Are the UN planning to make a *gasp* sternly worded phone-call?
Yes, via Skype so that North Korea has to use a proprietary phone application to receive the call. Since they can't security-audit the source, the NSA will end up pnwing the country's central computer. Hand the computer off to the CIA, who will then modify the payroll software to issue each soldier a voucher for an extra pound of rice every week, and the government will go bankrupt. The unpaid soldiers riot, overthrow the government, and checkmate.
Is the Six Strikes program well-designed enough to prevent mislabeling offenses? You're funny. Are you a comedian? But seriously, you have six of them. Even if one is an error (a nearly 17% rate, which I would think is unacceptable), it's pretty clear what the other five are.
The entire argument depends upon the above quotation being logically well-founded. Take the error probability, raise it to the sixth power, and you get a small enough fraction that you can blow it off. On the face of it, it's not stupid... until you realize that the system actually adds the fractions to each other, rather than multiplying them. Oy. We're off to a good start here, aren't we? And that's if we accept that the errors will really just be random noise, rather than possibly arise from systematic failures and patterns.
If you disagree with that founding assertion (and you will, if you have observed what has happened so far), then nothing else he says is going to make sense.
IMHO, nobody knows how Six Strikes works, or what its false positive rate is. If someone knew, they would have stepped forward by now. This is getting to become something like both the evidence which suggests Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, and the secret idea for an experiment to falsify it, together which would make it be a theory. At some point, when no one comes forth with either or them (let alone both), it starts to become reasonable to assume the theory probably doesn't yet exist.
Similarly, we have no reason to suspect Six Strikes' detection and identification tech is accurate. It might be, it's just that nothing leads us to that conclusion except faith. And it's not that it can't be done (within certain limitations); it's that we have past records (anyone remember the RIAA lawsuits?) of it being done by totally incompetent people, who went to work for the "MAFIAA" because that was the only job they could get. MAFIAA, show us your methodology, because your reputation is that you're crooks who just make shit up.
And because of the how-it-works problem, his last sentence
In a society so utterly desensitized to generic warnings, a little bit of secrecy can go a long way to getting people to take it more seriously.
is exactly wrong. It will be taken less seriously, because when you get one of these notices, your first thought isn't going to be "who in the house shared the Megadeth song?" It's going to be "which now-dead neighbor, who DHCP leased my current address for a couple weeks back in 2006, downloaded a file named peace_time_economics_in_the_rust_belt.pdf which matched some Megadeth keywords?"
Oh, they might be taken seriously as threats, but seriously not as being related to anything which may have happened on your ISP connection.
If you have seen how the MPAA has DMCAed some Google results in recent times, you will know (it's not even speculative) that false positives are extremely common in this industry's robot's actions, right now. Once I saw one of these false positives happen to me, it became apparent how easy it would be to accrue six Google-censored-results in a year, just by having truly innocent web pages which say certain words on them. (Tip: use HBO's show names. Haven't tried Showtime yet.) We're supposed to believe that your Six Strikes p2p tech is vastly better than your web tech? Why? What's your excuse? Please. [sits back, opens popcorn] This'll be good.
Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to actually try to get one of those slow remote control quadrocopters to intersect with a jet airliner going a few hundred miles per hour.
Yes, I do: difficult enough for the average programmer to consider it worth trying. (If it's too easy, no one will bother.) C'mon, admit it: aren't you already thinking, "How would I approach this problem?" And then whenever you get tired of it, you work on the evasion routines from the target's PoV. Who knows, 3 months later you might have a good sim.
The end result of a successful boycott is to either put them out of business or force them to lie about their beliefs.
Not so fast. Those things are among the end result (or possible end results). Let's not forget that the boycotter saved their money or enjoyed a competing product instead.
And I had to add "possible end results" because realistically, Card probably isn't going to be driven out of business by this. He might have less excess money, though. And there can be functional consequences to that: what if spends excess income on lobbying? Laws are for sale these days, so a dollar spent on Card may end up being a gun aimed at you.
And finally, the very product in question, is a product of ideas, and an idea is what triggered the boycott. When you get to ideological products, the line between boycotting "bad" opinions and rejecting a product for its merits (or lack) is fuzzy. I doubt the Superman comic preaches GayHate, but there could be common roots.
(I haven't read Card in a long time so I'm about to talk out of my ass. Perhaps that means I should stop right now, but no, I'll bravely press on.) It is being said that Card's eccentricity hasn't tainted his fiction, but is that really true, at a component or causal level? If someone believes that government powers should be expanded, at the expense of liberty, to prevent gays from marrying, that indicates a statist far-left-wing opinion, so they might harbor distrust for non-state-sponsored acts in general, and certainly that would include a caped vigilante. (Shit, ever over here on the right, we don't like vigilantes.)
