I think it would even go further than that. They'll rationalize that what they are doing isn't REALLY violating the Constitution because of reasons A, B, and C. (No matter how flimsy and/or wrong those reasons might be.) Thus, in their minds, they're good guys who are protecting America from a horrible threat and are staying well within the laws - all while ripping the Constitution to shreds.
I believe that banks like this too because the entire system is pretty automated. No need for staff to look at checks, deposit them, send the checks to the other bank, have THEM process the transaction, and then send the processed check back to the original check owner. Instead, the computers move a few bits around and all is good. Everyone wins (well, except perhaps for bank tellers who might find work harder to come by). When my wife and I were first married, she was dead set against online bill payment and wanted to pay everything by check. She's now a convert and complains loudly when some odd bill actually can't be paid online and requires a check,
Then there are the security risks of an unmonitored shared mailbox cluster, possibly being a place where mail could be stolen from, since it's not anywhere near someone's house....
That's the thought that crossed my mind. A common tactic of some identity thieves is to raid mailboxes for personal information. Right now, an ID thief might get information on one or two people per mailbox. They need to travel from mailbox to mailbox raiding each without being spotted. (And a car or person walking from mailbox to mailbox would be noticeable.) With a cluster, though, they could hit multiple mailboxes at once. Within a few minutes, they could get personal information on dozens of people and escape undetected.
Not to mention that it's not even the TSA doing the searches. It's the valets. At least we can require TSA agents to have some general knowledge of what they're looking for and have some oversight to prevent this from being a "Grab Anything Valuable In The Trunk" program. I'd have less trust that valets would have that training/oversight. (And my trust of TSA agents is pretty low to begin with.)
The problem isn't with "living breathing document" but with politicians and other people in positions of power who will find and exploit any loophole to increase their power.
If the Constitution wasn't seen as a "living, breathing document", then they would simply say "The Founding Fathers could never have foreseen GPS devices in portable telephony devices therefore the Constitution doesn't cover this."
The problem at this point is that the "people who abuse power" have gained so much power and most of the other people in positions with the power to change this (e.g. Congress) like the status quo too much and/or are afraid of change too much to stop them. So meetings will be held, hearings will take place, perhaps, if they are really serious, a flunky or two will lose their jobs, but in the end nothing will really change.
To an outsider it just looks like there's no difference at all between the parties, and that everything is set up to try to force people to think "well if I don't vote [Republican|Democrat], then those damn [Democrats|Republicans] will get in!"
That's the main part of the problem. Republicans and Democrats are different, but not radically. They are also increasingly out of touch with what the average American wants (but in different ways). They thrive in two ways:
1) Redistricting - At the local level, the party in power can change the maps of how voting districts are laid out. For example, if there is a district with a high number of voters for Democrats, Republicans can split it up among Republican-heavy districts resulting in closer elections in those districts, but still more Republican wins. (Or Dems can do that to Repubs if the Dems are in power.)
2) Fear - At the national level, each party demonizes the other. If you tend to land on the Democrat side, you get told that Republicans will ruin everything important to you. If you are on the Republican side, you are told a Democrat in office will destroy America. This builds up a high level of anxiety that NOT voting for the "good" party will let the "bad" one in office.
3) One Vote - Since people have just one vote and the person with the most votes essentially wins (with some complications when it comes to the Presidency and the Electoral College), a vote for a third party candidate is seen as one less vote for a Democrat/Republican. This means that your preferred of the two major party candidates might lose because you didn't support them with your vote. If we instead had Instant Runoff Voting, we could give our #1 vote to a third party and still support our preferred major party with our #2 or #3 votes. Of course, this would mean a rise in the power of third parties and the R's/D's wouldn't like that. So you can guess how quickly that will be implemented.
Honestly, if they'd set up for-pay streaming / downloading music for money back in 1999, I doubt I've have ever pirated any movies or music.
This.
Imagine an alternate world where the RIAA didn't sue Napster into oblivion but instead teamed up with it so that sharing was free for low-bitrate MP3s (say, radio-quality) and where links to official high-bitrate versions were available for a fair price. In this alternate reality, I highly doubt that music piracy would have taken off the way it did here. Instead, Napster would have thrived and would have funneled a lot of money to the RIAA from new music sales. Users wouldn't have been sued into bankruptcy but would have been encouraged to introduce their friends to new artists/songs. All years before Apple even considered making something called "iTunes."
