DMCA was a big law that did several different, only tenuously-related, things. It had stuff in it very specifically worded to address issues with, and I am not making this up, boat hull designs. Nobody would really claim to hate all of DMCA, unless their objection is systemic (i.e. that law like almost every other law, was passed without public input). I don't even have an opinion on the boat hull design part; like the people who enacted it, I've never bothered to read it.:-)
The anti-circumvention parts of DMCA were unambiguously evil with no redeeming virtues to even partially mitigate them, with no pretense of serving the interests of the public (and nothing but a false pretense of serving the interests of copyright holders; this law was bad for everyone except professional pirates and DRM snakeoil salesmen). I think that when most people bitch about "DMCA" as shorthand, they're talking about this part of it.
But sometimes people are talking about the notice-counternotice stuff, whose basic intention is to establish rules for who is liable for something, by creating a mechanic that lets you always point at someone and say "the buck stops there." While there are controversies about this part of DMCA, they're usually (but not always, there are subtleties) related to hosting services who take a default behavior of immediately folding when presented with a DMCA notice. (And youtube happens to be one of those.) People can always solve that problem by dumping a hosting service for a more customer-friendly one (or self-hosting if necessary), so this part of DMCA isn't nearly as flame worthy as the anti-circumvention part.
And within the notice-counternotice part of DMCA, is the safe harbor provision. This isn't so much something to be thankful for, though, as it is integral to the notice-counternotice mechanism having any point at all. Without safe harbor, you're practically back to a pre-DMCA situation with regard to hosting liability.
That would be both good and bad; it's complicated. It's particularly bad for services whose value lies in user participation, but possibly good in a very long view, as it would encourage a return to self-hosting -- distribution of power with fewer social bottlenecks the network effects stemming from that. But naturally, companies like Google and Facebook would hate that.
Er.. my question wasn't so much about state-vs-fed power distribution, but rather why there's any motive at all to restrict bees' movement -- what problem does limiting bee travel solve? I thought maybe the original poster was suggesting that interstate bee trucks need to be eliminated in order to solve the problem of them sometimes crashing. That's an idea that was so juicily mock-worthy that I figured it had to be a trap.
Someone mentioned disease containment; that's the kind of serious answer that I was looking for. Whether that would really solve bees' problems, I don't know, but it's certain not on-the-face-of-it stupid.
It really makes one wonder how those old school broadcasting companies managed to stay afloat.
From a tech perspective, the obvious thing that leaps out at me is that the broadcast companies had vastly superior delivery tech: radio broadcast. That means they really just had one party (not counting competitors) standing in their way (FCC) and once they got through that, nearly every potential viewer was guaranteed delivery of the ads.
Analogously, Netflix is using pre-radio tech such as letter-writing. Every single new customer has a corresponding increase in cost. Adding a broadcast receiver has no impact on the transmitter's bandwidth needs; adding a singlecast receiver has a linear increase on the transmitter's bandwidth needs.
And since a new customer also increases costs for the ISPs and other peering middlemen too (though at least they theoretically also receive a corresponding increase in revenue), the tech's poor scaling ability stresses everyone and leads to new potentials for shakedowns, whether by the businesses Netflix works with, or through the government. It's a dangerous and unstable situation where success will eventually punish itself.
Broadcast's ability to scale well, just made it so that the more people who used it, the better it worked. Unlike with streaming video, nobody ever worried, "Are too many people watching TV?"
That's a tech perspective. When it comes down to actual dollars going into the broadcast companies and Netflix, I may very well be talking out of my ass.;-) It's gotta be part of the problem at least, though.
When you take competitors into account, Netflix situation is worse there too. The parties bearing part of the cost of delivery practically are their competitors. It's like if CBS were broadcasting a show, and every time someone watched it, ABC and NBC got a bill in addition to losing a customer. Not that this is the tech's or Netflix's fault, though. We have serious conflict-of-interest problems with ISPs in USA at least.
The post you're replying to does mention the word "credit," but TFA is really about payment systems. You can live completely within your means and still you will be paying a "merchant services" tax on everything you buy and generate ad-targeting statistics. The issue isn't credit; it's about having a Man in the Middle.
We need cash or failing that, something just as good. I think a lot of people "get" this, which is why there's been so much desperate grabbing for Bitcoin stories and stuff like that on Slashdot lately.
