Do away with the patent system.
Get rid of copyright while you're at it.
A non-renewable copyright of five to ten years, which is valid only if owned by a natural (living, breathing, non-corporate) person, and becomes fully public domain at expiration... that might not be such a bad thing.
I do not know how much more the world must suffer before the power that be wakes up to the fact that the patent system is hopelessly broken.
They are quite awake to it. Being awake and aware of the situation, they (the monied interests who make the important decisions) realized long ago that the current broken-ness serves their interests.
It is only the little guys, the nobodies like you and I, who might want to protect ourselves using techniques that never should have been patentable. Everyone else either collects a check or purchases a license for a trivial, infinitessimal portion of their net worth.
I think for anyone paying attention to the subject of privacy, it is pretty apparent that tyrannical voyeurism is a State Vice -- behind which are packs of ravenous fiends that will stop at nothing short of pharisaic omniscience. Long before one method of 'evasion' (self defense) becomes popular among the masses, these fiends are devising new countermeasures to foil them. Already, they want to spy on us through household devices. It seems a time is coming when options are scarce and opting out will be difficult or impossible. And all they seemingly need to do to pacify us is whisper in a soothing tone words like "transparency"". Yes, transparency, a simplex protocol for the masses.
The scary part is, the Panopticon was intended to be a prison.
In the near future, prison won't be place you send people to. It will be a place you extend to them. Naturally you will be guilty until proven innocent, and since you cannot prove a negative, well, that narrows it down. After all, you might be up to no good.
All we get is the first sentence of an article copy-and-pasted as a summary now? Does the submitter think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Why should we care about this? What are the implications?
Can't we just turn the whole thing over to a bot and be done with it?
No, we can't. At this time, with the current state-of-the-art in software development, it's just too damned difficult and expensive to cause a bot to randomly produce so many spelling and grammatical errors.
Spelling errors alone would be easy, but not grammatical errors such as using a correctly spelled word in the wrong way or understanding the importance of context. We cannot easily produce this kind of AI.
This is only one company. If you didn't already know origin are giant dicks, but they are the only ones that do this. Sign up with any other retailer and meter provider and this will not happen. Just use metering dynamics or agl and they will look after your data.
That will inevitably change, just as soon as a slick salesman gives them a nice pitch about how such data can be monetized. It is only a matter of time. If the current management won't ever consider it under any circumstances no matter how much money they are offered (unlikely), future management will. Once it becomes a revenue stream, it will be depended upon as part of the budget and will not be reversed. "We will remove this revenue stream to fulfill non-material values" has never been popular among shareholders, however wise.
It is a general principle of inertia and inevitability that, for some reason, continues to be poorly understood by too many. You see the same thing with the legal system (the US income tax was "a temporary wartime measure").
The most telling mark of such events is that they are pushed by the institution and not the result of overwhelming demand by its customers/constituents.
So.... You actually believed them? That is slightly naive isn't it?
Info=$$$ It is always been that way, and will always be that way. Anyone knows that, so it is a pretty stupid idea to have yourself monitored that way.
No matter what the fanboys say. Smartmeters are for dumb people (assuming one has a choice).
What is next, smart-tv's, smart browsers, smart shoes that tell where you are walking?
To see these things coming before they actually happen is a great way to be told that your tinfoil hat is too tight.
That's why this kind of understanding (of what should be obvious) is so rarely appreciated. It belongs to a small minority who know their reasoning is sound with no concern for popularity. That's not the way I would have it, but that's the way it is.
It's not even a result of violating the API changes; it's a result of the redistribution of the Twitter data, which has been technically verboten all along, but is only getting cracked down on now (along with everything else.)
Yeah that's how it generally works. You let it go on for a while... then it builds momentum... then it goes on more and more.. then suddenly you decide to "crack down" on it now that lots of people have become used to it.
It's like the way government deals with tragedies. Years earlier, someone may have tried to tell them "you know, this procedure is unsafe, if it does go wrong someone could really get hurt... " and the answer is along the lines of "yeah yeah yeah, don't call us, we'll call you mmmkay?" Then one day it finally happens and someone gets hurt, maimed, or killed. Then the same government goes nuts, saying "HOLY SHIT! Somebody got hurt?!?! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!"
I guess prevention just isn't as sexy as overreaction?
Twitter has served and never will serve any useful purpose.
Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems. I would say Twitter does not hold a monopoly on this kind of communication. It was available prior to Twitter and will be there after Twitter is long forgotten. Twitter is a marketing phenomenon. It gives the externally-directed types (sheeple, the majority, people who vote for the candidate with the biggest ad budget, whatever you like to call them) something to rally around. That there are so many other like-minded users convinces them to stay.
The minority who don't jump on bandwagons might or might not use it, but trying to rally them around a brand name as a group is like herding cats.
Having said that, I have never once used Twitter or visited their site. For me personally, it has no appeal. I can easily see how a corporation wants to be a major "go to" place and hoard user-submitted data (which they now own) that cannot easily be transferred to any similar site in a standardized way, but I don't see why I should join them.
