We don't elect ANYONE - The "electoral college" actually does
Yes, I know the electoral college plays a role in presidential elections. They usually vote the same way as the people, but not always. Even when they don't though, in your lifetime the only times they disagreed with the people, the elections were close. It sucks that Bush was elected, but not just because he was a bad president. The worst thing about him being elected is that about half of America voted against him. What you're leaving out, though, is that if your hated electoral college had chosen Gore, the same problem would have remained: we'd have a president that half the voters voted against. Close elections are a lose/lose matter regardless of the electoral college. I'm ok with abolishing it, but don't kid yourself that doing so is going to make people happy. You will still have presidents that you hate. Everyone will, at least half the time and usually more. That's how it'll be until we switch to approval voting or something like that.
So you've got a point about the bill signer/vetoer but even so, it's a minor thing. Even in the popular vote, the prohibition party's presidents get 99-to-1 landslides.
But wait a minute.. you're saying we don't elect ANYONE? The electoral collegs does it all? They even elect your House and Senate members, the ones who actually made the drug laws and whose responsibility it is to repeal them? And they elect your governor and state legislature members too?
Dude, you should move to America. Our system over here has some problems too, but nevertheless we have way more democracy than whatever country you're talking about.
The people @ the top can be REAL FOOLS sometimes, & this is one of those times
By "the people @ the top" I assume you mean we the voters, since we are the ones who keep re-electing the prohibition parties by 99-to-1 landslides. Yes, you're right: we're fools.
The fact that you say it's the standard way for the police to track indoor gardeners, is exactly what I think makes it a problem in USA. If a detection tech is solely a "cop thing" then whatever it detects isn't what any layman would consider public information, so government using that detection tech against its people without a warrant, is against the law. It's "unreasonable search."
If lots of people walked around with IR goggles on all the time, so that it was common knowledge (not just among cops) which houses were hotter than others, then arguably it wouldn't be against the law for cops to use it warrantlessly, either. But that doesn't happen to be the case; if you walk around with IR goggles on, that's unusual. You're probably using it to peek through womens' dresses, or you're casing joints to burgle, or you're a nerd with a cool toy.
The interesting thing here, is that dogs, unlike IR goggles, are widely-deployed tech among the citizenry. I have one laying in my lap right now, and there's nothing unusual about having it: People don't think that I'm a "Sniffing Tom" simply because I happen to walk around with one of these special noses. She can certainly smell (and hear!!) things far outside my perception, and sometimes that nose is even in strangers' crotches. (The rules of etiquette are unintuitive, whenever there are dogs around.)
OTOH, she's not trained to communicate much about what she detects. (If anything, I keep trying to train her to stop telling me that every person who makes a noise outside, is an axe murderer.) But what if I did train her to describe everything she smelled? ("Tell me what you smell in that crotch, dog. Does that lady smell.. good?") And what if that was normal, so that every person had a reasonable expectation that even very faint odors were commonly perceived by a large fraction of the citizenry? Would that change the Fourth Amendment take on police dogs?
If it didn't, then we'd have a double-standard for privacy, and that would definitely have some weird side-effects.
The really funny thing is that at this point, society is always just one corporate decision away from all the privacy rules changing. If Apple decides that the next iPhone will have chemical detectors....
I'm not so sure about that. Maybe I'm reading the wrong thing (someone please correct me if you have a better reference) but I don't see anything in here which suggests a client application which interoperates with an online service is an online service, or that a client application which downloads other clients, is somehow governed by this law to display those other applications' policies in addition to its own.
You might say this is splitting hairs and ignoring the spirit of the law, but the text I'm reading is already so hair-splitting (talks about icons and color contrasts?!) and detailed that I'm not sure it's fair for AG to expect anyone to infer spirit.
That itself doesn't mean he's wrong in his interpretation (though I happen to think he is) but he sure seems to be going above-and-beyond the call of duty, in interpreting it so.. um.. progressively instead of leaving it to the legislature.
Presumably you're ok with the solar tech not actually being onboard the aircraft. The aircraft would still store the energy as energy-dense hydrocarbons (not lead batteries with wings) but on the opposite end of the airport from where they pump in the fuel you've got fields of solar panels and some kind of conversion system that binds the energy in the form of conventional jet fuel (kerosene/paraffin). The generation is totally asynchronous and buffered, and it's ok if sometimes it takes 4 hours to generate enough fuel for 2 hours of flight, as long as every month/week/day (whatever your buffer size) you make as much fuel as you burn.
In that case, I think the barrier is either that it currently costs too much (fuel made this way is expensive), or that jet fuel from fossil sources is subsidized (e.g. taxpayers provide security for oil tankers). Wouldn't surprise me if it's a combination of the two factors.
