I don't see anything better about any of them than representative democracy. Most of the examples on that page are just about using new tools to make your opinions known. Other than it being more convenient than writing a letter or attending town meetings, etc, what is the big deal? Furthermore, they all seem to be about 'picking a candidate' or 'choosing a platform'. How is that different than caucuses, etc? You still wind up with someone who will represent you in a representative democracy.
I think it makes the Democrats look scared. They have gone beyond pleading their own case (effective if you have a case worth pleading) and smearing the opposition (reviled, but effective), to actively trying to stop the opposition from getting their message out. Seems like this will make some excellent 'what are they so afraid of' campaign material.
Furthermore, it seems utterly pointless. Who do they think is going to be positively (for them) swayed by this? Someone going to that site is either going to already be a supporter, or be looking for his stated position on things. Someone who is a supported may be looking to make a donation, etc, and will be temporarily slowed down and even more pissed at the Democrats. Someone trying to decide will be looking for his position on things, not some smear job (which he can find elsewhere if he wants), and will not think kindly of the tactic. Someone who is already against him will be looking for his own position on things to use against him, and the site is also useless for them. So, what's the point?
Replacing a battery has zero to do with root access, so I don't know why you even bring it up. The only software 'upgrades' available for the Kindle and Nook come from the manufacturers, and they do fix security issues (such as being able to force privilege escalation). Everything else is a hack, which the manufacturer is under no obligation to support.
If you want a general-purpose, programmable device with replaceable batteries, buy one. If you buy a cheap appliance like an eReader and manage to make it do something else, good for you. But for crying out loud, stop acting like the manufacturers are in any way obligated to support that, either by explicitly allowing it or by not disabling whatever hack you found.
No matter how 'trivial' you perceive it to be, it is still expense. They not only have to provide the hardware and develop the software to support it, they also have to test it. Warranty costs will rise as idiots brick their devices and return them as defective. Support costs will rise as each call takes longer when it includes an attempt at recovery. Customers will get pissed at having to attempt recovery on a broken device.
A friend of mine had a Kindle that failed recently. They called Amazon, and after about 30 seconds had the authorization to return the device, and a replacement had already been shipped. The more complicated you make the device, the harder it is to afford/provide service like that.
Added cost to the manufacturer, no benefit to 99.9% of the users, and zero benefit to the manufacturer are all very good reasons to not provide that kind of function.
If you OWN X, you CAN do whatever you want with it, within the law. However, the only thing you OWN is the hardware. Unless you wrote it yourself, you do not OWN software (ever, even if using FOSS).
You are free to modify the PS3 to do anything you want. Change chips, replace firmware, anything at all. What you can not do is modify/use their software without their permission (license).
There is nothing special about the PS3. You can do whatever you want with the part you own (hardware), and Sony can do whatever they want with the part they own (software), including not permitting you to run it.
This is a pretty pathetic analogy, and yet dopes still mark it insightful. Amazing.
A car has a hood release for a very simple reason: the manufacturer REQUIRES you to perform regular checks and services under the hood. There are plenty of places in a car where the manufacturer does NOT make it easy to get to (under the dash, for instance), because in normal use (as intended by the manufacturer) there is simply no need to do that. There are other things in a car which require destruction of parts of the car to get to (some body panels, for instance).
As for adding a turbocharger, etc. I looked under the hood of my car, and I did not see some spot marked 'plug-in turbocharger here'. In fact, I don't even see enough room under there to install a turbocharger. However, I assume by your 'right' comment that you mean the manufacturer does not prevent you from installing a turbocharger.
Fair enough. However, I see no statement from the manufacturer that installing a turbocharger is supported in any way. If you install a turbocharger, it is pretty unreasonable to expect that the ECM is going to be able to handle that. It is unreasonable to expect the rest of the engine components and drivetrain to be capable of handling the extra horsepower. It is unreasonable to expect that replacement parts from the manufacturer are still going to fit. It is unreasonable to expect that the fuel economy and emissions characteristics are the same. It is unreasonable to expect the handling and braking characteristics the be able to handle the faster speeds.
