I don't want my TV producers negotiating with my hardware manufacturers or software developers. I want them negotiating with me, the person who watches the TV. Why the fuck should such a totally-unrelated third party be involved? How can that possibly be in my best interests?
It's not just a little weird; it's totally absurd. It's like if a I drive to the store to buy some socks, and what socks are available depends on a deal between the textile producer and my car manufacturer. WUT?! Believe me: this is not a way to get me to buy your socks or your car. This is something a sockmaker or carmaker thinks up when they're out of ideas and know that there are vastly better and cheaper socks and cars available.
Yes, good point! Without the government sticking their guns in everyone's faces and enforcing the email-writer's monopoly on commercially profiting from their blood, sweat, and tears, what incentive would party members have to communicate with each other?
If we don't properly enforce this monopoly, party members will give up and stop emailing each other! Then where will be be?
It's got to be some stupid script "helping" the editors.
Imagine you were serving content-contextual ads. You could show an Amazon ad here. So some idiot figured "if it's close enough for the advertising department, then it's close enough for the editorial department." The problem is that they never tested it, and nobody at Slashdot actually reads Slashdot so they're unaware how ridiculous it looks.
Let this be a lesson, folks: if you don't eat your own dog food, then you have to test your dog food in the lab. But FFS don't just throw it out into the world with nobody looking at it, or everyone's going to be staring at you.
Back to on-topic: I don't understand how there's even a question here. The entire point of Amazon's Echo is that it's a bug in your home, that you're wilfully giving up privacy to have someone else's computer constantly listening to you. If it weren't listening, it couldn't work.
This is like someone saying "I didn't have a flight but I forged a boarding pass, and then bribed the TSA worker with a hundred dollar bill, saying 'rectal exam, please.' His fingers were so cold! Anyway, the next day, I couldn't get anyone to tell me whether or not my privacy has been compromised. Why are they so suspiciously silent?"
This is opt-in surveillance. The only problem I have with opt-in surveillance is that The Truth (people are idiots) makes me feel uncomfortable. But knowledge is a good thing, whether I'm comfortable with it or not.
The reason for the content disappearing and missing seasons or episodes are licensing issues. Hollyweed is too greedy and thinks that their content is worth far more than it really is worth.
Why does anyone want to get this content from a middleman? What's wrong with Netflix selling you only the "Netflix original" shows, NBC selling you theirs, HBO selling you theirs, etc? There's no reason anyone should want to get Hollywood's show from Netflix or Amazon. It's just going to be marked up. You have The Internet now!! You can communicate with anyone. Deal direct.
Turns out there's answer to the above question: because most people are still using these stupid proprietary applications, instead of standard interfaces, to watch TV. So if you personally had a dozen TV vendors, then you'd have to switch between a dozen apps, and that's going to totally suck no matter what. Even if someone's app is ok (and that's usually about as good as they get, huh?) you still can't have Netflix shows on the same alphabetical menu as Amazon and HBO shows.
(Unless you pirate, because once the content is liberated, it has a standard interface, which means you can pipe to any interface you want.)
So fuck 'em. Standard interfaces or else No Sale. (And seriously: is a standard interface such a burdensome thing to ask?! Can you think of any endeavor where it's not considered both the ideal and the common-sense way things should be?) If a vendor can get onboard with doing things right, they can get paid.
But if they say "use my software" (sometimes disguised as "use my box" or "use one of these supported devices" but we're computer people so we know this hardware is just for running their shitty software) then they are trying to create one of two futures:
Where people have to switch between multiple un-integrated UIs to access basically that same type of data. That's guaranteed to be a UI fail.
Where people have a single database UI presented by a middleman who has to license-for-resale everything. That's guaranteed to be expensive and also guaranteed to have severe selection problems (since they won't really be able to get anywhere close to "everything" no matter how hard they try).
Both are absurd dystopias that you can't possibly want. Netflix is currently just changing their blend between these two hells, and I guess people were used to the devil-they-knew. But what you don't hear anyone talking about, is Netflix actually trying to solve the problem, because nobody's making them do it. So stop paying them until they'll sell you the.mkvs. (Or standard streams, if you're convinced that local storage is just too.. expensive? Ok, whatever, an argument for another time.)
you should be old enough to have seen a number of "magic" new languages, tools and coding techniques only to have them all fall flat on their faces.
Of course I've seen plenty of failures and stupid ideas! I don't see that (or your cherry-picked list) as important, though. In any human endeavor if you're around long enough, you'll see that happening. I'm sure in 4999 BC some numbnuts or con-artist had a really stupid idea about how to make farming work better. I don't care about him. Lots of people try things, and there are plenty of crackpots and real-but-nevertheless-mistaken geniuses. It doesn't mean things aren't getting better, though. I've also seen successes.
