I dunno, I was surprised to learn just how (extremely) high up in the 99% I am, though I have and continue to make a lot of money. I was kinda shocked to learn this year that the median personal income is only about $26K. Though I live/work in NYC, which is 1% land, even for people living like the 10% everywhere but on triple the income.
But indeed I realized all that only when OWS put "the 1%/the 99%" into the meme pool, and I wondered where I stood in it. I'm sure a lot of people also started looking at themselves in that frame for the first time this year (one reason I've never seen the income boundary of the 1% mentioned on TV, even after OWS and "the 99%" got some coverage).
I don't think a violent revolution is the way it will go. I think the country will continue to dumb down, the 1% media feed Americans a culture of distraction and division, so people are constantly scared of each other more than of the predators, while insisting on protecting the rich to protect their unreachable dream of becoming rich. The 1% is extremely sophisticated in its control, and has better modeling of the 99% all the time, and more complete data. The populace is awash in illegal stimulants that people have accepted losing their rights over, and even more awash in legal anxiety neutralizers that get people to accept anything that's explained away. Huxley's Brave New World looks more plausible every day.
On the other hand, the main advantage of the 1% is their organization and media infrastructure, which gives them a worldview in which to operate according to their self-interest. Which they use to pervert the worldview of the 99%, who cannot operate in their distorted worldview effectively enough to change things, or even to see their own self-interest. But network media levels that playing field. It's why SOPA and PIPPA are so important to the 1%, and rocketing through Congress. It's why the DMCA immunity decided in the story we're discussing is so important, and why SOPA threatens it. A large, dynamic, technologized society like America's, and its global associates, can really defy most expectations, even pretty quickly. So there's hope. Partly because it's too early, even if several watersheds have been passed. But also partly because without hope, there's doom, and insisting on hope is necessary if there's going to be hope. Life is complicated, and plenty of surprises are pleasant.
You start with a monopoly by making a deal with IBM as it introduces its first PC, requiring all IBM PCs to run your OS (but letting you license your OS to any competitor to IBM that might arise). I don't know how you missed that - it's pretty common knowledge. In fact it was a Supreme Court decision, if there were any doubt.
MSVC tools and.NET are extensions of the MS monopoly.
SQL Server gained its market share by making a deal similar to the IBM one with Sybase, though MS in that case literally copied Sybase and then used its business SW monopoly to kill first Sybase, then nearly all its other competitors. SQL Server is an interesting example, because it has gained market share not only through its business SW monopoly, but extended that monopoly through actual innovation and quality. But also through the synergy with its business SW monopoly and its developer market share that it gained through that monopoly.
The rest of what you say about MS is true. It's a symptom of its monopoly advantages. In fact MS benefits from sitting on good developers, even if it doesn't get better products from them, by denying them to the competition. More monopoly strategies.
The main problem with Microsoft is that they have abused their monopoly power to clog the innovation with anti-competitive software and market strategies for decades. Their crap software dominating through monopoly and other unfair competition is deadweight that has divided and slowed personal technology, and saddled it with all kinds of legacies that benefit no one but Microsoft.
So nobody will ever be considered for Supreme Court positions that doesn't believe in "case law" as a religion.
The Supreme Court is not bound by case law. In fact one of the main differences in the Supreme Court is its independence from case law, because case law is what is used to determine the lower court decisions that are being reconsidered in the SC. However, nominees to the Court are routinely asked during Senate confirmation hearings whether they agree with "Stare Decisis", the doctrine of case law, precedent, even in specific cases. The popular "Conservative" scam to get around that challenge is to answer with the contrived doctrine "Originalism" ("original intent", AKA "historical mind reading").
But in the case of Bush Jr's appointees to the current Court, they just agreed that Stare Decisis governs their decisions, then defy it, as in the Citizens United case. But this entire court is the product of Bush v Gore 2000, in which the Court invented a doctrine ignoring all other precedent and exempting their decision as a precedent ("applies only in the present circumstances").
In other words, the Supreme Court is as legitimate as is the economy we created with the bailouts of the failed economy. The current Court, along with the rest of the government, demonstrated that the US rule of law was entirely a product of adherence to customs, rather than a system of laws itself. Within a decade anything inconvenient to the privately powerful was ignored by the public powers. Consistency and justice are clearly maintained only for the illusion of the rule of law.
Now, all that could mean that as the culture of the people with power change, the US could return to the rule of law it convincingly maintained for a couple of centuries (with other notable, perhaps precedential, exceptions). That culture can be changed by popular effort, or by fads among the aristocrats. It could mean that a long backlash changes the system so that power really is checked and balanced, instead of maintained as a co-dependent cartel among branches and factions. Simple readings of the Constitution could be possible as the Court rolls over past its current low point.
