Don't forget there tended to be an "except for nobles... and priests" clause in most societies as well. Where getting married involved shagging the priest and/or the local lord for the privilage of being married. Of course it was dressed up as ceremonies and such.
Sitting in cafe's and parties every night? That's arts students you're thinking of. Although college really is about more than the lectures. I breezed through first year and went to every party, weekend away and Soc event there was and I'm very glad I did that since later years required actual work to get through the course work. I gained a hell of a lot more from the social aspect of college that year than I did from the classes.
I have an old phone PAYG in a draw in my parents house. Or at least I think I have a phone there. It could have been stolen months ago for all I know. Should I be a criminal?
pretty much all the 9/11 stuff is crap, I'm not saying that governments are keen to cause terrorist attacks, just that more political power can be gained from an ineffective but public fight than an effective quick removal of such groups since they pose such a small real threat.
I really don't want to keep pointing at the debian fiasco because personally I really like open source but it's a perfect example of a big huge problem which wasn't spotted despite these things.
Open source is better than closed but it isn't some magic bullet which fixes everything.
"Where one burns books, one will soon burn people." --Heinrich Heine
1:Censorship of any kind is the same as book burning, it serves to prevent people from accessing information which precludes any reasonable consideration of the topic. Want to bet whether forums where people discuss whether whatever material you name as evil should be blocked will suddenly become inaccessiable?
2:Once you've got a computer sitting listening in on everyones connections and blocking illegal content it's very very tempting to listen for other things. Express an unpopular political opinion with someone listening in on your line and you might very well get your door/head kicked in.
3:Parallels with groups which used to be treated similarly. Go back a few decades and groups seen as perverts were subjected to the same treatment, books protraying gays as anything other than evil were burned/censored.Hell, gays were burned along with the books in some countries.
4: It's very very tempting to add sites which you don't like to the list. If you give *government figure* the keys to the database of blocked sites then *government figure* might very well add *site critical of government figure* to the database as one of the -statisticly insignificant- false positives. Sites critical of some of the major blacklist publishers are often themselves blacklisted.
5: How do you know if you're being fed bullshit? China built it's firewall to "protect" people from the "harmful" content on the internet. What's to stop them from adding more and more and more to the list of things which make up "illegal content" which is of course perfectly OK to block. Until everything your local minister wouldn't like is on the list. The blocking system is there, everyone with a pet peeve will want to get their *thing they hate* added to the list.
6:Ultimatly it can all be defeated by technical means, the illegal content just sinks deeper, it doesn't disappear.
7: Comparison to physical situation, imagine being forced by law to wear a headset which blacks out your vision whenever it thinks you are looking at something which the makers of the device considered you shouldn't be looking at. Imagine such a device getting introduced as a measure to stop peeping toms and creepy old men in parks who stare at children. Never mind the tiny proportion of the population who get unlucky as it blacks out their vision while they're doing something totally blameless like driving. Does this seem reasonable? Stealing is illegal, should someone invent an implant which makes it physicly impossible for you to steal how happy would you be about wearing it? It's for your own good! it would just stop you from accidentally stealing things which would help you! Does this seem reasonable?
Peeping on people showering without their consent is illegal just like looking at child porn or stealing is illegal and if you get caught you're in trouble, this doesn't mean we have to blindfold/hobble everyone. The responsibility- the choice, to break the law or not is an individuals.
"Nice story, but if you also added that thugs came in and stole the guy's merchandise and gave it out for free, it might be closer to what's happening to IP on p2p sites."
Nice story, but if you also added that thugs came in bought one copy of the guy's merchandise, waved a magic wand to create 100 perfect copies and gave them out for free as they walked home, it might be closer to what's happening to IP on p2p sites.
FOSS software isn't immune, there have been some terrible security flaws which have gone unnoticed for a long time. Of course proprietry software has even more flaws but profits pay for a team of guys in nice suits to give powerpoint presentations on how good it is and take the head of purchasing out to dinner.
I would be very surprised if there weren't a few NSA plants in the dev teams of some of the more popular linux distros. How hard would it really be for a tallented coder to slip in a few subtle flaws to be exploited later if he's on the dev team and in every other way does the job very well.
only if you care about civilian casualties. as for finding terrorists, they're too useful. I don't mean in a conspiracy theory doing the governments bidding way. I mean they can be used to raise political capital.