Might plots involving Superman acting with independent initiative without government's explicit direction, written by someone who believes in authoritarianism, involve a slightly less heroically-portrayed Superman? (You wouldn't expect a communist to write a good "Richie Rich" comic, would you? You wouldn't expect a hippie to write a good "Rambo" movie script. You wouldn't expect a feminist to write good jokes for W.C. Fields.) I can easily picture someone writing a scene, where yes, Superman doesn't bash gays, but maybe Clark Kent chastises Jimmy for disrespecting political leaderss ("why were you taking photographs of the mayor's meeting at the docks? We must all trust and obey the mayor!"), or a plot which begins with a criminal getting acquitted because of lack of evidence, in spite of the prosecutor's faith that the accused was guilty.
Even if it's not true that Card's Superman is inferior, shouldn't the public, on average anticipate an inferior Superman from this guy? Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying people shouldn't expect good fiction from Card, just that he might be better suited for, say, a Judge Dredd comic than Superman. Superman is too American, too idealistic, etc for a gay-marriage-ban advocate to truly grok. So why spend the money on something likely to be below-average, when there are so many other comics out there? Pick a random comic and it'll probably be better than Card's Superman.
My point being, the disagreement becomes author-analysis, which becomes product critical quality prediction, which makes the "boycott" also have a functional aspect to it. And the buyer's "outcome" is half of the transaction, just as important as the author's income. "Boycott" blurs with "don't buy crap."
The thing which is wrong with it, is that the government currently acts against it. So if polygamy exists, then it means government isn't being as powerful as it can potentially be. And if my government doesn't exercise maximum power, then it means I am weak and have a small penis. And if I have a small penis, then I'm going to be at a competitive disadvantage in a polygamous marketplace. Some gay dude with a bigger schlong will get all the chicks!
In theory, the FCC could effectively overturn LoC's decision, by saying that no one may traffick in a radio device, if any usage of the device requires committing a DMCA violation. i.e. if you want to sell DMCA-enforced-locked phones, then those phones are not allowed to use public spectrum. That would either put an end to locked phones, or make it so that the DMCA arguments aginst unlocking could no longer be applied.
FCC already has tons of regulations on what phone makers and sellers are allowed to do, and this amount of
power and regulation generally has bipartisan support, so there would be few claims of it being overreach or beyond
FCC's authorized powers. Trying to prevent the breaking of Congress' own laws (DMCA), well, who in Congress would argue
FCC isn't allowed to do that?;-)
Someone looks under your car while you're driving, and notices the that while you do have axles and a transaxle, none of them are turning even though you're moving. The main engine runs a generator, the power is sent by wire to each wheel, which have their own electric motors. All the axles are just for.. ballast.
there isn't even a single current AAA title available.
I like Missile Command and vaguely-similar games as much as anyone, why why is everyone so obsessed with the anti-ballistic missile and anti-aircraft artillery genres so much? Most good games involving aircraft, have the player flying the aircraft (instead of shooting up at them) which is more fun, and evading AAA is typically only a small part of the game. Quit concentrating on micro-genres and look at the big picture.
It is unfortunate that Do Not Track seems more like politely asking the school bully, 'Please stop taking my lunch money.'
It is indeed unfortunate that people see it in such an unrealistic way. School bullies initiate action; they come to you, telling you to give them your lunch money. And if you refuse, then they do something bad to hurt you.
Web tracking is where you make the decision to talk to someone else, and they decide to remember the conversation happened (and a lot of other details, like where the two of you were when you started talking, who you are and what history you have with each other, etc). That can be good, totally unimportant, vaguely creepy, or bad.
DNT is where you start a conversation, and the first words out of your mouth are "after this conversion, please forget that it happened."
People are suggesting that the word "please" doesn't belong in that sentence, and that we ought to be pointing a gun at someone's face when we make that demand. Maybe there really is a bully in this story, after all.
I find this all so distasteful, becuse you don't need to point a gun at them, to effectively deny them the knowledge. The simplest answer is to not walk up to them, striking up conversations. This is extremely effective (pretty much a sure-fire strategy which can't lose) and easy, too.
There's another approach, assuming the above one isn't good enough. It's harder (especially to do well, and it's hard to know whether or not you've done it right) but possible to wear a mask, so they are talking to a different pseudonymous person every time someone walks up to them. This doesn't completely deny them the knowledge of the conversation, but makes it so that can't reliably infer connections wityh previous conversions with you. Some people might say this is deception and dishonest, a type of fraud, but compared to pointing guns at peoples' faces, I think it's relatively benign.
Either way, your worst case scenario, compared to a bully doing bad things to you, is that the perosn you walk up to, might decide to not talk to you. If the Silent Treatment is comparable to being bullied, then I guess you were entitled to the conversation. Were you?
