Don't be too hasty to assume the US is the bad player here. This is Vic "anyone who likes privacy is a child pornographer" Toews we're talking about.
Cost of implementation was a huge barrier to C-30 so if he can find a reason to force network upgrades anyway, why not just throw in a little online spying capability while they're at it and suddenly a huge stumbling block for C-30 (or whatever similar bill replaces it) is removed.
Yes, I was generalizing quite a bit. But not all services use authentication tokens yet either. Both sides of the equation are increasing however, so its only a matter of time.
I've read good things about iris scans. On a device with a front-facing camera, having the user stare at four randomly positioned icons in the correct order would help get the eyes to the right angle and distinguish a live iris from a printout.
Admittedly I don't follow along in biometrics news (beyond what gets posted to Slashdot of course) but of the two points you've listed there: - Front-facing camera requirement. These are pretty common -- almost all laptops have them, and many smart phones do as well. The bigger question is how much leeway can be given with respect to not looking squarely at the camera before the results become garbage. Maybe the smart peoples have figured out how to keep this loose enough to not be a real problem anymore?
- Distinguish a live iris from a printout. That's only half the battle. Also have to be able to distinguish my eyes from your eyes, and simple movement tracking is unlikely to be sufficient for that. I assume that the smart peoples know that much as well, so again its more a question of not "can we do it" but "can we do it good enough to be generally useful?" (and at a low enough price point to be acceptable to the wider public.)
- Something you have can be stolen. - Something you know can be coerced from you, retrieved via social engineering (ie: knowing your mother's maiden name or whatever), or whatever else. - Something you are can be duplicated by replicating you (or at least, the portion of you that the scanner cares about.)
Its still not perfect -- its entirely possible that somebody will just kidnap you while you've got your physical token on you -- that covers two of the three. And unless you're extremely stubborn and motivated, it probably wouldn't be hard to coerce most people's passwords either.
The easiest from a computer perspective is the password -- that's why its the most common/used.
Security tokens are rapidly becoming available for many systems (especially with the advent of cell phone authenticators since everybody already has a cell phone -- you don't need to purchase/obtain and carry around however many additional trinkets.)
Biometrics is harder. First of all, biometrics itself isn't extremely accurate. Its good enough to limit possibilities but for really secure applications, you still want a person to go in and confirm (or pick from a list, as in a police database search) to ensure that you've got a match. Not that people aren't fallible as well, but at least there's someone to blame.
Secondly, biometric scanners aren't all that common yet. If touch screens become high enough density then perhaps they could be used for fingerprint ID. Cameras are likely already good enough to be used for retinal scans, but it would require the user to position the camera at the correct angle and whatnot which is pretty implausible if they're just loosely holding it in front of them (that's why real retinal scanners, including your optometrist's tools, have headrests -- they keep your eyes in relatively the correct position while its scanning.)
So we've got one.. we're moving towards two.. I think three-tier authentication is a while away yet though.
There's a pretty big difference -- they're not selling the CEO's engine, the security system or their office plumbing.
They ARE selling software. It certainly helpful if the sales department has some clue what they're selling, that the support department has some clue how things are supposed to work and an idea of where to look when they stop working.
A knowledgeable support staff would certainly beat some call center drone in India reading off a half-hour-long script of things you've already tried (after being on hold for an hour in the first place) just to end up escalating and you have to wait another 2-3 days for tier 2 to bother with your ticket.
I don't really agree that non-programmers should be developing production code, but if they're doing most of that developing during their 2hr/wk of mentor-supervised time, then hopefully the mentor will be able to catch and prevent the worst coding failures before they become real problems.
Having a source != having copyright clearance to use the material from the source. Not that you can't question their claim regarding copyright clearance, but simply having a copy of the photo available isn't sufficient.
Windows equivalents of the databases, software development and text-processing tools that come free with Linux
Most, if not all, of which are available for Windows as well (though many of the dev and text tools might require cygwin or similar.)
I'm certainly not going to tell you to dislike or stop using Linux if its fulfilling your needs, but claiming Linux has a more accessible software suite is.. a little silly. There are very very few major projects, open or closed, that don't have a Windows port. Even free software tends to go where the users are.
