When you get a minute, check out the economic concept barrier to entry. "Wall" is one of the canonical terms used to refer to a barrier to entry. Such barriers need not be absolute (and, in fact, almost never are). When they are not, they are considered biasing factors.
Now, since you are a programmer, I assume you understand some system theory. So, next, consider what happens when a system evolves under biased pressure such as barriers to entry. Is the outcome optimal, or distorted?
Now, consider again: Do walled gardens have a harmful effect on the system in which they exist? If you still say they do not, then either you do not yet understand the above, or you are being disingenuous for the purposes of maintaining the distortion (ie: your post is a false flag operation).
The notion that walled gardens are not harmful to society is not compatible with the most basic system and economic theory. Your attempts to foster the notion that they are not harmful is either misinformed or anti-social.
Miniaturized stealth submarines purpose-built for smuggling are an impressive example of how much technological ingenuity is poured into evading the edicts of contemporary drug prohibition.
To say nothing of the infrared detecting devices, footstep detectors, UAVs, and more. Technological advancement is fueled by this cashflow. But, then, that is just another way of saying that this productive ingenuity is being consumed by a questionably productive sector of the economy. How much does it really benefit us to keep marijuana illegal?
Imagine if we applied all of that combined ingenuity to solving problems of satisfying wants and providing for the future, instead of investing it in prohibition and evasion.
Clearly there are benefits to prohibition. Average moms and dads don't have to worry as much about their kids smoking pot, because it is a little bit harder to get. They don't have to do as well, explaining to a teenager that moderation is worth it in the long run.
Those benefits must be measured against the costs. This must include all the costs; the government budgets, the human lives lost, and the money that the Zetas are spending on their militia and mules. Increasing enforcement has some mitigating effect on the availability of drugs, and increases the costs all around.
It also strikes me that the violence that is happening in Mexico is starting to resemble the violence in South and Central America. More specifically, it resembles the violence in South and Central America ever since Reagan's war on cocaine. Drugs fund terrorism, violent crime, and revolutionaries? Maybe so -- and prohibition drives up the profit margin on drugs. Funny how that works.
They think, and are correct, that they are fooling the people who believe that Fox News is fair and balanced.
This is a technique used regularly in controlling public opinion about policy. The further out you can pull one side of the argument, the further out you can pull the middle. This is a very effective approach, because so many people believe that justice means being reasonable, and that being reasonable means giving each side half of what they are asking for.
People are social animals and have a natural tendency to believe that both sides in a debate are being fair in their assessment and sincere about what they believe is just. They believe that each viewpoint must have merit. They believe, therefore, that any point roughly halfway between the two views must fall on reasonable ground. Trusting to this belief, they believe they do not have to know he details to know a fair solution. Any entity with a stake in public policy -- corporations, politicians, power-brokers -- knows about this mechanism. The big guys all have public relations people whose job is to manipulate this, and many other similar flaws.
This results in self-feeding bias. Left unchecked, it creates a disadvantage for entities that do not exploit the problem. In an otherwise competitive system, this selects for the entities most willing and capable of exploiting the flaw. This naturally breeds ever stronger abusers of such flaws.
Eventually, there comes a correction. If it happens early, it can be mild and the problem will be abated without a significant disturbance. The longer it goes, the stronger the distortion becomes -- as does the associated correction and disturbance.
If one believes in the value of economic stability as a path toward economic advancement, it is important to seek to avoid such extremity and correction.
There's lots of arguing going on about whether this is good or bad. All very interesting, I'm sure.
Here's the thing though; whether we think it is good or bad is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. This is inevitable.
We are approaching a state of effective global government, through synchronicity of corrupting forces. All the major governments are toppling to corruption in roughly the same way; fear of dissidents, desire to quash "harmful" speech, global lobbying entities, fear of the Internet, using fear of child porn to manipulate public opinion, megacorps abusing fear of economic instability, etc. They are all falling over the same way, and they're all reading each others play books and imitating each others steps, incapable of recognizing the downward treadmill they are all running on.
As with every sudden spurt in the growth of top-down authority, there is a concomitant concentration of power (wealth, influence, information, etc). Those who are winning at the concentration game are those who are most willing to sacrifice everything for a little more power. Their fundamental nature is that they will continue to sacrifice everything for a little more. And they will continue to gain more. It is becoming self catalyzing. Once that iterative selection mechanism gets rolling, it does not stop quietly.
Look back through world history and ask yourself this question: What happens when power concentration becomes self-catalyzing? What happens every single time that happens? What happened in Rome? The United States? France? Russia? China? Egypt? Yemen? Tunisia? Libya? Those are just off the top of my head. What has happened every single time power concentration has become self-catalyzing?
This particular incident may be real, or not. It may be part of what brings about change, or not. In the long run it may be net positive, or not. What is not in question is this: This sort of thing is going to happen. It cannot be avoided, unless we find a way to stop the cycle without the upheaval.
And do you think that is going to happen? Do you think the machines in power can be smoothly depowered, or will choose to relinquish their self-fueling avarice? Do you have any doubt that they are rapidly becoming self-fueling organisms? Have you ever tried to talk to a cancerous polyp, and explain that it should not consume everything it can?
The question is not whether bands of renegades will commit acts of poorly aimed hostility against poorly selected targets. The question is how we can best navigate our society through this period where we are incubating that sort of dangerous antigen to combat these cancerous concentration machines. How we can get back to a place where the cancer of anti-social avarice is no longer doing more harm than the chemotherapy of civil unrest.
