Sheesh, people, if you don't like the Bush administration vote for someone else in November. Let's quit with the conspiracy crap.
You want conspiracy theories? How about the fact that the database will be publicly available, but "an overhaul of the system should be finished by December" -- conveniently after the election. Hmmm. I wonder why the Bush-Cheney administration might want foreign connections quiet until after Nov 2? Can you say "Saudi Arabia"?
Now, most likely, this is some technical thing not directed by the White House or even Ashcroft. But this has been an administration with a proven track record of stonewalling, hedging, and obfuscating for political purposes... they simply don't have any benefit of the doubt left.
The NWS is pretty hardup for cash right now in order to waste money on developing Internet standards.
That is exactly the most dangerous time -- when the agency is tempted to sell its soul for private money to keep going. Look how wonderful things got at the USPTO when Congress stripped them of their income...
This is probably a vapor article, which won't effect any of our little applications anyway.
If the data formats are changed and the specs not made open, then for sure your little app will crash. It's not clear to me if they're really talking about making the data inaccessible -- but if that's the thrust, then we should be up in arms.
What about things which are not illegal, but just socially frowned upon?
That's not a bad point. But the Joe Average you're debating with will often feel that "socially frowned upon" is the same as "wrong", which should be the same as "illegal". In other words, arguing that privacy is necessary so that you can continue to practice your "perversions" doesn't convince people who want to take it away.
Of course I don't have to fear prosecution if have nothing to hide. But that does not mean that I'm willing to give up my basic right to privacy, just because somebody thinks I may commit a crime at some time.
But if you never commit a crime, why do you need (or value) privacy? What do you get out of it?
And don't tell me: "If you don't have anything to hide, why bother." If that is the case, than why not install a camera in everybodys home ala 1984... Nothing to hide... No problem... Right?
What is a good response to "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"? The parent post is not a good response; it doesn't actually convince the person who's ready to give up privacy. It falls back on the "we're all sinners" argument -- and some people recognize that we are all sinners, but still feel that the panopticon would reduce our sinning.
Interesting factoid: The Third Amendment is the only one with essentially no case law. It hasn't been the basis of any Supreme Court decisions, I believe...
Police occassionally use illegal methods of finding criminals and then must ignore the evidence obtained illegally until evidence can be legally obtained.
No, they must ignore the illegally-obtained evidence forever. What's more, the court will throw out any new evidence whose origin is the illegal evidence. In other words, imagine that the cops do an illegal search and finds drugs in an apartment. They use the drugs to convince a judge that the suspect is a middleman in a drug operation, and the judge gives them a wiretap so that they can see who the suspect calls. That wiretap leads to a massive crackdown that catches a dozen top drug traffickers. Yay. But when the defense attorneys find out that the original search was illegal, the whole game is blown: All the subsequent evidence -- and the convictions it enabled -- will be thrown out.
It's called "fruit of the poisonous tree" (see here for a good summary). It closes the loophole you seem to assume exists -- and thank goodness, since if consitutional protections could be blithely overlooked, then they wouldn't actually mean anything.
Let's face it, people, copy protection is really really easy to do. It's really really hard to do it well.
And that, in a nutshell, was the motivation for the DMCA: Criminalize the breaking of any copying system (no matter how trivial), so that companies no longer need to develop good ones.
... my only advice would be the same I give my high school seniors:
Figure out what you love. If you're truly clever, you should be able to find a way to mkae a good living doing what you love.
And if you try lots of things and can't find the thing you love? If you can't seem to focus for more than a few months? Pox take you: you're not "uniquely bright" -- you're just a dilettante (and not in the good way).
And that's precisely the problem. There aren't any financial or economic incentives to go into space.
I always shake my head when I see this. It's essentially the same verbiage used in 1957. Now, of course, we know that GPS and comm sats make near-Earth orbit valuable... but, you see, that market is mature and clearly there aren't any other ways to make money in space...
I don't know what the other ways are, but I'm pretty sure they're there. And it's always easy to see how the nay-sayers from the past were so shortsighted without somehow noticing that we parrot their arguments.
No successful market is seen as such until someone goes and does it.
To that end, I would think that the military would *want* people with a "death fetish" and/or people who can handle seeing other peoples' body parts blown off.
