Oh soo brill! Except you missed one enormous point - both civil libertarians and those who are opposed the patriot act and its brethren all want one thing - accountability.
You choose to frame it in terms of "Expanded government" - which is an extremely generic and thus almost meaningless term. If all you were doing was running a poll that said "Are you in favor of expanded government or reduced government" then the choice would be simple. But life ain't that simple.
I think they're on to something here in their interpretation of the law, unfortunately. I'm not a lawyer, but you can bet Apple had their lawyers look at it.
What they are probably "on to" is an attempt to generate a grass-roots campaign against Sarb-Ox. Wall-Street has been moaning about how anti-business Sarb-Ox is since before it was even implemented. All kinds of terrible doom and gloom have been predicted and blamed on Sarb-Ox. Which was itself a reaction to the various accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcomm and in retrospect - games like options back-dating.
By taking an extreme interpretation of Sarb-Ox and using it to hit customers where it hurts - in their wallet, Apple is generating ill-will towards Sarb-Ox. If it causes enough of an uproar, maybe Sarb-Ox gets repealed and then Apple (and the rest of Wall-Street) are again free of these oh-so-terrible and burdensome accountability and compliance requirements.
Hey, I have an idea! Let's have a contest where people shoot apples off each other's heads William Tell style! I bet that'd get great ratings!
A much closer example would be a contest to see who can eat more apple seeds. Probably just as few people understand the dangers of that as would understand the dangers of a water drinking contest.
one might also try adblock + noscript, or perhaps all three in concert.
GreaseMonkey and NoScript do not cooperate. I wish they did since I love NoScript and want to get some good greasy love too. But alas, they don't and apparently can't since GreaseMonkey's context is the site itself, so you can't block the scripts at a site and simultaneously grease it up.
There are people here who have pointed out that the world economy is not a zero-sum game. That, in many cases "a rising tide floats all boats." In general, that's true. But in practice it hasn't been so.
One of the problems with out-sourcing has been that technology has brought vast new labor markets online. But while these markets are rich with labor resources, they have a dearth of capital. So, in effect labor got cheaper but capital got more expensive. In the utopia of economists, the labor markets would bring new capital to their countries, thus increasing infrastructure development and creation of new local businesses, etc and ultimately raising the cost of labor in that market. But, in practice, most of the money that the out-sourcing firms have brought into their countries has flowed right back to the west in the form of things like US bonds (e.g. China holds billions in US treasury notes) and other investments. Thus bringing in a windfall for capital-owners without a proportional increase for the workers. Workers have seen increases, just not proportional increases.
Presumably this imbalance can't last - there are signs that the pendulum is already swinging back, such as the devaluation of the US dollar - but it is nearly impossible to say exactly when the labor/capital ratio will even out, or even if it will overshoot and swing in the other direction. Nor is it easy to say exactly what consequences such a change will bring either, although it might be wise to invest in foreign (non-western) markets.
That reminds me of an article here on/. about NSA or something looking at movies for predictions about threats to national security. I'm unable to find the article so maybe I do not remember correctly.
You are thinking about the plan to hire hollywood script-writers to come up with terrorist threats to be afraid of. You probably saw it on Schneier's blog since it was the personification of his favorite security complaint - "security theater."
Virtual drive software has no future on Vista; it is merely one feature that's gotta go for this magical protection to work.
Keep an eye out for USB, Firewire and IDE target HBAs. They function as targets rather than controllers for their respective buses. They are primarily a debug/development tool now, but they would be ideal for putting just enough hardware in the loop to make virtual drives work even with signed drivers.
Try calling 1-800-VISA-911 or 1-800-MC-ASSIST and filing an incident report. Unlike most bank customer support reps, the card network support reps almost always know the rules. When you file a complaint, the merchant gets a threatening letter. If they get enough complaints, their merchant account will be canceled.
I've filed incident reports against a local wal-mart store and a local target store for having such policies (posted on signs at the cashiers even). In each case, within a month, the signs about requiring ID were taken down and the policy no longer enforced.
In this case, a national identity plus fingerprints could be a good thing. You could easily prove you are not that other person by matching your fingerprints up to those of your id.
Unless the data-entry error caused the wrong ID to be associated with his set of fingerprints.
Brazil should be mandatory viewing for anyone discussing the creation of a police-state based on databases.
