There is no requirement of "absolute privacy" to keep someone off your private property. If I want to, I can even say that everyone _except_ _you_ is allowed in my living room. It's that simple. If it's private property, I have the right to allow or disallow access to whoever I see fit, no matter how arbitrary."
In fact, this is one of the methods used to assert private ownership over property that is usually publicly accessable -- closing it off one day per year, to demonstrate the continuing ability to keep it private, should the owner so desire.
I used to live next to a stretch of county-owned land that had been used as a shortcut by drivers for many years. At some point the county tried to close the ad hoc road created by 20 years of shortcut-seekers, but a court denied them, saying they'd left it open too long and that the ad hoc road was now public access.
In that case, you should be perfectly okay with roving gangs of travelling salesmen driving up to your house and knocking on your door any time they want, despite your "no soliciting" signs, eh??
I see no functional difference between that, and Google ignoring a "no trespassing" sign in pursuit of corporate profit.
I think it's simply meant to be punitive. You can't say "We're suing you to teach you not to be dicks with no respect for privacy" so instead we have these other various damages.
Agreed.... and a couple of the comments under TFA said volumes:
"google (and america) must come to realize that a business model based on nothing *but* advertizing can be nothing *but* evil"
and
"Google is a data acquisition company at the end of the day and they are selling info on their users as well as anyone else they can get their hands on.... even if it means illegal trespassing on private property."
"In a submission to court, Google is arguing that in the modern world there can be no expectation of privacy *because of Google*."
I think that's exactly what they're arguing: "WE can snoop, so we want the RIGHT to snoop". But they don't want to be seen as the bad guys, so they're blaming society as a whole and just claiming to be part of said unprivate society.
As to someone else's comment about low-flying aircraft, there are rules about how low you can fly, which are there not only for safety, but also for privacy -- or so I was taught in aviation class (admittedly 36 years ago when privacy still existed as a natural right). And I was taught that ANYONE can file complaints about aircraft that are below the specified flight floors, other than in takeoff/landing patterns (or in an emergency landing).
Actually, most servers DO restrict by size -- that's why we have multipart encoded messages.
And there's no good way to distinguish text from binary, since binaries are encoded as text for NNTP propagation.
The various binaries hierarchies were supposed to separate encoded binaries from conversational text, but in practice way too many people were lazy twits and posted wherever the hell they happened to be, rather than in the appropriate newsgroup.
I started with Usenet back in 1993, but for the past few years have rarely visited even my regular old haunts, let alone cruised at random, because most of the good conversation has long since moved elsewhere (including to slashdot!), and yEnc encoding mucked up binaries (I have yet to get an uncorrupted yEnc file from any newsgroup, and have quit trying).
I miss dialup BBSs too, but time marches on, or more accurately, tromps over us.
A good newsreader has much in common with a good BBS-style offline mail reader. Similar capabilities, interface, and behaviour. Extremely efficient, as is so commonly the case for essentially text-based apps.
The downside is that even the most self-evident clients for either venue have a learning curve that is beyond the average user of today, who has enough trouble figuring out that POP3 and webmail use different parts of their browser suite.
We oldsters learned OLMRs and NNTP clients because we had no choice. If you wanted group communication, they were THE choices.
Kids wandered off to IRC early on, because they liked the instantaneous in-your-faceness of it. And they took a whole lot of the daily conversation with 'em. That, I think, was the first major nail in the discussion groups' coffin.
Now, as others point out, there are other choices which offer group communication to anyone, no matter how "internet-impaired" they are. The new methods (mainly web forums) are clunky and inefficient, but it's where the majority of interpersonal communication now takes place.
I still prefer BBSs and usenet for sheer ease of use (that is, for we old text diehards), but hardly anyone I know or want to talk to is there anymore.:(
Hmm, I think you've got a very legit concern there...
So what about a proxy that hooks to the service?
