Correlation != causation: We don't know if the shuttering of Limewire had this effect or not. I'd wager that the availability of for-sale music at Amazon, iTunes, etc. and the availability of ad-supported music at Spotify, Pandora, etc. essentially killed this. We have to, of course, consider the effect of ridiculous lawsuits on the average user (the obvious goal, so "yay RIAA lawyers....?").
Numbers need labels: 16 percent of what?
Where's your causality now? If this is causal, can we take the causality further in saying that the lack of increased sales in albums demonstrates that LimeWire wasn't hurting album sales nearly as much as the RIAA made them out to be? Granted, that's obvious to anyone with half a brain (or a friend with half a brain), but it's worth pointing out that the theoretical damages presented by the RIAA were always just this side of fantasy land.
Exactly, except, you know, the US and the people of the US are the greatest the world has ever known...
Just about every presidential candidate in the US makes a statement of that nature, drumming up nationalistic sentiments to win votes.
Why does this work? How can six-figure-earning senators make $40k/year teachers in Wisconsin out to be our fiscal bandits? How can ACTA happen without national outrage?
Obvious (and unpopular) answer: Most people are selfish, stupid, and/or lazy.
When it comes to absolute power, the corruption may just be correlative.
But it's true that this is common reasoning here (and possible cause for a neurological exam). It is *ridiculous* to believe that, just because some members of the government didn't want something to happen, those actions should be prosecuted as crimes. What should the charges be? Felony truth telling?
The US got embarassed and then followed it up by confirming what everyone suspected: We're the manipulative bullies that everyone thought we were, and "justice" is highly subjective.
Though it might hamper any future in politics to say so, I'm getting the feeling that the US doesn't deserve to be a superpower. Maybe we never did.
An aggregate popular measure is invalid for arguments because we know that people vote with consideration of the limitations of the system. I vote, but I know that others in heavily leaning states are less motivated to than those in swing states. Similarly, campaigning is heavily targeted at swing states. This would not be the case in a purely popular vote.
You want everyone to be a patriotic idealist, too stupid to inspect the mechanisms of the system and adjust their behavior accordingly. You don't just stop there, though. You appear to be arguing that everyone *is* a patriotic idealist.
Quite simply put: The popular vote counts would be vastly different if we based our presidential elections on the popular vote.
If you deny that, you're either an idiot or a troll.
Though I agree that our democratic wishes are viewed through a very strange lens, the "popular vote" argument has always gotten to me.
Simply put:
The popular vote is *meaningless* because people vary whether or not they vote based on their established view of whether or not their vote will count.
You can't compare popular votes because plenty of people in California, Texas, Illinois, New York, and other strongly swayed (and heavily populated) states have voters that recognize that, with the tide or against it, their vote is meaningless in the outcome of the Presidential election.
Now, was the electoral college a meaningful and useful construct back when it was conceived? Sure. Will we ever be able to break free of the grip that it holds over our national elections? Given the amendment requirement of state approval, probably not...
There's a tiny little democratic cherry on top. If you want to be pedantic, a real democracy, or even a democratic republic, is a complete and utter fiction.
Let's just say that, on the "democratic" continuum, we're somewhere on the democratic side of, say, Libya.
We're like the skinniest fat man. Not great, but it's a start.
You have nothing to fear if you aren't a criminal. They're talking about mug-shots, not the readily available photo ID, license, and passport databases.
And we're talking about sketches from eye witnesses, people who perfectly saw the criminals in question, with near-perfect vision, spot-on memory, and the utterly transparent interpretations of police sketch artists. There is absolutely no way that a system never tested broadly against false positives could be used to improperly find the innocent guilty.
I mean, look at fingerprinting.
We have to trust that the government and police have our best interests in mind. If you can't turn to the frighteningly powerful to protect your civil rights, who can you turn to?
