It got them successfully on television for several years, where they had a lot of good programming and many fans, until they were later bought out by G4.
The fact that G4 never had any intention of following through on TechTV's devotion to quality is a completely separate matter.
Humans live a heck of a lot longer than most other mammals, learn, communicate, teach others, consume resources produced by society, etc; plus, if just possibly your actions end up hurting them emotionally, they'll almost certainly be shamed, coerced, and otherwise meant to believe that they themselves are wrong.
There will always be people that can get through something like that perfectly healthily in mind and body. However, for whatever reason, this is one of those things where society pretty well agrees they don't want to take the risk that the girl (or boy) won't. Children are held sacred in that way.
I have to say I tend to agree. Now, the question to ask is this:
Which system, capitalism or socialism, is more likely to find that convergence? Or, in particular, what path is necessary to get from their existing system to there?
Capitalism getting that kind of alteration requires, as we have seen, some amount of government-sponsored socialism. Some people still grumble about this today. Socialism getting a little bit more capitalistic? I can't even hazard a guess.
It's an interesting thing to think about I suppose.
"Capable of getting around your restrictions" is not the same thing as "free". Even if you are capable of doing it, they resist.
I like to say that there is only one guaranteed freedom -- the freedom to try. You can freely try to murder people, but you may well be caught, jailed, possibly executed. You can freely try to get around those restriction. You can also freely try to stop someone else's attempt to do whatever it is they're trying to do.
The need for food worldwide is enormous. When was the last time you saw a billionaire farmer?
One thing capitalism (or at least the versions I'm familiar with) does poorly is equating "necessary labor" with "valuable labor". Hell, TEACHERS don't get paid enough. They're giving in accordance with their ability, and yet, if they needed say a resort vacation because they've been dealing with nasty little shits for years on end and are overstressed, in some places they might have to give up hot meals for a while.
In other words, capitalism would be nice if it was entirely on TOP of everyone getting what they NEED. Since it's not, someone can have entirely valuable and useful contributions which are not market-driven, profitable, etc, and as a result, the system is completely unfair to the people that end up with that work.
Now can we stop arguing about it? I really don't want to start turning communist or whatever simply because it's the logical thing to do. I still have my own greediness I want to sate someday.
That makes no sense. As you say, if they really wanted to, they could do it, so they are free to do it in that regards.
They are not "free" to do it in the sense that we are talking about, because there are laws against it. There's a difference between "can get away with it" and "free to do it".
Actually, I'm fairly sure the police go out of their way (in most cases at least) to make sure you are not free to murder, rather than simply not allowing you to get away with it. If they have a reasonable indication that you are going to try, they will stop you.
This is insanely evident when it comes to terrorism / state security.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
Only if he wasn't getting what was due him as well. You're assuming that the system will only be fair to some and not others, which is kind of exactly opposite the point. Again, may not work in practice, but you don't have to be quite THAT cynical.
If you and your neighbor both work enough to repay your debt to society, and he's equally likely to get what he needs whether you take his specific labor or not, where is the discrepancy? The only thing I can think is if that particular item has sentimental value.
Really? You consider a discussion about sex to be just as black and white as a discussion about violence?
Yup.
"If someone tries to tell you what to do, or pressure you into doing it, don't do it, and come talk to me. If you aren't sure you understand what might happen, to you or someone else, don't do it until you talk to someone you trust first, hopefully me. If something seems weird about the situation, don't do it, and come talk to me. I'm not going to yell at you, but I'm going to do what I can to make sure nothing bad happens, alright?"
The astute may notice that this advice could easily apply to situations that might lead to becoming a bully, a criminal, or a drug addict, as easily as the the ones that might lead to sexual experimentation or exploitation.
Odd. So would you tell your 8 year old daughter that sex is fine, have fun? Or would you tell her sex is bad, don't do it? To me either position is bad for a child. The first is likely to get you a child who ends up getting gangbanged on girls gone wild because they see sex as nothing, the latter ends up with a child unable to enjoy sex because they've been conditioned to think of it as nasty or wrong.
You could as easily make the argument that the same sort of rules will produce either a bully or a handshy, squeamish little shut-in, depending on their exposure to violence. Not acknowledging that is somewhat of a double standard which is exactly what the GP was saying.
Oh, and your child doesn't feel empathy? They don't understand the consequences of hurting others? Really? Both of my daughters and my son began to show signs of empathy before they could speak. They understood that hurting others was bad long before they knew there were differences between girls and boys.
And yet you don't have the same degree of faith in their ability to deal reasonably with their genitals. Or do you really believe in the urban legend that men become drooling blockheads, and women become flighty ditzes, at the merest existence of the other sex in a ten mile radius?
I have, but you don't see the privacy settings page when you sign up. The point of the privacy policy is to know what you're getting into BEFORE you put your data on the internet.
I'll grant you that much (albeit by default as I haven't looked at Facebook's privacy policy), however...
I said "the system is broken" for good reason. The existence of a privacy policy or how good it is doesn't matter all that much. For a lot of people, myself included, the "have you read the privacy policy" question is read as "Do you trust us with your data?" I do, because I don't, to my knowledge, post anything that I shouldn't. Therefore, whenever that question comes up for any site, the only thing that passes through my head before I check off the consent box is, "Should I trust them?" Because I don't read it, there are probably issues I'm ignorant of. I'm aware of this, but the very idea of reading a privacy policy disgusts me because I expect them to be full of lies or at least boring details that could be summed up in a couple sentences.