They're banning illegal counterfeit goods to protect consumers.
No they're not. The way you do that is by tracking the sales, seizing the goods, and putting the vendors in jail.
What the judge is doing is banning speech. Banning a person who should be tried and (as far as I can tell) found guilty of trafficking in illegal merchandise from speaking. But it's so easy for the government to sit on it's fat ass like Henry VIII, wave a greasy drumstick in the air, and proclaim the Internet Death Sentence. By contrast, having actual law enforcement officers tracking down actual physical crimes, then wading through the slow and expensive process of having a real trial with an actual defendant is just far too much work.
Electronic justice is like clicking through channels on teevee. You can do it while stuffing your face with bon bons. No defendant to object, no defense attorney making arguments about how various things are illegal or unconstitutional. It's so much easier, don't you see? And that's what we want -- easy pseudo-justice that favors big lobbyists. In fact, after polling all the power-brokers in the halls of Congress, a recent study found 100% agreement -- easy pseudo-justice that favors the corrupt is Good For America.
As an aside, it just occurred to me how rude you are being. I offered some information which is based on years tracking copyright. I pointed out that fair use covers copies for personal use. That has been tested extensively, and is the reason you can still buy an iPod, and the reason that iTunes has not been wiped from the face of the Earth. Your response was not, "Thank you for the information, I am interested to learn more, do you have specific details on where this has been covered in code or at court?" Instead, your response was, "Give me a citation, you're wrong, and here's a red herring that pretends to prove it!"
Seriously, think about it: I offered some info to the general public -- info which, on further reflection, is observably true because making copies for personal use is pervasive and has not lead to a single successful infringement case -- and you, rather than showing some mental adventurousness and probing the answer space, simply demand that I give you more, like Henry VIII waving a drumstick in the air. That is not very nice, not to mention intellectually lazy.
that would also require you to delete your back up if you sold/gave away the original disc
Most definitely. You lose the rights to the work that you purchased (or otherwise acquired) if you transfer those rights to another party...
hmmm... I think I get it. You're new to this, aren't you? OK, let me try to be more convivial: If you are nicer when asking for details on subjects that you are learning about, it will be more likely to yield a positive response.
Pardon if this sounds glib, but, umm, you only need a citation for the right to personal use copies if you haven't been tracking copyright for the past decade. I don't recall, offhand, specific cases where it has been addressed, but it has been tested repeatedly. I wouldn't be surprised if the one I mentioned, DVD X Copy, touched on it.
It is a little painful for me to read this thread. We've been talking about this stuff on Slashdot since the late 90's. Yet in this thread I see several early fallacious arguments of the RIAA lawyers creeping into the common wisdom, despite having been discarded at court years ago. Is this what is going to happen to our judges? Will the MAFIAA poison the minds of future generations and lead us to losing what little protection we still have from the execution of these fiat monopolies? Will future judges, steeped in monopolist propaganda, simply assume these protections never existed?
Keep it up Facebook - you're just giving us yet another reason to show that you don't "get it" on so many levels.
Facebook is bad, for sure. But in a perfect world, I think this should really be showing us that entrusting your corporation's identity and goodwill (in this case, embodied in a Facebook path) to an unregulated third party is inherently risky behavior.
Centralizing most identity and relationship management and placing it under the auspices of a single unregulated corporation? What could possibly go wrong? (note that I'm not saying anyone is being forced to be so idiotic, just that some form of mass short-sighted convenience-seeking is occurring)
I suspect that it will take many lessons like this one, over many years, before we begin the process of decentralizing. A process which, by that time, will be very long and very painful.
The more users who liked the search results that you returned, the more of them would see your sponsored links. If you came up with a ranking algorithm that did a better job than existing ones, then you'd get a bigger slice of the advertising space. It's essentially the same business model as Google, just on a smaller scale.
Actually, in the case as described, it is not illegal.
1201(c)(1): Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Fair use covers copies for personal use, including media and time shifting.
The closest they have come to making circumvention for fair use purposes illegal is making distributing tools intended for non-fair-use purposes illegal. See DVD X Copy. Neither possession of the tools nor using them for legal purposes have not been found to be infringing, and the DMCA is actually pretty clear that neither case is covered.
Joe is such a ridiculous self-parody. "I am a staunch East Coast Jewish liberal. Period. End of story. Wait... the Neo-Con war machine is taking over the Republican party so they can justify unlimited military spending by killing Arabs? I am a Republican."
This story might as well read, "The Senator from Israel said today that Google is not doing enough to demonize heathen Muslims." The guy is a joke. A bitter, hateful, joke. I look forward to him being relegated to the same shelf of "famous people from our past that we're a little ashamed of" as Andrew Dice Clay.
Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide.
It is not his job until his superiors, whose job it is, fail in their duty. Then it is his obligation to do so. Our executive branch has chronically deprived the citizens of the information necessary for us to make informed decisions about how we wish our military to be employed. When those with standard authority are failing in their duty to keep us informed, it is only those without standard authority who can make the decision.
It is a further failure to satisfy their oaths of office that we have ceased to recognize whistleblower protection. The authoritarians have decided that the notion of citizens as sovereigns is far too inconvenient, and that we can't handle the truth.
Copyright works perfectly. The aim of copyright is to prevent an individual or company from profiting from the works of others, in order to allow the creator to enjoy the profits of their works.
You really capture the state of mind perfectly there.
The aim of copyright is to prevent an individual or company from profiting from the works of others, in order to allow the creator to enjoy the profits of their works.