And the only thing dumber than these kids is the nature of our societal reactions aimed (theoretically) at protecting these kids. Pulling the plug on kids who may need a bit of institutionalized rearing is a ridiculous response brought on by a systematic disease.
Handing a 12 year old a remote detonator and then jailing them for pressing the button is roughly the shape of it. This whole carnival ride that we call America is packed to the brim with oversensitive morons.
1. Presumption of innocence. 2. Sticks and stones, losers. Sheesh.
We're ruthless and dog eat dog for having free speech and privacy rights all these years, or for removing them over the last 20 in the name of thinking of the children?
Of course, if people would stop thinking of the children, we wouldn't have these concerns...
State constitutions cannot remove rights granted to individuals by the US constitution. We have Supreme Court rulings on this matter going back 100 years.
Deserving a school expulsion? Hardly. Kids make pedo jokes all the time, and an accusation on a limited forum like facebook, where a student must be compelled to login to provide evidence against him/herself is *hardly* the same thing as a formal or otherwise serious complaint. The overwhelming majority of content on Facebook is self-aggrandizing partial (if any) truth. Does nobody remember what a little braindead idiot they were when they were 12? Middle schoolers are stupid.
Besides, there's no issue with being a pedophile. Being a *practicing* pedophile... well...
You put your server on the internet, show some ports to the wild like a hole with party invites, and then want the law to make up for your technical inadequacies later on, divining the intention of the flawed system of your own construction? Nonsense.
The internet would be a far more secure/safe/reliable place if we just treated it as the wild west from a data perspective.
Using (but not acquiring) credit card numbers that don't belong to you? Still illegal.
Breaking into a building to gain access? Still illegal.
Gaining access under false pretenses (e.g. phone trickery)? Still fraud, still illegal.
Now, since Anonymous went old-school human engineering on this one, sure, someone broke the law, but I'm far more willing to tolerate this sort of action when it's aimed at exposing rights violations, abuse of legal procedure for what amounts to extortion, or corruption.
When it comes to just issuing requests to a faulty piece of software/hardware, I'd say that a hostile environment has a much better chance of improving real security than one with soft (and capriciously applied) legal restrictions. Straight up hacking should just be the expected norm.
Oddly enough, I reinstall OS X *way* more often than Windows. I only redo Windows when a drive craps out on me. With WHS backups, that's not even necessary.
Strange as it seems with Time Machine, restores from backups don't seem to bring everything back to a proper running state (Little Snitch comes to mind). Still, I can bring up either platform to fully running (all documents, all applications, project code, media editing, etc.) in under 10 hours.
Temporal and frequency response are inherently linked.
Your ability to detect a sustained frequency is not the same as your ability to detect transients.
If you can't hear the difference in the stereo field or of, say, a snare hit, of higher-rate/higher-depth recordings on even mediocre home stereos, you should get yourself to an audiologist and get your ears checked.
If you don't know what you're talking about? You should have a big cup of STFU.
Additionally, most Americans seem to fall the fuck over themselves for Disney and other media monsters. They have neither the will nor the wherewithal to see how the sausage is made.
The both of you, though, stand up guys. Too bad those of us who care are outnumbered about 10,000:1.
If I were GeoHot, I'd buy a new computer and go about my business. I'd also counter-sue the fuck out of them for frivolous and flagrant abuses of the court system.
Nobody ever one a Mexican stand-off by holstering their gun voluntarily.
Just because you can get something past an idiot judge doesn't mean that it's ethical to do so.
An attorney friend of mine and I were talking once about being in the right/wrong in court (oddly enough, regarding a dispute with Sony's counsel), and I said "Even if you're clearly legally right, the odds are probably only 80/20 that you're going to win in court."
His response: "It's probably more like 60/40 or 50/50."
That same attorney once half-joked "now you know the secret to my profession... Wear a really nice suit, and you'll win."
You realize, of course, that by increasing demand in the used market, you induce a teeny, tiny bit of scarcity that aids in the sale of new retail consoles, right?
