If encrypting gets common, then I think people will expect signing too.
Widespread signing would be death to spam. An email that isn't from someone, is from no one, and can be deleted without spamassassin ever needing to look at it. And an email that is signed by someone who has become known as a spammer...
I think you're talking about the end of spamassassin, yes, but in a good way.:-)
People use shockingly bad email clients which still don't support it. The reasons for this vary from the mysterious, to the practical (e.g. 1. some people want webmail and it'll never be very practical to make webmail secure 2. some people want to read mail on mobiles, where the mere labor of entering a passphrase would take on the order of a minute or two).
Unverified (MitM-vulnerable) key exchange is very easy and there's no technical reason it couldn't be the baseline. Even just moving up to that would have earthshaking consequences, and once you're doing that, verifying the keys of people that you know, should be straight-forward for people who care, and a big global WoT could stitch together pretty quickly, IMHO.
BTW, this works for winning, too. Kodos is the 0% inflation candidate, over pro-inflation Kang. But if Kodos is elected and inflation doesn't fall, it's because of those Kangist obstructionists in the House. That doesn't mean I was wrong in my assertion that he was the anti-inflation presidential candidate; just that it's something I couldn't reliably bet on, due to concerns over external forces and events.
I can blame externalities for any failed prediction, and blame my lack of betting on fears of those potential externalities. If we were talking about a huge series of small bets, where over the long haul, my tendencies toward political enlightenment would be proven to my profit, sure. But you're talking about a bet on a presidential race. I'm a mere mortal gambler, not a casino; I can't take a long view or exploit a statistical edge using volume. A single $500 bet every four years (approximately dozen bets over the course of a typical adult life) is far too small a sample to demostrate anything. By the time my amazingly awesome perfect political views are confirmed, I have been dead for centuries.
If Kang wins the presidency instead of Kodos, that will tend be symptomatic of really bad voting by a tragically uninformed citizenry, and probably correlate with a bunch of other races too. If people are stupid enough to vote for Kang (holy crap, we're not really that stupid, are we?!) then they're probably also voting Kang's party into power in the House and Senate too. So Kang, an evil moron of a president, is probably going to have a Congress of evil morons putting bills on his desk, which he'll sign and thereby destroy the country.
Kang will be a bad president. That's a fact. Sure, I'll gamble on that (him being a bad president), because it's no gamble at all. But I've got an out: it's only probable (and no, I can't estimate it) that all the other races, whose outcome are going to either enable Kang's evil or not, will go that way.
If Kang is elected and the really horrible shit doesn't happen, it's because plenty of people from Kodos' party got into the House to block him. So while Kang has bad policies, but I have my excuse for why inflation didn't hit 15%. That doesn't mean the Kang/Kodos issue doesn't matter and that the stakes weren't just as high as a 15% inflation rate risk, though. So my incorrectly-labeled "alarmist hyperbole" was actually reasonable argument. I may have lost the presidency debate but obviously I won the bigger picture by winning some races for Kodos' party. Or maybe even Kang and his own people decided to be less evil and moronic, thanks to my words of warning that inflation is about to go up to 15%.
I was right, even though the facts suggest I was wrong, and I would have technically lost my bet.;-) Indeed, this is likely to happen, so I won't place the bet to begin with.
One way I think helps to look at speech issues, is to imagine that topic of conversion were political (whether it really is, or not) and imagining it happening in the 1770s.
What if Tomas Paine or Samuel Adams were publishing computer programs, whose output were tables of imperial taxes divided by number of parliament seats? That's "just facts and information" but also 1) analytical, and the type of analysis chosen is derived from opinions 2) quite possible politically enlightening. Hell Yes the 1789 ratifiers thought they were outlawing government interference with that sort of thing.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Ian Malcolm
I get why people do maybe-foolish things, when the envisioned result is something cool like dinosaurs. Why do people do things when the best-case scenario is something, which is orders of magnitude lamer than the status quo?
Guys, we already have MICE. WTF is the point of using a kinect for a job like this? Are you saying some day you'll get it perceiving precisely enough that it'll be able to detect me slightly moving my hand on a table, as though I were using a mouse?
