So, defendant Anonymous, are you familiar with the term "cherry picking?". Why don't you tell the court what you understand the the phrase "cherry picking" to mean?
Defendant Anonymous, do you turn to the internet for information about climate change? You do? Since you know what cherry picking is and you have already described yourself as highly engaged with the topic of climate change, did you ever consider the possiblity that this statistic was itself cherry picking? Did you actively seek out disconfrirmatory evidence for this statistic?
Defendant Anonymous, I refer you to your posting on Slashdot Mar 2012 where you directly accused a poster of cherry picking his statistic. So you were well aware not only of the concept fo cherry picking but that cherry picking was used in the climate change debate....
Defandant Anonymous, I present to you a graph posted by a fellow poster WoofyGoofy in rebuttal to a comment you made describing "no climate change in nearly 19 years", do you recognize that graph? Would you say that that graph describes an instance of cherry picking? Speka up Defandant Anonymous.
Defendant Anonymous, were you aware of what people said the consequences of global warming would be upon hundreds of millions of people, if it were true? Speak up so the court can hear you Defendant Anonymous. Yes you were? And yet, you continued to post statements as facts , statements which a reasonably prudent person who did not possess a wanton disregard for the truth, would have rejected as likely falsehods. Isn't that right Defendant Anonymous? By your own measure, the statements you made were most likely false, weren't they Defendant Anonymous?
Ladies nad Gentlemen of the jury, we have here nothing more than the very description of the law under which Defendant Anonymous has been charged- Gross Negligence and a Depraved Indifference For Human Welfare With Special Circumstances.
Ladies and Gentlement of the jury, Defendant Anonymous and millions more just like him are precisely and individually culpable for the destrcutive falsehoods they either knew or should have known they were spreading through the years 1990-2020. These were years in which the Great Climate Crisis still could have been averted save for the actions of Defendant Anonymous and his ilk, actions which displayed a Depraved Indifference to Human Welfare. Actions which they knew or shoudl have known would contribute to the millions of deaths and political upheavals we see nightly on the news. ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the Supreme Court in 2025 had already found that each citizen, individually has and always has had an implicit, unshirkable obligation to be honest and to act in good conscience in their utterances and writings when the fate of other human beings rests in the balance of those utternaces, no matter how small a part their individual utterances and writings may have played in the ultimate fate of those fellow humans. That same ruling found that each individual can be charged with the totality of the crime to which they contributed, and that theories of so called "proportional guilt" serve only to thwart a justice which must not be thwarted.
What we have before us here in the public postings of Defendant Anonymous is nothing less than a criminal act of the highest order, Because of Defendant Anonymous, and others soon to be tried, the Earth is where it is and there is no going back.
Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I submit that there is one verdict which wil serve justice, a verdict of guilty on the charge before you. Defendant Anonymous knowingly and with malice aforethought made utterances and wrote statements which he himself knew or should have known were likely false. Bring back a verdict fo guilty, and may God have mercy on his soul.
The fact is that the world and the US DID have a consensus regarding human-induced climate change prior to the Koch brothers injection of denialism into the public discussion. You have only to read some of the eexhaustive and authoritative books available to you : Dark Money, Merchant of Doubt Doubt Is Their Product and The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars to understand therehas been a deliberate coordinated attack on climate science and climate scientists for the express purpose of deferring and delaying action on climate change. The Koch brothers own study told them the mainstream science was correct, and they buried that study.
Alright then. What are we really looking at? We are looking at a group of terrorists who have built and set off a bomb called global climate warming with the specific intent of handing the world's governments- which governments they have openly called for the desmantling and destruction of- a problem so large they will not be able to cope with the fallout. They have set off a bomb which they believe will cause the collapse of the United States Government. In this they have been aided by anti-government conservatives, conservative moevements, conservative think tanks, other conservative billionaires, all stripes of conservative publications, editors writers and bloggers. Each and everyone of is a terrorist or a supporter of terorism and the result of those terrrorist activities is hundreds of millions dead and condemend to death the permanent destrcution of the habitiblity of large portions of the Earth , mass envrionmentally caused political upheaval, population dislocation wars and diseases taking the lives of yet hundrends of millions more.
Those are crimes. Those are crimes so vast, the criminals believe they can never be charged with them. The criminals believe they will not be held accountable. The criminals believe there are too many of them to be prosecuted and their actions resemble too closely mere opinion offering to ever be labled as crimes.
I'll give them this- their plan to radically deconstrcut then reconstrcut the American government is going to suceeded beyone their wildest dreams. Because under our pre-Global Warming system of government, they would have gotten away with everything. But as we the afflicted, the destroyed, the people forced to live under the New Koch-Inflicted Reality, we the victims of Scalia and Thomas and Americans for Prosperity and the Wall Street Journal and Scaife and Murdoch and Norquist and all the tens of thousands of other organizations and individuals who together joined to systematically destroy our species common heritage, our ability to sustain life human civiliation on this planet, take power they will meet a very different United States Government. They won't be facing corporate water-carrying bitch boys and and fucking house niggers like Holder and Obama. No, it'll be more like the full Black Lives Matter treatment, joined by Yellow Lives Matter and Red Lives Matter and While Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. They'll be facing real justice courtesy of the United States Government and in accordance with the United States Government's laws, served up hot and they'll be no limit to scope of their assets we'll seize, or the nooses the United States Government's courts of law will sentence them to swing from.
In the pre-Global Warming American government, no mere opinion maker would have been put on trial for his life for "opinions" he offered. Under the post Global Warming American Government, they're very lkely find that the tolerance for mass-murder via mass-lies has been exhausted and, just as the world will witness unthinkable climatic and ecological and social events, so too the world will witness the trial of "average" citizens for Crimes Against Humanity. Let them tell the court and the wo
OK this is Linux's Big Chance. The nost savvy most technically literate most intelligent people are going to, for the first time, really really be looking for alternatives to Windows because of this shit. I know I am (not to say I qualify as any of the above). Those people, that 5-10% decide for their familes, their inlaws their friends their co-workers what's cool, what's great and what you shoudl avoid.
So is Linux ready or does it still expect its everyday users to be keen to memorize lots and lots of magical incantations - "sudo apt etc etc etc etc" - in order to really GetShitDone?
Every time I wanted to do something on previous version of Ubuntu- purpotedly the most user-friendly version of Linux out there- I quickly found myself instructed by the cognesceti to solemnly intone this and that long incantation into the darkness of a dos prompt. That's a deal breaker.
Does anyone in Linux-land really understand that very basic fact? People know how to use my computers by memorizing trails through GUIs. That mimics how primitve people (people like me and and you) learned to navigate and find their way around the real world; they used signposts and landmarks to remind them where to do next. Folks, accept it- this is how are brains are wired to find things in a complex environment.
Text is NOT how we are wired to find things. We have no good memory for text- it's always an explicit labor of memorization. And those memories are remarkably frail and subject to confusion with similar text-based memories. That's why indexes and filing cabinets and encyclopedias are alphabetical- because otherwise we'd never find that thing we were looking at before just by remembering where it was last time.
But I can remember how to get to the store, how to get home, where that vacation camp is that I last visited 20 years ago. Because it's a trail, just the kind of thing my brain is specialized to remember, with landmarks thattrigger further memories, landmarks which effectively let me offload the work of explicit memorization.
So.. do we have a real GUI in Linux yet or am I going to have to sudo apt my way around still? Because this is most definitely the magical moment Linux has been waiting for - the Gigantic, Customer-Alienating, Self-Inflcited, Grand Windows Fuck Up.
Very intersting obviously I've been schooled, so thank you fellow Slashdotters.
Monopoly is what you get when there is no regulation. Does anyone really want to argue that? Throughout history, what we've had is large corporations and banks getting larger without limit as they consume smaller efforts with anti-competitive practices, practices which are "natural" and dont' involve forcible coercion.
Sorry but Libertarianism is completely confused, at best and a refuge for scoundrels at worst. The whole Milton Friedman-Ayn Rand-Alan Greespan wing of libertariansim is just thinly disguised sociopathy. Rand herself was a true blue sociopath as evidenced not just from her policy recommendations but her personal utterances and interperonsal relations and Friedman, lest we forget, helped, approved and supported Pinochet , a torturer, terrorist, and mass murderer. and Greenspan's fantasy that the market is self correcting under all crcumstances, that it's impossible, as in physics-style impossible, for something like the 2008 crash to every happen in a market such as ours.
As far as indentured servitude goes, since when are libertarians concerned with one party's ability to inflict "duress" n another party? That is the whole point of not limiting financial power inequalities. If I own all the land through deals i made, I can shut off food production to everyone else and no one can do anything about it. If me and my buddies get together and decide not to hire Black people, then that's our business. If we decide to make a list of people to whom we dont' want food sold to or jobs offered to then that's out business.