And no-one really cares about whether entertainment is "decentralized" or using "open standards"
No, they don't care. That's why when they are exploited or mistreated by the centralized basket they've put all their eggs into, I have no sympathy for them. They put no serious effort into the matter; that they got anything of value (to them) out of it at all means they have still come out ahead. There is no valid basis for complaint because there is no victim here.
as long as they don't have to think
Thinking: the one case where a great privilege is commonly viewed as some kind of terrible burden.
Sure, entertainment is nice, but escapism is an abuse of it, the same way one might abuse a drug instead of merely using it. In both cases the result of repeated abuse is the same: a weaker, more petty person who is less and less able to deal with life. Not to mention that bread and circus is an ancient tactic which has been in use for so long because it is effective. Placate the masses with some transient, empty thing and they will love you for it. It has always been that way. That this no longer involves live gladiators hacking each other to death with swords and axes is progress, I suppose.
Don't worry, they have some of the best working on that one. All they have to do is raise a big enough stink over enough time and artificially generate enough of an outcry. Then they will manage to "harmonize" all of the "security laws" the same way they have internationally harmonized so many copyright laws.
Agreed. And we lose all the window managers, and if you want to write a new one, too bad! You have to write a compositor instead! And don't get me started about the decorations being controlled by the app instead of the WM. Grrr...
Anyone who has ever used Lotus Notes on WinXP can understand why that's a terrible idea.
"Oh is it checking for new mail? Yeah I can tell because the window is blank, featureless, and won't respond to input for several seconds..." Letting the apps have this control is why so many Windows systems feel subjectively sluggish and less responsive. At least when you're used to X with a low-latency kernel.
I'm aware that it is possible to write Windows applications that don't suffer this problem, so it's not necessarily a failing in Windows per se, but it is a design decision that leaves open an undesirable possibility that doesn't need to be there.
Because they have a computer and can make use Google to go the the interwebs.
They are fully capable of watching cat videos on The Youtube and are fully versed on the pros and cons of PC vs iPhone.
Also, they have a brother who is a hacker on counter strike.
Yes, arrogance/pridefulness is just about the only explanation. They scratch the surface and think they've conquered the world. It's the only way people think their ignorance is just as good as someone else's knowledge, to borrow a phrase from Asimov.
He does not have to be a moron.
He could be one of the many people I have met of around average intelligence with out enough tech knowledge to fill a thimble.
You know the people.
He probably got here by typing "slashdot.org" into Google and clicking on the first link.
Sure thing - I do know the people. They have one trait that makes no sense whatsoever. If they would question whether it makes sense, I believe they would abandon it, but sadly even a minor amount of introspection is... unpopular these days. I'll explain it with a counter-example:
I do not have enough neurosurgery knowledge to fill a thimble. It follows that you won't see me on medical forums, making claims and taking positions and displaying strong opinions about brain surgery. If I went to such forums at all, I might ask questions in the humble manner of one seeking to learn from those possessing knowledge I know I don't have, but that would be the limit. After all, I wouldn't have the background, the experience, or the education (self- or institutional) to do much else.
Likewise, while I do drive a car, I am not a mechanic. You won't see me on auto enthusiast forums arguing with experienced mechanics about how to build an engine. You won't see me making dubious claims about the performance or disadvantages of an engine I know nothing about. I'm simply not qualified to have a valid opinion.
What's magical about information technology? What is it about this particular branch of knowledge that makes people think this does not apply?
In a world where everyone respected, appreciated, and valued reason, indeed they would not be. We do not live in such a world.
You should be suspicious of dishonest people. It is a very important survival trait.
When I know that someone is using the tactics of deceit, there is no reason to be suspicious. Suspicion is how one deals with unknowns and uncertainties. When I know someone is lying to me, there is nothing to be suspicious about.
Telling people to lie down and take it is being part of the problem. Fighting the problem is not.
We simply have two different methods of fighting the problem. You believe that rationality and critical thought is something you can give to another person. I believe it's something they need to acquire for themselves. No one taught me those things. In fact, I had many contrary influences, especially in the public school system. Yet I could see what was wrong with them and decided I didn't want to follow their path.
The closest you can come to giving it to another person is to model it and demonstrate that it is superior to being easily misled. That in itself is not a task to be taken lightly. The difference between myself and the shills is that I understand one thing: telling another person that there is a correct way to think is a grave responsibility. I really better have my shit together before I do such a thing, or else I'll do more harm than good.
I'd much rather see a population of people who not only don't need me to do that, but would never accept any such attempt.
"It's hard" is not a good reason to give up on a just cause.
No, it is not, which is why I never claimed that is. In fact it's a reason to redouble your efforts. If you don't understand what you are up against, how do you intend to counteract it?
The real purpose of realizing the scope of the problem is to avoid disappointment when you don't immediately seem to achieve results. It doesn't mean you are doing wrong. It means you are trying to do something truly significant.
Telling people to lie down and take it is being part of the problem. Fighting the problem is not.
You know, in Mahatma Gandhi's time, there were people who wanted to violently fight the British. They felt that Gandhi's actions were not enough, etc. Yet he ended up being extremely effective with his passive resistance.
Going toe-to-toe is one way to deal with an adversary. Sometimes that is effective. Sometimes you'll never run out of adversaries and have to go a level deeper and understand why your adversary finds so much fertile ground in which to entrench themselves.
