1) Email and file services, for a research university with a computer science program, is a core function.
2) Data and communications storage, retention, and management, for a research university doing anything at all, is a core function.
3) The assumption that outsourcing non-core functionality is always and automatically the answer to inefficiency is a mistaken premise. There is nothing inherent in outside providers that makes them capable of greater efficiency. Especially when you house an entire department researching the best solutions to problems related to the concern at hand.
First, no, it is not completely irrelevant at all, because, for one thing, people assume a lot of things about people based on their parties, things which are not necessarily so. Plenty of people's party loyalties were developed before their parties flipped all over the place on their stances. As the post I was replying to astutely pointed out, the modern parties in the U.S. are better described as shifting coalitions than as consistent interest groups. I think it is extremely relevant to the current political landscape that people realize how inconsistent and short-lived the meanings of "Republican" and "Democrat" are, because one of the huge problems right now in the United States is blind party loyalty, along with unwillingness to hear or believe anything good about people who wear the other party's badge.
Second, "liberal" has its own problems with shifting meaning, but I do regularly remind people that the Republicans, even more recently, when their hero Ronald Reagan was President, believed that torture was something done by evil, communist regimes like the USSR, and that their beloved America was, back then, in their eyes heroic because it wasn't like those awful countries on the other side of the iron curtain with their secret prisons and indefinite detention of tortured prisoners. (And that they were right back then, and shouldn't have changed their mind about keeping the moral high ground just because an infinitely weaker enemy than the Soviet Union ever was has now taken center stage.)
Well said, though I'd add the caveat that the broad southern affinity for the Republican Party is a more recent development. The South was more Democratic until only recently. The Dixiecrats were a major force in their party's, and the nation's politics not very long ago, and that stems all the way back to opposition to Lincoln's party. So the Southern attempts to block civil rights advancements were mostly coming from the Democratic Party (which is a fact that most people under 30 seem completely unaware of). So the internal inconsistency of the two parties that you mention is actually surprisingly strong.
When I was a kid, I kind of liked stations that did anounncer-read commercials, because they were less annoying than other commercials. It wasn't until I became an adult that it even occurred to me that this was a failure of integrity. I'm glad I'm not the only person who has noticed there is a problem with that model.
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise.
To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.
The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.
There is nothing wrong with this. This entire discussion thread has taken failing to read the article to a new level. This section of the bill in question affirms that violence commenced via the Internet falls under the same rules as violence with regular guns, and thus it is subject to the laws of war and the War Powers Resolution. It is not a declaration of war, it is not permission to "fire at will." Nor is it an affirmation of pre-emptive strikes. Offensive use of force in defense of the nation is not a new or strange concept. The President has been, since the beginning of the republic, authorized to conduct offensive operations with the military to defend the United States, subject to Constitutional and Congressional limitations and the laws of warfare. This section effectively says, "cyberspace is an arena in which this may also occur." Nothing more. In that regard, it is actually an assertion that there are limits on Presidential use of the Internet for violent acts, although exactly how to apply the established laws regarding warfare to cyber-warfare is obviously a really big question.
Can a majority vote, in a well informed democracy, ethically suspend human rights?
Most definitely not, and the reason is that anything which is truly a right can never be taken away by someone other than the owner of that right. It doesn't matter one whit whether the persons taking rights are part of a majority or not. You can only waive your own rights, you can't vote away someone else's.
I meant that you are confusing copyrights with patents by suggesting that the latter allows you to rest on your laurels and forever accumulate riches (and use the government to protect them) from long-ago inventions. Patent law needs to be updated to apply to fast-moving technologies differently than to old-style, mechanical inventions by having a much shorter protection period, because both the returns on investment and the speed at which one generation of innovation is superseded by another are faster, but even the over-long protection doesn't cause things to work completely the way you suggest, because the profitable period on a 486 chip completely runs its course in under 20 years. Protecting it that long is silly, but the ownership of that property at year 19, when you can't even sell it anymore, isn't exactly "accumulated wealth".
Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jackpot before better-funded competitors can duplicate their work, but most creators will be outdone in profits by someone who has a fully funded team, an existing factory, and a standing army of salesmen ready to hit the market worldwide before the original inventor can get known by anyone or build a relationship with more than a handful of retailers.
Also, you seem to have a strange notion that the world is divided into "people who can create" and "people who can only copy," where people who can create have some infinite store of inventions or writings and an unending, Godlike power of creation, that at a moment's notice they can spit out a new, improved version of whatever someone else just copied, thereby holding some kind of perpetual lead based on a pure and complete mental superiority over all competitors. It is more accurate to say that many people have occasional points where they come up with a really good idea, and that working out the way these ideas can be put into practice is a difficult process. To imagine that someone who once innovates successfully is guaranteed to be able to generate an infinite stream of successfully implemented new ideas, each abandoned to competitors as quickly as those competitors can implement the same, is to dream of people having a different sort of nature than they really do. (Ayn Rand happened to have much the same misunderstanding, but it is nevertheless a misunderstanding.)
Countries and companies who have no intellectual property protections are "on the way up" in the same sense that, in a complete free-for-all, dog-eat-dog system, the dogs on the eating end are benefiting. Nobody can claim that it is not at the expense of other dogs or that those on the rise are doing anything whatsoever to introduce new calories into the food chain.
Nonsense. Patents only protect the new, which means it is only active innovators who stand to gain from their existence. One cannot "hold onto [one's] accumulated wealth and power even once [one is] no longer earning it" with patents, they don't work that way. They are useful to innovation in the same way that government enforcement of contracts allows one to safely pour money into developing a leased property into a business establishment; you can fail by doing poorly, but not by someone else simply walking off with your investment. They then expire, after the inventor has had a chance to reap his or her reward and incentive for taking risks and innovating, so that they can benefit the whole public. You seem to be confusing patents with copyrights, which are theoretically there for more or less the same reason, protecting new works, but which have been elongated and degraded into more or less everlasting protectionism.
"Race" is just a convenient term to try to place people into one of these various groups, although obviously it doesn't work for everyone (like someone who has parents from very different places), but then again the scientific concept of "species" isn't really black-and-white either and there's a lot of controversy about that too.
In other words, race is more or less a social construct, as opposed to one with a great deal of accuracy or usefulness in science. The genetic variation within African blacks is greater than the genetic variation of all other people combined, which means that people of the "black race" are actually in many cases far less closely related to one another than, say, European whites and south Asians. To say that differently, people of different races are often more similar genetically than people of the same race. Which makes race a very rough descriptor, an imprecise and a proxy of limited usefulness for the actual differences among people. It isn't a completely silly term, as it is useful to be able to distinguish among groups of people with different visual characteristics and different regional ancestry, but it is foolish to think it is more than a vague term, scientifically speaking.
Dividing people by color is therefore kind of like dividing foods by color. There are some generalities that one can find, like green ones are made of plant matter, and a chef concerned with artistic presentation of the food on the plate may well find color a useful concept, but nutritionally, biologically, or compositionally, is a green bell pepper more like an asparagus or a watermelon than it is like a yellow bell pepper? Is it reasonable to put turnips and fish in the same food group and call that a meaningful category? Obviously not.
YM every other browser that, if I accidentally forget and leave it open with a few tabs on different websites overnight, will have become unresponsive and eaten half of my system memory by the time I come back in the morning? FF is noticeably different than any other browser when it comes to in-use resource consumption, in my experience, not that it has much to do with the original story.
No, it's not, more like blaming a stalker services company for packaging their stalking services and selling them to Nike. Your response is like excusing them because they offer to Nike-- but not to you-- the option that their stalkers could stand in plain view rather than hiding in the bushes when stalking customers and look the other way when asked nicely. The whole idea is inappropriate to begin with, and only more so when the opt-out option is taken away. And opt-out? Since when should a total activity surveillance program be opt-out, rather than opt-in? The only appropriate use for this type of software is for cell phone manufacturers and providers to use themselves for development, diagnostics, and testing. It should not be included on customer phones at all. Maybe reasonable would be some cut-down version that allows a customer, when actively dealing with customer service, to purposefully boot the phone into a diagnostics mode to help determine the cause of trouble, but that is completely unlike what we're dealing with here.
