Yes, it is. Marriage itself is a governmental invention -- it's a special kind of incorporation that required governmental approval. That makes it the government's business (not the federal government, but the government nonetheless).
I personally believe that the government should do away with the concept of marriage entirely. Replace it with an overt kind of incorporation that has no connection to the idea of love, family, etc. and can be entered into by anybody. It would be incredibly useful for all kinds of situations, and would preserve the legal aspects of marriage for those who want to marry. It would also put "marriage" back to where it should be -- a matter of the local culture (religion, etc.) the people who want get married are a part of.
So, as long as you're going to have laws that say copyright is what it is and works how it works, I don't think it's entirely fair to criticise people in creative industries who try to actually enforce their legal rights in a practical way. They should be penalised in turn when they overstep those rights, of course.
I think that's totally fair. There are tons and tons of laws that are unjust or that can be used in unjust ways. It's fair (and essential) to criticize anyone who abuses these faults. People and companies should behave in ways that are ethical, not just in ways that are legally permissible. Criticizing them for unethical behavior is fair game.
Your carrier can already disable the phone part -- which they do when you report it stolen. The only things left to be done are location and wiping, which is now a feature in all smartphones.
Again, it depends on which encryption you're using. Here's a nice article about the weaknesses in the stock Android crypt as of last year: http://www.securityweek.com/de...
'The tablet and phone app ecosystem is slowly, painstakingly reinventing everything I hated about the computer software industry before the web blew it all up.'
Fair enough -- the web made everything that I hated about the software industry much worse!
'm not aware of anyone who has been able to steal information off of an encrypted phone, are you?
Depends on the encryption software. I do know that a lot of it is breakable, some easily and some with moderate effort, so stealing info off of those phones is completely doable.
There's no need for Samsung to do it -- this capability is already in every Android phone that uses Google Apps. It's enabled by default, although users can disable it. You can even disable the two things independently of each other: phone location and phone wiping.
I, for one, would absolutely object to this capability being included if I didn't know about it or I couldn't disable it. I don't want my carrier -- or anybody else -- to be able to locate my phone and disable it. The inclusion of this ability with no way to turn it off would prevent me from buying the phone.
But nowadays, people do give serious thought to their safety, which is why even the base model crapbox has ABS and airbags.
I thought the reason was that the law required them to have these things.
If I had a choice between a car advertised as "5 STAR crash rating" and one without that was 5 grand cheaper, the one with the 5 stars gets my money every time.
The very LAST thing I want is my car to get automatic software updates. It's bad enough that my computers and devices want to do this so badly, not to mention the insanity of ordinary software doing it. At least in all those cases, I can (and do) easily stop them.
That's a good point. Are there other predictions? Because that one has been falsified, repeatedly, for a very long time. Now it's up to creationists to modify their model to account for that, and make a new prediction.
Yes, it is. Evolution makes testable predictions. That's really all that's required. Creationism isn't science because it doesn't make testable predictions.
That does not mean Creationism is not a model for reality while Evolution is.
You're talking about something else now. Lots of models for reality are not science -- namely, every religious belief on the planet.
Not really. Creationism doesn't lie within the realm of science, so science cannot make any meaningful comment about it, pro or con. It can only say "that's not science".
It would be useful for illustrating what makes something not a scientific theory, though.
No, I'll argue that you're paying for a product (the music). If you're paying someone to monitor, you're paying for a service. If this were DIY, you'd be Doing It Yourself rather than paying someone else to do it. But your example does clue me in to the source of our disagreement -- we're talking about different levels of abstraction. For me, the whole point of DIY is to not be reliant on someone for the thing.
My real point is that if Verizon was marketing this as a DIY thing, then there's no mystery as to why it failed. They were offering a service where they "do" for a crowd who wants to do it for themselves.
There should be a link to the classic interface at the bottom of the page. Click it, and you won't be bothered with the beta anymore. At least, when I got drafted months ago, that's how it worked.
