It is not about hiring people already living in California and plan to stay there, but attracting new people to California, and keep the people there who lifestyle/future plans are in trouble.
I think that is the concept you are missing.
Most people don't want to live in areas they feel unwanted.
Please see my response to KatAngel. I understand why this article is on Slashdot. You are basically telling me why this article is on Slashdot. I understand that. Hopefully someone will read this and not make a third post telling me why this article/summary is on Slashdot or how this affects Google.
The post to which I responded brought up a related but separate issue, which is that of workplace discrimination. I responded to that post and to that subject because in the case of homosexuals, I don't understand how their sex lives become workplace issues. It would have to become a workplace issue before anyone would know what they do behind closed doors in the privacy of their homes, and that would have to happen first before they could be discriminated against. So far no one has explained how this takes place or why the standard that heterosexual people are expected to follow (which amounts to "you do not discuss your sex life at work for fear of being fired or sued") should not apply equally to homosexual people.
I think the point is... if the laws are bad for homosexuals, homosexuals aren't going to live there in the first place. And you can't hire someone who's not there. Google is asking for a more inviting environment so that homosexual people will be more in the mind to move there if they're hired. It's about improving the pool of potential hirees.
It has nothing to do with how the business treats homosexuals, but rather, whether or not they even have the opportunity to treat them in any way at all.
The post to which I responded specifically mentioned discrimination and it was to this issue that I was speaking. I understand (at least mostly) how this article ended up on Slashdot. I did not understand the discrimination issue that the parent post (by StandardDeviant) raised.
Seriously? Jesus, try not to be completely dense. Imagine for a second that you have polka-dot skin, and place you'd like to work for happens to be in Plaidlandia, where people with polka-dot skin are reviled and discriminatory laws are written into the books against them. Would you take the job in Plaidlandia?
You can fill in other involuntary attributes, places, and such above as needed until a light dawns in your head. (The part of me that thinks that subtly is lost on the clueless really wants to mutter something about being a Jewish, German-speaking chemist in 1933 and immigrating to Germany here, but that seems over the top.:P)
Hell, I'm as straight as an arrow and Prop 8 gives me pause regards moving to silicon valley. I left Texas partially because I was tired of my work and income supporting an economy full of bigots with a government happy to cater to them, and moving to where a pile of assholes just wrote discrimination (of any sort, regardless of whether I would be affected by it) into their state constitution isn't high on my list of Good Moves.
What I don't understand is how this comes up at all. I'm straight, too, but I don't discuss my sex life with coworkers. It's just not their business. So, how are they being discriminated against unless they are bringing very personal and non-work-related matters to the office? Do homosexual people want to be able to discuss their intimate sex lives at work without repercussions? Because straight people cannot do that without fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Seems to me that equal, non-discriminatory treatment would mean that everyone leaves sexual, non-business matters at the door when they walk into the office. I suppose you can't have political movements and protests and large organizations and campaigns and controversy if it were done this way, and we act like we need those things for their own sake sometimes, so perhaps that's too simple?
The only thing I can think of would be if there is a civil union or some other marriage analog that affects taxes or benefits like health insurance. In that case, however, the matter is between the individual employee and the company HR department. If anyone at the HR department cannot respect the privacy of employees, they need to be fired. Otherwise, I'm at a loss as to how this even comes up at all. To me this is very simple and seems to be much ado about nothing, perhaps just because the subject itself tends to be controversial.
Only to a point -- The benefits of additional cores becomes less and less significant with the addition of more cores unless you're running multi-threaded applications -- and quite frankly, for consumer level software, there's not a lot floating around. I would wager more than four cores is probably a waste on a consumer PC.
I suspect that the "unless you're running multi-threaded applications" applies much more to Windows than it does to *nix. If it's important to you to have a single application use multiple cores, then this is true. However, a *nix system generally prefers to use multiple processes instead of multiple threads and so it tends to be inherently better at utilizing multiple cores, whether the authors of those programs thought of this or not. At least on my Linux system, I am quite satisfied with multiple cores and I would not want to go back to a single-core system even if it were as fast (by whatever metric) as my multiple cores put together. I say that even knowing that there is always overhead that prevents, say, a dual-core system from ever being twice as fast as a single-core with equivalent specs. It really is a great setup and Linux seems particularly good at being able to utilize the cores.
Well, let's face it, it's not like it was 10 years ago where every 8 months you could buy a PC that was practically double the speed of your current PC. I mean how long have we been sitting at the same speeds?
I don't know, multiple cores are pretty damned sweet, too.
I've always thought it would be a good idea to build up a website that listed a bill summary and allow people to vote themselves on the site and it matched them up with politicians with the similar voting records. It really wouldn't take a long time for people to log in, read a summary and vote and they could even read the full bill if they wanted. If the system was robust enough, you could send people an email with the summary and a link they can click on to vote yes or no. Most people sit down and read through email on a regular basis now and clicking a link in an email to vote wouldn't be too bad I don't think.
I think all that this would do is emphasize just how centrist (to avoid confusion, this does not mean "middle ground between Left and Right") our politicians are when compared to the general population.
The other bill they're pushing for, which I'll mention here because it also represents another process to improve our quality of legislation, is the One Subject at a Time Act [downsizedc.org]. It's pretty self-explanatory, and would end the use of "riders" - sneaking unpopular chunks of legislation (or pork) into other popular or necessary bills.
I've always thought that "riders" were a terrible idea and a sure way to encourage corruption. I like this solution because the only other workable one I've heard of would be to give the President a line-item veto. The line-item veto idea is flawed for a variety of reasons. For one, the power of the executive branch has already been expanded especially in the last 10 years or so; if anything it may be time for it to lose some power, not gain a new one. Another problem is that there is no guarantee the President will actually use a line-item veto, especially if the legislation in question was produced by a member of the same political party. A third issue is that this would require altering the Constitution and we have no guarantee that there would be no unintended consequences (or "intentional unintended consequences" if you get my drift) from this that would be very difficult to reverse in the future.
I fear that this may be like the Fair Tax Act. The Fair Tax Act is the most thoroughly-researched piece of legislation in history. The facts support it. The general population tends to support it (cue responses that don't know what "tends" does and does not mean). It has all the makings of legislation that should pass quickly and with little opposition. Yet, it would be the very first transfer of power from the federal government to the people that I have ever seen in my entire lifetime. Oddly enough, it hasn't gone anywhere. Here's to hoping that the One Subject at a Time Act won't have the same experience.
The first improvement would be removing the "Write the tax code by hand" requirement.
Why? Maybe it would give them an idea of just how ridicious the tax code really is. According to this the Federal tax code consists of 3.7 million words. By contrast, all seven Harry Potter novels only clock in at around 1.1 million words.
What's wrong with that picture? It really requires that much complexity to fund the Federal Government?
I think it was not so much a criticism of the idea as it is pointing out that it is a "fox guarding the henhouse" situation. Basically, short of a constitutional amendment requiring them to hand-write the tax code, they would just legislate it out of existence first chance they got.
