It's a trick question. If a new version of a browser is so important to you, you don't have a life.
Maybe that was true a decade ago, but not today. There's two types of people who have good reason to care about their browser choice: 1) Professionals who do much of their work through the web, and 2) people who spend a significant amount of their time online. These days, it's not that uncommon anymore for people with quite an active life to still spend a significant amount of time online. Of course, that trend is changing as web services evolve, but I think there's still enough browser interaction by normal people that a browser is an important thing.
But it's the first group that I feel is most affected. Many professionals use their browser extensively for work, and with the rise of JavaScript based web apps, I don't think that trend is shrinking anytime soon. If you spend 9+ hours a day using a piece of software to make your living, how it works is vitally important to you.
I work for a web hosting company. Obviously, many departments here view a lot of websites. However, most of our browser time is actually interacting with our internal web applications, along with a lot of googling. Depending on the department, the work can be very fast paced and can require a lot of juggling issues. TreeStyle Tabs is one extension that is irreplaceable for us, and is probably the single largest reason why most of the people here feel like we cant leave Firefox. GreaseMonkey/Scriptish is another. Of course, each person has their own personal suite of tools which they rely on to get their work done, and many of those tools are Firefox addons.
I'm not implying that we couldn't work without Firefox. Many people already gave up on Firefox a while back, and with each change, more people leave. What I am saying is that browser choice can legitimately be a huge factor for many people. If the web just isn't really your thing, that's fine, but for many of us, it's a significant piece of what we do.
All systems fail eventually. The better question is; how does a system handle failure and evolve? In the case of capitalism; we don't know yet. Hopefully the next system is kind to Americans of all income levels.
That depends on how you define "failure". If you exclude normal business cycle ups and downs, the Free Market has never failed, but we haven't seen it fully at work in our lifetime. As the US founders told us, once the people learn to "vote themselves a raise", they tend to destroy the framework that makes them free. Fortunately, the free market typically works to the extent it is implemented.
I'm also not certain what you mean by "kind" in the sense that an economic system can be. In economics, kindness to one person is unkindness to another. To give somebody something that nobody wants to give him requires that somebody is forced to give up something that otherwise would have belonged to him. Overall, in more capitalist societies, there's a much greater amount of resources and luxuries available to the poor than in communist societies. For instance, I don't know any of the 99% protesters who would want to live in North Korea for better living conditions or because that economy would be more kind to them. The problem isn't an economic problem.
Here, we are seeing the market manipulated by legislation, but the market still wins out. Higher minimum wage, tougher employment laws, health care requirements, and higher taxes made it more practical to hire outside of the country. However, because there is still competition, the consumers demanded a better product, and even though it is more expensive, have decided that it's worth the cost. To the extent the market was available, it has worked. If we were to allow the market to be more free from legislation, we would be able to have even more value and a better distribution of capital. In a perfectly capitalist society, outsourcing wouldn't be a bad word. In such a society, it would only be done as long as it is an actual benefit, and wouldn't likely have ended up with the poorly performing outsourcing we know today.
I hope this finds you well, Dear. Much excessive delay response making. Clients upset and are lose much profit. Kindly return outsourcing to US at soonest. Please do the needful.
The site is little more than a series of guided form letters. It might be a useful site, but it's certainly not a "robot lawyer". It is scarcely even a chat bot.
I agree. Also, even if there were actually harms being done, it would still be a question of whether government involvement would be the correct action. I do not personally think that the government is the right arbiter in this issue. The government has never been in the business of promoting free and open anything. I hate Comcast as much as anybody, but these rules are going to hurt them at all.
There's no rule that says that there has to be a good internet connection. If you force all connections to be the same, then you're very likely forcing the lowest common denominator. Also, as the article summary points out, the ISPs will still be able to control connections by arguing that they are preventing piracy or other illegal activity. So, in the end, they may not be able to slow sites, but they will be able to block certain traffic outright and be able to claim that they are doing so to comply with the law. And the big ISPs win because smaller companies who cannot afford to route faster traffic to the more resource heavy locations (or afford to pay for the extra peering which will be mandated) will be forced out of business. So, less competition, more bureaucracy, and you'll still risk having sites or access methods blocked, but now with no recourse.
If by "stealing" you mean, "having another exact copy of something that somebody else has", then sure, I would love it if everybody "steals" and were "stolen from". If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy. My car, like games, are capital. A system where there is more capital is a system where we're all better off. The reason why most of us don't want people taking things from us is not because we don't want other people to have stuff, but because we don't want to lose our stuff. Gaining Intellectual Property doesn't take anything away from the person who had it. It just adds to the people who have it.
But, isn't that taking the potential away from another person to make money? Yes, it is. However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money. If everybody makes horse carts and I make a car, I reduce the ability of horse cart manufacturers to make money. But what if they're really good at it and really really like to make money from it? I don't think that most people would consider that a good enough reason to not make cars. If your business model or current occupation doesn't give you profit that you want, then it's not up to other people to help you make it work. Just find another industry. Remove the artificial barriers and let people decide if and how they would like to support your work. So, reducing the ability for somebody to make money off a product by itself is not good reason to restrict an action. Creating artificial barriers to access something for the sole sake of creating a market is a bad idea and reduces overall capital. If a product is good, then there will be a natural model for it to make money.
