Re:DRM and Open Platform are separate issues
on
DRM and Democracy
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· Score: 1
I Perens has a point, although I haven't RTFA so i don't know whether he articulates it well. A lot of political speech requires quotation. If a candidate says something stupid on air, nothing beats being able to "quote" the audio or video in which he says it. If the government puts up pictures of something that turn out to be faked (as the Nixon administration once did to downplay the significance of anti-war protests), then nothing beats being able to display those pictures and point out how they were faked (as some anti-war protesters did by showing that shadows in the pictures were all wrong for the time of day when the protests took place). DRM could potentially prevent this kind of quotation.
Just to give an example, it would be possible to make a one time use image format. When you view a web page the images you get are coded to display at that particular time, but not at some other time, or not unless you can get permission from the original source, and so on. Now it's possible for the original source to prevent others from "quoting" those images, and even possible for the original source to make them disappear from the public record if they become inconvenient.
That would be exceptionally bad news for democratic discourse.
Judging by the things listed on the chart, I don't think there are many things that a doctor could not report and just tell his patient to 'live with it'. Diabetes? Cancer? Stroke?>/i> In fact all of these things can by under or over diagnosed. Not all strokes are catastrophic. Most of them are minor and get passed off as nothing more than dizzy spells. Likewise with adult onset diabetes, lots of people are in a grey area where their insulin production is not ideal, but not so bad either. Even with cancer there are some types and tests that yield a lot of false positives (like prostate cancer for example.
You think the US has "better access to healthcare" than the UK?
On average, yes. There is a segment of the US population that is too poor to pay for health insurance, but not poor enough (or old enough) to qualify for state funded health insurance. That segment has worse access to healthcare. But the rest of the US population has much better access to healthcare because heathcare isn't rationed the way it is in the UK. There are no waiting lists, and there is a much broader range of treatment options is availble (especially new or expensive options).
We lag in the lifespan department, there, chum. You are evidently not reading something correctly. We just caught up with India on lifespan not too long ago. Try again.
Averege expected life spans for the US and the UK are nearly identical, and the average expected life span for non-hispanic white Americans is considrerably better than the UK average. So what does this study mean?
(1) Being more sick more often won't actually make a difference to how long you can expect to live? Sounds implausible. (2) Americans get sick more often but their health care is better so they live just as long or longer? Sounds more plausible, although it seems like too much of a coincidence that better healthcare is almost exactly balancing worse health. (3) Maybe better access to health care in the US results in a higher rate of diagnosis, rather than a higher rate of illness? That would explain the nearly identical lifespan, but only if the better access to healthcare makes little difference to lifespan. (4) A difference in medical culture, where doctors in the US are more likely to diagnose and attempt to treat problems that doctors in the UK would just tell their patients to live with? I know that psychiatrists and psychologists in the US are very quick to diagnose and prescribe drugs compared to Japan or New Zealand (the other two countries that I am familiar with). Maybe there is something similar going on with the medical profession in general.
you fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of separation of powers in the US government
I think I understand it just fine.:) If the legislative branch could just pass laws constraining the power of the executive any way it liked then the executive wouldn't have any independent power, and thus couldn't act as a balance to the other two branches of government. But if you don't believe me, check the testimony of retired FISA judges who were asked about this issue:
Senator Feinstein: No. I am talking about FISA, and is a President bound by the rules and regulations of FISA?
Judge Baker: If it is held constitutional and it is passed, I suppose, just like everyone else, he is under the law too.
***
Senator Feinstein: Judge?
Judge Stafford: Everyone is bound by the law, but I do not believe, with all due respect, that even an act of Congress can limit the President's power under the Necessary and Proper Clause under the Constitution.
***
Chairman Specter: I think the thrust of what you are saying is the President is bound by statute like everyone else unless it impinges on his constitutional authority, and a statute cannot take away the President's constitutional authority. Anybody disagree with that?
There is no way that the NSA is listening in on *every* communication. What the article suggests, if anything, is that the program is not targeted at specific individuals, but rather that they are looking for certain patterns of communication, or certain networks of communication, and then listening in on individual communications within the networks that stand out.
In any case, as long as the communications that they listen in to are international (i.e. at least one end is outside the US) this doesn't affect the issues I raised above.
Under the US constitution power is divided between three branches of government. The central issue in this case is whether the power to conduct this kind of surveillence falls within the powers reserved to the executive branch. If that is the case then it doesn't matter what laws congress has passed, or what they appear to say. The only way to take this power away from the executive would be to ammend the constitution.
Nixon did of course get smacked down for doing something that looks similar, but in that case the spying was strictly domestic. In spite of what everyone keeps saying about the current case, it is not domestic spying. One end of every communication intercepted is in another country, and the court that decided the Nixon case specifically noted that their ruling did not apply to international communications.
