Wasnt the whole point that people wanted an unregulated currency with no government involvement?
Bitcoin has many points (see bitcoin.org) and this was never one of them. One of the many purposes of bitcoin is to have currency without central authority which could cause monetary inflation at will, but that in no way means that bitcoin should stay completely outside of any government influence and bitcoins thefts should be ignored by law enforcement.
Why is LGBT where the limit should be and no further? Again, it's not my thing, but I honestly don't care if people want to be in a polygamous marriage. If that makes them happy, great. But I don't want to hear about how I have to support it or something's wrong with me.
Everything which is not socialy dangerous behaviour should be legal including polygamy, safe incest with anticonception, necrofilia, non-violent zoophilia etc. It's not LGBT members who are usualy trying to ban this behavious citing religious/ethical concerns, it's conservatives like Card. Nobody wants you to suppor those things. Just don't try to make them into felony and ban them like Card is doing.
So you're saying that countries should have no control over their own borders, and who is allowed into the country?
I would appreciate if countries would place people at least on the same level as goods, ie if goods are allowed to freely cross the border, people should be allowed the same. Otherwise free market can hardly work and it's just exported slavery in my opinion.
Your vote is spoiler if you don't vote for the party you vant to win the most. People who made voting compromises are the reasons USA have the shitty two party system it has.
Oh, I totally agree... With the slight difference that I actually think that the Lightning connector is actually better design. It's small and orientation less and rather robust. Micro-USB, while ubiquitous, is rather fragile and has orientation. It'd rather see all phone manufacturers switch to the Lightning connector instead.
I wouldn't call ten-times more expensive cable better design.
Or in other words, i bet that if you'd be willing to pay 10x the price of lightning cable to the USB designers they would be able to come with even better product then the lightning cable.
Standardizing DRM in HTML5 is not caving to anyone
By "standardizing" DRM you make it easier and cheaper for content owners to use it so the amount of DRM protected work will increase.
Also note that the quotes around "standardizing" are intentional, because it's not realy standartization of DRM. The DRM modules will be still proprietary closed source binary blobs supported just for few selected architecture/operating system/browser combinations. Just the API between browser and the DRM module will be standardised. In my opinion this promotes creation of walled gardens accesible just to subset of internet users and goes directly against the original purpose of the web - to be open and platform-independend library of data.
Real names (at least tied to facebook) would greatly increase their initial efforts AND would feasibly provide their victims with more intel on how to track them down and publicly shame them.
Are you aware that you can register as many fake facebook accounts as you like? You just need e-mail address and fake name.
Also, i'd be very careful with the tracking and publicly shaming of some internet troll. He can easily pretend to be someone else end you end up tracking and shaming innocent person.
the value of an education does not reside solely in earnings potential
Maybe for the independently wealthy, that's true. For most people, we borrow money to go to that fancy university and then we've got to pay it back plus interest. Spending years in hock to attend a school that has limited potential to aid me in getting a job to pay off that nut is not particularly useful regardless of how much I might enjoy that semester studying the works of Euripides.
That's why socialised education is good thing. When choosing college or university, student should be free to choose what he thinks is best for him, for his personal development and growth, not what is best for current situation on job market. Otherwise, we are turning universities into simple trade schools. I firmly believe that if we want our higher school system to produce great people we need to let it be (at least partialy) independent from constant economic (and political) pressures. Government should cover the cost of 5 years long program for anyone interested (and smart enough to get through entry exams) from taxes. It should also make sure that the universities meets some quality standards. But otherwise, it should not meddle with them. Accademic freedom and independence is IMO worth it for the society as whole.
Note that socialised higher education is working well in some post-communistic european countries (i'm member of one of them) or in scandinavian countries like Sweden or Norway. Aside from advantages i listed above, "free" higher education has IMO positive effect on social mobility and makes the society more egalitarian (with tuition as high as in USA, how many people are prevented from attending school just because of their poor financial situation?) Unfortunately, in recent years there is a push from right-wing part of our political representation to introduce mandatory tuiton, student loans and in other ways comercialise higher education. I hope we'll resist this change as it is IMO more and more clear that it is not a fair or good way to provide education.
