I guess the important question is whether this is the correct way of doing it. Politicians are very busy, and don't like their time being wasted.
Problem is that politicians (especially those who have been in office too long) may have a rather warped view of what "time wasting" means compared with the general public. e.g. not regarding being wined and dined by lobbiests as being a time wasting activity...
For many years, MS mail readers and web browsers violated all of those rules, and they continue to violate some of them today.
Effectivly they decided to do their own thing.
They didn't bother registering content-types for their proprietary data formats or analyzing them for security risks. They didn't label attachments in outgoing mail with meaningful content-types, instead labeling everything as "application/octet-stream" even for contents clearly expected to be presented "inline" as part of the message - expecting the recipient to make sense of the filename suffix. On receipt, their mail readers would ignore the content-type and look at only the filename suffix, thus giving the author of a message the ability to send attachments to any application on the recipient's machine that had a filename suffix associated with it.
Thus meaning that a naming convention which goes back over 20 years still has meaning. Interestingly enough whilst CP/M used the 8.3 convention the filesystem actually used 11 character (7 bit) filenames.
Vendors of competing products more-or-less had to follow suit in order to make their products "usable" by those used to the MS behavior.
It dosn't help that Microsoft wern't even consistent with how they handled things. Which lead to all sorts of exploits involving renaming.EXE files and having them still execute.
I once attended a seminar on buying businesses. One of the methods of getting capital is to sell the customer list of the business you acquire. It doesn't matter what the original owners promised their customers, you own it now and there's nothing they can do about it.
Only in the absense of data protection laws. Try this in the EU and the fines will be a lot more than whatever you might have made by selling the list.
That's something to remember, even the current owners promise that they won't pimp you data, it doesn't prevent future owners from doing so. ANd even then, management changes or business starts take a downturn, it's amazing how "privacy policies" that "are subject to change at anytime" do so.
Even without such a clause these things are pointless. They only exist in the absense of laws to either protect personal data or punish liers.
DRM is crap because it lets the consumer pay for it to take away consumer rights whilst having absolutely no benefit to the consumer.
It's even worst than that. In order for the DRM to be supported the customer must pay for the extra hardware and software to support the DRM. There are also likely to be ongoing costs, at the very least extra electrical power converted to heat in order for all the additional caculations to be performed. Wasting resources and energy in this way is definitly something the "Greens" tend to be against.
If DRM ever managed to stop breaking copyright, it could be considered useful, but it doesn't.
Even then you'd want to perform some kind of cost/benefit analysis.
All it does is make honest consumers pay more to get their legal rights back, that were taken from them by DRM itself. DRM is extortion; "the more you pay, the less we'll steal from you".
It also may actually encourage piracy. Because people would rather have DRM free "pirate" copies, effectivly the pirate version can become more valuable than the "legit" version. If DRM is too much of a problem it effectivly ends up driving a black economy of paid for DRM free copies.
If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition. It will downgrade the signal if you try to play it on your 2-year old Celeron, and will not play in full 1080p glory.
In the process probably requiring more processing power that doing a non "degraded" rendering of the data.
That's what all the bruhaha is about.
Actually it's more about needing a more powerful machine to do useful work, thus otherwise perfectly functional machines ending up scrapped.
It's not a big deal to some people (like myself, who has a 50-inch HDTV and could care less about playing it on his PC) but to others this functionality is important.
There are actually a couple of relevent issues. The first is how much difference the extra resolution actually makes. Consider that only a small part of the retina is actually high resolution in the first place. The other is if there is "DRM overhead" even when Vista is not handling "protected content", even if the relevent hardware isn't actually in place.
How about 150ml of the Sony CEO's blood per rootkit. If they run out, then start taking blood from the rest of the executives in a hierarchical fashion.
Since Sony are ment to be in the entertainment business how about a "reality show" where viewers can vote for which executive gets fed to the vampire...
Is that $150 per cd "sold through" or $150 per customer who is aware of the lawsuit and actually files to get their cheque?
The number of infected PCs may well not tally well with the number of customers or the number of CDs. Some customers may have bought more than one infected CD and each CD can infect an arbitraty number of PCs. e.g. if it was bought by a lending library a single CD could have infected hundreds...
if i write a rootkit and distribute it inadvertently (because my GF burned it to CD??), would FTC settle?
