I can't find any articles to support this, but I believe I read somewhere that the US Military is developing this kind of capability to tap into the local power supply of whichever country we decide to invade next.
If you have the legal authority to get away with it, that's a great way to charge up electric vehicles or equipment.
You've posted this point in response to at least one other comment. I want to commend you for it.
Like this case, class action lawsuits are pretty commonly taken on with no guarantee of compensation. If the plaintiffs lose, their legal team gets nothing. Complain about the moral sliminess of lawyers all you want, but like all of us they definitely will not work for free.
Oh? If that's the case, then why the hell isn't my heating bill cheaper hmm?
Mine's gotten cheaper over the last couple of years. Of course a big portion of the cost to the homeowner is distribution to the home, not just the cost of obtaining the gas itself. Those LNG delivery trucks still burn good old fashioned diesel and require a fleshy meatbag to operate.
Thank you! I had this exact joke in my head and was scrolling down the list to make sure nobody had already used it. Though In this case, the surface area unit of one Rhode Island is actually moderately useful./p.
And by them attaching the tracker, they've just admitted that they're recording the location of your car. So there's no way in hell they can force you to reveal the location of your car, because, duh, that's testifying against yourself. (Think about it for a second. If the FBI is collecting 'the location of the car', then 'the location of the car' is clearly being used as evidence in an investigation, presumably against you, so if you're forced to tell them 'the location of the car'...)
That's a wonderfully rational and logical point. Unfortunately our Justice system doesn't take kindly to logic and rational thought. Clearly anyone making that argument is seditious and needs to be tracked to protect national security.
So you're saying that I can progressively pull out of the market until I am forced to opt out of technology in general because I don't agree to being abused by OEMs?
Yes, that's exactly right. You don't have any right to the technology. I would love to have a magical flying unicorn, but nobody offers such a thing. I don't get pissed off when Breeders tell me "Nope, sorry. Don't carry them". You have the freedom to make any purchasing decision you like. At the same time manufacturers have the right to decide what products they sell. We can't force them to offer an open phone that meets our wants.
Realistically though you will never have no devices to buy. Someone somewhere will continue to market more open devices so long as there is a demand for it. Otherwise, you are totally free to build yourself whatever kind of phone you want.
#1 is not entirely correct. Google "Warren v. District of Columbia". Basically the precedent set is that while Police exist to protect society at larg, they are are under no obligation to provide individual protection. As an individual I cannot expect the Police to render me personal protection, though most PD's will do their best to offer it anyway. Police primarily serve to prevent and investigate crime, not to stop it in the act.
To me this story sounds like a bit of ridiculous politicking on the part of some local government official. I know a few volunteer firefighters, and I can't imagine the guys I know would stand around and let that building burn just because the owner failed to pay his $75.
I don't know about the GP, but I do actually track fuel consumption based on mileage at fillups. Over time you would most definitely see differences of just a few % points.
Not sure if you're being serious with that. My great-grandfather fought in WWI and considered himself a hero. My dad still has the rifle my great-grandfather carried. He had put notches on the shoulder stock for every person he believes he killed. The rifle is a Mauser.
2) the "space race" against the Russians. Once the race had been "won", there wasn't any emphasis on continuing...
I know that the goal at the time was to put a human on the moon, and we did that first. But the Russians did follow it up with a reasonably sophisticated rover only a year later. Rovers seem like the most (only?) viable way to conduct preliminary explorations of extra-terrestrial bodies. In hindsight, maybe they had the right idea.
p.s. Not trying to belittle the accomplishments of the Apollo crews and engineers. Putting a squishy meatbag on the moon was an incredible feat. Getting him back safely was (IMO) even more incredible.
One of the reasons that's keeping me from deleting my facebook account is that having it active allows me to untag myself from all the pictures that I wish my friends would stop making public. If I didn't have an account they could link to, my name would just sit on the picture for anyone to see.
" I don't trust that every single person on the road is able to make an accurate risk assessment."
don't worry, they don't trust you can make an accurate risk assessment either.
RIGHT! That's exactly my point! That's why well enforced speed limits are a good thing. They eliminate everyones ability to make their own judgement about the level of risk they represent. They set conservative but reasonable standards on acceptable risk, and everyone is safer as a result.
I think part of the problem is that most people don't look at driving as a regulated licensed privilege that actually requires a fair bit of skill and practice not to suck at. Everyone gets a drivers license, and the conditions to revoke one are rare. If people took driving more seriously, I think you'd see a lot less of the stupid multitasking stuff.
