I agree that uploading is distribution. The problem is proving exactly how many people the song was distributed to. If you were at a street corner selling DVDs, the police might be able to raid your operation and determine how many CDs you sold, but how do you do this for P2P? Obviously, there's at least one distribution offense (sending the file to the RIAA or related agency who "caught" you and added you to the list to sue), but how many others? Do you sue for distributing to 100? 1,000? 1.000,000? How do you determine just how many "lost sales" (as much as I hate that term) a share is worth?
Apple should make the code available (as printed text) in a cellar with no lights, no stairs in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
In many cases, we live at the whims of giant corporations and our only hope is that a government agency can help us. For example, if your local cable ISP - likely your one source for wired, high speed Internet - decided to drastically cap your data rates to prevent streaming while pushing their TV services. Complaints to the ISP would go unheeded and there would be no competition to jump ship to or to help keep them honest. Only a government agency would have the power to keep them in check.
Here, though, it's reversed. A government agency has decided that they should have access to all phones all the time. (Let's be honest, that's the FBI's end game. They've all but admitted it.) What can the average person do? We can vote for other candidates, but that will only have so much of an effect. The powerful tend to know how to stay in power - even if it means subverting the voting process or corrupting new politicians. A big company (Apple) standing up to the government agency is our best hope at keeping the government agency at bay.
In either case, it's a story of two giant monsters fighting in a big city and the little people getting crushed. It's just a matter of which giant monster is on our side this time. (Next fight, it might the other way around.)
Hey, the FBI is just giving Apple a simple offer of protection (from having their programmers forced to do a lot of work for the government for free). If Apple doesn't want to take the FBI up on their offer, then the FBI can't be held responsible if Apple's business were to suffer some sort of "accidental setback." *cracks knuckles threateningly*
Don't worry. The FBI/NSA/etc. know where all those people are now, what they are doing, and who they have been talking with. Soon, the FBI might also be able to see what's on all of their phones as well. You know, just in case any of them even thinks of doing "wrong." (Where "wrong" is defined by the FBI/NSA/etc.)
Copyright does have its uses. Without it, someone could publish a book and have a movie company make a movie based on the book right away without giving the author anything. The problem with copyrights is that the terms and penalties have gotten all out of whack.
Copyrights now last for 90+ years and judges have indicated that any length of time is fine so long as it is limited. By this logic, they could extend copyright to 1 million years and argue that this is a "limited" period of time. Copyright lengths should be reduced to 14 years with a one-time, paid 14 year renewal. If something isn't making you enough money after 14 years to warrant paying for renewal, you let it go. And after 28 years, you should be able to milk everything out of it that you could so you release it to the public domain and make something new.
On the penalties front, the penalties were set in the days when casual copyright infringement was hardly ever prosecuted. People made and shared mix tapes recorded off the radio, but weren't sued for it. People who made multiple copies of CDs and sold them on the street corners, though, would find themselves in court facing huge fines. I'd argue that we should keep "commercial copyright infringement" fines where they are and cap "non-commercial/home infringement" at 10x the cost of buying the item infringed on. So if you uploaded 1,000 songs, you would face a fine of $0.99*10*1,000, or $9,900. High enough to act as a deterrent but not so high as to bankrupt you immediately. (Right now, uploading 1,000 songs would mean a fine of $750,000 to $150,000,000.)
If we reigned in copyright's length and fines, the balance would be restored and the usefulness of copyright would shine through again.
Actually, you do have every right to talk on your cellphone. Being rude and being against the law are two different things. The reaction to the former shouldn't be to do the latter. If you don't like hearing people talking on their cellphones, invest in some noise cancelling headphones. What's next? You don't like the smell of people when shoved together into the tiny metal box of a subway car so you bring a super-soaker filled with perfume and spray them all down?
If he didn't want to hear the cellphones, he could have gotten a good pair of noise canceling headphones and put on some music. It would block out the sounds of other people talking on the phone without breaking any laws. As it was, he was upset that people's actions (talking on the phone) were affecting him so he took an action (using a jammer) that affected others (not just the ones talking on the phone, but anyone using a cell phone even in a quiet manner).
And no, the harvested crops weren't eaten. The soils contained heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and mercury, and there were concerns that these could be taken up by the plants.
