That report is in x million, not x thousand. Their total assets is 24 trillion yen, or ~217 billion USD. Comparing the year-over-years, it looks like their assets are increasing 40-50bn/yr on average. That doesn't really give a clear idea of income vs costs, but 880bn spread over multiple injections doesn't seem too far out of reality as long as they can keep running at that level.
If you stopped after the word "machine," you probably could get a 10mil seed fund from somebody.
Hell that actually sounds like it might be an interesting idea if VR ever takes off. Imagine being able to browse Amazon, seeing the items rendered in 3D and maybe even being able to manipulate them?
Because we've collectively decided that adult privacy isn't worth protecting. Or more precisely, advertisers and the politicians they've bought have decided that for us. This was decided long before the interwebs was even a common thing, for that matter.. old school unsolicited snail mail worked much like modern spammers, just on a smaller and slower scale, including buying and selling peoples' personal information.
Frankly, I doubt we'd worry about child privacy protection or children's susceptibility to ads if it didn't lead to kids being annoying and constantly demanding you buy things for them... adults, even politicians, start caring a lot more when something directly annoys them or worse, costs them money.
Parents should be paying attention to what their kids are doing, especially younger kids. Can I assume you're also the first to scream "parental responsibility!" whenever there's a story about kids playing excessively violent games or watching online porn or whatever?
Presumably, the company considering taking the NIH tack isn't planning on developing an entire new standalone product line (and all of the marketing and support and whatnot that goes along with that) and are just needing the software either for internal purposes, or as part of a larger platform or product that is their primary business.
That's correct, I assumed the scenario that the parent poster had posed.
Answering questions about an unrelated scenario isn't really productive in most conversations regardless of how many times you can include the term "FOSS."
The problem isn't that we're seeing one 80-year-old record being broken.
The problem is that we're seeing record after record after record being broken, and then being broken again the following year and the year after that.
One hurricane record being broken is interesting. A dozen various hurricane records being broken in the span of two months is worrying, even if many of them are only decade-old records.
Especially when its happening almost exactly as predicted by the climate scientists that continually get written off as being hacks. How many times do they need to be proven right before people start considering the possibility that some of their more dire predictions may also be more than just "leftist propaganda?" When the ice sheets melt and New York is permanently under water? When we're all living in biodomes near the arctic because the rest of the planet is uninhabitable? Maybe not even then?
I don't know about theirs, but up here in Canada we have distracted driving laws (and have for a few years now, at least in BC.) Generally the punishments are some fairly hefty fines, and possible suspension or even revocation of your driver's license if you have multiple offenses.
And it applies to any distracted driving technically -- on your phone, eating, doing your hair, whatever. Of course there's a lot of responsibility on the cops to both somehow notice distracted drivers, and also to not abuse the law and fine people who don't deserve it. Luckily we don't have quite the same level of antagonistic relationship with our police force as we hear coming up from the states (not that they're perfect by any means.. just less negatively viewed in public opinion.. though there's at least some correlation there I'm sure.)
Ignoring the fact that a situation like that is a rare fraction of total accidents, in most such cases the biggest problem isn't the vehicle's capabilities but the operator's reaction time. It doesn't matter how sharp a corner you can theoretically pull off if you've already collided before you can turn the wheel.
.. And yet America is almost universally considered one of the rudest countries in the world.
Certainly some of that is just culture (everybody has a somewhat differing opinion of what is "polite." That is, what we consider rude might be perfectly fine if you were speaking to another American.)
But even with that consideration, Americans tend to be more standoffish than most of the rest of the world, just in terms of general speaking patterns.
The gun debate is a prime example. Americans want to protect their person and their property, while the rest of us shake our head because we realize that its really a tragedy of the commons in disguise. Every individual is choosing to arm themselves for their own (vaguely) good reasons, but at the end of the day you just end up with a society that, as a whole, just has a hell of a lot of killing tools, most of which will never actually be used for their theoretical defensive purposes and exist in the world purely as a risk factor.
On the other hand, I would claim virtually all of it. Almost every common software package these days has a "free for personal use," "free for up to X users," "free but limited features," or similar option, and you can bet that there's plenty of companies out there -- especially in the small-to-mid-size range -- that happily will grab the free version if they think its sufficient for their needs (even the personal use ones if they assume it will only be used in-house and nobody is likely to catch them.)
