The private citizen who owns his own copyright material doesn't want you to have it for free, since it's his, and he paid to create it. He wants it kept from you essentially forever, or at least as long as he and his first generation of children are alive to profit from his investment and creativity.
Sure, he can keep it forever, no argument here. Keep your CD, DVD, tape, HD, whatever. Just don't tell me I can't tell others the contents in whatever detail I wish if you showed them to me.
Once you give a copy of information to someone, it's not yours anymore; your copy is yours and his copy is his. Copyright law tries to interfere with this, and fails miserably, since it's completely contrary to human nature: we create new, derivative works of everything we've seen or heard, and distribute both those and the original works to everyone who wants them. That's how human culture has always advanced. If you actually managed to stop that, you'd stop progress itself.
If you want something to be yours, and you want it now, create it your own damned self, or buy the rights to it.
Or download it from the Internet, if applicable. You aren't entitled to get paid for a single work for two generations just because you're an "artist", no matter how much you want to:p.
We certainly don't want N. Korea to have our 1984-level rocketry capability, now do we?
North Korea doesn't have the industrial capacity to manufacture your old rockets, even if they obtained full blueprints. Neither do you, for that matter.
1984 atomic bombs are just as deadly... why should we give Iran a leg-up?
Nuclear physics aren't secret. The hard part in building nuclear weapons is obtaining sufficiently pure uranium/plutonium, not assembling it into a bomb. And even if it was, do you really think that everyone who's worked on atomic weapons through the years on both sides of Atlantic/Pacific is incorruptible?
Also, since most conflict in Middle-East seems to be initiated and driven by Israel nowadays, it could well be that Iran having the bomb would pacify the region.
Do we still have spies in place from the cold war? If it a long time to get them into place, you might as well leave them there for as long as possible.
This one might actually be a legitimate concern, if simply because any local collaborators might not be hailed as heroes as their countries, and it would be poor thanks to risk exposing them.
The relevant part of the summary is simply quoting Adobe's Flash release notes. Those might be incorrect or simply lying.
I've never really understood why it seems so extremely difficult for Flash to render some simple 2D vector graphics and run a script or two in a VM without maxing CPU usage on just about anything. Is it a disguised version of Batik or something?
I remember being very surprised to see that I was always searching in "authenticated" mode because I told Gmail to keep me logged in (btw, the option is checked by default so probably most users are).
Except those of us who set our browsers to delete all cookies at startup to make us harder to track:).
Laser eye surgery can correct defects in the organ of the eye, but what technology will correct a defect in your awareness?
Direct high-bandwidth interface between my brains and computer chips, allowing the addition of extra lobes? Reaching first singularity should be a huge improvement. Me wanna...
Karma is real - it is the relationship of causes and effects that ensures that war brings war, death brings death, immorality brings immorality, and ignorance brings ignorance.
So why are the BP executives still living and unharmed, while people who had nothing to do with the whole mess suffer?
And "karma" refers to the Hindu concept where what you do affects you reincarnation (specifically, what you get reincarnated as). What you are talking about - consequences in this life - is called "justice", or would if it actually got inflicted on the guilty party rather than innocents...
However, it is not the only fish to fill it's particular role in said food chain. In fact, the article and even the summary comments on one of the Bluefin's natural competitor's the Yellowfin Tuna. This is just one example of many other competitors that occupy the same, or very similar ecological roles as the Bluefin. Thus, what I think the parent was trying to get at was that even if the Bluefin population collapses (which, of course, would suck to some extent or another), it would not be some great ecological crisis.
Having two fish species compete in the same ecological niche means that you can lose one of them without catastrophic consequences. However, it also means that if you do lose Bluefin, and then something happens to Yellowfin - a plague, for example - there are no more Bluefins to take over.
Having multiple species that fill the same role is good precisely because it makes the ecosystem more robust; ergo, losing those redundant species makes ecosystem more fragile, even if it doesn't collapse oturight.
In fact, since we don't know exactly what the optimal amount of diversity for a given ecosystem is, claiming, generally, that diversity is good and so extinction is bad is pretty disingenuous. For all we know, a given ecosystem may actually need a particular species to die out so that the rest of the ecosystem may maintain equilibrium.
No. All data we have points to more diverse ecosystems being more robust. The only exceptions are situations where a species has been introduced to outside its normal ecosystem and lacked any natural enemies to keep it in check in the new environment.