The "inadvertently" bit would be tricky, in order for things to work the CD has to be mastered such that Windows automatically executes the malware when someone trys to play the disk. You need to do a few more things that just putting an executable on a data track.
Heck, i would be in Gitmo after being "renditioned" to Syria!
Actually, the $750 per song is for unintentional infringement.
Even that is a highly inflated figure. Actual "loses" are under 10USD, possibly under one.
This action was obviously intentional and profit-motivated, the statutory damages in that case are $150,000 per infringement
Part of the reason to have such massivly inflated figures is to ensure that the amount of money involved is high enough for law enforcement to take an interest. With something like spamming, even when it involves outright fraud, the amount of money involved per incident is often "too small".
which would be pretty good, I bet that would actually discourage them from doing this again,
Alternativly start putting the people responsible in jail. Remember that the "limited liability" is about the financial liability of investors.
Low voter turnout is endemic to winner takes all systems (and who can blame the voters, in a whole lot of cases there isnt even any point for some voters to vote).
Another factor, possibly most relevent to the US, is where there is lack of diversity amongst the candidates.
I'm sorry but this is not a level playing field. What this is is acknowledging the competition so as to appear fair and silence advocates, but then show off the latest features of Vista's interface, but not show the same in Linux and OSX
It also isn't exactly even handed to have twice as many Vista advocates. It's a bit like having a political program with two Labour, one Tory and one Liberal Democrat... A very obvious omission was "stick with XP".
Increasing the tax burden with the number of kids (or even keeping it the same, since kids place their own inherent economic burdens on their parents) could potentially be a very bad thing if it led to a decrease in the birthrate.
Possibly the fairest way to handle things would be via a transferable tax allowance.
Marriage is a religious construct, and it shouldn't be specifically recognized by our government.
Historically marriage has had economic elements e.g. effectivly overruling pre-existing wills even political elements e.g. treaties involving (typically arranged) marriages. At some points in history the religious elements of marriage havn't been especially strong.
However - one of the major design points and motivation for the shuttle was the abiliy to retrieve satellites and bring them back down, hence use of the term 'shuttle'. Ultimately this was rarely done,
Because there isn't much actual reason to do so. In the case of a satellite with a failed booster the safe thing is to either fix it in orbit or deorbit it. Sticking a dodgy rocket engine in the back of a manned vehicle is not a good idea.
and in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope the only shuttle which had large enough cargo bay to fit the Hubble was Columbia.
In order to bring it back to Earth you'd first have to dump the solar arrays, power it down and ensure that no fuel is leaking from the attitude control system. Even then what value is the thing on Earth? You don't need a vehicle anything like as big as the shuttle to carry a solid fuel motor suitable for deorbiting a defunct satellite, together with the crew to attach it.
The shuttles are piss-poor satellite delivery systems. They only go into low earth orbit. What we need is a cheap expendable unmanned cargo launch system, and a small passenger shuttle. Combining the two was sheer idiocy.
They were combined for political reasons. A smaller manned vehicle might well be able to reach higher orbits, thus be more useful for repairing satellites.
If the war on drugs was really about protecting public health, both would be illegal. Of course, we know what happened when alcohol was prohibited. The consequence of prohibition is organised crime.
One fundermental problem with prohibition is that it is unlikely to improve public health. Drugs supplied via a black market tend to be of unknown concentration and purity. Further gangsters tend to deal with their business problems by using weapons. The latter can be a big problem even for people who have no interest in the drugs in question.
Caffeine is highly addictive, and many regular coce and coffee drinkers are indeed dependant. Take away their drug and they'll experience headaches and become very irritable.
Cannabis, on the other hand, is one of the least addictive "drugs" we know.
Prohibition has little to do with if a drug is addictive or harmful. It is based on politics rather than pharmachology.
I pay $11 to sit through 5 tv commercials followed by 6 trailer commercials as well as about 8 studio commercials.
The trailer commercials might make some sense. But what idiot came up with the idea of putting them on VHS and DVD?
