Who (or what) is responsible isn't the same thing as "via what mechanism".
Precisely my point. While nothing is ever 100% provable (especially over astrological or evolutionary timescales,) we have some very good theories for things like planet generation and the evolution of life as we know it. No our theories are not 100% complete, but they're complete enough that "The universe winked into instance 6000 years ago" has become an obviously false mechanism.
If you want to talk about "who" did it well then we can take that to the logical extreme as well -- God is also responsible for the scientists who figured all those theories out being there in the first place, so therefore belief in God itself proves creationism false. Really, we can talk these points in circles forever because short of the second coming, there's no way to prove (or disprove) God did squat all even if He exists. All you have is faith, and faith alone is not a scientifically valid argument. Being written in the Bible is still useless because you have to take it on faith (again) that not only was the Bible truly Gods word, but that 2000+ years of human dickery hasn't corrupted God's words into something wholly unlike His original direction. That's a lot of faith and while the Bible certainly contains fact, it is not in itself sole evidence of said facts (scientifically speaking.)
Most creationists don't believe that the devil was responsible for creation.
I never said that. I suggested a possible claim that the devil fucked around with the planet (post-creation, presumably) in order to confuse us as a counterargument to any dating schemes that would disprove the creationist "theory" of a 6000 year old Earth.
Why does it matter if "God did it" or "it happened from a random chance accident of random molecules" when one is studying how DNA works?
No idea, and I have absolutely no problem with this line of thinking. Where I run into problems is when someone tells me the former faith-based "theory" wholly rejects the latter science-based theory.
Claims of accuracy require a known correct value. It is precision that deals with repeatability and consistency between numbers of unknown accuracy.
To be absolutely certain of your claim yes (but then why would you need estimates?) But multiple independent sources verifying a claim can be interpolated with the magic of statistics can be used to make an educated guess as to the accuracy of your estimate. Yes its still fallible (all of your sources could be incorrect) but its a hell of a lot better than just picking a number out of a book and claiming with absolute certainty that that number is correct because that same book said it is.
If you seek across the world wild web, you'll find places that give the age of the universe ranging from 16+-5, 12.0+-1.5, 13.7+-0.2, and 9-11 GYears. Over the last few hundred years of that process, scientists have told us that the Earth is 2 GY, between 20 and 400 MY, 22MY, 200 MY, 56 MY, 50-150 MY. Radiometric dating has given answers from 1.3 GY to 3.8 GY. And now, with dedicated certainty, 4.54 GY, ref here.
Absolutely. New measurements are being made all the time. Some verifying previous measurements, some refuting them. Looking back billions of years is hard to be sure. But none of those measurements are anywhere close to 6k years. I don't even want to guess never mind compute how many sigmas you'd need to get an estimate (never mind many estimates) in the MY or GY range if the real value is 6k. It would be a hell of a margin of error.
I don't see anyone having their "big old brains" limited by anything, in fact, lots of "big old brains" have been having a lot of fun working on this. And there is nothing inherent in the statement "God did it" that stops people from being scientists and seeking knowledge.
Humanity has NEVER had a high percentage of smart, responsible people. And we're still trending towards a smarter populace (more people with at least a BA and such metrics.) Also being a more responsible populace is questionable but that's digressing a bit.
Humanity's cogs have always been the grunts -- they're plentiful and replaceable. But our leaps and bounds have come from the very very few superstars -- the Newtons and Einsteins and Teslas of the world are the ones who progress us.
The rest of us mass of grunts get to benefit from the achievements of the few visionaries and progress marches on. But there's never been a time when more than a fraction of a percent of humanity has been "smart" in the world-moving (even a small corner of the world) sense. There has of course been times when certain factions have tried to suppress the few visionaries that do pop up during their rule.
Overall my point is that visionary intelligence is more likely the genetic mistake among a (comparatively) stupid population rather than some goal we're supposed to be moving towards -- as others have pointed out, evolution favors your reproduction far far more than it favors your contributions to other peoples' lives.
"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that?
I don't know about that. It takes a lot of dedicated effort to remain willfully ignorant in today's era of information overload.
"God did it" made reasonably sense when the state of human knowledge was such that we couldn't have known better. And "God did it" is still a reasonable (if unlikely) reason for the Big Bang happening in the first place. People who want to want to reconcile science and religion are welcome to do so on levels like that if it makes them happy.
But trying to claim that the world started 6000 years ago when we can date things back millions or billions of years with proven methods are just out to lunch. The absolutely best they can claim is that the devil (or maybe God himself, to "test" us -- ie: make sure we don't try to use the big old brains He gave us) purposely laced our planet with particular datable isotopes and geographic strata and whatever else the smart people use to (reasonably) accurately date things (accuracy within 1% is a reasonable accuracy in many cases, even if it means a potential real error of a million years, for example.)