And it goes without saying, don't use bloody Facebook.
For a great many people, that's practically impossible. My employer operates a page where I share administrative duties, but you have to have a personal account in order to be granted admin access. Yes, I know that I'm not compelled to put anything personally incriminating there; I'm just saying that there are social and economic pressures that exist which sometimes make 'bloody Facebook' unavoidable.
Now we get to the true heart of the matter. It's analogous to someone voting for Republicrats in spite of hating them. Or voting with your wallet for the iPod, even though you don't like it, "everyone else has one and I want to fit in." You know that the action is self-defeating and against your interests, but at some level, you obtain some short-term gain (or avoid a short-term loss) by hurting yourself.
I advocate that people look at it like that, and acknowledge what's really happening. Say it out loud, "I am doing this self-harming thing, for a short-term slightly mitigating payment." If you're not angry, then you're not thinking.
Now, when you go crying to the government, remember what actually happened, the whole picture. Are you sure the problem is really inside Facebook's computer, and that it isn't, say, your relationship with your employer?
Or could the problem even be with your own expectations? Most people aren't admins for their employers' facebook page. You are. So am I. Most of the people in my office, though, aren't. As strange as it sounds, you sort of chose a "
It's 2013. Anyone who still thinks "vote with your wallet" works is a fucking idiot.
Not only do I think it works in many situations, I see that it has a good track record, confirmed again and again to be devastatingly effective strategy for dealing with many different kinds of shit. I'm talking about the exact opposite of Free Market As Religion. I have evidence, and it's repeatable so that you can recreate it whenever you want to.
For example, there was a computer company that sold a truly piece-of-shit music player. It couldn't play Vorbis many years after the codec was stabilized, and it required very strange (and hard-to-use) proprietary software (which was ported to very few platforms) in order to "sync" music to it, instead of just letting people mount it and copy to it. (You would never guess this anachronistic garbage came out in the 21st century, but it did.)
I looked at it and did what any rational person would do: I voted against it with my wallet.
The polls closed, the results being 1 vote for anything-but-iPod, and 0 votes for iPod.
Ah, but what were the results of the voting? Are election results enforced? Does voting work? Turns out it did. Even after all these years, I still don't have an iPod, and therefore I'm also not required to have iTunes. I don't think I have ever seen anything so effective and decisive; it's right up there with saying no to drugs and declining the Scientology cult's invitation to get a free personality test.
Another example: I walked by a restaurant which smelled like shit. I voted against it. Result: I ended up not eating amidst the smell of shit.
This is what voting with your wallet is all about. I don't fucking care that you think I "lost" my iPod election due to the fact that some people still have them, and that the company who made it, is still around. *I* still avoided it.
The great power of voting with one's wallet, is that the election outcomes are subjective. You and I can vote different ways, be absolutely opposites and yet somehow, BOTH OF US CAN WIN, and by a crushing landslide, too. It's awesome.
Voting with your wallet means that if you think "Tracking" (whatever the fuck that really means) is sufficiently bad for you, that you care a lot that it doesn't happen, then you need to stop talking to servers who don't say they comply with the request. If you do this (instead of abstaining from doing it, and then complaining that you didn't get what you want, because you're a whiny bitch) then you mostly win. All that leaves is the possibility of fraud. Go ahead and sic government on fraud; you'll have my full support on that, and I won't claim voting-with-wallets happens to work on that problem.
It's 2013. Anyone who hasn't seen the overwhelming success of voting with their wallet, probably never votes. It's a game anyone can play, even the poor, where even the poorest win. The power of the wallet isn't in how much money it contains, it's in the decisions of when to open the wallet and when to leave it closed. Vote today!
While it's always nice to see people move a step toward thinking, it's still not nearly as satisfying as thinking.
Go ahead and revise penalties for crimes, but that should be totally secondary to making wise decisions about what is a crime and what is not. When something as innocent as taking a breath of air is a crime, and you make a light penalty of $0.001 per breath, it's still a serious problem, since my BreathBot can perform 60 Gigabreaths per second.
Lawmakers, why should something like CFAA have been applicable to Swartz's situation at all? You need to amend that law so that it doesn't cover the situation that happened.
If the energy shields could only stop energy and not physical materials from entering, then the rebel shield makes sense.
There is, in fact, some precedent for that in the first movie's Death Star's exhaust port being "ray shielded." The countermeasure to ray shielding was to use a physical torpedo.
If you're going to consider the "opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff" then maybe you ought to also consider the opportunity costs of those activities too.
"Son, we could play catch in the back yard, but that's time we could be spending on setting up our home server. I dont know if I want to want to waste the afternoon on throwing the ball back 'n' forth."
