees of the House and Senate make bills, which are passes to become laws". A college professor says "The committees are influenced by lobbyists representing industries and activists who have interest in the bill" and in the real world, a politician finds that the committees are influenced by lobbyists, activists, legal precedent, and international treaties (which are themselves subject to a complicated procedure), and myriad other sources.
This applies to every field. As more casual observers choose not to continue their education in a particular field, the study gets into more complex subjects. Knowing everything about everything is simply not possible today. There are too many fields with too much to know.
Then, there's the Internet, with its vast availability of information. Surely, this will allow everyone to fully understand the complexities and nuances of every field, right? Absolutely not. There are few resources on the Web where one can go to study in adequate depth, and those arcane details are incomprehensible without the prior years of study to understand how all the details work together. Very few people want to devote that much time to studying online, so they'll abandon learning the complexity, and will simply follow the advice of some person or website they trust.
Today, it appears that such trusted websites are predominantly social networks, where people hear the opinions of their peers, read a one-page summary of an issue, and instantly believe themselves qualified to debate it. This is why candidates with simple plans to fix everything get so much support from Internet-based grassroots movements, but can never gather support from the big corporations (who employ economic and political specialists who understand the complex consequences of the simple plans).
People hear that the Federal Reserve Bank loaned out $16 trillion dollars without any special announcement, and they start rallying against the Fed for this policy of handing out money to banks. They flock to Ron Paul's banner, calling to eliminate the Federal Reserve Bank. The real story is that the $16 trillion figure was the cumulative total of one-day loans, meaning that a $100 loan for one month would be recorded as $3000, even though only $100 was loaned out, and $100 was paid back.
The people in charge now understand the complexities of their fields, and the people in charge in the future will continue to understand the complexities of their fields. Hopefully, they will continue to ignore the uninformed masses, and take their short-sighted quick-fix plans with significant doses of salt.
This is not to say that the Internet is useless. There is great potential for legitimate change to be effected via websites like the EFF's, where organizations with particular (and publicly-stated) goals can state their view on an issue, and the masses can donate their voice (by way of a petition signature and/or a monetary donation) to support the experts of the organization, who do understand the complexities involved.
One major goal of government, including the United States' government, is to maintain peace. People who stir up calls of violence, rather than peaceful protests, should be watched and discouraged. It is unacceptable for that discouragement to involve censorship, just as it is unacceptable for a petition to involve explosives.
Unfortunately, the mere mention of any investigation makes the short-fuse radicals even more enraged. Nevermind that the goal is usually "see if this guy's dangerous", the person in question will often see it as a terrible threat, and will actively antagonize the police. The anti-establishment culture is as much responsible for our recent loss of freedoms as the legislature who sees increasing threats of violence.
But think of the possibilities! Cake batter, and quiche batter, and pancake batter, and crepe batter, and mousse, and meringue, and whipped cream...
Nothing to be done except, of course, for calling representatives and writing letters until a suitable about of attention is garnered to show that them opposition to a law is greater than what the RIAA/MPAA claims its support is.
True, but the last several comments I've seen bring up deficits have all been followed by various rants about balancing the budget perfectly, and how all debt is terrible, and China's going to own us, et cetera. I'm hoping to help avoid the same misinformation.