I've never been able to understand why this feature is missing. It's so obviously necessary to be able to declare silent zones, emergency call only zones, and so on, and phones have radio transceivers. I mean, what, the designers of these devices don't know about churches, theatres, funeral homes, schools and business meetings? Bah.
Absolutely amazing and very nearly indispensable—if rather pricey—Newton 2000's that they 'vanished' in the course of a single week (even taking down the support website) when they decided that it wouldn't be cost effective to nail a show-stopping kernel bug. That's why I'll never trust them again, myself.
10Gb is about three channels each way of uncompressed studio quality HD - uncompressed being the easy way to get low latency. Been there, as a matter of fact, done that across the continent - it's *so* 2006;). I must say it looks very nice... but it's not HDR and you can still see the pixels. We can always use more bandwidth!
If the term African-American isn't correct because many slaves came from Haiti, then it seems to me it's also incorrect because most Americans are, in fact, American, and have never even been to either Africa or Haiti. The notion that ones dead ancestors are more important than oneself is truly pathological (and my apologies to anyone who has one of those religions).
It is very hard to believe that a bank will not ask you for a username and password via email when you know from experience that they will cold call you and ask you to authenticate with them while treating you like a complete lunatic if you ask them to prove who they are. Combined with the fact that they all want to know my mother's maiden name (something anyone could simply look up), presumably with the idea that any employee of any institution I deal with should be able to impersonate me....
Of course, there are things you can do. You can compute your 'mother's maiden name' from the name of the institution (which works until it is acquired or changes its name, which seem to happen at least annually nowadays) to prevent them sharing passwords, and you can deliberately give incorrect authenticators and listen to their reaction to find out if they really have your record in front of them. But we should not be required to stoop to such cleverness.
Here's a thing to think about: every single website that asks you for a password must be presumed to be attacking your identity. Why? Because they know that only one person in a hundred will generate a fresh random password for each site. The entire web is a distributed phishing engine. Until we are routinely running active authentication systems, with open source software, on independently tested hardware, that we own—and until the financial institutions admit that our need to authenticate them is as urgent as their to authenticate us—there's little hope.
Not because we truly need that level of paranoia to have a functioning financial system, but because we need the corresponding level of awareness. Humans are clearly not in the habit of asking themselves how other people know things.
That's a very interesting statement. I would have said that the *theory* of insurance is that it is a mechanism to pool risk, not merely to calculate it. Payments are based on prior probabilities, allowing us to plan our lives, and payouts are made to compensate for surprises. After all, if it doesn't do this, why have insurance at all? You minimise your premiums by cancelling your policy, so on the libertarian analysis the best insurance is no insurance; you just gamble on remaining as lucky as you are today. On average, however, and that's the point, the ideal case would seem to be to have everyone pay the same premiums. It's less paperwork, too. And it's pretty much the economic insight behind universal healthcare.
The thing we should be working on is not screwing over the unfortunate at moments when our doctor happens to be giving us good news, it's developing management techniques that will allow socialist infrastructure to capitalise on its lower costs, so it can outperform capitalism consistently. A simple engineering problem that you would think would excite the slashdot crowd....
Then why are South Africans "African-American" and the English "Caucasian" (the Caucasus is the area immediately north of Iran, roughly centred on the incredibly historically important city of Tbilisi)? This offensive and demented nonsense is forced on you every time you apply for a job in the US. Of course middle-kingdom-men are Asian-Americans! And by the same logic the native people of Australia should probably be referred to as 'Cheese on Toast.'
Er, </sarcasm>, you understand.
Amazing how neatly political correctness and racism slot together....
Fortunately I am older now and I only have real trouble with this effect when computing, but as a child I often used to find it difficult to see the picture because of all the lines it was made out of. It was even worse when we got a colour TV with its clusters of coloured spots. Even today I'm really upset because my employer got me a BIG laptop when a smaller one with the same specs and pixel count (and thus higher text legibility) was available from the same source. Apparently (judging from the number of people at the office who think my complaint is starkly insane), those of us who care about resolution every minute of every day only run to about 10% of the population, but we, too, exist. So perhaps the salesman was not deceiving you, but simply has the opposite problem to yours.
