A more elaborate linguistic dodge (if you were writing a revolutionary manifesto or such) would be to create a detailed outline of your intended message and then set it aside. Go read works from an author, genre, or time period that you normally wouldn't be interested in. Absorb the linguistic quirks of this alter-canon and then "channel" it while you expand your manifesto's outline into a draft.
Take for instance, the distinctive voice of Thomas Paine's Common Sense:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.
I normally use "people" instead of "writers" and "confused" instead of "confounded", avoid multiple negatives/inversions in the same sentence ("little or no"... "whereas"... "not only"... "but"), use more parenthetical comments, write complete sentences after a {comma, conjuction} combination, and avoid the words "whereas" or "wicked". So if I channeled Paine successfully (and had some level awareness of my own quirks), I'd probably produce a linguistically distinct text.
Potential drawbacks include (1) being long-winded when you need to be succinct, (2) coming across as gimmicky b/c your speech isn't normal, or (3) coming across as fake b/c you're busy injecting artifice instead of genuine passion.
Perhaps a more interesting use of this approach would be to "frame" or draw suspicion to someone by producing an manifesto that matches other works they have published.
Privacy extensions are enabled by default in Windows, Mac OS X (since 10.7), and iOS (since version 4.3).
But it doesn't keep ISP's from moving to permanent, static IP addresses. So privacy extensions will "blur" the PC's within a single household together and keep stalking firms (um "ad agencies") from tracking you as you move between coffee shops*, but, in practice, all household traffic you generate will be branded with the same permanent, unique address.
I'm not poo-pooing IPv6, that's just an unfortunate drawback that comes with all of its advantages.
*Tracking you by IP, that is, there are still cookies, local storage, browser fingerprinting, etc.
That's actually what I'm hoping the general public will take away from this. That, basically, games are interactive books. Both are media products designed to express ideas, affect emotions, illicit passions, influence viewpoints, etc., etc. Sometimes the ideas are bad or extremist, but in a free society we protect your freedom to speak even when we hate what you're saying.
So anyways, I'm hoping this event will subtly backfire on the game-haters in the long run by helping the general public see the underlying equivalence of all forms of media. It will probably take awhile though. One barometer is academia: most English/culture departments took a long time to take film studies seriously, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some holdouts. Video games are facing a similar struggle, though ultimately it's inevitable.
Well I'm going to post links to Irish newspapers and charge them $300 per click-thru. If they don't like it, they don't have to respond to HTTP requests with my referrer URL.
Oh, and I'm also hitting them with a one time € 1,000,000 idiot fine. Failure to pay fine will result in confiscation of all assets that belong to NNI, its members and their subsidiaries, as well as the personal property of all high-level executives working for same.
Making sh*t up is fun. Making legal sh*t up is fun and (given all the lawyers I see) very profitable.
Not only that, but it's a very washed out, low-contrast design. Great if you're trying to write some rainy day poetry maybe, but hardly good design.
Also, it's easy to diss "visual gloss for it's own sake", but I think it's fair to judge user interfaces as successful when they positively influence how people feel about the product. As always, emotions are super-important, regardless if your aim is to pull more ordinary users into computing (e.g., grandma and Joe sixpack) or just make a boatload of money (a la Apple).
Turkey's "cultural lobotomy" wasn't entirely bloodless was it?
Check your dates: the Armenian Genocide was conducted by the Ottoman government prior to their being overthrown and replaced by the Republic of Turkey that Ataturk morphed into a secular state. Now it did take a war with 200,000 deaths to create the Republic, and I'm sure that, not being a historian, there are some complications I don't appreciate. But the secularization--the forced cultural shift that freed Turkish politics from the grip of religious posturing--seems to have been largely bloodless.
That's a great article for high-brow programmers who want to triple-plus-abstract and design-pattern everything. You know... the folks who Joel Spolsky calls "architects astronauts". However, notice that this article is readable and thoughtfully characterizes the two coding styles it trying to differentiate. Fundamentally, this person knows their craft.
