You are arguing at a tweet. You have taken a one sentence statement about a virtual country - a hypothetical place where policy makers pay attention to evidence instead of what they totally think is true (I mean, that's good enough right?) - and decided to rant about it. And there are two much longer rants linked in the summary extolling the virtues of holistic policy making, because some guy made a tweet. It's a fucking tweet, it's not a real argument.
Home computers are not a great example of increasing innovation. They have gotten more capable over time, but they have also consolidated greatly: how many commercial OS's do you have to choose from now? How many did there used to be? How about CPU architecture? Where are the modern day BeOS's and Amigas and Matroxes? Do you remember when the Parhelia was released? And it had a bunch of interesting features like edge antialiasing? Gone.
It's not that innovation is completely dead, Nvidia and AMD still compete with each other to push out the same features at cheaper prices... Oh, wait. Wasn't that what we were talking about? A race to the bottom?
This is a confusing statement. Any different result would be a new result, of course, and a second vote to leave would certainly be confirmatory. With the results of the first vote so close it could easily go either way, which is most of the point in having a super majority requirement for such a large and permanent decision. Something like that should not come down to which way the wind happened to be blowing on that particular day.
I guess what you're saying is that the surprising result and the subsequent outcry has changed some peoples' minds, so maybe now they'll vote differently? You seem to be implying that this is a negative thing, that saying "Are you sure you really want to do this?" will taint peoples' opinions on the matter... I'll agree that it could taint peoples' opinions, sure, but so does all the campaigning. When an MP says, "Do you want to leave the EU? I think you should say no." why is that okay, while saying, "What? You said yes? Are you sure about that?" why is that, for some reason, unconscionable?
You do not agree to the ToS when you buy the game - it's a shrink-wrap license, you only agree to the ToS after you buy the game. For that reason it's on dubious legal standing, but shrink-wrap licenses have been upheld in court so I can't say that it's completely bogus.
That's irrelevant though, since this person is not being prosecuted for violating Blizzard's ToS. This person may never have done that, and conceivably never purchased or used any of Blizzard's products at all. That's why I said in the other post: "it is not illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's terms of service." This is what the person in the article has done. They have created independent software which other people then use to violate Blizzard's terms of service.
For you other post: comparing a piece of media which you have purchased and own to a police station is... Frankly, that's a terrible analogy. I don't know where that came from. I'm going to assume that that made sense in your head, but I can't see how.
Your shady doctor at the Olympics is a better analogy, but what that Doctor is doing is illegal only because the substances which he's distributing are illegal. (And, if dangerous, he could also be subject to some questioning by a professional ethics board.) Otherwise the burden is on the athletes to play without cheating and should they be caught cheating it's not the courts and the legal system which they have to answer to. Sports discipline is maintained by the sports leagues who are certainly free to set and enforce their own rules, but who can not and should not expect the police to enforce those rules.
To Assange's credit, he's never claimed to have anything on all this email bullshit, or Benghazi, or whatever the current scandal-fad is. He was talking about real decisions which she made in office and relevant to her position, which he thought were questionable. His judgement may or may not be on-target there, but at least it's about capability as a decision maker.
I'm sorry, I didn't answer you're other question there. Yes, I think that there should be no legal recourse. When you can make a game and then make breaking the rules of your game illegal, enforceable in a real court by real police officers, this is just shy of being able to make your own laws. This is not a power that Blizzard or any private company should have. It should be up to Blizzard alone to enforce the rules of their game.
but I think the source code and rights to modify it would be easily in the millions of dollars.
Blizzard doesn't sell the source code and the people in question don't have access to the source code. What these people have done is written their own software, containing nothing copyrighted by Blizzard, which is designed to work with what they have purchased from Blizzard. Think of, for example, purchasing a book and then making a custom bookstand. It modifies the manner in which you read that book and that could possibly be in a way that the publisher doesn't like, but fuck them. Who cares what they think?
