That doesn't mean what they adapt to is any good. You can create the most horrible UI of all times, intentionally, and if you force them then people will learn to use it. Having to use it because of work or because you know nothing else is a kind of force.
I haven't used W8 yet, so I don't have an opinion. But I have used most other versions of windows, and the UI is pretty stupid, inconsistent and basically cobbled together. Always has been. Don't see why W8 would be any different all of a sudden.
Facebook is not a required service. Nobody has to use it. Users are not paying for it.
I do not understand why Facebook should have to do anything
Because it's the law. You do understand the concept of a law, don't you? It doesn't matter if it's required, if it is enforced, if you are paying. Shooting you is illegal, even if I do it for free and nobody forced me. Same with enforcing real-name restrictions online.
As a developer, I believe that I should be free to create websites, applications, etc. as I see fit.
Society disagrees. It doesn't want you to create kiddie-porn websites, fraud and scam websites, or websites where people can't use a nickname. Sure, that is on different points on the "evil" scale, but we here in Germany have decided that we want to be able to use nicknames online. So if you do business in Germany, that's a law you have to follow, whether you like it or not. Just like paying taxes or not using child labour.
Uh, sorry, but it's a law. How much more backing does it need to have merit in the eyes of FB?
Fact is, half the people in my friend list (yes, I am on FB, though I don't use it much, but lots of people don't read e-mail anymore these days, only their FB messages) already are using pseudonyms. Either fake names or pseudo-names, i.e. nicknames that follow the firstname-lastname system, but that's it.
I understand the idea. I do have an online game and ask people for their real names as well. However, I also respect their anonymity, if they want it. They can hide the name from everyone else, and in-game they will use their character names.
The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.
Does the legal system in the US not have a method to shut down such obvious abuse?
I'm seriously wondering. That seems like a shop with a shoplifting problem who knows who the thieves are and simply allows them in and out anyways.
I just watched that and I must say that woman is a scumbag if you've ever seen one. Where has society failed that we allow people like that to breathe, breed and bother us?
I was quite impressed by the Anonymous guy, on the other hand. Calm, collected, serious.
The only criticism I have is that he allowed her to crowd him out and talk over him. Hitchens has demonstrated how you deal with people on TV/radio who try to interrupt you: Just keep talking. Don't get louder or faster, just ignore the interruption completely and continue as if nothing happened. Let the moderator moderate, but don't allow the opposite partner to control the flow of the conversation.
Yes, but there is no way that a spammer could ever undo the damage he has done to society. He simply doesn't live long enough to cover the hours lost, because they multiply by millions.
I am willing to apply my usual and proven-to-work system: Everyone is entitled to one mistake. Death penalty only for repeat offenders.
If you put them in prison, even for life, you just add to the cost on society.
This sounds reasonable to me - the telephone company has no business filtering phone calls, so it should not filter text messages either.
Bullshit. The phone company should most definitely filter both calls and text messages if the customer requests it. If I don't want to receive any calls by 555-1234567 because they are from some sicko who breathes at me in the middle of the night, the phone company should block the calls when I ask them to. And if I don't want to receive any spam messages, and my phone company offers a spam filter, and I ask them to please use it on my number, then yes, please!
What you mean is that they should not do it without asking their customers. But the alternative is not to not do it, the alternative is asking the customers.
Subscribers may choose to employ a spam-blocking service, which could be provided by other people
For example, the phone company. Why not? They are in the best position.
Why aren't the US and Europe exerting more diplomatic pressure on these tax havens
Uh, why aren't they changing their own laws so that these profit-allocation schemes are not allowed anymore? If some country wants to run a low or zero tax rate - that's their business, isn't it? But allowing a company that runs its business in your country to record its profits elsewhere is your problem.
Same thing with Hollywood accounting. Sure they are scumbags for doing it, but what about the scumbags allowing it in the first place?
Yes, but - and (in the words of Ben Goldacre) it's a big butt - you are judging after the fact, while those people who did those things had to judge while the story was still developing.
