You know, I thought you might have been mistaken regarding the loss of nuclear weapons, but a little searching turned up several documented cases. I certainly never knew that there lies an unexploded nuclear bomb somewhere off the coast of Savannah.
I've downloaded music via TPB's index. Repeatedly. ALL of it was music put on bittorrent by the someone pretending to be the artist/copyright holder themselves for free download -- i.e. not "legal" at all. How do they determine whether or not bittorrent downloads are "legal"? Or do they just blindly assume "protocol == legal"?
Well it's certainly damaged *my* perception of her. Before I read that article, I thought all models were sweet, angelic, well adjusted puritans. All of them but one, apparently!
Deputy: Amanda Hugginkiss? I'm looking for Amanda Hugginkiss! Look, what's everybody laughing about? It's not like I chose this -- if I don't find Amanda Hugginkiss, the judge will have my ass. What?!? Do I have toilet paper on my shoe again?
Oh, they do.. you just need to know where to look.;) I had a technician troubleshooting an intermittent connectivity problem (after repeated calls, of course, and loads of documentation with pingtool), and he actually used my PC to log in to a page that showed the status of all nodes, along with subscriber data such as current connection status, average connection time, month-to-date and year-to-date usage statistics, MAC addresses and internal network topography, and of course their name, address, and phone number. (Un)fortunately, they used a 3 letter login & password, and while my browser didn't store the password, it stored the username... which was also the password.
The real problem I have with Comcast (as an ISP -- I've never had cable TV) hasn't been packet forging or customer service, but price gouging. Now I qualify that by saying it's a company's goal to make money, and there's nothing inherently evil with making a profit, but it's also extremely frustrating to be paying $65 for 8Mbit service in one part of the country while people in other areas are paying that much for 50Mbit service. IMO, if there's any legislation on this, and as interstate commerce it's clearly under the domain of the Federal government, they should ban the practice of charging customers more just because they live in another state or city. There's no reason they should be charging $20 for a 12Mbit connection in one area while charging $65 for an 8Mbit connection in another, except that they clearly set their prices based on regional competition, which is nonexistent in some areas. I don't expect all areas to have equal bandwidth, as it's neither practical to roll out service everywhere, nor fair to delay expansions in heavily metropolitan areas, but I do expect to be charged a reasonable rate based on the service they actually provide, not on the service compared to what the phone company's DSL does or does not provide, especially when service providers are granted regional monopolies.
In fact, the name, "i4i", implies the old "eye for an eye" rule. It's possible that this is a group of Free Software folks who have managed to get a patent on something obvious (as Microsoft has done so many times in the past) and wants to stick it to Microsoft the same way Microsoft keeps harassing open source folks with their patents on ones and zeros.
Yeah, I was imagining something similar, but a quick glance at the i4i website makes it clear that's not the case, and that [letter]4[letter] seems to be their product naming convention. Crazy Canuks.
To be fair, the stated goal of both Cider and the publishers who implement it is to enable same-day releases coinciding with Windows releases. Also, Cider dynamically translates Windows API calls to OS X system calls, which has a relatively low overhead and allows roughly 80-90% of Windows performance. It's more of a VM than an emulator, since the hardware architecture is the same. It's really the best of both world for a Mac lover -- you get the UI, security, and software available on a Mac, and you can still run what are essentially Windows games without booting into Windows itself. The alternative is to try to convince developers to make a large investment into porting games to, or writing them for, a platform with a relatively tiny market share.. and good luck with that. If/when the marketshare of OS X approaches 30%+ of the overall PC market, then I would expect that dynamic to change rapidly, but until then, don't hold your breath for native Mac games.
You know, military healthcare in general gets a lot of negative attention, but it's still better than any private program I've ever had. The idea of "death boards" is absolutely ridiculous -- the military will do anything in its power to treat someone, even if it means flying them halfway across the globe. And there's certainly no higher incidence of incompetence in military providers than in the civilian sector, especially when you consider that many military medical personnel moonlight at local clinics and hospitals.
