Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.
b) Even if I didn't, I'd rather see relevant ads than the random crap I'd get otherwise.
Both sides of this point have their merit. On the one hand, I case about my privacy, and don't want companies to profile everything I do. On the other hand, I'd rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ads. Should I sell my soul for comfort? Or stubbornly resist the flow and accept all the annoyances it brings? I'm not quite sure.
For the most part, they don't seem to be doing a terribly good job at showing me relevant ads, though. Except YouTube; ever since I googled for accountant services, YouTube keeps showing me ads for a few of them. And it's not stopping either; I don't even use Google for search anymore, and I still see those same ads.
But Wikileaks is not located in the US. How can you break the law of a place where you're not?
They encourage people in the US to break US law if they're asking people to give them confidential government data. Even data from private corporations is protected by law as intellectual property. Leaking company files can be prosecuted as theft. There is no point in trying to prosecute Assange, as he isn't in the US and can't be held accountable by US law. The those who steal the data in the first place are breaking US law.
Encouraging people to do that is a violation of the TOS.
But Wikileaks doesn't encourage people to steal data. It merely provides a platform for publishing information that needs to be public.
Who has determined that Wikileaks encourages people to break the law?
I've explained this a few times now, including again in this post. Asking people to steal data is encouraging them to break the law.
But Wikileaks doesn't ask anything like that. And with PayPal acting as its own judge in cases like these, it makes itself an unreliable payment processor. Especially for international payments, because not every country has the same laws as the US.
Leaking classified government data is always against the law. Asking people to provide it is encouraging people to break US laws.
But Wikileaks is not located in the US. How can you break the law of a place where you're not?
But moreover, does PayPal really block everybody who breaks the law? I really doubt that. Consider that Microsoft has been convicted (unlike Wikileaks) of breaking EU law. Consider the many other large organizations that are clearly involved in a wide variety of illegal activities, yet get to do business just fine. Why? Because they're too big to harass.
Has News Corp been blocked yet?
The New York Times didn't ask people to steal the data in the first place. The reported on something that was now already in public circulation.
The New York Times, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, worked closely with Wikileaks to redact and publish these cables, and is guilty of everything that Wikileaks is guilty of. The only reason reason not to harass the NYT like PayPal harassed Wikileaks, is because the NYT is too big. PayPal would immediately have a losing lawsuit on their hands.
PayPal doesn't take stands on political or moral beliefs for the most part (though you can't use PayPal to pay for porn or gambling),
Even when both you and the porn/gambling site are located in countries where it's legal? Then PayPal does take a stance.
PayPal's TOS state that if you encourage people to break the law (which Wikileaks did) then your account can be frozen. PayPal enforced TOS that Wikileaks agreed to.
Who has determined that Wikileaks encourages people to break the law? How do you determine that? As far as I'm aware, no judge has determined that determined that Wikileaks has done anything illegal, or encouraged anyone else to commit any crimes. No prosecutor has filed any charges. The harassment of Wikileaks has been entirely extralegal, and PayPal, Visa and MC allow themselves to be used as the US government's extralegal enforcers. There's no justice in it if there's no court of law involved.
And yet I never hear about these kind of problems with normal bank accounts or credit cards. There definitely is something about how PayPal operates that enables these kind of fuckups.
Wikileaks may have published the data, but they didn't encourage anyone to steal classified data. They may have published it, but so did the New York Times, who didn't get blocked. Meanwhile other organizations that can be considered to encourage illegal acts (like the KKK) don't get blocked, and nobody holds their payment processors accountable for it. Plenty of criminals have bank accounts and credit cards.
Had there been a court order that Wikileaks assets had to be frozen, then PayPal would have been entirely correct. But as far as anyone knows, they did it entirely out of their own free will. And that makes them unreliable.
PayPal is too eager to block accounts. It didn't happen just to Wikileaks. Many people and organizations receiving donations suddenly find their accounts blocked. PayPal has time and time again proven to be too unreliable to be the payment infrastructure we need.
Mind you, Mastercard and Visa are only marginally better. They too play politics with people's financial needs. Unfortunately we don't really have anything better right now. European banks are working on something that should work in the entire EU, but that's still not good enough. We need reliable world wide payment infrastructure, and we still don't have it.
He didn't just (inspire others to) create and sell cool computers and gadgets; he was also the most successful CEO we've ever seen. Plenty of people start a company and turn it into something big, but he started a company, made it successful, got kicked out by others, made a few other projects successful (Pixar), then when his old company was about to go bust, he came back and turned it into the single most valuable company in the world.
In the late '90s, nobody would have believed that Apple could ever overtake Microsoft, but Apple did that and more.
