Umm . . . Maybe I'm missing something here; how is living a lawful life, and expecting others to do the same, make one "profit from a system that creates criminals"?
Personally I think the waste of skin, and oxygen, is supporting the people who have demonstrated that they are no better than wild animals in re fitting into the society we're trying to keep civilized. At some point it's simply public hygiene like spraying for mosquitoes or germs.
In fact, it should be like the points system for driving: Someone who has hurt many people - even if no one of them was fatal, or even life-threatening - is more deserving of permanent removal like a disease than someone who has done one thing, even a heinous thing. In the New York City large-population-density area, every so often there are news items about someone involved in their third or fourth DWI collision that injured people; one time is a mistake, take the integral and at some point it adds up to "this person is no better than a virus". People have been arrested with multiple sets of credit cards robbed at gunpoint; DNA tests have demonstrated serial rapists. All wastes of space.
Well, no, actually I figure they don't *understand* just how badly they'll break things. And the fact that upgrading always breaks things is another problem that normal people won't put up with. "This is new and better" is *not* supposed to mean "and all of your old stuff is as useless as LPs on a CD player".
If you are a Linux user so stuck on apt-get that you cannot work with source code at all, I highly suggest you download the source...
This is why Linux will never win on the desktop with normal people in normal offices and homes. To paraphrase your words: You start out allowing for the concept of a Linux user who cannot work with source code at all, and then IMMEDIATELY tell that user that they should download source code. This is like: "I understand that you're a vegetarian, so this dish only has a *little* bacon in it."
Normal users want something as easy as plugging in an Atari cartridge, and they'll settle for clicking an "install" button. If they don't want source, telling them where to get source isn't just the wrong sales approach; it's a direct insult. Imagine yourself walking into a store, saying "I need a new shirt but I hate (color), what have you got?" and the salesperson showing you a rack full of (color).
Yes. You might interpret it that way; I would too. I bet their lawyers could beat up our lawyers. They carefully said what they knew people would hear one way, meaning it another, and by the strict letter of the words it's OK. I just saw Sherlock do the same thing on BBC; there it seemed clever and entertaining.
Contrarian: The main thing you get for demonstrating being smarter is MORE classroom time, after-school classes, extra homework, more difficult stuff . . . so why do it? Or at least that's the way it was for a bunch of years - not getting BETTER stuff, or MORE INTERESTING stuff, just more crap work. At least nowadays there are more interesting programs like robotics, *if* your school happens to have it - and if, unlike some friends of ours, the school helps you work with it (athletes get allowances for school time for travel, but kids going to VEX Robotics national championship are in danger of running over their allotted missed-classes count and not graduating).
++ on worshiping the athlete while ridiculing the intelligent.
The smarter-than-teacher problem varies widely. I was fortunate enough to be growing up in New York City, which has the critical mass to support specialized / magnet schools *and* has the public transportation that makes them widely available. Every teacher at Stuyvesant seemed to accept, even *hope*, that a future Nobel winner was in the class. (Note: Being a wiseass and trying to show people up is not the same as being smarter.) Maybe that's also a factor of the critical mass for *teacher* achievement - in smaller school systems you might get a teacher who feels bitter about teaching rather than being in a science field, while our teachers felt good about having achieved top-league status. Plus their *worst* students had tested out of every other school's *best*.
Very important: No discipline problems that I can ever remember. Not only that we were bright enough not to cause problems (at least none that the school found out about), but there was always the threat of being sent back to our neighborhood high schools, which would have been a fate worse than death for most of us . . . or, possibly, equivalent to death, considering the crime rate at my neighborhood school.
It's also easier for a coach to say "This kid is future (insert pro-league-name here) material" than for a teacher to say "This kid is future Nobel / Rhodes / dot-com material". The metrics are better known and easier to track.
If there is any truth at all to the risk of damage to your child from vaccination, you have a tremendous burden for life.