Of course, Sony really makes it on the games. Stay away from those and you're alright.
With a slightly perverse view of good hacking and bad hacking (US: good, China: bad) welling up, perhaps it's time for us to just say that electronic trespassing isn't trespassing at all. If it's the wild west for hackers, with no legal repercussions whatsoever for hacking someone else's systems, wouldn't the almighty invisible hand of the market dictate significantly-improved security?
At present, we use mediocre security, far less capable and strict than modern hardware could afford, because it, combined with the threat of legal action, appears sufficient to hold back the script kiddies (it isn't). This leaves us open to corporations and governments that have sufficient resources to, say, crack any of the limp-wristed protections that we have in place. This also makes the mere use of anonymization and encryption packages "probable cause" sufficient to trigger governmental abuse due to their relative rarity.
The weakness of A5/1 GSM encryption is well known, as is the intentional weakening of this encryption standard by the French government before its adoption. In a world where open-air and internet hacking were not only commonplace but also fair game, would people tolerate such weak systems? Would a rise in the tide of hacking(cracking, whatever, purists) raise all security boats?
Other illegal actions would still remain illegal, of course. Fraud, theft of real or intangible goods (but not mere copying of information), harassment, and every other crime that could be reasonably construed to apply to the information realm would still be applicable, but the mere act of using publicly presented systems and gathering publicly presented information would not be criminalized. And, yes, servers on the internet and wireless communications are publicly presented.
We're being hacked already. Maybe a level playing field will be a stronger one.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation != causation:
We don't know if the shuttering of Limewire had this effect or not. I'd wager that the availability of for-sale music at Amazon, iTunes, etc. and the availability of ad-supported music at Spotify, Pandora, etc. essentially killed this. We have to, of course, consider the effect of ridiculous lawsuits on the average user (the obvious goal, so "yay RIAA lawyers....?").
Numbers need labels:
16 percent of what?
Where's your causality now?
If this is causal, can we take the causality further in saying that the lack of increased sales in albums demonstrates that LimeWire wasn't hurting album sales nearly as much as the RIAA made them out to be? Granted, that's obvious to anyone with half a brain (or a friend with half a brain), but it's worth pointing out that the theoretical damages presented by the RIAA were always just this side of fantasy land.
You, Hatta, deserve a high-five for reading that hyphen-free sentence in that way (and causing others to do the same).
Clearly the police need to employ children in their honeypots for these predators...
But, yes, you are correct. The law, in this case, is quite stupid.
Exactly, except, you know, the US and the people of the US are the greatest the world has ever known...
Just about every presidential candidate in the US makes a statement of that nature, drumming up nationalistic sentiments to win votes.
Why does this work? How can six-figure-earning senators make $40k/year teachers in Wisconsin out to be our fiscal bandits? How can ACTA happen without national outrage?
Obvious (and unpopular) answer: Most people are selfish, stupid, and/or lazy.
When it comes to absolute power, the corruption may just be correlative.
Your point being?!?
Oh... wait.
Troll fed.
But it's true that this is common reasoning here (and possible cause for a neurological exam). It is *ridiculous* to believe that, just because some members of the government didn't want something to happen, those actions should be prosecuted as crimes. What should the charges be? Felony truth telling?
The US got embarassed and then followed it up by confirming what everyone suspected: We're the manipulative bullies that everyone thought we were, and "justice" is highly subjective.
Though it might hamper any future in politics to say so, I'm getting the feeling that the US doesn't deserve to be a superpower. Maybe we never did.
An aggregate popular measure is invalid for arguments because we know that people vote with consideration of the limitations of the system. I vote, but I know that others in heavily leaning states are less motivated to than those in swing states. Similarly, campaigning is heavily targeted at swing states. This would not be the case in a purely popular vote.
You want everyone to be a patriotic idealist, too stupid to inspect the mechanisms of the system and adjust their behavior accordingly. You don't just stop there, though. You appear to be arguing that everyone *is* a patriotic idealist.