Well, isn't that quote a terrifying window into modern understanding? The military needs people who can kill but it has no need of people who want to kill. One of the advances since the Enlightenment is that war is a thing to be avoided when at all possible, that it is not a thing to glory in or seek out. In an imperfect world, military force is going to be necessary sometimes... but you want the guys with the guns and the nukes to be resistant to the seductive call of destruction.
In the ancient world the military ideal for a free society was Cincinnatus. In our history, it's Washington. Or to draw upon recent commentary: the "Greatest Generation" wasn't great because they fought and won a war. They were great because when that war was over, they built a peace.
No, you're missing the point. Nothing ever just costs corporations money. If it costs them money, it will cost the end user money too. You don't really think that costs have nothing to do with market price, do you?
Ah, that's true if you include the whole economy. The issue here is, the cost is spread to more citizens than if it were rolled into the vending machines' design. In other words: Making the vending machines counterfeit-resistant adds to the cost of the vending machine. That cost is passed to the distributors, which is passed to the end customer. Fair enough. But if the price of candy rises too much, perhaps people don't buy as much. Maybe the vending machine companies go out of business; or at least, the least efficient ones do. That's how the market is supposed to work: Rational economic decisions based on true cost.
But if you're the head of the vending machine company, you don't give a fig about the markets. You'd rather have that cost passed onto all consumers, since the resultant price increase in just candy will be much smaller and will be in comparison to everything else rising, too. So no one ascribes the new cost to the vending machines, so they are not economically "penalized" for the unwanted feature of being easy to fool.
I have taken basic economics. But it astounds me how much everyone thinks "the costs all go back to the end user" waves away all the inequities. How the costs go to the end user and where value stops off along the way -- these are important questions, too. If you think that corporations wouldn't prefer to see costs hidden into social transaction costs -- income taxes, software mandates, etc. -- and thus spread around, well, I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
Follow this logic: While we can't make vending machines clever enough to tell the difference between real dollars and fake ones, we can make your computer smart enough to not let you do anything with money.
No, you miss the point. Modifying the vending machines would cost corporations money. Instead they'd rather put the onus on the end user -- we should pay to protect their investment. Or, put succinctly, business as usual.
Um, long term, isn't that what "the market" is? What's wrong with allowing market forces to come into play earlier than usual? Other than preventing early bidders from reaping unsustainable and unjustified rewards...
But I still think you should be teaching primary school... That is, people with your skills in describing reality being let loose to teach our young&dumb, that is.
Well, they let me at the high schoolers... maybe it's not too late by then...
sorry to be off-topic, but does anyone have any good links on how the American policial system works, who has what powers.
Sure. It's really quite simply, actually:
$$$ = power
The middle school textbook answer would be: Congress divides itself into committees, which further subdivide into subcommittees. All legislation starts in one of these subcommittees. (A member can introduce a bill directly but it is then routed to the "appropriate" subcommittee, yielding the same practical result.) The subcommittee holds hearings, which are basically a chance for the monied stakeholders to inveigle and jeremiad about how the proposed legislation will cause The End of the World as We Know It. (That is, unless the monied interest would benefit from the bill, in which case its passage is deemed Vital to the National Security and Desired by All Right-Thinking People, in contrast to its opponents, who Eat Babies and Hate America.) From time to time, for amusement value, small groups who have the actual public interest at heart get to testify, too.
If the subcommittee likes the bill, it is reported up to the full committee, which more or less repeats the process but adds some pork for various Congressional districts, entirely coincidentally the ones from which the committee members were elected. Then, at the whim of the committee chair, the bill as amended is reported to the House or Senate for the almost mythical "straight up-and-down vote".
If the bill is unpalatable but embarassing to vote against -- if, for example, it's a bill banning the sale of contaminated milk to schoolchildren but you happen to have been heavily lobbied by SpolitMilkCo -- then you look for ways to kill it without a vote. As much as possible, you keep it "bottled up in committee", meaning that there are occasional hearings but the report is never written. If you wait long enough, the Congress will adjourn and all unreported bills will die of asphyxiation. That means that the pesky bill would have to be re-introduced at the next session by whatever pesky Congressperson introduced it in the first place -- and with any luck, the massive spending by the ticked off monied interests will have led to the demise of that Congressperson. Then everyone wins.