There is no way you could ever fully comprehend the shill/marketing/dishonesty/lack-of-critical-thought problem without also looking at the public school system, how it came to be, the stated goals of those who created it, the media, their agenda, and the various elites who run all of the above. In the face of that, arguing with some low-level marketer who mindlessly obeys orders is pretty small fry. Yes, it does matter, but there are far larger fish to fry.
May tend to, but it is not working out so well in this thread.
It's a shame that you insist on identifying me as your enemy merely because I believe other methods would be more effective in the long term, though they lack the initially-satisfying short-term gains you seem to want. Perhaps you could peruse my posting history before coming to such a conclusion?
What I disagree with you about concerns strategy. That is, the means. I do not disagree with you regarding ends. I would very much love a world in which people think for themselves and are far too wise to fall for such things as shills, spammers, marketers, politicians, and con artists. I simply believe you are foc
One could make the same comment about people unfamiliar with copyright law deciding on their own what should be legal.
You might need highly educated, specialized, experienced professionals like lawyers and a judges to determine whether something is legal and how the law specifically does and does not apply, sure.
You need none of those things to determine what is just.
If those two things differ, then the system has become broken and requires correction. What Rosa Parks did was illegal, too. Any lawyer or judge of the time would have told you that, and lots of mindless people would have agreed. What has happened between then and now is called advancement. That's what needs to happen in the realm of copyright.
I recall reading that people, when given a range of options, tend to pick a middle one. So, they didn't take the minimum, and likely didn't take the maximum. They might even have simply averaged the two fenceposts.
That's a manner of making a guess when you have no solid criteria to make a real choice. It's mindless and I could hardly call it justice.
A real choice would be along the lines of "which of the allowed options best reflects the actual material harm done to the plaintiff, plus a little punitive damages?" Thomas certainly did not cause the corporation(s) in question to lose millions of dollars.
It's like the old, old days in some regions when stealing a loaf of bread could result in having your hands chopped off (with no anesthesia) if you were caught. Yes, that is indeed what the law said, but it's hardly justice. In modern times we recognize how primitive and backwards and unjust such laws were. Our laws on theft of physical objects more realistically reflect the actual harm that was done. One day we're going to feel the same way about current copyright laws.
Thomas did not ruin the life of any of the involved corporation(s), nor did she ruin the life of any of their employees. It is simply not just to ruin her life in retaliation. That this goes on and is so widely considered legitimate is an example of our remaining barbarism.
Well-written rebuttals are the right response to reasoned discourse by free people. Shill posts are not reasoned discourse by free people, they are for-profit attempts to manipulate public perception and behavior and to affect public policy. Detection of shills is tricky, but attenuating shills is objectively pro-social.
I suppose that's the crux of the matter. I believe in the power of reason. I believe that next to reason, nothing that shills and other dishonest marketers can do is ever going to have the appearance of merit or any persuasive power at all. I never felt like I had to use the shills' own tactics against them, resisting their dishonesty with suspicion and derision.
The marketers themselves are aware of this. That's why they seldom or never use reason. They tend to appeal to the emotions. What they absolutely do not want to do is to calmly discuss the facts of the matter in an objective manner. Because they don't want to do this, that's how I respond to them. It so happens this is how I prefer to respond to nearly anyone; it's just that dishonest people with ulterior motives are the ones who are made uncomfortable by it.
It is not enough to simply defend yourself. Their intent is to have an effect on public perception, behavior, and policy.
We are talking about adult people. It is a shame that so many adults choose to be uninformed and soft-minded and do not pursue reason and logic as worthy skills to acquire. They made that choice. They would rather worry about pop music and football and whatever the evening news tells them to be afraid of. So be it. I have the freedom of deciding not to join them. Yet, as long as so many people are this way, there will always be fertile ground for shills, scammers, lying politicians, and all sorts of deceitful people.
There is little point in trying to eliminate individual rats while you continue to leave rotting food laying around everywhere. The scope of this problem is huge. It is not easily fixed. It took a long time to become the way that it is and it will not be resolved overnight. The very best you can hope for is damage control, and not yourself being part of the problem.
While being informed is a sound foundation for engaging them in the court of public opinion successfully, informedness is not -- in itself -- sufficient to protect our society from them. Protecting our society depends rather heavily on things other people do. Preventing shills from having their intended effect on those people is a pro-social pursuit.
Only for people who have to be told what to believe, what to think, and how to feel about that information. In that case, you imagine yourself a better master than the ones currently pulling most of the strings. Perhaps you would be. Perhaps I would be. Perhaps neither of us would do a good job. But so long as there are so many effective mental puppets with so many mental and emotional strings, the deceitful people who wish to exploit them are always going to outnumber people like you and I.
I really believe that you mean well. I also sincerely believe you are merely hacking at the branches because the root of the problem is so big, so menacing, and so ugly that you'd prefer to deny it. I think the focus needs to be not exposing shills point-counterpoint style, though such damage control does have a minor role in a complete approach. The focus needs to be to promote the strength and virtue that comes from thinking for oneself, from recognizing when you are ignorant about something and remedying that if the subject matters enough to form an opinion about, and to eschew this naivete that makes people such malleable fools to every asshat who comes along. Until then, you have an enormous game of whack-a-mole that tends to favor the adversary.