That presentation is outstanding. It perfectly captures the sociopathic misperception by the advocates of expanding intellectual property enforcement.
The aim of copyright is not to prevent anything.
The aim of copyright is for the creator to profit from their works.
You have stated it as though the prevention of profit is a primary objective of copyright. As though "you can't use my stuff without my permission" is a primary objective.
Preventing others from profiting is in no way whatsoever an economically valid objective of copyright. It is a regrettable necessity of the current best known means to enable the creator to profit. Profit by the creator is the proximate objective, and "...progress of..." is the sole principle objective.
"Others profiting" is a good thing in a capitalist society. Profit is one of the most tangible side effects of creating wealth, and creating wealth (the ability to satisfy wants, in its official economic definition) is the only economic objective. Let me repeat that. The creation of wealth is the only economic objective, therefore others creating wealth is a good thing. That statement is both official and mathematical truth, like sunrise.
We want others within our society to create wealth as early and often as possible. We want individuals to do it in their own homes, we want groups of friends to get together and do it, and we want organized entities, large and small, public and private to do it. Rules which inhibit others from creating wealth are only economically acceptable when the direct consequence is more wealth being created. And in those cases, the inhibition on others creating wealth -- no matter what it is or what the moral justification -- is a regrettable negative side-effect in the economic sense. It is a harm to the objectives of capitalism and the free market, which can only be justified in those contexts by greater wealth creation outcomes as a direct consequence.
The objective of copyright is not to prevent others from creating wealth. That perception is sociopathic in the sense of being hostile to the benevolent goals of capitalism. And it is exactly what is wrong with many of the recent actions of the RIAA, MPAA, and their kind. It is exactly why the studies they present to Congress are inherently flawed -- they present a measure of the amount of profit made by others as though it is an accurate measure of cost to society, a primary bad to be inhibited in its own right. That is false. It is a primary good that must regrettably be inhibited because one side effect of the inhibition is the best path we have, at present, to enable the creator to profit -- thereby to advance "...the progress of...".
Browsing through the discussion, saw your sig, started to read the post. Saw this line:
We'd have to move away from the spanning tree topology currently popular on the Internet (because it's cheap) and move to as close to a full mesh topology
Thought to myself, holy crap -- this guy really knows his shit. That's why I started looking into the mesh networks they've building with bailing wire and twine in Africa. So I look up at the header, and see you've got me by a whole order of magnitude in the account number game. Perhaps it is not you who have reached the same conclusions as I, but the other way around.
I don't seriously expect... but I can honestly think of no other solution since everything else has been tried and been shown to be a disaster.
Dammit. You reached the same conclusion I did there, as well.
But here's what I've been thinking lately -- the world is an amazing self-correcting machine. Its corrections are often quite painful processes, but they inherently must happen. Why? Because as the kleptarchs and oligarchs gain power they cannot resist leveraging that power to steal more. It is central to their fundamental nature. It is so canonical that it is a recurring theme in civil revolt literature. Here is just one example; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
So what is our role? How do we help restore the vision embodied in no small list of documents from The Republic to The Constitution and beyond?
Here's what I see happening: The kinds of people who are the sort to get into the tussle side of the coming correction are starting to recognize the problem. That's not me, I'm not that guy. But when I see one of those kinds of people "get it" the reaction is pretty common: "Holy Crap! Now what do I do?"
That, I think, is where we come in. They are not, as a rule, the sort of people who spend a lot of time administering networks. We are. We are the information tool makers. We are the ones who know how to run darknets on the existing infrastructure, and have the ability to build the mesh networks that should replace it. We are the ones who understand why that is the only solution, and we are the ones who the common man will ask for information when he becomes active in solving the problem. When those more action-oriented people need the modern equivalent of muskets, we are the ones to whom they will turn. It happened on a large scale several times during the Arab Spring, and happened at least once on a small scale at Occupy San Francisco with a bicycle-dynamo powered network hub.
Geez -- I feel like I have to steal a glance over shoulder now, get skittish, and say, "I've already said too much."
In a perfect world, someone would whisper this in Sony's, RIAA's, MPAA's, ASCAP, AT&T's, and many others ears: "Honor is a lasting value. Try it. For a change."
In the real world, where sociopaths really do exist and really are out to get you, there is a better answer. It has been studied extensively and leads to the optimal outcome for society as a whole. The right answer is tit for tat with forgiveness.
To summarize, and to mangle an existing phrase: "Never cut a sociopath an even break." Once they show you their colors, you treat them as they treat others -- and as a pro-social actor, you give them a chance to redeem themselves once in a while.
If your definition of "honorable" is martyrdom, go ahead and turn the other cheek. If your definition is "maximizing societal value", don't let sociopaths get in your pockets. It only encourages them.
This issue is about privacy and protection from unreasonable search I would think.
Primarily, and on its face, I completely agree. And I don't want to suggest that those issues are not vital to our Nation. They are. It is only that I believe that Free Speech is the most important right in the protection of our Nation (Nation in the metaphysical sense, not our borders or governing bodies).
The threat to freedom of speech from this is more subtle, and relies on the assumption that government is inherently imperfect. If one has a government which is imperfect and hence liable to occasional abuse of power, then the inability to speak without the fear of discovery by the government becomes an implicit threat to free speech. Some things must be said anonymously or pseudonymously in order to ensure that complete candor in the public discourse may exist(*). One historical major example is Hamilton, Madison, and Jay using the pseudonym Publius to publish the Federalist Papers.
