I'm of the opinion that even the current system of private coverage is fundamentally a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality. You've got these insurance companies just itching to monetize any piece of data they can get from their paying customers, such that the half-assed nature of HIPAA really provides no assurance that your medical information won't be used in one way or another that is ultimately against your well-being.
The only way to be sure your information (any info, not just medical records) won't be systematically abused is to make sure it isn't entered into a file or a database in the first place. Unfortunately, there seems to be a real focus on doing just the opposite with these healthcare changes - some sort of magical computer worshipping cargo cult thing where too many people think that if they can just get all our personal info into a database it will be the best thing since sliced bread. I'm tired of sacrificing privacy for the promise of increased efficiency and convenience and I am doubly tired of those promises failing to pan out in the long run. But that's exactly what I expect is going to happen here too.
Re:Just to start us off with a car analogy...
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 4, Funny
The result is going to be a bunch of speakers wired in parallel, reducing the load across the amp down to less than an ohm, just go ahead and short your amp output now and save yourself the time of getting it all hooked up before you burn it up.
As I posted in another part of this discussion - use these $35 impedance matching volume controls to handle the problem of running a bunch of speakers in parallel from one source. They will s support up to 16 or 32 pairs of speakers depending on if the amp does 8 or 4 ohms.
Running wires to each room in the house would be both cheaper and have sound quality independent of network quality.
Yep, and with a handful of these $35 impedeance matching volume-controls, he can use a regular old stereo receiver to drive multiple rooms - note that you have to buy at least two (and do two rooms) with this model.
What happened to you is very common place. Simply showing up is usually enough to get a ticket 'plea-bargained' down. They know that if anything more than a tiny fraction of people were to contest their tickets, the entire system would fall apart from overload.
Umm, you want to rotate your block ciphers on long-running connections. Saying this isn't useful in practice implies that you must reset connections and recover at the application level instead, or risk using the same block ciphers for too long.
So maybe it's just a tad too early to stream 1080p over the Net, then?
(a) The numbers aren't even enough for 720p itunes quality. (b) Comcast advertise 12Mbps for their cheapest tier. (c) If comcast get's their way it will ALWAYS be a tad too early because their monopoly position in their market means they never have to improve.
Mentioning James Randi's 'challenge' doesn't garner you (or him) any credibility. Its not exactly in the same league as an 'X' prize. He's backed out of his offer several times to my knowledge.
You will have to do better than that. The only 'backing out' I've ever heard of has really just been sour grapes from losers who couldn't even pass the preliminary requirements of minimal verification, much less the full test of scientific reproducibility.
MAYBE that's true for netflix. It isn't true for other services.
I'm looking at season 1 of "Parks and Recreation" from Itunes at 720p. The bitrate of these episodes is roughly 4.5Mbps and it is just at the bare minimum of what I consider acceptable. They are going to need to more than double that for good quality 1080p, say at least 13Mbps for broadcast-quality (not blu-ray) 1080p. For example, NBC's nationwide 1080i backhaul is 15Mbps h264 and they are the lowest bitrate of all the major networks, ABC is roughly 35Mbps h264 for their 720p backhaul.
So, 13Mbps for decent 1080p material - that works out to: ~4.0GB at good 1080p ~1.5GB at itunes quality 720p for typical 42 minute show with no commercials.
That puts comcast's cap at about 2 hours a day for good 1080p or 5.5 hours at itunes quality. For an entire family, with no commercials.
That puts comcast's 250GB cap at about half of the necessary level for itunes quality television, and a quarter for good quality 1080p. For the AVERAGE family. It doesn't account for the bell-curve at all. The cap needs to be more like 2TB to cover the average household video consumption out to the 1st standard deviation.
Has there been a statistically significant increase in accidents caused by distracted driving? By significant I mean real - not just the result of changing the way accidents are reported.
If not, then this just sounds like bandwagon-jumping.
I do, in fact, think that copyright holders have every right to defend their legal rights but they absolutely must not step on the rights of others in so doing.
I do, in fact, think that copyright holders have every right to defend their legal rights but they absolutely must not create new legal rights for themselves in so doing.
Solution: Transcribe it. Have someone rephrase it himself. Or translate it to another language via something like babelfish.
Map makers are known to create false streets in out of the way places. If the copies of this document were 'watermarked' with a fake line-item (that won't appear in the final draft that is eventually published) then no amount of translations and re-wording is going clean it up.