That is only true in the sense of how it affects a shill inside his head. The purpose of shilling is not to affect
I'm going to assume that is a serious question and give you the straight answer:
The reason they are marking you "troll" is because it is the closest thing to "shill" in the mod system. Your comment is indistinguishable from that of a copyright industry shill and you have a high user ID. There's more to it than that in the way your post is presented -- it looks suspicious -- but I'm not going to tell you any more. If you are a shill, I don't want you to know where your veil is thin.
I thought it was a little suspect myself. Still, I would not personally have modded him down.
If the presence of shills causes us to be so suspicious of each other, to never extend benefit of doubt, to be less tolerant of unpopular speech, and above all to use down-mods as a substitute for well-written rebuttals... then the shills have done much more damage to this community than they could have hoped to accomplish. And we ourselves helped them to do it.
A genuine shill being treated a bit more kindly than he deserves, while undesirable, is a better outcome than this. The best way to combat actual shills is to know in your mind and understand in your heart why they are wrong, because hearts and minds are what they want to capture. That knowing and understanding is the product of informing yourself and does not depend on anything someone else does.
Consider also that if he actually is that much of a corporate whore, his inability to respect himself in any real way is far worse than thousands of down-mods.
The real solutions are shunned, the real solutions is to allow the people (market) set the interest rates, allow the people (market) choose what to use as money, prevent government from printing, from interfering with the economy, prevent gov't from deficit spending, ensure that all bonds pay actual interest rates, not fake ones, that support deficit spending, things like that.
Of-course the actual solutions aren't even accepted on silly public forums, and they are definitely not going to be accepted by the politicians.
You sound like someone who wants a nation that is long-term viable.
That's seriously out of fashion these days.
No, the trend for the modern era has been to have fiat currency instead of representative currency, surrender control of your money supply to an unaccountable group of private international bankers, still call it "government-issued currency" for that added appearance of legitimacy, and then to steal wealth from the lower and middle classes through the undeclared tax of inflation until collapse becomes inevitable. I guess after that, the powers behind the throne move on to greener pastures and then they wash, rinse, repeat.
The Federal Reserve would more properly be called the Third Bank of the United States. Oliver Wolcott and Andrew Jackson were kind enough to get rid of the First and Second ones.
Intel's early SSDs such as the Intel X25-E were the last time I really got screwed by SATA drives that screwed this up very badly. See the PostgreSQL page on Reliable Writes for a lot more details on this subject.
This is why I am never an early adopter. If there were some tremendous emergency that only an early SSD could solve, and life-and-limb were on the line, I suppose I would take my chances. But I've never had that much of a need for an SSD.
I suppose I have pioneers like you to thank, however, for helping to identify and work out the problems so that people like me who wait a little while have such a good experience. It's like volunteer work, except of course that you had to pay in order to do it.
Given that we are talking about Kirk McKusick an appeal to authority is entirely fair. Just because he didn't have a bunch of citations or references listed at the bottom of the article does not mean they do not exist somewhere. For you to say it is a "fallacious" appeal to authority is unfair - it has not been proven as fallacious. (You assert it to be fallacious due to a lack of reference... the culture created by Wikipedia and all the "[Citation Needed]" slackers never fails to impress me.) Surely there exists blacklists in source in Linux/FreeBSD/other publicly viewable code, I also will not hold your hand and show you where.
I have personally seen these kinds of issues (with writes not happening soon enough and fsync calls introduced for data integrity) with flash media which is something mentioned in the beginning of article. I would like to further comment that the article talked about other things such as sector size side effects and the impact on useful space. ++Great article. Does anyone else remember how he (Kirk McK.) used to sell shirts and pc stickers? I still have the bsd daemon logo sticker on the case of my first pc.
I think GP has a good point. Sure, Kirk knows his shit. Sure, he really could be considered an authority. Yeah, I can just take his word for it with some confidence.
But that doesn't help me to understand. It's just a memorized factoid. I just know that the statement has a boolean condition of "true". This does nothing to help me understand if *my* hardware is affected. Since just about everyone here has a hard drive (or severa), this would be useful information.
I don't care if Kirk has a 16 inch penis and has never once been wrong about anything. I still want to know if my own drives are affected. In this entire thread, anytime someone asks that question or anything related to it, they receive hand-waving and " this isn't wikipedia" etc. That's cute, but we are asking for knowledge, and you'll never understand that if you make no effort to entertain what the other person is saying long enough to appreciate where they're coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Do away with the patent system. Get rid of copyright while you're at it.
A non-renewable copyright of five to ten years, which is valid only if owned by a natural (living, breathing, non-corporate) person, and becomes fully public domain at expiration... that might not be such a bad thing.
I do not know how much more the world must suffer before the power that be wakes up to the fact that the patent system is hopelessly broken.
They are quite awake to it. Being awake and aware of the situation, they (the monied interests who make the important decisions) realized long ago that the current broken-ness serves their interests.
It is only the little guys, the nobodies like you and I, who might want to protect ourselves using techniques that never should have been patentable. Everyone else either collects a check or purchases a license for a trivial, infinitessimal portion of their net worth.
