Other than not watching it you mean? Or were you so blinded by your sense of entitlement to the works of others that that option didn't occur to you?
I don't have a sense of entitlement: I have a sense of "They can go fuck themselves." They need to dry up and die, and paying them won't accomplish anything, the law is so perverted there's no moral imperative to follow it, so whether I watch it or not doesn't change the equation: Once something has crossed over into being harmful to society and wrong, legal or not, it's not something I will support.
Dude, going to NYU costs about 250k for a four year degree. 250k ain't that much bro.
It gets a lot bigger when the courts force you to pay it off as quickly as possible, to the detriment of your health, wellbeing, and future. Any judgement over $10,000 can't be discharged through bankrupcy... and there are legal ways of collecting on a judgement that make getting your liver chewed out every night by a giant bird look less punishing.
This woman needs to go back to law school and look up "fair use" and the difference between copyrights and trademarks.
Don't be so judgemental. Every test of Fair Use since SCOTUS got all those Bush nominations put on the bench has ruled in the most restrictive and compromising way about it. She might be making a crazy argument, but the law is crazy too. It has changed in the past decade or so much that crazy arguments are now normal. They think downloading an mp3 is right up there with murder -- there's tens of thousands out there right now who's lives are permafucked because of those changes to copyright law.*
Really, copyright law has been Poe's law for awhile.
. . .
*) At least in my state, you can murder someone (not pre-meditated) and it has less of a long term impact on your life -- you only spend may 7 years in jail, and after that you can get a job, a halfway decent place to live, and enough creature comforts to not be miserable. Get a judgement for $250,000 against you, and you're spending the rest of your life in cheap apartments and driving a car worth less than $2,000. No matter how much money you make at work, you'll never get out from under that; You're a slave until the day you die, because they can take away any of your possessions at will and as much as their paycheck as the courts allow -- which you should go and look up how they calculate that. It makes fixed income senior living look downright luxurous. Oh, and also.. your health will go to shit, because in this country, you have to buy your own insurance... and sorry, but that's not necessary to keep you pumping out the benjamins so... suck it up.
Now, the distribution network -- those people really are middle men. But without them, the record or movie generally doesn't make any money. Yes, there's a few exceptions, especially with albums -- bands selling their music online, for example. But for now, finding the right middle men often means the difference between making no money and making a lot of money -- that certainly does add value if you're trying to make money.
There's nothing (by law) to prevent artists from selling their work directly. The internet has made it absurdly easy to market, contact stores, make phone calls... everything the middlemen can do, and the overhead and setup costs are low enough that about 80% of the population in the US can set it up and do it full time without ever even leaving their basement, if they're so inclined.
Now if they want to hire someone to do that for them, hey, whatever --that's how a free market should work. Right now, there is no free market: It's sucking a sugar coated fuck off the record labels, or hawk it on the street since no store, movie theatre, or any other venue, will help you as required by contract. Break the monopoly, and you'll quickly see that the middlemen here suck most of the juice out and leave the artists with a shiny fraction of of the sale price, and the consumer gets a designed-for-obsolesence product with the shredded remains of fair use law, and their tears drizzled over the top for that crunchy freshly-raped texture.
When no legal methods exist for consumers to obtain content in a way they demand, of course the only option left for them then is to illegally obtain that which they desire.
But that's just it: They will never release a product that has broad consumer appeal. If they had DRM that used signatures instead of encrypting it, only allowing playback on certain devices, with an internet connection that's always on, etc., they'd have a lot better sell rate. But the truth is, the product is overpriced and heavily restricted to the point of being useless. If I could make a 1 time payment and get a license to watch A Movie(tm), and to play it anywhere, anytime, on any equipment, in any format -- for personal use... I'd do it if the price was reasonable. But that's the hideous evil about their marketing: They'll never give you that kind of a license. That's what you were buying in the 80s, and since we've gone digital, it's easy to create the extended edition, directors cut, ultimate, super, 1.5 version, diddledodedo edition -- and then we're going to release it on vhs, itunes, dvd, bluray, youtube, netflix, and in 23 different regions, at different times and price points... and you're going to have to PAY PAY PAY if you want to use any of them. Who cares if you already bought it and it's sitting on the shelf -- fuck you, you have to buy a slightly different version just to use it on your new streaming internet player, plus pay your ISP to stream it, plus pay the stream provider, along with the cost of the equipment, oh -- and every time you pay, we're right there, mouths wide, waiting to take a bite out of everyone else's sandwich.