Some theories posit that the population of (biologically) modern humans may have dipped down into the thousands at a few points in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans so that might be some reference.
Whether you'd want to bank the cost of a generational starship on those theories is of course another question.
Now where did I toss that power plant capable of not decaying over potentially several millennia and at the same time powerful enough to return a craft from Jupiter back to earth in-tact?
When I refer to information that isn't significant - then I think of all the tax records and statistics accumulated.
Don't discount tax records. Much of the information about the size and distribution of ancient populations comes from census records, tax records, bills of sale, etc.
Smart engineers will eventually be able to recreate or replace practically anything worth constructing. But all the smarts in the world won't be able to know whether our cell phones had rounded rectangles or not -- they'll have to (literally) dig up the legal documents or references to them in order to discover that kind of trivia (never mind more important things like the above-mentioned population distributions and quality of life measures and whatnot.)
Women can be judged on more than just their appearance.
Not from afar too easily. Problem with this method is you have to get to know them before you can decide whether you want to get to know them. Judging a book by its cover isn't the best way to do things, but if all you have is a cover its still better than nothing.
If you are wanting them to make that assessment about you guys, maybe turnabout is fair play.
Pretty sure they do. Judging by first appearances isn't a trait limited to the spear half of our species as far as I know. It might not be as obvious thanks to various social norms but I'd be very suspicious of any claims that say its not happening without some serious research to back up the claim that women somehow override (or don't have) the instinct in a way that men are incapable of.
Again as it has been talked about on/., these companies do not want others to create on there own, they want to own them, and by allowing DRM that is exactly were that dictatorship over internet by BIG media companies roots itself, you already have copyright trolls, and BIG media shutting down peoples music/videos/blogs claiming copyright infringement, let alone there propaganda and there false accusations over how piracy is destroying them.
Your point is correct but the reasoning is a little off. DRM in some movie that I've never watch in no way affects my ability to produce and distribute my own movie whether I choose to DRM it as well or not.
The takedown notices are a different and in my opinion a much more significant evil within the copyright law. DRM is constantly being used as a bludgeon rather than a deterrent but that's not intrinsic to DRM (just evil implementation choices) whereas the ability to enforce a takedown with no proof of ownership is pretty much writing "abuse me" right into the law.
Unfortunately that means a whole bag of squat all to anyone except said non-incumbents and their supporters.
There's no law saying that I HAVE to port my software for every obscure OS on the planet and nor is their any such law for whatever organizations develop or implements these standards.
Its your choice to use something non-mainstream. You can claim all sorts of moral, ethical or technical grounds for your choice and power to you for following your conscience! But you can't force anyone else to give the slightest bit of a fuck about your choice.
You (and others in your situation) should in fact be championing standardized DRM -- at least in as much as the choice of no DRM isn't available. If you're stuck with the shit, you at least have a better chance for standardized shit to some day be implemented in your OS of choice.
What I don't understand is why anyone should care.
Because said studios are painting their pockets green. For a select group of influential enough "anyone"s.
Past election day, the studios typically have far more leverage over the lawmakers (and thus the laws) than average citizens do.
Its not infinite leverage to be sure and a large enough group of us normal folk certainly CAN make a difference but it takes hundreds or thousands of us to compete against a single well-funded lobbyist, making for plenty of logistical problems in addition to the financial ones when it comes to ordinary people influencing the laws that govern them.
This worked just fine when your cable was the only distribution channel.
Nowadays you can find streams (admittedly lower quality) of everything that's currently being broadcast -- sometimes even before its broadcast in your area depending on time zones.
And if you're willing to wait an hour, it will be up on TPB in full quality.
Sure you're right that people would just watch the premium channels if available but I don't think that NOT having them is doing much to prevent them from obtaining the content elsewhere and likely will do even less as technology rolls on and more people realize the possibilities.
This comment pretty much sums up everything that's wrong with the way the DRM crowd thinks.
"Remove potential profits and you remove the strongest incentive for those making new movies or developing new technologies."
There is always potential profits. Movies were profitable before the web existed, they're still profitable today and they'll still be profitable in the future whether DRM is implemented in the web standards or not.
In fact, having a standard implementation is worse for these companies because it will be a lot harder to replace once its broken and only a fool would assume that it won't be broken almost immediately.
Trouble is, no matter how much a movie (or anything else) profits, the suits always think they can squeeze a bit more out of it, especially if they can pass the footwork of doing so off to a third party. Typically the government (in the form of new laws) but in this case a standards body.
