"It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."
The movie was good, but the conclusions they jumped to about causality, fate, and choice were bullshit. When you can know the outcome of an action and can change it, you have _more_ freedom to choose, not less. You can track the outcome of basically every possible decision, including goofball ones you'd never think to do. Case in point, the entire movie; he knew what was going to happen and could alter it far more elegantly and efficiently than if he'd been working blind.
For instance, Affleck says there's a bad plague and so they herd all the infected (or those who will be infected?) into a city and nuke it. Wouldn't you instead just use your machine to see the source of the plague and deal with it beforehand?
Do tell. And which law would that be? You mean the one that explicitly says you are allowed to copy currency given that a couple restrictions on 'identicalness' are met?
who didn't even care about this before Slashdot reported it
Well, thank you Mr. Clairvoyant, but I for one was totally unaware of this new 'feature'. Could it be that Adobe was secretly building arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions like this into their software and then *gasp* not telling anyone about it? So what else have they got in there? Does it try to stop me from working on images of Bruce Chizen (Adobe's CEO)? Does Word prevent me from pasting in text from other documents? Does Time Warner Road Runner restrict access to IP addresses is certain countries? More importantly, would we be informed if it did?
Adobe lost my business some time ago when they trotted out the DMCA for their e-books. This sort of crap (which admittedly may not even be true in this case; nobody here seems to be able to reproduce the problem) is the latest in the short-sighted proprietary trend of building sometimes wonderfully powerful tools and then saddling them with ridiculous legal or technical handicaps that are guaranteed to only piss off legit users. You know a company was actually selling a woodworking jig with an EULA? By virtue of the fact that it could be used to make a rough-quality version of itself, they declared, "You are not allowed to give this away or let anyone else use it".
And don't act like "the law" is always good, right, just, fair, or intelligent, either. Two states have got the UCITA on the books, which is just about the most anti-customer piece of legislation ever written. We're all familiar with the DMCA; "Thou shalt not do anything with our product that we didn't explicitly allow". The COPA, CDA, PATRIOT Acts I & II, need I go on?
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
How about we either pay reparations to blacks, or enforce mandatory quotas for as many years as slavery existed in the United States?
This is not heretical; it's certainly been pushed for Jewish survivors of the 3rd Reich and immediate family's ef the deceased. But for American slaves (or Salem Witch Trial victims, etc, etc; it is simply impractical and pointless. I would be more than happy to pay reparations to those african-americans who have had to live as slaves. I will _not_ pay 5th or 6th generation descendants compensation for suffering of people they never knew at the hands of people long since dead. Go back far enough and everyone has an ancestor who was a slave to someone else.
Besides, can you imagine the kind of legal feeding frenzy you'd get? "U.S. Government offers $100,000 to anyone who can show they had ancestors who were owned 150 years ago". At best, the standards of proof would be set high enough that virtually no one would be able to collect. More likely, there'd be a shitstorm of lawsuits claiming that they should get the money because the ancestry is 'known' but not documentable. Look at how well the government has handled the 9/11 victims' funds, where the victims and their families are very well known. Slavery reparations would, despite being very well-intentioned, be a waste of money, effort, and courtroom time beyond all reality.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Those drugs are the most deadly and addictive because they are legal
Would you care to rephrase or support that in a way that makes sense?
Great Britain. They actually have tech vans that go around hunting down stray TV-on signals from addresses that don't pay a TV tax. IIRC, much of it goes straight to the BBC. Mind you, it's not "pay for certain premium channels", it's "pay to have a TV turned on at all".
What? No insanely intrusive and wildly limiting viewing control? Are you some kind of unamerican hacker-anarchist or something?
Seriously, the idea of not putting their products under every kind of lock and key imaginable is going to be utter anathema to these guys. _Maybe_, if one of them tries an unprotected format on a large scale and is successful the rest will fall into line. But left to their own devices, most will opt for things like "You cannot read this book out loud". Remember, the RIAA has admitted that truly protected files can't be realized, but then from this drew the conclusion that music shouldn't be online at all.
Very likely that law could only be applied to driving out one's competetitors. But running at a loss to coerce action from your own suppliers? That's a new one to me. Anything like it in legal history?
"Hold a private conversation with a family member in a fashion not approved of by the US Government and we'll throw you in jail"? That'll go over real well with the likes of Ashcroft, but not too many others, and certainly not the Supreme Court.
And anyway, you still didn't answer the question. Skype comes to mind; it's a VoIP program that relies an a P2P phone book and encrypts the contents. I imagine it would not take too much effort to remove app-specific characteristics from the plaintext part of the stream. And just like that the politicos will have created yet another crime that is horrendously difficult to detect, much less punish. How do you enforce a law whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators? Historically, every attempt to do so has been a dismal, often disastrous, failure.
