Translation: "We did some things we thought would work, and then later we stopped doing the things that weren't working and did more of the things that were." In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
You'd be surprised to know how much of the real world operates on things they believe to work rather than having any proof that it's effective. For example I remember one person telling me about this new program they created to work with young criminals. He had suggested they give it to 50% of them, using the other as a control group. That was shot down in flames, of course this worked and no juvenile should go without such a program from now on. Did it work? Is this well spent money or a waste of resources? Who the fuck knows, since society changes so you can't say shit comparing old statistics to new statistics. The irony was they said this was "too important" to not provide help, while health care that deal with real life and death situations would never use medication they had no clue if worked or not.
It's a little better on the private side but there's a helluva lot of things that are done on pure belief, you may have had some very persuasive business cases and PowerPoint presentations at the start of the project but very rarely is it properly followed up at the end of the project if the goals were actually achieved - if they were even properly defined, quantifiable and measurable to begin with. Of course sometimes projects go wrong for reasons that were impossible to predict when the project was started, but most often not. Most companies just want to bury the failed project and not try deconstructing why they started a project with such flawed plans, requirements and goals. Usually because it'll reflect poorly on some executive who authorized it.
prompting a legal review by the highest legal court in the country. If the bill/law is found to be bad
I'm sorry, but how could a court possibly decide if a law is good or bad? That would make the Supreme Court into some kind of unelected super-parliament of nine deciding on their own whim what laws to keep and not. Yes, they can say if a law is constitutional or not but they don't form any opinion of whether that's good or bad, Congress has passed both the law and the constitution and the Supreme Court only make sure they're consistent. Despite all the flaws in the US election system, putting the democratically elected Congress at the mercy of an small circle of appointed-for-life Supreme Justices is a really, really bad idea.
the drafter is found to have drafted it specifically to benefit the interests of companies/people they are personally involved with (like insider trading, except for law) then the law should be repealed
Insider trading means using inside information, even if the lawmakers write laws for campaign contribution kickbacks that's not abuse of any privileged information. It's just a "if you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" arrangement that's both very common and in most cases completely legal.
Well, the Greens are typically in favor of regulations on emissions, taxes on polluting or otherwise environmentally harmful products and restrictions on destroying nature. That's usually enough to qualify as "far left" in American politics where ~50% is Republicans and Libertarians and oppose anything that remotely smells like government interference, it's more that if you go far enough right everything else looks like the far left.
Exactly. And that is only part of the point: how can linking be a crime, when even downloading isn't a crime. ("Piracy" is, but downloading is not piracy, according to the legal definition. Downloading is merely infringement, a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime, but in order to be piracy (generally speaking), it has to involve mass distribution of copyrighted materials for profit.
That's not +5 Informative, it's wrong. USC 17506(a)(1)(B):
by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
Did you see "reproduction" there? That's what you do when you download, it's been confirmed many times by the courts. The uploader distributes, the downloader reproduces. So if you download say the Adobe Master Collection ($2599 retail price) you are a criminal, not just a civil infringement. Criminal copyright infringement is actually more of an OR than an AND, either for profit OR distribution of high value OR in large quantity OR reproduction of high value OR in large quantity OR distributing an unpublished work OR a movie in cinemas but not on sale. That is, there are many ways to commit criminal infringement without it being for profit. The main reason it's used much less is that it's harder to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt), needs a public prosecution, you get all the benefits of a trial like the right to a lawyer and by itself the copyright holders aren't making any money on it - except possibly the scare factor.
Sure, but there is a huge difference between linking to the front page and links to specific pages that exist only to facilitate copyright infringement of one particular item. It's like a guy asking you "Do you know where I can get some drugs?" and the difference between you answering "Try the phone book." and "Here's the number for a dealer I know." A lot of people like to pretend the phone book and your guide book to local drug dealers with phone numbers are one and the same, because they both contain phone numbers and have ads. Just like both Google and The Pirate Bay contain links. In the words of a guy trying to sell me a fake Rolex, "same same but different".