Choosing between a few days of bedrest in a hospital with some peeling paint, making years of payments to cover my deductible/spending cap, or filing for bankruptcy, and in either case possibly losing my coverage and the ability to get new insurance, I'd pick the former. With insurance companies competing based on who can deny the most coverage, and most people unable to even chose their insurers in the first place (in any meaningful way), the state of healthcare in the US has nowhere to go but up.
Obviously the circumvention occurred when you made the copy. Maybe you could argue that you didn't do it intentionally, and that you weren't even aware that copy protection existed, but intent is *not* 100% of the law, and ignorance is never an affirmative defense.
I agree that the problem is with the law.. in fact, that's my whole point.
If either one were to rob,beat,kill one of their fellow participants, they would be tried as an adult in every state in the country.
Which sort of underscores the ridiculous nature of age discrimination in our country. If someone is not responsible enough to buy a lottery ticket, then clearly they are not responsible enough to determine the consequences of more serious actions, such as those you enumerated. The only non-hypocritical course of action is to lower the age of majority, or to respect it.
The most obvious is the law prohibiting convicted felons from owning firearms. On/. it's easy for people to insist that felons should have all their rights back but I can just imagine how the public would react to a politician that proposes restoring gun-ownership rights for convicts.
The problem with politics is that it only attracts politicians. Politicians aren't in the business of being leaders -- they're in the business of getting elected, and the best way to do that is to mirror the sentiment of their electorate, no matter how uninformed or illogical that sentiment might be. In other words, the fact that a politician would never say something is absolutely no reason to believe it's the wrong thing to say.
I've seen no evidence to suggest that disallowing firearm ownership for felons either effectively restricts access or decreases recidivism, and an ineffective law is worse than no law at all. It's just wishful thinking, and wishing never solves real problems. That a politician would never admit this, let alone campaign on it, only means that it is the public's mind that needs to be changed, not the politicians'.
That's the other problem with this law: What defines a social networking site? Just about any website that allows profiles and posts could be considered a social networking site. And is it just limited to websites? What about IRC or chat rooms? It wouldn't be hard to consider *any* network activity to be social in nature, ergo social networking, and they're effectively banned from the internet. If the internet is the important tool that politicians make it out to be -- requisite for education and competition in the modern and post-modern world -- then that should be a serious consideration.
1) The sex registry in many states (not sure about yours) only publicly releases information on "Level III" offenders, the definition of which varies, but includes the sort of cases you describe, and usually *doesn't* include urinaters who would still be subject to the restriction, just as they are subject to registration in the first place.
2) The crimes against minors are almost always family members. Of course that's terrible, yes, but they're also not prowling Facebook, which makes the ban nonsensical.
The premise is irrational, but prison is most certainly punishment, as evidenced by the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel and unusual "protection for society". Are perpetrators of so-called crimes of passion a threat to society at large? A woman who drowns her babies? A man who kills his spouse and her lover upon discovering them in bed? Probably not. Even a parent who abuses their children. All we'd have to do is take away her children, maybe get her spayed, don't allow adoption, and the problem is solved, right? We don't put them in prison to keep society safe; we put them in prison to punish their actions. You can argue that the goal *should* be rehabilitation and/or reintegration, but as it stands that's a separate issue.
So the fact that we let unsafe people out of jail isn't irrational -- they've served their sentence. The irrational thinking here is twofold: First, most sex crimes are committed against people with whom the offender is already intimately familiar. The reason the ratio of publicized rape cases to actual rapists is so high is because sex crimes against strangers are extremely rare, and thus newsworthy. There is an argument to be made that social networks (whatever the fsck that means) can be avenues to making new social connections, which could lead to recidivism, but by that logic we should be ban from *any* social contact, which is clearly both impossible and absurd.