"One compromise might be trying to apply the same rules that the drug companies operate under. They are given a chance to recoup the substantial R&D costs and turn a profit but after a certain number of years they lose their exclusive rights and others can create generics."
If only! The drug companies are given a certain number of years (currently 20 if I'm reading Wikipedia right.) The copyright cartels are given practically indefinite protection (currently 95 years for corporate works and almost certainly to be extended again when our good friend Mickey next risks hitting the public domain.) Both numbers are the US terms. Other jurisdictions may differ of course but we're talking about US firms at the moment so best to use US numbers.
The copyright industry has a far far better (for them) deal than the drug companies do, legally speaking. What they lack is enforcement abilities -- any kid anywhere in the world with enough brain cells clicking the right way can break a DRM scheme and distribute a movie to anyone else in the world and be nearly untraceable.
On the other hand, it takes large factories and the ability to purchase and handle often-dangerous chemicals in order to create, pack and distribute prescription drugs at scale in any sort of safe manner, whether or not you hold the patent on them. And if you do that outside of the US (where the patent may not apply) then you face import restrictions trying if you want to get your knockoff into the US market, so you're no further ahead by going international either.
Lack of privacy (whether taken or given up) can definitely lead to conformity, I'll give you that.
I don't see how that leads into accepting authority. If the going trend is to buck the man, then all the conformists out there are going to be having a problem with authority.
In fact all of this communication I would say does more to promote lack of authority. Authority figures generally exist to organize and control things -- a self-organizing network of peers would therefore remove 50% of the purpose of having an authority figure, never mind having a tower of authority figures so high that the top dogs forget what the support structure they're standing on looks like.
The control side of things is another issue all together though. Somebody has to have final say on decisions (which might include the decision to fire slackers) or nothing will ever get completed.
The Linux kernel is a great example. Thousands of contributors around the world who (mostly) don't even know each other with only one or two (relatively small) layers of vetters and Linus having the final say when things get contentious. A very very flat model compared to most large companies and yet its worked very well over the past two-ish decades.
An absolute pancake won't really work out for anybody but there's no reason that we need towers stretching to the moon either. The old guard prefer the latter, the new crowd prefers the former. If they can agree on a middle ground then everybody wins (except 6 layers of middle managers!)
The downside of course is that by the time these ideas percolate far enough through the public consciousness, the new guard will have aged and become the old guard and we'll rinse and repeat in another half century. That shouldn't stop us from trying though as even small improvements over the long run are worthwhile.
I Have always found it amusing that a business would fire thousands of people to save a couple of million, instead of firing one or two upper managers to save the same amount.
Biggest problem is that the people who make 7-figure salaries to to also be the same people that decide who gets punted. Very few of them choose themselves (they will however happily vote themselves a pay raise to offset the newly freed up funds.)
Because major companies tend to care about their reputation more than your average whackjob.
Individuals with a track record of making smart, relevant statements are treated with plenty of respect around here. Of course they're mostly ignored because $$$ moves things in this part of the world, not respect. But we still give them the props they deserve.
Similarly, we don't really trust anything some fly-by-night company we've never heard of throws out. Companies have to earn respect just as much as people.
The trick is building the track record to earn such respect. Very few companies of any size are willing to risk the PR hit of saying completely off-the-wall things (unless they're flat out dishonest but that's another story) so companies tend to get the benefit of the doubt based on the assumption that they'll have cleansed the worst of the garbage from their statements (but we also assume that their arguments, no matter how relevant, are also going to be heavily lop-sided thanks to that same PR spin.)
On the other hand, there's no shortage of kooks out there willing to yell out their personal theories to anyone who will listen. And they don't have PR departments so you get unfiltered crazy from them. We've (mostly) learned not to listen.
The bigger problem is usually what companies don't say. Google for the most part seems to uphold their "don't be evil" mantra on the surface.. but who knows what's going on behind the scenes? We've realized that they know dangerous amounts of information about most of us but we can only trust that they're handling it safely and appropriately since they'll never tell us otherwise (unless forced to admit something due to a leak or whatever.)
Need two things: - Verification that you are who you say you are. - Verification that you haven't voted before.
The second part is easy. Distribute a pre-generated code to each eligible and registered voter (this already happens in my country -- we get voter cards a week or two before the election, though they're more of a reminder than anything important -- you can vote without them as long as you provide some other proof of residence.) Generating a 128bit (or longer) code randomly for each citizen is dead simple and impractically difficult to break in a short amount of time (especially with some anti-cracking measures in place like giving you a 10min cooldown if a single IP fails more than 3 times in a row or something.)