Therefore, the best way of dealing with it is to not only sum it up in a couple sentences, but to make those sentences questions, such that they have to actually read the damn thing in order to continue. I'm not sure one can trust the company itself to form these questions for the benefit of the consumer (in most cases), but it doesn't take a lot of effort to come up with something far more readable than a privacy policy:
1) Facebook has the right to collect statistics based on your activities, for use by itself or advertisers [X] Yes [ ] No 2) Only people who you intend to find your Facebook page will find it [ ] Yes [X] No 3) The pictures you post to your Facebook page are private and cannot be seen by others [ ] Yes [X] No
etc.
I'm not sure this is exactly a good idea, but I think that in some ways it's a heck of a lot better than the alternative.
Hardware is indeed a thing, but hardware design? How is that different from software? I know : you can use the software, but you have to build the hardware before you can use it.
In principle there is another problem which I didn't think about until you brought it up, which is that certain problems with a design will ONLY be evident when it is built. The actual design of a piece of software is trivial in most cases. The ability to get it running bug-free is NOT.
So who does the debugging with open hardware? The designers, or the producers?
If the designers produce a design that is 100% bug-free then they have provided something VERY valuable to a producer (basically just a money factory). If the producers have to do the debugging then they are in fact producing something valuable to the designers (assuming the design is still open when they get finished with it): refinement and validation.
So frankly if the producer does 99% of the work to get a decent design into a working product, they DESERVE the profits they get off of it; however, if the design is open source and now someone can take their refinements and produce the same product without their permission, then THEY are the ones who just got cheated, since they had to spend capital to do it.
In either case the consumer ends up winning, but you CANNOT expect a production company to act unreasonably, and if their efforts to make a design workable are going to be a monetary gamble that might not work out at all, then they probably won't do it. If a bunch of people in their garages manage to create a bug-free design, which eventually gets produced as a marketable product, that's great--but if you're making money off their backs, they're going to be upset.
I guess it's just a complicated issue and always will be.
This goes back to something I originally wrote for a computer ethics class, but which I believe I commented on slashdot before with, which is the principle of "reasonable expectations" and how they differ between crowds.
A college student (or frankly anyone else) whose social life up till now has been dependent on trusting his friends not to spill details of his private life will not approach something like Facebook with the idea that the medium itself is going to betray them, privacy policy be damned. They don't expect someone they talk to to turn around and stab them in the back with it, unless it's someone that everyone publicly reviles for that sort of thing. Facebook may seem to some here to be publicly reviled, but honestly, we're not the ones those people talk to. They talk to friends who have spent the last couple years posting there and who have never had any concern with it at all. In short, the consumer expects the company to know that their data is precious to them and that it should not be treated with disrespect.
The company itself has a different standard for reasonable expectation; they expect people to know that when you give them marketable information after signing a disclaimer, it's alright for them to sell it. Further, it's alright to index your information in ways that is most useful for the community even though it might expose an individual or two who didn't understand the risks or who didn't care. In short, the company expects the consumers to know that they're still the ones who exposed their data and that they, not the company, are liable if it gets into the wrong hands.
Who's right?
Well, the answer is that the system itself is wrong. If the consumers did in fact completely understand their responsibility and liability in the matter beforehand, then they can be held accountable. However, if the company is putting up a privacy policy in hard-to-read and denser-than-necessary legalese, and in particular if they have come to the understanding that some percentage of their users don't understand because of this but they don't change their ways, then the company is the party which could have changed something to prevent the incident, whereas the users were acting in a way that seemed reasonable. The company being the person who could have prevented the incident, they are ethically responsible; in particular, because this is probably known to happen with some large subset of the population, they are in general responsible and it would take an unusual circumstance for the user to be the one who did something wrong.
Note: IANAL or frankly an ethicist; however, this does NOT take a genius to figure out.
I can understand the GP's point, and yours too, but...
In software, the entire saleable asset is the "blueprint". It's perfectly awesome to say "I didn't work hard enough on this to make money off of it, so here you guys go, have fun with what I tossed off in my spare time."
In hardware, the saleable asset is the actual item. While it takes resources to produce it, the actual production is only a service. If your company turned an open source car design into a product and made off like a bandit on the profits, purely because you could undercut your competition in pricing, then essentially the product that everyone's buying is your ruthlessness in making a cheap car, not the design itself. In other words, this would potentially allow someone with nothing BUT ruthless business sense to become a magnate in, say, car design.
I'm not saying open source hardware isn't an awesome idea in PRINCIPLE, but it does have the potential to reward ENTIRELY the wrong people.
You don't even see it after this direct quote from the CEO? He's effectively saying that privacy is immoral, and private people are shameful.
No, he's making the perfectly valid point that privacy is what has already happened not being known. I do things on the net that I know I probably shouldn't, but as I have yet to have my brains sucked out through a straw, I have yet to forget that someone may find out. That's a little scary sometimes, but as I don't do anything that if my neighbor found out he would call the police, I don't expect the ISP or Google to do anything unreasonable either. In other words, I have no expectation that what I do is private from the people helping me do it, but I expect them to keep it in confidence unless there's something criminal involved. If Google has (ahem) googlebytes of information on me but they keep it in confidence, the worst they can do is some sort of creepy cyber-stalking. The scary thing is when anyone no matter how bereft of scruples can have access to this information, and there's no immediate indication that Google is going to try anything like this.