Which I suppose is all well and good until the proxy gets compromised:/
Here's a better idea: get the existing torrent sites onboard as distributors. Give them a cut of every sale. They'll be quickly incentivized to make it easier to find paid downloads than freebies.
Normally I *BUY* my movies on DVD, and here is why I don't want DRM on them (we'll pretend CSS isn't DRM for this discussion, since it's been pretty much negated by modern rippers):
Not infrequently, the DVD is bad right out of the box, and will not play correctly. However, for the typical $12 movie, it's not really worth the bother to locate the receipt, call the vendor, argue about whether it's really the DVD or my player, package it up, send it back at my own expense, wait for a replacement to come that may well be in worse condition (DVDs being the fragile creatures they are), rinse and repeat.
Rather than inconvenience myself (and cost the vendor money too -- why needlessly drive up costs and therefore prices??), I just sic a ripper on the defective disk, and eventually it extracts a watchable file. (Worst one took 14 hours to get past whatever was wrong with the disk, but it DID extract.)
If I can't do this, it reduces the value of purchased DVDs to exactly the value of a free download, since as noted, the RMA process really isn't worth my cost and bother for a $12 disk.
So, listen up, Hollywood -- make your disks rip-proof, and I'll stop buying them.
Same for purchased downloads: Let me do whatever I damn please with 'em. Watermark the file, I don't care about that -- I'm not interested in uploading 'em to the wide world anyway. But don't stop me from storing it however I like, or accessing it whenever I wish without needing a special key or internet connection, or fixing the file if something ails it -- same as I can with the DVDs I currently buy.
An AC reports, "I don't know KAMAS but I do remember a DOS app called 'DIRWORKS' which was a great little file explorer, and guess what ?! It used a tree view."
And come to look it up, KAMAS was a CP/M app first.
And come to mention DOS file managers/explorers, the original version of XTree (1985) also did tree view.
And I'm reminded of something we had on my university's mainframe (of pre-1972 vintage) that printed a tree view of files and commands; this was back before CRTs, when all output was printed instead.
And back in the era of paper and pencil, we were taught to do outlining in just such a manner.
"Did you ever think that maybe it's the irresponsible and unreliable people who are the ones who smoke pot all day?"
There is that, but I've also known people who were perfectly reliable when they were straight, but when they smoked weed, became lackadasical and unreliable. I've seen this enough to make a connection.
Then, the people of America were trying to free themselves from what amounted to a foreign overseer with a massive global network but a relatively poor local presence.
Now, the people of America would have to free themselves from a local overseer, which lacks immediate support from foreign powers but has a massive local presence.
If copyright terms were shorter, there might not be any need to enforce anti-piracy, since the motivation would be vastly reduced. Can't afford or are too cheap to buy something? Wait a bit and it'll be public domain. Really want something or don't want to wait? Easier to just buy it while it's fresh than to chase it all over hell.
And as I've pointed out elsewhere, just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's not possible to make money publishing it. If it's in demand in *any* format other than purely digital, SOMEONE has to manufacture it, and the output can then be sold -- rather like bread. We can all grow wheat in our back yards and grind our own flour and bake our own bread, but it's generally not worth the trouble when yonder is the bakery.
Whilst reading this comment chain, I had the cynical thought that any job that *requires* "protection" probably lacks (or has lost) any real reason to exist.
And I've also known a lot of pot smokers -- and I would say the opposite: it causes people to forget their responsibilities and become generally unreliable, since nothing seems all that important. Yeah, it doesn't cause as much physical impairment as alcohol, but I wouldn't consider someone high on pot to be entirely in their full wits, either.
I don't care if someone smokes weed at home, or with a designated [sober] driver, but don't go putting other people at risk by using then driving (or operating dangerous machinery, or whatever).
It's a far more serious problem when anonymous snitching is used as a social weapon against anyone you don't like, disagree with, or have a feud going with. And historically, this is a much more frequent use than are legit snitches helping the cops solve actual crimes.
