Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
If you accept that kind of indirect blame, then right now you're murdering a starving African child.
Technically that's true. Just as anybody who buys clothes in Benetton, Primark, Matalan, Mango, Bonmarche, and the other companies sourcing from places like this bear some responsibility. Those companies source in countries with no unions, no ban on child labour, no minimum wage, and no workplace safety laws because their customers demand quality clothes a bargain basement prices. If you are a customer, you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
What about the choice to go to the party, and the choice to start drinking and maybe doing drugs, and the choice to keep drinking until she got drunk? Those choices were even more fundamental than the ones you listed.
So we should all stay home in case some douchebag videos us? I'm sure most other people at the party were in various stages of inebriation as well. That doesn't make them fair game. The choice to make the video and post it on Facebook were deliberate pre-meditated acts.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
Out of 1000 murders, how many do you think have no physical interaction, just psychological damage?
And this is relevant how? If you drive somebody to suicide you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you just because you didn't physically attack them. Numbers have nothing to do with it.
Right, like victims never have shares in their own plight? Was she bullied? yes.
She sure was
Did she choose to kill herself? yes.
Eh, probably not. Suicides don't typically want to die. They just believe that they are in an impossible/unbearable situation and death is the only way out.
Did the bullies kill her? no.
Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
Did facebook kill her? no.
No, but as the saying goes, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". They effectively provide a global broadcast platform for stuff like this.
Who is responsible for her death? she is. Each side made choices along the way.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
Saying things that happen to make someone kill themselves is not the same thing as murdering them yourself.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
I'd say the lack of understanding is yours; understanding of basic physics that is. Nobody's bandwidth is unlimited. [insert your favourite ISP here] has an upstream pipe with finite capacity. If one user saturates that pipe, then all the other customers suffer. That's why business plans are more expensive than residential plans; you are effectively funding the ISP to provide you with guaranteed capacity.
It baffles me that two-factor authentication patents can be valid.
Me too. According to Google's patent search, he filed the patent in 1998. In 1996 I worked on an online banking application that used two-factor authentication. Each customer was issued with a hand-held device (about the size of a small calculator) which generated a transaction authorisation number (TAN) in response to a challenge from the online system. The devices were commercially available at least two years before the patent filing.
That the Snooper's Charter will reduce the threat of Terrorism is an untested hypothesis. Prove it will achieve such goals, THEN we'll talk about having it be a law.
As one of my colleagues often says to me, "you're being rational again". Politics doesn't follow the scientific method. The British tabloids (which are already pretty xenophobic) will be cranking up the FUD level to the max. When the idea get's enough mindshare among their readers, the politicians will follow the votes.
Stupid judge, you can't order that, you ignorant ninny...
Sadly this is not that uncommon. In the UK last year there was a spate of so-called "super injunctions" being issued to various celebs; these were meant to not only prohibit publishing details of the subject under injunction but also any reporting of the mere fact that an injunction had been granted.
At one stage the High Court granted a permanent injunction against the "whole world" to prevent details of a married celebrity’s affair from being revealed (Super injunctions and the law). Much hilarity ensued.
Because I need tools that any home and SMB user can use easily and SanboxIE ain't that tool, it just ain't. And why would i want to go to the trouble of downloading some other program just to make up for the fact that the FF devs are shitty when it comes to security, when I can give them any Chromium based browser instead and just be done with it?
You do know that if your home of SMB user is running as a privileged user you are screwed anyway? LRM is indeed a best practice, but it should be applied at user level. If the user can write to system areas, interfere with system processes, etc. it's already game over.
But if we don't ask "what if", how is there any advancement? Yes, we'd most likely be wrong--it's only through error do we find the truth. What I fail to understand is how science advances without speculation?
The problem - eloquently expressed here The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next - arises when theoretical physics comes up with hypotheses that are untested (and even potentially untestable) but people start treating them as grounded theories. This is essentially no different from the intelligent design argument; a position that relies on unprovable speculation that you just have to take on faith.
I suspect smart phones and the like are doing more than anything else to kill the market for PCs. You don't need a PC to be a dog on the internet anymore.
It depends on what you want to do. If you are just tweeting, updating your Facebook profile, or casual web browsing then phones (or tablets) are fine. But for more serious work I find them uncomfortable, in simple ergonomic terms.