I'm sure there are just as many examples of extremist, reactionary, counter-revolutionary or just plain evil changes that were (successfully) fought off, if you were just looking for them. You select strongly. Not every change is positive, just because it is a change. Think of Stalinism or the Nazis, of the plague (brought to Europe by changes in trade routes) or Global Warming. Those are changes, too.
So basically, we are still at the same spot. Not every change is good, and quite often you don't know until later who was right and who was wrong. Abolishing slavery turned out to be right, even though many people at the time thought it was wrong. Abolishing the regulations on banks turned out to be wrong, even though many people at the time thought it was right.
I stand on your side regarding this particular case. But I don't think that everyone fighting against a change is automatically on the side of evil, or that we can find the truth just by checking who is for and who is against change. It's not that simple.
In a well-working court, no individual piece of evidence alone is sufficient. The sum is what matters.
So if eye-witnesses say that they are sure you were driving damn fast, and the impact damage is examined by an expert who concludes you were doing at least 70, and the black box says you were driving at 74.5 at the time of impact, then the evidence is conclusive.
If the eye-witnesses say you were the same speed as everyone else, and the impact gives and estimate in line with that, while the blax-box says you were twice that, then the black-box data will likely be thrown out.
And don't say "slippery slope fallacy". It's only a fallacy when there's no clear way for it to progress that way.
Last I checked, search warrants, prison terms and lots of other things have not slipped down the slope.
Just because you can imagine the slope does not mean it is slippery. It is good to be aware and cautious. Being paranoid and calling every change a slippery slope is overdoing it.
While I treasure the right to not testify against yourself, I am also a firm believer in truth. I don't mean that in any philosophical sense, I mean facts of the physical world. Your speed at impact is such a fact.
I believe that in all walks of life, we are better off if we follow the facts. While your personal interest in a lawsuit is to get the best result for yourself, the social purpose is to arrive at a fair judgement. And that begins with establishing the facts.
The problem with the inquisition and torture and self-incrimination is that under pressure, people will say a lot of things that they later regret. Basically, apply enough physical pain to the body of someone and he will not only admit to having been the real murderer of both Kennedy and Julius Cesar, he will also gladly invent details describing how he did it. To a lesser extend, psychological pressure does the same.
The social reason we have the right to not testify against yourself is that we've learnt that such testimony is incredibly unreliable. Just like eye-witnesses, btw., which only make or break a case in movies. So the social reason for the ban on self-incrimination is not to the advantage of the defendant, but to the advantage of the trial and its result.
Yeah, sorry for the wall of text, but it's necessary to explain why I don't consider factual information as self-incrimination. More facts instead of hearsay and his-words-against-yours will make cases easier and more just.
Even without the last decade of copyright law stupidity, setting up a business that works by copyright infringement would be a criminal offense in all western countries.
Individual infringements are civil matters. Running an organization based on them is not. The law knows about a point where intentional, continued civil matters become criminal matters.
So he is employing a million people, paying out unemployment benefits and healthcare? Financing a legal system and running the police and fire departments in your city?
Everyone loves to hate the government, but let's face it, you'd be dead in a month without it, and pretty miserable in the time until then.
I see lots and lots and lots of people rooting for a career criminal who made copyright infringement a business concept. The exact kind of people you do not want to be associated with when you are interested in a sane copyright reform, because they are more useful to those crying for more and stricter laws than to anyone fighting for the public good.
Really? Follow the money and all? If the US government is crying wolf, are they really interested in ideals, or in advantages for themselves? Same for Google.
If you assign motives to one side and question their words, do so for the other as well.
But we have a lot of historical information to make educated guesses.
The best estimates I know of put the NSA about five years (down from ten) ahead of the public cryptology experts (universities, etc.). Now check back five years, to 2007. What we know today, the NSA probably knew back then. A few interesting attacks (BEAST, CRIME) are on the list, but something world-shattering like a break for AES, are not.
