And the market is responding appropriately. A few people are willing to pay $60 for a new game. Others are not willing to pay that much, but would pay $30 plus a few months (after all, time has a cost). Others will pay no more than $10 and are willing to wait years.
The gaming industry has a few options:
Find a way to control costs, which I submit is already being done with the number of sequels, etc. instead of brand new content
Increase the price, which they've done since demand for brand new games has decreased and demand for used games has increased (granted, the demand for used games increased because people don't want to pay the higher price)
Move to a product-key model where each device must be registered. This seems to be the direction gaming studios are moving.
Decrease the price for the game, hoping that people will purchase new instead of used.
This option is probably not going to happen since it requires long-term thinking. You're hedging that more people will purchase the game new if the price is so low that it negates the savings of buying it used. It also would discouraging selling since the owner wouldn't recoup much of the cost anyway.
But when has the gaming/music/movie industry ever been this forward-thinking without being forced to?
I don't have a problem with companies/organizations funding studies that test their own policies. The problem comes if they in any way influence the results.
The contract would have to be written basically saying that once the money is received, the benefactor does not have access to the results until published.
I imagine that drug testing has little to do with work performance than it does liability. If an employee is high or has drugs on company property, it would give the police cause to do a full search. Probably just to the employee's work area, but it's something the company wants to avoid.
IANAL or a LTE, but makes sense to just not hire someone who refuses a drug test than assume the risk and have something happen later on. I imagine this was the same rationale for giving up your social network credentials. The difference being that it's illegal to use controlled substances whereas it's not illegal to be on Facebook.
Are/Were companies doing this because it's cheaper than running a background check?
Additionally, sharing your Facebook password is against the TOS (Section 4, subsection 8). You can tell an employer/prospective employer that you will reveal your credentials if they assume the legal responsibility for breaching the contract.
That should get them off your back. Whether you get hired/fired, that's an entirely different matter.
What if you release your copyright? For example, in your post you write, "The author of this advert has released all content within this page to the public domain. In case this is not legally possible, the creator grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."
Sure, CL would have a license, but the license would be worthless. Since most cases, copyrighting, "Hey I need a roommate" is pointless, I see no bad side for retaining your rights.
Can someone with more lawyer points provide insight?
Your humor notwithstanding, in some jurisdictions, it's not considered shoplifting until the suspect leaves the premises. Trapping them could be considered unlawful detainment.
However, in some jurisdictions, a store owner may hold a person who is suspected to have shoplifted. I believe the words are "reasonable suspicion" or some other legal term. They can't hold the person indefinitely though. Usually it's enough time for the police to arrive.
This actually could be a good thing. Right now, the public mentality is that gun owner = nut job. Unless Congress is willing to criminalize owning a 3D printer, it might actually force people think about the current state of laws and actually make sensible gun laws.
Although this may seem hard for conservatives to believe, there is such a thing as a government program that does its job well...
Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.
The VA works well because the customers are limited. The US Coast Guard does a great job because their mission scope is small (compared to the other service branches). But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.
My parents own a carry-out restaurant. They are forced by competition to accept EBT (food stamps). It strikes them as odd that people who pay for their food in food stamps usually drive really nice cars (e.g. BMWs, Cadies). Could be that the cars belong to a rich relative but it still strikes them as weird. Could be that they got great deals on the cars. But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.
They hate having to accept food stamps because it's a nightmare to manage. But they have to because if they don't, they would lose a lot of business to their competitors. My parents often wonder if the government audits the people who get food stamps as often as companies do. Their sense is that they don't. I believe they're right since it's easier and more politically palpable to audit a company than it is to audit a poor person.
Too many people online think that "anonymous" = "license to be a complete fuckwad".
So much +1.
I'm actually surprised people still comment on youtube. I hypothesize that an adblock plus element filter on the comments section would increase the quality of youtube.
Time to test it out...