OTOH the odds of getting measles, at the moment, are very low. And those of us old enough to remember getting it as children (before the MMR was standard) all lived through it; and people who saw it in other countries presumably also lived through it.
So the problem is selling people on an unknown risk of tremendous harm, or an apparently low risk of low expected harm. All you gamer-geeks out there, min/max this, and see if you don't come up with the same decision. You can't expect the average person to understand this as a "tragedy of the commons" issue - that the only reason the measles risk is low is that most people are vaccinated, and that if more people make the selfish decision to avoid the damage risk, then the measles risk goes up.
As it happens, while I am in favor of vaccination, I also think we're giving too much to children too early, before their bodies can handle it, and we have no idea whether we're shaving a percent or two off the whole population's IQ by giving so many babies high fevers. I'd like to see better blood tests before pumping babies full of crap made by the lowest bidder.
Plugs and voltages can be dealt with, especially since US voltage is the *lower* standard (considering the most available as (nominally) 120 and 240). Infrastructure is more touchy, and more easily interfered with, something the Secret Service tries to avoid. Just as important is the charge time; even if you have a second vehicle following with an any-combustible-fuel generator, it takes too long to refuel. Much easier carrying that second vehicle's weight in gasoline.
Hmm. I suppose the question is where to draw the line. I think we would agree that if I were to touch someone else's clothes and *create* their wardrobe malfunction, it would clearly be *over* the line. I guess I'm focusing on that line between "action taken by viewer" and "accident occurring to viewed". I see placing a camera in a non-normal viewing position below the skirt to be as much a personal attack as picking up that person's skirt to look (and by the way, if I were to like on the floor staring upwards I would expect skirt wearers to give me a wide berth), and I understand you to be drawing the line at contact - if it might be seen from below on a stairwell or ledge, then creating a viewpoint from below may be tacky but not illegal.
BTW - as it happens, I had a "marilyn" / "woman in red" moment just a few weeks ago on an extremely windy day, as a woman ahead of me on the street reached the corner and, due to the wind coming down the cross-street, had her loose skirt blown all over the place. Nothing more revealing than the beach, but unexpected in center city. I suppose the difference between me and the original story's protagonist is that, in addition to amusement, I felt embarrassed on her behalf simultaneously
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana
Happens so often that I read an item about a "new improved" technique, and realize it's just a renaming or repackaging of something people did in the 1970s to get around minicomputer limitations. There's always a bottleneck; it just moves around the system as different parts of the hardware improve at different rates. And there's always a clever way of getting around that bottleneck by trading other resources. It's almost as bad as clothing styles coming back around as soon as people have worn out the clothes from the *last* time plaid was in (or whatever).
Maybe because it's a phone, not a very small PC? or PDA or tablet? Yes, I know, the hardware and system are pretty much the same, but the assumption is "it's a phone, it's connected".
... I am under no legal, dare I even say ethical, obligation to turn my gaze upon seeing you experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction, though it may be considered polite and kind to do so.
I agree - but I see a HUGE difference between "seeing someone experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction" (especially with non-recording eyes) and deliberately placing a camera in an unusual and revealing viewpoint.
Your description is sound, but I wouldn't compare it to circumventing DRM. DRM is trying to control how you use something that is supposedly yours (restricting how you use a DVD that you bought and paid for). In this case, the viewer has *no* good reason to be in that "abnormal position" viewpoint other than getting that view, and society has norms of the "reasonable" viewpoint - from a small child up to a tall adult.
It's true that one might occasionally have a line-of-sight from beneath - climbing my high-school staircase comes to mind - but the question there would be whether one gets flashed momentarily or whether one is waiting deliberately with a camera to record such occasions and, more obnoxiously, posting it for others. Noticing a flash is harmless, being creepy is not.
My take on it is very simple:
(A) If it's visible in public, it's fair game.
But this is *not* visible in public from a normal human viewing angle. And the typical case that makes news is someone having a camera on a shoe, or suspended from their hand (in a bag or briefcase, for example), to get an angle that a human would only get lying on the floor - not a typical posture in public.