So, what about the incentive to create good works of art or games, etc.? I believe that thinking is a more recent invention. There has been literature, works of art, games, and many other types of intellectual exchange long before there was a government restricting access to it. People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist. However, not everything that is free as in liberty is free as in beer. There's lots of FOSS out there which is made by people who do get paid for their work. Sometimes, the software is made by people who just want it to exist and be shared. Sometimes, it's to share support. Another example is convenience. I just bought a book the other day from a book store that contained nothing but works in the public domain. I knew that I could just as easily go home, take a copy of the table of contents, and download the whole thing myself and print it out if I wanted and be completely within my legal rights. But the book was there, and at a good price, and I liked it. They made a profit, and no copyright law would have been required.
Sure, there's content out there that may be better because the extra funding that copyright laws provide. Also, I think that maybe having some protections for inventors to allow them to recoup cost of development can help provide an incentive. However, I would rather have both those good things gone than to have to endure the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead (which they copied originally from the public domain). However, even in the most proper use of copyrights, you aren't exactly taking away a thing. It may be illegal, and that may make it wrong by definition, but it certainly is not harmful in the same sense as stealing a car, and may instead actually benefit society as a whole.
You thought, even for a moment, that a government legislation affecting the market would actually hurt big business? Why? Is that what you think usually happens?
Of course they fought it. It takes work and money to re-structure your company to compensate for new rules like that. However, in the end, any time you make more laws that restrict the freedom of buyers and sellers to freely exchange capital, somebody is going to try to use those rules to their advantage, and the winner will likely be the group with most capital and interest in directing that system. At the very least, the laws will create a further barrier to entry into the market, thus preventing competition, which is the one tool that would cause them to cater to their customers.
Expect to see more of this. At some point, people will get mad and they'll try to make more laws to stop this, and then these companies will re-structure to take advantage of those laws. At some point, people will get mad, and they'll convince the government to declare internet as a utility, and then these companies will gain government funding and become completely immune to customer complaints. What does customer satisfaction matter when there's no competition?
I was brought up in a multicultural area of a large city. I had (and still have) friends who are Muslims, Jews and probably other religions. Guess what, they are no different from my Christian family. They may worship differently from me, but they have the same values and the same outlook on life. They certainly have no interest in changing the law to fit their beliefs or converting the country to their religion.
There are all sorts of people, and there are many people who don't follow what their religion teaches. If you picked about any random belief, you might find people of every religion who agree with that belief. However, you're missing a very critical fact. The people who are killing people in the name of Allah are generally doing so in perfect agreement with Islamic teaching and the Quran. There are few religions out there which truly demand that you kill people. Most consider it a sin or place other heavy restrictions on it. To the contrary, devout following of the Quran means that you should be seeking total subjection of other religious people and even killing them. The "good" people who you speak of may in fact not view these actions as acceptable, but when they disagree with Jihad, they disagree with Muhammad, and they disagree with their holy book, and their disagreement is not based on religion, but personal preference.
They go to work every day, they love their families, they give to charity, they have the same concerns as me, and they enjoy life in the community. In short, they are fully integrated and indistinguishable unless you look at the way they worship.
One other difference with their religion and our culture's expectation is that their religion does not teach honesty, but deception. They believe that Allah is a trickster type of god who has no problem causing deception or allowing his followers to deceive. I don't believe this is one of his most notable attributes, but you can find indication in the Quran where he caused deception and you can find where Muslims are instructed to deceive where it accomplishes a goal in line with their teaching. Therefor, it is quite possible that some of them, even the ones who seem sincere, are deceiving you because they believe fervently that such deception is the truly good thing to do. Most of the time, the liars we know of would also be people without much of a moral framework. It would be harder for us to detect deception from people who fervently think it's a good thing.
There are extremists of all faiths. Including Christians.
Once again, the difference is whether the "extreme" behavior is inspired by the religious belief or in contradiction to it. Yes, a person can kill and claim it to be caused by any religion. They could kill and claim Dr. Sues told them. But these extreme Muslims can give good, solid, and complete explanations from their holy book which not only point to historical example, but direct scripture which tells them to do so. Christians could, at best, use some very fuzzy logic and have to ignore massive amounts of their holy book to be able to excuse killing somebody, and I don't even know the fuzziest of logic they could use to justify terrorist activity. The same is probably true of many religious groups other than Muslims.
They are a private industry, so I suppose that I support their right to do something as horrible as limit speech. However, I think it's time that we much more loudly call for a new medium to host and share video content.
Google won't be alone. Pressure will mount inside the industry and at some point from the government, etc. to try to limit certain types of content. As that happens, or hopefully in anticipation of that happening, I recommend a new paradigm of free, and open video sharing, perhaps powered by TOR networks and/or torrent. I would recommend it would be:
Open - Any video subject can be shared.
Distributed - No single point of failure, or few, and no one system handling the resource usage for all content.
Free to the end user - Perhaps being distributed can spread resource costs sufficiently to make this practical.
Homogenous - Simple, specific video formats to make acquiring the media simple and to prevent abuse.
Browsable - Should be easy to find content, especially by search, but also good recommendations.
If something like this already this already exists, I would love to know about it. If not, maybe it's time to start gauging interest for one.
You can use a VPN to hide your traffic from your ISP. They would only know when and how much your location makes connections. VPN technology is pretty easy to setup and is generally good for security.