While the various government TLAs should not be underestimated, they aren't mythical unicorns, either.
what is the point of SSL if we trust certificate authorities that can't be trusted?
The CAs are irrelevant to the encryption part. They are important if you want SSL to verify identity, and against certain attacks that otherwise become possible, but purely speaking, to the listening-in part, they don't matter.
Yes, you are silly. SSL does not send keys over the network. It uses a public key system. If you do SSL properly, the encryption key never leaves your own machine (or network, for larger operators).
You can't use encryption in isolation. Want to send your email encrypted?
Which is why PGP is a failure (as a global tool) and IPSec or even just SMTP/SSL is the much better solution.
The moment you start to encrypt traffic, you are drawing attention to yourself.
Which is... basically, encryption needs to be universal for that very reason.
You have to be clear who you are protecting your communication from. If the answer is friend or family, then it might work. If your answer is that you hope to protect yourself from government intercept, you are kidding yourself. Every major nation has the ability to intercept and brute-force decrypt messages.
I very much doubt that. We have very strong crypto these days, that has stood the test of time. Sure, the NSA might know a trick for AES to reduce the time to break it by two or three orders of magnitude, like they did with DES. They might have special hardware to reduce it another three or four orders of magnitude. That still leaves us with enough strength to make any kind of mass-brute-forcing unfeasable.
The point is not to protect one particular message against all the worlds' resources in cracking. The point is to encrypt everything, so even the government can only try to crack what they really, really care about.
"Cool. So please give me the phone number of your hot wife, your private pictures especially the naked ones, and your bank account details, PINs and TAN lists."
Of course you have something to hide. The real problem with this meme is the assumption that having something to hide means that something must be illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, people are amazingly adaptable.
That doesn't mean what they adapt to is any good. You can create the most horrible UI of all times, intentionally, and if you force them then people will learn to use it. Having to use it because of work or because you know nothing else is a kind of force.
I haven't used W8 yet, so I don't have an opinion. But I have used most other versions of windows, and the UI is pretty stupid, inconsistent and basically cobbled together. Always has been. Don't see why W8 would be any different all of a sudden.
Facebook is not a required service. Nobody has to use it. Users are not paying for it.
I do not understand why Facebook should have to do anything
Because it's the law. You do understand the concept of a law, don't you? It doesn't matter if it's required, if it is enforced, if you are paying. Shooting you is illegal, even if I do it for free and nobody forced me. Same with enforcing real-name restrictions online.
As a developer, I believe that I should be free to create websites, applications, etc. as I see fit.
Society disagrees. It doesn't want you to create kiddie-porn websites, fraud and scam websites, or websites where people can't use a nickname. Sure, that is on different points on the "evil" scale, but we here in Germany have decided that we want to be able to use nicknames online. So if you do business in Germany, that's a law you have to follow, whether you like it or not. Just like paying taxes or not using child labour.
We believe the orders are without merit,
Uh, sorry, but it's a law. How much more backing does it need to have merit in the eyes of FB?
Fact is, half the people in my friend list (yes, I am on FB, though I don't use it much, but lots of people don't read e-mail anymore these days, only their FB messages) already are using pseudonyms. Either fake names or pseudo-names, i.e. nicknames that follow the firstname-lastname system, but that's it.
I understand the idea. I do have an online game and ask people for their real names as well. However, I also respect their anonymity, if they want it. They can hide the name from everyone else, and in-game they will use their character names.
The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.
Does the legal system in the US not have a method to shut down such obvious abuse?
I'm seriously wondering. That seems like a shop with a shoplifting problem who knows who the thieves are and simply allows them in and out anyways.
I just watched that and I must say that woman is a scumbag if you've ever seen one. Where has society failed that we allow people like that to breathe, breed and bother us?
I was quite impressed by the Anonymous guy, on the other hand. Calm, collected, serious.