People have power in this world to the extent that they control resources. For all practical purposes there is no upper limit on the resources a person can control under Libertarian schemes- a fact Libertarians are well aware of. IT follows immediately that there is no upper limit on the power Libertariansim gives someone over other people's lives and fates and their ability to pursue happiness . Libertarianism could give a shit about creating a fair and equitable world. It's monomanically obsessed with process and keeping the number of rules which govern that process as small as possible and what comes out the other end of this for real flesh and blood members of society who have to live and suffer under this "purity" , well , who really gives a fuck? It's a kind of poitical and social autism.
It's not a coincidence that Rand Paul would roll back the civil rights legislation of the 60s. That's a prinicpled decision on his part that comes straight out of the Libertairan playbook.
Sorry, it's nto just that the Koch brothers have given it a bad name. It goes all the way back to Greespan and Friedman and Ayn Rand . This is a political movement built upon the predatory and incredibly short-sighted ideas of sociopaths and autistics. It just is.
One more thing. Libertariansim shares a LOT in common with Marxism in a very specific way- it suffers from 19th century-physics-envy. Like Marxism, it posits that a set of "laws" which should govern a "system" and if those "laws" are followed then the sytem's behavior will be predictable.
Well folks, that is just pure physics-envy bullshit when it's applied to hyper complex "systems" like "the economy" and "people's economic behavior", which are "systems" only in the sense that you have applied that word "system" to them and in no other meaningful sense.
This whole 19th century "call it a system and devine the sytem's behavior from a few underlying princples" is absolute wishful thinking. If you want to reduce it to a few underlying principles then reduce it to the physical forces - gravity the strong force, the weak force etc. and come show it to everyone when you're done. And good luck with that, too.
What are we supposed to think when the group explicitly replaces "the pursuit of happiness" with "property"?
From their site:
Statement of Intent: "I hereby state my solemn intent to move to the State of New Hampshire. Once there, I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of individualsâ(TM) rights to life, liberty, and property."
Pretty much sums up this group of people up. I think we all know a monpolistic, anti-social, predatory-capitalism-loving, big-bank-hugging, Koch-worshipping, Grover Norquist-loving, environment-trashing, indentured-servitude (hey, it's a contract btween consenting adults) pushing libertarian sociopath when we see one...or 20,000
"In early grades, students differentiate between responsible and irresponsible computing behaviors. Students learn that responsible behaviors can help individuals while irresponsible behaviors can hurt individuals. They examine legal and ethical considerations for obtaining and sharing information and apply those behaviors to protect original ideas. As students progress academically, they engage in legal and ethical behaviors to guard against intrusive applications and promote a safe and secure computing experience. "
What these Kings of the Universe don't realize is normal people don't share and will never share their Ayn Rand -cocaine-driven amphetamine-fueled vision of extreme indivuduality at the expense of the health of society (which is the bedrock upon which protection of individuality rests).
So, sure, go ahead promote those discussions. The more discussion there is, the less well it goes for software patent lawyers like Brad Smith who, readers should know, basically originated the idea of using software patents as an offense weapon to supress innovation while he was at M$:
which directly led to all other tech companies following suit and finally the fantastical, supernatrual prosperity of every Chinese take-out in Tyler, Texas.
All that's going to happen is they're going to find out no one shares their idea of societal good and justice. Every survey finds that young people are far more concerned with creating an fair, free and egalitarian society that benefits everyone, rather than the winner-take-all psychopathic shithole that is America at this particular tick of the clock.
Not everyone blew their brains out snorting coke while reading Ayn Rand in the 80s. That's a particular generation and they have a particular , uh, "view" of what the goals laws of society should support. Going on 40 years later now, it's getting to be old-man-dying-time for this particular strain of sociopathic, societal predators. Can't happen too soon for my money. Here, take it with you; fuckin' see ya later.
The fact that M$ and Oracle and IBM and all the rest of the "victims" of "trolls" would rather pay the trolls than do what is intellectually ethcially and morally right- lobby Congress to ban software patents (and yes trolls, those ARE a definable thing) tells you something. They'd rather endure the billions lost to trolls than have to compete in the open marketplace, without their trivial patents. If they didn't have this barrier to entrance and the threat of crushing legal judgements, then they'd have to compete on the basis of the goodness of their product offerings.
Obviously, such a "disaster" is monetarily more frigthening to them than losing to billions to trolls.
It gives you some idea of the amount of market supression and concomitant loss of innovation the consumer is experiencing without ever knowing it.
Believe me, lot's of "agreements to be acquired" by small companies are in reality software-patent blackmail- you can sell us your comapny, or we can go to court.
It how they make sure that all innovation accrues to them, and they retain all real financial and political power in the world.
And computers have too much memory also. Who would ever need more than 64k?
It gives you a glimpse into what sort of mind people like Tom Wheeler and his Republican buddies have. They've effectively completely sat out the last 20 years of tech progress. They have no access- as personal memories - of the lessons, lore, and legends of computing and the internet and consequently lack the shared base of facts upon which sound judgments can be built. They are totally cut off from the weltanschauung of the modernity and are effectively legislating across time, legislating from the past.
They have no idea what the cultural refernce I made above refers to. They have no idea of how it is shorthand for the tech insight: "if you built it, they will come" . If you create it, if you allow it, it will be quickly be put to extraordinary use which no one can now foresee, but which will become the stuff of future economic activity....and the taxes guys like you live off.
Yeah the FBI seeing the photos is probably a non-issue since a large number of them are probably honeypots in the first place. It's a product of how much contempt they have for this man that they think one of them will eventually work.
HEADLINE:
Snowden caught in honeypot while stepping out on his girlfriend.
I don't know if these people have done anything or not; you might think that people that intelligent would not stoop that low. I will offer this though.
One of the persistent and compelling illusions I had in life was that somewhere, there existed a self-selected group of people for whom a primary concern was to just be decent to each other.
I am not sure where I got this idea from, but if you have it, if you think that *this* group of people united by *this* purpose or POV or goal or whatever is going to be some kind of refuge from Assholedom, then you owe it to yourself before you waste any more of your life looking for such a group to just stop. Put it down and walk away.
My first pursuit of this mythological beast was with a community of artists and counter-cultural types. I thought without jocks or grades or the pursuit of money or even fame people would have nothing but each others fellowship to rely on and that would be a kind of uniting force, or something. How very young and wrong I was .
After some years spent pursuing that ghost, I next chased another another idea I had always had in my head- that academics, university types, were just naturally a cut above in terms of decency and non-aggression. In my imagination they were people to whom the stated ideals of a university- diversity, the pursuit of truth, respect for excellence,
valuing of curiosity and the impartial unbiased pursuit of knowledge - were real living things. The university was THEIR place which abided by THEIR values and stood as a bastion against Assholedom.
So I went to university and I did meet people as described- a couple. And the rest were sort of Super Assholes - people who nourished grudges, pursued revenge via administrative back-channeling and complaint processes, for any perceived slight or offense, advanced themselves through undermining others, sincerely worked to
undermine others simply because they didn't like them, and worked the system as best they could to horde time, reputation, money and power. It was one of the worst
environments I've been in. At one point a recent-hire prof confided in me that "they" - the other professors in the department- "had taken him into a room and gone to town on him for spending time preparing for his classes. If he wanted them to recommend him for tenure, it was going to stop. The gist f it was that there was no reward for teaching,
only for publishing and grant getting- things that brought the university prestige and money. Nothing else mattered and the degree to which nothing else mattered was total. I
asked him who "they" were, exactly, and his reply was "all of them. Every one of them." Of course the teaching is what you'd expect given the above. And that's not even the
worst dirty trick- and that's what it was- I saw there. Not by a long shot .
After that I got it into my head that business, corporation, out of necessity, would be a place where the reality principle reigned supreme. Even if it wasn't friendly per se, at least it would be grounded in some kind of market discipline and that discipline would realize itself in the relations between people within the company.
I know, but in my defense, this was around 2000.
Here's the thing. If it's true, -but then harassment charges are just another arrow in the quiver or these types - this is not surprising , because *that's what people are*. If for some reason that actually doesn't describe you and you know it,then know with certainty: you're on your own There is no *good* group of people united by any property or purpose out there. The best you can hope for is a occasional light from someone you are completely removed from, say whose books you read. If you really want to swing for the wall, the trifecta is your mother, your spouse and your dog. If you can trust all three of those , then know you're luckier than most .