Because: 1) It usually costs more. A third party selling a product is splitting the development costs among multiple customers. You building it yourself means eating 100% of the cost yourself. This is the main reason pretty much in all cases. But even when it isn't,
2) You're probably going to do it worse. A third party selling a product is dedicated to that product and knows what they're doing usually pretty good. If you try to build it yourself, sure you can tailor it to your business needs better but at the cost of doing its primary job worse. Think of all of the TDWTF posts that relate to date handling because people don't know about, or can't be bothered using, one of the standard (and usually built-in in modern languages) set of date handling routines.
Of course there's plenty of examples of companies going way too far and trying to jackhammer third party software into their business flow in a way it really was never meant to be used.. those situations are when they should be considering option 2.
Its not. The point is that people forget that fact and just assume OSS is better because that's what they've been told over and over again, even though in the vast majority of cases with OSS, its simply not true. All software has bugs and potential security risks no matter what philosophy the developers happen to follow.
And I'm not talking about Linux vs Windows or Apache vs IIS -- all four of those are enormous products with an enormous amount of effort put into developing and testing them.
I'm talking about the tiny one-offs that some dude slapped together 3 years ago and decided to release and has barely looked at since. People look at that and all they see is "OSS is secure cause eyeballs right!?" They fail to think about the fact that just because reading the code is possible, doesn't mean anyone's actually bothered doing it (or that the author has bothered applying any fixes/patches they were sent.)
Until you work for a company that doesn't give a crap about your hashes and sues for ownership in east Texas anyway..
Then you have to prove that: a) Your hash shows what you claim it shows. b) You couldn't have forged the timestamp (albeit that should be difficult if you're using a major public service such as gmail.) c) You couldn't have forged your code to match a previously-uploaded timestamp in some way. d) Any of that matters under your employment contract (you had a lawyer review it before you accepted the job, right?)
And do all that in a jurisdiction you probably don't live in (possibly not even in your state) and is historically company-favored.
I mean sure that's some fairly evil doings, and hopefully you'd recognize your company's nefariousness before it comes to a that.. But just keep in mind that being right isn't always sufficient -- you have to be able to prove you're right, possibly to people who don't understand technology and don't want to understand it.
There is no reason to think that "wisdom" or some other factor CAN be captured in A.I.
There's no reason to think that it can't either. In fact, its more likely that AI could potentially exactly model a human brain given enough processing power and other such things. Outside of religious ideals, there's nothing to suggest that the human brain is anything more than an absurdly complex computer.
We can barely even make software that runs reliably.
We're unwilling to pay for software that runs reliably. There's a difference.
Moores Law is dead.
The verdict's still out on that. Current technology is near its limit, but there's plenty of new tech being researched that could potentially keep Moore's law going for years or decades to come.
What makes you think there will be some magic leap that brings intelligence to computers?
I believe intelligence is simply a natural outcome of having enough processing power. The Church-Turing thesis would be the most obvious contradiction here, but to really show that that prevents intelligence, you would have to show that "intelligence" is truly non-computable, as opposed to being just an enormously complex set of computations.
If you want a "magic leap," Arthur C. Clarke nailed it: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Simply wait until our technology advances enough.
Says who? As far as I know, there's no theoretical reason why a computer with enough processing nodes couldn't 100% emulate a human brain, including all of the thoughts and even emotions that come with it.
We're of course nowhere close to being able to actually construct such a thing, but progress marches on and at some point, it will happen providing we don't kill ourselves off before we get to that point.
But I'm not going to be able to prove this to you.... Why?
Because its untrue.
Because ultimately it's a question of philosophy
No, its a question of time. You can't even really claim a question of moral philosophy since someone, somewhere will have different morals than you and will let the cat out of the bag almost as soon as the cat exists.
Somehow I expect that to not be an exception. That's probably one of the first thing robots will do once they get human-emulating enough to avert the squick factor.
No risk of disease (assuming they know how to keep themselves clean of course..) No wondering if you're helping to feed some poor girl's drug habit.. No worrying if they're actually as old as they claim.. All sorts of negatives that come with prostitution in our current culture could be avoided (of course, much of that could be avoided by legalizing and regulating prostitution as well but that's pretty unlikely to happen as long as the religious right holds sway over politics.)
the text of which describes the electroweak interaction.
