Because if I have to mute or change the channel at every commercial:
1) It's highly obnoxious 2) I'm likely to miss parts of what I was trying to watch 3) It defeats the purpose of advertising
It's not like they're spending a trillion dollars to do this. It's just a nice simple curb on the advertisers' bad behavior. I know some people think the government should be basically comatose, and complain whenever they do anything. But most of us like when our representatives represent us.
What does the internet have to do with it? Last time I checked, hundreds of millions of people still watched TV. I agree this law should have come sooner, but it's not as though it's too late to be a good thing. Just like the Do Not Call list was a good thing even though cell phones were already invented.
A knife has the ability to kill someone, that doesn't mean we should ban knives. Intention does matter. This is extremely useful software, that a few OEMs misused. There's absolutely zero evidence that any wrongdoing even occurred. Be honest with yourself. You just want to be angry and righteous about something. It feels good, I know. But find a better issue. Perhaps one where people were actually hurt? Maybe even by a party that actually meant to do harm?
It's not spyware. Carriers want info on how people use their phones so that they can fix bugs and make better phones. It's no different from software that occasionally reports home with usage statistics. Everyone does it, and it's a good thing. The only problem is that a few OEMs and carriers disabled the user's ability to opt out.
CarrierIQ makes a legal, useful, morally-sound product. Some companies go on to use that product in a legal, useful, but less moral manner. But some asshole of a security researcher figured out (correctly!) that he'd get way more hits on his webpage if he accused them of making a rootkit and keylogger. And now all the innocent, hardworking developers at this small business will be out on the streets, because the rage-a-holics want something to scream about, and the media is more than happy to manufacture controversy if it means good ratings.
So congrats. You're going to destroy the lives of some innocent people over the tiniest of slights. I'm sure you're very proud.
I think some reporter got confused. Cadmium hasn't seen much use in displays since the early 80s, because there are better, non-toxic materials that have been discovered since then. I think it's still used in a few applications, but nothing Joe Consumer is likely to buy. Where cadmium is often used is in quantum dots, which has thus far made quantum dots unusable for most consumer applications. That appears to be one of the innovations coming out of the research here... quantum dots that don't use cadmium (or other heavy metals), and are thus safe to use in the creation of the flexible display that everyone's wanted for a while.
I just went to noscript's page and disabled ad-block. There's one small, non-animated banner ad running down the right-hand margin of the page, for something called Babylon -- which appears to be offering an over-excited girl hugging a browser window. Beyond that, there are a few very small text ads for pieces of software, such as FlashGot. Slashdot has more ads.
Seriously, why lie about something like this? Did you think no one would check? Did Giorgio Maone kill your dog?
Sorry, but I've got to call BS on that. There's no way that you, on a middle class income, accumulated the $15 million necessary to break into the top 1% of net worth. Even if you could save $10k a month (hardly what anyone would consider a middle class income), you'd need to beat the indices every year for decades to reach the top 1%. Maybe you broke into the top 10%, in which case, good for you. But the top 1% is so far above anything reasonable, it's simply unattainable for anyone who isn't either a celebrity, a founding member of a successful startup, or a thief in a suit. Two of those group deserve their earning, for bringing happiness or utility to millions of people. The third simple stole the money by positioning themselves in a job that allows them to siphon off a bit of all the wealth passing through them.
Wall Street investors don't make money, they take it. You think those dollars are just appearing out of nowhere? If you "make" a million bucks off an IPO, it's because you sold your shares to a sucker who paid more than they're worth. Or maybe your a fund manager, and you just take a few percent off every American's retirement fund every year, as payment for your "skill" at investment (even though you're all but certain to underperform the index in the long run).
Buying and holding a stock for dividends or growth are legit. Venture capital and angel investments are legit. But this IPO pump-n-dump crap is a scam. It's theft. Ditto mutual fund fees and high frequency trading. The robber barons at Wall Street are just siphoning off tiny bits of everyone else's savings every day. It's nice and slow, so you won't notice, but in aggregate it's enough money for them to live like gods.