Of course if you just like to run a whole lot of experimental or largely-unknown software then you might be on to something.. but nothing you've listed suggests that you're looking for that.
They would love to meet the Streisand effect -- Laminar would then have more money to hand over should they end up having to settle or lose the case.
And if Laminar follows it through to court and wins, the troll isn't going to feel any additional pain just because Laminar made a few extra sales in the meantime.
The only way this would cause the troll a problem is if: - Laminar currently doesn't have the money to defend, AND - They make enough additional sales that they DO have enough money to defend.
$1.5mill is a heck of a lot of additional sales at $3 a pop. (Of course, presumably they have some cash banked already so the tipping point is likely somewhat under $1.5mill, assuming its above zero in the first place.)
More likely the fact that everything under the sun comes with a EULA or ToS specifying that its non-transferable.
The technical side of breaking DRM hasn't historically been a big problem (even if you can't figure it out yourself, the torrent is only a few clicks away.)
Its the legal side of things that can be tricky, assuming you're in the group of people who care about keeping legitimate (and anyone high-profile pretty much has to be or they'd be plastered all over the news in short order.)
And come on, its Bruce Willis. I don't know how big his iTunes collection is, but I somehow think he could afford to just buy his daughters a copy if that's all he cared about.
He's taking a stand on principle. I give him a giant thumbs up for that! The whole mentality of locking in and locking down needs to be fought wherever it can!
The problem with things like medical apps is false negatives -- things the apps miss but a doctor should be able to discover. Except you don't go to the doctor because your app says "all clear."
Of course regulation can only go so far. Just as doctors themselves aren't always perfect and sometimes miss or even mis-diagnose issues, so will these apps no matter how tightly controlled they are.
But there's a huge difference between apps that have actual thought and medical knowledge (and UI design to prevent users from getting bad results due to bad input) put into them compared to apps that just give you some arbitrary "diagnosis" based on whatever informal medical buzzword happens to sell the best that year.
Cause lets face it, the majority of people are gullible and stupid when it comes to things they don't understand, and very few of us understand medicine and biology to any great extent. Obtaining a medical license wouldn't be nearly as expensive or take nearly as long if most of it could be (accurately) summed up as common knowledge.
"Too much" is subjective though. There's a lot of psychology that people will pay more for certain products essentially for the sake of paying more -- they feel they've got a better product even in cases where there's no quantitative difference.
And I'm not even talking about the prestige of owning something more expensive than your peers (that's also a big factor, but its a different one.) I'm talking about charging $500 for a $400 product and getting more customers, essentially completely inverting (a naive interpretation of) the tenets of microeconomics.
I say naive because a full treatment of micro involves "utility" rather than raw dollar value -- a much looser term that can potentially incorporate concepts like how a person feels about their purchase.
Essentially in my example, the customer is still paying $400 for the product, with the additional $100 buying them a warm fuzzy feeling as an accessory to the main purchase. Exactly the kind of thing you're seeing in action when a product is up-priced based purely on what brand/logo is attached to it.
For instance... if we must pass all 'legal' traffic, what about e-mail that complies with the CAN-SPAM act? Would we be allowed to filter that out, or does it have to go through to the customer's mailboxes?
IMO you should have to pass it through. If I want my email filtered, its my job to filter it.
You can provide the option to filter it yourself. That's cool. Its still my decision whether to enable the option or not. But its not cool for you to just arbitrarily delete my email, no matter how much it looks like spam to you or how beneficial you think you're being.
That said, I could see an argument for regulation-based decisions regarding whether specific filtering options are "opt-in" or "opt-out." But the keyword is "opt."
AFAIK, NN doesn't (currently) prevent traffic shaping based on the type of traffic -- ISP's are still able to give things like VOIP and other high-QoS services preference over things like bittorrent.
What they're not allowed to do is give their own VOIP service preferential treatment over Skype, Vonage, etc.
I'm not entirely sure where NN sits on topics like just capping bittorrent out of hand to make random third parties (ie: MPAA/RIAA) happy. In my mind that's not quite in the same category as the above VOIP example (since it would still treat all bittorrent the same without preference) but its still pretty shady to have third parties manipulating my service contract behind my back -- especially when my choices are typically "accept it or go offline" with zero room to bargain.