Going 60 in a 55 mph zone is considered speeding. I don't consider myself to be more at risk in that case. However, if you mean excessive speeding like 75 or 80 in a 55 then I agree.
I think it's entirely dependent on the road conditions. Doing 60 in a 55 is more dangerous than going 55, but doing 60 in a 55 when everyone else is doing 70 is even more dangerous.
It's all about calculated risk. I am totally comfortable driving at 75, I don't like driving any faster than that ever. But my problem is that I don't trust that every single person on the road is able to make an accurate risk assessment. Thus, I like the idea of speed limits. It limits the potential for someone else to make a bad judgement about their own vehicle and driving skills.
China: "Dear US, we are cashing in the giant pile of debt you owe us."
US: "Shucks, China, it looks like we spent all our money on increasingly elaborate pyramid schemes and shitty exurbs that nobody wants. Anyway, thanks for all the free stuff over the years, and I hope you don't find the sudden transition from high-employment export economy to moderate-unemployment internal economy too jarring... TTLGTG!"
I'm no economist, but I think you're spot on. It's not like China can "cash out" and repossess our SUV's if we can't pay. We simply can't pay, the cash is gone. All China can really do is stop lending to us. Which would be catastrophic for the US, and a smaller but still really big problem for the rest of the world.
The worst thing they could do is dump our debt to other countries for cheap, which I think would serve to devalue our currency quite a bit. Because so much of the global economy is based around the USD, this would be bad for everybody.
It's just plain wrong that in 2010, there isn't an eBook version of every text book. I would buy a kindle for my 11 year old son if I could gt all his texts on it.
I just went back to school myself, and looked at a Kindle as an alternative to lugging around my own textbooks. The only problem was that I couldn't buy electronic versions of most of my texts, so I skipped it. This actually surprised me, I would think text book publishers would want me buying their e-books. They save the distribution costs and it creates more business for them by eliminating the second-hand market.
Ironically one of my courses is "Training Methods for Adult Learners", and one of our topics is discussing the use of open courseware lectures and texts to reach out to unprecedented numbers of learners.
Matter of perspective? Both pushing for their own interests? Neither one is right or wrong? Both are the same?
Not quite. I'm saying the terms right, wrong, good, and bad are not appropriate. I am not saying that the sides are the same, clearly they are not. I'm saying that we shouldn't be applying a relative moral judgement to the different positions. I'm also saying that there is no absolute moral spectrum on which to place these ideas. This point is, of course, up for some debate as well. Keep in mind that I am only arguing my own opinion; of course I believe it to be correct but I won't vilify anyone that disagrees.
An assumption you appear to make is that the side that favors the public benefit is good while the side that favors the personal benefit is bad. All I am saying is that good and bad imply an inherent universal moral order along which these perspectives fall. It is arrogant for us to assume that our side is more "good" than any other simply because it's the side that we are on.
From a utilitarian perspective I see an easy argument how the public benefit from open information outweighs the personal benefit of closed information (greater good for greater numbers and all that), but nobody cares to actually pursue that argument. Realistically we can never really quantify the units of good or units of bad that either option would produce. However most of the debate I see here includes people mindlessly labeling us "good" and them "bad". It's irrational and irresponsible.
No, in fact I don't. Anthropomorphizing information is silly and only serves to raise people's hackles. Society benefits when information is free, usually. So in that respect as a society we want to ensure that the information we want to be free remains free. But the good does not come from the absence of restrictions, the good comes from our consumption and application of the information. Free information is a means to an end, but is not itself "good".
The poster I replied to said:
Stallman's cause is just. Theirs is greed.
My point is that this is simply a matter of perspective. Neither cause is in and of itself "Right" or "Wrong", both parties are pushing for their own interests. Remember that I am of the opinion that open information will have a generally net benefit to society, but also remember that this is just an opinion. Not a universal truth.
apologies: i meant intellectual property in regards to only one kind of intellectual property: media
anything that is consumed as electronic bits: books, music, movies, should be completely devoid of any intellectual property conventions
But that system will never work. Anyone that produces those kinds of media will never put it into electronic formats if they will lose their ability to make money of off it. Your system would encourage content producers to limit themselves to archaic copy-protected distribution models, and potentially large segments of society will never be able to see the cultural benefit of their work.
Some level of reasonable IP protection has to be in place to allow content producers the ability to generate content. We need to come to some agreement about what level of protection is reasonable, but some protection is absolutely necessary.
There is no equivalence there. Stallman's cause is just. Theirs is greed.
While I agree with you, it is just a matter of perspective. There is nothing inherently good about information being "free" aside from the benefits that people will receive from the information. Some people have an interest in keeping information closed.
