It's obvious that the intent was to pay the employees with goods valued at one price that they could readily and anonymously sell at a much higher price without having to pay taxes on the difference.
We're selecting for a stronger motherhood instinct. Those that don't have it take birth control, and their lines go extinct. We're also selecting against logic and attention span. Those that have it choose education over family, and their lines go extinct. Any human characteristic that leads a person in this society to participate in "planned parenthood" is being winnowed out of our gene pool. We're selecting in favour of passionate people who have a lack of self control and rebel against the system.
I was with you until that very last part. Rebel against the system? I have no clue how that follows from your previous claims. In any case, rebelling requires an attention span and some semblance of logic.
Once I have a paper accepted, it is necessary for me to assign the copyright to the publishers of the journal. No copyright assignment, no publication.
I had thought the standard agreement in Computer Science is that the author keeps the copyright, but the publisher obtains a kind of exclusive use, but in the last agreement I signed, the copyright was assigned to the publisher. Oh well. In any case, the standard practice in Computer Science is also to ignore these things and have them available on one's web site and Citeseer and the like. I've never had a publisher complain about it.
The internet gives too much power to the serfs^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers. We can't control them anymore. How can we bribe the government and lie to the public to give us back the power we deserve?
Given that ISPs are the distributors in this brave new world, and that anybody can duplicate, how does one ensure that the creators (and their owners) make enough to offset the cost of making the first copy? I think we might have to compromise on net neutrality for this to happen. Just like cable companies make deals with channels and then "lease" content to subscriber, ISPs will make deals with content providers and lease content.
Perhaps this won't adversely affect net neutrality much at all. At the University where I work, the library has online subscriptions to various publications, and they allow me to download based by checking my IP number. ISPs or some proxy could do much the same.
Governments and corporations have formed a partnership. Just look at how data aggregration companies are helping governments (and other corporations) to keep an eye on us.
The problem with software liability is that there no limit on how much might be risked on $100 (or so) software. With a ladder, the risk is on the order of one life per ladder. With software, there is no physical constraint that prevents someone or some company risking any number of lives or any amount of money on cheap software. What we have today is special rules for special risks (e.g., airplane control systems, medical devices). Other than that, you should assume that you bear any risk beyond what you paid for the software (or some small multiple).
I think the journalists are underestimating the intelligence of the readers. To avoid the no-nothings for the most part, all they need to do is to count the readers who want a story and discount the readers who do not want a story. Just pick the stories who have the votes for them. You'll get a lot of nonsense, but that happens anyways.
It seemed like an eternal struggle to edit.XF86config into something X would bless. Every new version of RH ensured another tussle. And I remember a 200K partition for Redhat 4.2, which was more than plenty for the time.
For each encrypted data chunk, you supply a corresponding bag of encrypted tokens. Each search is expressed with encrypted tokens. The information that an attacker can infer depends on the size of the chunk and the viability of a frequency analysis on the tokens, as well as the possibility of the attacker having access to some of the plaintext.
Now if you want to search for phrases, you will have to supply a bigger bag of tokens, and that will probably have more weaknesses to attack.
I more or less agree with IWasNotMe, that the effort put into creating a useful program deserves compensation, but let me list some of the justifications for copyright infringers. I certainly don't claim that they win the argument.
1) Copyright infringement is not stealing, at least not in the same sense as stealing your car or your guns. Copyright infringement is not piracy either, as least not in the same sense as taking over a ship on the oceans. To make sense of IP, we borrow the terms of real property in analogy, but beware of when the analogies fail.
2) Copyright infringement is a modern sin as ethics goes. And most of the history of copyright is focused on commercial infringement. Public libraries would be considered copyright infringement by the standards of many copyright holders today, who want a buck for every use.
3) Bits and numbers do not come tagged as copyrighted, patented, or whatever. Yes, your software is a very big number, and you worked hard to find that number, but it seems odd to own or have rights to a number.
4) If you deserve a buck for your effort, what about the efforts of all the computer scientists that your software depends on? Surely, they deserve (by the same logic) a cut of your profits.
5) Do you want to live in a society that spies on our activities to such an extent to catch all/most copyright infringers?
When I was working on my CS undergrad degree, more than one professor told me that I was really limiting my job prospects because I declined to take the elective COBOL classes. I knew enough about COBOL then to know that I could not drag myself out of bed in the morning to make a living with it.
The ranks of COBOL programmers out there are living drone like lives without passion or joy. That's not for me. I code for the love if it.
