The real problem is that the current generation of internet users as a whole have moved into free houses stuffed with video cameras and microphones, which is what the cloud services are, basically.
As a result, people effectively have no rights, and if this isn't changed soon, we'll have a generation of people who are completely disenfranchised, and only exist at the whim of their "free" providers of services. This is not a good place to be.
Even if your emails are sealed from casual man-in-the-middle attacks during transit, companies still snoop on them once they're delivered (eg Google with Gmail or Yahoo etc). The privacy issues at this point have blown up to gigantic proportions, and are *much* worse than the postcard analogy.
For example, *I* don't have a Gmail account or any direct service agreement with Google, but if I send an email to any one person with a Gmail address (and who doesn't know somebody like that?), then *my* privacy is breached automatically once the message arrives. And with email redirection services, this can happen even if I'm not sending directly to a gmail.com address.
The cloud is a clusterfuck of privacy abuses that no single individual can protect himself from.
A transaction in
which I gain something of value to me, in return for something of value to the other person,
which I value less than the goods I receive is the fundamental bedrock of economics.
Not quite. There are some things which aren't meant for you to be traded, even if you'd really like that beer. You can't sell your kids for a beer, for example. Even though they're your kids, and you should be able to do with them what you like in general, it's not in society's interest to let you do that. I like to think that letting you sell your privacy for a free beer is not in society's interest either.
Companies have always sought to find information on us,
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
If you use a free fitting room in a clothes store, and they take photos and video from hidden cameras while you change, it's ok right, cause it's free and you expect that.
If you leave your car in a free parking zone, and there's a guy there hiding a tracking device on the more expensive cars, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
If you let your kids go to the local playground and there's a guy there asking them questions about where they live, and when you go to work, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
I guess you think that the word free is like a magic incantation that makes everything ok.
I agree. Slashdot is such bullshit now, it was way better a year ago.
That's nothing, sonny! In the old days, we had Jon Katz, and he was the meanest, most bad-ass greatest content producer of intelligent FA's on slashdot, ever! And we liked it that way. Now that was quality, dammit!
So why go the trouble of crafting regulation to solve a problem taking care of itself already? All you
can do is make things more annoying for people.
The problem isn't taking care of itself. We are seeing Apple, Google and Facebook doing rearguard actions because they are afraid of regulation and lawsuits. Remove that threat, and they'll stop worrying about privacy.
It's much better to have a standardized set of laws that spell out the rights of customers than a mish mash of piecemeal solutions that companies have to invent themselves.
Moreover, the Europeans are doing it already, so why not copy^H^H^H harmonize with their laws in America? That'll save American companies a lot of work when they realize that their system must be redesigned anyway if they want European customers.
NO ONE will willingly enter into a long term project where you can arbitarily change the rules and
make them infinitely liable for whatever enters your head.
Wrong wrong wrong. People do, people have, and people will. If you can't be bothered reading the link about Lloyds names I provided, there's no point in continuing this discussion.
If they followed all the rules as stipulated upon being granted a license to
operate a nuclear reactor then they broke nothing.
That's a naive viewpoint. Rules change, countries change. A long term project has to take this into account.
No one accepts limitless liabilities. That you don't seem to grasp this is
really rather amusing. Liabilities are defined before hand and are not
subject to later change.
Your understanding of business history is extremely weak. Limitation on liability is a very recent phenomenon. Lloyd's of London is a great counterexample of your assertion.
This has been a common legal practice for the last 2000 or so years.
Not even close, and nevermind that legal practices have had very little in common around the world for most of the last 2000 years. There are at least 4 major legal frameworks in common use. The English common law system is spread about the former commonwealth and used (with some changes) in the US. The Roman inspired civil law system is used in most of Europe. The religious system based on Shariah is used in parts of the Middle East. The Russians and Chinese use socialist legal systems.
As to grabbing profit now and leaving a mess for later. Of course it isn't
okay. That's why you have to define liabilities beforehand. If you take care
of all stated liabilities then you technically didn't leave a mess.