This should be the big showstopper. The whole purpose of growing plants on Mars or the Moon are for future astronauts to eat. If the astronauts can't eat them because the plants pulls toxic compounds from the soil, then what's the purpose of growing them in the first place? Why not just use hydroponics?
It's not just the math. It's a mix up of which place the requested number is, whether the number is spelled out ("ten") or written using digits ("10"), and what operation is being requested. For example, my captcha could be any of the following:
5 - two = [ ] [ ] + 1 = 7 12 + [ ] = nineteen
Combining all of these makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha while keeping it easy for humans. I was getting 80+ spam comments daily until I implemented the captcha. Then it dropped to one or two a day. No, it's not unsolvable by computers. Captchas and computers solving them will always be an arms race so at some point this captcha method will fail. For now, though, it puts up enough of a roadblock to stop the spam bots while not irritating human readers to much that they don't comment because of the captcha.
I added a captcha field to my blog's comments section and that really cut down on the spam. I didn't opt for a "letters written so weirdly that even humans can't read it" captcha, but for a math based one. For example, my comment form might say: One + [ ] = 5. If you type in "4", your comment gets through. If you type in anything else, your comment gets nuked. The math problems are simple enough for even the most math-challenged commenter but wind up being tricky for comment spam bots. (Some spammers hand copy/paste their spam so this gets through, but Akismet and other tools can help catch these.)
Except that "we don't support older phones" won't be a valid response to a court order of "unlock this phone." In addition, precedent will state that since Apple unlocked these phones before, they have the ability to keep unlocking it. Worst case scenario would be that the court says "ok, you don't need to unlock these old phones in the future - you just need to give the FBI a universal unlocking program and THEY can unlock the phones."
You do bring up a good point, though. Once this precedent is set, Apple will be all but required to have unlocking tools (either on-hand or given to the FBI) for any version of their OS and any model of their phone.
If the FBI gets the precedent set that Apple has to unlock the phone for them, then how long will it be before it's declared that all phone vendors must be able to unlock phones for law enforcement at any time? We're already seeing laws of this kind being proposed in some states. The precedent will grease these wheels and make the move towards stronger encryption risky for any device manufacturer.
Actually, the FBI's been pretty overt with what they want and they view "just this one phone" as a stepping stone to unlock any phone they want at any time they want. Like you pointed out, precedent is the important thing here. If Apple fails to set the right precedent, then it's only a matter of time before Apple is flooded with requests and the FBI demands that Apple turn over the unlocking program so that the FBI can unlock phones quicker.
The FBI only wants Apple to have the access right now just like it's "just for this one phone." Once the precedent is set, the FBI will ask for more and more phones to be unlocked for ever-less-severe crimes. It'll go from "he's a terrorist" to "he's a murderer" to "he threatened someone" to "this person uploaded some movies against copyright law." Meanwhile, the law enforcement agencies requesting this unlocking will increase. It'll start with the FBI, but eventually local law enforcement will want access. Also, law enforcement agencies around the world will demand that Apple unlock devices for crimes committed in their own countries.
As the requests pour in, Apple will take longer and longer to fulfill the them (at greater and greater cost to Apple) until the FBI tells Apple to just hand over a generic "unlock any iPhone" program. Apple will resist but the precedent will have already been set. This is just quibbling over who has the program (and it'll be spun that this is easier for everyone involved) so Apple will hand the program to the FBI... and then to local law enforcement... and then to law enforcement organizations across the world. And then the inevitable leak will occur and hacking groups will get access to it.
I know "slippery slope" can be a tenuous argument, but the FBI and various law enforcement agencies haven't even tried to hide their true intent. They want to be able to unlock any phone, at any time, based on the flimsiest of reasons. Apple is standing in the way and they want the courts to order Apple to comply and weaken our security (device encryption) to make us more "secure" (as in anti-terrorism security theater).
Similar results here in upstate NY. By now we should have gotten 49.2 inches of snow. Instead, we've gotten 10.3 inches. It's 54F out right now (at nearly 9PM) and it should get to 70 tomorrow. Christmas day here was warmer than it was on July 4th. I didn't need to use ice melt, my roof rake, or more than one shovel all winter. I'm not really complaining about the lack of snow, but my youngest son (age 9) definitely has been.