I'm a pirate and proud of it. Because I'm not just doing it because I can, but because there's no other choice. The business model is corrupt, it doesn't serve the public interest, nor does it serve the artists interests, nor does it really even serve the industry as a whole; It serves about 150 people who are middle men for a dying industry. The only reason bluray has any traction at all is because our internet connections are shit and we can't download it or stream it on demand. There's no reason for optical drives anymore; even mechanical hard drives are going the way of the dodo bird. But these guys are pushing their distribution model onto the world and passing laws and crap thinking it's going to save them. It's just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Bitches, ship's going down -- and the pirates already hopped in a life boat, cast off, lit a big fatty.. and now they're waiting for the artists and wondering what'll happen to those poor bastard consumers in 'economy'.
RIAA and the MPAA are middle men. Middle men don't add value: They don't produce the product, and they don't use it. They're worthless. Fuck them. Get the consumers to the life boats (teach them how to torrent and bypass torrent blocking), and let the artists and the middle men figure out whether they want to drown together in each other's cold, unfeeling arms, or get on the goddamn boats and end this crap.
I'd like to see this feature rolled out in every country. There are very few countries that aren't busy censoring something; Whether it's the copywrongers or some anti-terror legislation, or the latest "Save the children" law, Google receives piles of censorship demands weekly from every government. We can't just say "Shame on China!" when everyone else is doing variations on the same theme.
...they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?"
The only real option here is to ignore the law, as many of us here do now. The United States, and much of the western world, has become so enamored with short-term profit gain, that they're sacrificing the technological progress of all of humanity. The only rational course of action is to ignore them until another group or organization either through economic, political, or military means, remediates the problem.
Yes, I am suggesting that copyright law could eventually become an issue which countries go to war over. No, I don't think it's that crazy: Governments are already engaging in mass electronic attacks of their enemies. It's only a matter of time before things get physical. UEFI could be perceived as a threat to national security: It's giving one corporation carte blanche access to hardware owned by other governments. Redmond, WA may soon be ringed with missiles and armed guards to keep out other governments when they find out their hardware has been taken over by a foreign power. This is just how the world seems to be evolving... there's too much at stake now.
Censorship is ultimately about breaking trust networks. Pro-censorship governments almost always want the citizens to trust them above all other sources. Cryptography, anti-censorship proxies, and other communication mediums provide an external point of view. This is only dangerous to governments that aren't telling the truth -- in which case, their reaction to such communication mediums is from an understanding of how much that trust would be damaged if word got out about what they're really doing. What this means is, it's obvious that such a government would poison pill any alternatives by making them appear (or interfering with them in such as a way as to cause them) to be untrustworthy. The malware may or may not have been released by the government; It's doubtful we'll ever know the truth, but it is obviously in the government's best interests to damage the reliability of any kind of 'bypass' software.
Disclaimer: Many governments, including those who claim to be "free" engage in similar behavior. Your government is not exempt from this behavior.
Perhaps if they're painted like a police box, nobody will even notice they're present?
As a bonus, equipment with broken chameleon circuits could continue to operate in the community. Of course, you'd also have to put up signs saying that upon meeting an adult who talks very quickly and mumbles about his screwdriver, you are instructed to immediately provide your full name and some kind of sob story. It'll save them when the monsters, sentient water, spacecraft, and parasites come.
Call me a luddite, but I'm perfectly happy to stick with cash.
You're not a luddite. I try explaining the need for cash to my geek friends, but they're mystified about why anyone would want to keep something in "analog land". But basically, every system has slippage, whether it's a packet-switched network, or landing airplanes on aircraft carriers. Traffic engineers have found that, for example, if 3% of the vehicles on the road break the law by speeding or aggressive driving, it stops standing waves of vehicles forming near egress points, and actually improves the entire system's reliability. In most systems, you will find that if you increase tolerances too much, the system, engine, or component, becomes much less reliable and efficient.
Economic systems are no different. Governments will always be pushing for a perfect 1:1 parity between actions and identities, because the goal of government is perfect order, which means everything following formal rules, with 100% compliance. And should they ever even come within spitting distance of achieving this, they will have made themselves obsolete compared to other countries. We're already seeing what this kind of economic "hardening" does: Moving everything to electronic payment means that prices can jump wildly; The stock market is currently controlled by systems that make buy/sell decisions in fractions of a millisecond, and when the algorithms in those systems homogenized, we watched billions of dollars vaporize. Homogeny in economic systems (information systems too) has the same effect as it does in biological systems: It makes them vulnerable to disease.