It's better to first worry about whether an idea is sound and good. Only after deciding that does it really make sense to concern yourself with what it would take to bring it about, like a constitutional amendment in this case. The difficulty of doing a thing, alone, is not a valid argument against the soundness of an idea so long as it really could be done, which is true in this case. It does take a measure of courage to see and entertain possibilities like this despite knowing that these good things are also unlikely, but I believe that not succumbing to hopelessness is the beginning of real change.
What bothers me is that in Congress, the senators and representatives routinely vote on bills that they have not even read. They rely far too heavily on their staff to process and condense this information for them, which is flawed because we voted for and elected the representative, not his assistant.
And the representative chose the staff, and chose how much to rely on them.
If you don't like it, run for office yourself on a platform of not having your staff read bills and condense information for you, and you can test the theory of whether or not that is really as important to other voters as it clearly is to you.
I'm just curious as to whether you really consider this to be a constructive response.
The point is not the name of the person who reads a particular bill. The point is that the Founding Fathers intended for most of our experience with government to come from the state and local levels. This is a sound idea and I believe in it. But instead of that, we have a federal government that is so involved and so complex that the people running it have no hope of personally managing their own workload. When I say it bothers me that Congressmen don't read the bills they vote on, I am not saying they are lazy and that I could do a much better job (the absence of those claims from my post was your first clue). I am saying they are dealing with an unwieldy, overly complex system that does not need to be this way. They obviously need their staff to deal with the system as it is, so it's not a leap of faith to say that requiring the representatives to personally take care of thee matters would be a step in the direction of changing how the system currently is. That's all.
Sure, I could run for office and try to do things differently but it would accomplish next to nothing unless the culture itself changes. Other than a slightly more polite "shut up" I'm really wondering what you believe you are telling me that I don't already know or couldn't reason out. You really seem to have taken the most superficial interpretation possible of what I said and responded to it and I think you can do better than that.
Part of the reason for the United Stated Democratic-Republic. Is the fact that most people don't have time for full involvement in the government. While network neutrality may be a big issue for you for others they will take it or leave it. As for all the stuff that goes on.
What I find more annoying is the people who we hire to take care of our government is not there to vote for every bill that goes across, and it is widely accepted that they don't.
What bothers me is that in Congress, the senators and representatives routinely vote on bills that they have not even read. They rely far too heavily on their staff to process and condense this information for them, which is flawed because we voted for and elected the representative, not his assistant.
Not only do I think they should be required to read every bill on which they vote, I also think that each year they should be forced to copy down the entire tax code, by hand, before they are allowed to take any other action (I wish I could remember where I heard this idea). When that proves impossible perhaps we would see some improvements to the way things are done.
The problem with implementing a system like this is that similar-sounding yet completely different systems were used as a form of institutionalized racism in the past, typically referred to as "literacy tests", which had the sole purpose of preventing black people from voting. This kind of abuse is radically different from what I am advocating, but it would make my idea very easy to demagogue in the media.
No, your idea is not at all different from the abuse you described. You simply use a different function to decide who is similar enough to you to vote.
If I advocate centrally planned economy and toll barriers, will you conclude that I don't know enough about economy to be allowed to vote ? If I say that I'm for gun control, is that grounds to take my vote away ? Or if I'm against your plan because I consider any limitation in the ability to vote a step towards a dictatorship - and yes, that means felons in prison should be allowed to vote - does that mean that I'm clearly too idealistic to have a say in the government ?
Move to China if you want rule by elite, but please leave the remaining democracies alone; they are crumbling fast enough without you helping them along with your condescending "people shouldn't have a say in matters which concern them unless they can prove they're smart enough to satisfy me" bullshit.
You are responding to me as though I advocated a test of political viewpoints. What I pictured, and in fact what I said, was a civics test and not a political alignment test. There is a significant difference between the two. In the USA a civics test would include things like knowledge of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the purpose and original intent behind the Amendments including the powers that government does and does not possess under the Constitution, the concept of separation of powers and the purpose and role of the three branches of federal government, the concept of checks and balances and how the three branches of government are intended to accomplish this, things of that nature.
This is most definitely not an assessment of political views. You can be liberal or you can be conservative or anything in-between and a thorough understanding of the Constitution should not change that. If you are worried that it would, then I don't know what else to call that except to say that I sincerely question why you are insecure in your beliefs (I would compare it to how the Church felt about Galileo's telescope). If what "got you" was me saying that this may eliminate certain views that are based on faulty beliefs, I simply meant that if you seriously study i.e. the Constitution and find out that you were misinformed about what it says and does not say, and if this results in a change to your political views, then they needed to change anyway. There is nothing wrong with that unless you believe that acquiring new knowledge and evaluating your beliefs in light of the new knowledge is somehow a bad thing.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but many times I post ideas to Slashdot and I choose my words carefully, making sure I do not say anything I did not intend to say. I do this and then someone runs with that and assumes implications that I never intended and never said. I think benefit of doubt and assumption of good faith are valuable things, so I will assume that's what happened here and that this is not a deliberate straw man on your part. In that spirit, I ask you how anything I have said constitutes "rule by elite" or how this is condescending. It might be condescending and elitist if only the rich, or only a certain religion or a certain color were allowed to take such a civics test, but that is not what I am advocating and never was. What I am suggesting is something in which anyone could participate. Everyone would have their fair chance to pass this test. There could even be free, state-sponsored books and classes, available to everyone, so that anyone who cares en
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised
Well there is one way but people seem too stupid to utilize it. They'd rather keep voting in the incumbent because "he's done good things and has experience" or just blindly vote for the guy who shares the same party affiliation as them. Those of who are smart enough not to do this have our votes buried by those who aren't or by rigged electoral processes (gerrymandering in the US, I'm sure other countries have their own version).
This is not flamebait. This is rather obviously how he/she sincerely feels about the subject and there is nothing wrong with that. Disagreeing with it, even vehemently, still does not make it flamebait and still does not mean there is anything wrong with it. Flamebait is when the sole purpose of the post is to make people angry and upset and otherwise to get an emotional reaction. That's just not what happened here. Mods, please reverse this. I'm tired of the overall lower quality of moderation lately. Blatant examples like this used to be rare and they are increasingly common. It does not bode well for Slashdot and that's a shame because I really enjoy the site. I'm writing this betting that someone with mod points is tired of it too and willing to show it.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised
Well there is one way but people seem too stupid to utilize it. They'd rather keep voting in the incumbent because "he's done good things and has experience" or just blindly vote for the guy who shares the same party affiliation as them. Those of who are smart enough not to do this have our votes buried by those who aren't or by rigged electoral processes (gerrymandering in the US, I'm sure other countries have their own version).
I know what you mean. That's actually why I don't vote. I want to see a smaller, less powerful federal government. No one who is running for national office wants to do that, so none of them get my vote. This, for me, amounts to disenfranchisement, not de jure but de facto. The "debates" in the media are not real debate and do not include real dissent because the only controversy is concerning the purpose for which government is to be expanded (health care, for example). That's an outright propaganda tactic known as debate-framing and it's a shame it is not universally recognized as such.
