To put it more simply, action against an existing regime is useless without organization. Organization depends on information. If you cut off the flow of information, you disrupt the organization, resulting in action that has minimal effect.
Therefore, maintaining/controlling the communication infrastructure is key -- ALL modern governments know this.
Using the GP's example, we can see a meteor approaching earth, but by ourselves, there isn't much we can do about it; any action we may take is useless. However, working together and communicating (with some people dedicated to facilitating that communication), we CAN deflect/destroy/protect ourselves from it.
This is why the argument is a straw man -- we need BOTH information and action; saying that the information facilitators should be out protesting is just as wrong as saying ALL protesters should be working at the ISPs to make sure the Internet service doesn't go down.
...except that the alternative to keeping this in good condition and entering the codes is going to juvenile detention and/or a hefty fine. This won't stop option 1 from happening though.
You raise a good point; this device shouldn't be given to the student; it should be given to the parent(s). Give the kids an RSA token on a bracelet, and the parent has to enter the code at "check in" times -- which would be agreed upon case-by-case as times when the parent should actually be with their child.
After all, parents are legally responsible for their children, and should be held to this.
All this will do is to condition these children to accept invasive tracking and surveillance. This is not a question of children's rights, it is a question of what those children will think is normal or acceptable in a decade, when they are adults.
Let me get this straight... children who regularly flout authority and decide to do what they want to do instead being given a device that is supposed to make them accountable for their whereabouts (in the same way that some prisons track day leave and parole) are going to start accepting invasive tracking and surveillance??? It sure works for ex-cons, doesn't it?
When I read the title of this article, I thought: "Great idea! The schools have got permission to track student's cell phones during school hours!" To me, this would have been within the remit of the schools, and as a kid these days isn't going to skip without their phone, the schools (and parents, as the data would automatically be shared with parents) would know exactly what the kids were up to. They could even go so far as to get all SMS and phone records for activities during a school day.
Instead, they issue a device that makes the kids feel like they're on parole, and are already part of the prison system -- except that they can "lose" the device, or break it, or give it to a friend, or....
This is definitely a solution chasing after the wrong problem.
The interesting thing about this is that the security protections in SC chips would be triviial to port to a larger IC CPU; you're get a bit of performance loss, but randomizing the pipelining would probably be enough for simple protection.
So what you'd see is not too much cost involved in adding the protection, but a minor performance hit. Seems to me the Mobile market (where chips are usually underclocked anyway) would be the perfect market to start implementing this in. Gaming PCs probably don't need this feature anyway, so if it could be installed but disabled (with a Turbo/Insecure button?) everyone could have what they want.
But personally I don't really care who is leaking and linking my information, as my general username is one associated with my online persona... a persona which keeps its javascript disabled, flash disabled, cookies trashed for the most part, and also does not buy anything.
That last bit is the most important. Marketers have almost nothing to gain from my general-use persona. It's not linked to the real world, nor to anything that could make money for a third party -- it doesn't even click on ads.
If I want to follow an ad, I bookmark the site (not the uri, as those have tracking info) and browse/google it later. When they need information about me, I can then decide exactly how much, and what type of information they should get.
This is Slashdot, remember. Half the people here wholeheartedly believe the U.S. government would cheerfully murder you stepping out of line to the extent of wearing a non-government-approved color of shirt in private, and the other half are dead certain this has already happened and anyone who's ever said anything bad online about the ruling political party in the past has been "replaced" by government shills (yet somehow the government is too incompetent to run anything). Add in the belief that they are the sole defenders of "freedom", for some anomalous definition of same (which somehow coincidentally always lines up with their own personal beliefs at the time), and you've picked up any outliers who slipped through the cracks.
Are you saying that most of the people on Slashdot are Scientologists?
I disagree; WikiLeaks was around for a number of years before they were first noticed... and even then, it took until last year before someone attempted to really do something about them beyond hand slapping.
You joke, but I've seen what damaged nets can do in the ocean... just imagine if one of these space nets got loose; you'd suddenly have quite a mess piling up, in some random orbit that might intersect something legitimate.
Although, I guess if it gathered enough mass, the momentum of caught objects would cancel each other out, and the entire tangle would plummet back to earth (most of the debris burning up on reentry).
Just speculate for a minute - let's assume they pull their Evil Puppet String, call someone on the Purple Phone, and Voila, Google is faced with a cease and desist from doing business on the net. Just here in dreamland, suppose it is as easy as what Egypt pulled.