I think that people who voted for republicans or democrats in last elections have no right to complain about current state of affairs. They voted for people who are responsible for it.
There's plenty of people dreaming, my 6 old daughter thinks there should be an emergency slide to get from a space station back to earth. Where's her article?
Did she write 100 pages technical PDF about it? Publish a link and i bet it will make it to the slashdot frontpage.
Also, since when is Australia, US, Canada, UK and Netherlands considered 'global'? There are cca 200 countries in the world, this is just five of them. When they meassured the piracy rate of this new breaking bad release, did they only counted pirates from those five countries?
So whats your answer? Why do you beleave you have a right to anything others make using their own resources. I draw but im not uploading any of my drawing because i dont want them shared or stolen. What your saying is that I dont have the right to claim what i do as my own. Why?
I don't believe i have right to anything you created using your resources. I believe i have right to copy anything i discover without breaking a law using my resources.
The solution is simple - artists/creators should sell their work for real price (i.e. the money they spent creating the work + reasonable profit) instead of selling licences to copies of their work and then demanding from everyone not to create aditional copies or derivative works. Crowdfunding is the way, the resulting work can then be placed into public domain immediately.
- Government should introduce regulatios which would bring enough tax money for those crowdfunded creative projects. Taxes would rise slightly but you will not have to spent money on books/movies/games etc. directly so on average, there should be no additional expenses for tax-payers.
The result would be IMO ideal - intelectual property would be paid for and shared collectively because that is its nature. Copyright is trying to twist digital bits into tangible property but it doesn't work very well. There is great disproportion between how many people are needed to fund creation of some creative work and how many people can then benefit from such work. Copyright is trying to limit use of creative works only to people who directly contributed money to them, which is very inefficient (and i'm not even mentioning threats to our privacy and liberty asociated with efforts to enforce copyright)
Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living).
Copyright is evil in principle. Without copyright, all of human public knowledge and culture would be available to anyone on the planet with connection to the internet. Without copyright, managing, sorting, backing up and distributing our intelectual property would be much easier. Everyone could do it for example in distributed/peer-to-peer way. Without copyright, creation of translations and other related works would be much easier. Without copyright, artists and other creators would not need to be in conflict with their own interests. On one hand, they want their creation to be spread to as many people as possible. On the other hand, they artificaly restrict sharing of their works because of copyright. I can go on but i hope i made my point that copyright is very harmfull in digital world.
That doesn't mean that authors and artists don't need to earn living. Supporting creation of intelectual property doesn't need to be tied to distribution restrictions! We need to introduce different government regulation which would ensure enough money for creators, which would ensure fair distribution of such money between them and which would not introduce artificial restrictions in distribution of content. Such schemes are surely possible with current technologies, unfortunately there is no will to introduce them. I guess it will take more time for the copyright to crumble under its own weight and ineffectiveness.
By the time I had any need of a hardware h264 decoder in Linux, the drivers were readily available and used by all of the relevant software.
Hardware accelerated video is still huge problem on linux if you don't own one of the few supported brands of graphic cards (nvidia vdpau with proprietary drivers and intel HD graphics vaapi open source drivers). Recently i wanted to purchase odroid-u2 ARM computer with Mali-400 graphics accelerator but the driver support is not there and unfortunately it's not exception.
No, it means investing in them is slightly dumber than we all knew it was yesterday.
No, it means investing in bitcoin-denominated ponzi schemes is dumb, running ponzi schemes is illegal and keeping their saving in bitcoins would be good idea for people scammed by pirate40.