Hopefully when more people think like us than think like them we can get our way. Not that our way is somehow the "right" way, just that it works for us.
Please also note that the specific example I referred to in my OP wasn't an estranged family member, but a family member who was asked by the patient to get information yet wasn't listed as an "official" contact. A few days later, they called with the patient also on the line, and the patient confirmed they were authorized...but they were still pissed that they lost a few days on it.
I saw similar situations in my time answering phones. It sucks, the human in me wanted to be able to bend the rules to help, but there was always a rational part of me that understood that the laws exist for a reason and I have no way of knowing if the "desperate family member" was giving me the whole story. That is one of the many reasons I am glad not to be in a direct people facing role anymore; it saves me stressing the moral ambiguity.
At the very least those experiences have made me think very hard about who I would want to be able to access my medical information and make decisions about my care if I was unable to do so.
If your house burns down and destroys all your DVDs the store you bought them from isn;t going to let you replace them all for free -
This is tangentially related to the story topic, but I have definitely had physical media replaced. It wasn't through the retailer though. One instance I recall was that I accidentally dropped one of the disks to C&C Generals and rolled over it in my office chair. Totally ruined it. I wrote a polite letter to EA Games, included what was left of the original media to prove I wasn't trying to scam them, and they sent me a replacement disk.
They weren't obligated to do this by any means (that I am aware of). But they did. That was good customer support.
Of course I never expected them to do this, so by the time I received the replacement disk I had already gotten a pirated copy and was playing that. It was so convenient to use the cracked version that I just kept on doing so. But I felt righteous knowing that I also owned a usable physical disk.
I mean DVDs are still being sold by the millions so why I believe BlueRay fills a needed market, that market is just shrinking like crazy.
DVD has huge penetration already, and adequately fills most of the low end market for media distribution and storage. Bluray is still in kind of a high end specialty market that is being squashed. Unlike the switch to Bluray there is no extra cost to the consumer to start using digital downloaded media.
You're right in that the market exists. I don't think DVD or Bluray are in immediate danger of abandonment and death (Remember HD-DVD? That was tragically swift). But if only one of those formats is going to survive then I think at this point DVD has more staying power. It's the perfect format for cheap media distribution because everyone can already play it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find any articles to support this, but I believe I read somewhere that the US Military is developing this kind of capability to tap into the local power supply of whichever country we decide to invade next.
If you have the legal authority to get away with it, that's a great way to charge up electric vehicles or equipment.
You've posted this point in response to at least one other comment. I want to commend you for it.
Like this case, class action lawsuits are pretty commonly taken on with no guarantee of compensation. If the plaintiffs lose, their legal team gets nothing. Complain about the moral sliminess of lawyers all you want, but like all of us they definitely will not work for free.
Well, natural gas is now much cheaper
Oh? If that's the case, then why the hell isn't my heating bill cheaper hmm?
Mine's gotten cheaper over the last couple of years. Of course a big portion of the cost to the homeowner is distribution to the home, not just the cost of obtaining the gas itself. Those LNG delivery trucks still burn good old fashioned diesel and require a fleshy meatbag to operate.
Or alternatively, Rhode ISland.
Thank you! I had this exact joke in my head and was scrolling down the list to make sure nobody had already used it. Though In this case, the surface area unit of one Rhode Island is actually moderately useful./p.
And by them attaching the tracker, they've just admitted that they're recording the location of your car. So there's no way in hell they can force you to reveal the location of your car, because, duh, that's testifying against yourself. (Think about it for a second. If the FBI is collecting 'the location of the car', then 'the location of the car' is clearly being used as evidence in an investigation, presumably against you, so if you're forced to tell them 'the location of the car'...)
That's a wonderfully rational and logical point. Unfortunately our Justice system doesn't take kindly to logic and rational thought. Clearly anyone making that argument is seditious and needs to be tracked to protect national security.
So you're saying that I can progressively pull out of the market until I am forced to opt out of technology in general because I don't agree to being abused by OEMs?
Yes, that's exactly right. You don't have any right to the technology. I would love to have a magical flying unicorn, but nobody offers such a thing. I don't get pissed off when Breeders tell me "Nope, sorry. Don't carry them". You have the freedom to make any purchasing decision you like. At the same time manufacturers have the right to decide what products they sell. We can't force them to offer an open phone that meets our wants.
Realistically though you will never have no devices to buy. Someone somewhere will continue to market more open devices so long as there is a demand for it. Otherwise, you are totally free to build yourself whatever kind of phone you want.