This is unlike some of my coworkers, who still embedd SQL straight into their GUI's. (I know of one of our apps where all the methods have the same 30+ parameters being slopped around [to represent a row from table X] because the original dev team couldn't be bothered to create a class called "X" to represent the concept of X and so pass around 1 reference.)
These people aren't heroic real-world veterans who sagely ignore the pretentious chatterings of academics... they're simply folks who don't understand how to express themselves clearly in code, much less the runtime environment, compilation process, or other fundamentals of the basic tools they've worked with for the past ~5 years.
The problem is that most "cultural lobotomies" have been performed by ethnic discrimination, terror, or simply mass killing.
Aye, that is a problem. I guess that it all boils down to the fact that until recently, for a very long period (approximately from the end of the Neolithic), there has been very little value put on a human life. And in many parts of the world, it still is.
And, just as counterexample, some "cultural lobotomies" have been relatively bloodless. Some of the changes were subtle, such as adopting a new alphabet so as to separate people from their history. Ninety years later, Turkey's doing better than most of its Islamist cousins. Was it ethical? Probably not, but it turned out better than most ideologically driven changes.
Apple cares about making as much money for its shareholders as possible. Period.
That is the purpose â" the only purpose â" of a business.
Oh well. In that case, let's give them a free pass on any lapses of ethical behavior or social consciousness. Heh heh... no need for them to live up to their agreements after all, eh?
Or, you know... we could point out Apple's crassness to others (especially Apple's core market of naieve-yet-earnest hipsters who actually do care about the environment, etc.). It wouldn't be the first time a company (or Apple itself) changed its stance based on public pressure.
Incidentally, you're wrong about profit being the sole purpose of a business. Some businesses include explicit humanitarian goals in their corporate charter.
And most--while focused on the bottom line--realize that they won't be in business long term if they don't develop good relationships with their employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and communities.
What other outcome would you expect? People aren't becoming less familiar with it because it is forced on all new [consumer] PC's. If you're going to take a data-centric approach please choose data that is meaningful to the issue being discussed. In this case, you'd most likely want to take a look at corporate adoption rate, mac-to-PC sale ratio, and Surface return rate, among other things.
The tutorial plays the first time you log on to a new account..... This accounts for everything the GP complained is hidden and confusing
A video is a poor substitute for a well-designed user interface. For one thing, the forced-pace of a video can overwhelm new users [for whom it seems to fast] and tempt experts [for whom it seems to slow] to skip the tutorial altogether. But mainly, all forms of documentation (videos, manuals, etc.) exist separately from the artifact they document. They have to be remembered or referenced and mentally paired up with what the user is currently looking at. By contrast, design cues (labels, shadows, animations, etc.) are welded to the exact moment and place in which a user is trying to figure something out.
That's not to say that good design can completely eliminate the need for documentation, but should you need to watch a video to figure out how to launch an app on a modern OS? Or open the control panels / system settings / whatever you want to call them? This is a solved problem in OS design, and Microsoft doesn't get a bye in my book for adding a tutorial to compensate--that they tried to paper over it in that fashion is evidence of design denialism at Redmond.
The MFR simply makes the product.
The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.
While I agree with your examples (as you've stated them), manufacturers do have a responsibility for building safe products, anticipating obvious failure modes that could cause human injury, and adequately/appropriately communicating safety issues to end users. As the saying goes, safety is everyone's responsibility (manufacturer's and owner's), and while there are some egregious examples of folks seeking a payday off their own stupidity, let's not forget that good product design is the surest defense against human folly.
Yeah, again. Seems every five years or so there's a book, article, or study saying that IQ is not a single thing.
Moreover, this whole "IQ is wrong because intelligence can be measured in many different dimensions" idea never seems to hit the other major problem with how we typically think about IQ: IQ is bad because it suggests that intelligence is a fixed, innate quantity.
