That is heard quite often: "even with science, you can't..."
You know, some day we just might. Maybe not today, maybe never, but please, when someone who knows more than you about a certain topic warns you, listen!
Even with science, you can't prove that God does or does not exist.
Ummm, yeah, the shooter who killed 14 in NY state "had a permit for two handguns and wore body armor, indicating he was prepared for a confrontation with police."
You must live in some fantasy world - nothing, not one thing in this world is 100% good, or 100% bad for that matter. There are costs to all choices. The question is - what is the net benefit? When you include the fact that guns are used as a deterrent to crime over a million times per year, then the net benefit of gun ownership seems pretty clear.
I normally don't care about privacy issues. The government can tap my phone if they feel like it, they can look into my purchasing records, they can stake out my house. They can look into my past work history. I really don't care.
They don't care about you. It isn't about you. They care about rising politicians and others who challenge the status quo.
I care deeply about personal privacy for the same reason I care deeply about gun rights - chances are that I will never carry a weapon in my life, but our society as a whole is made safer and more resilient by the fact that law-abiding citizens can own and use them in self defense. Similarly our society is made stronger and more egalitarian when everybody has privacy, the people who can make a difference and the common peons like the rest of us.
Other than France - who do it with quality or possibly jingoism - and China - who do it with censorship - none of those countries have a domestic film industry that outsells hollywood imports at the local box office. In fact, only two other countries in all of the world can claim that -- India with their dirt cheap to make and hugely prodigious output of bollywood musicals and south korea with their peculiar knack for drama (and until just recently, mandatory domestic content laws for theaters).
Well, Presidential appointees don't seem to pay any taxes either and the last time I checked that was also illegal. More of the same 'do as I say, not as do.'
No, you missed the point. The only way to get these guys to pay their taxes is for the president to appoint them to office. So far Obama has a 100% success record in collecting from these guys. He's not "the uniter," nor is he "the decider," Obama is "the collector."
Which is pretty much the situation that we have today.
You seem to be implying that the current situation, other than duration, is perfectly acceptable. Byzantine laws, life-ruining fines, FBI task forces, copyright czars, strained international relations, ridiculous licensing requirements where samples of just six notes or 5 seconds of a painting in the background of a video don't qualify as fair use. All of those costs - enforcement or otherwise - are hugely destructive to our culture.
If it were a free-for-all, I'd imagine that a lot of content creators, which now make a profit even with all the piracy losses, would become unprofitable overnight.
Obviously there are lots of people who make money under the current system, but they are propped up by all the losses of the people who get the short end of the stick. Consumers, creators and tax payers who are bearing the costs of the current system.
It was just a specific historical example of the more reasonable terms, for the whole "copyright is okay if it weren't extended all the time" crowd (to which I myself belong).
Those terms were reasonable within their own historic context. They would not be reasonable even today.
If you think that copyright has no reasons to exist regardless of its scope, then it was not intended for you (and I do not know any good arguments; at that point, it's a matter of personal beliefs, not rational reasoning).
I absolutely disagree that it is about belief and not rational reasoning. I thought I did a good job of laying out a rational argument for why copyright is infeasible within the context of the modern world. I'll try to do it again, but if I'm missing something then this will probably be a broken record:
Copyright in the modern world is unenforceable. The cost to enforce it is way out of balance compared to the cost of enforcement before the internet. Today anyone can distribute tens of thousands of copies of any number of works to others for little effort. Whats more, unlike other crimes like murder, rape, assault, etc - people are naturally hardwired to share ideas, especially when it costs them practically nothing to share. So you have a situation where essentially everybody has motive and means to break the law.
Thus, no matter how beneficial copyright may or may not be (which, I will concede *is* a matter of opinion) the cost of enforcing anything remotely like copyright will dwarf even the most optimistic evaluation of the benefits of copyright.
What is the value of using the original US terms of copyright? The original terms of copyright in the US didn't apply to foreign owned works, if you were a British author your works had zero copyright protection in the US. Given that almost every studio is a multinational or completely foreign owned, under the original terms of copyright their products would have little or no protection either.
See the problem with using the original terms as the benchmark?
Times have changed. It has always been human nature to share cool stuff with others, back when the original US terms of copyright were written into law it was nearly impossible to make copies, the general public were limited to tedious handwriting or more commonly oral story telling and live performances. Thus the original terms were no great burden on the public.
Now, because anyone has the ability to easily share cool stuff with friends and strangers alike it is a huge burden to restrict that ability, even for a few days. It is a burden on the people so restricted and it is a huge burden on anyone whose job it is to enforce the restrictions.
