"Also, patenet claims SHOULD also include proof that the design wasn't come upon independently and without using any of the claimers work."
You realize, don't you, that this would be nigh impossible to prove except in the most contrived of examples? You can't prove that someone else did not think of something. If you're in favor of just dismantling patent law altogether, since that's what your proposal would do, then just say so.
Well the advertisers could just be crazy, but I suspect they're not. I remember when the national Do Not Call list was being set up, I was surprised to learn that there was no significant correlation between people who opted for the list and people who buy from telemarketers; that is, people who choose to avoid telephone solicitation are just as likely to buy from it as everyone else. The other possible phenomenon is that, while they may offend popup blockers by defeating the popup blocking, they don't have anything to lose. Given a choice between the.001% chance of a customer clicking on their ad even though they're mad about the popup blocker being circumvented and the 0% chance of someone clicking on their ad when it was blocked, the advertisers prefer the former. More eyeballs is always better than fewer, I suppose.
...that airplanes cause global warming. They seed cirrus clouds which develop fully overnight. This holds in a lot of solar heat throughout the night, and they dissipate in time for sunlight again the next day. More planes are in the air in the evening than in the morning, so the effect is not symmetrical.
The only way to test this would be to ground planes -- or at least require that they fly much lower -- and observe the weather. 9/11 is the only real data point we have, and I believe the temperature did drop. Of course, this is totally unscientific. I leave it to the academics to pick up my slashdot droppings and change the world:)
I agree -- but I think the reason Bush was able to ride bigotry to victory is that the Democrats let him get away with the sterile frame of "protecting the sanctity of marriage." Had they framed it as "denying basic human rights to some people for no reason whatsoever" they might have fared better. True, they would have to do it carefully. But I think the potential is enormous, both for partisan gain and for the improvement of the world.
But a heterosexual person doesn't want to marry a person of the same gender.
It's just like anti-miscegenation laws. A black person couldn't marry a white person any more than a white person could marry a black person, but we still consider this horribly bigoted.
Except, in a way, it's worse. Because gay people through no fault of their own only want to marry people of the same gender, whereas straight people don't. So the law prevents one class of people from engaging in consensual and fulfilling marriage with another adult but not another. That's bigotry. It will change, and history will see it for what it was.
It's your kind of backwater, bigoted views that need to be exposed to the sunlight. Either you'd change your mind, or other people would see what a bigot you are and distance themselves from you. Humanity would win either way.
No! Voting for the lesser of two evils is GOOD! Less evil is better than more evil! In a plurality election as we have, no one will ever find a perfect match in a primary candidate. So you vote for the one who is closest. It's only the nutjobs that take your third-party all-or-nothing hardline stance. When your tiny coalition stands in a country of almost 300 million people and screams "All or nothing!", the people are going to give you nothing.
If libertarians were more willing to vote for primary candidates, the primary candidates might actually try to accommodate libertarian voters. As long as they throw their votes away on all-or-nothing, politicians can continue to ignore them completely. After all, what possible incentive can there be for a Democratic or Republican candidate to adopt libertarian precepts if the libertarians won't vote for him anyway?
Sad but true. Gay rights are not a core Democratic issue. But they SHOULD be. Democrats are having a hard time distinguishing themselves from Republicans. No one believes that they're in favor of fiscal responsibility, or that their position on Iraq is viable.
But if they remade themselves as the Party of Tolerance, I think they could do a lot better. They could brand the Republicans as intolerant, exclusionist, backwards. They could make gay rights into the Civil Rights struggle of the new generation that it will inevitably be and call themselves the champions of it. They could personalize all of the anti-gay policies the GOP pushes under the sterile cover of "protecting the sanctity of marriage." Put some very charismatic, very likable gay people on TV. Have them tell their stories. "Why does President Bush hate this man? Why doesn't he deserve the right to marry someone he loves? Why does the Republican Party think they're more moral than him, when he's just trying to live his life with the hand God dealt him?" The Republicans are VERY vulnerable on this front, and the Democrats could make a lot of headway pushing at it. They could also make the world a much better place.
