Obama, being a fool, is about to learn why those loopholes exist. We put them in to keep some of the multinationals headquartered here in the US in practice by allowing them to headquarter on paper somewhere else and we all agreed to ignore the oddities that followed from that.
Oddities are still a symptom of fuckedupness, though. If you and I don't have the loopholes (we have to pay taxes that, say, Proctor and Gamble doesn't have to), then we are losing.
Either repeal the taxes or enforce them uniformly without loopholes. If one business gets the loophole by being technically in the Cayman Islands and another business doesn't, then that second business is being punished for not doing absurd things like technically moving their HQ to Cayman Islands.
Loopholes are just special interests crying for a subsidy. They should have lobbied for lower taxes for everyone, instead of obscure exceptions. Then their whining about taxes would have some legitimacy. Right now, they sound about as legitimate as bankers.
"Quantity has a quality all its own." -- Joseph Stalin
Size matters. Within the topic of mysticism, when you get to the mainstream stuff like Christianity/Judaism/Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they're not cults, regardless of any of the beliefs within them. Likewise, neither is Windows, for the same exact reason. You have to be a persecuted minority to be a cult. Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant.
Apple is approaching loss of its culty flavor as well. Sure, they're still minority, but they're a big rich one, and certainly not persecuted (except maybe the gamers).
C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.
1879 comes with all that "you're not allowed to secede" baggage. Yes, slavery sucks and it's probably not all that practical or smart to leave the union. But in the libertarian fantasy, the people of a state are certainly allowed to reject a government, and do so as they chant Locke-ian platitudes about government only being legitimate if the governed consent to it. That's just basic democracy.
1879 is gonna rub some libertarians the wrong way. But I guess either slavery prohibition or legitimate federal governance has to go. Pre-civil-war or post-civil-war: pick your poison. Both have problems, so which ever you select, you're going to need some revisionism to turn the uglier real America into fantasy America (which is totally awesome!).
e-Reader: $300 Newspaper: 50 cents. I know which one I'm more likely to buy...
What's really great is this: personal computer with generic text-reading software (e.g. web browsers, less, etc): costs even more, and I'm more likely to buy it.
Proprietary dedicated reader for some obscure file format? Fuck that. I won't even buy a blu-ray drive until I know mplayer can deal with it (i.e. the DRM is permanently defeated).
They never seem to get it that a "working" example of a "libertarian society" is... Somalia. No functional central government..
C'mon, you call it a libertarian example, and then completely contradict that statement in the next sentence by essentially saying it's anarchy instead. No functional government (i.e. no enforcement of property rights or civil rights) means a place is as just as unlike libertarian utopia as the Soviet Union was.
The libertarian fantasy is not anarchy. It's not Mad Max. It's 1789 America, or more precisely, a romanticized version of that with certain revisionist modifications (e.g. no slavery).
Why the hell would my computer slow down or freeze because of network congestion?
Modern codecs are pretty CPU-intense. As long as you keep the data flowing, the CPU stays busy and generates a lot of heat. If the pipe stalls, what happens is that the CPU idles. Now, the article is probably written for an audience where most people overclock with some rather extreme cooling solutions. When these peoples' CPUs idle, the water-cooling can actually ice up.
When the coolant freezes, the tubes burst. (Senator Stevens warned us about this, but people didn't understand, and some even ridiculed him.) Then when more packets come in and the CPU resumes working and heats up, the coolant thaws and leaks out of the broken tubes. Coolant gets all over the motherboard, and the computer crashes.
We're not talking the president asking congress to spend more money on post offices or change patent laws. The founders said the republic should make decisions about those things and then clearly left the rest to democracy.
If you want, argue about whether the founders had a good idea or not, but don't try to say they intended for the president and congress to deal with every decision that people can make. The founders were in favor of splitting decisions up between government and people, which is why they were so careful to write that into the laws that we now routinely break.
Wow, I can't believe you would bring the founding fathers and the constitution into this. They aren't on your side. Your side is supposed to say that stuff is outdated and no longer applicable.
*no* user is ever going to stick a CD in the drive, and then say "Well, that was fun" and then take the CD back out and throw it away. They're putting it in to install software!
No, they may have put the CD in there to read the (theoretically) harmless passive data, such as music.
I use autorun for my customers.
It sounds like you sell software, and your customers know they are buying software from you. Your customers are people who (by virtue of being customers) have already made the decision to trust you to supply code that will run on their computers.
