If enough people want something, then the politician HAS to vote in favor of it, otherwise he will be voted out of office, and someone else will replace him.
I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think. I don't know either; it's hard to find a real dialogue on these "objectionable speech" issues in this society.
this is what happened recently in California on proposition 8, where the majority of voters decided that gay marriage is not something they wanted (for the record, in case you care, I voted against prop 8, although I really don't care much either way). So gay marriage is illegal. Sucks if you're gay and want to get married, but well, you have an option, you can convince enough other people that gay marriage is a good idea and put it up for vote again.
Your example may be undermined by the underlying issues around voters being able to override constitutional principles by passing amendments with only a simple majority. (That is: The supreme court is supposed to be able to make decisions like "equal protection implies that gay marriage is legal" and have it stick even if it's unpopular. A majority vote by the people is not the last word in a constitutional republic; it's subject to checks and balances like everything else. That a 52% majority had the power to circumvent that by amending the constitution is troubling.)
Once again, this is what happened in California when lots of people in favor of proposition 8 cared enough about it to go call their neighbors and reason with them why it was a good idea. The opponents of prop 8 didn't have the same ambition, which is why at the end of the day they lost.
That's not true. The campaign for Prop 8 didn't owe its success to grassroots support; most of that work was paid for by out-of-state religious interest groups with deep pockets (who cared very strongly, for reasons I can't fathom, whether people neither from their church nor from their state could get married). The campaign against Prop 8 was quite ambitious, with many impassioned supporters whose lives were changed by its passing, which unfortunately wasn't enough.
I am among many open-source supporters who think Richard Stallman is generally too far out on the fringe, but I think the opinions illustrated in his sci-fi story "The Right to Read" are a pretty dead-on assessment of what is going on here. Basically this is what happens when software vendors are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that software is not a tangible good and can't really be sold or rented out for a unit price, no matter how profitable it may be, and they redouble their efforts to force that business model into existence, to hell with the consumers.
If you use Microsoft Office, do yourself a favor and switch to OpenOffice as soon as possible. The sooner you do it, the fewer of your files you'll need to convert/jailbreak some day. (Plus you might help to stave off some big dystopian-future scenario, which is nice.)
What you say is completely reasonable, ought to be true, used to be true in the U.S., and still partly is, but unfortunately the DMCA screwed it up. Circumventing a technological measure meant to prevent copying is now illegal in and of itself, even if your use of the copy is completely innocent under copyright law. Commercial DVDs and most proprietary ebook formats have encryption measures that invoke this legal "protection". (I am not a lawyer and this may be an oversimplification. The DMCA does provide some exemptions to the anti-circumvention clauses but overall the consumer seems to get screwed over pretty well.)
I would also ask how they accounted for BitTorrent downloads, which are provided on the main OpenOffice.org website (in addition to the normal third-party sites). At first glance, it seems like the most logical interpretation is to count each copy of the.torrent file downloaded from the main website as one full download of the corresponding file. Or are they only counting downloads of the software from their own site?
SJG was raided because one of their games under development was thought by the feds to be "a handbook for cybercrime".
That's right. It was in fact a GURPS sourcebook for cyberpunk settings. Naturally, it would teach you about as much about successfully profiting from cybercrime as (to paraphrase a quip by someone from SJG) the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook would teach you how to survive in medieval combat. (Or for that matter, I would add, how to cast magical spells.)
Well, let's hypothetically accept the premise that the police and feds will be able to seize the trademark from the group as though it were originally their own. Then they could at least seek legal action against anyone who produces new jackets with the logo, on the grounds that it would infringe the police's newfound exclusive rights to use the mark to promote their own goods and services. (That's why they wanted the trademark, right? I mean, what else is a trademark good for?)
So this strategy could work, so long as the police pick up the Mongols' trademarked product line and start handing out their own Mongol-branded beatings, robberies, extortion schemes, and contraband sales. (Cue a flood of cynical responses saying that the police would merely have to rebrand their existing product line.) At the very least, they could pay lip service to IP law by selling a few Mongol coffee mugs on CafePress—maybe they could donate the proceeds to those police charities instead of bothering me with telephone solicitations.
[T]he only other requirement is a source of alpha particles. This would have required an understanding of a radioactivity, however, which is much easier when you have discovered electricity.
Either that or a very pressurized tank of helium with a pinhole leak. I'll bet if you could just get it shooting out of there fast enough...?