Would that be enough for the revolt to kick off real change? Would the frog finally notice it's been boiling?
No, the frog would just switch to Bing unfortunately.
Remember: back in the day there was Hotbot.. then MetaBot... then AltaVista and Yahoo!... then Google... then a bunch of names that are bigger than AltaVista ever was (Wolfram, Bing, etc.), but are still tiny compared to Google.
However, considering that Google Egypt employees played a large part in that revolution, and that Google has their own darknet that they could activate should they get pulled from the Internet, you might have a point.
Remember, Sony (Sony Pictures) is a member of the MPAA. The MPAA is a collective of companies that are not only capable of spewing out nuclear-grade stupid, but also in getting people in powerful positions to believe them. That's why people cringe in anger instead of responding in anger.
I vote that we go to something that allows more combinations... for instance, http:/// 51A5:4D07, or maybe http:/// 736C:6173:6864:6F74 or even http:/// 0115:0108:0097:0115:0104:0100:0111:0116. Web browsers could even convert this into readable text.
This would have the added benefit that DNS would be obsolete, as each IP would have a unique name.
Your IP not in the 0115 domain? Tough luck; just pick a name that doesn't start with an "s".
Does anyone seriously look at 2 competing products and see a version number as a bullet point?
The answer, sadly, is yes. Some people think of version numbers as equating to some feature set. So if everyone's moved from HTML3 to HTML5, then the browsers should be moving from SuperBrowser 4 to SuperBrowser 11. Any browser still back at InferiorBrowser 5 obviously hasn't implemented all the recent changes. I thought Microsoft moved to year-based release versionings to get away from all this in marketing. They discovered however that year-based versioning has its own pitfalls. Apple has got around this by making the "package" year based, but the products all have a sane number. So, you can buy the year's bundle, but it may or may not have major changes in each piece compared to the previous year's bundle.
I'm waiting for someone to do some deep analysis of a pro-anarchy group calling themselves "Anonymous Cowards". I hear the senior members and founders can be found lurking around here sometimes... some of them are even rumoured to have girlfriends or be married.
...such as "This is being used as satire" -- protected speech, use of IP, and all that.
Now, people in countries that have stricter personal information laws than the US might be able to sue both organizations (FB for leaking PII and these other guys for publishing without notification).
You forget your basic statistics. If you have 10*10k/year and 1*100k/year... the median(18k) is no where what most of the people make.
I think it is you who forget your basic statistics... median != mean; mean is the average (18k) -- median on 10*10k and 1*100k would be 10k (11 samples, the middle one is 10k). So, the median in your example would be *exactly* what most of the people make.
If, he hasnt used 'period' and 'full stop' and created enough dramatic pause, i wouldnt have believed him.
but now, i believe him, despite bing has been caught red handed, denied it without showing ANY proof, and then went on to accuse google of something totally irrelevant.
He actually had me believing he was really William Shatner for a moment... I was trying to figure out how he could possibly be a spokesperson for Microsoft.
It would be the weirdest form of alibi if someone claimed he could not have robbed a bank because at that exact moment he was murdering someone.
Actually, that sounds like an ingenious alibi, assuming that when the murder case came to trial he claimed he could not have murdered the person because at that exact moment he was robbing a bank. After all, you can't be charged twice for the same offense.
As we like to state on here so often, copyright and trademark infringement are not "basic theft".
Unless the submitter includes the original copyright and trademark information, Apple has no way of knowing for sure that the content belongs to someone else. For those that argue "but someone else was already publishing the same assets with a copyright attached!" this is true, but whose to say it wasn't the other guys who slapped on some fake rights? The problem is, while all these things are theoretically detectable, you have an open-ended detection problem. What should they be detecting? How far should they search? As soon as they enter this arena, they become liable for anything they miss.
It's easier just to respond to appropriate DMCA and Trade notifications -- which they do.
Cite your sources please? Stats Canada gets their info directly from census results of a large random sampling. Responding to the census is mandatory in Canada. Therefore, if anything, the numbers are low (due to non-declared income) not high. However, the value could still be slightly high, as the number of homeless people included in the census tends to be a bit skewed (they've been getting better at that recently). All in all, the outlying factors tend to cancel each other out, giving us pretty reliable statistics.
