About 2-4 years ago, in one of the NY magazines, someone did a joke article about setting up a phone system where you could call a cab company and they would assign an empty car to you. The rest of the joke said that once they accepted your call, the passenger doors would not open till you called in a confirmation code on the same phone.
Do not be silly. The only reason that slavery works in the US is the Slave-Owners preselect non-assertive people. If they take random people, one out of 20 will make a run for it/learn english/tell the cops/ whatever.
That is what happened eventually with the NYC Deaf-Mute South American Slavers.
Instead of selecting submissive/non-assertive people, they selected Deaf-Mute people on the belief that they could not communicate.
Then they sent them out into NYC to sell junk (batteris, candy) at inflated "charity prices". It worked for about 2 years, then one of their "Deaf-Mute" people found someone that could understand the sign language they knew and told the cops.
No, my definition MATCHES the semantic content of their definition.
The only real semantic difference between my definition and theirs is the MOTIVE ascribed for doing the war driving.
They talked about how people would war-drive so as to possibly engage in illegal activities.
I talked about taking advantage of charity, advertising, public service and other legal activities.
When I say that an activity can be legal, and someone else says it can be legal, that does NOT make me "naive", any more than it makes them paranoid.
What it means is that I am not a criminal, and they have been robbed.
As a legal person that does not engage in crime (cripes, I do not even download music.), I should not have MY rights taken away simply because some idiot refused to take standard precautions against theft. I should not be forced to take a Paranoid stance to save them the trouble of taking minimal pre-cautions.
So basically, you are saying that the people running the FREE, UNPAID SERVICE, should take responsibility for making clear that you are legally allowed to use their service , instead of requireing that the people running the for-profit service that they desperately want to be safe for making it clear that you are NOT legally allowed to use their service????
Hm. Interesting Idea. Lets take it further:
People should be required to put on "LEGAL TO WALK ON MY GRASS" signs instead "No Tresspasing Signs"
"You are allowed to Park here!" rather than "No Parking here"
"Smoking is allowed Here!" rather than "No smoking"
"Admittance Allowed" must be placed on EVERY door a business wants the public to use instead of "No Admittance" signs on restricted doors.
Beaches should put up "Bathing Suits, Swimming, sunbathing, sand-castle building, frisbee games, picnicing allowed" rather than "No alcohol, no dogs, no nudity" signs.
and on the other side of that admittance allowed sign, their should be a "Exit allowed" instead of "No Exit, alarm will sound".
I see no difference between what you are requesting and ANY of the above rules. They are all equally stupid. If people own something and do not want other people to use it, it is the owners responsibility to at least take MINOR steps to secure that property. Failure to do so should mean that you can not prosecute people for entering your property looking around and NOT harming anything.
Part of the problem is you fail to admit that there is a LEGAL and requested "war-driving" going on. (If you live in NYC, I know that Chelsea Market advertises the fact that they offer a free network for people to log in - I heard about it and I do not even own a network card for my computer). Shooting people is NEVER legal.
Try again but remember that PUBLIC minded groups are intentionally leaving networks open and WANT you to use it.
The TRUE analogy is NOT someone that is leaving their cars onlocked, but people that buy cars without locks and ignore the instructions from the manufacturer to put a lock in. The reason the cars are sold without locks is that many cities buy them without locks and leave them around for their citizens to use free of charge.
Once you realize that is going on, then locking up some innocent guy that takes your car when you were too STUPID to buy a lock for it, is not fair.
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE GUY IS NOT TAKING ANYTHING. - he still lets you use it.
So that means the true analogy is you buy a car without any locks, ignore the manufacturer's warning to get locks, ignore the fact that the local groups are leaving unlocked cars around for free, and then the guy that takes your car only does it when you are asleep, and he brings it right back to where you left it.
