You're talking about semantics. Marx's position was that small pre-industrial societies were communistic, based on their attitude toward force as it protects property rights, following from Proudhon. Besides, you can't describe a hunter-gatherer society like the Lakota Souix as "agrarian": they didn't farm.
but it tells us nothing about how to run a large modern country like the usa or germany
It might tell us a lot about how to calibrate our delegation of authority and how strongly to weight localism, given a certain level of technological development. OTOH, if you see people starving a thousand miles away on the TV, this is naturally going to prey on people's innate sense of equity.
so i don't have to hear about this useless mental diarrhea again
You have to make more positive arguments and not just throw something in the dustbin because is starts with "commu-". People like Marx, Luxembourg, DeLeon, and Gramsci had a lot to say about the world and you can't just dismiss all of 19th century philosophy by kicking a rock, Berkeley-like.
you will of course lump me with the Grabby McRichguys of the world because i don't embrace your cottonheaded idealism
I never said you were, don't be so defensive. Everybody embraces a "cottonheaded idealism," our worth is measured by how we bring it into the world; the real archfiends of history are the ones who work cheap cynicism and phony skepticism to tear down other people's cottonheaded idealism, out of vanity and envy for something to believe in.
Well, most native American societies were anarcho-communist, as most indigenous societies are, as well as various small post-industrial communities, like Kibbutzes. Isolated small populations tend to have decreasing tolerance for property rights; its really just a function of how many people you know and how many people you don't know get to borrow your stuff, and how many people you know are starving because Grabby McRichguy won't sell his grain.
Also, nobody speaks of 256 bit RSA in this century; the recommended key size for use with a 128 bit block cipher is 3072 bits when I last checked.
You only need a key size that big if you're doing asymmetric keys -- see Schneier and ridiculous key lengths. The encryption on these phones is symmetric, and the reason it's so easy to crack is the 256 bit keys are in fact selected from a very restricted space: they just take four numeric digits from the phone entry and then maybe hash them to get better bit coverage.
If you can circumvent the crypto hardware and the tool has raw access to the storage, it can try passphrases willy-nilly and any such limits won't be applied.
It seems like this would work on any phone, in principle. If you're using a 4-digit numeric password to protect your phone, any kind of phone, yeah, somebody's eventually going to crack it in a non-end-of-the-universe timeframe, if they get unattended access to it, and you don't remote-wipe it.
Use an alphanumeric password to protect your phone. Also, it's got a ton of your stuff on it, never leave it unattended for extended periods of time, never give it to people you don't trust. A cellphone is a very personal frob and no amount of engineering is going to make it safe from hacking, modulo the sensitivity of the data contained therein -- even if you pick a 20 char, completely random password, nefarious folk can still dust the screen for fingerprints, or surreptitiously videotape you unlocking your phone...
"Only download software from repositories" is a very flaky solution-- all you're doing is translating your trust from a website to a repo maintainer. The repo maintainer obviously is a good third-party that has a strong incentive to only provide clean software, but what if he gets hacked? It's no better or worse than a top-down App Store then, with the added complication that there are no repos for any Linux distro I'm aware of that allow for developers to charge money for installation, which drives away a lot of commercial retail development.
No you're fine. Everybody basically acknowledges this, but you're skipping all the good closed media Miro will be selling too: the Miro will let you buy from the Amazon MP3 store, so there will be a good selection of DRM-free music available on the platform, too.
They are ONLY ASKING FOR a very VERY small amount.
The precedent would be absolutely toxic, though. What would keep the MPEG-LA from going to every app developer who uses a movie view in their app, and demanding a little 3% too? It's the same situation -- Apple has all the licenses, it does all the coding, the app developers just enter and exit Apple's service, and along comes someone who says "Well, you're not actually implementing our technology or process, but you're availing yourself of someone's implementation of it and making money by the by." You can't charge everyone down the line for using something patented, as Apple states in its letter, it's license to the technology is subject to the First Sale doctrine like anything else.
In most large communities private corporations did run transit lines; they were systematically bought up by a few large trusts and then dismantled, tracks torn up, cables pulled and rights-of-way broken in order to drive the sale of buses, tires, and gasoline.
This is the thing we have to be very careful of at this juncture, there's a definite threat that the last mile will be bought up by a few companies, and then universal access and de facto network neutrality will be broken, under the justifications of "efficiency" and "modernization."
If a town wants to start a new bus line, or double the number of stops, or open a new school, or put water fountains on Main Street, they just hold a vote at a city council meeting.
If a town wants to hang some antennas to offer a public amenity on Main Street, probably costing about as much as the water fountains, they gotta go through the equivalent of a consent decree. This sounds like broadband provider protectionism to me. That a municipal utility can provide better service than a private utility is an open question and a lot of cities do very well with publicly-owned electric grids and traction transit; adding hoops to jump through for broadband wifi in particular is just a way of protecting Comcast's fiefdom.