On the other hand, to block Facebook, you would have to null route their hostnames. That can become a chore. Even if you don't intend to visit Facebook, unless they are null routed somehow, simply surfing most popular sites will connect you to Facebook. And that's just one site. There's tons of other trackers on the web, and most people couldn't even name a few of them. Yes, there are tools to restrict these, but they aren't as effective as a simple VPN.
I think that this sort of thing is a good argument in favor of the legislation change. This collecting of information was not enabled by the change. This is something that people could have done anyway, and still can do, and even the ISPs could have used similar technology already.
I'm not saying that it isn't bad for ISPs to sell info. I'm not in favor of the big ISPs, but I believe they are what they are because of government intervention, and not in spite of it. Also, this legislation doesn't explicitly allow them to sell information, such as what all the hype tries to indicate. It simply removes some legislation that some of the politicians believed was unfair. If they can block ISPs from selling data, why couldn't they also, by the same argument, block software like this, or sites like Facebook, which people freely give the same information to, and which openly states that they are doing so to track you and sell your habits. Furthermore, a VPN could prevent such tracking by your ISP, but not by itself from these other sites. Facebook is already much better at selling your traffic than any ISP could be anytime soon, and yet nobody is lobbying Washington to demand they add legislation to prevent that.
I'll grant that ISPs are a bit different, but I think that overall, software like this is much more of a potential issue than the legislation it is attempting to protest. If you have a problem with the legislation, you should have a problem with this software also. Or is it only okay because they claim to only be gathering data from people you don't care about?
Piracy is one of the greatest forms of advertising. In some businesses, it's called "word of mouth". Growing up, many of the products I was introduced to, and subsequently became loyal customers of, was thanks to "piracy" of one sort or another. Back then, nobody saw it as a bad thing. The rule of thumb was copy all that you want as long as you don't try to make a profit from it or pass it off as your own.
When I was younger and still listened to mainstream music, my favorite band was Metallica. I heard them on the radio a few times, but I didn't know who they were. That is, until one of my friends loaned me a cassette tape. Then, a series of them. I was hooked. I bought every CD I could find (even though I already had the tapes), and I tuned into every radio station that played them. From what I understand, they owe a lot of their success to piracy. It's a shame that they attacked Napster. By the way, has anybody heard anything from them lately? I wonder how their anti-piracy campaign is working?
It wasn't just music. Everything from software and video games to free food came along my way, and I often rewarded the company with my business. I was always more loyal to companies that treated me like I was a prize to be one, and not a resource to be manipulated. I hope that the media companies realize this before we lose too many of our rights. As for me, I've already given up on them.
Just because you, the end user, doesn't see something, doesn't mean that you aren't actively engaging it. Everytime you open a web page, your browser usually makes several requests to retrieve stylesheets, scripts, and every image on the page. There is nothing that requires those items to come from the site you think they do. If a rogue script is there, then it gets on your computer and likely has all the permission that you've allowed for the page you're on, possibly including cookie information. Also, a script could quietly auto-redirect you to a phishing page, etc.
Very true. It's something that has bothered me for a while. I'd really rather not have Facebook and others tracking me all over the web, and yet, they usually do. Even while you're viewing this very page, there are icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google which must be loaded from their site. IIRC, some of those ToS won't allow you to use their logo, so it has to come from their site. Even the website has a copy of the image, you still need to use their site for stats and other nifty functionality. In modern sites, that is almost always done by client side JavaScript which makes users send traffic to their site. All of that can be bypassed, but I don't know anybody who does for long.
I think that people would be truly shocked to find out how much information they are sending about themselves, and how many sites collect it that they are unaware of. Most of that comes because of an ignorance about how the web works. What makes it sad is that most of them don't care as long as they get to chat with friends on their Facebook page.</rant>
... and none of it goes to the original developer!
And why should it? The developer was paid from the initial sale. Part of the value of the product for the initial buyer was the fact that it was his to now keep or sell. Wen you buy something, it's yours, and you have to right to use it, sell it, or throw it away if you want.
How many other industries let you sell something, and then still keep all rights to it? When a car company sells you a car, they don't demand that every time you sell that car, they get a portion of the sale. If you buy fries at McDonalds, your friend doesn't have to pay McDonalds a fee if you give them one of your fries. Suppose that I went out and built a radio and sold it to somebody. You would think I was crazy if I demanded that each time it was sold or given a way, I should get some of the profit. You would think me insane if I pushed laws demanding that you never take it apart or use its parts for other things. And yet, that is exactly what you propose for games. It's interesting to see how you and others like you have been conditioned to express shock and resentment when it's legal for people to do the same things with media that they do with any other legal product.
Also, it's been a while since I've bought any games, but I find it unlikely that somebody would pay 90% of the new product price when they could get the new, out of the box version for only 10% more. Of course, if they would, that only goes to further show how much resentment people are feeling for the manufacturers.
I think that you miss the point. Nobody is trying to stop them from making a profit. This isn't about us trying to make them poor, it's about people being fed up with companies acting more like parasites trying to squeeze more revenue from their product their predecessors did and is worth paying. They treat the consumers like they need their products. They forget that people aren't always able or willing to pay higher and higher prices for their merchandise.
Sure, F2P games are often there to provide a profit. We don't have a problem with that like we didn't have a problem buying and trading games back in the 80's and 90's. When I was growing up, part of the fun of buying a game was that after you got bored with it, you could trade it off with one of your friends. You'd still buy the latest games that came out when you had the cash, but your old games still held value. Even in this new age, I still enjoy breaking out the old Nintendo games sometimes.
