Most acts detrimental to the free state, such as murder, can be solved to within an acceptable degree by simply illegalizing it. Deterrence acts on would-be offenders, and the number of murders in the country is small enough that it generally does not disrupt life for most of us.
Spam works by entirely different rules. It is not enough to deter MOST spammers. It takes only a sufficiently capable handful to bring the mail systems of the entire country to their knees. The economies don't work in the same way: a typical murderer affects the lives of anywhere between one and a hundred people; a spammer affects between one and a hundred MILLION every week.
So relying on a citizen to be rational -- to realize that it's not in his best interest to spam, given the consequences -- will not work. There are more irrational actors than it takes for spamming to remain alive and well. There must be some sort of technological barrier in place -- with the support of the law, I believe -- to ensure that even these irrational actors are incapable of spamming.
What are some examples? Require by law that all ISPs -- be they mom and pop shops, tremendous corporations, or colleges and universities -- provide information in an email sufficient to identify the sender. Then prosecute the ISP harshly if it allows a user to spam; hopefully, ISPs can be deterred more consistently than individuals. Overseas ISPs are obviously beyond this jurisdiction, but the FCC might take it upon itself to publish a list of overseas ISPs that comply, and recommend blocking all that don't.
Alternatively, institute a microcharge on email -- be it monetary or computational -- to disrupt the economies of scale. When a user receives an email from an address not on his whitelist, his computer (or the ISP's) responds with an NP-hard computation problem that the sender's computer must solve before the email is delivered. Solving one -- or one hundred -- such problems would be no problem for a user's computer, but solving one to one hundred million would be much harder. Spamming would require computation like Japan's Earth Simulator to pull off, and the amount of computation might scale each year according to Moore's Law.
All right, but you're attacking the hypothetical rather than the argument. If you want a more clear-cut example, take the guy whose job it was to pull the gas chamber lever in Auschwitz.
"Well jeez, it's not like I WANTED to kill all those people... but I have a family to support!"
I know, I've invoked Naziism, Godwin's Law and all... sue me:)
What if they're in debt and need the money?... What if you have a sick family member, and need the health insurance the company provides you?
This could justify ANY unethical job in the universe. Drug runners, brothel owners, and hit men probably all tell themselves "I really need the money. My children have to eat, after all. Other people do worse things." every night.
And if you are someone supporting a couple kids and a wife on your income in an economy that sucks when your previously decent company is bought by scumbags? You should just quit?
No, of course not. But when you need another job and the interviewer asks you why you hung on to a sleazy company like SCO, you explain your unusual circumstances.
On first thought, that sounds quite plausible. But on second thought, i know and you know that if someone bails out of a $25/hr job, the company will be more than happy to try to hire someone into it (read: inexperienced newbs or immigrants) at $9/hr.
Yeah, I thought about that -- but if inexperienced newbs or immigrants can do the job adequately for less, then the company would already have replaced its workforce with them.
On the other hand, if the newbs or immigrants they would hire are less capable, then the company suffers. That has the benefit of
Driving an evil company out of business, and
Motivating other companies not to become evil.
If skilled workers know that they will not be able to get a job after working for a sleazy company, then the preponderance won't, or will quit when they see that their company is headed down that path. Granted, a few will join up or hang on -- the financially strapped, for example -- and those few can explain their straits to their next employer, if he will hear them.
I haven't given this whole theory much thought: an economics PhD might just have a study up her sleeve proving me wrong. It just makes some sense to me.
Harsh as it may sound, perhaps it would be better if they couldn't get over having SCO on their resume.
Perhaps that would motivate employers to quit as soon as their company starts being vastly evil, which would in itself be a motivation for companies not to be evil.
I mean, okay: there are 600 million carp in the water. Scientists engineer a good thousand fish to have this gene. Then they release them into the water. So those thousand fish have male offspring.
Now what? Is this gene dominant? Is it even hereditary? Even if it is, how can the effect be anything better than infinitesimal?