There's always more work to do, until they build HedonismBot. That will finally be a sign that something has gone too far. Until then, the robots are just helping us all to become HedonismMeatbags.
Jobs wasn't indignant that someone made a phone; there were already other smartphones but Apple wasn't suing them. This is really just Look and Feel V2. Apple wants to fight that war again, just like Hitler. <gd&r>
Perhaps a way around it, though, is to define what "speaking" is. A person giving money - sure.
I think that is where we went wrong, and from that error, other errors were inevitable.
If I pay for your printing press to print MY pamphlet which flames the Stamp Act, that transaction was part of my speech.
If I pay you, to fund your pamphlet and hope for the best that you say something I 60% agree with, then that wasn't my speech, it was yours. It's too.. deferential (?) to count as my speech. While I wouldn't necessarily endorse Congress passing laws saying I can't aid you in your speech, it doesn't really look like a First Amendment issue, unless I'm willing to have my byline on your pamphlet (with all the consequences of that).
The essence of a campaign contribution is that I'm hiring someone else as my proxy to advertise "Vote for Thomas Jefferson" and the person I hire also just happens to be Thomas Jefferson. I don't see why that mechanic needs to be protected, since I'm just as capable of advertising "Vote for Thomas Jefferson" myself. This proxy stuff seems not only irresponsible and deceptive, but I'm drawing a blank on coming up with any upsides it may have. I don't think it's what the framers had in mind, and it sure isn't what they said in any plain text reading (I don't mean case law!) of the First Amendment.
Once we get that handled correctly, I'm not sure we need to worry so much about any negative consequences of corporate speech. NYT can print editorials and Exxon can buy ads saying vote for a certain candidate, but neither of them (or you or me) will be able to give money to that candidate under the guise of speech. Then we'll all have a clearer picture of what they are giving the money for, and we can make a decision about whether bribery should be regulated.;-)
No, you defeat one of the points of using cash. One of cash's advantages is that it's anonymous, but another advantage it has, is that you're not paying a "tax" on every transaction to a bank, like you do with, say, plastic money.
According to TFA the police didn't copy the software, they only used its documentation
Regardless of whatever facts (or lack thereof) resolve the original accusation, that accusation still exists. Strike One, British Police. Two more of these, and no more Net for you.
You've never been to our neighborhood polling station at Alpha Centauri? Oh for heaven sake, it's only four light years away! I'm sorry but if you can't be bothered to vote, you've got no business complaining about this term's gods.
It's a smartphone, not a computer... A phone is an appliance.
Smartphones are PCs. Indeed, being thought of and used as a "computer," and being extensible to handle new applications that the manufacturer never thought of, is practically what distinguishes a smartphone from a dumbphone. Being totally-unlike-an-appliance was the essense of the iPhone1'z buzz.
When is the last time you installed a new application on your microwave? When's the last time your microwave interacted with an upgrading world over a network, perhaps through a web browser? If you did those things with your microwave, you would expect it to be upgradable.
[No one] is wholly good or wholly evil. Can we leave it at that?
I don't think so, precisely because the statement is so universal. If there were nothing more to say about Jobs (or anyone else) than that, there would be nothing to say at all. Now is precisely the time for different people with different agendas to call attention to what about Jobs (or Apple under his leadership) was good, evil, or interesting.
The time for respect was a long time ago, and we showed plenty enough of it back then.
People who want personal computers to not just be video game consoles, were complaining about Jobs' influence on the industry up until the last minute of his life. The reality of what's happening didn't magically stop the instant Jobs died, so why should people stop complaining about it? Lots of people die every day, and those who remain can't (and shouldn't) all just shut up about what's left behind, out of some desire to not offend a former adversary's shade. (And, BTW, look at what RMS really says. He doesn't talk shit about Jobs personally; he really does seem to limit the comment to Jobs' exit from the industry.)
The media went totally overboard with all the Jobs-love and they didn't just talk about his personal life; some praised his business, and I don't just mean Apple in general but even the IOS devices. That especially puts the topic on the table.
If Jobs' death means you shouldn't talk frankly about IOS' evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it, then Jobs' death means you also shouldn't misrepresent IOS evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it. So if anyone criticizes RMS' lack of "respect" here, I wonder where's their anger about how the rest of the media disrespected the living last week, with their you're-not-allowed-to-rebut-this deification.