$15k/year = $300/week, or $7.50/hour for a 40-hour work week for one person (with everyone else in the household being a dependant). Considering this is below minimum wage in ALL Canadian provinces and territories (excepting BC's "probationary wage" which only lasts a max of 6 months),
$65k/year = $32.50/hour, or $16.25/hour for two people in a household. This sounds MUCH more reasonable.
However, this is before taxes, which will bring this down to $13/hour per person (on average).
That said, I grew up below the median, and my family was still able to save up for 2 intercontinental trips including visits to the Louvre, etc. The trick was that we saved up for them by saving money instead of frittering it away on incidentals. Considering as of December 2009 the average household debt in Canada was $96,000, I have a feeling people tend to go travelling whether they can afford it or not.
Actually, this raises a good point. I use Stanza, which is an app without a bookseller behind it; instead, it can link to a number of websites for downloads (including a local Calibre share).
If this goes through, will Apple be kicking Stanza from the App store? After all, you can use it to connect to sites where you have an account -- some of these sites require purchasing books you download. As such, "Stanza" would have to provide Apple with all the third-party content they have access to (which is unlimited, causing a problem).
I just hope that someone re-publishes Stanza via a cydia repo if this happens.
Hmm? Are you talking to the users or the developers? All users will see is that they can either buy direct from amazon, or buy through Apple for an increased price. They will have MORE options than they did before. If they're willing to pay the premium, they can buy the book without leaving their app.
However, your advice is sage for any developers developing for the plaltform through official channels. The booksellers not only have to update their apps to support Apple purchases, but they need to re-orient their sales infrastructure to track a "price+x%" value and push their catalog to Apple.
It should be interesting to see how Amazon and B&N respond.
(one side note... it's not so clear cut as "this will take 30% out of the book margins" as Apple WILL be handling full processing for any books sold this way; the vendor just needs to make the data available. So for big sellers like Amazon who already have everything set up and optimized, this will have some impact [which they can likely route around somehow]. However, for vanity press and individual title releasers, this doesn't change much, as publishing through Apple is probably cheaper than doing it themselves anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
What amazes me about that is that Comcast, Charter and Cox are so obviously in the lead. Did Netflix pay them anything for this?
To put it more simply, action against an existing regime is useless without organization. Organization depends on information. If you cut off the flow of information, you disrupt the organization, resulting in action that has minimal effect.
Therefore, maintaining/controlling the communication infrastructure is key -- ALL modern governments know this.
Using the GP's example, we can see a meteor approaching earth, but by ourselves, there isn't much we can do about it; any action we may take is useless. However, working together and communicating (with some people dedicated to facilitating that communication), we CAN deflect/destroy/protect ourselves from it.
This is why the argument is a straw man -- we need BOTH information and action; saying that the information facilitators should be out protesting is just as wrong as saying ALL protesters should be working at the ISPs to make sure the Internet service doesn't go down.
...except that the alternative to keeping this in good condition and entering the codes is going to juvenile detention and/or a hefty fine. This won't stop option 1 from happening though.
You raise a good point; this device shouldn't be given to the student; it should be given to the parent(s). Give the kids an RSA token on a bracelet, and the parent has to enter the code at "check in" times -- which would be agreed upon case-by-case as times when the parent should actually be with their child.
After all, parents are legally responsible for their children, and should be held to this.
All this will do is to condition these children to accept invasive tracking and surveillance. This is not a question of children's rights, it is a question of what those children will think is normal or acceptable in a decade, when they are adults.
Let me get this straight... children who regularly flout authority and decide to do what they want to do instead being given a device that is supposed to make them accountable for their whereabouts (in the same way that some prisons track day leave and parole) are going to start accepting invasive tracking and surveillance??? It sure works for ex-cons, doesn't it?
When I read the title of this article, I thought: "Great idea! The schools have got permission to track student's cell phones during school hours!" To me, this would have been within the remit of the schools, and as a kid these days isn't going to skip without their phone, the schools (and parents, as the data would automatically be shared with parents) would know exactly what the kids were up to. They could even go so far as to get all SMS and phone records for activities during a school day.
Instead, they issue a device that makes the kids feel like they're on parole, and are already part of the prison system -- except that they can "lose" the device, or break it, or give it to a friend, or....
This is definitely a solution chasing after the wrong problem.
The interesting thing about this is that the security protections in SC chips would be triviial to port to a larger IC CPU; you're get a bit of performance loss, but randomizing the pipelining would probably be enough for simple protection.
