Knowledge has certainly increased, but how can we tell if intellect has on average? Maybe we have more intelligent people than we had a thousand years ago, but we've got more people period.
My hope is that even if we are coasting downward on some earlier leaps in average intelligence; that we'll get to the stage where we can write our own genetic future.
I admire your intentions, but the unforeseen consequences are what concern me. By fixing prices, you artificially constrain the growth of a whole industry rather than letting the money flow to where people are perfectly willing to send it. This isn't a cure for cancer we're talking about -- it's football games, rock concerts, and monster truck pulls.
If people want to blow $1000 to buy a ticket to see some idiots throw a ball around then they should be allowed to. The NFL will respond by opening up another 20 teams in areas that normally don't even have football teams. Ticket prices will normalize to something that's more equitable to most folks since availability will increase.
I agree that the artist should be able to sell tickets to whomever he wishes for whatever price. It's fraud to misrepresent who you are like the perps did in this case.
I wasn't arguing against that at all.
I was arguing against the notion that letting demand of entertainment determine pricing is some kind of cultural evil... it isn't.
If society decides with its dollars that entertainment is worth more then let the dollars speak that. Let there be more money involved. Let us build more venues for watching live entertainment. Let our children see entertainment as a more likely career and work for it.
More than anything, pricing entertainment according to demand seems the fairest thing possible.
As I mentioned in another post, monopolies, botnets, and fraud are bad. Letting demand set prices is good.
1. Bot nets are typically created illegally. 2. Sellers have a right to sell to whomever they choose as long as they don't discriminate for the legal mix of race, color, creed, etc. They have a right to "limit one per customer", as it were. After that transaction, I'd agree that it's out of their hands - but violating the seller's request to limit the transactions to individuals by impersonating different people is fraudulent, I believe. 3. Monopolistic behaviors need to be monitored for abuse. I'm a free market guy most of the time, but monopolies happen and when they do they really tend to shit in the punch bowl. Since large venues for entertainment and certain events do tend to extremely limited as a resource, I'm okay with some oversight.
I think that sellers have a right to control the first sale without fear that buyers are misrepresenting who they are. After that, the market should be allowed to do its work. I'm okay with people reselling their tickets for whatever the market will bear. I'm okay with people buying up tickets from individuals to resell them for a profit. I just don't like misrepresentation/fraud or other illegal activity entering the picture.
Yeah, "assholes" buy up tons of product every day and resell them for more money. They're called super markets.
If you've ever lived in a country/area where socialistic price fixing is the norm and capitalism can never get enough of a hold to make it economical for resellers to streamline the purchase and distribution of food, you might have a second thought about who lacks active neurons in this conversation.
Sometimes when I'm dialing my cell phone, a call comes in. Sometimes that call is from the person I was dialing. It's called a coincidence.
If I believed in psychic phenomena, I might pull my phone out every once in a while in false anticipation of someone calling me. Sometimes, merely by coincidence, a call would come in when I pulled the phone out. Sometimes, it may even be the person I was thinking of. Just like in the earlier examples, these would still be coincidences.
Science has shown consistently that psychic feelings and powers are actually fraud or misfirings of our complex brains.
It's more fun to believe in psychic powers, magic, unicorns, God, and Santa Claus... doesn't make them real, though.
Like many others in this thread, it all comes down to not wanting to pay outrageous subscription fees.
It just never made economic sense.
Tivo is just too friggin' greedy. On top of subscription fees, then they have the nerve to put ads in their users' faces.
No way.
I can build my own PVR *system* so don't need their nonsense. I don't even care if it sometimes costs me more to go my own way. Screw Tivo. They wasted a shitload of good will and credit for the coolness of their ideas with a lot of bare naked greed.
This is entirely true. I put another post in this thread describing how to use digital signatures with your cell phone to avoid using easily obtainable information for payments. Rich0 describes that same method below. This is an easily solvable problem that banks don't give a shit to solve.
... there's still no legal mandate to provide digital signatures for credit card transactions! Why?
Signing smart cards have been around for well over a decade. Smart phones could easily handle the duty and give you a processing/verification module that is really tough for a criminal to tamper with.
