Not all parenting tools are appropriate for all children. It is, and always has been, up to the parent to decide the appropriate amount of latitude any particular child should enjoy.
Agree 100%. So for students that need monitoring it's available. If students don't need monitoring, then the parents don't need to use it.
As a parent, much of my view of the roles of parents and what they're supposed to do has changed. I suspect that many of the High School crowd that reads/. does not have the faintest clue of the responsibilties that their parents have.
I'm reminded of a line from the movie Heathers where one of the parents says, "When teenagers complain about not being treated like adults, the reason they're complaining is that they are being treated like adults." That's not an exact quote, but the point is that most high school students (this includes me when I was in high school) want the freedom to do whatever they want, but they expect their parents to pick up the pieces after they screw up.
IMHO, if the law says that the parents are 100% responsible for the students being in school, then this thing is appropriate. OTOH, I think that such a law is stupid. If a gradeschooler or middleschooler doesn't show up at school, one can reasonably ask the parents what happened. But if a teenager doesn't show up, the responsibility should be borne by the teenager.
What this would mean, though, is that the magic protection of 18 years old would go away. Suddenly any crimes commited by someone under 18 would be treated as if they were adults. That's just the way that it goes. If you want the freedom to act like an adult, then you get the resonsibility that goes along with it.
IMHO, as long as the law enforces 18 years old as the cutoff for parental responsibility, anything short of abuse is fair game for making sure that teenagers are kept in line. If you're a teenager and you don't like this, you have two choices:
behave responsibly so that your parents trust you and give you more freedom
what would you say was the defining moment that facilitated public consumption of the technology?
For me it was the release of a usable mosaic, and not too long after that, yahoo. I don't remember when mosaic was released, but I remember downloading it and skipping around to different people's web sites. I also remember thinking to myself that this thing was interesting but that it probably wouldn't catch on. Usenet had a nice indexing system in that there were groups identified by interest. So if you had a paritcular interest, you could find resources on Usenet by looking at the names of the groups. But there was no such mechanism with mosaic (I called it "mosaic" at the time for lack of better understanding of what drove it).
So much for my prognostication. I now predict that any predictions from me are sketchy at best. (This bit of self reference brought to you by "Godel, Escher, Bach".)
I used to be an IT contracter at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. As such, I worked quite closely with people who were getting things certified to fly.
You would not believe how involved the process is to get something certified to fly. The people who work on projects tend to work on their own piece of the project, and how it will fit into a mission. However, 99% of the flight certification process revolves around safety - AS IT SHOULD.
If that means that people aren't reusing materials optimally, that may be disappointing, but it's much better than creating an unsafe environment. Space, without our help, is one of the most inhospitable environments for humans. Huge amounts of time and effort go into safety precautions.
Personally, I can see why the ground crews would have balked at the table making enterprise. Those "spare parts" that they used were there serving a purpose, most of which was safety related. Simply removing them w/out consulting the people who built them and determining their purpose may have the unintended effect of making something unsafe.
Right now NASA seems to be applauding the ingenuity of the american who created fashioned the table. I wonder how they'll react if the things used end up creating some sort of safety hazard. Remember how critical NASA was of MIR with all of its safety problems.
only six complaints about local sites were made in the second 6 months of operation. It suggests that the majority of money spent, and investigations carried out, only helps the largely U.S.-based content filtering industry
<devil's advocate>
Maybe the limit of 6 complaints suggests instead that the blocking software is accomplishing it's tasks... ?? If you're a government agency working on this, and you do this because you're getting complaints from your constituents, wouldn't you consider 6 complaints in the 2nd 6 mos of operations to be a grand success...?
</devil's advocate>
BTW, I release my code into the public domain. Many programmers have been fed a lot of lies about liability and told things like "if you don't GPL it, proprietary companies can take it for themselves," without really thinking about what things like that mean. GPL is just the default by sheer publicity, no other license (much less the public domain) has a dedicated cadre of propagandists working for it.
Congratulations. I hope you'll permit me the right to control my code the way that I want to. And if I want to release my code under the terms that you're allowed to use it if and only if you don't proprietize it, what's wrong with that?
I get a kick out of people who proclaim that anyone who uses GPL or believes the tenets of the GPL is somehow restricting other people's rights. My use of the GPL does not prevent you from using any license on your software, or releasing it to the public domain. But because I prevent you from using my software under conditions that I don't approve of, you think I'm the zealot? You're trying to take my code, use it, and not contribute back. You're trying to take the work of others and proclaim it for yourself. And I'm the one impinging on your rights?