By the way, how do you feel about Google Earth vans putting their cameras on top of a van higher than the typical fence? Or someone floating a camera drone outside your bedroom window? It's the same argument, from above or below: Yes, you're in public, but we have a convention of viewpoint being within a normal range, and if you go out of your way to get an improper viewpoint you're a "Peeping Tom".
I once drove my father, an attorney for an insurance company, to a suburban house whose owner had recently died. He joined the family, and their counsel, and two town policemen, and a town representative, in witnessing a locksmith open the door which - to their surprise - the family's spare set of keys hadn't opened. Yes, there was a court order; yes, this is such a normal circumstance, with such normal procedure, that it had been done in a matter of days. The best we can hope for is that this kind of procedure becomes normal as well.
Black Death. Spanish Flu. Popular culture like "Downton Abbey" has revived awareness that pandemics really happen, and these events are in comparatively recent history. Yet it seems that nobody takes it seriously, despite the faster transportation and greater population density we have today. Before worrying about total unknowns, just consider what a Spanish Flu outbreak would look like in NYC or LA or Hong Kong.
.... but it will also sterilize 99% of the population . . . Oh, wait, that was Stargate. And Star Trek. And maybe it explains why elves didn't overpopulate Middle-Earth.
Only as long as you keep them in bitcoin. And that's assuming that nobody charges each other ridiculous fees, the way the banks still charge fees as if they were handling paper and examining papers by hand rather than sending an email back and forth. At some point, though, to use your value with the 99.9% of the rest of the world, you have to change the bitcoins into currency of some recognized value, and that means exchanges, and that means all the problems that banks have already gained experience dealing with.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm . . . Maybe I'm missing something here; how is living a lawful life, and expecting others to do the same, make one "profit from a system that creates criminals"?
Personally I think the waste of skin, and oxygen, is supporting the people who have demonstrated that they are no better than wild animals in re fitting into the society we're trying to keep civilized. At some point it's simply public hygiene like spraying for mosquitoes or germs.
In fact, it should be like the points system for driving: Someone who has hurt many people - even if no one of them was fatal, or even life-threatening - is more deserving of permanent removal like a disease than someone who has done one thing, even a heinous thing. In the New York City large-population-density area, every so often there are news items about someone involved in their third or fourth DWI collision that injured people; one time is a mistake, take the integral and at some point it adds up to "this person is no better than a virus". People have been arrested with multiple sets of credit cards robbed at gunpoint; DNA tests have demonstrated serial rapists. All wastes of space.
Well, no, actually I figure they don't *understand* just how badly they'll break things. And the fact that upgrading always breaks things is another problem that normal people won't put up with. "This is new and better" is *not* supposed to mean "and all of your old stuff is as useless as LPs on a CD player".
If you are a Linux user so stuck on apt-get that you cannot work with source code at all, I highly suggest you download the source ...
This is why Linux will never win on the desktop with normal people in normal offices and homes. To paraphrase your words: You start out allowing for the concept of a Linux user who cannot work with source code at all, and then IMMEDIATELY tell that user that they should download source code. This is like: "I understand that you're a vegetarian, so this dish only has a *little* bacon in it."
Normal users want something as easy as plugging in an Atari cartridge, and they'll settle for clicking an "install" button. If they don't want source, telling them where to get source isn't just the wrong sales approach; it's a direct insult. Imagine yourself walking into a store, saying "I need a new shirt but I hate (color), what have you got?" and the salesperson showing you a rack full of (color).
- Woody Allen, "Sleeper"
Yes. You might interpret it that way; I would too. I bet their lawyers could beat up our lawyers. They carefully said what they knew people would hear one way, meaning it another, and by the strict letter of the words it's OK. I just saw Sherlock do the same thing on BBC; there it seemed clever and entertaining.
Agreed. They're rules-lawyering the wording. By the way, I backed "The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate" which promised a DRM-free HD download, and delivered.
