It seems to me that the responsibility of companies like Facebook for illegal ads on their platforms should be the same as the responsibility of ISPs for illegal file sharing on their platforms. It's the same principle. If people use my service in illegal ways, am I responsible or not? And if so, to what extent? We've been over this ground before, extensively. It shouldn't be treated like unexplored territory just because we're talking about different content.
The more coupling there is between corporations and the federal agencies that are supposed to regulate them, the less you need a tinfoil hat to wonder if influential companies might use the FDA to obstruct research that could result in products that threaten their business. We live in an age of medical maintenance, not cures. How long has it been since the last eradication of a major disease? I have to wonder if we'll ever see cures for diseases such as diabetes that support multi-billion dollar maintenance industries.
That's true... people's voting habits are no more rational than their buying habits, probably because politicians are sold using the same techniques that sell hamburgers and deodorant. The goal of political campaigns, like other ad campaigns, isn't to help people make choices that reflect their free will or their best interests, it's to convince them that they're doing that, whether it's true or not. Voting doesn't reflect people's concerns or desires, it reflects the effectiveness of campaigning.
The reality of human nature appears not to support the theory that our choices will generally reflect what we want, or what we think we want. For the advertising industry this finding is a great big DUHHH!!! It wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry if convincing people to act against their own interests didn't work. But for the rest of us this seems to be a startling revelation.
When we discuss and argue about how to handle behavior-driven problems like rampant obesity, consumer debt, diabetes, and social media addiction, somebody always plays the free will card - "Nobody's putting a gun to their heads!" But is "free will" the part where we rationally think about what we want out of life and what's best for us, without any extraneous influences? Or is it the part where images and sound bites hit our insecurities and cravings, and we override our rationality and click a BUY button or chug down a 48-oz soda?
Our laws and customs are based on the assumption that our everyday decisions are based on free will. But how realistic is that? Really, truly, how much are we free-willed beings and how much are we profit-generating stimulus-response drones? Because calling the latter state Freedom doesn't make it a good thing. If our normal, natural behavior is to let ourselves be taken advantage of, it seems like we need to change our environment so it works better for us. How can we do that?
I agree that ISPs shouldn't act as copyright cops, judges and juries, but this one isn't threatening to mess with anybody's thermostat. They're just threatening to throttle bandwidth, which realistically could affect the operation of net-enabled devices if say a bit torrent client is hogging the connection.
I believe the design includes venting through the car if there is a large pressure difference between front and rear. So not only would the tube have to be breached, this would also have to fail.
I think crowdfunding will eventually replace big entertainment companies, and the transition actually won't involve a huge change. The movie/television business has already evolved away from the monolithic studio business model of the past, which used to do entire productions. Since the late-1980s most movies and TV shows have been made by temporary assemblies of small, specialized production companies and services. The part the big studios still play is putting up the money, and thereby controlling the whole process. As crowdfunding generates more and more of the money, the big studios will have less and less control.
... even achieving transparency between departments is difficult. When I used to work there you should have seen what we went through to get code from other teams. In spite of the fact that the company rewards cross-group collaboration (which was the main reason we were doing it).
In 30 years as a software dev I don't think I've known more than a couple computer geeks who might have the guts to steal data, let alone the personality to locate a buyer, negotiate a price and actually follow through on the deal. Sure we've all seen Office Space and talked trash about what we'd like to do to a company, but at the moment of truth, no way. And managers tend to be even more gutless -- something tells me the survey results were heavily skewed by false bravado.
Apart from the joy of eccentricity I don't see any real advantage in only one copy of the game existing, as opposed to multiple copies each residing on its own USB stick. You'd have the same effect of a world passing from person to person, maintaining all the modifications made by previous players. Each copy would be unique. More people would get to participate.
Any law is automatically an incentive for people not to admit breaking it. That's no rationale against making laws. The reason for any business regulation is that there's a tendency for business owners not to be altruistic unless there are tangible consequence hanging over their heads.
I sure hope you're not lumping local TV news into the category of "professional journalism." Local news is like a high school version of "real" news -- for example, the ubiquitous "Live Report!" in which a reporter goes out to a location where nothing is happening at the moment, and narrates a tape about something that happened earlier in the day. What a joke.
Pick almost any free-time activity people used to do before the Internet, and I'll bet they're doing less of it today, because free time is a finite resource. New alternatives always compete with older ones.