You're the one who said Facebook Page with a capital p, the quote didn't. The original sentence could refer to anywhere on Facebook's site. Now if the government was doing anything illegal, you wouldn't expect them to be blatant about it would you? They'd of course have some sort of excuse, some sort of explanation as to where the lead came from. We already know Facebook monitors all "private" communication, they've admitted as much when identifying a guy trying to groom girls. Of course that probably means a ton of other conversations gets flagged and looked at, without you ever knowing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Facebook also has an agreement to look for possible terrorists, drug deals and whatever else the government might have an interest in knowing. Nothing you say there should be treated as private, ever.
I know a friend of mine who did something more or less the same, the pay was extremely good, fancy company car, big travel benefits - in return they basically owned his life, not only the long hours but he could be bounced around to any place they needed him to work. When you're young and single you can pretty much do this, put your life on pause for half a year or a year and make a buttload of money. It was also a case of "been there, done that, downpaid my loans and got my economic freedom, never again".
I remember seeing a documentary on the TV this weekend about some spoiled brats who were sent on a trip to discover how hard other people had to work for their money. Their first stop was a sapphire mine in Africa where it was hard physical labor, six long days a week for the local minimum wage - basically enough for food and practically nothing else. Compared to that you're still in your comfy chair in your air-conditioned office, it's not like long coding sessions will kill anyone. Sure I could do it, that I don't want to is an entire matter entirely.
Only if your definition of quick only includes time elapsed between take off and landing. Definitely not that fast if you time door to door and include everything.
Depends on where you are, going 5-600 km here in Norway my choices are: 1. Airport express + airplane + airport bus = 3.5 hours 2. Train: 6.5 hours 3. Bus: 8 hours
Could it be done in 2-3 hours if we had 250-300 km/h rail? Yes. But we're not going to get that because it'd cost billions of dollars building tunnels and bridges and keeping it clear of snow and ice in the winter. And dealing with a moose impact is a big problem at 300 km/h. But we can build airports on each end, ignoring the whole problem.
Also, why isn't a 'medium' class anymore? One would think that any company that provided decent legroom at a reasonable price would make a killing.
I know at least some airplane companies have this, search for "Economy Comfort", KLM, Delta and Iceland Air do at least. And many companies now let you pay your way to the emergency exit seats that have extra legroom.
The less people respect the idea of IP, the more draconian enforcement you need. The divide between the public opinion on one side and the law, the entertainment industry and their lobbyists on the other side is growing. What you see as a crackdown I see as desperation, as more and more obnoxious threats are required to keep the population at bay. They're not winning the hearts and minds of the young generation, they're just hoping to intimidate them into not file sharing. Most people don't kill because they feel it's wrong, not because the law says so. The situation is like a rubber band being stretched and stretched but sooner or later it will snap.
The Pirate Bay is still running after 9 years and is still among the world's top 100 websites, Game of Thrones is now more downloaded than watched on HBO, taking down megaupload didn't really do anything more than taking down suprnova did for torrents and the pirate parties are making progress. It's not like they're winning, it's not even like they're standing their ground. Every small victory they've scored is like a small dam against a rising tide. You're right, I don't expect the fight to be over in 10 years, but I expect them to still be on the losing side trying to hold it all together.
Those resources may be limited, but from an individual's point of view they might not be. A famous celebrity may find that there are paparazzis following her all the time, the police can be following a suspected mafia boss almost constantly. People can hire private investigators to follow their SO around because they suspect they're sleeping with somebody else, no celebrity status or criminal activity required. Hell, if you avoid harassing them and turning into a stalker you can probably do it yourself. If no right is being violated when it happens to one person, why should their rights be violated when it happens to everyone? It's very different from when say the NSA wiretaps domestic phone calls without warrant, because wiretapping one phone call would also be a violation.
We are just going to have to deal with it. Eventually the patents will expire and it will no longer be a problem; we just have to make the mistake of not choosing an encumbered standard NEXT TIME once h.264 is obsolete.