For those that want to join me, here's the adblock element block code:
It's not so much whether something is worse but whether something is more profitable.
As far as know, there aren't easy ways to get these rare elements out of electronics. The ways are expensive per device. It suffers the same problem as recycling did back in the 80's. The technology wasn't there to automate it.
I imagine that it's much simpler and easier (thus more profitable) to find the raw materials in the earth and then mine them. That technology is around now. But actually reclaiming the metals from existing devices that are getting tinier and tinier, meaning the amount of raw materials used it smaller.
I'm not a scientist or geologist or whatever, so please feel free to correct my ignorance.
My civics may be a bit rusty but my understanding of executive orders is that they are used to further describe legislation that has been passed (i.e. laws) and outlines what federal officers (in the broad sense, not LEOs) are to do to execute the law.
From just the summary, this doesn't seem like this is the case. This seems like a sweeping "I want the ability to do this but not willing to pass it through congress."
Can anyone with more civics experience clarify this? Don't get me wrong: both sides have done this. But want to know how things "should" be.
Their use of SEO not-withstanding, judging articles by the number of comments generated is kind of like judging the performance of a car engine based on how load the stereo gets.
Controversial topics will get many more comments than topics about boring stuff. Hell, comments with horrible grammer andd skeling mystakes will get more comments than the actual story.
And yes, I realize the irony of posting this in the comments section of Slashdot.;-)
I didn't mod your post but I can see why someone would have flagged it troll. It's a bit snarky.;-)
However, your point is still valid and came to post this exact point: will you have a choice to not accept these "ultraviolet rays"? As much as we would like to, we don't control what our cells do. And there is a lot of good that this technology can do. How long until this becomes weaponized and used not only to cure, but also to control?
I will admit, however, there is some time before this debate absolutely needs to happen, This doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen now. If all it takes is ultraviolet radiation to program the cells, all it takes is some paranoid politician or evil genius to just pump people full of insulin to make them have a coma.
If you are trolling Drug Dealer Drive for drugs and you happen to ask a undercover agent for drugs, you are guilty.
If a undercover agent posing as a drug dealer comes to you out of the blue and says that you need to buy his drugs so that he can help his sweet grandmother beat cancer, that's entrapment.
The difference is that in the first example, you were already out with the intention of doing something illegal. The second example you were approached by LEO and convinced to do something you normally wouldn't do.
IANAL and I'm sure each jurisdiction has it's own definition of entrapment but this is the jist.
This is a great start. The only problem with this is that these "laws" must be programmed. This means that bugs can be introduced, weaknesses exploited, etc.
Unfortunately, computers do *EXACTLY* what they are told. Machines are programmed by imperfect and fallible humans. Machines are not greedy; people are greedy. The reason why our machines do all of the things the OP hates is because someone is making a buck.
The "Laws of Robotics" is not realistically feasible at this point in time. Because if the "robot" fails to do this, who is responsible? The robot or the programmer? That's why the Law of Robotics is a great literary tool, but not possible...yet.
Don't get me wrong! I can't wait to see commercials for "The iPhone 12: 3 laws safe and ready to read your thoughts!" But I'm not holding my breath.
If I had to guess, the OP doesn't want to go to the cloud because, hell, why should he?
The current state of affairs is that the data center owns the data ("possession is 9/10ths of the law"). Latency and bandwidth is also an issue. Everything is currently on-site. Trading latency and bandwidth for uptime may not be necessary nor desirable.
Additionally, when it's hosted by someone else, you live under their rules. Rules that are subject to change and not necessarily to your liking. Having the hardware/software on-site where you control it has a lot of pros and few cons. Though, without more information, I can only speculate.
I understand Mozilla's argument. But I don't agree with it.
DNT has two tracks: Either a small majority of users will enable it and it will be honored by all web sites (highly unlikely) or a large majority of users will enable it and web sites will continue to operate as it currently does. In both scenarios, the end user is relying on a third party to honor a wish.