Researchers from the Vectra Threat Lab have demonstrated how easy it can be to embed a backdoor into such a web cam, with the goal of proving how IoT devices expand the attack surface of a network
Ignore the trolls on slashdot who hate the government. What you said is exactly right. Netflix has a pretty good piece interviewing current and former Presidents (Bush I) NSA and CIA directors. What comes across is that there is not unanimity about surveillance, the WoT or how to run it or even the limits of governmental powers with respect to fighting the WoT. Some disapprove (!) of the killing of US citizen al-Awalaki (sp?) and see it as a slippery slope. Some are nervous about ubiquitous surveillance.
The point is, you're exactly right. The government is not Dr Evil. The trolls in this thread just get off on a certain small circumscribed set of ideas. They're less like thoughtful people and more like rats pulling that same lever over and over again in order to get their high. This describes most anti-government types. It's like a thought addiction, place in their minds where they can get their rage on.
To their point about Hitler et. al., it's they who lack an understanding of history. These guys didn't rise to power despite the will of the people. They didn't overwhelm the government and take control. The people in those nations themselves cheered when they took control. They WANTED it to happen. Hitler never would have come to power if Wall Street hadn't tanked the world's economy. At the time, the post war hyper inflation in Germany had subsided and things were looking better for Germany. Then the Wall Street speculators destroyed the economy and hyperinflation kicked in again and the people themselves wanted a "strong man" and a scapegoat and the rest is history.
There is nothing in any democracy which prevents its own people from willing it out of existence. That's what happened in Germany and Italy.
The best hedge against that is a stable prosperous nation. The best way to get that is to have a strong central government to act as a counter-force to the unlimited power corporations would otherwise have.
The fact is there are a lot of people who wish to do as much harm as they can. We have always had well-poisoners in our midst but thanks to current and near-future technology, their ability to do great harm to great numbers of people is increasing dramatically. I've said this before but here it is again. Tell me I am wrong:
1) The number of technologies that can cause serious, deadly harm to humans and other living things is going up.
2) The number of substantively different or novel attacks that technology is capable of producing, each requiring its own custom defense, is going up more than arithmetically, possibly geometrically.
3) The number of people required to wield those technologies in order to create one of those attacks is going down, heading distressingly towards one.
4) The number of people which can be simultaneously harmed by such an attack is going up, distressingly, headed towards millions or billions.
5) Failure to thwart a plausible large and successful attack will result in a distressingly large expansion of the powers of the national security state and a distressingly large diminuation of civil liberties, individual freedoms and privacy, heading towards fascism.
So what do you want from the world's governments? To just not take any preemptive measures? If you read what he's suggesting, he's suggesting that no one government be able to decrypt traffic without the others' approval. It's not a bad as in evil idea - we have to give the government the powers it needs and as Enigma has shown, decrypting the enemies communication is crucial- it's just that it won't work for mundane reasons. But it's a start at the kind of crazy, out of the box thinking we need.
He's not shown any reason why the 9 governments (who have to all agree to decrypt transmission X using their collective keys or it can't be decrypted) wouldn't just engage in politicking of the worst sort. We already have the Five Eyes collaborating in secret -for decades- and we already have the 11 FISA judges absolutely positively rubber-stamping just anything that comes their way.
What more proof do we need that when the circle of power gets small enough, there are no good guys? Governments are good at convincing their own kind to cooperate and this would all just devolve into horse trading. You give me my dissidents and I'll give you yours and we'll stay fat n' happy in a world we like to call "Things As They Ought To Be".
It won't work. But I praise his attempt mightily. The basic issue is, we need a police force whose sole purpose is to monitor the police force (NSA CIA ETC.) and whose authority is final barring a super-majority of both houses of Congress (say). None of those agencies are going to go for that, obviously. A real issue is this- once the oversight circle expands enough, you get traitors and leakers and spies. But is that truly worse than a nation whose agencies ARE corrupt or whose population BELIEVE they are corrupt and act on that belief?
The effect of being in member of a TLA on the human psyche is profound and negative. The human mind wasn't made to perpetually tread water in an horizonless sea of stress hormones. It changes your brain; it changes who you are and how you perceive people and the world. You become someone who fits the job, and that eventually makes you very very different from ordinary citizens, especially with respect to your value system. You might very well decide to "collect it all" even if that makes no logistical or operational sense, and you know it. You might very well come to devalue privacy to a degree that outsiders would find shocking, even demented. You might very well see the Constitution or some of its amendments as the biggest threat to the nation.
Here's my first idea. Part of our problem is, we lack a particular representational language. We need a language, a way of expressing
Yeah I am all for what they did and the way they did it. Your comment however: I subscribe to the theory that when you break the laws of a country (i.e. by distributing child porn), you should forfeit the right to be protected by those same laws"
is the definition of fascism. No one knows if you broke the law until a jury or judge says so. What you're saying is, let's have no laws set upon the police because they only go after people who are (suspected of) breaking the law. That makes zero sense.
If we implemented that policy, we'd have cops framing everyone they suspected or really, after a little while under your regime, anyone they just didn't like.
Sure framing people is illegal and immoral but hey, no laws apply to law breakers so have at it.
We need the criminal justice system to work properly so people have faith in it and its results. That means protecting the accused whether you like them or not. Absent that, their is lawlessness everywhere, on the part of ordinary citizens, who would there's nothing fair about "the law" and law enforcement which would quickly devolve into thuggery, blackmail, racketeering, extortion and murder.
Do you think you're the first person to contemplate how law should be applied to people accused of a crime? This goes back centuries and the subject has been the focus of generations and generations of the world's best minds. Trashing it all for some idea you get into your head because it "makes sense to me!" is a frightening prospect. It's also the roots of fascism, which always needs lots of shallow-thinking "sounds good to me! " types like you to actually bring them to power.
You need to take a serious, searching and thorough moral inventory of yourself and you need to examine the criteria you're accepting of when coming to conclusions about how you would like to see society structured.
Policing involves dealing with people who are motivated to lie; lie to the police and lie about the police. All cops hear all day long are lies lies lies and some of those lies get pointed at them. It's true that cops are less likely to abuse their position if they know they're being recorded but that also holds true for citizens lying about cops' conduct.
The net effect is complaints go down, but there are two forces giving rise to that effect; it's not just the police changing their conduct. Just sayin'
What you're citing is an imperfection in the execution by the EU of the EU's own stated policy, not a public policy position by the EU. Big difference. Here is the EU's statment on software patents:
Here's an example of a public statement from the EPO. This is from 2009:
The EPO does not grant "software patents". The term itself is a misleading concept. Under the EPC a computer program claimed as such is not a patentable invention (Art. 52(2)(c) and (3) EPC). Inventions involving computer programs that implement business, mathematical or similar methods and do not produce technical effects (e. g. because they solve a business problem rather than a technical one) are not patentable, and no patents will be granted for such inventions in Europe.[1]
Now compare that description of exclusions to Dropbox's patent. Dropbox's patent solves a business problem.
Elsewhere, the EU explicitly states that software whose only effect is on a screen or CPU or other computer or part of a computer is NOT eligible. Their intent is clear.
What you're doing is taking the existence of policy anomalies and presenting them as normative. They're not.
Yeah you're wrong on every point. That means you're trying.
In the US software CAN be patented- purely virtual events which result in nothing more than a change in a computer screen or a change in state of a CPU can be the subject of a US patent. Exactly that is forbidden the EU.
It is a well-worn talking point by patent lawyers, and a lame one, to assert as you did that since a computer is a machine and a computer screen is a machine then anything which effects those in a useful way are patents on machines and not software patents.
>>that means that the only way to really protect your business software.
Yeah, you protect your business by providing excellent software which is itself a natural barrier to entrance. It's a myth that anyone or any team can just rip a quick clone of any software. It's the kind f thing that people who don't know anything about software development think is true.
If you look at the world of IDEs, people have very strong preferences for one over the other. There are no software patents involved protecting anyone. In fact, even giving away the stuff for free is NOT enough to make enough people switch from IntelliJ to Eclipse, for example, to put IntelliJ out of business. All with no software patents.
Just as with extremely fecund and vigorous software ecosystem which existed in the 70s to the 90s caused the Cambrian explosion of software innovation which gave us the internet, word processes, spreadsheet, drawing programs, browsers, hyperlinks HTML etc. etc., the above case proves no one needs software patents to have a successful defensible business, not in the past and nto now.
>>That's a figure from the patent, it's not what the patent covers. The only part of the patent that has legal weight are the claims
The information provided in the drawings is exactly isomorphic tot he information provided in the claims. Patent lawyers know people have a hard time reading claims (by design.. patent language is a product of a priesthood which self-consciously seeks to protect itself by bartering in obscuritanism ) and like to make this argument also. If you read the claims and look at the diagrams, they are describing the same set of affairs, encryption keys and all.