Why does this matter? Well, psychologists have found that people who perceive intelligence as an intrinsic personal characteristic have trouble learning new skills and overcoming certain types of obstacles. (Presumably because they are worried about appearing stupid at something.) By contrast, people who think of intelligence as something that is fluid, that can be built, are more willing to throw themselves into a new activity. Of course, the latter group ends up learning more, which makes your views on IQ curiously self-fulfilling.
As an example, one group of researchers gave elementary kids a reading assignment. The first paragraph contained some really dense material way above their reading level. The remaining paragraphs were accessible and age-appropriate. Kids who believed in fixed intelligence (as determine by a separate test) did very poorly on the reading assignment compared to their peers. Apparently, they got tripped up on the first paragraph and seldom completed the reading.
if there's something you don't want anyone to know, don't do it in the first place.
Please post your bank and account password.
It's not just that we humans have things to hide (legitimate or not), it's that privacy is a basic psychological need. Some people can't work or even pee if someone's watching over their shoulder. Zoologist see this basic need in animals that start going crazy (exhibiting stereotypic motions, etc.) because they've been kept in a concrete pit in front of the public for years (and now zoos exhibits are designed completely differently as a result).
Privacy is a human right--not because we have secrets, but because it's a fundamental need.
the total human population shrunk to 2 000 individuals - that's one flu outbreak from extinction
But... it takes a huge amount of land to support hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't know how much, exactly, but I've seen estimates from ~25 acres per person up to 640 acres per person (1 square mile). Which means these folks were living in very small groups, probably migratory but still extremely spread out. A global drought or el-Nino style weather changes seem like a more likely global threat than flu.
Make static analysis much more anal,... make unit/integration testing mandatory,... [force] API's to be public,... add a sane API mechanism for backwards compatibility,... [require] implementing the old API in terms of the new.
Groan.... everybody's got a solution for code quality, and it always seems to involve being real anal in some respect or another.
The problem with these (untested, speculative) solutions is that they prioritize one development concern at the expense of others. Notice how your own solutions, for example, do nothing to address the installation/deployment issues spoken about in the fine article. Mandatory unit testing is not going to solve usability problems and better static analysis tools (wonderful as they are) aren't going to cue your dev team to add good diagnostic support to the product.
That's not to say that you can't improve code quality thru better languages and tools. You can. But it takes engineering wisdom. And it takes testing (both dog-fooding your own dev tools and community review). And languages/tools can't do everything: to get better code, you ultimately need to get better people, ideally ones who have a balance of all the hard and soft skills needed for successful development. For a field with strong market demand and low barrier to entry, that's going to be hard do anytime soon.
If the student's religion requires that they not wear such articles, then I think it's a pretty clear case that the student should not be going to that school.
The parents are legally obligated to send them there. They can change (for now, maybe not for long) that by paying lots of money or uprooting their life and moving somewhere else. That's not acceptable for a free society
I don't really like Texan-style religious crazies, and I'm not saying that these badges are a bona fide violation of her faith, but no friend of liberty ever says "if you don't like it, don't live here".
But somewhere along the line, advertising usurped that role and no micropayment system ever achieved viability.
Ads would have cropped up anyways, just like they did with cable TV (originally sold under the "pay-and-don't see ads" theory).
And it's easy to see why this is... the penalty for slowly introducing ads, even to a paying audience, is effectively near zero. Oh, people will gripe and you might lose a tiny sliver of your audience, but most folks aren't going to have the righteous ire to punish you long term if they still like your content.
So I think it's pretty silly to hope that "advertising recedes and we come up with [a]... straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund... content." Advertising is not going away, ever, even if you had a time machine. And micro-payments would bring its own social ills.
One problem I see is the US doesn't have any border controls between states. So if some states are strict on scrap metal sales while others don't give a fuck what is stopping the theives simply driving to a state that doesn't give a fuck and selling it there?