Or it could mean a violent revolution. Which is almost certain to make things worse. The US birth in a war, rather than in a vote or negotiation, is a defining part of what's kept the rule of law from being its root rather than its evolution, and kept the rule of force majeure its actual basis.
It's fascinating to watch Microsoft fail in market after market where it didn't start with a monopoly, like in mobile devices generally, phones specifically, tablets specifically, media generally, mobile media players specifically, and everything else.
Except for mouse and keyboard, and in games both console and PC. Why are those different from the rest? Maybe because mouse and keyboard are just extensions of the Windows brand monopoly on the desktop, with no real brand competition whatsoever. And maybe in games the competitors each have their own monopolies, and the competition is the kind Microsoft likes: based on spending a lot of money and running a corrupt supply chain / marketing system rather than on quality.
Except most adults already have learned to read the characters, so the years of practice aren't necessary. The packaging of barcodes in fonts is just more argument to use human readable fonts that machines can read instead of ones only machines can read. It would be very straightforward to switch the software, and prohibitively difficult (though purely in principle possible) to switch the humans.
Your metaphor is a bad argument for you, because using the same font for both machine and human reading does not present dangers to humans the way driving cars on sidewalks does. The point of your metaphor is that content for machine consumption and human consumption should be kept segregated. But that is inconvenient for humans, the way it would be inconvenient to never let humans walk in streets (parades, crosswalks).
Also, just as OCR fonts are less prone to machine reading error than human-only fonts, so are QR codes only less prone to error than OCR fonts. There's always an error rate, as in any decoding of anything. OCR rates with a standardized font are low enough, just as QR code error rates are low enough without being perfect.
The extra machine resources to parse OCR instead of barcode are available. The point of the machines is human convenience, not machine convenience. QR codes that humans can't read are inconvenient, and also a security risk as this article we're discussing points out.
Barcode is not OCR. Not all optical scans are OCR. "Characters" are different from bitmaps that humans can't read.
QR codes are a regression towards barcodes, away from OCR.
The MICR charset could certainly be extended (in style or in principle) to a 40-something charset required for URL encoding. Then people could read the URL before retrieving it. And just like with obfuscated clickable URLs, if they don't trust what they see, they can opt not to retrieve it. People should not click IP# URLs they don't somehow know, and many do not. With QR codes, the trust phase is solely determined by the context, not the content, which means nobody considers the trust, and hence the malicious QR code on the rise.
It's funny you should dismiss this clear security risk as paranoia in a comment posted anonymously.
How soon before the US extrajudicially targets for execution US citizens inside the US, but kills the wrong people as "collateral damage". I expect the police state has now collected enough un-Constitutional laws to do it all "legally". If their scenario comes from the recent accusations of some Iranian expat of trying to contract with a Mexican drug mob, and kills some "drug dealers", the police state will have the power to execute anyone without even pressing charges, starting with the secret kidnapping of people tortured for false confessions to execute those people. A small escalation of drug policy makes millions of medical marijuana users (all registered) into legitimate targets, and many millions more meth and oxy users. Of course foreigners and US citizens abroad are even less safe.
And consider that "terrorism" is a political act. Alawlaki probably never committed any act of violence himself, but probably only acts of speech. This system is designed to kill political opponents, even if the inaugural targets are part of a political group actually making war on the US government. That last distinction is not necessary under these laws, only to slide it into US policy without resistance.
Until a Supreme Court is available that will decide in favor of the plain reading of the Constitution, not some contrived "original intent" or arbitrary invention, this police state will be an apparatus with those functions. Given the self-perpetuation of decisions like Bush v Gore, PATRIOT Acts, and Citizens United, there seems to be no hope.
These two were probably actually terrorists. But according to what, to whom? If they were what the military says they were, then they were US citizens guilty of treason, their citizenship strippable, and subject to the death penalty. But US citizens have the right to due process, and no due process convicted them of treason. No due process at all, concluding nothing. Instead, somebody said they were targets, and they were executed. There is no check or balance on this extrajudicial execution of Americans, no penalty except the grumbling of the usual people powerless to change it, like me
So now when the government has a political enemy, which is all that anyone is until convicted of a crime, it can execute them. Of course the policy is kicked off with someone everyone wants dead. But when people finally complain about someone not as hated, it will be too late: the law, precedents, and accepted practice will all have enshrined this most fundamental violation of American rights.
Phone displays and cameras are routinely in the megapixel range. As I pointed out, the image can be processed at the server. I don't see why practically every smartphone, and most featurephones, can't do the OCR.