Then i sit through a commercial telling me that piracy is illegal and that i could go to jail. This delightful process then takes up 30 minutes of my life that i PAID FOR. This isn't entertainment, this is crap that I don't want and am pissed of by it.
Hence it isn't unknown for people to turn up 30 minutes after the published start time of the movie.
To top it off ushers from the movie theater then walk up and down the isles during the movie with infra-red binoculars in order to seek out pirates with video cameras, which disturbs everyone in the theater.
Effectivly a proportion of your ticket has paid for this "service" of disrupting the entertainment you actually wanted to pay for.
If the **AA were correct, record and movie producers/directors/actors/musicians/singers/britn ey spears would all be penniless paupers and the industry would be bankrupt, and we would have no more movies or music.
There dosn't appear to be any shortage of people wanting to provide entertainment or people wanting to be entertained...
Downloading torrents is very very convenient and quick. Torrent download sites are generally well organised and the vast majority of movie rips are fairly good quality. If I really like the movie I generally go and buy the dvd, because the quality is better - and I hardly ever go to the cinema.
Assuming a "legal" copy is available to you. Having to get something shipped from another country increases the cost both in money and time. (Even more so if you need an airline ticket.) Which is why the proposed "solution" of delaying movie releases to Canada is likely to be counterproductive.
So basically, they want to be able to convict people without evidence?
Sounds like the Canadian police might be actually doing their job. Maybe they are too busy dealing with actual criminals to bother with someone moaning about something which has killed and injuried exactly zero Canadians.
How can these guys still be in business? It seems like every couple weeks for the past 3 or 4 years I have been hearing about them screwing shit up, over and over and over and over again. Any other company would have been history long ago. What's with Diebold? Why don't they die?
Presumably, as with SCO, they have some other entity propping them up...
It's not about what *you* can do, it's about what the government, and the corporations and other private interests, can do, or will be made easier, by the card.
As well as anyone who is trusted by these entities and/or has infiltrated them. Quite possibly several levels removed.
Whilst you may trust your own government do you trust every government your government trusts? Your government will share such information with anyone they trust. Governments routinely spy on other governments, even their "friends". Thus you are not just entrusting this information with one government in practice you are entrusting it to a collection of governments, mobsters, corporations, terrorist groups and other assorted entities.
The correct question to ask is "what good would it do?" Since the answer is "none whatsoever," the government has no business doing it!
Note that this thing is not "free" at best it will just suck money. At worst it will mean that other things which might actually be effective won't get done. The problem with criminal behaviour is one of action and intent. It really dosn't matter if someone arrested has a valid identity document or not. Indeed there is some evidence that some documents can be "get out of jail free cards". The evidence gathered should determine if the case goes to court and if a conviction results. There's also the problem that left to their own devices governments will tend to target people "dangerous" to government (and members of government). It can be considered more important to get rid of people who may try and get incompetent officials shown as the fools they are than someone who might injure or kill some "plebs".
But security is sexy these days and Common Sense isn't.
Except that the former isn't even actually "security". Rather it's an illusion of security, produced by politicans and "journalists", who often don't appear to have the first clue about the subject. There's a lot of real security which isn't in anyway "sexy", involves a lot of hard work and is even counterintuitive on first inspection. One reason for the latter is that a big part of the problem is that the entities you are trying to guard against are intelligent and able to quickly change their behaviour. e.g profiling airline passengers actually weakens security against any remotly organised terrorist group who can take a bit of time. (Even more fundermentally there are plenty of ways of creating mayhem which don't involve aircraft or airports.)
First, national ID looks unconstitutional, and I think it is always a good idea to stop unconstitutional Federal behavior, even if well intentioned. If constitutional limits are regularly trampled even for good intentions, they will become irrelevant on the day that we really need to say, "No, they can't do that." The government needs limits.
There's also the matter that even good intentions can have dire consequences. Hence the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". There's also the problem of working out if the advocated intentions are the actual ones. Sucessful con artists are good at gaining people's trust even when they are talking complete fiction. Thing is that the same skills can also come in handy getting elected.
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I guess the important question is whether this is the correct way of doing it. Politicians are very busy, and don't like their time being wasted.