When you solve this, you'll probably have solar-powered everything, not just aircraft.
Me using my own personal property should not be considered illegal or immoral.
Perhaps it shouldn't, but Congress passed a law that it is illegal. FWIW, prior to the ludicrousness of DMCA, there were centuries of precedent for government saying what people could do with their own property. You weren't allowed to photocopy and sell copies of a book that you bought. You weren't allowed to drive your car 56MPH on some roads, or fiddle with its emissions control equipment. You weren't allowed to grow marijuana in the back yard of the house you own (that's interstate commerce) and if you live in a city, you might not even be allowed to build a wall closer than 8 feet from the property line, or raze the house and build a slaughterhouse there.
We're mostly ok with there being laws against people doing some things with their own property. It's the details we're quibbling about, and DMCA took it to a pretty absurd degree.
Everybody who's playing DVDs on Linux already has a license, because they have a licensed DVD player in the computer
What license is that? What evidence you do have that the DVD manufacturer got a license from every movie publisher? What evidence do you have, that they somehow transferred some special permissions to you?
The "license" in this context is the authorization to descramble CSS, which DMCA requires in order for the descrambling to not count as "circumvention." If you buy a DVD and then watch it, but can't produce a document showing that the copyright holder gave you permission to descramble CSS, then you're at risk in court, should anyone come after you for watching DVDs (which they won't, because no one outside you home ever knows you're doing that).
The above happens to be true regardless of whatever licensing the software's developer did or did not obtain. I challenge everyone to find anything in DMCA which distinguishes between the two types of software (DVDCCA-blessed vs unblessed) from a user's point of view.
There is a logical resolution to it all, which sort of gets users off the hook. Sure, users (whether they use libcss or a licensed box with a Sony logo on it) don't have any way to prove that they're watching DVDs legally, because there is no explicit authorization for anyone to watch DVDs. But if the cartels like you, then of course you won't be sued. By extension, you can argue that there is implicit undocumented authorization, but it has a lot of undocumented conditions, such as "you may descramble CSS if you use software or equipment that we have blessed." If you put the copyright holder on the stand and ask them if a user has permission to watch the DVD, they can say Yes, if they want to. So there you go: if you didn't get sued for watching DVDs today, maybe it's because the copyright holder secretly granted you authorization.
And always remember, this authorization is from the movie's copyright holder, not DVDCCA. DVDCCA licensing of the player, just happens to be one of the unspoken conditions for authorization by the copyright holders.
Or rather, most of the copyright holders. If you publish your movie on DVD and manage to get it CSS-scrambled, then you are the one person who makes the rules for what users' behaviors are legal, and by what terms all DVD manufacturers are allowed to operate. And the commonly-accepted industry precedent is that you don't have to supply any documentation to users at the time of sale; there is no reason you can't sue your customers. Don't laugh that off, either, since that's what TFA is about: the feds will be on your side, as silly as that sounds.
So go make a movie, sell it, sue your customer, and get a precedent. Then take that precedent and go sue Sony for manufacturing the circumvention equipment, sue Best Buy for selling that equipment, etc.;-)
The issue with Android making the jump to the desktop hinges around one issue: User support. Android uses UIDs to separate apps. How would it keep users separate, which is a must on a desktop box.
The only way I can see that happening would be a hypervisor based system with each user on their own VM, and the core filesystem everything sits on having deduplication built in (so each user's environment only saves what the user's changes are.) Then, have a system where users have one mounted filesystem for sharing between everything.
Forget desktops; even for single-user mobile devices, what you're describing sounds like an excellent idea anyway. "Excellent" maybe even understates it; I'd say something like this is necessary for phones to ever stop sucking.
It'd useful not just so that different users could use different VMs, but also to optionally hide one user's applications from one another. Something refuses to install unless I give it access to my address book? Ok, here, have.. um.. an address book.
go on Google, get lots of hits, make no money; or stay off Google, get next-to-no hits, make no money.
I don't understand. If "gets lots of hits" causes "make no money" then wouldn't the sites hurt just as much, if no Google existed? Or wouldn't they be hurting just as much, if Google were heavily regulated?
If "get lots of hits" means "make no money" then can you imagine any possible scenario where they do make money? And if so, won't that scenario work with search referrals working as they currently do?
I totally get that it's hard to make money posting news to the web, but I'm missing how Google is somehow responsible for it being hard, unless you're talking about the landscape being so amazingly competitive due to Google helping people find competitors.
It's more complicated than that. When you're mashing the grains to make the sugar for the yeast, you might be targeting a pH 5.2 or whatever, and your mash temp is going to be all about getting the right enzymes to trim the right length starches; the chem and the biochem and the bio all come together. Most brewers really do have to deal with this stuff, at some level. It has an effect on what you end up making.