How about "higher level" languages with memory-safety and/or garbage collection? There was a time when these things were new kids on the block, too, and even looked down upon. I can get some things finished far sooner in Python than in C, because I'm not having to think about some details far below the abstraction of my problem. Had I dismissed Python out-of-hand because it didn't have pointers, I'd be worse off today.
How about tools like git? (You wouldn't believe the amount of my time as a human I sometimes spent in the 1980s merging someone's changes into a "main" version.)
You don't think these things are letting people get more stuff done, in less time? We don't call them magic, we call them technological progress.
One of the things that many programmers know would help them, even if they disagree on all the details, would be to communicate with the compiler just a little better, so that certain theoretically-automate-able things can get actually automated (e.g. generate warnings to catch certain types of bugs sooner, "automagically" parallelize some types of loops, etc). It's just a matter of time and creativity, until someone really gets this done well (e.g. so procedural programmers don't have to think like functional ones).
I don't think we have reached the full practical potential for programming languages. I'm not saying Rust is the next thing, but there will be a next thing. If we're all joking about Rust and Go and Swift in 20 years (like how we joke about Ruby now), fine! But it's reasonably likely that something will have happened in that period, making a 2036 programmer more productive than a 2016 one. It'll happen because programmers have real, and increasingly well-understood, meta-problem that repeat themselves over and over again. People are aware of it and trying all kinds of things to address them.
I think it just points out that the idea of a central repository doesn't make sense with proprietary software. I basically trust the Debian repo (or OpenBSD ports, etc) because there's at least a chance that someone checked the software out to see if it's intended to work for the users instead of someone else.
With the bullshit repos from Google, Apple, etc you know they aren't auditing the software, due to one really simply fact: they can't audit it. Binaries are submitted, not source. So whatever "vetting" happens, you damn well know it's not intended to be the in users' interest. At best, all users have going for them is that sometimes a barn door will get closed after the horses get out.
If you're going to run proprietary software, there's no point in using a store. You might as well just get it from the makers themselves.
And, because they are "safer", languages with safe memory usually come with less competent coders, which often nicely eliminates any advantage gained.
Ah, the nobody can make things better argument, because if you improve things, someone will (should!) use up the extra slack they're given. You're basically arguing that software needs to have a certain amount of bugs, because if it has too few, the programmer market is being inefficient by not cranking out shittier code faster/cheaper.
I don't buy it. I think it's possible for things to be better, that net gains are possible.
I cite the entirety of humanity's technological progress as my evidence. Someone said, "You can't improve on gathering! If your 'farming' idea takes off, people will just fuck up the food supply some other way, in order to stay incompetent." That person was wrong.
My prediction is that Rust will do nothing security-wise as soon as attackers actually start to attack it.
Okee dokee. I'm betting on the other side. I guess we'll revisit this in a few years, then.
I never knew about H1Bs until I joined Slashdot approximately when you did. H1Bs weren't on my radar. And here is what I learned:
The objection to H1Bs wasn't "they're coming to take our jobs" but rather, that the imported workers were abused. Their residency is a function of having a job (a pretty damn un-American way to treat anyone, IMHO) so their employers have an unusual amount of power over them, compared to the more equitable power relationship that naturalized citizens have with their employers. And it could be addressed by fixing our immigration policy: make citizenship be a lot cheaper/faster/easier, thereby obsoleting the visas.
I was glad to get more informed about what was happening to some of my fellow computer dorks.
But somewhere along the last 15 years, the "they're coming to take our jobs" crybabies started taking over the discussion.
I think the demographics of "computer people" have changed since the good old days. More casuals, fewer passionate lifers. Damn IT-immigrants! Why don't they go back to the industries they came from?! They're diluting our traditionally libertarian-leaning values!
There's nothing wrong with entertaining all these crazy (or really neat-o) ideas. There's nothing wrong with developing them. There's nothing wrong with suspecting one of them might be right.
But please, for fuck's sake, stop calling them fucking Theories!
That word already meant something. Your completely untested hypothesis, no matter how cool it is, is not a Theory. If you're going to call the string and multiverse ideas "theories" then (I am dead serious) you might as well let Creationism into the fold too. Creationism is no worse, because you've taken away everything that makes science be science.
Now, is that a price you want to pay? Hell no. So watch your mouth and stop using the the "T" word so lightly. (You can still sound cool and use a fancy word to the press, if you want. Watch: "String Hypothesis." See? That wasn't so hard.)
Watermarking isn't anything like DRM. It doesn't limit access to the work; assuming it's an otherwise standard format, you can still play/read it with anything that you want.
The fun thing would have been if they had use DRM. I suppose Swartz's estate (who?) is the copyright holder. DMCA defines circumvention as being a function of whether or not the copyright holder (not some other party) authorizes you to access the content. Presumably, Swartz' estate would authorize buyers to read the book. Therefore, you'd be legally allowed to crack whatever DRM were present, make/market/sell tools for doing that, etc. All legal because none of it would be primarily intended to circumvent.