First of all, it is highly unlikely that Amazon would ever make that mistake again. But if you're really worried, and not just pandering for karma, then simply copy the ebooks to your computer via USB. Ta-da! You've got a back up. For bonus points, use Calibre to break the (trivial) DRM and convert to your file format of choice.
The problem is with interstate commerce. I know libertarians love to blast that part of the Constitution, but it does serve an important purpose. For example, maybe Mississippi decides they want absolutely no environmental protections. Corporations will move their factories there, and start dumping their toxic wastes into the river. Only now the people in New Orleans have to suffer for their neighbors choices. If the states were each independent countries, that sort of thing would lead to serious border conflicts, sanctions, and maybe even war. Instead we have the federal government to unite us and pass nationwide standards. We're already in a race to the bottom with third world nations. The last thing we need is to start a race to the bottom between ourselves.
Or how about immigration? What if Tennessee decides that they want to let in all comers? Do we build a wall around the state, station guards at every border crossing?
Or the FCC? As nice as it might be to have different radio standards in Philly, Newark, NYC, and Stamford, the laws of physics don't allow it.
Entitlements might be better left to the state, but it would be a bureaucratic nightmare tracking people's moves across the nation (so that someone doesn't spend most of their life in a low tax state and retire in a high entitlement state).
There are some cases where we would be better off giving the states more control, but in many ways the old federal model simply can't work in the modern world.
"...the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities. If there's money left over, it goes to general entertainment, but that includes stuff like restaurants and bars and sports tickets and travel. Things that in no way support the people I didn't pay. Maybe some small percentage ends up buying some other piece of media, but it would be a very small percentage.
So now we've got one side claiming that piracy costs a quintillion dollars a year, and the other side claiming that it costs absolutely nothing. Can we please get some sane leaders to acknowledge the obvious fact: it costs the media companies something, but nowhere near what they claim? That it's bad enough that it should stay illegal, but not so bad that people's lives should be ruined over half a dozen songs? Why does everything need to be black and white?
Just because they're barbaric in the moral sense doesn't mean they are in the technological sense. They are quite capable of using computers and cell phones and shredders.
Oh for fucks sake. THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU. There are no feds swooping in in black helicopters to dig through your garbage and piece together your shredded electric bill.
Honestly, mods, giving positive reinforcement to this sort of paranoia is only hurting the people suffering from it.
One interesting thing to look at is the percentage of an individual politician's money that comes from small donors. Contrary to what some would expect, it doesn't split by party lines (nor by candidate sanity). Instead it gives you a good, non-partisan view of just how beholden a politician is to their corporate donors. Because while the corporations may always give lots of money to both sides, if (for example) Generic Democrat #1 pisses them off, they'll just stop giving to him, and give to Generic Democrat #2 instead. Assuming Generic Democrat #1 wants to keep his job, he either needs to play nice with the big donors, or bring in lots of small ones.
Obama, Ron Paul, Gingrich, and Bachman (I told you sanity didn't matter) all get around 50% of their money from small donors. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney get 90+% of their money from major corporations and billionaires. That should tell you all you need to know about those two.
Huntsman is also in the 90+% camp, but in his case it might just be lack of name recognition. This method really only works for the big names, since the small players have trouble reaching out to individual donors through no fault of their own.
Millionaire is an old term. To stay with the true spirit of the word, and not it's numerical meaning, it is commonly used today to refer to a person who makes a million dollars a year. Perhaps I should have initially said "people with tens of millions", but sadly we don't have a good word for that. And regardless, if you're basing all your ranting on that one word from my initial post, then you clearly don't have much of an argument.
But go ahead. Keep white knighting for your masters. Maybe if you lick enough boots, they'll toss a quarter your way;-)
I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. You need to learn what the word "excess" means. Maybe invest in a dictionary.
