The only voice Congressional representatives should be hearing are their direct constituents.
Often, those lobbyists are their direct constituents. What you need to do is outlaw lobbying while on the clock. That's a lot more clear cut. Allow employees of companies to lobby for their employers' interests, but don't allow them to count that as work time, don't allow it to be a part of their job responsibilities, and don't allow the company to punish employees for not doing so.
See, they don't see it that way. The folks in power see the Internet as the great equalizer. The last thing someone in power wants is to give the masses comparable power. It is therefore no surprise that Congress is hellbent on screwing up the Internet as much as humanly possible.
Yeah, because it's really useful to prevent suicidal passengers from bringing bombs on trains when any idiot can plant one under the rails anywhere along a thousand-mile-long stretch without any significant risk to themselves.
This is a prime example of why everyone in the top tier of TSA management should be fired. If they are so dumb that they naïvely believe that adding security stations for bus and train terminals is useful, they should absolutely not be allowed to be in charge of anything.
I'm okay with banning all liquids and gels, so long as they also:
Ban checked luggage fees on your first bag so that I can carry a tube of toothpaste for less than $30.
Get all the checked luggage out of the plane and to the baggage claim in five minutes instead of half an hour.
Besides, it's a moot point anyway. Odds are good that the next successful attack on airport security will involve airport employees (e.g. maintenance workers) who often get little or no screening. Our airport security is myopically focused on passengers, while ignoring the bigger picture. Such schemes never work for very long.
Pretty much. A browser cookie identifies that a specific machine no longer needs to be asked for auth, which means unless you're using HTTPS, it is trivially sniffable.
What? You thought your feelings on what is private are the only ones that matter?
No, that's just not a relevant data point. If you tell something private about me, there's not a thing I can do about that, whether you do it on Facebook, on your own website, by telling the neighborhood gossip, etc. Ultimately, that's not a privacy flaw in Facebook, but rather a flaw in my friends. Facebook isn't violating my privacy; my friends are.
More to the point, there's no reasonable way for Facebook to police everyone's posts for every single thing that they might say about me that I might consider a privacy violation.
Comparing that to water meters is absurd. The power company is collecting the information from me, not from my neighbor. It's more like the power company doing a poll and my neighbors mentioning that they should do repair work between [insert hours here] because I'm not home. If my neighbors were stupid enough to say that, the power company isn't obligated to keep those survey results secret, particularly if they posted that along with a hundred thousand other people's comments.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's probably both per capita and overall. Walk around China and see how easy it is to find pirated copies of movies, software, etc. for a buck or less. Mass piracy runs rampant like you wouldn't believe in many countries. I'm talking about real piracy here, not penny ante Bittorrent downloader piracy.
And although the BSA might predominantly (or exclusively) harass businesses, AFAIK their piracy stats are not business-specific. If they were, their arguments about a pirated copy being a lost sale might actually have some merit.
If Adobe sold a full version of Photoshop for non-commercial use, that would be a valid argument. Arguing that a watered down version of Photoshop is affordable isn't because it doesn't counter the original point.
If I buy Elements for me and I go to work for a company and they ask what software I want to use, I'm going to say Elements because it was good enough for my own personal work. And if they buy me the full version of it and I discover something really useful, odds are I'm going to pirate it for personal use. (This is hypothetical, BTW—I own a fully licensed Photoshop, not Elements, for personal use.) Either way, they've "lost" the sale of a full copy of Photoshop.
At best, you might argue that one should buy the cheap version, then pirate the more expensive one so that you're at least paying something for it, but according to BSA logic, you pirated a copy of Photoshop that you otherwise would have bought (even if you wouldn't have).
Further, the majority of piracy happens in developing nations, where the people make single-digit U.S. dollars per week. They could afford Elements if they just gave up food for a year. See how silly that argument looks when put in the proper perspective?
Photoshop is just as bad. Apple has supported case-sensitive boot volumes for an entire decade, and Photoshop still barfs if you try to install it on one (and beginning in CS3, the installer actively prevents you from trying it). They blame Apple for the problem, because that's what they do. This despite the fact that you can fix it by adding a few (thousand) symbolic links.
And don't get me started on the unholy hell that was FrameMaker on the Mac.
Adobe isn't about creating good code, and never has been. They're about cutting corners in quality while trying to pack in as many new features as possible to drive people to buy upgrades. Flash is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not just Flash. It's pretty much every piece of software Adobe makes. The only piece of Adobe software that I have any respect for is Lightroom.