You're just undermining your position by revealing that a humdrum and natural application of encryption keys (what else are they for except exchanging information securely over a public network) is now off limits to everyone but Dropbox.
>>Now the part that you seem to be confused about is that patents cover any way of doing that implementation - so, it's no different if you code it in C or C# or Swift or COBOL or Java, or if you make it big-endian rather than little-endian,
You're minimizing the damage by presenting the scope of the limitations being imposed on other developers to only the most narrow (implementing language, big- endian etc) while in fact they are very much broader than that. To wit: there is no set of classes, no interaction between any objects and no alternative architecture of any kind which is permitted by this patent. Any implementation, no matter how different, which achieves the same effect by using the humdrum, run of the mill technique of exchanging encryption keys in ways which they were designed to be exchanged in circumstances and for reasons which make use of these keys a natural fit, is now forbidden. The use of encryption in this manner is now the personal property of Dropbox.
It's just like any other operating system. Once you know how it works, really really well, your mind turns to the thought of what you could do with yoru knowledge , if you wanted to. Most people don't act on it at all. Some people are inspired to make it more secure. Some people see it as an opportunity to be evil.
When I was implementing an RFP back in the day for a certain protocol , it just so happened that what I wrote , when I posted it to a webserver, took that webserver DOWN. IT was just a quirk; nothing I wrote was wrong. Nothing the server did was wrong, but RFPs are sufficiently vague to allow for a quirks mode to surface betwen two non-coordinating implementors.
The thing was, the server had about, oh, 90% market share so what I had in effect was an Evil Death Ray on the entire internet. I never even considered there was any up side in this because I am not naturally inclined to exploit people, situations or circumstances. Some of the people around me however, their minds immediately alighted on the potential and began joking about what they could do.. blackmail to major websites and crap like that.
Either it strikes you as horrifyingly wrong and against everything that gives life meaning, or it doesn't. It's as simple as that.
If you look at the biographies of people in corporations and organizations who Do Evil, you may come to the conclusion that graduating from elite universities and following other societally sanctioned pathways to power does not in any way filter out sociopaths, it just filters out a certain kind of disorganized, irresponsible sociopath. The ones that emerge from these pathways are super-charged, in deep cover and are basicaly responsible for most of the real, intractable, structural badness in our society.
This is part of the reason the Government's NSA exploits and attitudes towards our privacy are so threatening to people. The technology is fearsome, the sociopath sieve, very far from effective.
Yeah, otherwise known as a "software patent". It's worth clarifying what a software patent is not, the better to understand what it is and why it's so pernicious and why they're banned (yes, they are) in the EU and pretty much everywhere else in the world except AU. and JP.
Software patents are not patents on specific ways for causing a machine to perform a useful function. That type of IP is the IP we call "copyright". Copyright does prevent your code, your (virtual) machine, from being ripped off.
So with copyright you're not issued a patent on the concept of any wheel, you're issued a patent on your wheel's unique and specific implementation. If you stop and think about it, it's a really amazing how well copyright serves as the natural vehicle for IP in the computer industry. You cannot just steal another person's original work. Stealing includes *near copying with just a few things changed*. You have to find a relatively original way to achieve the same effect, but the *idea* of what you're doing is not patentable. Copyright naturally delivers all that to computer IP.
Software patents are patents on all ways to cause a machine to perform a generally describable function. It's not the specific implementation performing the useful function that is being protected- it's the ability to achieve the same ends in any way whatsoever.
So like the RIM patent debacle, this patent covers things unbelievably abstract and covers things like this:
For people who don't follow links, it's a picture of little labeled boxes representing computers, with arrows being drawn between the little boxes to signify what info gets passed between what computers and when. That's what they're patenting. That's what the patent in the 750 million dollar RIM/NTP case did- took THIS info out of a data base NOW and sent it to THAT computer who did THIS with that info.
That's right folks, we are patenting flowcharts. Read it and weep-
This is exactly why in the EU computer-related inventions must control some physical, industrial process and then only that physical industrial process is patented, not the code which drives it. Otherwise you're patenting processes defined by flowcharts. You're patenting results. You're patenting ideas.
We know for a fact we don't need these patents for software to progress and for companies to becomes powerful, even monopolistically so, since prior to 1987-1990 or so very few software patents were permitted. Yet we had the invention of EVERYTHING and we had gigantic corporations reaping huge profits also.
This is about regulatory capture and the corporate coffers it fills (with what would have otherwise been your money).
OK khallow you're the climate change denying troll that is the ONE person I actually did mark as a troll in my control panel. I answer posts without reading the name because it's not important to me who you are but in your case, actually, I amnot arguing with a person who is legitimately confused over nad over again I am arguing with someone whois a known to me troll.
Suffice it to say that that each of yoru asertions are wrong. Wrong that we can't imagine a world without consciousness for exactly the reasons I delineated. Wrong about "emergent properties" being bull shit , a point I won't prove again and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it.
I am pretty sure anyone else reading my posts does not have your objections and I am pretty sure you're the single person interested enough in this argument (with me, you're hated climate change opponent with the signature you hate) to downvote its (my) posts days after it's been moved 3 or 4 pages back from the front and for which there are only 100 psts, fully a quarter of them mine.
You're the worst kind of liar. An insincere, time-wasting trolling system-gaming liar. That, sir is what you are. Goodday.
never understood -1 insightful comments. They're comments which have a high rating and people like them but have been modded down by a one or a bunch of people determined to put thehated poster in his or her "place" by jacking the rating system.
>> To be blunt, I think it quite reasonable that the fact that consciousness exists in the universe is an imposed precondition
Imposed by whom? Your prof? Yout think just exists as a kind of fundamental matter, like the Weak Force? You are arguing against that. Anyway this thing "consciousness or experience" (same thing) has deeply troubling properties. If you say it's emergent, then that's scientific bunk. If you say no, it's a part of the reductionist chain, then it's a thing without purpose , one our explanations can do without. It has neither mass, nor volume nor does it interact with anything causally. Sounds like Life Force level bullshit to me.
You're tlaking out of two sides of your mouth without realizing it.
What kind of crappy philosophical argument is this? Just because you can model the physical atoms of the brain with a sufficiently large "abacus," materialism must be false?
No I am not arguing against materialism here, I am saying that the idea that computation equals cognition- Strong AI's basic claim- is silly on the face of it.
It's not that I can model a physical system and therefore it doesn't exist (I guess this is what you are accusing me of saying?). It's that Strong AI is making it's Strong AI claim- consciousness IS computation. Well, here's something that can compute anything- does this now make it conscious?
Neither am I saying that other things can't be conscious. What I am saying is if they are, the source of that consciousness is not their brains. Turing machines are good models of computers and computation. IMHO the Turing test lacks a lot for being a test of... whatever consciousness, AI.. basically because people are gullible in the short term.
You're going after solisism and I am not that. I am only willing to defend myself against so many things I didn't say. This is one of them.
from here: http://science.slashdot.org/co... It's not solipsism because solipsism means the only thing I know for sure is my own self and my own thoughts. That is subtly (depending on whose thinking about it) a very different statement than "there is only experience", or experience is ontologically superior or the only "real" or "ontologically most real" thing. Hopefully those two things are clearly distinguishable from each other.
If you conclude that I must think this or that about other people or their minds or their existence or non-existence of whatever, well... I don't. I just say- the only thing that is certain is experience. Full stop. This by itself has big consequences of its own it turns out, sice experince is totally superfluous to the functioning of brains - we can imagine a brain which behaves exactly the same as any other, but has no experience since brains are controlled by their underlying biochemical processes - which have no experience- they're underlying electrical activity- which has no experience- and so on and so on and it is these things which totally determine the brain's function.
So anytime you feel like pointing to a process and inserting "experience" into it, just remember that *no one needs you're mystical thing to account for the behavior of brains* and inserting it any scientific theory is itself unscientific since it contributes nada to the explanatory power of the theory.
The only issue then is, *experience does exist*.
So how are you going to be a good scientist? If you inject experience into brains at some level- the biochemical, the electrical, the computational, via so called emergent properties, you're doing bad science or rather not doing science at all, since "emergent properties" all scientific bullshit on a stick:
If on the other hand you choose to ignore experience, well, you're avoiding doing science on a category of thing , which is not *really* doing science in the fullest sense since science is willing to account for al lphenomena and this is one we can't pretend doesn't exist (although, to be fair, BF Skinner did make exactly this claim).
Slashdot Mirror
http://davidappell.blogspot.no...
So, defendant Anonymous, are you familiar with the term "cherry picking?". Why don't you tell the court what you understand the the phrase "cherry picking" to mean?