What I'm suggesting is that if someone's making 10 million bucks a year, they could easily guarantee a luxurious life for themselves and everyone they love on a fraction of that. So they should give up, say, half of it. Give 5 million a year, of their ten, to help other people. After all, the only reason they're even able to make that much is because of the fantastic circumstances they chanced into. You think Steve Jobs would have been a success if he had grown up in Somalia? The rich owe it to society to provide future generations the same benefits they took advantage of.
No, in my perfect world, they would give up their excess money voluntarily, so that the following generation can enjoy the same privileges that helped them reach their current heights.
In my near perfect world, the government would collect taxes in a sane manner, so that wealthy bankers pay a higher percentage than their secretaries and multi-billion dollar corporations pay at least something.
But in our current world, most of the rich choose to hoard their money, and they have purchased enough senators to ensure that their taxes are next to nothing. So non-violent theft becomes an acceptable option.
It has been said that taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society. The robber barons and their bribed congressmen who have been driving down taxes for decades apparently need to learn that lesson first-hand. I'd rather they learn it through theft than through violence. And make no mistake, if we continue our march back to the Gilded Age, it will come to violence.
No, you're factually and provably wrong. I suspect that you know this, and are lying in hopes of scaring members of the middle class away from any policies that might fix the distribution of wealth in this country.
The bottom 80% of Americans, a group that includes both the poor and the middle class, owns just 7% of the wealth in the country. Redistributing that 7% evenly among the 250 million people that make up the bottom 80% won't do a damn thing.
So, given the demographic that most often uses credit, they're going to steal from the poor to give to the poor? Except they're not even going to give to the poor, but rather they'll give the stolen funds to people who normally help the poor, thus causing trouble for them. So really, they're going to steal from the poor to harass the people who help the poor. This seems poorly thought out.
If they somehow manage to steal exclusively from millionaires, and if they don't keep a dime for themselves, and if they do it in such a way that it doesn't cause headaches for the charities involved, then fine. More power to them. But somehow I suspect that none of those three criteria will be met.
I remember Neuromancer, and while it was fun, I finished it off in a single evening. I recall it being short and linear, though the bit where you get some antagonist arrested by plugging his SSN and other info into an existing warrant in the police network was pretty entertaining and not too obvious. The battles against the AI, however, weren't so interesting. I haven't played Uplink yet (I downloaded it from Home of the Underdogs what seems like a lifetime ago, but never got around to playing it). Maybe it will have the same failing.
Also, if you're counting Neuromancer as a hacking game, then credit should also go to the Sega version of Shadowrun. It came out much later, but was also much deeper, and included randomly generated missions for extra replayability.
What are you going on about? No such thing as "less harmful"? That's bullshit.
So you think censoring child porn and censoring political dissent are the same? You're insane. You're using a slippery slope fallacy to argue that if we censor anything we'll eventually censor everything, and just back it up by saying "we know from experience". But that's so trivially false it's almost painful.
Child porn has been censored in the US for decades. Has it led to political censorship yet? Nope. Again, you're insane. Paranoid, specifically. So I'm directing this more at Slashdot than at you. I know it's fun to get outraged and +1 anyone who says how terrible everything is. It releases little squirts of feel-good chemicals in the brain. But please, try to be rational. Try to actually think. Because this sort of blatant logical fallacy and paranoia really should not be encouraged.
Amazon doesn't have the clout to fight the publishers anyway. They tried holding the line at $10 per book, and lost.
The best path we have to DRM-free ebooks is authors deciding to self-publish DRM free titles. If the next JK Rowling were to do so, it would have a big impact. Of course, you aren't likely to reach that point without publishers backing you at the start, and they probably make you sign contracts that you'll stay with them through the whole series.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if I have to mute or change the channel at every commercial:
1) It's highly obnoxious
2) I'm likely to miss parts of what I was trying to watch
3) It defeats the purpose of advertising
It's not like they're spending a trillion dollars to do this. It's just a nice simple curb on the advertisers' bad behavior. I know some people think the government should be basically comatose, and complain whenever they do anything. But most of us like when our representatives represent us.