I pretty much thought the same thing; the only thing I can think is that a cloud-based solution would work the same no matter where you were, where if you depend on your ISP but take your laptop to a coffee shop wireless kiosk, it's not the same service.
To that and only that degree the term might have any application here, AFAIK.
If I understand their previous policy it's pretty much what I would have suggested; whatever tracking you do to a customer, it doesn't affect how you view them unless they sign up for it, and it isn't tied to them. The metrics of what you do are interesting to the people who want ads that you'd care about, or who want to put ads where you'll find them, but that tweaking search results is a bit much for someone who hasn't signed onto the program.
This is without mentioning that the potential for this one-atom setup to have a severely reduced usable lifespan has to be through the roof. How much force can it really take to displace one damned atom? What happens when heat and time stress everything it's connected to?
This started tickling my mind since I started using my laptops as multi-monitor devices. I haven't done as much looking around as I should, but I've come to the conclusion that not a single OS I've seen was designed or redesigned with multiple monitors in mind.
As an exercise and as a pie-in-the-sky dream I've been trying to work out what dedicated multi-monitor support would look like. I can't work on it because I've been depressed and having trouble concentrating lately, but this is a summation:
There is a fundamental unit of screen space which is treated as a single desktop; you can have more than one of them across your desktops, and you switch between them with modifier keys and the mouse. If you have multiple input sources, you can bind them to either follow the mouse, or lock them to a desktop or monitor. Monitors always stay at maximum resolution (Yes, FUCK YOU, time-it-takes-to-reset-monitors) even if a desktop changes resolution or switches to "fullscreen application" status, because the optimization isn't done on the video output, but on each desktop's framebuffer, and those framebuffers are combined into the display after the fact. (I assume modern video cards aren't set up this way, but a guy can dream.) Naturally, because the desktop framebuffers are simply blitted to the main framebuffer, you can reorganize them as you like, as long as you don't change their dimensions.
What this means is that screen real estate is actually paid attention to by the OS rather than the window manager saying "Oh hey look another monitor. *glitch glitch glitch* Okay now you can use it." It also fits in with other ideas I have (modular computing, etc) in ways that would make sense if you heard both sides of it, but I don't intend to get into detail about.
I anticipate people coming up with reasons why this will never be made, but that's not really the point; I just dream of the future. It's entirely doable, it's just not likely to catch on, especially since nobody knows the details but me, and I'm pretty unreliable about these sorts of things.
Google knows UI design better than that. Instead of Clippy, they'd just have a short snippet that says, "According to our profile, the Ford Mondeo is X% likely to be a good car for you. [Click here for details]" and then below that they'd have the normal search results. There would probably also be competitive ad spots in the same area, if your profile matches you better with another car for example, or for dealerships nearby.
Amazon, et al, would LOVE them for that kind of positioning. I have to say, it would very likely hurt small business pretty badly, though, unless their reviews process weights small (or local) businesses appropriately.
Yes, advertisers do this today, but this could bring it to a whole new level, because they'll know which cars their tracked population actually bought and what factors led up to that decision. Then they can extrapolate that out to the larger population for which they have less complete data.
Creeped out yet?
If the advertisers know what factors lead up to my decision, then they wouldn't show me ads unless I was in the market for that or something similar. I can understand the creepiness of that kind of mind reading, but if for example the ad host in question did a deal with you where you said what you were in the market for whenever you wanted something, and they turned off the ads when you were NOT going to buy anything, or at least reduced them to things that fall into your impulse buy range, then I can't see this being a bad thing.
And really, once you get to the point you're talking about, it makes plenty of sense for you to actually have an account with the ad host so that you can have some explicit input anyway.
(Cue a thousand cynical slashdotters telling me how business interests are never going to do anything halfway worthwhile for the consumer like that, even when it IS practical)
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish.
But when the content industry does that to many people, suddenly it's not childish?
You would prefer "Please stop that, children, we need to sell those products to other people so that we can make more money"?
I really don't understand what you think the "mature" response to people undermining your ability to sell your own product are.
The term "piracy" did not arise from a legal document or an official government notice.
[citation needed]
The wikipedia article's example that I mentioned before clearly stated that by order of a Royal Charter infringement would be treated as piracy. I fail to see how this isn't considered a legal document.
Just because something is a tactical maneuver, does not mean that it is not childish. A child may call another names in order to elevate their own social status. They may not be able to articulate their reasons for doing so, but merely because they are obeying evolutionary instinct rather than rational thought, does not mean that their actions are not tactical.
I'm just going to politely disagree with you on this. My reason stems from my personal definition of "ethical behavior;" in that definition, if you are not being ethical because you tried to be, but rather because "things turned out alright" then your behavior was not ethical even if it is repeatable. To bring that into this conversation, children may MIMIC tactical behavior, but they are not thinking tactically.
I think you're underestimating children, and overestimating the content industry:)
I'm certainly not the former and I think I've equivocated enough, and deliberately, to be able to fairly say I'm not the latter either.