Defendant Anonymous, do you turn to the internet for information about climate change? You do? Since you know what cherry picking is and you have already described yourself as highly engaged with the topic of climate change, did you ever consider the possiblity that this statistic was itself cherry picking? Did you actively seek out disconfrirmatory evidence for this statistic?
Defendant Anonymous, I refer you to your posting on Slashdot Mar 2012 where you directly accused a poster of cherry picking his statistic. So you were well aware not only of the concept fo cherry picking but that cherry picking was used in the climate change debate....
Defandant Anonymous, I present to you a graph posted by a fellow poster WoofyGoofy in rebuttal to a comment you made describing "no climate change in nearly 19 years", do you recognize that graph? Would you say that that graph describes an instance of cherry picking? Speka up Defandant Anonymous.
Defendant Anonymous, were you aware of what people said the consequences of global warming would be upon hundreds of millions of people, if it were true? Speak up so the court can hear you Defendant Anonymous. Yes you were? And yet, you continued to post statements as facts , statements which a reasonably prudent person who did not possess a wanton disregard for the truth, would have rejected as likely falsehods. Isn't that right Defendant Anonymous? By your own measure, the statements you made were most likely false, weren't they Defendant Anonymous?
Ladies nad Gentlemen of the jury, we have here nothing more than the very description of the law under which Defendant Anonymous has been charged- Gross Negligence and a Depraved Indifference For Human Welfare With Special Circumstances.
Ladies and Gentlement of the jury, Defendant Anonymous and millions more just like him are precisely and individually culpable for the destrcutive falsehoods they either knew or should have known they were spreading through the years 1990-2020. These were years in which the Great Climate Crisis still could have been averted save for the actions of Defendant Anonymous and his ilk, actions which displayed a Depraved Indifference to Human Welfare. Actions which they knew or shoudl have known would contribute to the millions of deaths and political upheavals we see nightly on the news. ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the Supreme Court in 2025 had already found that each citizen, individually has and always has had an implicit, unshirkable obligation to be honest and to act in good conscience in their utterances and writings when the fate of other human beings rests in the balance of those utternaces, no matter how small a part their individual utterances and writings may have played in the ultimate fate of those fellow humans. That same ruling found that each individual can be charged with the totality of the crime to which they contributed, and that theories of so called "proportional guilt" serve only to thwart a justice which must not be thwarted.
What we have before us here in the public postings of Defendant Anonymous is nothing less than a criminal act of the highest order, Because of Defendant Anonymous, and others soon to be tried, the Earth is where it is and there is no going back.
Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I submit that there is one verdict which wil serve justice, a verdict of guilty on the charge before you. Defendant Anonymous knowingly and with malice aforethought made utterances and wrote statements which he himself knew or should have known were likely false. Bring back a verdict fo guilty, and may God have mercy on his soul.
The fact is that the world and the US DID have a consensus regarding human-induced climate change prior to the Koch brothers injection of denialism into the public discussion. You have only to read some of the eexhaustive and authoritative books available to you : Dark Money, Merchant of Doubt Doubt Is Their Product and The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars to understand therehas been a deliberate coordinated attack on climate science and climate scientists for the express purpose of deferring and delaying action on climate change. The Koch brothers own study told them the mainstream science was correct, and they buried that study.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Alright then. What are we really looking at? We are looking at a group of terrorists who have built and set off a bomb called global climate warming with the specific intent of handing the world's governments- which governments they have openly called for the desmantling and destruction of- a problem so large they will not be able to cope with the fallout. They have set off a bomb which they believe will cause the collapse of the United States Government. In this they have been aided by anti-government conservatives, conservative moevements, conservative think tanks, other conservative billionaires, all stripes of conservative publications, editors writers and bloggers. Each and everyone of is a terrorist or a supporter of terorism and the result of those terrrorist activities is hundreds of millions dead and condemend to death the permanent destrcution of the habitiblity of large portions of the Earth , mass envrionmentally caused political upheaval, population dislocation wars and diseases taking the lives of yet hundrends of millions more.
Those are crimes. Those are crimes so vast, the criminals believe they can never be charged with them. The criminals believe they will not be held accountable. The criminals believe there are too many of them to be prosecuted and their actions resemble too closely mere opinion offering to ever be labled as crimes.
I'll give them this- their plan to radically deconstrcut then reconstrcut the American government is going to suceeded beyone their wildest dreams. Because under our pre-Global Warming system of government, they would have gotten away with everything. But as we the afflicted, the destroyed, the people forced to live under the New Koch-Inflicted Reality, we the victims of Scalia and Thomas and Americans for Prosperity and the Wall Street Journal and Scaife and Murdoch and Norquist and all the tens of thousands of other organizations and individuals who together joined to systematically destroy our species common heritage, our ability to sustain life human civiliation on this planet, take power they will meet a very different United States Government. They won't be facing corporate water-carrying bitch boys and and fucking house niggers like Holder and Obama. No, it'll be more like the full Black Lives Matter treatment, joined by Yellow Lives Matter and Red Lives Matter and While Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. They'll be facing real justice courtesy of the United States Government and in accordance with the United States Government's laws, served up hot and they'll be no limit to scope of their assets we'll seize, or the nooses the United States Government's courts of law will sentence them to swing from.
In the pre-Global Warming American government, no mere opinion maker would have been put on trial for his life for "opinions" he offered. Under the post Global Warming American Government, they're very lkely find that the tolerance for mass-murder via mass-lies has been exhausted and, just as the world will witness unthinkable climatic and ecological and social events, so too the world will witness the trial of "average" citizens for Crimes Against Humanity. Let them tell the court and the wo
OK this is Linux's Big Chance. The nost savvy most technically literate most intelligent people are going to, for the first time, really really be looking for alternatives to Windows because of this shit. I know I am (not to say I qualify as any of the above). Those people, that 5-10% decide for their familes, their inlaws their friends their co-workers what's cool, what's great and what you shoudl avoid.
So is Linux ready or does it still expect its everyday users to be keen to memorize lots and lots of magical incantations - "sudo apt etc etc etc etc" - in order to really GetShitDone?
Every time I wanted to do something on previous version of Ubuntu- purpotedly the most user-friendly version of Linux out there- I quickly found myself instructed by the cognesceti to solemnly intone this and that long incantation into the darkness of a dos prompt. That's a deal breaker.
Does anyone in Linux-land really understand that very basic fact? People know how to use my computers by memorizing trails through GUIs. That mimics how primitve people (people like me and and you) learned to navigate and find their way around the real world; they used signposts and landmarks to remind them where to do next. Folks, accept it- this is how are brains are wired to find things in a complex environment.
Text is NOT how we are wired to find things. We have no good memory for text- it's always an explicit labor of memorization. And those memories are remarkably frail and subject to confusion with similar text-based memories. That's why indexes and filing cabinets and encyclopedias are alphabetical- because otherwise we'd never find that thing we were looking at before just by remembering where it was last time.
But I can remember how to get to the store, how to get home, where that vacation camp is that I last visited 20 years ago. Because it's a trail, just the kind of thing my brain is specialized to remember, with landmarks thattrigger further memories, landmarks which effectively let me offload the work of explicit memorization.
So.. do we have a real GUI in Linux yet or am I going to have to sudo apt my way around still? Because this is most definitely the magical moment Linux has been waiting for - the Gigantic, Customer-Alienating, Self-Inflcited, Grand Windows Fuck Up.
Very intersting obviously I've been schooled, so thank you fellow Slashdotters.
Monopoly is what you get when there is no regulation. Does anyone really want to argue that? Throughout history, what we've had is large corporations and banks getting larger without limit as they consume smaller efforts with anti-competitive practices, practices which are "natural" and dont' involve forcible coercion.
Sorry but Libertarianism is completely confused, at best and a refuge for scoundrels at worst. The whole Milton Friedman-Ayn Rand-Alan Greespan wing of libertariansim is just thinly disguised sociopathy. Rand herself was a true blue sociopath as evidenced not just from her policy recommendations but her personal utterances and interperonsal relations and Friedman, lest we forget, helped, approved and supported Pinochet , a torturer, terrorist, and mass murderer. and Greenspan's fantasy that the market is self correcting under all crcumstances, that it's impossible, as in physics-style impossible, for something like the 2008 crash to every happen in a market such as ours.
As far as indentured servitude goes, since when are libertarians concerned with one party's ability to inflict "duress" n another party? That is the whole point of not limiting financial power inequalities. If I own all the land through deals i made, I can shut off food production to everyone else and no one can do anything about it. If me and my buddies get together and decide not to hire Black people, then that's our business. If we decide to make a list of people to whom we dont' want food sold to or jobs offered to then that's out business.