* Note that this is the same reasoning behind politicians having privacy protection regarding their discussions with their staff members -- the only difference being that the privacy of government officials in the performance of their official duties is a privilege that We The People grant them -- our right to it is inalienable and granted by the creator.
There is a question raised, occasionally, of freedom from government versus freedom through government. It should be apparent, by now, to everyone that Free Speech cannot be had through the U.S. Government. They no longer defend the clear expressed will of The Constitution. That leaves us only one choice for the defense of Free Speech: Darknets.
If you've got the skills, get a darknet node up now, and begin teaching your less skilled friends how to do so. It is the only chance we have of retaining our right to Free Speech. And as so many of The Founding Fathers made so clear, Free Speech is the most important right for the defense of democracy. Without Free Speech, we are no more than a tin-pot dictatorship in sheep's clothing.
One important note before you venture there, though: Truly free speech can be a horrifying thing. I have seen things on I2P that have forced me to run back through the logic that leads me to the conclusion that the good of Free Speech outweighs the bad of it. There are things out there that are painful to see if you stumble across them. My advice is this: If you think it might be there, and it might be disturbing; do your very best to avoid stumbling across it. The worst you can imagine is a good enough representation of what is there -- you don't want to see it. Seriously. I heard the same advice but did not take sufficient care about what links I clicked on. It is so profoundly disturbing that I considered uninstalling I2P, despite my absolute conviction that darknets are necessary.
This is what escalation in the war on Free Speech leads to. Sigh. Those images in my head are because of the MAFIAA and the authoritarians. They did this. And I hope someday they suffer for it. They are monsters.
Nice post. There's a lot of info packed in those few sentences. It made me think through how filesystems and compression work, and I learned from the experience. Thanks!
many users use a GUI rather than a terminal. This means that the separation is not needed.
Not directing this criticism at you, I know you are just giving a clear explanation of the state of the consensus.
Seems like if there's a layer for creating a more friendly user abstraction of the underlying system (like a GUI), that is the right place to create a simplified view of the two directories. If the reason for jumbling everything into the same directory is really because point-and-droolers are confused and frightened by having separate, contextual directories, ummm, give them the dumbed down version in their layer. Don't fuck up the healthy, organized layer underneath down where the superusers spend their time.
Scientific belief is a lot more fluid than religious belief
That is the principle difference between "belief" and whatever scientists have. For a religionist, "belief" means truth. Scientists don't have truth. They have the best known current interpetation. Scientists seek truth, but accept that it is eternally elusive -- subject only to approximate estimation through repeated observation (aka, "Measurement").
If you conflate religious belief with scientific best known approximation, you are not demonstrating that scientists have religious belief. You are confusing people who do not understand the difference.
'concerns that overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community.'
Let me translate: I know you dirty hippies believe in utopia, and you've done some interesting things, but you are not being realistic. The real producers are Microsoft and Amazon.
Here's the thing though, knucklehead: Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, IBM, and eBay -- not one of those companies could make it out of the garage today. It's not just the dirty hippies you are harming, it is entrepreneurs -- the guys building a better mousetrap -- the icons that "America Invents" is pretending to recognize. It is the kinds of people who turned America into a superpower in the 50's and 60's. The engines of tomorrow's economic superiority. That is who patents are harming -- and their blood is running over the alter of a few extra private jets today, for an ever smaller sliver of people who did something great twenty years ago, and have been kicking everyone else off the hill ever since.
You are all overreacting. The answer is quite obvious, and is held right in a bit of law often quoted around here:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
See, right at the end -- you have a right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It doesn't say they have to listen. They even capitalized "Government" but not "the people" -- it's like they knew how our lords in D.C. would view us today.
Go ahead, serf, petition away. It is your inalienable right. May I suggest shouting, while standing on your lawn in your underwear with a tin-foil hat on your head. That way all your neighbors will recognize you as the sort of looney who thinks the Easter Bunny is real, or that we have a representative government.
Good post, solid analysis of the flaw in Mr. Elahi's perception.
I just don't care that you know what I'm doing under the current system with my current lack of nefarious activity (this lack of interest will undoubtedly hurt me someday in some way though it will likely be minor and related to employment or income rather than incarceration).
I think that the reason that it is important to you is the same reason that it was important to let Larry Flynt continue to publish Penthouse. I have seen Penthouse a number of times, and it is not to my taste. That is not the same as saying that I would not have been harmed if Mr. Flynt had lost his case. My interest lies not in my right to free speech, I have nothing particularly controversial to say. My interest does not lie in protecting, specifically, Mr. Flynt's right to free expression, because I do not like what he has to say. My interest lies in protecting the right of people to say things that I do not like -- things I would not say and do not agree with.
Proper race timing needs to be 3 decimal places, at 200kph (124mph) a 1/1000th of a second ammounts to 6cm of difference.
Good math.
AutoX is much slower than that. This may not work for F1, but F1 can afford the fancy equipment.
AutoX top speed is well below 100kph on most tracks, and you can put a turn near the finish line to keep the speed across the line under 50 kph (I suspect the turn near the finish is pretty common anyway, to keep the course exit speed down). It's also rarely more important than who buys the first round at the bar afterwards, so you could probably go as low as the hundredth with no loss. 1/4th the speed, 1/10th the resolution gets you to 2.4 meters. You should be able to hit that 99% of the time with one crappy camera. Better gear for a better answer, or use multiple cameras and average the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Walls can easily be broken.
