It's not even a "profit first" motive -- it's an "aggression first" motive. Indeed. For a nice encapsulation of this concept, see the Jargon File entry for the term "hollised". Though it refers specifically to over-reactionary policies on public postings by an organization's own employees, it can carry over to any of that sort of knee-jerk aggression. The last sentence is especially relevant:
Use of this term carries the strong connotation that the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots blinded to their own best interests by territorial reflexes.
Um, sir... we had some trouble getting the Atomic Circuits. It seems they haven't actually been invented yet, so we had to get circuits that use electrons. But they areill-tempered electrons...
Lol! Don't you know that rights, like the presumption of innocence, are only for American citizens? Correction: American citizens who haven't been accused of having links to terrorists.
As I always like to point out, the most important thing to remember about Occam's Razor is that it's a rule of thumb, not a Law of Nature. If two proposed theories otherwise seem to work similarly well, but one introduces fewer assumptions than the other, Occam's Razor suggests that the former is probably better than the latter, but you can't take this as "proof" -- at best, it lets you make a better educated guess about which avenue is likely to be more fruitful to continue exploring.
It's fringe groups that have broken off from the official church, mostly in Utah and with a few hundred to maybe a few thousand members each, who still practice polygamy. They may call themselves mormon, but they aren't associated with the official church in any way. And just what part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" do you interpret as stating that, in order to "qualify" for freedom of religion, one must be associated with an "official" church?
Who decides what religions are "official"?
The government? If so, you've effectively repealed freedom of religion entirely, because if the government want to ban a religion, all they have to do is declare that it isn't a "real" religion, and thus isn't protected.
Other religions? Even better! (need I elaborate?)
I'm aware that the LDS Church no longer sanctions polygamy (but used to). I'm also aware that not all of their followers accepted the change, and some continue the practice. Now, it's perfectly okay for you (and/or your Church) to distance yourselves from those "fringe groups", pointing out that they're not part of your Church, don't share your beliefs, etc. But I really hope you didn't mean to imply that their beliefs don't constitute a "real" religion, and/or are not entitled to the same Constitutional protections as yours.
The question is, when he says "their DRM is too lax", does he mean that... ...it's too easy to crack? ...even when used normally, it permits copying to too many devices? ...it doesn't give him the same kind of feature-level control as, say, DVD UOPs?
Because, see, only the latter interpretation would actually mean that "it's not really about piracy".
The loonies who think that AIDS is some sort of anti-homosexual fire-and-brimstone gift from God, perhaps? Thankfully, there aren't too many people like that. It wouldn't take very many.
Maybe I just haven't seen enough tentacle porn, but it occurred to me to wonder, and I'm sure the collective intelligence of Slashdot can answer this: are the tentacle monsters always male? Where are the female tentacle monsters? Given the... uhhh... wide variety of interests already represented, there must be people who'd like to see them.
Maybe the female tentacle monster goes around attacking men more-or-less the same way the male ones do with women? Or maybe to have an "all (including the monster) lesbian tentacle porn? Or maybe a happy ending where the scientists manage to get the male and the female tentacle monster back together and they attack each other? What about a hermaphrodite tentacle monster, with both boy tentacles and girl tentacles?
Okay, for that last one, the answer is probably "sure, they exist, but you don't see them come up and terrorize Japanese towns because they're happy staying where they are and just attacking themselves". But in any case, are there any examples that use these ideas? Or have I managed to out-weird the entire tentacle-porn industry?
No, that's exactly it: as I read it, Bob's first attempt to connect to Alice is discarded by Alice's firewall, but it was never intended to be received; its only purpose was to put Bob's firewall into the "waiting for response" state, so that when Alice subsequently attempts to connect to Bob, Bob's firewall interprets the incoming data as the response that Bob was waiting for. And that's exactly what it is, in the sense that Alice and Bob are both intentionally following the Skype protocol; it's just not technically a "response" to Bob's actual packet.