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
Reminds me of evolution deniers. Those people are apparently ignoring the fact that there is ovehelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warning. From Wikipedia:
National and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed current scientific opinion on climate change. These assessments are generally consistent with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarized below:
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as evidenced by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.[5]
- Most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human activities.[6]
- "Benefits and costs of climate change for [human] society will vary widely by location and scale.[7] Some of the effects in temperate and polar regions will be positive and others elsewhere will be negative.[7] Overall, net effects are more likely to be strongly negative with larger or more rapid warming."[7]
- "[...] the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time"[8]
- "The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global change drivers (e.g. land-use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources)"[9]
No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,[10] which in 2007[11] updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.[12] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions.
I don't know why so many techies are ignoring scientific opinion on climate change. My guess is they have political reasons: - most techies i know are individualists advocating right wing political ideologies (libertarians, minimal or no government etc.). Global warming is inconvinient to their views because it can be solved only with strong and coordinated world-wide effort. Free market can't handle it. - global warming is tied with environmental activism. Unfortunately enviromentalists are also often advocating against nuclear power and some other tehcnologies techies like. As a result, techies view scepticaly everything that enviromentalists say including global warming.
There are certainly few legit uses of 0-day exploits. Anti-virus creators to name one.
....when do we start treating these folks like arms dealers? It's not a stretch, ITAR classified cryptography as munitions....
Maybe part of the responsibility for current situation lies on the corporations and government agencies which often treat white-hat hackers, who try to inform them about their vulnerabilities, like criminals and throw legal actions on them. It's no wonder that some of the hackers turn their exploits to black market for money.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasnt the whole point that people wanted an unregulated currency with no government involvement?
Bitcoin has many points (see bitcoin.org) and this was never one of them. One of the many purposes of bitcoin is to have currency without central authority which could cause monetary inflation at will, but that in no way means that bitcoin should stay completely outside of any government influence and bitcoins thefts should be ignored by law enforcement.
Silly, but it is their right... They own the copyright and that's that.
It's silly so the law shoud be changed. Nobody shoud have right to restrict sharing of public knowledge/culture/ideas.
Why is LGBT where the limit should be and no further? Again, it's not my thing, but I honestly don't care if people want to be in a polygamous marriage. If that makes them happy, great. But I don't want to hear about how I have to support it or something's wrong with me.
Everything which is not socialy dangerous behaviour should be legal including polygamy, safe incest with anticonception, necrofilia, non-violent zoophilia etc. It's not LGBT members who are usualy trying to ban this behavious citing religious/ethical concerns, it's conservatives like Card.
Nobody wants you to suppor those things. Just don't try to make them into felony and ban them like Card is doing.
So you're saying that countries should have no control over their own borders, and who is allowed into the country?
I would appreciate if countries would place people at least on the same level as goods, ie if goods are allowed to freely cross the border, people should be allowed the same. Otherwise free market can hardly work and it's just exported slavery in my opinion.
But, one big problem I see with this, is likely that you will be giving your fucking phone number to every website you want to log onto using this.
Why would you do this? SQRL doesn't require you to give your phone number to anyone.
Your vote is spoiler if you don't vote for the party you vant to win the most. People who made voting compromises are the reasons USA have the shitty two party system it has.
Let's mandate an inferior standard and kill a superior standard so everyone can be the same on paper.
Lightning connector is not superior to microUSB connector because of the price of the coresponding cables.
Oh, I totally agree... With the slight difference that I actually think that the Lightning connector is actually better design. It's small and orientation less and rather robust. Micro-USB, while ubiquitous, is rather fragile and has orientation. It'd rather see all phone manufacturers switch to the Lightning connector instead.
I wouldn't call ten-times more expensive cable better design.
Or in other words, i bet that if you'd be willing to pay 10x the price of lightning cable to the USB designers they would be able to come with even better product then the lightning cable.
You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did.
Fair enough, i can agree with this. But the copies of the content other people produce are different story.
Standardizing DRM in HTML5 is not caving to anyone
By "standardizing" DRM you make it easier and cheaper for content owners to use it so the amount of DRM protected work will increase.