But regardless, whatever transactional system you use, letting the provider take a percentage rather than a fixed cost is criminally stupid. Any high volume transaction system can process a single transaction for fractions of a penny; And that cost includes equipment maintenance, replacement, and the labor to carry out said tasks. You're paying 3% of your net income for the convenience of handing vendors a piece of plastic instead of a piece of paper... over the course of a year, that'll add up to around, what, $850 for a person making median income? Think of what an extra $850 a year could do for you. Then realize that it's not: It's working for someone else because you're a lazy ass. I'm sorry, but my "luddite-ness" gives me an $850 'convenience tax' credit at the end of the year; If I invest that, it'll pay for my retirement. So you know what, I'm thinking... "Cash: It gets me Everywhere I Want To Be". As opposed to Visa, which is everywhere I want to be, waiting, like a serpent, to stick its fangs in my wallet.
Hmm. A new program to uniquely track and identify scientists springs up in the middle of an all out war between science and the idiocracy. Totally coincidental. *adjusts tin foil hat*
I always find it amusing when Google claims that it's impossible to filter copyrighted content, that the uploaders are the copyright infringers, but at the same time, YouTube is doing a heck of a job to filter out porn -- you never find porn there and I don't think that's because nobody ever tried uploading it. So what gives?
I don't think you're looking hard enough. That said, I wouldn't click the link unless you want to have a limp dick for the next week. However, fewer people object to copyright infringement than sexual content; I don't see religious groups spending wednesday nights at church clicking through videos to report which ones are copyrighted. -_-
E-mail will replace regular mail. It's been a slow process, but the Post Office (in the US and Britain; I can't speak for other countries) is starting to cut back; The majority of what is being sent out are physical goods and junk mail (advertising). Many people here have switched to online bill pay, and most banks offer automatic payment if the company (rarely) doesn't do bill to credit card.
Party lines gave way to single user land lines, and single user landlines gave way to cell phones. Cell phones are now giving way to text-based near realtime communication like text messages. And cell phones will eventually transition to packet-switched radio communications using VoIP and QoS.
The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.
Political leanings had a bigger influence than their level of education.
There. Simple, to the point, guaranteed to have rooms full of people shaking their finger at the computer screen. Because that's what you get when you simplify.:D
But the truth is, making guns in a new caliber and making ammunition to match is easy enough that some hobbyists do it in their garage.
Yup. And a lot of times, those self-packed loads fail. Gunpowder mixture is the wrong type, wasn't packed tight enough, moisture, grease, etc. I've seen these hobbyists you speak of; All of them have at least one story of how they ruined their gun because their custom ammo was shit. You do it amateur, you get amateur results. But hey, don't let me stop you from taking your custom-built guns and ammo into a combat situation...
There are, apparently (I Am Not A Military Expert), valid military reasons to make your guns and ammunition incompatible with the enemy's. America and the rest of NATO were the first to use 5mm-caliber small arms - the M16, FAMAS, L86, etc. are all chambered for a standard 5.56mm round, and I believe most even have compatible magazines.
The "valid military reason" is called "economy of scale". We don't want to blow their budget on ammo, and by happy coincidence, our allies don't either.
Iran is simply doing the same thing. Instead of using NATO-standard 7.62mm miniguns, 20mm autocannons, 40mm grenade launchers or 2.75" rockets, they'll use ones that are just slightly incompatible, but nearly identical in performance.
That would be stupid. Iran doesn't have much of a defense industry; they rely on importing arms. It makes no sense to outfit some of your military with Mark I whatchamagigies and some of them with the incompatible Mark II whatchamagigies. There are few things more damning than sitting next to three full ammo boxes, and not one round that'll fit the only gun you have.
One reason is economics - trying to stimulate their own arms industry,
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to stimulate your industry: That's a purely American thing. In the rest of the world, you steal tech, duplicate it, and save yourself the R&D costs. See also: North Korea, China, India, Egypt, Iraq...
Another could be that they are more concerned about being invaded, rather than invading others. You are, after all, more likely to be the one capturing supplies, rather than having your supplies captured, when you are on the attack.
The traditional response to this is to decentralize your weapons depots, caches, and supply lines, and to be as covert as possible. Every ground war we've fought against similarily sized and equipped militaries has been massively asymetrical, and the enemy wears us down by hit and run tactics (which we invented), and urban guerilla warfare. They don't give two shits how much you capture, as long as they've got just enough left to keep costing us economically. They know if we invade, we're out a few more trillion dollars -- and our economy just can't handle that right now (it couldn't before!). Stop thinking like this is conventional warfare: It isn't. It hasn't been since the 70s.
History would seem to bear this view out - during the Cold War, neither side used intercompatible ammunition, and as it turns out, neither side much wanted to invade the other.