The call center staffer seemed surprised I even asked and said a merchant could ask for ID for any dollar amount as a means of fraud protection.
Then you spoke to an ignorant call center staffer.
When should you ask a cardholder for an official government ID?
Although Visa rules do not preclude merchants from asking for cardholder ID, merchants cannot make an ID a condition of acceptance. Therefore, merchants cannot refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to provide ID. Visa believes merchants should not ask for ID as part of their regular card acceptance procedures . Laws in several states also make it illegal for merchants to write a cardholder's personal information, such as an address or phone number, on a sales receipt. Page 29 - Rules for VISA Merchants
Mastercard has similar rules and Amex says you can mandate ID, but only if you mandate it for all charge cards you accept, making their rules effectively the same as VISA and MC.
"right to travel freely on a (very expensive, not that inherently changes things either) piece of machinery that is the sole private property of a third party who may afford you carriage in return for monetary compentsation"?
Well, that certainly doesn't apply to train in the US, and even private bus carriers are driving on public roads and thus receiving an indirect, but rather large, government subsidy.
It is a violation of the standard credit-card merchant contract to require ID to complete a purchase. So, if it is an anti-fraud technique, it is a contractual violation.
The tinfoil hat brigade who don't want to be tracked don't pay by credit card, anyway. They go out of their way to pay cash.
Since when is the right to travel freely something that only the "tinfoil hat brigade" deserve?
All of which is lovely, until someone makes a mistake. And then your life is shattered if it's your fingerprint they mismatched. Do you think your government would ever make such a mistake?
Trillian, Doom (and a thousand other Shareware titles), MS Outlook (via Express), Winamp (although I don't know if that's "succeeding" or merely "subsidized")
Other than Trillian, your list is bogus. ID Software does not in any way market their older games as free "lite" versions, and the thousand other shareware titles are exactly what I am talking about - none of them particularly successful. No one buys outlook as an express upgrade, outlook is sold to business, express is just bundled with the OS (if it were otherwise, you could cite wordpad and ms-word too).
Does Best Buy have to have legislation to ask for your ID when you pay by credit card? No. Do they? Yes. Why? Business policies.
Bad example - almost all merchant credit-card contracts prevent the merchant from requiring ID to make a purchase. The primary reason is that the credit-card companies want their credit cards to be as easy to use as cash and cash does not require an ID. You can argue all you want that it sucks for the merchant, but as you said -- business policies.
PS - there is a loophole, merchants are allowed to ASK for ID, they just can't require it.
First of all, his primary question is: Do citizens currently need to show ID in order to travel in their own country?
The answer is a resounding "no". He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
That's true, mostly only for the rich. Pedestrian travel is not a feasible option for anything like the common case. Motorcycle, car and boat all require a bunch of identification and licensing - or the payment of taxi fees that quickly become the provenance of the rich for travel between cities. Train and bus require ID unless you purchase your tickets with cash. And while Greyhound doesn't specifically require ID to get on the bus, other carriers do.
So, it is far from a "resounding no" - more of a "qualified no" and one that keeps getting more and more qualified as time passes. Do we really need to wait until the cat is out of the bag before we try to get people to notice what is going on?
Yes, all the 9/11 hijackers had valid IDs. So what? The ID requirement doesn't pretend to "prevent" issues; it's simply a place to start for investigators AFTER an incident, regardless of whether the IDs were real or fake...enabling investigators to get a list of names (again, real or not), issuing agencies for the IDs, and sometimes even pictures (which are many times real, even if the ID itself is fake). This information could be critical to an investigation when other lives may be at stake.
This kind of argument comes down to your philosophy about governance. Does society exist to serve law-enforcement, or does law-enforcement exist to serve society? If you believe the former, at what point do you draw the line? Should ID be required to go to the movie theater? How about sporting events? Ride the subway? Mail a letter?
I think the real answer is to invest some money in advertising a newer, more advanced version of the software product. (The old one can then serve as a "lite" version, maintained simply to help keep your "brand" alive, and to introduce new people to the product's existence.)
I'm sure I'm blinded by my primary dependence on Free software, so can you cite a few products that have had long-term success with the lite-is-free, full-is-pay model? I mean I've seen plenty try it, but over the long term I don't recall any having much long-lasting success.
The only one that comes to my mind is Ghostscript where new releases are free-as-in-beer (and sold to various OEMs) and then move to GPL when the next major release happens. Which isn't quite what you described.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh soo brill! Except you missed one enormous point - both civil libertarians and those who are opposed the patriot act and its brethren all want one thing - accountability.