You would have had it easy. When I took COBOL, it was with punch cards. That was torture to to produce not quite identical structures multiple times to run a program. Later in life, when I taught COBOL, the wonders of cut-paste-and-modify made COBOL programming a breeze in comparison to my student experience.
Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my.kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8.
You're just an example of "regression toward the mean" and you got all your broken stuff in one upgrade. Every release from RedHat 4.2 on has broken something for me. Audio is top on the list. Before Fedora, X often required twiddling. Fonts are always quirky in some way. Sometimes it's more things, sometimes it's less, but it's always something.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
I can almost agree with that. I can see two (or three) difficulties.
One is that it is not only prosecution, but discrimination by employers, insurers, banks, etc. If I gripe about my employer 100 years ago, it probably stays private, but if you gripe online now, it can easily become public, and you get fired. I am not sure how you prevent discrimination based on any of 1000 attributes of personal information. It's easier to uncover discrimination when it's just a few attributes, but a much larger set is more difficult to manage and could be damaging to employers as well as almost everyone has a bad value somewhere.
Two is that it can't be all information as your police story points out. The police are supposed to uncover personal information in their investigations and use it against alleged criminals, so it seems clear that your assertion should only apply to non-criminal information.
However (this is point 3 I guess), we have had a history of law enforcement in this country, where if no one complains and no one gets hurt, then no one is arrested, even if the activity is technically against the law. Getting away with breaking the law is a tradition in this country (again, I should note, as long as no one gets hurt). Making all personal information public will increase the criminal class without improving things much. Our whole set of laws need to be reworked if "your personal information wants to be free" becomes the norm.
"The NSA had access to all Americans' communications: faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," said Tice. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made any foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
Slashdot Mirror
Does he have the same copy as the rest of us?
It's obvious that the intent was to pay the employees with goods valued at one price that they could readily and anonymously sell at a much higher price without having to pay taxes on the difference.
I am surprised at the number of Slashdotters who support tax evasion and violent threats.
We're selecting for a stronger motherhood instinct. Those that don't have it take birth control, and their lines go extinct. We're also selecting against logic and attention span. Those that have it choose education over family, and their lines go extinct. Any human characteristic that leads a person in this society to participate in "planned parenthood" is being winnowed out of our gene pool. We're selecting in favour of passionate people who have a lack of self control and rebel against the system.
I was with you until that very last part. Rebel against the system? I have no clue how that follows from your previous claims. In any case, rebelling requires an attention span and some semblance of logic.
Once I have a paper accepted, it is necessary for me to assign the copyright to the publishers of the journal. No copyright assignment, no publication.
I had thought the standard agreement in Computer Science is that the author keeps the copyright, but the publisher obtains a kind of exclusive use, but in the last agreement I signed, the copyright was assigned to the publisher. Oh well. In any case, the standard practice in Computer Science is also to ignore these things and have them available on one's web site and Citeseer and the like. I've never had a publisher complain about it.
Next time I'll pay a little bit more attention.
Use one computer that passes the test as a proxy.
The internet gives too much power to the serfs^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers. We can't control them anymore. How can we bribe the government and lie to the public to give us back the power we deserve?
That is an excellent post.
Given that ISPs are the distributors in this brave new world, and that anybody can duplicate, how does one ensure that the creators (and their owners) make enough to offset the cost of making the first copy? I think we might have to compromise on net neutrality for this to happen. Just like cable companies make deals with channels and then "lease" content to subscriber, ISPs will make deals with content providers and lease content.
Perhaps this won't adversely affect net neutrality much at all. At the University where I work, the library has online subscriptions to various publications, and they allow me to download based by checking my IP number. ISPs or some proxy could do much the same.
Governments and corporations have formed a partnership. Just look at how data aggregration companies are helping governments (and other corporations) to keep an eye on us.
My SL400 works just fine with Linux. While they might not do customer support of Linux, they at least test Linux compatibility.
Products certified for use with Linux
The problem with software liability is that there no limit on how much might be risked on $100 (or so) software. With a ladder, the risk is on the order of one life per ladder. With software, there is no physical constraint that prevents someone or some company risking any number of lives or any amount of money on cheap software. What we have today is special rules for special risks (e.g., airplane control systems, medical devices). Other than that, you should assume that you bear any risk beyond what you paid for the software (or some small multiple).
it also means we consider non-state cyber-attackers to be illegal enemy combatants
Categorizing all those in Gitmo "illegal enemy combatants" has really worked out well for us.