Don't know the details of the case, but if its as cut-and-dry as you make it out, that sounds like the work of either a brilliant lawyer or a stupid judge (or both.)
Not that I have any love for the MPAA but come on -- if it points me to something, its a "link" I can follow, regardless of whether I can just click or if I have to cut and paste it (and the lines are even blurring these days with the advent of automatic link detection in various software.) Similarly, a "magnet" vs a "torrent" are both just links with different icons from the user's perspective (which is the perspective that really matters at the end of the day.) Magnet links having an extra layer of technical indirection doesn't make them any less link-like in the long run.
There's a flaw in this argument. Somebody will always arrive carrying a club. And all of the arguments for equality in the world won't help you if they decide to use their club instead of their brains.
As for "protection from harm" -- is it not harmful for the only ISP in my area to partner with Apple and prevent me from using Microsoft products? Say what you will about Microsoft, its still an option that would be taken away from me against my will, which in my mind is a form of harm.
So you've got a choice to make: - No regulation: Let the ISPs harm their customers (many of whom have no useful alternatives, and just cutting the cable isn't really an option anymore for most people in the digital age.)
- Regulation: Let the government "harm" the ISPs.
Personally, I'm going for option 2. For all of the "legal person" rhetoric, I still tend to hold real people in higher esteem than a corporation.
Technically I suppose it would also place a (comparatively small) financial burden on the CEO's bonuses and the dividends of the large shareholders -- namely, exactly the people who are most capable of withstanding such a burden. But I'm still going to take the rights of the little guy who's struggling to make ends meet over the ability of some CEO to buy another personal helicopter.
You have two choices: - Government regulate ISPs, with (at least theoretically) the public interest in mind.
- ISPs regulate themselves, with only large shareholders and CEO bonuses in mind.
Who do you think will serve the public good more?
"Competition" is all fine and dandy when it exists, but for the vast majority of ISP consumers, it doesn't.
And if there's no competition to hold these guys in check, who do you propose should do it? The internet is too necessary these days to expect any sort of large-scale boycott in single-ISP regions.
And even when there is "competition", they're frequently in collusion to some degree or other as there's such a small chance of an upstart beating them to the punch that they may as well coexist in relative peace (at least until one sees an opening and then you're back to a straight up monopoly.)
Of course, we could just go all out and completely remove the regulation. Allow potential competitors to tear up streets and run haphazard unsafe cabling and whatnot all over the place. It would certainly lower the barrier to entry and you might see some actual competition. Of course, I'm not sure what sort of a city you'd be living in with that kind of blatant disregard for the public good. Libertarian dreamland I suppose.
Good, if they want to sell that kind of service do not call it internet service.
This. If you're selling something other than unfiltered internet service, then you shouldn't be calling it internet service.
There's a huge caveat though: Locations with few or even one possible provider. They could call it "ram it up your tailpipe service" and people would still have to buy it due to lack of (viable) alternatives. So there's some necessity to force said providers to provide an unrestricted internet service level at a reasonable price point -- because if they weren't forced to, they wouldn't do it (competition is great and all, but its a relatively useless argument in areas where competition doesn't exist and isn't likely to be generated any time soon.)
This is a big problem IMO. These guys are supposed to be "representative" of my needs and desires. If they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, then how on earth are they going to do a decent job of representing their own needs, never mind the diverse needs of all of their millions of constituents.
Maybe what's really needed is to stop electing people geographically, and start electing people topically (though of course some subjects are geographically restricted so these aren't completely mutually exclusive.)
Of course that would mean each election would cover dozens or hundreds of positions rather than just a handful, so its probably untenable in practice.
But it just screams "wrong" to me when you come out and tell me I can't expect the people representing me in major nation-changing decisions know about the things they're deciding.
And to top it off, we've got a system which actually encourages politicians to make decisions with little or no information -- sliding things in at the last minute or dropping copies of the bill off at 7am when the decision is expect at 8am.. that kind of thing. Intentionally not giving the politicians a chance to research what they're doing before doing it. Just. Ugh.