To be fair, I'd probably ask the quarterback about how to kick a football before asking a master chef. At the very least, the quarterback is more likely to have interacted with people who kick footballs and might have picked up some knowledge about how to kick footballs.
Of course, I'd ask the chef about how to kick a football before asking Charlie Brown.
You can also have more snow in places because the warmer weather means lakes don't freeze over. Since they don't freeze over, there's more evaporation which turns into more lake effect snow.
Not to mention, you likely have to interact with the watch in some way to get to the information you need to cheat on the test. The professor might notice you repeatedly tapping and swiping on your Definitely-Not-A-Giant-Cheating-Smartwatch. About the only thing I can think of to make it more obvious is require voice commands. "Watch, what is the square root of 64 divided by 2 cubed?"
That's what happens in my son's middle school. Kids are allowed to have smartphones, but can't have them out during school. If they are caught with a smartphone out, it's confiscated and the parent needs to come to collect it. The reason for requiring the parent to collect it is to make it a bigger offense than just "oh well, I got caught texting in class. I'll just get it before I leave." The students recognize that Offense Requiring Parental Involvement is much more serious and are therefore much more likely to stay within the rules.
Yeah the cleaning industry, media etc have done an amazing job exploting people's ignorance and paranoia about "germs", making a lot of people unreasonably neurotic.
I saw a commercial for an automatic soap dispenser that touted that you wouldn't get germs on your hands if you used it to get soap. My response was: But you're putting soap on your hands at that point, shouldn't any germs you get on your hands at that point just die/get washed off soon afterwards? Why would you need something like this at your house?
Did Google+ ever fully do away with the real name policy? Last I heard, they allowed pseudonyms, but they were displayed as "Joe Smith (Pseudonym)". If you wanted to keep your real name private, there was no way to do this.
I liked Google+'s features in theory but disliked the real name policy. It meant that I couldn't use it for my blogging activities (on which I use a pseudonym) without risking getting all my Google services shut off (including things like e-mail which I used as well) just because my pseudonym isn't my actual name.
Testing? We have no time for testing! We have to ship the product out now because marketing told everyone that the release date was today. It seems to work well enough when we ran it that one time so it must be fine. Besides, you need to work on these five dozen other projects since we fired half the staff and kept the workload the same.
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I agree that uploading is distribution. The problem is proving exactly how many people the song was distributed to. If you were at a street corner selling DVDs, the police might be able to raid your operation and determine how many CDs you sold, but how do you do this for P2P? Obviously, there's at least one distribution offense (sending the file to the RIAA or related agency who "caught" you and added you to the list to sue), but how many others? Do you sue for distributing to 100? 1,000? 1.000,000? How do you determine just how many "lost sales" (as much as I hate that term) a share is worth?
Apple should make the code available (as printed text) in a cellar with no lights, no stairs in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
In many cases, we live at the whims of giant corporations and our only hope is that a government agency can help us. For example, if your local cable ISP - likely your one source for wired, high speed Internet - decided to drastically cap your data rates to prevent streaming while pushing their TV services. Complaints to the ISP would go unheeded and there would be no competition to jump ship to or to help keep them honest. Only a government agency would have the power to keep them in check.
Here, though, it's reversed. A government agency has decided that they should have access to all phones all the time. (Let's be honest, that's the FBI's end game. They've all but admitted it.) What can the average person do? We can vote for other candidates, but that will only have so much of an effect. The powerful tend to know how to stay in power - even if it means subverting the voting process or corrupting new politicians. A big company (Apple) standing up to the government agency is our best hope at keeping the government agency at bay.
In either case, it's a story of two giant monsters fighting in a big city and the little people getting crushed. It's just a matter of which giant monster is on our side this time. (Next fight, it might the other way around.)
Hey, the FBI is just giving Apple a simple offer of protection (from having their programmers forced to do a lot of work for the government for free). If Apple doesn't want to take the FBI up on their offer, then the FBI can't be held responsible if Apple's business were to suffer some sort of "accidental setback." *cracks knuckles threateningly*
Don't worry. The FBI/NSA/etc. know where all those people are now, what they are doing, and who they have been talking with. Soon, the FBI might also be able to see what's on all of their phones as well. You know, just in case any of them even thinks of doing "wrong." (Where "wrong" is defined by the FBI/NSA/etc.)