It is kind of like arguing that US export limits on computers set back in the 80s (attempting to prevent foreign ability to develop home-grown military tech) should apply today - rolling back the restrictions to under 5mips doesn't help because computers aren't even manufactured in the US anymore. It is orthogonal to the real issue - the world has changed and going backwards sure doesn't help to catch up with modern reality.
I really wonder how many of you still know what the word "Free" means or how to apply it.
What is your point? Are you trying to dispute that government policies that place people under the direct control of other people, artificially restricting the free market for labor, is somehow NOT in contradiction to the meaning of the word "free" in the phrase "land of the free?"
The article is extremely misleading and makes you think that these companies may have been started by people that came to the US on H1-B visas
They never break out the number of immigrants who come to the US on H1-B visas that start technology companies (H1-B is of course a temporary non-immigration visa).
However, they DO break out the percentage of returnees that are H1B/temporary - 1/5th of chinese and 1/2 of the indians. That means that 4/5ths of the chinese and half of the indian returnees had green-cards or full citizenship.
All this says is that the H1-B visa program is working as advertised.
And it shows just how stupidly designed the H1-B visa program was in the first place. These people are precisely the types we want as citizens. It should never have been temporary in the first place. It should have been designed to be a fast track to a green card. Instead it was designed as a way to put artificial leverage on these people to keep them under the thumbs of their corporate employers - in direct contradiction of traditional american values like being the "land of the free."
Suppose the cops want to search my house without a warrant. Stupidly, I let them, and they don't find anything. Now a week later they want to search again, and I deny them entry. Following this decision, since I waived my rights when I co-operated once, I have to co-operate again. WTF?
It sounds like this case is more like you let them search without a warrant, they found "something" but they stupidly forgot to take it with them. Now a week later they want to search again.
Still a big WTF - sounds like it was the cops' fault for not properly securing whatever evidence they think they had.
What proportion of Dell Inspirons are running pirated XP? My guess - around 32%.
Doubtful. All that anti-piracy work that MS has put into Windows really pays off in cases like this - only the relatively hardcore are going to go to the effort of getting a pirate copy of XP and then trust that it is not compromised with pre-loaded trojans and the like.
The question being... how could you use a monopoly on advertising to keep other advertising companies from effectively advertising?
Just as microsoft does more than simply sell operating systems, so does google do more than simply sell internet advertising.
For example, Google could rig their search engine to never index any web pages that discuss either yahoo's mapping service (formerly mapquest) or microsoft's mapping service with it is really awesome "bird's eye view" feature.
Thus Google's effective monopoly on internet searches could be used to harm other businesses which rely on internet advertising to pay the bills.
However, the cat here is just a tool for you to accept the agreement. If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms
Yeah, well, what if you used Schrodinger's cat? Then you have both accepted and not accepted the terms.
Am I the only one who doesn't mind the small breach of privacy...
Privacy is like Pandora's Box - people are all too willing to open it up when they are blissfully ignorant of the consequences. But once they finally do start to feel the pain of having set their privacy loose on the wind it is too late to try to stuff it all back into the box again.
So choose wisely, just because you can't think of any particularly severe repercussions today doesn't mean there won't be any in the future once your data is already far beyond your control.
Congrats for making emotional, rather than logical, decisions.
Big deal.
They did no harm. The reason the vaccinations are all grouped together like that is to reduce the frequency of doctor visits. If they felt it was worth the extra cost of an additional visit then more power to them. One size fits all isn't the way the rest of the world works, it doesn't have to be that way for vaccinations either.
I just received a new US passport. The passport itself has a blurb about being shielded when closed. Don't know if this is true or not, as I haven't checked it myself, but the covers feel like there's something in them.
It is true and it is not. Building a faraday cage into the cover was one of the "concessions" they made in response to all the complaints about privacy issues. But... it only really works if the covers are tightly pressed together. Leaving it open a quarter inch or so may be enough to prevent official readers from picking up the RFID, but not enough to protect against someone with a reader with more juice - like anyone who is up to no good will certainly have.
Did you know that every almost Target store in the United States is being fitted (or retrofitted) with Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems? In english, they tag you to your car.
I find your faith in advertisers disturbing. If they see fat people, they will advertise junk food, not diets because impulse sales are so much easier and lucrative.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no - don't tell me the next thing that will happen there is they elect a new government that will make sure the the earthquakes arrive on time
Next thing you know people will be repeating the anti-fascist quote that, "Mussolini made the earthquakes arrive on time."
That is heard quite often: "even with science, you can't..."
You know, some day we just might. Maybe not today, maybe never, but please, when someone who knows more than you about a certain topic warns you, listen!
