In short, you can poke a peeping tom in the eye with a stick, or see that you're being observed and close your blinds. You don't have either opportunity with a roving camera, and furthermore you have no idea who is watching you.
When I first heard of Street View, I thought it was just a public webcam aggregator -- and that would be a cool thing. But those are fixed views that don't generally peer into private space.
[wicked thought] If enough people hung blowups of the goatse.cx man in their front windows... hmm.;)
If Google happens to catch a shot of your naked child "playing with himself", does that constitute kiddie porn? If so, who is liable -- Google for "distributing" it, or the parent for "facilitating" it??
Second, what about stuff where anyone knowing of a crime is supposed to report it, and Google catches something innocuous but illegal, such as someone's pot plant or (in some states) two guys getting it on?
Disturbing implications all around, given the current state of mind in some circles of law enforcement.
Our standards HAVE dropped. And as I've said before, "reality shows" are a good deal of the reason. They've taught us that SNOOPING IS OKAY and that there ARE NO PENALTIES FOR DOING SO.
People have always been snoopy. Voyeurism seems to be built into the human species. But without technological help, this never gets beyond the neighbourhood peeping tom, and such behaviour has never been considered normal or acceptable. (In fact, it was liable to get you a squirt of ammonia in the eyes.)
But reality shows changed that. Now viewers can be peeping toms with impunity, and cannot be 'caught' doing this socially-unacceptable behaviour, because they get to do it by way of someone else's camera. And I think this has in turn diluted the present generation's expectation of privacy -- snooping has become normal and expected behaviour.
It should be no surprise that both gov't and private concerns increasingly think that full-time surveillance is perfectly legit, and that more and more young people see nothing wrong with this -- after all, they were raised in the Reality TV era, and don't know any better.
You have a good point. People tend to adopt only that which is 1) readily available, AND 2) gives them the least hassle *compared to what they're already using*. If linux was really all that superior on the desktop, there'd be little reason for zealotry, because users would naturally flow toward it.
As of the last halfway-reliable data I've seen, based on browser-and-platform stats recorded by several well-trafficked websites, linux had about 0.8% marketshare on the desktop. To put it in perspective, that's about 1/3rd of Apple's marketshare on the desktop, and remember linux doesn't have Apple's artificial restriction against adoption by way of requiring higher-priced proprietary hardware.
By contrast, linux's *internet server* marketshare has hovered in the 50% range for a long time (per Netcraft and others). But on a server, your goals are different, and whether an OS sucks as a *desktop* platform is irrelevant.
As to the nominal topic, I like the idea, and if it went into action at a major site like sourceforge, it could also spur developers into using more-consistent installers and behaviour. One of my pet gripes with opensource is indeed that everyone has their own notions about how to install stuff. This isn't much of a problem for myself, but what about non-geek users? One gets tired of walking them through a different fetch-and-install routine for every app they want to try! Anything that makes life easier for average users AND adds to their computing choices is a plus.
I had similar thoughts. No, this isn't the Library at Alexandria, and yeah, posterity probably doesn't need 50 million copies of the latest pop drivel...
Even so, I was horrified, and my first reaction was that this is a man who hates non-readers (or to be accurate, hates readers who get books from sources other than HIM) rather that a man who loves books. I wish him speedily out of the book business, before he does away with something truly irreplaceable.
But he is sadly correct that books are no longer revered by most people (apparently including himself) -- note how many here think that digital copies will suffice. Hope you not only made backups, but also have backup hardware to recover backups from obsolete media. Oh, you don't? Bye-bye data.
I just got done with a SF novel (Vonda McIntyre's Starfarer series) in which this worldship's people rely entirely on the ship's computer/intraweb and its adjuncts for ALL their knowledge, even of such simple things as doing laundry. When parts of the web fail, there are no hardcopy backups, and as it turns out, most of the ship's inhabitants lack the first clue how to do even the most basis daily tasks. The situation rapidly goes to hell, and no one knows how to fix it.
This is a classic "when things fell apart" scenario -- where knowledge is so centralized that there is a single point of failure. BOOKS can prevent that, being both fairly hardy in ordinary storage, and widely distributed if only by random purchasers over the books' useful lifespan.
We still have books over 100 years old that are useable in an everyday environment, with no special equipment required. You can't say that of digital media that's even as little as 20 years old.
Burning books... [shudder] The man isn't a reformer or a visionary; he's a heretic.