Doubtful, the work on HEVC is already in draft status and will probably be submitted for final approval in January 2013. That said, the significance is going down, for example I don't think many people outside technical communities care much about MP3 vs AAC vs OGG Vorbis anymore. With fiber and other superbroadband rolling out H.264 vs HEVC might not make that huge a difference. I know at least with myself that I manage to download everything I want just fine with H.264, sure it'd be nice if it took half the bandwidth and half the disk space but it's not revolutionary.
Protip, Google: if you threaten to pull H.264 support in Chrome in order to strengthen WebM's hand, you need to follow through within at least a couple of years. Otherwise, you just look like a poser chump.
It's called a "credible threat", the H.264 licenses are slump change for Google today. But with YouTube and all they are at a high risk of paying a lot in the future. So they let the MPEG-LA know that if they do pull crap on Google, then Google will go WebM. Lo and behold, the H.264 licensing costs are still reasonable and Google didn't actually want to go through with it. The only people who were played for chumps here is Mozilla, who jumped at it slashdot does whenever someone threatens to move to Linux to bring down their Microsoft licensing cost. Then they get a deal and it all stays Windows/Office/Outlook.
However, and especially in the context of the every increasing ease by which media can be reproduced, until we can devise a new system which suffers from none of the evils and still ensures reward of intellectual labour, our best hope is to point out how badly the system has gone wrong and attempt to steer it back towards health.
The problem is that "to steer it back towards health" for the most part equals "turn back time". As long as you have the following four components, IP is doomed:
1. Computers 2. Internet 3. 1st amendment 4. 4th amendment
Computers means we can create digital copies that can be copied infinitely without loss. Maybe getting our hands on the first copy may be complicated by breaking DRM or recording through the analog hole or whatever, but it's break once play everywhere. Internet means we can have the technical means to distribute it to everyone as an increasingly faster and faster flash mob. While the 1st and 4th amendment doesn't protect copyright violators, it means you generally can't prevent people from communicating in private. The public sites are a convenience but if you'd like to kill piracy you have to take away one of those four. Either turn it into an appliance-only Internet, shut down the Internet or take away some of the Bill of Rights. Or you can accept that technology has moved forward and that the "good old days" are never coming back.
Except what you're describing is not a false flag operation.
False flag (also known as black flag) operations are covert operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.
This may be a disinformation campaign but unless the DOJ is posing as someone else, it's not a false flag.
Sexual harassment is just plain old immature behavior. It isn't a part of Hack Culture.. its a part of immature people who associate with hacker culture.. hmm.. so maybe that should be a yes?
I'd go with correlation, not causation. "Hacker culture" typically comes from young introvert males with weak social antennas. "Sexual harassment" typically come from young introvert males with weak social antennas. That and how like-minded people in a crowd always stretch it further than any one person would individually. So it's a high risk event but I wouldn't say the hacker culture glorifies it in any way.
Stuck up? Do you know *anything* about GPGPU? It's good for embarrassingly parallel problems; video encoding relies on previous frames. It's not at all the right type of problem for GPGPU.
*facepalm* And for each full HD frame there's something like 2 million pixels with 3x8 bit color information to be encoded. There's huge potential for doing all of them in parallel, making it work in code is hard but it's definitively not the wrong type of problem.
Of course, some people are the type who could teach themselves and only show up for the exams but it kind of defeats the point of school or college or university. I remember one in particular that was a Russian with very weak English - and English isn't my native tongue. I still managed to get an A because I knew the textbooks, I gave up on trying to listen to lectures as I'd spend 90% of my energy trying to decipher what the hell he was saying.
Those people are also not on the left. Someone truly on the left is typically in favor of greater personal freedom, not bigger government for government's sake. True left-wing politics requires government to interfere in the lives of individuals only when those individuals hold undue power over others.
