It's rarely, if ever, a majority who actually want it. It's usually a very vocal minority who actually want it, and a majority who will go along with it because the vocal minority is promising it will solve some other problem (usually the economy).
A second vocal minority can, hopefully, cancel it out. And that minority has to start with one person speaking up, and being heard. As it just so happens, elected officials tend to be heard better.
And that's where we disagree. However, neither of us has any real evidence for our positions, so the only option is to step back and let things happen, and see which of us was right.
PS: Hasn't Vermont already legalized gay marriage? Or is that some other cold northern state I'm thinking of?
It sounds to me like "let the people make their choices" is one of his primary ethical constraints. So he would, hopefully, only violate it when what the people choose directly contravenes another of his primary ethical constraints. Given that he hasn't mentioned any of the common political hot-topic "ethical issues" (abortion, gay marriage, death penalty, etc.), it can be inferred that he places less importance on them than he does on Democracy.
Think of it like Asimov's laws: Law 1: The Representative shall not violate fundamental human rights. Law 2: The Representative shall follow the Constitution, except when doing so would violate the First Law. Law 3: The Representative shall follow the wishes of his constituency, except when doing so would violate the First or Second Law.
And yes, it absolutely is important that he be able to override the people. Remember, Hitler was *elected* (pardon my Godwinning). Sometimes, the People choose to do what is *wrong*. Now, having been to Vermont, I don't think they're likely to vote for genocide, but it has been proven to be *possible*. Having an emergency "what the fuck did you guys just vote for?!?" override is essential.
Go out, find what the commonly available price of purchase is for all the infringed songs. Don't bother trying to find "the best deal" or doing some big, exhaustive research on average prices. Just go out to Wal-Mart or go on iTunes, look up all the songs, see what it would cost.
Move the decimal point over one place. If they stole one album ($14.99), their liability is $149.90. If they stole $100 worth of music, they owe $1000. If they're a repeat offender, move it over an additional place (ie. if this you've been in court for it before, that one album is now $1,499).
If the defendant actively distributed it (not just "seeded their torrent", but actually posted it on new sites or made their own torrent or whatever), they're liable for both side's legal fees. Otherwise, each pays their own.
Same applies to any other Intellectual Property. Steal a $60 video game? Pay them $600. Steal a $20 movie? Pay $200.
The multiplier keeps damages reasonably bound to the actual value of the "goods", but also makes it far cheaper to buy instead of pirate. And the legal fees will make the MAFIAA go after the actual "distributors", not people who just download a few episodes of whatever TV show is popular right now. Economically, the only ones worth it are the distributors (because as long as you win, you have no costs), and the massive steal-every-song-made-in-the-past-century pirates who still rack up millions in damages, not the "I'm gonna give this song a listen before I buy it" crowd or the "piracy is *still* easier than buying" crowd.
1: License. Some people dislike GPL and other copyleft licenses, and demand something BSD-licensed or similar. I personally don't care, but for those that do, this is a Good Thing.
2: Just to be different. It's good to have *options*. I personally despise most Linux's init system. Too convoluted, too complicated, at least for my taste. Some distros, like Arch, have adopted a BSD-style init system. OpenBSD, and by extension Bitrig, also have a BSD-style init system. There's also the different package/port systems, and even the kernel is different. I'm not saying one is necessarily better, but being able to choose one that does it differently is a great thing.
3: Size. I've installed OpenBSD from *floppies* - a single 1.44MB floppy can boot OpenBSD enough to download the rest from the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more "and-the-kitchen-sink-as-well" Linuxes can't even fit on a CD anymore.
4: For Teh Lulz: It's a free project. Do they even *need* a reason? Plenty of Linux distros have started off as "hey, this could be fun..."
That's still a bandwidth cap, you can just buy as much as you need.
Far better than what they were doing, but I think I'll stick with Verizon for now. Still, good to know that there's an at least somewhat-acceptable alternative, should Verizon's Fiber division be taken over by their Cellular division, who are clearly working for al-Quada.
Seriously, you go through all that trouble to cram an ARM core in there, and you use it for exactly what it's *worst* at?
Crypto is best done by specialized, single-purpose hardware. Intel has special units on their chips just for certain common crypto algorithms. Doing it in software, on a core that's underpowered compared to the x86 cores next to it is retarded.
The strengths of ARM is low power. Doing what the Wii did would be a wonderful idea - they had a small ARM core on the northbridge, used to do online updates and such while in sleep mode. Imagine if your computer could keep your emails and RSS feeds synched and run updates while in sleep mode. Yes, it would need some OS-level support, and could probably be done better with an ultra-weak x86 core just for better compatibility (just take an old K6 core, shrink it down to 32nm and trim the cache - you don't need power, you just need small). Maybe it wouldn't be a killer feature, it would probably go unused by most users, but it's something that would actually *work*.
