This is the Mozilla Foundation we're taking about here. Honestly, it's one of the few organizations around today that I feel I can trust to value my privacy and have my interests in mind, even if they do annoy me sometimes with silly design decisions.
Everything Mozilla is open source, free as in beer *and* as in speech. My money's on Mozilla putting the user in control (I really hate that word... "consumer").
In my defense, the label is misleading. "Obtaining telecommunications services" leads you to think that it's the act of using a carrier's service without paying.
He received no "service" by accessing her computer, only "data". Yes, it's semantics, but I do think it's an important distinction and I think labeling it under this guise is badly presumptuous law.
That's a nice sentiment, but analogies don't automatically make a point valid.
Please be so kind as to point us to the scientifically founded data to support your claims that obesity is largely due to mental illness and not laziness.
This is misleading. He wasn't subletting connectivity to anyone by bridging a bunch of open APs or wiring his connection over to his neighbors on a downstream NAT, he was running a number of typical services on his one connection to share files with friends and family... y'know, like you do with an "Internet connection".
Admittedly, he did use an amazing amount of throughput, which is obviously what got Verizon's attention, but they really ought to just come out and say that the real reason is the phenomenal amount of data he was pushing around instead of just using some ToS bullshit as a scapegoat.
Which is bullshit, because the only real technical difference between a server and a client is that a server is configured to generally accept incoming connections. Every server is a client, most clients are also (implicitly) servers. Multi-player games, VoIP, file transfers, VNC, etc.... technically speaking, all of those things turn your computer into a server.
Yes, most likely, your ISP will only baulk at it you if you have a phenomenal amount of throughput (as demonstrated by the summary), but it's disturbing enough that their ToS worded like it is, giving them carte blanche to restrict your Internet connection for using it as... an Internet connection!
In fact I came across this very issue today: the internal struggle between, "this is technically possible and optimal, so it should be done," and, "users are at the peak of Mount Stupid and will screw everything up if you do that." Sometimes, limitations are a feature because the user's perception when something gets screwed up is that it's a "bug". In a way, in maybe kinda sorta is a "user experience" bug, but definitely not in the technical sense.
Your summary is deliberately vague, but I assume you're talking about software development. Your job is to find the ideal balance between "feature" and "stupid", ie.: in my custom-developed CMS, I allow certain HTML via a rich text editor, but parse it fairly heavily so that clients who know nothing about website development don't bugger up their website's design. Which direction and by how far you you tip that scale depends whether your project is destined for mass deployment or if it's a custom software package for a limited subset of users (and how technically sophisticated those users are).
I don't think your car analogy is very adept; there are already cars on the road today that already have built-in artificial limitations. The MazdaSpeed 3, for example, artificially restricts the power output in 1st and 2nd gears because most drivers don't know how to manage the torque steer that would be caused by the amount of power output at full throttle. You could argue that it is bad engineering decision to put almost 300hp and lb/ft torque in a front-wheel-drive drive car, and you'd basically be right, except that customers in that segment don't want an expensive and complicated all-wheel-drive system that would be far more suited to that amount of power. Hence, the power is restricted so that dumb drivers don't end up cliff-diving off Mount Stupid without a parachute.
I accept you're conclusion, but I reject your premise, which is just big load of computer nerd twaddle. Human beings are anything but a homogenous collection of computers. At the very most, you might be able to say they are biological computers with highly varying degrees and classifications of capabilities, sometimes overlapping.
We are all built and wired differently because nature favors diversity and, consequently, gives everyone different jobs (we usually call them "gifts" or "talents"). Sure, you can train, learn and improve somewhat in an area you don't currently excel, but everyone has an insurmountable "talent wall" for given tasks, limited by combining factors of the mental and physical capabilities bestowed upon us by nature. You give two people identical training and they *will* end up differently.
You're claim is just a veiled way of saying, "oh, I could do [thing X that I suck at] if I *really* wanted to," which is a complete falsity that you're unwilling to accept due to personal insecurities.
But, ultimately, yes, computers should be defined as machines by their hardware, not their instructions. Saying that they are a "new machine" because someone provided new instructions is asinine.
You forgot "get acquired for an absurd amount of money by a corporation with billions to throw around and a dunce CEO, spend the rest of your life sucking down fruity drinks on a beach".
So in a society and economy where driving is a necessity in many places to work, live, eat, support your family, etc., you don't think officers should have disincentives from violating our rights by skimping on due process? They should just be able to ruin anyone's life with insurmountable fines by handing out completely fraudulent tickets?
Technicalities and procedure are a *vital* part of the checks and balances in the legal system and quite wrongly receive a bad rap. There's no shame in getting off on a technicality: your rights were violated, so the prosecution is forced to make concessions and you receive the benefits as compensation.
Long ago, a Police state could occur in a swoop because a massive army of police could run down on an unsuspecting public. Advancements in communications have made the level of secrecy required to build up such an army nearly impossible.
Which is exactly why it's actually more dangerous.
You swoop in suddenly and everyone knows the deal; every citizen is more or less participatory in a resistance. But build it up gradually, creating an increasingly fascist atmosphere in small steps and you have only a minority as dissenters that the mostly docile and agreeable public will dismiss and even deride as extremist nutjobs and alarmists.