I got the impression that the voting of the parents was then analyzed by the neural net to allow the system to help predict what sort of decisions parents would make about sites... but I could be reading a bit more into it than is stated.
Compared to my freinds with Cabel Modems, well, I'll take DSL anyday. Sure they can get blazing download speends IF their neighbors aren't surfing and IF the phase of hte moon is right:) But it depends on the vendor. I've had friends drop Cable for DSL like crazy because of stability and bandwidth issues, but in other areas, its just the opposite.
Depends on the vendor is true with any internet service provider, including DSL providers and cable modem providers. It ALL depends on how much bandwidth the provider has to the internet and what their oversubscription model is like.
Every ISP, I repeat, EVERY ISP uses shared bandwidth. Including DSL providers. If the provider has a decent oversubscription model, then the only real question is a comparison of the infrastructure over the last mile. In the vast majority of cases, the cable infrastructure smokes the DSL infrastructure. Unshielded twisted pair vs shielded coaxial cable + fiber. There's really no comparison.
I have been testing the last mile bandwidth of my cable modem for over 2 years. I've been running continuous tests every half hour during that time. And the last mile bandwidth has not changed even the tiniest bit during any part of the day.
If bandwidth slows down at peak times, it's not because of the cable infrastructure. It's more likely because of the oversubscription rate of the provider, or the bandwidth of the internet site in question.
This certainly matches my experience with DSL vs. cable, but for various reasons you're probably familiar with, DSL can be a better way to connect
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable:
competition between vendors
Some reasons why Cable is better than DSL:
faster
better basic infrastructure. Whatever you say, twisted pair can not compare with shielded coaxial cable as far as signal quality. And in most cases, the coaxial cable is much shorter than the average twisted pair. After that the service runs on fiber.
no distance limitations. If you're connected to the cable company and the service is deployed, then you get the service. None of this well my next door neighbor got the service, but I'm too far out to qualify.
Some false reasons whey DSL is better than cable:
DSL provides guaranteed bandwidth. While, technically this is true, it's really misleading. DSL's guaranteed bandwidth is only to the CO or the exchange. After that, all the bandwidth is shared.
DSL's private bandwidth provides better security. This is also misleading. Remember, you're connecting to the Internet. Your next door neighbor can still scan and attack your machine. On top of that, most cable systems provide encryption between the cable modem and the cable router at the provider.
For a more eloquant summary of the differences see: Simson Garfinkle's excellent review. It's a bit dated (Sept 1999) but it's still does a good job of cutting through much of the rhetoric.
You are probably correct in saying that my post is ignorant. However I think you may be missing my point. My point is that we as members of a society have an influence in determining what is more important, specificity or intent. If you like specificity, then that's something that will probably have to be paid for, further empowering those with money. If you prefer intent, then how do you discern the intent a priori without good specificity?
My only intent (ironic) was to start a discussion of which side you think you'd rather have, or how you combine the two into something that is acceptable. Of course, no such discussion started, and discussion about how little I understand the law is what ensued. Oh well!
I think that specifity is important. Any software engineer will tell you that
[... ]
The english language (in common use) is suitably ambiguous to make that impossible
Specificity is critically important when you're communicating with a computer. But over specificity is actually a deterrant to communicating with another human. Ambiguity is a common mechanism by which we humans learn. So, for example, when I say "cat" you have one image in your mind and I have another image in my mind. But when we both discover that the thing that I was talking about is different than the thing you were thinking, we'll have expanded our understanding of what the word "cat" comprises. Just now, I was thinking of a cheetah. Do you remember when you learned that cheetahs and lions and tigers were also cats?
I'm overstating some things here becuase it's been about 8 years since I took my philosophy of language class. But to sum up, generally human communication works much more efficiently when there's some ambiguity in it.
Which leads us to where we are - I don't really like it when a silly case wins in court due to a loophole, but I see no alternative
But it's not just in the event of silly cases. You are cornered by the silliness everyday. Clearly you use a computer connected to the Internet. Do you think that the terms of service that govern your connection protect you? The point is that if we can't figure out a better way to deal with specificity and intent, then we consign ourselves to the rules that are written by those who can afford to write them.
I don't have an answer for this either, but I'd like to think that the discussion isn't so easily dismissed.
First of all, only naive idiots are universally pro-lawyer or anti-lawyer.