Problem is that politicians (especially those who have been in office too long) may have a rather warped view of what "time wasting" means compared with the general public. e.g. not regarding being wined and dined by lobbiests as being a time wasting activity...
For many years, MS mail readers and web browsers violated all of those rules, and they continue to violate some of them today.
.EXE files and having them still execute.
Effectivly they decided to do their own thing.
They didn't bother registering content-types for their proprietary data formats or analyzing them for security risks. They didn't label attachments in outgoing mail with meaningful content-types, instead labeling everything as "application/octet-stream" even for contents clearly expected to be presented "inline" as part of the message - expecting the recipient to make sense of the filename suffix. On receipt, their mail readers would ignore the content-type and look at only the filename suffix, thus giving the author of a message the ability to send attachments to any application on the recipient's machine that had a filename suffix associated with it.
Thus meaning that a naming convention which goes back over 20 years still has meaning. Interestingly enough whilst CP/M used the 8.3 convention the filesystem actually used 11 character (7 bit) filenames.
Vendors of competing products more-or-less had to follow suit in order to make their products "usable" by those used to the MS behavior.
It dosn't help that Microsoft wern't even consistent with how they handled things. Which lead to all sorts of exploits involving renaming
I once attended a seminar on buying businesses. One of the methods of getting capital is to sell the customer list of the business you acquire. It doesn't matter what the original owners promised their customers, you own it now and there's nothing they can do about it.
Only in the absense of data protection laws. Try this in the EU and the fines will be a lot more than whatever you might have made by selling the list.
That's something to remember, even the current owners promise that they won't pimp you data, it doesn't prevent future owners from doing so. ANd even then, management changes or business starts take a downturn, it's amazing how "privacy policies" that "are subject to change at anytime" do so.
Even without such a clause these things are pointless. They only exist in the absense of laws to either protect personal data or punish liers.
DRM is crap because it lets the consumer pay for it to take away consumer rights whilst having absolutely no benefit to the consumer.
It's even worst than that. In order for the DRM to be supported the customer must pay for the extra hardware and software to support the DRM. There are also likely to be ongoing costs, at the very least extra electrical power converted to heat in order for all the additional caculations to be performed.
Wasting resources and energy in this way is definitly something the "Greens" tend to be against.
If DRM ever managed to stop breaking copyright, it could be considered useful, but it doesn't.
Even then you'd want to perform some kind of cost/benefit analysis.
All it does is make honest consumers pay more to get their legal rights back, that were taken from them by DRM itself. DRM is extortion; "the more you pay, the less we'll steal from you".
It also may actually encourage piracy. Because people would rather have DRM free "pirate" copies, effectivly the pirate version can become more valuable than the "legit" version. If DRM is too much of a problem it effectivly ends up driving a black economy of paid for DRM free copies.
If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition. It will downgrade the signal if you try to play it on your 2-year old Celeron, and will not play in full 1080p glory.
In the process probably requiring more processing power that doing a non "degraded" rendering of the data.
That's what all the bruhaha is about.
Actually it's more about needing a more powerful machine to do useful work, thus otherwise perfectly functional machines ending up scrapped.
It's not a big deal to some people (like myself, who has a 50-inch HDTV and could care less about playing it on his PC) but to others this functionality is important.
There are actually a couple of relevent issues. The first is how much difference the extra resolution actually makes. Consider that only a small part of the retina is actually high resolution in the first place. The other is if there is "DRM overhead" even when Vista is not handling "protected content", even if the relevent hardware isn't actually in place.
How about 150ml of the Sony CEO's blood per rootkit. If they run out, then start taking blood from the rest of the executives in a hierarchical fashion.
Since Sony are ment to be in the entertainment business how about a "reality show" where viewers can vote for which executive gets fed to the vampire...
Is that $150 per cd "sold through" or $150 per customer who is aware of the lawsuit and actually files to get their cheque?
The number of infected PCs may well not tally well with the number of customers or the number of CDs. Some customers may have bought more than one infected CD and each CD can infect an arbitraty number of PCs. e.g. if it was bought by a lending library a single CD could have infected hundreds...
if i write a rootkit and distribute it inadvertently (because my GF burned it to CD??), would FTC settle?