Except, of course, the actual people of the United States. But really, if they can't be bothered to donate uber-millions to defend their interests, to heck with them.
Apple allows people to do just about anything they want with their music except put it on w4r3Z R US, and many people still invest hundreds of hours trying to find a way to crack it, with thousands cheering them on.
And millions use the software legally. Are you saying because "thousands" of people might engage in wholesale copying, we should lock everything down in a draconian information control system the likes of which even Stalin would have drooled over?
And before you whip me for extremism, my image is about as unreasonable as your contention that fixing the DMCA is the same as "repealing" copyright.
This is simply due to the fact that a member of congress has to handle physical letters (or pay a staffer to do it) and it can have much more of an impact.
Is this still true? I come from the postal district of the anthrax mailing. I know for some time Congresspeople stopped handling their mail, and I wonder if it's regained its cachet. Maybe faxing is the way to go...
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You want conspiracy theories? How about the fact that the database will be publicly available, but "an overhaul of the system should be finished by December" -- conveniently after the election. Hmmm. I wonder why the Bush-Cheney administration might want foreign connections quiet until after Nov 2? Can you say "Saudi Arabia"?
Now, most likely, this is some technical thing not directed by the White House or even Ashcroft. But this has been an administration with a proven track record of stonewalling, hedging, and obfuscating for political purposes
de do do do de da da da
That's all I have to say to you.
That is exactly the most dangerous time -- when the agency is tempted to sell its soul for private money to keep going. Look how wonderful things got at the USPTO when Congress stripped them of their income...
If the data formats are changed and the specs not made open, then for sure your little app will crash. It's not clear to me if they're really talking about making the data inaccessible -- but if that's the thrust, then we should be up in arms.
Haven't you been reading the news? This is already happening.
A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon it adds up to real money....
And why -- among other reasons -- Galactica 1980 stank up the screen.
That's not a bad point. But the Joe Average you're debating with will often feel that "socially frowned upon" is the same as "wrong", which should be the same as "illegal". In other words, arguing that privacy is necessary so that you can continue to practice your "perversions" doesn't convince people who want to take it away.
But if you never commit a crime, why do you need (or value) privacy? What do you get out of it?
What is a good response to "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"? The parent post is not a good response; it doesn't actually convince the person who's ready to give up privacy. It falls back on the "we're all sinners" argument -- and some people recognize that we are all sinners, but still feel that the panopticon would reduce our sinning.
Any good ripostes?
Interesting factoid: The Third Amendment is the only one with essentially no case law. It hasn't been the basis of any Supreme Court decisions, I believe...
No, they must ignore the illegally-obtained evidence forever. What's more, the court will throw out any new evidence whose origin is the illegal evidence. In other words, imagine that the cops do an illegal search and finds drugs in an apartment. They use the drugs to convince a judge that the suspect is a middleman in a drug operation, and the judge gives them a wiretap so that they can see who the suspect calls. That wiretap leads to a massive crackdown that catches a dozen top drug traffickers. Yay. But when the defense attorneys find out that the original search was illegal, the whole game is blown: All the subsequent evidence -- and the convictions it enabled -- will be thrown out.
It's called "fruit of the poisonous tree" (see here for a good summary). It closes the loophole you seem to assume exists -- and thank goodness, since if consitutional protections could be blithely overlooked, then they wouldn't actually mean anything.
Oh, wait....
And that, in a nutshell, was the motivation for the DMCA: Criminalize the breaking of any copying system (no matter how trivial), so that companies no longer need to develop good ones.
And if you try lots of things and can't find the thing you love? If you can't seem to focus for more than a few months? Pox take you: you're not "uniquely bright" -- you're just a dilettante (and not in the good way).
I always shake my head when I see this. It's essentially the same verbiage used in 1957. Now, of course, we know that GPS and comm sats make near-Earth orbit valuable
I don't know what the other ways are, but I'm pretty sure they're there. And it's always easy to see how the nay-sayers from the past were so shortsighted without somehow noticing that we parrot their arguments.
No successful market is seen as such until someone goes and does it.