Lets take a the example of ETA in the basque country of Spain. Every time there's a scandal or some big fuckup by senior government officials there just happens to be a crackdown on ETA members shortly after. Oil tanker disaster = crackdown. Senior official sex scandal = smaller crackdown. with lots of headlines about all the ETA members arrested pushing the sandals off the front page.
It's well known that the authorities in Spain keep tabs on most of the organisation and could probably round up most of them overnight if they really wanted.
The heavy handed way they treat it only serves to increase the number of recruits, the organisation would have faded away to almost nothing if the Spanish government didn't intern people and fuck up their lives as part of this.
Now I wonder if there are any parallels with how the US runs it's own war on terror...
Want to hold on to political power? don't even dream of getting rid of the terrorists, they're a minor threat but you can use them to demand a great deal of power.
sure but in those days the difference in power wasn't so huge. Armies in those days could be defeated by decent numbers of lightly armed pissed off citizens. Now days if, for example, the entire population of new york fought against the US army the whole place could be turned into a blackened crater in the space of a few hours.
The fact is that the police can bring more guns to bear and the penalties for using them on police, which you can bet would unofficially include long hours with the camera turned off and a taser being used inventively, are too high for most people to take that option.
1:Encrypted data can be hidden within random data. 2:Encrypted data can be hidden within normal data such as the least significant bit of your family photos. 3:Encrypted data can be hidden on a seemingly "empty" drive. 4:It is impossible to prove with certainty any of the above situations as opposed to 1:the data actually being random, 2:there being no data hidden within the normal data, 3: a drive really bing empty. 5:If the police think you have encrypted data you must give up the key or go to jail.
Result:If you live in the UK and own any form of electronic storage you can be jailed at at time.
It gets worse. Theory: with a good encryption program any encrypted data should look random. That truecrypt volume should be impossible to tell from a file I've created with cat/dev/urandom > file
So you could type that very command and 5 years later they ask for your encryption key... Key? To jail with you!
same goes for any random/semirandom data you have which has so mime type.
Now I'm willing to bet there are programs which can take a photo album and hide an encrypted volume in the least significant bit of the pixels, how would law enforcement deal with that?
"GIVE US THE KEY!" "but but but... what do you want the key to..."
Long story short, if you live in the UK and own an electronic data storage device you can now be thrown in jail for no reason at all.
You do know how fucked up the marriage laws are in some states? Anyone remember that protest brides-price site which nobody could decide on weather it was real or not until they declared on the site that they weren't real.
for anyone who never ran across it the basics: dowries/bride price/similar is a protected religious practice, in some states someone can get married as young as 12 with parents permission.... even if the partner is 60 years the senior. Combined with "it's not child abuse if you're married" and you get a really fucked up situation where people can and do buy children to abuse.
oh it most certainly is a sliperly slope. It just happens that this is quite some way further down the slope than where we started. "ISP's can volentarily log x information"(fine, they can run their buisness however) "ISP's must log x information!"(Well most of them were already doing this, only the negligent ones weren't doing it!) "ISP's log it anyway so it's no big deal if we centralise it"(well the only real difference is that they don't need a warrent any more...) *Jackboots kicking down the door*(Well Fuck....)
"engaging in relationships, going about day-to-day business."
Strange how people will sit in a bedroom controlling an avatar which is decorating it's bedroom....
Although I can understand to an extent. there have been times when I was unhappy and being able to spend a few hours in a virtual world completely disconnected from my real life somehow helped and overall made me a happier person. Don't play now that real life is good.
I avoid WOW at all cost though. I want to play it but I've seen what it does to people and I know I'd get hooked.
I'm 100% for socialised healthcare but I recognise that it has it's problems.
care for young people and you get a healthier population. OAPs however just need more and more care, the more care they get the longer they live the more care they need etc etc.
France has a fairly calous and cruel,but when it comes down to it, sensible system. If the hospitals can't cope(like during a heatwave or disaster) then they simply stop treating people over a certain age. Depending on how bad the situation is the age lowers or rises. There are cases of old buisnessmen having heart attacks but being refused treatment so it isn't even a matter of money.
It's one way of dealing with the problem of limited budgets and unlimited health problems.