The "inadvertently" bit would be tricky, in order for things to work the CD has to be mastered such that Windows automatically executes the malware when someone trys to play the disk. You need to do a few more things that just putting an executable on a data track.
Heck, i would be in Gitmo after being "renditioned" to Syria!
Or your GF or both of you...
Actually, the $750 per song is for unintentional infringement.
Even that is a highly inflated figure. Actual "loses" are under 10USD, possibly under one.
This action was obviously intentional and profit-motivated, the statutory damages in that case are $150,000 per infringement
Part of the reason to have such massivly inflated figures is to ensure that the amount of money involved is high enough for law enforcement to take an interest. With something like spamming, even when it involves outright fraud, the amount of money involved per incident is often "too small".
which would be pretty good, I bet that would actually discourage them from doing this again,
Alternativly start putting the people responsible in jail. Remember that the "limited liability" is about the financial liability of investors.
Low voter turnout is endemic to winner takes all systems (and who can blame the voters, in a whole lot of cases there isnt even any point for some voters to vote).
Another factor, possibly most relevent to the US, is where there is lack of diversity amongst the candidates.
I'm sorry but this is not a level playing field. What this is is acknowledging the competition so as to appear fair and silence advocates, but then show off the latest features of Vista's interface, but not show the same in Linux and OSX
It also isn't exactly even handed to have twice as many Vista advocates. It's a bit like having a political program with two Labour, one Tory and one Liberal Democrat...
A very obvious omission was "stick with XP".
Increasing the tax burden with the number of kids (or even keeping it the same, since kids place their own inherent economic burdens on their parents) could potentially be a very bad thing if it led to a decrease in the birthrate.
Possibly the fairest way to handle things would be via a transferable tax allowance.
Marriage is a religious construct, and it shouldn't be specifically recognized by our government.
Historically marriage has had economic elements e.g. effectivly overruling pre-existing wills even political elements e.g. treaties involving (typically arranged) marriages. At some points in history the religious elements of marriage havn't been especially strong.
However - one of the major design points and motivation for the shuttle was the abiliy to retrieve satellites and bring them back down, hence use of the term 'shuttle'. Ultimately this was rarely done,
Because there isn't much actual reason to do so. In the case of a satellite with a failed booster the safe thing is to either fix it in orbit or deorbit it. Sticking a dodgy rocket engine in the back of a manned vehicle is not a good idea.
and in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope the only shuttle which had large enough cargo bay to fit the Hubble was Columbia.
In order to bring it back to Earth you'd first have to dump the solar arrays, power it down and ensure that no fuel is leaking from the attitude control system. Even then what value is the thing on Earth? You don't need a vehicle anything like as big as the shuttle to carry a solid fuel motor suitable for deorbiting a defunct satellite, together with the crew to attach it.
The shuttles are piss-poor satellite delivery systems. They only go into low earth orbit. What we need is a cheap expendable unmanned cargo launch system, and a small passenger shuttle. Combining the two was sheer idiocy.
They were combined for political reasons. A smaller manned vehicle might well be able to reach higher orbits, thus be more useful for repairing satellites.
If the war on drugs was really about protecting public health, both would be illegal.
Of course, we know what happened when alcohol was prohibited. The consequence of prohibition is organised crime.
One fundermental problem with prohibition is that it is unlikely to improve public health. Drugs supplied via a black market tend to be of unknown concentration and purity. Further gangsters tend to deal with their business problems by using weapons. The latter can be a big problem even for people who have no interest in the drugs in question.
Caffeine is highly addictive, and many regular coce and coffee drinkers are indeed dependant. Take away their drug and they'll experience headaches and become very irritable.
Cannabis, on the other hand, is one of the least addictive "drugs" we know.
Prohibition has little to do with if a drug is addictive or harmful. It is based on politics rather than pharmachology.
I pay $11 to sit through 5 tv commercials followed by 6 trailer commercials as well as about 8 studio commercials.
The trailer commercials might make some sense. But what idiot came up with the idea of putting them on VHS and DVD?