Note, this work cannot address the privacy of information that we overtly share
Why do so many people feel an irresistable urge to disclaim claims that were never made?
It's a form of dumbing things down.
I think for anyone paying attention to the subject of privacy, it is pretty apparent that tyrannical voyeurism is a State Vice -- behind which are packs of ravenous fiends that will stop at nothing short of pharisaic omniscience. Long before one method of 'evasion' (self defense) becomes popular among the masses, these fiends are devising new countermeasures to foil them. Already, they want to spy on us through household devices. It seems a time is coming when options are scarce and opting out will be difficult or impossible. And all they seemingly need to do to pacify us is whisper in a soothing tone words like "transparency"". Yes, transparency, a simplex protocol for the masses.
The scary part is, the Panopticon was intended to be a prison.
In the near future, prison won't be place you send people to. It will be a place you extend to them. Naturally you will be guilty until proven innocent, and since you cannot prove a negative, well, that narrows it down. After all, you might be up to no good.
All we get is the first sentence of an article copy-and-pasted as a summary now? Does the submitter think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Why should we care about this? What are the implications?
Can't we just turn the whole thing over to a bot and be done with it?
No, we can't. At this time, with the current state-of-the-art in software development, it's just too damned difficult and expensive to cause a bot to randomly produce so many spelling and grammatical errors.
Spelling errors alone would be easy, but not grammatical errors such as using a correctly spelled word in the wrong way or understanding the importance of context. We cannot easily produce this kind of AI.
This is only one company. If you didn't already know origin are giant dicks, but they are the only ones that do this. Sign up with any other retailer and meter provider and this will not happen. Just use metering dynamics or agl and they will look after your data.
That will inevitably change, just as soon as a slick salesman gives them a nice pitch about how such data can be monetized. It is only a matter of time. If the current management won't ever consider it under any circumstances no matter how much money they are offered (unlikely), future management will. Once it becomes a revenue stream, it will be depended upon as part of the budget and will not be reversed. "We will remove this revenue stream to fulfill non-material values" has never been popular among shareholders, however wise.
It is a general principle of inertia and inevitability that, for some reason, continues to be poorly understood by too many. You see the same thing with the legal system (the US income tax was "a temporary wartime measure").
The most telling mark of such events is that they are pushed by the institution and not the result of overwhelming demand by its customers/constituents.
So.... You actually believed them? That is slightly naive isn't it? Info=$$$ It is always been that way, and will always be that way. Anyone knows that, so it is a pretty stupid idea to have yourself monitored that way. No matter what the fanboys say. Smartmeters are for dumb people (assuming one has a choice). What is next, smart-tv's, smart browsers, smart shoes that tell where you are walking?
To see these things coming before they actually happen is a great way to be told that your tinfoil hat is too tight.
That's why this kind of understanding (of what should be obvious) is so rarely appreciated. It belongs to a small minority who know their reasoning is sound with no concern for popularity. That's not the way I would have it, but that's the way it is.
It's not even a result of violating the API changes; it's a result of the redistribution of the Twitter data, which has been technically verboten all along, but is only getting cracked down on now (along with everything else.)
Yeah that's how it generally works. You let it go on for a while... then it builds momentum... then it goes on more and more .. then suddenly you decide to "crack down" on it now that lots of people have become used to it.
... " and the answer is along the lines of "yeah yeah yeah, don't call us, we'll call you mmmkay?" Then one day it finally happens and someone gets hurt, maimed, or killed. Then the same government goes nuts, saying "HOLY SHIT! Somebody got hurt?!?! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!"
It's like the way government deals with tragedies. Years earlier, someone may have tried to tell them "you know, this procedure is unsafe, if it does go wrong someone could really get hurt
I guess prevention just isn't as sexy as overreaction?
yes, that's right. they should just do pseudo browsers.
anyhow, twitter is just fucking itself with all this. you'd think myfiasco would have taught them something.
If people ever observe the history of how similar ideas played out, prior to trying such an idea, they are careful to hide all evidence of it.
Twitter has served and never will serve any useful purpose.
Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems. I would say Twitter does not hold a monopoly on this kind of communication. It was available prior to Twitter and will be there after Twitter is long forgotten. Twitter is a marketing phenomenon. It gives the externally-directed types (sheeple, the majority, people who vote for the candidate with the biggest ad budget, whatever you like to call them) something to rally around. That there are so many other like-minded users convinces them to stay.
The minority who don't jump on bandwagons might or might not use it, but trying to rally them around a brand name as a group is like herding cats.
Having said that, I have never once used Twitter or visited their site. For me personally, it has no appeal. I can easily see how a corporation wants to be a major "go to" place and hoard user-submitted data (which they now own) that cannot easily be transferred to any similar site in a standardized way, but I don't see why I should join them.
And no-one really cares about whether entertainment is "decentralized" or using "open standards"
No, they don't care. That's why when they are exploited or mistreated by the centralized basket they've put all their eggs into, I have no sympathy for them. They put no serious effort into the matter; that they got anything of value (to them) out of it at all means they have still come out ahead. There is no valid basis for complaint because there is no victim here.
as long as they don't have to think
Thinking: the one case where a great privilege is commonly viewed as some kind of terrible burden.