Well... time and gas money for one thing. For gangs operating out of major metro areas far from state lines, it kinda makes copper theft uneconomical at current price points. (It also makes other crimes [relatively] more attractive, too. An interesting question to ask would be... what crimes will increase as a result of the legislation?) You won't stop everyone, but legislation like this will be considered successful if it substantially reduces such losses.
Back in the day, there was some concern over the fact that domain names are universal. Someone wanting Amazon in the US for example has different rights than someone wanting Amazon in Brazil. Many people suggested that we go to location-based domains.
Not location-based, but country-based... if we had it to do over again, ccTLD's would be the way to go. That clearly "silos" trademark disputes and numerous other legal issues to each country's respective governing laws. You might make an exception for the root DNS servers and other ICANN-designated entities, but the principal would be the same: the TLD identifies the legal authority for the underlying names.
So when that 747 flies over my house, I can sue AA for millions for trespass?
Somebody tried that already. The supreme court smacked that down. However, it probably would not apply to a low-flying surveillance drone that has no navigational purpose other than interfering with one's enjoyment of their own property. You would think the activist face some sort of criminal or civil liability if the drones are crossing onto private property.
At the same time, the hunters may have criminal liability too... depending on the specific of where they were shooting.
be careful what you create, western legal trolls. it has a way of coming back to bite you in the ass
It's more likely that WIPO will be co-opted by first world interests and used to strong-arm developing nations into unfavorable positions, in some cases robbing them of their very inheritance (cref., WTO). More misery for Africa... that's my guess anyways.
I usually roll my eyes at attempts to diss or stereotype the entire slashdot community, but parent's critique is pretty accurate. Let's remember that the set of things that makes a technical product or business successful does not always overlap with the set of things we value.
Slashdot Mirror
A more elaborate linguistic dodge (if you were writing a revolutionary manifesto or such) would be to create a detailed outline of your intended message and then set it aside. Go read works from an author, genre, or time period that you normally wouldn't be interested in. Absorb the linguistic quirks of this alter-canon and then "channel" it while you expand your manifesto's outline into a draft.
Take for instance, the distinctive voice of Thomas Paine's Common Sense :
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.
I normally use "people" instead of "writers" and "confused" instead of "confounded", avoid multiple negatives/inversions in the same sentence ("little or no"... "whereas"... "not only"... "but"), use more parenthetical comments, write complete sentences after a {comma, conjuction} combination, and avoid the words "whereas" or "wicked". So if I channeled Paine successfully (and had some level awareness of my own quirks), I'd probably produce a linguistically distinct text.
Potential drawbacks include (1) being long-winded when you need to be succinct, (2) coming across as gimmicky b/c your speech isn't normal, or (3) coming across as fake b/c you're busy injecting artifice instead of genuine passion.
Perhaps a more interesting use of this approach would be to "frame" or draw suspicion to someone by producing an manifesto that matches other works they have published.
Privacy extensions are enabled by default in Windows, Mac OS X (since 10.7), and iOS (since version 4.3).
But it doesn't keep ISP's from moving to permanent, static IP addresses. So privacy extensions will "blur" the PC's within a single household together and keep stalking firms (um "ad agencies") from tracking you as you move between coffee shops*, but, in practice, all household traffic you generate will be branded with the same permanent, unique address.
I'm not poo-pooing IPv6, that's just an unfortunate drawback that comes with all of its advantages.
*Tracking you by IP, that is, there are still cookies, local storage, browser fingerprinting, etc.
Because a 7-8" android with stylus would be pretty convenient.
And preferably it would have a retina display, full-size sd card port, and unlocked bootloader.
But I'm not holding my breath.
No different then book burning.
That's actually what I'm hoping the general public will take away from this. That, basically, games are interactive books. Both are media products designed to express ideas, affect emotions, illicit passions, influence viewpoints, etc., etc. Sometimes the ideas are bad or extremist, but in a free society we protect your freedom to speak even when we hate what you're saying.