That's why my take is that this isn't really a "security issue" so much as an "acceptable-use policy" issue: it only works because Alice and Bob are both intentionally running the Skype software and signed into the Skype server. Bob obviously doesn't consider an incoming call from Alice to be an "attack", because if he didn't want to receive calls, he wouldn't be running that software. Bob's local BOFH may consider it an "attack" in the sense that one of his lusers is using his network in a way that he didn't approve and is unable to control, but that's a different sort of problem.
What's the purpose of a firewall? To protect the network from hack attacks? Or to enable BOFHs to enforce their AUPs and control how their own lusers use the network? It's really both, I guess, but at least it's only the latter that is thwarted by this method.
There were a few good points in there, but all in all I think that deep down inside The Lexus and the Olive Tree there was a clear and concise essay screaming to get out and being smothered by 200 pages of ad-hoc musings that were thrown in as filler.
Didn't you just describe nearly every book published?
Not every book ever published; just all the ones in the "political / punditry" category.
All this talk of organs and body parts... Screw that, I'm hungry -- can they use it to grow muscle tissue? Mmm, printed meat.
Once the technology gets established enough to be cheap, it sounds like it might actually become more energy-efficient than raising livestock. And it should be ethically acceptable for vegetarians -- wouldn't some of them at least, who aren't too spooked by the "sciencey-ness" of the whole thing, agree that since the meat didn't come from an animal, it's okay to eat?
Is there anybody else that finds that fingernails on a chalk board aren't that bothersome, but that other noises and vibrations seem to produce in oneself the reaction that most people get to the fingernals on a chalk board?
That sound has never really done anything to me, but the feeling of chalk dust on my fingers has always given me the chills -- so violently so, that I'll get a secondary/sympathetic reaction just from seeing someone else getting chalk all over their hands. So there's a bleed-over effect attached to seeing people write on chalk boards and, by extension, doing anything chalk-board-related. Other fine powders on the hands do it to me too: flour, pretty bad (which put a ceiling on my baking abilities); powdered sugar, less so; baking soda|powder, worst of all.
maybe people are using iTunes and Apple products BECAUSE of the fact they are the least offensive (and most easily avoided) DRM systems out there.
I guess the anti-DRM-purist's position is that this reasoning is very dangerous, because it legitimizes the concept of DRM, as long as it's "inoffensive". But saying that we only object to DRM when the restrictions are overly inconvenient is to say that a DRM scheme would be perfectly okay if only it could be made to work perfectly (i.e., to block piracy without blocking any ligitimate uses). But the reason for objecting to DRM is not because existing implementations are too annoying (which would reduce the issue to the technical problem of creating a "perfect" implementation) -- it's because the very concept is inherently disrespectful of our rights.
That they treat you like a human and not a thief?
NO! (the purist in me continues) They're still treating you like a thief, by having any DRM at all; they're just being more subtle about it. If anything, these are the ones that most need to be protested, lest they fool you into thinking otherwise.
Sure, if the requirement is to lob the pod all the way to orbit, ballistically, on just the initial kick from the mass-driver. But what about a hybrid approach, where the object you launch is a (basically) conventional rocket and the mass-driver just gives it an initial boost to save fuel?
With a bit of napkin-scribbling, I figured that a fairly modest acceleration of 5g's would get you to about Mach 1 on a 1-kilometer track, and Mach 3 on a 10-kilometer track. Nowhere near orbit, of course, but a rocket uses a lot of its fuel just to get to those speeds, right?
And that's just with the acceleration limited to human-friendly levels -- the same launcher could be built to use much higher acceleration for unmanned launches, and just scale it down as needed, depending on the squishiness of the payload.
I don't know enough rocket science (or maybe I just don't have enough napkins handy) to work out how much it would improve your overall payload fraction, but it seems like it'd be worth doing.
As to being a go-cart for the rich and famous, well, it will lead to a go-cart for the upper class
I'd say this is already the "go-cart for the upper class" stage -- "go-cart for the rich and famous" is a $20M ISS visit; this will cost only 1% of that. Yes, it's still (way) out of reach for normal people, but it'll put space-flight within the reach of a whole lot more people.
