In principle I agree with you. In practice, self checkouts are buggy as hell.
Couldn't agree with you more.
On most days I can walk reasonably upright, and while I have a nice pair of opposable thumbs and have been programming for 15+ years... the first (and only) time I ever tried to use one, it was bitching and shrieking that I didn't put the article into a bag. I didn't need a friggin bag. It seemed like every time I moved it started whining about "put the article in the bag".
Eventually, I walked away and left the PFY who oversaw them to sort it out. It was just way too rigid in what it expected me to do.
Admittedly, I see lots of people use them, so they must work. For me, they're not worth the hassle -- scanning groceries isn't something I aspire to do.
In spite of the name, "rights" is a game of subtraction, not addition. A person not under the domain of any government or any other higher power has no restrictions on their actions at all. Government and law add new restrictions (do not kill, do not steal).
Rubbish. A 'higher power' becomes the first person to come along who is bigger or stronger than you. Or, simply outnumbers you.
So, by your logic, slavery and tyranny are just the natural order of things? Government is the only thing keeping society from devolving into the worst sorts of human behavior. Peace and harmony isn't exactly the way mankind has typically run the show. Without someone enforcing rights, life would be like federal prison.
So, saying that everybody had all of these natural rights before government codified them for us is essentially bullshit. The Bill of Rights is one of the first things to explicitly entrench them in history. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be talking about how we are watching our rights erode.
Why shouldn't copyright infringement and national security come under the same law?
Because, historically it is two completely different realms of law. Copyright is civil law -- conflating it with national security is a he'll of a bad idea.
Commercial interests can't drive national security issues, or we will go to war with whoever is pirating the most videos.
Libertarians realize that it doesn't really matter (D or R), government is too powerful now, and need to be reigned in. It doesn't matter "who" is in power, they abuse it.
Libertarians believe that by completely dismantling government we will live in this wonderful utopia without regulation and we can all be happy capitalists and thrive in harmony, and be free to shoot anyone who threatened that harmony.
While I agree that government needs to be reigned in, I don't see removing a lot of the good things that governments accomplish as the right thing.
Weakening the 1st Amendment, and strengthening the ability of government (and corporations) to censor does move us towards tyranny, that much is true. I definitely agree with you. However, I disagree that:
it doesn't matter what the reason is (save the children,environment,rights,minority,tatas), there is always a nefarious outcome.
Yes, government does abuse their power, but saying we should stop trying to accomplish the goals of education and an overall. "Libertarians" would dismantle a lot of these things on the basis that it's onerous to individual freedoms and that they should be able to opt out of helping to pay for society. Boo hoo. Without these things, we'd all be friggin' eating one another in 6 months.
What needs to happen is stronger controls on how government does its job -- and I sure as hell don't claim to have an answer to this. However, human nature and history has shown time and time again that people try to consolidate power, and aren't above retroactively deciding they want to change how things work and want to undo change. Heck, that's exactly what the Taliban did.
Libertarianism has some interesting ideas, but it wouldn't solve any of these problems any better than modern economics does at really understanding how the economy works -- it's based on perfect models in ideal circumstances, and assumes that everyone else will all magically play by the same rules. It's grossly incomplete, and assumes way too much; and neither wrap things up quite so neatly as people believe.
And, in closing... we're all screwed, now get off my damned lawn. *grumble* *grumble* Damned kids.:-P --END RANT
1) Wikileaks has leaked details of draft ACTA proposals, and these have somewhat politically embarassing to the politicians who are doing MAFIAA's work.
2) MAFIAA hates it when people singing songs with lyrics like "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" and they really hate that funky sequel that begins with "6692d179032205".
3) The US government has figured out that people are so accustomed to the MPAA buying laws, they put them up to it so it could slip under the radar.
The MPAA gets the stuff they wanted in ACTA. The government gets carte blanche.
While I don't really believe that the US government is behind this, they do actually gain more from this than the MPAA does. I think more plausibly, the MPAA is trying to use this as a wedge so they can shut down anything which infringes on information they would like to retain control of or how to circumvent copyright -- such information gets effectively equated with sedition or somesuch.