History remembers that it doesn't really matter what ammo you use, as long as you've got a fuckton of it. And by ammo, I mean nukes.
The most notable case of cross-compatible weaponry was in WW2, when the British designed the Sten gun to use the same ammunition as the German MP40. And guess what (spoiler alert)? Britain later invaded Germany!
Yeah, why would a country who's factories were burning, a third of its population dead or injured, and entire cities leveled want to put their limited resources towards making sure they could use whatever ammo was available. The mind boggles.
OK, that's probably a massive simplification of things (remember, IANAME), but still, look at things
, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country,
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.
You just don't get it. Mobile is going to hire Steve Ballmer to crush them. With a chair.
Only if they can get more developers, developers, developers, developers. And considering the next iteration of their operating system's programming tools is full of limitations, limitations, limitations, limitations, I'm guessing even a supertanker filled with Ballmers and chairs won't be enough to convince anyone to develop for CrippleOS(tm) (aka Windows 8). And as has been learned many times over by everyone but Microsoft; It doesn't matter how awesome your product is... if you don't have people developing applications for it, it dies on the launch pad.
The thing people like a lot of the times is that microsoft offers support, they have it stuck in their head that if you spend money on it, it must be better than a free alternative.
I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies. Support has nothing to do with the decision: Exclusionary contracts do. Microsoft offers huge discounts to businesses that agree not to use a competitor's product. They also regularily check for compliance and there are large fines for any company caught using open source software. Management often parrots what Microsoft says to tell the tech workers who question the policy, but if you ask the right people the right questions, you'll find out the company you're working for entered into an exclusive contract with Microsoft, and that was one of the conditions.
...destroying their ability to connect with women, and therefore threatening the future of our entire species.
For 20,000 years, men have been busy beating each other and other animals to a pulp, engaging in risky behaviors, being generally anti-social, and treating women like dirt. If they're playing video games and watching porn instead of those things, I think we're going to be just fine, thanks.
And as for being unable to connect with women, they haven't been able to do that since we crawled down from the trees. Somehow, dick still manages to meet vagina. People will keep having sex no matter how bad it is, because bad sex is worse than no sex... and really, if you're going to be a straight woman, once you've weaned yourself off Disney propaganda, your standards drop dramatically. Look at how many of us married fat dudes who beach themselves on couches.
The human species is in no danger of going extinct... despite yearly predictions of the end of the world. Which is disappointing really... it means I'll probably have to pay back my student loans. -_-
Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?
Which is fine when you're conducting foreign intelligence operations. However, the FBI's charter is to investigate private citizens within the United States. Given their track record, I don't think anything they do should be opaque:
They consider anyone who protests the government a terrorist, recently helped bust protesters for terrorism in Chicago -- which in actuality they were busting them for making beer. In their own home. They break federal laws so often that they had to change the laws so the FBI could continue to get convictions -- they still conceal evidence from defense attorneys to this day, and increasingly call such evidence off limits "due to national security". The FBI was instrumental in the passage and current use of the Patriot Act, which prevents citizens from even knowing the evidence presented against them, as the Constitution prescribed. I could go on, but really, I think you get the point: The FBI is one of the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the world. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country worldwide. The Innocence Project routinely finds people who have been sitting 20 or 30 year prison terms for crimes they can prove beyond reasonable doubt they did not commit. The FBI's response has been to open case files and monitor everyone who comes in contact with the project. Anyone who shows the FBI as a corrupt organization quickly finds themselves facing trumped up charges of tax evasion, drugs, or even copyright infringement: Whatever it takes to silence their critics.
I mean, I could go on... it's not hard to find examples of FBI agents engaging in activities that in any other civilized country would be grounds for imprisonment... and that was pre-9/11. Since then, they've enjoyed practically blanket-immunity for civil rights violations, and it shows. Any citizen of this country that thinks the FBI is anything but a bunch of thugs with a huge budget and no ethical constraints is deluding themselves.
I think the real story here is that people still believe innovation is possible in the United States. The patent on originality isn't set to expire here for another 150 years plus the life of the author, at which point, the rest of the world will send researchers and film crews in to study our city ruins and study the native peoples...
It was a program by one Robert Tappan Morris, as I recall.
True, but he programmed it badly, and used active injection into the network to measure it, rather than programming each node to passively collect data and make decisions based on the results of that. In short, he was young and stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than not watching it you mean? Or were you so blinded by your sense of entitlement to the works of others that that option didn't occur to you?
I don't have a sense of entitlement: I have a sense of "They can go fuck themselves." They need to dry up and die, and paying them won't accomplish anything, the law is so perverted there's no moral imperative to follow it, so whether I watch it or not doesn't change the equation: Once something has crossed over into being harmful to society and wrong, legal or not, it's not something I will support.