Quite simply put: The popular vote counts would be vastly different if we based our presidential elections on the popular vote.
If you deny that, you're either an idiot or a troll.
Though I agree that our democratic wishes are viewed through a very strange lens, the "popular vote" argument has always gotten to me.
Simply put:
The popular vote is *meaningless* because people vary whether or not they vote based on their established view of whether or not their vote will count.
You can't compare popular votes because plenty of people in California, Texas, Illinois, New York, and other strongly swayed (and heavily populated) states have voters that recognize that, with the tide or against it, their vote is meaningless in the outcome of the Presidential election.
Now, was the electoral college a meaningful and useful construct back when it was conceived? Sure. Will we ever be able to break free of the grip that it holds over our national elections? Given the amendment requirement of state approval, probably not...
There's a tiny little democratic cherry on top. If you want to be pedantic, a real democracy, or even a democratic republic, is a complete and utter fiction.
Let's just say that, on the "democratic" continuum, we're somewhere on the democratic side of, say, Libya.
We're like the skinniest fat man. Not great, but it's a start.
You have nothing to fear if you aren't a criminal. They're talking about mug-shots, not the readily available photo ID, license, and passport databases.
And we're talking about sketches from eye witnesses, people who perfectly saw the criminals in question, with near-perfect vision, spot-on memory, and the utterly transparent interpretations of police sketch artists. There is absolutely no way that a system never tested broadly against false positives could be used to improperly find the innocent guilty.
I mean, look at fingerprinting.
We have to trust that the government and police have our best interests in mind. If you can't turn to the frighteningly powerful to protect your civil rights, who can you turn to?
And the only thing dumber than these kids is the nature of our societal reactions aimed (theoretically) at protecting these kids. Pulling the plug on kids who may need a bit of institutionalized rearing is a ridiculous response brought on by a systematic disease.
Handing a 12 year old a remote detonator and then jailing them for pressing the button is roughly the shape of it. This whole carnival ride that we call America is packed to the brim with oversensitive morons.
1. Presumption of innocence.
2. Sticks and stones, losers. Sheesh.
We're ruthless and dog eat dog for having free speech and privacy rights all these years, or for removing them over the last 20 in the name of thinking of the children?
Of course, if people would stop thinking of the children, we wouldn't have these concerns...
State constitutions cannot remove rights granted to individuals by the US constitution. We have Supreme Court rulings on this matter going back 100 years.
Deserving a school expulsion? Hardly. Kids make pedo jokes all the time, and an accusation on a limited forum like facebook, where a student must be compelled to login to provide evidence against him/herself is *hardly* the same thing as a formal or otherwise serious complaint. The overwhelming majority of content on Facebook is self-aggrandizing partial (if any) truth. Does nobody remember what a little braindead idiot they were when they were 12? Middle schoolers are stupid.
Besides, there's no issue with being a pedophile. Being a *practicing* pedophile... well...
You put your server on the internet, show some ports to the wild like a hole with party invites, and then want the law to make up for your technical inadequacies later on, divining the intention of the flawed system of your own construction? Nonsense.
The internet would be a far more secure/safe/reliable place if we just treated it as the wild west from a data perspective.
Using (but not acquiring) credit card numbers that don't belong to you? Still illegal.
Breaking into a building to gain access? Still illegal.
Gaining access under false pretenses (e.g. phone trickery)? Still fraud, still illegal.
Now, since Anonymous went old-school human engineering on this one, sure, someone broke the law, but I'm far more willing to tolerate this sort of action when it's aimed at exposing rights violations, abuse of legal procedure for what amounts to extortion, or corruption.
When it comes to just issuing requests to a faulty piece of software/hardware, I'd say that a hostile environment has a much better chance of improving real security than one with soft (and capriciously applied) legal restrictions. Straight up hacking should just be the expected norm.
Oddly enough, I reinstall OS X *way* more often than Windows. I only redo Windows when a drive craps out on me. With WHS backups, that's not even necessary.
