You touch on another flaw in the original article's reasoning: By eliminating copyright protection of all kind, you make it harder for people to reward the original artist.
Right now, people who want to get a copy of a work for free know what they're doing. They're going to Pirate Bay or some other website instead of Amazon, while people who are happy with paying artists can do so relatively easy (how much publishers are taking is another issue). If you were to eliminate attribution requirements, I'd be free to republish your works on Amazon uncredited or even (depending on the laws that do remain) claim them as my own. Now people have to do additional research to determine just who the actual artist is and whether they're rewarding the right person. Your legal recourse may be limited.
But this isn't about a right to privacy. If this was about a right to privacy, then whoever uncovered the information in the first place would be the target of legal action, not everybody talking about it. This is the age of the internet and vast, multinational communication. Trying to stop information that's already out there is just a lot of flailing about that's going to hurt a few people and have no real effect.
Whether we should care or not doesn't enter into it, because the laws he wants to use to silence everyone are the same ones politicians or other actually important public figures will use when we find out about things they don't want in the public.
I was mistaken then, my mistake. But although he has been charged, Manning still has yet to be convicted, and his incarceration certainly seems excessively harsh in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
Here's something to call into question Poulsen's integrity: Lamo has continued to make claims about what Manning told him and how Manning first contacted him. Some of these claims seem to be contradictory. Not only has Poulsen not released the remainder of the logs, he has so far refused to use them to fact-check Lamo's more recent accusations.
Greenwald's agenda is that Bradley Manning has been held in solitary confinement for seven months without yet being charged with a crime. The chat logs (which the federal government has copies of) may contain evidence that helps to exonerate Manning or to prove his guilt. Outside of Lamo, Poulsen, Manning, and the government, nobody knows.
However, Lamo has continued to make (sometimes conflicting) statements about what Manning has told him, and Poulsen refuses to so much as confirm or deny whether the logs support any of these statements.
Not very low budgets. I mean, they've got to afford the surface-to-air missiles first. But after the missiles all they had left was enough to buy an iPhone, a two-year contract, and a $2 app.
And hopefully some lunch, because they're just gonna walk outside and wait until a plane shows up overhead in range, and they're gonna get hungry sitting there.
Maybe they speak English and read this from the article The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security
You need to finish reading sentences. The actual line reads, "The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners."
That means security experts have called it an aid to terrorists, and that the DHS is looking into protecting airlines (which they're kind of always doing, since it's their job). It does not mean that DHS has called it an aid to terrorists.
Wrong again, rtb61. A mine in a poorer country that dumps toxic waste into a river is bad news. A modern mine, with all it's emission controls and neutralization processes is not. You really have to understand the difference between an open coal fire and highly emissions controlled one.
Just because a mine is modern and in a first world country doesn't mean it's clean and safe. I don't have any examples from precious metals on hand, but the BP gulf disaster, the continuing poor safety record of American underground coal mining, and mountaintop removal coal mining are all excellent examples.
Exactly. And if the tremors really were strong indicators of a following quake, everyone would only have to put their lives on hold for about a week or so. Maybe less if the quake comes soon!
"Spiritual" is the ultimate in content-free words when it comes to breakdowns like this. Lots of people like to say they're atheist or agnostic but still "spiritual," but I'd be surprised if more than one in five could clearly describe what they mean by that.
Do they mean they believe there's things in the universe we still don't understand? That's practically a given. Do they mean they think that certain things (life in general, self-aware life, etc) is "special" and should be accorded some extra respect? That's fine as an ethical position, but without attributing that specialness to something, it's another waste of a statement to call it spiritual.
This is Slashdot, so I think I'm required to not actually read the article, but a valid and informative followup question for this survey would have been for people who claim "spirituality" to try and explain that stance in an actual substantive way. If you say you're Evangelical or Catholic or Jewish or Humanist, those are descriptions with meaning and descriptive power. Saying you're spiritual doesn't mean a damn thing unless you explain it.
Three errors: First, I've always seen the conversion given as either 33 feet or 10 m (which is actually 32.8), never 33.7. Second, the actual pressure varies slightly based on temperature and salinity. Third, you forgot to add the 1 atmosphere from the surface. So even if your 33.7 is accurate, it'd be 149.4 and fails to account for local variability.
Fair use has nothing to do with trademarks, it's a doctrine of copyright law. GW may have a trademark on Warhammer, but not a copyright. If this fan site is republishing copyrighted materials (rulebooks, background documents, etc), then there may be an issue. But unless you're intentionally trying to confuse people into purchasing a competing product, there's nothing wrong with using a trademark regardless of whether you're a private citizen or a commercial entity.