The first part is the hard part. In a regular polling station, the primary thing stopping me from selling my vote is that you have to trust I'm going to mark the one you paid me to mark. With the online system though I could just sell you my code and then you mark it yourself. This doesn't work in a regular polling station because the polling officers will be checking (photo) ID which is not an option online.
Of course a hybrid approach (electronic voting stations) is entirely possible -- that is, a regular polling station except with computer terminals instead of paper ballots.
Of course with any technological solution (online or not) you have to be able to trust the people who built the system to not have political motivations of their own (or at least be sufficiently moral to not compromise the system.) Which eliminates almost every company and government body large enough to actually implement such a system unfortunately.
Uhh wow. When did "the state" last stop much in the way of anything? They step in for antitrust cases (very) occasionally and they'll at least investigate if you're doing something nasty enough to catch the public's attention, but for the most part if you remember to pay your taxes, "the state" leaves you the hell alone (particularly in the US with their free-market-is-a-silver-bullet zealotry no matter how ridiculous the concept is in any particular market.)
Generally speaking, if someone's going to shut you down it will be another private enterprise. Some obscure Motorola patent from 1992 that barely scratches your product when you read it backwards and out of context will have you tied up in legal fees for the rest of your company's existence.
True, patents are government-backed but the government is NOT the one enforcing them and making it hard to innovate. Its the "free market" abuses of patents that does that. And don't start on "just get the government out all together" because then said private enterprises will be coming at you with private military forces (no government so nothing stopping them from doing that) instead of patent lawyers. Not much of an improvement.
Oh yeah I never meant to imply that -ALL- drug deals are made in dark alleys. I know it also happens in private residences and the riskier the deal the more likely it is to be kept as far out of sight as possible, but I would hazard to guess that in terms of individual transactions, most of them are more casual than a door-to-door delivery.
I'd probably guess that the larger majority aren't even terribly "private" in the dark alley sense -- most are probably just grabbing single hit or two at a party or concert or other such event where there's probably a bunch of other people in close proximity (who probably don't care cause most of them will be doing the same, but that's not the point here..)
And frankly, *you're not that interesting, so why the fuck would I spend precious resources to record your boring ass?* The camera's there in case something interesting happens.
Problem is, times that you start considering me interesting have a bad habit of being the very times I least want to be caught on permanent record.. at least for a large portion of the various values of 'you' and 'I'. A large chunk of Youtube exists because of that phenomenon!
Me walking down the street normally? No one cares. Me drunk off my ass and serenading a lamp post? That shit's worth recording! Guess which one I'd regret when my boss finds it online?
if I do something in public today that'd get me turned down for a job in ten years, that's 100% my own damned fault.
To a degree yes. The big problem is when you do something stupid at 16 when you aren't thinking about ten years in the future (and the law in many places even considers you unfit to make serious decisions, for better or worse!) Then at 26 when you're done college and looking at getting out on your own.. maybe start a family (if you don't already have one) and some potential employer finds that old picture.
Sure you can say "you don't want to work for them anyway" but when its a choice of putting up with an asswad or not eating that week/month well.. that's not much of a choice for most people. Some people don't have options (or at least can't pull them together before they run out of savings.)
if everyone is getting the same kind of record built up about them, then small infractions aren't such a big thing
I generally subscribe to this as well but its unfortunately not universally applicable. Celebrities and public officials in particular are held to a much much higher standard than the rest of us without much regard for the fact that they're just as human as we all are and sometimes fall to temptation too. It (usually) doesn't affect their job performance, but we still get all up in arms for relatively minor infractions that we laugh off when its our friends (or even ourselves.)
Regardless of how "common" it is, if someone decides that they need to smear you for some reason (prevent you from getting a job.. excuse to fire you.. getting the president impeached.. whatever..) and all of your past sins are available for anyone to view well.. you're just making their lives easier. Never mind the concoction that could likely be made with video editing software to help take things out of context!
I would hesitate to make that claim. They might find a dark alley to reduce the chances that someone will stumble over them, but its still a "public" alley in the sense that you're just playing the odds of someone not walking by -- there's no guarantee or restriction of such a fact.
Oppose that to having sex in your (legitimately) private bedroom. If someone (who doesn't live with you..) unexpectedly enters your bedroom while you're getting it on, you've probably got bigger problems than whether they saw you naked. Namely the fact that they had to break into your house and probably have more nefarious plans than voyeurism.
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Who (or what) is responsible isn't the same thing as "via what mechanism".