Well, not quite. You may recall, in the novella, copyrights had been reduced to about 5 years to reflect the ridiculously fast pace of life. I can't envision anything short of revelation of a conspiracy involving Jack Valenti, Michael Eisner, Orrin Hatch, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Il Jong that would start us down that road.
And just how would they enforce any such regulation? VoIP is basically just a program running over existing networks. Cell phones not withstanding, you can no more require charges to be paid than you could charge for email or instant messaging. It's just a communications protocol!
The intent was not to 'sanitize' lap dances. Prohibition, for instance, didn't outlaw drinking alcohol. It only made it illegal to make it, transport it, import it, export it, sell it, think about it, and talk about it. It was still perfectly legal to have, it was just technically impossible to do so legally.
Don't forget the case a few weeks ago about two 15 year-old kids charged with child molestation on each other. Was via Fark, I'll try and dig up a link...
Prohibition didn't make drinking alcohol illegal. And the Marijuana Tax Act didn't make smoking pot illegal either. And of course, the DMCA does't outlaw reverse engineering. But total illegality has been the effects of all such laws.
Very true. But I can think of no other way to 'make public information accessible to only one person', so to speak. Anyway, a voter under this scheme has plausible deniability; don't know your passphrase. And really, how many times could a group get away with threatening voters, has to be done on a case by case basis after all, before it got public?
Combine the person's voter ID # with a passphrase or some such chosen by the voter and MD5 it to get a unique, but anonymous, vote lookup key. Make sure the hashing algorithm is public so anyone who wants to can verify that the lookup key they got really was generated from their info.
Well...
Always remember the only known means of propelling a ship at speeds faster than light: You point your finger and say 'Engage'. It's fiction. I love old-school Trek as much as the next guy, but having serious discussions about ftl based on TV episodes is like trying to do longevity studies of elves and vampires.
Relativistic sublight propulsion and magnetic deflection of charged particles are real sciences which, ideally, will be practical realities in the coming decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? What on earth was this in the context of?
You mean wall candy?
The movie was good, but the conclusions they jumped to about causality, fate, and choice were bullshit. When you can know the outcome of an action and can change it, you have _more_ freedom to choose, not less. You can track the outcome of basically every possible decision, including goofball ones you'd never think to do. Case in point, the entire movie; he knew what was going to happen and could alter it far more elegantly and efficiently than if he'd been working blind.
For instance, Affleck says there's a bad plague and so they herd all the infected (or those who will be infected?) into a city and nuke it. Wouldn't you instead just use your machine to see the source of the plague and deal with it beforehand?
Except, of course, I can't. Bright House RR has a monopoly on broadband where I live.
Do tell. And which law would that be? You mean the one that explicitly says you are allowed to copy currency given that a couple restrictions on 'identicalness' are met?
who didn't even care about this before Slashdot reported it
Well, thank you Mr. Clairvoyant, but I for one was totally unaware of this new 'feature'. Could it be that Adobe was secretly building arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions like this into their software and then *gasp* not telling anyone about it? So what else have they got in there? Does it try to stop me from working on images of Bruce Chizen (Adobe's CEO)? Does Word prevent me from pasting in text from other documents? Does Time Warner Road Runner restrict access to IP addresses is certain countries? More importantly, would we be informed if it did?
Adobe lost my business some time ago when they trotted out the DMCA for their e-books. This sort of crap (which admittedly may not even be true in this case; nobody here seems to be able to reproduce the problem) is the latest in the short-sighted proprietary trend of building sometimes wonderfully powerful tools and then saddling them with ridiculous legal or technical handicaps that are guaranteed to only piss off legit users. You know a company was actually selling a woodworking jig with an EULA? By virtue of the fact that it could be used to make a rough-quality version of itself, they declared, "You are not allowed to give this away or let anyone else use it".
And don't act like "the law" is always good, right, just, fair, or intelligent, either. Two states have got the UCITA on the books, which is just about the most anti-customer piece of legislation ever written. We're all familiar with the DMCA; "Thou shalt not do anything with our product that we didn't explicitly allow". The COPA, CDA, PATRIOT Acts I & II, need I go on?
This is not heretical; it's certainly been pushed for Jewish survivors of the 3rd Reich and immediate family's ef the deceased. But for American slaves (or Salem Witch Trial victims, etc, etc; it is simply impractical and pointless. I would be more than happy to pay reparations to those african-americans who have had to live as slaves. I will _not_ pay 5th or 6th generation descendants compensation for suffering of people they never knew at the hands of people long since dead. Go back far enough and everyone has an ancestor who was a slave to someone else.