I agree, and I don't see how Microsoft can "kill".Net. As the article points out, Microsoft tends to abandon platforms it isn't interested in, but so what?.Net works fine, doesn't really need anything more done to it, and has a huge development community using it and documenting how to use it better. Seems like it can survive on its own without any further input from MS.
"We may be slow but we're not stupid," is an interesting remark, considering that public stupidity is the major weapon in the battle of Greedy Bastards vs. Everybody Else. The small number of people who can't stand to live in the world unless they own it have been actively cultivating mass stupidity for years. Their arsenal includes kneejerk emotional responses, supersitious fear of science and academia, leadership cultism, and other ignorance-based aspects of human psychology. It's like a giant football team with a handful of quarterbacks standing safely behind millions of big dumb linemen who are willing to charge out and get their knees broken for the cause. If we're going to save ourselves from disaster we had better start using the public's stupidity for the public good. Stop offering up facts and reason and switch to trite, mindless slogans and overblown imagery. People will respond much more to a scary picture of a boogeyman than to a reasonable explanation that there is no boogeyman. Instead of trying to explain climate change, draw a cartoon of a family and their dog huddled on the roof of a floating house. The American public has been conditioned to believe fear and stupidity, so I say give them fear and stupidity. "But that makes you just as bad." No it doesn't. Using other people's stupidity to save them from disaster is much better than using it to screw them over.
The article mentions a 1994 law that removed works from the public domain, but doesn't name the law. I've been searching online but can find nothing about a copyright law change in the U.S. in 1994. How is this not a well-known thing? I would like to read about it and what was the rationale behind it. Retroactively removing material from the public domain, as was done en masse in the Bono Act, strikes me as the most sinister type of copyright legislation.
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It seems to me that the responsibility of companies like Facebook for illegal ads on their platforms should be the same as the responsibility of ISPs for illegal file sharing on their platforms. It's the same principle. If people use my service in illegal ways, am I responsible or not? And if so, to what extent? We've been over this ground before, extensively. It shouldn't be treated like unexplored territory just because we're talking about different content.
The more coupling there is between corporations and the federal agencies that are supposed to regulate them, the less you need a tinfoil hat to wonder if influential companies might use the FDA to obstruct research that could result in products that threaten their business. We live in an age of medical maintenance, not cures. How long has it been since the last eradication of a major disease? I have to wonder if we'll ever see cures for diseases such as diabetes that support multi-billion dollar maintenance industries.
That's true... people's voting habits are no more rational than their buying habits, probably because politicians are sold using the same techniques that sell hamburgers and deodorant. The goal of political campaigns, like other ad campaigns, isn't to help people make choices that reflect their free will or their best interests, it's to convince them that they're doing that, whether it's true or not. Voting doesn't reflect people's concerns or desires, it reflects the effectiveness of campaigning.
The reality of human nature appears not to support the theory that our choices will generally reflect what we want, or what we think we want. For the advertising industry this finding is a great big DUHHH!!! It wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry if convincing people to act against their own interests didn't work. But for the rest of us this seems to be a startling revelation.
When we discuss and argue about how to handle behavior-driven problems like rampant obesity, consumer debt, diabetes, and social media addiction, somebody always plays the free will card - "Nobody's putting a gun to their heads!" But is "free will" the part where we rationally think about what we want out of life and what's best for us, without any extraneous influences? Or is it the part where images and sound bites hit our insecurities and cravings, and we override our rationality and click a BUY button or chug down a 48-oz soda?
Our laws and customs are based on the assumption that our everyday decisions are based on free will. But how realistic is that? Really, truly, how much are we free-willed beings and how much are we profit-generating stimulus-response drones? Because calling the latter state Freedom doesn't make it a good thing. If our normal, natural behavior is to let ourselves be taken advantage of, it seems like we need to change our environment so it works better for us. How can we do that?
I agree that ISPs shouldn't act as copyright cops, judges and juries, but this one isn't threatening to mess with anybody's thermostat. They're just threatening to throttle bandwidth, which realistically could affect the operation of net-enabled devices if say a bit torrent client is hogging the connection.
I believe the design includes venting through the car if there is a large pressure difference between front and rear. So not only would the tube have to be breached, this would also have to fail.