I think that may well be the case now in the U.S. at least in non-illegal-immigrant populations, even tho it wasn't true (in my observation, anyway) 30-odd years ago, and is quite definitely not true in some heavily-Catholic countries.
Goes to show the society around a church is more of a factor than the church itself, tho it can also be a unifying factor.
I do remember when it was different, and Catholics were almost regarded (and considered themselves) as a different "race". But like you said -- in the U.S., nobody gives a crap anymore. Which is a good thing, I think -- keep whatever is good in the religion, and discard whatever divides people into hostile camps.
This Catholic JH school didn't have a huge incentive since they got a lot of the kids from the neighbourhoods between the two public Junior Highs, Catholic or not. Of course this was at the tail end of the cloistered-education era, too (1960s-70s). At the time, I recall Catholics across the board tended to be less-educated than other folks. As you note, this appears to have changed with the modernization of the church's attitudes toward science, but moreso, I think, in its attitudes toward education in general -- education is no longer solely for the glory of God and the benefit of the monasteries.
I'm not Catholic, nor religious, but I think it's an interesting social evolution regardless.
Somehow I missed that part:) But as someone else says, and as I speculate in another post, now it sounds like something is awry in the house wiring.
I had something like that here, where stuff plugged into a certain kitchen outlet made the bathroom plug flicker or not work, and v.v. Turned out they're on the same circuit (my house was evidently wired by a contortionist) and the polarity was wrong on the bathroom plug. Fixed that and the problem went away.
Similarly, the 220 outlet in my kitchen doesn't carry enough amps -- so if I try to use both the oven and the stovetop (on my electric range), it'll pop *half* of the 220 circuit's breaker (it's two breakers wired together, however that works). And then the stove goes thru the motions and looks like it's still powered on, but nothing cooks.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, this is one of the methods used to assert private ownership over property that is usually publicly accessable -- closing it off one day per year, to demonstrate the continuing ability to keep it private, should the owner so desire.
I used to live next to a stretch of county-owned land that had been used as a shortcut by drivers for many years. At some point the county tried to close the ad hoc road created by 20 years of shortcut-seekers, but a court denied them, saying they'd left it open too long and that the ad hoc road was now public access.
In that case, you should be perfectly okay with roving gangs of travelling salesmen driving up to your house and knocking on your door any time they want, despite your "no soliciting" signs, eh??
I see no functional difference between that, and Google ignoring a "no trespassing" sign in pursuit of corporate profit.
I think it's simply meant to be punitive. You can't say "We're suing you to teach you not to be dicks with no respect for privacy" so instead we have these other various damages.
Agreed.... and a couple of the comments under TFA said volumes:
"google (and america) must come to realize that a business model based on nothing *but* advertizing can be nothing *but* evil"
and
"Google is a data acquisition company at the end of the day and they are selling info on their users as well as anyone else they can get their hands on.... even if it means illegal trespassing on private property."
"In a submission to court, Google is arguing that in the modern world there can be no expectation of privacy *because of Google*."
I think that's exactly what they're arguing: "WE can snoop, so we want the RIGHT to snoop". But they don't want to be seen as the bad guys, so they're blaming society as a whole and just claiming to be part of said unprivate society.
As to someone else's comment about low-flying aircraft, there are rules about how low you can fly, which are there not only for safety, but also for privacy -- or so I was taught in aviation class (admittedly 36 years ago when privacy still existed as a natural right). And I was taught that ANYONE can file complaints about aircraft that are below the specified flight floors, other than in takeoff/landing patterns (or in an emergency landing).
Actually, most servers DO restrict by size -- that's why we have multipart encoded messages.
And there's no good way to distinguish text from binary, since binaries are encoded as text for NNTP propagation.
The various binaries hierarchies were supposed to separate encoded binaries from conversational text, but in practice way too many people were lazy twits and posted wherever the hell they happened to be, rather than in the appropriate newsgroup.
