The fact is > 50% of the voters elected the current leader of the US within the last 4 years
Due to the electoral colleges system, not necessarily. Also, 50% of voters is a lot different from 50% of the population, given that voting is voluntary. And finally, the person elected is selected from a pool of 2, who generally don't have views that diverge that much on a great number of topics - despite the interest from both sides in spinning it to look like they're poles apart.
The thing that really prevents an uprising is plenty of bread and circuses. All but the very poorest American can afford plentiful food (hence the obesity epidemic), and that "very poor" subclass is extremely small - far too small to support a revolution. Entertainment is plentiful and cheap, from free-to-air television, through to cable and computer games. Revolt is really an act of desperation, and most people just aren't desperate enough.
Note, there are only a tiny handful of corporations controlling the major social media sites, too; with the power to scan/filter/block/report/infiltrate communications as they see fit (including, as will be profitable to them in dealing with other repressive governments)
The thing is, they can't do it transparently. If a social network starts blocking/filtering users, it's generally immediately apparent to that user, and the people that user is connected to. If someone suddenly gets banned from Twitter for their political views, it's likely to go Streisand.
It's also much harder to inject content, which to my mind, is the more effective method of manipulation. Sure, the network can post ads; hell, they could even hijack accounts and post false stories under them - but again, it's much easier to uncover in a social network, and the backlash is likely to be huge.
Compare this to a traditional newspaper, where the owner speaks to the editor, and the editor tells the journos what stories they need to write. If the editor cuts certain stories, or inserts stories slanted to one side or the other, who's going to know? Many if it was egregious enough, someone might turn whistleblower, but even then, it's hardly a scandal when an editor exercises editorial control.
You're actually arguing in defence of Eirenarch's point. The reason social media can destroy a society, is that it provides so many independent channels of information, that the authorities cannot monitor/manipulate them all. Manipulation requires the state (or other manipulative party) to be able to influence the information people receive.
That's easy when all you have is two or three companies controlling the major news outlets, but when your people have access to a hundred thousand different people, it's not so easy. Social media undermines the easy-to-dominate, single-channel mechanism that allows for mass media manipulation.
It's been established in previous episodes that regenerations are transferable. The Doctor's also been a bit profligate with his regenerations lately (blowing one to heal River's small cut) - he may be aware that he's transcended that limit for whatever reason.
Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be?
I dunno, what's the asking price for the first copy of GIMP? Pick a feature GIMP doesn't have that Photoshop does, that you want - how much do you reckon it'd cost to get a contractor (or the maintainers) to add it? How would that compare to, say, five seats of Photoshop?
Software developer is iterative. Yeah, paying for every feature of a feature-bloated piece of software like Photoshop would be cost-prohibitive. But if you start with a basic package, and everyone who wants a new feature rolls it back in, sooner or later, you'll have something photoshop-equivalent. That sort of development has a lot of up-front cost (paying for the development, time for it to be done) but it can result in economies of scale (no per-seat licensing cost). The only reason it doesn't happen that way, is that the model supported by our current laws is the opposite - has a low up-front cost and scales really poorly.
And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh
That's great and all, but laughing at something isn't precisely an argument. Yeah, custom development's a poor match for crowd-funding, but something with mass appeal, like Lord of the Rings, is another question entirely, and none of your arguments made against crowd-funding for bespoke development apply to mass-market film production. Veronica Mars, a niche movie, raised almost six million dollars on Kickstarter, and that's while crowd-sourcing is in its infancy, and competing with an entrenched existing system.
Now, six million dollars is a drop in the bucket for a star-studded, special effects bonanza like Lord of the Rings (budget ~90 million for Fellowship), but LotR is on the extreme end of film budgets. In the same year, Amélie, which won 5 academy awards, was made on a 10 million dollar budget, on par with the funds able to be raised by the top kickstarters. And all this is without factoring in the distorting effects of massive payments to the actors, and Hollywood's legendary accounting. Sure, you're not likely to be able to fund a LotR-equivalent now, when Kickstarter is in its infancy, but it's not exactly outside the realms of possibility. After all, people were willing to pay ten time's LotR's budget to see it at the box office, presumably without being able to see it first (there would have been some multiple-viewers, of course).
Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.
It hasn't, because the closed-source methodology is being propped up by the legal system. If you removed copyright law, open source would take over, as the alternative would no longer be tenable.
I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does"
Really? So you can walk through the "pipe refit" aisle of your plumbing store, and buy your home's repaired plumbing after inspecting it? Or your landscaped garden? Do real estate developers have a shop they can go to where they can buy a sky scraper off-the-shelf?
By "inherent value", I mean that the commodity in question can be used for something other than exchanging it for something else. For example, a bushel of apples has inherent value because I can eat it.
So you're saying that if, for some strange reason, the US decided to mandate Bitcoin as the only currency it would accept for tax purposes, Bitcoin would become inherently valuable, and the USD would lose its inherent value?
Inherent - I don't think this word means what you think it means.
The ability to print more money as needed is a *feature* of the system. Any currency where you cannot do this is seriously lacking in long term sustainability and is essentially only a pyramid scheme for early 'investors' and currency manipulators.
So, what you're saying is that any currency that cannot be manipulated is a scheme by currency manipulators? *boggle*
The exact same criticisms (except even more so) can be made against cash. It's truly anonymous, unlike Bitcoin, which is pseudonymous.
But what does all this have to do with Bitcoin and making it legitimate? When you have currencies not controlled by the government like Bitcoin, taxes aren't being collected.
That's just not true. Like I said, prior to electronic banking, cash had much the same properties - in terms of governmental control of transactions - as Bitcoin*. And yet taxes were still paid. Cash, bitcoin or VISA, people can still lie on their tax returns, and most people have very little chance of being caught. People don't, because they feel a moral obligation not to. It's the erosion of that idea that the taxes we pay buy something worthwhile that's going to fuel tax evasion, not a new currency.
* the government had more control when it came to regulation of the production of new currency, obviously, but that's not the sticking point here
There are plenty of national currencies that have wildly fluctuated in the past; hell, in recent years, there are plenty of national currencies that have been more stable that the US dollar. Does that mean they are "more legitimate" than the USD?
If they want, the US government can make exchanging dollars for Bitcoins in significant quantities very hard. They can also prevent law-abiding US-based businesses from accepting Bitcoins in exchange for goods and services. The utility of Bitcoins would be severely limited for most Americans.
In my mind, that demonstrates the illegitimacy of the US government more than it does that of Bitcoin.
Look at what happened to online poker.
Indeed, online gambling (and software patents) were the examples I was thinking of.
"Legit" is a meaningless qualifier. If a currency is legitimate when it can be exchanged for goods and services, then Bitcoin is already legit. If a currency is legitimate when it's approved of by your government of choice, then no, Bitcoin will never be "legitimate". If that's your definition, though, the real question is "why is legitimacy necessary?"
What will happen is probably what has already happened to other areas that have been persecuted by the US government at the behest of incumbent industries: they'll just move off-shore.
So most of the Hollywood high end cameras are also non functional? Because a panavision camera cant record audio. That is why they do the clapper thing and have an audio recording setup.
IT makes it unusable to consumers that want to film their kitteh. But then shooting RAW video is useless to 99% of the people that have video cameras.
Yeah, and this is a pro-sumer camera, not a Hollywood high-end camera. Not being able to record audio, and not being able to preview the shot is likely to make it useless for the vast majority of its target demographic (as you observer). I'm not saying the hack is useless, I'm saying that if Canon had included it as a feature, it would have appeared half-assed to most if the owners, making the whole device seem bad.
That's why Canon didn't enable it, not because they were trying to artificially raise the price of their higher-tier hardware.
So if you don't have a lot of money and you really need video at that quality, then working around the restrictions of a hacked DSLR may very well be worth it, and can open up possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be accessible to you.