What you mention is all too common. In addition to it, there is often also the mentality that "MY Congressman is great, it's all the others that need to go!" which fails when everyone else feels the same way.
I see two solutions to this that are actually doable. My idea from my previous post, which is that if even one citizen can objectively rigorously prove that a law has failed, that should cause the repeal of the law. I like this idea because it makes it possible to remove the politics from the equation. If the facts are clearly and demonstrably on your side, it should not matter whether or not there is enough political support to go wherever the facts may lead. Let the politics be reserved for situations that are not so clear-cut and cannot be objectively proven. This is the basic "use the right tool for the job" idea.
My other solution is that no one should be allowed to vote unless they can pass an extremely tough civics test. The idea is that you should demonstrate that you understand how the system works before you can be trusted to have a say in who should run it. I think this would eliminate a great deal of the excesses and abuses that we see today. Make this civics test comprehensive and very hard. If only a fraction of the population can pass it, then only a fraction is eligible to vote. If this is a bad thing, educate the rest of the voters and remove some of the unsound ideas on which their political views are based. The problem with implementing a system like this is that similar-sounding yet completely different systems were used as a form of institutionalized racism in the past, typically referred to as "literacy tests", which had the sole purpose of preventing black people from voting. This kind of abuse is radically different from what I am advocating, but it would make my idea very easy to demagogue in the media.
You say "destroy national sovereignty" (and all of the restrictions therein) like it's a bad thing.
You see restrictions where I see freedoms. Globalization has already created a race to the bottom for labor and environmental standards. Will our freedoms and rights be next in line? Will the United States be forced to adopt European restrictions on free speech? Will Europe be forced to adopt Islamic restrictions on free speech? Will the United States, Finland, Switzerland and Norway be forced to adopt stricter gun control laws?
What really bothers me about governments and large organizations in general is that they fail to understand the saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back." Governments almost never say "this sounded like a good idea at the time but it's just not working, things are getting worse, time to abandon this idea and try something else." If they do say that, it's over the course of decades or sometimes centuries even though the knowledge of better solutions (or at least that this solution isn't working) has been around for a long time.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised. If there were a way to get rid of otherwise legally valid laws that can be objectively proven to be counterproductive, not because enough voters put enough pressure on the legislators to repeal the law, but because at least one citizen can rigorously prove that it has failed, this would represent real progress.
On topic, while I see the good side of pointing out security holes, any time it goes to actively pentesting a site, the perpetrators need to be prosecuted; sure, they don't mean to break things, but a well intentioned idiot can cause a lot of damage, and what would it solve anyway? People who don't care about security won't change just because they know about a problem, they'll only secure things when forced.
That's very much like the point I was making. I especially agree about the "only secure things when forced". I don't like it but I recognize that this is the reality of the situation in many cases. To me, laws that prosecute people for computer intrusion represent the opposite of "when forced". Think of it this way: if the laws work perfectly and all intruders are either caught and imprisoned, or deterred because of fear of the law, then why bother to secure anything?
This is something that I believe others have explained better than I am likely to, but I'll try. Generally, laws are a way to manage things that we otherwise don't know what to do about. We don't know how to convince everyone to stop being violent, to stop raping or murdering, so we have laws to deal with the people who choose to do these things. This is so much better than nothing that it isn't even funny, but it is not a real solution to the problem of violence. Likewise, laws against computer intrusion are not a real solution to the problem of insecure systems. They can only deal with the people who break into them, and that's if the perpetrator is in a jurisdiction in which this is possible.
As complex as they are, computers and networks are still significantly simpler and easier to understand than human beings. We can describe and theorize and predict with great success every last thing that these machines can do; with human beings, we don't really even know what consciousness is. You don't even need perfect security or anything remotely like it; all you need to do is to make the average compromise difficult enough that it is no longer worthwhile. I think this is doable and that the only reason why it hasn't already happened is that it's not very important to us, collectively. In the meantime, laws that create a culture in which the criminals have several advantages are counterproductive. I think we can do better than that.
My ethics don't include taking undeserved abuse from someone for whom you are trying to do a significant favor when the favor is on a "take it or leave it" basis so no one is being coerced into anything. This is a situation where trying to do something good can easily get a person prosecuted. There are probably a lot of "white hats" who would help with these things, for free, if only their efforts were appreciated. Laws like this have a significant chilling effect.
The parallels to gun control are interesting. Criminals who are willing to commit armed robbery and murder and the like are not intimidated by illegal weapons charges. Law-abiding citizens are very much intimidated by illegal weapons charges. What's the result? Armed criminals and disarmed potential victims. There's a good reason why states that enact conceal-carry laws see declines in violent crime, because those laws represent a step away from that situation. Here you have corporations that want the law to protect them from computer intrusion. They got what they wanted. So now you have criminal "black hats" who obviously are not intimidated by computer intrusion charges and law-abiding "white hats" who risk prosecution if they try to do anything about it, just so an otherwise humiliated corporation can save face.
If trying to help them is not appreciated, then I think the proper, ethical response is to leave the corporations to their own devices. That is, to neither help them nor harm them in any way. If they suffer from an exploit that your skills could have prevented or mitigated, just accept that this is the decision they have made. I think it's a situation where people need to "come to their senses" and learn to be realistic, to raise the general consciousness and overcome old ideas like the "cops and robbers" mentality that have not been very successful in this new environment. I'd much rather see that than more clever solutions that don't really address the lack of understanding. These situations take time and, like most truly good things, attempts to speed it up or to force it to happen just makes it worse. It takes a degree of patience, the real kind, to understand and accept this without falling into the trap of the resentment of the non-ideal.
It's sad that nobody has thought to pass a law to protect digital good samaritans -- that is, people who discover and report (in good faith) security issues either to the people running the servers directly, or the vendor(s) of the software/hardware that is vulnerable
It will never happen, because "harm" is arguable, so they can accuse you of harm no matter what you do. You should always *always* report these things anonymously. Not doing so is... a learning experience.
If they're (the vulnerable site) going to be that way about it, maybe the solution is to stop reporting anything to them at all. I mean really, if you intend to do something good, why go where you're not wanted? Let them wonder why they've seen a sudden spike of $ACTIVITY and let them find and fix the flaws on their own. Let them explain to their users that they couldn't perform damage control/threat mitigation early on because they have soiled any kind of trust relationship between companies and the would-be white hats who could have tipped them off.
If you're going to start shooting messengers, you're going to start running out of messengers. Make sure you don't need their message before you do that. This sort of common sense seems to be the first loss whenever there is a "prosecute everyone!" mentality.
How do you limit someone's login attempts to an account without allowing an account to be denial of serviced?
Captcha - hurts young, old, and disabled users. It can also make it hard for normal users if poorly designed (as many are).
IP Limit - Very easy to bypass with a proxy list.
Hard Account Limits - Denial of service
Thus is the problem. How do you limit logins without hurting legitimate users?