Dude, going to NYU costs about 250k for a four year degree. 250k ain't that much bro.
It gets a lot bigger when the courts force you to pay it off as quickly as possible, to the detriment of your health, wellbeing, and future. Any judgement over $10,000 can't be discharged through bankrupcy... and there are legal ways of collecting on a judgement that make getting your liver chewed out every night by a giant bird look less punishing.
This woman needs to go back to law school and look up "fair use" and the difference between copyrights and trademarks.
Don't be so judgemental. Every test of Fair Use since SCOTUS got all those Bush nominations put on the bench has ruled in the most restrictive and compromising way about it. She might be making a crazy argument, but the law is crazy too. It has changed in the past decade or so much that crazy arguments are now normal. They think downloading an mp3 is right up there with murder -- there's tens of thousands out there right now who's lives are permafucked because of those changes to copyright law.*
Really, copyright law has been Poe's law for awhile.
.
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*) At least in my state, you can murder someone (not pre-meditated) and it has less of a long term impact on your life -- you only spend may 7 years in jail, and after that you can get a job, a halfway decent place to live, and enough creature comforts to not be miserable. Get a judgement for $250,000 against you, and you're spending the rest of your life in cheap apartments and driving a car worth less than $2,000. No matter how much money you make at work, you'll never get out from under that; You're a slave until the day you die, because they can take away any of your possessions at will and as much as their paycheck as the courts allow -- which you should go and look up how they calculate that. It makes fixed income senior living look downright luxurous. Oh, and also.. your health will go to shit, because in this country, you have to buy your own insurance... and sorry, but that's not necessary to keep you pumping out the benjamins so... suck it up.
Now, the distribution network -- those people really are middle men. But without them, the record or movie generally doesn't make any money. Yes, there's a few exceptions, especially with albums -- bands selling their music online, for example. But for now, finding the right middle men often means the difference between making no money and making a lot of money -- that certainly does add value if you're trying to make money.
There's nothing (by law) to prevent artists from selling their work directly. The internet has made it absurdly easy to market, contact stores, make phone calls... everything the middlemen can do, and the overhead and setup costs are low enough that about 80% of the population in the US can set it up and do it full time without ever even leaving their basement, if they're so inclined.
Now if they want to hire someone to do that for them, hey, whatever --that's how a free market should work. Right now, there is no free market: It's sucking a sugar coated fuck off the record labels, or hawk it on the street since no store, movie theatre, or any other venue, will help you as required by contract. Break the monopoly, and you'll quickly see that the middlemen here suck most of the juice out and leave the artists with a shiny fraction of of the sale price, and the consumer gets a designed-for-obsolesence product with the shredded remains of fair use law, and their tears drizzled over the top for that crunchy freshly-raped texture.
When no legal methods exist for consumers to obtain content in a way they demand, of course the only option left for them then is to illegally obtain that which they desire.
But that's just it: They will never release a product that has broad consumer appeal. If they had DRM that used signatures instead of encrypting it, only allowing playback on certain devices, with an internet connection that's always on, etc., they'd have a lot better sell rate. But the truth is, the product is overpriced and heavily restricted to the point of being useless. If I could make a 1 time payment and get a license to watch A Movie(tm), and to play it anywhere, anytime, on any equipment, in any format -- for personal use... I'd do it if the price was reasonable. But that's the hideous evil about their marketing: They'll never give you that kind of a license. That's what you were buying in the 80s, and since we've gone digital, it's easy to create the extended edition, directors cut, ultimate, super, 1.5 version, diddledodedo edition -- and then we're going to release it on vhs, itunes, dvd, bluray, youtube, netflix, and in 23 different regions, at different times and price points... and you're going to have to PAY PAY PAY if you want to use any of them. Who cares if you already bought it and it's sitting on the shelf -- fuck you, you have to buy a slightly different version just to use it on your new streaming internet player, plus pay your ISP to stream it, plus pay the stream provider, along with the cost of the equipment, oh -- and every time you pay, we're right there, mouths wide, waiting to take a bite out of everyone else's sandwich.
I'm a pirate and proud of it. Because I'm not just doing it because I can, but because there's no other choice. The business model is corrupt, it doesn't serve the public interest, nor does it serve the artists interests, nor does it really even serve the industry as a whole; It serves about 150 people who are middle men for a dying industry. The only reason bluray has any traction at all is because our internet connections are shit and we can't download it or stream it on demand. There's no reason for optical drives anymore; even mechanical hard drives are going the way of the dodo bird. But these guys are pushing their distribution model onto the world and passing laws and crap thinking it's going to save them. It's just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Bitches, ship's going down -- and the pirates already hopped in a life boat, cast off, lit a big fatty.. and now they're waiting for the artists and wondering what'll happen to those poor bastard consumers in 'economy'.