Mind you, I don't agree with everything he did. The iPhone's walled garden is evil. But it's also effective. There's no denying the uniqueness of his accomplishments, and on the whole, his impact on the world was very positive.
Being a great leader or CEO isn't about coming up with great ideas, it's about recognizing them.
This is very true. Who here hasn't had a boss who seemed incapable of recognizing good ideas?
Though one of Jobs' strengths wasn't just using good ideas from engineers, it was also steering his engineers towards coming up with good ideas that added to a good user experience.
Are people switching TO Opera? I'm in the process of abandoning it. It used to be an amazing browser, way ahead of the curve. But all its interesting features have been copied by everybody else by now, and too many websites just don't work well in Opera.
The fact that they have a dot in the middle suggests that they have some structure; that the number in front of the dot is more significant than the one after the dot. Why call it 8.0 when it's just a meaningless number? And why is mine called 7.0.1 instead of 7 or 7.1 or 8?
In fact, why not just use build numbers? Just give me Firefox 7136 and I'll admit that it's just a number with no implication of meaning or structure.
You can't blame this one just on the US. The EU was also involved, but unfortunately, the EU isn't really all that democratic. The Europarliament may have objected to ACTA on various occasions, the negotiators continued anyway.
I hope this still requires parliamentary ratification. No idea whether it'll be the national or EU parliament, but I hope they take a very critical look at it. I think it'd be a very constructive signal if they rejected ACTA. I hope that'll prevent these kind of secret, uninformed negotiations in the future.
That's what limited liability means, I'm afraid. Though with the recent mess in mismanaged corporations, I'd say it sounds reasonable if the limitations to liability were to be reduced somewhat. In other words, people and corporations should be held accountable, and indeed pay, if they cause big problems like these.
Good point. On the one hand, they deserve to go bankrupt for failing at the one thing that justified their existence, but dumping the corpse before it can be properly examined smells iffy.
Note that you don't have to be charged with anything to go bankrupt, though. When all your customers leave, you suddenly have no revenue, but you still have your costs. And since it's obvious to everybody that DigiNotar will go bankrupt anyway, nobody loans them money, they quickly lack the money to pay salaries and other costs, and suddenly they're bankrupt.
Actually Star Trek looked backwards more than forward. Roddenberry piched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and based it's main character on Horatio Hornblower, an 18th century sailing captain. The worldviews expressed were firmly locked in '50's paternalism and the show was generally more of an Establishment reaction against the progressive movements than for it.
Well put. In Star Trek, the heroes represent the establishment; they operate from a position of power, most of the time. In Star Wars, the establishment is evil, and the heroes are rebelling against it.
Trek is definitely a soft brand of science fiction, but it's not fantasy. Its technologies can be wildly speculative, even sound like gibberish, but it is rooted in science and scientific explanation.
No, it's not. Its technology is rooted in a need to tell a story on a limited budget. Technologically, Star Trek is probably softer than Star Wars. It just pretends that it's not, because it gives the technology a more central role in the story. Star Wars' technology is for the most part probably harder than Star Trek's, but it receives less attention, because The Force takes central stage.
I'd say Star Trek is far more science fiction than Star Wars, though that's mostly because of the style. Star Wars is the classic Good vs Evil epic, like Lord of the Rings. Star Trek is much more an extrapolation of our technology. But technologically, they don't differ all that much. Both have FTL travel, both have some supernatural powers (in Star Wars they take a more central role, though). Star Trek's biggest failing in this regard are the transporters; if you can disassemble something here and magically reassemble it there, then you should be able to create an entire army our of thin air, shouldn't you? Despite all the technobabble lending superficial credibility to it, Star Trek's tech isn't in any way more plausible than Star Wars' tech, and possibly even less so.
The big difference is mainly that Star Trek presents a reasonable though utopian extrapolation of our society, whereas Star Wars presents a completely invented galaxy of adventure.
What? Harrison Ford was the only real actor that Star Wars had! Well, and Sir Alec Guinness of course, but he died.
I'm firmly convinced that Harrison Ford saved Star Wars. Look at the movies that don't have him in them. Look at the scenes that don't have him in them.
Slashdot Mirror
Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.
b) Even if I didn't, I'd rather see relevant ads than the random crap I'd get otherwise.
Both sides of this point have their merit. On the one hand, I case about my privacy, and don't want companies to profile everything I do. On the other hand, I'd rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ads. Should I sell my soul for comfort? Or stubbornly resist the flow and accept all the annoyances it brings? I'm not quite sure.