Its possible that with multiple copies one could compare them for differences and excise the watermark - but even that may not be fool-proof if they were smart enough to use sets of differences rather than just a single difference per document.
What really needs to happen is for someone to fall on his sword and put it on wikileaks, consequences be damned. But, it would be nice if it was someone in a country that maybe had not classified the document to the same level as the US apparently has.
There is a section in the agreement allowing the RIAA or MPAA to confiscate all of your possessions if they find a single infringing item on any PC you own. If you don't believe me, just ask the government to show it to you and prove me wrong. Tell all your friends.
Secrecy cuts two ways. If they want to keep it a secret because it benefits their agenda to do so, then I don't have a problem with rumours like that being passed around because it benefits everybody else's agenda. A couple of good rumours like that may be what it takes to make this treaty dead on arrival.
Basing a supercomputer on MIPs was short-sighted; even if it offers a a price/performance or power/performance advantage now, in a couple years it won't, because x86 is being improved at a much faster rate. Where is Sequent now?
Uh, Sequent never used MIPs chips. In fact, the vast majority of the system that they sold were Intel based.
Maybe you mean SGI? Their problems seemed to coincided with their moves to Intel chips (SGI PCs that flopped and then later the wholesale move to ia64). Not to say that the problems were caused by those moves - maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but it certainly didn't make the problems go away.
Next you'll be telling me that 8 out of 10 people who have unprotected sex with HIV-positive, syphilitic, sore-encrusted prostitutes will contract some sort of venereal disease.
And, you know, this could alleviate a lot of the "bring iTunes/Amazon MP3/Hulu to the rest of the world" complaints we get so frequently on Slashdot. But all too often you see labels balk at foreign markets and a lot of time (though not always) they cite lack of copyright control and enforcement in these countries.
You are confused. The reason streaming services aren't globally available has nada to do with lax copyright controls and everything to with licensing rights. The system was created decades ago when information flow across borders was 100% physical and thus cumbersome. The copyright cartels exploited that fact by partitioning each country into its own licensing region and then created a market to buy and sell international distribution rights. In many cases there were no buyers for distribution rights in certain countries for reasons like the asking price being too high. The only people who felt inconvenienced by this arrangement were aficionados of foreign culture and ex-pats, everybody else didn't even know what they were missing.
The internet changed the awareness of the people so that today a hell of a lot more people are aware of what they are missing. The copyright cartels have not kept up with the increased demand, instead resting on the easy money of their monopolies, and the market for international distribution rights has not significantly changed. Stronger copyright controls won't enable increased foreign distribution, if anything it will just reinforce the status quo.
In contrast, piracy has actually provoked studios into more rapid foreign distribution - it is now common place for official DVDs of Hollywood productions to be released in countries like Russia, India and China day and date with theatrical release in the west - one recent example is District 9.
Let me try again with an analogy you won't take too literally: I'll hold the door open for you with no expected reciprocity because it takes so little effort. If I help you move I won't help you twice if I'm getting no favors/kindness in return.
Literal or not, holding the door open for someone is nothing like helping someone move. There is no common principle shared between the two cases. The first is the principle that politeness helps society in general and the second is that friends help each other (no one helps someone else move even once if they aren't getting something in return, just because it isn't immediately tangible doesn't mean there is not a debt incurred.)
Another: If you do 51% of the work and your partner does 49% you probably won't notice, and even if you do you wouldn't complain. Make it 70/30 and you will notice and might speak up about it.
You gloss over so many details as to make this example meaningless. What's the nature of the partnership? Is it ongoing? Are you in competition with the partner? Can you even measure the percentage of work with that level of accuracy? Answers to those sorts of questions will almost certainly lead to your example becoming contradictory. I think the reason you complain about taking your example 'too literally' is simply because they fall apart under close examination. You want to hand-wave and really say "big is hard, small is easy" but my original point stands - if its a principle it needs to cover all bases, not just the ones that conveniently map to a popular mode of thinking.
You are ignoring social implications which vary by the significance of the subject at hand. Unless you can somehow concretely define all social costs and benefits your model is going to have error.
Actually, I think's precisely what you've been doing by trying to avoid being too literal.
If I'm buying something at your sandwich shop and come up 2 cents short, you would be considered a jerk to tell me I don't get my sandwich. Something tells me that principle doesn't scale when I'm buying a car from you and I'm short $10k.