This can't be anything other than flamebait. I'll try and overlook it by saying that I never meant to suggest that I was universally pro- or anti-lawyer. I meant to discuss how a person's stance on this issue might lead to unintended consequences. Specifically that you might be enabling the powerful to be more powerful, by giving less value to intent and only sticking to the specificity that was set forth in his challenge.
But my assumptions about how the law does and does not work are well corrected by you. (Obviously) IANAL, so anything I said about how the law works is left to better people than me.
I think that a person's stance on this issue, of who was right and who was wrong, will indicate that same person's approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today.
If you are for the challengee, then you believe that exact specificity is more important than intent. And you inadvertantly empower the legal profession to profit from being better able to specify rules, etc. Which, in turn, gives those with money even more power. They can write the rules by which your interaction with them will be governed. You can be certain that the rules will be written to the advantage of the guy with the money.
If, on the other hand, you are for the challenger, then you believe that his intent was more important. (Considering that the challenge came from the compression FAQ, the exact definition of "compression" should have not been vague. It seems clear to me that his intent was obvious, even though his challenge wasn't very specific.) Still there is a problem with valuing intent over specificity. That is it's easy to misrepresent intent after the fact. Thus the need to clearly specify our intentions prior to anything we do. That being the case, with accurate documentation, it seems possible to me that we can discern the original intent w/out having to specify everything legalistically. For example, I think that I was able to clearly determine the challenger's intent well after the fact, and I did this having read the challengee's representation of the events.
Now you may say, in rebuttal, "Who cares who I choose? I don't get to make the law." But
think of yourself as the jury trying to determine to whom you would award the money. You may one day find yourself on a jury and trying to determine who should be awarded money. I see this as a microcosm of exactly how our court system has gotten into the state that it's in. Specificity is clearly more important than intent. And it's that way because juries award that way. Since juries are comprised of members of society, it's not a far stretch to say that society as a whole regards specificity as more important than intent.
Is there any chance that we can change this? And if we did, would it be better?
In reference to instant messaging being a public accomodation you say:
I really don't think it should be. As you as you get to something like that, you end up having government regulation and problems like we see with the Bells and even the power providers.
Why do you think that? Email is a public accomodation. Ok, so email isn't the same thing as power and phone service. But in the scope of the internet, why shouldn't IM be as public as email? There don't appear to be any government regulation problems with email.
Personally, I think that jabber will eventually win the day rendering the discussion moot. I remember when I was sending email on a WANG VS system. This system was so foreign to SMTP, that I think it prohibited the use of S, M, T, or P in any email. It was as proprietary as they come. But no one uses it now. Not because it wasn't popular at the time. It was very popular. But an open standard (meaning anyone was allowed to implement it) was just more attractive. It allowed everyone to be able to communicate to everyone else. It was proprietary and had a ton more features, but it lost because it had a self imposed limitation on how much it could grow.
I think (hope?) that eventually Jabber will do the same.
I know it's way to late in/. time to post something that anyone is going to see. Heck there are already over 300 posts to this article. But I can't let this one go by w/out comment.
money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it. In American capitalism, money is exchangeable for property, and vice versa.
This is completely true. But in the very next sentance he says,
The reality of money is founded in our belief that the ownership of property is a fundamental right.
This is way off base. The reality of money is founded in our belief that members of society must work or create some kind of value in order to survive. And upon creating that value, or working, you have earned the right to property ownership.
Money is a convenient and arbitrary way for people to exchange anything for work or creativity or something of value. On the one hand he says that the value of money is arbitrary, then in the next breath, he says that it only corresponds to property. This is the falacy that leads people to believe that there is a fixed amount of
money in the world, and if some people have more, they must have taken it from those who have less.
The richest people in the world, of previous generations, would give most of their entire kingdoms to have the facilities that the common person has today: instant communication, quick and efficient travel to anywhere in the world. The common person today is richer than the royalty of 300 years ago. In other words, we have all become richer w/out some corresponding huge population of us becoming poorer.
Money is the catalyst that has allowed this tranformation to take place. Money says nothing about society's beliefs about the rights of property ownership. It says that society requires work, or creativity, or something of value in order for individuals w/in the society to survive. Which can then be passed on to future generations.
It works like this:
want something? need money.
want money? provide something of value which you can exchange for money (typically work)
use money for whatever you want, but now the world has twice the value that it had before: the thing of value or work that you created + the money that paid for it.
I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying. And for the most part I agree with this guy when he says that communication is necessasary in order to prevent the blind submission of our rights to corporate entities. But money isn't evil, even if it is just a social contract. And the social contract that money represents is not what this guy thinks it is.