One approach is to still allow the login but to insert artificial delays. Maybe your password cracker can guess several thousand passwords in one second; too bad, because the site will only allow you to try one every three seconds. Even a fairly weak password can be extremely difficult to guess this way, though it is no substitute for strong passwords that are never sent as cleartext.
Again, you may find all forms of DRM to be abhorrent, but the more moderate forms are acceptable to many.
That's because, as I explained, I find it to be abhorrent in principle. It's the practical implementation that the many find so acceptable. I won't mince words here; compromising principles not even for short-term gain, but worse, for no gain at all, on the grounds of "well it isn't really so bad (yet)", are the actions of weak-minded people who deserve what this inevitably leads to. Do it once and you prove that you and your beliefs and interests are compromisable. Prove that these are compromisable and you invite more of the same. Whether you are talking about nations or corporations, It is always a tiny, gradual, bit-by-bit encroachment and any particular "bit" never seems so bad at the time. Waiting until this happens and becomes entrenched is probably the worst time to resist it. With all of the examples provided by history, I can't believe anyone still doubts the inevitability of this process. Yet every time this comes up you always have the apologists who excuse the encroachment; their failure is that they are only looking at the immediate short-term and are not taking the idea to its full expression or at least asking "what precedent does this establish?".
DRM was not the result of overwhelming customer demand. DRM amounts to the corporations telling their customers how the market will be. This is backwards. It is the customers who should be telling the corporations how the market will be, with bankruptcy as the corporations' only option. I'll make my priorities clear to you: I would rather see every last member of the RIAA and MPAA and every last video game company go completely out of business than see the widespread acceptance of unnecessary limitations on freedom. Freedom is easily that precious.
To concern yourself with whether this form of DRM is a little bad while that one over there is quite agreeable is to miss the point. That's exactly the kind of shortsighted tunnel-vision that is hoped for by the people who want more control over you. Take my definition from my first paragraph. It is compromising sound principles, not even for short-term gain but for no gain at all, on the grounds of "well at present it's not that bad". Does this sound like the behavior of sane, rational people who are looking after their own interests?
It's like that saying, when you call things what they are everything becomes so much simpler. This is drastically more clear-cut than issues that cause half the amount of controversy.
The problem with most DRM implementations they are setup for products that are only entertainment related. It is tough to say that anyone who cannot use this product due to DRM restrictions is going to suffer from it.
Anyone who, acting in good faith, pays good money for any product that turns out to be unusable, when there was a reasonable expectation that it should be usable, has suffered. This is more true, not less, when the actual cause of the problem is not an honest mistake but a deliberate restriction. Any person who fits my description who is denied a refund has been defrauded. That's the essence of the phrase "defective by design".
Oh I am sorry you cannot play this game or play your music on Linux. But really with all the problems in the world this just seems really minor. It is akin to a wealthy man complaining about the economy and had to let go of one of his many maids.
There is an idea, well really it's more of an observation, that every big menacing problem was once a small problem that could have been easily dealt with. It's our lack of foresight and our unwillingness to take an idea to its completion that keeps us from seeing the problems while they are still small.
"I can't play this music on Linux" is a very small problem indeed. "I can't make any changes to any equipment I supposedly own or view any media for which I bought a license without first obtaining approval from several different companies" is a much larger problem. Both have the same nature. The only difference between them is degree. The first example is the small problem that is tough but not so hard to deal with. The second example is more like what you would get if the acceptability of this kind of control is taken to its conclusion. The problem is that this is very much a "frog soup" type of situation, so the time to start protesting it is now.
That's the beauty of having principles and considering these matters in terms of underlying principles. You don't have to wait until freedoms are taken away before you realize that this is where the situation is headed. You also don't have to worry about whether it's a big step towards reducing freedom or a baby-step towards reducing freedom before you realize that any step towards that is simply unacceptable.
Directly? Not very much. Indirectly? They're trying to pave the way for more DRM in general.
I think the problem is that we draw too many distinctions between this form of DRM and that form of DRM. The basic idea is that you either accept and agree with the philosophy of control underlying DRM or you see it as a threat to the freedom and assumption of good faith that most customers in most industries currently enjoy. If it's okay for media conglomerates to exert this kind of after-the-sale control of the market for music, it's also okay for software companies to exert this kind of after-the-sale control of the market for video games. It would be hypocritical to embrace one and resist the other.
The way I see it, this is not about DRM or SecuROM or gaming or the RIAA or the MPAA. This is about the acceptance or the rejection of an idea. Any successful DRM scheme in any industry is an argument for the acceptability of DRM in general. Taken to its conclusion, the acceptability of DRM and the legitimization of this kind of micromanaged control would eventually have DRM-like systems showing up in many industries, even those that do not depend on copyright law. What has the MAFIAA to do with gaming? You can bet that the gaming companies are looking at the lessons learned from systems like iTunes, such as why it was successful, and considering these things for their own DRM.
The part that bothers me is that you see this same pattern with most other systems of control. Remember the earlier PCs and the "Don't Copy That Floppy" campaigns and the severe antipiracy measures? They were not successful enough to become a widespread, enduring practice but the desire for control didn't just go away. The government is not the only large entity that is able to manipulate people and convince them that less freedom is somehow a good thing. So maybe people back then weren't prepared to accept it and here it comes rearing its ugly head once again. The pattern that bothers me is that this will keep coming up again and again, decade after decade, until it finally takes root, because the people pushing it know that once it is viewed as "just the way things are done" then it will be here to stay. Then the only "debate" will be about which forms of it are to be used and whether the FTC or anyone else will regulate it. If it ever becomes so legitimized, that would represent a significant victory for those who place short-term profits ahead of long-term freedoms.
These kind of stories swing both ways, and we've had literally dozens of "Finally the pendulum swings the other way moments" that have amounted to nothing more than blips across the radar...
But I can't help but optimistically wonder if this is the start of a trend fighting back against corporate abuse of us, the customer? For several years now, I (and probably you) have been inured to new stories about corporation X doing new thing Y to screw customer z, and the news story hasn't even batted an eyelash because we're not surprised.
Now the RIAA is backpedaling, and DRM is getting an appropriate scrutinizing. =) Its a good start to 2009!
The more the abuses go on, the bigger the backlash is going to be when it finally does happen. You could call it conservation of energy. The RIAA may actually be smart enough to understand that, albeit slow to admit and act on the truth of it, though I have my doubts that it will be this way with DRM. Where the RIAA had to go through channels (i.e. the legal system), I think DRM appeals too directly to the fantasy of market control for the content providers to give it up so easily.
Right now the average customer does not fully understand the restrictive technologies behind DRM. This is rather well-known and often discussed. What is not discussed as often is the philosophy of control and the assumption of bad faith that is behind it. If the content providers continue to embrace DRM and add more and more restrictions, and if this results in the general public receiving a rude awakening, it could be one of the best things to happen. If there is a backlash, what I hope is that it will be against excessive control and far-reaching restrictions in general and not against the particular tools (DRM, etc.) that are currently being used to bring this about. You know that saying about how the government should fear the people and the people should not fear their government? I believe that corporations should fear their customers for all of the same reasons. I'd rather see a large number of people get pissed off and decide that they're never going to put up with this shit anymore no matter how badly they wanted that movie or that video game, than see the FTC tell the media companies to play nice with their DRM. Any day.