It really doesn't, beyond stating that the electroweak interaction is a thing that exists at higher energy levels. It does nothing to actually describe the interaction or its relation to the electromagnetic and weak forces.
It would be like having "catamaran" point you to "boat" with a single sentence that just said "catamaran is a boat with two hulls," and no further description as to why you'd do that, how they're laid out or anything, and assumes you know what part of the boat the "hull" is! (Amusingly, wikipedia actually doesn't have a "simple" page for catamaran..)
Well I can answer that one for you: Physicists consider it important because its part of the universe, and their job is to describe (not necessarily understand!) the universe.
The weak interaction itself is already a bit hard to intuitively grasp since it doesn't work like any of the other forces (mainly, it doesn't follow the "attracts/repels" theme.) The unified electroweak force is even less comprehensible in any context other than its mathematical description, and its at an energy scale that probably will never exist in our world outside of short bursts within particle accelerators. There simply isn't any real "significance" to it outside of scientific curiosity.
The very first usage of that term links to another page that describes it.
Not to mention, would it make a whole lot more sense to you if they told you the Higgs was found at 2.223x10^-25 kg? Can you even comprehend 10^-25 of anything? Does it help to know that its approximately 133x the mass of a proton? Do you have any better intuitive idea how much a proton weighs?
eV is used because it provides human-understandable numbers, even if the units themselves are not really understandable. But that gives some information that laypeople can understand -- namely, comparisons with other objects of similar size. Its much easier to tell at a glance that 938MeV second. That makes a lightyear approximately 9.461x10^12 km if my math is right. And again, you have no way to contextually 10^12 of anything.
Its not hopelessly complex "for no reason," its hopelessly complex because its a realm that's entirely outside of human intuition and many concepts don't even have useful human-scale metaphors to help you. The only way to understand much of it, even on a basic level, is through the math.
And they own the copy_right_. They get to dictate how you use that copy, not some guy who happens to have a device it can be played on.
The fact that its difficult-to-impossible to prevent you from infringing their copyright, doesn't change the fact that doing so is illegal no matter how much you think you control your device, or how much you want to believe copyright shouldn't exist.
You have the right to record Netflix shows and watch them on another device.
I think you'd have a bit of a fight on that one, since Netflix is available on practically every common device and at pretty much any time of day or night, which is a very different scenario from TV where if you miss the show, you're screwed. I mean depending on the judge, it might be considered the same, but I'm not sure I would rely on it if you wish to stay legal.
DRM is a bad idea, from start to finish. It is going to cause future generations to lose access to decades of culture when the DRM servers shut down.
Again, this is not the fault of DRM. Its the fault of the laws surrounding DRM.
And the fault of idiots assuming that "preserving content for future generations" somehow implies that they personally should be allowed to "preserve" the content for future generations (aka: keep it in their bittorrent queue until want to reclaim their disk space. That's the same thing, right?)
Never mind the assumption that there's any content needs to be preserved at all. I mean sure it would be nice, but its hardly required by any stretch of the imagination.
That said, the law could be fixed by a) Not having copyright terms be continually extended until we may as well just call it the age of the universe and b) Once the term expires, require that the content be released into the public domain unencumbered. And finally c) Restrict the "breaking DRM = breaking the law" clauses to not apply to public domain content.
b) of course may be hard to implement in some ways since it would be easy enough for a publisher to "lose" their unencrypted sources just as they're about to expire and "find" them again later if it suits their business interests, but at the same time if you combine it with c), the problem kind of goes away on its own since people could just (legally) rip copies they already have, and it seems unlikely that unbreakable DRM will ever be a thing that's possible.
Except the legal sense. Which is what the whole discussion is about. If there was no copyright law, the point would be moot. And you could argue a world without copyright may be better, but its not the world we live in.
It is. Other people in this thread have mentioned things you can verify -- for instance, you can verify that you did vote and that the machine accepted your vote (someone could certainly watch over your shoulder on that as well, but we generally don't consider that part to be sensitive information.)
I mean there could be some tricks to be done. Each ballot for instance could have a picture of one of 16 animals listed beside each choice, and then as long as you remember which animal was associated with your candidate, you could verify that that animal shows up later (through a website or such,) and since each ballot is randomized, someone looking over your shoulder would at best have to trust you when you say the animal it shows is associated with the candidate they wanted you to pick.