As a side note, there are many truly free games out there. It's called OSS. I know that some people will complain about the low quality compared to the more polished proprietary games, but at least we have some free options. As for me, I haven't found any game, for pay or for free, that I enjoy as much as nethack. So, let them make a profit, but when that profit is made to spite the consumer, I say it's time to look for an alternative.
These protests are short-lived and I wonder if they end up doing any good.
These protests might do a little good and kill some of these bills. The problem is that the bills keep coming. How long will people protest? They will eventually tire of protests and blackouts for each and every bill. The only answer is to stop it all at its source.
This sort of legislation is being funded and pushed by the big media companies who are afraid of losing their oligarchy. If we want to do something that will last, we need to limit their funding and rethink how we get our information and entertainment. Y Combinator has already planned to fund such startup companies, and Reddit already has it's own community to gather ideas. I think that it's time to do more to address the real problem.
I'm a bit on the fence. I don't like mandated censorship (by governments), but I'm sometimes okay with private entities censoring themselves. The problem here is that Twitter seems to be bending to the will of the various governments, and doing so in a time when it's best to act out against those governments. However, something else that I must consider is that if it doesn't comply, it might have to be banned by those governments, so this might actually allow them to be more useful there. After all, people can still get useful information out by bypassing censorship. In the end, I'm still not strongly on either side.
That's exactly the point. These media companies have been expanding their "rights" for years while shrinking ours. If the copyright system was anything like it is now back when these companies started doing business, they would have been sued out of existence before anybody knew who they were. They want to make it big playing by one set of rules, but then change the rules to prevent others from doing the same.
I think that it's a wonderful idea. Hollywood is already on the way out, and it needs a shove. We need to see more real innovation from the public, and not the same old stale model. There's a new community on Reddit seeking to do just that:/r/KillHollywood. I don't know if that is where the next big idea could come from, but it could be a place to give some of us a voice.
When I first started playing nethack, I was frustrated by how almost everything was irreversible and game changing. I would quickly kill myself when sometihing didn't go the way I thought it should.
I have since resolved to play out each game the best I can no matter how unlikely the odds seem to be. In the process, I've learned to be more careful with each choice that I make. This has the advantage of adding a more real sort of fear that gets the blood pumping. I get a real tingle up my spine when I "sense a wave of psychic energy" at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines.
Another upside is that I find that I have more unique characters which sometimes require unusual tactics to get by. When you overcome these challenges, you have a story to tell that likely has never been experienced before.
It wasn't that somebody just decided "You know, we should just not have fun!", but there are reasons why these things are considered bad. The first hint is your conscience, but the reason behind it is that they are simply, as the Bible explains, inconvenient.
Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage. However, when we use it as a source of pleasure, we find ourselves in all sorts of painful and distracting situations. As for intoxication, there are several problems. Other than the fact that you are out of control (depending on the intoxicant), you also have the tendency to get wrapped up in it and become less productive.
One may argue that there are drugs that are not adictive and cause no lasting damage. That may be the case, so they may not be so bad. The real problem is trying to define your life by pleasure, which is fleeting. It is one of the things, such as money, fame, etc. that people set their sites on that have no lasting benefit. In that sense, it is inconvenient at best.
Sadly, I have known many people who have had their life ruined by drug addiction. It is their experience that has told me the harm that those things can cause. Am I therefore advocating laws against drugs? Not necessarily. I'm just saying that they are a potential snare, and I thank God that He loves and forgives even the worst and will remove them from the things they can't leave on their own.
I don't understand why people are still using IE. Is there a test that it can pass? I would just put in some conditional comments (which should just be ignored), and give them an "upgrade" link to get a real browser.
If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to... encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it.
A computer programs simply models what we have already conceived, and so they aren't useful for solving philosophic debates. However, learning computer science can be helpful in learning logical steps that solve many practical problems. Though it doesn't really help you think outside of the box, I find that it is far more useful than philosophy.
In my own definition, phylosophy is nothing more than the systematic removal of common sense and then trying to argue about who is the most wrong. Most of the questions are completely foolish. There are some, however, that are interesting even while they are useless. This is the reason why a computer model would not be useful. Computers are practical, and most philosophical models would be optamised out by the compiler.
There are some philosophical conclusions that happen to be correct. So what of them? Sadly, there are others that contradict those, so a person would be lost as to which to believe and apply. Fortunately, for all useful and correct wisdom, the Bible has provided the answers. I might be wrong in this, but I suppose that if you were to pick any philosophical question and searched dilligently through nothing more than the book of Proverbs, you would find the solution.
While I imagine that a super railgun isn't the best thing to spend money on, I can think of much worse things. Some of the things that would be worse are the things that we have already been spending our non-existant money on like stimulus packages, company bailouts, and more entitlement spending. These things are certain to crash our economy and we're seeing the effects.
Right now, I'm not a big fan of spending anything that we don't have to. With those other things, the only thing that we get from the spending is negative incentives. At least with military spending, we gain a little more firepower. While we are not doing well in the Middle East, the reason is politics and not weaponry. Right now, Russia and China are getting awful friendly and pushing a few buttons to see how strong our resolve is. More firepower is always better. Also, our military spending is a tiny drop in our deficit spending. If we manage to keep the manufacture in the U.S., then we'll have the benefit of boosting the economy a little. Sure, it wouldn't be enough to pay for the expense, but it would be more practicle than spending on "green" jobs.