Piracy might have once been a good phrase to use, evoking emotion and fear. But since then the content industries have gone through several cycles of rebirth, and the word "pirate" could now be taken to mean "the people who will succeed us". This perhaps isn't the message the current content industry would like to put out.
You may recall actually that a lot of industry, content or otherwise, is actually based off of stealing from other countries, and otherwise sneaking around the precepts of copyright enforcement--by being outside its jurisdiction. The American textiles industry for example, I believe was originally founded off of memorized plans leaked from Britain.
This doesn't actually help my argument--they have been two-faced scumbags for a while, is all I'm saying--but it's relevant.
In any event I'm tired of this conversation, so I probably won't reply again. I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but frankly, most of your arguments are more emotionally charged and abusive than well reasoned, even when the reason that you did have would have made a decent argument. Thanks for the conversation anyway.
Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603.
In other words, a pirate was someone who 1)violated the law, 2)did so in spite of someone being there to protect business interests, and 3)having violated the law produced goods that reduced the market for a legitimate (if monopolized) company. I fail to see any evidence that this was chosen to be childish name-calling at all.
Further,
It's just a form of name-calling, and therefore childish and idiotic.
I disagree. Labeling an action in an attempt to convince others IS childish, when you are doing it one-on-one rather than engaging the other person in meaningful debate; however, when you refer to a global scale, it no longer is reasonable to assume that people can convince others on a one-on-one basis to follow the guidelines that you are told to enforce.
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish. Putting out an official notice that those who violate the law will be viewed in the eyes of the law as not only criminals, but serious criminals, isn't childish. In particular, when the term is used so that other people will be more likely to report the activity, then it is a tactical maneuver, even if it is a sleazy one.
To call something "childish" means that you could expect, say, a 10-year-old to have the same train of thought. I can't imagine a child, on his own accord, thinking of official edicts, or people enforcing charters, or choosing a term that's just related enough to be plausible and invective enough to stir people's emotions, or even setting policies in general. They would more likely stand on a step and throw a temper tantrum. And while people probably did that in those days, and still do today, I can't imagine that they're the ones behind any of the actually threatening things, because they're far less likely to be taken seriously.
This is without addressing the "suicide bars" argument which frankly is more of a slippery slope fallacy than actual logic.
The reason I still dislike this word is not so much that its original meaning has been twisted (that happens to words all the time), but because its indicative of distasteful tactics that are employed as much today as they were four centuries ago. It's name-calling by companies too stupid to adapt to marketplace changes.
If you had actually made that argument in the first place I would have agreed with you. Irrespective, I argued as I did to bring up something that people may not have thought of which might frame the entire conversation in a different light. Knowing this, while you have a point, you have not shown any reason why my argument is incorrect.
People choose their words--for better or worse--and more importantly spread them amongst themselves because of everything else they know about the subject. The use of "Pirate" in this context probably would not have caught on if people didn't agree that it had merit. For instance, if pirates had always and forever been known for simply sinking the ships and taking nothing for themselves, it wouldn't apply here; if they had all returned the goods to a neutral party, say the church, who profited off of all of it, it would again have a different meaning, and they wouldn't use it here.
The fact that the word actually DOES have merit doesn't harm anyone's case but continues to be brought up as an oddity--or that's what I assumed, and was addressing.
So your argument is that if you can find something in common between two words, even if in every other respect they are completely different, it is acceptable to substitute one word for the other.
The argument goes like this.
SIDE A: There is no merit to this word choice at all! ME: No, I'm pretty sure that several important parts of the term apply. They may not be what you're meaning when you say "pirate", but they're valid points and may explain why the word is used. YOU: But this word is clearly used to mean {subset of the original meaning} ME:... Yeah. However, that being PART of it doesn't mean that there is NOT another part that means what I suggested. Unless you can explain why that invalidates my argument, I don't have anything in particular to reply to you about.
Or if you prefer, to restate my ORIGINAL argument, both copying the product and stealing large quantities of it undercut the market FOR your product, in a way that individual theft does not. The bloody nature of piracy was actually only actually apropos to a fairly small subset of the population--ever. A ship at sea may have had what, twenty to a hundred sailors? If a hundred ships fell to piracy in a year, that's at most ten thousand men lost at sea, and it didn't happen that fast, I'd wager. The only other actual losses of life would be from starvation, etc, or from raids on small coastal settlements.
Barbaric? Yes, but compare it to war, or the Black Death, or whatever. You could argue that they are responsible for more deaths per capita than most--I wouldn't argue that. But that comes from their disregard for consequences and cavalier attitude towards lawbreaking--which modern pirates also have.
I think I'm drifting off my point here but whatever.
It's idiotic because the use of violence to rob ships at sea, is rather different act than copying data without the author's permission.
And yet in both cases, your company's products--whether the actual article or identical duplicates--are appearing in unregulated markets in large quantities.
It would be an idiotic analogy if there was no merit to it. I think I've made a decent case that there's merit to it. If you can actually counter that argument, please do. If instead you're going to repeat things I 1)obviously knew and 2)took into consideration when crafting my argument, just keep it to yourself, hm?
Slashdot Mirror
Look at what this madness did to TechTV.
