Except pretty much every government is doing this, because apparently these days the entire function of governments establishing laws and treaties is to enshrine in law the protection of corporate profits.
Pretty much every treaty I've seen mentioned in the last bunch of years expands copyright, places the burden of policing copyright onto someone else, is negotiated in secret, and can really only be described as undermining our rights for the benefit of corporations.
Governments no longer represent citizens, they represent the interests of multi-national corporations. And as a result, they time after time pass laws which really only benefit multi-national corporations.
What should be happening is the company who wants to issue the takedown has to go to court and prove their assertions, and then the court tells the ISP to add it to the list.
But, since this is a copyright related law, the people who bought it didn't want any pesky burden of proof, so it's written in such a way that the ISP is responsible for defending the content.
Take the ISP out of the equation until the court has ruled. Otherwise all you're really doing is allowing someone to make an unsubstantiated demand, and having that be someone else's problem.
It's time we stopped giving copyright laws such wide room for interpretation and abuse, and make the people who want to claim infringement have some actual standard of providing proof and showing how the content is actually infringing.
Right now they have bought themselves the right to say anything they want, with no burden of proof, and no consequences for being wrong or outright lying.
That's an utterly insane law, because it lets them just make up anything they want to, and it's others who have to comply.
Imagine if I could go to the police and say you stole my car.. and they will come and take your car and give it to me, and then you have to prove that it was actually your car.
This is a law which essentially assumes the accuser is in the right, and the accused must prove their innocence. And, make no mistake, this law is written like this by design, because in all likelihood the people who wrote it are the people who paid for it.
Worse than that, this is a law designed for copyright being abused for some idiot to try to enforce his trademark by claiming a company in another country is somehow infringing.
This site is not anywhere near "the primary purpose of the online location is to infringe, or to facilitate the infringement of, copyright".
This has nothing to do with copyright.
This is exactly what happens when you put the onus of policing these things onto the fucking ISPs.
The ONLY way this should work is companies go to a court, prove their case, and then the court say "OK, block this". If the law is so badly written it can be used by a company to bully an ISP into doing something the law isn't intended to do.. then the law is terribly written.
Essentially the law was written that each ISP has to be the defender of any site they are asked to block, or will just blindly block them out of sheer laziness.
And, once again, the copyright cartels have bought themselves a law which allows them to do anything they wish, with no consequences, and shift the cost of keeping things in check onto others. Any law which allows people to make copyright claims without proving them has been designed to pander to one industry at the expense of every other industry.
Now, apparently, you can just claim copyright infringement, and be able to do that for free and make it someone else's problem.
This is what happens when you let companies write their own damned laws in such a way that they can do anything. From the sounds of it, this law was intentionally written as to allow copyright holders as much leeway as possible... which means it's an utterly useless law.
Zero-knowledge encryption? Sounds like they're trying to invent some new buzzword
In this case, it's being used by Apple and Google (and likely others) to say "we have zero knowledge of how to decrypt this because we haven't given it to ourselves".
This is them trying to wash their hands of it and say "we can't help you, you need to get subpoenas and contact the user", but leave us out of this.
to try to make something almost no one could argue against, secured communications and records for banking, conversations & confidential information (medical records, personal matters, etc)
And why do you say that like it's a bad thing? They're explicitly saying "since we have zero knowledge of how to decrypt it, it is safe for those things".
Isn't this what we want?
The DA wants "zero-knowledge" encryption to go away. Apple et al are saying "we don't want to do that". Are you arguing that Apple and Google are wrong here?
Not just the economy... your privacy, your personal digital security, your freedom of association.
When these clowns say this kind of stuff, what they're really saying is "we need to be able to spy on everybody to make sure we can find the bad guys, if you're not a bad guy you'll be fine".
This is basically saying "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", and pretty much only fascists and tyrants say shit like this.