When it comes down to the almighty dollar, companies have absolutely no incentive to actually comply with DNT. Unless DNT comes with the punishment of fines and can be collected by Joe Sixpack, it will be useless.
If DNT isn't implementable, maybe having a banner that says, "Hey, welcome to my site! By the way, I track what you're doing and sell it to third parties. If you continue on my site, you consent to this." If websites were required to disclose this, then it would be up to the user to either continue on the web site or move on.
Yes, "privacy policies" do this but in legalese and is often obfuscated. I want it so clear that there is no confusion as to what the site records.
I really wish NoScript was a bit easier to use. Don't get me wrong; it's a great Addon, but I found it to have a pretty steep, albeit short, learning curve.
I implicitly block all facebook.(com|net) connections unless I'm on facebook.com. But that's the kind of thing you don't figure out unless you google it or know how to use NoScript.
AdBlock is pretty easy to use. My fear, though, is that more advertisers are starting to use DIV "pop-ups". These are even MORE annoying that pop-up ads since finding the close button is difficult and, in a few cases, can be decoys and will click through to the advertiser's site.
Government cannot compel a particular response without a warrant or court order: Google is not obligated to respond to the a request that is not accompanied by a warrant or court order in any particular way. Google may CHOOSE to comply with a request because there is nothing inappropriate about a business deciding to comply with a lawful request from a government agency.
If I had the mod points, I'd mod you up. This is an important distinction.
My guess is that Google wants to keep the feds on their good side. Google is getting rather large and wants to make sure that the Feds remember that Google helps them "catch terrorists". Unlike the populous, the federal government has long memories and can hold grudges for long periods of time.
Fortunately, if you don't like Google's policy, you can choose not to use it.
This is easier said than done. Google, like Facebook, has become tightly integrated with our society, so much so that it's weird when I see product placements for other search engines on shows and movies. I can't remember the show but I remember seeing a product placement for Yahoo search. I remember saying out loud, "Who still uses Yahoo?"
I would say it's easier to simply not register an account on Google. However, they may still know who you are based on your browser fingerprint.
There is a difference between military operations, where the mission is directly against a citizen of the state and within the confines of its borders, and military training. I believe the parent author is referring to the latter.
Interestingly, the Posse Comitatus Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act) only covers the Army and Air Force. So the Marine UAV bases could still be used against state citizens.
Just to clear the air, entrapment is when the police cause a person to do something illegal when that person had no intention of doing so in the first place.
Example: I'm walking down the street and an UC tells me that I need to buy drugs so that I can save the life of his grandmother. If I buy the drugs, I can say entrapment because my concern was for his grandmother (real or not) and not for the drugs (as I have no history with it.)
If some junkie strolls down Drug Dealer Blvd. looking for a score and happens to buy from a UC, that's not entrapment since they were out to buy drugs in the first place.
The key to this is would the person committed the crime if the police were not there to begin with.
I personally want to have the ability to read any bill that has been introduced. THOMAS is a good system, but horribly outdated. It could be made so much better. But we make do with what we have.
Improvements to the system should be that the database is updated in real-time, or at least as close to real-time as possible. There is no reason why this shouldn't be possible.
My guess, however, is that reps want not to be able to be accountable for their votes. Not many representatives have easy access to their voting record on their official web site. I know my old rep did (Frank Wolf) but my current (Jim Moran) does not. While the information can be found on THOMAS, it adds an additional step.
I know a few months ago, DC Counsel put an unpopular bill available online for comment. It was passed and when it finally it the news, there was outcry. The counsel said, "But you had a chance to comment." The problem was that they hid the bill on their website in a rarely browsed section, obfuscated, and ultimately in a place where no one would think to look. Stepping aside the fact that the news should have picked this up before it was voted on, the fact is that the DC Counsel followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
Every politician must be not be trusted, even if they are from "your party" or even if you voted for the guy. The framers had this in mind when writing the Constitution.