Canonical's "garden" has no "walls." The use of "technical measures to limit access" (if I may borrow some DMCA-speak) against the user is the main distinguishing features of walled gardens. If you let the user do whatever they want, it doesn't make any sense to call it a walled garden. It's just a garden.
Seems like RTS customers are the ones who would have a right to demand the source to whatever GPLed software they bought or been given. And any of them could legally "leak" to Grover. Not sure how RTS currently has any obligations to Grover, though. Why would they?
Remember that GPL is about protecting users. As handy as it usually is for developers, that's incidental; it's not for developers.
Consumers are getting exactly the level of service they are willing to pay for. It's why airlines have had to soak the passengers in other ways, including baggage fees and overpriced onboard snacks/meals. Maybe we need to go back to the golden days of regulated airfares and routes.
Or maybe not. I'd say seeing somebody else get "soaked" on baggage feeds or onboard meals, is an argument for not going back to a regulated industry.
The fewer bags you take, the less you pay. If you bring your own food or eat before you get on the plane, you pay less. And similarly, if you want to live it up, you can have what you want and there's somebody there to say "yes sir" and take your damn money, if it's so important to you to have an extra drink or bring an extra bag. What could be better?
Flat rates just mean everyone pays more, and half of the time that means you're paying for something you didn't take advantage of, to subsidize someone else's elective expenses.
I like being a miserly grudging cheapskate in some ways and a gushing luxurious cowboy in others. Don't we all have our own tastes and needs?
IMHO an interesting factor here is that we're talking about one (possibly dishonest) fuckwit. What about the other eleven jurors? Part of the reason for an independent jury is to be able to stand up to the government (I agree!) but another reason for a jury is that it is multiple people, so like elections themselves, fringes should get marginalized. If a judge has a bad day there is no check against that except (maybe!) appeals. If a juror has a bad day, there are supposedly eleven checks against that.
I like the idea of eleven checks. What could possibly go wrong?;-)
That didn't happen here; one fringe dude is alleged to have magically taken over. I realize it's not magic (people are easily manipulated) but you've got to have some faith in people's resistance to that, or else there's no point to juries at all (nor is there a point to democracy itself!).
I think the bigger strategic lesson here isn't to so quickly turn against democracy or jury nullification, but rather, we really need to do a better job of teaching people to tell other people "fuck you." No, really.
Or to put it another way (and look at the guy in the best light), one juror who believed in nullification, blew off the statutes and did what he thought was best to promote the cause of justice (in his sick twisted sense, but hey, we all are like that in some ways). But eleven other jurors did not believe in justice, and wanted to uphold statutes instead. This one guy, through lying, was able to make them think they were successfully doing that, even if maybe it went against their sense of right and wrong. If they had also believed in nullification and had been working for justice (their sense of it) too, then the lone defector and his lies would have mattered much less.
It's not just "tech-challenged" friends. I have friends that are quite technically knowledgeable and competent but still won't do it.
Quite a bit of it simply not-caring.
In the last few years, a new problem has arisen: people are using tech-challenged software. Both iOS and Android come with shockingly bad email clients that probably aren't as good as whatever you were using a decade or two ago. Presumably you can get pgp-interoperative mailreaders for these platforms but I think the users of these platforms have a weird everything-must-be-out-of-the-box expectation. And out-of-the-box, the platforms are simply hopeless for reading encrypted mail. It's weird; in some ways these platforms are super-slick, and in other ways they are glaringly impoverished anachronistic wastelands.
Before this, another one of the problems was webmail; it's very awkward to do webmail right. (And I'm being rather charitable!)
On the bright side, I think mobiles are making people care less about webmail (not completely, but less); now that everyone has a personal terminal in their pocket, they don't need "read from anyone's machine with no installs or complicated configuration" which is what webmail's big attraction was. So if decent mailreaders somehow get more common on mobiles, then email security could get back up to mid-1990s tech some day.
Then it'll be time to sigh and fight the people-not-caring battle all over again.:-/
Bad ideas are the beginning of good plots. Bad-ideas-that-look-good make for better plots, I agree, so you've got a point about the A-Team lacking in this department. But no one ever said the A-Team was good.