Overall, I guess that I agree, it isn't a great expenditure. I just think that there are worse things. Really, we aren't too interested in defense right now anyway. Obama is making deals with Russia to make us get rid of our defenses. I'm just praying that we'll make it through the year without too much damage.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a trick question. If a new version of a browser is so important to you, you don't have a life.
Maybe that was true a decade ago, but not today. There's two types of people who have good reason to care about their browser choice: 1) Professionals who do much of their work through the web, and 2) people who spend a significant amount of their time online. These days, it's not that uncommon anymore for people with quite an active life to still spend a significant amount of time online. Of course, that trend is changing as web services evolve, but I think there's still enough browser interaction by normal people that a browser is an important thing.
But it's the first group that I feel is most affected. Many professionals use their browser extensively for work, and with the rise of JavaScript based web apps, I don't think that trend is shrinking anytime soon. If you spend 9+ hours a day using a piece of software to make your living, how it works is vitally important to you.
I work for a web hosting company. Obviously, many departments here view a lot of websites. However, most of our browser time is actually interacting with our internal web applications, along with a lot of googling. Depending on the department, the work can be very fast paced and can require a lot of juggling issues. TreeStyle Tabs is one extension that is irreplaceable for us, and is probably the single largest reason why most of the people here feel like we cant leave Firefox. GreaseMonkey/Scriptish is another. Of course, each person has their own personal suite of tools which they rely on to get their work done, and many of those tools are Firefox addons.
I'm not implying that we couldn't work without Firefox. Many people already gave up on Firefox a while back, and with each change, more people leave. What I am saying is that browser choice can legitimately be a huge factor for many people. If the web just isn't really your thing, that's fine, but for many of us, it's a significant piece of what we do.
All systems fail eventually. The better question is; how does a system handle failure and evolve? In the case of capitalism; we don't know yet. Hopefully the next system is kind to Americans of all income levels.
That depends on how you define "failure". If you exclude normal business cycle ups and downs, the Free Market has never failed, but we haven't seen it fully at work in our lifetime. As the US founders told us, once the people learn to "vote themselves a raise", they tend to destroy the framework that makes them free. Fortunately, the free market typically works to the extent it is implemented.
I'm also not certain what you mean by "kind" in the sense that an economic system can be. In economics, kindness to one person is unkindness to another. To give somebody something that nobody wants to give him requires that somebody is forced to give up something that otherwise would have belonged to him. Overall, in more capitalist societies, there's a much greater amount of resources and luxuries available to the poor than in communist societies. For instance, I don't know any of the 99% protesters who would want to live in North Korea for better living conditions or because that economy would be more kind to them. The problem isn't an economic problem.
Here, we are seeing the market manipulated by legislation, but the market still wins out. Higher minimum wage, tougher employment laws, health care requirements, and higher taxes made it more practical to hire outside of the country. However, because there is still competition, the consumers demanded a better product, and even though it is more expensive, have decided that it's worth the cost. To the extent the market was available, it has worked. If we were to allow the market to be more free from legislation, we would be able to have even more value and a better distribution of capital. In a perfectly capitalist society, outsourcing wouldn't be a bad word. In such a society, it would only be done as long as it is an actual benefit, and wouldn't likely have ended up with the poorly performing outsourcing we know today.
I hope this finds you well, Dear. Much excessive delay response making. Clients upset and are lose much profit. Kindly return outsourcing to US at soonest. Please do the needful.
The site is little more than a series of guided form letters. It might be a useful site, but it's certainly not a "robot lawyer". It is scarcely even a chat bot.
I agree. Also, even if there were actually harms being done, it would still be a question of whether government involvement would be the correct action. I do not personally think that the government is the right arbiter in this issue. The government has never been in the business of promoting free and open anything. I hate Comcast as much as anybody, but these rules are going to hurt them at all.
There's no rule that says that there has to be a good internet connection. If you force all connections to be the same, then you're very likely forcing the lowest common denominator. Also, as the article summary points out, the ISPs will still be able to control connections by arguing that they are preventing piracy or other illegal activity. So, in the end, they may not be able to slow sites, but they will be able to block certain traffic outright and be able to claim that they are doing so to comply with the law. And the big ISPs win because smaller companies who cannot afford to route faster traffic to the more resource heavy locations (or afford to pay for the extra peering which will be mandated) will be forced out of business. So, less competition, more bureaucracy, and you'll still risk having sites or access methods blocked, but now with no recourse.
If by "stealing" you mean, "having another exact copy of something that somebody else has", then sure, I would love it if everybody "steals" and were "stolen from". If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy. My car, like games, are capital. A system where there is more capital is a system where we're all better off. The reason why most of us don't want people taking things from us is not because we don't want other people to have stuff, but because we don't want to lose our stuff. Gaining Intellectual Property doesn't take anything away from the person who had it. It just adds to the people who have it.
But, isn't that taking the potential away from another person to make money? Yes, it is. However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money. If everybody makes horse carts and I make a car, I reduce the ability of horse cart manufacturers to make money. But what if they're really good at it and really really like to make money from it? I don't think that most people would consider that a good enough reason to not make cars. If your business model or current occupation doesn't give you profit that you want, then it's not up to other people to help you make it work. Just find another industry. Remove the artificial barriers and let people decide if and how they would like to support your work. So, reducing the ability for somebody to make money off a product by itself is not good reason to restrict an action. Creating artificial barriers to access something for the sole sake of creating a market is a bad idea and reduces overall capital. If a product is good, then there will be a natural model for it to make money.