3. Every turbine should have a turbine bypass and a set of dummy loads or a smaller emergency power turbine and a set of dummy loads so that in an emergency, any single reactor can be brought up to minimal output and used to produce "outside" power for the others. Or, alternatively,
4. Every power plant that cannot safely scram without outside power should be shut down and replaced with a newer design that can.
If I remember correctly Truth isn't a liable/slander legal defense in the UK.
It's not an absolute defense in the U.S., either. If the information is private and the person is a private citizen, you can still get into trouble for invasion of privacy.
If so, before you call the country "corrupt", try bribing a cop to let you off a speeding ticket or a DUI, and see where it actually gets you.
Now repeat this experiment a thousand times. I'd be willing to bet that at least a few of them will bite, assuming the bribe is large enough. (Probably more for a speeding ticket than a DUI.)
Now take it one step farther and offer those same officers money to get you out of speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc. written by someone else.
See, that's the problem. It doesn't take complete corruption for the system to be corrupted. It's just like computer security—you only have to miss one vulnerability to completely destroy all the hard work you put into securing a system. In the court system, all it takes is one corrupt judge at the right level and the ability to steer your case towards that judge. In the legislature, all it takes is managing to buy a couple of corruptible people whose opinions other congresscritters mistakenly trust and respect. And so on.
It is not sufficient to limit corruption to a small amount because even the smallest bit of corruption ruins the whole system. It must be systematically eliminated through (among other things) making it illegal for members of government to take a position in industries that they previously regulated for a period of years after they leave government and vice-versa. Similarly, we should not allow people who have recently been practicing lawyers to serve in the legislature because of the inherent conflict of interest that this poses. (Why would a lawyer want to simplify our legal code? That complexity serves his/her profession well.) And so on.
No, attitudes on privacy aren't diverging. You're just misrepresenting them.
I post on Facebook what I choose to post. Therefore, Facebook posts are not a privacy violation (unless they ignore my privacy settings) because the act of making those posts was an act of explicit consent to share that information with the people I chose to share it with. Yes, stupid people will post stupid things that allow others to invade their privacy, but you can't legislate away stupidity.
By contrast, I don't choose what information my water meter collects. Therefore, the water company should not be allowed to disclose any information that it collects. Similarly, Facebook should not be allowed to disclose anything that I don't explicitly allow them to disclose. And so on.
Disclosure of private information should require explicit consent. The deeper you hide that consent in some service agreement, the bigger the privacy violation you're committing. Simple as that.
We're talking about two different things. Advertising the site (on other sites) could potentially be infringement for the reasons you give, depending on whether the site itself is an infringing use of the mark. Selling advertising space on the site almost certainly is not.
I think you missed the point that the publishers get 30%, and now apple gets another 30%.
No, you misread that. The publishers get 70% of MSRP and Apple gets 30% of the sale price. So for sale prices at or below MSRP, the middleman gets nothing or takes a loss.
What happened was that this company was buying books on a 50% margin, which meant that they got a 50% cut of the suggested retail price, assuming they sold at MSRP. Apple was willing to sell eBooks on their store for a 30% cut, so the publishers said to the other booksellers, "Why should we give you more than a 30% cut?" Then, they raised their wholesale prices to 70% of MSRP.
At least in iOS 3 (which is the last version my phone supports), it's Settings > General > Location Services, and the only choices are "on" or "off". So your choice is between an obnoxious nag every time you launch Facebook or having to manually reenable location services every time you want to use Google Maps.
Either way, it does nothing to solve the problem that I was pointing out, which was that if apps ask for location services even when they don't really need location services (as is the case when you're using the other 99% of Facebook's functionality), then the nag message loses all meaning.
For the purposes of trademark law, commercial use of a mark means using it to sell goods or services, period. Advertising is not generally considered a product unless your company is an ad network.
Using the name of a website to sell ads on that site is purely a descriptive use of the mark, in that it is the only way to identify that website. In general, descriptive uses are explicitly not considered commercial use. Thus, it is highly unlikely that advertising on such a site would constitute infringement if the site itself does not constitute infringement.
Therefore, the only relevant question is whether the website is being used to explicitly sell goods or services with that mark. For example, it might be dubious to sell T-shirts with the PayPalSucks.com logo. It would definitely be problematic to start a banking site at that address. The site itself, however, is certainly well within its rights to sell ad space.
Don't worry. I'm sure the judge has twelve wives and seventy children under the age of 18.
Wow. Twelve wives under the age of 18? That's pretty impressive....
But enough about why commas can sometimes be useful for adding clarity. I'm wondering what impact this decision will have with regards to the URS process discussion.
