But today, when new road construction happens (and not construction to widen an existing road), what do they do?
They often turn it into a toll road. Ostensibly to "pay for the construction". But of course, that construction was probably already funded by taxes already. And the money collected doesn't actually go directly back into the road -- it goes into the "general fund". And I wouldn't doubt that some of that is diverted to "interested parties", like perhaps the contractor that constructed the road to begin with (indirectly, of course, after being suitably, um, "processed"), and the politicians that managed to make the deal happen to begin with.
Why? Because the cops can afford it, and the protesters usually can't.
And if real people have to hit the streets on either side, then the other side has an advantage.
End result: protests will become even less effective and more meaningless than they are now, because the police will have a lot less incentive to keep the violence down. They'll be able to use violence at will.
The best thing to do is to send your kids to school outside of the country. *shrugs*
Yeah. Where?
The UK is already beholden to the interests of the corporations. I dare say the same is true of most of Europe. The same is obviously true of Australia. It's true of every country that is even considering DMCA-like legislation.
So what does that leave? Homeschooling. And, as I said, once homeschooling gets popular (more precisely, once it threatens to get popular. Much easier and politically safer to make something illegal if it's not popular already), it'll be outlawed.
A lot of people here joke about how public school is very much like prison. Bills like this will ensure that the joke is no joke.
Federal legislation like this is even worse in that it might affect not just public schools, but private schools as well. The bill itself refers to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 8801), section 14101, but I'm not aware of how to track that down (Google doesn't come up with much of interest).
If it refers strictly to public schools, then private institutions (and the home, for homeschoolers) might be the only place where a kid can really be free to learn. This, to me, is ironic and more than a little sad.
I expect two things to happen if bills like this pass:
Homeschooling will become a lot more popular.
Homeschooling will therefore eventually become illegal, since it's important to the corporations and government that kids be properly indoctrinated.
I don't know about you guys, but it looks to me like the good 'ol USA is slowly turning into its former Communist enemy, the USSR. Oh, there are certainly distinctions (power in the hands of the corps versus power in the hands of the Communist leaders). But I think they are distinctions without a substantial difference.
I think this trend will continue. The laws will get worse over time for the individual. I suspect only armed revolt will be enough to change it, and that won't happen because the general population doesn't have sufficient military strength anymore, thanks to expensive (so the general population can't afford them) high-tech weapons that give the government (and thus the corporations, since they are roughly the same thing these days) a millions-to-one advantage in firepower.
And nobody from the outside would provide military aid to those revolting, since the corporations are multinational and have sufficient influence over every government that matters.
Reading Slashdot is depressing sometimes, because the problems discussed there are usually things we can't do a damned thing about. I have a large sense of inevitability of the corporate police state.
I think if I were paranoid about being hacked before being able to download the updates, I'd think seriously about booting the machine in single-user mode and then doing my downloads. Much less risk that way. But unfortunately, this method isn't of much use to those who aren't very familiar with Unix administration.
Somehow it's inspiring to see just how long we've been killing each other. This story is great in so many ways.
Yeah, but it's so much more satisfying these days, when you can have the gore setting cranked all the way up and see your enemies exploding into blood vapor when you hit then with the BFG, and all from the comfort of your own home! None of that actually having to work at it like the old days.:-)
This is why you want the archives to be mirrored across the world. This should happen automatically for any new content that appears on the site. Many here seem to be concerned about how electronic media formats (like DVD) tend towards obsolescence and aren't terribly resistant to destruction. In the computer world, I think the best safeguard against that is active maintenance of the mirror group. As long as at least a couple of sites remain active, the data will remain safe.
It seems obvious that the archives should be "append only". They'll grow over time. But I suspect storage technology improvements will remain ahead of the amount of data that need to be archived, at least for a reasonable amount of time.
Seems to me that you need three categories of submissions:
Papers/Articles
Peer-review responses
Discussion
Papers/articles and peer-review responses can only be submitted by those given "peer-review" status. Such people can moderate any of the above categories. Discussion messages can be submitted by anyone and moderated by anyone.
Peer-review involves both moderating a submitted paper/article and submitting a response, the purpose of which is to justify the moderation. Discussion can be in response to peer-review or to the paper itself.