Holy cow. What an incisive summary of Microsoft's attitude, from the grandest corporate strategy all the way down to the microcosmic world of the individual employee.
So what's your suggestion? Just let spammers rule the world? I'm all for universal access when there isn't a compelling reason not to have it, but this sounds like a compelling reason not to have it.
I suppose we could register certain IP addresses as belonging to a handicapped user and require sites to forgo the captcha when they hear from one of those IPs... but then we have all the problems of centralization, privacy invasion, and verification.
And how the fuck does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.
Oh -- and how the hell do you find a consistent 10% return on investment? The stock market historically returns 7%, and that's about as risky as anyone should get for the long-term.
Yes, compounding interest can be very impressive, and your numbers are very pretty. But they're also very unrealistic.
It doesn't matter if you get working photon transmission through infinity kilometers of air. The earth curves. I admit that an international infrastructure of quantum repeaters (which we can't yet make) put on satellites and coupled with a carefully routed ground-based network might provide everyone with workable quantum cryptography. But I really wonder and seriously doubt whether the expense involved with this would provide unbreakable bandwidth sufficient to overcome the already-available technology of large digital one-time pads. Once you've distributed the one-time pads, you HAVE a "guaranteed secure link to their national headquarters": the internet. That's with today's technology and minimal expense.
Because you can transmit the key before you know what the message will be. So, for example, at the beginning of the year you could transmit a 10 terabyte OTP key, and then throughout the year, gradually transmit and unbreakably encrypt up to ten terabytes of data. A bank would therefore not need to send a car with ten intensely loyal guys every single time someone made a transaction; instead, they could do it only once in January.
Quantum cryptography is a solution in search of a problem. It cannot implement public key/private key cryptography, and it can transmit only through a single uninterrupted fiber-optic cable, not over the internet at large. Given those limitations (which I don't think can be surmounted), one might as well use tremendous, digital one-time pads. Transmission of the pads to the relevant parties should be strictly easier than the quantum cryptographic solution: if nothing else, generate terabytes of noise, store it on a RAID, and put it in a car with ten intensely loyal guys. After you've done that, you can send up to that amount of data securely over the internet at large, and no amount of quantum hocus-pocus will be able to decode it.
"Regardless of the solvency or lack thereof in the system, I want out."
Yeah, it would be fun to opt out of things like taxes and social responsibility while still getting the benefits, wouldn't it?
But wait, you say, I wouldn't get the benefits. But you would -- even if you didn't collect your $14,000/yr after you retired, you would have the luxury of living in a society where retired people aren't starving on the street.
Let me just head off all the complaints that inevitably occur whenever it comes out that people like me use ad blockers.
First, I will continue to use the ad blocker. Nothing you say will convince me otherwise.
Second, I am in no way obligated, implicitly or explicitly, contractually or morally, to view ads. If you're willing to take this route, you also have to argue that it is/should be illegal/immoral to fast-forward through commercials on the T.V., or to get up and make a sandwich when they come on, or to not look at the advertisements in a magazine.
Third, ad-blockers will win this particular game of cat and mouse. If websites do not serve us without an ad download, we will download the ad and fail to render it.
Fourth, I don't see a problem with paid-subscription services once the market equilibrates. Something that few people seem to understand is that looking at ads inflicts a cost on you. Companies wouldn't pay for your eyeball time if it weren't worth something. Why is it worth something? Because we are sheep. We react to ads.
Everyone, of course, seems convinced that only other people react to ads. No one admits that they, themselves, are personally influenced. But if you don't react to ads, then why do you object to my ad-blocker? And if you DO react to ads, necessarily in a way that costs you financially, then why aren't you just willing to make the payment up front? At least that way you KNOW what you're paying. At least that way you cut out the inefficiency of the middle-man advertiser and actually get your product cheaper.
So get your moral outrage off of my ad-blocker. Better, get one of your own. I use Privoxy, which works miracles with any web browser on any platform.
So that means people going out and finding the stories that reinforce their existing opinions, further fragmenting society. Utopia? Not as such.