Yeah, I'm encouraged to believe that this is starting to seep into the mainstream. I actually heard DVD DRM being negatively discussed in the context of consumer gadgetry on a (not particularly geek-oriented) morning radio show a little while ago.
The recent xkcd strip "Steal This Comic" makes a solid and concise against the DMCA and similar laws. If you want your non-geek acquaintances to understand why this matters, you might consider showing it to them.
Geez, this makes me wonder how well that ParanoidLinux project is coming along. This sort of story really shows why it's such a good idea—having anonymity and encryption is good, but having them auto-configured and applied seamlessly to your online presence is better, especially since privacy is everyone's right, not just techno-geeks'. With undirected, warrantless government monitoring going on, even non-technical users should start asking for good privacy tech. (Disclaimer: Auto-configuration and seamlessness are not necessarily goals of the ParanoidLinux project, but I anticipate that it could be done if enough developers get involved. I am not involved in the project.)
Hmm, turns out they made their first alpha build earlier this week. That's good news; I've been worried that it would turn into vaporware. (Although in the spirit of the article I suppose I should spell that "vapourware".)
I had the same reaction to the title. "[T]he teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." —Edsger W. Dijkstra
I agree that Python would almost definitely be the best first choice as far as language. It has simple syntax without sacrificing expressive power. Dynamic typing and native lists defer the need to understand memory-related details, and may encourage students to write flexible code without having to learn about explicit polymorphism. Perhaps most importantly, as an interpreted language, Python allows the students to "be the program" and tinker with the language one line at a time.
Java is a good second choice if you want them to have type-safety and to work with a more conventional syntax, so long as you don't let the students fall into the trap of just using the libraries to do everything without understanding the underlying computational processes, as warned in this essay (and as cited by the great ESR).
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
we might be able to increase the depressingly small fraction of encrypted traffic on the Internet.
I agree that this would indeed be a good thing for several reasons. An encrypted message in a medium where most everything is plaintext may attract the attention of attackers or, worse, be seen as "suspicious" by a government. (Certainly the U.S. and the PATRIOT Act spring to mind, but let's not forget the truly oppressive governments such as China's and any number of third-world dictatorships.) If online privacy via encryption comes to be a right that everyone gets used to enjoying—much like how almost all mail is sent in sealed envelopes, whether or not its contents are sensitive—then it will be that much harder, for technical and/or social reasons, for an authority to take away. If Obfuscated TCP is even a token step in that direction (and it seems to be a bit better than that), then it is probably a good thing overall.
Someone earlier today on Slashdot was plugging Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and I'm going to follow that example (you can read it for free!) as part of it advances the same idea.
Maybe I'm missing something, but is this necessarily evidence that the Skype client and transmission are not themselves secure? The third link indicates that TOM-Skype uses TOM-specific client software that does the filtering (which Skype knew about). Isn't it likely that that software is also what's squealing to the monitoring system (which Skype apparently didn't know about) despite the supposed end-to-end security of the actual transmission over the Skype protocol? Is there any evidence that the monitoring is going on during the transmission, rather than this being a case of the TOM software phoning home separately?
I'm not suggesting that the Skype client should be trusted even outside of China—if it's closed-source, it might as well not encrypt anything at all—and this story certainly seems to cast additional doubt on it. But nonetheless, couldn't the foul play here be limited to the "TOM" side of TOM-Skype?
Well, CAPTCHAs aren't true Turing tests; the goal of the classic Turing test is to force the computer to exhibit human intelligence in a back-and-forth interaction with an actual human. A CAPTCHA presents only a single intelligence-based challenge (recognizing the image). But if the CAPTCHA is considered to be a kind of limited/lazy Turing test, passing it "honestly" would consist of being able to recognize images in general, like a human, not by merely knowing how to solve the limited scope of image-puzzles that the particular CAPTCHA uses. So in that sense, these CAPTCHA-breakers do "cheat" or "break" the test by exploiting that limited scope.
Actually, I've been told that assembler code ought to be commented in just that way. In well written high-level code, individual lines should have a self-evident purpose, but often this is just not possible in very low-level code. Can you really tell at a glance what "djnz" means? And even if the answer is "yes", can you reasonably expect everyone else to have it memorized?
I don't have enough experience with assembly language to render an opinion myself on whether this is really necessary in a development context, but in school I spent a semester programming ASM and the line-by-line commenting seemed indispensable.
