I've spent time in socialist countries and it was miserable. And the closer a country gets to socialism, the more miserable and poor people end up being, the more their liberties end up being restricted, and the more corrupt government becomes.
Most libertarians would be happy to turn back the clock on government regulations and government taxes to more traditionally American levels, for the simple reason that the current situation is not sustainable. Progressives are so much into sustainability, why don't you start with finances?
I don't know about this "partially base 2" stuff, but having units which are evenly divisible by 3 seems like a clear advantage to me. Why do you think we still measure time in base 60, or angles in 360ths of a circle?
Would it be possible to improve recpetion (i.e., stop the digital signal from going straight to shit every time it rains) by attaching a DirectTV reciever to a BUD?
Really? My impression was that, while one could freely create characters derived from the PD works, it would still be illegal to label those derivative works as Mickey Mouse (TM) without Disney's approval.
On the subject of big, scary spear-chucking dudes
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 1
Does Yevgeny, by any chance, bear the last name Ravinoff?
The definition of libertarian is one who is for minimal government intrusion in both personal and economic life.
Not exactly. Capital-L Libertarians hold those beliefs, true, but small-L libertarians (AKA civil libertarians or social liberals) are much more varied when it comes to economic policy.
A person for minimal government intrusion in economic life and more intruusion in personal life is a conservative.
Eh, "conservative" has so many definitions piled on it that it's essentially meaningless by itself. Social conservatives (e.g., Jerry Falwell) are the ones who want to legislate morality. Paleoconservatives (e.g., John McCain), on the other hand, are essentially moderate (capital-L) Libertarians, idealizing smaller government.
No problem. Just look up the IP on ARIN. If they tell you to look it up on RIPE/APNIC/whoever, it's from overseas; otherwise, it's generally from the US.
I'd suggest lobbying for instant-runoff (or similar) voting, as well, if I thought it would do any good, but with the current Republicratic power structure firmly entrenched in the government, that doesn't seem likely.
RF modulators don't seem to be covered by section 1201(k) of the DMCA* ("Thou not manufacture Macrovision-immune VHS, beta, or 8mm recorders."), and since Macrovision is akin to benefit denial rather than access control (i.e., the actual signal is unmodified until after the supposed crime has been committed), the other sections probably don't apply, either.
No, that only applies if the swervice provider removes the infringing content from their servers after being notified (which is what Microsoft is trying to do), otherwise they become liable for damages.
That's a good idea in theory; in practice, it would be very difficult to sum up the entire issue in a message that is short, interesting, and simple enough for anyone to understand. Here on Slashdot, we can almost take for granted that anyone we talk to will understand why this sort of thing is harmful, but once you've gotten used to that sort of understanding, it becomes difficult to explain things clearly to someone who is unfamiliar with the underlying issues.
Let's say we've got two candidates. One candidate, who we'll call Al, has policies that are slightly left of center, the other, George, is slightly to the right. Al is getting 51% of the votes, George is getting 49%. If there were no other candidates, Al would win this round.
Suddenly, our third-party candidate, Ralph, pops up. He's somewhere to the left of Al, and some of Al's voters decide that, although Al would be an OK president, Ralph's views are closer to their own. The votes are now 48% Al, 3% Ralph, and 49% George. The addition of a third party to what was intended to be a two-party system can cause the balance of power to shift away from the candidate who would have otherwise had a majority.
(This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Honest.)
you will no longer be able to find an ad-blocking proxy server to use, they will be illegal black box circumention devices designed to alter the display of a copyrighted work.
How, exactly, does this constitute circumvention of a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work? The DMCA does not require you to download anything a corporation tells you to, or prohibit you from automatically modifying files before displaying them, so unless you're circumventing one of those pesky technological measures in order to do so, it's totally legal.
Reverse engineering will also include using a sniffer to look at the network traffic that is leaving your machine and deciding what you do and do not want to allow to go out to the internet.
Repeat after me: Reverse-engineering is not illegal under the DMCA. The only mention of reverse engineering in the DMCA is section 1201(f), which expressly allows circumvention and reverse-engineering for the purposes of "enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs."
anonymous proxies, remailers, news posters or any technology that grants the user relative or absolute anonynmity will be illegal, they allow the widespread and fast and unaccountable distribution of illegal information
It's entirely possible, given the sort of precedent set by the Napster case, for systems that allow the distribution of circumvention devices to be ruled against in court, but, as is demonstrated by Guntella, Freenet, FastTrack, et. al., it's unlikely that such systems will ever be taken down completely.
Encryption will be for criminals.