And even if your speculation was correct - and there's no reason to think it is - there would still be no reason to assume that it applies to Bluefin and to this situation.
Not trolling here, but since when is its mankind's responsibility to save every variety of every species of animal on the planet?
Since when we realized that every snapped link in the food web makes it weaker and more likely to collapse completely, which would be rather unpleasant for us.
I know that we have been responsible for the extinction of many species, but does that now make us responsible for stopping extinction altogether?
Yes. Every extinction weakened the balance of the ecosystem, making it more prone to chaotic changes. Since we don't know when we reach the critical point - when the cycle of extinction starts feeding on itself, with each change killing more species, which causes more change, which kills more species and so forth - it would be a really good idea to do something while we still can.
Huge swaths of species went extinct long before man even came along, and so it seems pretty clear that it's part of the natural order.
Yes, mass extinctions occur every now and then and typically end up wiping out the dominant megafauna. That means us.
But I am saying that it's not our responsibility to save every species in the world that happens to exist now, not our place to end "extinction" itself as a process.
It's our place to do whatever we damn well please with this world, or can you give a single reason why it wouldn't be? And it would be best for us to keep it as close to as it is, ecosystem-wise, since that's what we're evolved for and can likely deal with best.
The LAST thing I want in a browser is for it to operate as admin/root.
It doesn't really matter. Browsers usually run with enough privileges to completely hose the user who's running them. Now, if it was possible to sandbox everything, it would make sense to worry about this; but, it isn't, so...
Do you completely lack imagination? You can generate a signature and stuff it into a binary blob only after approving them for first use. You could append metadata to an alternate data stream that is based off a per-installation GUID. There are lots of things you can do to prevent unauthorized add-ons from running.
Do you completely lack intelligence? The attacker will simply generate this signature and stuff it into the proper place, along with the add-on.
Sure, hypothetically Microsoft could just replace firefox.exe with a version built from the same source except removing the chunk that checks signatures, but I'd bet ten thousand dollars that it would not happen.
Hypothetically your "security" feature is completely broken, even you seem to realize this, yet you suggest using it anyway.
They should make it impossible for anyone to install plugins/extensions without user interaction
That's not possible in this case. Microsoft update mechanism can simply alter the on-disk data structures to make it seem like the user has agreed to installation. The browser has no magical way of knowing that it's data files were changed by the OS to insert a malicious extension there.
As a Finnish taxpayer, I'm happy that my government is once again giving my tax money to foreigners, rather than keeping Finnish hospitals going. No, really, I'm sure that photovoltaic cells will do a lot of good to us here in the Arctic Circle where the Sun shines a few hours a day most of the year. Really, it's better to spend money on useless shit like this than to treat rheumatic children.
Sadly you can get a comp sci phd without knowing how to properly work with a computer, it's not hard given how abstract and math centric the curriculum are at many schools and universities.
As well as it should be. Computer science isn't about using any particular existing computer, it's about the theory underlaying computing and algorithms.
"Sadly, you can get an engineering degree wiihtout knowing how to drive a tractor" doesn't make any sense, for the exactly same reason your statement doesn't.
In many of those schools graphics is relegated to reams of algorithms and theory and anything UI related is pushed off to the graphic design departments.
Good. That's where it belongs. Or possibly to a whole new department - "User Interface Science"?
The new taskbar also makes it hard to identify if a program is running (of if it's just a quicklaunch shortcut) and impossible to tell how many instances of an application are running.
Um, what? If a program is running, there's the "button border" to the left and right of it. And it's never been possible to tell how many instances of a program are running, just how many windows they have open in total.
The real killer is the lack of multiple desktops - or, more abstractly, "window groups". That's the real killer. A pity too, since Windows 7 seems stable enough to actually have a significant amount of stuff running at once.
The 7 taskbar is also very intuitive. If an application has more than one window open, you see a little stack of tiles. if you hover over the stack, you get a bunch of live previews of that application's windows.
As long as there's just a few of them. For some reason, Windows won't simply use multiple rows for them when there's many.
Oh well. One of these days Windows will have multiple desktop support.
The buttons are in the same place and do the same tasks. What, really, is the big deal?
Insufficient level of abstraction, I'd imagine. The buttons are a little bit to the left, or look a bit different, or the color scheme is a little different; and consequently those buttons are not recognized anymore by route-learning algorithm the user has used.