Not everyone who supplies CDs is actually trusted that much. For example, Sony is only trusted to supply inactive music data, and nobody wants to actually run code supplied by Sony on their own computers. But some people did, because those people were unfortunate enough (or foolish enough, depending on your point of view) to have Microsoft Windows.
You and Sony are not the same, nor viewed with the same level of trust by users! But MS Windows treats your CDs as the same.
The best system is one that just does what you want it to do
Autorun isn't intended to do what users want it to do. Close, but not quite. Autorun is intended to do what..
.... somebody.... .. wants it to do. That person is never the user, unless the user wrote the autorun script. That person may have the user's interests at heart.
Yeah, that's my complaint about the EFF too. They're so biased against abusing law to fuck innocent people over. Why don't they ever advocate the other side, explaining that freedom is a bad thing and we need to pass more laws for the purpose of harming the public? I'm getting sick and tired of these people always being so consistently anti-evil. EFF is so predictably transparent.
What does this have to do with the president? I don't need a president to tell me the address of some scientist who needs funding. In fact, I'm going to automatically be pretty suspicious of anyone a president does single out.
The catch, is that's he's not suggesting we all decide to spend more. He's saying the we will do so -- he will use his power to make us to it and make sure the money goes to whoever he happens to have in mind.
At first, that sounds harmless. I like funding science. But that's just the problem: I like funding science. If I start forcing people to do what I like, there goes my moral high ground.
Next time, they will tell me what to fund. I'm afraid that isn't going to be science (or anything else that I have chosen to support), and it's not going to be limited to 3% of my paycheck. What am I going to say when that happens, "Hey, I didn't make you fund my science?" I can't say that; my hands will already be dirty.
Don't do this, Mr. President. If we fund science in 2009, we'll be funding churches in 2013, and then science again in 2017, and churches in 2021. Get political winds out of this, so that we can all win instead of all losing.
I remember the first game I got: it was a wack-a-mole game for the VIC-20. It came on a cartridge. The cartridge contained a ROM chip. It was digital.
Later I started buying games on floppy disks. Those were digital too.
Then some came on CDs. (Digital, of course.)
At approximately the same times that CD ROM drives became affordable, distribution over the internet also started gaining popularity. The internet is digital.
Now retailers are saying that the profits from the last 3 decades of software sales were illusory, and that they were actually hurting themselves? Wow. What is the alternative to digital distribution? Are these people going to bring back laserdisc, or analog tape? I just can't believe it.
;)
People, do you have any idea how incredibly stupid you sound, when you use the word "digital," not to describe, but to contrast(!!?!) networks with digital media?
Since this is Slashdot, I'll use a car analogy. A manufacturer comes out with a new car. Their ads say, "Don't drive a car! Drive a conveyance!" and it has a picture of their car in the ad. And people buy into it and act like it's not ridiculous. That's you, people who use "digital" as a secret code word that means "download."
TFA says the FBI had a warrant. When that is the case, I *want* them to be able to own a suspect's machine.
I agree that when the good guys act like good guys, I want them to win.
Your computer never knows who the good guys are, though. And even if everyone signed their attacks (e.g. this spyware is signed by the FBI), it would never know when there's a warrant and when there isn't. (Just as a DRM scheme never knows whether you're trying to violate copyright vs do something innocent.)
When you receive a trojan, it might be a lawful attack by the FBI, or it might be Russian spammers wanting to add you to their botnet. You don't know which. So what's the right thing to do: run it? Or don't run it?
Alas, whatever you do to deal with the bad guys, is also going to work against the good guys.
So.. do I want the FBI, when working within the law, to be able to own a suspect's machine? Sure, in an idealistic fantasy kind of way. But in real life, I know that question can be rephrased, without losing any meaning, as "Do I want Russian spammers to be able to own anyone's machine?"
- You will be more hesitant to download movies and music legitimately--even though you've paid to watch/listen.
- You will watch more cable TV (so you can see all those great ads).
- You will accidentally pay more for less.
- Pirates get a whacking.
Those are reasons that it sucks. Notice that not a single one is even in the ballpark of DRM.
Quit diluting the meaning of DRM to simply mean everything stupidly any-business that the companies are doing to reduce their own revenue. DRM is about just one of those techniques (and the probably the most destructive one) they use to lose money: making the content you've bought not be playable.
ISP capping simply interferes with the business of selling (or pirating -- it hits both of them equally) content, but has no bearing at all on whether or not the content (however you get it, which may include means other than your ISP) actually works once you have it.