What does the internet have to do with it? Last time I checked, hundreds of millions of people still watched TV. I agree this law should have come sooner, but it's not as though it's too late to be a good thing. Just like the Do Not Call list was a good thing even though cell phones were already invented.
CarrierIQ sends your text messages
Completely false. It might be accidentally logging received messages, but even those aren't human readable.
and keypresses (including your typed passwords)
There's no evidence that this is even true.
to various third parties
Only in the form of OS logs for crash reports.
including the FBI
Baseless speculation.
and carriers
The only true part of the sentence!
The whole "case" against CIQ is hugely overblown by media sources looking for ratings and people who desperately want something to be outraged over.
A knife has the ability to kill someone, that doesn't mean we should ban knives. Intention does matter. This is extremely useful software, that a few OEMs misused. There's absolutely zero evidence that any wrongdoing even occurred. Be honest with yourself. You just want to be angry and righteous about something. It feels good, I know. But find a better issue. Perhaps one where people were actually hurt? Maybe even by a party that actually meant to do harm?
It's not spyware. Carriers want info on how people use their phones so that they can fix bugs and make better phones. It's no different from software that occasionally reports home with usage statistics. Everyone does it, and it's a good thing. The only problem is that a few OEMs and carriers disabled the user's ability to opt out.
CarrierIQ makes a legal, useful, morally-sound product. Some companies go on to use that product in a legal, useful, but less moral manner. But some asshole of a security researcher figured out (correctly!) that he'd get way more hits on his webpage if he accused them of making a rootkit and keylogger. And now all the innocent, hardworking developers at this small business will be out on the streets, because the rage-a-holics want something to scream about, and the media is more than happy to manufacture controversy if it means good ratings.
So congrats. You're going to destroy the lives of some innocent people over the tiniest of slights. I'm sure you're very proud.
I think some reporter got confused. Cadmium hasn't seen much use in displays since the early 80s, because there are better, non-toxic materials that have been discovered since then. I think it's still used in a few applications, but nothing Joe Consumer is likely to buy. Where cadmium is often used is in quantum dots, which has thus far made quantum dots unusable for most consumer applications. That appears to be one of the innovations coming out of the research here... quantum dots that don't use cadmium (or other heavy metals), and are thus safe to use in the creation of the flexible display that everyone's wanted for a while.
I just went to noscript's page and disabled ad-block. There's one small, non-animated banner ad running down the right-hand margin of the page, for something called Babylon -- which appears to be offering an over-excited girl hugging a browser window. Beyond that, there are a few very small text ads for pieces of software, such as FlashGot. Slashdot has more ads.
Seriously, why lie about something like this? Did you think no one would check? Did Giorgio Maone kill your dog?
Sorry, but I've got to call BS on that. There's no way that you, on a middle class income, accumulated the $15 million necessary to break into the top 1% of net worth. Even if you could save $10k a month (hardly what anyone would consider a middle class income), you'd need to beat the indices every year for decades to reach the top 1%. Maybe you broke into the top 10%, in which case, good for you. But the top 1% is so far above anything reasonable, it's simply unattainable for anyone who isn't either a celebrity, a founding member of a successful startup, or a thief in a suit. Two of those group deserve their earning, for bringing happiness or utility to millions of people. The third simple stole the money by positioning themselves in a job that allows them to siphon off a bit of all the wealth passing through them.
Wall Street investors don't make money, they take it. You think those dollars are just appearing out of nowhere? If you "make" a million bucks off an IPO, it's because you sold your shares to a sucker who paid more than they're worth. Or maybe your a fund manager, and you just take a few percent off every American's retirement fund every year, as payment for your "skill" at investment (even though you're all but certain to underperform the index in the long run).
Buying and holding a stock for dividends or growth are legit. Venture capital and angel investments are legit. But this IPO pump-n-dump crap is a scam. It's theft. Ditto mutual fund fees and high frequency trading. The robber barons at Wall Street are just siphoning off tiny bits of everyone else's savings every day. It's nice and slow, so you won't notice, but in aggregate it's enough money for them to live like gods.