As always, you should exercise caution while downloading any file from an unverified source on the internet; at the very least, you should run it through a virus scanner before doing anything with it.
We're trying to have a discussion about a car which prioritizes other lives over the life of its owner, and this nice young man here thinks he should have a choice about whether or not to stay away from PreachyCar! Looks like somebody has the "needs of the few" on his mind! Pfft.
BTW, I was merely suggesting the car would preach to its occupants, but your idea that it would preach to pedestrians too, is a good one. Thanks. Your idea might save many lives. "Attention pedestrians! You! With the mole. Is that new? Have you had that looked at?"
Your outcome 1 is so overwhelmingly preferable, and comes up continuously so many thousands of times per day, that the rest of the list is nearly irrelevant.
Every single time, you try your very hardest to achieve to outcome 1. This is the problem's absolute top priority, such that nothing else really matters. Unless the solution is simply a failure (in which case the car shouldn't be on the road at all), you'll succeed almost every time, and it's so close to being literally every time, that the exceptions are almost noise.
Almost. But here's the best part: by trying to get outcome 1, you've also caused outcome 2 to be the next likely thing, and 3 to be the next likely thing after that.
By the time you get to outcome 4, your priorities are out of wack. Instead of worrying about collision injuries, you ought to be putting screens and speakers into the vehicle, spamming the passengers with advice to eat more healthily and get enough exercise. "Have you had a prostate or breast exam?" You ought to be reminding people of their appointments so they leave earlier and the vehicle can travel more slowly.. wait, we're addressing outcome 1 again here. Oh, right: exactly!
Handle outcome 1 well enough, and then life becomes less of an issue, and it's quality of life. Instead of counting how many pedestrians each path has you mowing down, preach to the occupants about learning how the world works instead of clinging to mysticism. Tell them that beer can have taste. Suggest the best TV shows. Remind them that the wife's birthday is coming up. Etc. Your car computer should be doing all these things way before it ever counts the number of deaths on the left vs right, because you've already gotten it down to 0 deaths because you put so much effort into missing all obstacles, every single time. Your car is an AI playing a game called "you can't hit me." It dodges missiles.
No, the simplest solution is to simply not ever bother putting the decryption key on that drive. That way, when the drive fails and you're unable to write to it, your work has already been done.
where everyone's car knows when every toddler on Earth decided to wander onto a road?
No.... if a Toddler wanders onto the highway, then that toddler's parents just committed a homicide.
There's another way to look at this too, though. If a toddler can suddenly get in front of you -- so suddenly that you lack the ability to miss it -- then a rock can roll down a slope onto the road too, or a deer can leap out of the woods and through your windshield.
People are so worried about the toddler's safety, that they forgot they are hypothesizing situations where the driver could use some better protection too! And even if it were just 40 pounds of soft material and not a serious threat to the driver's life, a dead toddler is going to ruin everyone's day, and that's no matter who the cops decide to charge with whatever.
If you can't avoid a collision, then you're not completely in control. We tolerate some of that, because having complete control (where you can avoid any threat approaching from any direction) is too impractical (if you're boxed in and someone wants to hit you from behind, what can you do?). But let's not pretend control isn't desirable or something that shouldn't be reasonably maximized.
You don't need to know where the toddlers are, because you can't. You need good senses and fast reactions. If your reactions aren't fast enough for the sensory conditions (whether it's due to weather or pedestrian-concealing cars parked on the side of the road), then you need more time (less speed). It's not just for them; it's for you too!
A computer should serve its owner's interests with absolute priority over the interests of all other parties. Period. If it's my computer -- my agent -- then I am #1. By default (without my interaction) it should allow a million children to slowly burn to death if it means that I get to skip an ad. (That's a ludicrous example, but if people want to explore the edge cases of the policy I'm advocating, then there you go.)
You're going to find that this strongly favors protecting other people anyway. The "someone must die, pick who" scenario is extremely rare to the point of non-existent, compared to the routine "avoid having any collision at all, so that no damage or injury happens" scenario. (Stop smoking before you drive yourself crazy with fear of being hit in the head by a meteorite!)
That's not a global policy; that's just the policy for my computer. I don't mean I'm more important than you; I mean that to my computer I am more important that you. And your computer should serve you, too!
This is a case where evil had a good side-effect: people aren't using lavabit anymore. That's good news for all privacy/security advocates.
The whole reason lavabit was attacked by the government, is that the government's attack would have worked. It is totally absurd for people to be downloading their email client plus pgp implementation from the server every time they want to read their email. The government wanted to compromise the client to have it log Snowden's key, and they decided the best tactic was to stick a gun in the lavabit guy's face.