Patents are most useful when they are tightly linked into clusters by references, such that they cover every angle on an idea
I'm so confused. I thought patents were most useful when they promoted the progress of science and useful arts.;-)
Look how far we've come. The ostensible purpose of patents isn't even given lip service anymore. Everybody knows they're not for what we say they're for. There isn't even a thin veneer of pretense left.
If you've just got to have removable storage, then you pay for special connectors, so they are incompatible with anything else.
Or you just... oh I don't know.. stop using OSes which go to extra trouble to find, load, and execute code from removable drives whenever it sees one.
When I hear fear about plugging in drives, I think that's just as amazing as people saying to not surf porn sites or be careful about what links you click on. If those activities pose the slightest risk of infection, then your computer is already "infected" with shitware, and shouldn't be used for anything important.
Even with the most incorruptible, angelic, and law-abiding cops, there are still thieves out there (otherwise you wouldn't need the cops to even exist), and even without thieves, people still lose things.
It's simply a bad idea to have portable devices that hold sensitive information but which lack any sort of protection. You wouldn't do it with a laptop, but once the computer gets small enough to fit in your pocket, people lose all their common sense.
Address the basic threat, you'll have also addressed the relatively infrequently occurring government-related variants of the threat too.
I think too many people narrowly limit their thoughts to government, when they think about privacy issues. Government is important, but as soon as you start thinking of them as the main problem, or as the main solution, you have lost. You can't solve privacy problems with a strengthened BIll of Rights, and you can't create new privacy problems by ignoring the Bill of Rights. Government is merely a major player, not The System itself.
Passwords do not really matter. Their scanning device bypasses passwords.
That is really just a symptom of handheld PCs totally sucking compared to what you'd otherwise expect from a larger one. And while this situation is dragging on a lot longer than I thought it would, it's still not going to last forever.
Eventually someone will do it right: the passphrase won't merely authenticate, but will also decrypt the session key for the cipher that encrypts the user's home directory.
That's like saying you don't need to use crypto on the Internet, because you don't give permission to anyone to intercept your plaintext. Just like how you don't need to put armor on your combat tank because you don't give anyone permission to shoot at it.;-) Not giving permission doesn't "solve" problems.
(Still, I think I get your point: Lots of people give more permissions to cops than they need to.)
"Low-end" CPUs are definitely underrated. I don't know exactly what addons you're talking about, and no doubt there are some good ones that make a low-end CPU insufferable, but..
We've got an ION (Atom 330+Nvidia 9400) (which a Brazos easily beats) in a box that somehow perversely turned out to be the most-used machine in the house. I did not plan for that; it was an accident. It was originally just intended for MythTV (where all I cared about was 1. must decode video 2. minimize total wattage), and ION fit the bill at the time. But the usage evolved and we browse the web on it (FF3.6), play some undemanding games, and it's totally enough. It would look horrible on most benchmarks, but the benchmark that matters the most, is the human-never-waits-for-computer benchmark, where it scores about 0.90.
I can't chuck a box that scores that high, and that presents a dilemma. If there's any good news about this machine, it's that it's single-head, and the smizmar is tired of watching me play Dwarf Fortress or NAEV on the biscreen TV when she wants to watch her gardening shows. So I might yet have the excuse for the e-peen...
Who wants a low end radeon, who can't make do with an HD 2000 or HD 3000?
That's my thinking too, but there it turns out there is an answer. The niche I see for Llano is where someone is looking the at absolute dollars spent on the machine, combined with having some minimum standard performance for both the GPU and CPU. That is, someone doesn't want pre-Sandy Bridge Intel integrated graphics (i965 isn't enough even if the CPU is) or a weak CPU (ION's Atom isn't enough even though the Nvidia 9400 is), so buying cheaper pre-2011 equipment is off the table.
If you look at it that way, I think the cheapest Llanos start at (roughly) $50 less than the cheapest HD2000s. If I wanted to move machines through Wal-Mart, I might build Llano computers. People buying those would end up pretty satisfied, even though they could have gotten better performance per dollar if they had spent just a few more dollars.