First of all, it is highly unlikely that Amazon would ever make that mistake again. But if you're really worried, and not just pandering for karma, then simply copy the ebooks to your computer via USB. Ta-da! You've got a back up. For bonus points, use Calibre to break the (trivial) DRM and convert to your file format of choice.
The problem is with interstate commerce. I know libertarians love to blast that part of the Constitution, but it does serve an important purpose. For example, maybe Mississippi decides they want absolutely no environmental protections. Corporations will move their factories there, and start dumping their toxic wastes into the river. Only now the people in New Orleans have to suffer for their neighbors choices. If the states were each independent countries, that sort of thing would lead to serious border conflicts, sanctions, and maybe even war. Instead we have the federal government to unite us and pass nationwide standards. We're already in a race to the bottom with third world nations. The last thing we need is to start a race to the bottom between ourselves.
Or how about immigration? What if Tennessee decides that they want to let in all comers? Do we build a wall around the state, station guards at every border crossing?
Or the FCC? As nice as it might be to have different radio standards in Philly, Newark, NYC, and Stamford, the laws of physics don't allow it.
Entitlements might be better left to the state, but it would be a bureaucratic nightmare tracking people's moves across the nation (so that someone doesn't spend most of their life in a low tax state and retire in a high entitlement state).
There are some cases where we would be better off giving the states more control, but in many ways the old federal model simply can't work in the modern world.
"...the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities. If there's money left over, it goes to general entertainment, but that includes stuff like restaurants and bars and sports tickets and travel. Things that in no way support the people I didn't pay. Maybe some small percentage ends up buying some other piece of media, but it would be a very small percentage.
So now we've got one side claiming that piracy costs a quintillion dollars a year, and the other side claiming that it costs absolutely nothing. Can we please get some sane leaders to acknowledge the obvious fact: it costs the media companies something, but nowhere near what they claim? That it's bad enough that it should stay illegal, but not so bad that people's lives should be ruined over half a dozen songs? Why does everything need to be black and white?
Just because they're barbaric in the moral sense doesn't mean they are in the technological sense. They are quite capable of using computers and cell phones and shredders.
Oh for fucks sake. THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU. There are no feds swooping in in black helicopters to dig through your garbage and piece together your shredded electric bill.
Honestly, mods, giving positive reinforcement to this sort of paranoia is only hurting the people suffering from it.
One interesting thing to look at is the percentage of an individual politician's money that comes from small donors. Contrary to what some would expect, it doesn't split by party lines (nor by candidate sanity). Instead it gives you a good, non-partisan view of just how beholden a politician is to their corporate donors. Because while the corporations may always give lots of money to both sides, if (for example) Generic Democrat #1 pisses them off, they'll just stop giving to him, and give to Generic Democrat #2 instead. Assuming Generic Democrat #1 wants to keep his job, he either needs to play nice with the big donors, or bring in lots of small ones.
Obama, Ron Paul, Gingrich, and Bachman (I told you sanity didn't matter) all get around 50% of their money from small donors. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney get 90+% of their money from major corporations and billionaires. That should tell you all you need to know about those two.
Huntsman is also in the 90+% camp, but in his case it might just be lack of name recognition. This method really only works for the big names, since the small players have trouble reaching out to individual donors through no fault of their own.
Millionaire is an old term. To stay with the true spirit of the word, and not it's numerical meaning, it is commonly used today to refer to a person who makes a million dollars a year. Perhaps I should have initially said "people with tens of millions", but sadly we don't have a good word for that. And regardless, if you're basing all your ranting on that one word from my initial post, then you clearly don't have much of an argument.
But go ahead. Keep white knighting for your masters. Maybe if you lick enough boots, they'll toss a quarter your way ;-)
I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. You need to learn what the word "excess" means. Maybe invest in a dictionary.