It's interesting to me how the/. community is all up in arms to attack owners of IP when such owners are large corporations who use IP to make money. But then when the IP owner is an individual trying to do the same thing, suddenly IP is a good thing.
No matter, I think that this kid made the same mistake that most large corporations make w.r.t. IP. He assumed that he could own an idea, and at the same time tell someone about it. The fact is that you get to do one or the other. Once an idea is shared, you can't ever take it back. In fact, the benefactor of this sharing can't give it back no matter how hard he tries.
I think that if Adam Hinkley really wanted to keep the code that he worked on, while employed by someone else, he should have released it under GPL. But because he tried to keep ownership of it w/out the resources to defend that ownership, he lost it completely.
I've been a network security professional for about 8 years now, and one of the things that people seem to forget is that security is not some absolute thing which you can measure your stuff against and then be happy that you've met the standard. You constantly have to measure security against the context of what you're trying to protect.
So, for example, my private email communications with my friend in New Jersey are done using GPG. We both have 1024 bit keys. Do I store my private key on some non-interceptible media? Do I have my computer room tempest shielded? No, of course not. But why should I. The risk of my emails being wanted by anyone other than my friend is not very high. My only reason for encrypting our communication is to make it difficult for casual snoops. And given me and my friend's relative importance in the world, those are the only people who will try to eavesdrop on our communication. I'm sure that professional snoops would easily be able to get our communication without our even knowing it. But I'm also pretty sure that there are no professional snoops running around even trying to read our email.
My conclusion: GPG is good enough, becuase the relative risk is very low. Is the exact same set up good enough for communication between the President and the National Security Advisor when talking about issues of national security? Probably not. (Ignore for the moment that the Pres has sworn off email.)
My point: you can't answer the question of "is PGP (or GPG) secure enough?". The answer depends on what you're trying to protect.
The only companies that can make money online are companies that can also make money offline.
While a lot of companies who make money offline are also able to make money online, they're not the only companies that can make money online. There are a gazillion pr0n sites that have absolutely no chance of making money offline because of the expense of producing hard copies of their stuff. But online, it's incredibly cheap for just about anyone to produce and sell pr0n. Remember, the pr0n sites are the most successful businesses on the Internet today.
For the most part I agree with you, but I think that the Internet is something new and different. IF you can figure out how to leverage it, you can be a successful online only company. So far the only ones who've figured this out are the pr0n sites. But I have no doubt there will be more.
The real difference is that Microsoft has a larger market share, and hence lawyers can get more money out of them. But as a matter of law and economics, what's the difference? Judge Jackson ruled that the "relevant market" for Microsoft was PC consumer OS's, so it would seem that there is a similar market for antitrust purposes for Mac hardware. If that's the case, Apple's far more of a monopolist than Microsoft is.
IIRC, Judge Jackson's definition of PC included Mac's. If that's true, then Apple can't be considered to be in a monopoly position because their OS is in competition with Winders.
If Apple isn't a monopolist, then the rules that govern monopolists don't apply to Apple. In other words the rules that Microsoft has to follow, becuase of their monopoly position, are very much different than the rules that everyone else has to follow.
Remember, being a monopoly isn't illegal. It's the attempt to maintain and extend the monopoly that's illegal. Thus, deals that preclude consumer choice in operating systems, done by a monopoly, are acts that maintain the monopoly power and are thus illegal. Those same deals, done by someone who is not a monopolist may or may not be good business practice, but they aren't illegal.
IANAL, so maybe I got this wrong. Someone who knows the law better care to comment?
Oh please, oh please, oh please, let the claim that it's fair use. Please, I just wanna see AOL Time Warner claiming that this is fair use of something that they already paid for. PLEASE have them open up that pandora's box.
Right. This is exactly the conclusion that Garfinkle was pointing out and exactly the reason that I linked to him, since he described it much more clearly than I could.
I have never qualified for DSL at my house. I have cable modem. I've heard a lot of people, mostly DSL providers, telling me that cable modem will always be slower than DSL, and after almost 30 months with cable modem, I'm convinced that the DSL providers are full of it.
Now I don't claim to know that DSL is slow. I have no idea, I've never had it at my house. But cable ain't slow. My cable modem provider has put a 12MB file for download at their central site. This download is directly at the other end of the cable infrastructure, so downloading this file is a good test of the cable infrastructure. Armed with linux (as the only OS in my household thank you very much) I set up a cron job to download this file every 30 minutes and report the results.