Precisely my point. While nothing is ever 100% provable (especially over astrological or evolutionary timescales,) we have some very good theories for things like planet generation and the evolution of life as we know it. No our theories are not 100% complete, but they're complete enough that "The universe winked into instance 6000 years ago" has become an obviously false mechanism.
If you want to talk about "who" did it well then we can take that to the logical extreme as well -- God is also responsible for the scientists who figured all those theories out being there in the first place, so therefore belief in God itself proves creationism false. Really, we can talk these points in circles forever because short of the second coming, there's no way to prove (or disprove) God did squat all even if He exists. All you have is faith, and faith alone is not a scientifically valid argument. Being written in the Bible is still useless because you have to take it on faith (again) that not only was the Bible truly Gods word, but that 2000+ years of human dickery hasn't corrupted God's words into something wholly unlike His original direction. That's a lot of faith and while the Bible certainly contains fact, it is not in itself sole evidence of said facts (scientifically speaking.)
Most creationists don't believe that the devil was responsible for creation.
I never said that. I suggested a possible claim that the devil fucked around with the planet (post-creation, presumably) in order to confuse us as a counterargument to any dating schemes that would disprove the creationist "theory" of a 6000 year old Earth.
Why does it matter if "God did it" or "it happened from a random chance accident of random molecules" when one is studying how DNA works?
No idea, and I have absolutely no problem with this line of thinking. Where I run into problems is when someone tells me the former faith-based "theory" wholly rejects the latter science-based theory.
Claims of accuracy require a known correct value. It is precision that deals with repeatability and consistency between numbers of unknown accuracy.
To be absolutely certain of your claim yes (but then why would you need estimates?) But multiple independent sources verifying a claim can be interpolated with the magic of statistics can be used to make an educated guess as to the accuracy of your estimate. Yes its still fallible (all of your sources could be incorrect) but its a hell of a lot better than just picking a number out of a book and claiming with absolute certainty that that number is correct because that same book said it is.
If you seek across the world wild web, you'll find places that give the age of the universe ranging from 16+-5, 12.0+-1.5, 13.7+-0.2, and 9-11 GYears. Over the last few hundred years of that process, scientists have told us that the Earth is 2 GY, between 20 and 400 MY, 22MY, 200 MY, 56 MY, 50-150 MY. Radiometric dating has given answers from 1.3 GY to 3.8 GY. And now, with dedicated certainty, 4.54 GY, ref here.
Absolutely. New measurements are being made all the time. Some verifying previous measurements, some refuting them. Looking back billions of years is hard to be sure. But none of those measurements are anywhere close to 6k years. I don't even want to guess never mind compute how many sigmas you'd need to get an estimate (never mind many estimates) in the MY or GY range if the real value is 6k. It would be a hell of a margin of error.
I don't see anyone having their "big old brains" limited by anything, in fact, lots of "big old brains" have been having a lot of fun working on this. And there is nothing inherent in the statement "God did it" that stops people from being scientists and seeking knowledge.
I have to fully disagree with this argument.
Humanity has NEVER had a high percentage of smart, responsible people. And we're still trending towards a smarter populace (more people with at least a BA and such metrics.) Also being a more responsible populace is questionable but that's digressing a bit.
Humanity's cogs have always been the grunts -- they're plentiful and replaceable. But our leaps and bounds have come from the very very few superstars -- the Newtons and Einsteins and Teslas of the world are the ones who progress us.
The rest of us mass of grunts get to benefit from the achievements of the few visionaries and progress marches on. But there's never been a time when more than a fraction of a percent of humanity has been "smart" in the world-moving (even a small corner of the world) sense. There has of course been times when certain factions have tried to suppress the few visionaries that do pop up during their rule.
Overall my point is that visionary intelligence is more likely the genetic mistake among a (comparatively) stupid population rather than some goal we're supposed to be moving towards -- as others have pointed out, evolution favors your reproduction far far more than it favors your contributions to other peoples' lives.
"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that?
I don't know about that. It takes a lot of dedicated effort to remain willfully ignorant in today's era of information overload.
"God did it" made reasonably sense when the state of human knowledge was such that we couldn't have known better. And "God did it" is still a reasonable (if unlikely) reason for the Big Bang happening in the first place. People who want to want to reconcile science and religion are welcome to do so on levels like that if it makes them happy.
But trying to claim that the world started 6000 years ago when we can date things back millions or billions of years with proven methods are just out to lunch. The absolutely best they can claim is that the devil (or maybe God himself, to "test" us -- ie: make sure we don't try to use the big old brains He gave us) purposely laced our planet with particular datable isotopes and geographic strata and whatever else the smart people use to (reasonably) accurately date things (accuracy within 1% is a reasonable accuracy in many cases, even if it means a potential real error of a million years, for example.)