Even with science, you can't prove that God does or does not exist.
Ummm, yeah, the shooter who killed 14 in NY state "had a permit for two handguns and wore body armor, indicating he was prepared for a confrontation with police."
You must live in some fantasy world - nothing, not one thing in this world is 100% good, or 100% bad for that matter. There are costs to all choices. The question is - what is the net benefit? When you include the fact that guns are used as a deterrent to crime over a million times per year, then the net benefit of gun ownership seems pretty clear.
I normally don't care about privacy issues. The government can tap my phone if they feel like it, they can look into my purchasing records, they can stake out my house. They can look into my past work history. I really don't care.
They don't care about you. It isn't about you. They care about rising politicians and others who challenge the status quo.
I care deeply about personal privacy for the same reason I care deeply about gun rights - chances are that I will never carry a weapon in my life, but our society as a whole is made safer and more resilient by the fact that law-abiding citizens can own and use them in self defense. Similarly our society is made stronger and more egalitarian when everybody has privacy, the people who can make a difference and the common peons like the rest of us.
Other than France - who do it with quality or possibly jingoism - and China - who do it with censorship - none of those countries have a domestic film industry that outsells hollywood imports at the local box office. In fact, only two other countries in all of the world can claim that -- India with their dirt cheap to make and hugely prodigious output of bollywood musicals and south korea with their peculiar knack for drama (and until just recently, mandatory domestic content laws for theaters).
Well, Presidential appointees don't seem to pay any taxes either and the last time I checked that was also illegal. More of the same 'do as I say, not as do.'
No, you missed the point. The only way to get these guys to pay their taxes is for the president to appoint them to office.
So far Obama has a 100% success record in collecting from these guys.
He's not "the uniter," nor is he "the decider," Obama is "the collector."
Which is pretty much the situation that we have today.
You seem to be implying that the current situation, other than duration, is perfectly acceptable.
Byzantine laws, life-ruining fines, FBI task forces, copyright czars, strained international relations, ridiculous licensing requirements where samples of just six notes or 5 seconds of a painting in the background of a video don't qualify as fair use. All of those costs - enforcement or otherwise - are hugely destructive to our culture.
If it were a free-for-all, I'd imagine that a lot of content creators, which now make a profit even with all the piracy losses, would become unprofitable overnight.
Obviously there are lots of people who make money under the current system, but they are propped up by all the losses of the people who get the short end of the stick. Consumers, creators and tax payers who are bearing the costs of the current system.
It was just a specific historical example of the more reasonable terms, for the whole "copyright is okay if it weren't extended all the time" crowd (to which I myself belong).
Those terms were reasonable within their own historic context. They would not be reasonable even today.
If you think that copyright has no reasons to exist regardless of its scope, then it was not intended for you (and I do not know any good arguments; at that point, it's a matter of personal beliefs, not rational reasoning).
I absolutely disagree that it is about belief and not rational reasoning. I thought I did a good job of laying out a rational argument for why copyright is infeasible within the context of the modern world. I'll try to do it again, but if I'm missing something then this will probably be a broken record:
Copyright in the modern world is unenforceable. The cost to enforce it is way out of balance compared to the cost of enforcement before the internet. Today anyone can distribute tens of thousands of copies of any number of works to others for little effort. Whats more, unlike other crimes like murder, rape, assault, etc - people are naturally hardwired to share ideas, especially when it costs them practically nothing to share. So you have a situation where essentially everybody has motive and means to break the law.
Thus, no matter how beneficial copyright may or may not be (which, I will concede *is* a matter of opinion) the cost of enforcing anything remotely like copyright will dwarf even the most optimistic evaluation of the benefits of copyright.
What is the value of using the original US terms of copyright? The original terms of copyright in the US didn't apply to foreign owned works, if you were a British author your works had zero copyright protection in the US. Given that almost every studio is a multinational or completely foreign owned, under the original terms of copyright their products would have little or no protection either.
See the problem with using the original terms as the benchmark?
Times have changed. It has always been human nature to share cool stuff with others, back when the original US terms of copyright were written into law it was nearly impossible to make copies, the general public were limited to tedious handwriting or more commonly oral story telling and live performances. Thus the original terms were no great burden on the public.
Now, because anyone has the ability to easily share cool stuff with friends and strangers alike it is a huge burden to restrict that ability, even for a few days. It is a burden on the people so restricted and it is a huge burden on anyone whose job it is to enforce the restrictions.
It is kind of like arguing that US export limits on computers set back in the 80s (attempting to prevent foreign ability to develop home-grown military tech) should apply today - rolling back the restrictions to under 5mips doesn't help because computers aren't even manufactured in the US anymore. It is orthogonal to the real issue - the world has changed and going backwards sure doesn't help to catch up with modern reality.