That said, you don't really need to understand chemistry very deeply to do it. But also u dont need righting class 2 suxessfuelee koomikate on interweb eether.
And that said, while I might drink a beer made by someone who is a chem "moron", I would never even consider touching any distilled drink made by someone whose competence I didn't trust. Keep your half-assed scotch the fuck away from me. I like being able to see.
Uhr? I'm not suggesting MS isn't responsible. I'm saying that if computers which require SecureBoot are what is for sale, then that's a problem that a person who buys computers needs to deal with, and implementing SecureBoot deals with it. That's the point of implementing SecureBoot: you get to use your computer in spite of its firmware's silly requirement.
If it weren't required, then there would be no point to this. But it is required, so there is a point to it.
I don't care about giving him a second chance. I want his slave labor more than I want his blood. But I need filesystems more often than I need license plates.
That's stupid, because it implies a technical approach to fighting tracking won't work. And technical approaches are, in fact, very likely to work to a great degree.
We know this, because back in the 1990s we-the-users had better tech, so tracking us was harder.
WHAT?! B-B-Better tech?! Yes.. from TFA:
When you visit a site — say, The Verge, your browser loads content that is served directly by The Verge (the first party), like our articles and images. It also loads content served by third parties, like embedded videos from YouTube, the Facebook "Like" button, and advertising content.
Anyone else remember when browser preference windows actually had a "load images" option, which you turned off sometimes? And remember when it wasn't even a checkbox, but a three-way switch, where the middle one was something along the lines of only loading images from the same domain as the page?
Naturally, with current tech, this switch is not just applied to images, but any other external resource, such as scripts or iframe or SWFs or.. hey, wait a minute. I can't find this browser preference at all!
Chrome: not there. Safari: not there. Firefox: not there, seriously?! Et tu, Firefox?
We are choosing to run software which we know leaks uniquely identifiable information, does it without explicit direction from the user, and leaks it to parties not shown in the UI. It's all stuff that anyone alive 15 years ago could have told you is obviously a bad idea, which is why, back then, many of us rather effortlessly chose to abstain from doing it, rather than doing it. (Ok, back then it was partly for performance reasons so your USR Courier could keep up with what you were doing, but c'mon -- even back then, we all knew what tiny 1x1 transparent "web bugs" were really about.) Today, we choose to do these insane things, and we're complaining about who does what with the leaked intell?!
What happens to the leaked intell isn't what's interesting. The fact that we're leaking it, and to whom and how we're doing it, is what's interesting.
A technical approach (stop leaking so much!) will go a long way toward fixing the problem.
Of course, I'm one of those damn fool idealists who thought a technical approach could beat spam too.;-) Everyone, just sign your emails! Alas, that technical solution just creates a social problem...
Not set doesn't mean "ok to track." Yes, they will track you, but the difference from DNT:0 is when it's not set, they're tracking you without your consent (nobody said you're ok with it). With DNT:0, you are consenting.
And the difference between that and DNT:1 (where most of them also track you) is that when it's not set, they have plausible deniability that they resisted your preference. With DNT:1, you're not consenting and they can't credibly say "I didn't know you had a problem with that."
(Unless you're running MSIE10, in which case if you send DNT:1, they can say "I didn't know you had a problem with that.")
Maybe this is the best way to look at it. DNT is "plausible deniability by default." It's not about tracking; it's about the relationship, and it provides a previously-missing piece of the model, representing the level to which hostility has escalated.
Hey hot stuff, I have rotatating medi-- no wait, hold on! I have read-ahead cache! That's right. Would you like to read from my cache? Sure. Oh. No, we don't need to go back to my place, we can VPN in from right here. Yeah. Oh. No, I have no idea what VPN software is available for that thing. No. No. Yeah, anything that talks OpenVPN. Yeah. Well, I think there's something called Cygus or Macports or something like.. oh, wait, this isn't ported to your phone yet. Well, we can always download the source's tarball. You've got a C compiler, snarfo-make (which uses slightly different makefiles than all the other make programs), and all the rest of the usual build tools, right? No. Well, maybe.. no wait, no. No. Hey lady, you're the one who bought a piece-of-shit computer, don't blame me. No. Maybe. Yeah, maybe! Whoa whoa whoa -- I'm merely saying that you're probably stupid; I don't have any opinion as to why people-like-you are stupid; I would never be so presumptuous. No. Sometimes. No. Linus?! That asshole?! Don't do it! He'll break your heart! I saw him in here last night with a different floozy than the night before!
..but I still didn't get laid. There's something wrong with your cache idea.
this is the Linux community attempting to force Nvidia to develop open-source drivers
I assume that by "force" you actually meant "persuade," right? Linux is offering this k3wl new interface as a carrot to graphics performance freaks in exchange for GPL-licensing their driver. If Nvidia rejects the offer and has their driver do the same stuff it did before this interface existed, the csonsequences to them are... ? Alan Cox has them arrested and sent to the Gulag? If not, then please watch your use of the word "force."