It got them successfully on television for several years, where they had a lot of good programming and many fans, until they were later bought out by G4.
The fact that G4 never had any intention of following through on TechTV's devotion to quality is a completely separate matter.
Humans live a heck of a lot longer than most other mammals, learn, communicate, teach others, consume resources produced by society, etc; plus, if just possibly your actions end up hurting them emotionally, they'll almost certainly be shamed, coerced, and otherwise meant to believe that they themselves are wrong.
There will always be people that can get through something like that perfectly healthily in mind and body. However, for whatever reason, this is one of those things where society pretty well agrees they don't want to take the risk that the girl (or boy) won't. Children are held sacred in that way.
I have to say I tend to agree. Now, the question to ask is this:
Which system, capitalism or socialism, is more likely to find that convergence? Or, in particular, what path is necessary to get from their existing system to there?
Capitalism getting that kind of alteration requires, as we have seen, some amount of government-sponsored socialism. Some people still grumble about this today. Socialism getting a little bit more capitalistic? I can't even hazard a guess.
It's an interesting thing to think about I suppose.
"Capable of getting around your restrictions" is not the same thing as "free". Even if you are capable of doing it, they resist.
I like to say that there is only one guaranteed freedom -- the freedom to try. You can freely try to murder people, but you may well be caught, jailed, possibly executed. You can freely try to get around those restriction. You can also freely try to stop someone else's attempt to do whatever it is they're trying to do.
The need for food worldwide is enormous. When was the last time you saw a billionaire farmer?
One thing capitalism (or at least the versions I'm familiar with) does poorly is equating "necessary labor" with "valuable labor". Hell, TEACHERS don't get paid enough. They're giving in accordance with their ability, and yet, if they needed say a resort vacation because they've been dealing with nasty little shits for years on end and are overstressed, in some places they might have to give up hot meals for a while.
In other words, capitalism would be nice if it was entirely on TOP of everyone getting what they NEED. Since it's not, someone can have entirely valuable and useful contributions which are not market-driven, profitable, etc, and as a result, the system is completely unfair to the people that end up with that work.
Now can we stop arguing about it? I really don't want to start turning communist or whatever simply because it's the logical thing to do. I still have my own greediness I want to sate someday.
That makes no sense. As you say, if they really wanted to, they could do it, so they are free to do it in that regards.
They are not "free" to do it in the sense that we are talking about, because there are laws against it. There's a difference between "can get away with it" and "free to do it".
Actually, I'm fairly sure the police go out of their way (in most cases at least) to make sure you are not free to murder, rather than simply not allowing you to get away with it. If they have a reasonable indication that you are going to try, they will stop you.
This is insanely evident when it comes to terrorism / state security.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
Only if he wasn't getting what was due him as well. You're assuming that the system will only be fair to some and not others, which is kind of exactly opposite the point. Again, may not work in practice, but you don't have to be quite THAT cynical.
If you and your neighbor both work enough to repay your debt to society, and he's equally likely to get what he needs whether you take his specific labor or not, where is the discrepancy? The only thing I can think is if that particular item has sentimental value.
Note IANAC
Really? You consider a discussion about sex to be just as black and white as a discussion about violence?
Yup.
"If someone tries to tell you what to do, or pressure you into doing it, don't do it, and come talk to me. If you aren't sure you understand what might happen, to you or someone else, don't do it until you talk to someone you trust first, hopefully me. If something seems weird about the situation, don't do it, and come talk to me. I'm not going to yell at you, but I'm going to do what I can to make sure nothing bad happens, alright?"
The astute may notice that this advice could easily apply to situations that might lead to becoming a bully, a criminal, or a drug addict, as easily as the the ones that might lead to sexual experimentation or exploitation.
Odd. So would you tell your 8 year old daughter that sex is fine, have fun? Or would you tell her sex is bad, don't do it? To me either position is bad for a child. The first is likely to get you a child who ends up getting gangbanged on girls gone wild because they see sex as nothing, the latter ends up with a child unable to enjoy sex because they've been conditioned to think of it as nasty or wrong.
You could as easily make the argument that the same sort of rules will produce either a bully or a handshy, squeamish little shut-in, depending on their exposure to violence. Not acknowledging that is somewhat of a double standard which is exactly what the GP was saying.
Oh, and your child doesn't feel empathy? They don't understand the consequences of hurting others? Really? Both of my daughters and my son began to show signs of empathy before they could speak. They understood that hurting others was bad long before they knew there were differences between girls and boys.
And yet you don't have the same degree of faith in their ability to deal reasonably with their genitals. Or do you really believe in the urban legend that men become drooling blockheads, and women become flighty ditzes, at the merest existence of the other sex in a ten mile radius?
I have, but you don't see the privacy settings page when you sign up. The point of the privacy policy is to know what you're getting into BEFORE you put your data on the internet.
I'll grant you that much (albeit by default as I haven't looked at Facebook's privacy policy), however...
I said "the system is broken" for good reason. The existence of a privacy policy or how good it is doesn't matter all that much. For a lot of people, myself included, the "have you read the privacy policy" question is read as "Do you trust us with your data?" I do, because I don't, to my knowledge, post anything that I shouldn't. Therefore, whenever that question comes up for any site, the only thing that passes through my head before I check off the consent box is, "Should I trust them?" Because I don't read it, there are probably issues I'm ignorant of. I'm aware of this, but the very idea of reading a privacy policy disgusts me because I expect them to be full of lies or at least boring details that could be summed up in a couple sentences.