You'd rather prescribe a correct interpretation of events, so the hooligans who disagree with you wouldn't be able to reinforce their existing opinions? What shall we call your centralized, monolithic, ideologically controlled and controlling news source? How about Pravda?
John Naughton praises wikipedia for what it could be more than what it is right now.
Nonsense. He says he and countless others use it all the time. He says he finds the articles useful and more timely than EB's. He cites the articles of George Bush and Sollog and Tsunami as examples of Wikipedia's enormous success. He even begins the article by comparing Wikipedia to the bumblebee: all of our theory says that it shouldn't work, but it does. This is not a man waiting for things to get better; it is a man who thinks things are great now. Perhaps you only read the last paragraph where he says that someday it will as invaluable and popular as Google. That hardly means he isn't praising its current state. RTFA next time.
Re:I want to start some more discussion...
on
The Law as a Parent
·
· Score: 1
You cite some pretty disturbing situations, and I suppose you're to be commended for drawing the argument to its logical conclusions. But:
I read in this discussion "leave law abiding citizens alone." Watching hardcore pornography is certainly law abiding. Would you allow parents to let their 8 year olds watch hardcore pornography?... Even watching people have sex is legal, if they want you to watch. Would you let parents let their children watch them have sex? Extremely disturbing, that's how you make a sociopath, but the parents should have the right, right?
Yes. Parents should have that right. I am not aware of any studies that suggest that watching hardcore porn or sex makes a kid into a sociopath, and until and unless someone can point to actual scientific evidence that it does, I don't think the law should interfere with parents' discretion.
Self-mutilation is legal, within people's rights. Would you allow parents to let their children watch them as they mutilate their own body? Or on that note, would you allow parents to let their children mutilate themselves?
No. Most kinds of self-mutilation are symptoms of mental turmoil; I suggest this, rather than the actual act of self-mutilation, makes the parents unfit to parent. I am unfamiliar with the child custody laws of the United States, but I have no problem making the normative argument that parents who mutilate themselves should not live with their children. Children cannot legally mutilate themselves; it is an act that is universally unsafe and with permanent physical disfigurement. It harms them, and this is medically certain. We do not let children smoke cigarettes or drop out of school before they are 16 for the same reason: it harms them. It is perfectly consistent to forbid them to mutilate themselves.
I don't think cannibalism itself is illegal in the U.S, I could be wrong, it's not in Germany I know that! Would you let parents feed their children human flesh?
What, you suggest a law that says it is legal for parents to eat human flesh but not children? Ideally the law would forbid the taste of human from everyone, but if through some perverse logic you see fit to allow parents to do it, then I cannot imagine that the same logic would not also apply to children. It's not the actual ingestion that harms someone, you see, it's the killing of the donor that is the problem. If you want an analogy, it's not looking at kiddie porn that harms children, it's making it. To disrupt the incentives to make it, we forbid people to look at it.
But none of that really gets at the heart of violent video games. Until you can show me a study that proves that violent video games universally harm children, then I see no reason why parents should be forbidden to incorporate them into their parenting.
This is ultimately what is wrong with copyright law. There are large, monied interests with large, monied incentives to see law swing against public domain, but the public domain has no one to defend it.
Contrast this state of affairs with patent law, where the public domain has generic drug makers fighting for it, and note the difference in term limits. (copyrights last 70+ years today; patents last twenty-something.)
I don't know what is to be done about it, but that is the problem.
A corporation is not a fucking person. It can't get married, it can't get a birth certificate, driver's license, or passport, it is not entitled to a public education, and it can't apply for federal programs like food stamps or social security. The only reason this obnoxious misconception/talking point even exists is because former Chief Justice Waite wrote in the late 1800s that corporations are entitled to due process under the 14th amendment. Corporations have legal standing -- they can sue and they can be sued, and I hope you don't think that's a bad thing -- so it makes sense to apply substantive due process. And it happens that the fourteenth amendment uses the word "person" to describe who is eligible for due process. For heaven's sake, this does not legally make them people. If you still believe otherwise, cite some law.