Peer-reviewers can be meta-moderated by other peer-reviewers, and a "credibility score" is kept for each peer-reviewer. This score is available for all to see, and the site should generate a list ordered by credibility.
It'll probably be necessary to compartmentalize the peer-reviewers by field, so that they can peer-review articles and papers submitted only by others in the same field (and can only meta-moderate people in the same field). It might be easier to just run multiple field-specific sites, but searching might be more powerful if they were combined.
I suppose there might also be a "credibility score" associated with everyone and computed strictly from moderation done to discussion messages, but it's important to keep that separate from the "credibility score" computed from the moderation of papers and peer-review responses.
How to grant peer-review status? Good question. One way would be to allow an existing peer-reviewer to "approve" a new peer-reviewer. Another might be to grant everyone the chance to submit one paper/article and, if it gets moderated high enough, they are granted peer-review status. This will probably require a lot more thought, so feel free to chime in!
They see a "My Pictures" folder with thumbnails and stuff, and they think "Wow! I can keep digital pictures in here. Windows XP lets me manage pictures!"
Actually, I can just imagine some of the amusing tech support that might come from this:
Clueless user: Hello, MS tech support? What's with this bogus product you sold me?
MS tech support: Huh? What do you mean?
Clueless user: My computer. It says it can hold my pictures for me. Says so right here on the screen.
MS tech support: I don't follow.
Clueless user: It says "My Pictures" on the screen. That's where my pictures are supposed to go, right?
MS tech support: Yes, that's right.
Clueless user: But my computer won't take my pictures! I keep giving it my pictures but it doesn't put them in "My Pictures".
MS tech support: Umm... how are you giving it your pictures?
Clueless user: I'm putting them in the slot in the computer. Isn't that where they're supposed to go?
You hear a loud crash and laughing. Apparently the MS tech support person fell out of their chair...
Clueless user: And why didn't they make the slot bigger? I have to fold my pictures to put them into the computer!
Yeah, okay, so perhaps that's not all that original. But you get the idea...
Fair enough. But the main difference is that as an individual, you get paid in exchange for the time and effort you expend on the company's behalf. Taxes against you are the same as taxes against your labor, which means that some of your labor goes to the government.
Whereas a company acts as the mechanism by which your efforts (and the efforts of many others) are converted into money -- when the company itself "pays taxes", it does so by charging a correspondingly higher price for its goods in order to offset the tax. And the end result is that its customers end up paying more, meaning that those people that (either as individuals or collectively as companies) purchase goods from your company must expend greater amounts of labor to afford your goods than they would without the tax.
So in the end, it really does go back to the individual, and it is ultimately the individual that pays, one way or another.
Point being that it makes no sense to me to say that a company "pays taxes" and is thus somehow equivalent to individuals in that regard. It's not the same thing at all -- the company itself isn't penalized by the payment of taxes except in terms of how doing so affects its ability to compete, and even in that case it's only in relative terms (relative to how much in the way of taxes its competitors have to pay).
Doesn't matter anyway...any taxes that Adobe pays come out of the pockets of its customers. Adobe itself doesn't take any losses as a result except perhaps that their prices aren't quite as competitive as a result.
Why can't these virus writers do something cool? Like install the SETI@home client on every infected machine? Or install something to DOS the RIAA/MPAA/Bad-guy-of-the-week (how about having the DOS daemon check Slashdot to determine who the current bad guy is)?
I'm sure that someone can come up with even more interesting things than this...
As long as they find and correct, and learn from, the problem, then nothing was wasted.
Agreed. It would be interesting to know what can be learned from this particular failure, since it was a failure of the rocket, not of the sail.
After 50 years of messing around with rockets, you'd think we'd know how to build them to be cheap and reliable. That we're still struggling with this means that it's probably a very difficult problem.
Makes me wonder what the actual launch success rate of modern rockets is...
If I remember correctly, the DMCA passed by a voice vote, so there's no record of who supported it and who didn't. This was probably intentional. And if they did this, it's unlikely that they listened to any of their constituents (save the corporations, who seem to have drafted it) no matter how vocal. After all, they can "plausibly" deny that they voted for it...must have been the other reps that did, right?