(Or did you mean that the comment was somehow inaccurate? Like I said, who can look at "djnz" and remember what it means? I can't.)
You see, this is clearly a calculated move in the epic power struggle otherwise known as the Cal/Stanford rivalry. Do you really think it's a coincidence that the world's leading institution in the field of hating Stanford also happens to be the 'B' in BSD? You can soon expect a ferocious counterattack of Unix hacking, liberal politics, and lateral passes.
Indeed it is, but even quackery should be refuted by facts, not bias. How would we know it was quackery otherwise?
(Which is not to suggest that scientists ought to go out and disprove every homeopathic remedy some idiot comes up with. Any claim based on the so-called principles of homeopathic practice can be safely ignored—although guilt by association does not positively prove that it wouldn't work either.)
The tendency to falsely link cause to effect â" a superstition â" is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide.
First, this hardly seems like a false link. A link based on a slim probability perhaps, but when the stakes are high enough (e.g., being eaten by a lion), that's probably perfectly reasonable. Second, it's not superstition that helped evolving humans survive, it's the propensity to link cause and effect at all; superstition just consists of cases where it's taken too far. Superstition arises because, even though correlation does not imply causality, "correlation does imply causality" is a close enough approximation to the truth when you're hunting, gathering, and dodging sabertooth tigers. (Or so I would think. IANAEB. (I am not an evolutionary biologist.))
Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect â" often falsely â" science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition.
Tsk tsk. Science is the pursuit of finding the true links between cause and effect. Anyone who insists dogmatically on false links is not doing science, and the fact that scientists, being humans, may occasionally dismiss homeopathic remedies or something with a bit of prejudice does not invert the meaning of science, nor does it necessarily mean they're wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
If enough people want something, then the politician HAS to vote in favor of it, otherwise he will be voted out of office, and someone else will replace him.
I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think. I don't know either; it's hard to find a real dialogue on these "objectionable speech" issues in this society.
this is what happened recently in California on proposition 8, where the majority of voters decided that gay marriage is not something they wanted (for the record, in case you care, I voted against prop 8, although I really don't care much either way). So gay marriage is illegal. Sucks if you're gay and want to get married, but well, you have an option, you can convince enough other people that gay marriage is a good idea and put it up for vote again.
Your example may be undermined by the underlying issues around voters being able to override constitutional principles by passing amendments with only a simple majority. (That is: The supreme court is supposed to be able to make decisions like "equal protection implies that gay marriage is legal" and have it stick even if it's unpopular. A majority vote by the people is not the last word in a constitutional republic; it's subject to checks and balances like everything else. That a 52% majority had the power to circumvent that by amending the constitution is troubling.)
Once again, this is what happened in California when lots of people in favor of proposition 8 cared enough about it to go call their neighbors and reason with them why it was a good idea. The opponents of prop 8 didn't have the same ambition, which is why at the end of the day they lost.
That's not true. The campaign for Prop 8 didn't owe its success to grassroots support; most of that work was paid for by out-of-state religious interest groups with deep pockets (who cared very strongly, for reasons I can't fathom, whether people neither from their church nor from their state could get married). The campaign against Prop 8 was quite ambitious, with many impassioned supporters whose lives were changed by its passing, which unfortunately wasn't enough.
Now your choice is either the slavery office-space style, or go to the free soup line at salvation army...
It doesn't sound so bad when you phrase it that way, actually -- choosing between slavery and free soup. Does that work anything like "cake or death"?
I am among many open-source supporters who think Richard Stallman is generally too far out on the fringe, but I think the opinions illustrated in his sci-fi story "The Right to Read" are a pretty dead-on assessment of what is going on here. Basically this is what happens when software vendors are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that software is not a tangible good and can't really be sold or rented out for a unit price, no matter how profitable it may be, and they redouble their efforts to force that business model into existence, to hell with the consumers.
If you use Microsoft Office, do yourself a favor and switch to OpenOffice as soon as possible. The sooner you do it, the fewer of your files you'll need to convert/jailbreak some day. (Plus you might help to stave off some big dystopian-future scenario, which is nice.)
He had a paper cutout of another person's face that he would hold over his own whenever passing by a camera so that he could not be given a ticket.
So you're given an incentive to cover your eyes while speeding? Wow, this system just keeps sounding better and better.