Second, as previously stated, one needn't be a rapist or a molester to end up on a sex offender registry. But more importantly, what is it about crimes involving sex that makes them inherently worse than other crimes, aside from morality. Why is stealing panties worse than stealing cash or a television? Why is a crime committed pursuant to the offender's own sexual gratification worse than a crime committed pursuant to the offender's fiscal gratification? Or megalomaniacal gratification? Or even psychopathic indifference which, I would argue, is a far more dangerous trait. If we are to use motivation to determine the severity of a crime, then it should be reserved for cases where motivation excuses the act, not where it reinforces the idea that the act should be illegal -- that's why the law exists in the first place*. This is especially true because rape is, at its root, an act of power. This is evident even by the context in which the word is used -- nobody sees an attractive person and says "I'd sure like to rape them!" They might use lewd terminology, but certainly they wouldn't be sexually gratified by raping them. On the other hand, rape is frequently a threat made by people who are angry at each other. People who want to, but usually cannot, impose their will on others. (See also: nerd rage). This is also the root problem of "hate crimes," because every crime is a crime of hate, or of deciding that someone else's value is less than your own, and acting accordingly.
* For example, killing to defend your own life is sometimes acceptable. It's acceptable when someone else initiates a threat against you, but obviously attempting to mug someone with a knife and having them pull a gun isn't an excuse to slash their throat.
Because it *is* circumventing the protection mechanism. You don't have to decrypt to circumvent *copy protection*, and the fact that there exists a weakness in that protection makes no difference. The same is true of anything else.. you don't get to copy dollars just because you can, or take things out of my house just because because you found my keys, or because the door opens when you kick it really hard.
I agree 100% that the DMCA is a bad law, but you're trying to argue that because the protection has a flaw, it shouldn't be covered, which is neither logical nor true.
If someone has searched your computer such that they've closely examined all of the software you have installed, then you've *already* been harassed and had your privacy invaded.
Aside from that, customs is one of the few places where I can see it as reasonable to require access to encrypted information. It's no different than having a locked container in your luggage and not allowing any agent to see the contents. Don't expect to just say "trust me," and walk away.
The StarWalk app does this as well, albeit for astronomical rather than terrestrial objects. It's just a shame that the accuracy of the iPhone compass is so appallingly low.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I thought you might have been mistaken regarding the loss of nuclear weapons, but a little searching turned up several documented cases. I certainly never knew that there lies an unexploded nuclear bomb somewhere off the coast of Savannah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_B-47_crash
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7720049.stm
Also, the List of military nuclear accidents is much longer than I expected.
I've downloaded music via TPB's index. Repeatedly. ALL of it was music put on bittorrent by the someone pretending to be the artist/copyright holder themselves for free download -- i.e. not "legal" at all. How do they determine whether or not bittorrent downloads are "legal"? Or do they just blindly assume "protocol == legal"?
74 posts, and not a single joke about PNAS has popped up.
Doh!!
Well it's certainly damaged *my* perception of her. Before I read that article, I thought all models were sweet, angelic, well adjusted puritans. All of them but one, apparently!
Deputy: Amanda Hugginkiss? I'm looking for Amanda Hugginkiss! Look, what's everybody laughing about? It's not like I chose this -- if I don't find Amanda Hugginkiss, the judge will have my ass. What?!? Do I have toilet paper on my shoe again?
depressionquit?
Oh, they do.. you just need to know where to look. ;) I had a technician troubleshooting an intermittent connectivity problem (after repeated calls, of course, and loads of documentation with pingtool), and he actually used my PC to log in to a page that showed the status of all nodes, along with subscriber data such as current connection status, average connection time, month-to-date and year-to-date usage statistics, MAC addresses and internal network topography, and of course their name, address, and phone number. (Un)fortunately, they used a 3 letter login & password, and while my browser didn't store the password, it stored the username... which was also the password.
The real problem I have with Comcast (as an ISP -- I've never had cable TV) hasn't been packet forging or customer service, but price gouging. Now I qualify that by saying it's a company's goal to make money, and there's nothing inherently evil with making a profit, but it's also extremely frustrating to be paying $65 for 8Mbit service in one part of the country while people in other areas are paying that much for 50Mbit service. IMO, if there's any legislation on this, and as interstate commerce it's clearly under the domain of the Federal government, they should ban the practice of charging customers more just because they live in another state or city. There's no reason they should be charging $20 for a 12Mbit connection in one area while charging $65 for an 8Mbit connection in another, except that they clearly set their prices based on regional competition, which is nonexistent in some areas. I don't expect all areas to have equal bandwidth, as it's neither practical to roll out service everywhere, nor fair to delay expansions in heavily metropolitan areas, but I do expect to be charged a reasonable rate based on the service they actually provide, not on the service compared to what the phone company's DSL does or does not provide, especially when service providers are granted regional monopolies.