Just being rich doesn't mean you should be referred to as "the 1%" even if it's statistically true. In fact the people "the 1%" refers to are mostly in the top 0.01% of income collectors. The term is self-defining: the richest people who pervert our government to remain the richest people, without consequence.
You are citing what the people in this group of extremely successful bureaucrats, politicians, and other top 1%ers are saying about their group publicly as it launches. As I pointed out, they also say some lies to get what they want, obvious from even scratching their surface. Everyone talks "fiscal conservative" until they get the power to spend, then they spend. This group is full of people who have spent and spent public money, mainly on military, intel and protecting polluters (petrofuel corps). The most glaring target for spending cuts is the military/intel budgets that went absolutely nuts during the Bush/Cheney war epoch, but which were already nuts during the Clinton "peace dividend" epoch, and really got nuts during the Reagan/Bush Cold War climax. These people were responsible for that spending, and there is no reason to believe they'll do anything but make it worse. No matter what they say now.
Show me some people who actually risked something to balance public budgets while getting a product worth buying, and who succeeded. Or even who failed, but who took the hit for taking the risk in the face of unbeaten odds. There are very few, but without them there's no real reason to believe anyone who says they'll do that.
Really I don't think there will be anything but extreme ripoffs of the public unless a few things change, more or less in combination. People have to get info from more verifiable sources than TV, newspapers and talk radio, or even from online corporate media outlets; better software that combines sources into a completer but still comprehensible story, or more generations of "blogging" that includes verified crowdsourced content that levels the playing field against the corporate outlets. Campaign finance reform that reduces the amount of money spent campaigning to well under a dollar per voter, and absolutely equal among all candidates (I've got my own plans). And auditing every elected official (and ex) every couple of years. Better informed voters, less bribed officials: the more of that, the more accountable the government, and the less it'll spend on waste and corruption.
FWIW, I posted what I did not to encourage anyone to give them no further attention. To the contrary: I plan to keep my attention on them when I can spare it, and I hope everyone else does as much as they can (so I can benefit from what they find). I'm glad you found it useful. I certainly don't want any automatic persuasion. I want you to persuade yourself, based on facts and logic that maybe I can help uncover.
What makes you think random grope-points won't be set up if someone else wins the election? The other guys are the ones who got us into this grope regime - Obama's to blame for keeping it going. The rest would just escalate it, as they always have.
What do you mean "overboard"? You mean "invade Iraq and let Binladen go for a decade"?
The government went overboard because the people running it want to spend $TRILLIONS on something that people didn't want to until the government convinced them it would protect them from another 9/11/2001 planebombing. And then going overboard killed many more Americans, cost far more money, and actually destroyed our freedoms far more than the planebombings did.
I've never worried about dying in a plane based on safety stats. Once in a while when I actually fell from the sky for a while I had my worries;), but not because 1 in 6.4M is any more worth worrying about than 1 in 7.4M.
But there is the very real risk of getting fondled by TSA, or baked under some extra full-body x-rays, that happens to many thousands out of every 6.4M or 7.1M passengers. And which does practically nothing to keep any of us from dying in a plane.
I don't understand why QR codes are needed. Why can't the camera use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) instead? Maybe a standard font that's easy for OCR to read, like that MICR font they invented for check numbering in the 1960s. Maybe at first the phone just sends the image up to a server, for 3D->2D reformation and reading. But it would eliminate this problem.
And also the IDN homograph attack that will surely become more widespread with the increase in Unicode in the Web and gradually in URLs. Your phone would be set to decode the URLs as your home character set, that you recognize, for opening as a URL - not the arbitrary URL composed of the similar looking but different valued Unicode characters.
There is the certainty of both voter intimidation and vote buying. That is what non-anonymous elections have proven throughout the past and around the world.
Besides, apart from making vote corruption worse, identified voting doesn't do anything to interfere with it.
What we really need is to prohibit parties altogether as political racketeering. Of course that won't happen any time soon, if ever.
But what we could maybe get sooner is to defund political parties. Every party, especially the duopoly, gets subsidies from the public in running their primary elections and other activities, which should end - especially the larger share gained by the larger parties.
Another way out from under these parties would be to enforce a policy they have gotten put into law that lets them raise unlimited money for their candidates, outside the avoidable limits directly on the parties. "501c" orgs are now allowed to raise unlimited money, and spend it on ads and other campaigning, but are prohibited from "coordinating" with the candidate or their campaign. It's not much to protect us from the expanded racketeering, but it's something. Which is something that should be applied to the political parties, too. Why are they more privileged than some other people, that they can coordinate with the candidate and raise unlimited money they spend in coordination with that candidate? Just another unfair advantage. They should not be allowed to coordinate with the candidate or their campaign. Certainly they shouldn't be paying unlimited money they raise to candidates who then rule the country. Who owe their power to the gang that paid and organized for them to be elected - a gang that then tells them how to vote, as everyone knows they do.