For the most part, they don't seem to be doing a terribly good job at showing me relevant ads, though. Except YouTube; ever since I googled for accountant services, YouTube keeps showing me ads for a few of them. And it's not stopping either; I don't even use Google for search anymore, and I still see those same ads.
But Wikileaks is not located in the US. How can you break the law of a place where you're not?
They encourage people in the US to break US law if they're asking people to give them confidential government data. Even data from private corporations is protected by law as intellectual property. Leaking company files can be prosecuted as theft. There is no point in trying to prosecute Assange, as he isn't in the US and can't be held accountable by US law. The those who steal the data in the first place are breaking US law.
Encouraging people to do that is a violation of the TOS.
But Wikileaks doesn't encourage people to steal data. It merely provides a platform for publishing information that needs to be public.
Who has determined that Wikileaks encourages people to break the law?
I've explained this a few times now, including again in this post. Asking people to steal data is encouraging them to break the law.
But Wikileaks doesn't ask anything like that. And with PayPal acting as its own judge in cases like these, it makes itself an unreliable payment processor. Especially for international payments, because not every country has the same laws as the US.
Leaking classified government data is always against the law. Asking people to provide it is encouraging people to break US laws.
But Wikileaks is not located in the US. How can you break the law of a place where you're not?
But moreover, does PayPal really block everybody who breaks the law? I really doubt that. Consider that Microsoft has been convicted (unlike Wikileaks) of breaking EU law. Consider the many other large organizations that are clearly involved in a wide variety of illegal activities, yet get to do business just fine. Why? Because they're too big to harass.
Has News Corp been blocked yet?
The New York Times didn't ask people to steal the data in the first place. The reported on something that was now already in public circulation.
The New York Times, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, worked closely with Wikileaks to redact and publish these cables, and is guilty of everything that Wikileaks is guilty of. The only reason reason not to harass the NYT like PayPal harassed Wikileaks, is because the NYT is too big. PayPal would immediately have a losing lawsuit on their hands.
PayPal doesn't take stands on political or moral beliefs for the most part (though you can't use PayPal to pay for porn or gambling),
Even when both you and the porn/gambling site are located in countries where it's legal? Then PayPal does take a stance.
PayPal's TOS state that if you encourage people to break the law (which Wikileaks did) then your account can be frozen. PayPal enforced TOS that Wikileaks agreed to.
Who has determined that Wikileaks encourages people to break the law? How do you determine that? As far as I'm aware, no judge has determined that determined that Wikileaks has done anything illegal, or encouraged anyone else to commit any crimes. No prosecutor has filed any charges. The harassment of Wikileaks has been entirely extralegal, and PayPal, Visa and MC allow themselves to be used as the US government's extralegal enforcers. There's no justice in it if there's no court of law involved.
And yet I never hear about these kind of problems with normal bank accounts or credit cards. There definitely is something about how PayPal operates that enables these kind of fuckups.
Wikileaks may have published the data, but they didn't encourage anyone to steal classified data. They may have published it, but so did the New York Times, who didn't get blocked. Meanwhile other organizations that can be considered to encourage illegal acts (like the KKK) don't get blocked, and nobody holds their payment processors accountable for it. Plenty of criminals have bank accounts and credit cards.
Had there been a court order that Wikileaks assets had to be frozen, then PayPal would have been entirely correct. But as far as anyone knows, they did it entirely out of their own free will. And that makes them unreliable.
I think they are evil. Freezing accounts should only happen for a really good reason. They should know that freezing accounts will hurt businesses.
If they think something suspicious happened, they should alert the police, not steal the money involved.
Have you sued them already?
Why do those accounts get frozen in the first place?
I'm not aware of a transaction service that charges precisely no fees.
I am. My bank, much as it sucks in many ways, doesn't charge fees for transferring money to another Dutch bank account.
PayPal is too eager to block accounts. It didn't happen just to Wikileaks. Many people and organizations receiving donations suddenly find their accounts blocked. PayPal has time and time again proven to be too unreliable to be the payment infrastructure we need.
Mind you, Mastercard and Visa are only marginally better. They too play politics with people's financial needs. Unfortunately we don't really have anything better right now. European banks are working on something that should work in the entire EU, but that's still not good enough. We need reliable world wide payment infrastructure, and we still don't have it.
He didn't just (inspire others to) create and sell cool computers and gadgets; he was also the most successful CEO we've ever seen. Plenty of people start a company and turn it into something big, but he started a company, made it successful, got kicked out by others, made a few other projects successful (Pixar), then when his old company was about to go bust, he came back and turned it into the single most valuable company in the world.
In the late '90s, nobody would have believed that Apple could ever overtake Microsoft, but Apple did that and more.