Slashdot Mirror
COMPUTAR! ENHANCE!
Are YOU missing the fact that "I con" is also a grammatical English sentence that says that you are a crook?
Accelerometers in controllers -- steer your Mario Kart by tilting the controller.
"Also, patenet claims SHOULD also include proof that the design wasn't come upon independently and without using any of the claimers work."
You realize, don't you, that this would be nigh impossible to prove except in the most contrived of examples? You can't prove that someone else did not think of something. If you're in favor of just dismantling patent law altogether, since that's what your proposal would do, then just say so.
In America, class action suit plaintiffs often receive damages even when there's no guarantee that everyone in the class has been included.
Well the advertisers could just be crazy, but I suspect they're not. I remember when the national Do Not Call list was being set up, I was surprised to learn that there was no significant correlation between people who opted for the list and people who buy from telemarketers; that is, people who choose to avoid telephone solicitation are just as likely to buy from it as everyone else. The other possible phenomenon is that, while they may offend popup blockers by defeating the popup blocking, they don't have anything to lose. Given a choice between the .001% chance of a customer clicking on their ad even though they're mad about the popup blocker being circumvented and the 0% chance of someone clicking on their ad when it was blocked, the advertisers prefer the former. More eyeballs is always better than fewer, I suppose.
...that airplanes cause global warming. They seed cirrus clouds which develop fully overnight. This holds in a lot of solar heat throughout the night, and they dissipate in time for sunlight again the next day. More planes are in the air in the evening than in the morning, so the effect is not symmetrical.
:)
The only way to test this would be to ground planes -- or at least require that they fly much lower -- and observe the weather. 9/11 is the only real data point we have, and I believe the temperature did drop. Of course, this is totally unscientific. I leave it to the academics to pick up my slashdot droppings and change the world
I agree -- but I think the reason Bush was able to ride bigotry to victory is that the Democrats let him get away with the sterile frame of "protecting the sanctity of marriage." Had they framed it as "denying basic human rights to some people for no reason whatsoever" they might have fared better. True, they would have to do it carefully. But I think the potential is enormous, both for partisan gain and for the improvement of the world.
But a heterosexual person doesn't want to marry a person of the same gender.
It's just like anti-miscegenation laws. A black person couldn't marry a white person any more than a white person could marry a black person, but we still consider this horribly bigoted.
Except, in a way, it's worse. Because gay people through no fault of their own only want to marry people of the same gender, whereas straight people don't. So the law prevents one class of people from engaging in consensual and fulfilling marriage with another adult but not another. That's bigotry. It will change, and history will see it for what it was.
It's your kind of backwater, bigoted views that need to be exposed to the sunlight. Either you'd change your mind, or other people would see what a bigot you are and distance themselves from you. Humanity would win either way.
No! Voting for the lesser of two evils is GOOD! Less evil is better than more evil! In a plurality election as we have, no one will ever find a perfect match in a primary candidate. So you vote for the one who is closest. It's only the nutjobs that take your third-party all-or-nothing hardline stance. When your tiny coalition stands in a country of almost 300 million people and screams "All or nothing!", the people are going to give you nothing.
If libertarians were more willing to vote for primary candidates, the primary candidates might actually try to accommodate libertarian voters. As long as they throw their votes away on all-or-nothing, politicians can continue to ignore them completely. After all, what possible incentive can there be for a Democratic or Republican candidate to adopt libertarian precepts if the libertarians won't vote for him anyway?
Sad but true. Gay rights are not a core Democratic issue. But they SHOULD be. Democrats are having a hard time distinguishing themselves from Republicans. No one believes that they're in favor of fiscal responsibility, or that their position on Iraq is viable.
But if they remade themselves as the Party of Tolerance, I think they could do a lot better. They could brand the Republicans as intolerant, exclusionist, backwards. They could make gay rights into the Civil Rights struggle of the new generation that it will inevitably be and call themselves the champions of it. They could personalize all of the anti-gay policies the GOP pushes under the sterile cover of "protecting the sanctity of marriage." Put some very charismatic, very likable gay people on TV. Have them tell their stories. "Why does President Bush hate this man? Why doesn't he deserve the right to marry someone he loves? Why does the Republican Party think they're more moral than him, when he's just trying to live his life with the hand God dealt him?" The Republicans are VERY vulnerable on this front, and the Democrats could make a lot of headway pushing at it. They could also make the world a much better place.