Ultimately no one should be able to give any money directly to anyone running for office. Anyone should be able to give money to a single shared account that everyone running for a single office can draw from equally, if there's any doubt they have the money to "get their message out" or organize getting onto ballots. Anyone should be able to spend money saying whatever they want (as long as it's true), on TV or elsewhere, but not giving money to a candidate, their campaign, or to someone giving to them or their campaign. Paying money isn't speech; speaking is speech. All of which would destroy the parties, since they're primarily a money laundering syndicate (and a policy setting syndicate in return). And crank way down the amount spent campaigning, which would crank way down the extravagant special effects bought instead of articulating a clear message the public can hold a candidate to. And of course delete the primary source of bribery and corruption that has gotten ever more out of control, every time these crooks pass a new law for themselves and their cronies.
Just because it's not one of the other two, major parties, or one of the several minor parties, doesn't make it "a credible, nonpartisan ticket that pushes alternative centrist solutions to the growing problems America's current political leadership seems unwilling or unable to tackle." It makes it a different party, which is by definition partisan.
And practically every party claims to offer only "a credible ticket that pushes alternative centrist solutions to blah blah blah".
This new party might have something to offer. But painting it as a non-partisan effort is lying.
But what else do you expect from a party organized by the 1%? How about calling itself non-partisan while organizing itself as a party:
AE states that it is “non-partisan” in its approach, and also claims that it is not a political party. However, to get a ballot line in some States you have to identify as a political party. Also, their draft by-lawscontain this section:
“Section 7.2. Transition to National Organization. Pending the formation of state committees, the Board of Americans Elect shall be deemed to be acting in each state as an authorized state committee and to perform and exercise all duties, powers and responsibilities of a state committee as may be required by state law. In states where Americans Elect has met all statutory requirements to form a minor political party, such organizations shall be considered separate legal entities from Americans Elect, and shall be governed by the Board pending qualification as a national political party in accordance with law in the 2012 election.
This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading.
Campaign finance reformers have already condemned Americans Elect for switching its organizational status under the Tax Code from political organization to 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. This change allows an organization to shield its donors. The group, which says it has raised $22 million of its $30 million goal, insists that it doesn’t have to be registered as a political organization, with publicly disclosed donors, because it is not a political party.
So it defines itself as a party to get on the ballot, but with a legal invention to fund itself as a "social welfare org" to keep its donors secret. It is known, however, that its $5M seed money came from a hedge funder. Its founding board has people who were Bush's EPA Director and previous FBI and CIA directors, among similar backgrounds.
Note that I am not saying that's any different from the other parties. In fact, I'm saying it's not any different.
US laws do not protect foreign publishers in foreign countries, which have their own laws.
Which is why the US is now working on changing the law to make publishers not just liable for posts, but subject to takedowns by the US government without even proving the accusation. Which is why we must stop SOPA, to protect our freedom better than it's protected elsewhere.
Yes, courts currently have to rule the website is immune from legal consequences of non-moderated posts, because that's what the current law (DMCA) says.
Which is exactly why the current Congress is working to pass SOPA, which would criminalize those posts, and give the government the power to shut it down.
This is the same government that is now killing American citizens who haven't been proven to have committed any crime or offense, but have been only accused by someone in the bureaucracy. The same government that just gave itself the power to kidnap American citizens even inside the US and imprison them forever, in secret, without even charging them with a crime, let alone proving anything about them.
And if they pass SOPA, they will have the power to shut down any website where anyone posts a complaint about it. Accusations of copyright violation, accusations of terrorism, whatever is convenient to the law without any proof required will get it shut down. Your rights are nothing; government power and its corporate sponsors' money is everything.
That's why you should do something to stop SOPA (and its Senate partner PIPA). Before it's too late, and SOPA deletes any website where you might even try.
No, I didn't find it incomprehensible. I understood it enough to boil it down to what I wrote. That's not what you said, but it's what you mean.
All you're really saying is that you'll pay Wikipedia if it includes ads, so long as they're small. And then once they have the money from small ads you'll give them money they won't need.
The big banners are clearly designed to be disruptive, the way on-air pledge drives at public radio stations are designed to draw attention in a context that's normally without ads, as an organizing principle. Because these orgs are communities with trust and communication that is degraded by advertising common to their medium, even when it's non-intrusive.
