DNS was a convenience tacked onto the robust, distributed, multi-path peer-based nature of IP. If we were willing to fall back to hand-wrangling 4,000-line HOSTS files like I used to back in 1983, I'm sure we could all be the rugged individualists.
DNS is a trade-off: network-wide consistency for autonomy. With DNS, you have to ask somebody how to get to http://slashdot.org/. That somebody should be someone you trust. But for now, there's only one "someone". If there were multiple "someone"s, the net would fragment, and that's inconvenient. So there'd be a meta-somebody who can bring all the fragmented parts together, like a super-DNS that points to all the individual DNS roots. But that just recreates the "authoritarian DNS system" problem, one level higher.
The broader Internet became less about "distributed, peer-based", robust communication and more about convenient and seamless communication at just about the dawn of Eternal September, and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network.
Counterargument: Vertical market software where the intended market numbers in the dozens of installations for highly specialist fields.
Another counterargument: Linux, with a userbase of tens of millions of installations.
But yeah, "often" is a fair usage in your sentence, because it actually says nothing whatsoever about the prevalence of your example. But the rest of your sentence seems to be constructed to shade "often" to mean "most often" in the first case and "less often" in the second occurrence, which is quite likely not accurate.
That's not a very fair discussion technique. Very.... "weasel word" ish.
discs in cases to indulge my anally retentive tendencies towards alphabetical filing.
Funny, I feel very much the same way with my meticulously organized directory structure of pirated ^w downloaded ^w legally obtained music files.
BTW, for future reference, please don't make a habit of mentioning "anally retentive" and "read on the toilet" in the same sentence. We here at Slashdot don't really need those visuals, and what has been mentally seen can never be unseen. Thank you.
You'll spend it anyway, in a futile attempt to get that last 5% (or, more honestly, in a risible attempt to pose to your fellow audiophools that you have attained sonic Nirvana with your oxygen-free native-thorium 23-to-1-braid speaker cabling at $45,000 per meter).
But... but... It's not the same product again! it's 8 bits better! OMG! I can heeeeear the sonic purity!* And it makes the Apple logo on my iPacifier to glow even more brilliantly!
*on the crap earbuds, with traffic noise leaking through. Trust me. The RDF is strong with this one.
So, you've held a seance and consulted with the departed spirits of our Founding Fathers? No? Then STFU and stop trying to stuff your words into their mouths.
The Constitution means precisely what it says. Not what you wish it says.
Well, try to list a child, even a newborn baby, as a dependent on a tax form without one. Quoting IRS Pub 17,:
If your dependent does not have an SSN by the time your return is due, you may want to ask for an extension of time to file, as explained earlier under When Do I Have To File.
If you do not provide a required SSN or if you provide an incorrect SSN, your tax may be increased and any refund may be reduced.
Sorry. The IRS has gone well beyond the intent of the original SSN, and there is absolutely no way out of it unless you're going to drop completely out of the economy and live illegally and on the streets (or a shack in the Montana wilderness).
To be explicit, SSNs were necessarily intended to capture demographic info about place of birth. The structure of the SSN assignment makes the first several digits an effective indicator of place of residence when the SSN request was made.
For the majority of Americans born in the last quarter century, however, the SSN indicates city of birth, because the IRS, in its infinite wisdom, conflated "SSN" (Social Security Number, an account number in the US social insurance and annuity program) with "Taxpayer Identification Number" and required every dependent reported on a tax form to have one; therefore, Mama and Papa will request an SSN for the little one just about as soon he or she is born. (The only corner case I can imagine is if the kid is born while the Mom is away from home; in that case, it's likely the SSN will reflect the family's residence address, not the actual city of birth.)
Good point. My "city of birth" is in a foreign country, but I was born an US citizen. No naturalization required.
I'm inclined to think the geniuses at Google decided to "solve" the "citizenship verification" problem with a borderline-illegal and conclusively-privacy-violating sledgehammer approach, rather than (for instance, as TFA suggested) using a "US citizen?" check box. (Yeah, liars gotta lie, but it's no harder to lie about your city of birth than to lie about the basic question "are you a US citizen?")