Western democracies, and the people who claim to be protecting us, are devolving into entities who claim they need to undermine our freedoms in order to protect them. They act like the old state police of the communist countries we spent 50 years in a cold war with.
They get these sweeping powers which are incompatible with our rights, claim they'll only use them for terrorists, and then come up with shit like "parallel construction" to commit perjury and lie about how they got it so they can make more mundane criminal charges stick. And, make no mistake, it's perjury -- it's a deliberate attempt to take evidence which would be inadmissible in court and obfuscate where it came from, including that it was technically illegally obtained.
So now they want to outlaw all forms of encryption they can't break so they can monitor everything. And then they'll inevitably take that information, pass it on to law enforcement.
There simply is no good outcome for citizens when government insist we not be able to have privacy from them, and then they can take everything we ever do and then retroactively decide we've broken a law.
This is about FAR more than your economy. This is attacking the very underlying premises of our societies.
When a fucking DA says shit like this, it says "we no longer give a damn about the law and your rights, it's far more convenient if we can just spy on everything everybody does and then decide who we need to round up".
And if he's stupid enough to not understand that if they can break it, the other bad guys can as well, then he's too fucking stupid to continue to hold his job.
How is it factually incorrect to call a slave a worker?
Oh, I don't know... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property. Tell you what, we could subject you to the same things as the slaves were, and you could tell us your thoughts on the difference.
This isn't about being PC, this is about pretending people who think that saying "well, it wasn't that bad" aren't morons.
"Workers" aren't chained up, brought thousands of miles, bought and sold, killed or maimed at will.
You simply can't talk about slavery and try claim you're being "PC" by referring to them as "workers" instead of what they really were. At that point you're just saying stupid shit like "well, slavery was a matter of historical perspective, and if you were a landowner these were valuable employees". This is literally whitewashing history to gloss over the details and downplay what actually happened.
That's not PC. That's fully intellectually dishonest, and re-casting slavery to pretend it wasn't that bad. This is fully revisionist history and dishonesty so a bunch of white folks can pretend like it was all a big misunderstanding... and I say this as a pasty white guy.
Essentially Texas has said their education is no longer about facts, which means who knows what kind of crap will creep into textbooks.
According to Kemp, his office shares "voter registration data every month with news media and political parties that have requested it as required by Georgia law.
Wait, what?
It is required by law that the state sell voter information to corporations? What the hell for?
This sounds like an incredibly stupid law which has either been recklessly put in to raise money, or stupidly put in to advance corporate interests.
Having government be required to sell this to corporations smacks of the results of terrible policy. The government should not be in the business of selling information about voters to anybody.
(or, in your case, maybe psplit across 50 floppies, eh? EH???)
Har har... the last (and only) time I ever used that many floppies was when I installed my first Slackware.
I just don't recommend Microsoft here though- they had to be basically punched repeatedly to take away this "check in every day online" restriction, and clearly only caved because they had no other choice.
Yeah, I'm kinda stuck with my XBox 360... the wife likes her Kinect games, and it comes handy in winter to kill some time.
Given what I'm seeing with Windows 10... I no longer trust that will last any longer than it has to. If Windows 10 has mandatory telemetry, the Xbone is an update away from taking that away.
Might need to buy a spare 360 and pick up a few greatest hits type games. I was underwhelmed with the Wii, don't want to rebuild a library with a PS4.
I thought the whole point of the new "emoji" stuff was that they're now standard Unicode characters
For the last several years it hasn't been. People have downloaded apps and keyboards which provide them.
They certainly haven't defined every possible emoji in unicode... I'm sure there are still people out there with "sparkly unicorn" and "pooping frog" emojis -- I'm pretty sure there are actual poop emojis.
So, yeah, to date, emojis are specific, not in a standard, not built into your device, and typically if your friend installs some emojis on their phone and sends them to you... you will need to fetch them.
Emojis didn't spring into existence as part of unicode. They were cobbled together and passed around using apps and bandwidth.
it's slightly different, it's a conditional purchase/pre-pay.