If your car dealer has a give-a-penny-take-a-penny pot that holds 10K then yeah, it would be FINE. See, how that principle scales?
I don't know of a single store that routinely sells stuff for less than the stated price, even by a few cents unless the money comes from some where else like a penny pot. So I don't see why a car dealer should either. See how that scales too?
I'm assuming* a significant motivation for contributing free software is that people are trying to pay for their use of others' contributions past and future (i.e. they like the software)-
You are wrong. The single most common reason for people to write Free software is to scratch an itch - they have a problem, the software mostly solves it and adding a few more features takes care of it completely. Other reasons are primarily for credit - students doing it as part of a school project and developers doing it either as part of their job or looking to build credibility in order to get a job. I've never heard of a single person writing code for a software project purely because they want to give something back.
Do we just have to keep changing models all the time now?
Yes. The only constant is change. Get used to it.
Does each model work for all industries as well as the current one does/did, such as for classical orchestras/composers, jazz musicians, authors etc?
Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But one thing is absolutely certain - when the world changes you have one choice - adapt or die. Insisting on maintaining copyright in the face of such radical and unstoppable failures of copyright is just the slow road to death.
Attribution is a completely different thing from copying.
I highly doubt that you ask the joke teller's permission to claim authorship of his fart joke. Certainly Mencia's problems (which are hardly unique in the stand-up comedy world, Robin Williams has been frequently accused of similar acts) aren't about copying other people's jokes - they are about his passing them off as his own jokes.
Your argument doesn't scale. In fact, all you did was tip-toe around the point I was trying to make people like you face -- that changing the principle just because of the scale is bogus. Either the principle is sound or it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm of the opinion that even the current system of private coverage is fundamentally a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality. You've got these insurance companies just itching to monetize any piece of data they can get from their paying customers, such that the half-assed nature of HIPAA really provides no assurance that your medical information won't be used in one way or another that is ultimately against your well-being.
The only way to be sure your information (any info, not just medical records) won't be systematically abused is to make sure it isn't entered into a file or a database in the first place. Unfortunately, there seems to be a real focus on doing just the opposite with these healthcare changes - some sort of magical computer worshipping cargo cult thing where too many people think that if they can just get all our personal info into a database it will be the best thing since sliced bread. I'm tired of sacrificing privacy for the promise of increased efficiency and convenience and I am doubly tired of those promises failing to pan out in the long run. But that's exactly what I expect is going to happen here too.
DRM is not the devil. It is a tool.
DRM is the Devil's tool.
The result is going to be a bunch of speakers wired in parallel, reducing the load across the amp down to less than an ohm, just go ahead and short your amp output now and save yourself the time of getting it all hooked up before you burn it up.
As I posted in another part of this discussion - use these $35 impedance matching volume controls to handle the problem of running a bunch of speakers in parallel from one source. They will s support up to 16 or 32 pairs of speakers depending on if the amp does 8 or 4 ohms.
Running wires to each room in the house would be both cheaper and have sound quality independent of network quality.
Yep, and with a handful of these $35 impedeance matching volume-controls, he can use a regular old stereo receiver to drive multiple rooms - note that you have to buy at least two (and do two rooms) with this model.
What happened to you is very common place.
Simply showing up is usually enough to get a ticket 'plea-bargained' down.
They know that if anything more than a tiny fraction of people were to contest their tickets, the entire system would fall apart from overload.
Unless the responsible adult is having a heart attack/stroke/seizure and the tyke has to call 911 for them.
Which probably happens once a year or less in the USA.
Umm, you want to rotate your block ciphers on long-running connections. Saying this isn't useful in practice implies that you must reset connections and recover at the application level instead, or risk using the same block ciphers for too long.
Exactly. I was going to say the same myself.
So maybe it's just a tad too early to stream 1080p over the Net, then?
(a) The numbers aren't even enough for 720p itunes quality.
(b) Comcast advertise 12Mbps for their cheapest tier.
(c) If comcast get's their way it will ALWAYS be a tad too early because their monopoly position in their market means they never have to improve.
Mentioning James Randi's 'challenge' doesn't garner you (or him) any credibility. Its not exactly in the same league as an 'X' prize. He's backed out of his offer several times to my knowledge.
You will have to do better than that. The only 'backing out' I've ever heard of has really just been sour grapes from losers who couldn't even pass the preliminary requirements of minimal verification, much less the full test of scientific reproducibility.