During the first 21 months or so, I got between 600 and 700 kBytes/s (i.e. 4.8 - 5.6 Mbits/s). Then at about 21 months, roadrunner installed a bandwidth cap, and since then I've gotten between 240 kBytes/s (1.9 Mbits/s) and 260 kBytes/s (2.0 Mbits/s).
After almost 30 months of continuous testing, I have NEVER seen the alleged slow downs that are supposed to come because the cable infrastructure is shared. And it isn't for lack of subscribers in my neighborhood! There are 4 people that I know have it on my culdesac alone!
Now, of course, it's a whole different ball of wax when I try to go to the Internet in general. There I get wildly fluctuating speed variations. (As you would expect) But across the cable infrastructure, I can floor it whenever I want, at any time of day.
My conclusion? I don't know if DSL is slow or not but what Simson Garfinkle said in his salon article is 100% on the money.
And the stuff that the DSL providers tell you about speed is just hogwash. And I'm pretty sure that all the stuff that they tell you about security is also crap.. although I can't really prove that it's crap.
The only thing that I don't like about cable modem is the lack of competition. I wish there was someone else out there other than roadrunner. Cuz they suck. Their mail server is slow, their response to problems is terrible. I'd love to be able to threaten them with switching to another provider. But hey, what's a monopoly if you don't get to stick it to someone!
So are you saying that once a person becomes president, anything that happens in the white house is public property?
What about what goes on in the residential portion of the white house? If W pays for a cable modem, for example, and sends encrypted email out the cable modem, would he be required to turn that over?
I understand his being cautious. I probably would be too. But doesn't the president have some expectation of privacy in his own residence? Or are you saying that the president doesn't have any expectation of any privacy during any point during the 4 years he occupies the office?
"My lawyers tell me all correspondence by email is subject to open record requests. Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course ofaction is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing witheach of you."
If he really wanted to continue to converse, privately, with his friends why doesn't he just download GPG (or any other encryption program) and start using it? If he does this, would the "open record requests" require him to relinquish the key?
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Agree 100%. So for students that need monitoring it's available. If students don't need monitoring, then the parents don't need to use it.
As a parent, much of my view of the roles of parents and what they're supposed to do has changed. I suspect that many of the High School crowd that reads /. does not have the faintest clue of the responsibilties that their parents have.
I'm reminded of a line from the movie Heathers where one of the parents says, "When teenagers complain about not being treated like adults, the reason they're complaining is that they are being treated like adults." That's not an exact quote, but the point is that most high school students (this includes me when I was in high school) want the freedom to do whatever they want, but they expect their parents to pick up the pieces after they screw up.
IMHO, if the law says that the parents are 100% responsible for the students being in school, then this thing is appropriate. OTOH, I think that such a law is stupid. If a gradeschooler or middleschooler doesn't show up at school, one can reasonably ask the parents what happened. But if a teenager doesn't show up, the responsibility should be borne by the teenager.
What this would mean, though, is that the magic protection of 18 years old would go away. Suddenly any crimes commited by someone under 18 would be treated as if they were adults. That's just the way that it goes. If you want the freedom to act like an adult, then you get the resonsibility that goes along with it.
IMHO, as long as the law enforces 18 years old as the cutoff for parental responsibility, anything short of abuse is fair game for making sure that teenagers are kept in line. If you're a teenager and you don't like this, you have two choices:
$.02.
Whew! I don't have a phaser or a photon torpedo. I feel safer now!
For me it was the release of a usable mosaic, and not too long after that, yahoo. I don't remember when mosaic was released, but I remember downloading it and skipping around to different people's web sites. I also remember thinking to myself that this thing was interesting but that it probably wouldn't catch on. Usenet had a nice indexing system in that there were groups identified by interest. So if you had a paritcular interest, you could find resources on Usenet by looking at the names of the groups. But there was no such mechanism with mosaic (I called it "mosaic" at the time for lack of better understanding of what drove it).
So much for my prognostication. I now predict that any predictions from me are sketchy at best. (This bit of self reference brought to you by "Godel, Escher, Bach".)
You would not believe how involved the process is to get something certified to fly. The people who work on projects tend to work on their own piece of the project, and how it will fit into a mission. However, 99% of the flight certification process revolves around safety - AS IT SHOULD.
If that means that people aren't reusing materials optimally, that may be disappointing, but it's much better than creating an unsafe environment. Space, without our help, is one of the most inhospitable environments for humans. Huge amounts of time and effort go into safety precautions.
