Corporate power is, by nature, less powerful than a tyrannical, omnipotent state. Without a powerful state to back it up, a corporation -has- no power not given to it by its citizens, and citizens can reduce the power of a corporation in a blink of an eye compared to power of a government.
A corporation requires money and resources, without that it dies. In a free market, no one is forced to pay for anything they don't want, this is in sharp contrast with a government where you -have- to pay for things, even if you don't want them. For example, if you disagree with Wal-Mart's hiring practices, you don't have to shop there, they don't get any of your money or support. On the other hand, if you oppose the war in Iraq, you still have to pay for the bullets or else go to prison.
Given a free enough market, corporations won't become tyrannical because of the fact that the market balances itself out. Even the "worst" monopoly was broken up in essence by market forces (the government breakup of Standard Oil was not needed because it no longer was even close to a monopoly at the time of its breakup). Anytime you see a monopoly, it either A) Is government imposed (postal service, utilities, etc), B) No need for competition (as in, if no one thought hamburgers would be profitable and therefore McDonalds was the only store selling hamburgers) or C) Is very temporary.
The problem is, our government is not free enough, when boiled down to a government whos only job is to protect against fraud and force both corporations and consumers win. Consumers win because they are free to screw the corporations, for example, no DMCA and most likely no (or very, very limited) copyright. Corporations win because they are free to innovate and expand beyond government constraints artificially limiting them. Consumers also have more choice, imagine if all the oil in the world was monopolized and there was incredibly high prices, a few things would have happened, either A) we'd find new sources of oil or more likely B) We'd develop things that didn't need oil thus pushing oil prices down further leading to a loss of that monopoly. Corporations also can provide infrastructure, if Company X needs to have an airport near Nowheresville, they will build an airport, because they can't utilize all of it 24/7, they rent it out to private airlines, therefore, suddenly Nowheresville has an airport and gets more trade without government waste.
I guarantee making voting more complicated is not the answer. You need an educated, informed electorate first. But if you have that, playing silly games with the ballot won't be necessary.
Look at countries with high voter turnout, almost all of them use the solution I'm proposing, for example, the US only has a 54% voter turnout, on the other hand, look at Sweden with 86% voter turnout because they use proportional voting.
Proportional representation is the easiest way to make sure that people's vote counts. Just because you don't agree with 50% of people, doesn't mean your voice shouldn't be heard. The idea that people vote politically based on the surrounding area is outdated, it worked before the civil war, where industries were tied to certain geographical areas. But they aren't.
Whole plane parachutes are already a reality on many private planes, just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_parachute the problem is, it just takes too many parachutes to work on something like a 747 or something.
Property by nature, and property law is filled with the assumption that property is limited. For example, if I have a plow and give it to you, I no longer have a plow. But lets say I have the plans to make a plow, that no longer is limited. If I tell you how to build a plow, I can still make a plow and you can make a plow. Those plans, provided they weren't written on anything and were simply verbal plans, were not property.
Property law would be needless if everything was like those plans, food would be infinite, water would be infinite, etc. But they are limited, thus why we need property laws.
Exactly. The US has gotten really good at making sure that people don't want to work here. News flash, its not 1950 anymore, Europe is just as developed if not more developed than the US, most of Asia has lots of cheap labor and good talent. If I was starting up a business I'd start it almost anywhere other than the US.
Which is why it is important to either have a very limited government that wouldn't let these abuses happen or allow for party-list based proportional representation in order to get people involved in politics and generate good government. Our current electoral system is great with very limited government and an even more limited federal government, but it isn't the 1830s anymore, the federal government is huge and this duopoly of parties only encourages political apathy. Party-list proportional representation means that everyone at least has -someone- representing their beliefs in congress, rather than people simply voting for the "lesser evil".
The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted
What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.
Isn't it time that we realized that property is not property unless it is limited and move on?
Actually, System 8 (Copland) had a ton of problems without including Jobs. The problem was, it was a disjointed effort where nothing was getting done. If anything blame Ellen Hancock for purchasing NeXT because when she was hired she basically said "screw this, it isn't ever going to get shipped" so they bailed out Jobs.