Besides, can you imagine the kind of legal feeding frenzy you'd get? "U.S. Government offers $100,000 to anyone who can show they had ancestors who were owned 150 years ago". At best, the standards of proof would be set high enough that virtually no one would be able to collect. More likely, there'd be a shitstorm of lawsuits claiming that they should get the money because the ancestry is 'known' but not documentable. Look at how well the government has handled the 9/11 victims' funds, where the victims and their families are very well known. Slavery reparations would, despite being very well-intentioned, be a waste of money, effort, and courtroom time beyond all reality.
Would you care to rephrase or support that in a way that makes sense?
Great Britain. They actually have tech vans that go around hunting down stray TV-on signals from addresses that don't pay a TV tax. IIRC, much of it goes straight to the BBC. Mind you, it's not "pay for certain premium channels", it's "pay to have a TV turned on at all".
Wasn't it 'shit'? And the episode revolved around their being able to say it uncensored? And didn't they keep score?
What? No insanely intrusive and wildly limiting viewing control? Are you some kind of unamerican hacker-anarchist or something?
Seriously, the idea of not putting their products under every kind of lock and key imaginable is going to be utter anathema to these guys. _Maybe_, if one of them tries an unprotected format on a large scale and is successful the rest will fall into line. But left to their own devices, most will opt for things like "You cannot read this book out loud". Remember, the RIAA has admitted that truly protected files can't be realized, but then from this drew the conclusion that music shouldn't be online at all.
Very likely that law could only be applied to driving out one's competetitors. But running at a loss to coerce action from your own suppliers? That's a new one to me. Anything like it in legal history?
Because I've already patented it! And companies are paying me millions _not_ to license it to Congress.
And anyway, you still didn't answer the question. Skype comes to mind; it's a VoIP program that relies an a P2P phone book and encrypts the contents. I imagine it would not take too much effort to remove app-specific characteristics from the plaintext part of the stream. And just like that the politicos will have created yet another crime that is horrendously difficult to detect, much less punish. How do you enforce a law whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators? Historically, every attempt to do so has been a dismal, often disastrous, failure.
It is if this bill passes. Any corp can claim that becauso they put time and effort into having a piece of data, they miraculously own it.
Well, not quite. You may recall, in the novella, copyrights had been reduced to about 5 years to reflect the ridiculously fast pace of life. I can't envision anything short of revelation of a conspiracy involving Jack Valenti, Michael Eisner, Orrin Hatch, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Il Jong that would start us down that road.
And just how would they enforce any such regulation? VoIP is basically just a program running over existing networks. Cell phones not withstanding, you can no more require charges to be paid than you could charge for email or instant messaging. It's just a communications protocol!
The intent was not to 'sanitize' lap dances. Prohibition, for instance, didn't outlaw drinking alcohol. It only made it illegal to make it, transport it, import it, export it, sell it, think about it, and talk about it. It was still perfectly legal to have, it was just technically impossible to do so legally.
I'm not particularly enthused with either of the players. Get Media Player Classic and just install the QT and Real codecs. MPC will happily use them.
Don't forget the case a few weeks ago about two 15 year-old kids charged with child molestation on each other. Was via Fark, I'll try and dig up a link...
Maybe he's the chief stylist for an army of greasy-haired lordlings.
Prohibition didn't make drinking alcohol illegal. And the Marijuana Tax Act didn't make smoking pot illegal either. And of course, the DMCA does't outlaw reverse engineering. But total illegality has been the effects of all such laws.
Very true. But I can think of no other way to 'make public information accessible to only one person', so to speak. Anyway, a voter under this scheme has plausible deniability; don't know your passphrase. And really, how many times could a group get away with threatening voters, has to be done on a case by case basis after all, before it got public?
Combine the person's voter ID # with a passphrase or some such chosen by the voter and MD5 it to get a unique, but anonymous, vote lookup key. Make sure the hashing algorithm is public so anyone who wants to can verify that the lookup key they got really was generated from their info.
It's not a trailer, it's a teaser. Teasers are basically supposed to say "This movie is coming out" and little else.
Always remember the only known means of propelling a ship at speeds faster than light: You point your finger and say 'Engage'. It's fiction. I love old-school Trek as much as the next guy, but having serious discussions about ftl based on TV episodes is like trying to do longevity studies of elves and vampires.
Relativistic sublight propulsion and magnetic deflection of charged particles are real sciences which, ideally, will be practical realities in the coming decades.