Either way, the outcome of ACTA allowing for the shutting down of web sites "because we want to" basically means that the world is now fucked, and all signatories to ACTA are enforcement arms for multi-national companies... with the US wielding a stick over everybody else.
This awful treaty is going to propel us into a future ran even more by corporations, and they keep adding more shit to it every time there's a leak.
Wow, if you try to go to the announcement, you get directed to an apparently broken age verification page. At least, I can't figure out how to get past it to read their own announcement.
Dragon's Lair, mid 1980s? It was a coin operated video game that basically played animated scenes from a laserdisc. Your inputs decides which way things forked at key points.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read the summary.
If that's not an example of choose your own adventure movie, I don't know what is. All of the animation was pre-done video which was being played back.
Of course, I remember not being a fan of the game -- sure, the graphics were pretty; but it would only take input at certain times, and it seemed that unless you followed their script exactly, you died at almost every step. I think I spent a couple of bucks on it and then decided to go back to Donkey Kong.:-P
It was more of a spectator sport -- the few guys who were good at it were really cool to watch.
I'm still not sure what exactly the fatal flaw was in the test version that got everyone all in an uproar.
I've just re-checked the linked articles from Tuesday... nobody explicitly says what about the software is flawed.
This post, however, contains a much more detailed description of the issue. Essentially, the techniques it employed didn't work the way they said it did, and it wasn't -- and those using it were a lot more vulnerable than claimed.
It appeared that Haystacks administrator did not or could not effectively track unofficial users and that the methods he believed would lock them out were ineffective. More brutally, it also demonstrated that the CRC did not seem able to adequately monitor nor administrate their half of the live Haystack circumvention service.
When you're skirting around a government like Iran's doing things they don't like, broken security is a very risky undertaking.
From the sounds of it, this got over-hyped, never adequately reviewed, and people just ran with it believing it was secure.
Man, I was stunned this summer when I saw that someone had invented fried butter, and I subsequently heard of fried coke.
Fried beer is a special case of fried coke I giess... but, damn, I bet people lined up to get some of that!! It's beer, and it's fried... in Texas. Bacon wrap that sucker, and I know some people who would crawl over cut glass to taste it.
Although CP/IP has been implemented several times, amazingly nobody thought to improve bandwidth through the use of memory cards. I assume a new standard will be put out to take advantage of this innovation.
Yeah, this isn't actually CP/IP since it's not using any of the IP protocols and not breaking stuff up into packets and the like.
This is more of a specialized case of the "station wagon full of mag tape" scenario.
It's hilarious, but it's not technically related to RFC1149.:-P
if such a system catches 100% sound wave, that's a wave that dies at that point and is no longer heard. And, if that gets converted back to power, that's worth something in money.
Who cares about 100%? If you can harvest a tiny fraction of energy that someone else is paying for, then you get that energy for free where it would otherwise go to waste.
Just remember Newton's Law of Energy Conservation... and remember that things powered by the car driving over a power capturing device is stealing gas from your tank indirectly.
Not stealing any more than you would otherwise expend. It's just harvesting what you waste in the form of sound.
This is sound waves that are coming out from you already... it's not like a mechanical system which in a small way transfers some of your energy; so it's not embedded in the road. It's next to it (probably in lots of places I should think.)
I'm pretty sure this in no way can be considered to be stealing from someone's gas tank, however indirectly since it doesn't actually increase the energy usage.
Also, the NSA needs to spy on my phone conversations in case I ever become a terrorist. Which, I have to admit, is pretty good foresight on their part.
So, you are going to become a terrorist then? Because, if it's good foresight, they're right.
What's interesting is that PS is a full Forth like language in a VM and we never see crap like this attacking Postscript engines.
That's because nobody cares. I mean, seriously, what kind of lame "4GL" can't even spell its own name right?
Other than hearing the odd person lament that nobody else uses Forth, I have never encountered Forth in actual use. Do people actually use this anywhere? I've actually begun thinking it's a large hoax.
Funny, the only PDF I can find is a link from the FA which demonstrates the attack. The article itself is a regular web page, and I can't seem to find a PDF of the full disclosure.
Congratulations, you get a whoosh, he got a Funny mod.
Bonus points if you can reason out the humor in his post.