This is like saying that a person who follows and videotapes everything you do, from your bedroom moments to your PIN-entering moments, serves a legitimate purpose by being able to report usage metrics on how well your shoes meet your needs in getting you from place to place, and that the existence of the Nike Stalker Program therefore, because it can help bring about better footwear, is a Good Thing. Highly misplaced acceptance. While I would be happy to see my shoe companies take an active interest in how comfortable or uncomfortable I am while wearing their products for certain types of activities, subjecting me to complete surveillance in order to carry this out is inappropriate, morally wrong, personally unacceptable, and falls very much into the Bad Thing category.
I don't know how even on Slashdot there are some people who tend to argue "what do I care, if I'm not doing anything bad with my phone?" Let's get rid of that before it gets started here. I have a Samsung, Android, Sprint phone. That means I apparently have a logger installed that can track every key I press, every message I send, every web site I visit. That means that Sprint, Sprint employees, and whosoever Sprint or its employees should share this information with, whether that be government, advertisers, companies or individuals with malicious or invasive intent, whether this is shared on purpose or by accident or security breach, has access to such things as:
* All my bank accounts
* My email accounts
* All my associates, how often I call them, and what I say to them via text message
* The password to my KeePass database and every password stored therein
Phones are not just text messaging and dialing devices anymore. A keylogger on my phone is equally offensive as a keylogger on my home PC, and has the potential for just as great a compromise of my life's privacy and security. I have no control over the security with which Sprint or anyone else transmits or stores my personal information, and even more importantly, they have no right to have it in the first place. Besides the fact that the FBI has a well-known history of tracking the lives of many private citizens with politically motivated intent, I certainly do not care for the idea of private corporations and whoever works for them having all of my passwords and knowing where all my accounts are. There is no reasonable argument for why I should think this is okay. I do not have to be doing anything illegal for me to reasonably object to my mobile phone company having, or storing (with who knows what security), a back door into every single piece of my life. Somebody whose involvement in my life is supposed to be merely providing me with telephone service does not need and has no right to expect the master key to my whole digital, financial, social, and business life.
I will be contacting Sprint and asking them for a means to permanently remove this software from my phone. If they are unwilling (which they probably will be, but they need to actively hear a complaint from me and everyone else so they understand the offensiveness of their actions), I will have to go down the "root it and fix it myself" path. I hope the rest of you with affected phones will do the same.
No it wasn't, the author of that article specifically takes on the idea of the crypto being delivered through a secure channel, having two basic objections: 1) If you have a secure channel already, then you don't need JavaScript encryption; and 2) JavaScript is completely malleable at runtime, and so you can't guarantee that running code, or the functions/libraries/objects on which it depends (down to the very basic JavaScript objects), will remain unmodified and trustworthy.
The first issue applies to a little different problem than the one being solved here. While the author was considering client-server communications, what we're dealing with here is a different use: end-to-end email encryption. That is, the browser-GMail encryption of the user session and all its contents is already taken care of by HTTPS, but GMail still knows what your email contains. This is, as I understand it, an attempt to encrypt/decrypt the text of the email on the client, such that GMail would only see the ciphertext and never receive the cleartext at all.
Fine in theory, but the second issue would seem to me to still apply. I haven't looked at their source, so maybe they've found a way to avoid this, but if any code from a server can interact with the code from this plugin, then it isn't obvious how the code remains trustworthy, no matter how secure the original channel was through which it was loaded.
My point is that the burden of selling into any given jurisdiction is identical for local or mail-order/internet retailers. If someone wants to sell by distance into a particular jurisdiction, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to adhere to that jurisdiction's laws. You will see this in action if you try to order wine online, for instance. If those laws are too complex or onerous, then nobody will want to sell there. But that doesn't make the burden any different for one than for the other, for any given sale. I think if Amazon refused to ship to your ZIP code, your municipal or state legislators would suddenly be under a lot of pressure to make the taxes conform to a common pattern such that retailers find it worthwhile to sell there...just like they already have to make taxes palatable for local retailers to set up shop.