Note, that I did say "ideally." However what is "ideal" and what is "realistic" are two very different things. So while ideally I'd love to have nobody control the Internet and have everyone behaving themselves purely because they are good human beings, I know that Reality dictates that this would never happen. Instead, corporations and governments would grab pieces of the Internet and rewrite the rules to benefit themselves and to keep smaller folks (especially idealists) out. (Or, at least, keep them "in their place.")
So we do need some group in charge, setting and enforcing rules, but the group needs to have checks and balances against its power and needs to have limits set on what it can and can't do. This way we don't get some UN group in charge that decides that saying something online that some religion somewhere considers blasphemous is grounds for being kicked offline for good (or extradited to some other country for prosecution). The US shouldn't be forced to send me to Morroco to stand trial for insulting their king and Morroco shouldn't be forced to send one of their citizens to the US for breaking a US law. (Now if the countries have an extradition agreement that covers this, that's another story, but that's between the governments and law enforcement agencies of those countries, not up to some "Internet governance" group.)
James Bond is British (sounding, at least) and changes his appearance every so often. Clearly James Bond is a Time Lord and just regenerates after every few movies. One of these days he's going to whip out a sonic device and disappear in a vessel that's bigger on the inside.
Ideally, neither the US nor the UN should "control the Internet." The US might be bad, but don't think the UN is some sort of "democracy of the world." When you look at who's demanding UN control of the Internet (countries like Russia, China, and various dictatorships around the world) and what proposals they keep floating (things like prosecution for offending their religious sensibilities - yes, if they had their way, posting "Religion X stinks!" would be a crime), you realize that UN control of the Internet would result in LESS online freedoms, not more. About the best thing that might happen if the UN took control of the Internet would be if it bungled its control in such a way as to render it unable to enforce provisions. More likely, though, anti-freedom provisions would be rammed through and the Internet would fracture into "countries who refuse to enforce the provisions" and "countries who enforce them." (Or, even more likely, a shade of grey where most countries enforce some but not all of the provisions. Resulting in the near-impossibility of moving to a place where the provisions aren't enforced at all.)
I used to work for a competitor of theirs (Windows Magazine), but I'm sad to see them go. Not PC World in general, but the "computer magazine" market in particular seems to have slid downhill a lot. As for the PC World staff goes, I sympathize a lot. I actually went through 2 shut downs with Windows Magazine. The first when we were called in by marketing, told we had a "great product but they didn't know how to sell it" so they were shutting us down. We went web-only and I remained on to work on their website. The second when a last-minute company-wide phone conference was called (never a good sign) and we were told that they were moving away from making their own content and would just rebrand others' content.
In other words, it costs us twice. First, to get cell phone service (acceptable though whether the amount is fair is arguable) and second to send our data to the NSA without our approval (definitely NOT acceptable). And the phone companies get paid twice by us (well, once by the government using our tax money). So they aren't likely to argue too strenuously against this unless the potential for bad PR is too high. (In other words, they'll work doubly hard to keep the whole thing secret.)
Ok, so let's split the difference with your cynicism and say you buy a new hard drive every 2 years. Granted hard drive prices and storage space are variable but right now (using GP's figures) you can get a 3TB drive for $100 or you can purchase 100GB of DropBox space for $10/month. This means you either spend $100 for 2 years' worth of space (at 3TB) or $240 for 2 years' worth of space - and only 3% of the space of the hard drive. With DropBox, you're paying more for less. Yes, DropBox has the advantage of (theoretically) being available anywhere you have Internet access, but who needs their entire document/photo/video/music library available all the time? If need be, you can get a free Google Drive or DropBox account and get a couple of GB of space for those few documents you need on the fly.
Re:Just shows what we already knew
on
How DRM Won
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· Score: 2
How long until the entertainment industry tries to claim that skipping a trailer on a DVD for a movie that was in theaters a decade ago somehow retroactively results in lost ticket sales?
"Our movie did horrible because two years from now some guys will rip their Blu-Ray disc releases of an unrelated movie released by the same studio, removing the trailer for our movie. This future action will have already caused us to lose ticket sales!"
Bonus: The Hollywood accountants can factor future ripping in when figuring out why a movie that made $500 million more than it cost to make actually lost money.
No place is guaranteed to last forever. And Amazon can change the TOS, but you can't criticize a company for things they might possibly do in the future, As it stands now, I can "accidentally" delete every single MP3 I've ever purchased from Amazon and then re-download them. In fact, Amazon does one better. If I buy a CD from them, they'll immediately give me the MP3 version as well. Yes, I can rip it myself, but it's a service that encourages people to buy more music from Amazon.