What I'm suggesting is that if someone's making 10 million bucks a year, they could easily guarantee a luxurious life for themselves and everyone they love on a fraction of that. So they should give up, say, half of it. Give 5 million a year, of their ten, to help other people. After all, the only reason they're even able to make that much is because of the fantastic circumstances they chanced into. You think Steve Jobs would have been a success if he had grown up in Somalia? The rich owe it to society to provide future generations the same benefits they took advantage of.
No, in my perfect world, they would give up their excess money voluntarily, so that the following generation can enjoy the same privileges that helped them reach their current heights.
In my near perfect world, the government would collect taxes in a sane manner, so that wealthy bankers pay a higher percentage than their secretaries and multi-billion dollar corporations pay at least something.
But in our current world, most of the rich choose to hoard their money, and they have purchased enough senators to ensure that their taxes are next to nothing. So non-violent theft becomes an acceptable option.
It has been said that taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society. The robber barons and their bribed congressmen who have been driving down taxes for decades apparently need to learn that lesson first-hand. I'd rather they learn it through theft than through violence. And make no mistake, if we continue our march back to the Gilded Age, it will come to violence.
No, you're factually and provably wrong. I suspect that you know this, and are lying in hopes of scaring members of the middle class away from any policies that might fix the distribution of wealth in this country.
The bottom 80% of Americans, a group that includes both the poor and the middle class, owns just 7% of the wealth in the country. Redistributing that 7% evenly among the 250 million people that make up the bottom 80% won't do a damn thing.
So, given the demographic that most often uses credit, they're going to steal from the poor to give to the poor? Except they're not even going to give to the poor, but rather they'll give the stolen funds to people who normally help the poor, thus causing trouble for them. So really, they're going to steal from the poor to harass the people who help the poor. This seems poorly thought out.
If they somehow manage to steal exclusively from millionaires, and if they don't keep a dime for themselves, and if they do it in such a way that it doesn't cause headaches for the charities involved, then fine. More power to them. But somehow I suspect that none of those three criteria will be met.
Key word being try. We don't have to let them. And we certainly shouldn't overreact by abolishing IP entirely.
I remember Neuromancer, and while it was fun, I finished it off in a single evening. I recall it being short and linear, though the bit where you get some antagonist arrested by plugging his SSN and other info into an existing warrant in the police network was pretty entertaining and not too obvious. The battles against the AI, however, weren't so interesting. I haven't played Uplink yet (I downloaded it from Home of the Underdogs what seems like a lifetime ago, but never got around to playing it). Maybe it will have the same failing.
Also, if you're counting Neuromancer as a hacking game, then credit should also go to the Sega version of Shadowrun. It came out much later, but was also much deeper, and included randomly generated missions for extra replayability.
No, he condemns Obama for being black and a Democratic president, both unforgivable sins, and together they make him the anti-Christ.
What are you going on about? No such thing as "less harmful"? That's bullshit.
So you think censoring child porn and censoring political dissent are the same? You're insane. You're using a slippery slope fallacy to argue that if we censor anything we'll eventually censor everything, and just back it up by saying "we know from experience". But that's so trivially false it's almost painful.
Child porn has been censored in the US for decades. Has it led to political censorship yet? Nope. Again, you're insane. Paranoid, specifically. So I'm directing this more at Slashdot than at you. I know it's fun to get outraged and +1 anyone who says how terrible everything is. It releases little squirts of feel-good chemicals in the brain. But please, try to be rational. Try to actually think. Because this sort of blatant logical fallacy and paranoia really should not be encouraged.
Amazon doesn't have the clout to fight the publishers anyway. They tried holding the line at $10 per book, and lost.
The best path we have to DRM-free ebooks is authors deciding to self-publish DRM free titles. If the next JK Rowling were to do so, it would have a big impact. Of course, you aren't likely to reach that point without publishers backing you at the start, and they probably make you sign contracts that you'll stay with them through the whole series.