Grant personhood only to those who ask for it? The protectors of the coma wards and unborn human fetuses are going to hate that.
That's the problem with personhood tests: not all humans can pass them, unless you set the bar so low that even most chickens can pass it. The only patch is to add unsatisfying arbitrary clauses, like whitelisting anything with human DNA. (Wait, how much human DNA?) But if you're going to arbitrarily whitelist some species, then you might as well throw out the test altogether, and just write things on your whitelist based on your intuition, preferences, etc -- subjective stuff.
This is one of those questions that can only lead to trouble. That doesn't mean don't ask it, just that trouble is coming and it might make the whole Nazi conflict seem smalltime. There is no good way to draw the line that isn't going to get someone accused of either murder or imprecise thinking. You can't win. Any answer will be hated, and rightly so because no answer will be right. This is bad shit.
Go ahead and support the dolphin research, work on AI, and look for aliens, but accept that you're asking for World War 3 to happen in your lifetime.
You're right that it's a "race to the bottom" and the manufacturers are going to have a harder time. (Lucky for the users!)
anyone buying an Android device is someone who's settling for a half-assed iPhone knock-off
I think you don't understand the Android market. The people buying Android aren't thinking in terms of getting something iPhone-like. They're thinking in terms of getting a phone (or highly portable PC; same thing), and all phones (even the cheapest) phones just happen to be (or will be) smartphones. As they explore the things it can do, there's an opportunity to make money off of them. Some will spend, some won't.
who wants to try to sell apps to the cheapskates?
You're looking at them as "cheapskates" when they simply aren't the kind of people who burn money for nothin'. Do you think nobody ever made any money off Dell-Acer-Gateway customers?
Developers are going to need serious, non-commodity apps, is all. I was pretty shocked that on Apple's platform, for example, you can't even get a free ssh client. If that makes me a cheapskate, then ok, we disagree about WTF is going on. But to me, the idea that ssh clients cost money (in spite of BSD-free reference implementations being available for many years), isn't a serious market; that's an unnatural market. Lack of anything quite that weird on Android, isn't a signal that developers can't still make a killing. They're just going to have to earn it.
A few years ago I used an old PC as a homebrew DVR and it didn't cost anything above a small investment in hardware and software, but nowadays things are so locked down the only realistic option is to rent the box and pay for the "service" from the provider.
No, there's one other realistic option. When they lock down, you stop sending them money. They are doing this to you because every month, you vote with your wallet, telling them that you are ecstatically happy with their service and wishing them to keep up the good work. Either stop complaining, or stop paying them.
What's shocking is not just that it happened. There are pedophiles out there, and sometimes people mistakenly do business with the wrong people or whatever. (I'm trying to look at it in the best possible light, giving the government the benefit of the doubt on that.)
The shocking part is that our government thinks it should be classified. Brad Manning might be a selfish prick who did what he did for the wrong reasons, but it's even worse to find out that we need the likes of him to gve this info out to the public. WTF kind of system makes it necessary for this stuff to be leaked? It should have been revealed at a press conference, perhaps with some apologetic embarrassment.
Instead, it's on Wikileaks. Why was this a secret?
Reminds me of the "Collateral Murder" video. Some people say it's heavily edited with bias, out of context, etc, but I don't remember the Pentagon releasing the same video months earlier, with all its context, and without "biased editing."
It's all well and fine to say diplomats need some privacy for candor, but WTF does that have to do with pedophiles and (apparent?) shooting of unarmed people? Stop keeping so many secrets which don't need to be secret, and maybe Wikileaks will start to be seen as something that reveals the "wrong" secrets, instead of the secrets that the public needs to know.
If Assange is a fanatic that discloses too much, why am I hearing the not too much stuff from him first?! Wikileaks critics, where was your story about the pedophiles?
Let me know if you manage to get that rule implemented, so I can get into the cellphone rental business. Both the cheaters and the innocent victims of your plan, will appreciate my services.
Dave, I just want to thank you for finding such amazingly bad "journalism" all over the place. You are doing a good job on finding things to make fun of.
You submitted an article that comes to the conclusion that Wikileaks, rather than Congress or the American people, will be responsible for what Congress decides to do about shield laws. That's is a spectacularly awesome example of how someone can so desperately try to avoiding thinking in terms of actual responsibility or cause-and-effect.
And now you find another article where someone makes the same mistake, blaming Wikileaks, rather than a dictator, for a dictator's decision to kill a potential rival.