Therefore, the best way of dealing with it is to not only sum it up in a couple sentences, but to make those sentences questions, such that they have to actually read the damn thing in order to continue. I'm not sure one can trust the company itself to form these questions for the benefit of the consumer (in most cases), but it doesn't take a lot of effort to come up with something far more readable than a privacy policy:
1) Facebook has the right to collect statistics based on your activities, for use by itself or advertisers [X] Yes [ ] No
2) Only people who you intend to find your Facebook page will find it [ ] Yes [X] No
3) The pictures you post to your Facebook page are private and cannot be seen by others [ ] Yes [X] No
etc.
I'm not sure this is exactly a good idea, but I think that in some ways it's a heck of a lot better than the alternative.
Hardware is indeed a thing, but hardware design? How is that different from software?
I know : you can use the software, but you have to build the hardware before you can use it.
In principle there is another problem which I didn't think about until you brought it up, which is that certain problems with a design will ONLY be evident when it is built. The actual design of a piece of software is trivial in most cases. The ability to get it running bug-free is NOT.
So who does the debugging with open hardware? The designers, or the producers?
If the designers produce a design that is 100% bug-free then they have provided something VERY valuable to a producer (basically just a money factory). If the producers have to do the debugging then they are in fact producing something valuable to the designers (assuming the design is still open when they get finished with it): refinement and validation.
So frankly if the producer does 99% of the work to get a decent design into a working product, they DESERVE the profits they get off of it; however, if the design is open source and now someone can take their refinements and produce the same product without their permission, then THEY are the ones who just got cheated, since they had to spend capital to do it.
In either case the consumer ends up winning, but you CANNOT expect a production company to act unreasonably, and if their efforts to make a design workable are going to be a monetary gamble that might not work out at all, then they probably won't do it. If a bunch of people in their garages manage to create a bug-free design, which eventually gets produced as a marketable product, that's great--but if you're making money off their backs, they're going to be upset.
I guess it's just a complicated issue and always will be.
This goes back to something I originally wrote for a computer ethics class, but which I believe I commented on slashdot before with, which is the principle of "reasonable expectations" and how they differ between crowds.
A college student (or frankly anyone else) whose social life up till now has been dependent on trusting his friends not to spill details of his private life will not approach something like Facebook with the idea that the medium itself is going to betray them, privacy policy be damned. They don't expect someone they talk to to turn around and stab them in the back with it, unless it's someone that everyone publicly reviles for that sort of thing. Facebook may seem to some here to be publicly reviled, but honestly, we're not the ones those people talk to. They talk to friends who have spent the last couple years posting there and who have never had any concern with it at all. In short, the consumer expects the company to know that their data is precious to them and that it should not be treated with disrespect.
The company itself has a different standard for reasonable expectation; they expect people to know that when you give them marketable information after signing a disclaimer, it's alright for them to sell it. Further, it's alright to index your information in ways that is most useful for the community even though it might expose an individual or two who didn't understand the risks or who didn't care. In short, the company expects the consumers to know that they're still the ones who exposed their data and that they, not the company, are liable if it gets into the wrong hands.
Who's right?
Well, the answer is that the system itself is wrong. If the consumers did in fact completely understand their responsibility and liability in the matter beforehand, then they can be held accountable. However, if the company is putting up a privacy policy in hard-to-read and denser-than-necessary legalese, and in particular if they have come to the understanding that some percentage of their users don't understand because of this but they don't change their ways, then the company is the party which could have changed something to prevent the incident, whereas the users were acting in a way that seemed reasonable. The company being the person who could have prevented the incident, they are ethically responsible; in particular, because this is probably known to happen with some large subset of the population, they are in general responsible and it would take an unusual circumstance for the user to be the one who did something wrong.
Note: IANAL or frankly an ethicist; however, this does NOT take a genius to figure out.
I can understand the GP's point, and yours too, but...
In software, the entire saleable asset is the "blueprint". It's perfectly awesome to say "I didn't work hard enough on this to make money off of it, so here you guys go, have fun with what I tossed off in my spare time."
In hardware, the saleable asset is the actual item. While it takes resources to produce it, the actual production is only a service. If your company turned an open source car design into a product and made off like a bandit on the profits, purely because you could undercut your competition in pricing, then essentially the product that everyone's buying is your ruthlessness in making a cheap car, not the design itself. In other words, this would potentially allow someone with nothing BUT ruthless business sense to become a magnate in, say, car design.
I'm not saying open source hardware isn't an awesome idea in PRINCIPLE, but it does have the potential to reward ENTIRELY the wrong people.
You don't even see it after this direct quote from the CEO? He's effectively saying that privacy is immoral, and private people are shameful.
No, he's making the perfectly valid point that privacy is what has already happened not being known. I do things on the net that I know I probably shouldn't, but as I have yet to have my brains sucked out through a straw, I have yet to forget that someone may find out. That's a little scary sometimes, but as I don't do anything that if my neighbor found out he would call the police, I don't expect the ISP or Google to do anything unreasonable either. In other words, I have no expectation that what I do is private from the people helping me do it, but I expect them to keep it in confidence unless there's something criminal involved. If Google has (ahem) googlebytes of information on me but they keep it in confidence, the worst they can do is some sort of creepy cyber-stalking. The scary thing is when anyone no matter how bereft of scruples can have access to this information, and there's no immediate indication that Google is going to try anything like this.