Some here have suggested that patents should be peer-reviewed. I concur. They have further argued that those reviewing the patents should keep what they learn secret. I disagree.
Here's why: obviously (who doesn't know this?:-) a patent is a grant of a (temporary) monopoly over a technology, business model, etc. That's quite a privilege to be handing someone -- monopolies can be and are often abused. So it follows, then, that someone who is seeking such a monopoly should have to risk something. I argue that they should risk the very thing they're attempting to patent. I argue that what they're attempting to patent should be disclosed to the public as a part of the patenting process.
This will have two effects:
Public peer-review of the patent will be essentially automatic. After all, the application is published for all the world to see as the initial part of the patent application process.
Because of the risk involved (the loss of what could otherwise be a "trade secret"), the applicant will bother only with those things that he believes very strongly he'll be able to get a patent on, even in the face of strong peer review. Hence, patents that are applied for will rarely be trivial or obvious, for not only would such an application be scorned by the public but the applicant would have his reputation tarnished (how important this part is depends on the applicant, of course. Some people/companies simply wouldn't care, while others would).
Will this cause many things that are currently being patented to instead be kept as trade secrets? Certainly. But I would say that such things should be trade secrets or, more appropriately, shouldn't be patented -- if it's obvious/trivial enough that it doesn't deserve a patent, then why should the patent office and the public waste their time looking at it in the context of a patent application? If it's that obvious/trivial, then someone else can implement it easily enough.
As for those things that are deserving of a patent but which would instead be kept as trade secrets, I'd remind you that individuals/companies already have the option of keeping anything they invent a trade secret. The system I describe would simply move the line between "better to be kept trade secret" and "better to patent" towards the former. Right now, as I believe is obvious to most of us, the line is skewed very much towards "better to patent" and the end result is a multitude of frivolous patents.
If they had been truly civilized with a proper (large) form of government, they would have had to prepare an environmental impact statement and thus the extinction would never have happened! If anything shows how important big government is, this does!
(That was sarcasm for those of you who didn't get it)
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The nature of laws, and what this implies...
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 1
Mod this down as obvious if you wish, but I'll say it anyway...
Ultimately, what is a law? It's a restriction on freedom.
What the Hague treaty does is to impose some of the laws of every country on earth (or, at least, the signatories) onto everyone. Now each person is subject to the superset that contains all said laws. The result? It minimizes freedom.
Worse, it means that individuals may be simultaneously subject to laws which are diametrically opposed, so the individual can in one country be convicted (or sued) for breaking a law forbidding an action that in his own (or some other) country requires that action.
While I believe the Hague treaty doesn't address criminal law in general (please correct me if I'm wrong), it's a very significant move in that direction. Its passage will set a precedent that will make remote enforcement of criminal law more palatable and thus more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true.
But today, when new road construction happens (and not construction to widen an existing road), what do they do?
They often turn it into a toll road. Ostensibly to "pay for the construction". But of course, that construction was probably already funded by taxes already. And the money collected doesn't actually go directly back into the road -- it goes into the "general fund". And I wouldn't doubt that some of that is diverted to "interested parties", like perhaps the contractor that constructed the road to begin with (indirectly, of course, after being suitably, um, "processed"), and the politicians that managed to make the deal happen to begin with.
Protesters won't.
Why? Because the cops can afford it, and the protesters usually can't.
And if real people have to hit the streets on either side, then the other side has an advantage.
End result: protests will become even less effective and more meaningless than they are now, because the police will have a lot less incentive to keep the violence down. They'll be able to use violence at will.
Not because the people don't want what you say they want. They do want it. But they can't have it, because they have no power anymore.
The UK is already beholden to the interests of the corporations. I dare say the same is true of most of Europe. The same is obviously true of Australia. It's true of every country that is even considering DMCA-like legislation.
So what does that leave? Homeschooling. And, as I said, once homeschooling gets popular (more precisely, once it threatens to get popular. Much easier and politically safer to make something illegal if it's not popular already), it'll be outlawed.
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Federal legislation like this is even worse in that it might affect not just public schools, but private schools as well. The bill itself refers to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 8801), section 14101, but I'm not aware of how to track that down (Google doesn't come up with much of interest).