Now, when we can get a >75Hz frame rate so that I can integrate moving objects without effort? Going to the cinema is often ok, resolution-wise, but all the motion is blink-blink-blink....
If the law says not 'thou shalt not do this,' but 'thou shalt pay this amount for the privilege of doing this,' what's the problem?
The point is that there's a distinction between the law saying, "thou shalt not do this, but if thou shouldst, the amend is such-and-such" and the law saying "do this if thou wilt, and the fee is so-and-so." A fine is not a tariff.
Nobody, for example, would describe income tax as an income fine, or claim that having a job is against the law. And no one should claim that there is a fraud tariff and not a fraud fine, and claim that white collar crime is legal.
Now, I agree that in this instance it appears that the judge himself feels that the moral case (as opposed to the legal one) is not so clear and has set the penalty at a level which provides only a mild incentive for Amazon to change its behaviour. But it is still for Amazon to demonstrate its respect for France and its willingness to abide by the rules of society by changing the way it does business.
First of all, the legal system in no way equates 'murder' with 'potentially unfair pricing practices,' so why do you keep comparing the two as though they're even close to being similar?
Because you say that anything is legal so long as you are willing to pay the penalty. I've been hoping I can get you to admit that this isn't in fact what you mean. And indeed, you have suddenly changed your position.
Now you are telling me that the requirement for breaking the law to be ok is not that you be willing to pay the penalty, but that the penalty you pay should profit the government.
In that case, why is the government not publishing tables of profitability of its penalties? For example, I am sure that the government can make no profit from a $10 fine, because the administrative overheads will be greater than the return. A $10,000 fine clearly benefits the government. Where is the line? At $100? At $1000? I have no idea. And without that information, under your argument, I cannot tell which things are legal.
The class of things you are charaterising as 'illegal' are in fact precisely the ones that are disadvantageous. I have no idea how you can mix these two notions up (though it is clear that the phenomenon is incredibly common).
As I say, if "performing the punishment satisfies the law," in the sense that you interpret the phrase, then murder (if punished) is legal. Since no sane person believes this, should I not conclude that no sane person agrees with you?
I think the idea you are looking for is that once the penalty has been paid and the offense is not repeated then you and the law are quits. It is generally accepted that you should not be punished twice for the same instance of the offense. But here, where Amazon have a declared intent to persist in violating the law indefinitely, something very inappropriate is clearly going on.
But tell me, why do you think fines are different from jail time? If the execs are willing to do the jail time—maybe the company pays them well for it—does it then become ok again? By your logic, I think it ought.
In which case, you would hold that murder-for-hire businesses are conceptually legal, am I right?
Almost any action is popular with some minority. Even things unpopular with a majority (such as protection of minority rights!) may be legitimate given the additional information, perspective and expertise of those in power—assuming that democracy is functioning as it is supposed to.
Civil disobedience may become the best available course of action when all else has failed—but is France's government illegitimate? Or is it more a case of projecting American values onto a European context? The theory the civil disobedience is acceptable when things don't go America's way is... well, unacceptable to the rest of the world, let me assure you.
Why should Amazon be above the law? Even a law that you (and Amazon) think is dumb?
I think it was modded insightful by someone who understood what I was saying better than you do.
Please get a sense of perspective. Don't you think the unlawful holding of American citizens by the federal government without habeus corpus is a little more "stark"?
Yes, I agree. The US government is also disregarding the rule of law. That is a clear, documented fact, and not something I need to speculate about or ask for input on. I was talking about the readership of slashdot, if you read my words more carefully. They, too, have seemingly caught the same disease.
You caim that Amazon's actions are a legitimate civil disobedience. Isn't disobedience the step that comes after casting your vote does no good? I can see a hypothetical argument that it's time for America's soldiers and jailers to refuse orders, if you believe that the last two election results amount to a silent coup, but that's not the situation in France.
And again, I did not say, as you claim, that France said "we do not want you in our country"—I said, France said, "we do not want you to do this in our country." For good or ill, the economic theory of the legitimately elected French government may not be the same as yours! Legitimate law is there to be obeyed. Even if the fine is a small one, breaking the law is in and of itself wrong—because you are setting yourself above other citizens, and their will as expressed through their democratically elected government and legally constituted courts.