They may need to be dragged out over how easy it is to opt-in
And how hard it is to opt back out. Unless they've fixed it recently, if you tap on the "Check-in" button in the iPhone app just out of curiosity to see what it is and how it works, from then on, Facebook asks for permission to use your location every time you run the d**n app, whether you use the check-in feature or not. Can you say obnoxious? The only way I've found to fix it is to delete the Facebook app entirely and reinstall it.
The bigger concern is that with an app like Facebook doing this at every launch instead of just when you use the check-in feature, the average user will become so conditioned to clicking "Allow" at this prompt that after a while, the privacy feature will lose all meaning.
DMCA, yes, but copyright terms were extended in most of the world by the Berne conventions many years before the U.S. signed on and brought their copyright law into compliance. Basically, the U.S. and Europe leapfrog each other in an effort to make a bigger mess than the other one.
Or you could, assuming that you knew they were coming, simply move the micrometeoroids out of your path, or liquefy them with a laser so that they add mass to your hull instead of puncturing it.
On the other hand, the solutions to those problems may be trivial in twenty or thirty years because of solutions to other problems that had little, if anything, to do with the original problem.
Take world hunger for example. World hunger is a trivial problem to solve. There's no real reason we can't produce enough food to feed the entire planet, nor is there any real distribution problem, per se. The real problem is ultimately one of poverty vs. greed, and more to the point, one of governments that take that food and sell it to buy guns instead of feeding their population.
Try as we might to solve the problem of poverty, the solution is hard because we're trying to fit it into a framework that makes it hard, namely one of a capitalistic society. Step forward a hundred years. Computers and mechanical automation have replaced humans in all manufacturing roles and nearly all mining, etc. At that point, there is no inherent value in most material goods because a human did not have to do any work to create them. This completely turns the entire economic system on its head, and poverty becomes solved, not by the sorts of solutions we could create now, but rather by its sudden lack of relevance.
Similarly, one would hope that in time, the tendency to spend so much of our world's budget on war machines will also decrease.
For another example, to step back a bit in time, people were once fretting about how to deliver mail in the wild west without getting shot. Now one could try to solve that problem through designing new carriages that were impervious to arrows, or one could sit back and let someone else solve the violence problem, while focusing your metallurgical skills on something that would eventually prove to be vastly more useful—creating a horseless carriage, for example.
You get the idea. For a functioning world, we need both short-term and long-term thinkers. We need people who can work on the immediate problems while others look for solutions to the longer-term issues. Without both, we're screwed. Arguing which one is more important is like arguing which table leg is more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Often, those lobbyists are their direct constituents. What you need to do is outlaw lobbying while on the clock. That's a lot more clear cut. Allow employees of companies to lobby for their employers' interests, but don't allow them to count that as work time, don't allow it to be a part of their job responsibilities, and don't allow the company to punish employees for not doing so.
See, they don't see it that way. The folks in power see the Internet as the great equalizer. The last thing someone in power wants is to give the masses comparable power. It is therefore no surprise that Congress is hellbent on screwing up the Internet as much as humanly possible.
Yeah, because it's really useful to prevent suicidal passengers from bringing bombs on trains when any idiot can plant one under the rails anywhere along a thousand-mile-long stretch without any significant risk to themselves.
This is a prime example of why everyone in the top tier of TSA management should be fired. If they are so dumb that they naïvely believe that adding security stations for bus and train terminals is useful, they should absolutely not be allowed to be in charge of anything.
I'm okay with banning all liquids and gels, so long as they also:
Besides, it's a moot point anyway. Odds are good that the next successful attack on airport security will involve airport employees (e.g. maintenance workers) who often get little or no screening. Our airport security is myopically focused on passengers, while ignoring the bigger picture. Such schemes never work for very long.
Pretty much. A browser cookie identifies that a specific machine no longer needs to be asked for auth, which means unless you're using HTTPS, it is trivially sniffable.
No, that's just not a relevant data point. If you tell something private about me, there's not a thing I can do about that, whether you do it on Facebook, on your own website, by telling the neighborhood gossip, etc. Ultimately, that's not a privacy flaw in Facebook, but rather a flaw in my friends. Facebook isn't violating my privacy; my friends are.
More to the point, there's no reasonable way for Facebook to police everyone's posts for every single thing that they might say about me that I might consider a privacy violation.