And it certainly is a retailer's responsibility to pay taxes on the items it sells, so I'm not sure what you mean by your claim. How do you think sales taxes are currently paid to the state? They are calculated and charged to you at the register by the retailer, who has to report and give them to the government. The buyer takes almost no part in this process except coughing up his or her part of the cost. And a state has the right to impose whatever tax burden it wants on transactions which take place in that state. The only reason this has not been applied to mail-order or online retailers is that the actual location of the transaction isn't really defined for a purchase happening across state lines. But since the federal government has the Constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce, it is within its powers to make a law defining that interstate transactions will be considered to be geographically taking place at the location of the buyer. (Or at the point of the seller, but that would be a bad idea.)
Maybe, but it is hard to say an income tax is exactly fair either. Probably the absolute fairest method of taxation is actually taxing total assets, but the fact that many assets are illiquid and the lack of any possible way to actually measure total wealth of a person are big barriers to that. If we're going to tax sales, we should at least make the tax apply as fairly as possible.
It's only seems a more significant burden because they are trying to do something a local retailer is not: sell in more than one market. A local store that opens a few branch locations also has to deal with the same thing. It is certainly less than the burden of actually opening a physical store. If states want to eliminate this extra burden and allow online businesses to sell in their localities, the answer is to simplify their tax codes.
And I certainly don't support a national sales tax. I'm just saying the state sales taxes should be applied evenly to everyone who sells in those states.
I've long thought that the federal government should simply define a sale in the United States as taking place at the location of the buyer. This would allow states to tax every business selling the same thing to the same person exactly the same way. There certainly is no fairness in taxing some sales differently than others; effectively it is a subsidy of business models that do their selling remotely. Plus, practically speaking, as sales move from in-person exchanges toward inter-state, online transactions, this forces states to tax the remaining local businesses at a higher rate, even as they now have to compete with a whole nation of online sellers, thus making it impossible to compete and putting the local employers out of business. We may not like taxes, but I would rather see a lower rate applied evenly than a higher rate applied just to one set of merchants. It is both fairer and stops discouraging businesses from remaining in a state. This hasn't happened up to now mainly because of concern over merchants being able to successfully know and apply all the tax rules in every jurisdiction they sell in. But that's always been a requirement of doing business in a locality, it shouldn't stop now, and hopefully some framework such as this will encourage states to simplify their tax rules in order to take part.
I, for one, like the idea of encouraging urban food production. Surely the issues will be solved soon by some smart cookie. And then newer, more powerful versions will be introduced. I, personally, am waiting for the "deer colony in your apartment" edition. Pull a string and out comes some tasty venison! Yum!
You know, I'm in the serious minority here, but I'm not sure why it is the unquestioned assumption that software patents are ridiculous. They are no more or less ridiculous than patenting the design of any other machinery or processes. The nonsense comes from the fact that software patents are apparently often granted on things that would not be patentable in other realms-- a patent is only supposed to be granted on something new and non-obvious. It also needs to be a truly specific invention, not a hand-waving notion (I can't patent "a machine for taking a person back in time", I can only patent a particular design for one). All three of these requirements seem to be regularly overlooked by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when it comes to software. (But not just software- for instance, patenting a gene that has existed for millions of years seems to have a little trouble in the "prior art" area), and it is obvious when it comes to software that there aren't enough well-trained people evaluating the "non-obvious" requirement. But that still doesn't invalidate the notion of a patent on software, any more than a misguided or ignorant government office that approved a bunch of patents on wheels and bricks would invalidate patents on mechanical inventions altogether as a concept. Patents are also relatively short-lived in the U.S., only 20 years, which may be too long, but they aren't the same as copyright protections (life + 70 years, which is utterly ridiculous).
I think if we only allowed legitimate patents in software by the same rules as supposedly apply to patents in other areas, the patent troll nonsense would be largely defeated simply because only true inventions would be given legal protection.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Email and file services, for a research university with a computer science program, is a core function.