If it refers strictly to public schools, then private institutions (and the home, for homeschoolers) might be the only place where a kid can really be free to learn. This, to me, is ironic and more than a little sad.
I expect two things to happen if bills like this pass:
I don't know about you guys, but it looks to me like the good 'ol USA is slowly turning into its former Communist enemy, the USSR. Oh, there are certainly distinctions (power in the hands of the corps versus power in the hands of the Communist leaders). But I think they are distinctions without a substantial difference.
I think this trend will continue. The laws will get worse over time for the individual. I suspect only armed revolt will be enough to change it, and that won't happen because the general population doesn't have sufficient military strength anymore, thanks to expensive (so the general population can't afford them) high-tech weapons that give the government (and thus the corporations, since they are roughly the same thing these days) a millions-to-one advantage in firepower.
And nobody from the outside would provide military aid to those revolting, since the corporations are multinational and have sufficient influence over every government that matters.
Reading Slashdot is depressing sometimes, because the problems discussed there are usually things we can't do a damned thing about. I have a large sense of inevitability of the corporate police state.
Sigh...
--
I think if I were paranoid about being hacked before being able to download the updates, I'd think seriously about booting the machine in single-user mode and then doing my downloads. Much less risk that way. But unfortunately, this method isn't of much use to those who aren't very familiar with Unix administration.
--
Yeah, but it's so much more satisfying these days, when you can have the gore setting cranked all the way up and see your enemies exploding into blood vapor when you hit then with the BFG, and all from the comfort of your own home! None of that actually having to work at it like the old days.
--
If you're heavily into aviation, then AVWeb (http://www.avweb.com) is a good site to visit. All sorts of good stuff there.
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The FTC will just say "look, Microsoft is already undergoing an antitrust trial, so siddown and shaddup".
The FTC hasn't done crap about protecting free trade in recent years, and I don't see that it's reasonable to expect them to do an about-face now.
--
This is why you want the archives to be mirrored across the world. This should happen automatically for any new content that appears on the site. Many here seem to be concerned about how electronic media formats (like DVD) tend towards obsolescence and aren't terribly resistant to destruction. In the computer world, I think the best safeguard against that is active maintenance of the mirror group. As long as at least a couple of sites remain active, the data will remain safe.
It seems obvious that the archives should be "append only". They'll grow over time. But I suspect storage technology improvements will remain ahead of the amount of data that need to be archived, at least for a reasonable amount of time.
--
Looks like the remnants of the ice comet Brennan sent crashing into Mars to me!
I'm glad we don't have to worry about those dangerous Martians anymore...
(For those who don't get the reference, read Protector, by Larry Niven)
--
Seems to me that you need three categories of submissions:
Papers/articles and peer-review responses can only be submitted by those given "peer-review" status. Such people can moderate any of the above categories. Discussion messages can be submitted by anyone and moderated by anyone.
Peer-review involves both moderating a submitted paper/article and submitting a response, the purpose of which is to justify the moderation. Discussion can be in response to peer-review or to the paper itself.
Peer-reviewers can be meta-moderated by other peer-reviewers, and a "credibility score" is kept for each peer-reviewer. This score is available for all to see, and the site should generate a list ordered by credibility.
It'll probably be necessary to compartmentalize the peer-reviewers by field, so that they can peer-review articles and papers submitted only by others in the same field (and can only meta-moderate people in the same field). It might be easier to just run multiple field-specific sites, but searching might be more powerful if they were combined.
I suppose there might also be a "credibility score" associated with everyone and computed strictly from moderation done to discussion messages, but it's important to keep that separate from the "credibility score" computed from the moderation of papers and peer-review responses.
How to grant peer-review status? Good question. One way would be to allow an existing peer-reviewer to "approve" a new peer-reviewer. Another might be to grant everyone the chance to submit one paper/article and, if it gets moderated high enough, they are granted peer-review status. This will probably require a lot more thought, so feel free to chime in!
Thoughts?
--
Yeah, okay, so perhaps that's not all that original. But you get the idea...
--
--
Fair enough. But the main difference is that as an individual, you get paid in exchange for the time and effort you expend on the company's behalf. Taxes against you are the same as taxes against your labor, which means that some of your labor goes to the government.