And here is the big difference between your car modification and your supposed general computing device modification. When you modify your car, you no longer expect to have what the manufacturer sold you. Sure, the hardware is still yours, but the reliability, performance, etc has been changed, perhaps drastically. But, for some reason, you expect to be able to modify an eReader into a general computing device, but still have it function as the manufacturer intended.
You have just as much RIGHT to modify your Kindle as your car. You can pull any chips and replace them with other ones. You can remove their software and install your own. However, you have absolutely NO right to insist that the Kindle retain it's original function, or that the manufacturer is in any way responsible for making the device capable of doing what you want.
Seriously? Where on the box does it mention that it won't walk your dog, clean your house, or save you from choking? There are an unlimited number of things a product (any product) won't do. There are an extremely limited number of things a product will do. They are listed on the box. If a box for a video game console does not say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', what reasonable expectation do you have that it will in fact do that?
It is your device, you can in fact do anything you want with it. Don't like what Amazon's software does? Fine, don't run their software. Exactly what makes you think anyone is under any obligation to make a piece of software behave how YOU want it to?
The problem with that analogy is that your piece of real estate is not a monopoly. However, if you owned ALL the beaches then you would have a monopoly, and could not abuse your position as beach owner to force every beach goer to use your other products, as that is anti-competitive. The problem is never that a monopoly exists, it is that the monopoly position is abused.
They modified their software so it only does things they want it to. They did not modify the so-called computer. If you want to pretend a Kindle is a general-purpose computer, then treat it like one. Only load your own software and software you trust. You have zero reasonable expectation that the software provided by Amazon (or anyone else) will do or be usable for anything other than what they say.
Holy crap. You suggest that I should learn what limited liability means? You apparently haven't got a clue.
Limited liability refers to the liability of the shareholders (individuals) not the corporation itself. Because, by law, shareholders are not involved in the day-to-day operations of the corporation, make no decisions about the corporation, and have no more information about the corporation, their liability is limited to only their financial stake in the company. It has nothing to do with what liability the company itself has. The company can lose all of it's assets and be forced to liquidate for it's actions, just like an individual.
Or perhaps you think that if you happen to own stock in XYZ corp (say in your 401K), and XYZ gets sued for some reason, it is entirely reasonable for you to lose not only that part of your 401K, but also your house, the rest of your 401K, etc.
The rest of your argument makes no sense either? "If companies were nothing more than people they would not be subject to separate taxation"? Says who.
What complete bullshit. You're just making stuff up. You can't even come up with a single case where a corporation caused a death that would have resulted in an individual being charged with murder or manslaughter. In fact, you appear to not even know what 'murder' is.
There are thousands and thousands of deaths from auto accidents each year. Almost none of them result in criminal charges. The only way criminal charges are brought (and it is never a murder charge) is if a law has been broken (such as DWI). What laws are being broken by corporations that directly result in deaths?
Uh, yeah. You'll have to show me the law that allows that. In addition, I would like to hear of an actual case, or even a plausible scenario, where a corporation could kill a person in such a manner that the corporation escapes the punishment that would be meted out to an individual that has done the same thing.
The reason for a corporation is to shield the shareholders from any more liability than their stake in the corporation. By law, individual shareholders do not have any say in the operation of the corporation (except for voting for the board), and they do not have any information about the operation of the corporation which is not available to the general public.
As for 'blame diffusion', I don't know what you are talking about. Either a crime has been committed or it hasn't. If it has been committed, someone did it. There is no such thing as a bunch of little non-criminal things adding up to a crime, unless there is a conspiracy involved. And if there is a conspiracy, then all parties share culpability.
Each one of those supposed 'corporate rights' comes from the fact that a corporation is nothing more than an association of people, and people do not forfeit any of their rights just because they associate. Those same corporate rights apply to unions, the FSF, the EFF, the KKK, and any other group of people you come up with. So again, what special rights does a corporation have that do not extend from the individuals making up the corporation?
Kennedy wrote: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
Emphasis mine. 'Corporations' don't have a right of free speech, PEOPLE have a right of free speech, even when those people form an association known as a 'corporation'.
So again I ask, exactly what rights (that do not extend from the individual rights of the owners) do you think a corporation has?