Copyright does have its uses. Without it, someone could publish a book and have a movie company make a movie based on the book right away without giving the author anything. The problem with copyrights is that the terms and penalties have gotten all out of whack.
Copyrights now last for 90+ years and judges have indicated that any length of time is fine so long as it is limited. By this logic, they could extend copyright to 1 million years and argue that this is a "limited" period of time. Copyright lengths should be reduced to 14 years with a one-time, paid 14 year renewal. If something isn't making you enough money after 14 years to warrant paying for renewal, you let it go. And after 28 years, you should be able to milk everything out of it that you could so you release it to the public domain and make something new.
On the penalties front, the penalties were set in the days when casual copyright infringement was hardly ever prosecuted. People made and shared mix tapes recorded off the radio, but weren't sued for it. People who made multiple copies of CDs and sold them on the street corners, though, would find themselves in court facing huge fines. I'd argue that we should keep "commercial copyright infringement" fines where they are and cap "non-commercial/home infringement" at 10x the cost of buying the item infringed on. So if you uploaded 1,000 songs, you would face a fine of $0.99*10*1,000, or $9,900. High enough to act as a deterrent but not so high as to bankrupt you immediately. (Right now, uploading 1,000 songs would mean a fine of $750,000 to $150,000,000.)
If we reigned in copyright's length and fines, the balance would be restored and the usefulness of copyright would shine through again.
Actually, you do have every right to talk on your cellphone. Being rude and being against the law are two different things. The reaction to the former shouldn't be to do the latter. If you don't like hearing people talking on their cellphones, invest in some noise cancelling headphones. What's next? You don't like the smell of people when shoved together into the tiny metal box of a subway car so you bring a super-soaker filled with perfume and spray them all down?
If he didn't want to hear the cellphones, he could have gotten a good pair of noise canceling headphones and put on some music. It would block out the sounds of other people talking on the phone without breaking any laws. As it was, he was upset that people's actions (talking on the phone) were affecting him so he took an action (using a jammer) that affected others (not just the ones talking on the phone, but anyone using a cell phone even in a quiet manner).
This should be the big showstopper. The whole purpose of growing plants on Mars or the Moon are for future astronauts to eat. If the astronauts can't eat them because the plants pulls toxic compounds from the soil, then what's the purpose of growing them in the first place? Why not just use hydroponics?
It's not just the math. It's a mix up of which place the requested number is, whether the number is spelled out ("ten") or written using digits ("10"), and what operation is being requested. For example, my captcha could be any of the following:
5 - two = [ ]
[ ] + 1 = 7
12 + [ ] = nineteen
Combining all of these makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha while keeping it easy for humans. I was getting 80+ spam comments daily until I implemented the captcha. Then it dropped to one or two a day. No, it's not unsolvable by computers. Captchas and computers solving them will always be an arms race so at some point this captcha method will fail. For now, though, it puts up enough of a roadblock to stop the spam bots while not irritating human readers to much that they don't comment because of the captcha.
I added a captcha field to my blog's comments section and that really cut down on the spam. I didn't opt for a "letters written so weirdly that even humans can't read it" captcha, but for a math based one. For example, my comment form might say: One + [ ] = 5. If you type in "4", your comment gets through. If you type in anything else, your comment gets nuked. The math problems are simple enough for even the most math-challenged commenter but wind up being tricky for comment spam bots. (Some spammers hand copy/paste their spam so this gets through, but Akismet and other tools can help catch these.)
Except that "we don't support older phones" won't be a valid response to a court order of "unlock this phone." In addition, precedent will state that since Apple unlocked these phones before, they have the ability to keep unlocking it. Worst case scenario would be that the court says "ok, you don't need to unlock these old phones in the future - you just need to give the FBI a universal unlocking program and THEY can unlock the phones."
You do bring up a good point, though. Once this precedent is set, Apple will be all but required to have unlocking tools (either on-hand or given to the FBI) for any version of their OS and any model of their phone.
If the FBI gets the precedent set that Apple has to unlock the phone for them, then how long will it be before it's declared that all phone vendors must be able to unlock phones for law enforcement at any time? We're already seeing laws of this kind being proposed in some states. The precedent will grease these wheels and make the move towards stronger encryption risky for any device manufacturer.