What you say is completely reasonable, ought to be true, used to be true in the U.S., and still partly is, but unfortunately the DMCA screwed it up. Circumventing a technological measure meant to prevent copying is now illegal in and of itself, even if your use of the copy is completely innocent under copyright law. Commercial DVDs and most proprietary ebook formats have encryption measures that invoke this legal "protection". (I am not a lawyer and this may be an oversimplification. The DMCA does provide some exemptions to the anti-circumvention clauses but overall the consumer seems to get screwed over pretty well.)
Did anyone else click the RSS link thinking the article would be about cybernetic mitochondria? That would have been much cooler.
from your home computer (using an anonymous account)
And an anonymous IP address through Tor or the like, just to be safe.
But it will (presumably) be added to the repository much sooner, right? It just won't be included on any Ubuntu discs until next April's release.
I would also ask how they accounted for BitTorrent downloads, which are provided on the main OpenOffice.org website (in addition to the normal third-party sites). At first glance, it seems like the most logical interpretation is to count each copy of the .torrent file downloaded from the main website as one full download of the corresponding file. Or are they only counting downloads of the software from their own site?
Download: a full download of the content should be available via BitTorrent by 23rd October. It is current being seeded.
SJG was raided because one of their games under development was thought by the feds to be "a handbook for cybercrime".
That's right. It was in fact a GURPS sourcebook for cyberpunk settings. Naturally, it would teach you about as much about successfully profiting from cybercrime as (to paraphrase a quip by someone from SJG) the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook would teach you how to survive in medieval combat. (Or for that matter, I would add, how to cast magical spells.)
Well, let's hypothetically accept the premise that the police and feds will be able to seize the trademark from the group as though it were originally their own. Then they could at least seek legal action against anyone who produces new jackets with the logo, on the grounds that it would infringe the police's newfound exclusive rights to use the mark to promote their own goods and services. (That's why they wanted the trademark, right? I mean, what else is a trademark good for?)
So this strategy could work, so long as the police pick up the Mongols' trademarked product line and start handing out their own Mongol-branded beatings, robberies, extortion schemes, and contraband sales. (Cue a flood of cynical responses saying that the police would merely have to rebrand their existing product line.) At the very least, they could pay lip service to IP law by selling a few Mongol coffee mugs on CafePress—maybe they could donate the proceeds to those police charities instead of bothering me with telephone solicitations.
[T]he only other requirement is a source of alpha particles. This would have required an understanding of a radioactivity, however, which is much easier when you have discovered electricity.
Either that or a very pressurized tank of helium with a pinhole leak. I'll bet if you could just get it shooting out of there fast enough...?
(Yes, I'm joking.)
Yeah, I'm encouraged to believe that this is starting to seep into the mainstream. I actually heard DVD DRM being negatively discussed in the context of consumer gadgetry on a (not particularly geek-oriented) morning radio show a little while ago.
The recent xkcd strip "Steal This Comic" makes a solid and concise against the DMCA and similar laws. If you want your non-geek acquaintances to understand why this matters, you might consider showing it to them.
Geez, this makes me wonder how well that ParanoidLinux project is coming along. This sort of story really shows why it's such a good idea—having anonymity and encryption is good, but having them auto-configured and applied seamlessly to your online presence is better, especially since privacy is everyone's right, not just techno-geeks'. With undirected, warrantless government monitoring going on, even non-technical users should start asking for good privacy tech. (Disclaimer: Auto-configuration and seamlessness are not necessarily goals of the ParanoidLinux project, but I anticipate that it could be done if enough developers get involved. I am not involved in the project.)
Hmm, turns out they made their first alpha build earlier this week. That's good news; I've been worried that it would turn into vaporware. (Although in the spirit of the article I suppose I should spell that "vapourware".)
I had the same reaction to the title. "[T]he teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." —Edsger W. Dijkstra
I agree that Python would almost definitely be the best first choice as far as language. It has simple syntax without sacrificing expressive power. Dynamic typing and native lists defer the need to understand memory-related details, and may encourage students to write flexible code without having to learn about explicit polymorphism. Perhaps most importantly, as an interpreted language, Python allows the students to "be the program" and tinker with the language one line at a time.
Java is a good second choice if you want them to have type-safety and to work with a more conventional syntax, so long as you don't let the students fall into the trap of just using the libraries to do everything without understanding the underlying computational processes, as warned in this essay (and as cited by the great ESR).
