Does not allow the use of information collected on Americans by foreign governments when that information was collected in violation of the U.S. Constitution
To paraphrase: Only our own government is allowed the use of information collected in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whew, that was close. For a second I was worried.
Does that mean every X years I lose one-half of my credit limit?
"Your ROD (Rate of Decay) is determined by subtracting 2 years from the prime ROD published on the last day of each month in the New York Times, or, if not published that day, on the next day the prime ROD is published."
I do tech support for a major OEM computer company, and my buddies and I have often speculated that we need a way to send a shock through the phone line.
I don't know if it would train our customers to be better at following directions, or help them right-click any better, but I do know that it should hurt to be that stupid.
Technology: The cause of, and solution to, type L users.
Then make a law so all porn sites have to be on.xxx or.sex.
Now you have a problem. Who decides what constitutes a "porn site"? Is H.R. Geiger's Landscape #20, which depicts row upon row of penises, porn? Or is it art? Where do you put Robert Mapplethorpe photographs? How much sexual content must anime have, and in what context, before it's hentai?
Problem number two: "Make a law" solutions are doomed to fail. Lawmaking to correct nonviolent social problems when it works at all, works only temporarily. Make a law today, and public opinion changes tomorrow. Then your law either becomes more restrictive, doing much more than you expected it to do, or less restrictive, and no longer accomplishes its stated goal. Thus it's extremely unlikely that laws against murder and robbery will ever be striken from the books, but Prohibition is gone, and at some point the seven words one can't say on the radio will be said on the radio.
The article makes a great point if we accept that a killer app has to be software. There really isn't any software out there right now that my 2-year-old Celeron 550 can't handle.
But: I went over to a buddy's house to help him hack together an FTP server on his 1 gig Thunderbird system, and all I can say is wow. I want. Okay, he's not doing anything I can't do, but everything happens virtually instantly. Need to install a program that would take my machine around 30 seconds to unpack? His is done in three. Three! Dialog boxes that I see for about ten seconds appeared on his screen so fast they couldn't be read all the way through before they were gone.
There's no software I want to use that requires this kind of speed, but I want it. I mean, they're not opening up any new highways in my area, and a Geo Metro will get me to all the same places as a Mustang, but I'd still rather have the Mustang.
There was an interesting article in the Apr 9 issue of Newsweek. Allan Sloan writes:
Amazon will survive, but not in its current form. Either it will pull a Netscape, which sold out to AOL, or else its main business will become running Web operations for other firms. Amazon is great at Web presence and savvy, crummy at making money. The world is full of companies that are great at profits, crummy at Web presence. The logic is irresistible.
Even if this doesn't turn out to be Amazon's main business, it would be a great way for them to staunch their gushing cash hemmorhage. Unfortunately it might mean that other companies would license the one-click patent from them, and then loyal/.'ers would have to boycott a slew of potentially cool businesses. This assumes that the boycotters (of which I am one) decide to be consistent about their principles instead of confining their malice to Steve Bezos.
-N
But consider how close to the mark he is here:
on
Why Community Matters
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· Score: 1
Communist revolutions all over the world have proven that individual ownership of property is not a fact of nature, but is a socially constructed reality that holds true only as long as a sufficient number of people believe in it. If a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered "yours," then that becomes true.
When I first read this, my bullshit detector when off just like yours did. But take a look at your next paycheck and look at the deductions for FICA and Social Security and then see how much bullshit it is.
I've earned money that I can't spend, and the reason is that the government has decided to steal from me. When I voice this very clear and simple fact ("The government took my money by force. Taking money by force is stealing. The government stole from me.") people look at me as if I'm insane. If that's not a case of "a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered 'yours,'", I don't know what is.
The opening about Communist revolutions is apt, as well. What was the New Deal if not a Socialist (okay, not quite Communist) Revolution?
Most of my problems with the article have already been very well criticized (well done, briancarnell, 8934tioegkldxf, Zal42). One thing I haven't seen shredded yet is Rusty's bit on money:
Like murder, though, money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it. In American capitalism, money is exchangeable for property, and vice versa. The reality of money is founded in our belief that the ownership of property is a fundamental right.
I might toss off as an aside that murder is pretty real to the person who gets killed. I think the point he's trying to make is that something that would be called "murder" in our society wouldn't be recognized as such in another culture. But that doesn't mean that murder isn't real. If one defines it simply enough, e.g. the killing of a person against that person's will, then clearly, murder is a reality. It is a thing that happens.