Strange as it seems with Time Machine, restores from backups don't seem to bring everything back to a proper running state (Little Snitch comes to mind). Still, I can bring up either platform to fully running (all documents, all applications, project code, media editing, etc.) in under 10 hours.
Clearly, this is why we have credit. Because our bodies and our budgets conspire to always level the playing field.
Dude, if you can't tell the difference between 24/96 and 44.1/16, you should get to an audiologist to get your ears checked.
If you can't tell the difference between stereo and surround, you should get to a doctor, as you apparently don't have ears.
Temporal and frequency response are inherently linked.
Your ability to detect a sustained frequency is not the same as your ability to detect transients.
If you can't hear the difference in the stereo field or of, say, a snare hit, of higher-rate/higher-depth recordings on even mediocre home stereos, you should get yourself to an audiologist and get your ears checked.
If you don't know what you're talking about? You should have a big cup of STFU.
Just giving you a hard time. I have a Kindle (my wife got it for me two Christmases ago), and I use it for tech books, pdfs from journals, etc.
A straight e-ink reader is loads more paper like than a backlit tablet. Easier on the eyes, battery lasts forever, etc.
Just keep a magazine or book around for when you're stuck on the runway and can't use electronic devices.
Or, you know.... just read a book...
Yeah, basically, most people are complete idiots.
Additionally, most Americans seem to fall the fuck over themselves for Disney and other media monsters. They have neither the will nor the wherewithal to see how the sausage is made.
The both of you, though, stand up guys. Too bad those of us who care are outnumbered about 10,000:1.
If I were GeoHot, I'd buy a new computer and go about my business. I'd also counter-sue the fuck out of them for frivolous and flagrant abuses of the court system.
Nobody ever one a Mexican stand-off by holstering their gun voluntarily.
Just because you can get something past an idiot judge doesn't mean that it's ethical to do so.
An attorney friend of mine and I were talking once about being in the right/wrong in court (oddly enough, regarding a dispute with Sony's counsel), and I said "Even if you're clearly legally right, the odds are probably only 80/20 that you're going to win in court."
His response: "It's probably more like 60/40 or 50/50."
That same attorney once half-joked "now you know the secret to my profession... Wear a really nice suit, and you'll win."
You realize, of course, that by increasing demand in the used market, you induce a teeny, tiny bit of scarcity that aids in the sale of new retail consoles, right?
Of course, Sony really makes it on the games. Stay away from those and you're alright.
With a slightly perverse view of good hacking and bad hacking (US: good, China: bad) welling up, perhaps it's time for us to just say that electronic trespassing isn't trespassing at all. If it's the wild west for hackers, with no legal repercussions whatsoever for hacking someone else's systems, wouldn't the almighty invisible hand of the market dictate significantly-improved security?
At present, we use mediocre security, far less capable and strict than modern hardware could afford, because it, combined with the threat of legal action, appears sufficient to hold back the script kiddies (it isn't). This leaves us open to corporations and governments that have sufficient resources to, say, crack any of the limp-wristed protections that we have in place. This also makes the mere use of anonymization and encryption packages "probable cause" sufficient to trigger governmental abuse due to their relative rarity.
The weakness of A5/1 GSM encryption is well known, as is the intentional weakening of this encryption standard by the French government before its adoption. In a world where open-air and internet hacking were not only commonplace but also fair game, would people tolerate such weak systems? Would a rise in the tide of hacking(cracking, whatever, purists) raise all security boats?
Other illegal actions would still remain illegal, of course. Fraud, theft of real or intangible goods (but not mere copying of information), harassment, and every other crime that could be reasonably construed to apply to the information realm would still be applicable, but the mere act of using publicly presented systems and gathering publicly presented information would not be criminalized. And, yes, servers on the internet and wireless communications are publicly presented.
We're being hacked already. Maybe a level playing field will be a stronger one.