Prexyzely!
Yeah, I was imagining something similar, but a quick glance at the i4i website makes it clear that's not the case, and that [letter]4[letter] seems to be their product naming convention. Crazy Canuks.
To be fair, the stated goal of both Cider and the publishers who implement it is to enable same-day releases coinciding with Windows releases. Also, Cider dynamically translates Windows API calls to OS X system calls, which has a relatively low overhead and allows roughly 80-90% of Windows performance. It's more of a VM than an emulator, since the hardware architecture is the same. It's really the best of both world for a Mac lover -- you get the UI, security, and software available on a Mac, and you can still run what are essentially Windows games without booting into Windows itself. The alternative is to try to convince developers to make a large investment into porting games to, or writing them for, a platform with a relatively tiny market share.. and good luck with that. If/when the marketshare of OS X approaches 30%+ of the overall PC market, then I would expect that dynamic to change rapidly, but until then, don't hold your breath for native Mac games.
You know, military healthcare in general gets a lot of negative attention, but it's still better than any private program I've ever had. The idea of "death boards" is absolutely ridiculous -- the military will do anything in its power to treat someone, even if it means flying them halfway across the globe. And there's certainly no higher incidence of incompetence in military providers than in the civilian sector, especially when you consider that many military medical personnel moonlight at local clinics and hospitals.
Choosing between a few days of bedrest in a hospital with some peeling paint, making years of payments to cover my deductible/spending cap, or filing for bankruptcy, and in either case possibly losing my coverage and the ability to get new insurance, I'd pick the former. With insurance companies competing based on who can deny the most coverage, and most people unable to even chose their insurers in the first place (in any meaningful way), the state of healthcare in the US has nowhere to go but up.
Let's be generous and say 50.
On the contrary, with a floor of 24 and an an infinite ceiling, 50 is quite a conservative definition of "dozens!"
Obviously the circumvention occurred when you made the copy. Maybe you could argue that you didn't do it intentionally, and that you weren't even aware that copy protection existed, but intent is *not* 100% of the law, and ignorance is never an affirmative defense.
I agree that the problem is with the law.. in fact, that's my whole point.
If either one were to rob,beat,kill one of their fellow participants, they would be tried as an adult in every state in the country.
Which sort of underscores the ridiculous nature of age discrimination in our country. If someone is not responsible enough to buy a lottery ticket, then clearly they are not responsible enough to determine the consequences of more serious actions, such as those you enumerated. The only non-hypocritical course of action is to lower the age of majority, or to respect it.
If punishment were meted out based on the odds of recidivism, we'd give life sentences for speeding and fines for murder.
The most obvious is the law prohibiting convicted felons from owning firearms. On /. it's easy for people to insist that felons should have all their rights back but I can just imagine how the public would react to a politician that proposes restoring gun-ownership rights for convicts.
The problem with politics is that it only attracts politicians. Politicians aren't in the business of being leaders -- they're in the business of getting elected, and the best way to do that is to mirror the sentiment of their electorate, no matter how uninformed or illogical that sentiment might be. In other words, the fact that a politician would never say something is absolutely no reason to believe it's the wrong thing to say.
I've seen no evidence to suggest that disallowing firearm ownership for felons either effectively restricts access or decreases recidivism, and an ineffective law is worse than no law at all. It's just wishful thinking, and wishing never solves real problems. That a politician would never admit this, let alone campaign on it, only means that it is the public's mind that needs to be changed, not the politicians'.