While she may be a media icon and corporate power in her own right, do you think her handlers are silly enough to let her counter attack this guy?
She makes money from the media, and the media companies like the current patent and copyright laws. No one in that business is going to step forward and say 'the system is broken.' I hope she does, but I don't consider it very likely.
She's in a position where if she does have "handlers", they probably need her a lot more than she needs them.
Also, saying "this is an abuse of the system" isn't necessarily an admission that the system is broken, only that it is imperfect. She could take the stance that fighting this is equivalent to working within the system to correct an abuse of it and that therefore it's not so broken at all. I'm not saying I personally feel this way, only that this is not necessarily the losing proposition you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not about hiring people already living in California and plan to stay there, but attracting new people to California, and keep the people there who lifestyle/future plans are in trouble. I think that is the concept you are missing.
Most people don't want to live in areas they feel unwanted.
Please see my response to KatAngel. I understand why this article is on Slashdot. You are basically telling me why this article is on Slashdot. I understand that. Hopefully someone will read this and not make a third post telling me why this article/summary is on Slashdot or how this affects Google.
The post to which I responded brought up a related but separate issue, which is that of workplace discrimination. I responded to that post and to that subject because in the case of homosexuals, I don't understand how their sex lives become workplace issues. It would have to become a workplace issue before anyone would know what they do behind closed doors in the privacy of their homes, and that would have to happen first before they could be discriminated against. So far no one has explained how this takes place or why the standard that heterosexual people are expected to follow (which amounts to "you do not discuss your sex life at work for fear of being fired or sued") should not apply equally to homosexual people.
I think the point is... if the laws are bad for homosexuals, homosexuals aren't going to live there in the first place. And you can't hire someone who's not there. Google is asking for a more inviting environment so that homosexual people will be more in the mind to move there if they're hired. It's about improving the pool of potential hirees. It has nothing to do with how the business treats homosexuals, but rather, whether or not they even have the opportunity to treat them in any way at all.
The post to which I responded specifically mentioned discrimination and it was to this issue that I was speaking. I understand (at least mostly) how this article ended up on Slashdot. I did not understand the discrimination issue that the parent post (by StandardDeviant) raised.
Seriously? Jesus, try not to be completely dense. Imagine for a second that you have polka-dot skin, and place you'd like to work for happens to be in Plaidlandia, where people with polka-dot skin are reviled and discriminatory laws are written into the books against them. Would you take the job in Plaidlandia?
You can fill in other involuntary attributes, places, and such above as needed until a light dawns in your head. (The part of me that thinks that subtly is lost on the clueless really wants to mutter something about being a Jewish, German-speaking chemist in 1933 and immigrating to Germany here, but that seems over the top. :P)
Hell, I'm as straight as an arrow and Prop 8 gives me pause regards moving to silicon valley. I left Texas partially because I was tired of my work and income supporting an economy full of bigots with a government happy to cater to them, and moving to where a pile of assholes just wrote discrimination (of any sort, regardless of whether I would be affected by it) into their state constitution isn't high on my list of Good Moves.
What I don't understand is how this comes up at all. I'm straight, too, but I don't discuss my sex life with coworkers. It's just not their business. So, how are they being discriminated against unless they are bringing very personal and non-work-related matters to the office? Do homosexual people want to be able to discuss their intimate sex lives at work without repercussions? Because straight people cannot do that without fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Seems to me that equal, non-discriminatory treatment would mean that everyone leaves sexual, non-business matters at the door when they walk into the office. I suppose you can't have political movements and protests and large organizations and campaigns and controversy if it were done this way, and we act like we need those things for their own sake sometimes, so perhaps that's too simple?
The only thing I can think of would be if there is a civil union or some other marriage analog that affects taxes or benefits like health insurance. In that case, however, the matter is between the individual employee and the company HR department. If anyone at the HR department cannot respect the privacy of employees, they need to be fired. Otherwise, I'm at a loss as to how this even comes up at all. To me this is very simple and seems to be much ado about nothing, perhaps just because the subject itself tends to be controversial.
Only to a point -- The benefits of additional cores becomes less and less significant with the addition of more cores unless you're running multi-threaded applications -- and quite frankly, for consumer level software, there's not a lot floating around. I would wager more than four cores is probably a waste on a consumer PC.
I suspect that the "unless you're running multi-threaded applications" applies much more to Windows than it does to *nix. If it's important to you to have a single application use multiple cores, then this is true. However, a *nix system generally prefers to use multiple processes instead of multiple threads and so it tends to be inherently better at utilizing multiple cores, whether the authors of those programs thought of this or not. At least on my Linux system, I am quite satisfied with multiple cores and I would not want to go back to a single-core system even if it were as fast (by whatever metric) as my multiple cores put together. I say that even knowing that there is always overhead that prevents, say, a dual-core system from ever being twice as fast as a single-core with equivalent specs. It really is a great setup and Linux seems particularly good at being able to utilize the cores.
Well, let's face it, it's not like it was 10 years ago where every 8 months you could buy a PC that was practically double the speed of your current PC. I mean how long have we been sitting at the same speeds?
I don't know, multiple cores are pretty damned sweet, too.
I think all that this would do is emphasize just how centrist (to avoid confusion, this does not mean "middle ground between Left and Right") our politicians are when compared to the general population.
I've always thought that "riders" were a terrible idea and a sure way to encourage corruption. I like this solution because the only other workable one I've heard of would be to give the President a line-item veto. The line-item veto idea is flawed for a variety of reasons. For one, the power of the executive branch has already been expanded especially in the last 10 years or so; if anything it may be time for it to lose some power, not gain a new one. Another problem is that there is no guarantee the President will actually use a line-item veto, especially if the legislation in question was produced by a member of the same political party. A third issue is that this would require altering the Constitution and we have no guarantee that there would be no unintended consequences (or "intentional unintended consequences" if you get my drift) from this that would be very difficult to reverse in the future.
I fear that this may be like the Fair Tax Act. The Fair Tax Act is the most thoroughly-researched piece of legislation in history. The facts support it. The general population tends to support it (cue responses that don't know what "tends" does and does not mean). It has all the makings of legislation that should pass quickly and with little opposition. Yet, it would be the very first transfer of power from the federal government to the people that I have ever seen in my entire lifetime. Oddly enough, it hasn't gone anywhere. Here's to hoping that the One Subject at a Time Act won't have the same experience.
The first improvement would be removing the "Write the tax code by hand" requirement.
Why? Maybe it would give them an idea of just how ridicious the tax code really is. According to this the Federal tax code consists of 3.7 million words. By contrast, all seven Harry Potter novels only clock in at around 1.1 million words.
What's wrong with that picture? It really requires that much complexity to fund the Federal Government?
I think it was not so much a criticism of the idea as it is pointing out that it is a "fox guarding the henhouse" situation. Basically, short of a constitutional amendment requiring them to hand-write the tax code, they would just legislate it out of existence first chance they got.