Does Apple have the legal right to do this? Certainly, they do.
The point of stories like this is not to have Apple brought up on charges, but to educate the consumer. If I were a consumer considering a new smartphone (which I am), I'd be grateful for stories like this that document how buying an iPhone or iPad will lock me into a horribly restricted app environment.
Is it "censorship" in a strict legal sense? No, but do you have a better description that's more concise than "not permitting things that violate a license agreement onto things that are restricted in terms of what they can load?"
Yes, actually. If you think he's a danger to society, throw him in jail. Don't let him out with some kind of ridiculous restrictions on what technology he can use and where he can live.
In South Florida, where I used to live, nearly every municipality had passed ordinances restricting registered sex offenders from living within certain distances of parks, schools, daycares, etc. To the point where there was basically nowhere for these people to live. They either had to abandon their families and leave the area (For where? Many other areas have similar restrictions.) or live under a bridge.
Seriously. There's large numbers of sex offenders living under bridges in the Miami area because there's nowhere else for them to live. Their parole officers know they're there, some of them have family that brings by food and supplies, etc.
These are people that the government has deemed to dangerous to live near places children congregate, but not dangerous enough that we need to keep them in prison. So they're homeless. And from the bridge, many of them simply give up and disappear. Off the radar. Gone. Poof. Living somewhere we don't know.
It's ridiculous. Either they're a danger to society or not. Make up your mind.
An example of the endpoint thing, specifically dealing with Amazon tribesmen: They'd ask them what's halfway between one and nine, and the answer would be three. These are experiments dealing with adults, not children, who've never been exposed to the type of math used worldwide. It's much harder to do this sort of thing with children, because we don't let them grow up isolated and "corrupt" them with modern math as soon as we're able.
Even more interesting is that the way we count is completely unnatural. Research with both small children and isolated Amazon tribes indicates that our natural inclination is to count logarithmically, but we train our kids away from this shortly after they learn to talk.
As someone else pointed out, this isn't just the collection of data in aggregate that can be sorted through later.
This kind of data collection is (relative to other digital data gathering, at least) fairly labor-intensive. Nobody from the FBI is going to pretend to be your friend on Facebook unless your name has already come to their attention for some other reason. You're not worth their time otherwise.
Now, whether they're investigating you because you've committed a crime or because you're a communist is another discussion entirely, but this worries me a hell of a lot less than, say, someone selling my info to spammers.
The problem is Scientology doesn't work the way other religions work, with respect to fanaticism. With Christianity (or Islam, or Judaism, or most traditional religions), you get a fair amount of fanatical individuals. You get the people that shoot doctors providing abortions and you get the suicide bombers.
As far as I've seen, the fanatics in Scientology are all high up in the organization and are smart enough to at least try and be circumspect about what they do. They're better organized than individuals or small groups. They're slicker and know how to sell their product.
That's the real problem here. Other religions may inspire some fanatics, but Scientology is run by fanatics.
There's three parties involved in the music business: The Artist, The Distributor, and The Consumer.
We like the Consumer, obviously, since that's us.
People usually like the Artist, too, because those are the guys that are actually producing the music.
The problem is the Distributor. We tend to think that the Distributor should either be working directly for the Artist, helping him get his message and his music out to the world, or for the Consumer, helping us find and purchase and own whatever music we want to hear. Instead, the Distributor works for himself and his investors. He sees this movement of music from the Artist to the Consumer and says, "How can I make money off that?" Not, "How can I facilitate that," except to the point where facilitating makes him money.
If the Distributor were a servant of either of the two parties, we'd be in much better shape. With the power of the internet that's starting to happen in some cases, but the big labels and their associates are still part of the problem.
I just spent a month working in El Paso, TX. Every morning we'd be up in the hills at sunrise, so we had a fantastic view all the way across into Mexico. Juarez is much, much bigger than El Paso, and every single morning it was covered by this thick green haze. It was ridiculous how bad the air pollution there was.
Illegally stopping sales? There is no law anywhere that says Amazon has to sell Macmillan's books. Whether it's because the prices are too high or because they just don't like the way the company smells, Amazon is perfectly within their rights to sell or not sell whatever they choose to.
Setting aside the obvious joke, the "wisdom of crowds" has actually been proven to be useful in certain situations.
If you ask, say, a single person how many jelly beans are in a jar, he may or may not come close. If you ask several hundred people how many are in a given jar and then average their responses, the result tends to be surprisingly accurate.
The problem is that this is limited to situations requiring little to no topic-specific knowledge. Asking a large crowd of random people what the GDP of China is will be a waste of time. It's a technique that requires you to be asking the right questions.