Of course Wikipedia has many options besides the two you said are its only options. It's your dogmatic commitment to fallacies that makes me suspicious of content you might add to Wikipedia. Which is now reinforced by your inability to see them even when they're pointed out to you succinctly.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I was surprised to learn just how (extremely) high up in the 99% I am, though I have and continue to make a lot of money. I was kinda shocked to learn this year that the median personal income is only about $26K. Though I live/work in NYC, which is 1% land, even for people living like the 10% everywhere but on triple the income.
But indeed I realized all that only when OWS put "the 1%/the 99%" into the meme pool, and I wondered where I stood in it. I'm sure a lot of people also started looking at themselves in that frame for the first time this year (one reason I've never seen the income boundary of the 1% mentioned on TV, even after OWS and "the 99%" got some coverage).
I don't think a violent revolution is the way it will go. I think the country will continue to dumb down, the 1% media feed Americans a culture of distraction and division, so people are constantly scared of each other more than of the predators, while insisting on protecting the rich to protect their unreachable dream of becoming rich. The 1% is extremely sophisticated in its control, and has better modeling of the 99% all the time, and more complete data. The populace is awash in illegal stimulants that people have accepted losing their rights over, and even more awash in legal anxiety neutralizers that get people to accept anything that's explained away. Huxley's Brave New World looks more plausible every day.
On the other hand, the main advantage of the 1% is their organization and media infrastructure, which gives them a worldview in which to operate according to their self-interest. Which they use to pervert the worldview of the 99%, who cannot operate in their distorted worldview effectively enough to change things, or even to see their own self-interest. But network media levels that playing field. It's why SOPA and PIPPA are so important to the 1%, and rocketing through Congress. It's why the DMCA immunity decided in the story we're discussing is so important, and why SOPA threatens it. A large, dynamic, technologized society like America's, and its global associates, can really defy most expectations, even pretty quickly. So there's hope. Partly because it's too early, even if several watersheds have been passed. But also partly because without hope, there's doom, and insisting on hope is necessary if there's going to be hope. Life is complicated, and plenty of surprises are pleasant.
Happy New Year.
You start with a monopoly by making a deal with IBM as it introduces its first PC, requiring all IBM PCs to run your OS (but letting you license your OS to any competitor to IBM that might arise). I don't know how you missed that - it's pretty common knowledge. In fact it was a Supreme Court decision, if there were any doubt.
MSVC tools and .NET are extensions of the MS monopoly.
SQL Server gained its market share by making a deal similar to the IBM one with Sybase, though MS in that case literally copied Sybase and then used its business SW monopoly to kill first Sybase, then nearly all its other competitors. SQL Server is an interesting example, because it has gained market share not only through its business SW monopoly, but extended that monopoly through actual innovation and quality. But also through the synergy with its business SW monopoly and its developer market share that it gained through that monopoly.
The rest of what you say about MS is true. It's a symptom of its monopoly advantages. In fact MS benefits from sitting on good developers, even if it doesn't get better products from them, by denying them to the competition. More monopoly strategies.
The main problem with Microsoft is that they have abused their monopoly power to clog the innovation with anti-competitive software and market strategies for decades. Their crap software dominating through monopoly and other unfair competition is deadweight that has divided and slowed personal technology, and saddled it with all kinds of legacies that benefit no one but Microsoft.
I disagree with you only here:
The Supreme Court is not bound by case law. In fact one of the main differences in the Supreme Court is its independence from case law, because case law is what is used to determine the lower court decisions that are being reconsidered in the SC. However, nominees to the Court are routinely asked during Senate confirmation hearings whether they agree with "Stare Decisis", the doctrine of case law, precedent, even in specific cases. The popular "Conservative" scam to get around that challenge is to answer with the contrived doctrine "Originalism" ("original intent", AKA "historical mind reading").
But in the case of Bush Jr's appointees to the current Court, they just agreed that Stare Decisis governs their decisions, then defy it, as in the Citizens United case. But this entire court is the product of Bush v Gore 2000, in which the Court invented a doctrine ignoring all other precedent and exempting their decision as a precedent ("applies only in the present circumstances").
In other words, the Supreme Court is as legitimate as is the economy we created with the bailouts of the failed economy. The current Court, along with the rest of the government, demonstrated that the US rule of law was entirely a product of adherence to customs, rather than a system of laws itself. Within a decade anything inconvenient to the privately powerful was ignored by the public powers. Consistency and justice are clearly maintained only for the illusion of the rule of law.
Now, all that could mean that as the culture of the people with power change, the US could return to the rule of law it convincingly maintained for a couple of centuries (with other notable, perhaps precedential, exceptions). That culture can be changed by popular effort, or by fads among the aristocrats. It could mean that a long backlash changes the system so that power really is checked and balanced, instead of maintained as a co-dependent cartel among branches and factions. Simple readings of the Constitution could be possible as the Court rolls over past its current low point.