Oh yeah, I'm not seeing there's no point to the hack - I'm just saying that Canon not providing video out of the box wasn't done out of malicious intent.
No, not really. This is a camera, designed for stills. It has the capacity to capture video (unlocked by this hack) but no ability to capture audio, or playback the video, meaning it's not really a functional video camera. That is, while it has the technical capacity to capture video, it has none of the supporting features that make the ability to capture video useful.
It's like plugging your headphones into your microphone jack and talking through them. Yeah, they have the technical capability to record sound, but the rest of the device isn't designed to make that capability useful.
That's great for you, and your embarrassing video that you want nobody but you to see. That's not the usual use-case for security though. It's usually the case that you want people to see it - often geographically separated people. Sometimes you want geographically separated people to be able to change it, and receive the changes others have made, in near real-time. The issue is, you want only certain, select people to have those privileges.
So how would you adapt your under-the-mattress approach to such a use-case?
Sure, a cellphone can be used for recording; but the one that's in your pocket, or sitting on the table, or being used by you to check your twitfeed likely isn't. It's just a matter of geometry: one camera on the back, possibly one on the face of the device.
If I'm reading something off the screen of my device, and am facing your general direction, switching to the video app and slightly adjusting my aim is likely to be able to record you without your notice. You might be able to tell when I'm definitely not recording (my phone's in my pocket) but if it's out, you really have no idea whether I am or not.
You don't need permission to use trademarks, if they're not being used in a manner likely to confuse consumers. Company names are also trademarks, but Slashdot isn't going to get in trouble for including "Microsoft" in this article. Whether the use of the logo in this particular case is likely to cause people to think it was an official X-box site is another question, but one that is only likely to be answerable by a judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget frying them with lasers before you get your sex on. And they say condoms are mood-killers.
The fact is > 50% of the voters elected the current leader of the US within the last 4 years
Due to the electoral colleges system, not necessarily. Also, 50% of voters is a lot different from 50% of the population, given that voting is voluntary. And finally, the person elected is selected from a pool of 2, who generally don't have views that diverge that much on a great number of topics - despite the interest from both sides in spinning it to look like they're poles apart.
The thing that really prevents an uprising is plenty of bread and circuses. All but the very poorest American can afford plentiful food (hence the obesity epidemic), and that "very poor" subclass is extremely small - far too small to support a revolution. Entertainment is plentiful and cheap, from free-to-air television, through to cable and computer games. Revolt is really an act of desperation, and most people just aren't desperate enough.
Presumably, the guy at the ticket counter
Yeah, because Anon. Coward trolls are well-known for their strict adherence to political dogma.
Note, there are only a tiny handful of corporations controlling the major social media sites, too; with the power to scan/filter/block/report/infiltrate communications as they see fit (including, as will be profitable to them in dealing with other repressive governments)
The thing is, they can't do it transparently. If a social network starts blocking/filtering users, it's generally immediately apparent to that user, and the people that user is connected to. If someone suddenly gets banned from Twitter for their political views, it's likely to go Streisand.
It's also much harder to inject content, which to my mind, is the more effective method of manipulation. Sure, the network can post ads; hell, they could even hijack accounts and post false stories under them - but again, it's much easier to uncover in a social network, and the backlash is likely to be huge.
Compare this to a traditional newspaper, where the owner speaks to the editor, and the editor tells the journos what stories they need to write. If the editor cuts certain stories, or inserts stories slanted to one side or the other, who's going to know? Many if it was egregious enough, someone might turn whistleblower, but even then, it's hardly a scandal when an editor exercises editorial control.
You're actually arguing in defence of Eirenarch's point. The reason social media can destroy a society, is that it provides so many independent channels of information, that the authorities cannot monitor/manipulate them all. Manipulation requires the state (or other manipulative party) to be able to influence the information people receive.
That's easy when all you have is two or three companies controlling the major news outlets, but when your people have access to a hundred thousand different people, it's not so easy. Social media undermines the easy-to-dominate, single-channel mechanism that allows for mass media manipulation.