Does this law mean a UK user could get thrown in jail for using an encryption scheme for which the government has no backdoor access?
How does anyone know that saving pink iguanas from a volcano is better than letting nature take its course?
Render city streets unnavigable? Where would the massive number of additional customers come from to support enough taxis to do that?
I think crowdfunding will eventually replace big entertainment companies, and the transition actually won't involve a huge change. The movie/television business has already evolved away from the monolithic studio business model of the past, which used to do entire productions. Since the late-1980s most movies and TV shows have been made by temporary assemblies of small, specialized production companies and services. The part the big studios still play is putting up the money, and thereby controlling the whole process. As crowdfunding generates more and more of the money, the big studios will have less and less control.
... even achieving transparency between departments is difficult. When I used to work there you should have seen what we went through to get code from other teams. In spite of the fact that the company rewards cross-group collaboration (which was the main reason we were doing it).
Exactly - don't poison your enemy, spy on his colon!
We would still need a ragtag band of misfits and renegades and a chainsmoking Russian refueling station attendant.
Exactly. In other news, 4 out of 5 IT people admit they'd like to be time-traveling superheroes and save the universe.
In 30 years as a software dev I don't think I've known more than a couple computer geeks who might have the guts to steal data, let alone the personality to locate a buyer, negotiate a price and actually follow through on the deal. Sure we've all seen Office Space and talked trash about what we'd like to do to a company, but at the moment of truth, no way. And managers tend to be even more gutless -- something tells me the survey results were heavily skewed by false bravado.
Apart from the joy of eccentricity I don't see any real advantage in only one copy of the game existing, as opposed to multiple copies each residing on its own USB stick. You'd have the same effect of a world passing from person to person, maintaining all the modifications made by previous players. Each copy would be unique. More people would get to participate.
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Bing uses Hadoop? Wow, that's kind of funny. Reminds me of when Hotmail ran on Apache, which it still might be doing for all I know.
Any law is automatically an incentive for people not to admit breaking it. That's no rationale against making laws. The reason for any business regulation is that there's a tendency for business owners not to be altruistic unless there are tangible consequence hanging over their heads.
I sure hope you're not lumping local TV news into the category of "professional journalism." Local news is like a high school version of "real" news -- for example, the ubiquitous "Live Report!" in which a reporter goes out to a location where nothing is happening at the moment, and narrates a tape about something that happened earlier in the day. What a joke.
Pick almost any free-time activity people used to do before the Internet, and I'll bet they're doing less of it today, because free time is a finite resource. New alternatives always compete with older ones.
True dat. Using javascript for backend coding would be like going back to classic ASP and VbScript.
I agree, and I don't see how Microsoft can "kill" .Net. As the article points out, Microsoft tends to abandon platforms it isn't interested in, but so what? .Net works fine, doesn't really need anything more done to it, and has a huge development community using it and documenting how to use it better. Seems like it can survive on its own without any further input from MS.
"We may be slow but we're not stupid," is an interesting remark, considering that public stupidity is the major weapon in the battle of Greedy Bastards vs. Everybody Else. The small number of people who can't stand to live in the world unless they own it have been actively cultivating mass stupidity for years. Their arsenal includes kneejerk emotional responses, supersitious fear of science and academia, leadership cultism, and other ignorance-based aspects of human psychology. It's like a giant football team with a handful of quarterbacks standing safely behind millions of big dumb linemen who are willing to charge out and get their knees broken for the cause.
If we're going to save ourselves from disaster we had better start using the public's stupidity for the public good. Stop offering up facts and reason and switch to trite, mindless slogans and overblown imagery. People will respond much more to a scary picture of a boogeyman than to a reasonable explanation that there is no boogeyman. Instead of trying to explain climate change, draw a cartoon of a family and their dog huddled on the roof of a floating house. The American public has been conditioned to believe fear and stupidity, so I say give them fear and stupidity.
"But that makes you just as bad." No it doesn't. Using other people's stupidity to save them from disaster is much better than using it to screw them over.
The article mentions a 1994 law that removed works from the public domain, but doesn't name the law. I've been searching online but can find nothing about a copyright law change in the U.S. in 1994. How is this not a well-known thing? I would like to read about it and what was the rationale behind it. Retroactively removing material from the public domain, as was done en masse in the Bono Act, strikes me as the most sinister type of copyright legislation.