You *cannot* limit liabilities in a long term (50+ years) project. The probability
of a major change rendering your calculations moot is so close to 1 as makes no difference.
Think about a reactor operating 50 years and letting radiation decay for another 50.
In a timespan of 100 years, countries and empires come and go. In the last century,
the extremely long lived Austrian Empire was destroyed. The Germans went from a monarchy, to a republic, to
a tyranny, to a democracy within 50 years only. The Russians overthrew the Tsar, became
a socialist state, and that collapsed within about 70 years. France is in its 5th republic,
(that's 5 different constitutions), and three of those occurred in the last century.
Hell, there's no guarantee that America will even exist by the end of this century.
We know that people (families) survive centuries, and that's it. If your liability estimates
*do not* take into account changes in the rules, then you are either extremely naive, or
trying to cheat. Even if the rules don't change (which has zero chance over 100 years), what about stock market crashes? Do you want to be absolved of those as well?
None of this is forever. These contracts and licenses aren't forever. When
the contracts are renegotiate you can stipulate new terms. And they will then
build those new expenses into their business model. If it turns out that they
can't make a profit due to a combination of price caps and high regulation
then they simply won't build.
The fact that you don't see this as a problem is exactly where we disagree. It's short term thinking without penalties for abandoning a project. I'm not against abandoning unviable projects, but I am against keeping the profits private and dumping the losses on the state. And that usually happens when government policies encourage private ownership of businesses where the public has an interest. Utilities are one example where the public interest is sufficiently important that they should not be privatized.
Do you really think it's ok to grab the profits now, and leave a mess for the next 50 years? Who are these business people who think they're owed special treatment?
How about we break the corporate veil, post their names and addresses, and see if the public at large really wants to give them special treatment?
Do you honestly think you know more about this than Steven Fry?
Of course he does. Fry's a pizza delivery guy whose best friend is a robot. Anybody knows more about... oh wait a minute. This is a pub, right? Bender knows a lot about beer, so... yeah, maybe Steven has been coached about the topic by an expert after all. Nevermind, carry on.
It's easy to forget that when these reactors were set up the world was a different place. The
"retirement" accounts for these reactors probably assumed a MUCH lower retirement cost. So
it's not the fault of the utility if there isn't enough money in the accounts if the rules
changed between point A and point B.
On the contrary, the utility is/should be very much responsible for this contingency. This is just like a margin call. When prices and regulations change, it's up to the utility to replenish the coffers *immediately* to guarantee that there are *always* enough funds to cover the final transaction cost.
A planned decommissioning is just another kind of futures contract, so there's no excuse to not use the standard rules of capitalism, especially since the utilities are private for profits.
And that applies to a discussion about Windows how, precisely?
Oh, that's easy. You just install this icon on Windows 7 called "Ubuntu", and, *get this*, when you click on it, you get a new desktop with this thing called Unity that, like, allows you to run one app maximized at a time. But the beauty of it is you can click the icon several times and get as many desktops as you like, for real, yeah I know, *virtual desktops* baby, so you can really run lots of apps now, and it's all based on GNOME 3 under the hood so it's really stable and all that just ends up using half of your machine memory only, because the other half, well, that's used by Windows 7 to display the Ubuntu icon and remind you to update your viruses which [...]
Unfortunately, somebody or something always needs rescuing or helping, otherwise it's not drama.
Do you really want to see a helpless male companion running and screaming, and needing to be rescued every episode? It gets old pretty quick if you're a guy watching the show (can't comment on the alternative). What's the demographic split between male and female viewers of Dr Who anyway?
This system gives money to people who reseach things that other people actually want or need,
which turns out to be a better system than giving money to research things that sound cool,
or to the politically connected, or some other central-planning fiasco.
Sorry, but no. Not at all.
The patent system gives money to people who want to gamble that other people might actually want or need something once it's available. That's the whole purpose of it.