Then you've been lucky... and more than likely been granted some professional courtesy by virtue of your vet plates.
Any cop looking to meet their quota and/or boost department revenue need only follow a car for a few miles before they can conjure up some obscure, bullshit charge to give you a ticket that's just cheaper than the time and effort to fight it. Y'know that ubiquitous "Never Talk to the Police" video where the police officer talks for the second half? Yeah, he admits *exactly* that.
Yes, many of us have shitty internet connections from a small selection of shitty providers. I know, let's saturate our already oversold connectivity to give said shitty providers another excuse to crank up rates with the bonus of hitting your usage caps even sooner!
From what I can tell, this "Switchboard" is basically trying to consolidate and minimize connection overhead, which should theoretically offer modest performance gains. But your bandwidth is your bandwidth, no amount of software is going to stretch it.
I wonder how much Kickstarter capital would need to be raised to start an ISP that doesn't employ the business model off shitting on its customers.
As the AC so aptly explained, responsibility only applies if you actually harm someone.
Sooner or later, you'll learn that law has nothing to do with morality, ethics, innocence or guilt. It's purely utilitarian and mostly a utility of the fortunate to wield their power over everyone else.
With the exception of maybe small claims court where a fair amount of back and forth discussion is involved, most proceedings are not a determination of guilt or innocence, it's a system of bureaucratic gamesmanship with silly playground rules to which only the most powerful players are privy.
You fight all traffic tickets, even if you know you're 100% guilty because it is your right to a trial and, because, fines and consequences are vastly disproportionate and because there are usually many pitfalls for charging officers that you may not even be aware of, ie.: equipment approval, calibration and usage, evidence processing, permissibility of statements, etc. They very purposely keep these details from you -- and often lie when you ask about them -- to trap you into disproportionate and incorrect judgements.
It's doing a perfectly good job destroying itself from the inside.
Budding chemists, engineers, pilots and generally skilled people are being caught up in the dragnet and being rounded up as potential terrorists in this persistent culture of fear. Especially if they're brown.
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This is the Mozilla Foundation we're taking about here. Honestly, it's one of the few organizations around today that I feel I can trust to value my privacy and have my interests in mind, even if they do annoy me sometimes with silly design decisions.
Everything Mozilla is open source, free as in beer *and* as in speech. My money's on Mozilla putting the user in control (I really hate that word ... "consumer").
Indeed, I thought that one in particular smelled like some pretty ripe bullshit.
In my defense, the label is misleading. "Obtaining telecommunications services" leads you to think that it's the act of using a carrier's service without paying.
He received no "service" by accessing her computer, only "data". Yes, it's semantics, but I do think it's an important distinction and I think labeling it under this guise is badly presumptuous law.
A backdoor in all your security protocols to enable easy snooping by three letter agencies.
That's a nice sentiment, but analogies don't automatically make a point valid.
Please be so kind as to point us to the scientifically founded data to support your claims that obesity is largely due to mental illness and not laziness.
This is misleading. He wasn't subletting connectivity to anyone by bridging a bunch of open APs or wiring his connection over to his neighbors on a downstream NAT, he was running a number of typical services on his one connection to share files with friends and family ... y'know, like you do with an "Internet connection".
Admittedly, he did use an amazing amount of throughput, which is obviously what got Verizon's attention, but they really ought to just come out and say that the real reason is the phenomenal amount of data he was pushing around instead of just using some ToS bullshit as a scapegoat.
They are murderers.
Hey, if you can equate copyright infringement to theft, you can draw the same comparison between willfully withholding information and murder.
Which is bullshit, because the only real technical difference between a server and a client is that a server is configured to generally accept incoming connections. Every server is a client, most clients are also (implicitly) servers. Multi-player games, VoIP, file transfers, VNC, etc. ... technically speaking, all of those things turn your computer into a server.
... an Internet connection!
Yes, most likely, your ISP will only baulk at it you if you have a phenomenal amount of throughput (as demonstrated by the summary), but it's disturbing enough that their ToS worded like it is, giving them carte blanche to restrict your Internet connection for using it as
In fact I came across this very issue today: the internal struggle between, "this is technically possible and optimal, so it should be done," and, "users are at the peak of Mount Stupid and will screw everything up if you do that." Sometimes, limitations are a feature because the user's perception when something gets screwed up is that it's a "bug". In a way, in maybe kinda sorta is a "user experience" bug, but definitely not in the technical sense.
Your summary is deliberately vague, but I assume you're talking about software development. Your job is to find the ideal balance between "feature" and "stupid", ie.: in my custom-developed CMS, I allow certain HTML via a rich text editor, but parse it fairly heavily so that clients who know nothing about website development don't bugger up their website's design. Which direction and by how far you you tip that scale depends whether your project is destined for mass deployment or if it's a custom software package for a limited subset of users (and how technically sophisticated those users are).