I suppose it makes it easier to buy politicians though. If they don't have the expertise to tell a good bill from a bad one, and aren't given a chance to consult with experts, they may as well just take the money and run cause what else can they do?
I don't envy a politician their job. At least not the ones who have any sense of morality left in them, as its doomed to be stifled at every turn possible it seems.
Which are, in essence, a link. Maybe not in the technical sense of a direct pointer, but its a method for finding what you're looking for.
Saying otherwise is just as pointless as the old bitching about how "piracy" wasn't a problem because "pirates" roamed the high seas and wore eye patches. Technically true, but a fundamentally pointless argument in practice -- which specific buzzword was used as the label is irrelevant.
Shakespeare even pointed this out several centuries ago ("A rose by any other name..") Its not like "using the wrong label!" has ever really held up as a useful argument.
Of course, taking Sturgeon's law into account, there's a whole lot of "less sparkle, less substance" out there as well. You can find some devastatingly terribly movies if you try!
And what's wrong with exchange an email address in exchange for something?
Nothing. Except that's rarely what you're exchanging.
Usually you're exchanging years of having to filter spam from your inbox for that something.
And its even nastier when the offering entity doesn't directly link the two. "Enter your email address to claim your free something!" They make it sound as if its a gift, when its actually an exchange. Shady. Commonplace by now and most people expect it, but still shady.
"Software" is far more than just bit manipulation. Its like saying Michelangelo just diddled with dyes a bit.
Sure you might be technically correct, but the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is obviously a bit more than just "paint manipulation" -- it required thought, design, artistry, etc -- all of which are aspects encompassed by the term "software" as well that goes far beyond the basic mathematics.
That said, I should clarify that I don't agree with the way software patents are currently handled, but I'm not against the general concept of protecting source code if a better system could be implemented (not likely to happen, but I can imagine such a thing!)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be too hasty to assume the US is the bad player here. This is Vic "anyone who likes privacy is a child pornographer" Toews we're talking about.
Cost of implementation was a huge barrier to C-30 so if he can find a reason to force network upgrades anyway, why not just throw in a little online spying capability while they're at it and suddenly a huge stumbling block for C-30 (or whatever similar bill replaces it) is removed.
Not strictly everybody.
Yes, I was generalizing quite a bit. But not all services use authentication tokens yet either. Both sides of the equation are increasing however, so its only a matter of time.
I've read good things about iris scans. On a device with a front-facing camera, having the user stare at four randomly positioned icons in the correct order would help get the eyes to the right angle and distinguish a live iris from a printout.
Admittedly I don't follow along in biometrics news (beyond what gets posted to Slashdot of course) but of the two points you've listed there:
- Front-facing camera requirement. These are pretty common -- almost all laptops have them, and many smart phones do as well. The bigger question is how much leeway can be given with respect to not looking squarely at the camera before the results become garbage. Maybe the smart peoples have figured out how to keep this loose enough to not be a real problem anymore?
- Distinguish a live iris from a printout. That's only half the battle. Also have to be able to distinguish my eyes from your eyes, and simple movement tracking is unlikely to be sufficient for that. I assume that the smart peoples know that much as well, so again its more a question of not "can we do it" but "can we do it good enough to be generally useful?" (and at a low enough price point to be acceptable to the wider public.)
That's why you have multiple methods:
- Something you have can be stolen.
- Something you know can be coerced from you, retrieved via social engineering (ie: knowing your mother's maiden name or whatever), or whatever else.
- Something you are can be duplicated by replicating you (or at least, the portion of you that the scanner cares about.)
Its still not perfect -- its entirely possible that somebody will just kidnap you while you've got your physical token on you -- that covers two of the three. And unless you're extremely stubborn and motivated, it probably wouldn't be hard to coerce most people's passwords either.
The easiest from a computer perspective is the password -- that's why its the most common/used.
Security tokens are rapidly becoming available for many systems (especially with the advent of cell phone authenticators since everybody already has a cell phone -- you don't need to purchase/obtain and carry around however many additional trinkets.)