But about money: Money is a social fiction, yes, but it is a social fiction that is a stand-in for a real and objective thing: worth. When an artisan makes a chair, he has created a real, tangible object that is valuable to humans. Ditto when a farmer grows wheat, or apples. The chairmaker may trade a chair to the farmer for some wheat. When they do this they are exchanging worth that they have each created, to mutual benefit. This is capitalism. Now consider someone whose work is not primarily concerned with physical objects -- say, an accountant, or a sysadmin. How are these people to obtain wheat or chairs? Should the accountant manage the chairmaker's accounts? What if the farmer doesn't have a server? Now the sysadmin can't get wheat.
Enter money. It is a medium of exchange which allows people engaged in specialized endeavors to trade the worth that they have created to obtain the objects or services they want or need.
So it's true that if everyone collectively decides that the US dollar is worthless tomorrow, then it's worthless -- all those green slips of paper are worth nothing. But that's not going to happen for the very simple reason that people in this country are creating ideas and objects and performing actions that have worth, and people are always going to need to some of what they've made for something that they aren't capable of making.
In short, the actual medium of exchange -- printed bills, or gold, or whatever -- is something of a social fiction, but the things for which money stands in are not the constructions of some hive mind: they are very real, even if they are sometimes intangible.
We didn't have this newfangled 'Internet v4', we had the freaking clapper! And if you wanted to turn the stereo down, you didn't telnet to it, you'd find your remote control. They don't even make remotes anymore! Everything has a 10base-1,000,000 jack on it. Now, instead of buying dozens of what we used to call 'type A batteries', you have to go buy extra cables and hubs every time you buy a toaster!"
"Whatever, grandpa. [Watch beeps] The laundry's done."
Except, if you review the article, at this point they postulate that the tower would _collapse_ without the tether and the counterbalance. Do try to pay attention.
You _agree_ to the GPL by viewing and/or modifying GPL'ed code. The DMCA applies to you just because you happen to reside in the US. In the first case, you have the choice not to enter into a binding situation.
I suppose technically you have the choice not to live in the US, but they didn't exactly tell us when we got here that it would mean being bound by this law (because it didn't exist yet).
Believe me, I work in tech support. A new user today has to learn what an icon is, how to manipulate them, etc. A popular conceit is that once voice recognition software gets good enough, the problems of acquiring computer literacy, or, if you will, a 'vocabulary', will disappear, but I disagree.
Even people who have learned the GUI vocabulary enough to get their work done have no idea what I mean when I say "launch this program" or "open this file"... Hard to believe, but true. And the people who have the GUI down are definitely in the minority.
What I'm saying is that the average user, in my experience, has trouble grasping the abstractions that we understand almost implicitly, and that is not going to change with voice recognition, any more than it changed when CLI was largely supplanted by point-and-click. A user still needs to know WHAT to click on, and when voice finally arrives, he will need to know what to say.
The article made it sound like Stephenson is some sort of software industry pundit or expert, not just an excellent writer throwing out musings which happen to include Microsoft and Linux.
Still, he did title his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, which you must admit has a sort of comp-sci history feel to it, so maybe Stephenson was trying to project the impression that he's an expert. =)
How suer are you of your numbers? I seem to have this impression that the population of the US is somewhere in the neighborhood of 265 million. So, 133 million viewers would be about half.
I disagree, and I think your error lies in believing that ethical acts are by their nature unselfish, or at least that acts by which one does not personally gain are more ethical (if there be degrees of "ethicality") than acts by which one does gain. So the guy has the foresight to register the right domain names. When the time comes, he picks a company that he believes will do the name credit, sells it at a whopping profit. Now, take a good look at it: Guy is happy that domain is now owned by a good company, and also, obviously, that he made a mint. Company is happy to have a good, pithy domain name. The community is happy that the domain isn't being used to throw FUD around. What's unethical?
If the W Bros. hinted that they'd "always envisioned" the story as a trilogy, how come they have so much trouble nailing down whether they've already made the first, second, or third one? I just hope the next films don't suffer from the common affliction of sequels created after-the-fact: namely, that they suck. Witness Highlander 2 and 3, Robocop 2 and 3. Further examples are left as an exercise for the reader.