Lavabit's users (including Snowden) are lucky that the government resorted to such thuggery, since you can't intimidate someone without their knowledge. So lavabit knew about the attack and since the Levison is a good guy, he shut it down. But the attackers' goal might also have been compromised by stealthy tactics instead (either by penetrating the servers, or MitM). Had that happened, lavabit wouldn't have shut down; instead, the client would have been compromised without anyone knowing.
The tech was awful, and predictable awful. Nobody should have been using lavabit, precisely because it implemented pgp as a downloaded program in the browser. Let's hope lavabit's death is the end of this kind of nonsense.
I never understood why people think networks like the Internet are supposed to be private.
Nobody thinks that. No wonder you misunderstood them!
People think that some applications should be private. i.e. before you decide how you're going to communicate, you have already decided to tell your wife, "Buy some orange juice on the way home." And once you know that you're about to say something private like that, then you look for ways to do it. Public networks are awesome for this.
They weren't designed to be originally.
Yes, and then a few thousand years ago, people started to realize that you could bolt privacy onto a medium that isn't necessarily private. Write instructions to the other general in code and then if the messenger is captured, the enemy won't know how to read the scroll.
It might be a monstrous idea, but your argument won't scratch it.
Nobody forced them to make income through capital gains. They can go back to making money through wages like all the proles if they want to. For whatever reason, they opted into investing.
How's this different than the Affordable Healthcare Act? If you have a human body (damn failure-prone expensive-to-maintain machines), then you're "forced" to either pay a higher income tax, or else buy health insurance. And SCOTUS has already ruled on the constitutionality of that.
FWIW, I bet this proposal could be implemented such that the taxpayer has a choice between either the lower tax rate but with drug testing, or the higher tax without testing. The government would be happy to let people opt out of the drug testing, in exchange for paying the same (higher) tax rate as everyone else. And it should probably be presented without the higher/lower and gains/wages terminology.
Tax Silver: you pay the wages rate. Few other restrictions or conditions.
Tax Gold Premium Membership: you go through drug testing, prove you eat healthy foods and get enough exercise and make income the preferred way (investments) each year, you either recite the pledge of allegiance or list of all the presidents from memory (but you don't have to recite the Bill of Rights -- that would be going too far!) and you march in at least one parade on either Independence day or Memorial Day. You pay the lower rate. JOIN TODAY! And on your 1040, don't forget to click on the Star-Spangled-Banner Rewards Club ad to learn about more exclusive privileges for which you might qualify!
This "gift" issue is a red herring. The issue is what should the conditions be for a reduced tax rate. There's already one (?) condition: you have to have made the money in a special way that society wants to encourage (whereas for some reason, we relatively prefer people that people choose to not make their money through paychecks). The proposal is to add another condition, where whether it makes sense or not (I totally see why everyone would disagree on that), it at least makes just as as much sense as the first (that you make the money in the preferred manner).
Drug laws exist because we are trying to band together and pool our power against other dissenting people to get them to live a certain way. We think it's not merely a good idea to abstain from drugs, but that it's so important that it's worth using force against an innocent person to try to "encourage" them to do what we say. But we don't, say, feel quite that strongly about people paying money to play Clash of Clans faster. It's ok for you to spend your money on that, whether you made your money through investments, through the "gift" of welfare (you may have noticed that the drug testees don't also have game audits) or even if you made it the dirty less-respected higher-taxed way (paychecks). They're probably not even testing for nicotine yet. But: details, details!
For whatever reason, we all vote about 99 to 1 that government should be using tax law (and ok, now welfare law too) to nudge people to adopt certain behaviors. While we disagree on the the tiny details, there is strong consensus that Father Knows Best and should use whatever means to guide our little citizens to salvation. Now that we have encouraged some people to make money through investing, it makes sense to press these already-proven-pliable subjects to adopt other desired behaviors as well. Why not play your strengths? These are people who have already shown themselves to be best subjects, so shouldn't we continue to guide them toward perfection?
And apparently there's this other effect where not only do we shape peoples' behaviors, but the more they resist, the more revenue we get! It's win/win.
What? You have a ffff.. what's that Yang holy word? You have a freedom agenda? Well, maybe you will vote some day. But for whatever reason, you Yangs have never shown up at any elections, ever, so we Comms have a supermajority and we make the rules and you amusing little people have to obey them. (And mostly, you do.)
So now that it's established that income tax doesn't really just have to be a tax on income but can be used to reward or puni-- excuse me -- incentivizewhatever behavior we want to (e.g. having health insurance, using mortgages to pay for houses, making money through investments) WTF is wrong with piling on one more tiny agenda (drug abstinence) onto the other thousand? (I jest: no serious mathematical analyses that have been attempted on the tax code, has ever really suggests that it's only 10^3.)