Imagine shooting blindly at the sky, and your bullet making it to a life sustaining planet billions of miles away by sheer blind luck. Not even Davy Crockett could pull off a shot like that!
And, now imagine the sheer number of stars which have gone supernova and sprayed stuff all over the place which eventually collided with planets and whatever else is out there.
Most of the elements that make up our bodies had be to created in stars that eventually died. The fact that we are made up of the leftovers from dead stars tells me that this isn't so much blind luck, as statistically inevitable. Stars have been exploding and sending stuff throughout the universe for a hell of a long time.
Now, finding it and identifying it for what it is seems pretty wild. But, if we're made up of star stuff, the fact that there is more of it isn't really that big of a shock.
"These people's remedy had anti-biotics so clearly they know about anti-biotics and did it on purpose!"
I doubt there was empirical testing going on here.
They may have not understood the specific science behind it (at least in terms of how we think of it), but I suspect they had more insight into it than you think. By the time a civilization has been around long enough to be building pyramids, using agriculture, apparently doing astronomy... they've been around quite a while. We're not talking cavemen here.
While they might not have been as sophisticated as we are now, and while some of their science may have been a little dodgy in that superstition came into play (or just an incomplete picture), they'd developed the ability to do some fairly complex observations about the world around them.
Why do people assume that a people who were as sophisticated as the Egyptians or the Greeks were total morons? Ancient people may not have had computers... but they had sophisticated building, astronomy, music, culture, food, art, and damned near everything else. Things we think are "modern" in some cases were invented 5000 years ago (like plumbing).
Discovering antibiotic benefits to your beer hardly seems a stretch. Statistically, ancient medicine had to produce some winners; this one was a fairly likely one given the nature of beer making and how long people have been doing it.
A good-sized nickel-iron NEO, on the other hand, could be an excellent prospecting opportunity -- depending on how big it is, it could supply enough iron to sate Earth's steel demand for a century or more -- or it could be used as a resource cache to bootstrap space-borne manufacturing.
OK, serious question here, because I'm baffled.
How do we return any actual meaningful mass from an asteroid? How do we push it home? What it the source of the push?
Do we send up rockets that are carrying rockets that then bring it home? ('Yo, Dawg, I hear you like rockets...;-)
I assume it's cheaper because it's closer than Mars... but, it would have to be a really good payout for the economics to make any sense, no? That's one hell of a lot of energy to move that much mass around space.
I maintain to this day that had we continued AvroCar and giant cannon development we'd rule this earth, with lasers, robots and polite letters of fury!
Hmmmm... I think without some stabilizing technology, the giant cannon would send the AvroCar whooshing backwards -- which, would of course be hilarious.
And, we wouldn't start with polite letters of fury -- we'd start with polite letters suggesting that it might merely be a misunderstand and we'd be happy to try to resolve it, but that we're not fully sure, so please disregard the letter if you feel it's in error.:-P
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Couldn't agree with you more.
On most days I can walk reasonably upright, and while I have a nice pair of opposable thumbs and have been programming for 15+ years ... the first (and only) time I ever tried to use one, it was bitching and shrieking that I didn't put the article into a bag. I didn't need a friggin bag. It seemed like every time I moved it started whining about "put the article in the bag".
Eventually, I walked away and left the PFY who oversaw them to sort it out. It was just way too rigid in what it expected me to do.
Admittedly, I see lots of people use them, so they must work. For me, they're not worth the hassle -- scanning groceries isn't something I aspire to do.
In spite of the name, "rights" is a game of subtraction, not addition. A person not under the domain of any government or any other higher power has no restrictions on their actions at all. Government and law add new restrictions (do not kill, do not steal).
Rubbish. A 'higher power' becomes the first person to come along who is bigger or stronger than you. Or, simply outnumbers you.
So, by your logic, slavery and tyranny are just the natural order of things? Government is the only thing keeping society from devolving into the worst sorts of human behavior. Peace and harmony isn't exactly the way mankind has typically run the show. Without someone enforcing rights, life would be like federal prison.
So, saying that everybody had all of these natural rights before government codified them for us is essentially bullshit. The Bill of Rights is one of the first things to explicitly entrench them in history. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be talking about how we are watching our rights erode.