Saying that humanity is not ready for Communism makes no sense. Governments are human constructs meant to provide a structure in which individuals can relate to one another. If Communism fails to do this (and history shows that it has failed), it is Communism that is not ready for humanity, not vice versa. Humanity -- individuals -- is the starting point. Political theory should focus on fitting a government to people in the real world, not, as Marx and Engel did, hoping people and the world would adapt to their political ideology.
Secondly, there's a very good reason that the world has not and will not see any such thing as "democratic" communism. "To each according to his need" -- who decides? Leave it up to individuals and they will take more than they "need" or deserve. Put it to a democratic vote and those who achieve most will be ripped off by the less able, resulting in "brain drains" that will destroy any country that adopts such folly. What if a totalitarian regime decides -- hmm, we've already seen what happens in that case. Communism is dead, which is fitting because it was never geared towards life on this planet anyway.
You argue that GUIDs are a useful addition to the IRS, FBI, and other invasions of privacy we already have. I suspect you missed something in your high school civics class, namely, that a) I never gave my consent to the FBI or IRS, b) the US Government is supposed to be a republic, and as such, does not rule over its citizens; it is supposed to serve them, and c) the framers of the US Constitution most certainly did not conclude, as you do, that "placing people in power and giving them authority to rule, requires us to subject ourselves to them and reduces our freedom." Heard of little thing called the fourth amendment? Freedom from unlawful search and seizure. The IRS clearly violates this law, requiring taxpayers to submit detailed accounts of their finances even though they've been accused of no crime and no warrant has been obtained. You propose that we consider in what form we'd like GUIDs added to the list of 4th Amendment violations. Well, I'd rather not add it, thank you very much, Big Brother.
Our social system should take a lesson from the court system. Accepting the tenet of "innocent until proven guilty" means placing a higher value on making sure innocents are not punished than it does on punishing every guilty party. Some criminal slip through the cracks, but it's necessary to protect the rest of us from punishment without cause. In the same way, keeping citizens private lives private until there's a good reason to suspect them of a crime, and a warrant is obtained, means that some people are going to get away with their crimes. But it means at the same time that everyone can enjoy the freedom the framers of our Constitution meant us to have.
By the way, unsolicited e-mail actually is illegal in Washington State, if I remember correctly.
Somebody just try to tell me the McMenamins aren't bona fide geniuses. In Portland, not only do they have several theater pubs at which one can not only have a tasty brew, but a full meal while watching a flick, but they also have tons of really cool bars all over the town.
The best part? Every one of their pubs is unique! Different decor, menus, everything! But they're all excellent. Anyone going to Portland needs to check these places out. It's a must.
I want to start by saying that Joshua has made very good and sensible points elsewhere in this thread, and I respect those opinions. However, in this case he is just plain wrong. Ask yourself why most people get up in the morning and go to work. Do they do it because they love each and every human being on the planet and believe that they are providing some necessary service to their fellow man, or do they do it because they want to secure prosperity for themselves and their families? They do it for themselves, and it is altogether proper that they do so, because they are individuals, which I take to mean that they are ends in their own right, not merely some small cog in a society. A society is only a group of individuals. When someone claims something is "good for society," what they're actually saying is that it is good for the greatest number of individual people in that society -- and they usually say this without regard for whether those benefited are the ones doing the work. Therefore it may be "good for society" for millionaires to give all their money away (greater number of people benefit), but it is surely unjust that they do so, unless they have a personal desire to do so. Greed does work. The amazing advances we have seen in standards of living around the world in the past century are _not_ due to people who decided to improve farming methods or medicines or whatever because they loved others. They did it because they wanted to make money. In a free Capitalist society, the only way to make money is to provide a useful product or service to fellow individuals. Everyone benefits. But remember that the motives of those who drive great societies are selfish, and they should be. Any economic system that does not reward, first and foremost, those doing the work, in effect makes of them sacrificial animals, _compelled by force_ to give of themselves for the benefit of others without just compensation. For a more comprehensive view of the metaphysical basis of Capitalism -- and hence Greed -- as the only economic system proper to mankind, I refer you to Ayn Rand's _The Virtue of Selfishness_.
Slashdot Mirror
Does not allow the use of information collected on Americans by foreign governments when that information was collected in violation of the U.S. Constitution
To paraphrase: Only our own government is allowed the use of information collected in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whew, that was close. For a second I was worried.
-N
"Your ROD (Rate of Decay) is determined by subtracting 2 years from the prime ROD published on the last day of each month in the New York Times, or, if not published that day, on the next day the prime ROD is published."