That's legit. I'm a little different... any discount that only offsets the cost of the service isn't a big enough discount to tempt me. I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't trust third parties with my data, so I run my own cloud service, my own email server, etc. specifically to minimize the exposure of my data to unaccountable companies.
In timothy's statement, he mentioned a time period of a few months. That's soon, in my book.
FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
Oh, I remember! You can't tell from my ID # (I lost my five-digit one years ago due to some sort of problem Slashdot had way back when), but I've been around since well, well before that redesign. And, if I'm to be perfectly honest, I did like the site better before that happened. But you're right. In the end, although the design we have now isn't quite as good, you guys did make it work adequately. Maybe you can do the same here. Still, I would prefer that the new design actually be better, not like the one in 2011.
I don't think people are complaining now because they love the current design as much as because the redesign beta as it currently stands is greatly inferior to what we have now.
If you're paying a third party for a service, it's not DIY.
I've had DIY home security for almost 20 years now. There's no need to pay for monitoring. When something is worth alerting me about, the system sends me a text ( before that, it paged me).
OK, fine. But if that's the case, then why is the current interface going to be retired? This whole firestorm could have been avoided entirely by committing to keeping the current interface indefinitely for us old farts, and providing the shiny new gee-whiz interface for the newcomers.
The beta doesn't look very promising in terms of meeting my needs. I tried using it seriously for a while, but it was 100% unusable for my purposes. If I had some assurance that if I still find it unusable when it leaves beta, I could still go back to this perfectly fine interface, I wouldn't be so frightened for Slashdot's future.
I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
Sure, but evolution needs to come in response to some kind of need. i think the thing that people here (or maybe it's just me) don't understand is what is the need this redesign is intending to meet? From my point of view, it looks like all loss and no win.
It shouldn't surprise you that the change is attributed to malice. In the first place, as a much smarter guy than I once observed, all UI changes are acts of hostility. Good changes are those that result in a better experience, but the change itself is still an aggressive act. In the second place, given that we don't know what problem the change is trying to solve, we're left guessing about it. And really, from the outside, the only problem that seems to match the changes is that the existing community isn't really wanted anymore. That may be entirely incorrect -- but when you aren't privy to the reasons for something, you tend to make guesses. That's not too hard to understand.
Slashdot could help counter this by actually explaining what the changes are for. What problem they are trying to solve. In all of the things written about these changes, those questions have never been addressed. If we knew the motives, then we wouldn't have to imagine them.
On the other hand, the change was needed in the end, it did provide a lot more flexibility, allowed for new features that could not be done in the old one, and it looked snazzier.
Was more flexibility actually needed? Were the new features actually desirable? If not, then those things don't make the change "needed".
As for looking snazzier, that is very, very rarely something that is "needed." It's just eye candy -- nice to have if everything else is top notch, but just plain insulting if the redesign functionally sucks.
I won't get into my detailed, point-by-point criticisms of the beta, because they already have that. Instead, I want to express the thing that bothers me the most by far about all this. As some commenters above have pointed out, it's tied into them calling us an "audience".
My biggest problem with the redesign is that it calls out, loud and clear, that Slashdot no longer values the existing community. The redesign is including things that are of no value at all to us, and is omitting things that are of great value. That means they want a different community altogether. Or, not a community at all, but an "audience".
This phrase in the OP sent chills up my spine: "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." That's pure marketing-speak for "we need to have readers in a more profitable demographic". The problem is, that demographic wants things that are completely incompatible with what most in the existing community wants.
This feedback from timothy (and I thank him for it, truly -- communication is better than silence) has made me more pessimistic about the future of Slashdot than I was before. It communicates very strongly that they are wanting to turn Slashdot into something common, mass-produced, and intended for "consumption" by a more general "audience".
In other words, it seems that they want it to stop being Slashdot at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is. Marriage itself is a governmental invention -- it's a special kind of incorporation that required governmental approval. That makes it the government's business (not the federal government, but the government nonetheless).