RIAA and the MPAA are middle men. Middle men don't add value: They don't produce the product, and they don't use it. They're worthless. Fuck them. Get the consumers to the life boats (teach them how to torrent and bypass torrent blocking), and let the artists and the middle men figure out whether they want to drown together in each other's cold, unfeeling arms, or get on the goddamn boats and end this crap.
I'd like to see this feature rolled out in every country. There are very few countries that aren't busy censoring something; Whether it's the copywrongers or some anti-terror legislation, or the latest "Save the children" law, Google receives piles of censorship demands weekly from every government. We can't just say "Shame on China!" when everyone else is doing variations on the same theme.
...they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?"
The only real option here is to ignore the law, as many of us here do now. The United States, and much of the western world, has become so enamored with short-term profit gain, that they're sacrificing the technological progress of all of humanity. The only rational course of action is to ignore them until another group or organization either through economic, political, or military means, remediates the problem.
Yes, I am suggesting that copyright law could eventually become an issue which countries go to war over. No, I don't think it's that crazy: Governments are already engaging in mass electronic attacks of their enemies. It's only a matter of time before things get physical. UEFI could be perceived as a threat to national security: It's giving one corporation carte blanche access to hardware owned by other governments. Redmond, WA may soon be ringed with missiles and armed guards to keep out other governments when they find out their hardware has been taken over by a foreign power. This is just how the world seems to be evolving... there's too much at stake now.
Censorship is ultimately about breaking trust networks. Pro-censorship governments almost always want the citizens to trust them above all other sources. Cryptography, anti-censorship proxies, and other communication mediums provide an external point of view. This is only dangerous to governments that aren't telling the truth -- in which case, their reaction to such communication mediums is from an understanding of how much that trust would be damaged if word got out about what they're really doing. What this means is, it's obvious that such a government would poison pill any alternatives by making them appear (or interfering with them in such as a way as to cause them) to be untrustworthy. The malware may or may not have been released by the government; It's doubtful we'll ever know the truth, but it is obviously in the government's best interests to damage the reliability of any kind of 'bypass' software.
Disclaimer: Many governments, including those who claim to be "free" engage in similar behavior. Your government is not exempt from this behavior.
Perhaps if they're painted like a police box, nobody will even notice they're present?
As a bonus, equipment with broken chameleon circuits could continue to operate in the community. Of course, you'd also have to put up signs saying that upon meeting an adult who talks very quickly and mumbles about his screwdriver, you are instructed to immediately provide your full name and some kind of sob story. It'll save them when the monsters, sentient water, spacecraft, and parasites come.
Call me a luddite, but I'm perfectly happy to stick with cash.
You're not a luddite. I try explaining the need for cash to my geek friends, but they're mystified about why anyone would want to keep something in "analog land". But basically, every system has slippage, whether it's a packet-switched network, or landing airplanes on aircraft carriers. Traffic engineers have found that, for example, if 3% of the vehicles on the road break the law by speeding or aggressive driving, it stops standing waves of vehicles forming near egress points, and actually improves the entire system's reliability. In most systems, you will find that if you increase tolerances too much, the system, engine, or component, becomes much less reliable and efficient.
Economic systems are no different. Governments will always be pushing for a perfect 1:1 parity between actions and identities, because the goal of government is perfect order, which means everything following formal rules, with 100% compliance. And should they ever even come within spitting distance of achieving this, they will have made themselves obsolete compared to other countries. We're already seeing what this kind of economic "hardening" does: Moving everything to electronic payment means that prices can jump wildly; The stock market is currently controlled by systems that make buy/sell decisions in fractions of a millisecond, and when the algorithms in those systems homogenized, we watched billions of dollars vaporize. Homogeny in economic systems (information systems too) has the same effect as it does in biological systems: It makes them vulnerable to disease.
But regardless, whatever transactional system you use, letting the provider take a percentage rather than a fixed cost is criminally stupid. Any high volume transaction system can process a single transaction for fractions of a penny; And that cost includes equipment maintenance, replacement, and the labor to carry out said tasks. You're paying 3% of your net income for the convenience of handing vendors a piece of plastic instead of a piece of paper... over the course of a year, that'll add up to around, what, $850 for a person making median income? Think of what an extra $850 a year could do for you. Then realize that it's not: It's working for someone else because you're a lazy ass. I'm sorry, but my "luddite-ness" gives me an $850 'convenience tax' credit at the end of the year; If I invest that, it'll pay for my retirement. So you know what, I'm thinking... "Cash: It gets me Everywhere I Want To Be". As opposed to Visa, which is everywhere I want to be, waiting, like a serpent, to stick its fangs in my wallet.