I started with Usenet back in 1993, but for the past few years have rarely visited even my regular old haunts, let alone cruised at random, because most of the good conversation has long since moved elsewhere (including to slashdot!), and yEnc encoding mucked up binaries (I have yet to get an uncorrupted yEnc file from any newsgroup, and have quit trying).
I miss dialup BBSs too, but time marches on, or more accurately, tromps over us.
A good newsreader has much in common with a good BBS-style offline mail reader. Similar capabilities, interface, and behaviour. Extremely efficient, as is so commonly the case for essentially text-based apps.
The downside is that even the most self-evident clients for either venue have a learning curve that is beyond the average user of today, who has enough trouble figuring out that POP3 and webmail use different parts of their browser suite.
We oldsters learned OLMRs and NNTP clients because we had no choice. If you wanted group communication, they were THE choices.
Kids wandered off to IRC early on, because they liked the instantaneous in-your-faceness of it. And they took a whole lot of the daily conversation with 'em. That, I think, was the first major nail in the discussion groups' coffin.
Now, as others point out, there are other choices which offer group communication to anyone, no matter how "internet-impaired" they are. The new methods (mainly web forums) are clunky and inefficient, but it's where the majority of interpersonal communication now takes place.
I still prefer BBSs and usenet for sheer ease of use (that is, for we old text diehards), but hardly anyone I know or want to talk to is there anymore. :(
Hmm, I think you've got a very legit concern there...
So what about a proxy that hooks to the service?
Which I suppose is all well and good until the proxy gets compromised :/
Here's a better idea: get the existing torrent sites onboard as distributors. Give them a cut of every sale. They'll be quickly incentivized to make it easier to find paid downloads than freebies.
Well, preventing that in perpetuity would have to be part of the deal then, eh?
But you're right -- enforcing that, with all the myriad ways to sneak new laws in under everyone's radar, would be difficult at best.
Better to change copyright law without special interests skewing the process.
Normally I *BUY* my movies on DVD, and here is why I don't want DRM on them (we'll pretend CSS isn't DRM for this discussion, since it's been pretty much negated by modern rippers):
Not infrequently, the DVD is bad right out of the box, and will not play correctly. However, for the typical $12 movie, it's not really worth the bother to locate the receipt, call the vendor, argue about whether it's really the DVD or my player, package it up, send it back at my own expense, wait for a replacement to come that may well be in worse condition (DVDs being the fragile creatures they are), rinse and repeat.
Rather than inconvenience myself (and cost the vendor money too -- why needlessly drive up costs and therefore prices??), I just sic a ripper on the defective disk, and eventually it extracts a watchable file. (Worst one took 14 hours to get past whatever was wrong with the disk, but it DID extract.)
If I can't do this, it reduces the value of purchased DVDs to exactly the value of a free download, since as noted, the RMA process really isn't worth my cost and bother for a $12 disk.
So, listen up, Hollywood -- make your disks rip-proof, and I'll stop buying them.
Same for purchased downloads: Let me do whatever I damn please with 'em. Watermark the file, I don't care about that -- I'm not interested in uploading 'em to the wide world anyway. But don't stop me from storing it however I like, or accessing it whenever I wish without needing a special key or internet connection, or fixing the file if something ails it -- same as I can with the DVDs I currently buy.
An AC reports, "I don't know KAMAS but I do remember a DOS app called 'DIRWORKS' which was a great little file explorer, and guess what ?! It used a tree view."
And come to look it up, KAMAS was a CP/M app first.
And come to mention DOS file managers/explorers, the original version of XTree (1985) also did tree view.
And I'm reminded of something we had on my university's mainframe (of pre-1972 vintage) that printed a tree view of files and commands; this was back before CRTs, when all output was printed instead.
And back in the era of paper and pencil, we were taught to do outlining in just such a manner.
So, yeah, the world is lousy with prior art.
"Did you ever think that maybe it's the irresponsible and unreliable people who are the ones who smoke pot all day?"
There is that, but I've also known people who were perfectly reliable when they were straight, but when they smoked weed, became lackadasical and unreliable. I've seen this enough to make a connection.