I'm going to lean on Hanlon's Razor here and assume that Google instinctively went for the convoluted and indirect way of "proving citizenship eligibility" and simply inadvertently wound up datamining privacy-sensitive critical data items about children, rather than some nefarious but nebulous plot to sell our children's identities to the highest bidder. (Social Security numbers? What conceivable use are those to marketers, unless they're planning to expand into outright identity fraud?)
And you are very right, in the sense that "IP" is discernibly different than tangible property. But again, IP is non-exclusionary, but so (potentially) is real estate. The physical laws of the universe* do not exclude me from occupying the same chunk of land as you, the landowner, the same way that the physical laws of the universe don't deprive you of the exclusive and sole possession of an idea.
*Barring Pauli exclusion, and that only applies because we have the bad luck of being Fermionic matter.
So... yes, IP should be treated differently than tangible property. It has different attributes, and the idea of "ownership" is far less intuitive. But "protected differently" is not necessarily "protected less".
The other issue is the reason we have intellectual property. We do not protect intellectual property to benefit the creator. We do it to benefit society, that part is written into the constitution
You haven't been paying attention, have you? Law protects ALL property rights for the benefit of society, not for the creator or owner or any other possessor. Please examine carefully the transcripts or docket information for any property crime (or any crime, for that matter.) The case will always be entitled "The <governmental entity> versus <defendant>". The victim-in-fact? At most, a witness. At least, a complete non-participant and non-factor. All property is protected, not for the benefit of any individual, but for the benefit of society at large. So there is no meaningful difference between tangible, real, and intellectual property in that.
In short, your argument is rubbish.
In short, you are a sore loser, but a loser you nonetheless are.
Is this the first time the "Steven King is dead" slashtroll got onto the front page? Seems to me it isn't, but I may have mercifully forgotten specifics.
Physical objects are not equivalent to abstract rights. The home from your example is unique, a physical object that can only belong to one party at a time. Mentioning the connections to public services is only disingenuous, really, since those are services that the landowner buys, not services that the landowner receives income fromâ"the municipality reserves the right to cut off service if the tenant does not pay.
Interesting. You neglect the intangible possession implicit in the example you're arguing. You speak of a house, and yes, it's tangible and inheritable. But what about the land it's on? It's on the deed. It's owned, and taxed, and serviced, but completely intangible.
I hear the enraged and incredulous squeals now. "Land ownership is timeless, ancient, well-accepted. Land is tangible!"
Dirt is tangible. Land is not. Land is an abstract geometric description of a fundamentally 2-d surface. You don't necessarily own any material below the ground-air interface, and you sure as Hell don't necessarily own the air above it. Even if you have exclusive possession rights to the "dirt", you many not necessarily own any valuable substances in it (e.g., mineral rights).
Ownership and possession rights are not some absolute. The most fundamental possession right is "It's tangible and in my physical control, and no one here is strong enough to wrestle it away." Beyond that, it's all conventions and customs and laws governing abstractions and intangibles, so any argument based on consistency and intuition has no basis in realty.
Take-away? Intellectual property is property because the law says it is. Q.E.D.
TBH, that's where I thought the sentence that starts "Mr. Villalobos has thought of a potential workaround: granting members of the jury pool free access to the court's wi-fi network..." was going.
I suppose that's a bit too far on the "OMG h@x0rz" paranoia. Still, I have to agree with other posters... unless the facebook info is made available to the defense during the jury vetting process, this smacks of improper and unbalanced quid pro quo.
is Alan Greenspan rising from the grave* to soberly chide the market about its irrational exuberance.
*Yeah, I know he's not dead. But you can't prove he wouldn't get into a grave for the sole purpose of rising from it, especially if it gives him occasion to do the "irrational exuberance" bit again.
Wow. I'm having to add a line of no-value text because quoting your yelling and providing a link in response is "lameness". Thanks, Slashdot. You're the best!
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
AIX, I'm looking at you. I haven't had to admin AIX since 5.3 days, but while our team was learning AIX (coming from Solaris) we would modify system configuration by editing the/etc config files like God intended. And they'd keep reverting to pre-edit config if we had to reboot. Which happened a lot because we had some flaky hardware.
It took the local IBM Customer Engineer weenie telling us about "SMIT" and the AIX ODB to realize we weren't editing the real system config... just the text file created from the ODB when AIX was booted.