(And yes, of course, this little hop is nowhere near the same thing as actually visiting the Space Station, but it is technically "going into space".)
Quite right. But/. existed as a discussion site for a while before they implemented user accounts -- that was sometime in 1998 or '99. At the time, the whole "prickly Civil-Libertarian / privacy / right-to-anonymity" attitude was such that a lot of us refused, on principle, to create accounts. I was there the day they launched accounts, but I held out for a few months before creating mine, which is why I didn't get a 2- or 3-digit number (and for which, of course, I've been kicking myself ever since).
Yes, changing the first-past-the-gate voting system (whether with IRV, Condorcet, Approval, or whatever) would solve the wasted-vote problem, and yes, starting at the local level might at least partially solve the inertia problem. But, if successful, that would just raise another problem:
Okay: say your state switches to a system that lets you make your vote count the way you most want it to. So you can express your preference for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE while still helping $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE beat $WORSE_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE if it comes to that. Now, say enough voters in your state feel the same way you do that $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE manages to carry the state. Then what?
I'll tell you what: then, when the Electoral College meets, your state's Electors vote for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE, instead of $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE (who, in this scenario, would presumably have carried the state otherwise), and $WORSE_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE wins.
In short, your state-level electoral reform just pushes the spoiler/wasted-vote problem up to the EC level. Or rather, the problem exists at both levels; it's just rare too see it in action above the state level.
So, really, for electoral reform to work, it would have to happen at the EC level, which, if I'm not mistaken, would require a Constitutional Amendment -- Congress couldn't do it even if they wanted to, right?
Then again, maybe there's a way after all: a state could change the way it instructs its Electors how to vote. Instead of sending its delegation to the EC with orders to "Vote for $CANDIDATE", the orders could be "Vote for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE, if and only if enough other states have publicly ordered their Electors to do the same; otherwise, vote for $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE". In short, the state's instructions to its Electors would be in the form of a Condorcet ballot, plus rules on how to conduct a private tally before the EC meets for the real election.
The conditions governing how the Electors determine what the other states have done would have to be very strict and explicit, of course, so the voters aren't just telling their Electors to "Do whatever you think is best". But that's not really so hard: currently, every state's outcome is clearly known, and any&all states that implement this system would publicize their results for the benefit of each other.
The real beauty of it is that a sufficiently-enlightened state could implement this system unilaterally, and it would work within the Electoral College system.
Alternativly once the shielding problem is solved should everyone who comes up with "Powering X with a small nuclear reactor" get a patent?
The funniest thing about this example is that patents have already been granted and long-since expired for a bunch of those ideas: One of Richard Feynman's anecdotes in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman describes how, after the Manhattan Project was done, some suits came around and asked him if he could think of any other applications for atomic energy. He basically rattled off a few iterations of "For all X where X is something that uses energy, 'An atomic-powered X'".
They wrote it all down and left, and that was the last he heard of it until, some time later, he learned that he'd been granted a bunch of patents on the "atomic-powered ship", "atomic-powered airplane", "atomic-powered truck", etc. (I forget what the actual examples were, but it was something like that -- not sure if they were all vehicles, if he included spacecraft, or if he mentioned electricity generation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Um, sir... we had some trouble getting the Atomic Circuits. It seems they haven't actually been invented yet, so we had to get circuits that use electrons. But they are ill-tempered electrons...
As I always like to point out, the most important thing to remember about Occam's Razor is that it's a rule of thumb, not a Law of Nature. If two proposed theories otherwise seem to work similarly well, but one introduces fewer assumptions than the other, Occam's Razor suggests that the former is probably better than the latter, but you can't take this as "proof" -- at best, it lets you make a better educated guess about which avenue is likely to be more fruitful to continue exploring.
Who decides what religions are "official"?