No! A fine is not a tariff, it is a penalty for breaking the law. Your response only supports my suspicion that the notion of 'legality' carries no weight with the readership here....
I find it fascinating that everyone here is discussing the ethicality and/or economic rationality of the French decision to fine Amazon, but nobody has taken up the issue of Amazon's deciding to pay the fine rather than obey the law. Is it seriously the view of every single slashdot reader that the purpose of the law is to raise money, and the sole reason for obeying the law is to avoid paying fines? Does the message that the French are sending—we do not want you to do this in our country—mean nothing?
I have long thought that the core problem with US culture, beyond even the diminishing influence of science, is that the ideal of the Rule of Law got lost at some point. While the evidence is indirect, this may be the starkest example I have seen in a long time.
Please, someone prove me wrong, and agree with me that Amazon is putting itself in a very bad light by ignoring this decision, whatever you may think of the reasoning behind it!
<sarcasm>I remember Jesus saying, "most people are worthless, we should skip their education and use them as meat."</sarcasm>
The shop assistant you spoke of was someone who thought that arithmetic was a matter of faith, and not something you can work out for yourself. Science should be taught to everyone because thinking that evolution is a matter of faith is a lot like needing a calculator to make change. The real world—that includes biology and arithmetic, engineering and politics—is real, and denying this screws things up for everyone.
People, you see, are not just cattle. They buy, they vote, they develop the land—they are powerful. It is absolutely imperative that they be educated.
Goodness, if you took a large modern nation and filled it with uneducated people they would do things like building cities designed to require everyone to make lengthy commutes in oil-burning vehicles, or fighting spurious ground wars in the cradle of civilisation, or—I'm reaching here—x-raying their shoes as a safety precaution!
Even more important to note is that there are no rights, only privileges. Guantanamo Bay proves this: in the view of the US Government, even the protections of the Constitution are there only insofar as the President feels like extending them. More broadly, if 'self defense' is a defense, or capital punishment is permitted, then there is clearly no inalienable right to life, even in legal fiction. (Outside of legal fiction, of course, you've always been able to smash someone over the head with a rock.)
My point is not that the US sucks; it's that all of these things—even the privilege of breathing—are negotiable, and that the official mechanism for negotiating them is to vote; in this case for someone who actually gives a damn about people. (Traditionally, plan B is violent revolution, but that's no good—that's part of the pattern that needs to be fixed.)
The interesting thing about copyright as applied to people is that artists like to be recognised for their work, and they like to have an income. Interestingly, artists who rework the work of other artists generally have no trouble with this (though they have the same pair of concerns themselves, of course). It is corporations who want to be seen as the owners and originators of works that were in fact executed by people who they paid, or bought from, or stole from (pop quiz, from the business of most readers here: how many Linux kernel contributors can you name? How about Vista?).
I think the reason for this is that corporations, judging their success by market share, imagine themselves to be living in a zero-sum world, where they con only 'own' something insofar as other people do not. Individuals, on the other hand, who clearly have no hope of getting it all (whatever 'it' may be) are generally happy if their own reputation, or income, or standard of living, increases, even if other people's does too.
Of course, the parent's point that the law says what the law says and that there is a disinformation campaign underway to persuade you that all rights are reserved to some corporation by default, and indeed that peer-to-peer protocols are felonious by nature, oh, let me see, and that security research is immoral, and... —well, the point is entirely well taken. And we mustn't be taken in. But it's only a small corner of the overall picture. Someone writes the rules, and presently, they are out of control.
But will the computer vendors give us 20 hour battery lives, or will they give us 16 cores, quad-SLI, 20 channel audio and a holographic projector that can spin your icons around your head while you are trying to work?
Ok, I exaggerate, but my first laptop ran Linux kernel 0.something for about six hours, after I installed all the RAM I could afford and turned off the sync daemon. I bought it with a monochrome display on purpose. Battery performance has not been getting worse since then, but battery life has—I haven't had a laptop since that got past five hours, even in Linux—and it's not because I don't pay attention when I buy.
I don't know why short battery life is the laptop manufacturer's strategy, but it can't be an accident.
(You also notice that they region lock the DVD players on laptops. Because everyone knows that laptop owners never travel, I guess. They're bloody insane, that's the explanation.)