Or it could mean a violent revolution. Which is almost certain to make things worse. The US birth in a war, rather than in a vote or negotiation, is a defining part of what's kept the rule of law from being its root rather than its evolution, and kept the rule of force majeure its actual basis.
It's fascinating to watch Microsoft fail in market after market where it didn't start with a monopoly, like in mobile devices generally, phones specifically, tablets specifically, media generally, mobile media players specifically, and everything else.
Except for mouse and keyboard, and in games both console and PC. Why are those different from the rest? Maybe because mouse and keyboard are just extensions of the Windows brand monopoly on the desktop, with no real brand competition whatsoever. And maybe in games the competitors each have their own monopolies, and the competition is the kind Microsoft likes: based on spending a lot of money and running a corrupt supply chain / marketing system rather than on quality.
Except most adults already have learned to read the characters, so the years of practice aren't necessary. The packaging of barcodes in fonts is just more argument to use human readable fonts that machines can read instead of ones only machines can read. It would be very straightforward to switch the software, and prohibitively difficult (though purely in principle possible) to switch the humans.
Your metaphor is a bad argument for you, because using the same font for both machine and human reading does not present dangers to humans the way driving cars on sidewalks does. The point of your metaphor is that content for machine consumption and human consumption should be kept segregated. But that is inconvenient for humans, the way it would be inconvenient to never let humans walk in streets (parades, crosswalks).
Also, just as OCR fonts are less prone to machine reading error than human-only fonts, so are QR codes only less prone to error than OCR fonts. There's always an error rate, as in any decoding of anything. OCR rates with a standardized font are low enough, just as QR code error rates are low enough without being perfect.
The extra machine resources to parse OCR instead of barcode are available. The point of the machines is human convenience, not machine convenience. QR codes that humans can't read are inconvenient, and also a security risk as this article we're discussing points out.
Barcode is not OCR. Not all optical scans are OCR. "Characters" are different from bitmaps that humans can't read.
QR codes are a regression towards barcodes, away from OCR.
The MICR charset could certainly be extended (in style or in principle) to a 40-something charset required for URL encoding. Then people could read the URL before retrieving it. And just like with obfuscated clickable URLs, if they don't trust what they see, they can opt not to retrieve it. People should not click IP# URLs they don't somehow know, and many do not. With QR codes, the trust phase is solely determined by the context, not the content, which means nobody considers the trust, and hence the malicious QR code on the rise.
It's funny you should dismiss this clear security risk as paranoia in a comment posted anonymously.
That is correct.
How soon before the US extrajudicially targets for execution US citizens inside the US, but kills the wrong people as "collateral damage". I expect the police state has now collected enough un-Constitutional laws to do it all "legally". If their scenario comes from the recent accusations of some Iranian expat of trying to contract with a Mexican drug mob, and kills some "drug dealers", the police state will have the power to execute anyone without even pressing charges, starting with the secret kidnapping of people tortured for false confessions to execute those people. A small escalation of drug policy makes millions of medical marijuana users (all registered) into legitimate targets, and many millions more meth and oxy users. Of course foreigners and US citizens abroad are even less safe.
And consider that "terrorism" is a political act. Alawlaki probably never committed any act of violence himself, but probably only acts of speech. This system is designed to kill political opponents, even if the inaugural targets are part of a political group actually making war on the US government. That last distinction is not necessary under these laws, only to slide it into US policy without resistance.
Until a Supreme Court is available that will decide in favor of the plain reading of the Constitution, not some contrived "original intent" or arbitrary invention, this police state will be an apparatus with those functions. Given the self-perpetuation of decisions like Bush v Gore, PATRIOT Acts, and Citizens United, there seems to be no hope.
Anwar Alawlaki and Samir Khan were American citizens targeted and killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in September.
These two were probably actually terrorists. But according to what, to whom? If they were what the military says they were, then they were US citizens guilty of treason, their citizenship strippable, and subject to the death penalty. But US citizens have the right to due process, and no due process convicted them of treason. No due process at all, concluding nothing. Instead, somebody said they were targets, and they were executed. There is no check or balance on this extrajudicial execution of Americans, no penalty except the grumbling of the usual people powerless to change it, like me
So now when the government has a political enemy, which is all that anyone is until convicted of a crime, it can execute them. Of course the policy is kicked off with someone everyone wants dead. But when people finally complain about someone not as hated, it will be too late: the law, precedents, and accepted practice will all have enshrined this most fundamental violation of American rights.