I really wonder how many of you still know what the word "Free" means or how to apply it.
What is your point?
Are you trying to dispute that government policies that place people under the direct control of other people, artificially restricting the free market for labor, is somehow NOT in contradiction to the meaning of the word "free" in the phrase "land of the free?"
The article is extremely misleading and makes you think that these companies may have been started by people that came to the US on H1-B visas
They never break out the number of immigrants who come to the US on H1-B visas that start technology companies (H1-B is of course a temporary non-immigration visa).
However, they DO break out the percentage of returnees that are H1B/temporary - 1/5th of chinese and 1/2 of the indians. That means that 4/5ths of the chinese and half of the indian returnees had green-cards or full citizenship.
All this says is that the H1-B visa program is working as advertised.
And it shows just how stupidly designed the H1-B visa program was in the first place. These people are precisely the types we want as citizens. It should never have been temporary in the first place. It should have been designed to be a fast track to a green card. Instead it was designed as a way to put artificial leverage on these people to keep them under the thumbs of their corporate employers - in direct contradiction of traditional american values like being the "land of the free."
Suppose the cops want to search my house without a warrant. Stupidly, I let them, and they don't find anything. Now a week later they want to search again, and I deny them entry. Following this decision, since I waived my rights when I co-operated once, I have to co-operate again. WTF?
It sounds like this case is more like you let them search without a warrant, they found "something" but they stupidly forgot to take it with them. Now a week later they want to search again.
Still a big WTF - sounds like it was the cops' fault for not properly securing whatever evidence they think they had.
Sounds like the broken window fallacy to me.
What proportion of Dell Inspirons are running pirated XP? My guess - around 32%.
Doubtful. All that anti-piracy work that MS has put into Windows really pays off in cases like this - only the relatively hardcore are going to go to the effort of getting a pirate copy of XP and then trust that it is not compromised with pre-loaded trojans and the like.
The question being... how could you use a monopoly on advertising to keep other advertising companies from effectively advertising?
Just as microsoft does more than simply sell operating systems, so does google do more than simply sell internet advertising.
For example, Google could rig their search engine to never index any web pages that discuss either yahoo's mapping service (formerly mapquest) or microsoft's mapping service with it is really awesome "bird's eye view" feature.
Thus Google's effective monopoly on internet searches could be used to harm other businesses which rely on internet advertising to pay the bills.
However, the cat here is just a tool for you to accept the agreement. If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms
Yeah, well, what if you used Schrodinger's cat? Then you have both accepted and not accepted the terms.
Am I the only one who doesn't mind the small breach of privacy...
Privacy is like Pandora's Box - people are all too willing to open it up when they are blissfully ignorant of the consequences. But once they finally do start to feel the pain of having set their privacy loose on the wind it is too late to try to stuff it all back into the box again.
So choose wisely, just because you can't think of any particularly severe repercussions today doesn't mean there won't be any in the future once your data is already far beyond your control.
Congrats for making emotional, rather than logical, decisions.
Big deal.
They did no harm. The reason the vaccinations are all grouped together like that is to reduce the frequency of doctor visits. If they felt it was worth the extra cost of an additional visit then more power to them. One size fits all isn't the way the rest of the world works, it doesn't have to be that way for vaccinations either.
Sony has explicitly denied the rumors.
Big deal - Sony routinely denies everything - even their own pre-released advertising copy.
That's a limited european marketing name. And it's spelled OuiiOuii.
And the version for playstation fanbois will be the ennui.
I just received a new US passport. The passport itself has a blurb about being shielded when closed. Don't know if this is true or not, as I haven't checked it myself, but the covers feel like there's something in them.
It is true and it is not. Building a faraday cage into the cover was one of the "concessions" they made in response to all the complaints about privacy issues. But... it only really works if the covers are tightly pressed together. Leaving it open a quarter inch or so may be enough to prevent official readers from picking up the RFID, but not enough to protect against someone with a reader with more juice - like anyone who is up to no good will certainly have.
Did you know that every almost Target store in the United States is being fitted (or retrofitted) with Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems? In english, they tag you to your car.
Confirmation.
I see a market for gadgets that can easily make plates unreadable when not on public roadways.
I'm thinking electrochromic plate covers.
Diet adds for fat people
I find your faith in advertisers disturbing.
If they see fat people, they will advertise junk food, not diets because impulse sales are so much easier and lucrative.
... Or, indeed, the continued existence of Zimbabwe as a state.
Don't forget North Korea, Zimbabwe is worse off, but probably not by much.