Something like that might work for a small ballot (ie: only one or two things to choose -- not some of the horror stories I hear with some ballots wanting you to elect the president and 50 judges and school trustees and the designated frozen pole licker and 13 referendums all at once) -- nobody would remember that many animals.
OK now I'm going a little crazy, but I guess you could then have the reading machine print out a "receipt" showing the animals you selected, and you could verify your receipt against your ballot before handing it in, and then verify it against the website/whatever later (and of course you wouldn't necessarily need animals for this -- I chose those originally as they're easy to distinguish and remember in small numbers. If you have a printed receipt you don't need to memorize things anymore..)
So OK, I think I've convinced myself that verifying your own vote could work while still protecting your privacy (as long as you can avoid telling anyone what the randomized receipt listing means, but that's equivalent to not telling them who you voted for.)
So next step.. how can you be sure that the system you verified yourself against is the same system that they used to tally the final vote count? I could build a perfectly safe and secure voting machine, collect say the 1 million votes in my district and open the website so each of those million people can verify that the machine indeed counted their vote as they made it -- and then report a totally arbitrary pair of numbers for the final counts, as long as they added up to a total of 1 million.
In large elections this would be somewhat mitigated the same way it is now -- each polling station reports numbers and providing you report the numbers per-station, its unlikely that enough stations could be corrupted to the point that they'd swing the vast majority of elections. Sure there might be the odd occasion here and there where the vote is tightly split and the tiebreaking polling station happens to be the corrupt one, but that's a lot of chance factors all having to line up perfectly so not impossible, but also not super likely and difficult to pre-plan.
For smaller votes though (say a small town voting for mayor) where there's only one or two polling stations however, the "reporting a count completely disconnected from the voting" issue could be a problem, and since we're talking about a theoreticals here, we'd rather not have problems. I can't think of a solution for this one. At least no solution that doesn't require out-of-band effort such as manual recounts and scrutineers and the such.
Slashdot Mirror
That report is in x million, not x thousand. Their total assets is 24 trillion yen, or ~217 billion USD. Comparing the year-over-years, it looks like their assets are increasing 40-50bn/yr on average. That doesn't really give a clear idea of income vs costs, but 880bn spread over multiple injections doesn't seem too far out of reality as long as they can keep running at that level.
If you stopped after the word "machine," you probably could get a 10mil seed fund from somebody.
Hell that actually sounds like it might be an interesting idea if VR ever takes off. Imagine being able to browse Amazon, seeing the items rendered in 3D and maybe even being able to manipulate them?
Because we've collectively decided that adult privacy isn't worth protecting. Or more precisely, advertisers and the politicians they've bought have decided that for us. This was decided long before the interwebs was even a common thing, for that matter.. old school unsolicited snail mail worked much like modern spammers, just on a smaller and slower scale, including buying and selling peoples' personal information.
Frankly, I doubt we'd worry about child privacy protection or children's susceptibility to ads if it didn't lead to kids being annoying and constantly demanding you buy things for them... adults, even politicians, start caring a lot more when something directly annoys them or worse, costs them money.
Parents should be paying attention to what their kids are doing, especially younger kids. Can I assume you're also the first to scream "parental responsibility!" whenever there's a story about kids playing excessively violent games or watching online porn or whatever?
Presumably, the company considering taking the NIH tack isn't planning on developing an entire new standalone product line (and all of the marketing and support and whatnot that goes along with that) and are just needing the software either for internal purposes, or as part of a larger platform or product that is their primary business.
That's correct, I assumed the scenario that the parent poster had posed.
Answering questions about an unrelated scenario isn't really productive in most conversations regardless of how many times you can include the term "FOSS."
You need hot water though, and he's trying to get America into lots of that..
The problem isn't that we're seeing one 80-year-old record being broken.
The problem is that we're seeing record after record after record being broken, and then being broken again the following year and the year after that.
One hurricane record being broken is interesting. A dozen various hurricane records being broken in the span of two months is worrying, even if many of them are only decade-old records.