Is it really?
Because I don't think that's what happened; it's far too easy to spend all the money and fail, or have the magic of accounting say you've spent all the money and failed.
You're looking for something which is insured, underwritten, and guaranteed.
I don't think you get any of those things. In fact, judging by the summary, I'd say you don't get that at all.
Having a mission statement and a promise of being sure it will work... well, good luck with that.
The vast majority of this crap is just enabling third parties to track your fucking email and texts as everyone has to download the stupid things.
I wonder how much bandwidth is wasted every day for this stuff?
Reminds me of a secretary we used to have to kept putting stationary/backgrounds, links to 3rd party garbage, fonts, and every other thing she could think of in her email.
It got to the point we had to talk with HR and IT and point out that her email was a frigging security risk, and was essentially being used as advertising.
She couldn't understand that not only did nobody give a damn about her stupid embedded graphic smileys which had to be downloaded from outside agencies, but that it was a damned security risk.
Someone once texted me something full of emojis in it. And since my phone doesn't have a data plan, it couldn't download the emojis, and I just had blanks. Which is fine by me... because I really am not interested in seeing "champagne champagne baboons-ass".
If you play this on PC, you need to have Origin installed. If you play it on consoles, you need to have an Origin account
And this is why I will stick with my old XBox 360 with no network connection.
I have no interest in having to be online, or have a bloody account to play a video game.
I miss old school gaming without the network. And when my 360 dies, then I guess I'm done with gaming for good.
I don't want to play against some kid who has put 10000 hours into a game. I don't want ads in my games. I don't want to have to sign up for a damned account, and fork over my credit card or any other personal information.
For some of us, video games are intermittent undertakings, and don't involve networking or people who aren't in the same room.
Have we completely lost the old school concept of console gaming as a standalone thing? Because that's all I really want.
Having worked at a pharma company I saw first hand huge amounts of resources dedicated to running around meeting the whim of every country's various regulatory agencies
And, by whim, you mean actually checking that the pharma company isn't lying through their teeth about the products?
There's been enough public instances showing these companies will paint an overly rosy picture of how good a drug is, downplay the incidence of side effects, and otherwise manipulate the data to give desired outcomes.
So, boo fucking hoo... compliance is how we have at least some confidence these guys aren't lying their asses off to sell a product which doesn't actually provide the benefits they claim, or which is far more likely to kill you than they claim.
I don't trust big pharma to ever be honest or have anything but their own profits as a priority. Not even a little.
2) Furthermore this sort of advertising creates all sorts of bad incentives for patients to ask about medicines that may not be appropriate for their condition. Most people without medical training demonstrably do not understand what these drugs do nor do they understand the side effects.
I'm betting most doctors don't either these days, and I'm also fairly sure the only source of this is the marketing material provided by the company -- and I refuse to believe that is accurate or doesn't downplay the issues.
Doctors can't see the real data on these things, and pharma companies routinely try to pitch it for "off-label" applications they haven't been approved for.
So, you have marketing to the consumers, marketing provided directly to the doctors in the form of samples of glossy material... and nobody really has a clue about the effectiveness or real incidence of side effects.
In a lot of cases, modern medicine as it relates to big pharma is a dog and pony show driven by salesmen and people in marketing.
The more we remove the pharmaceutical companies from driving decisions around healthcare and determining which products to use the better... because having the conversation be dictated by multi-billion dollar corporations trying to maximize profits is a terrible idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Except pretty much every government is doing this, because apparently these days the entire function of governments establishing laws and treaties is to enshrine in law the protection of corporate profits.
Pretty much every treaty I've seen mentioned in the last bunch of years expands copyright, places the burden of policing copyright onto someone else, is negotiated in secret, and can really only be described as undermining our rights for the benefit of corporations.
Governments no longer represent citizens, they represent the interests of multi-national corporations. And as a result, they time after time pass laws which really only benefit multi-national corporations.