Whether this cheap stuff is profitable for AMD, I can't say. But keeping it cheap is the only way to sell it, precisely because once you decide to spend $120 on the CPU, Intel parts' value becomes fucking awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
DMCA was a big law that did several different, only tenuously-related, things. It had stuff in it very specifically worded to address issues with, and I am not making this up, boat hull designs. Nobody would really claim to hate all of DMCA, unless their objection is systemic (i.e. that law like almost every other law, was passed without public input). I don't even have an opinion on the boat hull design part; like the people who enacted it, I've never bothered to read it. :-)
The anti-circumvention parts of DMCA were unambiguously evil with no redeeming virtues to even partially mitigate them, with no pretense of serving the interests of the public (and nothing but a false pretense of serving the interests of copyright holders; this law was bad for everyone except professional pirates and DRM snakeoil salesmen). I think that when most people bitch about "DMCA" as shorthand, they're talking about this part of it.
But sometimes people are talking about the notice-counternotice stuff, whose basic intention is to establish rules for who is liable for something, by creating a mechanic that lets you always point at someone and say "the buck stops there." While there are controversies about this part of DMCA, they're usually (but not always, there are subtleties) related to hosting services who take a default behavior of immediately folding when presented with a DMCA notice. (And youtube happens to be one of those.) People can always solve that problem by dumping a hosting service for a more customer-friendly one (or self-hosting if necessary), so this part of DMCA isn't nearly as flame worthy as the anti-circumvention part.
And within the notice-counternotice part of DMCA, is the safe harbor provision. This isn't so much something to be thankful for, though, as it is integral to the notice-counternotice mechanism having any point at all. Without safe harbor, you're practically back to a pre-DMCA situation with regard to hosting liability.
That would be both good and bad; it's complicated. It's particularly bad for services whose value lies in user participation, but possibly good in a very long view, as it would encourage a return to self-hosting -- distribution of power with fewer social bottlenecks the network effects stemming from that. But naturally, companies like Google and Facebook would hate that.
Er.. my question wasn't so much about state-vs-fed power distribution, but rather why there's any motive at all to restrict bees' movement -- what problem does limiting bee travel solve? I thought maybe the original poster was suggesting that interstate bee trucks need to be eliminated in order to solve the problem of them sometimes crashing. That's an idea that was so juicily mock-worthy that I figured it had to be a trap.
Someone mentioned disease containment; that's the kind of serious answer that I was looking for. Whether that would really solve bees' problems, I don't know, but it's certain not on-the-face-of-it stupid.
From a tech perspective, the obvious thing that leaps out at me is that the broadcast companies had vastly superior delivery tech: radio broadcast. That means they really just had one party (not counting competitors) standing in their way (FCC) and once they got through that, nearly every potential viewer was guaranteed delivery of the ads.
Analogously, Netflix is using pre-radio tech such as letter-writing. Every single new customer has a corresponding increase in cost. Adding a broadcast receiver has no impact on the transmitter's bandwidth needs; adding a singlecast receiver has a linear increase on the transmitter's bandwidth needs.
And since a new customer also increases costs for the ISPs and other peering middlemen too (though at least they theoretically also receive a corresponding increase in revenue), the tech's poor scaling ability stresses everyone and leads to new potentials for shakedowns, whether by the businesses Netflix works with, or through the government. It's a dangerous and unstable situation where success will eventually punish itself.
Broadcast's ability to scale well, just made it so that the more people who used it, the better it worked. Unlike with streaming video, nobody ever worried, "Are too many people watching TV?"
That's a tech perspective. When it comes down to actual dollars going into the broadcast companies and Netflix, I may very well be talking out of my ass. ;-) It's gotta be part of the problem at least, though.
When you take competitors into account, Netflix situation is worse there too. The parties bearing part of the cost of delivery practically are their competitors. It's like if CBS were broadcasting a show, and every time someone watched it, ABC and NBC got a bill in addition to losing a customer. Not that this is the tech's or Netflix's fault, though. We have serious conflict-of-interest problems with ISPs in USA at least.
The post you're replying to does mention the word "credit," but TFA is really about payment systems. You can live completely within your means and still you will be paying a "merchant services" tax on everything you buy and generate ad-targeting statistics. The issue isn't credit; it's about having a Man in the Middle.