Also, this is all based on the pretty radical assumption, that using an interface is enough to cause one side of the interface to be a derived work of the other. That may or may not be true, but I doubt you'll find a lot of unity of opinion on that. They might be able to get away with totally ignoring Alan's opinion, his veiled threat about the lawyers, notwithstanding. This shit is not clear-cut and if it ever gets to court (it never does) you'll see what a mess it is, and no matter who wins, half the people will be rightly calling the decision arbitrary.
Yeah, the chicks are all into low-latency/high-throughput. They want to watch their 20 gigabyte movie files in 12 seconds (with the first NFS reply coming less than 5ms after the request) and my computer can't serve it that fast! So they all go over to Linus' house, with his flashy SSDs and.. oooh, it makes me so mad.
Sure, maybe those rotating platters are ok in some NAS box that you keep your big media files on (or in that cloud storage cluster you use, and where the network latencies make the disk latencies be secondary), but in an actual computer? Ugh.
Hey Linus, guess what's my favorite kernel to run on that NAS computer? Yours. And yes, it is an "actual computer." Sorry if it's not sexy enough for ya.
Wouldn't they just mandate that your provider give them access to your device to record anything going to your mic?
That's one of the reasons people have been advocating for years, that it's undesirable/borderline_senseless to buy your PC from your ISP. In some contexts (PC sits on a desk) people get that and think the idea is absurd and they never would do it, and in others (PC fits in a pocket) it's routine and people don't give it a second thought. Weird.
But even so, that risk isn't absolute. Not all adversaries are the government, and "the government" isn't always the one government (e.g. is Iran capable of pressuring all the same parties that US is capable of pressuring?).
Totally agreed. There's not nearly as much email encryption as is justified.
But here's a thought experiment. Suppose you send someone an encrypted email. Suppose that other person has signed a contract in blood, that they promise they will send the decrypted plaintext of all the email they ever receive, to an ad company.
How would you know? And whether you knew or not, were you harmed by this? And assuming you were harmed, who harmed you?
I think the person who decides to share all their email, is the most harmful (assuming harm has happened at all). This dude probably doesn't have a case, but if he does, then he's suing the wrong people.
If I punch you in the face and take your wallet, you'll know it happened. It's also reasonably likely there may be other witnesses or evidence left behind, so you won't be the only one (just in case the punch kills you). That has drastic consequences for what strategies are likely to effectively deal with mugging.
OTOH, if you opt in to telling me lots of information, but don't opt in to me "thinking extra hard" and drawing creepily-insightful interences from what you told me, what can you do? Even if we assume you're evil enough to want to control my thoughts, and careless enough to not want to stop telling me things, what strategy do you propose, for effectively preventing me from thinking in the wrong way?
I think if you work it out, you'll find DNT's approach of asking-me-nicely, if weak, is about the best you can do. If that's not enough for you, then you are going to have to change. I suggest you start with changing your mind about wanting to send me so much information. If you deny me the ability to track you, that will go a hell of a long way toward your goal.
The hilarious thing is that I actually do have an alternative strategy, other than both asking-nicely and capability-denial, that I think could (though not efficiently) work. All we need to do, is create the surveillance state that we seek to avoid. Then Big Brother can routinely check the insides of everyone's computer to make sure they're not unfairly surveilling anyone.
I take what is probably seen as a pro-advertiser stance on ad tracking. I do something very similar whenever the topic of "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes up in the context of plaintext broadcasts of supposedly-private information (e.g. the Google wardriving story is totally overblown). Perhaps you think I'm an ex-STASI jerk who works at Doubleclick. No, I'm probably more pro-privacy than you. I just have a realistic sense of what it's going to take, for us to get what we want.
Stop leaking. Spread tech to help people stop leaking. Anything less, is a surrender flag. But for a surrender flag, DNT is actually a pretty good one. Too bad MSIE10 dyes it black. When the enemy fires on those users' surrender flags, I'm going to laugh in their faces if they dare to lie and say they weren't warned.
One possible unintended consequence to taxing pollution is that the government will become dependent on the tax revenue. Which may well cause the government to encourage pollution blocking manufacturer's efforts to reduce pollution.
That's because people don't understand how to do taxes. Stop electing these people!
It's dumb to tax pollution as a punitive measure, or to encourage/discourage the use of certain technologies or behaviors, or to raise general revenue.
It's smart to tax pollution to offset the public-born costs of the thing which is taxed.