The fact that when you do this in a multiplayer game it effects not just yourself but other people as well changes the ethical situation, but not the legal one. An aimbot (or whatever) changes how you interact with your purchased media, just as the bookstand does. Blizzard has made using one against their terms of service (which they are free to do) but it is not illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's terms of service. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's copyright. So Blizzard has found a way to convince a judge that violating their terms of service is the some thing as copyright infringement.
Is that a trick question? Copyright exists to incentivize the creation of new works by granting the creator of those works a temporary monopoly over their distribution. That is the intent.
Blizzard does not have any rights, explicitly granted by copyright law, over how their intellectual property is used, only how it's distributed. What they have managed to do is convince a court that running a piece of software is equivalent to copying that piece of software, since in the process of running it the computer copies parts of it from disc to memory. The idea that a company can sell a piece of media but still retain control over how and whether you use it falls far outside of the purpose of copyright and outside of the concept of property rights in general.
If this represents some kind of safety mongering to counter all the fear monger surrounding airplanes, and we could get rid of the TSA bullshit as a result, then I am 100% for this. It can't be more expensive than what we've spent on the TSA.
Blizzard certainly takes money seriously. You're applauding this, so I'm going to assume that you're not familiar with the history here. This is not the first time Blizzard has abused copyright to sue people for over something which has nothing to do with copyright, and won: link
Among the consequences of twisting around an inapplicable law in this way is that any time you use a piece of software without permission from the copyright holder, including just using it in a way that the copyright holder did not intend, you are committing copyright infringement. Regardless of whether you've paid for that software, regardless of whether you have a license to use that software for another purpose. If, for example, you install a mod for a game and that game does not give explicit permission to use mods? Or to use that mod? Copyright infringement. A macro for a word processor for a word processor which doesn't want you to use macros? Or doesn't want you to use anyone else's macros? Copyright infringement.
How about if that word processor is only licensed to write letters, and you use it to make a sign? What if you use some politician's campaign app in a way which doesn't support that politician? Copyright infringement. You get the idea. Blizzard is abusing the law in a way which wasn't intended.
Nutella may still be trying to push the idea that's it's healthy, so wouldn't want to be labeled as a desert.
Also: nougat can be pretty great in the right context. I love that someone made a website just to explain what nougat is. A question we've all asked at some point.
How could she be a career politician? She's a first term senator and she only ran for the senate because she was shut out of being nominated to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has very little experience as a politician, and that does show sometimes, but she knows an awful lot about the stuff in the article.
That would be exactly how the internet is now. The fact that Skype calls don't get priority may lead to a bit of stuttering now and then, but if it weren't for that fact then Skype wouldn't exist in the first place.
There isn't much difference between allowing the prioritization of protocols and allowing the prioritization of hosts. If you allow the first but not the second, then the ISP just comes up with its own proprietary protocol and gives that special privileges. Net Neutrality boils down to "all packets are treated the same way."
What's the difference between bandwidth hogs and bandwidth abusers? The two terms seem pretty similar. Admittedly though, I haven't spent much effort to discern the difference.
Of course they're making their own choices. That's what this is all about, that's what "autonomous" means. What's the confusion here? The point of all of this is to have cars which operate independently of direct human control. Given that scenario they need to be able to make good choices in difficult circumstances, with one example of such a circumstance given by the summary. The question is: "What choice should they make?"
Damn straight that's weird, I don't want robots defining their own morality. If that's really the reason for this, "Robots should come to their own conclusions about how to handle these things." then this scenario is even more fucked up than I thought.
Participants also balked at the notion of the government stepping in to regulate the "morality brain" of self-driving cars.
This statement makes no sense to me. What do these people want, free market morality? The car should save the richest people? Who the hell else but the government is going to standardize what the right action is for a robot to take in that sort of scenario?
You're forgetting about communism. We can't not be enemies so long as China doesn't fully and officially embrace capitalism as the one true ism. It just wouldn't be right.