Case in point, I was working from home recently. Sitting on my couch with my laptop on my lap (on one of those laptop tray thingies), screen at nice angle and height (without me having to hold it), mouse beside me lets me navigate the screen with minimal hand movement (no gorilla arm), and a full size keyboard when I need to enter text. For me, it's no contest. The laptop is way more usable.
All this legislation means, is that a lot of rightwing douchebags who previously think they're invincible and can destroy peoples' lives at whim, are finally brought to heel.
Replace "rightwing" with "tabloid" and that's pretty much my take on this legislation. The British tabloids (which are mostly, but not all, owned by Murdoch) have a long history of publishing sensational stories without worrying about their veracity. This is especially true if the target is a "little guy" who may not have the resources to defend himself against an aggressive legal team with deep pockets.
Case in point, Chris Jeffries (Murder of Joanna Yeates). He was Joanna Yeates landlord, and a somewhat eccentric looking guy. So the tabloids jumped to the conclusion that he was guilty, tried and convicted him on their front pages, and threw in some allegations of sexual perversion while they were at it. And none of it was true.
It's cases like that that have lead to this legislation. I don't see anything in it that will impede serious investigative journalism.
For a long time, Perl was one of the first things I installed on any new systems. I wrote tons of stuff in it, from sysadmin scripts to complete web sites.
But over the last 10 years I've moved totally to Python. Increasingly a lot of extensions to Perl felt like hacks. Whereas Python code is very clean by comparison. And consistent. TMTOWTDI sounds a great idea, but for code people depend on, consistency matters more.
Well said! This is exactly why I stopped using other AV products on my machines and the machines of family and friends that I'm "tech support" for.
All I wanted was a decent anti-virus solution, but every release of AVG etc. seemed to come with more new features I didn't want and be more in my face.
MSSE does a good job and doesn't bug me.
The stock market is about people being able to buy and sell securities that allows businesses to raise additional capital.
That was the original purpose of the stock market, but I'm not so sure that it actually plays out that way, at least for stocks. The primary reason for my skepticism is that once a company has sold its stock through an IPO, the company itself has little to gain through an increased share price. A higher share price means more money for the people who have stock options, but the company itself only benefits from the money originally raised through the IPO. After the IPO, most of the trading is done between investors and the company has little to no involvement. The stock basically becomes gambling chips with a corporate logo that you use to play a giant game of poker to attempt to win money from the other gamblers at the table.
This is spot on. The problem is that too many people in the media, politics and the general population still think that the stock price is a reliable indicator of the actual financial health of the company. These days it's more likely just the outcome of whatever algorithms the automated trading systems are using.
Ah, those urban legends that didn't happen to you either, but everybody says they experienced them first person.:-)
Yeah, those didn't happen to me either, but I've heard them many times.
I find the photocopy story a little hard to imagine, but FWIW, the staple thing I saw MANY times, and the magnet thing at least a couple times.
Bizarre as it sounds, it did happen. Turned out that the user had never been shown how to copy diskettes, but reasoned that the photocopier worked for "regular" documents so why not documents on a diskette? Live and learn!
I worked in tech support in the 1980s and 5.25" floppies were a great (unintended) source of fun.
For example, in response to "can you send me a copy of that floppy?" I was sent (a) a photocopy the floppy and (b) a floppy with a covering note stapled to it!
But best of all was the time I asked a user if they had a backup of some important documents. She pointed me to a 5.25" floppy - attached to the side of a filing cabinet with a fridge magnet.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."... "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."...
Those statements are entirely consistent. In the first case, Jobs is talking about ideas; in the second, he is talking about the implementation of ideas. It's the difference between an artist creating original art after being inspired by another artist, and an art student painting yet another copy of the Mona Lisa.
You seem to be confusing the concept "is a" with the concept "looks like a"
Simply cloning somebody else's implementation and sticking your own badge on it is one thing. Building your own clean room implementation, which incorporates a number of existing design ideas, is quite different. In the first case, there is only one (cloned) implementation. In the second there are two distinct implementations.
A large part of the problem with this lawsuit (and others like it) is companies contending that they have exclusive ownership of ideas, rather than a specific implementation of those ideas.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Jobs, interviewed in Triumph of the Nerds on PBS (1996)
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." - Jobs, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography (2011)
Though, I'd add in the many management types who still haven't read The Mythical Man-Month and who still believe that doubling the hours worked (or number of workers) doubles the productivity. It doesn't, it just makes things worse (and pisses everybody off in the process).