Slashdot Mirror
You touch on another flaw in the original article's reasoning: By eliminating copyright protection of all kind, you make it harder for people to reward the original artist.
Right now, people who want to get a copy of a work for free know what they're doing. They're going to Pirate Bay or some other website instead of Amazon, while people who are happy with paying artists can do so relatively easy (how much publishers are taking is another issue). If you were to eliminate attribution requirements, I'd be free to republish your works on Amazon uncredited or even (depending on the laws that do remain) claim them as my own. Now people have to do additional research to determine just who the actual artist is and whether they're rewarding the right person. Your legal recourse may be limited.
But this isn't about a right to privacy. If this was about a right to privacy, then whoever uncovered the information in the first place would be the target of legal action, not everybody talking about it. This is the age of the internet and vast, multinational communication. Trying to stop information that's already out there is just a lot of flailing about that's going to hurt a few people and have no real effect.
Whether we should care or not doesn't enter into it, because the laws he wants to use to silence everyone are the same ones politicians or other actually important public figures will use when we find out about things they don't want in the public.
I was mistaken then, my mistake. But although he has been charged, Manning still has yet to be convicted, and his incarceration certainly seems excessively harsh in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
Here's something to call into question Poulsen's integrity: Lamo has continued to make claims about what Manning told him and how Manning first contacted him. Some of these claims seem to be contradictory. Not only has Poulsen not released the remainder of the logs, he has so far refused to use them to fact-check Lamo's more recent accusations.
Greenwald's agenda is that Bradley Manning has been held in solitary confinement for seven months without yet being charged with a crime. The chat logs (which the federal government has copies of) may contain evidence that helps to exonerate Manning or to prove his guilt. Outside of Lamo, Poulsen, Manning, and the government, nobody knows.
However, Lamo has continued to make (sometimes conflicting) statements about what Manning has told him, and Poulsen refuses to so much as confirm or deny whether the logs support any of these statements.
Are these the same kids that just won't get off your lawn?
Or selling something.
Insurance, probably, based on the grandparent's post.
Not very low budgets. I mean, they've got to afford the surface-to-air missiles first. But after the missiles all they had left was enough to buy an iPhone, a two-year contract, and a $2 app.
And hopefully some lunch, because they're just gonna walk outside and wait until a plane shows up overhead in range, and they're gonna get hungry sitting there.
You need to finish reading sentences. The actual line reads, "The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners."
That means security experts have called it an aid to terrorists, and that the DHS is looking into protecting airlines (which they're kind of always doing, since it's their job). It does not mean that DHS has called it an aid to terrorists.
Just because a mine is modern and in a first world country doesn't mean it's clean and safe. I don't have any examples from precious metals on hand, but the BP gulf disaster, the continuing poor safety record of American underground coal mining, and mountaintop removal coal mining are all excellent examples.
Exactly. And if the tremors really were strong indicators of a following quake, everyone would only have to put their lives on hold for about a week or so. Maybe less if the quake comes soon!
"Spiritual" is the ultimate in content-free words when it comes to breakdowns like this. Lots of people like to say they're atheist or agnostic but still "spiritual," but I'd be surprised if more than one in five could clearly describe what they mean by that.
Do they mean they believe there's things in the universe we still don't understand? That's practically a given. Do they mean they think that certain things (life in general, self-aware life, etc) is "special" and should be accorded some extra respect? That's fine as an ethical position, but without attributing that specialness to something, it's another waste of a statement to call it spiritual.
This is Slashdot, so I think I'm required to not actually read the article, but a valid and informative followup question for this survey would have been for people who claim "spirituality" to try and explain that stance in an actual substantive way. If you say you're Evangelical or Catholic or Jewish or Humanist, those are descriptions with meaning and descriptive power. Saying you're spiritual doesn't mean a damn thing unless you explain it.
Three errors: First, I've always seen the conversion given as either 33 feet or 10 m (which is actually 32.8), never 33.7. Second, the actual pressure varies slightly based on temperature and salinity. Third, you forgot to add the 1 atmosphere from the surface. So even if your 33.7 is accurate, it'd be 149.4 and fails to account for local variability.
Fair use has nothing to do with trademarks, it's a doctrine of copyright law. GW may have a trademark on Warhammer, but not a copyright. If this fan site is republishing copyrighted materials (rulebooks, background documents, etc), then there may be an issue. But unless you're intentionally trying to confuse people into purchasing a competing product, there's nothing wrong with using a trademark regardless of whether you're a private citizen or a commercial entity.
Does Apple have the legal right to do this? Certainly, they do.