I think not. Remember, this is "6 years under the DMCA," not "6 years under the War on Some Terrorists." If encryption is outlawed, onl^H^H^Hthe DMCA will be superfluous; after all, how can you circumvent a technological measure when there is no technological measure to circumvent?
Those interested in learning what the DMCA actually does prohibit can read the EFF's copy here.
Re:Governmental control...?
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
That also seems a bit inconsistent. Right above that, he says paradoxes are impossible, but, for paradoxes to be impossible, any changes made would have to have no effect on the traveler's life before the point where they went back in time; any major change to the past would inherently cause a paradox. He also says that the universe operates according to many worlds theory; in that theory, any changes made would be invisible from the traveler's universe, making legislation unenforcable.
Besides, if you have the power to change history, it would be fairly easy to prevent that sort of law from being passed in the first place.
Actually, for a lot games, you can download RAM dumps from the sound chip that are even smaller than the equivalent MP3. The entire soundtrack of Chrono Trigger weighs in at less than 4MB in SPC format; that's only 64K per song. The only real issue is with the players (some of them don't emulate the sound chip very well, and the vast majority are Windows-only).
If SSSCA passes, Windows will have to be modified so that Print Screen does not work when a protected document is visible.
Actually, it can already do that. If you try to take a screenshot of PowerDVD using printscreen, when you paste it in the editor, there's a sort of "hole" in the picture where you can see the movie playing (find a copy of the demo and you'll see what I'm talking about), and if you save it, it shows up as black.
I have no clue why they do this, though, since there's a screenshot function built into the player anyway.
If the system was working as it should, that wouldn't matter. In a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," representatives should be easily accessable by all citizens. That most people here are having problems getting the message through reflects poorly on the state of the union.
What we need to do, since we can't get in touch with the government, is get in touch with people who can. Put up some four-color glossies on the bulletin board at the supermarket, walk around wearing a big cardboard sign,* take out an ad in the paper, anything - just get the message out. If we can get just 1% of the country to listen to us, we'd have a political force to be reckoned with.
*Note: While a cardboard sign may seem like adequate covering to some of you, it is recommended that you also wear pants while doing this. Thank you.
That depends on how the universe works. There are a couple major theories here:
The pessimistic one: Time does not exist at all, and we only think it exists because that's how we're wired. We remeber the past, but the universe doesn't.
The semi-optimistic one: The universe splits in two every time a decision is made at the quantum level. There's a universe where Hitler won the war, one where somebody killed him when he was two, and one where pigs evolved wings. You could, for example, go back to September 11 and gun down the highjackers as they're on their way to the airport, but you'd only be saving the WTC in that universe.
Paradoxes are unlikely, because, as you said, if they could exist, they probably already would.
Ah. I wasn't really sure what a Cayley tree was, so I just went with the article's explanation ("a tree with no root"), and put it together with what I knew about Gnutella.
What would be really interesting would be if the hypernet could seamlessly connect totally different network types. Unfortunately, I doubt this would work, since even if you were able to translate the search data, the methods for getting the actual files would probably be incompatable.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent time in socialist countries and it was miserable. And the closer a country gets to socialism, the more miserable and poor people end up being, the more their liberties end up being restricted, and the more corrupt government becomes.
The same could be said of capitalism.
Most libertarians would be happy to turn back the clock on government regulations and government taxes to more traditionally American levels, for the simple reason that the current situation is not sustainable. Progressives are so much into sustainability, why don't you start with finances?
Define "traditionally American levels" - taxes today are lower than at any point from 1933 to the mid-eighties, yet median income, as a percentage of GDP per capita, has been trending downwards since the '80s; meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed. Do you call that sustainable?
I don't know about this "partially base 2" stuff, but having units which are evenly divisible by 3 seems like a clear advantage to me. Why do you think we still measure time in base 60, or angles in 360ths of a circle?
Volkswagen.
You know it makes sense.
Try adding some synonyms; "freedom" is used more than "liberty" these days.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=liberty%2Csecurity%2Cfreedom%2Crights&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=0
Would it be possible to improve recpetion (i.e., stop the digital signal from going straight to shit every time it rains) by attaching a DirectTV reciever to a BUD?
Sticks and dirt? Luxury! In my day, we had to spend weeks clawing at solid rock with our bare hands... and we liked it!
Really? My impression was that, while one could freely create characters derived from the PD works, it would still be illegal to label those derivative works as Mickey Mouse (TM) without Disney's approval.
Does Yevgeny, by any chance, bear the last name Ravinoff?
Only in the UK. The US release is today.
No problem. Just look up the IP on ARIN. If they tell you to look it up on RIPE/APNIC/whoever, it's from overseas; otherwise, it's generally from the US.