"i386" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture variously known as "x86", "x86-32", "i686", "IA-32", and "32-bit Intel". Just as "amd64" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture known to others as "x64", "x86-64", "IA-32e", "64-bit Intel", "Intel 64", and whatever VIA calls it.
That's not what I said. I said there were two patents on the same patentable idea - by definition, at least one of them has to be invalid. If you have a legal license to one of them, you can fight a troll on the grounds that *their* patent is invalid. Trolls will tend to shy away, simply because they would risk losing their patent - and all they have are patents.
This is, of course, assuming that a) there are enough people in the patent pool, and b) there are enough duplicate patents.
I believe the thinking on that matter is that someone in the pool is likely to have an identical or nearly-identical patent. For instance, if a troll sues you for their patent on transmitting movies over the internet, hopefully someone in the defense pool has a patent on, say, transmitting video over the internet.
If it gets enough people in it, they will eventually have a patent on pretty much everything, simply because of how many duplicate patents there are.
I think the key point of a visual programming language/editor is functionality. I once used a *terrible* flowchart-based C compiler. It was literally impossible to do some things. Like, say, a modulus. Or define your own subroutines. And so on.
You know what would be a good test for this? You should be able to write a program (any program) in regular text mode, then import it into a visual editor and edit it there, and then re-export it into regular text and have it still be legible. If a visual editor can do that, it's as good as any other IDE.
The article really provides nothing worth reading. It spends a page on "what is Thunderbolt", another page on the motherboards, then a page running a *single* I/O benchmark on a *single* external RAID box, which they compare to an SSD in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I don't even have to explain why that's stupid), before going straight to "summary and conclusions".
It's a stupid article with a single, astoundingly stupid "test", no insightful remarks or even technical detail. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
In the US, Obama's about the most left leaning, liberal, progressive person we've ever seen rise to such a high office. Many people seem to be shocked....but he was honest about it, and in his writings, actions and own words...he has shown what he stands for, but people didn't see it during election time.
Oh please. Obama is the biggest hypocrite we've ever elected.
He promised more open, transparent government. He denied more FOIA requests than Bush, by orders of magnitude. And the token White House Petition website is basically just another way for him to shout about how right he is and how he totally agrees with you, while only rarely being able to back that up with actual actions he's done.
He promised to improve America's standing in the world, make countries actually like us again. And he gave us more of what Bush did - ramped up drone killings, invaded Pakistan, and odds are we'll be at war with Iran by Election Day, the way things are going.
He promised healthcare reform. We ended up with a compromise that took the worst of private health insurance and the worst of socialized healthcare, none of the benefits of either, and topped it off with some rather superficial reforms.
Just about the only thing he's done *anything* on was gay rights, and that boiled down to "repealing DADT" and *accidentally* endorsing gay marriage. Gitmo hasn't been shut down. He hasn't ended the War on Drugs. He hasn't fixed the economy. He's actually *increased* the Federal deficit.
He promised us hope. And now, we don't even have that.
Right now, the rover is in *space*. I can definitely understand catching this problem in simulations or in on-Earth tests, or catching it belatedly when they finally get to Mars and wonder why all the rocks contain fluorine, but in space? Only thing I can think of is "someone re-ran some simulations and noticed they messed up", which doesn't seem very probable (unless the engineers had been suspecting this since before launch, and only now have sufficient "proof").
Then again, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I probably missed something.
FTFY. This is just proof that idiocy knows no national boundaries - there's racist fucks in Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, Oceania and probably even Antarctica.
Unless you can definitively demonstrate that your country has never, in all its history, engaged in any sort of ethnic discrimination (or been the victim of it)...
"allow victims of online abuse to discover the identity of their persecutors and bring a case against them"
You know what? I can get behind this.
There are already laws against this sort of thing - libel, slander laws. They work fine, except when the victim is anonymous.
IF the law requires there to be an actual lawsuit in order to uncover someone's identity, that's fine. If it's serious enough for the victim to be suing, and serious enough for a judge to not immediately laugh the victim out of court, then it's serious enough that the speaker should be forced to defend himself.
Another useful key point: "aims to protect websites from threats of litigation for inadvertently displaying defamatory comments".
Ah, but how many would have voted Democrat regardless of the race of the candidate?