Well, isn't that quote a terrifying window into modern understanding? The military needs people who can kill but it has no need of people who want to kill. One of the advances since the Enlightenment is that war is a thing to be avoided when at all possible, that it is not a thing to glory in or seek out. In an imperfect world, military force is going to be necessary sometimes
In the ancient world the military ideal for a free society was Cincinnatus. In our history, it's Washington. Or to draw upon recent commentary: the "Greatest Generation" wasn't great because they fought and won a war. They were great because when that war was over, they built a peace.
Next, I hear, Microsoft plans to go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line...
... this is just a PR stunt by the Sci Fi Channel to hype their new series, Stargate: Atlantis.
Ah, that's true if you include the whole economy. The issue here is, the cost is spread to more citizens than if it were rolled into the vending machines' design. In other words: Making the vending machines counterfeit-resistant adds to the cost of the vending machine. That cost is passed to the distributors, which is passed to the end customer. Fair enough. But if the price of candy rises too much, perhaps people don't buy as much. Maybe the vending machine companies go out of business; or at least, the least efficient ones do. That's how the market is supposed to work: Rational economic decisions based on true cost.
But if you're the head of the vending machine company, you don't give a fig about the markets. You'd rather have that cost passed onto all consumers, since the resultant price increase in just candy will be much smaller and will be in comparison to everything else rising, too. So no one ascribes the new cost to the vending machines, so they are not economically "penalized" for the unwanted feature of being easy to fool.
I have taken basic economics. But it astounds me how much everyone thinks "the costs all go back to the end user" waves away all the inequities. How the costs go to the end user and where value stops off along the way -- these are important questions, too. If you think that corporations wouldn't prefer to see costs hidden into social transaction costs -- income taxes, software mandates, etc. -- and thus spread around, well, I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
No, you miss the point. Modifying the vending machines would cost corporations money. Instead they'd rather put the onus on the end user -- we should pay to protect their investment. Or, put succinctly, business as usual.
Um, long term, isn't that what "the market" is? What's wrong with allowing market forces to come into play earlier than usual? Other than preventing early bidders from reaping unsustainable and unjustified rewards...
Well, they let me at the high schoolers... maybe it's not too late by then...
Sure. It's really quite simply, actually:
The middle school textbook answer would be: Congress divides itself into committees, which further subdivide into subcommittees. All legislation starts in one of these subcommittees. (A member can introduce a bill directly but it is then routed to the "appropriate" subcommittee, yielding the same practical result.) The subcommittee holds hearings, which are basically a chance for the monied stakeholders to inveigle and jeremiad about how the proposed legislation will cause The End of the World as We Know It. (That is, unless the monied interest would benefit from the bill, in which case its passage is deemed Vital to the National Security and Desired by All Right-Thinking People, in contrast to its opponents, who Eat Babies and Hate America.) From time to time, for amusement value, small groups who have the actual public interest at heart get to testify, too.
If the subcommittee likes the bill, it is reported up to the full committee, which more or less repeats the process but adds some pork for various Congressional districts, entirely coincidentally the ones from which the committee members were elected. Then, at the whim of the committee chair, the bill as amended is reported to the House or Senate for the almost mythical "straight up-and-down vote".
If the bill is unpalatable but embarassing to vote against -- if, for example, it's a bill banning the sale of contaminated milk to schoolchildren but you happen to have been heavily lobbied by SpolitMilkCo -- then you look for ways to kill it without a vote. As much as possible, you keep it "bottled up in committee", meaning that there are occasional hearings but the report is never written. If you wait long enough, the Congress will adjourn and all unreported bills will die of asphyxiation. That means that the pesky bill would have to be re-introduced at the next session by whatever pesky Congressperson introduced it in the first place -- and with any luck, the massive spending by the ticked off monied interests will have led to the demise of that Congressperson. Then everyone wins.
Except, of course, the actual people of the United States. But really, if they can't be bothered to donate uber-millions to defend their interests, to heck with them.
And millions use the software legally. Are you saying because "thousands" of people might engage in wholesale copying, we should lock everything down in a draconian information control system the likes of which even Stalin would have drooled over?
And before you whip me for extremism, my image is about as unreasonable as your contention that fixing the DMCA is the same as "repealing" copyright.
Is this still true? I come from the postal district of the anthrax mailing. I know for some time Congresspeople stopped handling their mail, and I wonder if it's regained its cachet. Maybe faxing is the way to go...