Copland wasn't going anywhere so Apple decided to cut their losses.
Um, actually in the 90s there were some pretty good OSes. Yeah, ME sucked, but Windows NT was actually quite good, plus, the *Nix OSes were still as stable as ever, just not end-user friendly.
MacOS actually really, really sucked. NT had memory protection, MacOS didn't.
While NT wasn't exactly a "home" OS, it was used enough to make it pretty common if you knew to get it.
In the 90s, Mac was way and I mean way behind the curve.
No, I don't think that most users would block it, but it would allow you to have security without a closed ecosystem. For example, why would something like, say, a media player need access to my entire filesystem to play music when I could just limit it to read permissions on my music directory (and sub-directories). These things are what prevent security flaws and let you actually control your phone.
Plus, it would allow people without unlimited data plans to use an Android phone without wondering what it was doing in the background, etc.
I'm suggesting that none of the readers of/. are Paris Hilton.
Yeah, if you are a celebrity, people are going to look through your cell phone. But I'm not a celebrity, I don't think you are and neither is most of/. (I don't think that the average person cares to look through Linus Torvald's cell phone) and this idea that our data is somehow awesomely valuable to the average person and would be stolen is a bit too much of ego. No one cares about your source code to yet another text editor, no one cares about pictures of your cat, no one really cares about your high score on Galaga, they do however see a nice Droid/iPhone/BlackBerry phone and know that they can sell that for a few extra bucks.
I agree, really, Google should let -us- decide what an app can do. Want to access the internet, nope, check a box marked deny and that app no longer has access to that. Want to know my location, nope, check a box marked deny and that app no longer can find your location.
About the only thing is, that might piss off a few developers because ad-blocking becomes rather easy, but I'm sure they will find a way to have it use the internet in a non-annoying way...
but it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone
When you lose your phone, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the time they just want to wipe your iPhone and sell it to the local pawn shop. They don't care about your data, your songs, your apps, etc. they simply see that shiny, new hardware = money. Same thing with laptops, they don't care about the data on it, they want to wipe "that funny looking OS" off of it and put a pirated copy of XP on there and sell it on eBay.
The idea that stolen gadgets are going to be used for something beyond simple hardware really overestimates either your value of data or the intelligence of thieves.
The fact that carriers charge for SMS messages is already customers getting screwed. It has -no- impact on the network at all when you text. For one, you are sending -bytes- of data, not kilobytes, not megabytes just plain bytes.
SMS was essentially designed to take advantage of unused resources in most cell phone systems, (hence the character limit), why the carriers make us pay insane fees for what is non-existent use of their network is beyond me.
He isn't a Libertarian, real libertarians either believe in A) Incredibly limited copyright or B) No copyright. For example, see the Ludwig Von Mises article (http://mises.org/daily/4575) because property by nature is scarce and not unlimited.
But the thing is, if you are scammed you have the possibility to recover funds plus damages. It might take a few years but (presumably) you weren't trying to get that money back in the next few years anyways. It isn't like a robbery where the police rarely catch the suspect, everything is documented and you can get your money back.
The emotional trauma should be incredibly short lived and shouldn't be anymore than an inconvenience. Sure, you don't -want- it to happen but I'd rather have my money be stolen by Madoff that I can get back than me legitimately investing in a bad company where that money will never get returned to me.
Look at it this way, if someone had claimed to have invented something that... I don't know, neutralized the pepper spray that the riot police were using to break up the demonstrations. Do you really think that the journalist would have just taken them at their word, published stories to the effect that they were saving the world from tyranny? They would have wanted pictures of it in use, to talk to people who had used it successfully, maybe even interviewed a local chemist for his take on it. For whatever reason, technology stories just don't get the same level of scrutiny that other topics do.