Switzerland has the advantage of being located in what amounts to a natural fortress. The guy at the top of the hill always has an advantage. It's relatively easy to defend against an invader who has to struggle uphill to reach you, and meanwhile you drop rocks on his head. That's one reason why forts have always been built on high ground (at least if anyone with battlefield experience had a say in their location).
However, modern aircraft negate that advantage -- they effectively have the higher ground and can drop rocks on anyone's head.
The French resistance may have made life hot for the Nazi troops once in a while, but they had very little to do with why Germany lost the war, and they certainly didn't drive the Germans out of France. The real reason was that Germany was fighting on two fronts (western and Russian) and got over-extended, so was vulnerable to a concerted invasion force, and it wouldn't have mattered where that happened.
Which is why if you DO get into a war, you must always do so with the intent to WIN it as efficiently as possible. Piddlefucking around like we're doing in Iraq does nothing but tear up the landscape and piss off the inhabitants, and meanwhile you get your ass handed to you one little piece at a time.
Worry about building democracy (or whatever form of gov't floats your corpse) AFTER the war is won. You can't do it DURING a war.
If you were trying to run a small business during the Carter years, inflation was enough to kill you. -- IMO Carter was honest and meant well, but he'd give away the farm to anyone who looked needy enough, and he'd help the rest of the world before helping Americans. My impression of Obama is similar -- he'd do ANYTHING to help the poor people in *Africa*, out of the goodness of his heart, but is liable to forget about the working stiffs in his own country, who get to pay for this largesse.
Mind you, if I were to vote for a Democrat (unlikely, but you never know!) he'd probably be it, judging by what I've seen of him to date. He's certainly not as scary as Hillary!
All very interesting. Not the sort of thing we usually think about in these copyright discussions, but as you say, being used as evidence may be the ultimate "fair use".
Quote the good Captain, "I have heard of at least one lawyer who tried to interfere significantly in discovery with copyright arguments."
ISTM that action effectively says "this here content owner's right to make money is stronger than the court's right to dispense justice."
Come to think of it, that's exactly what the more-draconian copyright laws attempt to do -- redefine "justice" in terms of how much money the content owner wants to make.:/
"But if our democracy was a true market place of ideas, with many parties actually having real debates about real issues, each party would tend to stay true to it's ideals and its base."
Possibly so. But only so long as voting-block coalitions and backroom deals are not part of the picture.
One big problem is that people and issues are a spectrum, but parties tend to promote a narrow view, as if only THEIR solution could possibly work, and anyone who doesn't agree must be a heretic. In my observation, this is a problem no matter how small the party.
Might be better to ditch the party system entirely, and have only wholly-independent candidates and office-holders. Maybe then the *politician* aspects would wither sufficiently to let the People take back control over our own bloody government.
Those are damn good questions. I'm not sure I have any rational answers, but my gut feeling is that if you take from the tax pool, you should be obligated to give back equally.
But if interpreted too broadly, it could reach a ridiculous extreme like "farmer receives a publicly-funded subsidy, therefore his crop is public property". And there is no position so ridiculous that someone can't be found to argue for it in court!
All good reasons (I agree with you on all points), and as you say the horse is pretty much out of the barn on this one.
But my question was re whether public-funding-means-public-domain is a legally valid and/or viable concept. ISTM that has much broader implications, such as whether police filming police actions (ie. producing wholly state-funded content) is privately-owned or public-domain material. That could touch on evidence laws too, perhaps?
ISTM the criteria ought to be "Is this in a publicly-funded venue? is it being filmed by publicly-funded equipment? then what happens here and is filmed here is in public, and therefore ought to be public domain, video and all."
Is the NJTA a private corp? If so, then the above wouldn't apply.
Your thoughts on this? I'd value your perspective.
Later than that. Even as late as the Civil War (1860 for our foreign friends) most surgeons REFUSED to wash their hands between patients. Which is why soldiers were far more likely to die of hospital septicemia than of battlefield wounds. In fact up until about 1900, when sterilizing equipment and isolating contagious patients started making serious headway in medicine, going into hospital was effectively a death sentence. That's why most people born all the way up thru the 1930s or so strenuously resisted being hospitalized for any reason whatsoever.
Recycling dead folks' clothes and blankets was routine, even when a lethal plague was involved. There just wasn't a good understanding of disease vectors, despite that *corpses* had been used as a contaminant for millennia. To the pre-modern-medical mind, a corpse is an emitter of evil humours, not a source of disease in itself.