I'd suggest lobbying for instant-runoff (or similar) voting, as well, if I thought it would do any good, but with the current Republicratic power structure firmly entrenched in the government, that doesn't seem likely.
I will probably regret linking to my 56K from Slashdot, though.
*Please note, however, that I am not a lawyer.**
**Not that there's anything wrong with that.
No, that only applies if the swervice provider removes the infringing content from their servers after being notified (which is what Microsoft is trying to do), otherwise they become liable for damages.
That's a good idea in theory; in practice, it would be very difficult to sum up the entire issue in a message that is short, interesting, and simple enough for anyone to understand. Here on Slashdot, we can almost take for granted that anyone we talk to will understand why this sort of thing is harmful, but once you've gotten used to that sort of understanding, it becomes difficult to explain things clearly to someone who is unfamiliar with the underlying issues.
Let's say we've got two candidates. One candidate, who we'll call Al, has policies that are slightly left of center, the other, George, is slightly to the right. Al is getting 51% of the votes, George is getting 49%. If there were no other candidates, Al would win this round.
Suddenly, our third-party candidate, Ralph, pops up. He's somewhere to the left of Al, and some of Al's voters decide that, although Al would be an OK president, Ralph's views are closer to their own. The votes are now 48% Al, 3% Ralph, and 49% George. The addition of a third party to what was intended to be a two-party system can cause the balance of power to shift away from the candidate who would have otherwise had a majority.
(This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Honest.)
How, exactly, does this constitute circumvention of a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work? The DMCA does not require you to download anything a corporation tells you to, or prohibit you from automatically modifying files before displaying them, so unless you're circumventing one of those pesky technological measures in order to do so, it's totally legal.
Reverse engineering will also include using a sniffer to look at the network traffic that is leaving your machine and deciding what you do and do not want to allow to go out to the internet.
Repeat after me: Reverse-engineering is not illegal under the DMCA. The only mention of reverse engineering in the DMCA is section 1201(f), which expressly allows circumvention and reverse-engineering for the purposes of "enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs."
anonymous proxies, remailers, news posters or any technology that grants the user relative or absolute anonynmity will be illegal, they allow the widespread and fast and unaccountable distribution of illegal information
It's entirely possible, given the sort of precedent set by the Napster case, for systems that allow the distribution of circumvention devices to be ruled against in court, but, as is demonstrated by Guntella, Freenet, FastTrack, et. al., it's unlikely that such systems will ever be taken down completely.
Encryption will be for criminals.
I think not. Remember, this is "6 years under the DMCA," not "6 years under the War on Some Terrorists." If encryption is outlawed, onl^H^H^Hthe DMCA will be superfluous; after all, how can you circumvent a technological measure when there is no technological measure to circumvent?
Those interested in learning what the DMCA actually does prohibit can read the EFF's copy here.
Besides, if you have the power to change history, it would be fairly easy to prevent that sort of law from being passed in the first place.
Check out Zophar's Domain for more info.
They applied for the patent in 1998, but it wasn't granted until this year. The USPTO had to review it first.
Actually, it can already do that. If you try to take a screenshot of PowerDVD using printscreen, when you paste it in the editor, there's a sort of "hole" in the picture where you can see the movie playing (find a copy of the demo and you'll see what I'm talking about), and if you save it, it shows up as black.
I have no clue why they do this, though, since there's a screenshot function built into the player anyway.
If the system was working as it should, that wouldn't matter. In a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," representatives should be easily accessable by all citizens. That most people here are having problems getting the message through reflects poorly on the state of the union.
What we need to do, since we can't get in touch with the government, is get in touch with people who can. Put up some four-color glossies on the bulletin board at the supermarket, walk around wearing a big cardboard sign,* take out an ad in the paper, anything - just get the message out. If we can get just 1% of the country to listen to us, we'd have a political force to be reckoned with.
*Note: While a cardboard sign may seem like adequate covering to some of you, it is recommended that you also wear pants while doing this. Thank you.
- The pessimistic one: Time does not exist at all, and we only think it exists because that's how we're wired. We remeber the past, but the universe doesn't.
- The semi-optimistic one: The universe splits in two every time a decision is made at the quantum level. There's a universe where Hitler won the war, one where somebody killed him when he was two, and one where pigs evolved wings. You could, for example, go back to September 11 and gun down the highjackers as they're on their way to the airport, but you'd only be saving the WTC in that universe.
Paradoxes are unlikely, because, as you said, if they could exist, they probably already would.What would be really interesting would be if the hypernet could seamlessly connect totally different network types. Unfortunately, I doubt this would work, since even if you were able to translate the search data, the methods for getting the actual files would probably be incompatable.