People have power in this world to the extent that they control resources. For all practical purposes there is no upper limit on the resources a person can control under Libertarian schemes- a fact Libertarians are well aware of. IT follows immediately that there is no upper limit on the power Libertariansim gives someone over other people's lives and fates and their ability to pursue happiness . Libertarianism could give a shit about creating a fair and equitable world. It's monomanically obsessed with process and keeping the number of rules which govern that process as small as possible and what comes out the other end of this for real flesh and blood members of society who have to live and suffer under this "purity" , well , who really gives a fuck? It's a kind of poitical and social autism.
It's not a coincidence that Rand Paul would roll back the civil rights legislation of the 60s. That's a prinicpled decision on his part that comes straight out of the Libertairan playbook.
Sorry, it's nto just that the Koch brothers have given it a bad name. It goes all the way back to Greespan and Friedman and Ayn Rand . This is a political movement built upon the predatory and incredibly short-sighted ideas of sociopaths and autistics. It just is.
One more thing. Libertariansim shares a LOT in common with Marxism in a very specific way- it suffers from 19th century-physics-envy. Like Marxism, it posits that a set of "laws" which should govern a "system" and if those "laws" are followed then the sytem's behavior will be predictable.
Well folks, that is just pure physics-envy bullshit when it's applied to hyper complex "systems" like "the economy" and "people's economic behavior", which are "systems" only in the sense that you have applied that word "system" to them and in no other meaningful sense.
This whole 19th century "call it a system and devine the sytem's behavior from a few underlying princples" is absolute wishful thinking. If you want to reduce it to a few underlying principles then reduce it to the physical forces - gravity the strong force, the weak force etc. and come show it to everyone when you're done. And good luck with that, too.
What are we supposed to think when the group explicitly replaces "the pursuit of happiness" with "property"?
From their site:
Statement of Intent: "I hereby state my solemn intent to move to the State of New Hampshire. Once there, I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of individualsâ(TM) rights to life, liberty, and property."
Pretty much sums up this group of people up. I think we all know a monpolistic, anti-social, predatory-capitalism-loving, big-bank-hugging, Koch-worshipping, Grover Norquist-loving, environment-trashing, indentured-servitude (hey, it's a contract btween consenting adults) pushing libertarian sociopath when we see one ...or 20,000
Here's the full quote:
"In early grades, students differentiate between responsible and irresponsible computing
behaviors. Students learn that responsible behaviors can help individuals while
irresponsible behaviors can hurt individuals. They examine legal and ethical
considerations for obtaining and sharing information and apply those behaviors to protect
original ideas. As students progress academically, they engage in legal and ethical
behaviors to guard against intrusive applications and promote a safe and secure
computing experience. "
What these Kings of the Universe don't realize is normal people don't share and will never share their Ayn Rand -cocaine-driven amphetamine-fueled vision of extreme indivuduality at the expense of the health of society (which is the bedrock upon which protection of individuality rests).
So, sure, go ahead promote those discussions. The more discussion there is, the less well it goes for software patent lawyers like Brad Smith who, readers should know, basically originated the idea of using software patents as an offense weapon to supress innovation while he was at M$:
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
http://archive.fortune.com/mag...
which directly led to all other tech companies following suit and finally the fantastical, supernatrual prosperity of every Chinese take-out in Tyler, Texas.
All that's going to happen is they're going to find out no one shares their idea of societal good and justice. Every survey finds that young people are far more concerned with creating an fair, free and egalitarian society that benefits everyone, rather than the winner-take-all psychopathic shithole that is America at this particular tick of the clock.
Not everyone blew their brains out snorting coke while reading Ayn Rand in the 80s. That's a particular generation and they have a particular , uh, "view" of what the goals laws of society should support. Going on 40 years later now, it's getting to be old-man-dying-time for this particular strain of sociopathic, societal predators. Can't happen too soon for my money. Here, take it with you; fuckin' see ya later.
The fact that M$ and Oracle and IBM and all the rest of the "victims" of "trolls" would rather pay the trolls than do what is intellectually ethcially and morally right- lobby Congress to ban software patents (and yes trolls, those ARE a definable thing) tells you something. They'd rather endure the billions lost to trolls than have to compete in the open marketplace, without their trivial patents. If they didn't have this barrier to entrance and the threat of crushing legal judgements, then they'd have to compete on the basis of the goodness of their product offerings.
Obviously, such a "disaster" is monetarily more frigthening to them than losing to billions to trolls.
It gives you some idea of the amount of market supression and concomitant loss of innovation the consumer is experiencing without ever knowing it.
Believe me, lot's of "agreements to be acquired" by small companies are in reality software-patent blackmail- you can sell us your comapny, or we can go to court.
It how they make sure that all innovation accrues to them, and they retain all real financial and political power in the world.
And computers have too much memory also. Who would ever need more than 64k? It gives you a glimpse into what sort of mind people like Tom Wheeler and his Republican buddies have. They've effectively completely sat out the last 20 years of tech progress. They have no access- as personal memories - of the lessons, lore, and legends of computing and the internet and consequently lack the shared base of facts upon which sound judgments can be built. They are totally cut off from the weltanschauung of the modernity and are effectively legislating across time, legislating from the past. They have no idea what the cultural refernce I made above refers to. They have no idea of how it is shorthand for the tech insight: "if you built it, they will come" . If you create it, if you allow it, it will be quickly be put to extraordinary use which no one can now foresee, but which will become the stuff of future economic activity ....and the taxes guys like you live off.
Yeah the FBI seeing the photos is probably a non-issue since a large number of them are probably honeypots in the first place. It's a product of how much contempt they have for this man that they think one of them will eventually work.
HEADLINE:
Snowden caught in honeypot while stepping out on his girlfriend.
God, wouldn't they love that?
I don't know if these people have done anything or not; you might think that people that intelligent would not stoop that low. I will offer this though.
One of the persistent and compelling illusions I had in life was that somewhere, there existed a self-selected group of people for whom a primary concern was to just be decent to each other.
I am not sure where I got this idea from, but if you have it, if you think that *this* group of people united by *this* purpose or POV or goal or whatever is going to be some kind of refuge from Assholedom, then you owe it to yourself before you waste any more of your life looking for such a group to just stop. Put it down and walk away.
My first pursuit of this mythological beast was with a community of artists and counter-cultural types. I thought without jocks or grades or the pursuit of money or even fame people would have nothing but each others fellowship to rely on and that would be a kind of uniting force, or something. How very young and wrong I was .
After some years spent pursuing that ghost, I next chased another another idea I had always had in my head- that academics, university types, were just naturally a cut above in terms of decency and non-aggression. In my imagination they were people to whom the stated ideals of a university- diversity, the pursuit of truth, respect for excellence,
valuing of curiosity and the impartial unbiased pursuit of knowledge - were real living things. The university was THEIR place which abided by THEIR values and stood as a bastion against Assholedom.
So I went to university and I did meet people as described- a couple. And the rest were sort of Super Assholes - people who nourished grudges, pursued revenge via administrative back-channeling and complaint processes, for any perceived slight or offense, advanced themselves through undermining others, sincerely worked to
undermine others simply because they didn't like them, and worked the system as best they could to horde time, reputation, money and power. It was one of the worst
environments I've been in. At one point a recent-hire prof confided in me that "they" - the other professors in the department- "had taken him into a room and gone to town on him for spending time preparing for his classes. If he wanted them to recommend him for tenure, it was going to stop. The gist f it was that there was no reward for teaching,
only for publishing and grant getting- things that brought the university prestige and money. Nothing else mattered and the degree to which nothing else mattered was total. I
asked him who "they" were, exactly, and his reply was "all of them. Every one of them." Of course the teaching is what you'd expect given the above. And that's not even the
worst dirty trick- and that's what it was- I saw there. Not by a long shot .
After that I got it into my head that business, corporation, out of necessity, would be a place where the reality principle reigned supreme. Even if it wasn't friendly per se, at least it would be grounded in some kind of market discipline and that discipline would realize itself in the relations between people within the company.
I know, but in my defense, this was around 2000.
Here's the thing. If it's true, -but then harassment charges are just another arrow in the quiver or these types - this is not surprising , because *that's what people are*. If for some reason that actually doesn't describe you and you know it,then know with certainty: you're on your own There is no *good* group of people united by any property or purpose out there. The best you can hope for is a occasional light from someone you are completely removed from, say whose books you read. If you really want to swing for the wall, the trifecta is your mother, your spouse and your dog. If you can trust all three of those , then know you're luckier than most .
This needed to be proved?