Whereas a company acts as the mechanism by which your efforts (and the efforts of many others) are converted into money -- when the company itself "pays taxes", it does so by charging a correspondingly higher price for its goods in order to offset the tax. And the end result is that its customers end up paying more, meaning that those people that (either as individuals or collectively as companies) purchase goods from your company must expend greater amounts of labor to afford your goods than they would without the tax.
So in the end, it really does go back to the individual, and it is ultimately the individual that pays, one way or another.
Point being that it makes no sense to me to say that a company "pays taxes" and is thus somehow equivalent to individuals in that regard. It's not the same thing at all -- the company itself isn't penalized by the payment of taxes except in terms of how doing so affects its ability to compete, and even in that case it's only in relative terms (relative to how much in the way of taxes its competitors have to pay).
--
Doesn't matter anyway...any taxes that Adobe pays come out of the pockets of its customers. Adobe itself doesn't take any losses as a result except perhaps that their prices aren't quite as competitive as a result.
--
Why can't these virus writers do something cool? Like install the SETI@home client on every infected machine? Or install something to DOS the RIAA/MPAA/Bad-guy-of-the-week (how about having the DOS daemon check Slashdot to determine who the current bad guy is)?
I'm sure that someone can come up with even more interesting things than this...
--
It's really weird to be reading this thread about Linux 2.4.7 when it has 247 articles at my current threshold. Now I have to upgrade to 2.4.7...
:-)
Ooops...guess I just blew my own luck by posting this! Looks like I'll have to wait for 2.4.8.
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Agreed. It would be interesting to know what can be learned from this particular failure, since it was a failure of the rocket, not of the sail.
After 50 years of messing around with rockets, you'd think we'd know how to build them to be cheap and reliable. That we're still struggling with this means that it's probably a very difficult problem.
Makes me wonder what the actual launch success rate of modern rockets is...
--
If I remember correctly, the DMCA passed by a voice vote, so there's no record of who supported it and who didn't. This was probably intentional. And if they did this, it's unlikely that they listened to any of their constituents (save the corporations, who seem to have drafted it) no matter how vocal. After all, they can "plausibly" deny that they voted for it...must have been the other reps that did, right?
Sigh...
--
Here's why: obviously (who doesn't know this?
This will have two effects:
Will this cause many things that are currently being patented to instead be kept as trade secrets? Certainly. But I would say that such things should be trade secrets or, more appropriately, shouldn't be patented -- if it's obvious/trivial enough that it doesn't deserve a patent, then why should the patent office and the public waste their time looking at it in the context of a patent application? If it's that obvious/trivial, then someone else can implement it easily enough.
As for those things that are deserving of a patent but which would instead be kept as trade secrets, I'd remind you that individuals/companies already have the option of keeping anything they invent a trade secret. The system I describe would simply move the line between "better to be kept trade secret" and "better to patent" towards the former. Right now, as I believe is obvious to most of us, the line is skewed very much towards "better to patent" and the end result is a multitude of frivolous patents.
--
If they had been truly civilized with a proper (large) form of government, they would have had to prepare an environmental impact statement and thus the extinction would never have happened! If anything shows how important big government is, this does!
(That was sarcasm for those of you who didn't get it)
--
Mod this down as obvious if you wish, but I'll say it anyway...
Ultimately, what is a law? It's a restriction on freedom.
What the Hague treaty does is to impose some of the laws of every country on earth (or, at least, the signatories) onto everyone. Now each person is subject to the superset that contains all said laws. The result? It minimizes freedom.
Worse, it means that individuals may be simultaneously subject to laws which are diametrically opposed, so the individual can in one country be convicted (or sued) for breaking a law forbidding an action that in his own (or some other) country requires that action.
While I believe the Hague treaty doesn't address criminal law in general (please correct me if I'm wrong), it's a very significant move in that direction. Its passage will set a precedent that will make remote enforcement of criminal law more palatable and thus more likely.
Bad stuff indeed.
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Why? So they can renew their license of Microsoft Power Policy Manager, of course!
What, you mean they don't control the power by going to
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The "Police Brutality Edition"?
LOL!
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