Letting people install non-approved software is a different topic of discussion
Except it isn't, because this store is run by the same company that controls the whole platform, the platform in question is has by far the largest market share of any general-purpose computing platform, and the company has the power (because of the DMCA) to destroy the open nature of that platform at a whim.
Part of the 2016 election was the American people deciding how they wanted the Supreme Court to look. The American People, by a large majority...
Everything about that is a lie. The majority of the "American People" picked nobody.The plurality of eligible voters picked nobody. The plurality of people who actually voted picked fucking Hillary Clinton.
The only "majority" Trump got was the goddamn electoral college. 73% of eligible voters, and 80% -- EIGHTY FUCKING PERCENT -- of the American People as a whole, did NOT vote for him!
You just can't screw with the engine controls. Contrary to your line of argument, doing that has a very high probability of changing its emissions (like 100%).
No.
First of all, merely "changing" the emissions does not necessarily mean making the vehicle violate the emission standards. For example, if the owner made modifications elsewhere -- such as by switching to a cleaner fuel, like biodiesel -- it's entirely possible for there to be different settings that optimize the engine operation while still maintaining equal or better emissions. For that reason alone the EPA rule is overreaching.
Second, the ECU performs an increasingly large number of functions beyond just things that affect emissions. That means the bullshit emissions argument is used as an excuse to DRM all the other computerized functions in the tractor, up to and including things like GPS tracking or self-driving modes. Even worse than that, John Deere has argued that the DRM infection means the farmer only "licenses" the entire fucking tractor, including the hardware parts!
Therefore, this claim of yours:
You can modify all sorts of crap on a JD tractor. Tires get changed all the time. You can change the entire cab if you want.
...is not true, at least from John Deere's perspective. If this sort of tyranny is allowed to stand, there would be nothing stopping John Deere from requiring farmers to obtain its permission even to change the fucking tires (using only John Deere "licensed" parts), in exactly the same way e.g. Lexmark tries to pretend it's illegal to use third-party ink.
And then we can put it on the list along with other nerd arguments like:
There's NO WAY Bell can stop our Blue Boxes!
There's TOTALLY ILLEGAL for the government to spy on all our comms!
There's NO WAY they can patent computer code!
No one will ever get sued when using BitTorrent!
etc.
but then again I would not use a fingerprint as any sort of "security";)
At best, biometrics are a means of identification, but that is not the same thing as authentication. In other words, a reasonable use of the fingerprint would be as a replacement for the username, not the password.
Even more basic than that, what we need is to realize that the Fifth Amendment affirms the right to property and that any law that prohibits the owner from modifying his property -- such as the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause -- is therefore unconstitutional.
EPA regulations require emission controls on tractors to be tamper-resistant
And that's asinine by itself, because the EPA is infringing on tractor owners' property rights in order to prevent the "possibility" of those owners violating air pollution laws. Essentially, the EPA apparently considers any modification of the tractor to be an attempt or conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, despite the fact that, since there are plenty of other reasons someone might want to modify their tractor, neither the act nor the intent has necessarily occurred.
Moreover, because writing software is an act of expression, preventing the tractor owner from doing so is prior restraint of the owner's freedom of speech.
In other words, that EPA regulation should be considered unconstitutional because it violates both the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
If the EPA wants to enforce the Clean Air Act, then they should go after people who actually violate the act, not destroy everyone's fundamental rights!
DRM is an infringement on my ACTUAL property rights. I own the device I use to access the Internet. I have a right to use that device however I want, and to modify it however I want. That absolutely trumps any possible claim to control that some pissant holder of some bullshit temporary monopoly might have the delusional audacity to assert!
No I didn't; I called the thread idiotic. There's a difference.
Apparently in genius world, all sewage treatment plants are along the coast.
...But now I will, you blithering moron!
In case you hadn't noticed, the topic of this thread is desalinization. That's something you only consider doing in the first place when the ocean is the least-inconvenient place to get the water supply from. Given that assumption, can you guess what the most convenient body of water to discharge the wastewater into might be?
That's right, the ocean!
I admit, there are places that have water supplies other than the ocean. But in that case, they have water supplies other than the ocean and the problem of what to do with the excess salt is moot because you're not desalinizing to begin with!
Also, what about non-Americans? Citizens and aliens don't have the same rights, privileges or obligations by law...