Yes, it's bad. But it's not as bad as DRM. We got by for decades with effective caps (due to the simple fact that you can only download so much content at modem speeds per month) and it didn't hinder playback at all; CSS and the legal threats from DVDCCA and MPAA over DeCSS were what kept us from buying DVDs, not our slow modems.
With dual sided dvd's so cheap these days, why bother 'shrinking' the dvd?
Because removable discs suck and are inconvenient to use. That's the whole point of ripping; why else would you be doing it?
The reason you shrink, is so that you don't have to keep installing more hard discs in your fileserver, quite as often.
Blank DVDs could be literally free, and I still wouldn't use them as my primary playback media. But I still gotta shrink or else I have to install more hard discs.
And blank DVDs might be ok for backups of things much smaller than movies, but for movies, unless you shrink, you're only going to be able to fit one movie on there. DVDs suck. (Where's my 20 dollar terabyte tape cartridge?!)
however, unless those who criticize warrantless wiretaps can enunciate a valid alternative, the status quo is not going to change
of course, the smart aleck reply to my comment is: GET A WARRANT! DUH!
except that we are talking about the profusion and proliferation of modes of communication and channels of communication happening much faster, with only a handful of suspects, than any agent sitting down with a judge can keep up with.
So what? "Get a warrant" is still a drastically superior alternative. Let's look at your example where an agent can't realistically sit down with a judge and get all the warrants that agent doesn't want. What happens under the "Get a warrant" policy? Here's what happens: the domestic intercepts don't happen. Problem solved. But you're thinking: Ah, but the foreign intercepts don't happen either. But that's ok. Intercepts were never a crutch we could rely on; they were just convenient.
The government temporarily had an edge over the people, and then technologically lost that edge and had to resort to breaking the law. Follow the law, accept the edge is lost, and get back to dealing with problems the way you did before NSA existed.
I am more angry about those marines because they are not doing their best to show prisoners that they were fighting in the wrong camp.
I don't have any sympathy for Saddam or anger against the Southpark guys, but when you put it like that.. damn! Yeah, I guess there was a standard to uphold, and my country blew it.
In case you hadn't noticed, most of the world doesn't do this stuff anymore;
Death penalty aside, I'm really curious why people make that kind of comment. Is the fact that others have stopped doing it, relevant? Why would that influence anyone's decision? (I know that it does; I just think it's both strange and unfortunate.)
Here in US, when our state legislatures are debating a law or people are talking about whether a governor should sign/veto, one of the arguments is often, "__ is one of only 4 states that still permit ___" as though that should matter.
This seems exactly backwards. Every jurisdiction should lead the way by setting policies to match its own citizen's values. WTF should anyone care about other citizens values? That neighboring state/country didn't give me a vote.
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Oddities are still a symptom of fuckedupness, though. If you and I don't have the loopholes (we have to pay taxes that, say, Proctor and Gamble doesn't have to), then we are losing.
Either repeal the taxes or enforce them uniformly without loopholes. If one business gets the loophole by being technically in the Cayman Islands and another business doesn't, then that second business is being punished for not doing absurd things like technically moving their HQ to Cayman Islands.
Loopholes are just special interests crying for a subsidy. They should have lobbied for lower taxes for everyone, instead of obscure exceptions. Then their whining about taxes would have some legitimacy. Right now, they sound about as legitimate as bankers.
"Quantity has a quality all its own." -- Joseph Stalin
Size matters. Within the topic of mysticism, when you get to the mainstream stuff like Christianity/Judaism/Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they're not cults, regardless of any of the beliefs within them. Likewise, neither is Windows, for the same exact reason. You have to be a persecuted minority to be a cult. Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant.
Apple is approaching loss of its culty flavor as well. Sure, they're still minority, but they're a big rich one, and certainly not persecuted (except maybe the gamers).
C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.
1879 comes with all that "you're not allowed to secede" baggage. Yes, slavery sucks and it's probably not all that practical or smart to leave the union. But in the libertarian fantasy, the people of a state are certainly allowed to reject a government, and do so as they chant Locke-ian platitudes about government only being legitimate if the governed consent to it. That's just basic democracy.
1879 is gonna rub some libertarians the wrong way. But I guess either slavery prohibition or legitimate federal governance has to go. Pre-civil-war or post-civil-war: pick your poison. Both have problems, so which ever you select, you're going to need some revisionism to turn the uglier real America into fantasy America (which is totally awesome!).