The thing is about common sense is that it's something you gain from experience. (How many things seem like common sense to you now, and yet you didn't know those things n years ago?)
Experience is an asset and communication is commodization of that asset. When we're working together building a better world and trying to get happier, that's fucking awesome, and all hail the information revolution.
When you're in zero-sum with an adversary, you want them to be denied that asset. You want one of their earliest experiences to be death. Let 'em learn from that, and make their surviving allies perform seances to learn from it. Except those enemies will accidentally contact your demonic allies who you've contracted to perform seance interceptions and either feed false information to the enemy, or feed upon their souls.
Muahahah! If only they had the experience to detect when this is happening, and had a protective pentagram drawn on the floor as a precaution. It's all common sense! But they don't have it, because the last enemy mystic medium died screaming at the hands of my incubus and never got a chance to warn anyone.
Lies straight out of the pit of hell? Of course not!
In this thread you spin a yarn against spelling chaos, for words are the seeds of the ideas we communicate. In my defense, I should fairly mention that I am from a friendly flax farming family, simple sons subsisting on seeds we sow so that we may sew, so please give me a break.
*sigh* At least I didn't screw up affect vs effect again. I hate that one.
And even if you own handbrake + a lot of other ripping tools, that in itself is not a crime and it couldn't be used for getting a warrant.
It looks like you're right that it's not a crime to have that software, but it looks to me like 41.1(c) makes it a crime to create those tools or provide them. Also, you might be "import"ing the software (a new crime per this law) when you download/update it.
Interestingly, this law has the same weirdness as US' DMCA: it defines circumvention in terms of doing something without the authority of the copyright owner. But for tools, there never is any specific copyright owner. That creates a two-pronged weakness (just like DCMA) in that
DRM cracking can become legal if enough copyright owners who use that DRM, say they're ok with it, or
Mainstream tools (e.g. Sony's DVD player) may be violators if some copyright owner says they're not ok with it.
So this law is theoretically solvable the same way as DMCA: everyone, go make a movie, and publish it on CSS-protected DVD. Then sew chaos.
Why no party fission? Doesn't each side of the fundamentalism issue think their party would be better off without the other side?
Is it just a matter of each one thinking the other should have to give up the trademark, because they don't want to have to establish their own brand (which is very expensive)?
I wonder if Republicans could be persuaded to back election reform (e.g. approval voting) at their state and local levels, so that elections could support multiple parties. If they would be willing to work toward that, they could split up without feeling like they're giving easy victory to, say, Democrats.
I bet there are some people on the left who would support the same reforms.
Now does anyone have data on whether the forecasting of a win discourages the supporters or opponents of the projected winner from actually voting?
Well.. tons of anecdotal evidence (whatever that's worth). Lots of people say they won't vote Libertarian or Green because it would be "throwing their vote away." They say it's throwing-away because polls always indicate the person they'd like to vote for, is very likely to lose (so they vote for someone else who has higher polling numbers, instead).
Apparently the thinking is like this: if you vote for someone who lost, then your vote "doesn't count." From that I conclude that since all the losers' votes votes didn't count, the winner is always unanimously elected. You can't get a stronger mandate than that, so it's our way of telling the winner that 100% of America agrees with them on 100% of issues.
For reasons I don't understand, after the election, though, over half the people say they don't agree with whoever won. It's very strange, almost as though they don't really believe that losing is the same as not counting. Go figure.
*sigh* RTFA please. Then tell me this dude isn't 100% True Freedom on at least this issue. The guy is trying to keep us all from getting totally fucked by government policy for the crime of doing our jobs. If you are pissed about the GPL can we just agree that we have million-times-bigger fish to fry first? The BSD-GPL war can fucking wait, asshole. Until then, RMS is possibly the very best friend every programmer has (yes, even proprietary dudes). Dammit, now you've pissed me off. Yes, you're the kind of moron I was talking about.
As usual, he's right. Cue the morons who ignore him because they don't like him personally.
There was one thing that stuck out at me, though:
Second, the U.S. already has many thousands of computational idea patents, and changing the criteria to prevent issuing more would not get rid of the existing ones. We would have to wait almost 20 years for the problem to be entirely corrected through patent expiration. And legislating the abolition of these existing patents is probably unconstitutional. (Perversely, the Supreme Court has insisted that Congress can extend private privileges at the expense of the publicâ(TM)s rights but that it canâ(TM)t go in the other direction.)