We need cash or failing that, something just as good. I think a lot of people "get" this, which is why there's been so much desperate grabbing for Bitcoin stories and stuff like that on Slashdot lately.
There's always more work to do, until they build HedonismBot. That will finally be a sign that something has gone too far. Until then, the robots are just helping us all to become HedonismMeatbags.
Huh? Seriously, I don't get it. Why would that be the smart?
Jobs wasn't indignant that someone made a phone; there were already other smartphones but Apple wasn't suing them. This is really just Look and Feel V2. Apple wants to fight that war again, just like Hitler. <gd&r>
You know you've hopelessly fucked up, when the one guy who sends an encrypted email is suspected of being the leak.
I think that is where we went wrong, and from that error, other errors were inevitable.
If I pay for your printing press to print MY pamphlet which flames the Stamp Act, that transaction was part of my speech.
If I pay you, to fund your pamphlet and hope for the best that you say something I 60% agree with, then that wasn't my speech, it was yours. It's too .. deferential (?) to count as my speech. While I wouldn't necessarily endorse Congress passing laws saying I can't aid you in your speech, it doesn't really look like a First Amendment issue, unless I'm willing to have my byline on your pamphlet (with all the consequences of that).
The essence of a campaign contribution is that I'm hiring someone else as my proxy to advertise "Vote for Thomas Jefferson" and the person I hire also just happens to be Thomas Jefferson. I don't see why that mechanic needs to be protected, since I'm just as capable of advertising "Vote for Thomas Jefferson" myself. This proxy stuff seems not only irresponsible and deceptive, but I'm drawing a blank on coming up with any upsides it may have. I don't think it's what the framers had in mind, and it sure isn't what they said in any plain text reading (I don't mean case law!) of the First Amendment.
Once we get that handled correctly, I'm not sure we need to worry so much about any negative consequences of corporate speech. NYT can print editorials and Exxon can buy ads saying vote for a certain candidate, but neither of them (or you or me) will be able to give money to that candidate under the guise of speech. Then we'll all have a clearer picture of what they are giving the money for, and we can make a decision about whether bribery should be regulated. ;-)
No, you defeat one of the points of using cash. One of cash's advantages is that it's anonymous, but another advantage it has, is that you're not paying a "tax" on every transaction to a bank, like you do with, say, plastic money.
Is Slashdot just trying to generate ad impressions at the cost of misinforming people?
Regardless of whatever facts (or lack thereof) resolve the original accusation, that accusation still exists. Strike One, British Police. Two more of these, and no more Net for you.
You've never been to our neighborhood polling station at Alpha Centauri? Oh for heaven sake, it's only four light years away! I'm sorry but if you can't be bothered to vote, you've got no business complaining about this term's gods.
Smartphones are PCs. Indeed, being thought of and used as a "computer," and being extensible to handle new applications that the manufacturer never thought of, is practically what distinguishes a smartphone from a dumbphone. Being totally-unlike-an-appliance was the essense of the iPhone1'z buzz.
When is the last time you installed a new application on your microwave? When's the last time your microwave interacted with an upgrading world over a network, perhaps through a web browser? If you did those things with your microwave, you would expect it to be upgradable.
It's a sad comment, but is it really about "our times?" Untrusted government isn't a new invention.
The 22nd catch to the constitution says they don't.
I don't think so, precisely because the statement is so universal. If there were nothing more to say
about Jobs (or anyone else) than that, there would be nothing to say at all. Now is precisely the time
for different people with different agendas to call attention to what about Jobs (or Apple under
his leadership) was good, evil, or interesting.
The time for respect was a long time ago, and we showed plenty enough of it back then.
People who want personal computers to not just be video game consoles, were complaining about Jobs' influence on the industry up until the last minute of his life. The reality of what's happening didn't magically stop the instant Jobs died, so why should people stop complaining about it? Lots of people die every day, and those who remain can't (and shouldn't) all just shut up about what's left behind, out of some desire to not offend a former adversary's shade. (And, BTW, look at what RMS really says. He doesn't talk shit about Jobs personally; he really does seem to limit the comment to Jobs' exit from the industry.)
The media went totally overboard with all the Jobs-love and they didn't just talk about his personal life; some praised his business, and I don't just mean Apple in general but even the IOS devices. That especially puts the topic on the table.