Good video over the net is 2 Mbps for Netflix.
MAYBE that's true for netflix. It isn't true for other services.
I'm looking at season 1 of "Parks and Recreation" from Itunes at 720p.
The bitrate of these episodes is roughly 4.5Mbps and it is just at the bare minimum of what I consider acceptable. They are going to need to more than double that for good quality 1080p, say at least 13Mbps for broadcast-quality (not blu-ray) 1080p. For example, NBC's nationwide 1080i backhaul is 15Mbps h264 and they are the lowest bitrate of all the major networks, ABC is roughly 35Mbps h264 for their 720p backhaul.
So, 13Mbps for decent 1080p material - that works out to:
~4.0GB at good 1080p
~1.5GB at itunes quality 720p
for typical 42 minute show with no commercials.
That puts comcast's cap at about 2 hours a day for good 1080p or 5.5 hours at itunes quality.
For an entire family, with no commercials.
The average television is on for more than 8 hours a day in the US.
That puts comcast's 250GB cap at about half of the necessary level for itunes quality television, and a quarter for good quality 1080p. For the AVERAGE family. It doesn't account for the bell-curve at all. The cap needs to be more like 2TB to cover the average household video consumption out to the 1st standard deviation.
Has there been a statistically significant increase in accidents caused by distracted driving?
By significant I mean real - not just the result of changing the way accidents are reported.
If not, then this just sounds like bandwagon-jumping.
I do, in fact, think that copyright holders have every right to defend their legal rights but they absolutely must not step on the rights of others in so doing.
I do, in fact, think that copyright holders have every right to defend their legal rights but they absolutely must not create new legal rights for themselves in so doing.
Fixed that for you.
Solution: Transcribe it. Have someone rephrase it himself. Or translate it to another language via something like babelfish.
Map makers are known to create false streets in out of the way places. If the copies of this document were 'watermarked' with a fake line-item (that won't appear in the final draft that is eventually published) then no amount of translations and re-wording is going clean it up.
Its possible that with multiple copies one could compare them for differences and excise the watermark - but even that may not be fool-proof if they were smart enough to use sets of differences rather than just a single difference per document.
What really needs to happen is for someone to fall on his sword and put it on wikileaks, consequences be damned. But, it would be nice if it was someone in a country that maybe had not classified the document to the same level as the US apparently has.
There is a section in the agreement allowing the RIAA or MPAA to confiscate all of your possessions if they find a single infringing item on any PC you own. If you don't believe me, just ask the government to show it to you and prove me wrong. Tell all your friends.
Secrecy cuts two ways. If they want to keep it a secret because it benefits their agenda to do so, then I don't have a problem with rumours like that being passed around because it benefits everybody else's agenda. A couple of good rumours like that may be what it takes to make this treaty dead on arrival.
Basing a supercomputer on MIPs was short-sighted; even if it offers a a price/performance or power/performance advantage now, in a couple years it won't, because x86 is being improved at a much faster rate. Where is Sequent now?
Uh, Sequent never used MIPs chips. In fact, the vast majority of the system that they sold were Intel based.
Maybe you mean SGI? Their problems seemed to coincided with their moves to Intel chips (SGI PCs that flopped and then later the wholesale move to ia64). Not to say that the problems were caused by those moves - maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but it certainly didn't make the problems go away.
Next you'll be telling me that 8 out of 10 people who have unprotected sex with HIV-positive, syphilitic, sore-encrusted prostitutes will contract some sort of venereal disease.
Not if they use a Mac, they can't get viruses.
See what happens when you believe warm-fuzzy liberal propaganda!? They go and take your internet away!
Bush/McCain or Obama, it doesn't make a difference.
Either president could certainly have stopped this crap if he cared enough, these secret treaty negotiations started while Bush was running the show.
And, you know, this could alleviate a lot of the "bring iTunes/Amazon MP3/Hulu to the rest of the world" complaints we get so frequently on Slashdot. But all too often you see labels balk at foreign markets and a lot of time (though not always) they cite lack of copyright control and enforcement in these countries.
You are confused. The reason streaming services aren't globally available has nada to do with lax copyright controls and everything to with licensing rights. The system was created decades ago when information flow across borders was 100% physical and thus cumbersome. The copyright cartels exploited that fact by partitioning each country into its own licensing region and then created a market to buy and sell international distribution rights. In many cases there were no buyers for distribution rights in certain countries for reasons like the asking price being too high. The only people who felt inconvenienced by this arrangement were aficionados of foreign culture and ex-pats, everybody else didn't even know what they were missing.
