You are in seriously need of some perspective. The kicker is that this won't even hurt BK, as everyone sensible will deem it to be no more than an annoying practical joke, and it turns out there's no such thing as bad publicity.
That would be fine except for the fact that if it were an individual instead of a large corporation doing this, he'd be going to prison.
It doesn't even matter whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a good law or a bad law (for the purpose of my argument); allowing a law to be discriminatory in its application -- in this case, by failing to prosecute corporation-sponsored hacking -- is wrong and must be opposed.
I agree with all those reasons, but I'd characterize my feelings as schadenfreude against the people who bought the spy devices, not love for BK.
I also want this to have an additional consequence you didn't mention: I want BK's corporate officers to be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (Or if that doesn't happen, similarly to how Sony execs failed to get sent to prison for the rootkit, I want the blatant bias in its enforcement to eventually lead to the law's repeal.)
First of all, nothing gives "professional quality movies" the right to exist. People have the right not to be charged with a crime for trying to make them, but it's that person's own responsibility to figure out how to fund it.
Second: nothing about "[my] values being set in law" by reforming copyright would change that: people would still have the right not to be charged with a crime for making movies, and it would still be that person's responsibility to fund the process. Having less monopoly enforcement (or even no grant of monopoly at all) might make that harder, but that's not the same as prohibiting it by law. Even in an environment without copyright there are still plenty of ways to fund movies, such as by patronage (including crowdfunding), subsidizing them with other goods/services (e.g. merchandising or product placement), etc.
Third, it's not an issue of "ideological purity," it's an issue of human rights. "Free speech" means free exchange of ideas, and free exchange of ideas depends on the Public Domain. Requiring some third-party's permission before sharing an idea is the opposite of that. In other words, copyright is fundamentally censorship, and copyright enforced by DRM without regard for Fair Use is even more so. Moreover, copyright is increasingly an infringement upon actual property rights too. In fact, copyright maximalists are trying to create a world where "ownership" is only for corporations, but not for people: neo-feudalism, a.k.a. tyranny.
However, considering the different sub-versions of Mint as somehow a bridge too far to decide upon is the sort of concept that makes a two mouse click an unsufferable crime upon humanity.
Maybe so, but there are plenty of people -- like my baby-boomer parents -- who can barely even handle one button! Should we doom them to Windows spyware and exploitation just because they don't meet your condescending, elitist expectation of tech-savviness?
More to the point, even technical users shouldn't have to deal with every tiny detail, all the time. I'm a goddamn professional software engineer and even I don't want to deal with it! I got most of that shit out of my system running Gentoo in college.
Fundamentally, it's an issue of human interface design and cognitive load. A good user interface helps the user focus on things that he cares about and not waste effort on the things he doesn't. In the vast majority of cases, forcing the user to make a decision without suggesting a default choice means the designer was failing to do his damn job. Take the Linux Mint download page, for instance: would it have killed them to just pick one of the editions -- it doesn't even matter which, despite the desktop environment Holy Wars -- and put it in a larger font or add an arrow or something to denote "if you don't know what the difference is between these, pick this one?" Just one little note on the page would make all the difference.
I wonder, do you only use all defaults on your Windows machine?
Mostly yes, actually. You know why? Because -- aside from laziness -- having a consistent experience, where I can walk up to any other random Windows machine (at least of the same version) and know that it will work the same as my usual one instead of getting pissed off that my custom keyboard shortcuts don't work, is more important than wringing out that last 0.5% of optimization. Here's a quote from Joel Spolsky (also referenced in the link above) about it:
Most advanced users use several computers regularly; they upgrade their computer every couple of years, they reinstall their operating system every three weeks. It's true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren't the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things. I've asked a lot of my "power user" friends about this; hardly any of them do any customization other than the bare minimum necessary to make their system behave reasonably.
(I do change the important settings, of course, such as disabling Microsoft's attempts to shanghai the system with forced "upgrades" and telemetry.)
Zenin was complaining about the "crazy flow-chart of decisions" you have to go through when deciding to use Linux. You replied, essentially, "just use Mint." But my point is that even that relatively-simple advice implies deciding between six different options before you even get to run the installer!
(Note that I'm not even counting the decisions that are "easy" because they're not opinion-based, such as deciding between 32- or 64-bit and whether to use the.torrent or pick one of the 99 (I counted) mirrors. And that's for an "easy" distro -- heaven help you if you're a n00b who got told "just use Debian" instead! "'s390x-netinst?' WTF is this shit?")