Yes. Sorry if I was unclear. As in so many things, the world is realigning from East/West to New World/Old World, and, ironically, it is the New World that is trying to re-establish the economy and civil liberties situation of a century ago.
Maybe, it is because I never faced a gun of a fellow American? Only that of the Government...
This is interesting in another way. I've thought for a long time that you guys need to take back your government. It seems from your words that you yourself no longer even conceptualise them as Americans, much less your representatives! From your earlier post it really does seem as if you are not defending a political ideal so much as complaining that the present American implementation of government sucks—and who would disagree with that? But I don't think it weakens the argument that government oversight is needed. To take one example, that of universal education, I'd posit that the biggest problem with the States is that the Federal government does not regulate education—allowing all kinds of crackpot views to be taught at the whim of politically motivated 'religious' people—rather than that it over-regulates. Children (who are citizens too) need a fallback when their families and communities fail them, and it is a perfect example of the mandate of government to do this.
The US government (not uniquely!) is not fantastic at meeting its obligations, it is clear. But weakening (not fixing) the tool that is supposed to be providing us with a stable operating environment? I can't see that.
(A quick and pointed but somewhat facetious response, more later if possible...)
It sounds to me as if your main objection is to being made to do things at gunpoint. How curious, then, that disarming society is not item #1 on the agenda! I would certainly agree that an armed person is without moral authority, but do you mean it, I wonder?
I would like to point out that file sharing is legal, always has been legal, and always will be legal. Copyright infringement, however, is not.
No! No! No! Semantics is the coin of politics, and never forget it!
File sharing is legal and it has been legal, but there are forces working at making it illegal, because this is to their economic benefit. Aside from its much broader impact, it is like the hacker/cracker fight, now long lost. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising routine pieces of system administration. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising cryptography research. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising data archiving and hardware interoperability work. There is clearly an effort already under way to criminalise peer-to-peer protocols (however stupid that may sound to you and me), to the benefit of the *AA, the backbone providers, and the surveillance industry. What they are doing is modifying public perception of file sharing so that it is, for political purposes, piracy, and therefore "evil."
I am not being paranoid. Circumventing DVD region coding is already illegal in the US, and this was not justified by appeal to any previous principle. It was justified by a similar piece of semantic gerrymandering whereby, in the face of all logic, region coding was somehow reclassified in public perception as copy protection, something that every technically educated person knows it is not.
So yes, everyone needs to be reminded of the distinctions between stealing and sharing, and the fact that they are orthogonal to network protocol design. Not just slashdotters; everyone.
But the complacent attitude that sharing per se always will be legal? You need to lose that now. Because it may already be too late.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never been able to understand why this feature is missing. It's so obviously necessary to be able to declare silent zones, emergency call only zones, and so on, and phones have radio transceivers. I mean, what, the designers of these devices don't know about churches, theatres, funeral homes, schools and business meetings? Bah.
Absolutely amazing and very nearly indispensable—if rather pricey—Newton 2000's that they 'vanished' in the course of a single week (even taking down the support website) when they decided that it wouldn't be cost effective to nail a show-stopping kernel bug. That's why I'll never trust them again, myself.
10Gb is about three channels each way of uncompressed studio quality HD - uncompressed being the easy way to get low latency. Been there, as a matter of fact, done that across the continent - it's *so* 2006 ;). I must say it looks very nice... but it's not HDR and you can still see the pixels. We can always use more bandwidth!
If the term African-American isn't correct because many slaves came from Haiti, then it seems to me it's also incorrect because most Americans are, in fact, American, and have never even been to either Africa or Haiti. The notion that ones dead ancestors are more important than oneself is truly pathological (and my apologies to anyone who has one of those religions).
It is very hard to believe that a bank will not ask you for a username and password via email when you know from experience that they will cold call you and ask you to authenticate with them while treating you like a complete lunatic if you ask them to prove who they are. Combined with the fact that they all want to know my mother's maiden name (something anyone could simply look up), presumably with the idea that any employee of any institution I deal with should be able to impersonate me....