Hmm. A new program to uniquely track and identify scientists springs up in the middle of an all out war between science and the idiocracy. Totally coincidental. *adjusts tin foil hat*
I always find it amusing when Google claims that it's impossible to filter copyrighted content, that the uploaders are the copyright infringers, but at the same time, YouTube is doing a heck of a job to filter out porn -- you never find porn there and I don't think that's because nobody ever tried uploading it. So what gives?
I don't think you're looking hard enough. That said, I wouldn't click the link unless you want to have a limp dick for the next week. However, fewer people object to copyright infringement than sexual content; I don't see religious groups spending wednesday nights at church clicking through videos to report which ones are copyrighted. -_-
E-mail will replace regular mail. It's been a slow process, but the Post Office (in the US and Britain; I can't speak for other countries) is starting to cut back; The majority of what is being sent out are physical goods and junk mail (advertising). Many people here have switched to online bill pay, and most banks offer automatic payment if the company (rarely) doesn't do bill to credit card.
Party lines gave way to single user land lines, and single user landlines gave way to cell phones. Cell phones are now giving way to text-based near realtime communication like text messages. And cell phones will eventually transition to packet-switched radio communications using VoIP and QoS.
The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.
So let's put it in plain english:
Political leanings had a bigger influence than their level of education.
There. Simple, to the point, guaranteed to have rooms full of people shaking their finger at the computer screen. Because that's what you get when you simplify. :D
As I understand it, countries that have hosted the Olympic Games have to treat the rings and other IOC symbols as hardcoded famous trademarks
Yeah, another example of how copyrights and trademarks can never die; 776 BC and it still hasn't expired.
But the truth is, making guns in a new caliber and making ammunition to match is easy enough that some hobbyists do it in their garage.
Yup. And a lot of times, those self-packed loads fail. Gunpowder mixture is the wrong type, wasn't packed tight enough, moisture, grease, etc. I've seen these hobbyists you speak of; All of them have at least one story of how they ruined their gun because their custom ammo was shit. You do it amateur, you get amateur results. But hey, don't let me stop you from taking your custom-built guns and ammo into a combat situation...
There are, apparently (I Am Not A Military Expert), valid military reasons to make your guns and ammunition incompatible with the enemy's. America and the rest of NATO were the first to use 5mm-caliber small arms - the M16, FAMAS, L86, etc. are all chambered for a standard 5.56mm round, and I believe most even have compatible magazines.
The "valid military reason" is called "economy of scale". We don't want to blow their budget on ammo, and by happy coincidence, our allies don't either.
Iran is simply doing the same thing. Instead of using NATO-standard 7.62mm miniguns, 20mm autocannons, 40mm grenade launchers or 2.75" rockets, they'll use ones that are just slightly incompatible, but nearly identical in performance.
That would be stupid. Iran doesn't have much of a defense industry; they rely on importing arms. It makes no sense to outfit some of your military with Mark I whatchamagigies and some of them with the incompatible Mark II whatchamagigies. There are few things more damning than sitting next to three full ammo boxes, and not one round that'll fit the only gun you have.
One reason is economics - trying to stimulate their own arms industry,
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to stimulate your industry: That's a purely American thing. In the rest of the world, you steal tech, duplicate it, and save yourself the R&D costs. See also: North Korea, China, India, Egypt, Iraq...
Another could be that they are more concerned about being invaded, rather than invading others. You are, after all, more likely to be the one capturing supplies, rather than having your supplies captured, when you are on the attack.
The traditional response to this is to decentralize your weapons depots, caches, and supply lines, and to be as covert as possible. Every ground war we've fought against similarily sized and equipped militaries has been massively asymetrical, and the enemy wears us down by hit and run tactics (which we invented), and urban guerilla warfare. They don't give two shits how much you capture, as long as they've got just enough left to keep costing us economically. They know if we invade, we're out a few more trillion dollars -- and our economy just can't handle that right now (it couldn't before!). Stop thinking like this is conventional warfare: It isn't. It hasn't been since the 70s.
History would seem to bear this view out - during the Cold War, neither side used intercompatible ammunition, and as it turns out, neither side much wanted to invade the other.
History remembers that it doesn't really matter what ammo you use, as long as you've got a fuckton of it. And by ammo, I mean nukes.