As I pointed out, there are letters designed to be read by both humans and machines, which reduces the malicious QR code use we're discussing.
Phone displays and cameras are routinely in the megapixel range. As I pointed out, the image can be processed at the server. I don't see why practically every smartphone, and most featurephones, can't do the OCR.
Just being rich doesn't mean you should be referred to as "the 1%" even if it's statistically true. In fact the people "the 1%" refers to are mostly in the top 0.01% of income collectors. The term is self-defining: the richest people who pervert our government to remain the richest people, without consequence.
You are citing what the people in this group of extremely successful bureaucrats, politicians, and other top 1%ers are saying about their group publicly as it launches. As I pointed out, they also say some lies to get what they want, obvious from even scratching their surface. Everyone talks "fiscal conservative" until they get the power to spend, then they spend. This group is full of people who have spent and spent public money, mainly on military, intel and protecting polluters (petrofuel corps). The most glaring target for spending cuts is the military/intel budgets that went absolutely nuts during the Bush/Cheney war epoch, but which were already nuts during the Clinton "peace dividend" epoch, and really got nuts during the Reagan/Bush Cold War climax. These people were responsible for that spending, and there is no reason to believe they'll do anything but make it worse. No matter what they say now.
Show me some people who actually risked something to balance public budgets while getting a product worth buying, and who succeeded. Or even who failed, but who took the hit for taking the risk in the face of unbeaten odds. There are very few, but without them there's no real reason to believe anyone who says they'll do that.
Really I don't think there will be anything but extreme ripoffs of the public unless a few things change, more or less in combination. People have to get info from more verifiable sources than TV, newspapers and talk radio, or even from online corporate media outlets; better software that combines sources into a completer but still comprehensible story, or more generations of "blogging" that includes verified crowdsourced content that levels the playing field against the corporate outlets. Campaign finance reform that reduces the amount of money spent campaigning to well under a dollar per voter, and absolutely equal among all candidates (I've got my own plans). And auditing every elected official (and ex) every couple of years. Better informed voters, less bribed officials: the more of that, the more accountable the government, and the less it'll spend on waste and corruption.
FWIW, I posted what I did not to encourage anyone to give them no further attention. To the contrary: I plan to keep my attention on them when I can spare it, and I hope everyone else does as much as they can (so I can benefit from what they find). I'm glad you found it useful. I certainly don't want any automatic persuasion. I want you to persuade yourself, based on facts and logic that maybe I can help uncover.
What makes you think random grope-points won't be set up if someone else wins the election? The other guys are the ones who got us into this grope regime - Obama's to blame for keeping it going. The rest would just escalate it, as they always have.
What do you mean "overboard"? You mean "invade Iraq and let Binladen go for a decade"?
The government went overboard because the people running it want to spend $TRILLIONS on something that people didn't want to until the government convinced them it would protect them from another 9/11/2001 planebombing. And then going overboard killed many more Americans, cost far more money, and actually destroyed our freedoms far more than the planebombings did.
FWIW, I'm from NYC, and I approve this message.
I have cut down on my flying since the TSA got so invasive. It's definitely a factor when choosing the hassle of flying over doing something else.
And I'm sure I'm far from the only one.
I've never worried about dying in a plane based on safety stats. Once in a while when I actually fell from the sky for a while I had my worries ;), but not because 1 in 6.4M is any more worth worrying about than 1 in 7.4M.
But there is the very real risk of getting fondled by TSA, or baked under some extra full-body x-rays, that happens to many thousands out of every 6.4M or 7.1M passengers. And which does practically nothing to keep any of us from dying in a plane.
I don't understand why QR codes are needed. Why can't the camera use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) instead? Maybe a standard font that's easy for OCR to read, like that MICR font they invented for check numbering in the 1960s. Maybe at first the phone just sends the image up to a server, for 3D->2D reformation and reading. But it would eliminate this problem.
And also the IDN homograph attack that will surely become more widespread with the increase in Unicode in the Web and gradually in URLs. Your phone would be set to decode the URLs as your home character set, that you recognize, for opening as a URL - not the arbitrary URL composed of the similar looking but different valued Unicode characters.
WYSIWYG URLs. An idea whose time has come.
There is the certainty of both voter intimidation and vote buying. That is what non-anonymous elections have proven throughout the past and around the world.
Besides, apart from making vote corruption worse, identified voting doesn't do anything to interfere with it.
Thanks man. We're all in it together.
What we really need is to prohibit parties altogether as political racketeering. Of course that won't happen any time soon, if ever.
But what we could maybe get sooner is to defund political parties. Every party, especially the duopoly, gets subsidies from the public in running their primary elections and other activities, which should end - especially the larger share gained by the larger parties.