When you get a minute, check out the economic concept barrier to entry. "Wall" is one of the canonical terms used to refer to a barrier to entry. Such barriers need not be absolute (and, in fact, almost never are). When they are not, they are considered biasing factors.
Now, since you are a programmer, I assume you understand some system theory. So, next, consider what happens when a system evolves under biased pressure such as barriers to entry. Is the outcome optimal, or distorted?
Now, consider again: Do walled gardens have a harmful effect on the system in which they exist? If you still say they do not, then either you do not yet understand the above, or you are being disingenuous for the purposes of maintaining the distortion (ie: your post is a false flag operation).
The notion that walled gardens are not harmful to society is not compatible with the most basic system and economic theory. Your attempts to foster the notion that they are not harmful is either misinformed or anti-social.
Miniaturized stealth submarines purpose-built for smuggling are an impressive example of how much technological ingenuity is poured into evading the edicts of contemporary drug prohibition.
To say nothing of the infrared detecting devices, footstep detectors, UAVs, and more. Technological advancement is fueled by this cashflow. But, then, that is just another way of saying that this productive ingenuity is being consumed by a questionably productive sector of the economy. How much does it really benefit us to keep marijuana illegal?
Imagine if we applied all of that combined ingenuity to solving problems of satisfying wants and providing for the future, instead of investing it in prohibition and evasion.
Clearly there are benefits to prohibition. Average moms and dads don't have to worry as much about their kids smoking pot, because it is a little bit harder to get. They don't have to do as well, explaining to a teenager that moderation is worth it in the long run.
Those benefits must be measured against the costs. This must include all the costs; the government budgets, the human lives lost, and the money that the Zetas are spending on their militia and mules. Increasing enforcement has some mitigating effect on the availability of drugs, and increases the costs all around.
It also strikes me that the violence that is happening in Mexico is starting to resemble the violence in South and Central America. More specifically, it resembles the violence in South and Central America ever since Reagan's war on cocaine. Drugs fund terrorism, violent crime, and revolutionaries? Maybe so -- and prohibition drives up the profit margin on drugs. Funny how that works.
People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
Hey, now, that is unfair. A significant portion of them are both.
Who does AT&T think they are fooling?
They think, and are correct, that they are fooling the people who believe that Fox News is fair and balanced.
This is a technique used regularly in controlling public opinion about policy. The further out you can pull one side of the argument, the further out you can pull the middle. This is a very effective approach, because so many people believe that justice means being reasonable, and that being reasonable means giving each side half of what they are asking for.
People are social animals and have a natural tendency to believe that both sides in a debate are being fair in their assessment and sincere about what they believe is just. They believe that each viewpoint must have merit. They believe, therefore, that any point roughly halfway between the two views must fall on reasonable ground. Trusting to this belief, they believe they do not have to know he details to know a fair solution. Any entity with a stake in public policy -- corporations, politicians, power-brokers -- knows about this mechanism. The big guys all have public relations people whose job is to manipulate this, and many other similar flaws.
This results in self-feeding bias. Left unchecked, it creates a disadvantage for entities that do not exploit the problem. In an otherwise competitive system, this selects for the entities most willing and capable of exploiting the flaw. This naturally breeds ever stronger abusers of such flaws.
Eventually, there comes a correction. If it happens early, it can be mild and the problem will be abated without a significant disturbance. The longer it goes, the stronger the distortion becomes -- as does the associated correction and disturbance.
If one believes in the value of economic stability as a path toward economic advancement, it is important to seek to avoid such extremity and correction.
There's lots of arguing going on about whether this is good or bad. All very interesting, I'm sure.
Here's the thing though; whether we think it is good or bad is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. This is inevitable.
We are approaching a state of effective global government, through synchronicity of corrupting forces. All the major governments are toppling to corruption in roughly the same way; fear of dissidents, desire to quash "harmful" speech, global lobbying entities, fear of the Internet, using fear of child porn to manipulate public opinion, megacorps abusing fear of economic instability, etc. They are all falling over the same way, and they're all reading each others play books and imitating each others steps, incapable of recognizing the downward treadmill they are all running on.
As with every sudden spurt in the growth of top-down authority, there is a concomitant concentration of power (wealth, influence, information, etc). Those who are winning at the concentration game are those who are most willing to sacrifice everything for a little more power. Their fundamental nature is that they will continue to sacrifice everything for a little more. And they will continue to gain more. It is becoming self catalyzing. Once that iterative selection mechanism gets rolling, it does not stop quietly.
Look back through world history and ask yourself this question: What happens when power concentration becomes self-catalyzing? What happens every single time that happens? What happened in Rome? The United States? France? Russia? China? Egypt? Yemen? Tunisia? Libya? Those are just off the top of my head. What has happened every single time power concentration has become self-catalyzing?
This particular incident may be real, or not. It may be part of what brings about change, or not. In the long run it may be net positive, or not. What is not in question is this: This sort of thing is going to happen. It cannot be avoided, unless we find a way to stop the cycle without the upheaval.
And do you think that is going to happen? Do you think the machines in power can be smoothly depowered, or will choose to relinquish their self-fueling avarice? Do you have any doubt that they are rapidly becoming self-fueling organisms? Have you ever tried to talk to a cancerous polyp, and explain that it should not consume everything it can?
The question is not whether bands of renegades will commit acts of poorly aimed hostility against poorly selected targets. The question is how we can best navigate our society through this period where we are incubating that sort of dangerous antigen to combat these cancerous concentration machines. How we can get back to a place where the cancer of anti-social avarice is no longer doing more harm than the chemotherapy of civil unrest.