It all comes down to what you consider to be most important, whether for reasons of fun, education, or just plain necessity (e.g. we all have to deal with laundry). I think the value of your time may cancel out when comparing these things to one another.
I would have thought it obvious that the home server would be cheaper. The big question is performance. If you've got the upstream speed sufficent for the job, then cool! You win. If you have ADSL, then you lose (unless the application is particularly undemanding).
One team will built RoboCardinal (RoboPope-to-be).
Another team will supply a smokebomb, used to manipulate the chimney output.
And some of us ought to know some "jocks" to use for the actual insertion operation. It's ok if most of the cardinals are killed. Or.. wait.. killed and replaced, since I see no reason that only one RoboCardinal need be constructed. You know the second one will be better than the prototype, but with some extra bugs, the third one filled with dubious bloatware, and the forth should be about right to serve as actual pope.
Anyone who goes to the extreme overkill of disguising an entire vehicle-with-a-camera as a common object, when they could just disguise a camera which would be both easier (since it's much smaller and not vehicle-shaped) and a mere fraction of the price, deserves to win. If someone buys a Hubble telescope and hides it in my bathroom disguised as toiler paper roll, I hereby agree that such a badass motherfucker may gaze at my naked form as much as they like.
Whatever happened to the days that we all admired people who take on a project with a voluntary and totally unreasonable handicap? "I'm going to walk my cat around the dog park! Without any restraints!"
Having a whole bunch of radio signals emanating from your planet is like saying "rob me! rape me! kill me!" to any wandering castoffs from alien civilization.
Unless we detect such signals. In which case, a bunch of radio signals means "come into this trap."
It's probably going to happen in the opposite order. I bet we'll know the inevitability of life, long before we ever know where our life came from.
Someone will create conditions where a new tree of life can spontaneously start, or else we'll find a different independent already-existing one. Meanwhile, all traces of our own tree root will still be three-billion-years eroded/eaten.
I really don't understand why everyone here makes such a big deal out of this. Is theft some special, awful crime in the US?.. Everyone wastes so much time arguing about an exact physical analogy to copyright infringement that the main issue (without copyright, creators get no financial reward for their work) goes ignored.
Metaphors can be a tool for avoiding deep thought. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; I'm not saying don't use metaphors or use any other heuristics in order to avoid doing work! Sometimes that's a wise approach, especially if you're trying to do something quickly. Sometimes, though, you want people to think harder, and then you want to discourage metaphors. Perhaps you're not in a hurry. Or you want people to not think, so you encourage a default position which works to your own advantage.
If copyright infringement is theft, then instead of wasting time thinking about how you might deal with copyright infringement, you can instead think about how you have in the past dealt with theft. (For the most part, people think theft has been covered fairly well, as societies have had millennia to work on it.) Then, if you implement similar policies with regard to copyright infringement, this is simple conservativism rather than radical new-fangled unproven speculation. It's common sense. It's tried and true strategy. Not thinking can be smart! (?!)
If copyright infringement is not theft, then it's probably dumb to use policies derived from theft. It's going to fail to address the badness in copyright infringement, and it's going to result in collateral damage against innocent non-infringers (i.e. the policy will cause badness of some kind).
In USA, we currently all vote unanimously for politicians who treat copyright infringement as theft; we've either completely bought into the metaphor, or we act like we have. These lawmakers then pass laws which are based on that idea, so, for example, you get a situation where DRM is seen as being much like a "lock" on someone else's property. Of course you don't break someone else's lock, unless you intend to steal their stuff. From this premise, DMCA isn't absurd.
On the other hand...
If you have used a computer for more than a couple weeks, or if you have ever purchased DRMed media and then tried to make use of it, then you start to realize that the "lock" is on something you bought, and keeps you from conveniently making non-infringing use of it. So right off, the metaphor is letting you down, and laws based on it (DMCA) are a kind of injustice. But it gets even worse. You go pirate the thing you already bought, in order to get a DRM-free copy which you're able to play (if the DRM is non-trivial; if the DRM is trivial then you might simply use an illegal player, limiting your "black market" exposure to a single non-recurring instance). Go through this a few times, and you soon get habituated to using the piracy sources routinely, and..
.. (huh, that's weird, who could have predicted this?)..
.. eventually you stop seeing any advantage to ever bothering with the initial purchasing step. You never get anything useful out of it except a warm'n'fuzzy feeling, and you always have to pirate anyway, so pretty soon the piracy sources become the primary source ("I'll get around to buying the BluRay that the file was derived from, some day.... even though it'll stay shrink-wrapped since staying up-to-date with the keys and the BD+ scheme du jour is so tedious..")..