Biometrics is harder. First of all, biometrics itself isn't extremely accurate. Its good enough to limit possibilities but for really secure applications, you still want a person to go in and confirm (or pick from a list, as in a police database search) to ensure that you've got a match. Not that people aren't fallible as well, but at least there's someone to blame.
Secondly, biometric scanners aren't all that common yet. If touch screens become high enough density then perhaps they could be used for fingerprint ID. Cameras are likely already good enough to be used for retinal scans, but it would require the user to position the camera at the correct angle and whatnot which is pretty implausible if they're just loosely holding it in front of them (that's why real retinal scanners, including your optometrist's tools, have headrests -- they keep your eyes in relatively the correct position while its scanning.)
So we've got one.. we're moving towards two.. I think three-tier authentication is a while away yet though.
There's a pretty big difference -- they're not selling the CEO's engine, the security system or their office plumbing.
They ARE selling software. It certainly helpful if the sales department has some clue what they're selling, that the support department has some clue how things are supposed to work and an idea of where to look when they stop working.
A knowledgeable support staff would certainly beat some call center drone in India reading off a half-hour-long script of things you've already tried (after being on hold for an hour in the first place) just to end up escalating and you have to wait another 2-3 days for tier 2 to bother with your ticket.
I don't really agree that non-programmers should be developing production code, but if they're doing most of that developing during their 2hr/wk of mentor-supervised time, then hopefully the mentor will be able to catch and prevent the worst coding failures before they become real problems.
Having a source != having copyright clearance to use the material from the source. Not that you can't question their claim regarding copyright clearance, but simply having a copy of the photo available isn't sufficient.
How much work can it be to click a link really?
Oh, right.
Windows equivalents of the databases, software development and text-processing tools that come free with Linux
Most, if not all, of which are available for Windows as well (though many of the dev and text tools might require cygwin or similar.)
I'm certainly not going to tell you to dislike or stop using Linux if its fulfilling your needs, but claiming Linux has a more accessible software suite is.. a little silly. There are very very few major projects, open or closed, that don't have a Windows port. Even free software tends to go where the users are.
Of course if you just like to run a whole lot of experimental or largely-unknown software then you might be on to something.. but nothing you've listed suggests that you're looking for that.
They would love to meet the Streisand effect -- Laminar would then have more money to hand over should they end up having to settle or lose the case.
And if Laminar follows it through to court and wins, the troll isn't going to feel any additional pain just because Laminar made a few extra sales in the meantime.
The only way this would cause the troll a problem is if:
- Laminar currently doesn't have the money to defend, AND
- They make enough additional sales that they DO have enough money to defend.
$1.5mill is a heck of a lot of additional sales at $3 a pop. (Of course, presumably they have some cash banked already so the tipping point is likely somewhat under $1.5mill, assuming its above zero in the first place.)
More likely the fact that everything under the sun comes with a EULA or ToS specifying that its non-transferable.
The technical side of breaking DRM hasn't historically been a big problem (even if you can't figure it out yourself, the torrent is only a few clicks away.)
Its the legal side of things that can be tricky, assuming you're in the group of people who care about keeping legitimate (and anyone high-profile pretty much has to be or they'd be plastered all over the news in short order.)
And come on, its Bruce Willis. I don't know how big his iTunes collection is, but I somehow think he could afford to just buy his daughters a copy if that's all he cared about.
He's taking a stand on principle. I give him a giant thumbs up for that! The whole mentality of locking in and locking down needs to be fought wherever it can!
The problem with things like medical apps is false negatives -- things the apps miss but a doctor should be able to discover. Except you don't go to the doctor because your app says "all clear."
Of course regulation can only go so far. Just as doctors themselves aren't always perfect and sometimes miss or even mis-diagnose issues, so will these apps no matter how tightly controlled they are.
But there's a huge difference between apps that have actual thought and medical knowledge (and UI design to prevent users from getting bad results due to bad input) put into them compared to apps that just give you some arbitrary "diagnosis" based on whatever informal medical buzzword happens to sell the best that year.
Cause lets face it, the majority of people are gullible and stupid when it comes to things they don't understand, and very few of us understand medicine and biology to any great extent. Obtaining a medical license wouldn't be nearly as expensive or take nearly as long if most of it could be (accurately) summed up as common knowledge.