The thing that saddens me is that the original intentions of the Founding Fathers has long since gone: a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
And the market is responding appropriately. A few people are willing to pay $60 for a new game. Others are not willing to pay that much, but would pay $30 plus a few months (after all, time has a cost). Others will pay no more than $10 and are willing to wait years.
The gaming industry has a few options:
This option is probably not going to happen since it requires long-term thinking. You're hedging that more people will purchase the game new if the price is so low that it negates the savings of buying it used. It also would discouraging selling since the owner wouldn't recoup much of the cost anyway.
But when has the gaming/music/movie industry ever been this forward-thinking without being forced to?
I don't have a problem with companies/organizations funding studies that test their own policies. The problem comes if they in any way influence the results.
The contract would have to be written basically saying that once the money is received, the benefactor does not have access to the results until published.
You forget that Facebook is not the product. It's users are the product.
A panic password does little to nothing for Facebook and only creates more work for them.
In this case, we would need a law to force Facebook and others to do this.
I imagine that drug testing has little to do with work performance than it does liability. If an employee is high or has drugs on company property, it would give the police cause to do a full search. Probably just to the employee's work area, but it's something the company wants to avoid.
IANAL or a LTE, but makes sense to just not hire someone who refuses a drug test than assume the risk and have something happen later on. I imagine this was the same rationale for giving up your social network credentials. The difference being that it's illegal to use controlled substances whereas it's not illegal to be on Facebook.
Are/Were companies doing this because it's cheaper than running a background check?
Additionally, sharing your Facebook password is against the TOS (Section 4, subsection 8). You can tell an employer/prospective employer that you will reveal your credentials if they assume the legal responsibility for breaching the contract.
That should get them off your back. Whether you get hired/fired, that's an entirely different matter.
Read the full text of the law here
At least they cited the bill number. I hate it when news outlets don't tell you the bill and have to go searching for it.
What if you release your copyright? For example, in your post you write, "The author of this advert has released all content within this page to the public domain. In case this is not legally possible, the creator grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."
Sure, CL would have a license, but the license would be worthless. Since most cases, copyrighting, "Hey I need a roommate" is pointless, I see no bad side for retaining your rights.
Can someone with more lawyer points provide insight?
Your humor notwithstanding, in some jurisdictions, it's not considered shoplifting until the suspect leaves the premises. Trapping them could be considered unlawful detainment.
However, in some jurisdictions, a store owner may hold a person who is suspected to have shoplifted. I believe the words are "reasonable suspicion" or some other legal term. They can't hold the person indefinitely though. Usually it's enough time for the police to arrive.
This actually could be a good thing. Right now, the public mentality is that gun owner = nut job. Unless Congress is willing to criminalize owning a 3D printer, it might actually force people think about the current state of laws and actually make sensible gun laws.
Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.
The VA works well because the customers are limited. The US Coast Guard does a great job because their mission scope is small (compared to the other service branches). But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.
My parents own a carry-out restaurant. They are forced by competition to accept EBT (food stamps). It strikes them as odd that people who pay for their food in food stamps usually drive really nice cars (e.g. BMWs, Cadies). Could be that the cars belong to a rich relative but it still strikes them as weird. Could be that they got great deals on the cars. But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.
They hate having to accept food stamps because it's a nightmare to manage. But they have to because if they don't, they would lose a lot of business to their competitors. My parents often wonder if the government audits the people who get food stamps as often as companies do. Their sense is that they don't. I believe they're right since it's easier and more politically palpable to audit a company than it is to audit a poor person.
So much +1.
I'm actually surprised people still comment on youtube. I hypothesize that an adblock plus element filter on the comments section would increase the quality of youtube.
Time to test it out...
For those that want to join me, here's the adblock element block code:
It's not so much whether something is worse but whether something is more profitable.