Especially when its happening almost exactly as predicted by the climate scientists that continually get written off as being hacks. How many times do they need to be proven right before people start considering the possibility that some of their more dire predictions may also be more than just "leftist propaganda?" When the ice sheets melt and New York is permanently under water? When we're all living in biodomes near the arctic because the rest of the planet is uninhabitable? Maybe not even then?
I don't know about theirs, but up here in Canada we have distracted driving laws (and have for a few years now, at least in BC.) Generally the punishments are some fairly hefty fines, and possible suspension or even revocation of your driver's license if you have multiple offenses.
And it applies to any distracted driving technically -- on your phone, eating, doing your hair, whatever. Of course there's a lot of responsibility on the cops to both somehow notice distracted drivers, and also to not abuse the law and fine people who don't deserve it. Luckily we don't have quite the same level of antagonistic relationship with our police force as we hear coming up from the states (not that they're perfect by any means.. just less negatively viewed in public opinion.. though there's at least some correlation there I'm sure.)
Ignoring the fact that a situation like that is a rare fraction of total accidents, in most such cases the biggest problem isn't the vehicle's capabilities but the operator's reaction time. It doesn't matter how sharp a corner you can theoretically pull off if you've already collided before you can turn the wheel.
.. And yet America is almost universally considered one of the rudest countries in the world.
Certainly some of that is just culture (everybody has a somewhat differing opinion of what is "polite." That is, what we consider rude might be perfectly fine if you were speaking to another American.)
But even with that consideration, Americans tend to be more standoffish than most of the rest of the world, just in terms of general speaking patterns.
The gun debate is a prime example. Americans want to protect their person and their property, while the rest of us shake our head because we realize that its really a tragedy of the commons in disguise. Every individual is choosing to arm themselves for their own (vaguely) good reasons, but at the end of the day you just end up with a society that, as a whole, just has a hell of a lot of killing tools, most of which will never actually be used for their theoretical defensive purposes and exist in the world purely as a risk factor.
On the other hand, I would claim virtually all of it. Almost every common software package these days has a "free for personal use," "free for up to X users," "free but limited features," or similar option, and you can bet that there's plenty of companies out there -- especially in the small-to-mid-size range -- that happily will grab the free version if they think its sufficient for their needs (even the personal use ones if they assume it will only be used in-house and nobody is likely to catch them.)
Because:
1) It usually costs more. A third party selling a product is splitting the development costs among multiple customers. You building it yourself means eating 100% of the cost yourself. This is the main reason pretty much in all cases. But even when it isn't,
2) You're probably going to do it worse. A third party selling a product is dedicated to that product and knows what they're doing usually pretty good. If you try to build it yourself, sure you can tailor it to your business needs better but at the cost of doing its primary job worse. Think of all of the TDWTF posts that relate to date handling because people don't know about, or can't be bothered using, one of the standard (and usually built-in in modern languages) set of date handling routines.
Of course there's plenty of examples of companies going way too far and trying to jackhammer third party software into their business flow in a way it really was never meant to be used.. those situations are when they should be considering option 2.
Its not. The point is that people forget that fact and just assume OSS is better because that's what they've been told over and over again, even though in the vast majority of cases with OSS, its simply not true. All software has bugs and potential security risks no matter what philosophy the developers happen to follow.
And I'm not talking about Linux vs Windows or Apache vs IIS -- all four of those are enormous products with an enormous amount of effort put into developing and testing them.
I'm talking about the tiny one-offs that some dude slapped together 3 years ago and decided to release and has barely looked at since. People look at that and all they see is "OSS is secure cause eyeballs right!?" They fail to think about the fact that just because reading the code is possible, doesn't mean anyone's actually bothered doing it (or that the author has bothered applying any fixes/patches they were sent.)
Until you work for a company that doesn't give a crap about your hashes and sues for ownership in east Texas anyway..
Then you have to prove that:
a) Your hash shows what you claim it shows.
b) You couldn't have forged the timestamp (albeit that should be difficult if you're using a major public service such as gmail.)
c) You couldn't have forged your code to match a previously-uploaded timestamp in some way.
d) Any of that matters under your employment contract (you had a lawyer review it before you accepted the job, right?)
And do all that in a jurisdiction you probably don't live in (possibly not even in your state) and is historically company-favored.
I mean sure that's some fairly evil doings, and hopefully you'd recognize your company's nefariousness before it comes to a that.. But just keep in mind that being right isn't always sufficient -- you have to be able to prove you're right, possibly to people who don't understand technology and don't want to understand it.