Damn SMIT. It's blasphemy to alter the system's config with anything besides "vi".
and then we had the first real substantial power failure in years like a few months later.. and the thing had to go down:(
Perhaps caused by minor hard drive damage caused by relocating the system while under power?
A rotary-media hard drive is fairly robust, if static. If spinning, it's more fragile than a Slashdotter's ego.
I mean, it's your server, and it's an ancient 486 and all, so respect the hardware to the limit and extent you want to, but for me, if it's mine and uses hard drives, it doesn't move 2 inches or tip 5 degrees while it's powered.
Net neutrality isn't particularly about origin, other than "origin outside of the ISP's own moneymaking sphere."
Net neutrality is entirely about fairness of access in the face of pressure to monetize that access.... increasing the effective cost of access to content that the network provider isn't already making money on to drive traffic to its own revenue-providing offerings.
So, origin is a big part of it. But ignoring protocol is misguided. QoS is explicitly about protocol, but it's also a convenient end-run on net neutrality if the protocol you're throttling happens to be a competitor to your own marketed content.
Don't lose sight of that. Responsible ISPs will manage QoS for the best aggregate experience for their constituents. Fiduciarily responsible ISPs will also manage QoS for the best return on content and network investment, at the expense of access fairness and content diversity if necessary. It's this latter which is why QoS can be a network neutrality issue.
I guess I understand that. There's "justice" in the "due process"/"innocent until proven guilty"/"reasonable doubt" sense, and "justice" in the "guilty even though acquited"/"got off on a technicality" sense.
The former is the legal system. The latter is "the court of opinion" and occasionally "rough justice".
I can agree that, on principle, "fucking idiots who text while driving" deserve some punishment. However, all I can really say about that is to quote a fairly wise man:
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
--J. R. R. Tolkien
(And, frankly, I don't believe that the standards for "depriving of life" should be any higher than that of "depriving of liberty", if we're talking imprisonment rather then dancing at the end of a mob's rope.)
Slashdot Mirror
Aaah, kids.
DNS was a convenience tacked onto the robust, distributed, multi-path peer-based nature of IP. If we were willing to fall back to hand-wrangling 4,000-line HOSTS files like I used to back in 1983, I'm sure we could all be the rugged individualists.
DNS is a trade-off: network-wide consistency for autonomy. With DNS, you have to ask somebody how to get to http://slashdot.org/. That somebody should be someone you trust. But for now, there's only one "someone". If there were multiple "someone"s, the net would fragment, and that's inconvenient. So there'd be a meta-somebody who can bring all the fragmented parts together, like a super-DNS that points to all the individual DNS roots. But that just recreates the "authoritarian DNS system" problem, one level higher.
The broader Internet became less about "distributed, peer-based", robust communication and more about convenient and seamless communication at just about the dawn of Eternal September, and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network.
Counterargument: Vertical market software where the intended market numbers in the dozens of installations for highly specialist fields.
Another counterargument: Linux, with a userbase of tens of millions of installations.
But yeah, "often" is a fair usage in your sentence, because it actually says nothing whatsoever about the prevalence of your example. But the rest of your sentence seems to be constructed to shade "often" to mean "most often" in the first case and "less often" in the second occurrence, which is quite likely not accurate.
That's not a very fair discussion technique. Very.... "weasel word" ish.
Please publicly disclose your email address so that you can decide for yourself which spam email you'd like to keep.
Free your inbox from the tyranny of not getting enough herbal Viagra email!
Yeah, but "ALAC" doesn't lend itself to duck jokes as well.
discs in cases to indulge my anally retentive tendencies towards alphabetical filing.
Funny, I feel very much the same way with my meticulously organized directory structure of pirated ^w downloaded ^w legally obtained music files.
BTW, for future reference, please don't make a habit of mentioning "anally retentive" and "read on the toilet" in the same sentence. We here at Slashdot don't really need those visuals, and what has been mentally seen can never be unseen. Thank you.
You'll spend it anyway, in a futile attempt to get that last 5% (or, more honestly, in a risible attempt to pose to your fellow audiophools that you have attained sonic Nirvana with your oxygen-free native-thorium 23-to-1-braid speaker cabling at $45,000 per meter).
But... but... It's not the same product again! it's 8 bits better! OMG! I can heeeeear the sonic purity!* And it makes the Apple logo on my iPacifier to glow even more brilliantly!