Vista still sucks for the lower-end graphics it was originally promised to work on.
I think the journalists are underestimating the intelligence of the readers. To avoid the no-nothings for the most part, all they need to do is to count the readers who want a story and discount the readers who do not want a story. Just pick the stories who have the votes for them. You'll get a lot of nonsense, but that happens anyways.
Bravo!
.XF86config into something X would bless. Every new version of RH ensured another tussle. And I remember a 200K partition for Redhat 4.2, which was more than plenty for the time.
It seemed like an eternal struggle to edit
Anything that promotes survival is an evolutionary concern.
Evolution also didn't have any use for post-reproductive individuals ...
False! You don't need them all, but you need a few to maintain the history, culture, and wisdom of the tribe.
This doesn't seem so hard.
For each encrypted data chunk, you supply a corresponding bag of encrypted tokens. Each search is expressed with encrypted tokens. The information that an attacker can infer depends on the size of the chunk and the viability of a frequency analysis on the tokens, as well as the possibility of the attacker having access to some of the plaintext.
Now if you want to search for phrases, you will have to supply a bigger bag of tokens, and that will probably have more weaknesses to attack.
I more or less agree with IWasNotMe, that the effort put into creating a useful program deserves compensation, but let me list some of the justifications for copyright infringers. I certainly don't claim that they win the argument.
1) Copyright infringement is not stealing, at least not in the same sense as stealing your car or your guns. Copyright infringement is not piracy either, as least not in the same sense as taking over a ship on the oceans. To make sense of IP, we borrow the terms of real property in analogy, but beware of when the analogies fail.
2) Copyright infringement is a modern sin as ethics goes. And most of the history of copyright is focused on commercial infringement. Public libraries would be considered copyright infringement by the standards of many copyright holders today, who want a buck for every use.
3) Bits and numbers do not come tagged as copyrighted, patented, or whatever. Yes, your software is a very big number, and you worked hard to find that number, but it seems odd to own or have rights to a number.
4) If you deserve a buck for your effort, what about the efforts of all the computer scientists that your software depends on? Surely, they deserve (by the same logic) a cut of your profits.
5) Do you want to live in a society that spies on our activities to such an extent to catch all/most copyright infringers?
When I was working on my CS undergrad degree, more than one professor told me that I was really limiting my job prospects because I declined to take the elective COBOL classes. I knew enough about COBOL then to know that I could not drag myself out of bed in the morning to make a living with it.
The ranks of COBOL programmers out there are living drone like lives without passion or joy. That's not for me. I code for the love if it.
You would have had it easy. When I took COBOL, it was with punch cards. That was torture to to produce not quite identical structures multiple times to run a program. Later in life, when I taught COBOL, the wonders of cut-paste-and-modify made COBOL programming a breeze in comparison to my student experience.
Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my .kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8.
You're just an example of "regression toward the mean" and you got all your broken stuff in one upgrade. Every release from RedHat 4.2 on has broken something for me. Audio is top on the list. Before Fedora, X often required twiddling. Fonts are always quirky in some way. Sometimes it's more things, sometimes it's less, but it's always something.
... to get the alien vote.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
I can almost agree with that. I can see two (or three) difficulties.
One is that it is not only prosecution, but discrimination by employers, insurers, banks, etc. If I gripe about my employer 100 years ago, it probably stays private, but if you gripe online now, it can easily become public, and you get fired. I am not sure how you prevent discrimination based on any of 1000 attributes of personal information. It's easier to uncover discrimination when it's just a few attributes, but a much larger set is more difficult to manage and could be damaging to employers as well as almost everyone has a bad value somewhere.
Two is that it can't be all information as your police story points out. The police are supposed to uncover personal information in their investigations and use it against alleged criminals, so it seems clear that your assertion should only apply to non-criminal information.
However (this is point 3 I guess), we have had a history of law enforcement in this country, where if no one complains and no one gets hurt, then no one is arrested, even if the activity is technically against the law. Getting away with breaking the law is a tradition in this country (again, I should note, as long as no one gets hurt). Making all personal information public will increase the criminal class without improving things much. Our whole set of laws need to be reworked if "your personal information wants to be free" becomes the norm.
Well, they can always blow it up to get at the contents.
warrantless wiretaps of overseas calls
You must have missed this story:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/nsa-whistleblower-says-journos-were-targeted.ars
"The NSA had access to all Americans' communications: faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," said Tice. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made any foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."