Of course, there are things you can do. You can compute your 'mother's maiden name' from the name of the institution (which works until it is acquired or changes its name, which seem to happen at least annually nowadays) to prevent them sharing passwords, and you can deliberately give incorrect authenticators and listen to their reaction to find out if they really have your record in front of them. But we should not be required to stoop to such cleverness.
Here's a thing to think about: every single website that asks you for a password must be presumed to be attacking your identity. Why? Because they know that only one person in a hundred will generate a fresh random password for each site. The entire web is a distributed phishing engine. Until we are routinely running active authentication systems, with open source software, on independently tested hardware, that we own—and until the financial institutions admit that our need to authenticate them is as urgent as their to authenticate us—there's little hope.
Not because we truly need that level of paranoia to have a functioning financial system, but because we need the corresponding level of awareness. Humans are clearly not in the habit of asking themselves how other people know things.
That's a very interesting statement. I would have said that the *theory* of insurance is that it is a mechanism to pool risk, not merely to calculate it. Payments are based on prior probabilities, allowing us to plan our lives, and payouts are made to compensate for surprises. After all, if it doesn't do this, why have insurance at all? You minimise your premiums by cancelling your policy, so on the libertarian analysis the best insurance is no insurance; you just gamble on remaining as lucky as you are today. On average, however, and that's the point, the ideal case would seem to be to have everyone pay the same premiums. It's less paperwork, too. And it's pretty much the economic insight behind universal healthcare.
The thing we should be working on is not screwing over the unfortunate at moments when our doctor happens to be giving us good news, it's developing management techniques that will allow socialist infrastructure to capitalise on its lower costs, so it can outperform capitalism consistently. A simple engineering problem that you would think would excite the slashdot crowd....
That's clod-American to you!
Er, </sarcasm>, you understand.
Amazing how neatly political correctness and racism slot together....
Now, when we can get a >75Hz frame rate so that I can integrate moving objects without effort? Going to the cinema is often ok, resolution-wise, but all the motion is blink-blink-blink....
The point is that there's a distinction between the law saying, "thou shalt not do this, but if thou shouldst, the amend is such-and-such" and the law saying "do this if thou wilt, and the fee is so-and-so." A fine is not a tariff.
Nobody, for example, would describe income tax as an income fine, or claim that having a job is against the law. And no one should claim that there is a fraud tariff and not a fraud fine, and claim that white collar crime is legal.
Now, I agree that in this instance it appears that the judge himself feels that the moral case (as opposed to the legal one) is not so clear and has set the penalty at a level which provides only a mild incentive for Amazon to change its behaviour. But it is still for Amazon to demonstrate its respect for France and its willingness to abide by the rules of society by changing the way it does business.
Because you say that anything is legal so long as you are willing to pay the penalty. I've been hoping I can get you to admit that this isn't in fact what you mean. And indeed, you have suddenly changed your position.
Now you are telling me that the requirement for breaking the law to be ok is not that you be willing to pay the penalty, but that the penalty you pay should profit the government.
In that case, why is the government not publishing tables of profitability of its penalties? For example, I am sure that the government can make no profit from a $10 fine, because the administrative overheads will be greater than the return. A $10,000 fine clearly benefits the government. Where is the line? At $100? At $1000? I have no idea. And without that information, under your argument, I cannot tell which things are legal.
The class of things you are charaterising as 'illegal' are in fact precisely the ones that are disadvantageous. I have no idea how you can mix these two notions up (though it is clear that the phenomenon is incredibly common).
As I say, if "performing the punishment satisfies the law," in the sense that you interpret the phrase, then murder (if punished) is legal. Since no sane person believes this, should I not conclude that no sane person agrees with you?
I think the idea you are looking for is that once the penalty has been paid and the offense is not repeated then you and the law are quits. It is generally accepted that you should not be punished twice for the same instance of the offense. But here, where Amazon have a declared intent to persist in violating the law indefinitely, something very inappropriate is clearly going on.
I think my point is made :(.
But tell me, why do you think fines are different from jail time? If the execs are willing to do the jail time—maybe the company pays them well for it—does it then become ok again? By your logic, I think it ought.
In which case, you would hold that murder-for-hire businesses are conceptually legal, am I right?
Wow.
So it's ok, in your view, to speed, if you pay the ticket?