And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
They are revoking your right to access it, not 'stealing' it back. You didn't buy it (how can you buy information???), you bought the right to access it. It turns out Amazon didn't have the right to sell you in the first place, which also invalidated the purchase you made from them. AFAIK they refunded the purchase price anyway so if you want to draw a parallel with the physical world it's more like someone selling you a stolen car then the original owner taking it back from you, with the added bonus that actually get your money back.
Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
The problem is that the content owners have invented the artificial concept of your right to access something so they can derive a revenue from their work, and then the resellers use that concept to try and also make money for themselves.
Actually I'm fine with paying content creators for their work. They have to make living like everybody else. "Information just wants to be free" doesn't pay your mortgage or your grocery bills. But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revoked/whatever on a whim later.
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
No. The idea of first sale belongs to the world of physical things, and the physical world is slowly learning to adjust to what that means. Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
Now get off your lawn!
And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
I have an ebook reader and while it has undeniably cool and useful features, I'm not blind to the things I'm losing; ability to resell/give to a charity shop, lend to a friend, read anywhere/anytime and not just on the retailer's preferred devices/DRM scheme, and even (on some platforms) control over my own library.
The EC members, since 2009, consist of the head of states of every EU countries. Hardly "political appointees". In some countries in Europe the head of state is elected directly by the people.
Actually no. Have a look at the members of the current Commission. Not a head of state among them. Or anybody who was actually voted for by their national electorate.
Come on, quit that old bullshit. The European Commission is appointed and controlled by the governments of the member states, all of them democratically elected.
Your point being? The EC is a group of political appointees, with a history of pushing agendas at odds with the wishes of the electorate and their democratically elected representatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
If you accept that kind of indirect blame, then right now you're murdering a starving African child.
Technically that's true. Just as anybody who buys clothes in Benetton, Primark, Matalan, Mango, Bonmarche, and the other companies sourcing from places like this bear some responsibility. Those companies source in countries with no unions, no ban on child labour, no minimum wage, and no workplace safety laws because their customers demand quality clothes a bargain basement prices. If you are a customer, you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
What about the choice to go to the party, and the choice to start drinking and maybe doing drugs, and the choice to keep drinking until she got drunk? Those choices were even more fundamental than the ones you listed.
So we should all stay home in case some douchebag videos us? I'm sure most other people at the party were in various stages of inebriation as well. That doesn't make them fair game. The choice to make the video and post it on Facebook were deliberate pre-meditated acts.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
Out of 1000 murders, how many do you think have no physical interaction, just psychological damage?
And this is relevant how? If you drive somebody to suicide you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you just because you didn't physically attack them. Numbers have nothing to do with it.
Right, like victims never have shares in their own plight? Was she bullied? yes.
She sure was
Did she choose to kill herself? yes.
Eh, probably not. Suicides don't typically want to die. They just believe that they are in an impossible/unbearable situation and death is the only way out.
Did the bullies kill her? no.
Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
Did facebook kill her? no.
No, but as the saying goes, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". They effectively provide a global broadcast platform for stuff like this.
Who is responsible for her death? she is. Each side made choices along the way.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
Saying things that happen to make someone kill themselves is not the same thing as murdering them yourself.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
Excessive much? Yes.
what part of 'unlimited' don't you understand ?
I'd say the lack of understanding is yours; understanding of basic physics that is. Nobody's bandwidth is unlimited. [insert your favourite ISP here] has an upstream pipe with finite capacity. If one user saturates that pipe, then all the other customers suffer. That's why business plans are more expensive than residential plans; you are effectively funding the ISP to provide you with guaranteed capacity.
It baffles me that two-factor authentication patents can be valid.
Me too. According to Google's patent search, he filed the patent in 1998. In 1996 I worked on an online banking application that used two-factor authentication. Each customer was issued with a hand-held device (about the size of a small calculator) which generated a transaction authorisation number (TAN) in response to a challenge from the online system. The devices were commercially available at least two years before the patent filing.
That the Snooper's Charter will reduce the threat of Terrorism is an untested hypothesis. Prove it will achieve such goals, THEN we'll talk about having it be a law.