Or are the scientists using some sort of phage to infect ALL of the carp of the ocean? In which case, why not just kill the carp outright instead of all this fancypants gender manipulation?
I don't get it. I'm sure there's an explanation, but the ass-awful article doesn't help.
That's the problem: you're judging the quality of a product by the length of its list of features. But there are unquantifiable traits that make or break the deal that cannot be included in such a list.
The iPod has a very respectable feature list, but at the end of the day, here's what it does:
Play mp3s stylishly, painlessly, intuitively, dependably.
And no other player has been able to do it as well.
But that's just it -- for $300 you could get the cheapest iPod, which does not need to be networked at all, since it stores the music locally. Plug it into the wall, and shove the headphone output into the stereo. Just leave it there.
When your music collection changes, you admittedly have to update the iPod by carrying it to your computer. How often does this happen? I don't know, but I think it's worth the following exclusive advantage:
You don't need to worry about networking. No setup, no failures, no bandwidth allocation, etc.
You don't have to keep a computer on all the time. I have a laptop, and it sleeps when I'm not using it. And I often take it with me when I leave -- yet the iPod would stay behind for others to enjoy.
For what it's worth, you can play encrypted AACs.
I don't doubt, though, that the Squeezebox is one kickass box of electronics. Perhaps it's worth the price of admission just to tinker with it.
You designed your metaphor around the most damaging kind of pornography you could think of. You chose the item "hardcore gay S&M mag" because that's what it represents to you. Specifically, you think it's more damaging than hardcore straight S&M mags.
I mean, whatever -- a lot of people share your views. We call you homophobes, and society is increasingly adept at rightly categorizing your whining as hate speech and thus affording it the (lack of) attention it deserves. Signal-noise management on a societal level, one might call it.
So when you do the typical hand-waving -- "I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay, of course" -- you're lying. Because you very clearly do. And again, that's fine -- you're entitled to your opinions, but calling you on your hypocrisy is the least I can do. If you consider that "getting a rise out of" me, then I'm pleased to oblige, and I'm glad we agree.
However, what is important to note who stood up for what you and I consider right: "a federal judge"... emphasis on "a" That is one person to stand between the greedy trial lawyers and common sense.
Dude, a single judge ALWAYS decides the outcome of a civil trial. That's nothing specific to the DMCA. The fact is, the system WORKED.
And if this one judge had failed, perhaps the next up on the appeals chain wouldn't have.
This is not the last time that the DMCA is going to be used to squash a competing product. As long as it's on the books it's going to be used willy-nilly on anything remotely related to so-called IP rights.
Perhaps, perhaps not, but this has nothing to do with the article. If anything, this story is a shining example of our U.S. Justice System constraining the DMCA to what it was intended for. It should RESTORE one's faith, not shatter it!
The average lawyer has a *highly* developed sense of *ethics*. It's *morals* they're lacking.
You may be right and you may be wrong, but this story has nothing to say about the personality of the average lawyer.
Because they were doing their job. A corporation is designed to maximize profit, and nothing else. We can wax endless about how great the world would be if they were instead bent on Improving the Human Condition, but the fact is they're not, and the system isn't designed to motivate that. I even question if capitalism is workable if we allow that monied parties hold others' interests sovereign.
That said, a lawyer is hired to represent the best interests of his client. That is his job. If a law such as the DMCA exists that affords a corporation a financial advantage, it is the lawyer's job to evoke that law.
If the law was not designed to be used that way, then it is Congress's fault for failing at their job. If the lawyer is using the financial might of the corporation to bury the little guy in court, well, he's still representing the best interests of his client. Perhaps the U.S. justice system should be re-factored to demotivate this sort of behavior. Regardless, don't blame the lawyer for doing what society tells him to do.
Catching your kid reading Playboy is a much different thing than catching him reading a hardcore gay S&M mag. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not condemning homosexuality
Sure you're not. It's just one "danger factor" that, like physical violence and emotional abuse, we must protect the children from. Else those homosexuals will recruit them all.
But you're not condemning it or anything. You said so yourself.