First, taxation is in fact a restriction of trade.
Nit: Taxes only impose a deadweight loss on a transaction, or otherwise dis-incentivize it, insofar as the supply of the good is elastic. A perfectly inelastic good, such as a land, or a license to a fixed good like radio spectrum, can be taxed at an arbitrary rate and there will be no distortion of economic decisions. Also, taxes that penalize negative externalities can alter decisions and impose individualized deadweight losses that are recouped in other ways -- a tax on alcohol will restrain the buying of alcohol, which is arduous on alcohol sellers but probably guarantees them (and everyone else in the economy) a wider pool of people to sell to in the future.
Second, requiring a company to collect taxes in a state in which it has no physical presence could be construed as taxation without representation, an issue which historically speaking is unpopular in the USA - I think we fought a big war over it at one time...
The taxes in this case are collected under the authority of the purchaser's state government. The individuals making these purchases are liable for these taxes and are required to pay them; Jeff Bezos isn't disagreeing with that.
Their canceling of affiliate programs in states where the rule is enforced would indicate that they acknowledge the underlying legitimacy of the rule, and the unlikelyhood that they'd ever win their case in a court or with a legislature. So all the better to lobby us, which is exactly what Bezos is doing here.
One day, Google invented this totally awesome free and open source operating system for phones, which ran on hundreds of different devices from dozens of different vendors. It allowed people to customize their phones, run whatever apps they wanted, buy apps off of different stores and sideload whatever code they pleased.
Google also invented an awesome operating system for phones that they develop in secret, publish the source for only after select marketing partners have had a 6 month head start, and then only if the code "looks good enough," and their partners are only allowed a head start if they agree to not integrate their phones with services that would harm Google's strategic investments. These phones come in many different models, but only two of them, both coming from the same manufacturer, actually offer up-to-date support and updates. The rest are trendy abandonware, efused and ROMed.
I am continually informed by people here that these two operating systems are the same thing and that all the good stuff about the first operating system applies to the second one.
What about your freedom to stay? When people are compelled to emigrate in order to find work, this is generally called expulsion and is a bad thing. It's a rather thin continuum between a manager's commute from San Antonio to Matamoros, and the partition of India, and it's a very fine line between permitting people to move and leaving them no alternative.
They do seem to be coming at this from a funny direction-- replacing a doctor with a electronic frob will tend to greatly increase complexity for most kinds of examinations. To do something as simple as clearing a belly, for example, you can either invent a tricorder with some kind of low-grade tomography or sonogram imaging, or you can train a nurse who can do it in five seconds with superior quality. What the world probably needs a lot more than a tricorder is armies of people with a week of training, perhaps augmented by some kind of expert and telepresence system.
The idea they describe in TFA doesnt so much resemble a tricorder as it does the auto-diagnosis machine from Idiocracy, where the dude puts a tube up your nose, in your ear, up your butt and in your mouth and your aliment pops up on a carwash gantry.
Or - bear with me for a moment - we could abolish the ridiculous concept that media is somehow different depending on how you access it
We could do that, but of course there are tremendous distinctions between the different modes of delivery (if it were "all the same" we wouldn't really have an argument, would we?). Treating them as "all the same" doesn't really empower consumers as much as it empowers middlemen producers and hardware device makers: upstarts like these Zediva people would like nothing more than to make bank renting out movies other people made, just like Roku and Apple and Microsoft would love to sell every movie in the library at low fixed cost the day the movie's released in theaters, because they didn't pay any money to make it, and they're just the middlemen using their products to connect you with OTHER people's movies.
Joe Sixpack has probably never heard the terms "Osborne Effect" or "aircraft failure to maintain lateral clearance with terrain," but he still knows better than to buy Gamestation5 when Gamestation6 has been announced, and that a plane hitting a tree is bad.
The problem is people don't know what Android is, or what makes it different from iOS or Blackberry, aside from the fact that "having Android" doesn't seem to guarantee any particular functionality aside from the barest and most simple things, and that having an iPhone guarantees a lot more things will "just work." Hardware can vary but past a certain point it ceases to be a "platform."
Netflix can't get their client to work acceptably on slower hardware, so they aren't selling an Android app, they're selling a Droid/Nexus/etc. app.
On the other hand, you have to wonder if you're looking for a phone and you want Netflix, will it run today, will it run tomorrow? Is this exactly the SKU that runs Netflix?
Oh wait, this isn't from a content originator, this isn't the authors guild, this is another middle man
but our ebook reader auto-scrolls!!! For that we deserve to make dot-com millionaire money, selling other people's books with other people's merchandise platforms onto other people's tablets.