They're banning illegal counterfeit goods to protect consumers.
No they're not. The way you do that is by tracking the sales, seizing the goods, and putting the vendors in jail.
What the judge is doing is banning speech. Banning a person who should be tried and (as far as I can tell) found guilty of trafficking in illegal merchandise from speaking. But it's so easy for the government to sit on it's fat ass like Henry VIII, wave a greasy drumstick in the air, and proclaim the Internet Death Sentence. By contrast, having actual law enforcement officers tracking down actual physical crimes, then wading through the slow and expensive process of having a real trial with an actual defendant is just far too much work.
Electronic justice is like clicking through channels on teevee. You can do it while stuffing your face with bon bons. No defendant to object, no defense attorney making arguments about how various things are illegal or unconstitutional. It's so much easier, don't you see? And that's what we want -- easy pseudo-justice that favors big lobbyists. In fact, after polling all the power-brokers in the halls of Congress, a recent study found 100% agreement -- easy pseudo-justice that favors the corrupt is Good For America.
[citation needed]
As an aside, it just occurred to me how rude you are being. I offered some information which is based on years tracking copyright. I pointed out that fair use covers copies for personal use. That has been tested extensively, and is the reason you can still buy an iPod, and the reason that iTunes has not been wiped from the face of the Earth. Your response was not, "Thank you for the information, I am interested to learn more, do you have specific details on where this has been covered in code or at court?" Instead, your response was, "Give me a citation, you're wrong, and here's a red herring that pretends to prove it!"
Seriously, think about it: I offered some info to the general public -- info which, on further reflection, is observably true because making copies for personal use is pervasive and has not lead to a single successful infringement case -- and you, rather than showing some mental adventurousness and probing the answer space, simply demand that I give you more, like Henry VIII waving a drumstick in the air. That is not very nice, not to mention intellectually lazy.
that would also require you to delete your back up if you sold/gave away the original disc
Most definitely. You lose the rights to the work that you purchased (or otherwise acquired) if you transfer those rights to another party...
hmmm ... I think I get it. You're new to this, aren't you? OK, let me try to be more convivial: If you are nicer when asking for details on subjects that you are learning about, it will be more likely to yield a positive response.
[citation needed]
Pardon if this sounds glib, but, umm, you only need a citation for the right to personal use copies if you haven't been tracking copyright for the past decade. I don't recall, offhand, specific cases where it has been addressed, but it has been tested repeatedly. I wouldn't be surprised if the one I mentioned, DVD X Copy, touched on it.
It is a little painful for me to read this thread. We've been talking about this stuff on Slashdot since the late 90's. Yet in this thread I see several early fallacious arguments of the RIAA lawyers creeping into the common wisdom, despite having been discarded at court years ago. Is this what is going to happen to our judges? Will the MAFIAA poison the minds of future generations and lead us to losing what little protection we still have from the execution of these fiat monopolies? Will future judges, steeped in monopolist propaganda, simply assume these protections never existed?
Keep it up Facebook - you're just giving us yet another reason to show that you don't "get it" on so many levels.
Facebook is bad, for sure. But in a perfect world, I think this should really be showing us that entrusting your corporation's identity and goodwill (in this case, embodied in a Facebook path) to an unregulated third party is inherently risky behavior.
Centralizing most identity and relationship management and placing it under the auspices of a single unregulated corporation? What could possibly go wrong? (note that I'm not saying anyone is being forced to be so idiotic, just that some form of mass short-sighted convenience-seeking is occurring)
I suspect that it will take many lessons like this one, over many years, before we begin the process of decentralizing. A process which, by that time, will be very long and very painful.
The more users who liked the search results that you returned, the more of them would see your sponsored links. If you came up with a ranking algorithm that did a better job than existing ones, then you'd get a bigger slice of the advertising space. It's essentially the same business model as Google, just on a smaller scale.
That is a slick idea. Thanks for sharing!
breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA
Actually, in the case as described, it is not illegal.
1201(c)(1):
Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Fair use covers copies for personal use, including media and time shifting.
The closest they have come to making circumvention for fair use purposes illegal is making distributing tools intended for non-fair-use purposes illegal. See DVD X Copy. Neither possession of the tools nor using them for legal purposes have not been found to be infringing, and the DMCA is actually pretty clear that neither case is covered.
Joe is such a ridiculous self-parody. "I am a staunch East Coast Jewish liberal. Period. End of story. Wait... the Neo-Con war machine is taking over the Republican party so they can justify unlimited military spending by killing Arabs? I am a Republican."
This story might as well read, "The Senator from Israel said today that Google is not doing enough to demonize heathen Muslims." The guy is a joke. A bitter, hateful, joke. I look forward to him being relegated to the same shelf of "famous people from our past that we're a little ashamed of" as Andrew Dice Clay.
Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide.
It is not his job until his superiors, whose job it is, fail in their duty. Then it is his obligation to do so. Our executive branch has chronically deprived the citizens of the information necessary for us to make informed decisions about how we wish our military to be employed. When those with standard authority are failing in their duty to keep us informed, it is only those without standard authority who can make the decision.
It is a further failure to satisfy their oaths of office that we have ceased to recognize whistleblower protection. The authoritarians have decided that the notion of citizens as sovereigns is far too inconvenient, and that we can't handle the truth.
Copyright works perfectly. The aim of copyright is to prevent an individual or company from profiting from the works of others, in order to allow the creator to enjoy the profits of their works.
You really capture the state of mind perfectly there.