It goes like this:
1. You step up to the register/pump and identify your payment device. An iPhone can display a bar code with a public key, so that would work well. Heck, the iPhone camera can even read a bar code off the counter to get the register's public key, but that might be overkill. 2. The register uses the bar code identity to encrypt the payment details. 3. The iPhone owner approves the transaction, most likely entering a PIN. 4. The iPhone sends a strong digital signature of the approved transaction to the register. 5. The store/gas station must submit all digital signatures to the bank to get any payment.
DONE!
Tractor trailer sized holes that lead to credit card fraud could be sealed.
What is the friggin' problem here?
Oh yeah, credit card companies write off the fraud so it doesn't hurt them too much. Consumers aren't held responsible for using credit card companies that refuse to upgrade their infrastructure.
The old "I'm a better parent than women who let their kids be couch potatoes because I plant my ass on the couch right next to them so we can all be best 'spuds'" argument.
And I think you delivered it in all seriousness.:)
fucking fanboys with too much fiction and not enough reality
What on earth are you talking about? Fiction? I don't give a shit about 1984. Never really read it. I read history and current events. History has all the real examples I need of the great societies that destroyed themselves through doing stupid shit like whoring out their personal freedoms for a few shiny beads.
Dammit... my tendency to be skeptical of the Chicken Little antics of the Warmers is in direct contradiction with my rule to distrust the actions of religious nut jobs.
The rape comparison is because your argument smacks too much of "you have to defend yourself (SSL) or it's your fault if something happens to you".
You keep using the "see you on the street" analogy. It's not at all valid. I'm not talking about casual info like what you're wearing out on the street.
Let's take your analogy in the right direction... imagine if a company could set up a network of cameras and microphones to track every single place you went, what you said, who you associated with, what you ate, what books you looked at in the bookstore, what you were doing when you forgot to close the curtains at your house, etc. Imagine that they started to use that information to make a profit. Now we're getting closer to talking about the power that internet companies have.
You can't apply 19th century privacy scenarios in a 21st century environment.
I voluntarily gave my SSN to my cable company so they could run a credit check to see if I would pay my bills. I guess I should have no expectation that they won't sell that information on the open market.
Maybe if my ISP has the horsepower, they could start decrypting my SSL streams and snoop out my medical history, selling that information to those marketing cures, literature, insurance, etc.
While I'm running this to its logical conclusion... maybe leaving a window in your house unlocked should be a good enough excuse for someone to break in? Maybe a woman's dressing sexy is her just asking to get raped. I just don't buy that "tough shit, anything goes, use SSL or else, barricade yourself in your home" line of reasoning. We should expect better of our society and codify those expectations into laws where possible.
With the power and ubiquity of computers in our society, companies can completely blow away any traditional notions of privacy. Just because they can do something doesn't mean that they should or that it should even be legal.
Sorry, but my stance will always be to fight tooth and nail for freedom and privacy of the individual. There are plenty of malicious, greedy, and stupid forces that act to erode those things. I'll oppose them, tyvm.
I agree with you in not caring if statistics are collected about what I watch as long as they're not identifiable as mine. In other words, if I watch some otter porn, I don't want to start seeing PlayOtter advertisements show up in my mailbox. I don't want there to be records that my mother-in-law can use against me at Thanksgiving dinner.
The real problem is not the harmless collection of some anonymous marketing data. No, the problem is that the onus shouldn't be upon the citizen to protect his privacy from the government, corporations, and other citizens. Maximum privacy should be the default, with personal information being completely owned by the individual. Opting out of email and mail and phone calls should never be the case.
I will almost always vote for the politicians who understand and will likely legislate the importance of privacy. Maybe I don't care about exposing my television watching habits. But do I care about having my web surfing habits exposed? Do I care about having my financial details shared with others? History of the abuse of private data has shown that the slope is horribly slippery. The slippery slope should be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
Yikes, that whole "transparent society" notion is so horribly flawed and counter to the human experience at every level.