Yeah, that's most of the reason why they are settling lawsuits, but even so they can claim that it was just negligence rather than malice. Unless there is some evidence that it was intended to work that way there is no basis for criminal charges.
The difference is that with the Sony rootkit, people who installed it "agreed" to have the rootkit installed when they accepted the EULA. Yes, we all know that is a pretty dodgy excuse, and that it might not work in some jurisdictions, or for certain purposes, but it really does make a big difference legally. The 17 year old doesn't even have a dodgy excuse.
There are also good reasons why the government is unwilling to pass explicit legislation. Defining a rootkit is difficult, and sometimes people really actually genuinely do want to install something suspiciously like a rootkit on their own machines. Do you really want to government to prohibit rootkit-like software completely?
I hadn't noticed any politicians in the Bush administration publishing climate research, or trying to tell scientists what the facts are. But actually if they did there would be nothing wrong with that. Anyone can play scientist if they like (doesn't mean they should be taken seriously of course) but if you work for the government you have a legal, and moral, obligation to stay out of politics. If you don't then elected officials have every right to treat you like a politician, or a political appointee, which means giving you the boot when your side loses the election.
No doubt about that. These constant efforts by unelected government employees to undermine democratically elected governments are a real problem. If Hansen wants to play politics he should run for election, or at least resign and get a non-government job.
I'm having trouble remembering or thinking of a situation where acceleration is a better answer than braking. Can you give me a reasonable example? Anytime you are merging with traffic going at a higer speed.
...is lack of notification. Blizzard should just be upfront about the fact that the Warden watches everything else your machine is doing while the game is running, and that people who are worried about privacy should (a) not run anything else while the game is running or (b) not play the game.
Where is the problem here that they want to fix? If you examine UN discussions of control over the internet the problem appears to be free speech and political dissent.
Unfortunately windows don't work well in large buildings, for areas not facing the sun, for tall buildings surounded by other tall buildings. In other words, they have limited lighting use in almost all comercial buildings.
Why is it that so many Microsoft publicity campaigns make the company sound like an evil despotism? Like that "thought theives" campaign they had a while back. I mean really - if Microsoft is after the thought thieves then that immediately suggests that they are the thought police right? And now this story that sounds like a press realease from North Korea.
Is it because Microsoft really is like an evil despotism so they can't help sounding that way, or is someone doing some subtle undermining from within?
You need to upgrade your marxist propaganda. That particular item of BS was slightly plausible in the 1970's when the inflation rate was high, but inflation has been low in the US for a very long time.
The economy of the EU as a whole has been lagging behind the US for a long time. Since 1990 the EU has undergone huge growth in terms of territory and population as new countries have joined, but the comparative shares of the world economy for the EU and the US have barely moved. Stil some parts of the EU, like the UK for example, have been doing about as well as the US. (See here for details.)
I doubt if software patents have much, if anything, to do with it though. Aging populations, labour market inflexibility, and high tax rates, are more likely causes.
Nice hack, but alas it won't work. Not for long anyway. Federal copyright and patent law pre-empts state and local law, and I suspect that Congress would pass a law preventing this sort of taking in a heart-beat.
I also suspect that you would only be able to take such property from individuals or corporations residing within your jurisdiction.
They said that Intel is hurting customers and is bad for the public. Uhh that's slander.
No, that's just the current legal theory of what makes for an illegal monopoly. So as I said above, AMD has not said anything beyond the barest description of the complaint they are bringing, and there is no way that Intel will ever manage to base a libel case on that.
Monopolies can only inflate prices when they are actually a monopoly with no competitors. Intel has competitors and thus really can't inflate prices. Just cause one company sells their product at a high price doesn't mean you have to. And "monopoly profits", what the hell is that. That's bullshit.
The theory of monopoly pricing is old and well established. If you have a monoploy you can set prices higher than they would be in a competitive market. Even an imperfect monopoly can do this.
Just to give an example. Could Dell threaten to dump Intel and go with AMD? No. AMD could not supply the volume that Dell needs. Dell could threaten to go to AMD for some of its supply, but then Intel could threaten to hike the price on the rest because Dell really has no choice about where to go for *most* of its supply. In short, Intel gets to make the price, rather than the market.
If this gets to court there will be no real question about whether Intel has, or had, a monopoly. That part is too obvious. The question will be whether the public has suffered. Between economies of scale, and the effects of limited competition, AMD will have a hard time proving that prices would have been significantly lower in a fully competitive market.
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I Perens has a point, although I haven't RTFA so i don't know whether he articulates it well. A lot of political speech requires quotation. If a candidate says something stupid on air, nothing beats being able to "quote" the audio or video in which he says it. If the government puts up pictures of something that turn out to be faked (as the Nixon administration once did to downplay the significance of anti-war protests), then nothing beats being able to display those pictures and point out how they were faked (as some anti-war protesters did by showing that shadows in the pictures were all wrong for the time of day when the protests took place). DRM could potentially prevent this kind of quotation.