What should be happening is the company who wants to issue the takedown has to go to court and prove their assertions, and then the court tells the ISP to add it to the list.
But, since this is a copyright related law, the people who bought it didn't want any pesky burden of proof, so it's written in such a way that the ISP is responsible for defending the content.
Take the ISP out of the equation until the court has ruled. Otherwise all you're really doing is allowing someone to make an unsubstantiated demand, and having that be someone else's problem.
It's time we stopped giving copyright laws such wide room for interpretation and abuse, and make the people who want to claim infringement have some actual standard of providing proof and showing how the content is actually infringing.
Right now they have bought themselves the right to say anything they want, with no burden of proof, and no consequences for being wrong or outright lying.
That's an utterly insane law, because it lets them just make up anything they want to, and it's others who have to comply.
Imagine if I could go to the police and say you stole my car .. and they will come and take your car and give it to me, and then you have to prove that it was actually your car.
This is a law which essentially assumes the accuser is in the right, and the accused must prove their innocence. And, make no mistake, this law is written like this by design, because in all likelihood the people who wrote it are the people who paid for it.
Worse than that, this is a law designed for copyright being abused for some idiot to try to enforce his trademark by claiming a company in another country is somehow infringing.
This site is not anywhere near "the primary purpose of the online location is to infringe, or to facilitate the infringement of, copyright".
This has nothing to do with copyright.
This is exactly what happens when you put the onus of policing these things onto the fucking ISPs.
The ONLY way this should work is companies go to a court, prove their case, and then the court say "OK, block this". If the law is so badly written it can be used by a company to bully an ISP into doing something the law isn't intended to do .. then the law is terribly written.
Essentially the law was written that each ISP has to be the defender of any site they are asked to block, or will just blindly block them out of sheer laziness.
And, once again, the copyright cartels have bought themselves a law which allows them to do anything they wish, with no consequences, and shift the cost of keeping things in check onto others. Any law which allows people to make copyright claims without proving them has been designed to pander to one industry at the expense of every other industry.
Now, apparently, you can just claim copyright infringement, and be able to do that for free and make it someone else's problem.
This is what happens when you let companies write their own damned laws in such a way that they can do anything. From the sounds of it, this law was intentionally written as to allow copyright holders as much leeway as possible ... which means it's an utterly useless law.
In this case, it's being used by Apple and Google (and likely others) to say "we have zero knowledge of how to decrypt this because we haven't given it to ourselves".
This is them trying to wash their hands of it and say "we can't help you, you need to get subpoenas and contact the user", but leave us out of this.
And why do you say that like it's a bad thing? They're explicitly saying "since we have zero knowledge of how to decrypt it, it is safe for those things".
Isn't this what we want?
The DA wants "zero-knowledge" encryption to go away. Apple et al are saying "we don't want to do that". Are you arguing that Apple and Google are wrong here?
Not just the economy ... your privacy, your personal digital security, your freedom of association.
When these clowns say this kind of stuff, what they're really saying is "we need to be able to spy on everybody to make sure we can find the bad guys, if you're not a bad guy you'll be fine".
This is basically saying "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", and pretty much only fascists and tyrants say shit like this.
Western democracies, and the people who claim to be protecting us, are devolving into entities who claim they need to undermine our freedoms in order to protect them. They act like the old state police of the communist countries we spent 50 years in a cold war with.
They get these sweeping powers which are incompatible with our rights, claim they'll only use them for terrorists, and then come up with shit like "parallel construction" to commit perjury and lie about how they got it so they can make more mundane criminal charges stick. And, make no mistake, it's perjury -- it's a deliberate attempt to take evidence which would be inadmissible in court and obfuscate where it came from, including that it was technically illegally obtained.
So now they want to outlaw all forms of encryption they can't break so they can monitor everything. And then they'll inevitably take that information, pass it on to law enforcement.