Are email addresses private? Not really. Did you catch that other/. thread regarding the staggering increase in the volume of malicious spam. So when exactly will the cost of this exposure be "easily reversible"? When exactly will the vermin of society become sated on the free information of ours that they can take and use to their advantage? The answer is *never*.
Privacy is a battleground. It always will be. Surrendering all notions of privacy and expecting it to all be okay is like surrendering the notion of your body's immune system and hoping that bacteria and other parasites won't wipe you out. AIDS is the immunological equivalent of the notion of transparent privacy.
You can call it "nostalgia" if you want, but I see my kids and their friends (7-12 years old) as totally hooked on NSMBWii. They absolutely love it above all the other games we have for the Wii and PS3.
It may be nostalgia to those of us who played the earlier versions, but you can't really call it that for this new crop of kids who just think it's an awesome game in its own right.
I think the focus was more on the 45 day sales figure already reaching 10mil. Long-term, I don't think that anyone will be surprised if it breaks 20mil by next Christmas.
PCs are usually set up for one person at a desk. They don't come with any controllers or other gaming niceties, so typically gamers customize them in very one-player-specific ways.
Consoles fit in with the "entertainment area" of homes where there's a lot of seating so everyone can view the television. That environment lends itself to being shared by the gaming system which has lots of cheap-to-add controllers.
Oh, great.... now they'll have to bring back the North African elephant to validate this claim. Then there's the whole "mice scare elephants" wisdom, which some researchers say was only true with North African elephants and Eastern Egyptian mice.
I know they're tourist areas, but they're not end-to-end massive operations. You can find areas in Goa and Phuket that are way under-developed with small shops/carts that are individually owned. I mentioned them because they have accommodations for tourists, but it's not all veneer and upscale.
You caught me. I was thinking to take them for all they're worth.
Maybe pick up a skill, like stealing from the cups of blind people without their noticing. I find that playing the game Operation is great practice for that activity.:D
Slashdot Mirror
Knowledge has certainly increased, but how can we tell if intellect has on average? Maybe we have more intelligent people than we had a thousand years ago, but we've got more people period.
My hope is that even if we are coasting downward on some earlier leaps in average intelligence; that we'll get to the stage where we can write our own genetic future.
I admire your intentions, but the unforeseen consequences are what concern me. By fixing prices, you artificially constrain the growth of a whole industry rather than letting the money flow to where people are perfectly willing to send it. This isn't a cure for cancer we're talking about -- it's football games, rock concerts, and monster truck pulls.
If people want to blow $1000 to buy a ticket to see some idiots throw a ball around then they should be allowed to. The NFL will respond by opening up another 20 teams in areas that normally don't even have football teams. Ticket prices will normalize to something that's more equitable to most folks since availability will increase.
I agree that the artist should be able to sell tickets to whomever he wishes for whatever price. It's fraud to misrepresent who you are like the perps did in this case.
I wasn't arguing against that at all.
I was arguing against the notion that letting demand of entertainment determine pricing is some kind of cultural evil... it isn't.
Why? It's ENTERTAINMENT.
If society decides with its dollars that entertainment is worth more then let the dollars speak that. Let there be more money involved. Let us build more venues for watching live entertainment. Let our children see entertainment as a more likely career and work for it.
More than anything, pricing entertainment according to demand seems the fairest thing possible.
As I mentioned in another post, monopolies, botnets, and fraud are bad. Letting demand set prices is good.
1. Bot nets are typically created illegally.
2. Sellers have a right to sell to whomever they choose as long as they don't discriminate for the legal mix of race, color, creed, etc. They have a right to "limit one per customer", as it were. After that transaction, I'd agree that it's out of their hands - but violating the seller's request to limit the transactions to individuals by impersonating different people is fraudulent, I believe.
3. Monopolistic behaviors need to be monitored for abuse. I'm a free market guy most of the time, but monopolies happen and when they do they really tend to shit in the punch bowl. Since large venues for entertainment and certain events do tend to extremely limited as a resource, I'm okay with some oversight.