Contrarian: The main thing you get for demonstrating being smarter is MORE classroom time, after-school classes, extra homework, more difficult stuff . . . so why do it? Or at least that's the way it was for a bunch of years - not getting BETTER stuff, or MORE INTERESTING stuff, just more crap work. At least nowadays there are more interesting programs like robotics, *if* your school happens to have it - and if, unlike some friends of ours, the school helps you work with it (athletes get allowances for school time for travel, but kids going to VEX Robotics national championship are in danger of running over their allotted missed-classes count and not graduating).
++ on worshiping the athlete while ridiculing the intelligent.
The smarter-than-teacher problem varies widely. I was fortunate enough to be growing up in New York City, which has the critical mass to support specialized / magnet schools *and* has the public transportation that makes them widely available. Every teacher at Stuyvesant seemed to accept, even *hope*, that a future Nobel winner was in the class. (Note: Being a wiseass and trying to show people up is not the same as being smarter.) Maybe that's also a factor of the critical mass for *teacher* achievement - in smaller school systems you might get a teacher who feels bitter about teaching rather than being in a science field, while our teachers felt good about having achieved top-league status. Plus their *worst* students had tested out of every other school's *best*.
Very important: No discipline problems that I can ever remember. Not only that we were bright enough not to cause problems (at least none that the school found out about), but there was always the threat of being sent back to our neighborhood high schools, which would have been a fate worse than death for most of us . . . or, possibly, equivalent to death, considering the crime rate at my neighborhood school.
It's also easier for a coach to say "This kid is future (insert pro-league-name here) material" than for a teacher to say "This kid is future Nobel / Rhodes / dot-com material". The metrics are better known and easier to track.
How many times have you seen
// Increment the counter
// Keep track of how many filberts we have processed
// Finished another one
counter++;
rather than
counter++;
or, even better,
filbert_counter++;
I gave up trying to look at the site after enabling a dozen sites and seeing even *more* in the Noscript list.
If there is any truth at all to the risk of damage to your child from vaccination, you have a tremendous burden for life.
OTOH the odds of getting measles, at the moment, are very low. And those of us old enough to remember getting it as children (before the MMR was standard) all lived through it; and people who saw it in other countries presumably also lived through it.
So the problem is selling people on an unknown risk of tremendous harm, or an apparently low risk of low expected harm. All you gamer-geeks out there, min/max this, and see if you don't come up with the same decision. You can't expect the average person to understand this as a "tragedy of the commons" issue - that the only reason the measles risk is low is that most people are vaccinated, and that if more people make the selfish decision to avoid the damage risk, then the measles risk goes up.
As it happens, while I am in favor of vaccination, I also think we're giving too much to children too early, before their bodies can handle it, and we have no idea whether we're shaving a percent or two off the whole population's IQ by giving so many babies high fevers. I'd like to see better blood tests before pumping babies full of crap made by the lowest bidder.
Plugs and voltages can be dealt with, especially since US voltage is the *lower* standard (considering the most available as (nominally) 120 and 240). Infrastructure is more touchy, and more easily interfered with, something the Secret Service tries to avoid. Just as important is the charge time; even if you have a second vehicle following with an any-combustible-fuel generator, it takes too long to refuel. Much easier carrying that second vehicle's weight in gasoline.
Hmm. I suppose the question is where to draw the line. I think we would agree that if I were to touch someone else's clothes and *create* their wardrobe malfunction, it would clearly be *over* the line. I guess I'm focusing on that line between "action taken by viewer" and "accident occurring to viewed". I see placing a camera in a non-normal viewing position below the skirt to be as much a personal attack as picking up that person's skirt to look (and by the way, if I were to like on the floor staring upwards I would expect skirt wearers to give me a wide berth), and I understand you to be drawing the line at contact - if it might be seen from below on a stairwell or ledge, then creating a viewpoint from below may be tacky but not illegal.