There simply is no good outcome for citizens when government insist we not be able to have privacy from them, and then they can take everything we ever do and then retroactively decide we've broken a law.
This is about FAR more than your economy. This is attacking the very underlying premises of our societies.
When a fucking DA says shit like this, it says "we no longer give a damn about the law and your rights, it's far more convenient if we can just spy on everything everybody does and then decide who we need to round up".
And if he's stupid enough to not understand that if they can break it, the other bad guys can as well, then he's too fucking stupid to continue to hold his job.
Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property. Tell you what, we could subject you to the same things as the slaves were, and you could tell us your thoughts on the difference.
This isn't about being PC, this is about pretending people who think that saying "well, it wasn't that bad" aren't morons.
"Workers" aren't chained up, brought thousands of miles, bought and sold, killed or maimed at will.
You simply can't talk about slavery and try claim you're being "PC" by referring to them as "workers" instead of what they really were. At that point you're just saying stupid shit like "well, slavery was a matter of historical perspective, and if you were a landowner these were valuable employees". This is literally whitewashing history to gloss over the details and downplay what actually happened.
That's not PC. That's fully intellectually dishonest, and re-casting slavery to pretend it wasn't that bad. This is fully revisionist history and dishonesty so a bunch of white folks can pretend like it was all a big misunderstanding ... and I say this as a pasty white guy.
Essentially Texas has said their education is no longer about facts, which means who knows what kind of crap will creep into textbooks.
Wait, what?
It is required by law that the state sell voter information to corporations? What the hell for?
This sounds like an incredibly stupid law which has either been recklessly put in to raise money, or stupidly put in to advance corporate interests.
Having government be required to sell this to corporations smacks of the results of terrible policy. The government should not be in the business of selling information about voters to anybody.
Har har ... the last (and only) time I ever used that many floppies was when I installed my first Slackware.
Yeah, I'm kinda stuck with my XBox 360 ... the wife likes her Kinect games, and it comes handy in winter to kill some time.
Given what I'm seeing with Windows 10 ... I no longer trust that will last any longer than it has to. If Windows 10 has mandatory telemetry, the Xbone is an update away from taking that away.
Might need to buy a spare 360 and pick up a few greatest hits type games. I was underwhelmed with the Wii, don't want to rebuild a library with a PS4.
Good advice, I think that helps me plan that out.
For the last several years it hasn't been. People have downloaded apps and keyboards which provide them.
They certainly haven't defined every possible emoji in unicode ... I'm sure there are still people out there with "sparkly unicorn" and "pooping frog" emojis -- I'm pretty sure there are actual poop emojis.
So, yeah, to date, emojis are specific, not in a standard, not built into your device, and typically if your friend installs some emojis on their phone and sends them to you ... you will need to fetch them.
Emojis didn't spring into existence as part of unicode. They were cobbled together and passed around using apps and bandwidth.
Is it really?
Because I don't think that's what happened; it's far too easy to spend all the money and fail, or have the magic of accounting say you've spent all the money and failed.
You're looking for something which is insured, underwritten, and guaranteed.
I don't think you get any of those things. In fact, judging by the summary, I'd say you don't get that at all.
Having a mission statement and a promise of being sure it will work ... well, good luck with that.
Americans? ;-)
Is this unique to New Jersey? I think not.
What 'recovery'?
You're not an "investor", you're essentially a "benefactor".
Think of these crowd-sourcing things as giant tip jars. You don't get any guarantees.
Why do people act like these things are any different than throwing change into someone's guitar case?
My short answer to you is: that is utter bullshit.
You got some facts to back that up? Or just your own mistaken belief?
English is not a language in which everything has a gender. Claiming "he" and "she" are the only valid singular pronouns is wrong.
Nobody has defined a picture as a word. They've said "the word which denotes a picture used as a word" is a word.
You know: emoji.
You will note that "emoji" is not a picture.
What are you on about? I bet your mother knows what an emoji is ... which is probably why it became a word of the year.