The most notable case of cross-compatible weaponry was in WW2, when the British designed the Sten gun to use the same ammunition as the German MP40. And guess what (spoiler alert)? Britain later invaded Germany!
Yeah, why would a country who's factories were burning, a third of its population dead or injured, and entire cities leveled want to put their limited resources towards making sure they could use whatever ammo was available. The mind boggles.
OK, that's probably a massive simplification of things (remember, IANAME), but still, look at things
, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country,
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.
You just don't get it. Mobile is going to hire Steve Ballmer to crush them. With a chair.
Only if they can get more developers, developers, developers, developers. And considering the next iteration of their operating system's programming tools is full of limitations, limitations, limitations, limitations, I'm guessing even a supertanker filled with Ballmers and chairs won't be enough to convince anyone to develop for CrippleOS(tm) (aka Windows 8). And as has been learned many times over by everyone but Microsoft; It doesn't matter how awesome your product is... if you don't have people developing applications for it, it dies on the launch pad.
The thing people like a lot of the times is that microsoft offers support, they have it stuck in their head that if you spend money on it, it must be better than a free alternative.
I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies. Support has nothing to do with the decision: Exclusionary contracts do. Microsoft offers huge discounts to businesses that agree not to use a competitor's product. They also regularily check for compliance and there are large fines for any company caught using open source software. Management often parrots what Microsoft says to tell the tech workers who question the policy, but if you ask the right people the right questions, you'll find out the company you're working for entered into an exclusive contract with Microsoft, and that was one of the conditions.
Also, rational, thinking girls, which we find appealing, end up switching teams (like yourself) so after a while ...
Riiiight, my sexuality is a fad and with the right penis, I'll "switch teams" again. Sexuality does not work that way.
...destroying their ability to connect with women, and therefore threatening the future of our entire species.
For 20,000 years, men have been busy beating each other and other animals to a pulp, engaging in risky behaviors, being generally anti-social, and treating women like dirt. If they're playing video games and watching porn instead of those things, I think we're going to be just fine, thanks.
And as for being unable to connect with women, they haven't been able to do that since we crawled down from the trees. Somehow, dick still manages to meet vagina. People will keep having sex no matter how bad it is, because bad sex is worse than no sex... and really, if you're going to be a straight woman, once you've weaned yourself off Disney propaganda, your standards drop dramatically. Look at how many of us married fat dudes who beach themselves on couches.
The human species is in no danger of going extinct... despite yearly predictions of the end of the world. Which is disappointing really... it means I'll probably have to pay back my student loans. -_-
Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?
Which is fine when you're conducting foreign intelligence operations. However, the FBI's charter is to investigate private citizens within the United States. Given their track record, I don't think anything they do should be opaque:
They consider anyone who protests the government a terrorist, recently helped bust protesters for terrorism in Chicago -- which in actuality they were busting them for making beer. In their own home. They break federal laws so often that they had to change the laws so the FBI could continue to get convictions -- they still conceal evidence from defense attorneys to this day, and increasingly call such evidence off limits "due to national security". The FBI was instrumental in the passage and current use of the Patriot Act, which prevents citizens from even knowing the evidence presented against them, as the Constitution prescribed. I could go on, but really, I think you get the point: The FBI is one of the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the world. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country worldwide. The Innocence Project routinely finds people who have been sitting 20 or 30 year prison terms for crimes they can prove beyond reasonable doubt they did not commit. The FBI's response has been to open case files and monitor everyone who comes in contact with the project. Anyone who shows the FBI as a corrupt organization quickly finds themselves facing trumped up charges of tax evasion, drugs, or even copyright infringement: Whatever it takes to silence their critics.
I mean, I could go on... it's not hard to find examples of FBI agents engaging in activities that in any other civilized country would be grounds for imprisonment... and that was pre-9/11. Since then, they've enjoyed practically blanket-immunity for civil rights violations, and it shows. Any citizen of this country that thinks the FBI is anything but a bunch of thugs with a huge budget and no ethical constraints is deluding themselves.
I think the real story here is that people still believe innovation is possible in the United States. The patent on originality isn't set to expire here for another 150 years plus the life of the author, at which point, the rest of the world will send researchers and film crews in to study our city ruins and study the native peoples...
NIH Study Finds That Coffee Drinkers Have Lower Risk of Death.
In other news, death is avoidable.
It was a program by one Robert Tappan Morris, as I recall.
True, but he programmed it badly, and used active injection into the network to measure it, rather than programming each node to passively collect data and make decisions based on the results of that. In short, he was young and stupid.