If software patents are going to exist, then it makes sense to patent things you invent in order to protect yourself. If not, and your invention is worth anything significant, some other dweeb will come along, patent the thing you invented, then sue you for using it.
No it doesn't. All you need to do to protect yourself is:
Wait until you get sued
Invalidate the patent with proof of prior art.
Getting a patent is a long, expensive process. Defensive patenting doesn't work so well for the little guy.
That becomes a problem if said dweeb has deep pockets (e.g. Eolas, Microsoft,...) and you don't.
That's a problem WHENEVER you get sued, not just when you have a patent. Hell, you're in trouble if Microsoft sues you even if you DO have a patent. This is a structural problem with the U.S. legal system: it's not specific to patent cases. If Microsoft REALLY wants to burn you in court, you'll get burned.
right, because space systems don't fail, airplanes don't crash, reactors don't explode or melt down, and no one gets busted using Kazaa...
Right, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You, AC absolutely suck at making intelligent risk management decisions. Seriously: pay someone else to make them for you.
EVERYTHING is a risk. You can't get around it. Breathing our atmosphere puts you at some risk for respiratory ailments. Letting the sunlight touch your skin increases your risk for skin cancer. Stepping into an automobile is a TREMENDOUS risk, absolutely DWARFING the combined risks faced by a man who travels twice every day by plane, lives IN a nuclear power plant, and shares his music on KaZaA.
Yes, it DOES happen that any and all of these will lead to at least one consequence worldwide. We aren't interested in a categorical "has it killed people?" but rather in a question of degree: "What proportion of people exposed to this risk suffers the consequences?" We're interested in expected values. And the probability of suffering the much-feared consequences of flying, living near a power plant, or sharing music is VIRTUALLY NIL.
Review insurance policies. Living near a plant does not increase your life insurance premiums. Neither does flying. Are you better equipped to assess these risks than paid actuaries?
My concern is that any nation putting this sort of system into place risks misalignment of the beams and having a solar laser of incredible power strafing across the landscape.
This is so preventable that it makes me laugh.
Make the communication two-way. If the reception dish loses its lock on the power beam or if the transmitter loses its lock on the communication beam, the whole apparatus shuts off until it can be inspected.
The paranoia around such a non-issue just goes to show how stinkin' awful humans are at gut-feel cost-benefit analysis. You've seen it happen (as a Disaster) in SimCity 2000; therefore, it must be a real risk.
Ditto for those who are afraid of flying, living near a modern fission plant, or sharing files on KaZaA.
I'd say a feature ought to be enabled by default, provided that:
The average user will want it enabled
It poses no security risk or other unreasonable cost on the user
Ad blocking meets both criteria. Honestly, who WANTS to see those damn flashy, dialog-boxy, popping up, popping under, interstitial, pain-in-the-ass distractions? No one comes to mind...
Slashdot Mirror
Most acts detrimental to the free state, such as murder, can be solved to within an acceptable degree by simply illegalizing it. Deterrence acts on would-be offenders, and the number of murders in the country is small enough that it generally does not disrupt life for most of us.
Spam works by entirely different rules. It is not enough to deter MOST spammers. It takes only a sufficiently capable handful to bring the mail systems of the entire country to their knees. The economies don't work in the same way: a typical murderer affects the lives of anywhere between one and a hundred people; a spammer affects between one and a hundred MILLION every week.
So relying on a citizen to be rational -- to realize that it's not in his best interest to spam, given the consequences -- will not work. There are more irrational actors than it takes for spamming to remain alive and well. There must be some sort of technological barrier in place -- with the support of the law, I believe -- to ensure that even these irrational actors are incapable of spamming.
What are some examples? Require by law that all ISPs -- be they mom and pop shops, tremendous corporations, or colleges and universities -- provide information in an email sufficient to identify the sender. Then prosecute the ISP harshly if it allows a user to spam; hopefully, ISPs can be deterred more consistently than individuals. Overseas ISPs are obviously beyond this jurisdiction, but the FCC might take it upon itself to publish a list of overseas ISPs that comply, and recommend blocking all that don't.