And then the IDIOT that did all of this wants to arrest and charge the poor, innocent man (who thought he was just taking advantage of a common practice for using it.
remember, the law does not make it illegal to steal the data, it just makes it legal for the guy to use your network if you make NO attempt at all to secure it
A) You know that someone is advertising in the area that they have an open network and want you to use it (Happens a LOT - Chelsea Market in New York City publicly gave out business cards to get people to "war drive" their network... and maybe do a bit of shopping while you were there.)
B) That someone makes it easy for you by using the standard Linksys without a password setting so you do not have to remember anything.
C) The MORON running the top secret finance companies network headquarted right next store to that someone totally forgot to so much as change the standard Linksys ID, let alone put in a password)
D) When you head towards that nice someone you....
innocently stumbling upon the moron Finance companies network, that has NO labels/signs and connect up.
This law does NOT make it legal to take things at all, let alone things that you know the owner did not want you to take.
All the law does is make it LEGAL to enter the house if you leave it open. Which makes a LOT of sense considering that a lot of people are intionally leaving their doors open so that if you want to get out of the rain, you can enter their house. (Analogy - public groups are offering free services).
The law does not allow you to steal data, it just lets you wardrive. war drive is using their network to access the internet. If you use their network to access the private, secret data of the company, that is theft, and you can still be prosecuted.
Admittedly, the law does make it harder to prosecute you, as you have to be caught with the goods, but that is fair. After all it SHOULD be harder to prosecute a theif when the MORON of an owner takes ZERO effort to protect their property.
Yes stealing is stealing, but this is NOT stealing.
First of all a lot of public minded group/people are offering free use of their net. They signify this by leaving their net open, and use the standard Linksys as the ID.
In your example, would you think the person that takes your car is guilty if the city you lived in routinely leaves cars with the keys in the door as a public service, allowing anyone to use them.
The truth is, that your example is not even accurate. A better example would be if cars come with an optional LOCK. They give strict instructions that if you do not want everybody in the world to use your car, you should install a Lock. If asked, they say they build them without locks so that you can get your own lock, not one that they can open, and to allow pbulic oragnizations to make them available for general use without a Lock
If you get a car without a LOCK, then it is YOUR fault if someone takes your car, and the person that took it has the RIGHT to claim they thought it was a one of the cars made available to the general public for free.
All it says is that if you do not make basic efforts to secure the network, then you can not prosecute people for using it.
This law STILL allows you to prosecute people for using that network for illegal purposes, including stealing corporate secrets that were on that network and snooping the traffic.
It does have a side effect of making it harder to prove guilt (as merely being caught on the network is no longer a crime), but that is not that severe.
If the network people have those concerns, then they have the responsibility to PROTECT their system against it.
All this laws does is say:
"If you leave your doors wide open, you have no right to complain if some someone comes into your house to get out of the rain."
The law does not in any way make it legal for you to spam/print from their network, just as the above statement would not let people take stuff out of your house just because you left your door open.
Because there are already constituents that LIKE being able to malicoulsy prosecute for DMCA violations.
I APPLAUD them for solving the problem BEFORE it becomes important, and thereby stopping our enemies before they become strong enough to attack our freedoms.
If I were you I would not be so sure about that 180.
The US already has a birthrate that is almost Negativem, if you subtract out 2nd generation imigrants. (I.E. if your Grandparents were American Citizens, then your wife and you on average have less than less than 2 children).
The ideas expressed here are reasonable, but not valuable.
Basically, all they said was that there are a class of problems that indivualhumans are not good at solving, and that governements are nor perfect.
It would be more interesting if he at least discusssed possible ways to fix the problem.
Take the simple case of lawsuits. The class action lawsuit was designed to solve the specific kinds of problems mentioned by the author. The author should have discussed the value/flaws.
They talked about using Jeopardy format, but 3/4 the reasons Jeopardy was interesting was the DIFFERENT nature of the questions, and the fact that their answers were designed to be interesting.
It is possible to make a fun game that teaches anything, even the most boring of subjects.