Anyone got a citation for this, that Congress does not have the power to limit patents which already have been granted? AFAIK patent exist completely at the pleasure of Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
If encrypting gets common, then I think people will expect signing too.
Widespread signing would be death to spam. An email that isn't from someone, is from no one, and can be deleted without spamassassin ever needing to look at it. And an email that is signed by someone who has become known as a spammer...
I think you're talking about the end of spamassassin, yes, but in a good way. :-)
People use shockingly bad email clients which still don't support it. The reasons for this vary from the mysterious, to the practical (e.g. 1. some people want webmail and it'll never be very practical to make webmail secure 2. some people want to read mail on mobiles, where the mere labor of entering a passphrase would take on the order of a minute or two).
Unverified (MitM-vulnerable) key exchange is very easy and there's no technical reason it couldn't be the baseline. Even just moving up to that would have earthshaking consequences, and once you're doing that, verifying the keys of people that you know, should be straight-forward for people who care, and a big global WoT could stitch together pretty quickly, IMHO.
BTW, this works for winning, too. Kodos is the 0% inflation candidate, over pro-inflation Kang. But if Kodos is elected and inflation doesn't fall, it's because of those Kangist obstructionists in the House. That doesn't mean I was wrong in my assertion that he was the anti-inflation presidential candidate; just that it's something I couldn't reliably bet on, due to concerns over external forces and events.
I can blame externalities for any failed prediction, and blame my lack of betting on fears of those potential externalities. If we were talking about a huge series of small bets, where over the long haul, my tendencies toward political enlightenment would be proven to my profit, sure. But you're talking about a bet on a presidential race. I'm a mere mortal gambler, not a casino; I can't take a long view or exploit a statistical edge using volume. A single $500 bet every four years (approximately dozen bets over the course of a typical adult life) is far too small a sample to demostrate anything. By the time my amazingly awesome perfect political views are confirmed, I have been dead for centuries.
If Kang wins the presidency instead of Kodos, that will tend be symptomatic of really bad voting by a tragically uninformed citizenry, and probably correlate with a bunch of other races too. If people are stupid enough to vote for Kang (holy crap, we're not really that stupid, are we?!) then they're probably also voting Kang's party into power in the House and Senate too. So Kang, an evil moron of a president, is probably going to have a Congress of evil morons putting bills on his desk, which he'll sign and thereby destroy the country.
Kang will be a bad president. That's a fact. Sure, I'll gamble on that (him being a bad president), because it's no gamble at all. But I've got an out: it's only probable (and no, I can't estimate it) that all the other races, whose outcome are going to either enable Kang's evil or not, will go that way.
If Kang is elected and the really horrible shit doesn't happen, it's because plenty of people from Kodos' party got into the House to block him. So while Kang has bad policies, but I have my excuse for why inflation didn't hit 15%. That doesn't mean the Kang/Kodos issue doesn't matter and that the stakes weren't just as high as a 15% inflation rate risk, though. So my incorrectly-labeled "alarmist hyperbole" was actually reasonable argument. I may have lost the presidency debate but obviously I won the bigger picture by winning some races for Kodos' party. Or maybe even Kang and his own people decided to be less evil and moronic, thanks to my words of warning that inflation is about to go up to 15%.
I was right, even though the facts suggest I was wrong, and I would have technically lost my bet. ;-) Indeed, this is likely to happen, so I won't place the bet to begin with.
One way I think helps to look at speech issues, is to imagine that topic of conversion were political (whether it really is, or not) and imagining it happening in the 1770s.
What if Tomas Paine or Samuel Adams were publishing computer programs, whose output were tables of imperial taxes divided by number of parliament seats? That's "just facts and information" but also 1) analytical, and the type of analysis chosen is derived from opinions 2) quite possible politically enlightening. Hell Yes the 1789 ratifiers thought they were outlawing government interference with that sort of thing.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Ian Malcolm
I get why people do maybe-foolish things, when the envisioned result is something cool like dinosaurs. Why do people do things when the best-case scenario is something, which is orders of magnitude lamer than the status quo?