Comparing that to water meters is absurd. The power company is collecting the information from me, not from my neighbor. It's more like the power company doing a poll and my neighbors mentioning that they should do repair work between [insert hours here] because I'm not home. If my neighbors were stupid enough to say that, the power company isn't obligated to keep those survey results secret, particularly if they posted that along with a hundred thousand other people's comments.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's probably both per capita and overall. Walk around China and see how easy it is to find pirated copies of movies, software, etc. for a buck or less. Mass piracy runs rampant like you wouldn't believe in many countries. I'm talking about real piracy here, not penny ante Bittorrent downloader piracy.
And although the BSA might predominantly (or exclusively) harass businesses, AFAIK their piracy stats are not business-specific. If they were, their arguments about a pirated copy being a lost sale might actually have some merit.
Except that it won't ever cool down like Earth did, thanks to extreme tidal heating.
Even evil must sometimes do good. For example, you have to earn trust before you can breach it.
If Adobe sold a full version of Photoshop for non-commercial use, that would be a valid argument. Arguing that a watered down version of Photoshop is affordable isn't because it doesn't counter the original point.
If I buy Elements for me and I go to work for a company and they ask what software I want to use, I'm going to say Elements because it was good enough for my own personal work. And if they buy me the full version of it and I discover something really useful, odds are I'm going to pirate it for personal use. (This is hypothetical, BTW—I own a fully licensed Photoshop, not Elements, for personal use.) Either way, they've "lost" the sale of a full copy of Photoshop.
At best, you might argue that one should buy the cheap version, then pirate the more expensive one so that you're at least paying something for it, but according to BSA logic, you pirated a copy of Photoshop that you otherwise would have bought (even if you wouldn't have).
Further, the majority of piracy happens in developing nations, where the people make single-digit U.S. dollars per week. They could afford Elements if they just gave up food for a year. See how silly that argument looks when put in the proper perspective?
Photoshop is just as bad. Apple has supported case-sensitive boot volumes for an entire decade, and Photoshop still barfs if you try to install it on one (and beginning in CS3, the installer actively prevents you from trying it). They blame Apple for the problem, because that's what they do. This despite the fact that you can fix it by adding a few (thousand) symbolic links.
And don't get me started on the unholy hell that was FrameMaker on the Mac.
Adobe isn't about creating good code, and never has been. They're about cutting corners in quality while trying to pack in as many new features as possible to drive people to buy upgrades. Flash is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not just Flash. It's pretty much every piece of software Adobe makes. The only piece of Adobe software that I have any respect for is Lightroom.
3. Every turbine should have a turbine bypass and a set of dummy loads or a smaller emergency power turbine and a set of dummy loads so that in an emergency, any single reactor can be brought up to minimal output and used to produce "outside" power for the others. Or, alternatively,
4. Every power plant that cannot safely scram without outside power should be shut down and replaced with a newer design that can.
It's not an absolute defense in the U.S., either. If the information is private and the person is a private citizen, you can still get into trouble for invasion of privacy.
Now repeat this experiment a thousand times. I'd be willing to bet that at least a few of them will bite, assuming the bribe is large enough. (Probably more for a speeding ticket than a DUI.)
Now take it one step farther and offer those same officers money to get you out of speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc. written by someone else.
See, that's the problem. It doesn't take complete corruption for the system to be corrupted. It's just like computer security—you only have to miss one vulnerability to completely destroy all the hard work you put into securing a system. In the court system, all it takes is one corrupt judge at the right level and the ability to steer your case towards that judge. In the legislature, all it takes is managing to buy a couple of corruptible people whose opinions other congresscritters mistakenly trust and respect. And so on.
It is not sufficient to limit corruption to a small amount because even the smallest bit of corruption ruins the whole system. It must be systematically eliminated through (among other things) making it illegal for members of government to take a position in industries that they previously regulated for a period of years after they leave government and vice-versa. Similarly, we should not allow people who have recently been practicing lawyers to serve in the legislature because of the inherent conflict of interest that this poses. (Why would a lawyer want to simplify our legal code? That complexity serves his/her profession well.) And so on.
No, attitudes on privacy aren't diverging. You're just misrepresenting them.
I post on Facebook what I choose to post. Therefore, Facebook posts are not a privacy violation (unless they ignore my privacy settings) because the act of making those posts was an act of explicit consent to share that information with the people I chose to share it with. Yes, stupid people will post stupid things that allow others to invade their privacy, but you can't legislate away stupidity.
By contrast, I don't choose what information my water meter collects. Therefore, the water company should not be allowed to disclose any information that it collects. Similarly, Facebook should not be allowed to disclose anything that I don't explicitly allow them to disclose. And so on.
Disclosure of private information should require explicit consent. The deeper you hide that consent in some service agreement, the bigger the privacy violation you're committing. Simple as that.