Because, historically it is two completely different realms of law. Copyright is civil law -- conflating it with national security is a he'll of a bad idea.
Commercial interests can't drive national security issues, or we will go to war with whoever is pirating the most videos.
They don't belong in the same law.
Libertarians believe that by completely dismantling government we will live in this wonderful utopia without regulation and we can all be happy capitalists and thrive in harmony, and be free to shoot anyone who threatened that harmony.
While I agree that government needs to be reigned in, I don't see removing a lot of the good things that governments accomplish as the right thing.
Weakening the 1st Amendment, and strengthening the ability of government (and corporations) to censor does move us towards tyranny, that much is true. I definitely agree with you. However, I disagree that:
Yes, government does abuse their power, but saying we should stop trying to accomplish the goals of education and an overall. "Libertarians" would dismantle a lot of these things on the basis that it's onerous to individual freedoms and that they should be able to opt out of helping to pay for society. Boo hoo. Without these things, we'd all be friggin' eating one another in 6 months.
What needs to happen is stronger controls on how government does its job -- and I sure as hell don't claim to have an answer to this. However, human nature and history has shown time and time again that people try to consolidate power, and aren't above retroactively deciding they want to change how things work and want to undo change. Heck, that's exactly what the Taliban did.
Libertarianism has some interesting ideas, but it wouldn't solve any of these problems any better than modern economics does at really understanding how the economy works -- it's based on perfect models in ideal circumstances, and assumes that everyone else will all magically play by the same rules. It's grossly incomplete, and assumes way too much; and neither wrap things up quite so neatly as people believe.
And, in closing ... we're all screwed, now get off my damned lawn. *grumble* *grumble* Damned kids. :-P
--END RANT
3) The US government has figured out that people are so accustomed to the MPAA buying laws, they put them up to it so it could slip under the radar.
The MPAA gets the stuff they wanted in ACTA. The government gets carte blanche.
While I don't really believe that the US government is behind this, they do actually gain more from this than the MPAA does. I think more plausibly, the MPAA is trying to use this as a wedge so they can shut down anything which infringes on information they would like to retain control of or how to circumvent copyright -- such information gets effectively equated with sedition or somesuch.
Either way, the outcome of ACTA allowing for the shutting down of web sites "because we want to" basically means that the world is now fucked, and all signatories to ACTA are enforcement arms for multi-national companies ... with the US wielding a stick over everybody else.
This awful treaty is going to propel us into a future ran even more by corporations, and they keep adding more shit to it every time there's a leak.
Whale? WTF?
Wow, if you try to go to the announcement, you get directed to an apparently broken age verification page. At least, I can't figure out how to get past it to read their own announcement.
No wonder they're going out of business. :-P
Oh, god. Just what Hollywood has been moving towards for years -- a movie plot decided upon by a steering committee. :-P
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read the summary.
If that's not an example of choose your own adventure movie, I don't know what is. All of the animation was pre-done video which was being played back.
Of course, I remember not being a fan of the game -- sure, the graphics were pretty; but it would only take input at certain times, and it seemed that unless you followed their script exactly, you died at almost every step. I think I spent a couple of bucks on it and then decided to go back to Donkey Kong. :-P
It was more of a spectator sport -- the few guys who were good at it were really cool to watch.
There's at least five words in there that I don't know what they mean and that I'm afraid to google.
I've just re-checked the linked articles from Tuesday ... nobody explicitly says what about the software is flawed.
This post, however, contains a much more detailed description of the issue. Essentially, the techniques it employed didn't work the way they said it did, and it wasn't -- and those using it were a lot more vulnerable than claimed.
When you're skirting around a government like Iran's doing things they don't like, broken security is a very risky undertaking.
From the sounds of it, this got over-hyped, never adequately reviewed, and people just ran with it believing it was secure.
Man, I was stunned this summer when I saw that someone had invented fried butter, and I subsequently heard of fried coke.
Fried beer is a special case of fried coke I giess... but, damn, I bet people lined up to get some of that!! It's beer, and it's fried ... in Texas. Bacon wrap that sucker, and I know some people who would crawl over cut glass to taste it.