"Too much" is subjective though. There's a lot of psychology that people will pay more for certain products essentially for the sake of paying more -- they feel they've got a better product even in cases where there's no quantitative difference.
And I'm not even talking about the prestige of owning something more expensive than your peers (that's also a big factor, but its a different one.) I'm talking about charging $500 for a $400 product and getting more customers, essentially completely inverting (a naive interpretation of) the tenets of microeconomics.
I say naive because a full treatment of micro involves "utility" rather than raw dollar value -- a much looser term that can potentially incorporate concepts like how a person feels about their purchase.
Essentially in my example, the customer is still paying $400 for the product, with the additional $100 buying them a warm fuzzy feeling as an accessory to the main purchase. Exactly the kind of thing you're seeing in action when a product is up-priced based purely on what brand/logo is attached to it.
For instance ... if we must pass all 'legal' traffic, what about e-mail that complies with the CAN-SPAM act? Would we be allowed to filter that out, or does it have to go through to the customer's mailboxes?
IMO you should have to pass it through. If I want my email filtered, its my job to filter it.
You can provide the option to filter it yourself. That's cool. Its still my decision whether to enable the option or not. But its not cool for you to just arbitrarily delete my email, no matter how much it looks like spam to you or how beneficial you think you're being.
That said, I could see an argument for regulation-based decisions regarding whether specific filtering options are "opt-in" or "opt-out." But the keyword is "opt."
AFAIK, NN doesn't (currently) prevent traffic shaping based on the type of traffic -- ISP's are still able to give things like VOIP and other high-QoS services preference over things like bittorrent.
What they're not allowed to do is give their own VOIP service preferential treatment over Skype, Vonage, etc.
I'm not entirely sure where NN sits on topics like just capping bittorrent out of hand to make random third parties (ie: MPAA/RIAA) happy. In my mind that's not quite in the same category as the above VOIP example (since it would still treat all bittorrent the same without preference) but its still pretty shady to have third parties manipulating my service contract behind my back -- especially when my choices are typically "accept it or go offline" with zero room to bargain.
Don't know the details of the case, but if its as cut-and-dry as you make it out, that sounds like the work of either a brilliant lawyer or a stupid judge (or both.)
Not that I have any love for the MPAA but come on -- if it points me to something, its a "link" I can follow, regardless of whether I can just click or if I have to cut and paste it (and the lines are even blurring these days with the advent of automatic link detection in various software.) Similarly, a "magnet" vs a "torrent" are both just links with different icons from the user's perspective (which is the perspective that really matters at the end of the day.) Magnet links having an extra layer of technical indirection doesn't make them any less link-like in the long run.
There's a flaw in this argument. Somebody will always arrive carrying a club. And all of the arguments for equality in the world won't help you if they decide to use their club instead of their brains.
As for "protection from harm" -- is it not harmful for the only ISP in my area to partner with Apple and prevent me from using Microsoft products? Say what you will about Microsoft, its still an option that would be taken away from me against my will, which in my mind is a form of harm.
So you've got a choice to make:
- No regulation: Let the ISPs harm their customers (many of whom have no useful alternatives, and just cutting the cable isn't really an option anymore for most people in the digital age.)
- Regulation: Let the government "harm" the ISPs.
Personally, I'm going for option 2. For all of the "legal person" rhetoric, I still tend to hold real people in higher esteem than a corporation.
Technically I suppose it would also place a (comparatively small) financial burden on the CEO's bonuses and the dividends of the large shareholders -- namely, exactly the people who are most capable of withstanding such a burden. But I'm still going to take the rights of the little guy who's struggling to make ends meet over the ability of some CEO to buy another personal helicopter.
You have two choices:
- Government regulate ISPs, with (at least theoretically) the public interest in mind.
- ISPs regulate themselves, with only large shareholders and CEO bonuses in mind.
Who do you think will serve the public good more?
"Competition" is all fine and dandy when it exists, but for the vast majority of ISP consumers, it doesn't.
And if there's no competition to hold these guys in check, who do you propose should do it? The internet is too necessary these days to expect any sort of large-scale boycott in single-ISP regions.