Don't tax pollution to nudge people into abstaining from polluting; tax them whatever it costs to clean up their mess, and then spend that money to do just that. If someone is spewing greenhouse gasses, tax 'em to plant forests (or whatever, if you have a cheaper way to handle it) of the capacity needed to bind those gasses, and then actually do that (really plant the forests).
That alone may be enough to indirectly discourage them from polluting. Or maybe they'll pay to plant the forests themselves, since they can do it more efficiently (cheaper) than government contractors. Or if they're not discouraged: don't worry about it, because you got your offsetting forest and the pollution really did get handled.
If someone is spewing something harder to clean up, then use (and set) that tax to whatever it takes to deal with it. And if nobody has the magic or tech to deal with the pollutant, then the pollution (i.e. the liability) can't be paid for, so should be forcefully prohibited, rather than forgiven (i.e. subsidized at public expense).
Don't think in terms of saving the world; think in terms of turning externalities into actual liabilities.
Dependency isn't a problem if you handle taxes this way, because you don't use the pollution tax to pay for wars or Medicare or anything else which is unrelated to the tax. e.g. If people stop dumping CO2, then your forest-planting expenses just went down, so the demand for the revenue drops at the same time the supply does.
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Yes, I know the electoral college plays a role in presidential elections. They usually vote the same way as the people, but not always. Even when they don't though, in your lifetime the only times they disagreed with the people, the elections were close. It sucks that Bush was elected, but not just because he was a bad president. The worst thing about him being elected is that about half of America voted against him. What you're leaving out, though, is that if your hated electoral college had chosen Gore, the same problem would have remained: we'd have a president that half the voters voted against. Close elections are a lose/lose matter regardless of the electoral college. I'm ok with abolishing it, but don't kid yourself that doing so is going to make people happy. You will still have presidents that you hate. Everyone will, at least half the time and usually more. That's how it'll be until we switch to approval voting or something like that.
So you've got a point about the bill signer/vetoer but even so, it's a minor thing. Even in the popular vote, the prohibition party's presidents get 99-to-1 landslides.
But wait a minute.. you're saying we don't elect ANYONE? The electoral collegs does it all? They even elect your House and Senate members, the ones who actually made the drug laws and whose responsibility it is to repeal them? And they elect your governor and state legislature members too?
Dude, you should move to America. Our system over here has some problems too, but nevertheless we have way more democracy than whatever country you're talking about.
By "the people @ the top" I assume you mean we the voters, since we are the ones who keep re-electing the prohibition parties by 99-to-1 landslides. Yes, you're right: we're fools.
The fact that you say it's the standard way for the police to track indoor gardeners, is exactly what I think makes it a problem in USA. If a detection tech is solely a "cop thing" then whatever it detects isn't what any layman would consider public information, so government using that detection tech against its people without a warrant, is against the law. It's "unreasonable search."
If lots of people walked around with IR goggles on all the time, so that it was common knowledge (not just among cops) which houses were hotter than others, then arguably it wouldn't be against the law for cops to use it warrantlessly, either. But that doesn't happen to be the case; if you walk around with IR goggles on, that's unusual. You're probably using it to peek through womens' dresses, or you're casing joints to burgle, or you're a nerd with a cool toy.
The interesting thing here, is that dogs, unlike IR goggles, are widely-deployed tech among the citizenry. I have one laying in my lap right now, and there's nothing unusual about having it: People don't think that I'm a "Sniffing Tom" simply because I happen to walk around with one of these special noses. She can certainly smell (and hear!!) things far outside my perception, and sometimes that nose is even in strangers' crotches. (The rules of etiquette are unintuitive, whenever there are dogs around.)
OTOH, she's not trained to communicate much about what she detects. (If anything, I keep trying to train her to stop telling me that every person who makes a noise outside, is an axe murderer.) But what if I did train her to describe everything she smelled? ("Tell me what you smell in that crotch, dog. Does that lady smell .. good?") And what if that was normal, so that every person had a reasonable expectation that even very faint odors were commonly perceived by a large fraction of the citizenry? Would that change the Fourth Amendment take on police dogs?
If it didn't, then we'd have a double-standard for privacy, and that would definitely have some weird side-effects.
The really funny thing is that at this point, society is always just one corporate decision away from all the privacy rules changing. If Apple decides that the next iPhone will have chemical detectors....
I'm not so sure about that. Maybe I'm reading the wrong thing (someone please correct me if you have a better reference) but I don't see anything in here which suggests a client application which interoperates with an online service is an online service, or that a client application which downloads other clients, is somehow governed by this law to display those other applications' policies in addition to its own.
You might say this is splitting hairs and ignoring the spirit of the law, but the text I'm reading is already so hair-splitting (talks about icons and color contrasts?!) and detailed that I'm not sure it's fair for AG to expect anyone to infer spirit.
