I submitted this story specifically so I could say that: I don't want robots making my pizza, I want a skilled human being making my pizza, not for what a pizza costs. Otherwise I'd just settle for a shitty frozen pizza and throw it in the oven at home for a fraction of the price. At the very least there has to be a competent human being supervising the automated process for quality control purposes, but even then some pizza made on an assembly line by a bunch of robots just doesn't sound appetizing. If this is what the world ends up going to, then I guess I'll be staying home and making my own meals 100% of the time. I suspect I won't be alone in that, either.
Eventually the Internet will become such a sewer when it comes to being surveilled and so broken from all the walled gardens and blockades from this country and that, that it'll become nigh-unto unusable, and many people (and businesses) will just stop bothering with it. In short this sort of bullshit will eventually kill the Internet completely.
Okay; fair enough. This being the Internet and all, it wouldn't have been the first time someone didn't bother actually reading something, then making wild assumptions about the content they didn't actually read. xD
Yes, it's going to be a problem for everyone, assuming it actually becomes a law, but as previously stated they don't seem to comprehend how the Internet works any better than politicians anywhere else do. Hopefully someone will point out to them that it just can't be done unless they really do want to disconnect Russia from the rest of the Internet, and kick out all non-Russian companies providing services there.
claiming that this law is only a problem for Russia and needn't bother us here
Uh, I never claimed any such thing in my own comment so I have no idea why you're attributing that to me, please read my comment again since you see to be unclear on it.
Non-Russian-based companies can't be compelled to comply with this, and furthermore some companies are sure to just completely pull out of Russia completely. Apparently Russian politicians are no smarter than politicians anywhere else, and apparently are uncomprehending of the fact that the Internet is not just inside Russia or controlled by Russia.
How do you know I didn't do that on purpose? After all, if given their druthers, the NSA/CIA/FBI/three-letter-agency-of-your-choice would declare themselves kings over us all, now wouldn't they? xD
Thanks for the correction. I'm not all that well-versed on my 17th century references.
The precedent that it would set is the problem. If they have free reign to use hacking methods and tools to get IP address and other machine-specific information without a warrant, then they could get any information they wanted.
If this was upheld by SCOTUS then about all you could do anymore is keep anything important or sensitive on an external drive that is only connected when you need to access it. For those of you who are super-paranoid, I guess it would be time to have no internal HDD in your computer, and boot from a DVD, so your system is 100% read-only.
In my opinion, the real story here is not the end effect of cheating emissions testing, but the cheating itself. The revelations of what Volkswagen did opened a virtual Padoras' Box of scrutiny of all vehicle manufacturers, and that scrutiny has revealed more cheating of standards (both emissions, and fuel economy) testing than I think anyone thought possible or is really comfortable with. For me, the takeaway from this entire scandal, and things being subsequently revealed about the auto industry in general, is that the internal combustion engine is no longer a long-term sustainable technology, not if fuel economy and emissions standards keep getting harder to meet and stricter to comply with. The future of transporation is probably going to be electric in one form or another because of this, if for no other reason than to consolidate any pollutants into one source instead of hundreds of millions of sources.
Okay let me put it this way: It has to pass the KHELDAN Test: It has to convince me that it's fully conscious, in posession of a full set of emotions, has a sense of humor, and understands irony and sarcasm. It has to have an emotional appreciation for art and music. There is no set time limit on this Test; I am the sole determiner of whether the Test is in progress or has been completed, and I am the sole judge of whether a grade of Pass or Fail is assigned to the machine in question. There are no rules to this Test, and I may use any and all methods and means at my disposal during the Test, bar none.
Seems clear as day to me: People are getting stupider, not smarter. We don't have real artificial intelligence yet, and won't for quite some time to come, if ever, and by the way my definition of real AI is: Passes the Turing Test with flying colors, every single time. None of this 'expert system' bullshit, no 'clever learning algorithms', you sit down with it and have a totally random conversation and it's at least as good as your average human being, complete with a full range of emotions and a real sense of humor, including the abilty to comprehend irony and sarcasm. Otherwise: It's just another tool, property, and is to be treated as such.