-N
What good? Surfing pr0n on battery backup, man!
I don't know if it would train our customers to be better at following directions, or help them right-click any better, but I do know that it should hurt to be that stupid.
Technology: The cause of, and solution to, type L users.
-Noodle
Now you have a problem. Who decides what constitutes a "porn site"? Is H.R. Geiger's Landscape #20, which depicts row upon row of penises, porn? Or is it art? Where do you put Robert Mapplethorpe photographs? How much sexual content must anime have, and in what context, before it's hentai?
Problem number two: "Make a law" solutions are doomed to fail. Lawmaking to correct nonviolent social problems when it works at all, works only temporarily. Make a law today, and public opinion changes tomorrow. Then your law either becomes more restrictive, doing much more than you expected it to do, or less restrictive, and no longer accomplishes its stated goal. Thus it's extremely unlikely that laws against murder and robbery will ever be striken from the books, but Prohibition is gone, and at some point the seven words one can't say on the radio will be said on the radio.
But: I went over to a buddy's house to help him hack together an FTP server on his 1 gig Thunderbird system, and all I can say is wow. I want. Okay, he's not doing anything I can't do, but everything happens virtually instantly. Need to install a program that would take my machine around 30 seconds to unpack? His is done in three. Three! Dialog boxes that I see for about ten seconds appeared on his screen so fast they couldn't be read all the way through before they were gone.
There's no software I want to use that requires this kind of speed, but I want it. I mean, they're not opening up any new highways in my area, and a Geo Metro will get me to all the same places as a Mustang, but I'd still rather have the Mustang.
-N
Even if this doesn't turn out to be Amazon's main business, it would be a great way for them to staunch their gushing cash hemmorhage. Unfortunately it might mean that other companies would license the one-click patent from them, and then loyal /.'ers would have to boycott a slew of potentially cool businesses. This assumes that the boycotters (of which I am one) decide to be consistent about their principles instead of confining their malice to Steve Bezos.
-N
I've earned money that I can't spend, and the reason is that the government has decided to steal from me. When I voice this very clear and simple fact ("The government took my money by force. Taking money by force is stealing. The government stole from me.") people look at me as if I'm insane. If that's not a case of "a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered 'yours,'", I don't know what is.
The opening about Communist revolutions is apt, as well. What was the New Deal if not a Socialist (okay, not quite Communist) Revolution?
-N
I might toss off as an aside that murder is pretty real to the person who gets killed. I think the point he's trying to make is that something that would be called "murder" in our society wouldn't be recognized as such in another culture. But that doesn't mean that murder isn't real. If one defines it simply enough, e.g. the killing of a person against that person's will, then clearly, murder is a reality. It is a thing that happens.
But about money: Money is a social fiction, yes, but it is a social fiction that is a stand-in for a real and objective thing: worth. When an artisan makes a chair, he has created a real, tangible object that is valuable to humans. Ditto when a farmer grows wheat, or apples. The chairmaker may trade a chair to the farmer for some wheat. When they do this they are exchanging worth that they have each created, to mutual benefit. This is capitalism. Now consider someone whose work is not primarily concerned with physical objects -- say, an accountant, or a sysadmin. How are these people to obtain wheat or chairs? Should the accountant manage the chairmaker's accounts? What if the farmer doesn't have a server? Now the sysadmin can't get wheat.
Enter money. It is a medium of exchange which allows people engaged in specialized endeavors to trade the worth that they have created to obtain the objects or services they want or need.
So it's true that if everyone collectively decides that the US dollar is worthless tomorrow, then it's worthless -- all those green slips of paper are worth nothing. But that's not going to happen for the very simple reason that people in this country are creating ideas and objects and performing actions that have worth, and people are always going to need to some of what they've made for something that they aren't capable of making.
In short, the actual medium of exchange -- printed bills, or gold, or whatever -- is something of a social fiction, but the things for which money stands in are not the constructions of some hive mind: they are very real, even if they are sometimes intangible.
-N
"Whatever, grandpa. [Watch beeps] The laundry's done."
Hmmm...
-Noodle
Except, if you review the article, at this point they postulate that the tower would _collapse_ without the tether and the counterbalance. Do try to pay attention.
I suppose technically you have the choice not to live in the US, but they didn't exactly tell us when we got here that it would mean being bound by this law (because it didn't exist yet).