The only criticism I have is that he allowed her to crowd him out and talk over him. Hitchens has demonstrated how you deal with people on TV/radio who try to interrupt you: Just keep talking. Don't get louder or faster, just ignore the interruption completely and continue as if nothing happened. Let the moderator moderate, but don't allow the opposite partner to control the flow of the conversation.
Exactly. They should've been more patient and waited until they had been elected MPs, who enjoy immunity.
This
I'm not a sadist. I wouldn't enjoy their pain, I just want them gone and be sure they can't continue spamming. Quick is good.
Killing is a barbaric punishment.
Yes, but there is no way that a spammer could ever undo the damage he has done to society. He simply doesn't live long enough to cover the hours lost, because they multiply by millions.
I am willing to apply my usual and proven-to-work system: Everyone is entitled to one mistake. Death penalty only for repeat offenders.
If you put them in prison, even for life, you just add to the cost on society.
Religious people give far more to charitable causes in time and [...] in money.
Evidence?
This sounds reasonable to me - the telephone company has no business filtering phone calls, so it should not filter text messages either.
Bullshit. The phone company should most definitely filter both calls and text messages if the customer requests it. If I don't want to receive any calls by 555-1234567 because they are from some sicko who breathes at me in the middle of the night, the phone company should block the calls when I ask them to. And if I don't want to receive any spam messages, and my phone company offers a spam filter, and I ask them to please use it on my number, then yes, please!
What you mean is that they should not do it without asking their customers. But the alternative is not to not do it, the alternative is asking the customers.
Subscribers may choose to employ a spam-blocking service, which could be provided by other people
For example, the phone company. Why not? They are in the best position.
Can we please shoot them? Please? Pretty please?
Why aren't the US and Europe exerting more diplomatic pressure on these tax havens
Uh, why aren't they changing their own laws so that these profit-allocation schemes are not allowed anymore? If some country wants to run a low or zero tax rate - that's their business, isn't it? But allowing a company that runs its business in your country to record its profits elsewhere is your problem.
Same thing with Hollywood accounting. Sure they are scumbags for doing it, but what about the scumbags allowing it in the first place?
Yes, but - and (in the words of Ben Goldacre) it's a big butt - you are judging after the fact, while those people who did those things had to judge while the story was still developing.
I'm sure there are just as many examples of extremist, reactionary, counter-revolutionary or just plain evil changes that were (successfully) fought off, if you were just looking for them. You select strongly. Not every change is positive, just because it is a change. Think of Stalinism or the Nazis, of the plague (brought to Europe by changes in trade routes) or Global Warming. Those are changes, too.
So basically, we are still at the same spot. Not every change is good, and quite often you don't know until later who was right and who was wrong. Abolishing slavery turned out to be right, even though many people at the time thought it was wrong. Abolishing the regulations on banks turned out to be wrong, even though many people at the time thought it was right.
I stand on your side regarding this particular case. But I don't think that everyone fighting against a change is automatically on the side of evil, or that we can find the truth just by checking who is for and who is against change. It's not that simple.
In a well-working court, no individual piece of evidence alone is sufficient. The sum is what matters.
So if eye-witnesses say that they are sure you were driving damn fast, and the impact damage is examined by an expert who concludes you were doing at least 70, and the black box says you were driving at 74.5 at the time of impact, then the evidence is conclusive.
If the eye-witnesses say you were the same speed as everyone else, and the impact gives and estimate in line with that, while the blax-box says you were twice that, then the black-box data will likely be thrown out.
And don't say "slippery slope fallacy". It's only a fallacy when there's no clear way for it to progress that way.
Last I checked, search warrants, prison terms and lots of other things have not slipped down the slope.
Just because you can imagine the slope does not mean it is slippery. It is good to be aware and cautious. Being paranoid and calling every change a slippery slope is overdoing it.
While I treasure the right to not testify against yourself, I am also a firm believer in truth. I don't mean that in any philosophical sense, I mean facts of the physical world. Your speed at impact is such a fact.