*on the crap earbuds, with traffic noise leaking through. Trust me. The RDF is strong with this one.
That wasn't the intention.
So, you've held a seance and consulted with the departed spirits of our Founding Fathers? No? Then STFU and stop trying to stuff your words into their mouths.
The Constitution means precisely what it says. Not what you wish it says.
Yes. They've lost the game.
Well, try to list a child, even a newborn baby, as a dependent on a tax form without one. Quoting IRS Pub 17,:
Sorry. The IRS has gone well beyond the intent of the original SSN, and there is absolutely no way out of it unless you're going to drop completely out of the economy and live illegally and on the streets (or a shack in the Montana wilderness).
To be explicit, SSNs were necessarily intended to capture demographic info about place of birth. The structure of the SSN assignment makes the first several digits an effective indicator of place of residence when the SSN request was made.
For the majority of Americans born in the last quarter century, however, the SSN indicates city of birth, because the IRS, in its infinite wisdom, conflated "SSN" (Social Security Number, an account number in the US social insurance and annuity program) with "Taxpayer Identification Number" and required every dependent reported on a tax form to have one; therefore, Mama and Papa will request an SSN for the little one just about as soon he or she is born. (The only corner case I can imagine is if the kid is born while the Mom is away from home; in that case, it's likely the SSN will reflect the family's residence address, not the actual city of birth.)
Thanks, IRS.
Good point. My "city of birth" is in a foreign country, but I was born an US citizen. No naturalization required.
I'm inclined to think the geniuses at Google decided to "solve" the "citizenship verification" problem with a borderline-illegal and conclusively-privacy-violating sledgehammer approach, rather than (for instance, as TFA suggested) using a "US citizen?" check box. (Yeah, liars gotta lie, but it's no harder to lie about your city of birth than to lie about the basic question "are you a US citizen?")
I'm going to lean on Hanlon's Razor here and assume that Google instinctively went for the convoluted and indirect way of "proving citizenship eligibility" and simply inadvertently wound up datamining privacy-sensitive critical data items about children, rather than some nefarious but nebulous plot to sell our children's identities to the highest bidder. (Social Security numbers? What conceivable use are those to marketers, unless they're planning to expand into outright identity fraud?)
Yeah, you get a huge amount of Hipster Kitty "too mainstream" posing action here. It's amusing.
why Michigan would pay 10 cents for that movie is anyone's guess.
It's a condition on the Superfund money they're getting from the EPA for toxic media remediation.
And you are very right, in the sense that "IP" is discernibly different than tangible property. But again, IP is non-exclusionary, but so (potentially) is real estate. The physical laws of the universe* do not exclude me from occupying the same chunk of land as you, the landowner, the same way that the physical laws of the universe don't deprive you of the exclusive and sole possession of an idea.
*Barring Pauli exclusion, and that only applies because we have the bad luck of being Fermionic matter.
So... yes, IP should be treated differently than tangible property. It has different attributes, and the idea of "ownership" is far less intuitive. But "protected differently" is not necessarily "protected less".
The other issue is the reason we have intellectual property. We do not protect intellectual property to benefit the creator. We do it to benefit society, that part is written into the constitution
You haven't been paying attention, have you? Law protects ALL property rights for the benefit of society, not for the creator or owner or any other possessor. Please examine carefully the transcripts or docket information for any property crime (or any crime, for that matter.) The case will always be entitled "The <governmental entity> versus <defendant>". The victim-in-fact? At most, a witness. At least, a complete non-participant and non-factor. All property is protected, not for the benefit of any individual, but for the benefit of society at large. So there is no meaningful difference between tangible, real, and intellectual property in that.
In short, your argument is rubbish.
In short, you are a sore loser, but a loser you nonetheless are.
Really.
Is this the first time the "Steven King is dead" slashtroll got onto the front page? Seems to me it isn't, but I may have mercifully forgotten specifics.
Physical objects are not equivalent to abstract rights. The home from your example is unique, a physical object that can only belong to one party at a time. Mentioning the connections to public services is only disingenuous, really, since those are services that the landowner buys, not services that the landowner receives income fromâ"the municipality reserves the right to cut off service if the tenant does not pay.