What's really great is this: personal computer with generic text-reading software (e.g. web browsers, less, etc): costs even more, and I'm more likely to buy it.
Proprietary dedicated reader for some obscure file format? Fuck that. I won't even buy a blu-ray drive until I know mplayer can deal with it (i.e. the DRM is permanently defeated).
C'mon, you call it a libertarian example, and then completely contradict that statement in the next sentence by essentially saying it's anarchy instead. No functional government (i.e. no enforcement of property rights or civil rights) means a place is as just as unlike libertarian utopia as the Soviet Union was.
The libertarian fantasy is not anarchy. It's not Mad Max. It's 1789 America, or more precisely, a romanticized version of that with certain revisionist modifications (e.g. no slavery).
Now one of them is going to quote Gandhi's "then they laugh at you" line, and I just want you to know, you're to blame.
Modern codecs are pretty CPU-intense. As long as you keep the data flowing, the CPU stays busy and generates a lot of heat. If the pipe stalls, what happens is that the CPU idles. Now, the article is probably written for an audience where most people overclock with some rather extreme cooling solutions. When these peoples' CPUs idle, the water-cooling can actually ice up.
When the coolant freezes, the tubes burst. (Senator Stevens warned us about this, but people didn't understand, and some even ridiculed him.) Then when more packets come in and the CPU resumes working and heats up, the coolant thaws and leaks out of the broken tubes. Coolant gets all over the motherboard, and the computer crashes.
We're not talking the president asking congress to spend more money on post offices or change patent laws. The founders said the republic should make decisions about those things and then clearly left the rest to democracy.
If you want, argue about whether the founders had a good idea or not, but don't try to say they intended for the president and congress to deal with every decision that people can make. The founders were in favor of splitting decisions up between government and people, which is why they were so careful to write that into the laws that we now routinely break.
Wow, I can't believe you would bring the founding fathers and the constitution into this. They aren't on your side. Your side is supposed to say that stuff is outdated and no longer applicable.
No, they may have put the CD in there to read the (theoretically) harmless passive data, such as music.
It sounds like you sell software, and your customers know they are buying software from you. Your customers are people who (by virtue of being customers) have already made the decision to trust you to supply code that will run on their computers.
Not everyone who supplies CDs is actually trusted that much. For example, Sony is only trusted to supply inactive music data, and nobody wants to actually run code supplied by Sony on their own computers. But some people did, because those people were unfortunate enough (or foolish enough, depending on your point of view) to have Microsoft Windows.
You and Sony are not the same, nor viewed with the same level of trust by users! But MS Windows treats your CDs as the same.
I want to go to the yard work simulator!
Autorun isn't intended to do what users want it to do. Close, but not quite. Autorun is intended to do what ..
.. .. somebody .. ..
.. wants it to do. That person is never the user, unless the user wrote the autorun script. That person may have the user's interests at heart.
What is special about party affiliation, compared to any other campaign promises? If he had stayed "RINO" that would have been a virtue?
Yeah, that's my complaint about the EFF too. They're so biased against abusing law to fuck innocent people over. Why don't they ever advocate the other side, explaining that freedom is a bad thing and we need to pass more laws for the purpose of harming the public? I'm getting sick and tired of these people always being so consistently anti-evil. EFF is so predictably transparent.
WTF? How quickly people forget! The 747 was the plane Saddam Hussein was piloting.
That's an exaggeration. "We as a nation" aren't scared of this kind of stuff. Some people in NYC got scared. That's all that happened.
What does this have to do with the president? I don't need a president to tell me the address of some scientist who needs funding. In fact, I'm going to automatically be pretty suspicious of anyone a president does single out.
The catch, is that's he's not suggesting we all decide to spend more. He's saying the we will do so -- he will use his power to make us to it and make sure the money goes to whoever he happens to have in mind.
At first, that sounds harmless. I like funding science. But that's just the problem: I like funding science. If I start forcing people to do what I like, there goes my moral high ground.
Next time, they will tell me what to fund. I'm afraid that isn't going to be science (or anything else that I have chosen to support), and it's not going to be limited to 3% of my paycheck. What am I going to say when that happens, "Hey, I didn't make you fund my science?" I can't say that; my hands will already be dirty.
Don't do this, Mr. President. If we fund science in 2009, we'll be funding churches in 2013, and then science again in 2017, and churches in 2021. Get political winds out of this, so that we can all win instead of all losing.