It's better to first worry about whether an idea is sound and good. Only after deciding that does it really make sense to concern yourself with what it would take to bring it about, like a constitutional amendment in this case. The difficulty of doing a thing, alone, is not a valid argument against the soundness of an idea so long as it really could be done, which is true in this case. It does take a measure of courage to see and entertain possibilities like this despite knowing that these good things are also unlikely, but I believe that not succumbing to hopelessness is the beginning of real change.
And the representative chose the staff, and chose how much to rely on them.
If you don't like it, run for office yourself on a platform of not having your staff read bills and condense information for you, and you can test the theory of whether or not that is really as important to other voters as it clearly is to you.
I'm just curious as to whether you really consider this to be a constructive response.
The point is not the name of the person who reads a particular bill. The point is that the Founding Fathers intended for most of our experience with government to come from the state and local levels. This is a sound idea and I believe in it. But instead of that, we have a federal government that is so involved and so complex that the people running it have no hope of personally managing their own workload. When I say it bothers me that Congressmen don't read the bills they vote on, I am not saying they are lazy and that I could do a much better job (the absence of those claims from my post was your first clue). I am saying they are dealing with an unwieldy, overly complex system that does not need to be this way. They obviously need their staff to deal with the system as it is, so it's not a leap of faith to say that requiring the representatives to personally take care of thee matters would be a step in the direction of changing how the system currently is. That's all.
Sure, I could run for office and try to do things differently but it would accomplish next to nothing unless the culture itself changes. Other than a slightly more polite "shut up" I'm really wondering what you believe you are telling me that I don't already know or couldn't reason out. You really seem to have taken the most superficial interpretation possible of what I said and responded to it and I think you can do better than that.
Part of the reason for the United Stated Democratic-Republic. Is the fact that most people don't have time for full involvement in the government. While network neutrality may be a big issue for you for others they will take it or leave it. As for all the stuff that goes on. What I find more annoying is the people who we hire to take care of our government is not there to vote for every bill that goes across, and it is widely accepted that they don't.
What bothers me is that in Congress, the senators and representatives routinely vote on bills that they have not even read. They rely far too heavily on their staff to process and condense this information for them, which is flawed because we voted for and elected the representative, not his assistant.
Not only do I think they should be required to read every bill on which they vote, I also think that each year they should be forced to copy down the entire tax code, by hand, before they are allowed to take any other action (I wish I could remember where I heard this idea). When that proves impossible perhaps we would see some improvements to the way things are done.
No, your idea is not at all different from the abuse you described. You simply use a different function to decide who is similar enough to you to vote.
If I advocate centrally planned economy and toll barriers, will you conclude that I don't know enough about economy to be allowed to vote ? If I say that I'm for gun control, is that grounds to take my vote away ? Or if I'm against your plan because I consider any limitation in the ability to vote a step towards a dictatorship - and yes, that means felons in prison should be allowed to vote - does that mean that I'm clearly too idealistic to have a say in the government ?
Move to China if you want rule by elite, but please leave the remaining democracies alone; they are crumbling fast enough without you helping them along with your condescending "people shouldn't have a say in matters which concern them unless they can prove they're smart enough to satisfy me" bullshit.
You are responding to me as though I advocated a test of political viewpoints. What I pictured, and in fact what I said, was a civics test and not a political alignment test. There is a significant difference between the two. In the USA a civics test would include things like knowledge of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the purpose and original intent behind the Amendments including the powers that government does and does not possess under the Constitution, the concept of separation of powers and the purpose and role of the three branches of federal government, the concept of checks and balances and how the three branches of government are intended to accomplish this, things of that nature.
This is most definitely not an assessment of political views. You can be liberal or you can be conservative or anything in-between and a thorough understanding of the Constitution should not change that. If you are worried that it would, then I don't know what else to call that except to say that I sincerely question why you are insecure in your beliefs (I would compare it to how the Church felt about Galileo's telescope). If what "got you" was me saying that this may eliminate certain views that are based on faulty beliefs, I simply meant that if you seriously study i.e. the Constitution and find out that you were misinformed about what it says and does not say, and if this results in a change to your political views, then they needed to change anyway. There is nothing wrong with that unless you believe that acquiring new knowledge and evaluating your beliefs in light of the new knowledge is somehow a bad thing.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but many times I post ideas to Slashdot and I choose my words carefully, making sure I do not say anything I did not intend to say. I do this and then someone runs with that and assumes implications that I never intended and never said. I think benefit of doubt and assumption of good faith are valuable things, so I will assume that's what happened here and that this is not a deliberate straw man on your part. In that spirit, I ask you how anything I have said constitutes "rule by elite" or how this is condescending. It might be condescending and elitist if only the rich, or only a certain religion or a certain color were allowed to take such a civics test, but that is not what I am advocating and never was. What I am suggesting is something in which anyone could participate. Everyone would have their fair chance to pass this test. There could even be free, state-sponsored books and classes, available to everyone, so that anyone who cares en
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised
Well there is one way but people seem too stupid to utilize it. They'd rather keep voting in the incumbent because "he's done good things and has experience" or just blindly vote for the guy who shares the same party affiliation as them. Those of who are smart enough not to do this have our votes buried by those who aren't or by rigged electoral processes (gerrymandering in the US, I'm sure other countries have their own version).
This is not flamebait. This is rather obviously how he/she sincerely feels about the subject and there is nothing wrong with that. Disagreeing with it, even vehemently, still does not make it flamebait and still does not mean there is anything wrong with it. Flamebait is when the sole purpose of the post is to make people angry and upset and otherwise to get an emotional reaction. That's just not what happened here. Mods, please reverse this. I'm tired of the overall lower quality of moderation lately. Blatant examples like this used to be rare and they are increasingly common. It does not bode well for Slashdot and that's a shame because I really enjoy the site. I'm writing this betting that someone with mod points is tired of it too and willing to show it.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised
Well there is one way but people seem too stupid to utilize it. They'd rather keep voting in the incumbent because "he's done good things and has experience" or just blindly vote for the guy who shares the same party affiliation as them. Those of who are smart enough not to do this have our votes buried by those who aren't or by rigged electoral processes (gerrymandering in the US, I'm sure other countries have their own version).
I know what you mean. That's actually why I don't vote. I want to see a smaller, less powerful federal government. No one who is running for national office wants to do that, so none of them get my vote. This, for me, amounts to disenfranchisement, not de jure but de facto. The "debates" in the media are not real debate and do not include real dissent because the only controversy is concerning the purpose for which government is to be expanded (health care, for example). That's an outright propaganda tactic known as debate-framing and it's a shame it is not universally recognized as such.
What you mention is all too common. In addition to it, there is often also the mentality that "MY Congressman is great, it's all the others that need to go!" which fails when everyone else feels the same way.
I see two solutions to this that are actually doable. My idea from my previous post, which is that if even one citizen can objectively rigorously prove that a law has failed, that should cause the repeal of the law. I like this idea because it makes it possible to remove the politics from the equation. If the facts are clearly and demonstrably on your side, it should not matter whether or not there is enough political support to go wherever the facts may lead. Let the politics be reserved for situations that are not so clear-cut and cannot be objectively proven. This is the basic "use the right tool for the job" idea.