Actually, the FBI's been pretty overt with what they want and they view "just this one phone" as a stepping stone to unlock any phone they want at any time they want. Like you pointed out, precedent is the important thing here. If Apple fails to set the right precedent, then it's only a matter of time before Apple is flooded with requests and the FBI demands that Apple turn over the unlocking program so that the FBI can unlock phones quicker.
The FBI only wants Apple to have the access right now just like it's "just for this one phone." Once the precedent is set, the FBI will ask for more and more phones to be unlocked for ever-less-severe crimes. It'll go from "he's a terrorist" to "he's a murderer" to "he threatened someone" to "this person uploaded some movies against copyright law." Meanwhile, the law enforcement agencies requesting this unlocking will increase. It'll start with the FBI, but eventually local law enforcement will want access. Also, law enforcement agencies around the world will demand that Apple unlock devices for crimes committed in their own countries.
As the requests pour in, Apple will take longer and longer to fulfill the them (at greater and greater cost to Apple) until the FBI tells Apple to just hand over a generic "unlock any iPhone" program. Apple will resist but the precedent will have already been set. This is just quibbling over who has the program (and it'll be spun that this is easier for everyone involved) so Apple will hand the program to the FBI... and then to local law enforcement... and then to law enforcement organizations across the world. And then the inevitable leak will occur and hacking groups will get access to it.
I know "slippery slope" can be a tenuous argument, but the FBI and various law enforcement agencies haven't even tried to hide their true intent. They want to be able to unlock any phone, at any time, based on the flimsiest of reasons. Apple is standing in the way and they want the courts to order Apple to comply and weaken our security (device encryption) to make us more "secure" (as in anti-terrorism security theater).
Tic Tac Toe. A computer can never beat me at Tic Tac Toe. Of course, given a good enough computer, I'll never beat it at Tic Tac Toe either.
Similar results here in upstate NY. By now we should have gotten 49.2 inches of snow. Instead, we've gotten 10.3 inches. It's 54F out right now (at nearly 9PM) and it should get to 70 tomorrow. Christmas day here was warmer than it was on July 4th. I didn't need to use ice melt, my roof rake, or more than one shovel all winter. I'm not really complaining about the lack of snow, but my youngest son (age 9) definitely has been.
To be fair, I'd probably ask the quarterback about how to kick a football before asking a master chef. At the very least, the quarterback is more likely to have interacted with people who kick footballs and might have picked up some knowledge about how to kick footballs.
Of course, I'd ask the chef about how to kick a football before asking Charlie Brown.
You can also have more snow in places because the warmer weather means lakes don't freeze over. Since they don't freeze over, there's more evaporation which turns into more lake effect snow.
Not to mention, you likely have to interact with the watch in some way to get to the information you need to cheat on the test. The professor might notice you repeatedly tapping and swiping on your Definitely-Not-A-Giant-Cheating-Smartwatch. About the only thing I can think of to make it more obvious is require voice commands. "Watch, what is the square root of 64 divided by 2 cubed?"
That's what happens in my son's middle school. Kids are allowed to have smartphones, but can't have them out during school. If they are caught with a smartphone out, it's confiscated and the parent needs to come to collect it. The reason for requiring the parent to collect it is to make it a bigger offense than just "oh well, I got caught texting in class. I'll just get it before I leave." The students recognize that Offense Requiring Parental Involvement is much more serious and are therefore much more likely to stay within the rules.
I saw a commercial for an automatic soap dispenser that touted that you wouldn't get germs on your hands if you used it to get soap. My response was: But you're putting soap on your hands at that point, shouldn't any germs you get on your hands at that point just die/get washed off soon afterwards? Why would you need something like this at your house?
Did Google+ ever fully do away with the real name policy? Last I heard, they allowed pseudonyms, but they were displayed as "Joe Smith (Pseudonym)". If you wanted to keep your real name private, there was no way to do this.
I liked Google+'s features in theory but disliked the real name policy. It meant that I couldn't use it for my blogging activities (on which I use a pseudonym) without risking getting all my Google services shut off (including things like e-mail which I used as well) just because my pseudonym isn't my actual name.
Testing? We have no time for testing! We have to ship the product out now because marketing told everyone that the release date was today. It seems to work well enough when we ran it that one time so it must be fine. Besides, you need to work on these five dozen other projects since we fired half the staff and kept the workload the same.