I pretty much thought the same thing; the only thing I can think is that a cloud-based solution would work the same no matter where you were, where if you depend on your ISP but take your laptop to a coffee shop wireless kiosk, it's not the same service.
To that and only that degree the term might have any application here, AFAIK.
If I understand their previous policy it's pretty much what I would have suggested; whatever tracking you do to a customer, it doesn't affect how you view them unless they sign up for it, and it isn't tied to them. The metrics of what you do are interesting to the people who want ads that you'd care about, or who want to put ads where you'll find them, but that tweaking search results is a bit much for someone who hasn't signed onto the program.
This is without mentioning that the potential for this one-atom setup to have a severely reduced usable lifespan has to be through the roof. How much force can it really take to displace one damned atom? What happens when heat and time stress everything it's connected to?
This started tickling my mind since I started using my laptops as multi-monitor devices. I haven't done as much looking around as I should, but I've come to the conclusion that not a single OS I've seen was designed or redesigned with multiple monitors in mind.
As an exercise and as a pie-in-the-sky dream I've been trying to work out what dedicated multi-monitor support would look like. I can't work on it because I've been depressed and having trouble concentrating lately, but this is a summation:
There is a fundamental unit of screen space which is treated as a single desktop; you can have more than one of them across your desktops, and you switch between them with modifier keys and the mouse. If you have multiple input sources, you can bind them to either follow the mouse, or lock them to a desktop or monitor. Monitors always stay at maximum resolution (Yes, FUCK YOU, time-it-takes-to-reset-monitors) even if a desktop changes resolution or switches to "fullscreen application" status, because the optimization isn't done on the video output, but on each desktop's framebuffer, and those framebuffers are combined into the display after the fact. (I assume modern video cards aren't set up this way, but a guy can dream.) Naturally, because the desktop framebuffers are simply blitted to the main framebuffer, you can reorganize them as you like, as long as you don't change their dimensions.
What this means is that screen real estate is actually paid attention to by the OS rather than the window manager saying "Oh hey look another monitor. *glitch glitch glitch* Okay now you can use it." It also fits in with other ideas I have (modular computing, etc) in ways that would make sense if you heard both sides of it, but I don't intend to get into detail about.
I anticipate people coming up with reasons why this will never be made, but that's not really the point; I just dream of the future. It's entirely doable, it's just not likely to catch on, especially since nobody knows the details but me, and I'm pretty unreliable about these sorts of things.
Google knows UI design better than that. Instead of Clippy, they'd just have a short snippet that says, "According to our profile, the Ford Mondeo is X% likely to be a good car for you. [Click here for details]" and then below that they'd have the normal search results. There would probably also be competitive ad spots in the same area, if your profile matches you better with another car for example, or for dealerships nearby.
Amazon, et al, would LOVE them for that kind of positioning. I have to say, it would very likely hurt small business pretty badly, though, unless their reviews process weights small (or local) businesses appropriately.
Yes, advertisers do this today, but this could bring it to a whole new level, because they'll know which cars their tracked population actually bought and what factors led up to that decision. Then they can extrapolate that out to the larger population for which they have less complete data.
Creeped out yet?
If the advertisers know what factors lead up to my decision, then they wouldn't show me ads unless I was in the market for that or something similar. I can understand the creepiness of that kind of mind reading, but if for example the ad host in question did a deal with you where you said what you were in the market for whenever you wanted something, and they turned off the ads when you were NOT going to buy anything, or at least reduced them to things that fall into your impulse buy range, then I can't see this being a bad thing.
And really, once you get to the point you're talking about, it makes plenty of sense for you to actually have an account with the ad host so that you can have some explicit input anyway.
(Cue a thousand cynical slashdotters telling me how business interests are never going to do anything halfway worthwhile for the consumer like that, even when it IS practical)
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish.
But when the content industry does that to many people, suddenly it's not childish?
You would prefer "Please stop that, children, we need to sell those products to other people so that we can make more money"?
I really don't understand what you think the "mature" response to people undermining your ability to sell your own product are.
The term "piracy" did not arise from a legal document or an official government notice.
[citation needed]
The wikipedia article's example that I mentioned before clearly stated that by order of a Royal Charter infringement would be treated as piracy. I fail to see how this isn't considered a legal document.
Just because something is a tactical maneuver, does not mean that it is not childish. A child may call another names in order to elevate their own social status. They may not be able to articulate their reasons for doing so, but merely because they are obeying evolutionary instinct rather than rational thought, does not mean that their actions are not tactical.
I'm just going to politely disagree with you on this. My reason stems from my personal definition of "ethical behavior;" in that definition, if you are not being ethical because you tried to be, but rather because "things turned out alright" then your behavior was not ethical even if it is repeatable. To bring that into this conversation, children may MIMIC tactical behavior, but they are not thinking tactically.
I think you're underestimating children, and overestimating the content industry :)
I'm certainly not the former and I think I've equivocated enough, and deliberately, to be able to fairly say I'm not the latter either.