Holy cow. What an incisive summary of Microsoft's attitude, from the grandest corporate strategy all the way down to the microcosmic world of the individual employee.
It's a brilliant bit of social engineering, but at least we all get free porn out of the deal :)
So what's your suggestion? Just let spammers rule the world? I'm all for universal access when there isn't a compelling reason not to have it, but this sounds like a compelling reason not to have it.
I suppose we could register certain IP addresses as belonging to a handicapped user and require sites to forgo the captcha when they hear from one of those IPs... but then we have all the problems of centralization, privacy invasion, and verification.
Yes, except...
how the fuck does a 15 year old acquire $3,000?
And how the fuck does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.
Oh -- and how the hell do you find a consistent 10% return on investment? The stock market historically returns 7%, and that's about as risky as anyone should get for the long-term.
Yes, compounding interest can be very impressive, and your numbers are very pretty. But they're also very unrealistic.
It doesn't matter if you get working photon transmission through infinity kilometers of air. The earth curves. I admit that an international infrastructure of quantum repeaters (which we can't yet make) put on satellites and coupled with a carefully routed ground-based network might provide everyone with workable quantum cryptography. But I really wonder and seriously doubt whether the expense involved with this would provide unbreakable bandwidth sufficient to overcome the already-available technology of large digital one-time pads. Once you've distributed the one-time pads, you HAVE a "guaranteed secure link to their national headquarters": the internet. That's with today's technology and minimal expense.
Because you can transmit the key before you know what the message will be. So, for example, at the beginning of the year you could transmit a 10 terabyte OTP key, and then throughout the year, gradually transmit and unbreakably encrypt up to ten terabytes of data. A bank would therefore not need to send a car with ten intensely loyal guys every single time someone made a transaction; instead, they could do it only once in January.
Quantum cryptography is a solution in search of a problem. It cannot implement public key/private key cryptography, and it can transmit only through a single uninterrupted fiber-optic cable, not over the internet at large. Given those limitations (which I don't think can be surmounted), one might as well use tremendous, digital one-time pads. Transmission of the pads to the relevant parties should be strictly easier than the quantum cryptographic solution: if nothing else, generate terabytes of noise, store it on a RAID, and put it in a car with ten intensely loyal guys. After you've done that, you can send up to that amount of data securely over the internet at large, and no amount of quantum hocus-pocus will be able to decode it.
"Regardless of the solvency or lack thereof in the system, I want out."
Yeah, it would be fun to opt out of things like taxes and social responsibility while still getting the benefits, wouldn't it?
But wait, you say, I wouldn't get the benefits. But you would -- even if you didn't collect your $14,000/yr after you retired, you would have the luxury of living in a society where retired people aren't starving on the street.
First, I will continue to use the ad blocker. Nothing you say will convince me otherwise.
Second, I am in no way obligated, implicitly or explicitly, contractually or morally, to view ads. If you're willing to take this route, you also have to argue that it is/should be illegal/immoral to fast-forward through commercials on the T.V., or to get up and make a sandwich when they come on, or to not look at the advertisements in a magazine.
Third, ad-blockers will win this particular game of cat and mouse. If websites do not serve us without an ad download, we will download the ad and fail to render it.
Fourth, I don't see a problem with paid-subscription services once the market equilibrates. Something that few people seem to understand is that looking at ads inflicts a cost on you. Companies wouldn't pay for your eyeball time if it weren't worth something. Why is it worth something? Because we are sheep. We react to ads.
Everyone, of course, seems convinced that only other people react to ads. No one admits that they, themselves, are personally influenced. But if you don't react to ads, then why do you object to my ad-blocker? And if you DO react to ads, necessarily in a way that costs you financially, then why aren't you just willing to make the payment up front? At least that way you KNOW what you're paying. At least that way you cut out the inefficiency of the middle-man advertiser and actually get your product cheaper.