I think that sellers have a right to control the first sale without fear that buyers are misrepresenting who they are. After that, the market should be allowed to do its work. I'm okay with people reselling their tickets for whatever the market will bear. I'm okay with people buying up tickets from individuals to resell them for a profit. I just don't like misrepresentation/fraud or other illegal activity entering the picture.
Yeah, "assholes" buy up tons of product every day and resell them for more money. They're called super markets.
If you've ever lived in a country/area where socialistic price fixing is the norm and capitalism can never get enough of a hold to make it economical for resellers to streamline the purchase and distribution of food, you might have a second thought about who lacks active neurons in this conversation.
This was the day that you hit your head on the side of the toilet and thought up the flux capacitor?
I'll go get us a Delorean.
Sometimes when I'm dialing my cell phone, a call comes in. Sometimes that call is from the person I was dialing. It's called a coincidence.
If I believed in psychic phenomena, I might pull my phone out every once in a while in false anticipation of someone calling me. Sometimes, merely by coincidence, a call would come in when I pulled the phone out. Sometimes, it may even be the person I was thinking of. Just like in the earlier examples, these would still be coincidences.
Science has shown consistently that psychic feelings and powers are actually fraud or misfirings of our complex brains.
It's more fun to believe in psychic powers, magic, unicorns, God, and Santa Claus... doesn't make them real, though.
Right on...
Like many others in this thread, it all comes down to not wanting to pay outrageous subscription fees.
It just never made economic sense.
Tivo is just too friggin' greedy. On top of subscription fees, then they have the nerve to put ads in their users' faces.
No way.
I can build my own PVR *system* so don't need their nonsense. I don't even care if it sometimes costs me more to go my own way. Screw Tivo. They wasted a shitload of good will and credit for the coolness of their ideas with a lot of bare naked greed.
This is entirely true. I put another post in this thread describing how to use digital signatures with your cell phone to avoid using easily obtainable information for payments. Rich0 describes that same method below. This is an easily solvable problem that banks don't give a shit to solve.
... there's still no legal mandate to provide digital signatures for credit card transactions! Why?
Signing smart cards have been around for well over a decade. Smart phones could easily handle the duty and give you a processing/verification module that is really tough for a criminal to tamper with.
It goes like this:
1. You step up to the register/pump and identify your payment device. An iPhone can display a bar code with a public key, so that would work well. Heck, the iPhone camera can even read a bar code off the counter to get the register's public key, but that might be overkill.
2. The register uses the bar code identity to encrypt the payment details.
3. The iPhone owner approves the transaction, most likely entering a PIN.
4. The iPhone sends a strong digital signature of the approved transaction to the register.
5. The store/gas station must submit all digital signatures to the bank to get any payment.
DONE!
Tractor trailer sized holes that lead to credit card fraud could be sealed.
What is the friggin' problem here?
Oh yeah, credit card companies write off the fraud so it doesn't hurt them too much. Consumers aren't held responsible for using credit card companies that refuse to upgrade their infrastructure.
The old "I'm a better parent than women who let their kids be couch potatoes because I plant my ass on the couch right next to them so we can all be best 'spuds'" argument.
And I think you delivered it in all seriousness. :)
I like the sig, though.
fucking fanboys with too much fiction and not enough reality
What on earth are you talking about? Fiction? I don't give a shit about 1984. Never really read it. I read history and current events. History has all the real examples I need of the great societies that destroyed themselves through doing stupid shit like whoring out their personal freedoms for a few shiny beads.
Dammit... my tendency to be skeptical of the Chicken Little antics of the Warmers is in direct contradiction with my rule to distrust the actions of religious nut jobs.
What to do?
The rape comparison is because your argument smacks too much of "you have to defend yourself (SSL) or it's your fault if something happens to you".
You keep using the "see you on the street" analogy. It's not at all valid. I'm not talking about casual info like what you're wearing out on the street.
Let's take your analogy in the right direction... imagine if a company could set up a network of cameras and microphones to track every single place you went, what you said, who you associated with, what you ate, what books you looked at in the bookstore, what you were doing when you forgot to close the curtains at your house, etc. Imagine that they started to use that information to make a profit. Now we're getting closer to talking about the power that internet companies have.