Let's try a much much better analogy. You go to your local movie theater. Upon arriving you find that all 12 screens are showing Police Academy 27, at which point you decide that it's not worth the $10 admission to stare at Steve Guttenberg for 90 minutes. Then as you're walking home you pass a stand where some guy is handing out free copies of the movie to anyone who asks. You would not have paid the $10 admission, and the theater has empty seats (IOW, the theater's revenue is the same whether you take the offered copy or not) doesn't make it right to accept the copy without walking back to the movie theatre and handing them 10 dollars... wait this is more clearly the bullshit that your argument was...
Why would I bother pirating half life2? I can get it from steam fairly cheap and I don't have to worry about viruses and it's a hell of a lot faster than downloading it from a wares site.
sure some people still do but from my own experience of when I simply didn't have a credit card that's still a matter of convenience where going out and getting a credit card to conduct business with steam took more effort than going to the crack site. now I have a card going to steam is more appealing.
show me where on TPB they get asked to pay. The question was about lost sales. the point was there were no lost sales because if they had to pay to view then they simply wouldn't view.
"If something was crappy, you wouldn't have any interest in it."
Value: ~Zero Cost: ~Zero Result: Watch
Value: ~Zero Cost: ~$9.99! Result: Goes and watches someone light their farts on youtube instead.
Simple enough for you?
"without having to pay money for it." Convenience first. Cheap is good too. I wouldn't question that. paying the same for a download as for a boxset(so as to no hurt sales of the box set) when distribution is so very cheap will put people off but I'd be perfectly willing to pay the same money I pay to rapidshare to some TV network if they were able to provide just as fast downloads, the same range of movies and similar or less embedded advertising.
And ya, the psychology thing is true although the RIAA do tend to validate the belief what with actually being evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget there tended to be an "except for nobles... and priests" clause in most societies as well. Where getting married involved shagging the priest and/or the local lord for the privilage of being married.
Of course it was dressed up as ceremonies and such.
Sitting in cafe's and parties every night? That's arts students you're thinking of.
Although college really is about more than the lectures. I breezed through first year and went to every party, weekend away and Soc event there was and I'm very glad I did that since later years required actual work to get through the course work.
I gained a hell of a lot more from the social aspect of college that year than I did from the classes.
And they'd move the snow while you were in class so you'd have to walk up hill through snow going home as well :D
I have an old phone PAYG in a draw in my parents house. Or at least I think I have a phone there. It could have been stolen months ago for all I know. Should I be a criminal?
pretty much all the 9/11 stuff is crap, I'm not saying that governments are keen to cause terrorist attacks, just that more political power can be gained from an ineffective but public fight than an effective quick removal of such groups since they pose such a small real threat.
I really don't want to keep pointing at the debian fiasco because personally I really like open source but it's a perfect example of a big huge problem which wasn't spotted despite these things.
Open source is better than closed but it isn't some magic bullet which fixes everything.
"Where one burns books, one will soon burn people." --Heinrich Heine
1:Censorship of any kind is the same as book burning, it serves to prevent people from accessing information which precludes any reasonable consideration of the topic.
Want to bet whether forums where people discuss whether whatever material you name as evil should be blocked will suddenly become inaccessiable?
2:Once you've got a computer sitting listening in on everyones connections and blocking illegal content it's very very tempting to listen for other things. Express an unpopular political opinion with someone listening in on your line and you might very well get your door/head kicked in.
3:Parallels with groups which used to be treated similarly. Go back a few decades and groups seen as perverts were subjected to the same treatment, books protraying gays as anything other than evil were burned/censored.Hell, gays were burned along with the books in some countries.
4: It's very very tempting to add sites which you don't like to the list. If you give *government figure* the keys to the database of blocked sites then *government figure* might very well add *site critical of government figure* to the database as one of the -statisticly insignificant- false positives. Sites critical of some of the major blacklist publishers are often themselves blacklisted.
5: How do you know if you're being fed bullshit? China built it's firewall to "protect" people from the "harmful" content on the internet. What's to stop them from adding more and more and more to the list of things which make up "illegal content" which is of course perfectly OK to block. Until everything your local minister wouldn't like is on the list. The blocking system is there, everyone with a pet peeve will want to get their *thing they hate* added to the list.
6:Ultimatly it can all be defeated by technical means, the illegal content just sinks deeper, it doesn't disappear.