So anyways, I'm hoping this event will subtly backfire on the game-haters in the long run by helping the general public see the underlying equivalence of all forms of media. It will probably take awhile though. One barometer is academia: most English/culture departments took a long time to take film studies seriously, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some holdouts. Video games are facing a similar struggle, though ultimately it's inevitable.
Well I'm going to post links to Irish newspapers and charge them $300 per click-thru. If they don't like it, they don't have to respond to HTTP requests with my referrer URL.
Oh, and I'm also hitting them with a one time € 1,000,000 idiot fine. Failure to pay fine will result in confiscation of all assets that belong to NNI, its members and their subsidiaries, as well as the personal property of all high-level executives working for same.
Making sh*t up is fun. Making legal sh*t up is fun and (given all the lawyers I see) very profitable.
Some guy found a KDE theme he really liked.
Not only that, but it's a very washed out, low-contrast design. Great if you're trying to write some rainy day poetry maybe, but hardly good design.
Also, it's easy to diss "visual gloss for it's own sake", but I think it's fair to judge user interfaces as successful when they positively influence how people feel about the product. As always, emotions are super-important, regardless if your aim is to pull more ordinary users into computing (e.g., grandma and Joe sixpack) or just make a boatload of money (a la Apple).
Turkey's "cultural lobotomy" wasn't entirely bloodless was it?
Check your dates: the Armenian Genocide was conducted by the Ottoman government prior to their being overthrown and replaced by the Republic of Turkey that Ataturk morphed into a secular state. Now it did take a war with 200,000 deaths to create the Republic, and I'm sure that, not being a historian, there are some complications I don't appreciate. But the secularization--the forced cultural shift that freed Turkish politics from the grip of religious posturing--seems to have been largely bloodless.
It might be interesting to read The Rise of "Worse is Better"
That's a great article for high-brow programmers who want to triple-plus-abstract and design-pattern everything. You know... the folks who Joel Spolsky calls "architects astronauts". However, notice that this article is readable and thoughtfully characterizes the two coding styles it trying to differentiate. Fundamentally, this person knows their craft.
This is unlike some of my coworkers, who still embedd SQL straight into their GUI's. (I know of one of our apps where all the methods have the same 30+ parameters being slopped around [to represent a row from table X] because the original dev team couldn't be bothered to create a class called "X" to represent the concept of X and so pass around 1 reference.)
These people aren't heroic real-world veterans who sagely ignore the pretentious chatterings of academics... they're simply folks who don't understand how to express themselves clearly in code, much less the runtime environment, compilation process, or other fundamentals of the basic tools they've worked with for the past ~5 years.
The problem is that most "cultural lobotomies" have been performed by ethnic discrimination, terror, or simply mass killing.
Aye, that is a problem. I guess that it all boils down to the fact that until recently, for a very long period (approximately from the end of the Neolithic), there has been very little value put on a human life. And in many parts of the world, it still is.
And, just as counterexample, some "cultural lobotomies" have been relatively bloodless. Some of the changes were subtle, such as adopting a new alphabet so as to separate people from their history. Ninety years later, Turkey's doing better than most of its Islamist cousins. Was it ethical? Probably not, but it turned out better than most ideologically driven changes.
Apple cares about making as much money for its shareholders as possible. Period.
That is the purpose â" the only purpose â" of a business.
Oh well. In that case, let's give them a free pass on any lapses of ethical behavior or social consciousness. Heh heh... no need for them to live up to their agreements after all, eh?
Or, you know... we could point out Apple's crassness to others (especially Apple's core market of naieve-yet-earnest hipsters who actually do care about the environment, etc.). It wouldn't be the first time a company (or Apple itself) changed its stance based on public pressure.
Incidentally, you're wrong about profit being the sole purpose of a business. Some businesses include explicit humanitarian goals in their corporate charter. And most--while focused on the bottom line--realize that they won't be in business long term if they don't develop good relationships with their employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and communities.
Data shows people are becoming familiar with it.