So, what about the incentive to create good works of art or games, etc.? I believe that thinking is a more recent invention. There has been literature, works of art, games, and many other types of intellectual exchange long before there was a government restricting access to it. People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist. However, not everything that is free as in liberty is free as in beer. There's lots of FOSS out there which is made by people who do get paid for their work. Sometimes, the software is made by people who just want it to exist and be shared. Sometimes, it's to share support. Another example is convenience. I just bought a book the other day from a book store that contained nothing but works in the public domain. I knew that I could just as easily go home, take a copy of the table of contents, and download the whole thing myself and print it out if I wanted and be completely within my legal rights. But the book was there, and at a good price, and I liked it. They made a profit, and no copyright law would have been required.
Sure, there's content out there that may be better because the extra funding that copyright laws provide. Also, I think that maybe having some protections for inventors to allow them to recoup cost of development can help provide an incentive. However, I would rather have both those good things gone than to have to endure the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead (which they copied originally from the public domain). However, even in the most proper use of copyrights, you aren't exactly taking away a thing. It may be illegal, and that may make it wrong by definition, but it certainly is not harmful in the same sense as stealing a car, and may instead actually benefit society as a whole.
You thought, even for a moment, that a government legislation affecting the market would actually hurt big business? Why? Is that what you think usually happens?
Of course they fought it. It takes work and money to re-structure your company to compensate for new rules like that. However, in the end, any time you make more laws that restrict the freedom of buyers and sellers to freely exchange capital, somebody is going to try to use those rules to their advantage, and the winner will likely be the group with most capital and interest in directing that system. At the very least, the laws will create a further barrier to entry into the market, thus preventing competition, which is the one tool that would cause them to cater to their customers.
Expect to see more of this. At some point, people will get mad and they'll try to make more laws to stop this, and then these companies will re-structure to take advantage of those laws. At some point, people will get mad, and they'll convince the government to declare internet as a utility, and then these companies will gain government funding and become completely immune to customer complaints. What does customer satisfaction matter when there's no competition?
I was brought up in a multicultural area of a large city. I had (and still have) friends who are Muslims, Jews and probably other religions. Guess what, they are no different from my Christian family. They may worship differently from me, but they have the same values and the same outlook on life. They certainly have no interest in changing the law to fit their beliefs or converting the country to their religion.
There are all sorts of people, and there are many people who don't follow what their religion teaches. If you picked about any random belief, you might find people of every religion who agree with that belief. However, you're missing a very critical fact. The people who are killing people in the name of Allah are generally doing so in perfect agreement with Islamic teaching and the Quran. There are few religions out there which truly demand that you kill people. Most consider it a sin or place other heavy restrictions on it. To the contrary, devout following of the Quran means that you should be seeking total subjection of other religious people and even killing them. The "good" people who you speak of may in fact not view these actions as acceptable, but when they disagree with Jihad, they disagree with Muhammad, and they disagree with their holy book, and their disagreement is not based on religion, but personal preference.
They go to work every day, they love their families, they give to charity, they have the same concerns as me, and they enjoy life in the community. In short, they are fully integrated and indistinguishable unless you look at the way they worship.
One other difference with their religion and our culture's expectation is that their religion does not teach honesty, but deception. They believe that Allah is a trickster type of god who has no problem causing deception or allowing his followers to deceive. I don't believe this is one of his most notable attributes, but you can find indication in the Quran where he caused deception and you can find where Muslims are instructed to deceive where it accomplishes a goal in line with their teaching. Therefor, it is quite possible that some of them, even the ones who seem sincere, are deceiving you because they believe fervently that such deception is the truly good thing to do. Most of the time, the liars we know of would also be people without much of a moral framework. It would be harder for us to detect deception from people who fervently think it's a good thing.
There are extremists of all faiths. Including Christians.
Once again, the difference is whether the "extreme" behavior is inspired by the religious belief or in contradiction to it. Yes, a person can kill and claim it to be caused by any religion. They could kill and claim Dr. Sues told them. But these extreme Muslims can give good, solid, and complete explanations from their holy book which not only point to historical example, but direct scripture which tells them to do so. Christians could, at best, use some very fuzzy logic and have to ignore massive amounts of their holy book to be able to excuse killing somebody, and I don't even know the fuzziest of logic they could use to justify terrorist activity. The same is probably true of many religious groups other than Muslims.
They are a private industry, so I suppose that I support their right to do something as horrible as limit speech. However, I think it's time that we much more loudly call for a new medium to host and share video content.
Google won't be alone. Pressure will mount inside the industry and at some point from the government, etc. to try to limit certain types of content. As that happens, or hopefully in anticipation of that happening, I recommend a new paradigm of free, and open video sharing, perhaps powered by TOR networks and/or torrent. I would recommend it would be:
If something like this already this already exists, I would love to know about it. If not, maybe it's time to start gauging interest for one.
I can avoid using Facebook.
I cannot avoid using my ISP.
You can use a VPN to hide your traffic from your ISP. They would only know when and how much your location makes connections. VPN technology is pretty easy to setup and is generally good for security.
On the other hand, to block Facebook, you would have to null route their hostnames. That can become a chore. Even if you don't intend to visit Facebook, unless they are null routed somehow, simply surfing most popular sites will connect you to Facebook. And that's just one site. There's tons of other trackers on the web, and most people couldn't even name a few of them. Yes, there are tools to restrict these, but they aren't as effective as a simple VPN.