7: Comparison to physical situation, imagine being forced by law to wear a headset which blacks out your vision whenever it thinks you are looking at something which the makers of the device considered you shouldn't be looking at. Imagine such a device getting introduced as a measure to stop peeping toms and creepy old men in parks who stare at children. Never mind the tiny proportion of the population who get unlucky as it blacks out their vision while they're doing something totally blameless like driving.
Does this seem reasonable?
Stealing is illegal, should someone invent an implant which makes it physicly impossible for you to steal how happy would you be about wearing it? It's for your own good! it would just stop you from accidentally stealing things which would help you! Does this seem reasonable?
Peeping on people showering without their consent is illegal just like looking at child porn or stealing is illegal and if you get caught you're in trouble, this doesn't mean we have to blindfold/hobble everyone. The responsibility- the choice, to break the law or not is an individuals.
backdoor doesn't have to mean a port sitting open.
It can be a weakness in the RNG, a constant in an encryption scheme etc.
So ya, your idea for commenting out the NSA_BACKDOOR headders is the best one.
Show me an easy way to find the backdoors...
"Nice story, but if you also added that thugs came in and stole the guy's merchandise and gave it out for free, it might be closer to what's happening to IP on p2p sites."
Nice story, but if you also added that thugs came in bought one copy of the guy's merchandise, waved a magic wand to create 100 perfect copies and gave them out for free as they walked home, it might be closer to what's happening to IP on p2p sites.
FOSS software isn't immune, there have been some terrible security flaws which have gone unnoticed for a long time. Of course proprietry software has even more flaws but profits pay for a team of guys in nice suits to give powerpoint presentations on how good it is and take the head of purchasing out to dinner.
I would be very surprised if there weren't a few NSA plants in the dev teams of some of the more popular linux distros. How hard would it really be for a tallented coder to slip in a few subtle flaws to be exploited later if he's on the dev team and in every other way does the job very well.
only if you care about civilian casualties.
as for finding terrorists, they're too useful. I don't mean in a conspiracy theory doing the governments bidding way. I mean they can be used to raise political capital.
Lets take a the example of ETA in the basque country of Spain. Every time there's a scandal or some big fuckup by senior government officials there just happens to be a crackdown on ETA members shortly after. Oil tanker disaster = crackdown. Senior official sex scandal = smaller crackdown. with lots of headlines about all the ETA members arrested pushing the sandals off the front page.
It's well known that the authorities in Spain keep tabs on most of the organisation and could probably round up most of them overnight if they really wanted.
The heavy handed way they treat it only serves to increase the number of recruits, the organisation would have faded away to almost nothing if the Spanish government didn't intern people and fuck up their lives as part of this.
Now I wonder if there are any parallels with how the US runs it's own war on terror...
Want to hold on to political power? don't even dream of getting rid of the terrorists, they're a minor threat but you can use them to demand a great deal of power.
sure but in those days the difference in power wasn't so huge.
Armies in those days could be defeated by decent numbers of lightly armed pissed off citizens. Now days if, for example, the entire population of new york fought against the US army the whole place could be turned into a blackened crater in the space of a few hours.
The fact is that the police can bring more guns to bear and the penalties for using them on police, which you can bet would unofficially include long hours with the camera turned off and a taser being used inventively, are too high for most people to take that option.
Exactly.
It's just a power grab.
1:Encrypted data can be hidden within random data.
2:Encrypted data can be hidden within normal data such as the least significant bit of your family photos.
3:Encrypted data can be hidden on a seemingly "empty" drive.
4:It is impossible to prove with certainty any of the above situations as opposed to 1:the data actually being random, 2:there being no data hidden within the normal data, 3: a drive really bing empty.
5:If the police think you have encrypted data you must give up the key or go to jail.
Result:If you live in the UK and own any form of electronic storage you can be jailed at at time.
I hadn't noticed this in the artical when I made the last post but
"The woman, who claims to have not used encryption"
It gets worse. /dev/urandom > file
Theory: with a good encryption program any encrypted data should look random.
That truecrypt volume should be impossible to tell from a file I've created with
cat
So you could type that very command and 5 years later they ask for your encryption key...
Key?
To jail with you!
same goes for any random/semirandom data you have which has so mime type.