It's been established in previous episodes that regenerations are transferable. The Doctor's also been a bit profligate with his regenerations lately (blowing one to heal River's small cut) - he may be aware that he's transcended that limit for whatever reason.
Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be?
I dunno, what's the asking price for the first copy of GIMP? Pick a feature GIMP doesn't have that Photoshop does, that you want - how much do you reckon it'd cost to get a contractor (or the maintainers) to add it? How would that compare to, say, five seats of Photoshop?
Software developer is iterative. Yeah, paying for every feature of a feature-bloated piece of software like Photoshop would be cost-prohibitive. But if you start with a basic package, and everyone who wants a new feature rolls it back in, sooner or later, you'll have something photoshop-equivalent. That sort of development has a lot of up-front cost (paying for the development, time for it to be done) but it can result in economies of scale (no per-seat licensing cost). The only reason it doesn't happen that way, is that the model supported by our current laws is the opposite - has a low up-front cost and scales really poorly.
And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh
That's great and all, but laughing at something isn't precisely an argument. Yeah, custom development's a poor match for crowd-funding, but something with mass appeal, like Lord of the Rings, is another question entirely, and none of your arguments made against crowd-funding for bespoke development apply to mass-market film production. Veronica Mars, a niche movie, raised almost six million dollars on Kickstarter, and that's while crowd-sourcing is in its infancy, and competing with an entrenched existing system.
Now, six million dollars is a drop in the bucket for a star-studded, special effects bonanza like Lord of the Rings (budget ~90 million for Fellowship), but LotR is on the extreme end of film budgets. In the same year, Amélie, which won 5 academy awards, was made on a 10 million dollar budget, on par with the funds able to be raised by the top kickstarters. And all this is without factoring in the distorting effects of massive payments to the actors, and Hollywood's legendary accounting. Sure, you're not likely to be able to fund a LotR-equivalent now, when Kickstarter is in its infancy, but it's not exactly outside the realms of possibility. After all, people were willing to pay ten time's LotR's budget to see it at the box office, presumably without being able to see it first (there would have been some multiple-viewers, of course).
Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.
It hasn't, because the closed-source methodology is being propped up by the legal system. If you removed copyright law, open source would take over, as the alternative would no longer be tenable.
I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does"
Really? So you can walk through the "pipe refit" aisle of your plumbing store, and buy your home's repaired plumbing after inspecting it? Or your landscaped garden? Do real estate developers have a shop they can go to where they can buy a sky scraper off-the-shelf?
By "inherent value", I mean that the commodity in question can be used for something other than exchanging it for something else. For example, a bushel of apples has inherent value because I can eat it.
Good luck eating your paper dollars.
So you're saying that if, for some strange reason, the US decided to mandate Bitcoin as the only currency it would accept for tax purposes, Bitcoin would become inherently valuable, and the USD would lose its inherent value?
Inherent - I don't think this word means what you think it means.
The ability to print more money as needed is a *feature* of the system. Any currency where you cannot do this is seriously lacking in long term sustainability and is essentially only a pyramid scheme for early 'investors' and currency manipulators.
So, what you're saying is that any currency that cannot be manipulated is a scheme by currency manipulators? *boggle*
The exact same criticisms (except even more so) can be made against cash. It's truly anonymous, unlike Bitcoin, which is pseudonymous.
But what does all this have to do with Bitcoin and making it legitimate? When you have currencies not controlled by the government like Bitcoin, taxes aren't being collected.
That's just not true. Like I said, prior to electronic banking, cash had much the same properties - in terms of governmental control of transactions - as Bitcoin*. And yet taxes were still paid. Cash, bitcoin or VISA, people can still lie on their tax returns, and most people have very little chance of being caught. People don't, because they feel a moral obligation not to. It's the erosion of that idea that the taxes we pay buy something worthwhile that's going to fuel tax evasion, not a new currency.