I guess that is why, when writing that after 3 minutes of thought, I said I am sure there are problems with it. However, just because you (and all the other 'can't be done crowd) can't imagine it working does not mean there are not some very smart people working on the problem who WILL figure something out. Of course, when they do figure it out and try to patent it, then the 'can't be done' crowd will be screaming about how it is so OBVIOUS and should not be patentable.
What if the biometric device was not simply measuring a static thing (retina, fingerprint, etc) but the result of some action? What if to log on to your phone, it put up a message and said 'Please speak your passphrase, which is: My name is Mike, the bicycle is green, good morning'? Or 'hold the phone to your ear, and think of this image', and then read your brainwaves?
Yes, I am sure there are lots of problems with implementing such a thing, so don't point them out. The point is that there are biometrically measurable things which can be changed as easily as a password. And really, are they any less secure for the average user than a password of 'password', 'letmein', or 'abc123'?
Passwords suck. For them to be good, they must be complex and not guessable. And for most people, complex and not guessable means not memorable either. There has to be a better solution than passwords.
Tone down the paranoia a bit. They are not talking about connecting electrodes to your head and literally 'reading your mind'. They are talking about analyzing the vast amount of information that people leak about themselves (and others). Take all your Facebook posts, your posts to any forums (such as Slashdot), your spending habits, etc and put them together and you can start to form a pretty good idea of how someone thinks.
And yes, you can use that to 'put things into your brain'. It is called targeted marketing.
No, it's the same IBM that people CLAIM made that quote, but no-one can ever point to exactly when it was made or in what context. The quote doesn't even make sense. IBM has, over the last century, invested a huge amount of it's resources into developing computing - who does that if they think there is no market?
Just yesterday (I think) there was an article on here about an IBM system for tracking food from source to consumer in China.
IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system is now doing medical records processing as mentioned in the last item.
Are all these things in widespread use? No, not yet. They still require money to implement. However, from a technology point of view, they are available.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything better about any of them than representative democracy. Most of the examples on that page are just about using new tools to make your opinions known. Other than it being more convenient than writing a letter or attending town meetings, etc, what is the big deal? Furthermore, they all seem to be about 'picking a candidate' or 'choosing a platform'. How is that different than caucuses, etc? You still wind up with someone who will represent you in a representative democracy.
I think it makes the Democrats look scared. They have gone beyond pleading their own case (effective if you have a case worth pleading) and smearing the opposition (reviled, but effective), to actively trying to stop the opposition from getting their message out. Seems like this will make some excellent 'what are they so afraid of' campaign material.
Furthermore, it seems utterly pointless. Who do they think is going to be positively (for them) swayed by this? Someone going to that site is either going to already be a supporter, or be looking for his stated position on things. Someone who is a supported may be looking to make a donation, etc, and will be temporarily slowed down and even more pissed at the Democrats. Someone trying to decide will be looking for his position on things, not some smear job (which he can find elsewhere if he wants), and will not think kindly of the tactic. Someone who is already against him will be looking for his own position on things to use against him, and the site is also useless for them. So, what's the point?
Replacing a battery has zero to do with root access, so I don't know why you even bring it up. The only software 'upgrades' available for the Kindle and Nook come from the manufacturers, and they do fix security issues (such as being able to force privilege escalation). Everything else is a hack, which the manufacturer is under no obligation to support.
If you want a general-purpose, programmable device with replaceable batteries, buy one. If you buy a cheap appliance like an eReader and manage to make it do something else, good for you. But for crying out loud, stop acting like the manufacturers are in any way obligated to support that, either by explicitly allowing it or by not disabling whatever hack you found.
The locked bootloader is part of their software. Remove the chip that contains it and replace it with one that does what you want.
No matter how 'trivial' you perceive it to be, it is still expense. They not only have to provide the hardware and develop the software to support it, they also have to test it. Warranty costs will rise as idiots brick their devices and return them as defective. Support costs will rise as each call takes longer when it includes an attempt at recovery. Customers will get pissed at having to attempt recovery on a broken device.
A friend of mine had a Kindle that failed recently. They called Amazon, and after about 30 seconds had the authorization to return the device, and a replacement had already been shipped. The more complicated you make the device, the harder it is to afford/provide service like that.