But it takes a genius to do it for most things.
He does have a single point that a SLIGHTLY fun game, that is 90% boring, is often better than an incredibally boring, dry book, writen like a thesis.
But that is mroe an indictment against out textbook writers than anything else.
I do see that it is the case, but it is an ARTIFACT of their system, not an intentional outcome. Would you like them better if they instead had it set up so that people start with the WORST priorty and had to earn the good priorty? That would only be a minor change in their system. Their system is designed for a valid purpose, to reward those that deserve to be re-warded. For that reason, their system is NOT fundamentally Dishonest. Fundamentally, it is a fair attempt to apportion limited resources that people are NOT entitle to.
While I do not think their system is fundamentally dishonest, the fact that they do not sufficently explain their system IS fundamentally Dishonest. A fair and honest company would explicitedly explain how they do it, and that your service in the first couple of months may be better than in the future, as the new-comers are given the benefit of the doubt.
The trick is to carry red ballons that say "Emergency Gasoline Carrying Device". When they ask, just say your car broke down and the Emergency kit came with this handy, compact device to help you carry the gasoline back to your vehicle.
While liquid Nitrogen is easy to charge and has no waste products, storing it is dangerous, and retieving the energy is not effecient, hard, and expensive.
I definitely agree that they should tell people more about how the process works. It is only fair for people to realize why they are waiting a long time to get what they want to view.
But the hogging factor DOES apply. The Business does not promise to give everybody all the videos they want with no waiting. Everybody KNOWS they have a finite supply of the movies, and you have to wait for the right one.
The SPEED factor is what the people are Hogging, not the movies.
By watching more movies, you are slowing down the delivery of movies to other people, because you have them. Even with massive "hogging", everybody eventually gets the movies they request, so the hogging is not of the movies, but of the time.
Using the system they have, the people that 'create' the most waiting time, are suffering the most from the waiting time problem.
That would work fine if you could only be on one list at a time.
But is it fair if some one REALLY wants to see the movie Men In Black II and is the only thing they clicked on, but some idiot every day goes on line and clicks on EVERYTHING, thinking, at least he will get them eventually?
First Come first serve rewards SPEED ONLY. Are You REALLY going to give the people on the EAST COAST a 3 hour HEAD START on getting all the movies as compared to people on the West Coast???
Or are you going to adjust their request for time zone?
Then you are still rewarding obsseesive morons that sit at their screen all day WAITING for the new movies to come out. People have better things to do in life that that crap. It is a POOR business model. It is in fact so HORRIBLE, it created an entirely illegal line of business called scalpers.
You are leaving out all the things that make it fair. You are in fact totally ignoring my arguement, and instead only looking at the side-effect of being new.
Here is a FAIR comparison. The gym charges people $100 a year, regardless of how often you come, but you must call and get an apointment.
If you have not called yet that period you get an apointment of your choice, using any equiptment.
If you last called 7 days ago, you get an apointment during a prime hour, but not your choice, or your get your time, but not with the prime equiptment.
Called 6 days ago, you get an "off hour" that day with your equiptment, or a prime hour of their choice with non- prime equiptment
5 days ago, you get your choice tomorrow with the good equiptment, or non-prime equpitpemt today at an off hour.
etc. etc. etc.
That sounds fair to me.
What does NOT sound fair to me are the hogs that take all the Prime Membership benefits and use them up, preventing any other members from getting their fair share. By using the plan they have, it stops abusive behavior.
You are being cynical, and leaving out a lot of alternative reasons why people do not vote.
4) They are not informed about what the vote is about, have been lied to about what the vote is about. If you think they know what stuff is about, then you stop trying to find out more information about it - but if you are wrong...
5) They do not believe their vote will make a difference. This is the MAIN reason why most people do not vote.
6) The governement goes out of it's way to make it HARD to vote. Your #1 is a lie. It acts like it is always easy to vote and it is NOT. If you hvae moved/never voted before you may not know where the poling place is. You may not speak English, even though you are a citizen and can vote. You may be blind/old/sick/disabled. You may be away from home.