That itself doesn't mean he's wrong in his interpretation (though I happen to think he is) but he sure seems to be going above-and-beyond the call of duty, in interpreting it so .. um .. progressively instead of leaving it to the legislature.
Presumably you're ok with the solar tech not actually being onboard the aircraft. The aircraft would still store the energy as energy-dense hydrocarbons (not lead batteries with wings) but on the opposite end of the airport from where they pump in the fuel you've got fields of solar panels and some kind of conversion system that binds the energy in the form of conventional jet fuel (kerosene/paraffin). The generation is totally asynchronous and buffered, and it's ok if sometimes it takes 4 hours to generate enough fuel for 2 hours of flight, as long as every month/week/day (whatever your buffer size) you make as much fuel as you burn.
In that case, I think the barrier is either that it currently costs too much (fuel made this way is expensive), or that jet fuel from fossil sources is subsidized (e.g. taxpayers provide security for oil tankers). Wouldn't surprise me if it's a combination of the two factors.
When you solve this, you'll probably have solar-powered everything, not just aircraft.
Perhaps it shouldn't, but Congress passed a law that it is illegal. FWIW, prior to the ludicrousness of DMCA, there were centuries of precedent for government saying what people could do with their own property. You weren't allowed to photocopy and sell copies of a book that you bought. You weren't allowed to drive your car 56MPH on some roads, or fiddle with its emissions control equipment. You weren't allowed to grow marijuana in the back yard of the house you own (that's interstate commerce) and if you live in a city, you might not even be allowed to build a wall closer than 8 feet from the property line, or raze the house and build a slaughterhouse there.
We're mostly ok with there being laws against people doing some things with their own property. It's the details we're quibbling about, and DMCA took it to a pretty absurd degree.
Absurd except we re-elected them.
What license is that? What evidence you do have that the DVD manufacturer got a license from every movie publisher? What evidence do you have, that they somehow transferred some special permissions to you?
The "license" in this context is the authorization to descramble CSS, which DMCA requires in order for the descrambling to not count as "circumvention." If you buy a DVD and then watch it, but can't produce a document showing that the copyright holder gave you permission to descramble CSS, then you're at risk in court, should anyone come after you for watching DVDs (which they won't, because no one outside you home ever knows you're doing that).
The above happens to be true regardless of whatever licensing the software's developer did or did not obtain. I challenge everyone to find anything in DMCA which distinguishes between the two types of software (DVDCCA-blessed vs unblessed) from a user's point of view.
There is a logical resolution to it all, which sort of gets users off the hook. Sure, users (whether they use libcss or a licensed box with a Sony logo on it) don't have any way to prove that they're watching DVDs legally, because there is no explicit authorization for anyone to watch DVDs. But if the cartels like you, then of course you won't be sued. By extension, you can argue that there is implicit undocumented authorization, but it has a lot of undocumented conditions, such as "you may descramble CSS if you use software or equipment that we have blessed." If you put the copyright holder on the stand and ask them if a user has permission to watch the DVD, they can say Yes, if they want to. So there you go: if you didn't get sued for watching DVDs today, maybe it's because the copyright holder secretly granted you authorization.
And always remember, this authorization is from the movie's copyright holder, not DVDCCA. DVDCCA licensing of the player, just happens to be one of the unspoken conditions for authorization by the copyright holders.
Or rather, most of the copyright holders. If you publish your movie on DVD and manage to get it CSS-scrambled, then you are the one person who makes the rules for what users' behaviors are legal, and by what terms all DVD manufacturers are allowed to operate. And the commonly-accepted industry precedent is that you don't have to supply any documentation to users at the time of sale; there is no reason you can't sue your customers. Don't laugh that off, either, since that's what TFA is about: the feds will be on your side, as silly as that sounds.
So go make a movie, sell it, sue your customer, and get a precedent. Then take that precedent and go sue Sony for manufacturing the circumvention equipment, sue Best Buy for selling that equipment, etc. ;-)
Forget desktops; even for single-user mobile devices, what you're describing sounds like an excellent idea anyway. "Excellent" maybe even understates it; I'd say something like this is necessary for phones to ever stop sucking.
It'd useful not just so that different users could use different VMs, but also to optionally hide one user's applications from one another. Something refuses to install unless I give it access to my address book? Ok, here, have .. um.. an address book.
I don't understand. If "gets lots of hits" causes "make no money" then wouldn't the sites hurt just as much, if no Google existed? Or wouldn't they be hurting just as much, if Google were heavily regulated?
If "get lots of hits" means "make no money" then can you imagine any possible scenario where they do make money? And if so, won't that scenario work with search referrals working as they currently do?
I totally get that it's hard to make money posting news to the web, but I'm missing how Google is somehow responsible for it being hard, unless you're talking about the landscape being so amazingly competitive due to Google helping people find competitors.