So what you'd see is not too much cost involved in adding the protection, but a minor performance hit. Seems to me the Mobile market (where chips are usually underclocked anyway) would be the perfect market to start implementing this in. Gaming PCs probably don't need this feature anyway, so if it could be installed but disabled (with a Turbo/Insecure button?) everyone could have what they want.
Maybe he'd prefer the term Amplitude Modem?
But personally I don't really care who is leaking and linking my information, as my general username is one associated with my online persona... a persona which keeps its javascript disabled, flash disabled, cookies trashed for the most part, and also does not buy anything.
That last bit is the most important. Marketers have almost nothing to gain from my general-use persona. It's not linked to the real world, nor to anything that could make money for a third party -- it doesn't even click on ads.
If I want to follow an ad, I bookmark the site (not the uri, as those have tracking info) and browse/google it later. When they need information about me, I can then decide exactly how much, and what type of information they should get.
This is Slashdot, remember. Half the people here wholeheartedly believe the U.S. government would cheerfully murder you stepping out of line to the extent of wearing a non-government-approved color of shirt in private, and the other half are dead certain this has already happened and anyone who's ever said anything bad online about the ruling political party in the past has been "replaced" by government shills (yet somehow the government is too incompetent to run anything). Add in the belief that they are the sole defenders of "freedom", for some anomalous definition of same (which somehow coincidentally always lines up with their own personal beliefs at the time), and you've picked up any outliers who slipped through the cracks.
Are you saying that most of the people on Slashdot are Scientologists?
I disagree; WikiLeaks was around for a number of years before they were first noticed... and even then, it took until last year before someone attempted to really do something about them beyond hand slapping.
You joke, but I've seen what damaged nets can do in the ocean... just imagine if one of these space nets got loose; you'd suddenly have quite a mess piling up, in some random orbit that might intersect something legitimate.
Although, I guess if it gathered enough mass, the momentum of caught objects would cancel each other out, and the entire tangle would plummet back to earth (most of the debris burning up on reentry).
Just speculate for a minute - let's assume they pull their Evil Puppet String, call someone on the Purple Phone, and Voila, Google is faced with a cease and desist from doing business on the net. Just here in dreamland, suppose it is as easy as what Egypt pulled.
Would that be enough for the revolt to kick off real change? Would the frog finally notice it's been boiling?
No, the frog would just switch to Bing unfortunately.
Remember: back in the day there was Hotbot.. then MetaBot... then AltaVista and Yahoo!... then Google... then a bunch of names that are bigger than AltaVista ever was (Wolfram, Bing, etc.), but are still tiny compared to Google.
However, considering that Google Egypt employees played a large part in that revolution, and that Google has their own darknet that they could activate should they get pulled from the Internet, you might have a point.
Remember, Sony (Sony Pictures) is a member of the MPAA. The MPAA is a collective of companies that are not only capable of spewing out nuclear-grade stupid, but also in getting people in powerful positions to believe them. That's why people cringe in anger instead of responding in anger.
I vote that we go to something that allows more combinations... for instance, http:/// 51A5:4D07, or maybe http:/// 736C:6173:6864:6F74 or even http:/// 0115:0108:0097:0115:0104:0100:0111:0116. Web browsers could even convert this into readable text.
This would have the added benefit that DNS would be obsolete, as each IP would have a unique name.
Your IP not in the 0115 domain? Tough luck; just pick a name that doesn't start with an "s".
Does anyone seriously look at 2 competing products and see a version number as a bullet point?
The answer, sadly, is yes. Some people think of version numbers as equating to some feature set. So if everyone's moved from HTML3 to HTML5, then the browsers should be moving from SuperBrowser 4 to SuperBrowser 11. Any browser still back at InferiorBrowser 5 obviously hasn't implemented all the recent changes. I thought Microsoft moved to year-based release versionings to get away from all this in marketing. They discovered however that year-based versioning has its own pitfalls. Apple has got around this by making the "package" year based, but the products all have a sane number. So, you can buy the year's bundle, but it may or may not have major changes in each piece compared to the previous year's bundle.
I'm waiting for someone to do some deep analysis of a pro-anarchy group calling themselves "Anonymous Cowards". I hear the senior members and founders can be found lurking around here sometimes... some of them are even rumoured to have girlfriends or be married.
...such as "This is being used as satire" -- protected speech, use of IP, and all that.