I remember the first game I got: it was a wack-a-mole game for the VIC-20. It came on a cartridge. The cartridge contained a ROM chip. It was digital.
Later I started buying games on floppy disks. Those were digital too.
Then some came on CDs. (Digital, of course.)
At approximately the same times that CD ROM drives became affordable, distribution over the internet also started gaining popularity. The internet is digital.
Now retailers are saying that the profits from the last 3 decades of software sales were illusory, and that they were actually hurting themselves? Wow. What is the alternative to digital distribution? Are these people going to bring back laserdisc, or analog tape? I just can't believe it.
;)
People, do you have any idea how incredibly stupid you sound, when you use the word "digital," not to describe, but to contrast(!!?!) networks with digital media?
Since this is Slashdot, I'll use a car analogy. A manufacturer comes out with a new car. Their ads say, "Don't drive a car! Drive a conveyance!" and it has a picture of their car in the ad. And people buy into it and act like it's not ridiculous. That's you, people who use "digital" as a secret code word that means "download."
In Vatican, sun orbit YOU!
I agree that when the good guys act like good guys, I want them to win.
Your computer never knows who the good guys are, though. And even if everyone signed their attacks (e.g. this spyware is signed by the FBI), it would never know when there's a warrant and when there isn't. (Just as a DRM scheme never knows whether you're trying to violate copyright vs do something innocent.)
When you receive a trojan, it might be a lawful attack by the FBI, or it might be Russian spammers wanting to add you to their botnet. You don't know which. So what's the right thing to do: run it? Or don't run it?
Alas, whatever you do to deal with the bad guys, is also going to work against the good guys.
So .. do I want the FBI, when working within the law, to be able to own a suspect's machine? Sure, in an idealistic fantasy kind of way. But in real life, I know that question can be rephrased, without losing any meaning, as "Do I want Russian spammers to be able to own anyone's machine?"
Those are reasons that it sucks. Notice that not a single one is even in the ballpark of DRM.
Quit diluting the meaning of DRM to simply mean everything stupidly any-business that the companies are doing to reduce their own revenue. DRM is about just one of those techniques (and the probably the most destructive one) they use to lose money: making the content you've bought not be playable.
ISP capping simply interferes with the business of selling (or pirating -- it hits both of them equally) content, but has no bearing at all on whether or not the content (however you get it, which may include means other than your ISP) actually works once you have it.
Yes, it's bad. But it's not as bad as DRM. We got by for decades with effective caps (due to the simple fact that you can only download so much content at modem speeds per month) and it didn't hinder playback at all; CSS and the legal threats from DVDCCA and MPAA over DeCSS were what kept us from buying DVDs, not our slow modems.
Because removable discs suck and are inconvenient to use. That's the whole point of ripping; why else would you be doing it?
The reason you shrink, is so that you don't have to keep installing more hard discs in your fileserver, quite as often.
Blank DVDs could be literally free, and I still wouldn't use them as my primary playback media. But I still gotta shrink or else I have to install more hard discs.
And blank DVDs might be ok for backups of things much smaller than movies, but for movies, unless you shrink, you're only going to be able to fit one movie on there. DVDs suck. (Where's my 20 dollar terabyte tape cartridge?!)
So what? "Get a warrant" is still a drastically superior alternative. Let's look at your example where an agent can't realistically sit down with a judge and get all the warrants that agent doesn't want. What happens under the "Get a warrant" policy? Here's what happens: the domestic intercepts don't happen. Problem solved. But you're thinking: Ah, but the foreign intercepts don't happen either. But that's ok. Intercepts were never a crutch we could rely on; they were just convenient.
The government temporarily had an edge over the people, and then technologically lost that edge and had to resort to breaking the law. Follow the law, accept the edge is lost, and get back to dealing with problems the way you did before NSA existed.
I don't have any sympathy for Saddam or anger against the Southpark guys, but when you put it like that .. damn! Yeah, I guess there was a standard to uphold, and my country blew it.
Death penalty aside, I'm really curious why people make that kind of comment. Is the fact that others have stopped doing it, relevant? Why would that influence anyone's decision? (I know that it does; I just think it's both strange and unfortunate.)
Here in US, when our state legislatures are debating a law or people are talking about whether a governor should sign/veto, one of the arguments is often, "__ is one of only 4 states that still permit ___" as though that should matter.
This seems exactly backwards. Every jurisdiction should lead the way by setting policies to match its own citizen's values. WTF should anyone care about other citizens values? That neighboring state/country didn't give me a vote.