The government? If so, you've effectively repealed freedom of religion entirely, because if the government want to ban a religion, all they have to do is declare that it isn't a "real" religion, and thus isn't protected.
Other religions? Even better! (need I elaborate?)
I'm aware that the LDS Church no longer sanctions polygamy (but used to). I'm also aware that not all of their followers accepted the change, and some continue the practice. Now, it's perfectly okay for you (and/or your Church) to distance yourselves from those "fringe groups", pointing out that they're not part of your Church, don't share your beliefs, etc. But I really hope you didn't mean to imply that their beliefs don't constitute a "real" religion, and/or are not entitled to the same Constitutional protections as yours.
The question is, when he says "their DRM is too lax", does he mean that...
...it's too easy to crack?
...even when used normally, it permits copying to too many devices?
...it doesn't give him the same kind of feature-level control as, say, DVD UOPs?
Because, see, only the latter interpretation would actually mean that "it's not really about piracy".
Maybe I just haven't seen enough tentacle porn, but it occurred to me to wonder, and I'm sure the collective intelligence of Slashdot can answer this: are the tentacle monsters always male? Where are the female tentacle monsters? Given the... uhhh... wide variety of interests already represented, there must be people who'd like to see them.
Maybe the female tentacle monster goes around attacking men more-or-less the same way the male ones do with women? Or maybe to have an "all (including the monster) lesbian tentacle porn? Or maybe a happy ending where the scientists manage to get the male and the female tentacle monster back together and they attack each other? What about a hermaphrodite tentacle monster, with both boy tentacles and girl tentacles?
Okay, for that last one, the answer is probably "sure, they exist, but you don't see them come up and terrorize Japanese towns because they're happy staying where they are and just attacking themselves". But in any case, are there any examples that use these ideas? Or have I managed to out-weird the entire tentacle-porn industry?
No, that's exactly it: as I read it, Bob's first attempt to connect to Alice is discarded by Alice's firewall, but it was never intended to be received; its only purpose was to put Bob's firewall into the "waiting for response" state, so that when Alice subsequently attempts to connect to Bob, Bob's firewall interprets the incoming data as the response that Bob was waiting for. And that's exactly what it is, in the sense that Alice and Bob are both intentionally following the Skype protocol; it's just not technically a "response" to Bob's actual packet.
That's why my take is that this isn't really a "security issue" so much as an "acceptable-use policy" issue: it only works because Alice and Bob are both intentionally running the Skype software and signed into the Skype server. Bob obviously doesn't consider an incoming call from Alice to be an "attack", because if he didn't want to receive calls, he wouldn't be running that software. Bob's local BOFH may consider it an "attack" in the sense that one of his lusers is using his network in a way that he didn't approve and is unable to control, but that's a different sort of problem.
What's the purpose of a firewall? To protect the network from hack attacks? Or to enable BOFHs to enforce their AUPs and control how their own lusers use the network? It's really both, I guess, but at least it's only the latter that is thwarted by this method.
Didn't you just describe nearly every book published?
Not every book ever published; just all the ones in the "political / punditry" category.All this talk of organs and body parts... Screw that, I'm hungry -- can they use it to grow muscle tissue? Mmm, printed meat.
Once the technology gets established enough to be cheap, it sounds like it might actually become more energy-efficient than raising livestock. And it should be ethically acceptable for vegetarians -- wouldn't some of them at least, who aren't too spooked by the "sciencey-ness" of the whole thing, agree that since the meat didn't come from an animal, it's okay to eat?
Also, exactly what do you think "craven" means?
NO! (the purist in me continues) They're still treating you like a thief, by having any DRM at all; they're just being more subtle about it. If anything, these are the ones that most need to be protested, lest they fool you into thinking otherwise.
Sure, if the requirement is to lob the pod all the way to orbit, ballistically, on just the initial kick from the mass-driver. But what about a hybrid approach, where the object you launch is a (basically) conventional rocket and the mass-driver just gives it an initial boost to save fuel?