What's is really great about these examples of absurdity, though, isn't just the flawed thinking of blaming the press for decisions that governments make -- anyone can be that stupid, and hearing a stupid redneck bitch about there being too much freedom of the press is merely lame rather than funny. But that we're seeing members of the press doing it. The press condemning the press for being responsible for government. Stupidity with self-loathing.
Dude, you find the best stuff, the most egregious examples of people thinking completely backwards when it comes to basic civics, from exactly the kind of people who we'd all least expect to get it all wrong. First rate absurdity. Keep up the good work.
Because if the acts were not crimes, then the wholly-justified not-crimes acts of goodness were even moreso carried out in your name, because surely you'd want some of the credit for all the wonderful things that are being done to help the world become a better place.
I can't see how being associated with Michael Moore is going to help him or Wikileaks.
Oh, I can explain that for ya. Easy.
It helps Assange by getting him out of jail. It helps Wikileaks by getting Assange out of jail.
HTH.
Also, I doubt this will cause Wikileaks to become "associated with" Moore, or at least not in a negative way, even after Moore makes a movie about how much he loves Wikileaks. Let's look at the three cases.
Right wingers infuriated by government abuses of power: Moore's a lefty, but he's also a stick-it-to-The-Man leftie. These people can agree to disagree with Moore about what to do after the government is punished or overthrown, but agree that they have much bigger fish to fry than some wackjob filmmaker.
Left wingers who think government needs to have lots of power: damn, what Wikileaks did was very bad, but wait, my fellow leftie Moore is on their side?
Undecided people: If you're undecided about Wikileaks, then the arrest wasn't about confirming your desire for justice by punishing Assange for Wikileaks, or confirming your conspiracy theory about how evil governments are. He was arrested because of an unrelated rape charge. So this is all about Moore's attitude about rape, or his attitude about people rotting in jail awaiting trials, or whatever, but the bail is about Moore, not Assange.
It's break-even or win, every way. Of course Assange will choose to take advantage of the bail and leave jail. Other than fear of assassination (whether legitimate or due to delusions of grandeur), what does he have to lose? They can get you in jail too.
Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it.
If you really use it sparingly, you won't miss it. You'll hold down shift for an extra 4 seconds per week.
While their explanation about it improving comments is obviously bullshit, I like the decision anyway. Every single time I ever press caps lock, it's an accident.
If I may get overdramatic, having a caps lock key on your keyboard, is like having a bear trap on your desk. As long as you stay away from it, it's harmless. But it never under any circumstances ever ever helps you, and sometimes you accidently go near it.
Isn't it ironic that for all of the screaming about Republicans ignoring rules and laws and that its the Democrats that are the worst offenders?
No, it's not ironic that they do that. What's ironic is that people vote for them. Or worse, that they vote for them, get disappointed, and then vote for the Republicans.
Say all you want about the futility of voting for any other parties, but until/unless people start doing just that, people aren't going to get what they want. So I think the irony here is that people say they want things to be better, but then do everything they can to avoid making things better.
He mentions the idea that some ISPs are considering a plan where they only deliver content from their site. That's not Web access. Anybody who buys that is not on the web. And that's their own lookout.
When it comes to democracy, you can lead the horse to water, but it's gotta drink all by itself. You can yell, scream, cajole, etc. but in the end voters will make whatever decisions they want to make.
Ah, but there is one thing you can do: fight fraud, or to put it more nicely, "confusion in the mind of the consumer." If they're not selling web access, then it should be plainly obvious to someone before they buy it.
Suppose Comcast or Verizon were to offer a service that can access their servers at 300 Mbps or the rest of the internet at 80 kbps. If someone buys that with the expectation that they're going to have 300 Mbps access to the internet, then (assuming they're not just stupid and can't read) something has gone wrong, in a way that government force should prevent.
We have already (mostly) accepted having a bunch of laws that govern advertising, labeling, etc, all based on a very simple idea that even the furthest right-wing libertarian would agree with (the ideas, if not the implementation). A free market requires informed participants. Maybe this would be the best solution to Net Neutrality: if someone isn't selling internet access, then they shouldn't be allowed to call it internet access. Or if it's limited internet access (80 kbps in the above example) then that limit should be required to be what they most prominently refer to it as, in their ads. Not as part of a complex ever-nebulous and subjective half-assed attempt to serve the public good, but simple truth in advertising to prevent fraud/confusion.