Quite likely most of them. Blacks, for whatever reason, tend to vote liberal. I suspect it has something to do with many of them being low-income, who naturally tend liberal. I don't have any specific numbers myself, but a natural 80% Democrat trend (itself not unreasonable) would make your "95%" figure look like a much more modest "15% of blacks voted for Obama because of race reasons instead of politics".
Let's assume that the criminal group you're going after is shipping physical objects. Tracing information obviously will require heavy tech skills, but old-fashioned investigative work works well in the physical world.
Place an order on their site for the product, the drugs or whatever. Odds are they ship through an existing service, FedEx or something - it's simply implausible that they do the actual delivery themselves. With a simple warrant/subpeona, you can get the shipping info, find where it was shipped from.
Once you know where it's being shipped from, it's stakeout time. Repeat the buys a few more times, while recording everyone who ships a package from that location. You should be able to narrow it down rather quickly by process of elimination.
Now, the actual stuff you bought probably can't be used as evidence - it's probably entrapment, but IANAL so I can't be sure. But if they're shipping the stuff you bought, they're also shipping stuff to the actual customers.Catch the courier (who's most likely not a high-level guy, just a small-time crook doing the grunt job), and get him to roll over on the guys he works for. From there, it's literally the same routine as taking down any criminal enterprise.
Is it a lot more work than just serving up a subpeona and instantly getting every detail on the site operator? Yeah. But it's doable with as little tech skills as "being able to *use* Tor".
Criminals are going to use it. No matter what. Even no matter what it is, really.
If you want to decrease the proportion of illegal to legal users of Tor, there's two ways. One, reduce the number of illegal users. This is impossible. Second, you could increase the number of legal users. If half the country is using Tor for everyday browsing, the Feds literally will not be able to keep up - they can't interrogate everyone.
Isn't it kind of the POINT of a darknet that nobody can trace who's who? Sounds to me like the system is working as designed.
Yes, it will be used to break laws. But that's when you break out the actual investigative skills instead of relying on tech work and unrestricted wiretaps.
Not really. A tree can easily be far larger (have you *seen* a California Redwood?), and those things fall into rivers, which lead to the ocean, which leads to...
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It's rarely, if ever, a majority who actually want it. It's usually a very vocal minority who actually want it, and a majority who will go along with it because the vocal minority is promising it will solve some other problem (usually the economy).
A second vocal minority can, hopefully, cancel it out. And that minority has to start with one person speaking up, and being heard. As it just so happens, elected officials tend to be heard better.
And that's where we disagree. However, neither of us has any real evidence for our positions, so the only option is to step back and let things happen, and see which of us was right.
PS: Hasn't Vermont already legalized gay marriage? Or is that some other cold northern state I'm thinking of?
It sounds to me like "let the people make their choices" is one of his primary ethical constraints. So he would, hopefully, only violate it when what the people choose directly contravenes another of his primary ethical constraints. Given that he hasn't mentioned any of the common political hot-topic "ethical issues" (abortion, gay marriage, death penalty, etc.), it can be inferred that he places less importance on them than he does on Democracy.
Think of it like Asimov's laws:
Law 1: The Representative shall not violate fundamental human rights.
Law 2: The Representative shall follow the Constitution, except when doing so would violate the First Law.
Law 3: The Representative shall follow the wishes of his constituency, except when doing so would violate the First or Second Law.
And yes, it absolutely is important that he be able to override the people. Remember, Hitler was *elected* (pardon my Godwinning). Sometimes, the People choose to do what is *wrong*. Now, having been to Vermont, I don't think they're likely to vote for genocide, but it has been proven to be *possible*. Having an emergency "what the fuck did you guys just vote for?!?" override is essential.
There have been many candidates I would vote against. There have been many more that I would vote for purely for lack of a better option.
You are the only one I have yet seen that I would vote *for*. If you ever find yourself running for something I can vote for, you can count on mine.
Are your ideas perfect? No. But then again, neither are mine.
If I were a judge, this is what I would do.
Go out, find what the commonly available price of purchase is for all the infringed songs. Don't bother trying to find "the best deal" or doing some big, exhaustive research on average prices. Just go out to Wal-Mart or go on iTunes, look up all the songs, see what it would cost.
Move the decimal point over one place. If they stole one album ($14.99), their liability is $149.90. If they stole $100 worth of music, they owe $1000. If they're a repeat offender, move it over an additional place (ie. if this you've been in court for it before, that one album is now $1,499).
If the defendant actively distributed it (not just "seeded their torrent", but actually posted it on new sites or made their own torrent or whatever), they're liable for both side's legal fees. Otherwise, each pays their own.
Same applies to any other Intellectual Property. Steal a $60 video game? Pay them $600. Steal a $20 movie? Pay $200.