With a bit of napkin-scribbling, I figured that a fairly modest acceleration of 5g's would get you to about Mach 1 on a 1-kilometer track, and Mach 3 on a 10-kilometer track. Nowhere near orbit, of course, but a rocket uses a lot of its fuel just to get to those speeds, right?
And that's just with the acceleration limited to human-friendly levels -- the same launcher could be built to use much higher acceleration for unmanned launches, and just scale it down as needed, depending on the squishiness of the payload.
I don't know enough rocket science (or maybe I just don't have enough napkins handy) to work out how much it would improve your overall payload fraction, but it seems like it'd be worth doing.
(And yes, of course, this little hop is nowhere near the same thing as actually visiting the Space Station, but it is technically "going into space".)
Quite right. But /. existed as a discussion site for a while before they implemented user accounts -- that was sometime in 1998 or '99. At the time, the whole "prickly Civil-Libertarian / privacy / right-to-anonymity" attitude was such that a lot of us refused, on principle, to create accounts. I was there the day they launched accounts, but I held out for a few months before creating mine, which is why I didn't get a 2- or 3-digit number (and for which, of course, I've been kicking myself ever since).
You just now figured that out? And have a 5-digit UID? Welcome to Slashdot.
(And yes, they are good points; just had to poke some fun.)
Yes, changing the first-past-the-gate voting system (whether with IRV, Condorcet, Approval, or whatever) would solve the wasted-vote problem, and yes, starting at the local level might at least partially solve the inertia problem. But, if successful, that would just raise another problem:
Okay: say your state switches to a system that lets you make your vote count the way you most want it to. So you can express your preference for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE while still helping $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE beat $WORSE_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE if it comes to that. Now, say enough voters in your state feel the same way you do that $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE manages to carry the state. Then what?
I'll tell you what: then, when the Electoral College meets, your state's Electors vote for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE, instead of $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE (who, in this scenario, would presumably have carried the state otherwise), and $WORSE_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE wins.
In short, your state-level electoral reform just pushes the spoiler/wasted-vote problem up to the EC level. Or rather, the problem exists at both levels; it's just rare too see it in action above the state level.
So, really, for electoral reform to work, it would have to happen at the EC level, which, if I'm not mistaken, would require a Constitutional Amendment -- Congress couldn't do it even if they wanted to, right?
Then again, maybe there's a way after all: a state could change the way it instructs its Electors how to vote. Instead of sending its delegation to the EC with orders to "Vote for $CANDIDATE", the orders could be "Vote for $THIRD_PARTY_CANDIDATE, if and only if enough other states have publicly ordered their Electors to do the same; otherwise, vote for $LESS_BAD_MAJOR_PARTY_CANDIDATE". In short, the state's instructions to its Electors would be in the form of a Condorcet ballot, plus rules on how to conduct a private tally before the EC meets for the real election.
The conditions governing how the Electors determine what the other states have done would have to be very strict and explicit, of course, so the voters aren't just telling their Electors to "Do whatever you think is best". But that's not really so hard: currently, every state's outcome is clearly known, and any&all states that implement this system would publicize their results for the benefit of each other.
The real beauty of it is that a sufficiently-enlightened state could implement this system unilaterally, and it would work within the Electoral College system.
The funniest thing about this example is that patents have already been granted and long-since expired for a bunch of those ideas: One of Richard Feynman's anecdotes in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman describes how, after the Manhattan Project was done, some suits came around and asked him if he could think of any other applications for atomic energy. He basically rattled off a few iterations of "For all X where X is something that uses energy, 'An atomic-powered X'".
They wrote it all down and left, and that was the last he heard of it until, some time later, he learned that he'd been granted a bunch of patents on the "atomic-powered ship", "atomic-powered airplane", "atomic-powered truck", etc. (I forget what the actual examples were, but it was something like that -- not sure if they were all vehicles, if he included spacecraft, or if he mentioned electricity generation.)
We still have that right, it's just being violated by a corrupt government.