Again, I realize you might disagree on some minor details, but please don't tell me your commitment to this overall behavior management strategy is starting to waver. The last thing anyone wants this year is a strange election! I mean, there's already been a President Johnson. Think of all the confusion you might cause in history classes.
This is basically just a retelling of someone slaying the minotaur, or throwing the ring into a volcano, or...
"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world. Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" -- Dr. Richard Daystrom
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want my TV producers negotiating with my hardware manufacturers or software developers. I want them negotiating with me, the person who watches the TV. Why the fuck should such a totally-unrelated third party be involved? How can that possibly be in my best interests?
It's not just a little weird; it's totally absurd. It's like if a I drive to the store to buy some socks, and what socks are available depends on a deal between the textile producer and my car manufacturer. WUT?! Believe me: this is not a way to get me to buy your socks or your car. This is something a sockmaker or carmaker thinks up when they're out of ideas and know that there are vastly better and cheaper socks and cars available.
Yes, good point! Without the government sticking their guns in everyone's faces and enforcing the email-writer's monopoly on commercially profiting from their blood, sweat, and tears, what incentive would party members have to communicate with each other?
If we don't properly enforce this monopoly, party members will give up and stop emailing each other! Then where will be be?
Which just goes to show, FUSE makes it viable for people to use any protocol, even IMAP, as a filesystem.
It's got to be some stupid script "helping" the editors.
Imagine you were serving content-contextual ads. You could show an Amazon ad here. So some idiot figured "if it's close enough for the advertising department, then it's close enough for the editorial department." The problem is that they never tested it, and nobody at Slashdot actually reads Slashdot so they're unaware how ridiculous it looks.
Let this be a lesson, folks: if you don't eat your own dog food, then you have to test your dog food in the lab. But FFS don't just throw it out into the world with nobody looking at it, or everyone's going to be staring at you.
Back to on-topic: I don't understand how there's even a question here. The entire point of Amazon's Echo is that it's a bug in your home, that you're wilfully giving up privacy to have someone else's computer constantly listening to you. If it weren't listening, it couldn't work.
This is like someone saying "I didn't have a flight but I forged a boarding pass, and then bribed the TSA worker with a hundred dollar bill, saying 'rectal exam, please.' His fingers were so cold! Anyway, the next day, I couldn't get anyone to tell me whether or not my privacy has been compromised. Why are they so suspiciously silent?"
This is opt-in surveillance. The only problem I have with opt-in surveillance is that The Truth (people are idiots) makes me feel uncomfortable. But knowledge is a good thing, whether I'm comfortable with it or not.
Why does anyone want to get this content from a middleman? What's wrong with Netflix selling you only the "Netflix original" shows, NBC selling you theirs, HBO selling you theirs, etc? There's no reason anyone should want to get Hollywood's show from Netflix or Amazon. It's just going to be marked up. You have The Internet now!! You can communicate with anyone. Deal direct.
Turns out there's answer to the above question: because most people are still using these stupid proprietary applications, instead of standard interfaces, to watch TV. So if you personally had a dozen TV vendors, then you'd have to switch between a dozen apps, and that's going to totally suck no matter what. Even if someone's app is ok (and that's usually about as good as they get, huh?) you still can't have Netflix shows on the same alphabetical menu as Amazon and HBO shows.
(Unless you pirate, because once the content is liberated, it has a standard interface, which means you can pipe to any interface you want.)
So fuck 'em. Standard interfaces or else No Sale. (And seriously: is a standard interface such a burdensome thing to ask?! Can you think of any endeavor where it's not considered both the ideal and the common-sense way things should be?) If a vendor can get onboard with doing things right, they can get paid.
But if they say "use my software" (sometimes disguised as "use my box" or "use one of these supported devices" but we're computer people so we know this hardware is just for running their shitty software) then they are trying to create one of two futures:
Both are absurd dystopias that you can't possibly want. Netflix is currently just changing their blend between these two hells, and I guess people were used to the devil-they-knew. But what you don't hear anyone talking about, is Netflix actually trying to solve the problem, because nobody's making them do it. So stop paying them until they'll sell you the .mkvs. (Or standard streams, if you're convinced that local storage is just too .. expensive? Ok, whatever, an argument for another time.)
Of course I've seen plenty of failures and stupid ideas! I don't see that (or your cherry-picked list) as important, though. In any human endeavor if you're around long enough, you'll see that happening. I'm sure in 4999 BC some numbnuts or con-artist had a really stupid idea about how to make farming work better. I don't care about him. Lots of people try things, and there are plenty of crackpots and real-but-nevertheless-mistaken geniuses. It doesn't mean things aren't getting better, though. I've also seen successes.
How about "higher level" languages with memory-safety and/or garbage collection? There was a time when these things were new kids on the block, too, and even looked down upon. I can get some things finished far sooner in Python than in C, because I'm not having to think about some details far below the abstraction of my problem. Had I dismissed Python out-of-hand because it didn't have pointers, I'd be worse off today.