There is no reason to think that "wisdom" or some other factor CAN be captured in A.I.
There's no reason to think that it can't either. In fact, its more likely that AI could potentially exactly model a human brain given enough processing power and other such things. Outside of religious ideals, there's nothing to suggest that the human brain is anything more than an absurdly complex computer.
We can barely even make software that runs reliably.
We're unwilling to pay for software that runs reliably. There's a difference.
Moores Law is dead.
The verdict's still out on that. Current technology is near its limit, but there's plenty of new tech being researched that could potentially keep Moore's law going for years or decades to come.
What makes you think there will be some magic leap that brings intelligence to computers?
I believe intelligence is simply a natural outcome of having enough processing power. The Church-Turing thesis would be the most obvious contradiction here, but to really show that that prevents intelligence, you would have to show that "intelligence" is truly non-computable, as opposed to being just an enormously complex set of computations.
If you want a "magic leap," Arthur C. Clarke nailed it: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Simply wait until our technology advances enough.
Computers will not be capable of abstract thought
Says who? As far as I know, there's no theoretical reason why a computer with enough processing nodes couldn't 100% emulate a human brain, including all of the thoughts and even emotions that come with it.
We're of course nowhere close to being able to actually construct such a thing, but progress marches on and at some point, it will happen providing we don't kill ourselves off before we get to that point.
But I'm not going to be able to prove this to you.... Why?
Because its untrue.
Because ultimately it's a question of philosophy
No, its a question of time. You can't even really claim a question of moral philosophy since someone, somewhere will have different morals than you and will let the cat out of the bag almost as soon as the cat exists.
very few exceptions (maybe prostitution)
Somehow I expect that to not be an exception. That's probably one of the first thing robots will do once they get human-emulating enough to avert the squick factor.
No risk of disease (assuming they know how to keep themselves clean of course..) No wondering if you're helping to feed some poor girl's drug habit.. No worrying if they're actually as old as they claim.. All sorts of negatives that come with prostitution in our current culture could be avoided (of course, much of that could be avoided by legalizing and regulating prostitution as well but that's pretty unlikely to happen as long as the religious right holds sway over politics.)
the text of which describes the electroweak interaction.
It really doesn't, beyond stating that the electroweak interaction is a thing that exists at higher energy levels. It does nothing to actually describe the interaction or its relation to the electromagnetic and weak forces.
It would be like having "catamaran" point you to "boat" with a single sentence that just said "catamaran is a boat with two hulls," and no further description as to why you'd do that, how they're laid out or anything, and assumes you know what part of the boat the "hull" is! (Amusingly, wikipedia actually doesn't have a "simple" page for catamaran..)
Well I can answer that one for you: Physicists consider it important because its part of the universe, and their job is to describe (not necessarily understand!) the universe.
The weak interaction itself is already a bit hard to intuitively grasp since it doesn't work like any of the other forces (mainly, it doesn't follow the "attracts/repels" theme.) The unified electroweak force is even less comprehensible in any context other than its mathematical description, and its at an energy scale that probably will never exist in our world outside of short bursts within particle accelerators. There simply isn't any real "significance" to it outside of scientific curiosity.
The very first usage of that term links to another page that describes it.
Not to mention, would it make a whole lot more sense to you if they told you the Higgs was found at 2.223x10^-25 kg? Can you even comprehend 10^-25 of anything? Does it help to know that its approximately 133x the mass of a proton? Do you have any better intuitive idea how much a proton weighs?
eV is used because it provides human-understandable numbers, even if the units themselves are not really understandable. But that gives some information that laypeople can understand -- namely, comparisons with other objects of similar size. Its much easier to tell at a glance that 938MeV second. That makes a lightyear approximately 9.461x10^12 km if my math is right. And again, you have no way to contextually 10^12 of anything.
Its not hopelessly complex "for no reason," its hopelessly complex because its a realm that's entirely outside of human intuition and many concepts don't even have useful human-scale metaphors to help you. The only way to understand much of it, even on a basic level, is through the math.
And they own the copy_right_. They get to dictate how you use that copy, not some guy who happens to have a device it can be played on.