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
we might be able to increase the depressingly small fraction of encrypted traffic on the Internet.
I agree that this would indeed be a good thing for several reasons. An encrypted message in a medium where most everything is plaintext may attract the attention of attackers or, worse, be seen as "suspicious" by a government. (Certainly the U.S. and the PATRIOT Act spring to mind, but let's not forget the truly oppressive governments such as China's and any number of third-world dictatorships.) If online privacy via encryption comes to be a right that everyone gets used to enjoying—much like how almost all mail is sent in sealed envelopes, whether or not its contents are sensitive—then it will be that much harder, for technical and/or social reasons, for an authority to take away. If Obfuscated TCP is even a token step in that direction (and it seems to be a bit better than that), then it is probably a good thing overall.
Someone earlier today on Slashdot was plugging Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and I'm going to follow that example (you can read it for free!) as part of it advances the same idea.
Maybe I'm missing something, but is this necessarily evidence that the Skype client and transmission are not themselves secure? The third link indicates that TOM-Skype uses TOM-specific client software that does the filtering (which Skype knew about). Isn't it likely that that software is also what's squealing to the monitoring system (which Skype apparently didn't know about) despite the supposed end-to-end security of the actual transmission over the Skype protocol? Is there any evidence that the monitoring is going on during the transmission, rather than this being a case of the TOM software phoning home separately?
I'm not suggesting that the Skype client should be trusted even outside of China—if it's closed-source, it might as well not encrypt anything at all—and this story certainly seems to cast additional doubt on it. But nonetheless, couldn't the foul play here be limited to the "TOM" side of TOM-Skype?
Well, CAPTCHAs aren't true Turing tests; the goal of the classic Turing test is to force the computer to exhibit human intelligence in a back-and-forth interaction with an actual human. A CAPTCHA presents only a single intelligence-based challenge (recognizing the image). But if the CAPTCHA is considered to be a kind of limited/lazy Turing test, passing it "honestly" would consist of being able to recognize images in general, like a human, not by merely knowing how to solve the limited scope of image-puzzles that the particular CAPTCHA uses. So in that sense, these CAPTCHA-breakers do "cheat" or "break" the test by exploiting that limited scope.
Actually, I've been told that assembler code ought to be commented in just that way. In well written high-level code, individual lines should have a self-evident purpose, but often this is just not possible in very low-level code. Can you really tell at a glance what "djnz" means? And even if the answer is "yes", can you reasonably expect everyone else to have it memorized?
I don't have enough experience with assembly language to render an opinion myself on whether this is really necessary in a development context, but in school I spent a semester programming ASM and the line-by-line commenting seemed indispensable.
(Or did you mean that the comment was somehow inaccurate? Like I said, who can look at "djnz" and remember what it means? I can't.)
You see, this is clearly a calculated move in the epic power struggle otherwise known as the Cal/Stanford rivalry. Do you really think it's a coincidence that the world's leading institution in the field of hating Stanford also happens to be the 'B' in BSD? You can soon expect a ferocious counterattack of Unix hacking, liberal politics, and lateral passes.
http://xkcd.com/189/
Indeed it is, but even quackery should be refuted by facts, not bias. How would we know it was quackery otherwise?
(Which is not to suggest that scientists ought to go out and disprove every homeopathic remedy some idiot comes up with. Any claim based on the so-called principles of homeopathic practice can be safely ignored—although guilt by association does not positively prove that it wouldn't work either.)
The tendency to falsely link cause to effect â" a superstition â" is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide.
First, this hardly seems like a false link. A link based on a slim probability perhaps, but when the stakes are high enough (e.g., being eaten by a lion), that's probably perfectly reasonable. Second, it's not superstition that helped evolving humans survive, it's the propensity to link cause and effect at all; superstition just consists of cases where it's taken too far. Superstition arises because, even though correlation does not imply causality, "correlation does imply causality" is a close enough approximation to the truth when you're hunting, gathering, and dodging sabertooth tigers. (Or so I would think. IANAEB. (I am not an evolutionary biologist.))
Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect â" often falsely â" science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition.
Tsk tsk. Science is the pursuit of finding the true links between cause and effect. Anyone who insists dogmatically on false links is not doing science, and the fact that scientists, being humans, may occasionally dismiss homeopathic remedies or something with a bit of prejudice does not invert the meaning of science, nor does it necessarily mean they're wrong.