Added cost to the manufacturer, no benefit to 99.9% of the users, and zero benefit to the manufacturer are all very good reasons to not provide that kind of function.
If you OWN X, you CAN do whatever you want with it, within the law. However, the only thing you OWN is the hardware. Unless you wrote it yourself, you do not OWN software (ever, even if using FOSS).
You are free to modify the PS3 to do anything you want. Change chips, replace firmware, anything at all. What you can not do is modify/use their software without their permission (license).
There is nothing special about the PS3. You can do whatever you want with the part you own (hardware), and Sony can do whatever they want with the part they own (software), including not permitting you to run it.
This is a pretty pathetic analogy, and yet dopes still mark it insightful. Amazing.
A car has a hood release for a very simple reason: the manufacturer REQUIRES you to perform regular checks and services under the hood. There are plenty of places in a car where the manufacturer does NOT make it easy to get to (under the dash, for instance), because in normal use (as intended by the manufacturer) there is simply no need to do that. There are other things in a car which require destruction of parts of the car to get to (some body panels, for instance).
As for adding a turbocharger, etc. I looked under the hood of my car, and I did not see some spot marked 'plug-in turbocharger here'. In fact, I don't even see enough room under there to install a turbocharger. However, I assume by your 'right' comment that you mean the manufacturer does not prevent you from installing a turbocharger.
Fair enough. However, I see no statement from the manufacturer that installing a turbocharger is supported in any way. If you install a turbocharger, it is pretty unreasonable to expect that the ECM is going to be able to handle that. It is unreasonable to expect the rest of the engine components and drivetrain to be capable of handling the extra horsepower. It is unreasonable to expect that replacement parts from the manufacturer are still going to fit. It is unreasonable to expect that the fuel economy and emissions characteristics are the same. It is unreasonable to expect the handling and braking characteristics the be able to handle the faster speeds.
And here is the big difference between your car modification and your supposed general computing device modification. When you modify your car, you no longer expect to have what the manufacturer sold you. Sure, the hardware is still yours, but the reliability, performance, etc has been changed, perhaps drastically. But, for some reason, you expect to be able to modify an eReader into a general computing device, but still have it function as the manufacturer intended.
You have just as much RIGHT to modify your Kindle as your car. You can pull any chips and replace them with other ones. You can remove their software and install your own. However, you have absolutely NO right to insist that the Kindle retain it's original function, or that the manufacturer is in any way responsible for making the device capable of doing what you want.
Seriously? Where on the box does it mention that it won't walk your dog, clean your house, or save you from choking? There are an unlimited number of things a product (any product) won't do. There are an extremely limited number of things a product will do. They are listed on the box. If a box for a video game console does not say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', what reasonable expectation do you have that it will in fact do that?
It is your device, you can in fact do anything you want with it. Don't like what Amazon's software does? Fine, don't run their software. Exactly what makes you think anyone is under any obligation to make a piece of software behave how YOU want it to?
The problem with that analogy is that your piece of real estate is not a monopoly. However, if you owned ALL the beaches then you would have a monopoly, and could not abuse your position as beach owner to force every beach goer to use your other products, as that is anti-competitive. The problem is never that a monopoly exists, it is that the monopoly position is abused.
They modified their software so it only does things they want it to. They did not modify the so-called computer. If you want to pretend a Kindle is a general-purpose computer, then treat it like one. Only load your own software and software you trust. You have zero reasonable expectation that the software provided by Amazon (or anyone else) will do or be usable for anything other than what they say.
Holy crap. You suggest that I should learn what limited liability means? You apparently haven't got a clue.
Limited liability refers to the liability of the shareholders (individuals) not the corporation itself. Because, by law, shareholders are not involved in the day-to-day operations of the corporation, make no decisions about the corporation, and have no more information about the corporation, their liability is limited to only their financial stake in the company. It has nothing to do with what liability the company itself has. The company can lose all of it's assets and be forced to liquidate for it's actions, just like an individual.
Or perhaps you think that if you happen to own stock in XYZ corp (say in your 401K), and XYZ gets sued for some reason, it is entirely reasonable for you to lose not only that part of your 401K, but also your house, the rest of your 401K, etc.