Yes they probably would take his word for it. The level of scrutiny in mass media is less than the level of scrutiny on Wikipedia. The mass media doesn't care about "following up" on stories, they just want to tell you that (in the words of Ross Noble) "Bad Shit is happening in the world, there's loads of shit happening in the world". They don't care if you understand it, Americans are so used to seeing fancy things on TV and then forgetting about it. It seems like every month there is some new breakthrough that "cures cancer" that we never hear another word about.
The problem is then the people in management don't understand it so they force the tech people to "dumb it down" to the point where it becomes essentially false. For example:
Cookies can store data about where you have been and what ads you have seen. Therefore, cookies can be used to track you.
I wasn't saying that. I was saying that the idea that somehow we were interconnected that we can abolish all personal responsibility is wrong such as the person saying that somehow Madoff -made- someone commit suicide which is false.
Madoff should be punished, he should be forced to give funds to those who he scammed plus more. But the idea that somehow he is responsible for a death is complete bullshit.
But they are tied to the success of a certain brand. I see Bungie as being a lot like Rare who made a video game based on IP they didn't own (Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007) and that forced them to essentially make another game with the same engine in the case of Goldeneye to really have a failproof plan. Investors and CEOs don't like uncertainty, Halo for Bungie is filled with uncertainty because for one its tied into Microsoft's platform which at this mid-way point seems rather sturdy but could, like the Mega Drive be filled with failed products that don't catch on. Plus, what about the successor to the 360? The Halo franchise is pretty much tied to the success of that if it comes down to it. And everything changed this generation. Sony, which was at the top before fell to last place and Nintendo which was last the previous generation has climbed to first place.
Developing your own IP allows you to take things in your own direction. Because, Bungie owns a lot of the Halo code much like Rare owned the game engine for Goldeneye but just didn't own the IP used in there. So it is better in the long term for Bungie to make a Halo-like game and establish their own independent IP than to continue using Halo which the future is uncertain.
No, we are not all interconnected in a major way. Each man is his own and it is up to each man to take responsibility for their own actions rather than being a pussy and blaming it on someone else. When you really start to look at things, other people's actions have little to do with your own success. For example, this person made a bad business decision, yeah, Madoff was a crook who falsified information and should be punished, but the exact same scenario can happen without "bad people". Yeah, a lot of people lost money when typewriters declined, lost fortunes with the rise of the automobile, etc.
Each individual's decisions make a much, much, much, much, much larger impact on their lives than the things that other people do.
It seems like in reality virus/adware/spyware infections are down to very, very low levels.
It used to be in the late 90s to early-to-mid 2000s there would be people left and right with adware that popped up stuff and computers would grind to a halt. Today, I'm not seeing that on anyone's computer that I've done tech support for. I have seen a bunch of systems grind to a halt due to Norton/McAfee, but none caused by viruses/spyware/adware/etc. The only thing I can think of is that IE7 and beyond stepped up security enough to make a major impact.
So even though "threat analyzers" pull up scary numbers, I'm not seeing the results in the wild.
But if you are going to pay $60 for a game, wouldn't you want to be able to pick up and play it, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now and it be just as fun as it was the day it was released? Quite honestly, I think that is the mark of a really great game, if you can't do that, its not that great. For example, Super Mario Bros. is a great example, its just as much fun today as it was when it was released. Final Fantasy VII is also another great game that stood the test of time, barring the load times, its a very fun game. Same thing with Yoshi's Island and Doom. If you have to see the game in rose tinted glasses with a qualifier with "for its time..." the game failed. Super Mario Bros wasn't a great platformer for its time, it was a great platformer. Final Fantasy VII wasn't a great RPG for its time, it is simply a great RPG. Etc.
If I'm going to buy a game for full price on launch day, it better be a classic or close to one. and not a tech-demo style game emphasizing graphics or temporary features over long-term fun. I'm not going to be impressed with HD graphics 20 years from now, I'm not going to be enjoying a multiplayer feature that no longer exists, however, if the game is fun, it will be just as great as when it came out.