As one of my colleagues often says to me, "you're being rational again". Politics doesn't follow the scientific method. The British tabloids (which are already pretty xenophobic) will be cranking up the FUD level to the max. When the idea get's enough mindshare among their readers, the politicians will follow the votes.
Stupid judge, you can't order that, you ignorant ninny...
Sadly this is not that uncommon. In the UK last year there was a spate of so-called "super injunctions" being issued to various celebs; these were meant to not only prohibit publishing details of the subject under injunction but also any reporting of the mere fact that an injunction had been granted.
At one stage the High Court granted a permanent injunction against the "whole world" to prevent details of a married celebrity’s affair from being revealed (Super injunctions and the law). Much hilarity ensued.
Because I need tools that any home and SMB user can use easily and SanboxIE ain't that tool, it just ain't. And why would i want to go to the trouble of downloading some other program just to make up for the fact that the FF devs are shitty when it comes to security, when I can give them any Chromium based browser instead and just be done with it?
You do know that if your home of SMB user is running as a privileged user you are screwed anyway? LRM is indeed a best practice, but it should be applied at user level. If the user can write to system areas, interfere with system processes, etc. it's already game over.
But if we don't ask "what if", how is there any advancement? Yes, we'd most likely be wrong--it's only through error do we find the truth. What I fail to understand is how science advances without speculation?
The problem - eloquently expressed here The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next - arises when theoretical physics comes up with hypotheses that are untested (and even potentially untestable) but people start treating them as grounded theories. This is essentially no different from the intelligent design argument; a position that relies on unprovable speculation that you just have to take on faith.
I suspect smart phones and the like are doing more than anything else to kill the market for PCs. You don't need a PC to be a dog on the internet anymore.
It depends on what you want to do. If you are just tweeting, updating your Facebook profile, or casual web browsing then phones (or tablets) are fine. But for more serious work I find them uncomfortable, in simple ergonomic terms.
Case in point, I was working from home recently. Sitting on my couch with my laptop on my lap (on one of those laptop tray thingies), screen at nice angle and height (without me having to hold it), mouse beside me lets me navigate the screen with minimal hand movement (no gorilla arm), and a full size keyboard when I need to enter text. For me, it's no contest. The laptop is way more usable.
All this legislation means, is that a lot of rightwing douchebags who previously think they're invincible and can destroy peoples' lives at whim, are finally brought to heel.
Replace "rightwing" with "tabloid" and that's pretty much my take on this legislation. The British tabloids (which are mostly, but not all, owned by Murdoch) have a long history of publishing sensational stories without worrying about their veracity. This is especially true if the target is a "little guy" who may not have the resources to defend himself against an aggressive legal team with deep pockets.
Case in point, Chris Jeffries (Murder of Joanna Yeates). He was Joanna Yeates landlord, and a somewhat eccentric looking guy. So the tabloids jumped to the conclusion that he was guilty, tried and convicted him on their front pages, and threw in some allegations of sexual perversion while they were at it. And none of it was true.
It's cases like that that have lead to this legislation. I don't see anything in it that will impede serious investigative journalism.
For a long time, Perl was one of the first things I installed on any new systems. I wrote tons of stuff in it, from sysadmin scripts to complete web sites.
But over the last 10 years I've moved totally to Python. Increasingly a lot of extensions to Perl felt like hacks. Whereas Python code is very clean by comparison. And consistent. TMTOWTDI sounds a great idea, but for code people depend on, consistency matters more.
Well said! This is exactly why I stopped using other AV products on my machines and the machines of family and friends that I'm "tech support" for. All I wanted was a decent anti-virus solution, but every release of AVG etc. seemed to come with more new features I didn't want and be more in my face. MSSE does a good job and doesn't bug me.
Well demonstrating prior art shouldn't be difficult! :-)
I agree with most of your post except for this:
That was the original purpose of the stock market, but I'm not so sure that it actually plays out that way, at least for stocks. The primary reason for my skepticism is that once a company has sold its stock through an IPO, the company itself has little to gain through an increased share price. A higher share price means more money for the people who have stock options, but the company itself only benefits from the money originally raised through the IPO. After the IPO, most of the trading is done between investors and the company has little to no involvement. The stock basically becomes gambling chips with a corporate logo that you use to play a giant game of poker to attempt to win money from the other gamblers at the table.