Electronic voting solves this last problem. #1-5 it does nothing about.
P.S. I personally think that the current system of difficult to vote is OK, because it means that people that care MORE about an issue are more likely to vote, and have more power. However, being OK does not mean it is GOOD. A far better way to solve the problem is to change the voting system from a "select" me to a point based system, where you get say 30 votes to attribute among 10 issues, with a minimum of 1 vote per issue. You can put all 21 votes on one issue and use your remaining 9 votes on the 9 other issues, evenly distribute 3 votes for each issue, or anything in between. This system lets people that REALLY care about an issue have more power than the people that have no idea what they are voting about.
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Life imitates art.
That is what happened eventually with the NYC Deaf-Mute South American Slavers.
Instead of selecting submissive/non-assertive people, they selected Deaf-Mute people on the belief that they could not communicate.
Then they sent them out into NYC to sell junk (batteris, candy) at inflated "charity prices". It worked for about 2 years, then one of their "Deaf-Mute" people found someone that could understand the sign language they knew and told the cops.
Then there would be a chip inside the cat, that belongs to the Chip inside the Cat.
Store employees will however notice someone cutting out little squares from all the cardboard boxes.
The only real semantic difference between my definition and theirs is the MOTIVE ascribed for doing the war driving.
They talked about how people would war-drive so as to possibly engage in illegal activities.
I talked about taking advantage of charity, advertising, public service and other legal activities.
When I say that an activity can be legal, and someone else says it can be legal, that does NOT make me "naive", any more than it makes them paranoid.
What it means is that I am not a criminal, and they have been robbed.
As a legal person that does not engage in crime (cripes, I do not even download music.), I should not have MY rights taken away simply because some idiot refused to take standard precautions against theft. I should not be forced to take a Paranoid stance to save them the trouble of taking minimal pre-cautions.
Hm. Interesting Idea. Lets take it further:
People should be required to put on "LEGAL TO WALK ON MY GRASS" signs instead "No Tresspasing Signs"
"You are allowed to Park here!" rather than "No Parking here"
"Smoking is allowed Here!" rather than "No smoking"
"Admittance Allowed" must be placed on EVERY door a business wants the public to use instead of "No Admittance" signs on restricted doors.
Beaches should put up "Bathing Suits, Swimming, sunbathing, sand-castle building, frisbee games, picnicing allowed" rather than "No alcohol, no dogs, no nudity" signs.
and on the other side of that admittance allowed sign, their should be a "Exit allowed" instead of "No Exit, alarm will sound".
I see no difference between what you are requesting and ANY of the above rules. They are all equally stupid. If people own something and do not want other people to use it, it is the owners responsibility to at least take MINOR steps to secure that property. Failure to do so should mean that you can not prosecute people for entering your property looking around and NOT harming anything.
Part of the problem is you fail to admit that there is a LEGAL and requested "war-driving" going on. (If you live in NYC, I know that Chelsea Market advertises the fact that they offer a free network for people to log in - I heard about it and I do not even own a network card for my computer). Shooting people is NEVER legal.
Try again but remember that PUBLIC minded groups are intentionally leaving networks open and WANT you to use it.
The TRUE analogy is NOT someone that is leaving their cars onlocked, but people that buy cars without locks and ignore the instructions from the manufacturer to put a lock in. The reason the cars are sold without locks is that many cities buy them without locks and leave them around for their citizens to use free of charge.
Once you realize that is going on, then locking up some innocent guy that takes your car when you were too STUPID to buy a lock for it, is not fair.
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE GUY IS NOT TAKING ANYTHING. - he still lets you use it.
So that means the true analogy is you buy a car without any locks, ignore the manufacturer's warning to get locks, ignore the fact that the local groups are leaving unlocked cars around for free, and then the guy that takes your car only does it when you are asleep, and he brings it right back to where you left it.