Interesting. You neglect the intangible possession implicit in the example you're arguing. You speak of a house, and yes, it's tangible and inheritable. But what about the land it's on? It's on the deed. It's owned, and taxed, and serviced, but completely intangible.
I hear the enraged and incredulous squeals now. "Land ownership is timeless, ancient, well-accepted. Land is tangible!"
Dirt is tangible. Land is not. Land is an abstract geometric description of a fundamentally 2-d surface. You don't necessarily own any material below the ground-air interface, and you sure as Hell don't necessarily own the air above it. Even if you have exclusive possession rights to the "dirt", you many not necessarily own any valuable substances in it (e.g., mineral rights).
Ownership and possession rights are not some absolute. The most fundamental possession right is "It's tangible and in my physical control, and no one here is strong enough to wrestle it away." Beyond that, it's all conventions and customs and laws governing abstractions and intangibles, so any argument based on consistency and intuition has no basis in realty.
Take-away? Intellectual property is property because the law says it is. Q.E.D.
TBH, that's where I thought the sentence that starts "Mr. Villalobos has thought of a potential workaround: granting members of the jury pool free access to the court's wi-fi network..." was going.
I suppose that's a bit too far on the "OMG h@x0rz" paranoia. Still, I have to agree with other posters... unless the facebook info is made available to the defense during the jury vetting process, this smacks of improper and unbalanced quid pro quo.
is Alan Greenspan rising from the grave* to soberly chide the market about its irrational exuberance.
*Yeah, I know he's not dead. But you can't prove he wouldn't get into a grave for the sole purpose of rising from it, especially if it gives him occasion to do the "irrational exuberance" bit again.
WHERE THE HELL IS FROYO FOR MY WILDFIRE !?!?!?
Right here.
Wow. I'm having to add a line of no-value text because quoting your yelling and providing a link in response is "lameness". Thanks, Slashdot. You're the best!
courtesy of Appendix A of the Jargon File.
even databases without a plain text front end.
AIX, I'm looking at you. I haven't had to admin AIX since 5.3 days, but while our team was learning AIX (coming from Solaris) we would modify system configuration by editing the /etc config files like God intended. And they'd keep reverting to pre-edit config if we had to reboot. Which happened a lot because we had some flaky hardware.
It took the local IBM Customer Engineer weenie telling us about "SMIT" and the AIX ODB to realize we weren't editing the real system config... just the text file created from the ODB when AIX was booted.
Damn SMIT. It's blasphemy to alter the system's config with anything besides "vi".
and then we had the first real substantial power failure in years like a few months later.. and the thing had to go down :(
Perhaps caused by minor hard drive damage caused by relocating the system while under power?
A rotary-media hard drive is fairly robust, if static. If spinning, it's more fragile than a Slashdotter's ego.
I mean, it's your server, and it's an ancient 486 and all, so respect the hardware to the limit and extent you want to, but for me, if it's mine and uses hard drives, it doesn't move 2 inches or tip 5 degrees while it's powered.
Net neutrality isn't particularly about origin, other than "origin outside of the ISP's own moneymaking sphere."
Net neutrality is entirely about fairness of access in the face of pressure to monetize that access.... increasing the effective cost of access to content that the network provider isn't already making money on to drive traffic to its own revenue-providing offerings.
So, origin is a big part of it. But ignoring protocol is misguided. QoS is explicitly about protocol, but it's also a convenient end-run on net neutrality if the protocol you're throttling happens to be a competitor to your own marketed content.
Don't lose sight of that. Responsible ISPs will manage QoS for the best aggregate experience for their constituents. Fiduciarily responsible ISPs will also manage QoS for the best return on content and network investment, at the expense of access fairness and content diversity if necessary. It's this latter which is why QoS can be a network neutrality issue.
I guess I understand that. There's "justice" in the "due process"/"innocent until proven guilty"/"reasonable doubt" sense, and "justice" in the "guilty even though acquited"/"got off on a technicality" sense.
The former is the legal system. The latter is "the court of opinion" and occasionally "rough justice".
I can agree that, on principle, "fucking idiots who text while driving" deserve some punishment. However, all I can really say about that is to quote a fairly wise man:
--J. R. R. Tolkien
(And, frankly, I don't believe that the standards for "depriving of life" should be any higher than that of "depriving of liberty", if we're talking imprisonment rather then dancing at the end of a mob's rope.)