If it's really private information which belongs to that person alone, then how did the site get it? Do they steal it from people on days when people forget to put on their foil hats?
When you do that, though, you deny the Beatles their incentive to create the music in the first place. If you like the Beatles, you might want to think about the consequences of your actions, before you condemn them to a life of poverty and obscurity.
Engineer: I need some centrifuges and computers to control them.
Manager: Ok. Here, here you go. The computers have Windows preloaded for your convenience.
CIA: Yay!!
Engineer: No thanks, I don't need to run DirectX11 games or read lolcat emails sent as MS Word attachments. These computers are for getting things done.
Manager: I said, convenience.
Engineer: No, it's ok, really, I can find some OS to--
Manager: Convenience. Or else. [Pulls out gun]
Engineer: *facepalm*
Microsoft: Good job, manager, here's your kickback.
CIA: I knew selling them guns would work out, in the end.
they said there was an at-fault accident on my record that shouldn't have been there. I asked them where they got that information because my DMV record was clean.
Was this a collision that actually happened, or false data? (I can take your story either way.)
If the "information" about us is false, then I'm not sure it's so much a privacy violation, but rather libel/slander.
I would venture to guess that whoever attempts to extract the code internal to the device would be subject to legal action, and like it or not, Microsoft's litigation would be legitimate.
On what grounds? Copyright and/or DMCA? (probably not.) Trade secret? (definitely not) Contract? (maybe, if these things are only sold with a purchase agreement)
"reverse engineering for interoperability" is hacker-speak for tampering, right? Well, if tampering isn't illegal, it certainly should be! I don't want to buy a kinect and find out it doesn't work (or does something bad) because a hacker tampered with it!!!!11
You can run X on OS/X and WIndows so running X on top of Unity is probably going to be okay as well.
I think that's half of what people want.
You can run an X server on those OSes, so that a OS/X or Windows user can see the output of some X client that is running on a Linux box. But what it's can't do, is make the lOS/X or Windows apps be X clients. That is, you can't go to your Linux box that is running an X server, ssh to the Mac, launch a Mac app, and see that window on your Linux box's screen. You've gotta do something totally different (e.g. VNC) to do that.
How will one machine running Wayland show a window for an app that is running on another machine running Wayland? We can currently do that easily with X, in a way that is less convenient for Mac or Windows users, with their VNC or Citrix addons.
Slashdot Mirror
Grant personhood only to those who ask for it? The protectors of the coma wards and unborn human fetuses are going to hate that.
That's the problem with personhood tests: not all humans can pass them, unless you set the bar so low that even most chickens can pass it. The only patch is to add unsatisfying arbitrary clauses, like whitelisting anything with human DNA. (Wait, how much human DNA?) But if you're going to arbitrarily whitelist some species, then you might as well throw out the test altogether, and just write things on your whitelist based on your intuition, preferences, etc -- subjective stuff.
This is one of those questions that can only lead to trouble. That doesn't mean don't ask it, just that trouble is coming and it might make the whole Nazi conflict seem smalltime. There is no good way to draw the line that isn't going to get someone accused of either murder or imprecise thinking. You can't win. Any answer will be hated, and rightly so because no answer will be right. This is bad shit.
Go ahead and support the dolphin research, work on AI, and look for aliens, but accept that you're asking for World War 3 to happen in your lifetime.
Such a triviality aside, it's actually a good paper.
Right at the end of the first page of this paper: "casino's make profit."
*facepalm* Should I keep reading?
I think you don't understand the Android market. The people buying Android aren't thinking in terms of getting something iPhone-like. They're thinking in terms of getting a phone (or highly portable PC; same thing), and all phones (even the cheapest) phones just happen to be (or will be) smartphones. As they explore the things it can do, there's an opportunity to make money off of them. Some will spend, some won't.
You're looking at them as "cheapskates" when they simply aren't the kind of people who burn money for nothin'. Do you think nobody ever made any money off Dell-Acer-Gateway customers?
Developers are going to need serious, non-commodity apps, is all. I was pretty shocked that on Apple's platform, for example, you can't even get a free ssh client. If that makes me a cheapskate, then ok, we disagree about WTF is going on. But to me, the idea that ssh clients cost money (in spite of BSD-free reference implementations being available for many years), isn't a serious market; that's an unnatural market. Lack of anything quite that weird on Android, isn't a signal that developers can't still make a killing. They're just going to have to earn it.