If Jobs' death means you shouldn't talk frankly about IOS' evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it, then Jobs' death means you also shouldn't misrepresent IOS evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it. So if anyone criticizes RMS' lack of "respect" here, I wonder where's their anger about how the rest of the media disrespected the living last week, with their you're-not-allowed-to-rebut-this deification.
I'm so confused. I thought patents were most useful when they promoted the progress of science and useful arts. ;-)
Look how far we've come. The ostensible purpose of patents isn't even given lip service anymore. Everybody knows they're not for what we say they're for. There isn't even a thin veneer of pretense left.
Or you just... oh I don't know .. stop using OSes which go to extra trouble to find, load, and execute code from removable drives whenever it sees one.
When I hear fear about plugging in drives, I think that's just as amazing as people saying to not surf porn sites or be careful about what links you click on. If those activities pose the slightest risk of infection, then your computer is already "infected" with shitware, and shouldn't be used for anything important.
Even with the most incorruptible, angelic, and law-abiding cops, there are still thieves out there (otherwise you wouldn't need the cops to even exist), and even without thieves, people still lose things.
It's simply a bad idea to have portable devices that hold sensitive information but which lack any sort of protection. You wouldn't do it with a laptop, but once the computer gets small enough to fit in your pocket, people lose all their common sense.
Address the basic threat, you'll have also addressed the relatively infrequently occurring government-related variants of the threat too.
I think too many people narrowly limit their thoughts to government, when they think about privacy issues. Government is important, but as soon as you start thinking of them as the main problem, or as the main solution, you have lost. You can't solve privacy problems with a strengthened BIll of Rights, and you can't create new privacy problems by ignoring the Bill of Rights. Government is merely a major player, not The System itself.
That is really just a symptom of handheld PCs totally sucking compared to what you'd otherwise expect from a larger one. And while this situation is dragging on a lot longer than I thought it would, it's still not going to last forever.
Eventually someone will do it right: the passphrase won't merely authenticate, but will also decrypt the session key for the cipher that encrypts the user's home directory.
That's like saying you don't need to use crypto on the Internet, because you don't give permission to anyone to intercept your plaintext. Just like how you don't need to put armor on your combat tank because you don't give anyone permission to shoot at it. ;-) Not giving permission doesn't "solve" problems.
(Still, I think I get your point: Lots of people give more permissions to cops than they need to.)
"Low-end" CPUs are definitely underrated. I don't know exactly what addons you're talking about, and no doubt there are some good ones that make a low-end CPU insufferable, but ..
We've got an ION (Atom 330+Nvidia 9400) (which a Brazos easily beats) in a box that somehow perversely turned out to be the most-used machine in the house. I did not plan for that; it was an accident. It was originally just intended for MythTV (where all I cared about was 1. must decode video 2. minimize total wattage), and ION fit the bill at the time. But the usage evolved and we browse the web on it (FF3.6), play some undemanding games, and it's totally enough. It would look horrible on most benchmarks, but the benchmark that matters the most, is the human-never-waits-for-computer benchmark, where it scores about 0.90.
I can't chuck a box that scores that high, and that presents a dilemma. If there's any good news about this machine, it's that it's single-head, and the smizmar is tired of watching me play Dwarf Fortress or NAEV on the biscreen TV when she wants to watch her gardening shows. So I might yet have the excuse for the e-peen...
That's my thinking too, but there it turns out there is an answer. The niche I see for Llano is where someone is looking the at absolute dollars spent on the machine, combined with having some minimum standard performance for both the GPU and CPU. That is, someone doesn't want pre-Sandy Bridge Intel integrated graphics (i965 isn't enough even if the CPU is) or a weak CPU (ION's Atom isn't enough even though the Nvidia 9400 is), so buying cheaper pre-2011 equipment is off the table.
If you look at it that way, I think the cheapest Llanos start at (roughly) $50 less than the cheapest HD2000s. If I wanted to move machines through Wal-Mart, I might build Llano computers. People buying those would end up pretty satisfied, even though they could have gotten better performance per dollar if they had spent just a few more dollars.
Whether this cheap stuff is profitable for AMD, I can't say. But keeping it cheap is the only way to sell it, precisely because once you decide to spend $120 on the CPU, Intel parts' value becomes fucking awesome.