If you don't understand the abstractions used by your operating system - files, windows, desktop, etc. - you'll be lost anytime anything changes. For some reason some people are opposed to learning this, and will instead spend far more time learning a sequence of mouseclicks that changes every time the operating system or the program updates. I've never understood this mentality of intentional inefficiency; then again, I'm not a succesfull businessman, so I guess there's something I've neglected to learn too.
With modern contraceptives, morning-after pills, and abortions, sex is as likely to cause harm as crossing the road is to kill you. And, of course, even if you do get pregnant and give birth, that's an inconvenience, and not really comparable to someone killing you.
If you walk into a china shop and kick over all the shelves, smashing all the china, then turn around and tell the shop owner, "These shelves should have been secured better," I'm willing to bet a jury would find you liable for damages.
Except that he didn't break anything. It's more like trying a door to see if it's locked, noticing it's not, and being charged for a new lock. Or, better yet, trying a China shop door, noticing it's open, and being charged for new shelves because someone might have sabotaged the old ones since the door was unlocked.
So, what is it...are we, as Americans just naturally felonious, or...maybe, the justice system, um, sucks?
You Americans have a fetish for punishing people. Basically, you're the mob at Circus Maximus shouting for blood; your leaders are all too happy to find more people to feed to the lions to distract you from your crumbling empire.
But having seen in-house corporate PR men do their work first hand, it became apparent that 99% of the effort is just trying to ensure journalists don't screw up basic facts.
And so, just to make sure no one would have any false impressions about their business, BP paid Google so that their website would be the first result for the search term "oil spill".
Consider for a moment a draft republic. Instead of deciding which politicians represent the people, you simply pull names out of a hat. If you get selected, you have to serve for a period of time. Once your time is up, you leave. Any attempt to stay in office or create a law to let you stay in office is considered treason and results in immediate banishment.
So you have a government consisting of people who have no skill nor possibly even will to rule. What will they do? Why, what humans who have to do something always do - half-ass it. And if some well-meaning member of the public offers his help in guiding these unwilling rulers - perhaps several of them, one after another, just to build up the experience mind you - why I think they'd be grateful to take the assistance!
In such a system you would NEVER give one politician any real power. You would have no president. You would want as many hands on power as possible because anyone, from a genius to a retarded idiot, could be one of those hands. Only by diffusing power could you safely operate such a system.
Only by diffusing power can you safely operate any political system.
Unlike literally all other forms of government (democracy included), you would see the government try and spread out decision and making instead of concentrate it into the hands of a few.
No, it wouldn't. Selecting many people pretty much guarantees that some of them are power-hungry assholes. Since the rest are just trying to coast through their enforced service, those few will have no trouble concentrating power into their hands.
As an added bonus, you could probably do away with political parties. With no way to influence who serves as a representative, the only way left corrupt a politician is direct bribery. There can be no promises to help them get re-elected or any of that silliness.
So you promise them a lucrative position in your company instead.
I'm not saying the idea is without flaws, but it is a non-democratic and non-authoritarian form of government that doesn't rely on utopian ideals.
It's fatally flawed. Sorry, but just no.
I am pretty sure that there are other forms of possible government that could fit the bill. It isn't going to happen in the US, but I would love to see other countries give it a try.
The cynic in me points out that such experiments tend to result in utter disaster, so this reads suspiciously like "you pay the price, and I'll copy any benefits".
How many failed developing nation democracies do we have to have before we realize that maybe democracy isn't the end all be all?
Don't they usually fail because democracy fails - because a single dictator manages to get enough power to force through his half-cooked ideas which end up ruining the country? That's evidence for democracy, not against it.
Right; I'm not saying to ban lobbying, simply, ban lobbying by those who can't vote in our country. To bring up the old Nazi defense, how would things have turned out in WW2 if the Nazis had dumped a bunch of money into US lobbying to win support for Germany in the war? Or at least delayed it until they'd occupied Britain and Sweden?
Well, seeing how US stayed out of the war until Japan attacked it, at which point it's doubtful any amount of money would had been sufficient to keep it from responding, I'd say: exactly as they did.
Then again, US sent quite a bit of war material to Britain even prior to that, so...
By no means end lobbying outright.... just limit it to domestic and foreign policy that is actually beneficial to our country, not policies that are detrimental to the USA.
Many "special interests" are multinational these days. If multinationals can lobby, it won't take long for foreign interests to set up a branch in USA; if they can't, it'll be an officially separate proxy instead.