And then the IDIOT that did all of this wants to arrest and charge the poor, innocent man (who thought he was just taking advantage of a common practice for using it.
remember, the law does not make it illegal to steal the data, it just makes it legal for the guy to use your network if you make NO attempt at all to secure it
A) You know that someone is advertising in the area that they have an open network and want you to use it (Happens a LOT - Chelsea Market in New York City publicly gave out business cards to get people to "war drive" their network ... and maybe do a bit of shopping while you were there.)
B) That someone makes it easy for you by using the standard Linksys without a password setting so you do not have to remember anything.
C) The MORON running the top secret finance companies network headquarted right next store to that someone totally forgot to so much as change the standard Linksys ID, let alone put in a password)
D) When you head towards that nice someone you ....
innocently stumbling upon the moron Finance companies network, that has NO labels/signs and connect up.
This law does NOT make it legal to take things at all, let alone things that you know the owner did not want you to take.
All the law does is make it LEGAL to enter the house if you leave it open. Which makes a LOT of sense considering that a lot of people are intionally leaving their doors open so that if you want to get out of the rain, you can enter their house. (Analogy - public groups are offering free services).
The law does not allow you to steal data, it just lets you wardrive. war drive is using their network to access the internet. If you use their network to access the private, secret data of the company, that is theft, and you can still be prosecuted.
Admittedly, the law does make it harder to prosecute you, as you have to be caught with the goods, but that is fair. After all it SHOULD be harder to prosecute a theif when the MORON of an owner takes ZERO effort to protect their property.
In your example, would you think the person that takes your car is guilty if the city you lived in routinely leaves cars with the keys in the door as a public service, allowing anyone to use them.
The truth is, that your example is not even accurate. A better example would be if cars come with an optional LOCK. They give strict instructions that if you do not want everybody in the world to use your car, you should install a Lock. If asked, they say they build them without locks so that you can get your own lock, not one that they can open, and to allow pbulic oragnizations to make them available for general use without a Lock
If you get a car without a LOCK, then it is YOUR fault if someone takes your car, and the person that took it has the RIGHT to claim they thought it was a one of the cars made available to the general public for free.
All it says is that if you do not make basic efforts to secure the network, then you can not prosecute people for using it.
This law STILL allows you to prosecute people for using that network for illegal purposes, including stealing corporate secrets that were on that network and snooping the traffic.
It does have a side effect of making it harder to prove guilt (as merely being caught on the network is no longer a crime), but that is not that severe.
All this laws does is say: "If you leave your doors wide open, you have no right to complain if some someone comes into your house to get out of the rain."
The law does not in any way make it legal for you to spam/print from their network, just as the above statement would not let people take stuff out of your house just because you left your door open.
I APPLAUD them for solving the problem BEFORE it becomes important, and thereby stopping our enemies before they become strong enough to attack our freedoms.
The US already has a birthrate that is almost Negativem, if you subtract out 2nd generation imigrants. (I.E. if your Grandparents were American Citizens, then your wife and you on average have less than less than 2 children).
Basically, all they said was that there are a class of problems that indivualhumans are not good at solving, and that governements are nor perfect.
It would be more interesting if he at least discusssed possible ways to fix the problem.
Take the simple case of lawsuits. The class action lawsuit was designed to solve the specific kinds of problems mentioned by the author. The author should have discussed the value/flaws.
It is a known effect - if you want to tremondously increase your web site hits, post an article about it on slashdot.
It is possible to make a fun game that teaches anything, even the most boring of subjects.
But it takes a genius to do it for most things.
He does have a single point that a SLIGHTLY fun game, that is 90% boring, is often better than an incredibally boring, dry book, writen like a thesis.
But that is mroe an indictment against out textbook writers than anything else.