Personally, I can see why the ground crews would have balked at the table making enterprise. Those "spare parts" that they used were there serving a purpose, most of which was safety related. Simply removing them w/out consulting the people who built them and determining their purpose may have the unintended effect of making something unsafe.
Right now NASA seems to be applauding the ingenuity of the american who created fashioned the table. I wonder how they'll react if the things used end up creating some sort of safety hazard. Remember how critical NASA was of MIR with all of its safety problems.
<devil's advocate>
Maybe the limit of 6 complaints suggests instead that the blocking software is accomplishing it's tasks... ?? If you're a government agency working on this, and you do this because you're getting complaints from your constituents, wouldn't you consider 6 complaints in the 2nd 6 mos of operations to be a grand success...?
</devil's advocate>
Congratulations. I hope you'll permit me the right to control my code the way that I want to. And if I want to release my code under the terms that you're allowed to use it if and only if you don't proprietize it, what's wrong with that?
I get a kick out of people who proclaim that anyone who uses GPL or believes the tenets of the GPL is somehow restricting other people's rights. My use of the GPL does not prevent you from using any license on your software, or releasing it to the public domain. But because I prevent you from using my software under conditions that I don't approve of, you think I'm the zealot? You're trying to take my code, use it, and not contribute back. You're trying to take the work of others and proclaim it for yourself. And I'm the one impinging on your rights?
You live in a strange world.
I got the impression that the voting of the parents was then analyzed by the neural net to allow the system to help predict what sort of decisions parents would make about sites... but I could be reading a bit more into it than is stated.
Depends on the vendor is true with any internet service provider, including DSL providers and cable modem providers. It ALL depends on how much bandwidth the provider has to the internet and what their oversubscription model is like.
Every ISP, I repeat, EVERY ISP uses shared bandwidth. Including DSL providers. If the provider has a decent oversubscription model, then the only real question is a comparison of the infrastructure over the last mile. In the vast majority of cases, the cable infrastructure smokes the DSL infrastructure. Unshielded twisted pair vs shielded coaxial cable + fiber. There's really no comparison.
I have been testing the last mile bandwidth of my cable modem for over 2 years. I've been running continuous tests every half hour during that time. And the last mile bandwidth has not changed even the tiniest bit during any part of the day.
If bandwidth slows down at peak times, it's not because of the cable infrastructure. It's more likely because of the oversubscription rate of the provider, or the bandwidth of the internet site in question.
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable:
Some reasons why Cable is better than DSL:
Some false reasons whey DSL is better than cable:
For a more eloquant summary of the differences see: Simson Garfinkle's excellent review. It's a bit dated (Sept 1999) but it's still does a good job of cutting through much of the rhetoric.
My only intent (ironic) was to start a discussion of which side you think you'd rather have, or how you combine the two into something that is acceptable. Of course, no such discussion started, and discussion about how little I understand the law is what ensued. Oh well!
What's funny about that is that I was thinking that exact thing right after I pushed submit on my last post! Nice catch.
[ ... ]
Specificity is critically important when you're communicating with a computer. But over specificity is actually a deterrant to communicating with another human. Ambiguity is a common mechanism by which we humans learn. So, for example, when I say "cat" you have one image in your mind and I have another image in my mind. But when we both discover that the thing that I was talking about is different than the thing you were thinking, we'll have expanded our understanding of what the word "cat" comprises. Just now, I was thinking of a cheetah. Do you remember when you learned that cheetahs and lions and tigers were also cats?
I'm overstating some things here becuase it's been about 8 years since I took my philosophy of language class. But to sum up, generally human communication works much more efficiently when there's some ambiguity in it.
But it's not just in the event of silly cases. You are cornered by the silliness everyday. Clearly you use a computer connected to the Internet. Do you think that the terms of service that govern your connection protect you? The point is that if we can't figure out a better way to deal with specificity and intent, then we consign ourselves to the rules that are written by those who can afford to write them.
I don't have an answer for this either, but I'd like to think that the discussion isn't so easily dismissed.
This can't be anything other than flamebait. I'll try and overlook it by saying that I never meant to suggest that I was universally pro- or anti-lawyer. I meant to discuss how a person's stance on this issue might lead to unintended consequences. Specifically that you might be enabling the powerful to be more powerful, by giving less value to intent and only sticking to the specificity that was set forth in his challenge.
But my assumptions about how the law does and does not work are well corrected by you. (Obviously) IANAL, so anything I said about how the law works is left to better people than me.
Cheers!