Sure, entertainment is nice, but escapism is an abuse of it, the same way one might abuse a drug instead of merely using it. In both cases the result of repeated abuse is the same: a weaker, more petty person who is less and less able to deal with life. Not to mention that bread and circus is an ancient tactic which has been in use for so long because it is effective. Placate the masses with some transient, empty thing and they will love you for it. It has always been that way. That this no longer involves live gladiators hacking each other to death with swords and axes is progress, I suppose.
OH NOES! I've been forced to expand my vocabulary! The pain in my head is killing me, please make it stop!
Amen, brother.
(assuming you're American)
Don't worry, they have some of the best working on that one. All they have to do is raise a big enough stink over enough time and artificially generate enough of an outcry. Then they will manage to "harmonize" all of the "security laws" the same way they have internationally harmonized so many copyright laws.
After all, you don't want the terrorists to win.
Agreed. And we lose all the window managers, and if you want to write a new one, too bad! You have to write a compositor instead! And don't get me started about the decorations being controlled by the app instead of the WM. Grrr...
Anyone who has ever used Lotus Notes on WinXP can understand why that's a terrible idea.
"Oh is it checking for new mail? Yeah I can tell because the window is blank, featureless, and won't respond to input for several seconds..." Letting the apps have this control is why so many Windows systems feel subjectively sluggish and less responsive. At least when you're used to X with a low-latency kernel.
I'm aware that it is possible to write Windows applications that don't suffer this problem, so it's not necessarily a failing in Windows per se, but it is a design decision that leaves open an undesirable possibility that doesn't need to be there.
Because they have a computer and can make use Google to go the the interwebs. They are fully capable of watching cat videos on The Youtube and are fully versed on the pros and cons of PC vs iPhone. Also, they have a brother who is a hacker on counter strike.
Yes, arrogance/pridefulness is just about the only explanation. They scratch the surface and think they've conquered the world. It's the only way people think their ignorance is just as good as someone else's knowledge, to borrow a phrase from Asimov.
He does not have to be a moron. He could be one of the many people I have met of around average intelligence with out enough tech knowledge to fill a thimble. You know the people. He probably got here by typing "slashdot.org" into Google and clicking on the first link.
Sure thing - I do know the people. They have one trait that makes no sense whatsoever. If they would question whether it makes sense, I believe they would abandon it, but sadly even a minor amount of introspection is ... unpopular these days. I'll explain it with a counter-example:
I do not have enough neurosurgery knowledge to fill a thimble. It follows that you won't see me on medical forums, making claims and taking positions and displaying strong opinions about brain surgery. If I went to such forums at all, I might ask questions in the humble manner of one seeking to learn from those possessing knowledge I know I don't have, but that would be the limit. After all, I wouldn't have the background, the experience, or the education (self- or institutional) to do much else.
Likewise, while I do drive a car, I am not a mechanic. You won't see me on auto enthusiast forums arguing with experienced mechanics about how to build an engine. You won't see me making dubious claims about the performance or disadvantages of an engine I know nothing about. I'm simply not qualified to have a valid opinion.
What's magical about information technology? What is it about this particular branch of knowledge that makes people think this does not apply?
Those two statements cannot both be true.
In a world where everyone respected, appreciated, and valued reason, indeed they would not be. We do not live in such a world.
You should be suspicious of dishonest people. It is a very important survival trait.
When I know that someone is using the tactics of deceit, there is no reason to be suspicious. Suspicion is how one deals with unknowns and uncertainties. When I know someone is lying to me, there is nothing to be suspicious about.
Telling people to lie down and take it is being part of the problem. Fighting the problem is not.
We simply have two different methods of fighting the problem. You believe that rationality and critical thought is something you can give to another person. I believe it's something they need to acquire for themselves. No one taught me those things. In fact, I had many contrary influences, especially in the public school system. Yet I could see what was wrong with them and decided I didn't want to follow their path.
The closest you can come to giving it to another person is to model it and demonstrate that it is superior to being easily misled. That in itself is not a task to be taken lightly. The difference between myself and the shills is that I understand one thing: telling another person that there is a correct way to think is a grave responsibility. I really better have my shit together before I do such a thing, or else I'll do more harm than good.
I'd much rather see a population of people who not only don't need me to do that, but would never accept any such attempt.
"It's hard" is not a good reason to give up on a just cause.
No, it is not, which is why I never claimed that is. In fact it's a reason to redouble your efforts. If you don't understand what you are up against, how do you intend to counteract it?
The real purpose of realizing the scope of the problem is to avoid disappointment when you don't immediately seem to achieve results. It doesn't mean you are doing wrong. It means you are trying to do something truly significant.
Telling people to lie down and take it is being part of the problem. Fighting the problem is not.
You know, in Mahatma Gandhi's time, there were people who wanted to violently fight the British. They felt that Gandhi's actions were not enough, etc. Yet he ended up being extremely effective with his passive resistance.
Going toe-to-toe is one way to deal with an adversary. Sometimes that is effective. Sometimes you'll never run out of adversaries and have to go a level deeper and understand why your adversary finds so much fertile ground in which to entrench themselves.