The rest of your argument makes no sense either? "If companies were nothing more than people they would not be subject to separate taxation"? Says who.
What complete bullshit. You're just making stuff up. You can't even come up with a single case where a corporation caused a death that would have resulted in an individual being charged with murder or manslaughter. In fact, you appear to not even know what 'murder' is.
There are thousands and thousands of deaths from auto accidents each year. Almost none of them result in criminal charges. The only way criminal charges are brought (and it is never a murder charge) is if a law has been broken (such as DWI). What laws are being broken by corporations that directly result in deaths?
So if 'only a few' people have their rights violated that is OK?
If you don't like the way a corporation is representing you via it's political speech (or any other way), divest the shares.
Uh, yeah. You'll have to show me the law that allows that. In addition, I would like to hear of an actual case, or even a plausible scenario, where a corporation could kill a person in such a manner that the corporation escapes the punishment that would be meted out to an individual that has done the same thing.
The reason for a corporation is to shield the shareholders from any more liability than their stake in the corporation. By law, individual shareholders do not have any say in the operation of the corporation (except for voting for the board), and they do not have any information about the operation of the corporation which is not available to the general public.
As for 'blame diffusion', I don't know what you are talking about. Either a crime has been committed or it hasn't. If it has been committed, someone did it. There is no such thing as a bunch of little non-criminal things adding up to a crime, unless there is a conspiracy involved. And if there is a conspiracy, then all parties share culpability.
Each one of those supposed 'corporate rights' comes from the fact that a corporation is nothing more than an association of people, and people do not forfeit any of their rights just because they associate. Those same corporate rights apply to unions, the FSF, the EFF, the KKK, and any other group of people you come up with. So again, what special rights does a corporation have that do not extend from the individuals making up the corporation?
Right from the article you linked:
Kennedy wrote: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
Emphasis mine. 'Corporations' don't have a right of free speech, PEOPLE have a right of free speech, even when those people form an association known as a 'corporation'.
So again I ask, exactly what rights (that do not extend from the individual rights of the owners) do you think a corporation has?
Exactly what 'rights' (that do not extend from the individual rights of the owners) do you think a corporation has?
I guess that is why, when writing that after 3 minutes of thought, I said I am sure there are problems with it. However, just because you (and all the other 'can't be done crowd) can't imagine it working does not mean there are not some very smart people working on the problem who WILL figure something out. Of course, when they do figure it out and try to patent it, then the 'can't be done' crowd will be screaming about how it is so OBVIOUS and should not be patentable.
What if the biometric device was not simply measuring a static thing (retina, fingerprint, etc) but the result of some action? What if to log on to your phone, it put up a message and said 'Please speak your passphrase, which is: My name is Mike, the bicycle is green, good morning'? Or 'hold the phone to your ear, and think of this image', and then read your brainwaves?
Yes, I am sure there are lots of problems with implementing such a thing, so don't point them out. The point is that there are biometrically measurable things which can be changed as easily as a password. And really, are they any less secure for the average user than a password of 'password', 'letmein', or 'abc123'?
Passwords suck. For them to be good, they must be complex and not guessable. And for most people, complex and not guessable means not memorable either. There has to be a better solution than passwords.
Tone down the paranoia a bit. They are not talking about connecting electrodes to your head and literally 'reading your mind'. They are talking about analyzing the vast amount of information that people leak about themselves (and others). Take all your Facebook posts, your posts to any forums (such as Slashdot), your spending habits, etc and put them together and you can start to form a pretty good idea of how someone thinks.
And yes, you can use that to 'put things into your brain'. It is called targeted marketing.
When has IBM done that?
No, it's the same IBM that people CLAIM made that quote, but no-one can ever point to exactly when it was made or in what context. The quote doesn't even make sense. IBM has, over the last century, invested a huge amount of it's resources into developing computing - who does that if they think there is no market?
IBM has a traffic system in Stockholm that is easing congestion.
Just yesterday (I think) there was an article on here about an IBM system for tracking food from source to consumer in China.
IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system is now doing medical records processing as mentioned in the last item.
Are all these things in widespread use? No, not yet. They still require money to implement. However, from a technology point of view, they are available.