I swear, I just want to start punching people in the head whenever they start talking about the crap we have now as 'artificial intelligence'.
1. This point is invalid unless you're connecting it to an external amplifier with a hi-Z input, and even then unless it's ten feet away you won't get significant amounts of 60Hz hum or any other interference, unless you're in an RF-noisy environment (like next door to a big transmitter). 2. They're only 'finicky' for people who aren't careful with their electronics to start with, so don't try to tell us it's everyone. 3. They're 'universal' enough. TRS is what all headphones have; TRSS is what most headsets have. Engineers know this and account for it. 4. So some 'attacker' might discover you like to listen to Radiohead? LOL my heart bleeds for you. Not really a valid point unless you have a tinfoil hat. 5. Not ALL phones. You get what you pay for. Also, unless you're an 'audiophile' type, you won't know the difference, and unless you're listening to totally uncompressed or totally lossless audio, you won't hear the difference anyway. 6. This is the only really valid point you're making, but you're far from the first to do so.
That's not the only reason, though, that's just their ostensible reason. The recording and movie industries have been trying to close the 'analog hole' for years now, and that's also what this is about. Removing any baseband audio output from devices means you can' t just plug it straight into another computer or digital recorder and record music in analog format, then re-digitize it. Of course they're creating a huge inconvenience for the average, non-pirating end-user, whereas all you need is a USB DAC dongle to 're-open' the so-called 'analog hole'; at some point audio must be analog again, otherwise human ears will never hear it, therefore there's always a way to gain the connectivity necessary to record baseband audio. Of course I'm not saying that Apple's claim that it's doing this to make phones thinner isn't valid, either, but it's not the only reason. Oh and by the way expect to see analog headphone jacks disappearing from lots of things for the above mentioned reason.
Are they really looking for overall reform of the copyright and royalties system with regards to recorded music, or are they just shilling for the recording industry? If what they want just puts more money in the pockets of the recording industry and not into the actual pockets of the artists and other content creators, then I say "Fuck that".
You want things to be different? Stop voting like there are only two political parties in this country, regardless of the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs and batshit-insane lunatics they keep trotting out as 'candidates', even if who you vote for has no chance of winning an election. Remember: repeating the same actions over and over again, expecting a different result, is one definition of insanity. Help stop the insanity!
The issue the recording industry had with Internet Radio was over royalty payments. A traditional, over-the-air broadcast radio station has a listening area defined by the geography of the region it's in, and it's broadcast power, and therefore there is a defined number of people living within that market. ASCAP fees are based on that defined number of people living within that market. However with Internet Radio your 'market' is anywhere on the planet where there is Internet connectivity and people with computers to connect to it. Therefore their royalty structure didn't work, or so they claimed, and the new royalty structure imposed upon Internet Radio stations, even if they were operated out of the spare room in someone's house and operated at a loss every month because they had exactly zero revenues, bankrupted the vast majority of them and drove them off the Internet. I remember there being a drive by some of the more popular stations to accept donations, and the ones that still exist play lots of commercials, but due to the money-grubbing behavior of the recording industry, it's now a dead in the water, as you say. Which is very sad. Naturally that's when the 'official' streaming services started popping up, properly monetized by the recording industry. And they're crap, so far as I'm concerned. Therefore, I'll just stick to what I own copies of, or FM broadcast radio, or what I can get from alternative sources.
Evidently you're good at jumping to conclusions. Shoutcast used to be a Thing, but the broadcast industry and the recording industry both more or less ruined it with all their licensing and royalties crap. It drove the best ones out of business, and what's left is more or less the same as broadcast radio. So I don't usually bother with it anymore. Besides which I'm not always somewhere i have an Internet connection and computer anyway, and I don't have or want a smartphone (and if I did I wouldn't want to use up my very limited, overpriced dataplan on that) so it's a non-starter for me anymore anyway. If I'm at a computer and want music I'll listen to my own music.
Even if you're not paying for it, you're paying for it, in the form of being subjected to commercials.