Even people who have learned the GUI vocabulary enough to get their work done have no idea what I mean when I say "launch this program" or "open this file"... Hard to believe, but true. And the people who have the GUI down are definitely in the minority.
What I'm saying is that the average user, in my experience, has trouble grasping the abstractions that we understand almost implicitly, and that is not going to change with voice recognition, any more than it changed when CLI was largely supplanted by point-and-click. A user still needs to know WHAT to click on, and when voice finally arrives, he will need to know what to say.
Oh sure, you take a penny, -- you take pennies all the time, don't you? -- but you never leave a penny.
Still, he did title his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, which you must admit has a sort of comp-sci history feel to it, so maybe Stephenson was trying to project the impression that he's an expert. =)
How suer are you of your numbers? I seem to have this impression that the population of the US is somewhere in the neighborhood of 265 million. So, 133 million viewers would be about half.
I disagree, and I think your error lies in believing that ethical acts are by their nature unselfish, or at least that acts by which one does not personally gain are more ethical (if there be degrees of "ethicality") than acts by which one does gain. So the guy has the foresight to register the right domain names. When the time comes, he picks a company that he believes will do the name credit, sells it at a whopping profit. Now, take a good look at it: Guy is happy that domain is now owned by a good company, and also, obviously, that he made a mint. Company is happy to have a good, pithy domain name. The community is happy that the domain isn't being used to throw FUD around. What's unethical?
If the W Bros. hinted that they'd "always envisioned" the story as a trilogy, how come they have so much trouble nailing down whether they've already made the first, second, or third one? I just hope the next films don't suffer from the common affliction of sequels created after-the-fact: namely, that they suck. Witness Highlander 2 and 3, Robocop 2 and 3. Further examples are left as an exercise for the reader.
Secondly, there's a very good reason that the world has not and will not see any such thing as "democratic" communism. "To each according to his need" -- who decides? Leave it up to individuals and they will take more than they "need" or deserve. Put it to a democratic vote and those who achieve most will be ripped off by the less able, resulting in "brain drains" that will destroy any country that adopts such folly. What if a totalitarian regime decides -- hmm, we've already seen what happens in that case. Communism is dead, which is fitting because it was never geared towards life on this planet anyway.
Our social system should take a lesson from the court system. Accepting the tenet of "innocent until proven guilty" means placing a higher value on making sure innocents are not punished than it does on punishing every guilty party. Some criminal slip through the cracks, but it's necessary to protect the rest of us from punishment without cause. In the same way, keeping citizens private lives private until there's a good reason to suspect them of a crime, and a warrant is obtained, means that some people are going to get away with their crimes. But it means at the same time that everyone can enjoy the freedom the framers of our Constitution meant us to have.
By the way, unsolicited e-mail actually is illegal in Washington State, if I remember correctly.
The best part? Every one of their pubs is unique! Different decor, menus, everything! But they're all excellent. Anyone going to Portland needs to check these places out. It's a must.
I want to start by saying that Joshua has made very good and sensible points elsewhere in this thread, and I respect those opinions. However, in this case he is just plain wrong. Ask yourself why most people get up in the morning and go to work. Do they do it because they love each and every human being on the planet and believe that they are providing some necessary service to their fellow man, or do they do it because they want to secure prosperity for themselves and their families? They do it for themselves, and it is altogether proper that they do so, because they are individuals, which I take to mean that they are ends in their own right, not merely some small cog in a society. A society is only a group of individuals. When someone claims something is "good for society," what they're actually saying is that it is good for the greatest number of individual people in that society -- and they usually say this without regard for whether those benefited are the ones doing the work. Therefore it may be "good for society" for millionaires to give all their money away (greater number of people benefit), but it is surely unjust that they do so, unless they have a personal desire to do so. Greed does work. The amazing advances we have seen in standards of living around the world in the past century are _not_ due to people who decided to improve farming methods or medicines or whatever because they loved others. They did it because they wanted to make money. In a free Capitalist society, the only way to make money is to provide a useful product or service to fellow individuals. Everyone benefits. But remember that the motives of those who drive great societies are selfish, and they should be. Any economic system that does not reward, first and foremost, those doing the work, in effect makes of them sacrificial animals, _compelled by force_ to give of themselves for the benefit of others without just compensation. For a more comprehensive view of the metaphysical basis of Capitalism -- and hence Greed -- as the only economic system proper to mankind, I refer you to Ayn Rand's _The Virtue of Selfishness_.