This is a common misconception, at least when it comes to the Bill of Rights. Most of the amendments in it are not written to declare that "citizens shall have X right;" instead, they are written that "the US Government shall not infringe upon X right that the people have." In other words, the Bill of Rights presumes that the rights in question a priori exist as natural rights and prohibits the government from doing anything that violates them. Since non-citizens are a subgroup of "all people," and since non-US territory is a subgroup of "everywhere," the government is just as much prohibited from infringing the rights of foreigners or committing extraterritorial acts of infringement as it is for infringing the rights of US citizens on US soil.
That's the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, the CBP, TSA, and other TLAs are doing all sorts of unconstitutional shit and the Supreme Court apparently can't be bothered to stop them.
If a PC maker can do this with a machine, then why can't Apple design a Mac Pro that would function as a tower, plopped horizontally as a place for a monitor, or have a way to flip out some eyelets for some rack rails?
Because then it would need to have seams or screw holes or something, marring the perfect smooth surface of the case.
(I wish I were joking, but I have no doubt some industrial designer at Apple is really thinking that.)
I, too would love for a new XServe to exist, especially if there were a version packed full of GPUs for use in a render farm.
This entire thread has been idiotic, because everybody's missing the most important factor:
The desalinized water doesn't leave the system; it gets used and returned.
People drink the water, piss it back out, and flush it down the drain. The drain goes to the sewer. The sewer goes to the wastewater treatment plant. So re-salinize the wastewater after treating it and you can dump it back into the ocean at the same salinity you started with! (Give or take losses from outdoor watering and gains from precipitation falling into combined sewers, anyway. The net difference could be significant, but we shouldn't dismiss the idea out-of-hand by assuming so.) So just build the two treatment plants next to each other and pipe the salt across from the desalinizer to the resalinizer.
Or better yet, just build one plant capable of treating any water (seawater or wastewater) to a drinkable standard, and make the damn thing a closed loop!
I didn't say "if I'm at a party," I said "if I AM a party." "Party" doesn't mean "social gathering," it means "a participant in the conversation."
My claim is that each participant in a conversation should have just as much right to record the conversation with a recording device as he does to record it in his memory. That rule should apply to all conversations everywhere, whether in public or not.
Instead? Rather than? How about "in addition to". Hence why they have 15 different charges against them.
Well, good. In that case, 14 charges should be enough anyway.
I think Planned Parenthood does good work and I'm glad the asshats who tried to undermine it are getting prosecuted, but two-party consent is not the law the prosecution should be hanging their hat on. Why?
Because in general, two-party consent is bullshit (and CA's assertion of extraterritorial jursidiction over it is even more bullshit). If I'm a party to a conversation I should have the right to record it regardless of the consent -- or indeed, knowledge -- of any other party involved!
Instead, what these people should be prosecuted for is not the act of recording itself, but rather the act of slanderously misrepresenting their findings!
Sadly they won the biggest battle, except for open source 99.999% of all software is licensed through an EULA not copies sold like a book so you don't have any property rights to begin with.
Guess what: shrink-wrap EULAs have NOT ever been upheld as valid by any precedent-setting court. (There are some cases that address somewhat similar-issues, but not any that address an EULA presented after-the-fact in the context of a retail sale.) The idea that EULAs are anything but meaningless contracts of adhesion that offer no consideration to the buyer and are therefore invalid is propaganda that, sadly, you've fallen for.
Their argument is based on the premise that the long-standing "First Sale" doctrine doesn't apply, and that their patent rights extend to any subsequent use of their patented product
...which is fucking absurd on its face! After all, do people have the fundamental right to own property or not?
And that is the real issue here: with the DMCA, and now with patents, these fuckers are trying to create some sort of bizarro-world where Imaginary Property is not only no longer imaginary, but somehow actually superior to the right to own actual property! They want to enslave us into perpetually renting everything we use, which is no less a tyranny than being paid in scrip and being forced to buy from the company store, or being a serf indentured to the land. It is nothing less than digital Feudalism, and must be stopped at all costs!