My other solution is that no one should be allowed to vote unless they can pass an extremely tough civics test. The idea is that you should demonstrate that you understand how the system works before you can be trusted to have a say in who should run it. I think this would eliminate a great deal of the excesses and abuses that we see today. Make this civics test comprehensive and very hard. If only a fraction of the population can pass it, then only a fraction is eligible to vote. If this is a bad thing, educate the rest of the voters and remove some of the unsound ideas on which their political views are based. The problem with implementing a system like this is that similar-sounding yet completely different systems were used as a form of institutionalized racism in the past, typically referred to as "literacy tests", which had the sole purpose of preventing black people from voting. This kind of abuse is radically different from what I am advocating, but it would make my idea very easy to demagogue in the media.
You say "destroy national sovereignty" (and all of the restrictions therein) like it's a bad thing.
You see restrictions where I see freedoms. Globalization has already created a race to the bottom for labor and environmental standards. Will our freedoms and rights be next in line? Will the United States be forced to adopt European restrictions on free speech? Will Europe be forced to adopt Islamic restrictions on free speech? Will the United States, Finland, Switzerland and Norway be forced to adopt stricter gun control laws?
What really bothers me about governments and large organizations in general is that they fail to understand the saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back." Governments almost never say "this sounded like a good idea at the time but it's just not working, things are getting worse, time to abandon this idea and try something else." If they do say that, it's over the course of decades or sometimes centuries even though the knowledge of better solutions (or at least that this solution isn't working) has been around for a long time.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised. If there were a way to get rid of otherwise legally valid laws that can be objectively proven to be counterproductive, not because enough voters put enough pressure on the legislators to repeal the law, but because at least one citizen can rigorously prove that it has failed, this would represent real progress.
That's very much like the point I was making. I especially agree about the "only secure things when forced". I don't like it but I recognize that this is the reality of the situation in many cases. To me, laws that prosecute people for computer intrusion represent the opposite of "when forced". Think of it this way: if the laws work perfectly and all intruders are either caught and imprisoned, or deterred because of fear of the law, then why bother to secure anything?
This is something that I believe others have explained better than I am likely to, but I'll try. Generally, laws are a way to manage things that we otherwise don't know what to do about. We don't know how to convince everyone to stop being violent, to stop raping or murdering, so we have laws to deal with the people who choose to do these things. This is so much better than nothing that it isn't even funny, but it is not a real solution to the problem of violence. Likewise, laws against computer intrusion are not a real solution to the problem of insecure systems. They can only deal with the people who break into them, and that's if the perpetrator is in a jurisdiction in which this is possible.
As complex as they are, computers and networks are still significantly simpler and easier to understand than human beings. We can describe and theorize and predict with great success every last thing that these machines can do; with human beings, we don't really even know what consciousness is. You don't even need perfect security or anything remotely like it; all you need to do is to make the average compromise difficult enough that it is no longer worthwhile. I think this is doable and that the only reason why it hasn't already happened is that it's not very important to us, collectively. In the meantime, laws that create a culture in which the criminals have several advantages are counterproductive. I think we can do better than that.
My ethics don't include taking undeserved abuse from someone for whom you are trying to do a significant favor when the favor is on a "take it or leave it" basis so no one is being coerced into anything. This is a situation where trying to do something good can easily get a person prosecuted. There are probably a lot of "white hats" who would help with these things, for free, if only their efforts were appreciated. Laws like this have a significant chilling effect.
The parallels to gun control are interesting. Criminals who are willing to commit armed robbery and murder and the like are not intimidated by illegal weapons charges. Law-abiding citizens are very much intimidated by illegal weapons charges. What's the result? Armed criminals and disarmed potential victims. There's a good reason why states that enact conceal-carry laws see declines in violent crime, because those laws represent a step away from that situation. Here you have corporations that want the law to protect them from computer intrusion. They got what they wanted. So now you have criminal "black hats" who obviously are not intimidated by computer intrusion charges and law-abiding "white hats" who risk prosecution if they try to do anything about it, just so an otherwise humiliated corporation can save face.
If trying to help them is not appreciated, then I think the proper, ethical response is to leave the corporations to their own devices. That is, to neither help them nor harm them in any way. If they suffer from an exploit that your skills could have prevented or mitigated, just accept that this is the decision they have made. I think it's a situation where people need to "come to their senses" and learn to be realistic, to raise the general consciousness and overcome old ideas like the "cops and robbers" mentality that have not been very successful in this new environment. I'd much rather see that than more clever solutions that don't really address the lack of understanding. These situations take time and, like most truly good things, attempts to speed it up or to force it to happen just makes it worse. It takes a degree of patience, the real kind, to understand and accept this without falling into the trap of the resentment of the non-ideal.
If they're (the vulnerable site) going to be that way about it, maybe the solution is to stop reporting anything to them at all
Oh, no no no. You report it, just to different people. :-P
"To them" was a key component of that sentence. The implication that you have explicitly stated was intentional.
It's sad that nobody has thought to pass a law to protect digital good samaritans -- that is, people who discover and report (in good faith) security issues either to the people running the servers directly, or the vendor(s) of the software/hardware that is vulnerable
It will never happen, because "harm" is arguable, so they can accuse you of harm no matter what you do. You should always *always* report these things anonymously. Not doing so is... a learning experience.
If they're (the vulnerable site) going to be that way about it, maybe the solution is to stop reporting anything to them at all. I mean really, if you intend to do something good, why go where you're not wanted? Let them wonder why they've seen a sudden spike of $ACTIVITY and let them find and fix the flaws on their own. Let them explain to their users that they couldn't perform damage control/threat mitigation early on because they have soiled any kind of trust relationship between companies and the would-be white hats who could have tipped them off.
If you're going to start shooting messengers, you're going to start running out of messengers. Make sure you don't need their message before you do that. This sort of common sense seems to be the first loss whenever there is a "prosecute everyone!" mentality.
This is one of my favourite security conundrums.
How do you limit someone's login attempts to an account without allowing an account to be denial of serviced?
Captcha - hurts young, old, and disabled users. It can also make it hard for normal users if poorly designed (as many are).
IP Limit - Very easy to bypass with a proxy list.
Hard Account Limits - Denial of service
Thus is the problem. How do you limit logins without hurting legitimate users?
One approach is to still allow the login but to insert artificial delays. Maybe your password cracker can guess several thousand passwords in one second; too bad, because the site will only allow you to try one every three seconds. Even a fairly weak password can be extremely difficult to guess this way, though it is no substitute for strong passwords that are never sent as cleartext.
Sorry, I had to do it just once.