2) Data and communications storage, retention, and management, for a research university doing anything at all, is a core function.
3) The assumption that outsourcing non-core functionality is always and automatically the answer to inefficiency is a mistaken premise. There is nothing inherent in outside providers that makes them capable of greater efficiency. Especially when you house an entire department researching the best solutions to problems related to the concern at hand.
First, no, it is not completely irrelevant at all, because, for one thing, people assume a lot of things about people based on their parties, things which are not necessarily so. Plenty of people's party loyalties were developed before their parties flipped all over the place on their stances. As the post I was replying to astutely pointed out, the modern parties in the U.S. are better described as shifting coalitions than as consistent interest groups. I think it is extremely relevant to the current political landscape that people realize how inconsistent and short-lived the meanings of "Republican" and "Democrat" are, because one of the huge problems right now in the United States is blind party loyalty, along with unwillingness to hear or believe anything good about people who wear the other party's badge.
Second, "liberal" has its own problems with shifting meaning, but I do regularly remind people that the Republicans, even more recently, when their hero Ronald Reagan was President, believed that torture was something done by evil, communist regimes like the USSR, and that their beloved America was, back then, in their eyes heroic because it wasn't like those awful countries on the other side of the iron curtain with their secret prisons and indefinite detention of tortured prisoners. (And that they were right back then, and shouldn't have changed their mind about keeping the moral high ground just because an infinitely weaker enemy than the Soviet Union ever was has now taken center stage.)
Well said, though I'd add the caveat that the broad southern affinity for the Republican Party is a more recent development. The South was more Democratic until only recently. The Dixiecrats were a major force in their party's, and the nation's politics not very long ago, and that stems all the way back to opposition to Lincoln's party. So the Southern attempts to block civil rights advancements were mostly coming from the Democratic Party (which is a fact that most people under 30 seem completely unaware of). So the internal inconsistency of the two parties that you mention is actually surprisingly strong.
When I was a kid, I kind of liked stations that did anounncer-read commercials, because they were less annoying than other commercials. It wasn't until I became an adult that it even occurred to me that this was a failure of integrity. I'm glad I'm not the only person who has noticed there is a problem with that model.
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise. To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.
The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.
There is nothing wrong with this. This entire discussion thread has taken failing to read the article to a new level. This section of the bill in question affirms that violence commenced via the Internet falls under the same rules as violence with regular guns, and thus it is subject to the laws of war and the War Powers Resolution. It is not a declaration of war, it is not permission to "fire at will." Nor is it an affirmation of pre-emptive strikes. Offensive use of force in defense of the nation is not a new or strange concept. The President has been, since the beginning of the republic, authorized to conduct offensive operations with the military to defend the United States, subject to Constitutional and Congressional limitations and the laws of warfare. This section effectively says, "cyberspace is an arena in which this may also occur." Nothing more. In that regard, it is actually an assertion that there are limits on Presidential use of the Internet for violent acts, although exactly how to apply the established laws regarding warfare to cyber-warfare is obviously a really big question.
Can a majority vote, in a well informed democracy, ethically suspend human rights?
Most definitely not, and the reason is that anything which is truly a right can never be taken away by someone other than the owner of that right. It doesn't matter one whit whether the persons taking rights are part of a majority or not. You can only waive your own rights, you can't vote away someone else's.
Oh no! We better drill a hole to the center of Jupiter and explode a nuclear bomb to fix it, because that makes sense!
I meant that you are confusing copyrights with patents by suggesting that the latter allows you to rest on your laurels and forever accumulate riches (and use the government to protect them) from long-ago inventions. Patent law needs to be updated to apply to fast-moving technologies differently than to old-style, mechanical inventions by having a much shorter protection period, because both the returns on investment and the speed at which one generation of innovation is superseded by another are faster, but even the over-long protection doesn't cause things to work completely the way you suggest, because the profitable period on a 486 chip completely runs its course in under 20 years. Protecting it that long is silly, but the ownership of that property at year 19, when you can't even sell it anymore, isn't exactly "accumulated wealth".
Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jackpot before better-funded competitors can duplicate their work, but most creators will be outdone in profits by someone who has a fully funded team, an existing factory, and a standing army of salesmen ready to hit the market worldwide before the original inventor can get known by anyone or build a relationship with more than a handful of retailers.
Also, you seem to have a strange notion that the world is divided into "people who can create" and "people who can only copy," where people who can create have some infinite store of inventions or writings and an unending, Godlike power of creation, that at a moment's notice they can spit out a new, improved version of whatever someone else just copied, thereby holding some kind of perpetual lead based on a pure and complete mental superiority over all competitors. It is more accurate to say that many people have occasional points where they come up with a really good idea, and that working out the way these ideas can be put into practice is a difficult process. To imagine that someone who once innovates successfully is guaranteed to be able to generate an infinite stream of successfully implemented new ideas, each abandoned to competitors as quickly as those competitors can implement the same, is to dream of people having a different sort of nature than they really do. (Ayn Rand happened to have much the same misunderstanding, but it is nevertheless a misunderstanding.)
Countries and companies who have no intellectual property protections are "on the way up" in the same sense that, in a complete free-for-all, dog-eat-dog system, the dogs on the eating end are benefiting. Nobody can claim that it is not at the expense of other dogs or that those on the rise are doing anything whatsoever to introduce new calories into the food chain.
Nonsense. Patents only protect the new, which means it is only active innovators who stand to gain from their existence. One cannot "hold onto [one's] accumulated wealth and power even once [one is] no longer earning it" with patents, they don't work that way. They are useful to innovation in the same way that government enforcement of contracts allows one to safely pour money into developing a leased property into a business establishment; you can fail by doing poorly, but not by someone else simply walking off with your investment. They then expire, after the inventor has had a chance to reap his or her reward and incentive for taking risks and innovating, so that they can benefit the whole public. You seem to be confusing patents with copyrights, which are theoretically there for more or less the same reason, protecting new works, but which have been elongated and degraded into more or less everlasting protectionism.
"Race" is just a convenient term to try to place people into one of these various groups, although obviously it doesn't work for everyone (like someone who has parents from very different places), but then again the scientific concept of "species" isn't really black-and-white either and there's a lot of controversy about that too.
In other words, race is more or less a social construct, as opposed to one with a great deal of accuracy or usefulness in science. The genetic variation within African blacks is greater than the genetic variation of all other people combined, which means that people of the "black race" are actually in many cases far less closely related to one another than, say, European whites and south Asians. To say that differently, people of different races are often more similar genetically than people of the same race. Which makes race a very rough descriptor, an imprecise and a proxy of limited usefulness for the actual differences among people. It isn't a completely silly term, as it is useful to be able to distinguish among groups of people with different visual characteristics and different regional ancestry, but it is foolish to think it is more than a vague term, scientifically speaking.
Dividing people by color is therefore kind of like dividing foods by color. There are some generalities that one can find, like green ones are made of plant matter, and a chef concerned with artistic presentation of the food on the plate may well find color a useful concept, but nutritionally, biologically, or compositionally, is a green bell pepper more like an asparagus or a watermelon than it is like a yellow bell pepper? Is it reasonable to put turnips and fish in the same food group and call that a meaningful category? Obviously not.
Where are these bunnies you speak of?
YM every other browser that, if I accidentally forget and leave it open with a few tabs on different websites overnight, will have become unresponsive and eaten half of my system memory by the time I come back in the morning? FF is noticeably different than any other browser when it comes to in-use resource consumption, in my experience, not that it has much to do with the original story.
No, it's not, more like blaming a stalker services company for packaging their stalking services and selling them to Nike. Your response is like excusing them because they offer to Nike-- but not to you-- the option that their stalkers could stand in plain view rather than hiding in the bushes when stalking customers and look the other way when asked nicely. The whole idea is inappropriate to begin with, and only more so when the opt-out option is taken away. And opt-out? Since when should a total activity surveillance program be opt-out, rather than opt-in? The only appropriate use for this type of software is for cell phone manufacturers and providers to use themselves for development, diagnostics, and testing. It should not be included on customer phones at all. Maybe reasonable would be some cut-down version that allows a customer, when actively dealing with customer service, to purposefully boot the phone into a diagnostics mode to help determine the cause of trouble, but that is completely unlike what we're dealing with here.