Guys, we already have MICE. WTF is the point of using a kinect for a job like this? Are you saying some day you'll get it perceiving precisely enough that it'll be able to detect me slightly moving my hand on a table, as though I were using a mouse?
Canonical's "garden" has no "walls." The use of "technical measures to limit access" (if I may borrow some DMCA-speak) against the user is the main distinguishing features of walled gardens. If you let the user do whatever they want, it doesn't make any sense to call it a walled garden. It's just a garden.
Seems like RTS customers are the ones who would have a right to demand the source to whatever GPLed software they bought or been given. And any of them could legally "leak" to Grover. Not sure how RTS currently has any obligations to Grover, though. Why would they?
Remember that GPL is about protecting users. As handy as it usually is for developers, that's incidental; it's not for developers.
Or maybe not. I'd say seeing somebody else get "soaked" on baggage feeds or onboard meals, is an argument for not going back to a regulated industry.
The fewer bags you take, the less you pay. If you bring your own food or eat before you get on the plane, you pay less. And similarly, if you want to live it up, you can have what you want and there's somebody there to say "yes sir" and take your damn money, if it's so important to you to have an extra drink or bring an extra bag. What could be better?
Flat rates just mean everyone pays more, and half of the time that means you're paying for something you didn't take advantage of, to subsidize someone else's elective expenses.
I like being a miserly grudging cheapskate in some ways and a gushing luxurious cowboy in others. Don't we all have our own tastes and needs?
IMHO an interesting factor here is that we're talking about one (possibly dishonest) fuckwit. What about the other eleven jurors? Part of the reason for an independent jury is to be able to stand up to the government (I agree!) but another reason for a jury is that it is multiple people, so like elections themselves, fringes should get marginalized. If a judge has a bad day there is no check against that except (maybe!) appeals. If a juror has a bad day, there are supposedly eleven checks against that.
I like the idea of eleven checks. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)
That didn't happen here; one fringe dude is alleged to have magically taken over. I realize it's not magic (people are easily manipulated) but you've got to have some faith in people's resistance to that, or else there's no point to juries at all (nor is there a point to democracy itself!).
I think the bigger strategic lesson here isn't to so quickly turn against democracy or jury nullification, but rather, we really need to do a better job of teaching people to tell other people "fuck you." No, really.
Or to put it another way (and look at the guy in the best light), one juror who believed in nullification, blew off the statutes and did what he thought was best to promote the cause of justice (in his sick twisted sense, but hey, we all are like that in some ways). But eleven other jurors did not believe in justice, and wanted to uphold statutes instead. This one guy, through lying, was able to make them think they were successfully doing that, even if maybe it went against their sense of right and wrong. If they had also believed in nullification and had been working for justice (their sense of it) too, then the lone defector and his lies would have mattered much less.
Donkey tagged you in its Facebook photos.
It's not just "tech-challenged" friends. I have friends that are quite technically knowledgeable and competent but still won't do it.
Quite a bit of it simply not-caring.
In the last few years, a new problem has arisen: people are using tech-challenged software. Both iOS and Android come with shockingly bad email clients that probably aren't as good as whatever you were using a decade or two ago. Presumably you can get pgp-interoperative mailreaders for these platforms but I think the users of these platforms have a weird everything-must-be-out-of-the-box expectation. And out-of-the-box, the platforms are simply hopeless for reading encrypted mail. It's weird; in some ways these platforms are super-slick, and in other ways they are glaringly impoverished anachronistic wastelands.
Before this, another one of the problems was webmail; it's very awkward to do webmail right. (And I'm being rather charitable!)
On the bright side, I think mobiles are making people care less about webmail (not completely, but less); now that everyone has a personal terminal in their pocket, they don't need "read from anyone's machine with no installs or complicated configuration" which is what webmail's big attraction was. So if decent mailreaders somehow get more common on mobiles, then email security could get back up to mid-1990s tech some day.
Then it'll be time to sigh and fight the people-not-caring battle all over again. :-/
Bad ideas are the beginning of good plots. Bad-ideas-that-look-good make for better plots, I agree, so you've got a point about the A-Team lacking in this department. But no one ever said the A-Team was good.