If you are for the challengee, then you believe that exact specificity is more important than intent. And you inadvertantly empower the legal profession to profit from being better able to specify rules, etc. Which, in turn, gives those with money even more power. They can write the rules by which your interaction with them will be governed. You can be certain that the rules will be written to the advantage of the guy with the money.
If, on the other hand, you are for the challenger, then you believe that his intent was more important. (Considering that the challenge came from the compression FAQ, the exact definition of "compression" should have not been vague. It seems clear to me that his intent was obvious, even though his challenge wasn't very specific.) Still there is a problem with valuing intent over specificity. That is it's easy to misrepresent intent after the fact. Thus the need to clearly specify our intentions prior to anything we do. That being the case, with accurate documentation, it seems possible to me that we can discern the original intent w/out having to specify everything legalistically. For example, I think that I was able to clearly determine the challenger's intent well after the fact, and I did this having read the challengee's representation of the events.
Now you may say, in rebuttal, "Who cares who I choose? I don't get to make the law." But think of yourself as the jury trying to determine to whom you would award the money. You may one day find yourself on a jury and trying to determine who should be awarded money. I see this as a microcosm of exactly how our court system has gotten into the state that it's in. Specificity is clearly more important than intent. And it's that way because juries award that way. Since juries are comprised of members of society, it's not a far stretch to say that society as a whole regards specificity as more important than intent.
Is there any chance that we can change this? And if we did, would it be better?
Why do you think that? Email is a public accomodation. Ok, so email isn't the same thing as power and phone service. But in the scope of the internet, why shouldn't IM be as public as email? There don't appear to be any government regulation problems with email.
Personally, I think that jabber will eventually win the day rendering the discussion moot. I remember when I was sending email on a WANG VS system. This system was so foreign to SMTP, that I think it prohibited the use of S, M, T, or P in any email. It was as proprietary as they come. But no one uses it now. Not because it wasn't popular at the time. It was very popular. But an open standard (meaning anyone was allowed to implement it) was just more attractive. It allowed everyone to be able to communicate to everyone else. It was proprietary and had a ton more features, but it lost because it had a self imposed limitation on how much it could grow.
I think (hope?) that eventually Jabber will do the same.
This is completely true. But in the very next sentance he says,
This is way off base. The reality of money is founded in our belief that members of society must work or create some kind of value in order to survive. And upon creating that value, or working, you have earned the right to property ownership.
Money is a convenient and arbitrary way for people to exchange anything for work or creativity or something of value. On the one hand he says that the value of money is arbitrary, then in the next breath, he says that it only corresponds to property. This is the falacy that leads people to believe that there is a fixed amount of money in the world, and if some people have more, they must have taken it from those who have less.
The richest people in the world, of previous generations, would give most of their entire kingdoms to have the facilities that the common person has today: instant communication, quick and efficient travel to anywhere in the world. The common person today is richer than the royalty of 300 years ago. In other words, we have all become richer w/out some corresponding huge population of us becoming poorer.
Money is the catalyst that has allowed this tranformation to take place. Money says nothing about society's beliefs about the rights of property ownership. It says that society requires work, or creativity, or something of value in order for individuals w/in the society to survive. Which can then be passed on to future generations.
It works like this:
I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying. And for the most part I agree with this guy when he says that communication is necessasary in order to prevent the blind submission of our rights to corporate entities. But money isn't evil, even if it is just a social contract. And the social contract that money represents is not what this guy thinks it is.
No matter, I think that this kid made the same mistake that most large corporations make w.r.t. IP. He assumed that he could own an idea, and at the same time tell someone about it. The fact is that you get to do one or the other. Once an idea is shared, you can't ever take it back. In fact, the benefactor of this sharing can't give it back no matter how hard he tries.
I think that if Adam Hinkley really wanted to keep the code that he worked on, while employed by someone else, he should have released it under GPL. But because he tried to keep ownership of it w/out the resources to defend that ownership, he lost it completely.
I've been a network security professional for about 8 years now, and one of the things that people seem to forget is that security is not some absolute thing which you can measure your stuff against and then be happy that you've met the standard. You constantly have to measure security against the context of what you're trying to protect.
So, for example, my private email communications with my friend in New Jersey are done using GPG. We both have 1024 bit keys. Do I store my private key on some non-interceptible media? Do I have my computer room tempest shielded? No, of course not. But why should I. The risk of my emails being wanted by anyone other than my friend is not very high. My only reason for encrypting our communication is to make it difficult for casual snoops. And given me and my friend's relative importance in the world, those are the only people who will try to eavesdrop on our communication. I'm sure that professional snoops would easily be able to get our communication without our even knowing it. But I'm also pretty sure that there are no professional snoops running around even trying to read our email.