Another way out from under these parties would be to enforce a policy they have gotten put into law that lets them raise unlimited money for their candidates, outside the avoidable limits directly on the parties. "501c" orgs are now allowed to raise unlimited money, and spend it on ads and other campaigning, but are prohibited from "coordinating" with the candidate or their campaign. It's not much to protect us from the expanded racketeering, but it's something. Which is something that should be applied to the political parties, too. Why are they more privileged than some other people, that they can coordinate with the candidate and raise unlimited money they spend in coordination with that candidate? Just another unfair advantage. They should not be allowed to coordinate with the candidate or their campaign. Certainly they shouldn't be paying unlimited money they raise to candidates who then rule the country. Who owe their power to the gang that paid and organized for them to be elected - a gang that then tells them how to vote, as everyone knows they do.
Ultimately no one should be able to give any money directly to anyone running for office. Anyone should be able to give money to a single shared account that everyone running for a single office can draw from equally, if there's any doubt they have the money to "get their message out" or organize getting onto ballots. Anyone should be able to spend money saying whatever they want (as long as it's true), on TV or elsewhere, but not giving money to a candidate, their campaign, or to someone giving to them or their campaign. Paying money isn't speech; speaking is speech. All of which would destroy the parties, since they're primarily a money laundering syndicate (and a policy setting syndicate in return). And crank way down the amount spent campaigning, which would crank way down the extravagant special effects bought instead of articulating a clear message the public can hold a candidate to. And of course delete the primary source of bribery and corruption that has gotten ever more out of control, every time these crooks pass a new law for themselves and their cronies.
Just because it's not one of the other two, major parties, or one of the several minor parties, doesn't make it "a credible, nonpartisan ticket that pushes alternative centrist solutions to the growing problems America's current political leadership seems unwilling or unable to tackle." It makes it a different party, which is by definition partisan.
And practically every party claims to offer only "a credible ticket that pushes alternative centrist solutions to blah blah blah".
This new party might have something to offer. But painting it as a non-partisan effort is lying.
But what else do you expect from a party organized by the 1%? How about calling itself non-partisan while organizing itself as a party:
You can expect secrecy and total control by its directing board:
So it defines itself as a party to get on the ballot, but with a legal invention to fund itself as a "social welfare org" to keep its donors secret. It is known, however, that its $5M seed money came from a hedge funder. Its founding board has people who were Bush's EPA Director and previous FBI and CIA directors, among similar backgrounds.
Note that I am not saying that's any different from the other parties. In fact, I'm saying it's not any different.
US laws do not protect foreign publishers in foreign countries, which have their own laws.
Which is why the US is now working on changing the law to make publishers not just liable for posts, but subject to takedowns by the US government without even proving the accusation. Which is why we must stop SOPA, to protect our freedom better than it's protected elsewhere.
Yes, courts currently have to rule the website is immune from legal consequences of non-moderated posts, because that's what the current law (DMCA) says.
Which is exactly why the current Congress is working to pass SOPA, which would criminalize those posts, and give the government the power to shut it down.
This is the same government that is now killing American citizens who haven't been proven to have committed any crime or offense, but have been only accused by someone in the bureaucracy. The same government that just gave itself the power to kidnap American citizens even inside the US and imprison them forever, in secret, without even charging them with a crime, let alone proving anything about them.
And if they pass SOPA, they will have the power to shut down any website where anyone posts a complaint about it. Accusations of copyright violation, accusations of terrorism, whatever is convenient to the law without any proof required will get it shut down. Your rights are nothing; government power and its corporate sponsors' money is everything.
That's why you should do something to stop SOPA (and its Senate partner PIPA). Before it's too late, and SOPA deletes any website where you might even try.
No, I didn't find it incomprehensible. I understood it enough to boil it down to what I wrote. That's not what you said, but it's what you mean.
All you're really saying is that you'll pay Wikipedia if it includes ads, so long as they're small. And then once they have the money from small ads you'll give them money they won't need.
The big banners are clearly designed to be disruptive, the way on-air pledge drives at public radio stations are designed to draw attention in a context that's normally without ads, as an organizing principle. Because these orgs are communities with trust and communication that is degraded by advertising common to their medium, even when it's non-intrusive.
Of course Wikipedia has many options besides the two you said are its only options. It's your dogmatic commitment to fallacies that makes me suspicious of content you might add to Wikipedia. Which is now reinforced by your inability to see them even when they're pointed out to you succinctly.
So because you object to the ads in Wikipedia (the please donate banners), you will not give Wikipedia the money that lets them not have ads.
I'd like to know which articles you edit there, so I can judge the content accordingly.