You can't apply 19th century privacy scenarios in a 21st century environment.
Fight for privacy in every single way possible.
I voluntarily gave my SSN to my cable company so they could run a credit check to see if I would pay my bills. I guess I should have no expectation that they won't sell that information on the open market.
Maybe if my ISP has the horsepower, they could start decrypting my SSL streams and snoop out my medical history, selling that information to those marketing cures, literature, insurance, etc.
While I'm running this to its logical conclusion... maybe leaving a window in your house unlocked should be a good enough excuse for someone to break in? Maybe a woman's dressing sexy is her just asking to get raped. I just don't buy that "tough shit, anything goes, use SSL or else, barricade yourself in your home" line of reasoning. We should expect better of our society and codify those expectations into laws where possible.
With the power and ubiquity of computers in our society, companies can completely blow away any traditional notions of privacy. Just because they can do something doesn't mean that they should or that it should even be legal.
Sorry, but my stance will always be to fight tooth and nail for freedom and privacy of the individual. There are plenty of malicious, greedy, and stupid forces that act to erode those things. I'll oppose them, tyvm.
I agree with you in not caring if statistics are collected about what I watch as long as they're not identifiable as mine. In other words, if I watch some otter porn, I don't want to start seeing PlayOtter advertisements show up in my mailbox. I don't want there to be records that my mother-in-law can use against me at Thanksgiving dinner.
The real problem is not the harmless collection of some anonymous marketing data. No, the problem is that the onus shouldn't be upon the citizen to protect his privacy from the government, corporations, and other citizens. Maximum privacy should be the default, with personal information being completely owned by the individual. Opting out of email and mail and phone calls should never be the case.
I will almost always vote for the politicians who understand and will likely legislate the importance of privacy. Maybe I don't care about exposing my television watching habits. But do I care about having my web surfing habits exposed? Do I care about having my financial details shared with others? History of the abuse of private data has shown that the slope is horribly slippery. The slippery slope should be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
To quote yar's post above:
Yikes, that whole "transparent society" notion is so horribly flawed and counter to the human experience at every level.
Are email addresses private? Not really. Did you catch that other /. thread regarding the staggering increase in the volume of malicious spam. So when exactly will the cost of this exposure be "easily reversible"? When exactly will the vermin of society become sated on the free information of ours that they can take and use to their advantage? The answer is *never*.
Privacy is a battleground. It always will be. Surrendering all notions of privacy and expecting it to all be okay is like surrendering the notion of your body's immune system and hoping that bacteria and other parasites won't wipe you out. AIDS is the immunological equivalent of the notion of transparent privacy.
You can call it "nostalgia" if you want, but I see my kids and their friends (7-12 years old) as totally hooked on NSMBWii. They absolutely love it above all the other games we have for the Wii and PS3.
It may be nostalgia to those of us who played the earlier versions, but you can't really call it that for this new crop of kids who just think it's an awesome game in its own right.
I think the focus was more on the 45 day sales figure already reaching 10mil. Long-term, I don't think that anyone will be surprised if it breaks 20mil by next Christmas.
PCs are usually set up for one person at a desk. They don't come with any controllers or other gaming niceties, so typically gamers customize them in very one-player-specific ways.
Consoles fit in with the "entertainment area" of homes where there's a lot of seating so everyone can view the television. That environment lends itself to being shared by the gaming system which has lots of cheap-to-add controllers.
Oh, great.... now they'll have to bring back the North African elephant to validate this claim. Then there's the whole "mice scare elephants" wisdom, which some researchers say was only true with North African elephants and Eastern Egyptian mice.
This could take a while.
No, you'd just need kevlar body armor.
I know they're tourist areas, but they're not end-to-end massive operations. You can find areas in Goa and Phuket that are way under-developed with small shops/carts that are individually owned. I mentioned them because they have accommodations for tourists, but it's not all veneer and upscale.
You caught me. I was thinking to take them for all they're worth.
Maybe pick up a skill, like stealing from the cups of blind people without their noticing. I find that playing the game Operation is great practice for that activity. :D