Some theories posit that the population of (biologically) modern humans may have dipped down into the thousands at a few points in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans so that might be some reference.
Whether you'd want to bank the cost of a generational starship on those theories is of course another question.
Now where did I toss that power plant capable of not decaying over potentially several millennia and at the same time powerful enough to return a craft from Jupiter back to earth in-tact?
Ah yes, here it is! I'll get right on this one!
When I refer to information that isn't significant - then I think of all the tax records and statistics accumulated.
Don't discount tax records. Much of the information about the size and distribution of ancient populations comes from census records, tax records, bills of sale, etc.
Smart engineers will eventually be able to recreate or replace practically anything worth constructing. But all the smarts in the world won't be able to know whether our cell phones had rounded rectangles or not -- they'll have to (literally) dig up the legal documents or references to them in order to discover that kind of trivia (never mind more important things like the above-mentioned population distributions and quality of life measures and whatnot.)
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Women can be judged on more than just their appearance.
Not from afar too easily. Problem with this method is you have to get to know them before you can decide whether you want to get to know them. Judging a book by its cover isn't the best way to do things, but if all you have is a cover its still better than nothing.
If you are wanting them to make that assessment about you guys, maybe turnabout is fair play.
Pretty sure they do. Judging by first appearances isn't a trait limited to the spear half of our species as far as I know. It might not be as obvious thanks to various social norms but I'd be very suspicious of any claims that say its not happening without some serious research to back up the claim that women somehow override (or don't have) the instinct in a way that men are incapable of.
Again as it has been talked about on /., these companies do not want others to create on there own, they want to own them, and by allowing DRM that is exactly were that dictatorship over internet by BIG media companies roots itself, you already have copyright trolls, and BIG media shutting down peoples music/videos/blogs claiming copyright infringement, let alone there propaganda and there false accusations over how piracy is destroying them.
Your point is correct but the reasoning is a little off. DRM in some movie that I've never watch in no way affects my ability to produce and distribute my own movie whether I choose to DRM it as well or not.
The takedown notices are a different and in my opinion a much more significant evil within the copyright law. DRM is constantly being used as a bludgeon rather than a deterrent but that's not intrinsic to DRM (just evil implementation choices) whereas the ability to enforce a takedown with no proof of ownership is pretty much writing "abuse me" right into the law.
Unfortunately that means a whole bag of squat all to anyone except said non-incumbents and their supporters.
There's no law saying that I HAVE to port my software for every obscure OS on the planet and nor is their any such law for whatever organizations develop or implements these standards.
Its your choice to use something non-mainstream. You can claim all sorts of moral, ethical or technical grounds for your choice and power to you for following your conscience! But you can't force anyone else to give the slightest bit of a fuck about your choice.
You (and others in your situation) should in fact be championing standardized DRM -- at least in as much as the choice of no DRM isn't available. If you're stuck with the shit, you at least have a better chance for standardized shit to some day be implemented in your OS of choice.
What I don't understand is why anyone should care.
Because said studios are painting their pockets green. For a select group of influential enough "anyone"s.
Past election day, the studios typically have far more leverage over the lawmakers (and thus the laws) than average citizens do.
Its not infinite leverage to be sure and a large enough group of us normal folk certainly CAN make a difference but it takes hundreds or thousands of us to compete against a single well-funded lobbyist, making for plenty of logistical problems in addition to the financial ones when it comes to ordinary people influencing the laws that govern them.
This worked just fine when your cable was the only distribution channel.
Nowadays you can find streams (admittedly lower quality) of everything that's currently being broadcast -- sometimes even before its broadcast in your area depending on time zones.
And if you're willing to wait an hour, it will be up on TPB in full quality.
Sure you're right that people would just watch the premium channels if available but I don't think that NOT having them is doing much to prevent them from obtaining the content elsewhere and likely will do even less as technology rolls on and more people realize the possibilities.
You might be able to.
Standards are far more likely to be implemented for Linux than proprietary schemes.
There's a significant difference between being on the web and being the web.
This comment pretty much sums up everything that's wrong with the way the DRM crowd thinks.
"Remove potential profits and you remove the strongest incentive for those making new movies or developing new technologies."
There is always potential profits. Movies were profitable before the web existed, they're still profitable today and they'll still be profitable in the future whether DRM is implemented in the web standards or not.
In fact, having a standard implementation is worse for these companies because it will be a lot harder to replace once its broken and only a fool would assume that it won't be broken almost immediately.
Trouble is, no matter how much a movie (or anything else) profits, the suits always think they can squeeze a bit more out of it, especially if they can pass the footwork of doing so off to a third party. Typically the government (in the form of new laws) but in this case a standards body.