That's the other problem with this law: What defines a social networking site? Just about any website that allows profiles and posts could be considered a social networking site. And is it just limited to websites? What about IRC or chat rooms? It wouldn't be hard to consider *any* network activity to be social in nature, ergo social networking, and they're effectively banned from the internet. If the internet is the important tool that politicians make it out to be -- requisite for education and competition in the modern and post-modern world -- then that should be a serious consideration.
Two points:
1) The sex registry in many states (not sure about yours) only publicly releases information on "Level III" offenders, the definition of which varies, but includes the sort of cases you describe, and usually *doesn't* include urinaters who would still be subject to the restriction, just as they are subject to registration in the first place.
2) The crimes against minors are almost always family members. Of course that's terrible, yes, but they're also not prowling Facebook, which makes the ban nonsensical.
The premise is irrational, but prison is most certainly punishment, as evidenced by the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel and unusual "protection for society". Are perpetrators of so-called crimes of passion a threat to society at large? A woman who drowns her babies? A man who kills his spouse and her lover upon discovering them in bed? Probably not. Even a parent who abuses their children. All we'd have to do is take away her children, maybe get her spayed, don't allow adoption, and the problem is solved, right? We don't put them in prison to keep society safe; we put them in prison to punish their actions. You can argue that the goal *should* be rehabilitation and/or reintegration, but as it stands that's a separate issue.
So the fact that we let unsafe people out of jail isn't irrational -- they've served their sentence. The irrational thinking here is twofold: First, most sex crimes are committed against people with whom the offender is already intimately familiar. The reason the ratio of publicized rape cases to actual rapists is so high is because sex crimes against strangers are extremely rare, and thus newsworthy. There is an argument to be made that social networks (whatever the fsck that means) can be avenues to making new social connections, which could lead to recidivism, but by that logic we should be ban from *any* social contact, which is clearly both impossible and absurd.
Second, as previously stated, one needn't be a rapist or a molester to end up on a sex offender registry. But more importantly, what is it about crimes involving sex that makes them inherently worse than other crimes, aside from morality. Why is stealing panties worse than stealing cash or a television? Why is a crime committed pursuant to the offender's own sexual gratification worse than a crime committed pursuant to the offender's fiscal gratification? Or megalomaniacal gratification? Or even psychopathic indifference which, I would argue, is a far more dangerous trait. If we are to use motivation to determine the severity of a crime, then it should be reserved for cases where motivation excuses the act, not where it reinforces the idea that the act should be illegal -- that's why the law exists in the first place*. This is especially true because rape is, at its root, an act of power. This is evident even by the context in which the word is used -- nobody sees an attractive person and says "I'd sure like to rape them!" They might use lewd terminology, but certainly they wouldn't be sexually gratified by raping them. On the other hand, rape is frequently a threat made by people who are angry at each other. People who want to, but usually cannot, impose their will on others. (See also: nerd rage). This is also the root problem of "hate crimes," because every crime is a crime of hate, or of deciding that someone else's value is less than your own, and acting accordingly.
* For example, killing to defend your own life is sometimes acceptable. It's acceptable when someone else initiates a threat against you, but obviously attempting to mug someone with a knife and having them pull a gun isn't an excuse to slash their throat.
Because it *is* circumventing the protection mechanism. You don't have to decrypt to circumvent *copy protection*, and the fact that there exists a weakness in that protection makes no difference. The same is true of anything else.. you don't get to copy dollars just because you can, or take things out of my house just because because you found my keys, or because the door opens when you kick it really hard.
I agree 100% that the DMCA is a bad law, but you're trying to argue that because the protection has a flaw, it shouldn't be covered, which is neither logical nor true.
I want to copy it... I don't need to see their damn warning for the thousandth time either.
Clearly you do!
If someone has searched your computer such that they've closely examined all of the software you have installed, then you've *already* been harassed and had your privacy invaded.
Aside from that, customs is one of the few places where I can see it as reasonable to require access to encrypted information. It's no different than having a locked container in your luggage and not allowing any agent to see the contents. Don't expect to just say "trust me," and walk away.
The StarWalk app does this as well, albeit for astronomical rather than terrestrial objects. It's just a shame that the accuracy of the iPhone compass is so appallingly low.
Looks like you made the news yourself.