It's ok to shoot someone in the head, if you do the jail time?
I truly, truly, don't think it's me who needs to learn about the law, here! I don't think you get the idea of law at all.
Almost any action is popular with some minority. Even things unpopular with a majority (such as protection of minority rights!) may be legitimate given the additional information, perspective and expertise of those in power—assuming that democracy is functioning as it is supposed to.
Civil disobedience may become the best available course of action when all else has failed—but is France's government illegitimate? Or is it more a case of projecting American values onto a European context? The theory the civil disobedience is acceptable when things don't go America's way is ... well, unacceptable to the rest of the world, let me assure you.
Why should Amazon be above the law? Even a law that you (and Amazon) think is dumb?
I think it was modded insightful by someone who understood what I was saying better than you do.
Yes, I agree. The US government is also disregarding the rule of law. That is a clear, documented fact, and not something I need to speculate about or ask for input on. I was talking about the readership of slashdot, if you read my words more carefully. They, too, have seemingly caught the same disease.
You caim that Amazon's actions are a legitimate civil disobedience. Isn't disobedience the step that comes after casting your vote does no good? I can see a hypothetical argument that it's time for America's soldiers and jailers to refuse orders, if you believe that the last two election results amount to a silent coup, but that's not the situation in France.
And again, I did not say, as you claim, that France said "we do not want you in our country"—I said, France said, "we do not want you to do this in our country." For good or ill, the economic theory of the legitimately elected French government may not be the same as yours! Legitimate law is there to be obeyed. Even if the fine is a small one, breaking the law is in and of itself wrong—because you are setting yourself above other citizens, and their will as expressed through their democratically elected government and legally constituted courts.
No! A fine is not a tariff, it is a penalty for breaking the law. Your response only supports my suspicion that the notion of 'legality' carries no weight with the readership here....
I find it fascinating that everyone here is discussing the ethicality and/or economic rationality of the French decision to fine Amazon, but nobody has taken up the issue of Amazon's deciding to pay the fine rather than obey the law. Is it seriously the view of every single slashdot reader that the purpose of the law is to raise money, and the sole reason for obeying the law is to avoid paying fines? Does the message that the French are sending—we do not want you to do this in our country—mean nothing?
I have long thought that the core problem with US culture, beyond even the diminishing influence of science, is that the ideal of the Rule of Law got lost at some point. While the evidence is indirect, this may be the starkest example I have seen in a long time.
Please, someone prove me wrong, and agree with me that Amazon is putting itself in a very bad light by ignoring this decision, whatever you may think of the reasoning behind it!
<sarcasm>I remember Jesus saying, "most people are worthless, we should skip their education and use them as meat."</sarcasm>
The shop assistant you spoke of was someone who thought that arithmetic was a matter of faith, and not something you can work out for yourself. Science should be taught to everyone because thinking that evolution is a matter of faith is a lot like needing a calculator to make change. The real world—that includes biology and arithmetic, engineering and politics—is real, and denying this screws things up for everyone.
People, you see, are not just cattle. They buy, they vote, they develop the land—they are powerful. It is absolutely imperative that they be educated.
Goodness, if you took a large modern nation and filled it with uneducated people they would do things like building cities designed to require everyone to make lengthy commutes in oil-burning vehicles, or fighting spurious ground wars in the cradle of civilisation, or—I'm reaching here—x-raying their shoes as a safety precaution!
Even more important to note is that there are no rights, only privileges. Guantanamo Bay proves this: in the view of the US Government, even the protections of the Constitution are there only insofar as the President feels like extending them. More broadly, if 'self defense' is a defense, or capital punishment is permitted, then there is clearly no inalienable right to life, even in legal fiction. (Outside of legal fiction, of course, you've always been able to smash someone over the head with a rock.)
My point is not that the US sucks; it's that all of these things—even the privilege of breathing—are negotiable, and that the official mechanism for negotiating them is to vote; in this case for someone who actually gives a damn about people. (Traditionally, plan B is violent revolution, but that's no good—that's part of the pattern that needs to be fixed.)