What other outcome would you expect? People aren't becoming less familiar with it because it is forced on all new [consumer] PC's. If you're going to take a data-centric approach please choose data that is meaningful to the issue being discussed. In this case, you'd most likely want to take a look at corporate adoption rate, mac-to-PC sale ratio, and Surface return rate, among other things.
The tutorial plays the first time you log on to a new account..... This accounts for everything the GP complained is hidden and confusing
A video is a poor substitute for a well-designed user interface. For one thing, the forced-pace of a video can overwhelm new users [for whom it seems to fast] and tempt experts [for whom it seems to slow] to skip the tutorial altogether. But mainly, all forms of documentation (videos, manuals, etc.) exist separately from the artifact they document. They have to be remembered or referenced and mentally paired up with what the user is currently looking at. By contrast, design cues (labels, shadows, animations, etc.) are welded to the exact moment and place in which a user is trying to figure something out.
That's not to say that good design can completely eliminate the need for documentation, but should you need to watch a video to figure out how to launch an app on a modern OS? Or open the control panels / system settings / whatever you want to call them? This is a solved problem in OS design, and Microsoft doesn't get a bye in my book for adding a tutorial to compensate--that they tried to paper over it in that fashion is evidence of design denialism at Redmond.
The MFR simply makes the product.
The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.
While I agree with your examples (as you've stated them), manufacturers do have a responsibility for building safe products, anticipating obvious failure modes that could cause human injury, and adequately/appropriately communicating safety issues to end users. As the saying goes, safety is everyone's responsibility (manufacturer's and owner's), and while there are some egregious examples of folks seeking a payday off their own stupidity, let's not forget that good product design is the surest defense against human folly.
Yeah, again. Seems every five years or so there's a book, article, or study saying that IQ is not a single thing.
Moreover, this whole "IQ is wrong because intelligence can be measured in many different dimensions" idea never seems to hit the other major problem with how we typically think about IQ: IQ is bad because it suggests that intelligence is a fixed, innate quantity.
Why does this matter? Well, psychologists have found that people who perceive intelligence as an intrinsic personal characteristic have trouble learning new skills and overcoming certain types of obstacles. (Presumably because they are worried about appearing stupid at something.) By contrast, people who think of intelligence as something that is fluid, that can be built, are more willing to throw themselves into a new activity. Of course, the latter group ends up learning more, which makes your views on IQ curiously self-fulfilling.
As an example, one group of researchers gave elementary kids a reading assignment. The first paragraph contained some really dense material way above their reading level. The remaining paragraphs were accessible and age-appropriate. Kids who believed in fixed intelligence (as determine by a separate test) did very poorly on the reading assignment compared to their peers. Apparently, they got tripped up on the first paragraph and seldom completed the reading.
if there's something you don't want anyone to know, don't do it in the first place.
Please post your bank and account password.
It's not just that we humans have things to hide (legitimate or not), it's that privacy is a basic psychological need. Some people can't work or even pee if someone's watching over their shoulder. Zoologist see this basic need in animals that start going crazy (exhibiting stereotypic motions, etc.) because they've been kept in a concrete pit in front of the public for years (and now zoos exhibits are designed completely differently as a result).
Privacy is a human right--not because we have secrets, but because it's a fundamental need.
the total human population shrunk to 2 000 individuals - that's one flu outbreak from extinction
But... it takes a huge amount of land to support hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't know how much, exactly, but I've seen estimates from ~25 acres per person up to 640 acres per person (1 square mile). Which means these folks were living in very small groups, probably migratory but still extremely spread out. A global drought or el-Nino style weather changes seem like a more likely global threat than flu.
Make static analysis much more anal, ... make unit/integration testing mandatory,... [force] API's to be public,... add a sane API mechanism for backwards compatibility,... [require] implementing the old API in terms of the new.
Groan.... everybody's got a solution for code quality, and it always seems to involve being real anal in some respect or another.