The thing is about common sense is that it's something you gain from experience. (How many things seem like common sense to you now, and yet you didn't know those things n years ago?)
Experience is an asset and communication is commodization of that asset. When we're working together building a better world and trying to get happier, that's fucking awesome, and all hail the information revolution.
When you're in zero-sum with an adversary, you want them to be denied that asset. You want one of their earliest experiences to be death. Let 'em learn from that, and make their surviving allies perform seances to learn from it. Except those enemies will accidentally contact your demonic allies who you've contracted to perform seance interceptions and either feed false information to the enemy, or feed upon their souls.
Muahahah! If only they had the experience to detect when this is happening, and had a protective pentagram drawn on the floor as a precaution. It's all common sense! But they don't have it, because the last enemy mystic medium died screaming at the hands of my incubus and never got a chance to warn anyone.
Arithmetic and statistics are just lies straight from the pit of hell.
Lies straight out of the pit of hell? Of course not!
In this thread you spin a yarn against spelling chaos, for words are the seeds of the ideas we communicate. In my defense, I should fairly mention that I am from a friendly flax farming family, simple sons subsisting on seeds we sow so that we may sew, so please give me a break.
*sigh* At least I didn't screw up affect vs effect again. I hate that one.
It looks like you're right that it's not a crime to have that software, but it looks to me like 41.1(c) makes it a crime to create those tools or provide them. Also, you might be "import"ing the software (a new crime per this law) when you download/update it.
Interestingly, this law has the same weirdness as US' DMCA: it defines circumvention in terms of doing something without the authority of the copyright owner. But for tools, there never is any specific copyright owner. That creates a two-pronged weakness (just like DCMA) in that
So this law is theoretically solvable the same way as DMCA: everyone, go make a movie, and publish it on CSS-protected DVD. Then sew chaos.
Why no party fission? Doesn't each side of the fundamentalism issue think their party would be better off without the other side?
Is it just a matter of each one thinking the other should have to give up the trademark, because they don't want to have to establish their own brand (which is very expensive)?
I wonder if Republicans could be persuaded to back election reform (e.g. approval voting) at their state and local levels, so that elections could support multiple parties. If they would be willing to work toward that, they could split up without feeling like they're giving easy victory to, say, Democrats.
I bet there are some people on the left who would support the same reforms.
(er, disappointed if their trickery alarm didn't go off.)
I'd be disappointed if anyone read my second paragraph yet have their trickery alarm go off.
Nevertheless, it is a real example of polls changing how people vote. You don't think I'd troll without the truth on my side, do you?
Well.. tons of anecdotal evidence (whatever that's worth). Lots of people say they won't vote Libertarian or Green because it would be "throwing their vote away." They say it's throwing-away because polls always indicate the person they'd like to vote for, is very likely to lose (so they vote for someone else who has higher polling numbers, instead).
Apparently the thinking is like this: if you vote for someone who lost, then your vote "doesn't count." From that I conclude that since all the losers' votes votes didn't count, the winner is always unanimously elected. You can't get a stronger mandate than that, so it's our way of telling the winner that 100% of America agrees with them on 100% of issues.
For reasons I don't understand, after the election, though, over half the people say they don't agree with whoever won. It's very strange, almost as though they don't really believe that losing is the same as not counting. Go figure.
What's the big deal? Everyone knows economics and history are lies straight from the pit of hell.
*sigh* RTFA please. Then tell me this dude isn't 100% True Freedom on at least this issue. The guy is trying to keep us all from getting totally fucked by government policy for the crime of doing our jobs. If you are pissed about the GPL can we just agree that we have million-times-bigger fish to fry first? The BSD-GPL war can fucking wait, asshole. Until then, RMS is possibly the very best friend every programmer has (yes, even proprietary dudes). Dammit, now you've pissed me off. Yes, you're the kind of moron I was talking about.
As usual, he's right. Cue the morons who ignore him because they don't like him personally.
There was one thing that stuck out at me, though:
Anyone got a citation for this, that Congress does not have the power to limit patents which already have been granted? AFAIK patent exist completely at the pleasure of Congress.
The ad was written fine. You're just reading it wrong.