My conclusion: GPG is good enough, becuase the relative risk is very low. Is the exact same set up good enough for communication between the President and the National Security Advisor when talking about issues of national security? Probably not. (Ignore for the moment that the Pres has sworn off email.)
My point: you can't answer the question of "is PGP (or GPG) secure enough?". The answer depends on what you're trying to protect.
While a lot of companies who make money offline are also able to make money online, they're not the only companies that can make money online. There are a gazillion pr0n sites that have absolutely no chance of making money offline because of the expense of producing hard copies of their stuff. But online, it's incredibly cheap for just about anyone to produce and sell pr0n. Remember, the pr0n sites are the most successful businesses on the Internet today.
For the most part I agree with you, but I think that the Internet is something new and different. IF you can figure out how to leverage it, you can be a successful online only company. So far the only ones who've figured this out are the pr0n sites. But I have no doubt there will be more.
IIRC, Judge Jackson's definition of PC included Mac's. If that's true, then Apple can't be considered to be in a monopoly position because their OS is in competition with Winders.
If Apple isn't a monopolist, then the rules that govern monopolists don't apply to Apple. In other words the rules that Microsoft has to follow, becuase of their monopoly position, are very much different than the rules that everyone else has to follow.
Remember, being a monopoly isn't illegal. It's the attempt to maintain and extend the monopoly that's illegal. Thus, deals that preclude consumer choice in operating systems, done by a monopoly, are acts that maintain the monopoly power and are thus illegal. Those same deals, done by someone who is not a monopolist may or may not be good business practice, but they aren't illegal.
IANAL, so maybe I got this wrong. Someone who knows the law better care to comment?
Oh please, oh please, oh please, let the claim that it's fair use. Please, I just wanna see AOL Time Warner claiming that this is fair use of something that they already paid for. PLEASE have them open up that pandora's box.
Right. This is exactly the conclusion that Garfinkle was pointing out and exactly the reason that I linked to him, since he described it much more clearly than I could.
Now I don't claim to know that DSL is slow. I have no idea, I've never had it at my house. But cable ain't slow. My cable modem provider has put a 12MB file for download at their central site. This download is directly at the other end of the cable infrastructure, so downloading this file is a good test of the cable infrastructure. Armed with linux (as the only OS in my household thank you very much) I set up a cron job to download this file every 30 minutes and report the results.
During the first 21 months or so, I got between 600 and 700 kBytes/s (i.e. 4.8 - 5.6 Mbits/s). Then at about 21 months, roadrunner installed a bandwidth cap, and since then I've gotten between 240 kBytes/s (1.9 Mbits/s) and 260 kBytes/s (2.0 Mbits/s).
After almost 30 months of continuous testing, I have NEVER seen the alleged slow downs that are supposed to come because the cable infrastructure is shared. And it isn't for lack of subscribers in my neighborhood! There are 4 people that I know have it on my culdesac alone!
Now, of course, it's a whole different ball of wax when I try to go to the Internet in general. There I get wildly fluctuating speed variations. (As you would expect) But across the cable infrastructure, I can floor it whenever I want, at any time of day.
My conclusion? I don't know if DSL is slow or not but what Simson Garfinkle said in his salon article is 100% on the money.
And the stuff that the DSL providers tell you about speed is just hogwash. And I'm pretty sure that all the stuff that they tell you about security is also crap.. although I can't really prove that it's crap.
The only thing that I don't like about cable modem is the lack of competition. I wish there was someone else out there other than roadrunner. Cuz they suck. Their mail server is slow, their response to problems is terrible. I'd love to be able to threaten them with switching to another provider. But hey, what's a monopoly if you don't get to stick it to someone!
So are you saying that once a person becomes president, anything that happens in the white house is public property?
What about what goes on in the residential portion of the white house? If W pays for a cable modem, for example, and sends encrypted email out the cable modem, would he be required to turn that over?
I understand his being cautious. I probably would be too. But doesn't the president have some expectation of privacy in his own residence? Or are you saying that the president doesn't have any expectation of any privacy during any point during the 4 years he occupies the office?
If he really wanted to continue to converse, privately, with his friends why doesn't he just download GPG (or any other encryption program) and start using it? If he does this, would the "open record requests" require him to relinquish the key?