That's because, as I explained, I find it to be abhorrent in principle. It's the practical implementation that the many find so acceptable. I won't mince words here; compromising principles not even for short-term gain, but worse, for no gain at all, on the grounds of "well it isn't really so bad (yet)", are the actions of weak-minded people who deserve what this inevitably leads to. Do it once and you prove that you and your beliefs and interests are compromisable. Prove that these are compromisable and you invite more of the same. Whether you are talking about nations or corporations, It is always a tiny, gradual, bit-by-bit encroachment and any particular "bit" never seems so bad at the time. Waiting until this happens and becomes entrenched is probably the worst time to resist it. With all of the examples provided by history, I can't believe anyone still doubts the inevitability of this process. Yet every time this comes up you always have the apologists who excuse the encroachment; their failure is that they are only looking at the immediate short-term and are not taking the idea to its full expression or at least asking "what precedent does this establish?".
DRM was not the result of overwhelming customer demand. DRM amounts to the corporations telling their customers how the market will be. This is backwards. It is the customers who should be telling the corporations how the market will be, with bankruptcy as the corporations' only option. I'll make my priorities clear to you: I would rather see every last member of the RIAA and MPAA and every last video game company go completely out of business than see the widespread acceptance of unnecessary limitations on freedom. Freedom is easily that precious.
To concern yourself with whether this form of DRM is a little bad while that one over there is quite agreeable is to miss the point. That's exactly the kind of shortsighted tunnel-vision that is hoped for by the people who want more control over you. Take my definition from my first paragraph. It is compromising sound principles, not even for short-term gain but for no gain at all, on the grounds of "well at present it's not that bad". Does this sound like the behavior of sane, rational people who are looking after their own interests?
It's like that saying, when you call things what they are everything becomes so much simpler. This is drastically more clear-cut than issues that cause half the amount of controversy.
Anyone who, acting in good faith, pays good money for any product that turns out to be unusable, when there was a reasonable expectation that it should be usable, has suffered. This is more true, not less, when the actual cause of the problem is not an honest mistake but a deliberate restriction. Any person who fits my description who is denied a refund has been defrauded. That's the essence of the phrase "defective by design".
There is an idea, well really it's more of an observation, that every big menacing problem was once a small problem that could have been easily dealt with. It's our lack of foresight and our unwillingness to take an idea to its completion that keeps us from seeing the problems while they are still small.
"I can't play this music on Linux" is a very small problem indeed. "I can't make any changes to any equipment I supposedly own or view any media for which I bought a license without first obtaining approval from several different companies" is a much larger problem. Both have the same nature. The only difference between them is degree. The first example is the small problem that is tough but not so hard to deal with. The second example is more like what you would get if the acceptability of this kind of control is taken to its conclusion. The problem is that this is very much a "frog soup" type of situation, so the time to start protesting it is now.
That's the beauty of having principles and considering these matters in terms of underlying principles. You don't have to wait until freedoms are taken away before you realize that this is where the situation is headed. You also don't have to worry about whether it's a big step towards reducing freedom or a baby-step towards reducing freedom before you realize that any step towards that is simply unacceptable.
What does the MAFIAA have to do with gaming DRM?
Directly? Not very much. Indirectly? They're trying to pave the way for more DRM in general.
I think the problem is that we draw too many distinctions between this form of DRM and that form of DRM. The basic idea is that you either accept and agree with the philosophy of control underlying DRM or you see it as a threat to the freedom and assumption of good faith that most customers in most industries currently enjoy. If it's okay for media conglomerates to exert this kind of after-the-sale control of the market for music, it's also okay for software companies to exert this kind of after-the-sale control of the market for video games. It would be hypocritical to embrace one and resist the other.
The way I see it, this is not about DRM or SecuROM or gaming or the RIAA or the MPAA. This is about the acceptance or the rejection of an idea. Any successful DRM scheme in any industry is an argument for the acceptability of DRM in general. Taken to its conclusion, the acceptability of DRM and the legitimization of this kind of micromanaged control would eventually have DRM-like systems showing up in many industries, even those that do not depend on copyright law. What has the MAFIAA to do with gaming? You can bet that the gaming companies are looking at the lessons learned from systems like iTunes, such as why it was successful, and considering these things for their own DRM.
The part that bothers me is that you see this same pattern with most other systems of control. Remember the earlier PCs and the "Don't Copy That Floppy" campaigns and the severe antipiracy measures? They were not successful enough to become a widespread, enduring practice but the desire for control didn't just go away. The government is not the only large entity that is able to manipulate people and convince them that less freedom is somehow a good thing. So maybe people back then weren't prepared to accept it and here it comes rearing its ugly head once again. The pattern that bothers me is that this will keep coming up again and again, decade after decade, until it finally takes root, because the people pushing it know that once it is viewed as "just the way things are done" then it will be here to stay. Then the only "debate" will be about which forms of it are to be used and whether the FTC or anyone else will regulate it. If it ever becomes so legitimized, that would represent a significant victory for those who place short-term profits ahead of long-term freedoms.
These kind of stories swing both ways, and we've had literally dozens of "Finally the pendulum swings the other way moments" that have amounted to nothing more than blips across the radar... But I can't help but optimistically wonder if this is the start of a trend fighting back against corporate abuse of us, the customer? For several years now, I (and probably you) have been inured to new stories about corporation X doing new thing Y to screw customer z, and the news story hasn't even batted an eyelash because we're not surprised. Now the RIAA is backpedaling, and DRM is getting an appropriate scrutinizing. =) Its a good start to 2009!
The more the abuses go on, the bigger the backlash is going to be when it finally does happen. You could call it conservation of energy. The RIAA may actually be smart enough to understand that, albeit slow to admit and act on the truth of it, though I have my doubts that it will be this way with DRM. Where the RIAA had to go through channels (i.e. the legal system), I think DRM appeals too directly to the fantasy of market control for the content providers to give it up so easily.
Right now the average customer does not fully understand the restrictive technologies behind DRM. This is rather well-known and often discussed. What is not discussed as often is the philosophy of control and the assumption of bad faith that is behind it. If the content providers continue to embrace DRM and add more and more restrictions, and if this results in the general public receiving a rude awakening, it could be one of the best things to happen. If there is a backlash, what I hope is that it will be against excessive control and far-reaching restrictions in general and not against the particular tools (DRM, etc.) that are currently being used to bring this about. You know that saying about how the government should fear the people and the people should not fear their government? I believe that corporations should fear their customers for all of the same reasons. I'd rather see a large number of people get pissed off and decide that they're never going to put up with this shit anymore no matter how badly they wanted that movie or that video game, than see the FTC tell the media companies to play nice with their DRM. Any day.
While she may be a media icon and corporate power in her own right, do you think her handlers are silly enough to let her counter attack this guy? She makes money from the media, and the media companies like the current patent and copyright laws. No one in that business is going to step forward and say 'the system is broken.' I hope she does, but I don't consider it very likely.
She's in a position where if she does have "handlers", they probably need her a lot more than she needs them.
Also, saying "this is an abuse of the system" isn't necessarily an admission that the system is broken, only that it is imperfect. She could take the stance that fighting this is equivalent to working within the system to correct an abuse of it and that therefore it's not so broken at all. I'm not saying I personally feel this way, only that this is not necessarily the losing proposition you describe.