In dentistry, equipment was not routinely FULLY sterilized until AIDS forced the issue, in the late 1980s. Yeah, the small stuff was autoclaved. The drill head was NOT, even tho it accumulates blood and tissue from each patient's mouth.
That's a good thing... exposure builds name recognition, and that's really what elections are all about. (If you think otherwise, follow California politics for a while. There is NO other factor that means shit at the polls.)
Yesterday I started a quick count of how many posters here mentioned each candidate, and it quickly became obvious that Slashdot already elected Ron Paul by a 90%-of-the-vote landslide. The only other name mentioned more than a few times was Obama.
I haven't been able to watch Youtube videos... ain't installing any proprietary viewers on this machine, and don't remember what I did with the Youtube downloader I came across a while back.
Heh, I think we're wholly in agreement on what constitutes "freedom", just describing it from different angles:)
Myself, I'm a small-gov't Republican, from back when that meant "gov't handles certain things that it's in a better position to do, like roads, police, and national defense, and otherwise stays the fuck out of our lives". -- I suspect NO political party's ideals can survive a long period of being in power; the very position corrupts them.:(
Interesting angle. And yes, I think you're on to something. Financially or otherwise, illegal immigration dilutes the value of my citizenship. Quite noticeably here in SoCal, where us made-in-the-USA types are now second-class citizens.
BTW something I see a lot of here is gov't officials speaking Spanish to each other for the obvious purpose of *preventing* the English-speaking citizen from knowing what is being discussed. IMO, this dilutes and possibly negates my rights.
Rather, illegal immigrants do work that Americans *used* to do at similar wages, and take jobs that *used* to be done primarily by teenagers. Yeah, a lot of teens now think they're too good to do grunt work, but there are a lot of American teens who'd be happy as hell to earn ANY wages.
Kick out the illegals, and put our teens back to work.
Slashdot Mirror
In short, you can poke a peeping tom in the eye with a stick, or see that you're being observed and close your blinds. You don't have either opportunity with a roving camera, and furthermore you have no idea who is watching you.
;)
When I first heard of Street View, I thought it was just a public webcam aggregator -- and that would be a cool thing. But those are fixed views that don't generally peer into private space.
[wicked thought] If enough people hung blowups of the goatse.cx man in their front windows... hmm.
If Google happens to catch a shot of your naked child "playing with himself", does that constitute kiddie porn? If so, who is liable -- Google for "distributing" it, or the parent for "facilitating" it??
Second, what about stuff where anyone knowing of a crime is supposed to report it, and Google catches something innocuous but illegal, such as someone's pot plant or (in some states) two guys getting it on?
Disturbing implications all around, given the current state of mind in some circles of law enforcement.
Our standards HAVE dropped. And as I've said before, "reality shows" are a good deal of the reason. They've taught us that SNOOPING IS OKAY and that there ARE NO PENALTIES FOR DOING SO.
People have always been snoopy. Voyeurism seems to be built into the human species. But without technological help, this never gets beyond the neighbourhood peeping tom, and such behaviour has never been considered normal or acceptable. (In fact, it was liable to get you a squirt of ammonia in the eyes.)
But reality shows changed that. Now viewers can be peeping toms with impunity, and cannot be 'caught' doing this socially-unacceptable behaviour, because they get to do it by way of someone else's camera. And I think this has in turn diluted the present generation's expectation of privacy -- snooping has become normal and expected behaviour.
It should be no surprise that both gov't and private concerns increasingly think that full-time surveillance is perfectly legit, and that more and more young people see nothing wrong with this -- after all, they were raised in the Reality TV era, and don't know any better.
You have a good point. People tend to adopt only that which is 1) readily available, AND 2) gives them the least hassle *compared to what they're already using*. If linux was really all that superior on the desktop, there'd be little reason for zealotry, because users would naturally flow toward it.
As of the last halfway-reliable data I've seen, based on browser-and-platform stats recorded by several well-trafficked websites, linux had about 0.8% marketshare on the desktop. To put it in perspective, that's about 1/3rd of Apple's marketshare on the desktop, and remember linux doesn't have Apple's artificial restriction against adoption by way of requiring higher-priced proprietary hardware.
By contrast, linux's *internet server* marketshare has hovered in the 50% range for a long time (per Netcraft and others). But on a server, your goals are different, and whether an OS sucks as a *desktop* platform is irrelevant.