Yes text has its virtues, and yes it will always be around in some form or another, but none of these arguments about the virtues of text are hitting the real issue: text makes less money than video. This is the point that matters, most of this other crap is meaningless. Except the bit about searchability - Facebook can't give up text in any large way until they come up with an effective system to data mine video. Five years seems like a reasonable estimate for that.
I will second the opinion that McDonald's gets more flack than they deserve most of the time, but I think you're letting them off the hook too easily in this case. Not only did they treat this woman very poorly, not only did they know that serving coffee so hot was a risk, but they kept right on serving their coffee at this temperature even after this case was resolved. This shouldn't be brushed aside.
The thing that stopped this bad guy with a gun was good guys with a gun. For the life of me i cannot understand why you think taking guns from the good guys is the answer.
He killed 50+ people. He wasn't stopped, the deed was already done. Sure maybe he would have killed more, but somehow you're suggesting that this terrible problem isn't a problem because... it could have been even worse.
And further: it was the police who shot him. No one has suggested that police officers should not have access to guns, the only suggestion that's been floated is that there shouldn't be so many of them lying around where someone like this guy can so easily pick one up when he gets in a bad mood.
I'm not anti-gun, but I am anti-terrible reasoning. If criminals are as smart and resourceful as you're suggesting then what's to stop them from smuggling in something bigger? They don't have to smuggle guns in now, because they're readily available, but if these super criminals that you're so afraid of can smuggle in weapons so easily then why aren't they using stinger missiles? Why do they fuck around with rifles when they could go all the way?
Etc. Etc. This is some really twisted logic. The only compelling reason to have so many guns around is: people like guns. That is a fine and sufficient reason, but what's a lobbyist if they're not making up stupid bullshit justifications? At this point they just need to find a way to connect guns to stopping child pornography and they'll have the whole set.
Slashdot Mirror
You are arguing at a tweet. You have taken a one sentence statement about a virtual country - a hypothetical place where policy makers pay attention to evidence instead of what they totally think is true (I mean, that's good enough right?) - and decided to rant about it. And there are two much longer rants linked in the summary extolling the virtues of holistic policy making, because some guy made a tweet. It's a fucking tweet, it's not a real argument.
Well I only read the summary, but it does say specifically that her product was patented. So no, this would not be legitimate competition.
Home computers are not a great example of increasing innovation. They have gotten more capable over time, but they have also consolidated greatly: how many commercial OS's do you have to choose from now? How many did there used to be? How about CPU architecture? Where are the modern day BeOS's and Amigas and Matroxes? Do you remember when the Parhelia was released? And it had a bunch of interesting features like edge antialiasing? Gone.
It's not that innovation is completely dead, Nvidia and AMD still compete with each other to push out the same features at cheaper prices... Oh, wait. Wasn't that what we were talking about? A race to the bottom?
This is a confusing statement. Any different result would be a new result, of course, and a second vote to leave would certainly be confirmatory. With the results of the first vote so close it could easily go either way, which is most of the point in having a super majority requirement for such a large and permanent decision. Something like that should not come down to which way the wind happened to be blowing on that particular day.
I guess what you're saying is that the surprising result and the subsequent outcry has changed some peoples' minds, so maybe now they'll vote differently? You seem to be implying that this is a negative thing, that saying "Are you sure you really want to do this?" will taint peoples' opinions on the matter... I'll agree that it could taint peoples' opinions, sure, but so does all the campaigning. When an MP says, "Do you want to leave the EU? I think you should say no." why is that okay, while saying, "What? You said yes? Are you sure about that?" why is that, for some reason, unconscionable?
You do not agree to the ToS when you buy the game - it's a shrink-wrap license, you only agree to the ToS after you buy the game. For that reason it's on dubious legal standing, but shrink-wrap licenses have been upheld in court so I can't say that it's completely bogus.