We're talking about two different things. Advertising the site (on other sites) could potentially be infringement for the reasons you give, depending on whether the site itself is an infringing use of the mark. Selling advertising space on the site almost certainly is not.
No, you misread that. The publishers get 70% of MSRP and Apple gets 30% of the sale price. So for sale prices at or below MSRP, the middleman gets nothing or takes a loss.
What happened was that this company was buying books on a 50% margin, which meant that they got a 50% cut of the suggested retail price, assuming they sold at MSRP. Apple was willing to sell eBooks on their store for a 30% cut, so the publishers said to the other booksellers, "Why should we give you more than a 30% cut?" Then, they raised their wholesale prices to 70% of MSRP.
At least in iOS 3 (which is the last version my phone supports), it's Settings > General > Location Services, and the only choices are "on" or "off". So your choice is between an obnoxious nag every time you launch Facebook or having to manually reenable location services every time you want to use Google Maps.
Either way, it does nothing to solve the problem that I was pointing out, which was that if apps ask for location services even when they don't really need location services (as is the case when you're using the other 99% of Facebook's functionality), then the nag message loses all meaning.
For the purposes of trademark law, commercial use of a mark means using it to sell goods or services, period. Advertising is not generally considered a product unless your company is an ad network.
Using the name of a website to sell ads on that site is purely a descriptive use of the mark, in that it is the only way to identify that website. In general, descriptive uses are explicitly not considered commercial use. Thus, it is highly unlikely that advertising on such a site would constitute infringement if the site itself does not constitute infringement.
Therefore, the only relevant question is whether the website is being used to explicitly sell goods or services with that mark. For example, it might be dubious to sell T-shirts with the PayPalSucks.com logo. It would definitely be problematic to start a banking site at that address. The site itself, however, is certainly well within its rights to sell ad space.
Wow. Twelve wives under the age of 18? That's pretty impressive....
But enough about why commas can sometimes be useful for adding clarity. I'm wondering what impact this decision will have with regards to the URS process discussion.
And how hard it is to opt back out. Unless they've fixed it recently, if you tap on the "Check-in" button in the iPhone app just out of curiosity to see what it is and how it works, from then on, Facebook asks for permission to use your location every time you run the d**n app, whether you use the check-in feature or not. Can you say obnoxious? The only way I've found to fix it is to delete the Facebook app entirely and reinstall it.
The bigger concern is that with an app like Facebook doing this at every launch instead of just when you use the check-in feature, the average user will become so conditioned to clicking "Allow" at this prompt that after a while, the privacy feature will lose all meaning.
DMCA, yes, but copyright terms were extended in most of the world by the Berne conventions many years before the U.S. signed on and brought their copyright law into compliance. Basically, the U.S. and Europe leapfrog each other in an effort to make a bigger mess than the other one.
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but I'm on DSL modem #4 in 10 years. Four different brands. I'm hoping this one proves to be less unreliable.
Or you could, assuming that you knew they were coming, simply move the micrometeoroids out of your path, or liquefy them with a laser so that they add mass to your hull instead of puncturing it.
On the other hand, the solutions to those problems may be trivial in twenty or thirty years because of solutions to other problems that had little, if anything, to do with the original problem.
Take world hunger for example. World hunger is a trivial problem to solve. There's no real reason we can't produce enough food to feed the entire planet, nor is there any real distribution problem, per se. The real problem is ultimately one of poverty vs. greed, and more to the point, one of governments that take that food and sell it to buy guns instead of feeding their population.
Try as we might to solve the problem of poverty, the solution is hard because we're trying to fit it into a framework that makes it hard, namely one of a capitalistic society. Step forward a hundred years. Computers and mechanical automation have replaced humans in all manufacturing roles and nearly all mining, etc. At that point, there is no inherent value in most material goods because a human did not have to do any work to create them. This completely turns the entire economic system on its head, and poverty becomes solved, not by the sorts of solutions we could create now, but rather by its sudden lack of relevance.
Similarly, one would hope that in time, the tendency to spend so much of our world's budget on war machines will also decrease.
For another example, to step back a bit in time, people were once fretting about how to deliver mail in the wild west without getting shot. Now one could try to solve that problem through designing new carriages that were impervious to arrows, or one could sit back and let someone else solve the violence problem, while focusing your metallurgical skills on something that would eventually prove to be vastly more useful—creating a horseless carriage, for example.
You get the idea. For a functioning world, we need both short-term and long-term thinkers. We need people who can work on the immediate problems while others look for solutions to the longer-term issues. Without both, we're screwed. Arguing which one is more important is like arguing which table leg is more important.