How about tools like git? (You wouldn't believe the amount of my time as a human I sometimes spent in the 1980s merging someone's changes into a "main" version.)
You don't think these things are letting people get more stuff done, in less time? We don't call them magic, we call them technological progress.
One of the things that many programmers know would help them, even if they disagree on all the details, would be to communicate with the compiler just a little better, so that certain theoretically-automate-able things can get actually automated (e.g. generate warnings to catch certain types of bugs sooner, "automagically" parallelize some types of loops, etc). It's just a matter of time and creativity, until someone really gets this done well (e.g. so procedural programmers don't have to think like functional ones).
I don't think we have reached the full practical potential for programming languages. I'm not saying Rust is the next thing, but there will be a next thing. If we're all joking about Rust and Go and Swift in 20 years (like how we joke about Ruby now), fine! But it's reasonably likely that something will have happened in that period, making a 2036 programmer more productive than a 2016 one. It'll happen because programmers have real, and increasingly well-understood, meta-problem that repeat themselves over and over again. People are aware of it and trying all kinds of things to address them.
I think it just points out that the idea of a central repository doesn't make sense with proprietary software. I basically trust the Debian repo (or OpenBSD ports, etc) because there's at least a chance that someone checked the software out to see if it's intended to work for the users instead of someone else.
With the bullshit repos from Google, Apple, etc you know they aren't auditing the software, due to one really simply fact: they can't audit it. Binaries are submitted, not source. So whatever "vetting" happens, you damn well know it's not intended to be the in users' interest. At best, all users have going for them is that sometimes a barn door will get closed after the horses get out.
If you're going to run proprietary software, there's no point in using a store. You might as well just get it from the makers themselves.
No, he's effectively voting for Johnson. He's voting against Trump (and Clinton and Stein and some others). Can't you read?
Ah, the nobody can make things better argument, because if you improve things, someone will (should!) use up the extra slack they're given. You're basically arguing that software needs to have a certain amount of bugs, because if it has too few, the programmer market is being inefficient by not cranking out shittier code faster/cheaper.
I don't buy it. I think it's possible for things to be better, that net gains are possible.
I cite the entirety of humanity's technological progress as my evidence. Someone said, "You can't improve on gathering! If your 'farming' idea takes off, people will just fuck up the food supply some other way, in order to stay incompetent." That person was wrong.
Okee dokee. I'm betting on the other side. I guess we'll revisit this in a few years, then.
I never knew about H1Bs until I joined Slashdot approximately when you did. H1Bs weren't on my radar. And here is what I learned:
The objection to H1Bs wasn't "they're coming to take our jobs" but rather, that the imported workers were abused. Their residency is a function of having a job (a pretty damn un-American way to treat anyone, IMHO) so their employers have an unusual amount of power over them, compared to the more equitable power relationship that naturalized citizens have with their employers. And it could be addressed by fixing our immigration policy: make citizenship be a lot cheaper/faster/easier, thereby obsoleting the visas.
I was glad to get more informed about what was happening to some of my fellow computer dorks.
But somewhere along the last 15 years, the "they're coming to take our jobs" crybabies started taking over the discussion.
I think the demographics of "computer people" have changed since the good old days. More casuals, fewer passionate lifers. Damn IT-immigrants! Why don't they go back to the industries they came from?! They're diluting our traditionally libertarian-leaning values!
(Whoa.. this can happen in any scope, can't it?)
There's nothing wrong with entertaining all these crazy (or really neat-o) ideas. There's nothing wrong with developing them. There's nothing wrong with suspecting one of them might be right.
But please, for fuck's sake, stop calling them fucking Theories!
That word already meant something. Your completely untested hypothesis, no matter how cool it is, is not a Theory. If you're going to call the string and multiverse ideas "theories" then (I am dead serious) you might as well let Creationism into the fold too. Creationism is no worse, because you've taken away everything that makes science be science.
Now, is that a price you want to pay? Hell no. So watch your mouth and stop using the the "T" word so lightly. (You can still sound cool and use a fancy word to the press, if you want. Watch: "String Hypothesis." See? That wasn't so hard.)
Didn't Jack Tramiel buy Atari with his?
Watermarking isn't anything like DRM. It doesn't limit access to the work; assuming it's an otherwise standard format, you can still play/read it with anything that you want.
The fun thing would have been if they had use DRM. I suppose Swartz's estate (who?) is the copyright holder. DMCA defines circumvention as being a function of whether or not the copyright holder (not some other party) authorizes you to access the content. Presumably, Swartz' estate would authorize buyers to read the book. Therefore, you'd be legally allowed to crack whatever DRM were present, make/market/sell tools for doing that, etc. All legal because none of it would be primarily intended to circumvent.