Hell no. Speaking from Norway where two out of the three parties in government is the Worker's Party (red) and Socialist Left (redder) I can tell you that left wing is not only about economics. With social programs the government also take on the cost of our unhealthy habits, drinking, smoking, drugs, injuries, disease, obesity and so on. So they come up with plenty restrictions and taxes to make us do it less - for our own good of course. And because the government is so concerned with the well-being of all its citizens, if 99% of the population can handle it fine we still need to ban it because of the 1% that'd get a gambling addiction or blow their face off with fireworks. A good socialist will always interfere when you're doing anything that's harmful to yourself, even when you're perfectly aware of it.
The republicans don't have to promise anything, the economy is so in the crapper people are ready to try something new regardless. If you look at the employment-population ratio in the good years it was 62%, sometimes over 63%. It started falling rapidly in mid-2008 and hit rock bottom in December 2009 with 58.2%, where was it now in July? 58.4%. Of course that includes lots of people that aren't in the labor force but it's more of a honest measure of the economic temperature since people lose their benefits, they get discouraged from apply for jobs, they start studies and other things to stall while they hope the economy gets better. Reality is that it's been at a permanent low for 3 years now with no real hint of recovery.
Politics in the US is a bit strange since it's two parties lobbing the ball over the same fence, it's more about what you do when you have the ball than keeping it - because eventually people will give the other party a shot anyway. So if they manage to win this election then great, they have the political backing for social conservatism and haven't promised any quick fix for the economy. If they lose, well then Obama gets another four years of struggling with a fucked economy that probably isn't going to help them win the next election. The last really long stretch of one party was during WWII, mostly it's 8/4 year ping-pong.
Maybe if you use it non-commercially, but if you say "well, I gave up on your software because I can't easily separate weekday sales and weekend sales" then with 99.9%+ certainty they'll say if you want it, you pay for it. Don't expect nearly the same treatment when you're obviously asking them to help you improve profits for free. There's not a whole lot of people into corporate charity.
That's the key thing. Citizens have to care about the issue. Most citizens are ambivalent about security-vs.-surveillance.
It's more the threat perception, yes you can point to all the nasty stuff that happened with MLK and the civil liberties union or McCarthyism or in the Soviet Union or fascist Europe but to most people that's ancient history from the 1900s, neither the communist nor neonazist ideology hold any real sway in western countries. Sure there's quite a few undemocratic countries but they're not talking about an international socialist revolution like the Soviets did, nor does anyone look likely to want to start WWIII. In short, most people don't see much of a threat from the state. Meanwhile, there are threats from deranged terrorist groups. Getting killed or maimed by terrorists or anyone you know is a pretty real and serious infringement on your liberties too.
The first thing everybody says after a terror attack is that this will not change us and we will go on as before, but it is as much posturing as it is truth. You can't help wonder if that's just someone's forgotten luggage or a bomb, you can't help respond as if it were a bomb. If you did nothing then people would avoid it out of fear and the terrorists win. If you spend billions on extra security the terrorists win. But the terrorists win less if people keep flying after 9/11 than if they didn't, even with TSA groping and naked scanners and the ridiculous restrictions on liquids. You can't ever get back that innocence, but you're trying to restore normality as far as at all possible. People hand them surveillance power to find the really bad men, not to interfere in everyday life but that's what happens. That much power is always abused.
First, going strictly by your requirements, I would suggest either a fireproof safe or fireproof drive enclosure. I don't have experience with the enclosures, but the safe itself should be able to handle your normal everyday fire and protect your data.
Most "fireproof" safes are only designed to keep paper from catching fire, which is higher than a lot of computer media can stand. You need to get a media rated safe, which has more insulation and is more expensive.
However, I'd suggest that you don't store your safe at your location at all. Surely you have a friend or someone you know that would let you borrow a few square feet of their basement for the safe. This would create a physcial barrier that would enhance your securiy if not always convenient
I'd go with a deposit box at a bank, so you don't have to bother your friend all the time. If you want to make regular backups then it better not feel like you're hassling somebody. For the money you save on the fireproof safe you can probably rent one for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "We did some things we thought would work, and then later we stopped doing the things that weren't working and did more of the things that were." In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
You'd be surprised to know how much of the real world operates on things they believe to work rather than having any proof that it's effective. For example I remember one person telling me about this new program they created to work with young criminals. He had suggested they give it to 50% of them, using the other as a control group. That was shot down in flames, of course this worked and no juvenile should go without such a program from now on. Did it work? Is this well spent money or a waste of resources? Who the fuck knows, since society changes so you can't say shit comparing old statistics to new statistics. The irony was they said this was "too important" to not provide help, while health care that deal with real life and death situations would never use medication they had no clue if worked or not.