Just to give an example, it would be possible to make a one time use image format. When you view a web page the images you get are coded to display at that particular time, but not at some other time, or not unless you can get permission from the original source, and so on. Now it's possible for the original source to prevent others from "quoting" those images, and even possible for the original source to make them disappear from the public record if they become inconvenient.
That would be exceptionally bad news for democratic discourse.
Judging by the things listed on the chart, I don't think there are many things that a doctor could not report and just tell his patient to 'live with it'. Diabetes? Cancer? Stroke?>/i>
In fact all of these things can by under or over diagnosed. Not all strokes are catastrophic. Most of them are minor and get passed off as nothing more than dizzy spells. Likewise with adult onset diabetes, lots of people are in a grey area where their insulin production is not ideal, but not so bad either. Even with cancer there are some types and tests that yield a lot of false positives (like prostate cancer for example.
You think the US has "better access to healthcare" than the UK?
On average, yes. There is a segment of the US population that is too poor to pay for health insurance, but not poor enough (or old enough) to qualify for state funded health insurance. That segment has worse access to healthcare. But the rest of the US population has much better access to healthcare because heathcare isn't rationed the way it is in the UK. There are no waiting lists, and there is a much broader range of treatment options is availble (especially new or expensive options).
We lag in the lifespan department, there, chum. You are evidently not reading something correctly. We just caught up with India on lifespan not too long ago. Try again.
Here are the figures from 2005
United Kingdom 78.4
United States 77.7
India 64.4
Maybe you read something about the life expectancy for African-Americans? That is similar to the Indian average.
Averege expected life spans for the US and the UK are nearly identical, and the average expected life span for non-hispanic white Americans is considrerably better than the UK average. So what does this study mean?
(1) Being more sick more often won't actually make a difference to how long you can expect to live? Sounds implausible.
(2) Americans get sick more often but their health care is better so they live just as long or longer? Sounds more plausible, although it seems like too much of a coincidence that better healthcare is almost exactly balancing worse health.
(3) Maybe better access to health care in the US results in a higher rate of diagnosis, rather than a higher rate of illness? That would explain the nearly identical lifespan, but only if the better access to healthcare makes little difference to lifespan.
(4) A difference in medical culture, where doctors in the US are more likely to diagnose and attempt to treat problems that doctors in the UK would just tell their patients to live with? I know that psychiatrists and psychologists in the US are very quick to diagnose and prescribe drugs compared to Japan or New Zealand (the other two countries that I am familiar with). Maybe there is something similar going on with the medical profession in general.
Maybe you should write a letter to Judge Stafford and set him straight on that point.
you fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of separation of powers in the US government
:) If the legislative branch could just pass laws constraining the power of the executive any way it liked then the executive wouldn't have any independent power, and thus couldn't act as a balance to the other two branches of government. But if you don't believe me, check the testimony of retired FISA judges who were asked about this issue:
I think I understand it just fine.
Senator Feinstein: No. I am talking about FISA, and is a President bound by the rules and regulations of FISA?
Judge Baker: If it is held constitutional and it is passed, I suppose, just like everyone else, he is under the law too.
***
Senator Feinstein: Judge?
Judge Stafford: Everyone is bound by the law, but I do not believe, with all due respect, that even an act of Congress can limit the President's power under the Necessary and Proper Clause under the Constitution.
***
Chairman Specter: I think the thrust of what you are saying is the President is bound by statute like everyone else unless it impinges on his constitutional authority, and a statute cannot take away the President's constitutional authority. Anybody disagree with that?
[No response.]
Chairman Specter: Everybody agrees with that.
There is no way that the NSA is listening in on *every* communication. What the article suggests, if anything, is that the program is not targeted at specific individuals, but rather that they are looking for certain patterns of communication, or certain networks of communication, and then listening in on individual communications within the networks that stand out.
In any case, as long as the communications that they listen in to are international (i.e. at least one end is outside the US) this doesn't affect the issues I raised above.
Under the US constitution power is divided between three branches of government. The central issue in this case is whether the power to conduct this kind of surveillence falls within the powers reserved to the executive branch. If that is the case then it doesn't matter what laws congress has passed, or what they appear to say. The only way to take this power away from the executive would be to ammend the constitution.
Nixon did of course get smacked down for doing something that looks similar, but in that case the spying was strictly domestic. In spite of what everyone keeps saying about the current case, it is not domestic spying. One end of every communication intercepted is in another country, and the court that decided the Nixon case specifically noted that their ruling did not apply to international communications.