Oops, I mean assuming that it WOULD be copyrighted (as one of the states tried to do with all its state laws a while back).
So, speaking as an insider, what would you do about the problem of being afflicted with a self-interested government??
1776 wasn't the same, tho.
Then, the people of America were trying to free themselves from what amounted to a foreign overseer with a massive global network but a relatively poor local presence.
Now, the people of America would have to free themselves from a local overseer, which lacks immediate support from foreign powers but has a massive local presence.
This brings to mind a strange question...
What if the Constitution were written today... who would own the copyright??
And how would that affect its functionality?
Rennaisance portrait painters would be astonished to learn that only copyright made their profession profitable. ;)
If copyright terms were shorter, there might not be any need to enforce anti-piracy, since the motivation would be vastly reduced. Can't afford or are too cheap to buy something? Wait a bit and it'll be public domain. Really want something or don't want to wait? Easier to just buy it while it's fresh than to chase it all over hell.
And as I've pointed out elsewhere, just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's not possible to make money publishing it. If it's in demand in *any* format other than purely digital, SOMEONE has to manufacture it, and the output can then be sold -- rather like bread. We can all grow wheat in our back yards and grind our own flour and bake our own bread, but it's generally not worth the trouble when yonder is the bakery.
Whilst reading this comment chain, I had the cynical thought that any job that *requires* "protection" probably lacks (or has lost) any real reason to exist.
And I've also known a lot of pot smokers -- and I would say the opposite: it causes people to forget their responsibilities and become generally unreliable, since nothing seems all that important. Yeah, it doesn't cause as much physical impairment as alcohol, but I wouldn't consider someone high on pot to be entirely in their full wits, either.
I don't care if someone smokes weed at home, or with a designated [sober] driver, but don't go putting other people at risk by using then driving (or operating dangerous machinery, or whatever).
It's a far more serious problem when anonymous snitching is used as a social weapon against anyone you don't like, disagree with, or have a feud going with. And historically, this is a much more frequent use than are legit snitches helping the cops solve actual crimes.
Tree view existed in DOS apps too. Anyone else remember KAMAS, the outlining program? it dates to 1987, and I doubt it was the first.
I think that may well be the case now in the U.S. at least in non-illegal-immigrant populations, even tho it wasn't true (in my observation, anyway) 30-odd years ago, and is quite definitely not true in some heavily-Catholic countries.
Goes to show the society around a church is more of a factor than the church itself, tho it can also be a unifying factor.
I do remember when it was different, and Catholics were almost regarded (and considered themselves) as a different "race". But like you said -- in the U.S., nobody gives a crap anymore. Which is a good thing, I think -- keep whatever is good in the religion, and discard whatever divides people into hostile camps.
This Catholic JH school didn't have a huge incentive since they got a lot of the kids from the neighbourhoods between the two public Junior Highs, Catholic or not. Of course this was at the tail end of the cloistered-education era, too (1960s-70s). At the time, I recall Catholics across the board tended to be less-educated than other folks. As you note, this appears to have changed with the modernization of the church's attitudes toward science, but moreso, I think, in its attitudes toward education in general -- education is no longer solely for the glory of God and the benefit of the monasteries.
I'm not Catholic, nor religious, but I think it's an interesting social evolution regardless.
Somehow I missed that part :) But as someone else says, and as I speculate in another post, now it sounds like something is awry in the house wiring.
I had something like that here, where stuff plugged into a certain kitchen outlet made the bathroom plug flicker or not work, and v.v. Turned out they're on the same circuit (my house was evidently wired by a contortionist) and the polarity was wrong on the bathroom plug. Fixed that and the problem went away.
Similarly, the 220 outlet in my kitchen doesn't carry enough amps -- so if I try to use both the oven and the stovetop (on my electric range), it'll pop *half* of the 220 circuit's breaker (it's two breakers wired together, however that works). And then the stove goes thru the motions and looks like it's still powered on, but nothing cooks.