I personally believe that the government should do away with the concept of marriage entirely. Replace it with an overt kind of incorporation that has no connection to the idea of love, family, etc. and can be entered into by anybody. It would be incredibly useful for all kinds of situations, and would preserve the legal aspects of marriage for those who want to marry. It would also put "marriage" back to where it should be -- a matter of the local culture (religion, etc.) the people who want get married are a part of.
That's just as creepy.
So, as long as you're going to have laws that say copyright is what it is and works how it works, I don't think it's entirely fair to criticise people in creative industries who try to actually enforce their legal rights in a practical way. They should be penalised in turn when they overstep those rights, of course.
I think that's totally fair. There are tons and tons of laws that are unjust or that can be used in unjust ways. It's fair (and essential) to criticize anyone who abuses these faults. People and companies should behave in ways that are ethical, not just in ways that are legally permissible. Criticizing them for unethical behavior is fair game.
All the more reason that Google should simply stop doing business in Germany at all.
Your carrier can already disable the phone part -- which they do when you report it stolen. The only things left to be done are location and wiping, which is now a feature in all smartphones.
Again, it depends on which encryption you're using. Here's a nice article about the weaknesses in the stock Android crypt as of last year: http://www.securityweek.com/de...
'The tablet and phone app ecosystem is slowly, painstakingly reinventing everything I hated about the computer software industry before the web blew it all up.'
Fair enough -- the web made everything that I hated about the software industry much worse!
'm not aware of anyone who has been able to steal information off of an encrypted phone, are you?
Depends on the encryption software. I do know that a lot of it is breakable, some easily and some with moderate effort, so stealing info off of those phones is completely doable.
There's no need for Samsung to do it -- this capability is already in every Android phone that uses Google Apps. It's enabled by default, although users can disable it. You can even disable the two things independently of each other: phone location and phone wiping.
I, for one, would absolutely object to this capability being included if I didn't know about it or I couldn't disable it. I don't want my carrier -- or anybody else -- to be able to locate my phone and disable it. The inclusion of this ability with no way to turn it off would prevent me from buying the phone.
But nowadays, people do give serious thought to their safety, which is why even the base model crapbox has ABS and airbags.
I thought the reason was that the law required them to have these things.
If I had a choice between a car advertised as "5 STAR crash rating" and one without that was 5 grand cheaper, the one with the 5 stars gets my money every time.
Not me. I'd save the 5 grand.
The very LAST thing I want is my car to get automatic software updates. It's bad enough that my computers and devices want to do this so badly, not to mention the insanity of ordinary software doing it. At least in all those cases, I can (and do) easily stop them.
That's a good point. Are there other predictions? Because that one has been falsified, repeatedly, for a very long time. Now it's up to creationists to modify their model to account for that, and make a new prediction.
Evolution is not science either.
Yes, it is. Evolution makes testable predictions. That's really all that's required. Creationism isn't science because it doesn't make testable predictions.
That does not mean Creationism is not a model for reality while Evolution is.
You're talking about something else now. Lots of models for reality are not science -- namely, every religious belief on the planet.
Not really. Creationism doesn't lie within the realm of science, so science cannot make any meaningful comment about it, pro or con. It can only say "that's not science".
It would be useful for illustrating what makes something not a scientific theory, though.
No, I'll argue that you're paying for a product (the music). If you're paying someone to monitor, you're paying for a service. If this were DIY, you'd be Doing It Yourself rather than paying someone else to do it. But your example does clue me in to the source of our disagreement -- we're talking about different levels of abstraction. For me, the whole point of DIY is to not be reliant on someone for the thing.
My real point is that if Verizon was marketing this as a DIY thing, then there's no mystery as to why it failed. They were offering a service where they "do" for a crowd who wants to do it for themselves.
Monitoring service & electrical service are not comparable things.
I think you meant to reply to Mr. Dog & .40 below, not to me.