Piracy might have once been a good phrase to use, evoking emotion and fear. But since then the content industries have gone through several cycles of rebirth, and the word "pirate" could now be taken to mean "the people who will succeed us". This perhaps isn't the message the current content industry would like to put out.
You may recall actually that a lot of industry, content or otherwise, is actually based off of stealing from other countries, and otherwise sneaking around the precepts of copyright enforcement--by being outside its jurisdiction. The American textiles industry for example, I believe was originally founded off of memorized plans leaked from Britain.
This doesn't actually help my argument--they have been two-faced scumbags for a while, is all I'm saying--but it's relevant.
In any event I'm tired of this conversation, so I probably won't reply again. I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but frankly, most of your arguments are more emotionally charged and abusive than well reasoned, even when the reason that you did have would have made a decent argument. Thanks for the conversation anyway.
From the article:
Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603.
In other words, a pirate was someone who 1)violated the law, 2)did so in spite of someone being there to protect business interests, and 3)having violated the law produced goods that reduced the market for a legitimate (if monopolized) company. I fail to see any evidence that this was chosen to be childish name-calling at all.
Further,
It's just a form of name-calling, and therefore childish and idiotic.
I disagree. Labeling an action in an attempt to convince others IS childish, when you are doing it one-on-one rather than engaging the other person in meaningful debate; however, when you refer to a global scale, it no longer is reasonable to assume that people can convince others on a one-on-one basis to follow the guidelines that you are told to enforce.
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish. Putting out an official notice that those who violate the law will be viewed in the eyes of the law as not only criminals, but serious criminals, isn't childish. In particular, when the term is used so that other people will be more likely to report the activity, then it is a tactical maneuver, even if it is a sleazy one.
To call something "childish" means that you could expect, say, a 10-year-old to have the same train of thought. I can't imagine a child, on his own accord, thinking of official edicts, or people enforcing charters, or choosing a term that's just related enough to be plausible and invective enough to stir people's emotions, or even setting policies in general. They would more likely stand on a step and throw a temper tantrum. And while people probably did that in those days, and still do today, I can't imagine that they're the ones behind any of the actually threatening things, because they're far less likely to be taken seriously.
This is without addressing the "suicide bars" argument which frankly is more of a slippery slope fallacy than actual logic.
Two things--
[citation needed]
and
The reason I still dislike this word is not so much that its original meaning has been twisted (that happens to words all the time), but because its indicative of distasteful tactics that are employed as much today as they were four centuries ago. It's name-calling by companies too stupid to adapt to marketplace changes.
If you had actually made that argument in the first place I would have agreed with you. Irrespective, I argued as I did to bring up something that people may not have thought of which might frame the entire conversation in a different light. Knowing this, while you have a point, you have not shown any reason why my argument is incorrect.
People choose their words--for better or worse--and more importantly spread them amongst themselves because of everything else they know about the subject. The use of "Pirate" in this context probably would not have caught on if people didn't agree that it had merit. For instance, if pirates had always and forever been known for simply sinking the ships and taking nothing for themselves, it wouldn't apply here; if they had all returned the goods to a neutral party, say the church, who profited off of all of it, it would again have a different meaning, and they wouldn't use it here.
The fact that the word actually DOES have merit doesn't harm anyone's case but continues to be brought up as an oddity--or that's what I assumed, and was addressing.
Do you really not get how languages work?
So your argument is that if you can find something in common between two words, even if in every other respect they are completely different, it is acceptable to substitute one word for the other.
The argument goes like this.
SIDE A: There is no merit to this word choice at all! ... Yeah. However, that being PART of it doesn't mean that there is NOT another part that means what I suggested. Unless you can explain why that invalidates my argument, I don't have anything in particular to reply to you about.
ME: No, I'm pretty sure that several important parts of the term apply. They may not be what you're meaning when you say "pirate", but they're valid points and may explain why the word is used.
YOU: But this word is clearly used to mean {subset of the original meaning}
ME:
Or if you prefer, to restate my ORIGINAL argument, both copying the product and stealing large quantities of it undercut the market FOR your product, in a way that individual theft does not. The bloody nature of piracy was actually only actually apropos to a fairly small subset of the population--ever. A ship at sea may have had what, twenty to a hundred sailors? If a hundred ships fell to piracy in a year, that's at most ten thousand men lost at sea, and it didn't happen that fast, I'd wager. The only other actual losses of life would be from starvation, etc, or from raids on small coastal settlements.
Barbaric? Yes, but compare it to war, or the Black Death, or whatever. You could argue that they are responsible for more deaths per capita than most--I wouldn't argue that. But that comes from their disregard for consequences and cavalier attitude towards lawbreaking--which modern pirates also have.
I think I'm drifting off my point here but whatever.
Whoooosh.
It's idiotic because the use of violence to rob ships at sea, is rather different act than copying data without the author's permission.
And yet in both cases, your company's products--whether the actual article or identical duplicates--are appearing in unregulated markets in large quantities.
It would be an idiotic analogy if there was no merit to it. I think I've made a decent case that there's merit to it. If you can actually counter that argument, please do. If instead you're going to repeat things I 1)obviously knew and 2)took into consideration when crafting my argument, just keep it to yourself, hm?