"One compromise might be trying to apply the same rules that the drug companies operate under. They are given a chance to recoup the substantial R&D costs and turn a profit but after a certain number of years they lose their exclusive rights and others can create generics."
If only! The drug companies are given a certain number of years (currently 20 if I'm reading Wikipedia right.) The copyright cartels are given practically indefinite protection (currently 95 years for corporate works and almost certainly to be extended again when our good friend Mickey next risks hitting the public domain.) Both numbers are the US terms. Other jurisdictions may differ of course but we're talking about US firms at the moment so best to use US numbers.
The copyright industry has a far far better (for them) deal than the drug companies do, legally speaking. What they lack is enforcement abilities -- any kid anywhere in the world with enough brain cells clicking the right way can break a DRM scheme and distribute a movie to anyone else in the world and be nearly untraceable.
On the other hand, it takes large factories and the ability to purchase and handle often-dangerous chemicals in order to create, pack and distribute prescription drugs at scale in any sort of safe manner, whether or not you hold the patent on them. And if you do that outside of the US (where the patent may not apply) then you face import restrictions trying if you want to get your knockoff into the US market, so you're no further ahead by going international either.
Lack of privacy (whether taken or given up) can definitely lead to conformity, I'll give you that.
I don't see how that leads into accepting authority. If the going trend is to buck the man, then all the conformists out there are going to be having a problem with authority.
In fact all of this communication I would say does more to promote lack of authority. Authority figures generally exist to organize and control things -- a self-organizing network of peers would therefore remove 50% of the purpose of having an authority figure, never mind having a tower of authority figures so high that the top dogs forget what the support structure they're standing on looks like.
The control side of things is another issue all together though. Somebody has to have final say on decisions (which might include the decision to fire slackers) or nothing will ever get completed.
The Linux kernel is a great example. Thousands of contributors around the world who (mostly) don't even know each other with only one or two (relatively small) layers of vetters and Linus having the final say when things get contentious. A very very flat model compared to most large companies and yet its worked very well over the past two-ish decades.
An absolute pancake won't really work out for anybody but there's no reason that we need towers stretching to the moon either. The old guard prefer the latter, the new crowd prefers the former. If they can agree on a middle ground then everybody wins (except 6 layers of middle managers!)
The downside of course is that by the time these ideas percolate far enough through the public consciousness, the new guard will have aged and become the old guard and we'll rinse and repeat in another half century. That shouldn't stop us from trying though as even small improvements over the long run are worthwhile.
I Have always found it amusing that a business would fire thousands of people to save a couple of million, instead of firing one or two upper managers to save the same amount.
Biggest problem is that the people who make 7-figure salaries to to also be the same people that decide who gets punted. Very few of them choose themselves (they will however happily vote themselves a pay raise to offset the newly freed up funds.)
Because major companies tend to care about their reputation more than your average whackjob.
Individuals with a track record of making smart, relevant statements are treated with plenty of respect around here. Of course they're mostly ignored because $$$ moves things in this part of the world, not respect. But we still give them the props they deserve.
Similarly, we don't really trust anything some fly-by-night company we've never heard of throws out. Companies have to earn respect just as much as people.
The trick is building the track record to earn such respect. Very few companies of any size are willing to risk the PR hit of saying completely off-the-wall things (unless they're flat out dishonest but that's another story) so companies tend to get the benefit of the doubt based on the assumption that they'll have cleansed the worst of the garbage from their statements (but we also assume that their arguments, no matter how relevant, are also going to be heavily lop-sided thanks to that same PR spin.)
On the other hand, there's no shortage of kooks out there willing to yell out their personal theories to anyone who will listen. And they don't have PR departments so you get unfiltered crazy from them. We've (mostly) learned not to listen.
The bigger problem is usually what companies don't say. Google for the most part seems to uphold their "don't be evil" mantra on the surface.. but who knows what's going on behind the scenes? We've realized that they know dangerous amounts of information about most of us but we can only trust that they're handling it safely and appropriately since they'll never tell us otherwise (unless forced to admit something due to a leak or whatever.)
Need two things:
- Verification that you are who you say you are.
- Verification that you haven't voted before.
The second part is easy. Distribute a pre-generated code to each eligible and registered voter (this already happens in my country -- we get voter cards a week or two before the election, though they're more of a reminder than anything important -- you can vote without them as long as you provide some other proof of residence.) Generating a 128bit (or longer) code randomly for each citizen is dead simple and impractically difficult to break in a short amount of time (especially with some anti-cracking measures in place like giving you a 10min cooldown if a single IP fails more than 3 times in a row or something.)