While I do not think their system is fundamentally dishonest, the fact that they do not sufficently explain their system IS fundamentally Dishonest. A fair and honest company would explicitedly explain how they do it, and that your service in the first couple of months may be better than in the future, as the new-comers are given the benefit of the doubt.
The trick is to carry red ballons that say "Emergency Gasoline Carrying Device". When they ask, just say your car broke down and the Emergency kit came with this handy, compact device to help you carry the gasoline back to your vehicle.
There are four sections of energy storage, all of them must be effecient, easy, cheap and safe to make a good battery:
1) Charging 2) Storing 3) Retrieval 4) Disposal of waste products
While liquid Nitrogen is easy to charge and has no waste products, storing it is dangerous, and retieving the energy is not effecient, hard, and expensive.
And will they let you fill your balloon or are they going to insist on wasting it on a car?
I definitely agree that they should tell people more about how the process works. It is only fair for people to realize why they are waiting a long time to get what they want to view.
But the hogging factor DOES apply. The Business does not promise to give everybody all the videos they want with no waiting. Everybody KNOWS they have a finite supply of the movies, and you have to wait for the right one.
The SPEED factor is what the people are Hogging, not the movies.
By watching more movies, you are slowing down the delivery of movies to other people, because you have them. Even with massive "hogging", everybody eventually gets the movies they request, so the hogging is not of the movies, but of the time.
Using the system they have, the people that 'create' the most waiting time, are suffering the most from the waiting time problem.
But is it fair if some one REALLY wants to see the movie Men In Black II and is the only thing they clicked on, but some idiot every day goes on line and clicks on EVERYTHING, thinking, at least he will get them eventually?
First Come first serve rewards SPEED ONLY. Are You REALLY going to give the people on the EAST COAST a 3 hour HEAD START on getting all the movies as compared to people on the West Coast???
Or are you going to adjust their request for time zone?
Then you are still rewarding obsseesive morons that sit at their screen all day WAITING for the new movies to come out. People have better things to do in life that that crap. It is a POOR business model. It is in fact so HORRIBLE, it created an entirely illegal line of business called scalpers.
Here is a FAIR comparison. The gym charges people $100 a year, regardless of how often you come, but you must call and get an apointment.
If you have not called yet that period you get an apointment of your choice, using any equiptment.
If you last called 7 days ago, you get an apointment during a prime hour, but not your choice, or your get your time, but not with the prime equiptment.
Called 6 days ago, you get an "off hour" that day with your equiptment, or a prime hour of their choice with non- prime equiptment
5 days ago, you get your choice tomorrow with the good equiptment, or non-prime equpitpemt today at an off hour.
etc. etc. etc.
That sounds fair to me.
What does NOT sound fair to me are the hogs that take all the Prime Membership benefits and use them up, preventing any other members from getting their fair share. By using the plan they have, it stops abusive behavior.
4) They are not informed about what the vote is about, have been lied to about what the vote is about. If you think they know what stuff is about, then you stop trying to find out more information about it - but if you are wrong...
5) They do not believe their vote will make a difference. This is the MAIN reason why most people do not vote.
6) The governement goes out of it's way to make it HARD to vote. Your #1 is a lie. It acts like it is always easy to vote and it is NOT. If you hvae moved/never voted before you may not know where the poling place is. You may not speak English, even though you are a citizen and can vote. You may be blind/old/sick/disabled. You may be away from home.
Electronic voting solves this last problem. #1-5 it does nothing about.
P.S. I personally think that the current system of difficult to vote is OK, because it means that people that care MORE about an issue are more likely to vote, and have more power. However, being OK does not mean it is GOOD. A far better way to solve the problem is to change the voting system from a "select" me to a point based system, where you get say 30 votes to attribute among 10 issues, with a minimum of 1 vote per issue. You can put all 21 votes on one issue and use your remaining 9 votes on the 9 other issues, evenly distribute 3 votes for each issue, or anything in between. This system lets people that REALLY care about an issue have more power than the people that have no idea what they are voting about.