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A corporation requires money and resources, without that it dies. In a free market, no one is forced to pay for anything they don't want, this is in sharp contrast with a government where you -have- to pay for things, even if you don't want them. For example, if you disagree with Wal-Mart's hiring practices, you don't have to shop there, they don't get any of your money or support. On the other hand, if you oppose the war in Iraq, you still have to pay for the bullets or else go to prison.
Given a free enough market, corporations won't become tyrannical because of the fact that the market balances itself out. Even the "worst" monopoly was broken up in essence by market forces (the government breakup of Standard Oil was not needed because it no longer was even close to a monopoly at the time of its breakup). Anytime you see a monopoly, it either A) Is government imposed (postal service, utilities, etc), B) No need for competition (as in, if no one thought hamburgers would be profitable and therefore McDonalds was the only store selling hamburgers) or C) Is very temporary.
The problem is, our government is not free enough, when boiled down to a government whos only job is to protect against fraud and force both corporations and consumers win. Consumers win because they are free to screw the corporations, for example, no DMCA and most likely no (or very, very limited) copyright. Corporations win because they are free to innovate and expand beyond government constraints artificially limiting them. Consumers also have more choice, imagine if all the oil in the world was monopolized and there was incredibly high prices, a few things would have happened, either A) we'd find new sources of oil or more likely B) We'd develop things that didn't need oil thus pushing oil prices down further leading to a loss of that monopoly. Corporations also can provide infrastructure, if Company X needs to have an airport near Nowheresville, they will build an airport, because they can't utilize all of it 24/7, they rent it out to private airlines, therefore, suddenly Nowheresville has an airport and gets more trade without government waste.
I guarantee making voting more complicated is not the answer. You need an educated, informed electorate first. But if you have that, playing silly games with the ballot won't be necessary.
Look at countries with high voter turnout, almost all of them use the solution I'm proposing, for example, the US only has a 54% voter turnout, on the other hand, look at Sweden with 86% voter turnout because they use proportional voting.
Proportional representation is the easiest way to make sure that people's vote counts. Just because you don't agree with 50% of people, doesn't mean your voice shouldn't be heard. The idea that people vote politically based on the surrounding area is outdated, it worked before the civil war, where industries were tied to certain geographical areas. But they aren't.
Whole plane parachutes are already a reality on many private planes, just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_parachute the problem is, it just takes too many parachutes to work on something like a 747 or something.
Property by nature, and property law is filled with the assumption that property is limited. For example, if I have a plow and give it to you, I no longer have a plow. But lets say I have the plans to make a plow, that no longer is limited. If I tell you how to build a plow, I can still make a plow and you can make a plow. Those plans, provided they weren't written on anything and were simply verbal plans, were not property.
Property law would be needless if everything was like those plans, food would be infinite, water would be infinite, etc. But they are limited, thus why we need property laws.
Exactly. The US has gotten really good at making sure that people don't want to work here. News flash, its not 1950 anymore, Europe is just as developed if not more developed than the US, most of Asia has lots of cheap labor and good talent. If I was starting up a business I'd start it almost anywhere other than the US.
Which is why it is important to either have a very limited government that wouldn't let these abuses happen or allow for party-list based proportional representation in order to get people involved in politics and generate good government. Our current electoral system is great with very limited government and an even more limited federal government, but it isn't the 1830s anymore, the federal government is huge and this duopoly of parties only encourages political apathy. Party-list proportional representation means that everyone at least has -someone- representing their beliefs in congress, rather than people simply voting for the "lesser evil".
The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted
What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.
Isn't it time that we realized that property is not property unless it is limited and move on?
....Because many viruses will try to open up ports so they can send spam, etc.
Actually, System 8 (Copland) had a ton of problems without including Jobs. The problem was, it was a disjointed effort where nothing was getting done. If anything blame Ellen Hancock for purchasing NeXT because when she was hired she basically said "screw this, it isn't ever going to get shipped" so they bailed out Jobs.
Copland wasn't going anywhere so Apple decided to cut their losses.
Um, actually in the 90s there were some pretty good OSes. Yeah, ME sucked, but Windows NT was actually quite good, plus, the *Nix OSes were still as stable as ever, just not end-user friendly.