Does mysticism exert any advantageous selection pressures upon its host, moreso than reason does?
It's more complicated than that. When you're mashing the grains to make the sugar for the yeast, you might be targeting a pH 5.2 or whatever, and your mash temp is going to be all about getting the right enzymes to trim the right length starches; the chem and the biochem and the bio all come together. Most brewers really do have to deal with this stuff, at some level. It has an effect on what you end up making.
That said, you don't really need to understand chemistry very deeply to do it. But also u dont need righting class 2 suxessfuelee koomikate on interweb eether.
And that said, while I might drink a beer made by someone who is a chem "moron", I would never even consider touching any distilled drink made by someone whose competence I didn't trust. Keep your half-assed scotch the fuck away from me. I like being able to see.
Uhr? I'm not suggesting MS isn't responsible. I'm saying that if computers which require SecureBoot are what is for sale, then that's a problem that a person who buys computers needs to deal with, and implementing SecureBoot deals with it. That's the point of implementing SecureBoot: you get to use your computer in spite of its firmware's silly requirement.
If it weren't required, then there would be no point to this. But it is required, so there is a point to it.
I don't care about giving him a second chance. I want his slave labor more than I want his blood. But I need filesystems more often than I need license plates.
That's stupid, because it implies a technical approach to fighting tracking won't work. And technical approaches are, in fact, very likely to work to a great degree.
We know this, because back in the 1990s we-the-users had better tech, so tracking us was harder.
WHAT?! B-B-Better tech?! Yes.. from TFA:
Anyone else remember when browser preference windows actually had a "load images" option, which you turned off sometimes? And remember when it wasn't even a checkbox, but a three-way switch, where the middle one was something along the lines of only loading images from the same domain as the page?
Naturally, with current tech, this switch is not just applied to images, but any other external resource, such as scripts or iframe or SWFs or .. hey, wait a minute. I can't find this browser preference at all!
Chrome: not there. Safari: not there. Firefox: not there, seriously?! Et tu, Firefox?
We are choosing to run software which we know leaks uniquely identifiable information, does it without explicit direction from the user, and leaks it to parties not shown in the UI. It's all stuff that anyone alive 15 years ago could have told you is obviously a bad idea, which is why, back then, many of us rather effortlessly chose to abstain from doing it, rather than doing it. (Ok, back then it was partly for performance reasons so your USR Courier could keep up with what you were doing, but c'mon -- even back then, we all knew what tiny 1x1 transparent "web bugs" were really about.) Today, we choose to do these insane things, and we're complaining about who does what with the leaked intell?!
What happens to the leaked intell isn't what's interesting. The fact that we're leaking it, and to whom and how we're doing it, is what's interesting.
A technical approach (stop leaking so much!) will go a long way toward fixing the problem.
Of course, I'm one of those damn fool idealists who thought a technical approach could beat spam too. ;-) Everyone, just sign your emails! Alas, that technical solution just creates a social problem...
Not set doesn't mean "ok to track." Yes, they will track you, but the difference from DNT:0 is when it's not set, they're tracking you without your consent (nobody said you're ok with it). With DNT:0, you are consenting.
And the difference between that and DNT:1 (where most of them also track you) is that when it's not set, they have plausible deniability that they resisted your preference. With DNT:1, you're not consenting and they can't credibly say "I didn't know you had a problem with that."
(Unless you're running MSIE10, in which case if you send DNT:1, they can say "I didn't know you had a problem with that.")
Maybe this is the best way to look at it. DNT is "plausible deniability by default." It's not about tracking; it's about the relationship, and it provides a previously-missing piece of the model, representing the level to which hostility has escalated.
I don't understand it. I tried using your idea..
..but I still didn't get laid. There's something wrong with your cache idea.
Because the machine comes that way, yet you also want it to boot.
I assume that by "force" you actually meant "persuade," right? Linux is offering this k3wl new interface as a carrot to graphics performance freaks in exchange for GPL-licensing their driver. If Nvidia rejects the offer and has their driver do the same stuff it did before this interface existed, the csonsequences to them are ... ? Alan Cox has them arrested and sent to the Gulag? If not, then please watch your use of the word "force."
Also, this is all based on the pretty radical assumption, that using an interface is enough to cause one side of the interface to be a derived work of the other. That may or may not be true, but I doubt you'll find a lot of unity of opinion on that. They might be able to get away with totally ignoring Alan's opinion, his veiled threat about the lawyers, notwithstanding. This shit is not clear-cut and if it ever gets to court (it never does) you'll see what a mess it is, and no matter who wins, half the people will be rightly calling the decision arbitrary.