There is no way you could ever fully comprehend the shill/marketing/dishonesty/lack-of-critical-thought problem without also looking at the public school system, how it came to be, the stated goals of those who created it, the media, their agenda, and the various elites who run all of the above. In the face of that, arguing with some low-level marketer who mindlessly obeys orders is pretty small fry. Yes, it does matter, but there are far larger fish to fry.
May tend to, but it is not working out so well in this thread.
It's a shame that you insist on identifying me as your enemy merely because I believe other methods would be more effective in the long term, though they lack the initially-satisfying short-term gains you seem to want. Perhaps you could peruse my posting history before coming to such a conclusion?
What I disagree with you about concerns strategy. That is, the means. I do not disagree with you regarding ends. I would very much love a world in which people think for themselves and are far too wise to fall for such things as shills, spammers, marketers, politicians, and con artists. I simply believe you are foc
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to GoDaddy's incompetence just as easily.
Insecurity and exploitability are forms of incompetence. So this doesn't actually make much of a difference.
One could make the same comment about people unfamiliar with copyright law deciding on their own what should be legal.
You might need highly educated, specialized, experienced professionals like lawyers and a judges to determine whether something is legal and how the law specifically does and does not apply, sure.
You need none of those things to determine what is just.
If those two things differ, then the system has become broken and requires correction. What Rosa Parks did was illegal, too. Any lawyer or judge of the time would have told you that, and lots of mindless people would have agreed. What has happened between then and now is called advancement. That's what needs to happen in the realm of copyright.
They are common law judges.
Their hands are never really tied.
They may have no balls. They simply might not care.
However, there hands are not at all tied. They choose inaction.
Do they actually have the power to invalidate this law? Or at least to throw out the verdict in the case of this particular defendant?
I admit up-front I am ignorant about this, but I'd really like to know.
I recall reading that people, when given a range of options, tend to pick a middle one. So, they didn't take the minimum, and likely didn't take the maximum. They might even have simply averaged the two fenceposts.
That's a manner of making a guess when you have no solid criteria to make a real choice. It's mindless and I could hardly call it justice.
A real choice would be along the lines of "which of the allowed options best reflects the actual material harm done to the plaintiff, plus a little punitive damages?" Thomas certainly did not cause the corporation(s) in question to lose millions of dollars.
It's like the old, old days in some regions when stealing a loaf of bread could result in having your hands chopped off (with no anesthesia) if you were caught. Yes, that is indeed what the law said, but it's hardly justice. In modern times we recognize how primitive and backwards and unjust such laws were. Our laws on theft of physical objects more realistically reflect the actual harm that was done. One day we're going to feel the same way about current copyright laws.
Thomas did not ruin the life of any of the involved corporation(s), nor did she ruin the life of any of their employees. It is simply not just to ruin her life in retaliation. That this goes on and is so widely considered legitimate is an example of our remaining barbarism.
Well-written rebuttals are the right response to reasoned discourse by free people. Shill posts are not reasoned discourse by free people, they are for-profit attempts to manipulate public perception and behavior and to affect public policy. Detection of shills is tricky, but attenuating shills is objectively pro-social.
I suppose that's the crux of the matter. I believe in the power of reason. I believe that next to reason, nothing that shills and other dishonest marketers can do is ever going to have the appearance of merit or any persuasive power at all. I never felt like I had to use the shills' own tactics against them, resisting their dishonesty with suspicion and derision.
The marketers themselves are aware of this. That's why they seldom or never use reason. They tend to appeal to the emotions. What they absolutely do not want to do is to calmly discuss the facts of the matter in an objective manner. Because they don't want to do this, that's how I respond to them. It so happens this is how I prefer to respond to nearly anyone; it's just that dishonest people with ulterior motives are the ones who are made uncomfortable by it.
It is not enough to simply defend yourself. Their intent is to have an effect on public perception, behavior, and policy.
We are talking about adult people. It is a shame that so many adults choose to be uninformed and soft-minded and do not pursue reason and logic as worthy skills to acquire. They made that choice. They would rather worry about pop music and football and whatever the evening news tells them to be afraid of. So be it. I have the freedom of deciding not to join them. Yet, as long as so many people are this way, there will always be fertile ground for shills, scammers, lying politicians, and all sorts of deceitful people.
There is little point in trying to eliminate individual rats while you continue to leave rotting food laying around everywhere. The scope of this problem is huge. It is not easily fixed. It took a long time to become the way that it is and it will not be resolved overnight. The very best you can hope for is damage control, and not yourself being part of the problem.
While being informed is a sound foundation for engaging them in the court of public opinion successfully, informedness is not -- in itself -- sufficient to protect our society from them. Protecting our society depends rather heavily on things other people do. Preventing shills from having their intended effect on those people is a pro-social pursuit.
Only for people who have to be told what to believe, what to think, and how to feel about that information. In that case, you imagine yourself a better master than the ones currently pulling most of the strings. Perhaps you would be. Perhaps I would be. Perhaps neither of us would do a good job. But so long as there are so many effective mental puppets with so many mental and emotional strings, the deceitful people who wish to exploit them are always going to outnumber people like you and I.