I personally don't believe in 'streaming' services over the internet. I've tried them, and I don't like them one bit. If I want to listen to music for free and not have a choice in what I'm hearing, I'll turn on an FM radio, and mute it/turn down the volume/change the station when there's a commercial block. Otherwise I want to own copies of the music I want to listen to. Likewise I don't like or believe in 'The Cloud', since anything you're paying for that exists in 'The Cloud' isn't ever really yours, it's only available to you until someone else decides you're not entitled to it anymore. Nope, no thanks, I'll keep my own copies of media, or at least files, on a local piece of hardware that I own, that nobody else has the rights to examine, alter, or delete.
If you get into a car that has no controls that a human can use to directly control the speed and direction of the vehicle, then you are insane. I'd rather walk everywhere the rest of my life rather than get into some deathtrap like that.
See, I don't claim to know anything. We're all just a bunch of random dudes on a more-or-less anonymous internet discussion forum voicing our opinions. For all I know there'll be a revolution and the Internet will experience a second Golden Age. Or maybe it'll all go to corporate hell, and Internet 2.0 will spring up via Onion Routing or the Deep Web, and a new Golden Age will exist there, free of corporate interference. Or for all anyone knows, the Internet will become such bureaucratic crap all over the world that people will get sick of it and just not bother with it anymore, go back to the old ways of doing things. Who knows? Nobody.
You should vote for him anyway. "Why," you ask? To send a message to our political system and the American public in general: We're more than a two-party system, and we don't have to put up with having to choose the 'least bad' of only two candidates, from two clueless political parties that are so out of touch with things that they don't really represent us anymore. Will he get elected? No. We'll have to put up with Trump or Clinton for at least 4 years, and may the Universe have mercy upon us.. but at least when things go totally to shit because of them, you can say "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for them" with a straight face and a clear conscience. I'm dead serious: Aren't you tired of compromising your own values every 4 years?
If you don't vote for this guy, at least vote for someone else who isn't Trump or Clinton, someone you can at least believe in. Then your hands are clean.
People seem to have forgotten that the Internet was originally called ARPANET. The research was funded by the U.S. government, for use by the U.S. government (and military). It was never any sort of humanitarian project to connect the world and allow the sharing of ideas and allow people to freely communicate or any such blue-sky, egalitarian concept. All that stuff came much, much later on, and for a while, there was a 'Golden Age' of the Internet, before the corporations really got their hooks into it, where it was precisely that: A Mecca of freely sharing information, ideas, and communication, the likes of which hadn't been seen before. For those of you who remember those days, remember them well, and revel in the memory: It'll never happen like that again, unless it's over something akin to the Deep Web, where the corporations and governments really can't control things. Of course those days are long gone now, and what we have to day is just a way for corporations to collect data on people, which they then use for profiling, which they monetize by selling to other corporations, which in turn use it to create 'targeted ads', which are inserted into your datastream, jammed into your inbox, and generally speaking shoved down your throats -- and you're paying for the privilege every time you pay your ISP for access. Meanwhile governments are also using it to surveil people, especially their own citizens. Any semblance of it being a Mecca for information, ideas, and free communication between people all over the world, exists only at the pleasure of corporations and governments, who could shut those things out completely if they really wanted to. We're even having to fight constantly to keep the most basic communication protocols, that make the Internet function, freely accessible: corporations fight against Net Neutrality principles and regulations, complaining that it's hurting their business (profits) and telling gloom-and-doom stories about how it's going to 'stifle innovation and growth' of the Internet. The Internet may not have originally been a money-making project, but that's what it's turned into, and closing that particular Pandoras Box would be very difficult now, if not entirely impossible. Corporations like Xfinity/Comcast and AT&T literally own too much of the infrastructure, for instance, and I don't know that even if the U.S. government threw it's total weight at them, they'd be able to make them change anything. More than likely they'd just threaten to shut down the Internet here in the U.S.. But there are corporations all over the world that also make up the bulk of the Internet infrastructure, and we have no control over how they're conducting things.