Choice is good, so more choice must always be better, right? Nope, that's a fallacy. Instead, too much choice becomes a confusopoly and that isn't good. And accidentally creating a confusopoly without even having a profit motive, but instead just out of sheer "not invented here" syndrome, is even worse!
Don't get me wrong: having too much choice is still way better than having too little. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that making every new Linux user choose between dozens or hundreds of distros can't have negative practical consequences just because choice is theoretically good.
Ryzen also includes the "AMD Secure Processor," which is described as sort of equivalent to the Intel Management Engine, which itself is considered a backdoor. The capabilities of the AMD implementation appear to be less well-known, but I think it's safe to say that it's problematic at least.
When people suddenly can't use the computer they had bought and paid for then they will search for other options.
Windows 10 already has mandatory updates.
Windows 10 already has an locked bootloader (as the hardware manufacturer's option).
All Microsoft has to do is wait while locked bootloaders become more and more prevalent, then when they do roll out the subscription the users will find their choice is to either pay up or enjoy their brick.
This whole "it isn't theft" argument is ultimately self-defeating because you'll kill off the flow of content. Nobody indie studio or director with a bunch of no-name actors and no real budget is going to reliably produce something equivalent to what a skilled director and actor with a $150 million budget could do.
And nothing of value would be lost.
More generally, the existence of everything from folk music, to anonymous graffiti, to Free Software, to anything released under a sufficiently free CC license proves that plenty of works would continue to be created even if copyright were greatly reduced in scope or even abolished entirely.
Netflix was able to make some progress but really they are not the service they should be because the current broadcasters have been granted so many ways to create barriers.
And then Netflix started creating original content, which means it will shortly turn to the protectionist and DRM-maximalist dark side too.
As a programmer who is still relatively young (early 30s), I would say that you still do need to -- well, maybe not "master," but at least understand -- all the layers between the hardware and high-level programming. Even if you're writing in some high-level language you still need to understand things like the time and space complexity of different data structure types and which ones your code is using (even if the declaration is buried in libraries three layers deep), how the choice of "array of structs" vs. "struct of arrays" affects cache performance, how different multiprocessing architectures are best served by different parallelization and concurrency techniques, etc.
First, half of this shit ships with backdoors from the factory and the other half gets hacked five seconds after plugging it in, which means that not only will you be contributing to a botnet, the device logs (from which your home/away schedule could be deduced) and the recordings of everything you say would be available to every criminal on the Internet.
Second, all of this shit is explicitly designed to make those logs and recordings available for companies to analyze your habits and market even more shit to you (which is more than bad enough by itself), and will eventually get cross-referenced with all the other data being collected about you to form an Orwellian dystopia of constant surveillance (which is even worse).
You' seem to be assuming maximum contributions to a non-Roth 401(k)
That's not an assumption used to justify my claim; it's a necessary condition of the claim itself.
In other words, my claim was that that failing to contribute to your 401k [enough to lower the overall tax rate to a reasonable level (at least below the 33% cayenne8 claimed to be paying!), if not enough to max it out] is the thing that is stupid. The part inside the square brackets, by the way, was absolutely implied in my original post even if it wasn't explicitly stated.
you're completely ignoring state taxes
First of all, I'm not going to do 41 sets of state tax calculations. Second, even states that do have income tax tend to base the calculation on AGI, which means state tax is lowered by contributing to retirement accounts in the same way federal tax is. Third, to reach a 33% overall income tax rate in the example I gave, the state (or state + local) tax rate would have to be a whopping 19% (overall, not marginal). Even the absolute highest possible state + local income tax rate in the entire country doesn't come anywhere close to that in marginal terms, let alone overall.
cayenne8 presumably lives in a state with taxes.
Louisiana, apparently. (I should have guessed from the username, LOL.) I'm not about to go figure out how to do LA state income taxes just to post an example for you, though.
Most people don't structure their life around tax avoidance.
And most people are stupid. Your sentence does not contradict my claim.
Besides, tax avoidance isn't the main goal anyway; the main goal is to have a very high savings rate in order to become financially independent ASAP. Tax avoidance is just a reason to put those savings in a 401k instead of a normal brokerage account.
I invest in the total US stock market and the total international stock market. If those don't recover, it means the entire world is fucked and the only reasonable investments are ammunition and canned food anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be fine except for the fact that if it were an individual instead of a large corporation doing this, he'd be going to prison.