MacOS actually really, really sucked. NT had memory protection, MacOS didn't.
While NT wasn't exactly a "home" OS, it was used enough to make it pretty common if you knew to get it.
In the 90s, Mac was way and I mean way behind the curve.
No, I don't think that most users would block it, but it would allow you to have security without a closed ecosystem. For example, why would something like, say, a media player need access to my entire filesystem to play music when I could just limit it to read permissions on my music directory (and sub-directories). These things are what prevent security flaws and let you actually control your phone.
Plus, it would allow people without unlimited data plans to use an Android phone without wondering what it was doing in the background, etc.
I'm suggesting that none of the readers of /. are Paris Hilton.
/. (I don't think that the average person cares to look through Linus Torvald's cell phone) and this idea that our data is somehow awesomely valuable to the average person and would be stolen is a bit too much of ego. No one cares about your source code to yet another text editor, no one cares about pictures of your cat, no one really cares about your high score on Galaga, they do however see a nice Droid/iPhone/BlackBerry phone and know that they can sell that for a few extra bucks.
Yeah, if you are a celebrity, people are going to look through your cell phone. But I'm not a celebrity, I don't think you are and neither is most of
I agree, really, Google should let -us- decide what an app can do. Want to access the internet, nope, check a box marked deny and that app no longer has access to that. Want to know my location, nope, check a box marked deny and that app no longer can find your location.
About the only thing is, that might piss off a few developers because ad-blocking becomes rather easy, but I'm sure they will find a way to have it use the internet in a non-annoying way...
but it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone
When you lose your phone, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the time they just want to wipe your iPhone and sell it to the local pawn shop. They don't care about your data, your songs, your apps, etc. they simply see that shiny, new hardware = money. Same thing with laptops, they don't care about the data on it, they want to wipe "that funny looking OS" off of it and put a pirated copy of XP on there and sell it on eBay.
The idea that stolen gadgets are going to be used for something beyond simple hardware really overestimates either your value of data or the intelligence of thieves.
Um, already now.
The fact that carriers charge for SMS messages is already customers getting screwed. It has -no- impact on the network at all when you text. For one, you are sending -bytes- of data, not kilobytes, not megabytes just plain bytes.
SMS was essentially designed to take advantage of unused resources in most cell phone systems, (hence the character limit), why the carriers make us pay insane fees for what is non-existent use of their network is beyond me.
Because I think it simply used leaked keys that would then be revoked, rather than this key which is permanent and can't be changed.
He isn't a Libertarian, real libertarians either believe in A) Incredibly limited copyright or B) No copyright. For example, see the Ludwig Von Mises article (http://mises.org/daily/4575) because property by nature is scarce and not unlimited.
But the thing is, if you are scammed you have the possibility to recover funds plus damages. It might take a few years but (presumably) you weren't trying to get that money back in the next few years anyways. It isn't like a robbery where the police rarely catch the suspect, everything is documented and you can get your money back.
The emotional trauma should be incredibly short lived and shouldn't be anymore than an inconvenience. Sure, you don't -want- it to happen but I'd rather have my money be stolen by Madoff that I can get back than me legitimately investing in a bad company where that money will never get returned to me.
Look at it this way, if someone had claimed to have invented something that... I don't know, neutralized the pepper spray that the riot police were using to break up the demonstrations. Do you really think that the journalist would have just taken them at their word, published stories to the effect that they were saving the world from tyranny? They would have wanted pictures of it in use, to talk to people who had used it successfully, maybe even interviewed a local chemist for his take on it. For whatever reason, technology stories just don't get the same level of scrutiny that other topics do.
Yes they probably would take his word for it. The level of scrutiny in mass media is less than the level of scrutiny on Wikipedia. The mass media doesn't care about "following up" on stories, they just want to tell you that (in the words of Ross Noble) "Bad Shit is happening in the world, there's loads of shit happening in the world". They don't care if you understand it, Americans are so used to seeing fancy things on TV and then forgetting about it. It seems like every month there is some new breakthrough that "cures cancer" that we never hear another word about.