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I submitted this story specifically so I could say that: I don't want robots making my pizza, I want a skilled human being making my pizza, not for what a pizza costs. Otherwise I'd just settle for a shitty frozen pizza and throw it in the oven at home for a fraction of the price. At the very least there has to be a competent human being supervising the automated process for quality control purposes, but even then some pizza made on an assembly line by a bunch of robots just doesn't sound appetizing. If this is what the world ends up going to, then I guess I'll be staying home and making my own meals 100% of the time. I suspect I won't be alone in that, either.
Eventually the Internet will become such a sewer when it comes to being surveilled and so broken from all the walled gardens and blockades from this country and that, that it'll become nigh-unto unusable, and many people (and businesses) will just stop bothering with it. In short this sort of bullshit will eventually kill the Internet completely.
Okay; fair enough. This being the Internet and all, it wouldn't have been the first time someone didn't bother actually reading something, then making wild assumptions about the content they didn't actually read. xD
Yes, it's going to be a problem for everyone, assuming it actually becomes a law, but as previously stated they don't seem to comprehend how the Internet works any better than politicians anywhere else do. Hopefully someone will point out to them that it just can't be done unless they really do want to disconnect Russia from the rest of the Internet, and kick out all non-Russian companies providing services there.
claiming that this law is only a problem for Russia and needn't bother us here
Uh, I never claimed any such thing in my own comment so I have no idea why you're attributing that to me, please read my comment again since you see to be unclear on it.
Non-Russian-based companies can't be compelled to comply with this, and furthermore some companies are sure to just completely pull out of Russia completely. Apparently Russian politicians are no smarter than politicians anywhere else, and apparently are uncomprehending of the fact that the Internet is not just inside Russia or controlled by Russia.
So it comes with spyware then.
No doubt! Does it come with a 'Welcome to the Botnet' brochure, too?
How do you know I didn't do that on purpose? After all, if given their druthers, the NSA/CIA/FBI/three-letter-agency-of-your-choice would declare themselves kings over us all, now wouldn't they? xD
Thanks for the correction. I'm not all that well-versed on my 17th century references.
The precedent that it would set is the problem. If they have free reign to use hacking methods and tools to get IP address and other machine-specific information without a warrant, then they could get any information they wanted.
If this was upheld by SCOTUS then about all you could do anymore is keep anything important or sensitive on an external drive that is only connected when you need to access it. For those of you who are super-paranoid, I guess it would be time to have no internal HDD in your computer, and boot from a DVD, so your system is 100% read-only.
In my opinion, the real story here is not the end effect of cheating emissions testing, but the cheating itself. The revelations of what Volkswagen did opened a virtual Padoras' Box of scrutiny of all vehicle manufacturers, and that scrutiny has revealed more cheating of standards (both emissions, and fuel economy) testing than I think anyone thought possible or is really comfortable with. For me, the takeaway from this entire scandal, and things being subsequently revealed about the auto industry in general, is that the internal combustion engine is no longer a long-term sustainable technology, not if fuel economy and emissions standards keep getting harder to meet and stricter to comply with. The future of transporation is probably going to be electric in one form or another because of this, if for no other reason than to consolidate any pollutants into one source instead of hundreds of millions of sources.
Okay let me put it this way: It has to pass the KHELDAN Test: It has to convince me that it's fully conscious, in posession of a full set of emotions, has a sense of humor, and understands irony and sarcasm. It has to have an emotional appreciation for art and music. There is no set time limit on this Test; I am the sole determiner of whether the Test is in progress or has been completed, and I am the sole judge of whether a grade of Pass or Fail is assigned to the machine in question. There are no rules to this Test, and I may use any and all methods and means at my disposal during the Test, bar none.
Your average smartphone has a higher IQ than a fair fraction of the population already, so I guess it doesn't have far to go now does it?
Seems clear as day to me: People are getting stupider, not smarter. We don't have real artificial intelligence yet, and won't for quite some time to come, if ever, and by the way my definition of real AI is: Passes the Turing Test with flying colors, every single time. None of this 'expert system' bullshit, no 'clever learning algorithms', you sit down with it and have a totally random conversation and it's at least as good as your average human being, complete with a full range of emotions and a real sense of humor, including the abilty to comprehend irony and sarcasm. Otherwise: It's just another tool, property, and is to be treated as such.