As far as know, there aren't easy ways to get these rare elements out of electronics. The ways are expensive per device. It suffers the same problem as recycling did back in the 80's. The technology wasn't there to automate it.
I imagine that it's much simpler and easier (thus more profitable) to find the raw materials in the earth and then mine them. That technology is around now. But actually reclaiming the metals from existing devices that are getting tinier and tinier, meaning the amount of raw materials used it smaller.
I'm not a scientist or geologist or whatever, so please feel free to correct my ignorance.
My civics may be a bit rusty but my understanding of executive orders is that they are used to further describe legislation that has been passed (i.e. laws) and outlines what federal officers (in the broad sense, not LEOs) are to do to execute the law.
From just the summary, this doesn't seem like this is the case. This seems like a sweeping "I want the ability to do this but not willing to pass it through congress."
Can anyone with more civics experience clarify this? Don't get me wrong: both sides have done this. But want to know how things "should" be.
Their use of SEO not-withstanding, judging articles by the number of comments generated is kind of like judging the performance of a car engine based on how load the stereo gets.
Controversial topics will get many more comments than topics about boring stuff. Hell, comments with horrible grammer andd skeling mystakes will get more comments than the actual story.
And yes, I realize the irony of posting this in the comments section of Slashdot. ;-)
I didn't mod your post but I can see why someone would have flagged it troll. It's a bit snarky. ;-)
However, your point is still valid and came to post this exact point: will you have a choice to not accept these "ultraviolet rays"? As much as we would like to, we don't control what our cells do. And there is a lot of good that this technology can do. How long until this becomes weaponized and used not only to cure, but also to control?
I will admit, however, there is some time before this debate absolutely needs to happen, This doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen now. If all it takes is ultraviolet radiation to program the cells, all it takes is some paranoid politician or evil genius to just pump people full of insulin to make them have a coma.
A quick primer on entrapment:
If you are trolling Drug Dealer Drive for drugs and you happen to ask a undercover agent for drugs, you are guilty.
If a undercover agent posing as a drug dealer comes to you out of the blue and says that you need to buy his drugs so that he can help his sweet grandmother beat cancer, that's entrapment.
The difference is that in the first example, you were already out with the intention of doing something illegal. The second example you were approached by LEO and convinced to do something you normally wouldn't do.
IANAL and I'm sure each jurisdiction has it's own definition of entrapment but this is the jist.
+1 Interesting
This is a great start. The only problem with this is that these "laws" must be programmed. This means that bugs can be introduced, weaknesses exploited, etc.
Unfortunately, computers do *EXACTLY* what they are told. Machines are programmed by imperfect and fallible humans. Machines are not greedy; people are greedy. The reason why our machines do all of the things the OP hates is because someone is making a buck.
The "Laws of Robotics" is not realistically feasible at this point in time. Because if the "robot" fails to do this, who is responsible? The robot or the programmer? That's why the Law of Robotics is a great literary tool, but not possible...yet.
Don't get me wrong! I can't wait to see commercials for "The iPhone 12: 3 laws safe and ready to read your thoughts!" But I'm not holding my breath.
If I had to guess, the OP doesn't want to go to the cloud because, hell, why should he?
The current state of affairs is that the data center owns the data ("possession is 9/10ths of the law"). Latency and bandwidth is also an issue. Everything is currently on-site. Trading latency and bandwidth for uptime may not be necessary nor desirable.
Additionally, when it's hosted by someone else, you live under their rules. Rules that are subject to change and not necessarily to your liking. Having the hardware/software on-site where you control it has a lot of pros and few cons. Though, without more information, I can only speculate.
I understand Mozilla's argument. But I don't agree with it.
DNT has two tracks: Either a small majority of users will enable it and it will be honored by all web sites (highly unlikely) or a large majority of users will enable it and web sites will continue to operate as it currently does. In both scenarios, the end user is relying on a third party to honor a wish.