Amazon realizes that no-DRM MP3s are good for their business. If they switch to some heavily DRM-ed scheme in the future and cut off the MP3 access, I'll be in the front of the crowd criticizing them, but until then I'll cheer their good business practices and reward them with my business.
Does the app also tell you the nearest places to buy pitchforks and torches? I'm a big fan of (sensible) gun control legislation and even I think this app is a bad idea. Who is going to be determining what constitutes "dangerous"? Is that concealed carry permit holder dangerous because he has tattoos and piercings? (Never mind that he teaches gun safety classes at night.) Is the old bitter guy up the block who is constantly cleaning his shotgun on the porch dangerous? (Never mind that it's never loaded or that he always treats it as if it was.) Or is the normal looking guy the dangerous one? The guy who doesn't stand out at all. The guy who - unbeknownst to everyone else - likes to frequent websites of groups with extremist views.
Something tells me the first two people would get entered in the app and Mr. Normal would be left out. People would push for the guns to be taken away from the former and the latter would be the most likely to shoot up a crowd of people.
As someone just a few years ahead of you (37), I've noticed the creeping signs of "old age" (as I'd have defined it in my 20's): The music I grew up listening to is being played on the Oldies station (Billy Joel is NOT Oldies!!!!), I refer to college students as "those kids", and the hairs on my head now include some grey members. 20-something me would refer to me as "old", but 30-something me knows I'm not nearly old yet. (I'm sure 50-something me would laugh about 30-something me's ideas of what constitutes "old" so I won't make a new list.)
I read it a different way. "Median age is 29"... "Old techies don't die, they just can't get hired." Are they saying that over 30 is old? As someone who will soon celebrate his 38th birthday, I beg to disagree. Yes, there are some grey hairs on my head, but I've earned every one! I may not be as young as a college graduate who is packed with "fresh, new ideas", but I have the experience of being able to tell which ideas will succeed, which will fail, and I know how to properly implement said ideas.
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I think it would even go further than that. They'll rationalize that what they are doing isn't REALLY violating the Constitution because of reasons A, B, and C. (No matter how flimsy and/or wrong those reasons might be.) Thus, in their minds, they're good guys who are protecting America from a horrible threat and are staying well within the laws - all while ripping the Constitution to shreds.
I believe that banks like this too because the entire system is pretty automated. No need for staff to look at checks, deposit them, send the checks to the other bank, have THEM process the transaction, and then send the processed check back to the original check owner. Instead, the computers move a few bits around and all is good. Everyone wins (well, except perhaps for bank tellers who might find work harder to come by). When my wife and I were first married, she was dead set against online bill payment and wanted to pay everything by check. She's now a convert and complains loudly when some odd bill actually can't be paid online and requires a check,
That's the thought that crossed my mind. A common tactic of some identity thieves is to raid mailboxes for personal information. Right now, an ID thief might get information on one or two people per mailbox. They need to travel from mailbox to mailbox raiding each without being spotted. (And a car or person walking from mailbox to mailbox would be noticeable.) With a cluster, though, they could hit multiple mailboxes at once. Within a few minutes, they could get personal information on dozens of people and escape undetected.
Not to mention that it's not even the TSA doing the searches. It's the valets. At least we can require TSA agents to have some general knowledge of what they're looking for and have some oversight to prevent this from being a "Grab Anything Valuable In The Trunk" program. I'd have less trust that valets would have that training/oversight. (And my trust of TSA agents is pretty low to begin with.)
I have a Paypal account too.
*checks account balance*
*sees it's the same as before*
*cancels ordering giant yacht*
The problem isn't with "living breathing document" but with politicians and other people in positions of power who will find and exploit any loophole to increase their power.
If the Constitution wasn't seen as a "living, breathing document", then they would simply say "The Founding Fathers could never have foreseen GPS devices in portable telephony devices therefore the Constitution doesn't cover this."
The problem at this point is that the "people who abuse power" have gained so much power and most of the other people in positions with the power to change this (e.g. Congress) like the status quo too much and/or are afraid of change too much to stop them. So meetings will be held, hearings will take place, perhaps, if they are really serious, a flunky or two will lose their jobs, but in the end nothing will really change.