I believe that in all walks of life, we are better off if we follow the facts. While your personal interest in a lawsuit is to get the best result for yourself, the social purpose is to arrive at a fair judgement. And that begins with establishing the facts.
The problem with the inquisition and torture and self-incrimination is that under pressure, people will say a lot of things that they later regret. Basically, apply enough physical pain to the body of someone and he will not only admit to having been the real murderer of both Kennedy and Julius Cesar, he will also gladly invent details describing how he did it. To a lesser extend, psychological pressure does the same.
The social reason we have the right to not testify against yourself is that we've learnt that such testimony is incredibly unreliable. Just like eye-witnesses, btw., which only make or break a case in movies. So the social reason for the ban on self-incrimination is not to the advantage of the defendant, but to the advantage of the trial and its result.
Yeah, sorry for the wall of text, but it's necessary to explain why I don't consider factual information as self-incrimination. More facts instead of hearsay and his-words-against-yours will make cases easier and more just.
Even without the last decade of copyright law stupidity, setting up a business that works by copyright infringement would be a criminal offense in all western countries.
Individual infringements are civil matters. Running an organization based on them is not. The law knows about a point where intentional, continued civil matters become criminal matters.
Stupid view of the government.
So he is employing a million people, paying out unemployment benefits and healthcare? Financing a legal system and running the police and fire departments in your city?
Everyone loves to hate the government, but let's face it, you'd be dead in a month without it, and pretty miserable in the time until then.
Are we reading the same /. ?
I see lots and lots and lots of people rooting for a career criminal who made copyright infringement a business concept. The exact kind of people you do not want to be associated with when you are interested in a sane copyright reform, because they are more useful to those crying for more and stricter laws than to anyone fighting for the public good.
Really? Follow the money and all? If the US government is crying wolf, are they really interested in ideals, or in advantages for themselves? Same for Google.
If you assign motives to one side and question their words, do so for the other as well.
But we have a lot of historical information to make educated guesses.
The best estimates I know of put the NSA about five years (down from ten) ahead of the public cryptology experts (universities, etc.). Now check back five years, to 2007. What we know today, the NSA probably knew back then. A few interesting attacks (BEAST, CRIME) are on the list, but something world-shattering like a break for AES, are not.
While the various government TLAs should not be underestimated, they aren't mythical unicorns, either.
what is the point of SSL if we trust certificate authorities that can't be trusted?
The CAs are irrelevant to the encryption part. They are important if you want SSL to verify identity, and against certain attacks that otherwise become possible, but purely speaking, to the listening-in part, they don't matter.
Yes, you are silly. SSL does not send keys over the network. It uses a public key system. If you do SSL properly, the encryption key never leaves your own machine (or network, for larger operators).
You can't use encryption in isolation. Want to send your email encrypted?
Which is why PGP is a failure (as a global tool) and IPSec or even just SMTP/SSL is the much better solution.
The moment you start to encrypt traffic, you are drawing attention to yourself.
Which is... basically, encryption needs to be universal for that very reason.
You have to be clear who you are protecting your communication from. If the answer is friend or family, then it might work. If your answer is that you hope to protect yourself from government intercept, you are kidding yourself. Every major nation has the ability to intercept and brute-force decrypt messages.
I very much doubt that. We have very strong crypto these days, that has stood the test of time. Sure, the NSA might know a trick for AES to reduce the time to break it by two or three orders of magnitude, like they did with DES. They might have special hardware to reduce it another three or four orders of magnitude. That still leaves us with enough strength to make any kind of mass-brute-forcing unfeasable.
The point is not to protect one particular message against all the worlds' resources in cracking. The point is to encrypt everything, so even the government can only try to crack what they really, really care about.
As I've been saying to them forever:
"Cool. So please give me the phone number of your hot wife, your private pictures especially the naked ones, and your bank account details, PINs and TAN lists."
Of course you have something to hide. The real problem with this meme is the assumption that having something to hide means that something must be illegal.