Alternatively, institute a microcharge on email -- be it monetary or computational -- to disrupt the economies of scale. When a user receives an email from an address not on his whitelist, his computer (or the ISP's) responds with an NP-hard computation problem that the sender's computer must solve before the email is delivered. Solving one -- or one hundred -- such problems would be no problem for a user's computer, but solving one to one hundred million would be much harder. Spamming would require computation like Japan's Earth Simulator to pull off, and the amount of computation might scale each year according to Moore's Law.
Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism
All right, but you're attacking the hypothetical rather than the argument. If you want a more clear-cut example, take the guy whose job it was to pull the gas chamber lever in Auschwitz. "Well jeez, it's not like I WANTED to kill all those people... but I have a family to support!" I know, I've invoked Naziism, Godwin's Law and all... sue me :)
This could justify ANY unethical job in the universe. Drug runners, brothel owners, and hit men probably all tell themselves "I really need the money. My children have to eat, after all. Other people do worse things." every night.
No, of course not. But when you need another job and the interviewer asks you why you hung on to a sleazy company like SCO, you explain your unusual circumstances.
Yeah, I thought about that -- but if inexperienced newbs or immigrants can do the job adequately for less, then the company would already have replaced its workforce with them.
On the other hand, if the newbs or immigrants they would hire are less capable, then the company suffers. That has the benefit of
- Driving an evil company out of business, and
- Motivating other companies not to become evil.
If skilled workers know that they will not be able to get a job after working for a sleazy company, then the preponderance won't, or will quit when they see that their company is headed down that path. Granted, a few will join up or hang on -- the financially strapped, for example -- and those few can explain their straits to their next employer, if he will hear them.I haven't given this whole theory much thought: an economics PhD might just have a study up her sleeve proving me wrong. It just makes some sense to me.
Shall we also ban violent movies and books? Oh wait -- there's that First Amendment.
Perhaps that would motivate employers to quit as soon as their company starts being vastly evil, which would in itself be a motivation for companies not to be evil.
Thoughts?
Let's count. I remember one fall: the Gil Amelio days, before the age of iMac. And the rise happened right after when Jobs took over.
Is this your history of rise and fall? Am I forgetting some? You make Apple sound like a goddamn yo-yo dieter.
...how does this gene propagate?
I mean, okay: there are 600 million carp in the water. Scientists engineer a good thousand fish to have this gene. Then they release them into the water. So those thousand fish have male offspring.
Now what? Is this gene dominant? Is it even hereditary? Even if it is, how can the effect be anything better than infinitesimal?
Or are the scientists using some sort of phage to infect ALL of the carp of the ocean? In which case, why not just kill the carp outright instead of all this fancypants gender manipulation?
I don't get it. I'm sure there's an explanation, but the ass-awful article doesn't help.
The iPod has a very respectable feature list, but at the end of the day, here's what it does:
- Play mp3s stylishly, painlessly, intuitively, dependably.
And no other player has been able to do it as well.When your music collection changes, you admittedly have to update the iPod by carrying it to your computer. How often does this happen? I don't know, but I think it's worth the following exclusive advantage:
I don't doubt, though, that the Squeezebox is one kickass box of electronics. Perhaps it's worth the price of admission just to tinker with it.
Yet all these years later I still play and love MK64. I fully expect history to repeat.
I'm not gay.
You designed your metaphor around the most damaging kind of pornography you could think of. You chose the item "hardcore gay S&M mag" because that's what it represents to you. Specifically, you think it's more damaging than hardcore straight S&M mags.
I mean, whatever -- a lot of people share your views. We call you homophobes, and society is increasingly adept at rightly categorizing your whining as hate speech and thus affording it the (lack of) attention it deserves. Signal-noise management on a societal level, one might call it.
So when you do the typical hand-waving -- "I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay, of course" -- you're lying. Because you very clearly do. And again, that's fine -- you're entitled to your opinions, but calling you on your hypocrisy is the least I can do. If you consider that "getting a rise out of" me, then I'm pleased to oblige, and I'm glad we agree.