I'm not saying that it isn't bad for ISPs to sell info. I'm not in favor of the big ISPs, but I believe they are what they are because of government intervention, and not in spite of it. Also, this legislation doesn't explicitly allow them to sell information, such as what all the hype tries to indicate. It simply removes some legislation that some of the politicians believed was unfair. If they can block ISPs from selling data, why couldn't they also, by the same argument, block software like this, or sites like Facebook, which people freely give the same information to, and which openly states that they are doing so to track you and sell your habits. Furthermore, a VPN could prevent such tracking by your ISP, but not by itself from these other sites. Facebook is already much better at selling your traffic than any ISP could be anytime soon, and yet nobody is lobbying Washington to demand they add legislation to prevent that.
I'll grant that ISPs are a bit different, but I think that overall, software like this is much more of a potential issue than the legislation it is attempting to protest. If you have a problem with the legislation, you should have a problem with this software also. Or is it only okay because they claim to only be gathering data from people you don't care about?
Piracy is one of the greatest forms of advertising. In some businesses, it's called "word of mouth". Growing up, many of the products I was introduced to, and subsequently became loyal customers of, was thanks to "piracy" of one sort or another. Back then, nobody saw it as a bad thing. The rule of thumb was copy all that you want as long as you don't try to make a profit from it or pass it off as your own.
When I was younger and still listened to mainstream music, my favorite band was Metallica. I heard them on the radio a few times, but I didn't know who they were. That is, until one of my friends loaned me a cassette tape. Then, a series of them. I was hooked. I bought every CD I could find (even though I already had the tapes), and I tuned into every radio station that played them. From what I understand, they owe a lot of their success to piracy. It's a shame that they attacked Napster. By the way, has anybody heard anything from them lately? I wonder how their anti-piracy campaign is working?
It wasn't just music. Everything from software and video games to free food came along my way, and I often rewarded the company with my business. I was always more loyal to companies that treated me like I was a prize to be one, and not a resource to be manipulated. I hope that the media companies realize this before we lose too many of our rights. As for me, I've already given up on them.
Just because you, the end user, doesn't see something, doesn't mean that you aren't actively engaging it. Everytime you open a web page, your browser usually makes several requests to retrieve stylesheets, scripts, and every image on the page. There is nothing that requires those items to come from the site you think they do. If a rogue script is there, then it gets on your computer and likely has all the permission that you've allowed for the page you're on, possibly including cookie information. Also, a script could quietly auto-redirect you to a phishing page, etc.
Very true. It's something that has bothered me for a while. I'd really rather not have Facebook and others tracking me all over the web, and yet, they usually do. Even while you're viewing this very page, there are icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google which must be loaded from their site. IIRC, some of those ToS won't allow you to use their logo, so it has to come from their site. Even the website has a copy of the image, you still need to use their site for stats and other nifty functionality. In modern sites, that is almost always done by client side JavaScript which makes users send traffic to their site. All of that can be bypassed, but I don't know anybody who does for long.
I think that people would be truly shocked to find out how much information they are sending about themselves, and how many sites collect it that they are unaware of. Most of that comes because of an ignorance about how the web works. What makes it sad is that most of them don't care as long as they get to chat with friends on their Facebook page.</rant>
... and none of it goes to the original developer!
And why should it? The developer was paid from the initial sale. Part of the value of the product for the initial buyer was the fact that it was his to now keep or sell. Wen you buy something, it's yours, and you have to right to use it, sell it, or throw it away if you want.
How many other industries let you sell something, and then still keep all rights to it? When a car company sells you a car, they don't demand that every time you sell that car, they get a portion of the sale. If you buy fries at McDonalds, your friend doesn't have to pay McDonalds a fee if you give them one of your fries. Suppose that I went out and built a radio and sold it to somebody. You would think I was crazy if I demanded that each time it was sold or given a way, I should get some of the profit. You would think me insane if I pushed laws demanding that you never take it apart or use its parts for other things. And yet, that is exactly what you propose for games. It's interesting to see how you and others like you have been conditioned to express shock and resentment when it's legal for people to do the same things with media that they do with any other legal product.
Also, it's been a while since I've bought any games, but I find it unlikely that somebody would pay 90% of the new product price when they could get the new, out of the box version for only 10% more. Of course, if they would, that only goes to further show how much resentment people are feeling for the manufacturers.
I think that you miss the point. Nobody is trying to stop them from making a profit. This isn't about us trying to make them poor, it's about people being fed up with companies acting more like parasites trying to squeeze more revenue from their product their predecessors did and is worth paying. They treat the consumers like they need their products. They forget that people aren't always able or willing to pay higher and higher prices for their merchandise.
Sure, F2P games are often there to provide a profit. We don't have a problem with that like we didn't have a problem buying and trading games back in the 80's and 90's. When I was growing up, part of the fun of buying a game was that after you got bored with it, you could trade it off with one of your friends. You'd still buy the latest games that came out when you had the cash, but your old games still held value. Even in this new age, I still enjoy breaking out the old Nintendo games sometimes.
As a side note, there are many truly free games out there. It's called OSS. I know that some people will complain about the low quality compared to the more polished proprietary games, but at least we have some free options. As for me, I haven't found any game, for pay or for free, that I enjoy as much as nethack. So, let them make a profit, but when that profit is made to spite the consumer, I say it's time to look for an alternative.