#1 is not entirely correct. Google "Warren v. District of Columbia". Basically the precedent set is that while Police exist to protect society at larg, they are are under no obligation to provide individual protection. As an individual I cannot expect the Police to render me personal protection, though most PD's will do their best to offer it anyway. Police primarily serve to prevent and investigate crime, not to stop it in the act.
To me this story sounds like a bit of ridiculous politicking on the part of some local government official. I know a few volunteer firefighters, and I can't imagine the guys I know would stand around and let that building burn just because the owner failed to pay his $75.
I don't know about the GP, but I do actually track fuel consumption based on mileage at fillups. Over time you would most definitely see differences of just a few % points.
How dare you express an opinion about a controversial topic on the internet?
Not sure if you're being serious with that. My great-grandfather fought in WWI and considered himself a hero. My dad still has the rifle my great-grandfather carried. He had put notches on the shoulder stock for every person he believes he killed. The rifle is a Mauser.
2) the "space race" against the Russians. Once the race had been "won", there wasn't any emphasis on continuing...
I know that the goal at the time was to put a human on the moon, and we did that first. But the Russians did follow it up with a reasonably sophisticated rover only a year later. Rovers seem like the most (only?) viable way to conduct preliminary explorations of extra-terrestrial bodies. In hindsight, maybe they had the right idea.
p.s. Not trying to belittle the accomplishments of the Apollo crews and engineers. Putting a squishy meatbag on the moon was an incredible feat. Getting him back safely was (IMO) even more incredible.
One of the reasons that's keeping me from deleting my facebook account is that having it active allows me to untag myself from all the pictures that I wish my friends would stop making public. If I didn't have an account they could link to, my name would just sit on the picture for anyone to see.
" I don't trust that every single person on the road is able to make an accurate risk assessment."
don't worry, they don't trust you can make an accurate risk assessment either.
RIGHT! That's exactly my point! That's why well enforced speed limits are a good thing. They eliminate everyones ability to make their own judgement about the level of risk they represent. They set conservative but reasonable standards on acceptable risk, and everyone is safer as a result.
I think part of the problem is that most people don't look at driving as a regulated licensed privilege that actually requires a fair bit of skill and practice not to suck at. Everyone gets a drivers license, and the conditions to revoke one are rare. If people took driving more seriously, I think you'd see a lot less of the stupid multitasking stuff.
Going 60 in a 55 mph zone is considered speeding. I don't consider myself to be more at risk in that case. However, if you mean excessive speeding like 75 or 80 in a 55 then I agree.
I think it's entirely dependent on the road conditions. Doing 60 in a 55 is more dangerous than going 55, but doing 60 in a 55 when everyone else is doing 70 is even more dangerous.
It's all about calculated risk. I am totally comfortable driving at 75, I don't like driving any faster than that ever. But my problem is that I don't trust that every single person on the road is able to make an accurate risk assessment. Thus, I like the idea of speed limits. It limits the potential for someone else to make a bad judgement about their own vehicle and driving skills.
God I wish I had mod points for you. Brilliant.
China: "Dear US, we are cashing in the giant pile of debt you owe us." US: "Shucks, China, it looks like we spent all our money on increasingly elaborate pyramid schemes and shitty exurbs that nobody wants. Anyway, thanks for all the free stuff over the years, and I hope you don't find the sudden transition from high-employment export economy to moderate-unemployment internal economy too jarring... TTLGTG!"
I'm no economist, but I think you're spot on. It's not like China can "cash out" and repossess our SUV's if we can't pay. We simply can't pay, the cash is gone. All China can really do is stop lending to us. Which would be catastrophic for the US, and a smaller but still really big problem for the rest of the world.
The worst thing they could do is dump our debt to other countries for cheap, which I think would serve to devalue our currency quite a bit. Because so much of the global economy is based around the USD, this would be bad for everybody.
It's just plain wrong that in 2010, there isn't an eBook version of every text book. I would buy a kindle for my 11 year old son if I could gt all his texts on it.
I just went back to school myself, and looked at a Kindle as an alternative to lugging around my own textbooks. The only problem was that I couldn't buy electronic versions of most of my texts, so I skipped it. This actually surprised me, I would think text book publishers would want me buying their e-books. They save the distribution costs and it creates more business for them by eliminating the second-hand market.
Ironically one of my courses is "Training Methods for Adult Learners", and one of our topics is discussing the use of open courseware lectures and texts to reach out to unprecedented numbers of learners.
Matter of perspective? Both pushing for their own interests? Neither one is right or wrong? Both are the same?