The multiplier keeps damages reasonably bound to the actual value of the "goods", but also makes it far cheaper to buy instead of pirate. And the legal fees will make the MAFIAA go after the actual "distributors", not people who just download a few episodes of whatever TV show is popular right now. Economically, the only ones worth it are the distributors (because as long as you win, you have no costs), and the massive steal-every-song-made-in-the-past-century pirates who still rack up millions in damages, not the "I'm gonna give this song a listen before I buy it" crowd or the "piracy is *still* easier than buying" crowd.
So what's the point?
1: License. Some people dislike GPL and other copyleft licenses, and demand something BSD-licensed or similar. I personally don't care, but for those that do, this is a Good Thing.
2: Just to be different. It's good to have *options*. I personally despise most Linux's init system. Too convoluted, too complicated, at least for my taste. Some distros, like Arch, have adopted a BSD-style init system. OpenBSD, and by extension Bitrig, also have a BSD-style init system. There's also the different package/port systems, and even the kernel is different. I'm not saying one is necessarily better, but being able to choose one that does it differently is a great thing.
3: Size. I've installed OpenBSD from *floppies* - a single 1.44MB floppy can boot OpenBSD enough to download the rest from the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more "and-the-kitchen-sink-as-well" Linuxes can't even fit on a CD anymore.
4: For Teh Lulz: It's a free project. Do they even *need* a reason? Plenty of Linux distros have started off as "hey, this could be fun..."
That's still a bandwidth cap, you can just buy as much as you need.
Far better than what they were doing, but I think I'll stick with Verizon for now. Still, good to know that there's an at least somewhat-acceptable alternative, should Verizon's Fiber division be taken over by their Cellular division, who are clearly working for al-Quada.
Wait. They removed the data caps? Since when?
If they did that, and if they can match the speed of my current FTTH connection, I may just switch back.
Seriously, you go through all that trouble to cram an ARM core in there, and you use it for exactly what it's *worst* at?
Crypto is best done by specialized, single-purpose hardware. Intel has special units on their chips just for certain common crypto algorithms. Doing it in software, on a core that's underpowered compared to the x86 cores next to it is retarded.
The strengths of ARM is low power. Doing what the Wii did would be a wonderful idea - they had a small ARM core on the northbridge, used to do online updates and such while in sleep mode. Imagine if your computer could keep your emails and RSS feeds synched and run updates while in sleep mode. Yes, it would need some OS-level support, and could probably be done better with an ultra-weak x86 core just for better compatibility (just take an old K6 core, shrink it down to 32nm and trim the cache - you don't need power, you just need small). Maybe it wouldn't be a killer feature, it would probably go unused by most users, but it's something that would actually *work*.
"i386" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture variously known as "x86", "x86-32", "i686", "IA-32", and "32-bit Intel". Just as "amd64" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture known to others as "x64", "x86-64", "IA-32e", "64-bit Intel", "Intel 64", and whatever VIA calls it.
Another true freedom is having the ability to whine like a little bitch.
That's not what I said. I said there were two patents on the same patentable idea - by definition, at least one of them has to be invalid. If you have a legal license to one of them, you can fight a troll on the grounds that *their* patent is invalid. Trolls will tend to shy away, simply because they would risk losing their patent - and all they have are patents.
This is, of course, assuming that a) there are enough people in the patent pool, and b) there are enough duplicate patents.
I believe the thinking on that matter is that someone in the pool is likely to have an identical or nearly-identical patent. For instance, if a troll sues you for their patent on transmitting movies over the internet, hopefully someone in the defense pool has a patent on, say, transmitting video over the internet.
If it gets enough people in it, they will eventually have a patent on pretty much everything, simply because of how many duplicate patents there are.
I think the key point of a visual programming language/editor is functionality. I once used a *terrible* flowchart-based C compiler. It was literally impossible to do some things. Like, say, a modulus. Or define your own subroutines. And so on.
You know what would be a good test for this? You should be able to write a program (any program) in regular text mode, then import it into a visual editor and edit it there, and then re-export it into regular text and have it still be legible. If a visual editor can do that, it's as good as any other IDE.
The article really provides nothing worth reading. It spends a page on "what is Thunderbolt", another page on the motherboards, then a page running a *single* I/O benchmark on a *single* external RAID box, which they compare to an SSD in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I don't even have to explain why that's stupid), before going straight to "summary and conclusions".
It's a stupid article with a single, astoundingly stupid "test", no insightful remarks or even technical detail. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
In the US, Obama's about the most left leaning, liberal, progressive person we've ever seen rise to such a high office. Many people seem to be shocked....but he was honest about it, and in his writings, actions and own words...he has shown what he stands for, but people didn't see it during election time.