I don't think your car analogy is very adept; there are already cars on the road today that already have built-in artificial limitations. The MazdaSpeed 3, for example, artificially restricts the power output in 1st and 2nd gears because most drivers don't know how to manage the torque steer that would be caused by the amount of power output at full throttle. You could argue that it is bad engineering decision to put almost 300hp and lb/ft torque in a front-wheel-drive drive car, and you'd basically be right, except that customers in that segment don't want an expensive and complicated all-wheel-drive system that would be far more suited to that amount of power. Hence, the power is restricted so that dumb drivers don't end up cliff-diving off Mount Stupid without a parachute.
This would be explicitly illegal and the carrier would face penalties. How's that unencumbered free market capitalism goin' for ya?
There weren't enough reasons to avoid social networking.
s/BT/every ISP in the western world/g
Let's *really* call it what it is: culture sharing
It's not like I could go to any one of a several hundred torrent sites or alternative search engines.
I accept you're conclusion, but I reject your premise, which is just big load of computer nerd twaddle. Human beings are anything but a homogenous collection of computers. At the very most, you might be able to say they are biological computers with highly varying degrees and classifications of capabilities, sometimes overlapping.
We are all built and wired differently because nature favors diversity and, consequently, gives everyone different jobs (we usually call them "gifts" or "talents"). Sure, you can train, learn and improve somewhat in an area you don't currently excel, but everyone has an insurmountable "talent wall" for given tasks, limited by combining factors of the mental and physical capabilities bestowed upon us by nature. You give two people identical training and they *will* end up differently.
You're claim is just a veiled way of saying, "oh, I could do [thing X that I suck at] if I *really* wanted to," which is a complete falsity that you're unwilling to accept due to personal insecurities.
But, ultimately, yes, computers should be defined as machines by their hardware, not their instructions. Saying that they are a "new machine" because someone provided new instructions is asinine.
You forgot "get acquired for an absurd amount of money by a corporation with billions to throw around and a dunce CEO, spend the rest of your life sucking down fruity drinks on a beach".
I'm pretty sure the order in which those two things occur is the other way around ;)
So in a society and economy where driving is a necessity in many places to work, live, eat, support your family, etc., you don't think officers should have disincentives from violating our rights by skimping on due process? They should just be able to ruin anyone's life with insurmountable fines by handing out completely fraudulent tickets?
Technicalities and procedure are a *vital* part of the checks and balances in the legal system and quite wrongly receive a bad rap. There's no shame in getting off on a technicality: your rights were violated, so the prosecution is forced to make concessions and you receive the benefits as compensation.
Long ago, a Police state could occur in a swoop because a massive army of police could run down on an unsuspecting public. Advancements in communications have made the level of secrecy required to build up such an army nearly impossible.
Which is exactly why it's actually more dangerous.
You swoop in suddenly and everyone knows the deal; every citizen is more or less participatory in a resistance. But build it up gradually, creating an increasingly fascist atmosphere in small steps and you have only a minority as dissenters that the mostly docile and agreeable public will dismiss and even deride as extremist nutjobs and alarmists.
Frog in the pot, as it were...
Then you've been lucky ... and more than likely been granted some professional courtesy by virtue of your vet plates.
Any cop looking to meet their quota and/or boost department revenue need only follow a car for a few miles before they can conjure up some obscure, bullshit charge to give you a ticket that's just cheaper than the time and effort to fight it. Y'know that ubiquitous "Never Talk to the Police" video where the police officer talks for the second half? Yeah, he admits *exactly* that.
Yes, many of us have shitty internet connections from a small selection of shitty providers. I know, let's saturate our already oversold connectivity to give said shitty providers another excuse to crank up rates with the bonus of hitting your usage caps even sooner!
From what I can tell, this "Switchboard" is basically trying to consolidate and minimize connection overhead, which should theoretically offer modest performance gains. But your bandwidth is your bandwidth, no amount of software is going to stretch it.
I wonder how much Kickstarter capital would need to be raised to start an ISP that doesn't employ the business model off shitting on its customers.
Is when they think it has the potential to affect them directly.
Personally I feel that people who are willing to contest traffic convictions should put their own car on the line.
Wow... if you can't see the problem this would cause in such a massively corrupt system, you are hopelessly lost.
As the AC so aptly explained, responsibility only applies if you actually harm someone.
Sooner or later, you'll learn that law has nothing to do with morality, ethics, innocence or guilt. It's purely utilitarian and mostly a utility of the fortunate to wield their power over everyone else.
With the exception of maybe small claims court where a fair amount of back and forth discussion is involved, most proceedings are not a determination of guilt or innocence, it's a system of bureaucratic gamesmanship with silly playground rules to which only the most powerful players are privy.
You fight all traffic tickets, even if you know you're 100% guilty because it is your right to a trial and, because, fines and consequences are vastly disproportionate and because there are usually many pitfalls for charging officers that you may not even be aware of, ie.: equipment approval, calibration and usage, evidence processing, permissibility of statements, etc. They very purposely keep these details from you -- and often lie when you ask about them -- to trap you into disproportionate and incorrect judgements.
It's doing a perfectly good job destroying itself from the inside.
Budding chemists, engineers, pilots and generally skilled people are being caught up in the dragnet and being rounded up as potential terrorists in this persistent culture of fear. Especially if they're brown.