The aim of copyright is to prevent an individual or company from profiting from the works of others, in order to allow the creator to enjoy the profits of their works.
That presentation is outstanding. It perfectly captures the sociopathic misperception by the advocates of expanding intellectual property enforcement.
The aim of copyright is not to prevent anything.
The aim of copyright is for the creator to profit from their works.
You have stated it as though the prevention of profit is a primary objective of copyright. As though "you can't use my stuff without my permission" is a primary objective.
Preventing others from profiting is in no way whatsoever an economically valid objective of copyright. It is a regrettable necessity of the current best known means to enable the creator to profit. Profit by the creator is the proximate objective, and "...progress of..." is the sole principle objective.
"Others profiting" is a good thing in a capitalist society. Profit is one of the most tangible side effects of creating wealth, and creating wealth (the ability to satisfy wants, in its official economic definition) is the only economic objective. Let me repeat that. The creation of wealth is the only economic objective, therefore others creating wealth is a good thing. That statement is both official and mathematical truth, like sunrise.
We want others within our society to create wealth as early and often as possible. We want individuals to do it in their own homes, we want groups of friends to get together and do it, and we want organized entities, large and small, public and private to do it. Rules which inhibit others from creating wealth are only economically acceptable when the direct consequence is more wealth being created. And in those cases, the inhibition on others creating wealth -- no matter what it is or what the moral justification -- is a regrettable negative side-effect in the economic sense. It is a harm to the objectives of capitalism and the free market, which can only be justified in those contexts by greater wealth creation outcomes as a direct consequence.
The objective of copyright is not to prevent others from creating wealth. That perception is sociopathic in the sense of being hostile to the benevolent goals of capitalism. And it is exactly what is wrong with many of the recent actions of the RIAA, MPAA, and their kind. It is exactly why the studies they present to Congress are inherently flawed -- they present a measure of the amount of profit made by others as though it is an accurate measure of cost to society, a primary bad to be inhibited in its own right. That is false. It is a primary good that must regrettably be inhibited because one side effect of the inhibition is the best path we have, at present, to enable the creator to profit -- thereby to advance "...the progress of...".
Browsing through the discussion, saw your sig, started to read the post. Saw this line:
We'd have to move away from the spanning tree topology currently popular on the Internet (because it's cheap) and move to as close to a full mesh topology
Thought to myself, holy crap -- this guy really knows his shit. That's why I started looking into the mesh networks they've building with bailing wire and twine in Africa. So I look up at the header, and see you've got me by a whole order of magnitude in the account number game. Perhaps it is not you who have reached the same conclusions as I, but the other way around.
I don't seriously expect ... but I can honestly think of no other solution since everything else has been tried and been shown to be a disaster.
Dammit. You reached the same conclusion I did there, as well.
But here's what I've been thinking lately -- the world is an amazing self-correcting machine. Its corrections are often quite painful processes, but they inherently must happen. Why? Because as the kleptarchs and oligarchs gain power they cannot resist leveraging that power to steal more. It is central to their fundamental nature. It is so canonical that it is a recurring theme in civil revolt literature. Here is just one example; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
So what is our role? How do we help restore the vision embodied in no small list of documents from The Republic to The Constitution and beyond?
Here's what I see happening: The kinds of people who are the sort to get into the tussle side of the coming correction are starting to recognize the problem. That's not me, I'm not that guy. But when I see one of those kinds of people "get it" the reaction is pretty common: "Holy Crap! Now what do I do?"
That, I think, is where we come in. They are not, as a rule, the sort of people who spend a lot of time administering networks. We are. We are the information tool makers. We are the ones who know how to run darknets on the existing infrastructure, and have the ability to build the mesh networks that should replace it. We are the ones who understand why that is the only solution, and we are the ones who the common man will ask for information when he becomes active in solving the problem. When those more action-oriented people need the modern equivalent of muskets, we are the ones to whom they will turn. It happened on a large scale several times during the Arab Spring, and happened at least once on a small scale at Occupy San Francisco with a bicycle-dynamo powered network hub.
Geez -- I feel like I have to steal a glance over shoulder now, get skittish, and say, "I've already said too much."
In a perfect world, someone would whisper this in Sony's, RIAA's, MPAA's, ASCAP, AT&T's, and many others ears:
"Honor is a lasting value.
Try it.
For a change."
In the real world, where sociopaths really do exist and really are out to get you, there is a better answer. It has been studied extensively and leads to the optimal outcome for society as a whole. The right answer is tit for tat with forgiveness.
To summarize, and to mangle an existing phrase: "Never cut a sociopath an even break." Once they show you their colors, you treat them as they treat others -- and as a pro-social actor, you give them a chance to redeem themselves once in a while.
If your definition of "honorable" is martyrdom, go ahead and turn the other cheek. If your definition is "maximizing societal value", don't let sociopaths get in your pockets. It only encourages them.
This issue is about privacy and protection from unreasonable search I would think.
Primarily, and on its face, I completely agree. And I don't want to suggest that those issues are not vital to our Nation. They are. It is only that I believe that Free Speech is the most important right in the protection of our Nation (Nation in the metaphysical sense, not our borders or governing bodies).
The threat to freedom of speech from this is more subtle, and relies on the assumption that government is inherently imperfect. If one has a government which is imperfect and hence liable to occasional abuse of power, then the inability to speak without the fear of discovery by the government becomes an implicit threat to free speech. Some things must be said anonymously or pseudonymously in order to ensure that complete candor in the public discourse may exist(*). One historical major example is Hamilton, Madison, and Jay using the pseudonym Publius to publish the Federalist Papers.