As to the nominal topic, I like the idea, and if it went into action at a major site like sourceforge, it could also spur developers into using more-consistent installers and behaviour. One of my pet gripes with opensource is indeed that everyone has their own notions about how to install stuff. This isn't much of a problem for myself, but what about non-geek users? One gets tired of walking them through a different fetch-and-install routine for every app they want to try! Anything that makes life easier for average users AND adds to their computing choices is a plus.
I had similar thoughts. No, this isn't the Library at Alexandria, and yeah, posterity probably doesn't need 50 million copies of the latest pop drivel...
Even so, I was horrified, and my first reaction was that this is a man who hates non-readers (or to be accurate, hates readers who get books from sources other than HIM) rather that a man who loves books. I wish him speedily out of the book business, before he does away with something truly irreplaceable.
But he is sadly correct that books are no longer revered by most people (apparently including himself) -- note how many here think that digital copies will suffice. Hope you not only made backups, but also have backup hardware to recover backups from obsolete media. Oh, you don't? Bye-bye data.
I just got done with a SF novel (Vonda McIntyre's Starfarer series) in which this worldship's people rely entirely on the ship's computer/intraweb and its adjuncts for ALL their knowledge, even of such simple things as doing laundry. When parts of the web fail, there are no hardcopy backups, and as it turns out, most of the ship's inhabitants lack the first clue how to do even the most basis daily tasks. The situation rapidly goes to hell, and no one knows how to fix it.
This is a classic "when things fell apart" scenario -- where knowledge is so centralized that there is a single point of failure. BOOKS can prevent that, being both fairly hardy in ordinary storage, and widely distributed if only by random purchasers over the books' useful lifespan.
We still have books over 100 years old that are useable in an everyday environment, with no special equipment required. You can't say that of digital media that's even as little as 20 years old.
Burning books... [shudder] The man isn't a reformer or a visionary; he's a heretic.
[laughing] Help yourself!
;)
For my next trick, I fill a thimble with the whole ocean!
Anyone got figures handy on how many of these dead Muslims (however many there may be) were killed by other Muslims?
"Any war where there are rules will always be decided in favor of the side which ignores the rules."
Best observation all day. In fact, that pretty much applies to any sort of conflict, armed or otherwise.
Switzerland has the advantage of being located in what amounts to a natural fortress. The guy at the top of the hill always has an advantage. It's relatively easy to defend against an invader who has to struggle uphill to reach you, and meanwhile you drop rocks on his head. That's one reason why forts have always been built on high ground (at least if anyone with battlefield experience had a say in their location).
However, modern aircraft negate that advantage -- they effectively have the higher ground and can drop rocks on anyone's head.
The French resistance may have made life hot for the Nazi troops once in a while, but they had very little to do with why Germany lost the war, and they certainly didn't drive the Germans out of France. The real reason was that Germany was fighting on two fronts (western and Russian) and got over-extended, so was vulnerable to a concerted invasion force, and it wouldn't have mattered where that happened.
Which is why if you DO get into a war, you must always do so with the intent to WIN it as efficiently as possible. Piddlefucking around like we're doing in Iraq does nothing but tear up the landscape and piss off the inhabitants, and meanwhile you get your ass handed to you one little piece at a time.
Worry about building democracy (or whatever form of gov't floats your corpse) AFTER the war is won. You can't do it DURING a war.
And if you extrapolate that infinitely... you'll eventually invent the wheel!
If you were trying to run a small business during the Carter years, inflation was enough to kill you. -- IMO Carter was honest and meant well, but he'd give away the farm to anyone who looked needy enough, and he'd help the rest of the world before helping Americans. My impression of Obama is similar -- he'd do ANYTHING to help the poor people in *Africa*, out of the goodness of his heart, but is liable to forget about the working stiffs in his own country, who get to pay for this largesse.
Mind you, if I were to vote for a Democrat (unlikely, but you never know!) he'd probably be it, judging by what I've seen of him to date. He's certainly not as scary as Hillary!
All very interesting. Not the sort of thing we usually think about in these copyright discussions, but as you say, being used as evidence may be the ultimate "fair use".
:/
Quote the good Captain, "I have heard of at least one lawyer who tried to interfere significantly in discovery with copyright arguments."
ISTM that action effectively says "this here content owner's right to make money is stronger than the court's right to dispense justice."
Come to think of it, that's exactly what the more-draconian copyright laws attempt to do -- redefine "justice" in terms of how much money the content owner wants to make.