As a civil engineer (albeit not a wastewater one), I was thinking about this issue too. On one hand, flushing unused medicine does add to the downstream contamination. But on the other hand, even if it were used it (or its metabolites, which might be equally bad) would still end up being flushed anyway. And even then, medicines aren't the only (or even the largest) problem: there's also pesticides, detergents, etc. to deal with. this study (which, it should be noted, measured streams as opposed to treatment plant outflow, which means some pollution sources were untreated runoff) has this to say:
The most frequently detected chemicals (found in more than half of the streams) were coprostanol (fecal steroid), cholesterol (plant and animal steroid), N-N-diethyltoluamide (insect repellent), caffeine (stimulant), triclosan (antimicrobial disinfectant), tri (2-chloroethyl) phosphate (fire retardant), and 4-nonylphenol (nonionic detergent metabolite). Steroids, nonprescription drugs, and insect repellent were the chemical groups most frequently detected. Detergent metabolites, steroids, and plasticizers generally were measured at the highest concentrations.
IMO, the only complete solution would be to change the treatment criteria on its head: currently, we only even consider treating for substances that are proven to be harmful (i.e. default-allow with a blacklist, to use a computer firewall analogy). Instead, we should switch to a default-deny policy and use better wastewater treatment techniques to remove all non-H2O chemicals from the water. The trouble is, it would be a lot more expensive.
To be honest, people like OP are right to be suspicious. It really is always a possibility any sort of claim about an adversary's capabilities could be a ruse to lull you into a false sense of security.
However, when the claim matches up with the independently-verifiable evidence (in this case, the mathematical proof that the algorithm is unbreakable before the heat-death of the universe), I tend to believe it.
First of all, I acknowledged that the history must be preserved. Re-read the second paragraph of my previous post. What I'm saying is that you if you want to know what the law is on any given date -- whether that date is today or sometime in the past -- it should be written/stored/organized in such a way that you can retrieve it and just read the thing from beginning to end without having to cross-reference other documents or piece together stuff like "subsection X is hereby repealed and replaced with language Y." Instead, it should just replace subsection X with language Y and not tell you about it. (If you want to know about that, you can use the version control system to figure out how it changed, who changed it, when, why, etc. -- but that's a *different* kind of operation than retrieving a copy to read.)
Second, I would *hope* that if an act were legalized before the case had a chance to get to trial, that the prosecutor would have enough common decency to drop the case. That's probably asking too much, though...
Sometimes a new law is explicitly a diff. "Repeal The Idiot Act of 1822 and add "new text" in the place in the criminal code, 4.2 (1)A(2)(c). The law is a diff.
That's exactly the sort of cruft I'm complaining about. Making a law like that is *fundamentally stupid* because it leaves the entire history of the law embedded in the code so that you have to step through all the changes just to figure out what the *current* law is.
Instead, laws should be repealed by *actually deleting the old law* and keeping track of the history separately. (I mean, I realize you need to be able to look up historical laws in order to, for example, understand cases that were prosecuted under the old version... but that doesn't mean you need to clutter up the current version by keeping it all mixed together!)
The F-35 is sadly one of the best military R&D projects of the past 20 years, as it's actually somewhat usable for its intended purpose.
What about the F-22? I admittedly have not paid much attention, but I was under the impression that it's good at what it does and is only over-budget because the military bought fewer of them than was intended (because they tried to inappropriately substitute the "cheaper" F-35, screwing up that program too by trying to expand its mission scope too much).
Slashdot Mirror
Except it isn't, because this store is run by the same company that controls the whole platform, the platform in question is has by far the largest market share of any general-purpose computing platform, and the company has the power (because of the DMCA) to destroy the open nature of that platform at a whim.
The issues are inextricably related because we are one step away from an "only criminals would run non-approved software" endgame.
Everything about that is a lie. The majority of the "American People" picked nobody.The plurality of eligible voters picked nobody. The plurality of people who actually voted picked fucking Hillary Clinton.
The only "majority" Trump got was the goddamn electoral college. 73% of eligible voters, and 80% -- EIGHTY FUCKING PERCENT -- of the American People as a whole, did NOT vote for him!
They're working on exactly that.
No, it really fucking isn't. Microsoft has NO RIGHT WHATSOFUCKINGEVER to tell me what I can and cannot do with my property!
The copyright totalitarians have already destroyed those.
No.
First of all, merely "changing" the emissions does not necessarily mean making the vehicle violate the emission standards. For example, if the owner made modifications elsewhere -- such as by switching to a cleaner fuel, like biodiesel -- it's entirely possible for there to be different settings that optimize the engine operation while still maintaining equal or better emissions. For that reason alone the EPA rule is overreaching.