Also, who gets to decide what policy is beneficial? Has anyone ever actually outright admitted that the policy they're lobbying for is harmful?
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Sure, he can keep it forever, no argument here. Keep your CD, DVD, tape, HD, whatever. Just don't tell me I can't tell others the contents in whatever detail I wish if you showed them to me.
Once you give a copy of information to someone, it's not yours anymore; your copy is yours and his copy is his. Copyright law tries to interfere with this, and fails miserably, since it's completely contrary to human nature: we create new, derivative works of everything we've seen or heard, and distribute both those and the original works to everyone who wants them. That's how human culture has always advanced. If you actually managed to stop that, you'd stop progress itself.
Or download it from the Internet, if applicable. You aren't entitled to get paid for a single work for two generations just because you're an "artist", no matter how much you want to :p.
North Korea doesn't have the industrial capacity to manufacture your old rockets, even if they obtained full blueprints. Neither do you, for that matter.
Nuclear physics aren't secret. The hard part in building nuclear weapons is obtaining sufficiently pure uranium/plutonium, not assembling it into a bomb. And even if it was, do you really think that everyone who's worked on atomic weapons through the years on both sides of Atlantic/Pacific is incorruptible?
Also, since most conflict in Middle-East seems to be initiated and driven by Israel nowadays, it could well be that Iran having the bomb would pacify the region.
This one might actually be a legitimate concern, if simply because any local collaborators might not be hailed as heroes as their countries, and it would be poor thanks to risk exposing them.
The problem is, the people saying this aren't trustworthy. And the "SUPER good reason" is usually that they personally benefit from keeping it secret.
The relevant part of the summary is simply quoting Adobe's Flash release notes. Those might be incorrect or simply lying.
I've never really understood why it seems so extremely difficult for Flash to render some simple 2D vector graphics and run a script or two in a VM without maxing CPU usage on just about anything. Is it a disguised version of Batik or something?
Except those of us who set our browsers to delete all cookies at startup to make us harder to track :).
Direct high-bandwidth interface between my brains and computer chips, allowing the addition of extra lobes? Reaching first singularity should be a huge improvement. Me wanna...
So why are the BP executives still living and unharmed, while people who had nothing to do with the whole mess suffer?
And "karma" refers to the Hindu concept where what you do affects you reincarnation (specifically, what you get reincarnated as). What you are talking about - consequences in this life - is called "justice", or would if it actually got inflicted on the guilty party rather than innocents...
Social Darwinism, also known as the survival of the richest.
Having two fish species compete in the same ecological niche means that you can lose one of them without catastrophic consequences. However, it also means that if you do lose Bluefin, and then something happens to Yellowfin - a plague, for example - there are no more Bluefins to take over.
Having multiple species that fill the same role is good precisely because it makes the ecosystem more robust; ergo, losing those redundant species makes ecosystem more fragile, even if it doesn't collapse oturight.
No. All data we have points to more diverse ecosystems being more robust. The only exceptions are situations where a species has been introduced to outside its normal ecosystem and lacked any natural enemies to keep it in check in the new environment.
And even if your speculation was correct - and there's no reason to think it is - there would still be no reason to assume that it applies to Bluefin and to this situation.
Since when we realized that every snapped link in the food web makes it weaker and more likely to collapse completely, which would be rather unpleasant for us.
Yes. Every extinction weakened the balance of the ecosystem, making it more prone to chaotic changes. Since we don't know when we reach the critical point - when the cycle of extinction starts feeding on itself, with each change killing more species, which causes more change, which kills more species and so forth - it would be a really good idea to do something while we still can.
Yes, mass extinctions occur every now and then and typically end up wiping out the dominant megafauna. That means us.
But I am saying that it's not our responsibility to save every species in the world that happens to exist now, not our place to end "extinction" itself as a process.
It's our place to do whatever we damn well please with this world, or can you give a single reason why it wouldn't be? And it would be best for us to keep it as close to as it is, ecosystem-wise, since that's what we're evolved for and can likely deal with best.
It doesn't really matter. Browsers usually run with enough privileges to completely hose the user who's running them. Now, if it was possible to sandbox everything, it would make sense to worry about this; but, it isn't, so...
Do you completely lack intelligence? The attacker will simply generate this signature and stuff it into the proper place, along with the add-on.
Hypothetically your "security" feature is completely broken, even you seem to realize this, yet you suggest using it anyway.
Do you perhaps work for Microsoft?