Not quite. I'm saying the terms right, wrong, good, and bad are not appropriate. I am not saying that the sides are the same, clearly they are not. I'm saying that we shouldn't be applying a relative moral judgement to the different positions. I'm also saying that there is no absolute moral spectrum on which to place these ideas. This point is, of course, up for some debate as well. Keep in mind that I am only arguing my own opinion; of course I believe it to be correct but I won't vilify anyone that disagrees.
An assumption you appear to make is that the side that favors the public benefit is good while the side that favors the personal benefit is bad. All I am saying is that good and bad imply an inherent universal moral order along which these perspectives fall. It is arrogant for us to assume that our side is more "good" than any other simply because it's the side that we are on.
From a utilitarian perspective I see an easy argument how the public benefit from open information outweighs the personal benefit of closed information (greater good for greater numbers and all that), but nobody cares to actually pursue that argument. Realistically we can never really quantify the units of good or units of bad that either option would produce. However most of the debate I see here includes people mindlessly labeling us "good" and them "bad". It's irrational and irresponsible.
No, in fact I don't. Anthropomorphizing information is silly and only serves to raise people's hackles. Society benefits when information is free, usually. So in that respect as a society we want to ensure that the information we want to be free remains free. But the good does not come from the absence of restrictions, the good comes from our consumption and application of the information. Free information is a means to an end, but is not itself "good".
The poster I replied to said:
Stallman's cause is just. Theirs is greed.
My point is that this is simply a matter of perspective. Neither cause is in and of itself "Right" or "Wrong", both parties are pushing for their own interests. Remember that I am of the opinion that open information will have a generally net benefit to society, but also remember that this is just an opinion. Not a universal truth.
apologies: i meant intellectual property in regards to only one kind of intellectual property: media
anything that is consumed as electronic bits: books, music, movies, should be completely devoid of any intellectual property conventions
But that system will never work. Anyone that produces those kinds of media will never put it into electronic formats if they will lose their ability to make money of off it. Your system would encourage content producers to limit themselves to archaic copy-protected distribution models, and potentially large segments of society will never be able to see the cultural benefit of their work.
Some level of reasonable IP protection has to be in place to allow content producers the ability to generate content. We need to come to some agreement about what level of protection is reasonable, but some protection is absolutely necessary.
There is no equivalence there. Stallman's cause is just. Theirs is greed.
While I agree with you, it is just a matter of perspective. There is nothing inherently good about information being "free" aside from the benefits that people will receive from the information. Some people have an interest in keeping information closed.
Hopefully when more people think like us than think like them we can get our way. Not that our way is somehow the "right" way, just that it works for us.
Please also note that the specific example I referred to in my OP wasn't an estranged family member, but a family member who was asked by the patient to get information yet wasn't listed as an "official" contact. A few days later, they called with the patient also on the line, and the patient confirmed they were authorized...but they were still pissed that they lost a few days on it.
I saw similar situations in my time answering phones. It sucks, the human in me wanted to be able to bend the rules to help, but there was always a rational part of me that understood that the laws exist for a reason and I have no way of knowing if the "desperate family member" was giving me the whole story. That is one of the many reasons I am glad not to be in a direct people facing role anymore; it saves me stressing the moral ambiguity.
At the very least those experiences have made me think very hard about who I would want to be able to access my medical information and make decisions about my care if I was unable to do so.
If your house burns down and destroys all your DVDs the store you bought them from isn;t going to let you replace them all for free -
This is tangentially related to the story topic, but I have definitely had physical media replaced. It wasn't through the retailer though. One instance I recall was that I accidentally dropped one of the disks to C&C Generals and rolled over it in my office chair. Totally ruined it. I wrote a polite letter to EA Games, included what was left of the original media to prove I wasn't trying to scam them, and they sent me a replacement disk.
They weren't obligated to do this by any means (that I am aware of). But they did. That was good customer support.
Of course I never expected them to do this, so by the time I received the replacement disk I had already gotten a pirated copy and was playing that. It was so convenient to use the cracked version that I just kept on doing so. But I felt righteous knowing that I also owned a usable physical disk.
I mean DVDs are still being sold by the millions so why I believe BlueRay fills a needed market, that market is just shrinking like crazy.
DVD has huge penetration already, and adequately fills most of the low end market for media distribution and storage. Bluray is still in kind of a high end specialty market that is being squashed. Unlike the switch to Bluray there is no extra cost to the consumer to start using digital downloaded media.
You're right in that the market exists. I don't think DVD or Bluray are in immediate danger of abandonment and death (Remember HD-DVD? That was tragically swift). But if only one of those formats is going to survive then I think at this point DVD has more staying power. It's the perfect format for cheap media distribution because everyone can already play it.