It's a little better on the private side but there's a helluva lot of things that are done on pure belief, you may have had some very persuasive business cases and PowerPoint presentations at the start of the project but very rarely is it properly followed up at the end of the project if the goals were actually achieved - if they were even properly defined, quantifiable and measurable to begin with. Of course sometimes projects go wrong for reasons that were impossible to predict when the project was started, but most often not. Most companies just want to bury the failed project and not try deconstructing why they started a project with such flawed plans, requirements and goals. Usually because it'll reflect poorly on some executive who authorized it.
prompting a legal review by the highest legal court in the country. If the bill/law is found to be bad
I'm sorry, but how could a court possibly decide if a law is good or bad? That would make the Supreme Court into some kind of unelected super-parliament of nine deciding on their own whim what laws to keep and not. Yes, they can say if a law is constitutional or not but they don't form any opinion of whether that's good or bad, Congress has passed both the law and the constitution and the Supreme Court only make sure they're consistent. Despite all the flaws in the US election system, putting the democratically elected Congress at the mercy of an small circle of appointed-for-life Supreme Justices is a really, really bad idea.
the drafter is found to have drafted it specifically to benefit the interests of companies/people they are personally involved with (like insider trading, except for law) then the law should be repealed
Insider trading means using inside information, even if the lawmakers write laws for campaign contribution kickbacks that's not abuse of any privileged information. It's just a "if you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" arrangement that's both very common and in most cases completely legal.
Well, the Greens are typically in favor of regulations on emissions, taxes on polluting or otherwise environmentally harmful products and restrictions on destroying nature. That's usually enough to qualify as "far left" in American politics where ~50% is Republicans and Libertarians and oppose anything that remotely smells like government interference, it's more that if you go far enough right everything else looks like the far left.
Exactly. And that is only part of the point: how can linking be a crime, when even downloading isn't a crime. ("Piracy" is, but downloading is not piracy, according to the legal definition. Downloading is merely infringement, a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime, but in order to be piracy (generally speaking), it has to involve mass distribution of copyrighted materials for profit.
That's not +5 Informative, it's wrong. USC 17506(a)(1)(B):
by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
Did you see "reproduction" there? That's what you do when you download, it's been confirmed many times by the courts. The uploader distributes, the downloader reproduces. So if you download say the Adobe Master Collection ($2599 retail price) you are a criminal, not just a civil infringement. Criminal copyright infringement is actually more of an OR than an AND, either for profit OR distribution of high value OR in large quantity OR reproduction of high value OR in large quantity OR distributing an unpublished work OR a movie in cinemas but not on sale. That is, there are many ways to commit criminal infringement without it being for profit. The main reason it's used much less is that it's harder to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt), needs a public prosecution, you get all the benefits of a trial like the right to a lawyer and by itself the copyright holders aren't making any money on it - except possibly the scare factor.
Sure, but there is a huge difference between linking to the front page and links to specific pages that exist only to facilitate copyright infringement of one particular item. It's like a guy asking you "Do you know where I can get some drugs?" and the difference between you answering "Try the phone book." and "Here's the number for a dealer I know." A lot of people like to pretend the phone book and your guide book to local drug dealers with phone numbers are one and the same, because they both contain phone numbers and have ads. Just like both Google and The Pirate Bay contain links. In the words of a guy trying to sell me a fake Rolex, "same same but different".