It doesn't even matter whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a good law or a bad law (for the purpose of my argument); allowing a law to be discriminatory in its application -- in this case, by failing to prosecute corporation-sponsored hacking -- is wrong and must be opposed.
That's hilarious, but what's not funny is that Burger King marketing vandalized the page too.
I agree with all those reasons, but I'd characterize my feelings as schadenfreude against the people who bought the spy devices, not love for BK.
I also want this to have an additional consequence you didn't mention: I want BK's corporate officers to be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (Or if that doesn't happen, similarly to how Sony execs failed to get sent to prison for the rootkit, I want the blatant bias in its enforcement to eventually lead to the law's repeal.)
Let's get a few things straight here:
First of all, nothing gives "professional quality movies" the right to exist. People have the right not to be charged with a crime for trying to make them, but it's that person's own responsibility to figure out how to fund it.
Second: nothing about "[my] values being set in law" by reforming copyright would change that: people would still have the right not to be charged with a crime for making movies, and it would still be that person's responsibility to fund the process. Having less monopoly enforcement (or even no grant of monopoly at all) might make that harder, but that's not the same as prohibiting it by law. Even in an environment without copyright there are still plenty of ways to fund movies, such as by patronage (including crowdfunding), subsidizing them with other goods/services (e.g. merchandising or product placement), etc.
Third, it's not an issue of "ideological purity," it's an issue of human rights. "Free speech" means free exchange of ideas, and free exchange of ideas depends on the Public Domain. Requiring some third-party's permission before sharing an idea is the opposite of that. In other words, copyright is fundamentally censorship, and copyright enforced by DRM without regard for Fair Use is even more so. Moreover, copyright is increasingly an infringement upon actual property rights too. In fact, copyright maximalists are trying to create a world where "ownership" is only for corporations, but not for people: neo-feudalism, a.k.a. tyranny.
I'd say that everyone has a good reason use their own modem/router.
Hence my use of the word "can," not the word "should."
LOL, you've got that completely backwards.
Copyright is an artificial construct of government. It does not exist by default. That means you're the one arrogantly foisting your values on me!
Maybe so, but there are plenty of people -- like my baby-boomer parents -- who can barely even handle one button! Should we doom them to Windows spyware and exploitation just because they don't meet your condescending, elitist expectation of tech-savviness?
More to the point, even technical users shouldn't have to deal with every tiny detail, all the time. I'm a goddamn professional software engineer and even I don't want to deal with it! I got most of that shit out of my system running Gentoo in college.
Fundamentally, it's an issue of human interface design and cognitive load. A good user interface helps the user focus on things that he cares about and not waste effort on the things he doesn't. In the vast majority of cases, forcing the user to make a decision without suggesting a default choice means the designer was failing to do his damn job. Take the Linux Mint download page, for instance: would it have killed them to just pick one of the editions -- it doesn't even matter which, despite the desktop environment Holy Wars -- and put it in a larger font or add an arrow or something to denote "if you don't know what the difference is between these, pick this one?" Just one little note on the page would make all the difference.
This article explains the issue better.
Mostly yes, actually. You know why? Because -- aside from laziness -- having a consistent experience, where I can walk up to any other random Windows machine (at least of the same version) and know that it will work the same as my usual one instead of getting pissed off that my custom keyboard shortcuts don't work, is more important than wringing out that last 0.5% of optimization. Here's a quote from Joel Spolsky (also referenced in the link above) about it:
(I do change the important settings, of course, such as disabling Microsoft's attempts to shanghai the system with forced "upgrades" and telemetry.)
In other words, fingerprints can be replacements for usernames, not passwords! Identification, not authentication.
I think you might have missed my point.
Zenin was complaining about the "crazy flow-chart of decisions" you have to go through when deciding to use Linux. You replied, essentially, "just use Mint." But my point is that even that relatively-simple advice implies deciding between six different options before you even get to run the installer!
(Note that I'm not even counting the decisions that are "easy" because they're not opinion-based, such as deciding between 32- or 64-bit and whether to use the .torrent or pick one of the 99 (I counted) mirrors. And that's for an "easy" distro -- heaven help you if you're a n00b who got told "just use Debian" instead! "'s390x-netinst?' WTF is this shit?")
Which Mint? Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, KDE, LDME Cinnamon, or LDME MATE?