These protests are short-lived and I wonder if they end up doing any good.
These protests might do a little good and kill some of these bills. The problem is that the bills keep coming. How long will people protest? They will eventually tire of protests and blackouts for each and every bill. The only answer is to stop it all at its source.
This sort of legislation is being funded and pushed by the big media companies who are afraid of losing their oligarchy. If we want to do something that will last, we need to limit their funding and rethink how we get our information and entertainment. Y Combinator has already planned to fund such startup companies, and Reddit already has it's own community to gather ideas. I think that it's time to do more to address the real problem.
I'm a bit on the fence. I don't like mandated censorship (by governments), but I'm sometimes okay with private entities censoring themselves. The problem here is that Twitter seems to be bending to the will of the various governments, and doing so in a time when it's best to act out against those governments. However, something else that I must consider is that if it doesn't comply, it might have to be banned by those governments, so this might actually allow them to be more useful there. After all, people can still get useful information out by bypassing censorship. In the end, I'm still not strongly on either side.
Copyright owners want to do away with fair use.
That's exactly the point. These media companies have been expanding their "rights" for years while shrinking ours. If the copyright system was anything like it is now back when these companies started doing business, they would have been sued out of existence before anybody knew who they were. They want to make it big playing by one set of rules, but then change the rules to prevent others from doing the same.
I think that it's a wonderful idea. Hollywood is already on the way out, and it needs a shove. We need to see more real innovation from the public, and not the same old stale model. There's a new community on Reddit seeking to do just that: /r/KillHollywood. I don't know if that is where the next big idea could come from, but it could be a place to give some of us a voice.
When I first started playing nethack, I was frustrated by how almost everything was irreversible and game changing. I would quickly kill myself when sometihing didn't go the way I thought it should.
I have since resolved to play out each game the best I can no matter how unlikely the odds seem to be. In the process, I've learned to be more careful with each choice that I make. This has the advantage of adding a more real sort of fear that gets the blood pumping. I get a real tingle up my spine when I "sense a wave of psychic energy" at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines.
Another upside is that I find that I have more unique characters which sometimes require unusual tactics to get by. When you overcome these challenges, you have a story to tell that likely has never been experienced before.
It wasn't that somebody just decided "You know, we should just not have fun!", but there are reasons why these things are considered bad. The first hint is your conscience, but the reason behind it is that they are simply, as the Bible explains, inconvenient.
Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage. However, when we use it as a source of pleasure, we find ourselves in all sorts of painful and distracting situations. As for intoxication, there are several problems. Other than the fact that you are out of control (depending on the intoxicant), you also have the tendency to get wrapped up in it and become less productive.
One may argue that there are drugs that are not adictive and cause no lasting damage. That may be the case, so they may not be so bad. The real problem is trying to define your life by pleasure, which is fleeting. It is one of the things, such as money, fame, etc. that people set their sites on that have no lasting benefit. In that sense, it is inconvenient at best.
Sadly, I have known many people who have had their life ruined by drug addiction. It is their experience that has told me the harm that those things can cause. Am I therefore advocating laws against drugs? Not necessarily. I'm just saying that they are a potential snare, and I thank God that He loves and forgives even the worst and will remove them from the things they can't leave on their own.
I don't understand why people are still using IE. Is there a test that it can pass? I would just put in some conditional comments (which should just be ignored), and give them an "upgrade" link to get a real browser.
If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to ... encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it.
A computer programs simply models what we have already conceived, and so they aren't useful for solving philosophic debates. However, learning computer science can be helpful in learning logical steps that solve many practical problems. Though it doesn't really help you think outside of the box, I find that it is far more useful than philosophy.
In my own definition, phylosophy is nothing more than the systematic removal of common sense and then trying to argue about who is the most wrong. Most of the questions are completely foolish. There are some, however, that are interesting even while they are useless. This is the reason why a computer model would not be useful. Computers are practical, and most philosophical models would be optamised out by the compiler.
There are some philosophical conclusions that happen to be correct. So what of them? Sadly, there are others that contradict those, so a person would be lost as to which to believe and apply. Fortunately, for all useful and correct wisdom, the Bible has provided the answers. I might be wrong in this, but I suppose that if you were to pick any philosophical question and searched dilligently through nothing more than the book of Proverbs, you would find the solution.
While I imagine that a super railgun isn't the best thing to spend money on, I can think of much worse things. Some of the things that would be worse are the things that we have already been spending our non-existant money on like stimulus packages, company bailouts, and more entitlement spending. These things are certain to crash our economy and we're seeing the effects.
Right now, I'm not a big fan of spending anything that we don't have to. With those other things, the only thing that we get from the spending is negative incentives. At least with military spending, we gain a little more firepower. While we are not doing well in the Middle East, the reason is politics and not weaponry. Right now, Russia and China are getting awful friendly and pushing a few buttons to see how strong our resolve is. More firepower is always better. Also, our military spending is a tiny drop in our deficit spending. If we manage to keep the manufacture in the U.S., then we'll have the benefit of boosting the economy a little. Sure, it wouldn't be enough to pay for the expense, but it would be more practicle than spending on "green" jobs.
Overall, I guess that I agree, it isn't a great expenditure. I just think that there are worse things. Really, we aren't too interested in defense right now anyway. Obama is making deals with Russia to make us get rid of our defenses. I'm just praying that we'll make it through the year without too much damage.