You're the one who said Facebook Page with a capital p, the quote didn't. The original sentence could refer to anywhere on Facebook's site. Now if the government was doing anything illegal, you wouldn't expect them to be blatant about it would you? They'd of course have some sort of excuse, some sort of explanation as to where the lead came from. We already know Facebook monitors all "private" communication, they've admitted as much when identifying a guy trying to groom girls. Of course that probably means a ton of other conversations gets flagged and looked at, without you ever knowing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Facebook also has an agreement to look for possible terrorists, drug deals and whatever else the government might have an interest in knowing. Nothing you say there should be treated as private, ever.
...but insanely exciting missions: a robotic boat that would have floated on a methane lake on Saturnâ(TM)s moon Titan
A Titanic boat? They should name it "The Unsinkable" and fund it by selling the movie rights to Hollywood.
I know a friend of mine who did something more or less the same, the pay was extremely good, fancy company car, big travel benefits - in return they basically owned his life, not only the long hours but he could be bounced around to any place they needed him to work. When you're young and single you can pretty much do this, put your life on pause for half a year or a year and make a buttload of money. It was also a case of "been there, done that, downpaid my loans and got my economic freedom, never again".
I remember seeing a documentary on the TV this weekend about some spoiled brats who were sent on a trip to discover how hard other people had to work for their money. Their first stop was a sapphire mine in Africa where it was hard physical labor, six long days a week for the local minimum wage - basically enough for food and practically nothing else. Compared to that you're still in your comfy chair in your air-conditioned office, it's not like long coding sessions will kill anyone. Sure I could do it, that I don't want to is an entire matter entirely.
Only if your definition of quick only includes time elapsed between take off and landing. Definitely not that fast if you time door to door and include everything.
Depends on where you are, going 5-600 km here in Norway my choices are:
1. Airport express + airplane + airport bus = 3.5 hours
2. Train: 6.5 hours
3. Bus: 8 hours
Could it be done in 2-3 hours if we had 250-300 km/h rail? Yes. But we're not going to get that because it'd cost billions of dollars building tunnels and bridges and keeping it clear of snow and ice in the winter. And dealing with a moose impact is a big problem at 300 km/h. But we can build airports on each end, ignoring the whole problem.
Also, why isn't a 'medium' class anymore? One would think that any company that provided decent legroom at a reasonable price would make a killing.
I know at least some airplane companies have this, search for "Economy Comfort", KLM, Delta and Iceland Air do at least. And many companies now let you pay your way to the emergency exit seats that have extra legroom.
Stop and think about that for a second, then get back to us once you remove the tinfoil hat.
Aha, it's a conspiracy to make me remove my tinfoil hat!
The less people respect the idea of IP, the more draconian enforcement you need. The divide between the public opinion on one side and the law, the entertainment industry and their lobbyists on the other side is growing. What you see as a crackdown I see as desperation, as more and more obnoxious threats are required to keep the population at bay. They're not winning the hearts and minds of the young generation, they're just hoping to intimidate them into not file sharing. Most people don't kill because they feel it's wrong, not because the law says so. The situation is like a rubber band being stretched and stretched but sooner or later it will snap.
The Pirate Bay is still running after 9 years and is still among the world's top 100 websites, Game of Thrones is now more downloaded than watched on HBO, taking down megaupload didn't really do anything more than taking down suprnova did for torrents and the pirate parties are making progress. It's not like they're winning, it's not even like they're standing their ground. Every small victory they've scored is like a small dam against a rising tide. You're right, I don't expect the fight to be over in 10 years, but I expect them to still be on the losing side trying to hold it all together.
Well, it does sound more productive than making Linux run on your toaster...
Those resources may be limited, but from an individual's point of view they might not be. A famous celebrity may find that there are paparazzis following her all the time, the police can be following a suspected mafia boss almost constantly. People can hire private investigators to follow their SO around because they suspect they're sleeping with somebody else, no celebrity status or criminal activity required. Hell, if you avoid harassing them and turning into a stalker you can probably do it yourself. If no right is being violated when it happens to one person, why should their rights be violated when it happens to everyone? It's very different from when say the NSA wiretaps domestic phone calls without warrant, because wiretapping one phone call would also be a violation.