I swear, I just want to start punching people in the head whenever they start talking about the crap we have now as 'artificial intelligence'.
1. This point is invalid unless you're connecting it to an external amplifier with a hi-Z input, and even then unless it's ten feet away you won't get significant amounts of 60Hz hum or any other interference, unless you're in an RF-noisy environment (like next door to a big transmitter).
2. They're only 'finicky' for people who aren't careful with their electronics to start with, so don't try to tell us it's everyone.
3. They're 'universal' enough. TRS is what all headphones have; TRSS is what most headsets have. Engineers know this and account for it.
4. So some 'attacker' might discover you like to listen to Radiohead? LOL my heart bleeds for you. Not really a valid point unless you have a tinfoil hat.
5. Not ALL phones. You get what you pay for. Also, unless you're an 'audiophile' type, you won't know the difference, and unless you're listening to totally uncompressed or totally lossless audio, you won't hear the difference anyway.
6. This is the only really valid point you're making, but you're far from the first to do so.
That's not the only reason, though, that's just their ostensible reason. The recording and movie industries have been trying to close the 'analog hole' for years now, and that's also what this is about. Removing any baseband audio output from devices means you can' t just plug it straight into another computer or digital recorder and record music in analog format, then re-digitize it. Of course they're creating a huge inconvenience for the average, non-pirating end-user, whereas all you need is a USB DAC dongle to 're-open' the so-called 'analog hole'; at some point audio must be analog again, otherwise human ears will never hear it, therefore there's always a way to gain the connectivity necessary to record baseband audio. Of course I'm not saying that Apple's claim that it's doing this to make phones thinner isn't valid, either, but it's not the only reason. Oh and by the way expect to see analog headphone jacks disappearing from lots of things for the above mentioned reason.
Are they really looking for overall reform of the copyright and royalties system with regards to recorded music, or are they just shilling for the recording industry? If what they want just puts more money in the pockets of the recording industry and not into the actual pockets of the artists and other content creators, then I say "Fuck that".
You want things to be different? Stop voting like there are only two political parties in this country, regardless of the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs and batshit-insane lunatics they keep trotting out as 'candidates', even if who you vote for has no chance of winning an election. Remember: repeating the same actions over and over again, expecting a different result, is one definition of insanity. Help stop the insanity!
The issue the recording industry had with Internet Radio was over royalty payments. A traditional, over-the-air broadcast radio station has a listening area defined by the geography of the region it's in, and it's broadcast power, and therefore there is a defined number of people living within that market. ASCAP fees are based on that defined number of people living within that market. However with Internet Radio your 'market' is anywhere on the planet where there is Internet connectivity and people with computers to connect to it. Therefore their royalty structure didn't work, or so they claimed, and the new royalty structure imposed upon Internet Radio stations, even if they were operated out of the spare room in someone's house and operated at a loss every month because they had exactly zero revenues, bankrupted the vast majority of them and drove them off the Internet. I remember there being a drive by some of the more popular stations to accept donations, and the ones that still exist play lots of commercials, but due to the money-grubbing behavior of the recording industry, it's now a dead in the water, as you say. Which is very sad. Naturally that's when the 'official' streaming services started popping up, properly monetized by the recording industry. And they're crap, so far as I'm concerned. Therefore, I'll just stick to what I own copies of, or FM broadcast radio, or what I can get from alternative sources.
Evidently you're good at jumping to conclusions. Shoutcast used to be a Thing, but the broadcast industry and the recording industry both more or less ruined it with all their licensing and royalties crap. It drove the best ones out of business, and what's left is more or less the same as broadcast radio. So I don't usually bother with it anymore. Besides which I'm not always somewhere i have an Internet connection and computer anyway, and I don't have or want a smartphone (and if I did I wouldn't want to use up my very limited, overpriced dataplan on that) so it's a non-starter for me anymore anyway. If I'm at a computer and want music I'll listen to my own music.