No, there's one other realistic option. When they lock down, you stop sending them money. They are doing this to you because every month, you vote with your wallet, telling them that you are ecstatically happy with their service and wishing them to keep up the good work. Either stop complaining, or stop paying them.
What's shocking is not just that it happened. There are pedophiles out there, and sometimes people mistakenly do business with the wrong people or whatever. (I'm trying to look at it in the best possible light, giving the government the benefit of the doubt on that.)
The shocking part is that our government thinks it should be classified. Brad Manning might be a selfish prick who did what he did for the wrong reasons, but it's even worse to find out that we need the likes of him to gve this info out to the public. WTF kind of system makes it necessary for this stuff to be leaked? It should have been revealed at a press conference, perhaps with some apologetic embarrassment.
Instead, it's on Wikileaks. Why was this a secret?
Reminds me of the "Collateral Murder" video. Some people say it's heavily edited with bias, out of context, etc, but I don't remember the Pentagon releasing the same video months earlier, with all its context, and without "biased editing."
It's all well and fine to say diplomats need some privacy for candor, but WTF does that have to do with pedophiles and (apparent?) shooting of unarmed people? Stop keeping so many secrets which don't need to be secret, and maybe Wikileaks will start to be seen as something that reveals the "wrong" secrets, instead of the secrets that the public needs to know.
If Assange is a fanatic that discloses too much, why am I hearing the not too much stuff from him first?! Wikileaks critics, where was your story about the pedophiles?
Let me know if you manage to get that rule implemented, so I can get into the cellphone rental business. Both the cheaters and the innocent victims of your plan, will appreciate my services.
Dave, I just want to thank you for finding such amazingly bad "journalism" all over the place. You are doing a good job on finding things to make fun of.
You submitted an article that comes to the conclusion that Wikileaks, rather than Congress or the American people, will be responsible for what Congress decides to do about shield laws. That's is a spectacularly awesome example of how someone can so desperately try to avoiding thinking in terms of actual responsibility or cause-and-effect.
And now you find another article where someone makes the same mistake, blaming Wikileaks, rather than a dictator, for a dictator's decision to kill a potential rival.
What's is really great about these examples of absurdity, though, isn't just the flawed thinking of blaming the press for decisions that governments make -- anyone can be that stupid, and hearing a stupid redneck bitch about there being too much freedom of the press is merely lame rather than funny. But that we're seeing members of the press doing it. The press condemning the press for being responsible for government. Stupidity with self-loathing.
Dude, you find the best stuff, the most egregious examples of people thinking completely backwards when it comes to basic civics, from exactly the kind of people who we'd all least expect to get it all wrong. First rate absurdity. Keep up the good work.
Because if the acts were not crimes, then the wholly-justified not-crimes acts of goodness were even moreso carried out in your name, because surely you'd want some of the credit for all the wonderful things that are being done to help the world become a better place.
Oh, I can explain that for ya. Easy.
It helps Assange by getting him out of jail. It helps Wikileaks by getting Assange out of jail.
HTH.
Also, I doubt this will cause Wikileaks to become "associated with" Moore, or at least not in a negative way, even after Moore makes a movie about how much he loves Wikileaks. Let's look at the three cases.
Right wingers infuriated by government abuses of power: Moore's a lefty, but he's also a stick-it-to-The-Man leftie. These people can agree to disagree with Moore about what to do after the government is punished or overthrown, but agree that they have much bigger fish to fry than some wackjob filmmaker.
Left wingers who think government needs to have lots of power: damn, what Wikileaks did was very bad, but wait, my fellow leftie Moore is on their side?
Undecided people: If you're undecided about Wikileaks, then the arrest wasn't about confirming your desire for justice by punishing Assange for Wikileaks, or confirming your conspiracy theory about how evil governments are. He was arrested because of an unrelated rape charge. So this is all about Moore's attitude about rape, or his attitude about people rotting in jail awaiting trials, or whatever, but the bail is about Moore, not Assange.
It's break-even or win, every way. Of course Assange will choose to take advantage of the bail and leave jail. Other than fear of assassination (whether legitimate or due to delusions of grandeur), what does he have to lose? They can get you in jail too.
But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.
How odd that Google's notebook isn't targeting this niche. I wonder what other 3170 keys it lacks. ;)
Never. It's an accident, 100.000% of the time.
Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it.