We are just going to have to deal with it. Eventually the patents will expire and it will no longer be a problem; we just have to make the mistake of not choosing an encumbered standard NEXT TIME once h.264 is obsolete.
Doubtful, the work on HEVC is already in draft status and will probably be submitted for final approval in January 2013. That said, the significance is going down, for example I don't think many people outside technical communities care much about MP3 vs AAC vs OGG Vorbis anymore. With fiber and other superbroadband rolling out H.264 vs HEVC might not make that huge a difference. I know at least with myself that I manage to download everything I want just fine with H.264, sure it'd be nice if it took half the bandwidth and half the disk space but it's not revolutionary.
Protip, Google: if you threaten to pull H.264 support in Chrome in order to strengthen WebM's hand, you need to follow through within at least a couple of years. Otherwise, you just look like a poser chump.
It's called a "credible threat", the H.264 licenses are slump change for Google today. But with YouTube and all they are at a high risk of paying a lot in the future. So they let the MPEG-LA know that if they do pull crap on Google, then Google will go WebM. Lo and behold, the H.264 licensing costs are still reasonable and Google didn't actually want to go through with it. The only people who were played for chumps here is Mozilla, who jumped at it slashdot does whenever someone threatens to move to Linux to bring down their Microsoft licensing cost. Then they get a deal and it all stays Windows/Office/Outlook.
However, and especially in the context of the every increasing ease by which media can be reproduced, until we can devise a new system which suffers from none of the evils and still ensures reward of intellectual labour, our best hope is to point out how badly the system has gone wrong and attempt to steer it back towards health.
The problem is that "to steer it back towards health" for the most part equals "turn back time". As long as you have the following four components, IP is doomed:
1. Computers
2. Internet
3. 1st amendment
4. 4th amendment
Computers means we can create digital copies that can be copied infinitely without loss. Maybe getting our hands on the first copy may be complicated by breaking DRM or recording through the analog hole or whatever, but it's break once play everywhere. Internet means we can have the technical means to distribute it to everyone as an increasingly faster and faster flash mob. While the 1st and 4th amendment doesn't protect copyright violators, it means you generally can't prevent people from communicating in private. The public sites are a convenience but if you'd like to kill piracy you have to take away one of those four. Either turn it into an appliance-only Internet, shut down the Internet or take away some of the Bill of Rights. Or you can accept that technology has moved forward and that the "good old days" are never coming back.
Except what you're describing is not a false flag operation.
False flag (also known as black flag) operations are covert operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.
This may be a disinformation campaign but unless the DOJ is posing as someone else, it's not a false flag.
Sexual harassment is just plain old immature behavior. It isn't a part of Hack Culture .. its a part of immature people who associate with hacker culture .. hmm .. so maybe that should be a yes?
I'd go with correlation, not causation. "Hacker culture" typically comes from young introvert males with weak social antennas. "Sexual harassment" typically come from young introvert males with weak social antennas. That and how like-minded people in a crowd always stretch it further than any one person would individually. So it's a high risk event but I wouldn't say the hacker culture glorifies it in any way.
Stuck up? Do you know *anything* about GPGPU? It's good for embarrassingly parallel problems; video encoding relies on previous frames. It's not at all the right type of problem for GPGPU.
*facepalm* And for each full HD frame there's something like 2 million pixels with 3x8 bit color information to be encoded. There's huge potential for doing all of them in parallel, making it work in code is hard but it's definitively not the wrong type of problem.
Of course, some people are the type who could teach themselves and only show up for the exams but it kind of defeats the point of school or college or university. I remember one in particular that was a Russian with very weak English - and English isn't my native tongue. I still managed to get an A because I knew the textbooks, I gave up on trying to listen to lectures as I'd spend 90% of my energy trying to decipher what the hell he was saying.
Those people are also not on the left. Someone truly on the left is typically in favor of greater personal freedom, not bigger government for government's sake. True left-wing politics requires government to interfere in the lives of individuals only when those individuals hold undue power over others.