Even if you're not paying for it, you're paying for it, in the form of being subjected to commercials.
I personally don't believe in 'streaming' services over the internet. I've tried them, and I don't like them one bit. If I want to listen to music for free and not have a choice in what I'm hearing, I'll turn on an FM radio, and mute it/turn down the volume/change the station when there's a commercial block. Otherwise I want to own copies of the music I want to listen to. Likewise I don't like or believe in 'The Cloud', since anything you're paying for that exists in 'The Cloud' isn't ever really yours, it's only available to you until someone else decides you're not entitled to it anymore. Nope, no thanks, I'll keep my own copies of media, or at least files, on a local piece of hardware that I own, that nobody else has the rights to examine, alter, or delete.
Go to hell.
If you get into a car that has no controls that a human can use to directly control the speed and direction of the vehicle, then you are insane. I'd rather walk everywhere the rest of my life rather than get into some deathtrap like that.
See, I don't claim to know anything. We're all just a bunch of random dudes on a more-or-less anonymous internet discussion forum voicing our opinions. For all I know there'll be a revolution and the Internet will experience a second Golden Age. Or maybe it'll all go to corporate hell, and Internet 2.0 will spring up via Onion Routing or the Deep Web, and a new Golden Age will exist there, free of corporate interference. Or for all anyone knows, the Internet will become such bureaucratic crap all over the world that people will get sick of it and just not bother with it anymore, go back to the old ways of doing things. Who knows? Nobody.
You should vote for him anyway. "Why," you ask? To send a message to our political system and the American public in general: We're more than a two-party system, and we don't have to put up with having to choose the 'least bad' of only two candidates, from two clueless political parties that are so out of touch with things that they don't really represent us anymore. Will he get elected? No. We'll have to put up with Trump or Clinton for at least 4 years, and may the Universe have mercy upon us.. but at least when things go totally to shit because of them, you can say "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for them" with a straight face and a clear conscience. I'm dead serious: Aren't you tired of compromising your own values every 4 years?
If you don't vote for this guy, at least vote for someone else who isn't Trump or Clinton, someone you can at least believe in. Then your hands are clean.
People seem to have forgotten that the Internet was originally called ARPANET. The research was funded by the U.S. government, for use by the U.S. government (and military). It was never any sort of humanitarian project to connect the world and allow the sharing of ideas and allow people to freely communicate or any such blue-sky, egalitarian concept. All that stuff came much, much later on, and for a while, there was a 'Golden Age' of the Internet, before the corporations really got their hooks into it, where it was precisely that: A Mecca of freely sharing information, ideas, and communication, the likes of which hadn't been seen before. For those of you who remember those days, remember them well, and revel in the memory: It'll never happen like that again, unless it's over something akin to the Deep Web, where the corporations and governments really can't control things. Of course those days are long gone now, and what we have to day is just a way for corporations to collect data on people, which they then use for profiling, which they monetize by selling to other corporations, which in turn use it to create 'targeted ads', which are inserted into your datastream, jammed into your inbox, and generally speaking shoved down your throats -- and you're paying for the privilege every time you pay your ISP for access. Meanwhile governments are also using it to surveil people, especially their own citizens. Any semblance of it being a Mecca for information, ideas, and free communication between people all over the world, exists only at the pleasure of corporations and governments, who could shut those things out completely if they really wanted to. We're even having to fight constantly to keep the most basic communication protocols, that make the Internet function, freely accessible: corporations fight against Net Neutrality principles and regulations, complaining that it's hurting their business (profits) and telling gloom-and-doom stories about how it's going to 'stifle innovation and growth' of the Internet. The Internet may not have originally been a money-making project, but that's what it's turned into, and closing that particular Pandoras Box would be very difficult now, if not entirely impossible. Corporations like Xfinity/Comcast and AT&T literally own too much of the infrastructure, for instance, and I don't know that even if the U.S. government threw it's total weight at them, they'd be able to make them change anything. More than likely they'd just threaten to shut down the Internet here in the U.S.. But there are corporations all over the world that also make up the bulk of the Internet infrastructure, and we have no control over how they're conducting things.