Also note that the quotes around "standardizing" are intentional, because it's not realy standartization of DRM. The DRM modules will be still proprietary closed source binary blobs supported just for few selected architecture/operating system/browser combinations. Just the API between browser and the DRM module will be standardised. In my opinion this promotes creation of walled gardens accesible just to subset of internet users and goes directly against the original purpose of the web - to be open and platform-independend library of data.
Real names (at least tied to facebook) would greatly increase their initial efforts AND would feasibly provide their victims with more intel on how to track them down and publicly shame them.
Are you aware that you can register as many fake facebook accounts as you like? You just need e-mail address and fake name.
Also, i'd be very careful with the tracking and publicly shaming of some internet troll. He can easily pretend to be someone else end you end up tracking and shaming innocent person.
the value of an education does not reside solely in earnings potential
Maybe for the independently wealthy, that's true. For most people, we borrow money to go to that fancy university and then we've got to pay it back plus interest. Spending years in hock to attend a school that has limited potential to aid me in getting a job to pay off that nut is not particularly useful regardless of how much I might enjoy that semester studying the works of Euripides.
That's why socialised education is good thing. When choosing college or university, student should be free to choose what he thinks is best for him, for his personal development and growth, not what is best for current situation on job market. Otherwise, we are turning universities into simple trade schools.
I firmly believe that if we want our higher school system to produce great people we need to let it be (at least partialy) independent from constant economic (and political) pressures. Government should cover the cost of 5 years long program for anyone interested (and smart enough to get through entry exams) from taxes. It should also make sure that the universities meets some quality standards. But otherwise, it should not meddle with them. Accademic freedom and independence is IMO worth it for the society as whole.
Note that socialised higher education is working well in some post-communistic european countries (i'm member of one of them) or in scandinavian countries like Sweden or Norway. Aside from advantages i listed above, "free" higher education has IMO positive effect on social mobility and makes the society more egalitarian (with tuition as high as in USA, how many people are prevented from attending school just because of their poor financial situation?)
Unfortunately, in recent years there is a push from right-wing part of our political representation to introduce mandatory tuiton, student loans and in other ways comercialise higher education. I hope we'll resist this change as it is IMO more and more clear that it is not a fair or good way to provide education.
We have 2 political parties in this country.
I'm not from USA and even i know that this is not true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_States
I think that people who voted for republicans or democrats in last elections have no right to complain about current state of affairs. They voted for people who are responsible for it.
There's plenty of people dreaming, my 6 old daughter thinks there should be an emergency slide to get from a space station back to earth. Where's her article?
Did she write 100 pages technical PDF about it? Publish a link and i bet it will make it to the slashdot frontpage.
Also, since when is Australia, US, Canada, UK and Netherlands considered 'global'? There are cca 200 countries in the world, this is just five of them.
When they meassured the piracy rate of this new breaking bad release, did they only counted pirates from those five countries?
So whats your answer? Why do you beleave you have a right to anything others make using their own resources. I draw but im not uploading any of my drawing because i dont want them shared or stolen. What your saying is that I dont have the right to claim what i do as my own. Why?
I don't believe i have right to anything you created using your resources. I believe i have right to copy anything i discover without breaking a law using my resources.
The solution is simple - artists/creators should sell their work for real price (i.e. the money they spent creating the work + reasonable profit) instead of selling licences to copies of their work and then demanding from everyone not to create aditional copies or derivative works. Crowdfunding is the way, the resulting work can then be placed into public domain immediately.
- Government should introduce regulatios which would bring enough tax money for those crowdfunded creative projects. Taxes would rise slightly but you will not have to spent money on books/movies/games etc. directly so on average, there should be no additional expenses for tax-payers.
The result would be IMO ideal - intelectual property would be paid for and shared collectively because that is its nature. Copyright is trying to twist digital bits into tangible property but it doesn't work very well. There is great disproportion between how many people are needed to fund creation of some creative work and how many people can then benefit from such work. Copyright is trying to limit use of creative works only to people who directly contributed money to them, which is very inefficient (and i'm not even mentioning threats to our privacy and liberty asociated with efforts to enforce copyright)
Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living).