Hell no. Speaking from Norway where two out of the three parties in government is the Worker's Party (red) and Socialist Left (redder) I can tell you that left wing is not only about economics. With social programs the government also take on the cost of our unhealthy habits, drinking, smoking, drugs, injuries, disease, obesity and so on. So they come up with plenty restrictions and taxes to make us do it less - for our own good of course. And because the government is so concerned with the well-being of all its citizens, if 99% of the population can handle it fine we still need to ban it because of the 1% that'd get a gambling addiction or blow their face off with fireworks. A good socialist will always interfere when you're doing anything that's harmful to yourself, even when you're perfectly aware of it.
The republicans don't have to promise anything, the economy is so in the crapper people are ready to try something new regardless. If you look at the employment-population ratio in the good years it was 62%, sometimes over 63%. It started falling rapidly in mid-2008 and hit rock bottom in December 2009 with 58.2%, where was it now in July? 58.4%. Of course that includes lots of people that aren't in the labor force but it's more of a honest measure of the economic temperature since people lose their benefits, they get discouraged from apply for jobs, they start studies and other things to stall while they hope the economy gets better. Reality is that it's been at a permanent low for 3 years now with no real hint of recovery.
Politics in the US is a bit strange since it's two parties lobbing the ball over the same fence, it's more about what you do when you have the ball than keeping it - because eventually people will give the other party a shot anyway. So if they manage to win this election then great, they have the political backing for social conservatism and haven't promised any quick fix for the economy. If they lose, well then Obama gets another four years of struggling with a fucked economy that probably isn't going to help them win the next election. The last really long stretch of one party was during WWII, mostly it's 8/4 year ping-pong.
Maybe if you use it non-commercially, but if you say "well, I gave up on your software because I can't easily separate weekday sales and weekend sales" then with 99.9%+ certainty they'll say if you want it, you pay for it. Don't expect nearly the same treatment when you're obviously asking them to help you improve profits for free. There's not a whole lot of people into corporate charity.
That's the key thing. Citizens have to care about the issue. Most citizens are ambivalent about security-vs.-surveillance.
It's more the threat perception, yes you can point to all the nasty stuff that happened with MLK and the civil liberties union or McCarthyism or in the Soviet Union or fascist Europe but to most people that's ancient history from the 1900s, neither the communist nor neonazist ideology hold any real sway in western countries. Sure there's quite a few undemocratic countries but they're not talking about an international socialist revolution like the Soviets did, nor does anyone look likely to want to start WWIII. In short, most people don't see much of a threat from the state. Meanwhile, there are threats from deranged terrorist groups. Getting killed or maimed by terrorists or anyone you know is a pretty real and serious infringement on your liberties too.
The first thing everybody says after a terror attack is that this will not change us and we will go on as before, but it is as much posturing as it is truth. You can't help wonder if that's just someone's forgotten luggage or a bomb, you can't help respond as if it were a bomb. If you did nothing then people would avoid it out of fear and the terrorists win. If you spend billions on extra security the terrorists win. But the terrorists win less if people keep flying after 9/11 than if they didn't, even with TSA groping and naked scanners and the ridiculous restrictions on liquids. You can't ever get back that innocence, but you're trying to restore normality as far as at all possible. People hand them surveillance power to find the really bad men, not to interfere in everyday life but that's what happens. That much power is always abused.
First, going strictly by your requirements, I would suggest either a fireproof safe or fireproof drive enclosure. I don't have experience with the enclosures, but the safe itself should be able to handle your normal everyday fire and protect your data.
Most "fireproof" safes are only designed to keep paper from catching fire, which is higher than a lot of computer media can stand. You need to get a media rated safe, which has more insulation and is more expensive.
However, I'd suggest that you don't store your safe at your location at all. Surely you have a friend or someone you know that would let you borrow a few square feet of their basement for the safe. This would create a physcial barrier that would enhance your securiy if not always convenient
I'd go with a deposit box at a bank, so you don't have to bother your friend all the time. If you want to make regular backups then it better not feel like you're hassling somebody. For the money you save on the fireproof safe you can probably rent one for years.