The first part is the hard part. In a regular polling station, the primary thing stopping me from selling my vote is that you have to trust I'm going to mark the one you paid me to mark. With the online system though I could just sell you my code and then you mark it yourself. This doesn't work in a regular polling station because the polling officers will be checking (photo) ID which is not an option online.
Of course a hybrid approach (electronic voting stations) is entirely possible -- that is, a regular polling station except with computer terminals instead of paper ballots.
Of course with any technological solution (online or not) you have to be able to trust the people who built the system to not have political motivations of their own (or at least be sufficiently moral to not compromise the system.) Which eliminates almost every company and government body large enough to actually implement such a system unfortunately.
Uhh wow. When did "the state" last stop much in the way of anything? They step in for antitrust cases (very) occasionally and they'll at least investigate if you're doing something nasty enough to catch the public's attention, but for the most part if you remember to pay your taxes, "the state" leaves you the hell alone (particularly in the US with their free-market-is-a-silver-bullet zealotry no matter how ridiculous the concept is in any particular market.)
Generally speaking, if someone's going to shut you down it will be another private enterprise. Some obscure Motorola patent from 1992 that barely scratches your product when you read it backwards and out of context will have you tied up in legal fees for the rest of your company's existence.
True, patents are government-backed but the government is NOT the one enforcing them and making it hard to innovate. Its the "free market" abuses of patents that does that. And don't start on "just get the government out all together" because then said private enterprises will be coming at you with private military forces (no government so nothing stopping them from doing that) instead of patent lawyers. Not much of an improvement.
Yes. My following sentence specifically mentioned collective punishment (though I used a fairly extreme example to be sure, the point was made.)
Oh yeah I never meant to imply that -ALL- drug deals are made in dark alleys. I know it also happens in private residences and the riskier the deal the more likely it is to be kept as far out of sight as possible, but I would hazard to guess that in terms of individual transactions, most of them are more casual than a door-to-door delivery.
I'd probably guess that the larger majority aren't even terribly "private" in the dark alley sense -- most are probably just grabbing single hit or two at a party or concert or other such event where there's probably a bunch of other people in close proximity (who probably don't care cause most of them will be doing the same, but that's not the point here..)
And frankly, *you're not that interesting, so why the fuck would I spend precious resources to record your boring ass?* The camera's there in case something interesting happens.
Problem is, times that you start considering me interesting have a bad habit of being the very times I least want to be caught on permanent record.. at least for a large portion of the various values of 'you' and 'I'. A large chunk of Youtube exists because of that phenomenon!
Me walking down the street normally? No one cares. Me drunk off my ass and serenading a lamp post? That shit's worth recording! Guess which one I'd regret when my boss finds it online?
if I do something in public today that'd get me turned down for a job in ten years, that's 100% my own damned fault.
To a degree yes. The big problem is when you do something stupid at 16 when you aren't thinking about ten years in the future (and the law in many places even considers you unfit to make serious decisions, for better or worse!) Then at 26 when you're done college and looking at getting out on your own.. maybe start a family (if you don't already have one) and some potential employer finds that old picture.
Sure you can say "you don't want to work for them anyway" but when its a choice of putting up with an asswad or not eating that week/month well.. that's not much of a choice for most people. Some people don't have options (or at least can't pull them together before they run out of savings.)
if everyone is getting the same kind of record built up about them, then small infractions aren't such a big thing
I generally subscribe to this as well but its unfortunately not universally applicable. Celebrities and public officials in particular are held to a much much higher standard than the rest of us without much regard for the fact that they're just as human as we all are and sometimes fall to temptation too. It (usually) doesn't affect their job performance, but we still get all up in arms for relatively minor infractions that we laugh off when its our friends (or even ourselves.)
Regardless of how "common" it is, if someone decides that they need to smear you for some reason (prevent you from getting a job.. excuse to fire you.. getting the president impeached.. whatever..) and all of your past sins are available for anyone to view well.. you're just making their lives easier. Never mind the concoction that could likely be made with video editing software to help take things out of context!
People buy and sell heroin in private.
I would hesitate to make that claim. They might find a dark alley to reduce the chances that someone will stumble over them, but its still a "public" alley in the sense that you're just playing the odds of someone not walking by -- there's no guarantee or restriction of such a fact.
Oppose that to having sex in your (legitimately) private bedroom. If someone (who doesn't live with you..) unexpectedly enters your bedroom while you're getting it on, you've probably got bigger problems than whether they saw you naked. Namely the fact that they had to break into your house and probably have more nefarious plans than voyeurism.