Slashdot Mirror
Staffer: "How much time do we need to debate the Affordable Care Act?"
Senator: "At least eight months!"
Staffer: "How much time for the federal court appointee?"
Senator: "T is Undefined. We're filibustering him without a vote."
Staffer: "How about to renew the USA PATRIOT act?"
Senator: "Oh, four to six hours."
You're talking about semantics. Marx's position was that small pre-industrial societies were communistic, based on their attitude toward force as it protects property rights, following from Proudhon. Besides, you can't describe a hunter-gatherer society like the Lakota Souix as "agrarian": they didn't farm.
It might tell us a lot about how to calibrate our delegation of authority and how strongly to weight localism, given a certain level of technological development. OTOH, if you see people starving a thousand miles away on the TV, this is naturally going to prey on people's innate sense of equity.
You have to make more positive arguments and not just throw something in the dustbin because is starts with "commu-". People like Marx, Luxembourg, DeLeon, and Gramsci had a lot to say about the world and you can't just dismiss all of 19th century philosophy by kicking a rock, Berkeley-like.
I never said you were, don't be so defensive. Everybody embraces a "cottonheaded idealism," our worth is measured by how we bring it into the world; the real archfiends of history are the ones who work cheap cynicism and phony skepticism to tear down other people's cottonheaded idealism, out of vanity and envy for something to believe in.
Well, most native American societies were anarcho-communist, as most indigenous societies are, as well as various small post-industrial communities, like Kibbutzes. Isolated small populations tend to have decreasing tolerance for property rights; its really just a function of how many people you know and how many people you don't know get to borrow your stuff, and how many people you know are starving because Grabby McRichguy won't sell his grain.
You only need a key size that big if you're doing asymmetric keys -- see Schneier and ridiculous key lengths. The encryption on these phones is symmetric, and the reason it's so easy to crack is the 256 bit keys are in fact selected from a very restricted space: they just take four numeric digits from the phone entry and then maybe hash them to get better bit coverage.
If you can circumvent the crypto hardware and the tool has raw access to the storage, it can try passphrases willy-nilly and any such limits won't be applied.
It seems like this would work on any phone, in principle. If you're using a 4-digit numeric password to protect your phone, any kind of phone, yeah, somebody's eventually going to crack it in a non-end-of-the-universe timeframe, if they get unattended access to it, and you don't remote-wipe it.
Use an alphanumeric password to protect your phone. Also, it's got a ton of your stuff on it, never leave it unattended for extended periods of time, never give it to people you don't trust. A cellphone is a very personal frob and no amount of engineering is going to make it safe from hacking, modulo the sensitivity of the data contained therein -- even if you pick a 20 char, completely random password, nefarious folk can still dust the screen for fingerprints, or surreptitiously videotape you unlocking your phone...
Giza. Pyramids of Giza. Gaza is city hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the Sinai.
"Open Source" is orthogonal to "consumer rights."
"Only download software from repositories" is a very flaky solution-- all you're doing is translating your trust from a website to a repo maintainer. The repo maintainer obviously is a good third-party that has a strong incentive to only provide clean software, but what if he gets hacked? It's no better or worse than a top-down App Store then, with the added complication that there are no repos for any Linux distro I'm aware of that allow for developers to charge money for installation, which drives away a lot of commercial retail development.
No you're fine. Everybody basically acknowledges this, but you're skipping all the good closed media Miro will be selling too: the Miro will let you buy from the Amazon MP3 store, so there will be a good selection of DRM-free music available on the platform, too.
The precedent would be absolutely toxic, though. What would keep the MPEG-LA from going to every app developer who uses a movie view in their app, and demanding a little 3% too? It's the same situation -- Apple has all the licenses, it does all the coding, the app developers just enter and exit Apple's service, and along comes someone who says "Well, you're not actually implementing our technology or process, but you're availing yourself of someone's implementation of it and making money by the by." You can't charge everyone down the line for using something patented, as Apple states in its letter, it's license to the technology is subject to the First Sale doctrine like anything else.
In most large communities private corporations did run transit lines; they were systematically bought up by a few large trusts and then dismantled, tracks torn up, cables pulled and rights-of-way broken in order to drive the sale of buses, tires, and gasoline.
This is the thing we have to be very careful of at this juncture, there's a definite threat that the last mile will be bought up by a few companies, and then universal access and de facto network neutrality will be broken, under the justifications of "efficiency" and "modernization."
If a town wants to start a new bus line, or double the number of stops, or open a new school, or put water fountains on Main Street, they just hold a vote at a city council meeting.