I really believe that you mean well. I also sincerely believe you are merely hacking at the branches because the root of the problem is so big, so menacing, and so ugly that you'd prefer to deny it. I think the focus needs to be not exposing shills point-counterpoint style, though such damage control does have a minor role in a complete approach. The focus needs to be to promote the strength and virtue that comes from thinking for oneself, from recognizing when you are ignorant about something and remedying that if the subject matters enough to form an opinion about, and to eschew this naivete that makes people such malleable fools to every asshat who comes along. Until then, you have an enormous game of whack-a-mole that tends to favor the adversary.
That is only true in the sense of how it affects a shill inside his head. The purpose of shilling is not to affect
to those who are itchy to mark me troll - why?
I'm going to assume that is a serious question and give you the straight answer:
The reason they are marking you "troll" is because it is the closest thing to "shill" in the mod system. Your comment is indistinguishable from that of a copyright industry shill and you have a high user ID. There's more to it than that in the way your post is presented -- it looks suspicious -- but I'm not going to tell you any more. If you are a shill, I don't want you to know where your veil is thin.
I thought it was a little suspect myself. Still, I would not personally have modded him down.
If the presence of shills causes us to be so suspicious of each other, to never extend benefit of doubt, to be less tolerant of unpopular speech, and above all to use down-mods as a substitute for well-written rebuttals... then the shills have done much more damage to this community than they could have hoped to accomplish. And we ourselves helped them to do it.
A genuine shill being treated a bit more kindly than he deserves, while undesirable, is a better outcome than this. The best way to combat actual shills is to know in your mind and understand in your heart why they are wrong, because hearts and minds are what they want to capture. That knowing and understanding is the product of informing yourself and does not depend on anything someone else does.
Consider also that if he actually is that much of a corporate whore, his inability to respect himself in any real way is far worse than thousands of down-mods.
The root cause behind HFT is high level of inflation (money printing), artificial interest rates that are forced down to support inflation and thus the consumers, who are forced into the stock markets, which become gambling mechanisms rather than investment platforms.
The real solutions are shunned, the real solutions is to allow the people (market) set the interest rates, allow the people (market) choose what to use as money, prevent government from printing, from interfering with the economy, prevent gov't from deficit spending, ensure that all bonds pay actual interest rates, not fake ones, that support deficit spending, things like that.
Of-course the actual solutions aren't even accepted on silly public forums, and they are definitely not going to be accepted by the politicians.
You sound like someone who wants a nation that is long-term viable.
That's seriously out of fashion these days.
No, the trend for the modern era has been to have fiat currency instead of representative currency, surrender control of your money supply to an unaccountable group of private international bankers, still call it "government-issued currency" for that added appearance of legitimacy, and then to steal wealth from the lower and middle classes through the undeclared tax of inflation until collapse becomes inevitable. I guess after that, the powers behind the throne move on to greener pastures and then they wash, rinse, repeat.
The Federal Reserve would more properly be called the Third Bank of the United States. Oliver Wolcott and Andrew Jackson were kind enough to get rid of the First and Second ones.
Intel's early SSDs such as the Intel X25-E were the last time I really got screwed by SATA drives that screwed this up very badly. See the PostgreSQL page on Reliable Writes for a lot more details on this subject.
This is why I am never an early adopter. If there were some tremendous emergency that only an early SSD could solve, and life-and-limb were on the line, I suppose I would take my chances. But I've never had that much of a need for an SSD.
I suppose I have pioneers like you to thank, however, for helping to identify and work out the problems so that people like me who wait a little while have such a good experience. It's like volunteer work, except of course that you had to pay in order to do it.
Given that we are talking about Kirk McKusick an appeal to authority is entirely fair. Just because he didn't have a bunch of citations or references listed at the bottom of the article does not mean they do not exist somewhere. For you to say it is a "fallacious" appeal to authority is unfair - it has not been proven as fallacious. (You assert it to be fallacious due to a lack of reference... the culture created by Wikipedia and all the "[Citation Needed]" slackers never fails to impress me.) Surely there exists blacklists in source in Linux/FreeBSD/other publicly viewable code, I also will not hold your hand and show you where.
I have personally seen these kinds of issues (with writes not happening soon enough and fsync calls introduced for data integrity) with flash media which is something mentioned in the beginning of article. I would like to further comment that the article talked about other things such as sector size side effects and the impact on useful space. ++Great article. Does anyone else remember how he (Kirk McK.) used to sell shirts and pc stickers? I still have the bsd daemon logo sticker on the case of my first pc.
I think GP has a good point. Sure, Kirk knows his shit. Sure, he really could be considered an authority. Yeah, I can just take his word for it with some confidence.
But that doesn't help me to understand. It's just a memorized factoid. I just know that the statement has a boolean condition of "true". This does nothing to help me understand if *my* hardware is affected. Since just about everyone here has a hard drive (or severa), this would be useful information.
I don't care if Kirk has a 16 inch penis and has never once been wrong about anything. I still want to know if my own drives are affected. In this entire thread, anytime someone asks that question or anything related to it, they receive hand-waving and " this isn't wikipedia" etc. That's cute, but we are asking for knowledge, and you'll never understand that if you make no effort to entertain what the other person is saying long enough to appreciate where they're coming from.