The problem with these (untested, speculative) solutions is that they prioritize one development concern at the expense of others. Notice how your own solutions, for example, do nothing to address the installation/deployment issues spoken about in the fine article. Mandatory unit testing is not going to solve usability problems and better static analysis tools (wonderful as they are) aren't going to cue your dev team to add good diagnostic support to the product.
That's not to say that you can't improve code quality thru better languages and tools. You can. But it takes engineering wisdom. And it takes testing (both dog-fooding your own dev tools and community review). And languages/tools can't do everything: to get better code, you ultimately need to get better people, ideally ones who have a balance of all the hard and soft skills needed for successful development. For a field with strong market demand and low barrier to entry, that's going to be hard do anytime soon.
If the student's religion requires that they not wear such articles, then I think it's a pretty clear case that the student should not be going to that school.
The parents are legally obligated to send them there. They can change (for now, maybe not for long) that by paying lots of money or uprooting their life and moving somewhere else. That's not acceptable for a free society
I don't really like Texan-style religious crazies, and I'm not saying that these badges are a bona fide violation of her faith, but no friend of liberty ever says "if you don't like it, don't live here".
But somewhere along the line, advertising usurped that role and no micropayment system ever achieved viability.
Ads would have cropped up anyways, just like they did with cable TV (originally sold under the "pay-and-don't see ads" theory).
And it's easy to see why this is... the penalty for slowly introducing ads, even to a paying audience, is effectively near zero. Oh, people will gripe and you might lose a tiny sliver of your audience, but most folks aren't going to have the righteous ire to punish you long term if they still like your content.
So I think it's pretty silly to hope that "advertising recedes and we come up with [a] ... straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund ... content." Advertising is not going away, ever, even if you had a time machine. And micro-payments would bring its own social ills.
One problem I see is the US doesn't have any border controls between states. So if some states are strict on scrap metal sales while others don't give a fuck what is stopping the theives simply driving to a state that doesn't give a fuck and selling it there?
Well... time and gas money for one thing. For gangs operating out of major metro areas far from state lines, it kinda makes copper theft uneconomical at current price points. (It also makes other crimes [relatively] more attractive, too. An interesting question to ask would be... what crimes will increase as a result of the legislation?) You won't stop everyone, but legislation like this will be considered successful if it substantially reduces such losses.
Also, with something like this, the net inevitably gets tighter as more and more states pass similar laws [and notice that article is 4 years old].
Start making the recyclers who pay cash for copper keep records and start prosecuting them for receiving stolen goods.
That's what other states have done, but the fence is more amusing.
Back in the day, there was some concern over the fact that domain names are universal. Someone wanting Amazon in the US for example has different rights than someone wanting Amazon in Brazil. Many people suggested that we go to location-based domains.
Not location-based, but country-based... if we had it to do over again, ccTLD's would be the way to go. That clearly "silos" trademark disputes and numerous other legal issues to each country's respective governing laws. You might make an exception for the root DNS servers and other ICANN-designated entities, but the principal would be the same: the TLD identifies the legal authority for the underlying names.
So when that 747 flies over my house, I can sue AA for millions for trespass?
Somebody tried that already. The supreme court smacked that down. However, it probably would not apply to a low-flying surveillance drone that has no navigational purpose other than interfering with one's enjoyment of their own property. You would think the activist face some sort of criminal or civil liability if the drones are crossing onto private property.
At the same time, the hunters may have criminal liability too... depending on the specific of where they were shooting.
be careful what you create, western legal trolls. it has a way of coming back to bite you in the ass
It's more likely that WIPO will be co-opted by first world interests and used to strong-arm developing nations into unfavorable positions, in some cases robbing them of their very inheritance (cref., WTO). More misery for Africa... that's my guess anyways.
I usually roll my eyes at attempts to diss or stereotype the entire slashdot community, but parent's critique is pretty accurate. Let's remember that the set of things that makes a technical product or business successful does not always overlap with the set of things we value.