You choose to frame it in terms of "Expanded government" - which is an extremely generic and thus almost meaningless term. If all you were doing was running a poll that said "Are you in favor of expanded government or reduced government" then the choice would be simple. But life ain't that simple.
I think they're on to something here in their interpretation of the law, unfortunately. I'm not a lawyer, but you can bet Apple had their lawyers look at it.
What they are probably "on to" is an attempt to generate a grass-roots campaign against Sarb-Ox. Wall-Street has been moaning about how anti-business Sarb-Ox is since before it was even implemented. All kinds of terrible doom and gloom have been predicted and blamed on Sarb-Ox. Which was itself a reaction to the various accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcomm and in retrospect - games like options back-dating.
By taking an extreme interpretation of Sarb-Ox and using it to hit customers where it hurts - in their wallet, Apple is generating ill-will towards Sarb-Ox. If it causes enough of an uproar, maybe Sarb-Ox gets repealed and then Apple (and the rest of Wall-Street) are again free of these oh-so-terrible and burdensome accountability and compliance requirements.
That's worse than manslaughter, it's not just being ignorant when you are told by a fucking nurse that it is dangerous.
The nurse doesn't even need to be that specialized - any kind of nurse would probably do.
Hey, I have an idea! Let's have a contest where people shoot apples off each other's heads William Tell style! I bet that'd get great ratings!
A much closer example would be a contest to see who can eat more apple seeds.
Probably just as few people understand the dangers of that as would understand the dangers of a water drinking contest.
Anytime the state gets involved, the market is by definition no longer free.
Right now the state is involved in two ways:
1) Enforcement of the copyright monopoly.
2) Enforcement of DRM effectiveness.
If the state withdraws from those positions (and doesn't take any new ones), then we would have a free market worth talking about.
one might also try adblock + noscript, or perhaps all three in concert.
GreaseMonkey and NoScript do not cooperate. I wish they did since I love NoScript and want to get some good greasy love too. But alas, they don't and apparently can't since GreaseMonkey's context is the site itself, so you can't block the scripts at a site and simultaneously grease it up.
Also keep in mind that Tenet was a Clinton appointee, not some politically motivated war-hawk.
Those two are in no way mutually exclusive.
Average consumer: "WTF is Blue Ray?"
That's not what Jessica Simpson would say.
Jessica: Blue Ray! I totally don't know what that means, but I want it!
There are people here who have pointed out that the world economy is not a zero-sum game. That, in many cases "a rising tide floats all boats." In general, that's true. But in practice it hasn't been so.
One of the problems with out-sourcing has been that technology has brought vast new labor markets online. But while these markets are rich with labor resources, they have a dearth of capital. So, in effect labor got cheaper but capital got more expensive. In the utopia of economists, the labor markets would bring new capital to their countries, thus increasing infrastructure development and creation of new local businesses, etc and ultimately raising the cost of labor in that market. But, in practice, most of the money that the out-sourcing firms have brought into their countries has flowed right back to the west in the form of things like US bonds (e.g. China holds billions in US treasury notes) and other investments. Thus bringing in a windfall for capital-owners without a proportional increase for the workers. Workers have seen increases, just not proportional increases.
Presumably this imbalance can't last - there are signs that the pendulum is already swinging back, such as the devaluation of the US dollar - but it is nearly impossible to say exactly when the labor/capital ratio will even out, or even if it will overshoot and swing in the other direction. Nor is it easy to say exactly what consequences such a change will bring either, although it might be wise to invest in foreign (non-western) markets.
That reminds me of an article here on /. about NSA or something looking at movies for predictions about threats to national security. I'm unable to find the article so maybe I do not remember correctly.
You are thinking about the plan to hire hollywood script-writers to come up with terrorist threats to be afraid of. You probably saw it on Schneier's blog since it was the personification of his favorite security complaint - "security theater."
I have, and your comment is meaningless in the context of a target HBA. In fact, it is just random buzzwords.
I don't think you have a clue what you are talking about.
Virtual drive software has no future on Vista; it is merely one feature that's gotta go for this magical protection to work.
Keep an eye out for USB, Firewire and IDE target HBAs. They function as targets rather than controllers for their respective buses. They are primarily a debug/development tool now, but they would be ideal for putting just enough hardware in the loop to make virtual drives work even with signed drivers.