"But if our democracy was a true market place of ideas, with many parties actually having real debates about real issues, each party would tend to stay true to it's ideals and its base."
Possibly so. But only so long as voting-block coalitions and backroom deals are not part of the picture.
One big problem is that people and issues are a spectrum, but parties tend to promote a narrow view, as if only THEIR solution could possibly work, and anyone who doesn't agree must be a heretic. In my observation, this is a problem no matter how small the party.
Might be better to ditch the party system entirely, and have only wholly-independent candidates and office-holders. Maybe then the *politician* aspects would wither sufficiently to let the People take back control over our own bloody government.
Those are damn good questions. I'm not sure I have any rational answers, but my gut feeling is that if you take from the tax pool, you should be obligated to give back equally.
But if interpreted too broadly, it could reach a ridiculous extreme like "farmer receives a publicly-funded subsidy, therefore his crop is public property". And there is no position so ridiculous that someone can't be found to argue for it in court!
All good reasons (I agree with you on all points), and as you say the horse is pretty much out of the barn on this one.
But my question was re whether public-funding-means-public-domain is a legally valid and/or viable concept. ISTM that has much broader implications, such as whether police filming police actions (ie. producing wholly state-funded content) is privately-owned or public-domain material. That could touch on evidence laws too, perhaps?
ISTM the criteria ought to be "Is this in a publicly-funded venue? is it being filmed by publicly-funded equipment? then what happens here and is filmed here is in public, and therefore ought to be public domain, video and all."
Is the NJTA a private corp? If so, then the above wouldn't apply.
Your thoughts on this? I'd value your perspective.
Later than that. Even as late as the Civil War (1860 for our foreign friends) most surgeons REFUSED to wash their hands between patients. Which is why soldiers were far more likely to die of hospital septicemia than of battlefield wounds. In fact up until about 1900, when sterilizing equipment and isolating contagious patients started making serious headway in medicine, going into hospital was effectively a death sentence. That's why most people born all the way up thru the 1930s or so strenuously resisted being hospitalized for any reason whatsoever.
Recycling dead folks' clothes and blankets was routine, even when a lethal plague was involved. There just wasn't a good understanding of disease vectors, despite that *corpses* had been used as a contaminant for millennia. To the pre-modern-medical mind, a corpse is an emitter of evil humours, not a source of disease in itself.
In dentistry, equipment was not routinely FULLY sterilized until AIDS forced the issue, in the late 1980s. Yeah, the small stuff was autoclaved. The drill head was NOT, even tho it accumulates blood and tissue from each patient's mouth.
That's a good thing... exposure builds name recognition, and that's really what elections are all about. (If you think otherwise, follow California politics for a while. There is NO other factor that means shit at the polls.)
... ain't installing any proprietary viewers on this machine, and don't remember what I did with the Youtube downloader I came across a while back.
Yesterday I started a quick count of how many posters here mentioned each candidate, and it quickly became obvious that Slashdot already elected Ron Paul by a 90%-of-the-vote landslide. The only other name mentioned more than a few times was Obama.
I haven't been able to watch Youtube videos
Heh, I think we're wholly in agreement on what constitutes "freedom", just describing it from different angles :)
:(
Myself, I'm a small-gov't Republican, from back when that meant "gov't handles certain things that it's in a better position to do, like roads, police, and national defense, and otherwise stays the fuck out of our lives". -- I suspect NO political party's ideals can survive a long period of being in power; the very position corrupts them.
Obama reminds me a lot of Jimmy Carter. And tho I like the man and think he means well, I also think he could mean us well into the poorhouse.
Interesting angle. And yes, I think you're on to something. Financially or otherwise, illegal immigration dilutes the value of my citizenship. Quite noticeably here in SoCal, where us made-in-the-USA types are now second-class citizens.
BTW something I see a lot of here is gov't officials speaking Spanish to each other for the obvious purpose of *preventing* the English-speaking citizen from knowing what is being discussed. IMO, this dilutes and possibly negates my rights.
Rather, illegal immigrants do work that Americans *used* to do at similar wages, and take jobs that *used* to be done primarily by teenagers. Yeah, a lot of teens now think they're too good to do grunt work, but there are a lot of American teens who'd be happy as hell to earn ANY wages.
Kick out the illegals, and put our teens back to work.
For purposes of this discussion, how are you defining "freedom" ??
:)
(No fair answering "I know it when I see it", which after several false starts is the definition I wound up with.