The interesting thing about copyright as applied to people is that artists like to be recognised for their work, and they like to have an income. Interestingly, artists who rework the work of other artists generally have no trouble with this (though they have the same pair of concerns themselves, of course). It is corporations who want to be seen as the owners and originators of works that were in fact executed by people who they paid, or bought from, or stole from (pop quiz, from the business of most readers here: how many Linux kernel contributors can you name? How about Vista?).
I think the reason for this is that corporations, judging their success by market share, imagine themselves to be living in a zero-sum world, where they con only 'own' something insofar as other people do not. Individuals, on the other hand, who clearly have no hope of getting it all (whatever 'it' may be) are generally happy if their own reputation, or income, or standard of living, increases, even if other people's does too.
Of course, the parent's point that the law says what the law says and that there is a disinformation campaign underway to persuade you that all rights are reserved to some corporation by default, and indeed that peer-to-peer protocols are felonious by nature, oh, let me see, and that security research is immoral, and ... —well, the point is entirely well taken. And we mustn't be taken in. But it's only a small corner of the overall picture. Someone writes the rules, and presently, they are out of control.
But will the computer vendors give us 20 hour battery lives, or will they give us 16 cores, quad-SLI, 20 channel audio and a holographic projector that can spin your icons around your head while you are trying to work?
Ok, I exaggerate, but my first laptop ran Linux kernel 0.something for about six hours, after I installed all the RAM I could afford and turned off the sync daemon. I bought it with a monochrome display on purpose. Battery performance has not been getting worse since then, but battery life has—I haven't had a laptop since that got past five hours, even in Linux—and it's not because I don't pay attention when I buy.
I don't know why short battery life is the laptop manufacturer's strategy, but it can't be an accident.
(You also notice that they region lock the DVD players on laptops. Because everyone knows that laptop owners never travel, I guess. They're bloody insane, that's the explanation.)
Yes. Sorry if I was unclear. As in so many things, the world is realigning from East/West to New World/Old World, and, ironically, it is the New World that is trying to re-establish the economy and civil liberties situation of a century ago.
This is interesting in another way. I've thought for a long time that you guys need to take back your government. It seems from your words that you yourself no longer even conceptualise them as Americans, much less your representatives! From your earlier post it really does seem as if you are not defending a political ideal so much as complaining that the present American implementation of government sucks—and who would disagree with that? But I don't think it weakens the argument that government oversight is needed. To take one example, that of universal education, I'd posit that the biggest problem with the States is that the Federal government does not regulate education—allowing all kinds of crackpot views to be taught at the whim of politically motivated 'religious' people—rather than that it over-regulates. Children (who are citizens too) need a fallback when their families and communities fail them, and it is a perfect example of the mandate of government to do this.
The US government (not uniquely!) is not fantastic at meeting its obligations, it is clear. But weakening (not fixing) the tool that is supposed to be providing us with a stable operating environment? I can't see that.
(A quick and pointed but somewhat facetious response, more later if possible...)
It sounds to me as if your main objection is to being made to do things at gunpoint. How curious, then, that disarming society is not item #1 on the agenda! I would certainly agree that an armed person is without moral authority, but do you mean it, I wonder?
No! No! No! Semantics is the coin of politics, and never forget it!
File sharing is legal and it has been legal, but there are forces working at making it illegal, because this is to their economic benefit. Aside from its much broader impact, it is like the hacker/cracker fight, now long lost. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising routine pieces of system administration. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising cryptography research. Laws have been passed, in the Western world, criminalising data archiving and hardware interoperability work. There is clearly an effort already under way to criminalise peer-to-peer protocols (however stupid that may sound to you and me), to the benefit of the *AA, the backbone providers, and the surveillance industry. What they are doing is modifying public perception of file sharing so that it is, for political purposes, piracy, and therefore "evil."
I am not being paranoid. Circumventing DVD region coding is already illegal in the US, and this was not justified by appeal to any previous principle. It was justified by a similar piece of semantic gerrymandering whereby, in the face of all logic, region coding was somehow reclassified in public perception as copy protection, something that every technically educated person knows it is not.
So yes, everyone needs to be reminded of the distinctions between stealing and sharing, and the fact that they are orthogonal to network protocol design. Not just slashdotters; everyone.
But the complacent attitude that sharing per se always will be legal? You need to lose that now. Because it may already be too late.