There should be a link to the classic interface at the bottom of the page. Click it, and you won't be bothered with the beta anymore. At least, when I got drafted months ago, that's how it worked.
That's legit. I'm a little different... any discount that only offsets the cost of the service isn't a big enough discount to tempt me. I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't trust third parties with my data, so I run my own cloud service, my own email server, etc. specifically to minimize the exposure of my data to unaccountable companies.
Well, the classic site isn't going away soon.
In timothy's statement, he mentioned a time period of a few months. That's soon, in my book.
FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
Oh, I remember! You can't tell from my ID # (I lost my five-digit one years ago due to some sort of problem Slashdot had way back when), but I've been around since well, well before that redesign. And, if I'm to be perfectly honest, I did like the site better before that happened. But you're right. In the end, although the design we have now isn't quite as good, you guys did make it work adequately. Maybe you can do the same here. Still, I would prefer that the new design actually be better, not like the one in 2011.
I don't think people are complaining now because they love the current design as much as because the redesign beta as it currently stands is greatly inferior to what we have now.
If you're paying a third party for a service, it's not DIY.
I've had DIY home security for almost 20 years now. There's no need to pay for monitoring. When something is worth alerting me about, the system sends me a text ( before that, it paged me).
OK, fine. But if that's the case, then why is the current interface going to be retired? This whole firestorm could have been avoided entirely by committing to keeping the current interface indefinitely for us old farts, and providing the shiny new gee-whiz interface for the newcomers.
The beta doesn't look very promising in terms of meeting my needs. I tried using it seriously for a while, but it was 100% unusable for my purposes. If I had some assurance that if I still find it unusable when it leaves beta, I could still go back to this perfectly fine interface, I wouldn't be so frightened for Slashdot's future.
I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
Sure, but evolution needs to come in response to some kind of need. i think the thing that people here (or maybe it's just me) don't understand is what is the need this redesign is intending to meet? From my point of view, it looks like all loss and no win.
It shouldn't surprise you that the change is attributed to malice. In the first place, as a much smarter guy than I once observed, all UI changes are acts of hostility. Good changes are those that result in a better experience, but the change itself is still an aggressive act. In the second place, given that we don't know what problem the change is trying to solve, we're left guessing about it. And really, from the outside, the only problem that seems to match the changes is that the existing community isn't really wanted anymore. That may be entirely incorrect -- but when you aren't privy to the reasons for something, you tend to make guesses. That's not too hard to understand.
Slashdot could help counter this by actually explaining what the changes are for. What problem they are trying to solve. In all of the things written about these changes, those questions have never been addressed. If we knew the motives, then we wouldn't have to imagine them.
On the other hand, the change was needed in the end, it did provide a lot more flexibility, allowed for new features that could not be done in the old one, and it looked snazzier.
Was more flexibility actually needed? Were the new features actually desirable? If not, then those things don't make the change "needed".
As for looking snazzier, that is very, very rarely something that is "needed." It's just eye candy -- nice to have if everything else is top notch, but just plain insulting if the redesign functionally sucks.
I won't get into my detailed, point-by-point criticisms of the beta, because they already have that. Instead, I want to express the thing that bothers me the most by far about all this. As some commenters above have pointed out, it's tied into them calling us an "audience".
My biggest problem with the redesign is that it calls out, loud and clear, that Slashdot no longer values the existing community. The redesign is including things that are of no value at all to us, and is omitting things that are of great value. That means they want a different community altogether. Or, not a community at all, but an "audience".
This phrase in the OP sent chills up my spine: "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." That's pure marketing-speak for "we need to have readers in a more profitable demographic". The problem is, that demographic wants things that are completely incompatible with what most in the existing community wants.
This feedback from timothy (and I thank him for it, truly -- communication is better than silence) has made me more pessimistic about the future of Slashdot than I was before. It communicates very strongly that they are wanting to turn Slashdot into something common, mass-produced, and intended for "consumption" by a more general "audience".
In other words, it seems that they want it to stop being Slashdot at all.