.. somehow the lawmakers' metaphor that copyright infringement is theft, not only fails to make a dent in the theft, but is causing creators to get less financial reward. Oops. Instead of the law being a force for justice, it has created an "Everyone loses" situation.
That is the power of a metaphor, when the metaphor has been d
If they are too stupid to set it up correctly, then they aren't the fools whom you are supposed to part with their money?!
"Too stupid" is exactly the kind of person I'm looking for!
It's the smart people I don't want to hear from. You know the people I'm talking about: the ones who are so smart that they don't have to work, they just program their botnet to send viagra spam and sit back and collect the money. I admire them, but they're useless to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, via Skype so that North Korea has to use a proprietary phone application to receive the call. Since they can't security-audit the source, the NSA will end up pnwing the country's central computer. Hand the computer off to the CIA, who will then modify the payroll software to issue each soldier a voucher for an extra pound of rice every week, and the government will go bankrupt. The unpaid soldiers riot, overthrow the government, and checkmate.
That's actually not quite right either. WTF was I thinking, posting a math problem to Slashdot, with an incorrect solution.
He fell on his face with point #2.
The entire argument depends upon the above quotation being logically well-founded. Take the error probability, raise it to the sixth power, and you get a small enough fraction that you can blow it off. On the face of it, it's not stupid... until you realize that the system actually adds the fractions to each other, rather than multiplying them. Oy. We're off to a good start here, aren't we? And that's if we accept that the errors will really just be random noise, rather than possibly arise from systematic failures and patterns.
If you disagree with that founding assertion (and you will, if you have observed what has happened so far), then nothing else he says is going to make sense.
IMHO, nobody knows how Six Strikes works, or what its false positive rate is. If someone knew, they would have stepped forward by now. This is getting to become something like both the evidence which suggests Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, and the secret idea for an experiment to falsify it, together which would make it be a theory. At some point, when no one comes forth with either or them (let alone both), it starts to become reasonable to assume the theory probably doesn't yet exist.
Similarly, we have no reason to suspect Six Strikes' detection and identification tech is accurate. It might be, it's just that nothing leads us to that conclusion except faith. And it's not that it can't be done (within certain limitations); it's that we have past records (anyone remember the RIAA lawsuits?) of it being done by totally incompetent people, who went to work for the "MAFIAA" because that was the only job they could get. MAFIAA, show us your methodology, because your reputation is that you're crooks who just make shit up.
And because of the how-it-works problem, his last sentence
is exactly wrong. It will be taken less seriously, because when you get one of these notices, your first thought isn't going to be "who in the house shared the Megadeth song?" It's going to be "which now-dead neighbor, who DHCP leased my current address for a couple weeks back in 2006, downloaded a file named peace_time_economics_in_the_rust_belt.pdf which matched some Megadeth keywords?"
Oh, they might be taken seriously as threats, but seriously not as being related to anything which may have happened on your ISP connection.
If you have seen how the MPAA has DMCAed some Google results in recent times, you will know (it's not even speculative) that false positives are extremely common in this industry's robot's actions, right now. Once I saw one of these false positives happen to me, it became apparent how easy it would be to accrue six Google-censored-results in a year, just by having truly innocent web pages which say certain words on them. (Tip: use HBO's show names. Haven't tried Showtime yet.) We're supposed to believe that your Six Strikes p2p tech is vastly better than your web tech? Why? What's your excuse? Please. [sits back, opens popcorn] This'll be good.
Yes, I do: difficult enough for the average programmer to consider it worth trying. (If it's too easy, no one will bother.) C'mon, admit it: aren't you already thinking, "How would I approach this problem?" And then whenever you get tired of it, you work on the evasion routines from the target's PoV. Who knows, 3 months later you might have a good sim.
Not so fast. Those things are among the end result (or possible end results). Let's not forget that the boycotter saved their money or enjoyed a competing product instead.
And I had to add "possible end results" because realistically, Card probably isn't going to be driven out of business by this. He might have less excess money, though. And there can be functional consequences to that: what if spends excess income on lobbying? Laws are for sale these days, so a dollar spent on Card may end up being a gun aimed at you.
And finally, the very product in question, is a product of ideas, and an idea is what triggered the boycott. When you get to ideological products, the line between boycotting "bad" opinions and rejecting a product for its merits (or lack) is fuzzy. I doubt the Superman comic preaches GayHate, but there could be common roots.
(I haven't read Card in a long time so I'm about to talk out of my ass. Perhaps that means I should stop right now, but no, I'll bravely press on.) It is being said that Card's eccentricity hasn't tainted his fiction, but is that really true, at a component or causal level? If someone believes that government powers should be expanded, at the expense of liberty, to prevent gays from marrying, that indicates a statist far-left-wing opinion, so they might harbor distrust for non-state-sponsored acts in general, and certainly that would include a caped vigilante. (Shit, ever over here on the right, we don't like vigilantes.)