Now, people in countries that have stricter personal information laws than the US might be able to sue both organizations (FB for leaking PII and these other guys for publishing without notification).
Median != Most people
You forget your basic statistics. If you have 10*10k/year and 1*100k/year ... the median(18k) is no where what most of the people make.
I think it is you who forget your basic statistics... median != mean; mean is the average (18k) -- median on 10*10k and 1*100k would be 10k (11 samples, the middle one is 10k). So, the median in your example would be *exactly* what most of the people make.
If, he hasnt used 'period' and 'full stop' and created enough dramatic pause, i wouldnt have believed him.
but now, i believe him, despite bing has been caught red handed, denied it without showing ANY proof, and then went on to accuse google of something totally irrelevant.
He actually had me believing he was really William Shatner for a moment... I was trying to figure out how he could possibly be a spokesperson for Microsoft.
It would be the weirdest form of alibi if someone claimed he could not have robbed a bank because at that exact moment he was murdering someone.
Actually, that sounds like an ingenious alibi, assuming that when the murder case came to trial he claimed he could not have murdered the person because at that exact moment he was robbing a bank. After all, you can't be charged twice for the same offense.
As we like to state on here so often, copyright and trademark infringement are not "basic theft".
Unless the submitter includes the original copyright and trademark information, Apple has no way of knowing for sure that the content belongs to someone else. For those that argue "but someone else was already publishing the same assets with a copyright attached!" this is true, but whose to say it wasn't the other guys who slapped on some fake rights? The problem is, while all these things are theoretically detectable, you have an open-ended detection problem. What should they be detecting? How far should they search? As soon as they enter this arena, they become liable for anything they miss.
It's easier just to respond to appropriate DMCA and Trade notifications -- which they do.
That median is completely wrong.
Cite your sources please? Stats Canada gets their info directly from census results of a large random sampling. Responding to the census is mandatory in Canada. Therefore, if anything, the numbers are low (due to non-declared income) not high. However, the value could still be slightly high, as the number of homeless people included in the census tends to be a bit skewed (they've been getting better at that recently). All in all, the outlying factors tend to cancel each other out, giving us pretty reliable statistics.
$15k/year = $300/week, or $7.50/hour for a 40-hour work week for one person (with everyone else in the household being a dependant). Considering this is below minimum wage in ALL Canadian provinces and territories (excepting BC's "probationary wage" which only lasts a max of 6 months),
$65k/year = $32.50/hour, or $16.25/hour for two people in a household. This sounds MUCH more reasonable.
However, this is before taxes, which will bring this down to $13/hour per person (on average).
That said, I grew up below the median, and my family was still able to save up for 2 intercontinental trips including visits to the Louvre, etc. The trick was that we saved up for them by saving money instead of frittering it away on incidentals. Considering as of December 2009 the average household debt in Canada was $96,000, I have a feeling people tend to go travelling whether they can afford it or not.
Actually, this raises a good point. I use Stanza, which is an app without a bookseller behind it; instead, it can link to a number of websites for downloads (including a local Calibre share).
If this goes through, will Apple be kicking Stanza from the App store? After all, you can use it to connect to sites where you have an account -- some of these sites require purchasing books you download. As such, "Stanza" would have to provide Apple with all the third-party content they have access to (which is unlimited, causing a problem).
I just hope that someone re-publishes Stanza via a cydia repo if this happens.
Hmm? Are you talking to the users or the developers? All users will see is that they can either buy direct from amazon, or buy through Apple for an increased price. They will have MORE options than they did before. If they're willing to pay the premium, they can buy the book without leaving their app.
However, your advice is sage for any developers developing for the plaltform through official channels. The booksellers not only have to update their apps to support Apple purchases, but they need to re-orient their sales infrastructure to track a "price+x%" value and push their catalog to Apple.
It should be interesting to see how Amazon and B&N respond.
(one side note... it's not so clear cut as "this will take 30% out of the book margins" as Apple WILL be handling full processing for any books sold this way; the vendor just needs to make the data available. So for big sellers like Amazon who already have everything set up and optimized, this will have some impact [which they can likely route around somehow]. However, for vanity press and individual title releasers, this doesn't change much, as publishing through Apple is probably cheaper than doing it themselves anyway).
Youtube won't remove h.264 encoding until the majority of mobile browsers (I'm looking at you, Mobile Safari) support WebM.