Copyright is evil in principle. Without copyright, all of human public knowledge and culture would be available to anyone on the planet with connection to the internet.
Without copyright, managing, sorting, backing up and distributing our intelectual property would be much easier. Everyone could do it for example in distributed/peer-to-peer way.
Without copyright, creation of translations and other related works would be much easier.
Without copyright, artists and other creators would not need to be in conflict with their own interests. On one hand, they want their creation to be spread to as many people as possible. On the other hand, they artificaly restrict sharing of their works because of copyright.
I can go on but i hope i made my point that copyright is very harmfull in digital world.
That doesn't mean that authors and artists don't need to earn living. Supporting creation of intelectual property doesn't need to be tied to distribution restrictions! We need to introduce different government regulation which would ensure enough money for creators, which would ensure fair distribution of such money between them and which would not introduce artificial restrictions in distribution of content. Such schemes are surely possible with current technologies, unfortunately there is no will to introduce them. I guess it will take more time for the copyright to crumble under its own weight and ineffectiveness.
Sex may be used to purchase goods and services, and more importantly, can be converted to conventional currencies, it is a form of currency
Can you point me to an exchange which would convert some of my sex to conventional currency?
By the time I had any need of a hardware h264 decoder in Linux, the drivers were readily available and used by all of the relevant software.
Hardware accelerated video is still huge problem on linux if you don't own one of the few supported brands of graphic cards (nvidia vdpau with proprietary drivers and intel HD graphics vaapi open source drivers). Recently i wanted to purchase odroid-u2 ARM computer with Mali-400 graphics accelerator but the driver support is not there and unfortunately it's not exception.
No, it means investing in them is slightly dumber than we all knew it was yesterday.
No, it means investing in bitcoin-denominated ponzi schemes is dumb, running ponzi schemes is illegal and keeping their saving in bitcoins would be good idea for people scammed by pirate40.
Commenting to undo moderation. Wanted to mod you insightfull but missclicked...
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
Reminds me of evolution deniers. Those people are apparently ignoring the fact that there is ovehelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warning. From Wikipedia:
National and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed current scientific opinion on climate change. These assessments are generally consistent with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarized below:
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as evidenced by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.[5]
- Most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human activities.[6]
- "Benefits and costs of climate change for [human] society will vary widely by location and scale.[7] Some of the effects in temperate and polar regions will be positive and others elsewhere will be negative.[7] Overall, net effects are more likely to be strongly negative with larger or more rapid warming."[7]
- "[...] the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time"[8]
- "The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global change drivers (e.g. land-use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources)"[9]
No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,[10] which in 2007[11] updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.[12] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions.
I don't know why so many techies are ignoring scientific opinion on climate change. My guess is they have political reasons:
- most techies i know are individualists advocating right wing political ideologies (libertarians, minimal or no government etc.). Global warming is inconvinient to their views because it can be solved only with strong and coordinated world-wide effort. Free market can't handle it.
- global warming is tied with environmental activism. Unfortunately enviromentalists are also often advocating against nuclear power and some other tehcnologies techies like. As a result, techies view scepticaly everything that enviromentalists say including global warming.
There's really no "legal use" for a zero-day.
There are certainly few legit uses of 0-day exploits. Anti-virus creators to name one.
Maybe part of the responsibility for current situation lies on the corporations and government agencies which often treat white-hat hackers, who try to inform them about their vulnerabilities, like criminals and throw legal actions on them. It's no wonder that some of the hackers turn their exploits to black market for money.
The issue with long-term storage is _not_ how to preserve the bits
This is wrong. For example with my collection of optical disks my problem is precisly how to preserve the bits. Reading equipment is non-issue.
IANAL but if I were Swidish, I would be pissed
I'm pissed even as non-swedish. This kind of raid could happen to anyone in first-world country.