So get your moral outrage off of my ad-blocker. Better, get one of your own. I use Privoxy, which works miracles with any web browser on any platform.
You'd rather prescribe a correct interpretation of events, so the hooligans who disagree with you wouldn't be able to reinforce their existing opinions? What shall we call your centralized, monolithic, ideologically controlled and controlling news source? How about Pravda?
Nonsense. He says he and countless others use it all the time. He says he finds the articles useful and more timely than EB's. He cites the articles of George Bush and Sollog and Tsunami as examples of Wikipedia's enormous success. He even begins the article by comparing Wikipedia to the bumblebee: all of our theory says that it shouldn't work, but it does. This is not a man waiting for things to get better; it is a man who thinks things are great now. Perhaps you only read the last paragraph where he says that someday it will as invaluable and popular as Google. That hardly means he isn't praising its current state. RTFA next time.
I read in this discussion "leave law abiding citizens alone." Watching hardcore pornography is certainly law abiding. Would you allow parents to let their 8 year olds watch hardcore pornography? ... Even watching people have sex is legal, if they want you to watch. Would you let parents let their children watch them have sex? Extremely disturbing, that's how you make a sociopath, but the parents should have the right, right?
Yes. Parents should have that right. I am not aware of any studies that suggest that watching hardcore porn or sex makes a kid into a sociopath, and until and unless someone can point to actual scientific evidence that it does, I don't think the law should interfere with parents' discretion.
Self-mutilation is legal, within people's rights. Would you allow parents to let their children watch them as they mutilate their own body? Or on that note, would you allow parents to let their children mutilate themselves?
No. Most kinds of self-mutilation are symptoms of mental turmoil; I suggest this, rather than the actual act of self-mutilation, makes the parents unfit to parent. I am unfamiliar with the child custody laws of the United States, but I have no problem making the normative argument that parents who mutilate themselves should not live with their children. Children cannot legally mutilate themselves; it is an act that is universally unsafe and with permanent physical disfigurement. It harms them, and this is medically certain. We do not let children smoke cigarettes or drop out of school before they are 16 for the same reason: it harms them. It is perfectly consistent to forbid them to mutilate themselves.
I don't think cannibalism itself is illegal in the U.S, I could be wrong, it's not in Germany I know that! Would you let parents feed their children human flesh?
What, you suggest a law that says it is legal for parents to eat human flesh but not children? Ideally the law would forbid the taste of human from everyone, but if through some perverse logic you see fit to allow parents to do it, then I cannot imagine that the same logic would not also apply to children. It's not the actual ingestion that harms someone, you see, it's the killing of the donor that is the problem. If you want an analogy, it's not looking at kiddie porn that harms children, it's making it. To disrupt the incentives to make it, we forbid people to look at it.
But none of that really gets at the heart of violent video games. Until you can show me a study that proves that violent video games universally harm children, then I see no reason why parents should be forbidden to incorporate them into their parenting.
This is ultimately what is wrong with copyright law. There are large, monied interests with large, monied incentives to see law swing against public domain, but the public domain has no one to defend it.
Contrast this state of affairs with patent law, where the public domain has generic drug makers fighting for it, and note the difference in term limits. (copyrights last 70+ years today; patents last twenty-something.)
I don't know what is to be done about it, but that is the problem.
A corporation is not a fucking person. It can't get married, it can't get a birth certificate, driver's license, or passport, it is not entitled to a public education, and it can't apply for federal programs like food stamps or social security. The only reason this obnoxious misconception/talking point even exists is because former Chief Justice Waite wrote in the late 1800s that corporations are entitled to due process under the 14th amendment. Corporations have legal standing -- they can sue and they can be sued, and I hope you don't think that's a bad thing -- so it makes sense to apply substantive due process. And it happens that the fourteenth amendment uses the word "person" to describe who is eligible for due process. For heaven's sake, this does not legally make them people. If you still believe otherwise, cite some law.