Second, the ECU performs an increasingly large number of functions beyond just things that affect emissions. That means the bullshit emissions argument is used as an excuse to DRM all the other computerized functions in the tractor, up to and including things like GPS tracking or self-driving modes. Even worse than that, John Deere has argued that the DRM infection means the farmer only "licenses" the entire fucking tractor , including the hardware parts!
Therefore, this claim of yours:
...is not true, at least from John Deere's perspective. If this sort of tyranny is allowed to stand, there would be nothing stopping John Deere from requiring farmers to obtain its permission even to change the fucking tires (using only John Deere "licensed" parts), in exactly the same way e.g. Lexmark tries to pretend it's illegal to use third-party ink.
Fuck off with your strawman arguments!
At best, biometrics are a means of identification, but that is not the same thing as authentication. In other words, a reasonable use of the fingerprint would be as a replacement for the username, not the password.
Even more basic than that, what we need is to realize that the Fifth Amendment affirms the right to property and that any law that prohibits the owner from modifying his property -- such as the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause -- is therefore unconstitutional.
Android devices don't have home buttons that could be insecure in the first place, dipshit.
And that's asinine by itself, because the EPA is infringing on tractor owners' property rights in order to prevent the "possibility" of those owners violating air pollution laws. Essentially, the EPA apparently considers any modification of the tractor to be an attempt or conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, despite the fact that, since there are plenty of other reasons someone might want to modify their tractor, neither the act nor the intent has necessarily occurred.
Moreover, because writing software is an act of expression, preventing the tractor owner from doing so is prior restraint of the owner's freedom of speech.
In other words, that EPA regulation should be considered unconstitutional because it violates both the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
If the EPA wants to enforce the Clean Air Act, then they should go after people who actually violate the act, not destroy everyone's fundamental rights!
Of course not, which is exactly the point!
DRM is an infringement on my ACTUAL property rights. I own the device I use to access the Internet. I have a right to use that device however I want, and to modify it however I want. That absolutely trumps any possible claim to control that some pissant holder of some bullshit temporary monopoly might have the delusional audacity to assert!
No I didn't; I called the thread idiotic. There's a difference.
...But now I will, you blithering moron!
In case you hadn't noticed, the topic of this thread is desalinization. That's something you only consider doing in the first place when the ocean is the least-inconvenient place to get the water supply from. Given that assumption, can you guess what the most convenient body of water to discharge the wastewater into might be?
That's right, the ocean!
I admit, there are places that have water supplies other than the ocean. But in that case, they have water supplies other than the ocean and the problem of what to do with the excess salt is moot because you're not desalinizing to begin with!
This is a common misconception, at least when it comes to the Bill of Rights. Most of the amendments in it are not written to declare that "citizens shall have X right;" instead, they are written that "the US Government shall not infringe upon X right that the people have." In other words, the Bill of Rights presumes that the rights in question a priori exist as natural rights and prohibits the government from doing anything that violates them. Since non-citizens are a subgroup of "all people," and since non-US territory is a subgroup of "everywhere," the government is just as much prohibited from infringing the rights of foreigners or committing extraterritorial acts of infringement as it is for infringing the rights of US citizens on US soil.
That's the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, the CBP, TSA, and other TLAs are doing all sorts of unconstitutional shit and the Supreme Court apparently can't be bothered to stop them.
Because then it would need to have seams or screw holes or something, marring the perfect smooth surface of the case.
(I wish I were joking, but I have no doubt some industrial designer at Apple is really thinking that.)
I, too would love for a new XServe to exist, especially if there were a version packed full of GPUs for use in a render farm.
This entire thread has been idiotic, because everybody's missing the most important factor:
The desalinized water doesn't leave the system; it gets used and returned.
People drink the water, piss it back out, and flush it down the drain. The drain goes to the sewer. The sewer goes to the wastewater treatment plant. So re-salinize the wastewater after treating it and you can dump it back into the ocean at the same salinity you started with! (Give or take losses from outdoor watering and gains from precipitation falling into combined sewers, anyway. The net difference could be significant, but we shouldn't dismiss the idea out-of-hand by assuming so.) So just build the two treatment plants next to each other and pipe the salt across from the desalinizer to the resalinizer.
Or better yet, just build one plant capable of treating any water (seawater or wastewater) to a drinkable standard, and make the damn thing a closed loop!
I didn't say "if I'm at a party," I said "if I AM a party." "Party" doesn't mean "social gathering," it means "a participant in the conversation."