And even when there is "competition", they're frequently in collusion to some degree or other as there's such a small chance of an upstart beating them to the punch that they may as well coexist in relative peace (at least until one sees an opening and then you're back to a straight up monopoly.)
Of course, we could just go all out and completely remove the regulation. Allow potential competitors to tear up streets and run haphazard unsafe cabling and whatnot all over the place. It would certainly lower the barrier to entry and you might see some actual competition. Of course, I'm not sure what sort of a city you'd be living in with that kind of blatant disregard for the public good. Libertarian dreamland I suppose.
Good, if they want to sell that kind of service do not call it internet service.
This. If you're selling something other than unfiltered internet service, then you shouldn't be calling it internet service.
There's a huge caveat though: Locations with few or even one possible provider. They could call it "ram it up your tailpipe service" and people would still have to buy it due to lack of (viable) alternatives. So there's some necessity to force said providers to provide an unrestricted internet service level at a reasonable price point -- because if they weren't forced to, they wouldn't do it (competition is great and all, but its a relatively useless argument in areas where competition doesn't exist and isn't likely to be generated any time soon.)
This is a big problem IMO. These guys are supposed to be "representative" of my needs and desires. If they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, then how on earth are they going to do a decent job of representing their own needs, never mind the diverse needs of all of their millions of constituents.
Maybe what's really needed is to stop electing people geographically, and start electing people topically (though of course some subjects are geographically restricted so these aren't completely mutually exclusive.)
Of course that would mean each election would cover dozens or hundreds of positions rather than just a handful, so its probably untenable in practice.
But it just screams "wrong" to me when you come out and tell me I can't expect the people representing me in major nation-changing decisions know about the things they're deciding.
And to top it off, we've got a system which actually encourages politicians to make decisions with little or no information -- sliding things in at the last minute or dropping copies of the bill off at 7am when the decision is expect at 8am.. that kind of thing. Intentionally not giving the politicians a chance to research what they're doing before doing it. Just. Ugh.
I suppose it makes it easier to buy politicians though. If they don't have the expertise to tell a good bill from a bad one, and aren't given a chance to consult with experts, they may as well just take the money and run cause what else can they do?
I don't envy a politician their job. At least not the ones who have any sense of morality left in them, as its doomed to be stifled at every turn possible it seems.
With only two choices, you won't suddenly get better government by getting the 60% who know/care the most to show up either.
Which are, in essence, a link. Maybe not in the technical sense of a direct pointer, but its a method for finding what you're looking for.
Saying otherwise is just as pointless as the old bitching about how "piracy" wasn't a problem because "pirates" roamed the high seas and wore eye patches. Technically true, but a fundamentally pointless argument in practice -- which specific buzzword was used as the label is irrelevant.
Shakespeare even pointed this out several centuries ago ("A rose by any other name..") Its not like "using the wrong label!" has ever really held up as a useful argument.
Indie and B movies are good for that.
Of course, taking Sturgeon's law into account, there's a whole lot of "less sparkle, less substance" out there as well. You can find some devastatingly terribly movies if you try!
And what's wrong with exchange an email address in exchange for something?
Nothing. Except that's rarely what you're exchanging.
Usually you're exchanging years of having to filter spam from your inbox for that something.
And its even nastier when the offering entity doesn't directly link the two. "Enter your email address to claim your free something!" They make it sound as if its a gift, when its actually an exchange. Shady. Commonplace by now and most people expect it, but still shady.
"Software" is far more than just bit manipulation. Its like saying Michelangelo just diddled with dyes a bit.
Sure you might be technically correct, but the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is obviously a bit more than just "paint manipulation" -- it required thought, design, artistry, etc -- all of which are aspects encompassed by the term "software" as well that goes far beyond the basic mathematics.
That said, I should clarify that I don't agree with the way software patents are currently handled, but I'm not against the general concept of protecting source code if a better system could be implemented (not likely to happen, but I can imagine such a thing!)
Because a dodecahedron with sharp jagged edges sounds like a useful shape. Certainly more obvious than a rectangle!
Random number generator, apparently.