Now I'm willing to bet there are programs which can take a photo album and hide an encrypted volume in the least significant bit of the pixels, how would law enforcement deal with that?
"GIVE US THE KEY!"
"but but but... what do you want the key to..."
Long story short, if you live in the UK and own an electronic data storage device you can now be thrown in jail for no reason at all.
You do know how fucked up the marriage laws are in some states? Anyone remember that protest brides-price site which nobody could decide on weather it was real or not until they declared on the site that they weren't real.
for anyone who never ran across it the basics:
dowries/bride price/similar is a protected religious practice, in some states someone can get married as young as 12 with parents permission.... even if the partner is 60 years the senior. Combined with "it's not child abuse if you're married" and you get a really fucked up situation where people can and do buy children to abuse.
oh it most certainly is a sliperly slope. It just happens that this is quite some way further down the slope than where we started.
"ISP's can volentarily log x information"(fine, they can run their buisness however)
"ISP's must log x information!"(Well most of them were already doing this, only the negligent ones weren't doing it!)
"ISP's log it anyway so it's no big deal if we centralise it"(well the only real difference is that they don't need a warrent any more...)
*Jackboots kicking down the door*(Well Fuck....)
"engaging in relationships, going about day-to-day business."
Strange how people will sit in a bedroom controlling an avatar which is decorating it's bedroom....
Although I can understand to an extent. there have been times when I was unhappy and being able to spend a few hours in a virtual world completely disconnected from my real life somehow helped and overall made me a happier person. Don't play now that real life is good.
I avoid WOW at all cost though. I want to play it but I've seen what it does to people and I know I'd get hooked.
I'm 100% for socialised healthcare but I recognise that it has it's problems.
care for young people and you get a healthier population.
OAPs however just need more and more care, the more care they get the longer they live the more care they need etc etc.
France has a fairly calous and cruel,but when it comes down to it, sensible system.
If the hospitals can't cope(like during a heatwave or disaster) then they simply stop treating people over a certain age. Depending on how bad the situation is the age lowers or rises. There are cases of old buisnessmen having heart attacks but being refused treatment so it isn't even a matter of money.
It's one way of dealing with the problem of limited budgets and unlimited health problems.
Let's try a much much better analogy. You go to your local movie theater. Upon arriving you find that all 12 screens are showing Police Academy 27, at which point you decide that it's not worth the $10 admission to stare at Steve Guttenberg for 90 minutes. Then as you're walking home you pass a stand where some guy is handing out free copies of the movie to anyone who asks. You would not have paid the $10 admission, and the theater has empty seats (IOW, the theater's revenue is the same whether you take the offered copy or not) doesn't make it right to accept the copy without walking back to the movie theatre and handing them 10 dollars... wait this is more clearly the bullshit that your argument was...
exactly!
Why would I bother pirating half life2? I can get it from steam fairly cheap and I don't have to worry about viruses and it's a hell of a lot faster than downloading it from a wares site.
sure some people still do but from my own experience of when I simply didn't have a credit card that's still a matter of convenience where going out and getting a credit card to conduct business with steam took more effort than going to the crack site. now I have a card going to steam is more appealing.
show me where on TPB they get asked to pay.
The question was about lost sales. the point was there were no lost sales because if they had to pay to view then they simply wouldn't view.
"If something was crappy, you wouldn't have any interest in it."
Value: ~Zero
Cost: ~Zero
Result: Watch
Value: ~Zero
Cost: ~$9.99!
Result: Goes and watches someone light their farts on youtube instead.
Simple enough for you?
"without having to pay money for it."
Convenience first. Cheap is good too. I wouldn't question that. paying the same for a download as for a boxset(so as to no hurt sales of the box set) when distribution is so very cheap will put people off but I'd be perfectly willing to pay the same money I pay to rapidshare to some TV network if they were able to provide just as fast downloads, the same range of movies and similar or less embedded advertising.
And ya, the psychology thing is true although the RIAA do tend to validate the belief what with actually being evil.
Nobody's asking them to pay. But if they were asked to pay they'd simply decline to watch. simple as that.
Value: ~Zero
Cost: ~Zero
Result: Watch
Value: ~Zero
Cost: ~$9.99!
Result: Goes and watches someone light their farts on youtube.
Simple enough for an arts student to understand.
How is this concept so very very very hard for certain people to understand?