Then i sit through a commercial telling me that piracy is illegal and that i could go to jail. This delightful process then takes up 30 minutes of my life that i PAID FOR. This isn't entertainment, this is crap that I don't want and am pissed of by it.
Hence it isn't unknown for people to turn up 30 minutes after the published start time of the movie.
To top it off ushers from the movie theater then walk up and down the isles during the movie with infra-red binoculars in order to seek out pirates with video cameras, which disturbs everyone in the theater.
Effectivly a proportion of your ticket has paid for this "service" of disrupting the entertainment you actually wanted to pay for.
If the **AA were correct, record and movie producers/directors/actors/musicians/singers/britn ey spears would all be penniless paupers and the industry would be bankrupt, and we would have no more movies or music.
There dosn't appear to be any shortage of people wanting to provide entertainment or people wanting to be entertained...
Downloading torrents is very very convenient and quick. Torrent download sites are generally well organised and the vast majority of movie rips are fairly good quality. If I really like the movie I generally go and buy the dvd, because the quality is better - and I hardly ever go to the cinema.
Assuming a "legal" copy is available to you. Having to get something shipped from another country increases the cost both in money and time. (Even more so if you need an airline ticket.)
Which is why the proposed "solution" of delaying movie releases to Canada is likely to be counterproductive.
So basically, they want to be able to convict people without evidence?
:)
Sounds like the Canadian police might be actually doing their job. Maybe they are too busy dealing with actual criminals to bother with someone moaning about something which has killed and injuried exactly zero Canadians.
Is this guy out of his mind?
Almost by definition
The way to get rid of election controversies is to have a national election commission like in India.
No need to even look that far away. It would be easier to have some Canadians come in and run the whole thing.
How can these guys still be in business? It seems like every couple weeks for the past 3 or 4 years I have been hearing about them screwing shit up, over and over and over and over again. Any other company would have been history long ago. What's with Diebold? Why don't they die?
Presumably, as with SCO, they have some other entity propping them up...
It's not about what *you* can do, it's about what the government, and the corporations and other private interests, can do, or will be made easier, by the card.
As well as anyone who is trusted by these entities and/or has infiltrated them. Quite possibly several levels removed.
Whilst you may trust your own government do you trust every government your government trusts? Your government will share such information with anyone they trust. Governments routinely spy on other governments, even their "friends". Thus you are not just entrusting this information with one government in practice you are entrusting it to a collection of governments, mobsters, corporations, terrorist groups and other assorted entities.
The correct question to ask is "what good would it do?" Since the answer is "none whatsoever," the government has no business doing it!
Note that this thing is not "free" at best it will just suck money. At worst it will mean that other things which might actually be effective won't get done.
The problem with criminal behaviour is one of action and intent. It really dosn't matter if someone arrested has a valid identity document or not. Indeed there is some evidence that some documents can be "get out of jail free cards". The evidence gathered should determine if the case goes to court and if a conviction results.
There's also the problem that left to their own devices governments will tend to target people "dangerous" to government (and members of government). It can be considered more important to get rid of people who may try and get incompetent officials shown as the fools they are than someone who might injure or kill some "plebs".
But security is sexy these days and Common Sense isn't.
Except that the former isn't even actually "security". Rather it's an illusion of security, produced by politicans and "journalists", who often don't appear to have the first clue about the subject. There's a lot of real security which isn't in anyway "sexy", involves a lot of hard work and is even counterintuitive on first inspection. One reason for the latter is that a big part of the problem is that the entities you are trying to guard against are intelligent and able to quickly change their behaviour. e.g profiling airline passengers actually weakens security against any remotly organised terrorist group who can take a bit of time. (Even more fundermentally there are plenty of ways of creating mayhem which don't involve aircraft or airports.)
First, national ID looks unconstitutional, and I think it is always a good idea to stop unconstitutional Federal behavior, even if well intentioned. If constitutional limits are regularly trampled even for good intentions, they will become irrelevant on the day that we really need to say, "No, they can't do that." The government needs limits.
There's also the matter that even good intentions can have dire consequences. Hence the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
There's also the problem of working out if the advocated intentions are the actual ones. Sucessful con artists are good at gaining people's trust even when they are talking complete fiction. Thing is that the same skills can also come in handy getting elected.