You might as well complain we have the word statue, because a statue isn't a word either.
It has never been wrong. The use of "they" like that isn't a new construct, was never wrong.
In fact, it's been correct for a very long time.
That you don't know it was already correct is your damned problem.
I'm pretty sure the singular, gender-neutral use of the word "they" has been around a lot longer than the 1980s.
"When a person is cold they might shiver" is hardly a new grammatical construct.
LOL, basically anybody who lives in cold climates, and has a beard I think.
Think plaid flannel.
The vast majority of this crap is just enabling third parties to track your fucking email and texts as everyone has to download the stupid things.
I wonder how much bandwidth is wasted every day for this stuff?
Reminds me of a secretary we used to have to kept putting stationary/backgrounds, links to 3rd party garbage, fonts, and every other thing she could think of in her email.
It got to the point we had to talk with HR and IT and point out that her email was a frigging security risk, and was essentially being used as advertising.
She couldn't understand that not only did nobody give a damn about her stupid embedded graphic smileys which had to be downloaded from outside agencies, but that it was a damned security risk.
Someone once texted me something full of emojis in it. And since my phone doesn't have a data plan, it couldn't download the emojis, and I just had blanks. Which is fine by me ... because I really am not interested in seeing "champagne champagne baboons-ass".
In some ways, yes ... the longer the internet is around and becomes attached to everything, the less I want it to be attached to everything.
Because the internet is largely now taken over by marketing assholes and analytics.
I want a fucking video game, not yet another vector to have these clowns track everything I do.
For the same reasons I don't want my TV or my toilet connected to the internet -- because it's pointless and doesn't offer me any added value.
Apparently something works ... cooling, but with frickin' lasers.
And yet ... I'd still need a network connection and an online account.
Does anybody know what the current status of the XBone wrt networking? Does it still need a 24x7 or at least weekly network connection?
Or should I just buy a spare XBox 360 and stock up on a few older games.
I just want a console which never connects to the internet ever.
And this is why I will stick with my old XBox 360 with no network connection.
I have no interest in having to be online, or have a bloody account to play a video game.
I miss old school gaming without the network. And when my 360 dies, then I guess I'm done with gaming for good.
I don't want to play against some kid who has put 10000 hours into a game. I don't want ads in my games. I don't want to have to sign up for a damned account, and fork over my credit card or any other personal information.
For some of us, video games are intermittent undertakings, and don't involve networking or people who aren't in the same room.
Have we completely lost the old school concept of console gaming as a standalone thing? Because that's all I really want.
Wow, that sounds awesome ... I might have to RTFA even.
And, by whim, you mean actually checking that the pharma company isn't lying through their teeth about the products?
There's been enough public instances showing these companies will paint an overly rosy picture of how good a drug is, downplay the incidence of side effects, and otherwise manipulate the data to give desired outcomes.
So, boo fucking hoo ... compliance is how we have at least some confidence these guys aren't lying their asses off to sell a product which doesn't actually provide the benefits they claim, or which is far more likely to kill you than they claim.
I don't trust big pharma to ever be honest or have anything but their own profits as a priority. Not even a little.
I'm betting most doctors don't either these days, and I'm also fairly sure the only source of this is the marketing material provided by the company -- and I refuse to believe that is accurate or doesn't downplay the issues.
Doctors can't see the real data on these things, and pharma companies routinely try to pitch it for "off-label" applications they haven't been approved for.
So, you have marketing to the consumers, marketing provided directly to the doctors in the form of samples of glossy material ... and nobody really has a clue about the effectiveness or real incidence of side effects.
In a lot of cases, modern medicine as it relates to big pharma is a dog and pony show driven by salesmen and people in marketing.
The more we remove the pharmaceutical companies from driving decisions around healthcare and determining which products to use the better ... because having the conversation be dictated by multi-billion dollar corporations trying to maximize profits is a terrible idea.