My claim is that each participant in a conversation should have just as much right to record the conversation with a recording device as he does to record it in his memory. That rule should apply to all conversations everywhere, whether in public or not.
Well, good. In that case, 14 charges should be enough anyway.
I think Planned Parenthood does good work and I'm glad the asshats who tried to undermine it are getting prosecuted, but two-party consent is not the law the prosecution should be hanging their hat on. Why?
Because in general, two-party consent is bullshit (and CA's assertion of extraterritorial jursidiction over it is even more bullshit). If I'm a party to a conversation I should have the right to record it regardless of the consent -- or indeed, knowledge -- of any other party involved!
Instead, what these people should be prosecuted for is not the act of recording itself, but rather the act of slanderously misrepresenting their findings!
Guess what: shrink-wrap EULAs have NOT ever been upheld as valid by any precedent-setting court. (There are some cases that address somewhat similar-issues, but not any that address an EULA presented after-the-fact in the context of a retail sale.) The idea that EULAs are anything but meaningless contracts of adhesion that offer no consideration to the buyer and are therefore invalid is propaganda that, sadly, you've fallen for.
NO.
That "fuzzy gray area" only exists in the delusional minds of tyrannical asshats and their boot-licking shills.
...which is fucking absurd on its face! After all, do people have the fundamental right to own property or not?
And that is the real issue here: with the DMCA, and now with patents, these fuckers are trying to create some sort of bizarro-world where Imaginary Property is not only no longer imaginary, but somehow actually superior to the right to own actual property! They want to enslave us into perpetually renting everything we use, which is no less a tyranny than being paid in scrip and being forced to buy from the company store, or being a serf indentured to the land. It is nothing less than digital Feudalism, and must be stopped at all costs!
As a civil engineer (albeit not a wastewater one), I was thinking about this issue too. On one hand, flushing unused medicine does add to the downstream contamination. But on the other hand, even if it were used it (or its metabolites, which might be equally bad) would still end up being flushed anyway. And even then, medicines aren't the only (or even the largest) problem: there's also pesticides, detergents, etc. to deal with. this study (which, it should be noted, measured streams as opposed to treatment plant outflow, which means some pollution sources were untreated runoff) has this to say:
IMO, the only complete solution would be to change the treatment criteria on its head: currently, we only even consider treating for substances that are proven to be harmful (i.e. default-allow with a blacklist, to use a computer firewall analogy). Instead, we should switch to a default-deny policy and use better wastewater treatment techniques to remove all non-H2O chemicals from the water. The trouble is, it would be a lot more expensive.
To be honest, people like OP are right to be suspicious. It really is always a possibility any sort of claim about an adversary's capabilities could be a ruse to lull you into a false sense of security.
However, when the claim matches up with the independently-verifiable evidence (in this case, the mathematical proof that the algorithm is unbreakable before the heat-death of the universe), I tend to believe it.
First of all, I acknowledged that the history must be preserved. Re-read the second paragraph of my previous post. What I'm saying is that you if you want to know what the law is on any given date -- whether that date is today or sometime in the past -- it should be written/stored/organized in such a way that you can retrieve it and just read the thing from beginning to end without having to cross-reference other documents or piece together stuff like "subsection X is hereby repealed and replaced with language Y." Instead, it should just replace subsection X with language Y and not tell you about it. (If you want to know about that, you can use the version control system to figure out how it changed, who changed it, when, why, etc. -- but that's a *different* kind of operation than retrieving a copy to read.)
Second, I would *hope* that if an act were legalized before the case had a chance to get to trial, that the prosecutor would have enough common decency to drop the case. That's probably asking too much, though...
That's exactly the sort of cruft I'm complaining about. Making a law like that is *fundamentally stupid* because it leaves the entire history of the law embedded in the code so that you have to step through all the changes just to figure out what the *current* law is.
Instead, laws should be repealed by *actually deleting the old law* and keeping track of the history separately. (I mean, I realize you need to be able to look up historical laws in order to, for example, understand cases that were prosecuted under the old version... but that doesn't mean you need to clutter up the current version by keeping it all mixed together!)
What about the F-22? I admittedly have not paid much attention, but I was under the impression that it's good at what it does and is only over-budget because the military bought fewer of them than was intended (because they tried to inappropriately substitute the "cheaper" F-35, screwing up that program too by trying to expand its mission scope too much).