Might plots involving Superman acting with independent initiative without government's explicit direction, written by someone who believes in authoritarianism, involve a slightly less heroically-portrayed Superman? (You wouldn't expect a communist to write a good "Richie Rich" comic, would you? You wouldn't expect a hippie to write a good "Rambo" movie script. You wouldn't expect a feminist to write good jokes for W.C. Fields.) I can easily picture someone writing a scene, where yes, Superman doesn't bash gays, but maybe Clark Kent chastises Jimmy for disrespecting political leaderss ("why were you taking photographs of the mayor's meeting at the docks? We must all trust and obey the mayor!"), or a plot which begins with a criminal getting acquitted because of lack of evidence, in spite of the prosecutor's faith that the accused was guilty.
Even if it's not true that Card's Superman is inferior, shouldn't the public, on average anticipate an inferior Superman from this guy? Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying people shouldn't expect good fiction from Card, just that he might be better suited for, say, a Judge Dredd comic than Superman. Superman is too American, too idealistic, etc for a gay-marriage-ban advocate to truly grok. So why spend the money on something likely to be below-average, when there are so many other comics out there? Pick a random comic and it'll probably be better than Card's Superman.
My point being, the disagreement becomes author-analysis, which becomes product critical quality prediction, which makes the "boycott" also have a functional aspect to it. And the buyer's "outcome" is half of the transaction, just as important as the author's income. "Boycott" blurs with "don't buy crap."
The thing which is wrong with it, is that the government currently acts against it. So if polygamy exists, then it means government isn't being as powerful as it can potentially be. And if my government doesn't exercise maximum power, then it means I am weak and have a small penis. And if I have a small penis, then I'm going to be at a competitive disadvantage in a polygamous marketplace. Some gay dude with a bigger schlong will get all the chicks!
In theory, the FCC could effectively overturn LoC's decision, by saying that no one may traffick in a radio device, if any usage of the device requires committing a DMCA violation. i.e. if you want to sell DMCA-enforced-locked phones, then those phones are not allowed to use public spectrum. That would either put an end to locked phones, or make it so that the DMCA arguments aginst unlocking could no longer be applied.
FCC already has tons of regulations on what phone makers and sellers are allowed to do, and this amount of power and regulation generally has bipartisan support, so there would be few claims of it being overreach or beyond FCC's authorized powers. Trying to prevent the breaking of Congress' own laws (DMCA), well, who in Congress would argue FCC isn't allowed to do that? ;-)
Someone looks under your car while you're driving, and notices the that while you do have axles and a transaxle, none of them are turning even though you're moving. The main engine runs a generator, the power is sent by wire to each wheel, which have their own electric motors. All the axles are just for .. ballast.
I like Missile Command and vaguely-similar games as much as anyone, why why is everyone so obsessed with the anti-ballistic missile and anti-aircraft artillery genres so much? Most good games involving aircraft, have the player flying the aircraft (instead of shooting up at them) which is more fun, and evading AAA is typically only a small part of the game. Quit concentrating on micro-genres and look at the big picture.
It is indeed unfortunate that people see it in such an unrealistic way. School bullies initiate action; they come to you, telling you to give them your lunch money. And if you refuse, then they do something bad to hurt you.
Web tracking is where you make the decision to talk to someone else, and they decide to remember the conversation happened (and a lot of other details, like where the two of you were when you started talking, who you are and what history you have with each other, etc). That can be good, totally unimportant, vaguely creepy, or bad.
DNT is where you start a conversation, and the first words out of your mouth are "after this conversion, please forget that it happened."
People are suggesting that the word "please" doesn't belong in that sentence, and that we ought to be pointing a gun at someone's face when we make that demand. Maybe there really is a bully in this story, after all.
I find this all so distasteful, becuse you don't need to point a gun at them, to effectively deny them the knowledge. The simplest answer is to not walk up to them, striking up conversations. This is extremely effective (pretty much a sure-fire strategy which can't lose) and easy, too.
There's another approach, assuming the above one isn't good enough. It's harder (especially to do well, and it's hard to know whether or not you've done it right) but possible to wear a mask, so they are talking to a different pseudonymous person every time someone walks up to them. This doesn't completely deny them the knowledge of the conversation, but makes it so that can't reliably infer connections wityh previous conversions with you. Some people might say this is deception and dishonest, a type of fraud, but compared to pointing guns at peoples' faces, I think it's relatively benign.
Either way, your worst case scenario, compared to a bully doing bad things to you, is that the perosn you walk up to, might decide to not talk to you. If the Silent Treatment is comparable to being bullied, then I guess you were entitled to the conversation. Were you?