Nope. Read the original published findings. Can log basically every event on your phone, including every keypress.
This is like saying that a person who follows and videotapes everything you do, from your bedroom moments to your PIN-entering moments, serves a legitimate purpose by being able to report usage metrics on how well your shoes meet your needs in getting you from place to place, and that the existence of the Nike Stalker Program therefore, because it can help bring about better footwear, is a Good Thing. Highly misplaced acceptance. While I would be happy to see my shoe companies take an active interest in how comfortable or uncomfortable I am while wearing their products for certain types of activities, subjecting me to complete surveillance in order to carry this out is inappropriate, morally wrong, personally unacceptable, and falls very much into the Bad Thing category.
I don't know how even on Slashdot there are some people who tend to argue "what do I care, if I'm not doing anything bad with my phone?" Let's get rid of that before it gets started here. I have a Samsung, Android, Sprint phone. That means I apparently have a logger installed that can track every key I press, every message I send, every web site I visit. That means that Sprint, Sprint employees, and whosoever Sprint or its employees should share this information with, whether that be government, advertisers, companies or individuals with malicious or invasive intent, whether this is shared on purpose or by accident or security breach, has access to such things as:
Phones are not just text messaging and dialing devices anymore. A keylogger on my phone is equally offensive as a keylogger on my home PC, and has the potential for just as great a compromise of my life's privacy and security. I have no control over the security with which Sprint or anyone else transmits or stores my personal information, and even more importantly, they have no right to have it in the first place. Besides the fact that the FBI has a well-known history of tracking the lives of many private citizens with politically motivated intent, I certainly do not care for the idea of private corporations and whoever works for them having all of my passwords and knowing where all my accounts are. There is no reasonable argument for why I should think this is okay. I do not have to be doing anything illegal for me to reasonably object to my mobile phone company having, or storing (with who knows what security), a back door into every single piece of my life. Somebody whose involvement in my life is supposed to be merely providing me with telephone service does not need and has no right to expect the master key to my whole digital, financial, social, and business life.
I will be contacting Sprint and asking them for a means to permanently remove this software from my phone. If they are unwilling (which they probably will be, but they need to actively hear a complaint from me and everyone else so they understand the offensiveness of their actions), I will have to go down the "root it and fix it myself" path. I hope the rest of you with affected phones will do the same.
No it wasn't, the author of that article specifically takes on the idea of the crypto being delivered through a secure channel, having two basic objections: 1) If you have a secure channel already, then you don't need JavaScript encryption; and 2) JavaScript is completely malleable at runtime, and so you can't guarantee that running code, or the functions/libraries/objects on which it depends (down to the very basic JavaScript objects), will remain unmodified and trustworthy.
The first issue applies to a little different problem than the one being solved here. While the author was considering client-server communications, what we're dealing with here is a different use: end-to-end email encryption. That is, the browser-GMail encryption of the user session and all its contents is already taken care of by HTTPS, but GMail still knows what your email contains. This is, as I understand it, an attempt to encrypt/decrypt the text of the email on the client, such that GMail would only see the ciphertext and never receive the cleartext at all.
Fine in theory, but the second issue would seem to me to still apply. I haven't looked at their source, so maybe they've found a way to avoid this, but if any code from a server can interact with the code from this plugin, then it isn't obvious how the code remains trustworthy, no matter how secure the original channel was through which it was loaded.
My point is that the burden of selling into any given jurisdiction is identical for local or mail-order/internet retailers. If someone wants to sell by distance into a particular jurisdiction, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to adhere to that jurisdiction's laws. You will see this in action if you try to order wine online, for instance. If those laws are too complex or onerous, then nobody will want to sell there. But that doesn't make the burden any different for one than for the other, for any given sale. I think if Amazon refused to ship to your ZIP code, your municipal or state legislators would suddenly be under a lot of pressure to make the taxes conform to a common pattern such that retailers find it worthwhile to sell there...just like they already have to make taxes palatable for local retailers to set up shop.