The fact that its difficult-to-impossible to prevent you from infringing their copyright, doesn't change the fact that doing so is illegal no matter how much you think you control your device, or how much you want to believe copyright shouldn't exist.
You have the right to record Netflix shows and watch them on another device.
I think you'd have a bit of a fight on that one, since Netflix is available on practically every common device and at pretty much any time of day or night, which is a very different scenario from TV where if you miss the show, you're screwed. I mean depending on the judge, it might be considered the same, but I'm not sure I would rely on it if you wish to stay legal.
DRM is a bad idea, from start to finish. It is going to cause future generations to lose access to decades of culture when the DRM servers shut down.
Again, this is not the fault of DRM. Its the fault of the laws surrounding DRM.
And the fault of idiots assuming that "preserving content for future generations" somehow implies that they personally should be allowed to "preserve" the content for future generations (aka: keep it in their bittorrent queue until want to reclaim their disk space. That's the same thing, right?)
Never mind the assumption that there's any content needs to be preserved at all. I mean sure it would be nice, but its hardly required by any stretch of the imagination.
That said, the law could be fixed by a) Not having copyright terms be continually extended until we may as well just call it the age of the universe and b) Once the term expires, require that the content be released into the public domain unencumbered. And finally c) Restrict the "breaking DRM = breaking the law" clauses to not apply to public domain content.
b) of course may be hard to implement in some ways since it would be easy enough for a publisher to "lose" their unencrypted sources just as they're about to expire and "find" them again later if it suits their business interests, but at the same time if you combine it with c), the problem kind of goes away on its own since people could just (legally) rip copies they already have, and it seems unlikely that unbreakable DRM will ever be a thing that's possible.
Except the legal sense. Which is what the whole discussion is about. If there was no copyright law, the point would be moot. And you could argue a world without copyright may be better, but its not the world we live in.
It is. Other people in this thread have mentioned things you can verify -- for instance, you can verify that you did vote and that the machine accepted your vote (someone could certainly watch over your shoulder on that as well, but we generally don't consider that part to be sensitive information.)
I mean there could be some tricks to be done. Each ballot for instance could have a picture of one of 16 animals listed beside each choice, and then as long as you remember which animal was associated with your candidate, you could verify that that animal shows up later (through a website or such,) and since each ballot is randomized, someone looking over your shoulder would at best have to trust you when you say the animal it shows is associated with the candidate they wanted you to pick.
Something like that might work for a small ballot (ie: only one or two things to choose -- not some of the horror stories I hear with some ballots wanting you to elect the president and 50 judges and school trustees and the designated frozen pole licker and 13 referendums all at once) -- nobody would remember that many animals.
OK now I'm going a little crazy, but I guess you could then have the reading machine print out a "receipt" showing the animals you selected, and you could verify your receipt against your ballot before handing it in, and then verify it against the website/whatever later (and of course you wouldn't necessarily need animals for this -- I chose those originally as they're easy to distinguish and remember in small numbers. If you have a printed receipt you don't need to memorize things anymore..)
So OK, I think I've convinced myself that verifying your own vote could work while still protecting your privacy (as long as you can avoid telling anyone what the randomized receipt listing means, but that's equivalent to not telling them who you voted for.)
So next step.. how can you be sure that the system you verified yourself against is the same system that they used to tally the final vote count? I could build a perfectly safe and secure voting machine, collect say the 1 million votes in my district and open the website so each of those million people can verify that the machine indeed counted their vote as they made it -- and then report a totally arbitrary pair of numbers for the final counts, as long as they added up to a total of 1 million.
In large elections this would be somewhat mitigated the same way it is now -- each polling station reports numbers and providing you report the numbers per-station, its unlikely that enough stations could be corrupted to the point that they'd swing the vast majority of elections. Sure there might be the odd occasion here and there where the vote is tightly split and the tiebreaking polling station happens to be the corrupt one, but that's a lot of chance factors all having to line up perfectly so not impossible, but also not super likely and difficult to pre-plan.
For smaller votes though (say a small town voting for mayor) where there's only one or two polling stations however, the "reporting a count completely disconnected from the voting" issue could be a problem, and since we're talking about a theoreticals here, we'd rather not have problems. I can't think of a solution for this one. At least no solution that doesn't require out-of-band effort such as manual recounts and scrutineers and the such.