That's the main part of the problem. Republicans and Democrats are different, but not radically. They are also increasingly out of touch with what the average American wants (but in different ways). They thrive in two ways:
1) Redistricting - At the local level, the party in power can change the maps of how voting districts are laid out. For example, if there is a district with a high number of voters for Democrats, Republicans can split it up among Republican-heavy districts resulting in closer elections in those districts, but still more Republican wins. (Or Dems can do that to Repubs if the Dems are in power.)
2) Fear - At the national level, each party demonizes the other. If you tend to land on the Democrat side, you get told that Republicans will ruin everything important to you. If you are on the Republican side, you are told a Democrat in office will destroy America. This builds up a high level of anxiety that NOT voting for the "good" party will let the "bad" one in office.
3) One Vote - Since people have just one vote and the person with the most votes essentially wins (with some complications when it comes to the Presidency and the Electoral College), a vote for a third party candidate is seen as one less vote for a Democrat/Republican. This means that your preferred of the two major party candidates might lose because you didn't support them with your vote. If we instead had Instant Runoff Voting, we could give our #1 vote to a third party and still support our preferred major party with our #2 or #3 votes. Of course, this would mean a rise in the power of third parties and the R's/D's wouldn't like that. So you can guess how quickly that will be implemented.
This.
Imagine an alternate world where the RIAA didn't sue Napster into oblivion but instead teamed up with it so that sharing was free for low-bitrate MP3s (say, radio-quality) and where links to official high-bitrate versions were available for a fair price. In this alternate reality, I highly doubt that music piracy would have taken off the way it did here. Instead, Napster would have thrived and would have funneled a lot of money to the RIAA from new music sales. Users wouldn't have been sued into bankruptcy but would have been encouraged to introduce their friends to new artists/songs. All years before Apple even considered making something called "iTunes."
Well, you're a small time operator so you'd either be ignored or sued into oblivion. Now, if you were a multi-billion dollar corporation....
And Apple owns the lowercase letter i.
To quote a favorite webcomic of mine: "You can do more evil when you do it legal."
Bah. My blood (and the rest of me as well) is made from the remains of a star that went supernova and scattered its remnants throughout the Universe.
Actually, being hideously inefficient is the best case scenario when it comes to UN control of the Internet.
Note, that I did say "ideally." However what is "ideal" and what is "realistic" are two very different things. So while ideally I'd love to have nobody control the Internet and have everyone behaving themselves purely because they are good human beings, I know that Reality dictates that this would never happen. Instead, corporations and governments would grab pieces of the Internet and rewrite the rules to benefit themselves and to keep smaller folks (especially idealists) out. (Or, at least, keep them "in their place.")
So we do need some group in charge, setting and enforcing rules, but the group needs to have checks and balances against its power and needs to have limits set on what it can and can't do. This way we don't get some UN group in charge that decides that saying something online that some religion somewhere considers blasphemous is grounds for being kicked offline for good (or extradited to some other country for prosecution). The US shouldn't be forced to send me to Morroco to stand trial for insulting their king and Morroco shouldn't be forced to send one of their citizens to the US for breaking a US law. (Now if the countries have an extradition agreement that covers this, that's another story, but that's between the governments and law enforcement agencies of those countries, not up to some "Internet governance" group.)
James Bond is British (sounding, at least) and changes his appearance every so often. Clearly James Bond is a Time Lord and just regenerates after every few movies. One of these days he's going to whip out a sonic device and disappear in a vessel that's bigger on the inside.
Ideally, neither the US nor the UN should "control the Internet." The US might be bad, but don't think the UN is some sort of "democracy of the world." When you look at who's demanding UN control of the Internet (countries like Russia, China, and various dictatorships around the world) and what proposals they keep floating (things like prosecution for offending their religious sensibilities - yes, if they had their way, posting "Religion X stinks!" would be a crime), you realize that UN control of the Internet would result in LESS online freedoms, not more. About the best thing that might happen if the UN took control of the Internet would be if it bungled its control in such a way as to render it unable to enforce provisions. More likely, though, anti-freedom provisions would be rammed through and the Internet would fracture into "countries who refuse to enforce the provisions" and "countries who enforce them." (Or, even more likely, a shade of grey where most countries enforce some but not all of the provisions. Resulting in the near-impossibility of moving to a place where the provisions aren't enforced at all.)
For some reason, I'm reminded of Futurama's Robot Santa reviewing his Naughty list:
"Mobsters beating up a shopkeeper for protection money: Naughty! Shopkeeper not paying his protection money: Equally as naughty!"