That's irrelevant though, since this person is not being prosecuted for violating Blizzard's ToS. This person may never have done that, and conceivably never purchased or used any of Blizzard's products at all. That's why I said in the other post: "it is not illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's terms of service." This is what the person in the article has done. They have created independent software which other people then use to violate Blizzard's terms of service.
For you other post: comparing a piece of media which you have purchased and own to a police station is... Frankly, that's a terrible analogy. I don't know where that came from. I'm going to assume that that made sense in your head, but I can't see how.
Your shady doctor at the Olympics is a better analogy, but what that Doctor is doing is illegal only because the substances which he's distributing are illegal. (And, if dangerous, he could also be subject to some questioning by a professional ethics board.) Otherwise the burden is on the athletes to play without cheating and should they be caught cheating it's not the courts and the legal system which they have to answer to. Sports discipline is maintained by the sports leagues who are certainly free to set and enforce their own rules, but who can not and should not expect the police to enforce those rules.
To Assange's credit, he's never claimed to have anything on all this email bullshit, or Benghazi, or whatever the current scandal-fad is. He was talking about real decisions which she made in office and relevant to her position, which he thought were questionable. His judgement may or may not be on-target there, but at least it's about capability as a decision maker.
I'm sorry, I didn't answer you're other question there. Yes, I think that there should be no legal recourse. When you can make a game and then make breaking the rules of your game illegal, enforceable in a real court by real police officers, this is just shy of being able to make your own laws. This is not a power that Blizzard or any private company should have. It should be up to Blizzard alone to enforce the rules of their game.
but I think the source code and rights to modify it would be easily in the millions of dollars.
Blizzard doesn't sell the source code and the people in question don't have access to the source code. What these people have done is written their own software, containing nothing copyrighted by Blizzard, which is designed to work with what they have purchased from Blizzard. Think of, for example, purchasing a book and then making a custom bookstand. It modifies the manner in which you read that book and that could possibly be in a way that the publisher doesn't like, but fuck them. Who cares what they think?
The fact that when you do this in a multiplayer game it effects not just yourself but other people as well changes the ethical situation, but not the legal one. An aimbot (or whatever) changes how you interact with your purchased media, just as the bookstand does. Blizzard has made using one against their terms of service (which they are free to do) but it is not illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's terms of service. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is illegal to produce software which can be used to violate some company's copyright. So Blizzard has found a way to convince a judge that violating their terms of service is the some thing as copyright infringement.
Is that a trick question? Copyright exists to incentivize the creation of new works by granting the creator of those works a temporary monopoly over their distribution. That is the intent.
Blizzard does not have any rights, explicitly granted by copyright law, over how their intellectual property is used, only how it's distributed. What they have managed to do is convince a court that running a piece of software is equivalent to copying that piece of software, since in the process of running it the computer copies parts of it from disc to memory. The idea that a company can sell a piece of media but still retain control over how and whether you use it falls far outside of the purpose of copyright and outside of the concept of property rights in general.
If this represents some kind of safety mongering to counter all the fear monger surrounding airplanes, and we could get rid of the TSA bullshit as a result, then I am 100% for this. It can't be more expensive than what we've spent on the TSA.
Blizzard certainly takes money seriously. You're applauding this, so I'm going to assume that you're not familiar with the history here. This is not the first time Blizzard has abused copyright to sue people for over something which has nothing to do with copyright, and won: link
Among the consequences of twisting around an inapplicable law in this way is that any time you use a piece of software without permission from the copyright holder, including just using it in a way that the copyright holder did not intend, you are committing copyright infringement. Regardless of whether you've paid for that software, regardless of whether you have a license to use that software for another purpose. If, for example, you install a mod for a game and that game does not give explicit permission to use mods? Or to use that mod? Copyright infringement. A macro for a word processor for a word processor which doesn't want you to use macros? Or doesn't want you to use anyone else's macros? Copyright infringement.
How about if that word processor is only licensed to write letters, and you use it to make a sign? What if you use some politician's campaign app in a way which doesn't support that politician? Copyright infringement. You get the idea. Blizzard is abusing the law in a way which wasn't intended.