Dude, a single judge ALWAYS decides the outcome of a civil trial. That's nothing specific to the DMCA. The fact is, the system WORKED.
And if this one judge had failed, perhaps the next up on the appeals chain wouldn't have.
Perhaps, perhaps not, but this has nothing to do with the article. If anything, this story is a shining example of our U.S. Justice System constraining the DMCA to what it was intended for. It should RESTORE one's faith, not shatter it!
You may be right and you may be wrong, but this story has nothing to say about the personality of the average lawyer.
Because they were doing their job. A corporation is designed to maximize profit, and nothing else. We can wax endless about how great the world would be if they were instead bent on Improving the Human Condition, but the fact is they're not, and the system isn't designed to motivate that. I even question if capitalism is workable if we allow that monied parties hold others' interests sovereign.
That said, a lawyer is hired to represent the best interests of his client. That is his job. If a law such as the DMCA exists that affords a corporation a financial advantage, it is the lawyer's job to evoke that law.
If the law was not designed to be used that way, then it is Congress's fault for failing at their job. If the lawyer is using the financial might of the corporation to bury the little guy in court, well, he's still representing the best interests of his client. Perhaps the U.S. justice system should be re-factored to demotivate this sort of behavior. Regardless, don't blame the lawyer for doing what society tells him to do.
Sure you're not. It's just one "danger factor" that, like physical violence and emotional abuse, we must protect the children from. Else those homosexuals will recruit them all.
But you're not condemning it or anything. You said so yourself.
You're what I would call a closeted homophobe.
No it doesn't. All you need to do to protect yourself is:
Getting a patent is a long, expensive process. Defensive patenting doesn't work so well for the little guy.
That becomes a problem if said dweeb has deep pockets (e.g. Eolas, Microsoft, ...) and you don't.
That's a problem WHENEVER you get sued, not just when you have a patent. Hell, you're in trouble if Microsoft sues you even if you DO have a patent. This is a structural problem with the U.S. legal system: it's not specific to patent cases. If Microsoft REALLY wants to burn you in court, you'll get burned.
And they'd yell back "Suck on THIS! Here's a subpoena; now decrypt the volume or become a felon!"
:)
Right, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You, AC absolutely suck at making intelligent risk management decisions. Seriously: pay someone else to make them for you.
EVERYTHING is a risk. You can't get around it. Breathing our atmosphere puts you at some risk for respiratory ailments. Letting the sunlight touch your skin increases your risk for skin cancer. Stepping into an automobile is a TREMENDOUS risk, absolutely DWARFING the combined risks faced by a man who travels twice every day by plane, lives IN a nuclear power plant, and shares his music on KaZaA.
Yes, it DOES happen that any and all of these will lead to at least one consequence worldwide. We aren't interested in a categorical "has it killed people?" but rather in a question of degree: "What proportion of people exposed to this risk suffers the consequences?" We're interested in expected values. And the probability of suffering the much-feared consequences of flying, living near a power plant, or sharing music is VIRTUALLY NIL.
Review insurance policies. Living near a plant does not increase your life insurance premiums. Neither does flying. Are you better equipped to assess these risks than paid actuaries?
No...
This is so preventable that it makes me laugh.
Make the communication two-way. If the reception dish loses its lock on the power beam or if the transmitter loses its lock on the communication beam, the whole apparatus shuts off until it can be inspected.
The paranoia around such a non-issue just goes to show how stinkin' awful humans are at gut-feel cost-benefit analysis. You've seen it happen (as a Disaster) in SimCity 2000; therefore, it must be a real risk.
Ditto for those who are afraid of flying, living near a modern fission plant, or sharing files on KaZaA.
But using the phone DOES make you look like a dork!
- The average user will want it enabled
- It poses no security risk or other unreasonable cost on the user
Ad blocking meets both criteria. Honestly, who WANTS to see those damn flashy, dialog-boxy, popping up, popping under, interstitial, pain-in-the-ass distractions? No one comes to mind...