Yeah, the chicks are all into low-latency/high-throughput. They want to watch their 20 gigabyte movie files in 12 seconds (with the first NFS reply coming less than 5ms after the request) and my computer can't serve it that fast! So they all go over to Linus' house, with his flashy SSDs and .. oooh, it makes me so mad.
Hey Linus, guess what's my favorite kernel to run on that NAS computer? Yours. And yes, it is an "actual computer." Sorry if it's not sexy enough for ya.
The summary could actually be correct, but it shouts (perhaps incorrectly) "I am stupid!" Why not include the obviously-needed missing thought?
That's one of the reasons people have been advocating for years, that it's undesirable/borderline_senseless to buy your PC from your ISP. In some contexts (PC sits on a desk) people get that and think the idea is absurd and they never would do it, and in others (PC fits in a pocket) it's routine and people don't give it a second thought. Weird.
But even so, that risk isn't absolute. Not all adversaries are the government, and "the government" isn't always the one government (e.g. is Iran capable of pressuring all the same parties that US is capable of pressuring?).
Totally agreed. There's not nearly as much email encryption as is justified.
But here's a thought experiment. Suppose you send someone an encrypted email. Suppose that other person has signed a contract in blood, that they promise they will send the decrypted plaintext of all the email they ever receive, to an ad company.
How would you know? And whether you knew or not, were you harmed by this? And assuming you were harmed, who harmed you?
I think the person who decides to share all their email, is the most harmful (assuming harm has happened at all). This dude probably doesn't have a case, but if he does, then he's suing the wrong people.
If I punch you in the face and take your wallet, you'll know it happened. It's also reasonably likely there may be other witnesses or evidence left behind, so you won't be the only one (just in case the punch kills you). That has drastic consequences for what strategies are likely to effectively deal with mugging.
OTOH, if you opt in to telling me lots of information, but don't opt in to me "thinking extra hard" and drawing creepily-insightful interences from what you told me, what can you do? Even if we assume you're evil enough to want to control my thoughts, and careless enough to not want to stop telling me things, what strategy do you propose, for effectively preventing me from thinking in the wrong way?
I think if you work it out, you'll find DNT's approach of asking-me-nicely, if weak, is about the best you can do. If that's not enough for you, then you are going to have to change. I suggest you start with changing your mind about wanting to send me so much information. If you deny me the ability to track you, that will go a hell of a long way toward your goal.
The hilarious thing is that I actually do have an alternative strategy, other than both asking-nicely and capability-denial, that I think could (though not efficiently) work. All we need to do, is create the surveillance state that we seek to avoid. Then Big Brother can routinely check the insides of everyone's computer to make sure they're not unfairly surveilling anyone.
I take what is probably seen as a pro-advertiser stance on ad tracking. I do something very similar whenever the topic of "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes up in the context of plaintext broadcasts of supposedly-private information (e.g. the Google wardriving story is totally overblown). Perhaps you think I'm an ex-STASI jerk who works at Doubleclick. No, I'm probably more pro-privacy than you. I just have a realistic sense of what it's going to take, for us to get what we want.
Stop leaking. Spread tech to help people stop leaking. Anything less, is a surrender flag. But for a surrender flag, DNT is actually a pretty good one. Too bad MSIE10 dyes it black. When the enemy fires on those users' surrender flags, I'm going to laugh in their faces if they dare to lie and say they weren't warned.
That's because people don't understand how to do taxes. Stop electing these people!
It's dumb to tax pollution as a punitive measure, or to encourage/discourage the use of certain technologies or behaviors, or to raise general revenue.
It's smart to tax pollution to offset the public-born costs of the thing which is taxed.
Don't tax pollution to nudge people into abstaining from polluting; tax them whatever it costs to clean up their mess, and then spend that money to do just that. If someone is spewing greenhouse gasses, tax 'em to plant forests (or whatever, if you have a cheaper way to handle it) of the capacity needed to bind those gasses, and then actually do that (really plant the forests).
That alone may be enough to indirectly discourage them from polluting. Or maybe they'll pay to plant the forests themselves, since they can do it more efficiently (cheaper) than government contractors. Or if they're not discouraged: don't worry about it, because you got your offsetting forest and the pollution really did get handled.
If someone is spewing something harder to clean up, then use (and set) that tax to whatever it takes to deal with it. And if nobody has the magic or tech to deal with the pollutant, then the pollution (i.e. the liability) can't be paid for, so should be forcefully prohibited, rather than forgiven (i.e. subsidized at public expense).
Don't think in terms of saving the world; think in terms of turning externalities into actual liabilities.
Dependency isn't a problem if you handle taxes this way, because you don't use the pollution tax to pay for wars or Medicare or anything else which is unrelated to the tax. e.g. If people stop dumping CO2, then your forest-planting expenses just went down, so the demand for the revenue drops at the same time the supply does.