Choice is good, so more choice must always be better, right? Nope, that's a fallacy. Instead, too much choice becomes a confusopoly and that isn't good. And accidentally creating a confusopoly without even having a profit motive, but instead just out of sheer "not invented here" syndrome, is even worse!
Don't get me wrong: having too much choice is still way better than having too little. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that making every new Linux user choose between dozens or hundreds of distros can't have negative practical consequences just because choice is theoretically good.
You underestimate the threat of DRM, the DMCA anti-circumvention clause, and a Federal government packed full of corporatist authoritarians.
Ryzen also includes the "AMD Secure Processor," which is described as sort of equivalent to the Intel Management Engine, which itself is considered a backdoor. The capabilities of the AMD implementation appear to be less well-known, but I think it's safe to say that it's problematic at least.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5wntlt/question_is_there_an_equivalent_of_the_intel/
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/139701/what-is-known-about-the-capabilities-of-amds-secure-processor
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5yjl2h/libreboot_calls_on_amd_to_release_source_code_and/
Windows 10 already has mandatory updates.
Windows 10 already has an locked bootloader (as the hardware manufacturer's option).
All Microsoft has to do is wait while locked bootloaders become more and more prevalent, then when they do roll out the subscription the users will find their choice is to either pay up or enjoy their brick.
And nothing of value would be lost.
More generally, the existence of everything from folk music, to anonymous graffiti, to Free Software, to anything released under a sufficiently free CC license proves that plenty of works would continue to be created even if copyright were greatly reduced in scope or even abolished entirely.
And then Netflix started creating original content, which means it will shortly turn to the protectionist and DRM-maximalist dark side too.
This.
The real theft is not copying, but rather copyright itself!
Specifically, excessive copyright term lengths are theft of the Public Domain, and DRM is theft of device owners' property rights.
(By the way, "IP" is not a thing.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/1vq87d/project_meshnet_for_everyone_a_complete/
As a programmer who is still relatively young (early 30s), I would say that you still do need to -- well, maybe not "master," but at least understand -- all the layers between the hardware and high-level programming. Even if you're writing in some high-level language you still need to understand things like the time and space complexity of different data structure types and which ones your code is using (even if the declaration is buried in libraries three layers deep), how the choice of "array of structs" vs. "struct of arrays" affects cache performance, how different multiprocessing architectures are best served by different parallelization and concurrency techniques, etc.
You missed the two biggest issues:
First, half of this shit ships with backdoors from the factory and the other half gets hacked five seconds after plugging it in, which means that not only will you be contributing to a botnet, the device logs (from which your home/away schedule could be deduced) and the recordings of everything you say would be available to every criminal on the Internet.
Second, all of this shit is explicitly designed to make those logs and recordings available for companies to analyze your habits and market even more shit to you (which is more than bad enough by itself), and will eventually get cross-referenced with all the other data being collected about you to form an Orwellian dystopia of constant surveillance (which is even worse).
Ah, yes, the classic politician's syllogism:
That's not an assumption used to justify my claim; it's a necessary condition of the claim itself.
In other words, my claim was that that failing to contribute to your 401k [enough to lower the overall tax rate to a reasonable level (at least below the 33% cayenne8 claimed to be paying!), if not enough to max it out] is the thing that is stupid. The part inside the square brackets, by the way, was absolutely implied in my original post even if it wasn't explicitly stated.
First of all, I'm not going to do 41 sets of state tax calculations. Second, even states that do have income tax tend to base the calculation on AGI, which means state tax is lowered by contributing to retirement accounts in the same way federal tax is. Third, to reach a 33% overall income tax rate in the example I gave, the state (or state + local) tax rate would have to be a whopping 19% (overall, not marginal). Even the absolute highest possible state + local income tax rate in the entire country doesn't come anywhere close to that in marginal terms, let alone overall.
Louisiana, apparently. (I should have guessed from the username, LOL.) I'm not about to go figure out how to do LA state income taxes just to post an example for you, though.
And most people are stupid. Your sentence does not contradict my claim.
Besides, tax avoidance isn't the main goal anyway; the main goal is to have a very high savings rate in order to become financially independent ASAP. Tax avoidance is just a reason to put those savings in a 401k instead of a normal brokerage account.
I invest in the total US stock market and the total international stock market. If those don't recover, it means the entire world is fucked and the only reasonable investments are ammunition and canned food anyway.
I fold.