When it comes down to the almighty dollar, companies have absolutely no incentive to actually comply with DNT. Unless DNT comes with the punishment of fines and can be collected by Joe Sixpack, it will be useless.
If DNT isn't implementable, maybe having a banner that says, "Hey, welcome to my site! By the way, I track what you're doing and sell it to third parties. If you continue on my site, you consent to this." If websites were required to disclose this, then it would be up to the user to either continue on the web site or move on.
Yes, "privacy policies" do this but in legalese and is often obfuscated. I want it so clear that there is no confusion as to what the site records.
I really wish NoScript was a bit easier to use. Don't get me wrong; it's a great Addon, but I found it to have a pretty steep, albeit short, learning curve.
I implicitly block all facebook.(com|net) connections unless I'm on facebook.com. But that's the kind of thing you don't figure out unless you google it or know how to use NoScript.
AdBlock is pretty easy to use. My fear, though, is that more advertisers are starting to use DIV "pop-ups". These are even MORE annoying that pop-up ads since finding the close button is difficult and, in a few cases, can be decoys and will click through to the advertiser's site.
If I had the mod points, I'd mod you up. This is an important distinction.
My guess is that Google wants to keep the feds on their good side. Google is getting rather large and wants to make sure that the Feds remember that Google helps them "catch terrorists". Unlike the populous, the federal government has long memories and can hold grudges for long periods of time.
This is easier said than done. Google, like Facebook, has become tightly integrated with our society, so much so that it's weird when I see product placements for other search engines on shows and movies. I can't remember the show but I remember seeing a product placement for Yahoo search. I remember saying out loud, "Who still uses Yahoo?"
I would say it's easier to simply not register an account on Google. However, they may still know who you are based on your browser fingerprint.
There is a difference between military operations, where the mission is directly against a citizen of the state and within the confines of its borders, and military training. I believe the parent author is referring to the latter.
Interestingly, the Posse Comitatus Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act) only covers the Army and Air Force. So the Marine UAV bases could still be used against state citizens.
Just to clear the air, entrapment is when the police cause a person to do something illegal when that person had no intention of doing so in the first place.
Example: I'm walking down the street and an UC tells me that I need to buy drugs so that I can save the life of his grandmother. If I buy the drugs, I can say entrapment because my concern was for his grandmother (real or not) and not for the drugs (as I have no history with it.)
If some junkie strolls down Drug Dealer Blvd. looking for a score and happens to buy from a UC, that's not entrapment since they were out to buy drugs in the first place.
The key to this is would the person committed the crime if the police were not there to begin with.
ICANN should probably just create this TLD and then use it the same way they use example.com.
So many shows and movies have used .web as fake URLs so that they don't have the same problem they did with phone numbers.
Futurama notoriously used .web and I, for one, give all power to the hypnotoad.
I personally want to have the ability to read any bill that has been introduced. THOMAS is a good system, but horribly outdated. It could be made so much better. But we make do with what we have.
Improvements to the system should be that the database is updated in real-time, or at least as close to real-time as possible. There is no reason why this shouldn't be possible.
My guess, however, is that reps want not to be able to be accountable for their votes. Not many representatives have easy access to their voting record on their official web site. I know my old rep did (Frank Wolf) but my current (Jim Moran) does not. While the information can be found on THOMAS, it adds an additional step.
I know a few months ago, DC Counsel put an unpopular bill available online for comment. It was passed and when it finally it the news, there was outcry. The counsel said, "But you had a chance to comment." The problem was that they hid the bill on their website in a rarely browsed section, obfuscated, and ultimately in a place where no one would think to look. Stepping aside the fact that the news should have picked this up before it was voted on, the fact is that the DC Counsel followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
Every politician must be not be trusted, even if they are from "your party" or even if you voted for the guy. The framers had this in mind when writing the Constitution.
The thing that saddens me is that the original intentions of the Founding Fathers has long since gone: a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. I don't see this changing anytime soon.