The masses have a really, really short memory.
The problem is then the people in management don't understand it so they force the tech people to "dumb it down" to the point where it becomes essentially false. For example:
Cookies can store data about where you have been and what ads you have seen. Therefore, cookies can be used to track you.
Soon becomes:
Cookies track data about people.
Eventually becomes:
Cookies are a privacy threat.
Which gets read by the masses as:
Cookies are viruses.
I wasn't saying that. I was saying that the idea that somehow we were interconnected that we can abolish all personal responsibility is wrong such as the person saying that somehow Madoff -made- someone commit suicide which is false.
Madoff should be punished, he should be forced to give funds to those who he scammed plus more. But the idea that somehow he is responsible for a death is complete bullshit.
But they are tied to the success of a certain brand. I see Bungie as being a lot like Rare who made a video game based on IP they didn't own (Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007) and that forced them to essentially make another game with the same engine in the case of Goldeneye to really have a failproof plan. Investors and CEOs don't like uncertainty, Halo for Bungie is filled with uncertainty because for one its tied into Microsoft's platform which at this mid-way point seems rather sturdy but could, like the Mega Drive be filled with failed products that don't catch on. Plus, what about the successor to the 360? The Halo franchise is pretty much tied to the success of that if it comes down to it. And everything changed this generation. Sony, which was at the top before fell to last place and Nintendo which was last the previous generation has climbed to first place.
Developing your own IP allows you to take things in your own direction. Because, Bungie owns a lot of the Halo code much like Rare owned the game engine for Goldeneye but just didn't own the IP used in there. So it is better in the long term for Bungie to make a Halo-like game and establish their own independent IP than to continue using Halo which the future is uncertain.
Except for the fact that for a lot of people, they didn't really lose any money. (see http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/09/23/2009-09-23_50_of_madoff_investors_lost_nothing.html ) and as for the rest they will just get their money back in court.
No, we are not all interconnected in a major way. Each man is his own and it is up to each man to take responsibility for their own actions rather than being a pussy and blaming it on someone else. When you really start to look at things, other people's actions have little to do with your own success. For example, this person made a bad business decision, yeah, Madoff was a crook who falsified information and should be punished, but the exact same scenario can happen without "bad people". Yeah, a lot of people lost money when typewriters declined, lost fortunes with the rise of the automobile, etc.
Each individual's decisions make a much, much, much, much, much larger impact on their lives than the things that other people do.
It seems like in reality virus/adware/spyware infections are down to very, very low levels.
It used to be in the late 90s to early-to-mid 2000s there would be people left and right with adware that popped up stuff and computers would grind to a halt. Today, I'm not seeing that on anyone's computer that I've done tech support for. I have seen a bunch of systems grind to a halt due to Norton/McAfee, but none caused by viruses/spyware/adware/etc. The only thing I can think of is that IE7 and beyond stepped up security enough to make a major impact.
So even though "threat analyzers" pull up scary numbers, I'm not seeing the results in the wild.
But if you are going to pay $60 for a game, wouldn't you want to be able to pick up and play it, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now and it be just as fun as it was the day it was released? Quite honestly, I think that is the mark of a really great game, if you can't do that, its not that great. For example, Super Mario Bros. is a great example, its just as much fun today as it was when it was released. Final Fantasy VII is also another great game that stood the test of time, barring the load times, its a very fun game. Same thing with Yoshi's Island and Doom. If you have to see the game in rose tinted glasses with a qualifier with "for its time..." the game failed. Super Mario Bros wasn't a great platformer for its time, it was a great platformer. Final Fantasy VII wasn't a great RPG for its time, it is simply a great RPG. Etc.
If I'm going to buy a game for full price on launch day, it better be a classic or close to one. and not a tech-demo style game emphasizing graphics or temporary features over long-term fun. I'm not going to be impressed with HD graphics 20 years from now, I'm not going to be enjoying a multiplayer feature that no longer exists, however, if the game is fun, it will be just as great as when it came out.