* the government had more control when it came to regulation of the production of new currency, obviously, but that's not the sticking point here
There are plenty of national currencies that have wildly fluctuated in the past; hell, in recent years, there are plenty of national currencies that have been more stable that the US dollar. Does that mean they are "more legitimate" than the USD?
If they want, the US government can make exchanging dollars for Bitcoins in significant quantities very hard. They can also prevent law-abiding US-based businesses from accepting Bitcoins in exchange for goods and services. The utility of Bitcoins would be severely limited for most Americans.
In my mind, that demonstrates the illegitimacy of the US government more than it does that of Bitcoin.
Look at what happened to online poker.
Indeed, online gambling (and software patents) were the examples I was thinking of.
"Legit" is a meaningless qualifier. If a currency is legitimate when it can be exchanged for goods and services, then Bitcoin is already legit. If a currency is legitimate when it's approved of by your government of choice, then no, Bitcoin will never be "legitimate". If that's your definition, though, the real question is "why is legitimacy necessary?"
What will happen is probably what has already happened to other areas that have been persecuted by the US government at the behest of incumbent industries: they'll just move off-shore.
I am thinking neither do most of this camera's owners
So most of the Hollywood high end cameras are also non functional? Because a panavision camera cant record audio. That is why they do the clapper thing and have an audio recording setup.
IT makes it unusable to consumers that want to film their kitteh. But then shooting RAW video is useless to 99% of the people that have video cameras.
Yeah, and this is a pro-sumer camera, not a Hollywood high-end camera. Not being able to record audio, and not being able to preview the shot is likely to make it useless for the vast majority of its target demographic (as you observer). I'm not saying the hack is useless, I'm saying that if Canon had included it as a feature, it would have appeared half-assed to most if the owners, making the whole device seem bad.
That's why Canon didn't enable it, not because they were trying to artificially raise the price of their higher-tier hardware.
So if you don't have a lot of money and you really need video at that quality, then working around the restrictions of a hacked DSLR may very well be worth it, and can open up possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be accessible to you.
Oh yeah, I'm not seeing there's no point to the hack - I'm just saying that Canon not providing video out of the box wasn't done out of malicious intent.
No, not really. This is a camera, designed for stills. It has the capacity to capture video (unlocked by this hack) but no ability to capture audio, or playback the video, meaning it's not really a functional video camera. That is, while it has the technical capacity to capture video, it has none of the supporting features that make the ability to capture video useful.
It's like plugging your headphones into your microphone jack and talking through them. Yeah, they have the technical capability to record sound, but the rest of the device isn't designed to make that capability useful.
Except the OP is saying Blizzard is "buying more cows". It's not. It's cutting down its existing herd, exactly the opposite of what she said.
The latency sucks.
That's great for you, and your embarrassing video that you want nobody but you to see. That's not the usual use-case for security though. It's usually the case that you want people to see it - often geographically separated people. Sometimes you want geographically separated people to be able to change it, and receive the changes others have made, in near real-time. The issue is, you want only certain, select people to have those privileges.
So how would you adapt your under-the-mattress approach to such a use-case?
Pretty sure by the end of the book Hiro had made a U-turn and gargoyled himself up.
Sure, a cellphone can be used for recording; but the one that's in your pocket, or sitting on the table, or being used by you to check your twitfeed likely isn't. It's just a matter of geometry: one camera on the back, possibly one on the face of the device.
If I'm reading something off the screen of my device, and am facing your general direction, switching to the video app and slightly adjusting my aim is likely to be able to record you without your notice. You might be able to tell when I'm definitely not recording (my phone's in my pocket) but if it's out, you really have no idea whether I am or not.
You don't need permission to use trademarks, if they're not being used in a manner likely to confuse consumers. Company names are also trademarks, but Slashdot isn't going to get in trouble for including "Microsoft" in this article. Whether the use of the logo in this particular case is likely to cause people to think it was an official X-box site is another question, but one that is only likely to be answerable by a judge.