Yeah, that's most of the reason why they are settling lawsuits, but even so they can claim that it was just negligence rather than malice. Unless there is some evidence that it was intended to work that way there is no basis for criminal charges.
The difference is that with the Sony rootkit, people who installed it "agreed" to have the rootkit installed when they accepted the EULA. Yes, we all know that is a pretty dodgy excuse, and that it might not work in some jurisdictions, or for certain purposes, but it really does make a big difference legally. The 17 year old doesn't even have a dodgy excuse.
There are also good reasons why the government is unwilling to pass explicit legislation. Defining a rootkit is difficult, and sometimes people really actually genuinely do want to install something suspiciously like a rootkit on their own machines. Do you really want to government to prohibit rootkit-like software completely?
I hadn't noticed any politicians in the Bush administration publishing climate research, or trying to tell scientists what the facts are. But actually if they did there would be nothing wrong with that. Anyone can play scientist if they like (doesn't mean they should be taken seriously of course) but if you work for the government you have a legal, and moral, obligation to stay out of politics. If you don't then elected officials have every right to treat you like a politician, or a political appointee, which means giving you the boot when your side loses the election.
No doubt about that. These constant efforts by unelected government employees to undermine democratically elected governments are a real problem. If Hansen wants to play politics he should run for election, or at least resign and get a non-government job.
I'm having trouble remembering or thinking of a situation where acceleration is a better answer than braking. Can you give me a reasonable example?
Anytime you are merging with traffic going at a higer speed.
...is lack of notification. Blizzard should just be upfront about the fact that the Warden watches everything else your machine is doing while the game is running, and that people who are worried about privacy should (a) not run anything else while the game is running or (b) not play the game.
Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
If you examine UN discussions of control over the internet the problem appears to be free speech and political dissent.
Right. This is a step towards a better legal system, even if it allows some to exploit existing flaws more effectively.
Unfortunately windows don't work well in large buildings, for areas not facing the sun, for tall buildings surounded by other tall buildings. In other words, they have limited lighting use in almost all comercial buildings.
There's also a mod that allows some 32 player coop maps - here.
This mod is a little unstable, but a lot of fun. Excellent for flying practice as well.
Why is it that so many Microsoft publicity campaigns make the company sound like an evil despotism? Like that "thought theives" campaign they had a while back. I mean really - if Microsoft is after the thought thieves then that immediately suggests that they are the thought police right? And now this story that sounds like a press realease from North Korea.
Is it because Microsoft really is like an evil despotism so they can't help sounding that way, or is someone doing some subtle undermining from within?
especially as they occasionally hold the government to task on all their spin.
And when there is no spin to hold them to account for they just make shit up.
You need to upgrade your marxist propaganda. That particular item of BS was slightly plausible in the 1970's when the inflation rate was high, but inflation has been low in the US for a very long time.
The economy of the EU as a whole has been lagging behind the US for a long time. Since 1990 the EU has undergone huge growth in terms of territory and population as new countries have joined, but the comparative shares of the world economy for the EU and the US have barely moved. Stil some parts of the EU, like the UK for example, have been doing about as well as the US. (See here for details.)
I doubt if software patents have much, if anything, to do with it though. Aging populations, labour market inflexibility, and high tax rates, are more likely causes.
Nice hack, but alas it won't work. Not for long anyway. Federal copyright and patent law pre-empts state and local law, and I suspect that Congress would pass a law preventing this sort of taking in a heart-beat.
I also suspect that you would only be able to take such property from individuals or corporations residing within your jurisdiction.
They said that Intel is hurting customers and is bad for the public. Uhh that's slander.
No, that's just the current legal theory of what makes for an illegal monopoly. So as I said above, AMD has not said anything beyond the barest description of the complaint they are bringing, and there is no way that Intel will ever manage to base a libel case on that.
Monopolies can only inflate prices when they are actually a monopoly with no competitors. Intel has competitors and thus really can't inflate prices. Just cause one company sells their product at a high price doesn't mean you have to. And "monopoly profits", what the hell is that. That's bullshit.
The theory of monopoly pricing is old and well established. If you have a monoploy you can set prices higher than they would be in a competitive market. Even an imperfect monopoly can do this.
Just to give an example. Could Dell threaten to dump Intel and go with AMD? No. AMD could not supply the volume that Dell needs. Dell could threaten to go to AMD for some of its supply, but then Intel could threaten to hike the price on the rest because Dell really has no choice about where to go for *most* of its supply. In short, Intel gets to make the price, rather than the market.
If this gets to court there will be no real question about whether Intel has, or had, a monopoly. That part is too obvious. The question will be whether the public has suffered. Between economies of scale, and the effects of limited competition, AMD will have a hard time proving that prices would have been significantly lower in a fully competitive market.