Whenever people *actually* want or need something, they're prepared to pay you in advance to develop those solutions. There's no need for patents or monopolies to guarantee profits. Just 1) convince people you can make something they really want, 2) they pay you to support you while you develop it, 3) you deliver.
The use case for patents is speculation and gambling. It goes like this: 1) let's spend a lot of money making FOO regardless. 2) Oh oh, please Mr Uncle Sam, we've spent all this money already and anybody can copy FOO now. 3) Thank you Mr Uncle Sam, the gamble paid off.
In both cases you might end up with a product that benefits humanity, but in the first case you have a growing market with lots of competing players and in the second case you have a monopoly and intellectual censorship.
The editor of IEEE Software recounts that in the 1980s television
advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to
his own dogs. Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who
was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.^[6]
In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for
Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled "Eating our own Dogfood", challenging
him to increase internal usage of the company's product. From there, the usage
of the term spread through the company.^[7]^[8]
Slashdot Mirror
As a result, people effectively have no rights, and if this isn't changed soon, we'll have a generation of people who are completely disenfranchised, and only exist at the whim of their "free" providers of services. This is not a good place to be.
For example, *I* don't have a Gmail account or any direct service agreement with Google, but if I send an email to any one person with a Gmail address (and who doesn't know somebody like that?), then *my* privacy is breached automatically once the message arrives. And with email redirection services, this can happen even if I'm not sending directly to a gmail.com address.
The cloud is a clusterfuck of privacy abuses that no single individual can protect himself from.
Not quite. There are some things which aren't meant for you to be traded, even if you'd really like that beer. You can't sell your kids for a beer, for example. Even though they're your kids, and you should be able to do with them what you like in general, it's not in society's interest to let you do that. I like to think that letting you sell your privacy for a free beer is not in society's interest either.
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
If you leave your car in a free parking zone, and there's a guy there hiding a tracking device on the more expensive cars, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
If you let your kids go to the local playground and there's a guy there asking them questions about where they live, and when you go to work, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
I guess you think that the word free is like a magic incantation that makes everything ok.
If that's so, why do they wear shoes for lifts in the first place? A lot of gymnasts don't wear shoes when performing, so it's a legitimate question.
That's nothing, sonny! In the old days, we had Jon Katz, and he was the meanest, most bad-ass greatest content producer of intelligent FA's on slashdot, ever! And we liked it that way. Now that was quality, dammit!
In fairness, he probably tried but couldn't understand the cop/driver's strange accent.
Bah, they're only planets in metric units. In imperial units, it turns out those are only dwarf planets, and who cares about those? ;-)
The problem isn't taking care of itself. We are seeing Apple, Google and Facebook doing rearguard actions because they are afraid of regulation and lawsuits. Remove that threat, and they'll stop worrying about privacy. It's much better to have a standardized set of laws that spell out the rights of customers than a mish mash of piecemeal solutions that companies have to invent themselves.
Moreover, the Europeans are doing it already, so why not copy^H^H^H harmonize with their laws in America? That'll save American companies a lot of work when they realize that their system must be redesigned anyway if they want European customers.
Wrong wrong wrong. People do, people have, and people will. If you can't be bothered reading the link about Lloyds names I provided, there's no point in continuing this discussion.
That's a naive viewpoint. Rules change, countries change. A long term project has to take this into account.
Your understanding of business history is extremely weak. Limitation on liability is a very recent phenomenon. Lloyd's of London is a great counterexample of your assertion.
Not even close, and nevermind that legal practices have had very little in common around the world for most of the last 2000 years. There are at least 4 major legal frameworks in common use. The English common law system is spread about the former commonwealth and used (with some changes) in the US. The Roman inspired civil law system is used in most of Europe. The religious system based on Shariah is used in parts of the Middle East. The Russians and Chinese use socialist legal systems.
You *cannot* limit liabilities in a long term (50+ years) project. The probability of a major change rendering your calculations moot is so close to 1 as makes no difference.