Mind you, I don't agree with everything he did. The iPhone's walled garden is evil. But it's also effective. There's no denying the uniqueness of his accomplishments, and on the whole, his impact on the world was very positive.
Being a great leader or CEO isn't about coming up with great ideas, it's about recognizing them.
This is very true. Who here hasn't had a boss who seemed incapable of recognizing good ideas?
Though one of Jobs' strengths wasn't just using good ideas from engineers, it was also steering his engineers towards coming up with good ideas that added to a good user experience.
Are people switching TO Opera? I'm in the process of abandoning it. It used to be an amazing browser, way ahead of the curve. But all its interesting features have been copied by everybody else by now, and too many websites just don't work well in Opera.
The fact that they have a dot in the middle suggests that they have some structure; that the number in front of the dot is more significant than the one after the dot. Why call it 8.0 when it's just a meaningless number? And why is mine called 7.0.1 instead of 7 or 7.1 or 8?
In fact, why not just use build numbers? Just give me Firefox 7136 and I'll admit that it's just a number with no implication of meaning or structure.
Every time you touch that search button on your Android phone it makes Google very happy.
It does? Because my search button directs its search to DuckDuckGo.
You can't blame this one just on the US. The EU was also involved, but unfortunately, the EU isn't really all that democratic. The Europarliament may have objected to ACTA on various occasions, the negotiators continued anyway.
I hope this still requires parliamentary ratification. No idea whether it'll be the national or EU parliament, but I hope they take a very critical look at it. I think it'd be a very constructive signal if they rejected ACTA. I hope that'll prevent these kind of secret, uninformed negotiations in the future.
Yeah, they're not as evil as they used to be. Turns out evil was the only thing they were really good at.
There's a difference between launching a nuclear bomb to end WW2 and launching one in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis.
That's what limited liability means, I'm afraid. Though with the recent mess in mismanaged corporations, I'd say it sounds reasonable if the limitations to liability were to be reduced somewhat. In other words, people and corporations should be held accountable, and indeed pay, if they cause big problems like these.
Good point. On the one hand, they deserve to go bankrupt for failing at the one thing that justified their existence, but dumping the corpse before it can be properly examined smells iffy.
Note that you don't have to be charged with anything to go bankrupt, though. When all your customers leave, you suddenly have no revenue, but you still have your costs. And since it's obvious to everybody that DigiNotar will go bankrupt anyway, nobody loans them money, they quickly lack the money to pay salaries and other costs, and suddenly they're bankrupt.
Actually Star Trek looked backwards more than forward. Roddenberry piched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and based it's main character on Horatio Hornblower, an 18th century sailing captain. The worldviews expressed were firmly locked in '50's paternalism and the show was generally more of an Establishment reaction against the progressive movements than for it.
Well put. In Star Trek, the heroes represent the establishment; they operate from a position of power, most of the time. In Star Wars, the establishment is evil, and the heroes are rebelling against it.
One thing I've noticed is that most big Star Trek fan also enjoy Star Wars, while big Star Wars fans often strongly dislike and berate Star Trek.
Even Star Trek fans berate Star Trek, so that doesn't mean much.
Trek is definitely a soft brand of science fiction, but it's not fantasy. Its technologies can be wildly speculative, even sound like gibberish, but it is rooted in science and scientific explanation.
No, it's not. Its technology is rooted in a need to tell a story on a limited budget. Technologically, Star Trek is probably softer than Star Wars. It just pretends that it's not, because it gives the technology a more central role in the story. Star Wars' technology is for the most part probably harder than Star Trek's, but it receives less attention, because The Force takes central stage.
I'd say Star Trek is far more science fiction than Star Wars, though that's mostly because of the style. Star Wars is the classic Good vs Evil epic, like Lord of the Rings. Star Trek is much more an extrapolation of our technology. But technologically, they don't differ all that much. Both have FTL travel, both have some supernatural powers (in Star Wars they take a more central role, though). Star Trek's biggest failing in this regard are the transporters; if you can disassemble something here and magically reassemble it there, then you should be able to create an entire army our of thin air, shouldn't you? Despite all the technobabble lending superficial credibility to it, Star Trek's tech isn't in any way more plausible than Star Wars' tech, and possibly even less so.
The big difference is mainly that Star Trek presents a reasonable though utopian extrapolation of our society, whereas Star Wars presents a completely invented galaxy of adventure.
What? Harrison Ford was the only real actor that Star Wars had! Well, and Sir Alec Guinness of course, but he died.
I'm firmly convinced that Harrison Ford saved Star Wars. Look at the movies that don't have him in them. Look at the scenes that don't have him in them.