Ignore the trolls on slashdot who hate the government. What you said is exactly right. Netflix has a pretty good piece interviewing current and former Presidents (Bush I) NSA and CIA directors. What comes across is that there is not unanimity about surveillance, the WoT or how to run it or even the limits of governmental powers with respect to fighting the WoT. Some disapprove (!) of the killing of US citizen al-Awalaki (sp?) and see it as a slippery slope. Some are nervous about ubiquitous surveillance.
The point is, you're exactly right. The government is not Dr Evil. The trolls in this thread just get off on a certain small circumscribed set of ideas. They're less like thoughtful people and more like rats pulling that same lever over and over again in order to get their high. This describes most anti-government types. It's like a thought addiction, place in their minds where they can get their rage on.
To their point about Hitler et. al., it's they who lack an understanding of history. These guys didn't rise to power despite the will of the people. They didn't overwhelm the government and take control. The people in those nations themselves cheered when they took control. They WANTED it to happen. Hitler never would have come to power if Wall Street hadn't tanked the world's economy. At the time, the post war hyper inflation in Germany had subsided and things were looking better for Germany. Then the Wall Street speculators destroyed the economy and hyperinflation kicked in again and the people themselves wanted a "strong man" and a scapegoat and the rest is history.
There is nothing in any democracy which prevents its own people from willing it out of existence. That's what happened in Germany and Italy.
The best hedge against that is a stable prosperous nation. The best way to get that is to have a strong central government to act as a counter-force to the unlimited power corporations would otherwise have.
The fact is there are a lot of people who wish to do as much harm as they can. We have always had well-poisoners in our midst but thanks to current and near-future technology, their ability to do great harm to great numbers of people is increasing dramatically. I've said this before but here it is again. Tell me I am wrong:
1) The number of technologies that can cause serious, deadly harm to humans and other living things is going up.
2) The number of substantively different or novel attacks that technology is capable of producing, each requiring its own custom defense, is going up more than arithmetically, possibly geometrically.
3) The number of people required to wield those technologies in order to create one of those attacks is going down, heading distressingly towards one.
4) The number of people which can be simultaneously harmed by such an attack is going up, distressingly, headed towards millions or billions.
5) Failure to thwart a plausible large and successful attack will result in a distressingly large expansion of the powers of the national security state and a distressingly large diminuation of civil liberties, individual freedoms and privacy, heading towards fascism.
So what do you want from the world's governments? To just not take any preemptive measures? If you read what he's suggesting, he's suggesting that no one government be able to decrypt traffic without the others' approval. It's not a bad as in evil idea - we have to give the government the powers it needs and as Enigma has shown, decrypting the enemies communication is crucial- it's just that it won't work for mundane reasons. But it's a start at the kind of crazy, out of the box thinking we need.
He's not shown any reason why the 9 governments (who have to all agree to decrypt transmission X using their collective keys or it can't be decrypted) wouldn't just engage in politicking of the worst sort. We already have the Five Eyes collaborating in secret -for decades- and we already have the 11 FISA judges absolutely positively rubber-stamping just anything that comes their way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
What more proof do we need that when the circle of power gets small enough, there are no good guys? Governments are good at convincing their own kind to cooperate and this would all just devolve into horse trading. You give me my dissidents and I'll give you yours and we'll stay fat n' happy in a world we like to call "Things As They Ought To Be".
It won't work. But I praise his attempt mightily. The basic issue is, we need a police force whose sole purpose is to monitor the police force (NSA CIA ETC.)
and whose authority is final barring a super-majority of both houses of Congress (say). None of those agencies are going to go for that, obviously. A real issue is this- once the oversight circle expands enough, you get traitors and leakers and spies. But is that truly worse than a nation whose agencies ARE corrupt or whose population BELIEVE they are corrupt and act on that belief?
The effect of being in member of a TLA on the human psyche is profound and negative. The human mind wasn't made to perpetually tread water in an horizonless sea of stress hormones. It changes your brain; it changes who you are and how you perceive people and the world. You become someone who fits the job, and that eventually makes you very very different from ordinary citizens, especially with respect to your value system. You might very well decide to "collect it all" even if that makes no logistical or operational sense, and you know it. You might very well come to devalue privacy to a degree that outsiders would find shocking, even demented. You might very well see the Constitution or some of its amendments as the biggest threat to the nation.
Here's my first idea. Part of our problem is, we lack a particular representational language. We need a language, a way of expressing
Yeah I am all for what they did and the way they did it. Your comment however:
I subscribe to the theory that when you break the laws of a country (i.e. by distributing child porn), you should forfeit the right to be protected by those same laws"
is the definition of fascism. No one knows if you broke the law until a jury or judge says so. What you're saying is, let's have no laws set upon the police because they only go after people who are (suspected of) breaking the law. That makes zero sense.
If we implemented that policy, we'd have cops framing everyone they suspected or really, after a little while under your regime, anyone they just didn't like.
Sure framing people is illegal and immoral but hey, no laws apply to law breakers so have at it.
We need the criminal justice system to work properly so people have faith in it and its results. That means protecting the accused whether you like them or not. Absent that, their is lawlessness everywhere, on the part of ordinary citizens, who would there's nothing fair about "the law" and law enforcement which would quickly devolve into thuggery, blackmail, racketeering, extortion and murder.
Do you think you're the first person to contemplate how law should be applied to people accused of a crime? This goes back centuries and the subject has been the focus of generations and generations of the world's best minds. Trashing it all for some idea you get into your head because it "makes sense to me!" is a frightening prospect. It's also the roots of fascism, which always needs lots of shallow-thinking "sounds good to me! " types like you to actually bring them to power.
You need to take a serious, searching and thorough moral inventory of yourself and you need to examine the criteria you're accepting of when coming to conclusions about how you would like to see society structured.
GO FBI GO !!!!
Oh me too, me too. Finally got that off my todo list. Whew.
One of the effects of body cameras is complaints against the police go down:
http://www.sandiegouniontribun...
http://www.cleveland.com/cityh...
http://www.policeone.com/offic...
Policing involves dealing with people who are motivated to lie; lie to the police and lie about the police. All cops hear all day long are lies lies lies and some of those lies get pointed at them. It's true that cops are less likely to abuse their position if they know they're being recorded but that also holds true for citizens lying about cops' conduct.
The net effect is complaints go down, but there are two forces giving rise to that effect; it's not just the police changing their conduct. Just sayin'
What you're citing is an imperfection in the execution by the EU of the EU's own stated policy, not a public policy position by the EU. Big difference. Here is the EU's statment on software patents:
Here's an example of a public statement from the EPO. This is from 2009:
The EPO does not grant "software patents". The term itself is a misleading concept. Under the EPC a computer program claimed as such is not a patentable invention (Art. 52(2)(c) and (3) EPC). Inventions involving computer programs that implement business, mathematical or similar methods and do not produce technical effects (e. g. because they solve a business problem rather than a technical one) are not patentable, and no patents will be granted for such inventions in Europe.[1]
Now compare that description of exclusions to Dropbox's patent. Dropbox's patent solves a business problem.
Elsewhere, the EU explicitly states that software whose only effect is on a screen or CPU or other computer or part of a computer is NOT eligible. Their intent is clear.
What you're doing is taking the existence of policy anomalies and presenting them as normative. They're not.
Yeah you're wrong on every point. That means you're trying.
In the US software CAN be patented- purely virtual events which result in nothing more than a change in a computer screen or a change in state of a CPU can be the subject of a US patent. Exactly that is forbidden the EU.
It is a well-worn talking point by patent lawyers, and a lame one, to assert as you did that since a computer is a machine and a computer screen is a machine then anything which effects those in a useful way are patents on machines and not software patents.
>>that means that the only way to really protect your business software.
Yeah, you protect your business by providing excellent software which is itself a natural barrier to entrance. It's a myth that anyone or any team can just rip a quick clone of any software. It's the kind f thing that people who don't know anything about software development think is true.
If you look at the world of IDEs, people have very strong preferences for one over the other. There are no software patents involved protecting anyone. In fact, even giving away the stuff for free is NOT enough to make enough people switch from IntelliJ to Eclipse, for example, to put IntelliJ out of business. All with no software patents.
Just as with extremely fecund and vigorous software ecosystem which existed in the 70s to the 90s caused the Cambrian explosion of software innovation which gave us the internet, word processes, spreadsheet, drawing programs, browsers, hyperlinks HTML etc. etc., the above case proves no one needs software patents to have a successful defensible business, not in the past and nto now.
>>That's a figure from the patent, it's not what the patent covers. The only part of the patent that has legal weight are the claims
The information provided in the drawings is exactly isomorphic tot he information provided in the claims. Patent lawyers know people have a hard time reading claims (by design.. patent language is a product of a priesthood which self-consciously seeks to protect itself by bartering in obscuritanism ) and like to make this argument also. If you read the claims and look at the diagrams, they are describing the same set of affairs, encryption keys and all.