WTF?
Well, look at Mister 1776 here!
We're trying to have a discussion about a car which prioritizes other lives over the life of its owner, and this nice young man here thinks he should have a choice about whether or not to stay away from PreachyCar! Looks like somebody has the "needs of the few" on his mind! Pfft.
BTW, I was merely suggesting the car would preach to its occupants, but your idea that it would preach to pedestrians too, is a good one. Thanks. Your idea might save many lives. "Attention pedestrians! You! With the mole. Is that new? Have you had that looked at?"
Your outcome 1 is so overwhelmingly preferable, and comes up continuously so many thousands of times per day, that the rest of the list is nearly irrelevant.
Every single time, you try your very hardest to achieve to outcome 1. This is the problem's absolute top priority, such that nothing else really matters. Unless the solution is simply a failure (in which case the car shouldn't be on the road at all), you'll succeed almost every time, and it's so close to being literally every time, that the exceptions are almost noise.
Almost. But here's the best part: by trying to get outcome 1, you've also caused outcome 2 to be the next likely thing, and 3 to be the next likely thing after that.
By the time you get to outcome 4, your priorities are out of wack. Instead of worrying about collision injuries, you ought to be putting screens and speakers into the vehicle, spamming the passengers with advice to eat more healthily and get enough exercise. "Have you had a prostate or breast exam?" You ought to be reminding people of their appointments so they leave earlier and the vehicle can travel more slowly .. wait, we're addressing outcome 1 again here. Oh, right: exactly!
Handle outcome 1 well enough, and then life becomes less of an issue, and it's quality of life. Instead of counting how many pedestrians each path has you mowing down, preach to the occupants about learning how the world works instead of clinging to mysticism. Tell them that beer can have taste. Suggest the best TV shows. Remind them that the wife's birthday is coming up. Etc. Your car computer should be doing all these things way before it ever counts the number of deaths on the left vs right, because you've already gotten it down to 0 deaths because you put so much effort into missing all obstacles, every single time. Your car is an AI playing a game called "you can't hit me." It dodges missiles.
No, the simplest solution is to simply not ever bother putting the decryption key on that drive. That way, when the drive fails and you're unable to write to it, your work has already been done.
There's another way to look at this too, though. If a toddler can suddenly get in front of you -- so suddenly that you lack the ability to miss it -- then a rock can roll down a slope onto the road too, or a deer can leap out of the woods and through your windshield.
People are so worried about the toddler's safety, that they forgot they are hypothesizing situations where the driver could use some better protection too! And even if it were just 40 pounds of soft material and not a serious threat to the driver's life, a dead toddler is going to ruin everyone's day, and that's no matter who the cops decide to charge with whatever.
If you can't avoid a collision, then you're not completely in control. We tolerate some of that, because having complete control (where you can avoid any threat approaching from any direction) is too impractical (if you're boxed in and someone wants to hit you from behind, what can you do?). But let's not pretend control isn't desirable or something that shouldn't be reasonably maximized.
You don't need to know where the toddlers are, because you can't. You need good senses and fast reactions. If your reactions aren't fast enough for the sensory conditions (whether it's due to weather or pedestrian-concealing cars parked on the side of the road), then you need more time (less speed). It's not just for them; it's for you too!
A computer should serve its owner's interests with absolute priority over the interests of all other parties. Period. If it's my computer -- my agent -- then I am #1. By default (without my interaction) it should allow a million children to slowly burn to death if it means that I get to skip an ad. (That's a ludicrous example, but if people want to explore the edge cases of the policy I'm advocating, then there you go.)
You're going to find that this strongly favors protecting other people anyway. The "someone must die, pick who" scenario is extremely rare to the point of non-existent, compared to the routine "avoid having any collision at all, so that no damage or injury happens" scenario. (Stop smoking before you drive yourself crazy with fear of being hit in the head by a meteorite!)
That's not a global policy; that's just the policy for my computer. I don't mean I'm more important than you; I mean that to my computer I am more important that you. And your computer should serve you, too!
This is a case where evil had a good side-effect: people aren't using lavabit anymore. That's good news for all privacy/security advocates.
The whole reason lavabit was attacked by the government, is that the government's attack would have worked. It is totally absurd for people to be downloading their email client plus pgp implementation from the server every time they want to read their email. The government wanted to compromise the client to have it log Snowden's key, and they decided the best tactic was to stick a gun in the lavabit guy's face.
Lavabit's users (including Snowden) are lucky that the government resorted to such thuggery, since you can't intimidate someone without their knowledge. So lavabit knew about the attack and since the Levison is a good guy, he shut it down. But the attackers' goal might also have been compromised by stealthy tactics instead (either by penetrating the servers, or MitM). Had that happened, lavabit wouldn't have shut down; instead, the client would have been compromised without anyone knowing.