Now we get to the true heart of the matter. It's analogous to someone voting for Republicrats in spite of hating them. Or voting with your wallet for the iPod, even though you don't like it, "everyone else has one and I want to fit in." You know that the action is self-defeating and against your interests, but at some level, you obtain some short-term gain (or avoid a short-term loss) by hurting yourself.
I advocate that people look at it like that, and acknowledge what's really happening. Say it out loud, "I am doing this self-harming thing, for a short-term slightly mitigating payment." If you're not angry, then you're not thinking.
Now, when you go crying to the government, remember what actually happened, the whole picture. Are you sure the problem is really inside Facebook's computer, and that it isn't, say, your relationship with your employer?
Or could the problem even be with your own expectations? Most people aren't admins for their employers' facebook page. You are. So am I. Most of the people in my office, though, aren't. As strange as it sounds, you sort of chose a "
Not only do I think it works in many situations, I see that it has a good track record, confirmed again and again to be devastatingly effective strategy for dealing with many different kinds of shit. I'm talking about the exact opposite of Free Market As Religion. I have evidence, and it's repeatable so that you can recreate it whenever you want to.
For example, there was a computer company that sold a truly piece-of-shit music player. It couldn't play Vorbis many years after the codec was stabilized, and it required very strange (and hard-to-use) proprietary software (which was ported to very few platforms) in order to "sync" music to it, instead of just letting people mount it and copy to it. (You would never guess this anachronistic garbage came out in the 21st century, but it did.)
I looked at it and did what any rational person would do: I voted against it with my wallet.
The polls closed, the results being 1 vote for anything-but-iPod, and 0 votes for iPod.
Ah, but what were the results of the voting? Are election results enforced? Does voting work? Turns out it did. Even after all these years, I still don't have an iPod, and therefore I'm also not required to have iTunes. I don't think I have ever seen anything so effective and decisive; it's right up there with saying no to drugs and declining the Scientology cult's invitation to get a free personality test.
Another example: I walked by a restaurant which smelled like shit. I voted against it. Result: I ended up not eating amidst the smell of shit.
This is what voting with your wallet is all about. I don't fucking care that you think I "lost" my iPod election due to the fact that some people still have them, and that the company who made it, is still around. *I* still avoided it.
The great power of voting with one's wallet, is that the election outcomes are subjective. You and I can vote different ways, be absolutely opposites and yet somehow, BOTH OF US CAN WIN, and by a crushing landslide, too. It's awesome.
Voting with your wallet means that if you think "Tracking" (whatever the fuck that really means) is sufficiently bad for you, that you care a lot that it doesn't happen, then you need to stop talking to servers who don't say they comply with the request. If you do this (instead of abstaining from doing it, and then complaining that you didn't get what you want, because you're a whiny bitch) then you mostly win. All that leaves is the possibility of fraud. Go ahead and sic government on fraud; you'll have my full support on that, and I won't claim voting-with-wallets happens to work on that problem.
It's 2013. Anyone who hasn't seen the overwhelming success of voting with their wallet, probably never votes. It's a game anyone can play, even the poor, where even the poorest win. The power of the wallet isn't in how much money it contains, it's in the decisions of when to open the wallet and when to leave it closed. Vote today!
While it's always nice to see people move a step toward thinking, it's still not nearly as satisfying as thinking.
Go ahead and revise penalties for crimes, but that should be totally secondary to making wise decisions about what is a crime and what is not. When something as innocent as taking a breath of air is a crime, and you make a light penalty of $0.001 per breath, it's still a serious problem, since my BreathBot can perform 60 Gigabreaths per second.
Lawmakers, why should something like CFAA have been applicable to Swartz's situation at all? You need to amend that law so that it doesn't cover the situation that happened.
It's too broad, "hardness" issues aside.
There is, in fact, some precedent for that in the first movie's Death Star's exhaust port being "ray shielded." The countermeasure to ray shielding was to use a physical torpedo.
If you're going to consider the "opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff" then maybe you ought to also consider the opportunity costs of those activities too.
"Son, we could play catch in the back yard, but that's time we could be spending on setting up our home server. I dont know if I want to want to waste the afternoon on throwing the ball back 'n' forth."
It all comes down to what you consider to be most important, whether for reasons of fun, education, or just plain necessity (e.g. we all have to deal with laundry). I think the value of your time may cancel out when comparing these things to one another.
I would have thought it obvious that the home server would be cheaper. The big question is performance. If you've got the upstream speed sufficent for the job, then cool! You win. If you have ADSL, then you lose (unless the application is particularly undemanding).
One team will built RoboCardinal (RoboPope-to-be).
Another team will supply a smokebomb, used to manipulate the chimney output.