The internet changed the awareness of the people so that today a hell of a lot more people are aware of what they are missing. The copyright cartels have not kept up with the increased demand, instead resting on the easy money of their monopolies, and the market for international distribution rights has not significantly changed. Stronger copyright controls won't enable increased foreign distribution, if anything it will just reinforce the status quo.
In contrast, piracy has actually provoked studios into more rapid foreign distribution - it is now common place for official DVDs of Hollywood productions to be released in countries like Russia, India and China day and date with theatrical release in the west - one recent example is District 9.
holding a door and helping someone move are similar in the way making a joke or making a book are similar.
Distribution is distribution be it large or small.
What you've got with your analogy isn't even on the same page, much less the same word.
Modifying equipment to get a higher level of service than was paid for is, in fact, stealing. Morally and legally.
Uh, no. Modifying equipment is not stealing, especially when its your own damn property.
Using that equipment to steal is stealing.
Let me try again with an analogy you won't take too literally: I'll hold the door open for you with no expected reciprocity because it takes so little effort. If I help you move I won't help you twice if I'm getting no favors/kindness in return.
Literal or not, holding the door open for someone is nothing like helping someone move. There is no common principle shared between the two cases. The first is the principle that politeness helps society in general and the second is that friends help each other (no one helps someone else move even once if they aren't getting something in return, just because it isn't immediately tangible doesn't mean there is not a debt incurred.)
Another: If you do 51% of the work and your partner does 49% you probably won't notice, and even if you do you wouldn't complain. Make it 70/30 and you will notice and might speak up about it.
You gloss over so many details as to make this example meaningless. What's the nature of the partnership? Is it ongoing? Are you in competition with the partner? Can you even measure the percentage of work with that level of accuracy? Answers to those sorts of questions will almost certainly lead to your example becoming contradictory. I think the reason you complain about taking your example 'too literally' is simply because they fall apart under close examination. You want to hand-wave and really say "big is hard, small is easy" but my original point stands - if its a principle it needs to cover all bases, not just the ones that conveniently map to a popular mode of thinking.
You are ignoring social implications which vary by the significance of the subject at hand. Unless you can somehow concretely define all social costs and benefits your model is going to have error.
Actually, I think's precisely what you've been doing by trying to avoid being too literal.
If I'm buying something at your sandwich shop and come up 2 cents short, you would be considered a jerk to tell me I don't get my sandwich. Something tells me that principle doesn't scale when I'm buying a car from you and I'm short $10k.
If your car dealer has a give-a-penny-take-a-penny pot that holds 10K then yeah, it would be FINE.
See, how that principle scales?
I don't know of a single store that routinely sells stuff for less than the stated price, even by a few cents unless the money comes from some where else like a penny pot. So I don't see why a car dealer should either.
See how that scales too?
I'm assuming* a significant motivation for contributing free software is that people are trying to pay for their use of others' contributions past and future (i.e. they like the software)-
You are wrong. The single most common reason for people to write Free software is to scratch an itch - they have a problem, the software mostly solves it and adding a few more features takes care of it completely. Other reasons are primarily for credit - students doing it as part of a school project and developers doing it either as part of their job or looking to build credibility in order to get a job. I've never heard of a single person writing code for a software project purely because they want to give something back.
Do we just have to keep changing models all the time now?
Yes. The only constant is change. Get used to it.
Does each model work for all industries as well as the current one does/did, such as for classical orchestras/composers, jazz musicians, authors etc?
Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But one thing is absolutely certain - when the world changes you have one choice - adapt or die.
Insisting on maintaining copyright in the face of such radical and unstoppable failures of copyright is just the slow road to death.
Attribution is a completely different thing from copying.
I highly doubt that you ask the joke teller's permission to claim authorship of his fart joke.
Certainly Mencia's problems (which are hardly unique in the stand-up comedy world, Robin Williams has been frequently accused of similar acts) aren't about copying other people's jokes - they are about his passing them off as his own jokes.
Your argument doesn't scale. In fact, all you did was tip-toe around the point I was trying to make people like you face -- that changing the principle just because of the scale is bogus. Either the principle is sound or it isn't.