You're just undermining your position by revealing that a humdrum and natural application of encryption keys (what else are they for except exchanging information securely over a public network) is now off limits to everyone but Dropbox.
>>Now the part that you seem to be confused about is that patents cover any way of doing that implementation - so, it's no different if you code it in C or C# or Swift or COBOL or Java, or if you make it big-endian rather than little-endian,
You're minimizing the damage by presenting the scope of the limitations being imposed on other developers to only the most narrow (implementing language, big- endian etc) while in fact they are very much broader than that. To wit: there is no set of classes, no interaction between any objects and no alternative architecture of any kind which is permitted by this patent. Any implementation, no matter how different, which achieves the same effect by using the humdrum, run of the mill technique of exchanging encryption keys in ways which they were designed to be exchanged in circumstances and for reasons which make use of these keys a natural fit, is now forbidden. The use of encryption in this manner is now the personal property of Dropbox.
It's just like any other operating system. Once you know how it works, really really well, your mind turns to the thought of what you could do with yoru knowledge , if you wanted to. Most people don't act on it at all. Some people are inspired to make it more secure. Some people see it as an opportunity to be evil.
When I was implementing an RFP back in the day for a certain protocol , it just so happened that what I wrote , when I posted it to a webserver, took that webserver DOWN. IT was just a quirk; nothing I wrote was wrong. Nothing the server did was wrong, but RFPs are sufficiently vague to allow for a quirks mode to surface betwen two non-coordinating implementors.
The thing was, the server had about, oh, 90% market share so what I had in effect was an Evil Death Ray on the entire internet. I never even considered there was any up side in this because I am not naturally inclined to exploit people, situations or circumstances. Some of the people around me however, their minds immediately alighted on the potential and began joking about what they could do.. blackmail to major websites and crap like that.
Either it strikes you as horrifyingly wrong and against everything that gives life meaning, or it doesn't. It's as simple as that.
If you look at the biographies of people in corporations and organizations who Do Evil, you may come to the conclusion that graduating from elite universities and following other societally sanctioned pathways to power does not in any way filter out sociopaths, it just filters out a certain kind of disorganized, irresponsible sociopath. The ones that emerge from these pathways are super-charged, in deep cover and are basicaly responsible for most of the real, intractable, structural badness in our society.
This is part of the reason the Government's NSA exploits and attitudes towards our privacy are so threatening to people. The technology is fearsome, the sociopath sieve, very far from effective.
Yeah, otherwise known as a "software patent". It's worth clarifying what a software patent is not, the better to understand what it is and why it's so pernicious and why they're banned (yes, they are) in the EU and pretty much everywhere else in the world except AU. and JP.
Software patents are not patents on specific ways for causing a machine to perform a useful function. That type of IP is the IP we call "copyright". Copyright does prevent your code, your (virtual) machine, from being ripped off.
So with copyright you're not issued a patent on the concept of any wheel, you're issued a patent on your wheel's unique and specific implementation. If you stop and think about it, it's a really amazing how well copyright serves as the natural vehicle for IP in the computer industry. You cannot just steal another person's original work. Stealing includes *near copying with just a few things changed*. You have to find a relatively original way to achieve the same effect, but the *idea* of what you're doing is not patentable. Copyright naturally delivers all that to computer IP.
Software patents are patents on all ways to cause a machine to perform a generally describable function. It's not the specific implementation performing the useful function that is being protected- it's the ability to achieve the same ends in any way whatsoever.
So like the RIM patent debacle, this patent covers things unbelievably abstract and covers things like this:
http://torrentfreak.com/images...
For people who don't follow links, it's a picture of little labeled boxes representing computers, with arrows being drawn between the little boxes to signify what info gets passed between what computers and when. That's what they're patenting. That's what the patent in the 750 million dollar RIM/NTP case did- took THIS info out of a data base NOW and sent it to THAT computer who did THIS with that info.
That's right folks, we are patenting flowcharts. Read it and weep-
https://www.scribd.com/doc/294...
This is exactly why in the EU computer-related inventions must control some physical, industrial process and then only that physical industrial process is patented, not the code which drives it. Otherwise you're patenting processes defined by flowcharts. You're patenting results. You're patenting ideas.
We know for a fact we don't need these patents for software to progress and for companies to becomes powerful, even monopolistically so, since prior to 1987-1990 or so very few software patents were permitted. Yet we had the invention of EVERYTHING and we had gigantic corporations reaping huge profits also.
This is about regulatory capture and the corporate coffers it fills (with what would have otherwise been your money).
https://news.vice.com/article/...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
OK khallow you're the climate change denying troll that is the ONE person I actually did mark as a troll in my control panel. I answer posts without reading the name because it's not important to me who you are but in your case, actually, I amnot arguing with a person who is legitimately confused over nad over again I am arguing with someone whois a known to me troll.
Suffice it to say that that each of yoru asertions are wrong. Wrong that we can't imagine a world without consciousness for exactly the reasons I delineated. Wrong about "emergent properties" being bull shit , a point I won't prove again and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it.
I am pretty sure anyone else reading my posts does not have your objections and I am pretty sure you're the single person interested enough in this argument (with me, you're hated climate change opponent with the signature you hate) to downvote its (my) posts days after it's been moved 3 or 4 pages back from the front and for which there are only 100 psts, fully a quarter of them mine.
You're the worst kind of liar. An insincere, time-wasting trolling system-gaming liar. That, sir is what you are. Goodday.
never understood -1 insightful comments. They're comments which have a high rating and people like them but have been modded down by a one or a bunch of people determined to put thehated poster in his or her "place" by jacking the rating system.
Good to know.
>> To be blunt, I think it quite reasonable that the fact that consciousness exists in the universe is an imposed precondition
Imposed by whom? Your prof? Yout think just exists as a kind of fundamental matter, like the Weak Force? You are arguing against that. Anyway this thing "consciousness or experience" (same thing) has deeply troubling properties. If you say it's emergent, then that's scientific bunk. If you say no, it's a part of the reductionist chain, then it's a thing without purpose , one our explanations can do without. It has neither mass, nor volume nor does it interact with anything causally. Sounds like Life Force level bullshit to me.
You're tlaking out of two sides of your mouth without realizing it.
What kind of crappy philosophical argument is this? Just because you can model the physical atoms of the brain with a sufficiently large "abacus," materialism must be false?
No I am not arguing against materialism here, I am saying that the idea that computation equals cognition- Strong AI's basic claim- is silly on the face of it.
It's not that I can model a physical system and therefore it doesn't exist (I guess this is what you are accusing me of saying?). It's that Strong AI is making it's Strong AI claim- consciousness IS computation. Well, here's something that can compute anything- does this now make it conscious?
Neither am I saying that other things can't be conscious. What I am saying is if they are, the source of that consciousness is not their brains. Turing machines are good models of computers and computation. IMHO the Turing test lacks a lot for being a test of ... whatever consciousness, AI.. basically because people are gullible in the short term.
You're going after solisism and I am not that. I am only willing to defend myself against so many things I didn't say. This is one of them.
from here:
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
It's not solipsism because solipsism means the only thing I know for sure is my own self and my own thoughts. That is subtly (depending on whose thinking about it) a very different statement than "there is only experience", or experience is ontologically superior or the only "real" or "ontologically most real" thing. Hopefully those two things are clearly distinguishable from each other.
If you conclude that I must think this or that about other people or their minds or their existence or non-existence of whatever, well... I don't. I just say- the only thing that is certain is experience. Full stop. This by itself has big consequences of its own it turns out, sice experince is totally superfluous to the functioning of brains - we can imagine a brain which behaves exactly the same as any other, but has no experience since brains are controlled by their underlying biochemical processes - which have no experience- they're underlying electrical activity- which has no experience- and so on and so on and it is these things which totally determine the brain's function.
So anytime you feel like pointing to a process and inserting "experience" into it, just remember that *no one needs you're mystical thing to account for the behavior of brains* and inserting it any scientific theory is itself unscientific since it contributes nada to the explanatory power of the theory.
The only issue then is, *experience does exist*.
So how are you going to be a good scientist? If you inject experience into brains at some level- the biochemical, the electrical, the computational, via so called emergent properties, you're doing bad science or rather not doing science at all, since "emergent properties" all scientific bullshit on a stick:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
If on the other hand you choose to ignore experience, well, you're avoiding doing science on a category of thing , which is not *really* doing science in the fullest sense since science is willing to account for al lphenomena and this is one we can't pretend doesn't exist (although, to be fair, BF Skinner did make exactly this claim).