And it certainly is a retailer's responsibility to pay taxes on the items it sells, so I'm not sure what you mean by your claim. How do you think sales taxes are currently paid to the state? They are calculated and charged to you at the register by the retailer, who has to report and give them to the government. The buyer takes almost no part in this process except coughing up his or her part of the cost. And a state has the right to impose whatever tax burden it wants on transactions which take place in that state. The only reason this has not been applied to mail-order or online retailers is that the actual location of the transaction isn't really defined for a purchase happening across state lines. But since the federal government has the Constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce, it is within its powers to make a law defining that interstate transactions will be considered to be geographically taking place at the location of the buyer. (Or at the point of the seller, but that would be a bad idea.)
Maybe, but it is hard to say an income tax is exactly fair either. Probably the absolute fairest method of taxation is actually taxing total assets, but the fact that many assets are illiquid and the lack of any possible way to actually measure total wealth of a person are big barriers to that. If we're going to tax sales, we should at least make the tax apply as fairly as possible.
It's only seems a more significant burden because they are trying to do something a local retailer is not: sell in more than one market. A local store that opens a few branch locations also has to deal with the same thing. It is certainly less than the burden of actually opening a physical store. If states want to eliminate this extra burden and allow online businesses to sell in their localities, the answer is to simplify their tax codes. And I certainly don't support a national sales tax. I'm just saying the state sales taxes should be applied evenly to everyone who sells in those states.
I've long thought that the federal government should simply define a sale in the United States as taking place at the location of the buyer. This would allow states to tax every business selling the same thing to the same person exactly the same way. There certainly is no fairness in taxing some sales differently than others; effectively it is a subsidy of business models that do their selling remotely. Plus, practically speaking, as sales move from in-person exchanges toward inter-state, online transactions, this forces states to tax the remaining local businesses at a higher rate, even as they now have to compete with a whole nation of online sellers, thus making it impossible to compete and putting the local employers out of business. We may not like taxes, but I would rather see a lower rate applied evenly than a higher rate applied just to one set of merchants. It is both fairer and stops discouraging businesses from remaining in a state. This hasn't happened up to now mainly because of concern over merchants being able to successfully know and apply all the tax rules in every jurisdiction they sell in. But that's always been a requirement of doing business in a locality, it shouldn't stop now, and hopefully some framework such as this will encourage states to simplify their tax rules in order to take part.
I, for one, like the idea of encouraging urban food production. Surely the issues will be solved soon by some smart cookie. And then newer, more powerful versions will be introduced. I, personally, am waiting for the "deer colony in your apartment" edition. Pull a string and out comes some tasty venison! Yum!
You know, I'm in the serious minority here, but I'm not sure why it is the unquestioned assumption that software patents are ridiculous. They are no more or less ridiculous than patenting the design of any other machinery or processes. The nonsense comes from the fact that software patents are apparently often granted on things that would not be patentable in other realms-- a patent is only supposed to be granted on something new and non-obvious. It also needs to be a truly specific invention, not a hand-waving notion (I can't patent "a machine for taking a person back in time", I can only patent a particular design for one). All three of these requirements seem to be regularly overlooked by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when it comes to software. (But not just software- for instance, patenting a gene that has existed for millions of years seems to have a little trouble in the "prior art" area), and it is obvious when it comes to software that there aren't enough well-trained people evaluating the "non-obvious" requirement. But that still doesn't invalidate the notion of a patent on software, any more than a misguided or ignorant government office that approved a bunch of patents on wheels and bricks would invalidate patents on mechanical inventions altogether as a concept. Patents are also relatively short-lived in the U.S., only 20 years, which may be too long, but they aren't the same as copyright protections (life + 70 years, which is utterly ridiculous).
I think if we only allowed legitimate patents in software by the same rules as supposedly apply to patents in other areas, the patent troll nonsense would be largely defeated simply because only true inventions would be given legal protection.