If a town wants to hang some antennas to offer a public amenity on Main Street, probably costing about as much as the water fountains, they gotta go through the equivalent of a consent decree. This sounds like broadband provider protectionism to me. That a municipal utility can provide better service than a private utility is an open question and a lot of cities do very well with publicly-owned electric grids and traction transit; adding hoops to jump through for broadband wifi in particular is just a way of protecting Comcast's fiefdom.
Well in an avionics class I'd hope they'd at least let you use your E6-B. Last calculator you'll ever need!
Nit: Taxes only impose a deadweight loss on a transaction, or otherwise dis-incentivize it, insofar as the supply of the good is elastic. A perfectly inelastic good, such as a land, or a license to a fixed good like radio spectrum, can be taxed at an arbitrary rate and there will be no distortion of economic decisions. Also, taxes that penalize negative externalities can alter decisions and impose individualized deadweight losses that are recouped in other ways -- a tax on alcohol will restrain the buying of alcohol, which is arduous on alcohol sellers but probably guarantees them (and everyone else in the economy) a wider pool of people to sell to in the future.
The taxes in this case are collected under the authority of the purchaser's state government. The individuals making these purchases are liable for these taxes and are required to pay them; Jeff Bezos isn't disagreeing with that.
Their canceling of affiliate programs in states where the rule is enforced would indicate that they acknowledge the underlying legitimacy of the rule, and the unlikelyhood that they'd ever win their case in a court or with a legislature. So all the better to lobby us, which is exactly what Bezos is doing here.
So 30% of all Internet traffic is DRMd video, and is beating non-DRMd, free-as-in-beer video.
One day, Google invented this totally awesome free and open source operating system for phones, which ran on hundreds of different devices from dozens of different vendors. It allowed people to customize their phones, run whatever apps they wanted, buy apps off of different stores and sideload whatever code they pleased.
Google also invented an awesome operating system for phones that they develop in secret, publish the source for only after select marketing partners have had a 6 month head start, and then only if the code "looks good enough," and their partners are only allowed a head start if they agree to not integrate their phones with services that would harm Google's strategic investments. These phones come in many different models, but only two of them, both coming from the same manufacturer, actually offer up-to-date support and updates. The rest are trendy abandonware, efused and ROMed.
I am continually informed by people here that these two operating systems are the same thing and that all the good stuff about the first operating system applies to the second one.
What about your freedom to stay? When people are compelled to emigrate in order to find work, this is generally called expulsion and is a bad thing. It's a rather thin continuum between a manager's commute from San Antonio to Matamoros, and the partition of India, and it's a very fine line between permitting people to move and leaving them no alternative.
They do seem to be coming at this from a funny direction-- replacing a doctor with a electronic frob will tend to greatly increase complexity for most kinds of examinations. To do something as simple as clearing a belly, for example, you can either invent a tricorder with some kind of low-grade tomography or sonogram imaging, or you can train a nurse who can do it in five seconds with superior quality. What the world probably needs a lot more than a tricorder is armies of people with a week of training, perhaps augmented by some kind of expert and telepresence system.
The idea they describe in TFA doesnt so much resemble a tricorder as it does the auto-diagnosis machine from Idiocracy, where the dude puts a tube up your nose, in your ear, up your butt and in your mouth and your aliment pops up on a carwash gantry.
We could do that, but of course there are tremendous distinctions between the different modes of delivery (if it were "all the same" we wouldn't really have an argument, would we?). Treating them as "all the same" doesn't really empower consumers as much as it empowers middlemen producers and hardware device makers: upstarts like these Zediva people would like nothing more than to make bank renting out movies other people made, just like Roku and Apple and Microsoft would love to sell every movie in the library at low fixed cost the day the movie's released in theaters, because they didn't pay any money to make it, and they're just the middlemen using their products to connect you with OTHER people's movies.
DRM was bad until it stopped being inconvenient.
Joe Sixpack has probably never heard the terms "Osborne Effect" or "aircraft failure to maintain lateral clearance with terrain," but he still knows better than to buy Gamestation5 when Gamestation6 has been announced, and that a plane hitting a tree is bad.
The problem is people don't know what Android is, or what makes it different from iOS or Blackberry, aside from the fact that "having Android" doesn't seem to guarantee any particular functionality aside from the barest and most simple things, and that having an iPhone guarantees a lot more things will "just work." Hardware can vary but past a certain point it ceases to be a "platform."
Netflix can't get their client to work acceptably on slower hardware, so they aren't selling an Android app, they're selling a Droid/Nexus/etc. app.
They are probably the five most popular.
On the other hand, you have to wonder if you're looking for a phone and you want Netflix, will it run today, will it run tomorrow? Is this exactly the SKU that runs Netflix?
but our ebook reader auto-scrolls!!! For that we deserve to make dot-com millionaire money, selling other people's books with other people's merchandise platforms onto other people's tablets.