Yeah, this isn't actually CP/IP since it's not using any of the IP protocols and not breaking stuff up into packets and the like.
This is more of a specialized case of the "station wagon full of mag tape" scenario.
It's hilarious, but it's not technically related to RFC1149. :-P
Who cares about 100%? If you can harvest a tiny fraction of energy that someone else is paying for, then you get that energy for free where it would otherwise go to waste.
Not stealing any more than you would otherwise expend. It's just harvesting what you waste in the form of sound.
This is sound waves that are coming out from you already ... it's not like a mechanical system which in a small way transfers some of your energy; so it's not embedded in the road. It's next to it (probably in lots of places I should think.)
I'm pretty sure this in no way can be considered to be stealing from someone's gas tank, however indirectly since it doesn't actually increase the energy usage.
So, you are going to become a terrorist then? Because, if it's good foresight, they're right.
Stay put, agents are on their way.
That's because nobody cares. I mean, seriously, what kind of lame "4GL" can't even spell its own name right?
Other than hearing the odd person lament that nobody else uses Forth, I have never encountered Forth in actual use. Do people actually use this anywhere? I've actually begun thinking it's a large hoax.
Congratulations, you get a whoosh, he got a Funny mod.
Bonus points if you can reason out the humor in his post.
Oh, those guys are anything but boring. They're friggin' hilarious. Almost as strange as the ones from Saskatchewan wearing watermelon helmets.
And, now imagine the sheer number of stars which have gone supernova and sprayed stuff all over the place which eventually collided with planets and whatever else is out there.
Most of the elements that make up our bodies had be to created in stars that eventually died. The fact that we are made up of the leftovers from dead stars tells me that this isn't so much blind luck, as statistically inevitable. Stars have been exploding and sending stuff throughout the universe for a hell of a long time.
Now, finding it and identifying it for what it is seems pretty wild. But, if we're made up of star stuff, the fact that there is more of it isn't really that big of a shock.
They may have not understood the specific science behind it (at least in terms of how we think of it), but I suspect they had more insight into it than you think. By the time a civilization has been around long enough to be building pyramids, using agriculture, apparently doing astronomy ... they've been around quite a while. We're not talking cavemen here.
While they might not have been as sophisticated as we are now, and while some of their science may have been a little dodgy in that superstition came into play (or just an incomplete picture), they'd developed the ability to do some fairly complex observations about the world around them.
Why do people assume that a people who were as sophisticated as the Egyptians or the Greeks were total morons? Ancient people may not have had computers ... but they had sophisticated building, astronomy, music, culture, food, art, and damned near everything else. Things we think are "modern" in some cases were invented 5000 years ago (like plumbing).
Discovering antibiotic benefits to your beer hardly seems a stretch. Statistically, ancient medicine had to produce some winners; this one was a fairly likely one given the nature of beer making and how long people have been doing it.
Well, as much as I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with firing huge, pointy spears of iron at the Earth at crazy speeds ...
No, wait ...
I don't have any confidence we could do that on a regular basis without occasionally taking out something we didn't plan on.
That just sounds really scary to me.
OK, serious question here, because I'm baffled.
How do we return any actual meaningful mass from an asteroid? How do we push it home? What it the source of the push?
Do we send up rockets that are carrying rockets that then bring it home? ('Yo, Dawg, I hear you like rockets ... ;-)
I assume it's cheaper because it's closer than Mars ... but, it would have to be a really good payout for the economics to make any sense, no? That's one hell of a lot of energy to move that much mass around space.
You mean, other than, say, intercepting a couple of Russian Bear bombers over the Arctic last week?
You may not be aware of it, but Canada has an air force, and is a member of NORAD.
We're buying some Joint Strike Fighters too.
Hmmmm ... I think without some stabilizing technology, the giant cannon would send the AvroCar whooshing backwards -- which, would of course be hilarious.
And, we wouldn't start with polite letters of fury -- we'd start with polite letters suggesting that it might merely be a misunderstand and we'd be happy to try to resolve it, but that we're not fully sure, so please disregard the letter if you feel it's in error. :-P
Or, in this case, the rotary wing. :-P