* Note that this is the same reasoning behind politicians having privacy protection regarding their discussions with their staff members -- the only difference being that the privacy of government officials in the performance of their official duties is a privilege that We The People grant them -- our right to it is inalienable and granted by the creator.
There is a question raised, occasionally, of freedom from government versus freedom through government. It should be apparent, by now, to everyone that Free Speech cannot be had through the U.S. Government. They no longer defend the clear expressed will of The Constitution. That leaves us only one choice for the defense of Free Speech: Darknets.
If you've got the skills, get a darknet node up now, and begin teaching your less skilled friends how to do so. It is the only chance we have of retaining our right to Free Speech. And as so many of The Founding Fathers made so clear, Free Speech is the most important right for the defense of democracy. Without Free Speech, we are no more than a tin-pot dictatorship in sheep's clothing.
One important note before you venture there, though: Truly free speech can be a horrifying thing. I have seen things on I2P that have forced me to run back through the logic that leads me to the conclusion that the good of Free Speech outweighs the bad of it. There are things out there that are painful to see if you stumble across them. My advice is this: If you think it might be there, and it might be disturbing; do your very best to avoid stumbling across it. The worst you can imagine is a good enough representation of what is there -- you don't want to see it. Seriously. I heard the same advice but did not take sufficient care about what links I clicked on. It is so profoundly disturbing that I considered uninstalling I2P, despite my absolute conviction that darknets are necessary.
This is what escalation in the war on Free Speech leads to. Sigh. Those images in my head are because of the MAFIAA and the authoritarians. They did this. And I hope someday they suffer for it. They are monsters.
Nice post. There's a lot of info packed in those few sentences. It made me think through how filesystems and compression work, and I learned from the experience. Thanks!
many users use a GUI rather than a terminal. This means that the separation is not needed.
Not directing this criticism at you, I know you are just giving a clear explanation of the state of the consensus.
Seems like if there's a layer for creating a more friendly user abstraction of the underlying system (like a GUI), that is the right place to create a simplified view of the two directories. If the reason for jumbling everything into the same directory is really because point-and-droolers are confused and frightened by having separate, contextual directories, ummm, give them the dumbed down version in their layer. Don't fuck up the healthy, organized layer underneath down where the superusers spend their time.
Scientific belief is a lot more fluid than religious belief
That is the principle difference between "belief" and whatever scientists have. For a religionist, "belief" means truth. Scientists don't have truth. They have the best known current interpetation. Scientists seek truth, but accept that it is eternally elusive -- subject only to approximate estimation through repeated observation (aka, "Measurement").
If you conflate religious belief with scientific best known approximation, you are not demonstrating that scientists have religious belief. You are confusing people who do not understand the difference.
'concerns that overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community.'
Let me translate: I know you dirty hippies believe in utopia, and you've done some interesting things, but you are not being realistic. The real producers are Microsoft and Amazon.
Here's the thing though, knucklehead: Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, IBM, and eBay -- not one of those companies could make it out of the garage today. It's not just the dirty hippies you are harming, it is entrepreneurs -- the guys building a better mousetrap -- the icons that "America Invents" is pretending to recognize. It is the kinds of people who turned America into a superpower in the 50's and 60's. The engines of tomorrow's economic superiority. That is who patents are harming -- and their blood is running over the alter of a few extra private jets today, for an ever smaller sliver of people who did something great twenty years ago, and have been kicking everyone else off the hill ever since.
You are all overreacting. The answer is quite obvious, and is held right in a bit of law often quoted around here:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
See, right at the end -- you have a right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It doesn't say they have to listen. They even capitalized "Government" but not "the people" -- it's like they knew how our lords in D.C. would view us today.
Go ahead, serf, petition away. It is your inalienable right. May I suggest shouting, while standing on your lawn in your underwear with a tin-foil hat on your head. That way all your neighbors will recognize you as the sort of looney who thinks the Easter Bunny is real, or that we have a representative government.
Good post, solid analysis of the flaw in Mr. Elahi's perception.
I just don't care that you know what I'm doing under the current system with my current lack of nefarious activity (this lack of interest will undoubtedly hurt me someday in some way though it will likely be minor and related to employment or income rather than incarceration).
I think that the reason that it is important to you is the same reason that it was important to let Larry Flynt continue to publish Penthouse. I have seen Penthouse a number of times, and it is not to my taste. That is not the same as saying that I would not have been harmed if Mr. Flynt had lost his case. My interest lies not in my right to free speech, I have nothing particularly controversial to say. My interest does not lie in protecting, specifically, Mr. Flynt's right to free expression, because I do not like what he has to say. My interest lies in protecting the right of people to say things that I do not like -- things I would not say and do not agree with.
It is just the same with privacy.
Proper race timing needs to be 3 decimal places, at 200kph (124mph) a 1/1000th of a second ammounts to 6cm of difference.
Good math.
AutoX is much slower than that. This may not work for F1, but F1 can afford the fancy equipment.
AutoX top speed is well below 100kph on most tracks, and you can put a turn near the finish line to keep the speed across the line under 50 kph (I suspect the turn near the finish is pretty common anyway, to keep the course exit speed down). It's also rarely more important than who buys the first round at the bar afterwards, so you could probably go as low as the hundredth with no loss. 1/4th the speed, 1/10th the resolution gets you to 2.4 meters. You should be able to hit that 99% of the time with one crappy camera. Better gear for a better answer, or use multiple cameras and average the answer.