And some of us ought to know some "jocks" to use for the actual insertion operation. It's ok if most of the cardinals are killed. Or .. wait .. killed and replaced, since I see no reason that only one RoboCardinal need be constructed. You know the second one will be better than the prototype, but with some extra bugs, the third one filled with dubious bloatware, and the forth should be about right to serve as actual pope.
Anyone who goes to the extreme overkill of disguising an entire vehicle-with-a-camera as a common object, when they could just disguise a camera which would be both easier (since it's much smaller and not vehicle-shaped) and a mere fraction of the price, deserves to win. If someone buys a Hubble telescope and hides it in my bathroom disguised as toiler paper roll, I hereby agree that such a badass motherfucker may gaze at my naked form as much as they like.
Whatever happened to the days that we all admired people who take on a project with a voluntary and totally unreasonable handicap? "I'm going to walk my cat around the dog park! Without any restraints!"
Attached: boobies.jpg.exe
Unless we detect such signals. In which case, a bunch of radio signals means "come into this trap."
Hey, you're right: paranoia is fun!
It's probably going to happen in the opposite order. I bet we'll know the inevitability of life, long before we ever know where our life came from.
Someone will create conditions where a new tree of life can spontaneously start, or else we'll find a different independent already-existing one. Meanwhile, all traces of our own tree root will still be three-billion-years eroded/eaten.
If people's are willing to pay extra for apostrophe's, you will make fortune's.
You just listed some reasons they are crappy|broken|limited|specialized|niche|elite PCs, not reasons they aren't PCs.
Is a ZX Spectrum a PC? What about a Nokia N900?
Most of us always did. They're PCs.
Metaphors can be a tool for avoiding deep thought. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; I'm not saying don't use metaphors or use any other heuristics in order to avoid doing work! Sometimes that's a wise approach, especially if you're trying to do something quickly. Sometimes, though, you want people to think harder, and then you want to discourage metaphors. Perhaps you're not in a hurry. Or you want people to not think, so you encourage a default position which works to your own advantage.
If copyright infringement is theft, then instead of wasting time thinking about how you might deal with copyright infringement, you can instead think about how you have in the past dealt with theft. (For the most part, people think theft has been covered fairly well, as societies have had millennia to work on it.) Then, if you implement similar policies with regard to copyright infringement, this is simple conservativism rather than radical new-fangled unproven speculation. It's common sense. It's tried and true strategy. Not thinking can be smart! (?!)
If copyright infringement is not theft, then it's probably dumb to use policies derived from theft. It's going to fail to address the badness in copyright infringement, and it's going to result in collateral damage against innocent non-infringers (i.e. the policy will cause badness of some kind).
In USA, we currently all vote unanimously for politicians who treat copyright infringement as theft; we've either completely bought into the metaphor, or we act like we have. These lawmakers then pass laws which are based on that idea, so, for example, you get a situation where DRM is seen as being much like a "lock" on someone else's property. Of course you don't break someone else's lock, unless you intend to steal their stuff. From this premise, DMCA isn't absurd.
On the other hand...
If you have used a computer for more than a couple weeks, or if you have ever purchased DRMed media and then tried to make use of it, then you start to realize that the "lock" is on something you bought, and keeps you from conveniently making non-infringing use of it. So right off, the metaphor is letting you down, and laws based on it (DMCA) are a kind of injustice. But it gets even worse. You go pirate the thing you already bought, in order to get a DRM-free copy which you're able to play (if the DRM is non-trivial; if the DRM is trivial then you might simply use an illegal player, limiting your "black market" exposure to a single non-recurring instance). Go through this a few times, and you soon get habituated to using the piracy sources routinely, and ..
.. (huh, that's weird, who could have predicted this?) ..
.. eventually you stop seeing any advantage to ever bothering with the initial purchasing step. You never get anything useful out of it except a warm'n'fuzzy feeling, and you always have to pirate anyway, so pretty soon the piracy sources become the primary source ("I'll get around to buying the BluRay that the file was derived from, some day.... even though it'll stay shrink-wrapped since staying up-to-date with the keys and the BD+ scheme du jour is so tedious..")..
.. somehow the lawmakers' metaphor that copyright infringement is theft, not only fails to make a dent in the theft, but is causing creators to get less financial reward. Oops. Instead of the law being a force for justice, it has created an "Everyone loses" situation.
That is the power of a metaphor, when the metaphor has been d
If they are too stupid to set it up correctly, then they aren't the fools whom you are supposed to part with their money?!
"Too stupid" is exactly the kind of person I'm looking for!
It's the smart people I don't want to hear from. You know the people I'm talking about: the ones who are so smart that they don't have to work, they just program their botnet to send viagra spam and sit back and collect the money. I admire them, but they're useless to me.