Think about a reactor operating 50 years and letting radiation decay for another 50. In a timespan of 100 years, countries and empires come and go. In the last century, the extremely long lived Austrian Empire was destroyed. The Germans went from a monarchy, to a republic, to a tyranny, to a democracy within 50 years only. The Russians overthrew the Tsar, became a socialist state, and that collapsed within about 70 years. France is in its 5th republic, (that's 5 different constitutions), and three of those occurred in the last century. Hell, there's no guarantee that America will even exist by the end of this century.
We know that people (families) survive centuries, and that's it. If your liability estimates *do not* take into account changes in the rules, then you are either extremely naive, or trying to cheat. Even if the rules don't change (which has zero chance over 100 years), what about stock market crashes? Do you want to be absolved of those as well?
The fact that you don't see this as a problem is exactly where we disagree. It's short term thinking without penalties for abandoning a project. I'm not against abandoning unviable projects, but I am against keeping the profits private and dumping the losses on the state. And that usually happens when government policies encourage private ownership of businesses where the public has an interest. Utilities are one example where the public interest is sufficiently important that they should not be privatized.
If you pollute it, you clean it up.
Do you really think it's ok to grab the profits now, and leave a mess for the next 50 years? Who are these business people who think they're owed special treatment? How about we break the corporate veil, post their names and addresses, and see if the public at large really wants to give them special treatment?
Of course he does. Fry's a pizza delivery guy whose best friend is a robot. Anybody knows more about... oh wait a minute. This is a pub, right? Bender knows a lot about beer, so... yeah, maybe Steven has been coached about the topic by an expert after all. Nevermind, carry on.
On the contrary, the utility is/should be very much responsible for this contingency. This is just like a margin call. When prices and regulations change, it's up to the utility to replenish the coffers *immediately* to guarantee that there are *always* enough funds to cover the final transaction cost.
A planned decommissioning is just another kind of futures contract, so there's no excuse to not use the standard rules of capitalism, especially since the utilities are private for profits.
Or a tiny cat.
Bad kitty, bad!
Ionic, isn't it?
Oh, that's easy. You just install this icon on Windows 7 called "Ubuntu", and, *get this*, when you click on it, you get a new desktop with this thing called Unity that, like, allows you to run one app maximized at a time. But the beauty of it is you can click the icon several times and get as many desktops as you like, for real, yeah I know, *virtual desktops* baby, so you can really run lots of apps now, and it's all based on GNOME 3 under the hood so it's really stable and all that just ends up using half of your machine memory only, because the other half, well, that's used by Windows 7 to display the Ubuntu icon and remind you to update your viruses which [...]
Do you really want to see a helpless male companion running and screaming, and needing to be rescued every episode? It gets old pretty quick if you're a guy watching the show (can't comment on the alternative). What's the demographic split between male and female viewers of Dr Who anyway?
Sorry, but no. Not at all. The patent system gives money to people who want to gamble that other people might actually want or need something once it's available. That's the whole purpose of it.
Whenever people *actually* want or need something, they're prepared to pay you in advance to develop those solutions. There's no need for patents or monopolies to guarantee profits. Just 1) convince people you can make something they really want, 2) they pay you to support you while you develop it, 3) you deliver.
The use case for patents is speculation and gambling. It goes like this: 1) let's spend a lot of money making FOO regardless. 2) Oh oh, please Mr Uncle Sam, we've spent all this money already and anybody can copy FOO now. 3) Thank you Mr Uncle Sam, the gamble paid off.
In both cases you might end up with a product that benefits humanity, but in the first case you have a growing market with lots of competing players and in the second case you have a monopoly and intellectual censorship.
That's a sheep shot, you insensitive clod!
"Linux. The Desktop Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles use. Torrent It This Summer, Or No Pizza For You."
Did it? I still liked Dirk Benedict better.
"I'm a ninja, you know what I mean? And I do my little turn on the catwalk. On the catwalk. Yeah. On the catwalk. Yeah."