I used to work for a competitor of theirs (Windows Magazine), but I'm sad to see them go. Not PC World in general, but the "computer magazine" market in particular seems to have slid downhill a lot. As for the PC World staff goes, I sympathize a lot. I actually went through 2 shut downs with Windows Magazine. The first when we were called in by marketing, told we had a "great product but they didn't know how to sell it" so they were shutting us down. We went web-only and I remained on to work on their website. The second when a last-minute company-wide phone conference was called (never a good sign) and we were told that they were moving away from making their own content and would just rebrand others' content.
In other words, it costs us twice. First, to get cell phone service (acceptable though whether the amount is fair is arguable) and second to send our data to the NSA without our approval (definitely NOT acceptable). And the phone companies get paid twice by us (well, once by the government using our tax money). So they aren't likely to argue too strenuously against this unless the potential for bad PR is too high. (In other words, they'll work doubly hard to keep the whole thing secret.)
Ok, so let's split the difference with your cynicism and say you buy a new hard drive every 2 years. Granted hard drive prices and storage space are variable but right now (using GP's figures) you can get a 3TB drive for $100 or you can purchase 100GB of DropBox space for $10/month. This means you either spend $100 for 2 years' worth of space (at 3TB) or $240 for 2 years' worth of space - and only 3% of the space of the hard drive. With DropBox, you're paying more for less. Yes, DropBox has the advantage of (theoretically) being available anywhere you have Internet access, but who needs their entire document/photo/video/music library available all the time? If need be, you can get a free Google Drive or DropBox account and get a couple of GB of space for those few documents you need on the fly.
How long until the entertainment industry tries to claim that skipping a trailer on a DVD for a movie that was in theaters a decade ago somehow retroactively results in lost ticket sales?
"Our movie did horrible because two years from now some guys will rip their Blu-Ray disc releases of an unrelated movie released by the same studio, removing the trailer for our movie. This future action will have already caused us to lose ticket sales!"
Bonus: The Hollywood accountants can factor future ripping in when figuring out why a movie that made $500 million more than it cost to make actually lost money.
No place is guaranteed to last forever. And Amazon can change the TOS, but you can't criticize a company for things they might possibly do in the future, As it stands now, I can "accidentally" delete every single MP3 I've ever purchased from Amazon and then re-download them. In fact, Amazon does one better. If I buy a CD from them, they'll immediately give me the MP3 version as well. Yes, I can rip it myself, but it's a service that encourages people to buy more music from Amazon.
Amazon realizes that no-DRM MP3s are good for their business. If they switch to some heavily DRM-ed scheme in the future and cut off the MP3 access, I'll be in the front of the crowd criticizing them, but until then I'll cheer their good business practices and reward them with my business.
Does the app also tell you the nearest places to buy pitchforks and torches? I'm a big fan of (sensible) gun control legislation and even I think this app is a bad idea. Who is going to be determining what constitutes "dangerous"? Is that concealed carry permit holder dangerous because he has tattoos and piercings? (Never mind that he teaches gun safety classes at night.) Is the old bitter guy up the block who is constantly cleaning his shotgun on the porch dangerous? (Never mind that it's never loaded or that he always treats it as if it was.) Or is the normal looking guy the dangerous one? The guy who doesn't stand out at all. The guy who - unbeknownst to everyone else - likes to frequent websites of groups with extremist views.
Something tells me the first two people would get entered in the app and Mr. Normal would be left out. People would push for the guns to be taken away from the former and the latter would be the most likely to shoot up a crowd of people.
As someone just a few years ahead of you (37), I've noticed the creeping signs of "old age" (as I'd have defined it in my 20's): The music I grew up listening to is being played on the Oldies station (Billy Joel is NOT Oldies!!!!), I refer to college students as "those kids", and the hairs on my head now include some grey members. 20-something me would refer to me as "old", but 30-something me knows I'm not nearly old yet. (I'm sure 50-something me would laugh about 30-something me's ideas of what constitutes "old" so I won't make a new list.)
I read it a different way. "Median age is 29"... "Old techies don't die, they just can't get hired." Are they saying that over 30 is old? As someone who will soon celebrate his 38th birthday, I beg to disagree. Yes, there are some grey hairs on my head, but I've earned every one! I may not be as young as a college graduate who is packed with "fresh, new ideas", but I have the experience of being able to tell which ideas will succeed, which will fail, and I know how to properly implement said ideas.
Now get off my lawn you kids!