The point of stories like this is not to have Apple brought up on charges, but to educate the consumer. If I were a consumer considering a new smartphone (which I am), I'd be grateful for stories like this that document how buying an iPhone or iPad will lock me into a horribly restricted app environment.
Is it "censorship" in a strict legal sense? No, but do you have a better description that's more concise than "not permitting things that violate a license agreement onto things that are restricted in terms of what they can load?"
Yes, actually. If you think he's a danger to society, throw him in jail. Don't let him out with some kind of ridiculous restrictions on what technology he can use and where he can live.
In South Florida, where I used to live, nearly every municipality had passed ordinances restricting registered sex offenders from living within certain distances of parks, schools, daycares, etc. To the point where there was basically nowhere for these people to live. They either had to abandon their families and leave the area (For where? Many other areas have similar restrictions.) or live under a bridge.
Seriously. There's large numbers of sex offenders living under bridges in the Miami area because there's nowhere else for them to live. Their parole officers know they're there, some of them have family that brings by food and supplies, etc.
These are people that the government has deemed to dangerous to live near places children congregate, but not dangerous enough that we need to keep them in prison. So they're homeless. And from the bridge, many of them simply give up and disappear. Off the radar. Gone. Poof. Living somewhere we don't know.
It's ridiculous. Either they're a danger to society or not. Make up your mind.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/09 was where I heard most of it.
An example of the endpoint thing, specifically dealing with Amazon tribesmen: They'd ask them what's halfway between one and nine, and the answer would be three. These are experiments dealing with adults, not children, who've never been exposed to the type of math used worldwide. It's much harder to do this sort of thing with children, because we don't let them grow up isolated and "corrupt" them with modern math as soon as we're able.
Even more interesting is that the way we count is completely unnatural. Research with both small children and isolated Amazon tribes indicates that our natural inclination is to count logarithmically, but we train our kids away from this shortly after they learn to talk.
Established, peer-reviewed journals?
As someone else pointed out, this isn't just the collection of data in aggregate that can be sorted through later.
This kind of data collection is (relative to other digital data gathering, at least) fairly labor-intensive. Nobody from the FBI is going to pretend to be your friend on Facebook unless your name has already come to their attention for some other reason. You're not worth their time otherwise.
Now, whether they're investigating you because you've committed a crime or because you're a communist is another discussion entirely, but this worries me a hell of a lot less than, say, someone selling my info to spammers.
The problem is Scientology doesn't work the way other religions work, with respect to fanaticism. With Christianity (or Islam, or Judaism, or most traditional religions), you get a fair amount of fanatical individuals. You get the people that shoot doctors providing abortions and you get the suicide bombers.
As far as I've seen, the fanatics in Scientology are all high up in the organization and are smart enough to at least try and be circumspect about what they do. They're better organized than individuals or small groups. They're slicker and know how to sell their product.
That's the real problem here. Other religions may inspire some fanatics, but Scientology is run by fanatics.
There's three parties involved in the music business: The Artist, The Distributor, and The Consumer.
We like the Consumer, obviously, since that's us.
People usually like the Artist, too, because those are the guys that are actually producing the music.
The problem is the Distributor. We tend to think that the Distributor should either be working directly for the Artist, helping him get his message and his music out to the world, or for the Consumer, helping us find and purchase and own whatever music we want to hear. Instead, the Distributor works for himself and his investors. He sees this movement of music from the Artist to the Consumer and says, "How can I make money off that?" Not, "How can I facilitate that," except to the point where facilitating makes him money.
If the Distributor were a servant of either of the two parties, we'd be in much better shape. With the power of the internet that's starting to happen in some cases, but the big labels and their associates are still part of the problem.
I just spent a month working in El Paso, TX. Every morning we'd be up in the hills at sunrise, so we had a fantastic view all the way across into Mexico. Juarez is much, much bigger than El Paso, and every single morning it was covered by this thick green haze. It was ridiculous how bad the air pollution there was.
Illegally stopping sales? There is no law anywhere that says Amazon has to sell Macmillan's books. Whether it's because the prices are too high or because they just don't like the way the company smells, Amazon is perfectly within their rights to sell or not sell whatever they choose to.
Setting aside the obvious joke, the "wisdom of crowds" has actually been proven to be useful in certain situations.
If you ask, say, a single person how many jelly beans are in a jar, he may or may not come close. If you ask several hundred people how many are in a given jar and then average their responses, the result tends to be surprisingly accurate.
The problem is that this is limited to situations requiring little to no topic-specific knowledge. Asking a large crowd of random people what the GDP of China is will be a waste of time. It's a technique that requires you to be asking the right questions.