Try calling 1-800-VISA-911 or 1-800-MC-ASSIST and filing an incident report. Unlike most bank customer support reps, the card network support reps almost always know the rules. When you file a complaint, the merchant gets a threatening letter. If they get enough complaints, their merchant account will be canceled.
I've filed incident reports against a local wal-mart store and a local target store for having such policies (posted on signs at the cashiers even). In each case, within a month, the signs about requiring ID were taken down and the policy no longer enforced.
In this case, a national identity plus fingerprints could be a good thing. You could easily prove you are not that other person by matching your fingerprints up to those of your id.
Unless the data-entry error caused the wrong ID to be associated with his set of fingerprints.
Brazil should be mandatory viewing for anyone discussing the creation of a police-state based on databases.
Pat Buchannon humping on Charlize Theron?
Which one?
The Aileen in Monster Charlize?
or
The Aeon in Æon Flux Charlize?
Then you spoke to an ignorant call center staffer.
Mastercard has similar rules and Amex says you can mandate ID, but only if you mandate it for all charge cards you accept, making their rules effectively the same as VISA and MC.
"right to travel freely on a (very expensive, not that inherently changes things either) piece of machinery that is the sole private property of a third party who may afford you carriage in return for monetary compentsation"?
Well, that certainly doesn't apply to train in the US, and even private bus carriers are driving on public roads and thus receiving an indirect, but rather large, government subsidy.
Doom was shareware. The unregistered version was free to distribute and use but was incomplete.
Right, like over 10 years ago. They haven't done that in recent history.
Sounds like anti-fraud techniques to me.
It is a violation of the standard credit-card merchant contract to require ID to complete a purchase. So, if it is an anti-fraud technique, it is a contractual violation.
The tinfoil hat brigade who don't want to be tracked don't pay by credit card, anyway. They go out of their way to pay cash.
Since when is the right to travel freely something that only the "tinfoil hat brigade" deserve?
Like this?
Trillian, Doom (and a thousand other Shareware titles), MS Outlook (via Express), Winamp (although I don't know if that's "succeeding" or merely "subsidized")
Other than Trillian, your list is bogus. ID Software does not in any way market their older games as free "lite" versions, and the thousand other shareware titles are exactly what I am talking about - none of them particularly successful. No one buys outlook as an express upgrade, outlook is sold to business, express is just bundled with the OS (if it were otherwise, you could cite wordpad and ms-word too).
Does Best Buy have to have legislation to ask for your ID when you pay by credit card? No. Do they? Yes. Why? Business policies.
Bad example - almost all merchant credit-card contracts prevent the merchant from requiring ID to make a purchase. The primary reason is that the credit-card companies want their credit cards to be as easy to use as cash and cash does not require an ID. You can argue all you want that it sucks for the merchant, but as you said -- business policies.
PS - there is a loophole, merchants are allowed to ASK for ID, they just can't require it.
That's true, mostly only for the rich. Pedestrian travel is not a feasible option for anything like the common case. Motorcycle, car and boat all require a bunch of identification and licensing - or the payment of taxi fees that quickly become the provenance of the rich for travel between cities. Train and bus require ID unless you purchase your tickets with cash. And while Greyhound doesn't specifically require ID to get on the bus, other carriers do.
So, it is far from a "resounding no" - more of a "qualified no" and one that keeps getting more and more qualified as time passes. Do we really need to wait until the cat is out of the bag before we try to get people to notice what is going on?
This kind of argument comes down to your philosophy about governance. Does society exist to serve law-enforcement, or does law-enforcement exist to serve society? If you believe the former, at what point do you draw the line? Should ID be required to go to the movie theater? How about sporting events? Ride the subway? Mail a letter?
I think the real answer is to invest some money in advertising a newer, more advanced version of the software product. (The old one can then serve as a "lite" version, maintained simply to help keep your "brand" alive, and to introduce new people to the product's existence.)
I'm sure I'm blinded by my primary dependence on Free software, so can you cite a few products that have had long-term success with the lite-is-free, full-is-pay model? I mean I've seen plenty try it, but over the long term I don't recall any having much long-lasting success.
The only one that comes to my mind is Ghostscript where new releases are free-as-in-beer (and sold to various OEMs) and then move to GPL when the next major release happens. Which isn't quite what you described.