If you really use it sparingly, you won't miss it. You'll hold down shift for an extra 4 seconds per week.
While their explanation about it improving comments is obviously bullshit, I like the decision anyway. Every single time I ever press caps lock, it's an accident.
If I may get overdramatic, having a caps lock key on your keyboard, is like having a bear trap on your desk. As long as you stay away from it, it's harmless. But it never under any circumstances ever ever helps you, and sometimes you accidently go near it.
No, it's not ironic that they do that. What's ironic is that people vote for them. Or worse, that they vote for them, get disappointed, and then vote for the Republicans.
Say all you want about the futility of voting for any other parties, but until/unless people start doing just that, people aren't going to get what they want. So I think the irony here is that people say they want things to be better, but then do everything they can to avoid making things better.
He mentions the idea that some ISPs are considering a plan where they only deliver content from their site. That's not Web access. Anybody who buys that is not on the web. And that's their own lookout.
When it comes to democracy, you can lead the horse to water, but it's gotta drink all by itself. You can yell, scream, cajole, etc. but in the end voters will make whatever decisions they want to make.
Ah, but there is one thing you can do: fight fraud, or to put it more nicely, "confusion in the mind of the consumer." If they're not selling web access, then it should be plainly obvious to someone before they buy it.
Suppose Comcast or Verizon were to offer a service that can access their servers at 300 Mbps or the rest of the internet at 80 kbps. If someone buys that with the expectation that they're going to have 300 Mbps access to the internet, then (assuming they're not just stupid and can't read) something has gone wrong, in a way that government force should prevent.
We have already (mostly) accepted having a bunch of laws that govern advertising, labeling, etc, all based on a very simple idea that even the furthest right-wing libertarian would agree with (the ideas, if not the implementation). A free market requires informed participants. Maybe this would be the best solution to Net Neutrality: if someone isn't selling internet access, then they shouldn't be allowed to call it internet access. Or if it's limited internet access (80 kbps in the above example) then that limit should be required to be what they most prominently refer to it as, in their ads. Not as part of a complex ever-nebulous and subjective half-assed attempt to serve the public good, but simple truth in advertising to prevent fraud/confusion.
Let's let the horses know what they're drinking.
If it's really private information which belongs to that person alone, then how did the site get it? Do they steal it from people on days when people forget to put on their foil hats?
How can you disable the driver's ability to use a phone, without disabling passengers' ability too?
I cheated on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the student sitting next to me.
When you do that, though, you deny the Beatles their incentive to create the music in the first place. If you like the Beatles, you might want to think about the consequences of your actions, before you condemn them to a life of poverty and obscurity.
Beatles recordings have been for sale for decades. I don't know anyone who hasn't heard of this band yet.
Engineer: I need some centrifuges and computers to control them.
Manager: Ok. Here, here you go. The computers have Windows preloaded for your convenience.
CIA: Yay!!
Engineer: No thanks, I don't need to run DirectX11 games or read lolcat emails sent as MS Word attachments. These computers are for getting things done.
Manager: I said, convenience.
Engineer: No, it's ok, really, I can find some OS to--
Manager: Convenience. Or else. [Pulls out gun]
Engineer: *facepalm*
Microsoft: Good job, manager, here's your kickback.
CIA: I knew selling them guns would work out, in the end.
Was this a collision that actually happened, or false data? (I can take your story either way.)
If the "information" about us is false, then I'm not sure it's so much a privacy violation, but rather libel/slander.
On what grounds? Copyright and/or DMCA? (probably not.) Trade secret? (definitely not) Contract? (maybe, if these things are only sold with a purchase agreement)
"reverse engineering for interoperability" is hacker-speak for tampering, right? Well, if tampering isn't illegal, it certainly should be! I don't want to buy a kinect and find out it doesn't work (or does something bad) because a hacker tampered with it!!!!11
I think that's half of what people want.
You can run an X server on those OSes, so that a OS/X or Windows user can see the output of some X client that is running on a Linux box. But what it's can't do, is make the lOS/X or Windows apps be X clients. That is, you can't go to your Linux box that is running an X server, ssh to the Mac, launch a Mac app, and see that window on your Linux box's screen. You've gotta do something totally different (e.g. VNC) to do that.
How will one machine running Wayland show a window for an app that is running on another machine running Wayland? We can currently do that easily with X, in a way that is less convenient for Mac or Windows users, with their VNC or Citrix addons.