This is spot on. The problem is that too many people in the media, politics and the general population still think that the stock price is a reliable indicator of the actual financial health of the company. These days it's more likely just the outcome of whatever algorithms the automated trading systems are using.
Ah, those urban legends that didn't happen to you either, but everybody says they experienced them first person. :-)
Yeah, those didn't happen to me either, but I've heard them many times.
I find the photocopy story a little hard to imagine, but FWIW, the staple thing I saw MANY times, and the magnet thing at least a couple times.
Bizarre as it sounds, it did happen. Turned out that the user had never been shown how to copy diskettes, but reasoned that the photocopier worked for "regular" documents so why not documents on a diskette? Live and learn!
I worked in tech support in the 1980s and 5.25" floppies were a great (unintended) source of fun.
For example, in response to "can you send me a copy of that floppy?" I was sent (a) a photocopy the floppy and (b) a floppy with a covering note stapled to it!
But best of all was the time I asked a user if they had a backup of some important documents. She pointed me to a 5.25" floppy - attached to the side of a filing cabinet with a fridge magnet.
Happy days!
Those statements are entirely consistent. In the first case, Jobs is talking about ideas; in the second, he is talking about the implementation of ideas. It's the difference between an artist creating original art after being inspired by another artist, and an art student painting yet another copy of the Mona Lisa.
You seem to be confusing the concept "is a" with the concept "looks like a"
Simply cloning somebody else's implementation and sticking your own badge on it is one thing. Building your own clean room implementation, which incorporates a number of existing design ideas, is quite different. In the first case, there is only one (cloned) implementation. In the second there are two distinct implementations.
A large part of the problem with this lawsuit (and others like it) is companies contending that they have exclusive ownership of ideas, rather than a specific implementation of those ideas.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Jobs, interviewed in Triumph of the Nerds on PBS (1996)
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." - Jobs, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography (2011)
So it's OK if Apple do it, but not otherwise?
Great summary!
Though, I'd add in the many management types who still haven't read The Mythical Man-Month and who still believe that doubling the hours worked (or number of workers) doubles the productivity. It doesn't, it just makes things worse (and pisses everybody off in the process).
And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
They are revoking your right to access it, not 'stealing' it back. You didn't buy it (how can you buy information???), you bought the right to access it. It turns out Amazon didn't have the right to sell you in the first place, which also invalidated the purchase you made from them. AFAIK they refunded the purchase price anyway so if you want to draw a parallel with the physical world it's more like someone selling you a stolen car then the original owner taking it back from you, with the added bonus that actually get your money back.
Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
The problem is that the content owners have invented the artificial concept of your right to access something so they can derive a revenue from their work, and then the resellers use that concept to try and also make money for themselves.
Actually I'm fine with paying content creators for their work. They have to make living like everybody else. "Information just wants to be free" doesn't pay your mortgage or your grocery bills. But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revoked/whatever on a whim later.
Can we get our rights back, please?
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
No. The idea of first sale belongs to the world of physical things, and the physical world is slowly learning to adjust to what that means. Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
Now get off your lawn!
And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
I have an ebook reader and while it has undeniably cool and useful features, I'm not blind to the things I'm losing; ability to resell/give to a charity shop, lend to a friend, read anywhere/anytime and not just on the retailer's preferred devices/DRM scheme, and even (on some platforms) control over my own library.
If you're that worried about obscenely uncommon edge cases, you might as well just lock yourself up in your house.
Increasingly, this is sadly not an edge case.
BBC News - Facial recognition marks the end of anonymity
Being able to photograph a random stranger and, with the picture, pull up personal details about the person is genuinely disturbing.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
-- from (the aptly titled) Won't Get Fooled Again
The EC members, since 2009, consist of the head of states of every EU countries. Hardly "political appointees". In some countries in Europe the head of state is elected directly by the people.
Actually no. Have a look at the members of the current Commission. Not a head of state among them. Or anybody who was actually voted for by their national electorate.
Come on, quit that old bullshit. The European Commission is appointed and controlled by the governments of the member states, all of them democratically elected.
Your point being? The EC is a group of political appointees, with a history of pushing agendas at odds with the wishes of the electorate and their democratically elected representatives.
Remember the software patents battle?