The tech was awful, and predictable awful. Nobody should have been using lavabit, precisely because it implemented pgp as a downloaded program in the browser. Let's hope lavabit's death is the end of this kind of nonsense.
Nobody thinks that. No wonder you misunderstood them!
People think that some applications should be private. i.e. before you decide how you're going to communicate, you have already decided to tell your wife, "Buy some orange juice on the way home." And once you know that you're about to say something private like that, then you look for ways to do it. Public networks are awesome for this.
Yes, and then a few thousand years ago, people started to realize that you could bolt privacy onto a medium that isn't necessarily private. Write instructions to the other general in code and then if the messenger is captured, the enemy won't know how to read the scroll.
Did he just post the "take a life" emoji? Quick, somebody, call the cops!!
It might be a monstrous idea, but your argument won't scratch it.
Nobody forced them to make income through capital gains. They can go back to making money through wages like all the proles if they want to. For whatever reason, they opted into investing.
How's this different than the Affordable Healthcare Act? If you have a human body (damn failure-prone expensive-to-maintain machines), then you're "forced" to either pay a higher income tax, or else buy health insurance. And SCOTUS has already ruled on the constitutionality of that.
FWIW, I bet this proposal could be implemented such that the taxpayer has a choice between either the lower tax rate but with drug testing, or the higher tax without testing. The government would be happy to let people opt out of the drug testing, in exchange for paying the same (higher) tax rate as everyone else. And it should probably be presented without the higher/lower and gains/wages terminology.
Tax Silver: you pay the wages rate. Few other restrictions or conditions.
Tax Gold Premium Membership: you go through drug testing, prove you eat healthy foods and get enough exercise and make income the preferred way (investments) each year, you either recite the pledge of allegiance or list of all the presidents from memory (but you don't have to recite the Bill of Rights -- that would be going too far!) and you march in at least one parade on either Independence day or Memorial Day. You pay the lower rate. JOIN TODAY! And on your 1040, don't forget to click on the Star-Spangled-Banner Rewards Club ad to learn about more exclusive privileges for which you might qualify!
This "gift" issue is a red herring. The issue is what should the conditions be for a reduced tax rate. There's already one (?) condition: you have to have made the money in a special way that society wants to encourage (whereas for some reason, we relatively prefer people that people choose to not make their money through paychecks). The proposal is to add another condition, where whether it makes sense or not (I totally see why everyone would disagree on that), it at least makes just as as much sense as the first (that you make the money in the preferred manner).
Drug laws exist because we are trying to band together and pool our power against other dissenting people to get them to live a certain way. We think it's not merely a good idea to abstain from drugs, but that it's so important that it's worth using force against an innocent person to try to "encourage" them to do what we say. But we don't, say, feel quite that strongly about people paying money to play Clash of Clans faster. It's ok for you to spend your money on that, whether you made your money through investments, through the "gift" of welfare (you may have noticed that the drug testees don't also have game audits) or even if you made it the dirty less-respected higher-taxed way (paychecks). They're probably not even testing for nicotine yet. But: details, details!
For whatever reason, we all vote about 99 to 1 that government should be using tax law (and ok, now welfare law too) to nudge people to adopt certain behaviors. While we disagree on the the tiny details, there is strong consensus that Father Knows Best and should use whatever means to guide our little citizens to salvation. Now that we have encouraged some people to make money through investing, it makes sense to press these already-proven-pliable subjects to adopt other desired behaviors as well. Why not play your strengths? These are people who have already shown themselves to be best subjects, so shouldn't we continue to guide them toward perfection?
And apparently there's this other effect where not only do we shape peoples' behaviors, but the more they resist, the more revenue we get! It's win/win.
What? You have a ffff.. what's that Yang holy word? You have a freedom agenda? Well, maybe you will vote some day. But for whatever reason, you Yangs have never shown up at any elections, ever, so we Comms have a supermajority and we make the rules and you amusing little people have to obey them. (And mostly, you do.)
So now that it's established that income tax doesn't really just have to be a tax on income but can be used to reward or puni-- excuse me -- incentivize whatever behavior we want to (e.g. having health insurance, using mortgages to pay for houses, making money through investments) WTF is wrong with piling on one more tiny agenda (drug abstinence) onto the other thousand? (I jest: no serious mathematical analyses that have been attempted on the tax code, has ever really suggests that it's only 10^3.)
Again, I realize you might disagree on some minor details, but please don't tell me your commitment to this overall behavior management strategy is starting to waver. The last thing anyone wants this year is a strange election! I mean, there's already been a President Johnson. Think of all the confusion you might cause in history classes.
This is basically just a retelling of someone slaying the minotaur, or throwing the ring into a volcano, or...
"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world. Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" -- Dr. Richard Daystrom