Nutella may still be trying to push the idea that's it's healthy, so wouldn't want to be labeled as a desert.
Also: nougat can be pretty great in the right context. I love that someone made a website just to explain what nougat is. A question we've all asked at some point.
How could she be a career politician? She's a first term senator and she only ran for the senate because she was shut out of being nominated to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has very little experience as a politician, and that does show sometimes, but she knows an awful lot about the stuff in the article.
That would be exactly how the internet is now. The fact that Skype calls don't get priority may lead to a bit of stuttering now and then, but if it weren't for that fact then Skype wouldn't exist in the first place.
There isn't much difference between allowing the prioritization of protocols and allowing the prioritization of hosts. If you allow the first but not the second, then the ISP just comes up with its own proprietary protocol and gives that special privileges. Net Neutrality boils down to "all packets are treated the same way."
What's the difference between bandwidth hogs and bandwidth abusers? The two terms seem pretty similar. Admittedly though, I haven't spent much effort to discern the difference.
Of course they're making their own choices. That's what this is all about, that's what "autonomous" means. What's the confusion here? The point of all of this is to have cars which operate independently of direct human control. Given that scenario they need to be able to make good choices in difficult circumstances, with one example of such a circumstance given by the summary. The question is: "What choice should they make?"
Damn straight that's weird, I don't want robots defining their own morality. If that's really the reason for this, "Robots should come to their own conclusions about how to handle these things." then this scenario is even more fucked up than I thought.
Participants also balked at the notion of the government stepping in to regulate the "morality brain" of self-driving cars.
This statement makes no sense to me. What do these people want, free market morality? The car should save the richest people? Who the hell else but the government is going to standardize what the right action is for a robot to take in that sort of scenario?
But if you want to impress me: Build your own god.
That's what it takes to impress you? You're setting the bar awfully high there.
You're forgetting about communism. We can't not be enemies so long as China doesn't fully and officially embrace capitalism as the one true ism. It just wouldn't be right.
It also makes sense because a rifle isn't an emotion.
Yes text has its virtues, and yes it will always be around in some form or another, but none of these arguments about the virtues of text are hitting the real issue: text makes less money than video. This is the point that matters, most of this other crap is meaningless. Except the bit about searchability - Facebook can't give up text in any large way until they come up with an effective system to data mine video. Five years seems like a reasonable estimate for that.
I will second the opinion that McDonald's gets more flack than they deserve most of the time, but I think you're letting them off the hook too easily in this case. Not only did they treat this woman very poorly, not only did they know that serving coffee so hot was a risk, but they kept right on serving their coffee at this temperature even after this case was resolved. This shouldn't be brushed aside.
The thing that stopped this bad guy with a gun was good guys with a gun. For the life of me i cannot understand why you think taking guns from the good guys is the answer.
He killed 50+ people. He wasn't stopped, the deed was already done. Sure maybe he would have killed more, but somehow you're suggesting that this terrible problem isn't a problem because... it could have been even worse.
And further: it was the police who shot him. No one has suggested that police officers should not have access to guns, the only suggestion that's been floated is that there shouldn't be so many of them lying around where someone like this guy can so easily pick one up when he gets in a bad mood.
I'm not anti-gun, but I am anti-terrible reasoning. If criminals are as smart and resourceful as you're suggesting then what's to stop them from smuggling in something bigger? They don't have to smuggle guns in now, because they're readily available, but if these super criminals that you're so afraid of can smuggle in weapons so easily then why aren't they using stinger missiles? Why do they fuck around with rifles when they could go all the way?
Etc. Etc. This is some really twisted logic. The only compelling reason to have so many guns around is: people like guns. That is a fine and sufficient reason, but what's a lobbyist if they're not making up stupid bullshit justifications? At this point they just need to find a way to connect guns to stopping child pornography and they'll have the whole set.