BTW - as it happens, I had a "marilyn" / "woman in red" moment just a few weeks ago on an extremely windy day, as a woman ahead of me on the street reached the corner and, due to the wind coming down the cross-street, had her loose skirt blown all over the place. Nothing more revealing than the beach, but unexpected in center city. I suppose the difference between me and the original story's protagonist is that, in addition to amusement, I felt embarrassed on her behalf simultaneously
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana
Happens so often that I read an item about a "new improved" technique, and realize it's just a renaming or repackaging of something people did in the 1970s to get around minicomputer limitations. There's always a bottleneck; it just moves around the system as different parts of the hardware improve at different rates. And there's always a clever way of getting around that bottleneck by trading other resources. It's almost as bad as clothing styles coming back around as soon as people have worn out the clothes from the *last* time plaid was in (or whatever).
Maybe because it's a phone, not a very small PC? or PDA or tablet? Yes, I know, the hardware and system are pretty much the same, but the assumption is "it's a phone, it's connected".
... I am under no legal, dare I even say ethical, obligation to turn my gaze upon seeing you experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction, though it may be considered polite and kind to do so.
I agree - but I see a HUGE difference between "seeing someone experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction" (especially with non-recording eyes) and deliberately placing a camera in an unusual and revealing viewpoint.
I am morally certain that underneath their panties they were totally nude.
Your description is sound, but I wouldn't compare it to circumventing DRM. DRM is trying to control how you use something that is supposedly yours (restricting how you use a DVD that you bought and paid for). In this case, the viewer has *no* good reason to be in that "abnormal position" viewpoint other than getting that view, and society has norms of the "reasonable" viewpoint - from a small child up to a tall adult.
It's true that one might occasionally have a line-of-sight from beneath - climbing my high-school staircase comes to mind - but the question there would be whether one gets flashed momentarily or whether one is waiting deliberately with a camera to record such occasions and, more obnoxiously, posting it for others. Noticing a flash is harmless, being creepy is not.
My take on it is very simple: (A) If it's visible in public, it's fair game.
But this is *not* visible in public from a normal human viewing angle. And the typical case that makes news is someone having a camera on a shoe, or suspended from their hand (in a bag or briefcase, for example), to get an angle that a human would only get lying on the floor - not a typical posture in public.
By the way, how do you feel about Google Earth vans putting their cameras on top of a van higher than the typical fence? Or someone floating a camera drone outside your bedroom window? It's the same argument, from above or below: Yes, you're in public, but we have a convention of viewpoint being within a normal range, and if you go out of your way to get an improper viewpoint you're a "Peeping Tom".
I once drove my father, an attorney for an insurance company, to a suburban house whose owner had recently died. He joined the family, and their counsel, and two town policemen, and a town representative, in witnessing a locksmith open the door which - to their surprise - the family's spare set of keys hadn't opened. Yes, there was a court order; yes, this is such a normal circumstance, with such normal procedure, that it had been done in a matter of days. The best we can hope for is that this kind of procedure becomes normal as well.
Black Death. Spanish Flu. Popular culture like "Downton Abbey" has revived awareness that pandemics really happen, and these events are in comparatively recent history. Yet it seems that nobody takes it seriously, despite the faster transportation and greater population density we have today. Before worrying about total unknowns, just consider what a Spanish Flu outbreak would look like in NYC or LA or Hong Kong.
.... but it will also sterilize 99% of the population . . . Oh, wait, that was Stargate. And Star Trek. And maybe it explains why elves didn't overpopulate Middle-Earth.
And how hard could it be?
I disagree strongly. Panic now. Avoid the rush later.
... a system that offers frictionless payments ...
Only as long as you keep them in bitcoin. And that's assuming that nobody charges each other ridiculous fees, the way the banks still charge fees as if they were handling paper and examining papers by hand rather than sending an email back and forth. At some point, though, to use your value with the 99.9% of the rest of the world, you have to change the bitcoins into currency of some recognized value, and that means exchanges, and that means all the problems that banks have already gained experience dealing with.