That's not possible in this case. Microsoft update mechanism can simply alter the on-disk data structures to make it seem like the user has agreed to installation. The browser has no magical way of knowing that it's data files were changed by the OS to insert a malicious extension there.
As a Finnish taxpayer, I'm happy that my government is once again giving my tax money to foreigners, rather than keeping Finnish hospitals going. No, really, I'm sure that photovoltaic cells will do a lot of good to us here in the Arctic Circle where the Sun shines a few hours a day most of the year. Really, it's better to spend money on useless shit like this than to treat rheumatic children.
As well as it should be. Computer science isn't about using any particular existing computer, it's about the theory underlaying computing and algorithms.
"Sadly, you can get an engineering degree wiihtout knowing how to drive a tractor" doesn't make any sense, for the exactly same reason your statement doesn't.
Good. That's where it belongs. Or possibly to a whole new department - "User Interface Science"?
Um, what? If a program is running, there's the "button border" to the left and right of it. And it's never been possible to tell how many instances of a program are running, just how many windows they have open in total.
The real killer is the lack of multiple desktops - or, more abstractly, "window groups". That's the real killer. A pity too, since Windows 7 seems stable enough to actually have a significant amount of stuff running at once.
As long as there's just a few of them. For some reason, Windows won't simply use multiple rows for them when there's many.
Oh well. One of these days Windows will have multiple desktop support.
Insufficient level of abstraction, I'd imagine. The buttons are a little bit to the left, or look a bit different, or the color scheme is a little different; and consequently those buttons are not recognized anymore by route-learning algorithm the user has used.
If you don't understand the abstractions used by your operating system - files, windows, desktop, etc. - you'll be lost anytime anything changes. For some reason some people are opposed to learning this, and will instead spend far more time learning a sequence of mouseclicks that changes every time the operating system or the program updates. I've never understood this mentality of intentional inefficiency; then again, I'm not a succesfull businessman, so I guess there's something I've neglected to learn too.
With modern contraceptives, morning-after pills, and abortions, sex is as likely to cause harm as crossing the road is to kill you. And, of course, even if you do get pregnant and give birth, that's an inconvenience, and not really comparable to someone killing you.
Except that he didn't break anything. It's more like trying a door to see if it's locked, noticing it's not, and being charged for a new lock. Or, better yet, trying a China shop door, noticing it's open, and being charged for new shelves because someone might have sabotaged the old ones since the door was unlocked.
You Americans have a fetish for punishing people. Basically, you're the mob at Circus Maximus shouting for blood; your leaders are all too happy to find more people to feed to the lions to distract you from your crumbling empire.
Spelling nazis should be punished by grammatical hangman.
They'll be booted straight to another cushy job with a golden parachute worth millions as a failsafe.
Personal responsibility is for the serfs, not for the nobility.
And so, just to make sure no one would have any false impressions about their business, BP paid Google so that their website would be the first result for the search term "oil spill".
Gotta admit, that is admirably honest...
So you have a government consisting of people who have no skill nor possibly even will to rule. What will they do? Why, what humans who have to do something always do - half-ass it. And if some well-meaning member of the public offers his help in guiding these unwilling rulers - perhaps several of them, one after another, just to build up the experience mind you - why I think they'd be grateful to take the assistance!
Only by diffusing power can you safely operate any political system.
No, it wouldn't. Selecting many people pretty much guarantees that some of them are power-hungry assholes. Since the rest are just trying to coast through their enforced service, those few will have no trouble concentrating power into their hands.
So you promise them a lucrative position in your company instead.
It's fatally flawed. Sorry, but just no.
The cynic in me points out that such experiments tend to result in utter disaster, so this reads suspiciously like "you pay the price, and I'll copy any benefits".
Don't they usually fail because democracy fails - because a single dictator manages to get enough power to force through his half-cooked ideas which end up ruining the country? That's evidence for democracy, not against it.
Well, seeing how US stayed out of the war until Japan attacked it, at which point it's doubtful any amount of money would had been sufficient to keep it from responding, I'd say: exactly as they did.
Then again, US sent quite a bit of war material to Britain even prior to that, so...
Many "special interests" are multinational these days. If multinationals can lobby, it won't take long for foreign interests to set up a branch in USA; if they can't, it'll be an officially separate proxy instead.
Also, who gets to decide what policy is beneficial? Has anyone ever actually outright admitted that the policy they're lobbying for is harmful?