Oh please. Obama is the biggest hypocrite we've ever elected.
He promised more open, transparent government. He denied more FOIA requests than Bush, by orders of magnitude. And the token White House Petition website is basically just another way for him to shout about how right he is and how he totally agrees with you, while only rarely being able to back that up with actual actions he's done.
He promised to improve America's standing in the world, make countries actually like us again. And he gave us more of what Bush did - ramped up drone killings, invaded Pakistan, and odds are we'll be at war with Iran by Election Day, the way things are going.
He promised healthcare reform. We ended up with a compromise that took the worst of private health insurance and the worst of socialized healthcare, none of the benefits of either, and topped it off with some rather superficial reforms.
Just about the only thing he's done *anything* on was gay rights, and that boiled down to "repealing DADT" and *accidentally* endorsing gay marriage. Gitmo hasn't been shut down. He hasn't ended the War on Drugs. He hasn't fixed the economy. He's actually *increased* the Federal deficit.
He promised us hope. And now, we don't even have that.
Right now, the rover is in *space*. I can definitely understand catching this problem in simulations or in on-Earth tests, or catching it belatedly when they finally get to Mars and wonder why all the rocks contain fluorine, but in space? Only thing I can think of is "someone re-ran some simulations and noticed they messed up", which doesn't seem very probable (unless the engineers had been suspecting this since before launch, and only now have sufficient "proof").
Then again, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I probably missed something.
There are still Nazi pigs in Europe
FTFY. This is just proof that idiocy knows no national boundaries - there's racist fucks in Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, Oceania and probably even Antarctica.
Unless you can definitively demonstrate that your country has never, in all its history, engaged in any sort of ethnic discrimination (or been the victim of it)...
"allow victims of online abuse to discover the identity of their persecutors and bring a case against them"
You know what? I can get behind this.
There are already laws against this sort of thing - libel, slander laws. They work fine, except when the victim is anonymous.
IF the law requires there to be an actual lawsuit in order to uncover someone's identity, that's fine. If it's serious enough for the victim to be suing, and serious enough for a judge to not immediately laugh the victim out of court, then it's serious enough that the speaker should be forced to defend himself.
Another useful key point: "aims to protect websites from threats of litigation for inadvertently displaying defamatory comments".
Ah, but how many would have voted Democrat regardless of the race of the candidate?
Quite likely most of them. Blacks, for whatever reason, tend to vote liberal. I suspect it has something to do with many of them being low-income, who naturally tend liberal. I don't have any specific numbers myself, but a natural 80% Democrat trend (itself not unreasonable) would make your "95%" figure look like a much more modest "15% of blacks voted for Obama because of race reasons instead of politics".
Surely the last remaining world super-power could manage that?
Well yes, they probably could, but I fail to see what China has to do with any of this...
Let's assume that the criminal group you're going after is shipping physical objects. Tracing information obviously will require heavy tech skills, but old-fashioned investigative work works well in the physical world.
Place an order on their site for the product, the drugs or whatever. Odds are they ship through an existing service, FedEx or something - it's simply implausible that they do the actual delivery themselves. With a simple warrant/subpeona, you can get the shipping info, find where it was shipped from.
Once you know where it's being shipped from, it's stakeout time. Repeat the buys a few more times, while recording everyone who ships a package from that location. You should be able to narrow it down rather quickly by process of elimination.
Now, the actual stuff you bought probably can't be used as evidence - it's probably entrapment, but IANAL so I can't be sure. But if they're shipping the stuff you bought, they're also shipping stuff to the actual customers.Catch the courier (who's most likely not a high-level guy, just a small-time crook doing the grunt job), and get him to roll over on the guys he works for. From there, it's literally the same routine as taking down any criminal enterprise.
Is it a lot more work than just serving up a subpeona and instantly getting every detail on the site operator? Yeah. But it's doable with as little tech skills as "being able to *use* Tor".
Criminals are going to use it. No matter what. Even no matter what it is, really.
If you want to decrease the proportion of illegal to legal users of Tor, there's two ways. One, reduce the number of illegal users. This is impossible. Second, you could increase the number of legal users. If half the country is using Tor for everyday browsing, the Feds literally will not be able to keep up - they can't interrogate everyone.
Isn't it kind of the POINT of a darknet that nobody can trace who's who? Sounds to me like the system is working as designed.
Yes, it will be used to break laws. But that's when you break out the actual investigative skills instead of relying on tech work and unrestricted wiretaps.
Not really. A tree can easily be far larger (have you *seen* a California Redwood?), and those things fall into rivers, which lead to the ocean, which leads to...