4:3 makes a lot more sense for document editing and web browsing, which is what most people spend the majority of their time doing.
Widescreen ratios are great for movies and games. But I sure wish I could still buy a 4:3 monitor for all the time I spend doing things besides watching movies and playing games.
"Code audits" are not "wisdom of crowds". Code audits are performed by very few people, and while you may subscribe to the notices that report such results, the vast majority of people do not. The "crowd" has no wisdom about security issues; it's select people who spend the time looking for them and a slightly larger group that cares enough to read the reports.
"The wisdom of crowds" (in this context, at least) assumes that we're talking about groups of people who are reasonably well-informed about the subject under discussion, not the population at large. It's a variation on the "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" maxim.
Whether that information makes it to the public as a whole in large part depends on the apparent nuttiness of the reporter. Act like chicken little, talk about laws prohibiting things like Facebook, and people will tune you out. When you use the phrase "police state" referring to Facebook, people will run from you. Add in a demand that such companies not be allowed to exist and you've completely lost them. Not "mystified" lost, but lost their interest and their attention.
If your point is that Stallman is not the most effective advocate for his political positions, you won't get any argument from me.
Facebook could be completely open software like the Apache web server is and you'd never know what data Facebook is collecting. I can configure Apache to keep all kinds of stuff on every visitor to my websites but you'll never know what my logging looks like based on a code audit of the Apache source.
Certainly, but I'd know the maximum amount of data you could possibly be logging.
Stallman's argument is that systems should be designed so that they can't store private data -- or that, where private data is required for their function, that they face tax penalties and tight restrictions on its use.
That introduces all kinds of implementation questions, of course.
The big one is, what about cases where people want to disclose personal information? What should the restrictions be on collection and usage of data that's intentionally disclosed in a public context, but not intended to be used by advertisers or political campaigns? That's a difficult question, to say the least.
Vendor lock-in and difficulties in migration are issues, but I don't think they've got much to do with whether the underlying software is free or proprietary.
This is the same logical fallacy that results in statements like "FOSS is so good because if you don't like how something works or need a new feature you can add it yourself." Ninety-nine and 54 one hundredths of the users have no clue how to audit the code, and thus no way of making the "informed decision", and even fewer would know that "fork" wasn't what you eat with.
That's a fair criticism. But, just as a non-programmer can benefit from the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser, the wisdom of crowds plays a role.
No, not everyone is a programmer. But everyone can benefit from the work of programmers.
Provided there's enough interest in a piece of software, third-party developers will audit the code and disclose their findings. This happens with proprietary software too, of course, but it's not as easy to determine what data Facebook or Google are collecting as it would be with a FOSS piece of software.
Until there is another secret vote, which won't happen because SCOTUS ruled the way they did, it is impossible to know if the majority is in favor or not.
You're mistaken. It's impossible to know the amount of public support for gay marriage with absolute certainty, but we can state with a very high degree of certainty that it's above 50%.
The last set of national polls were useless in determining the thinking of the electorate.
Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state. Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.
While most 2016 polls were off, they were within the margin of error. They were off by less than 4 points.
Current polling consistently shows support of gay marriage above 60%. Now, statistics is not an exact science -- the actual number could be a few points below that. 59%, 58%, 57%...sure. But under 50%? No. These are multiple reliable polling agencies. It's entirely possible that they're all off by 2-3 points, as the 2016 election showed us. But the odds that they're all off by more than ten points (and, in some cases, as many as 15) are so low as to be effectively impossible.
Further, current polls on public opinion of gay marriage are consistent with two things: increasing acceptance of gay marriage over time, and historical instances where public opinion on civil rights issues changed following court decisions.
Having your personal data collected by Facebook is not.
Back when Facebook was first taking off, I used to get E-Mails trying to get me to sign up: "Do you know this person?"
Once, I got one that asked me if I knew so-and-so. And, well, I did, because I used to date his daughter in high school.
I never signed up for Facebook. But Facebook's got a profile on me. A profile that was able to determine, based on other people's data and searches, that I have a tenuous, second-degree connection to this particular gentleman. And that was a dozen years ago; who knows how much information it's got on me now?
And that's before we even get into the Facebook tracking scripts hidden on most major websites. A typical Slashdot reader knows those are there and how to block them, but most people don't.
That was ten years ago, though. The majority is now in favor of gay marriage -- now that it was recognized by the Supreme Court as a right, regardless of what the majority thought at the time.
And that's another factor: sometimes, a court decision precedes a shift in public opinion. Gay marriage is legal now, and so people who were against it before have either realized that it's not so bad after all and doesn't affect them, or that the battle is lost and they need to find a new one.
You could build a FOSS global gossip network and it would still have it's data harvested.
Yes -- but people could audit the code and find out exactly what data was being harvested, make informed decisions, and fork it to create an alternate version that didn't harvest the same data.
(Besides which point, RMS is proposing something beyond software licenses here; he says that such data-gathering should be illegal unless absolutely necessary to the purpose of the business, and heavily taxed if so.)
For example: I guarantee Github's data is scraped.
I was given to understand that the FSF considers Github to be nonfree because it requires the use of nonfree scripts. But I could be mistaken.
Don't put your life on the net, do put disinformation on the net. It is that simple.
It's really not, though. I run uBlock Origin, NoScript, and Privacy Badger, but most users don't. Most people routinely access third-party sites that run Facebook and Google tracking scripts that monitor their browsing habits, and don't even realize it.
And my browser extensions don't prevent other people from disclosing data about me. I don't use Facebook, but of course I know people who do. They've searched for my name, and allowed Facebook to build a pretty good profile of my mutual friends and acquaintances. Some have probably even tagged me in photos.
Of course, I post under my own name and I've posted photos of myself online. And you're right: those disclosures were my choice. But that's not true of everybody. Even if you don't use your real name, even if you don't use social networks, even if you don't post photos of yourself, you still have limited control over that information.
Richard Stallman is falling into the same trap that we've been stuck in for ages - he thinks that there is an easy legislative road out of societal problems.
Did you read the full interview?
He's not just advocating legislative changes; he's advocating cultural and ideological ones too.
This is the same nonsense that people quote when they think that banning guns and knives will eliminate murder...
Wow, you packed an awful lot of straw into that man.
Majority want Gay and Lesbian rights as well as allowing Marijuana and few are fighting against that.
Yes -- now.
As recently as a few years ago, this was not the case; a majority were against those things.
So, are gay rights and marijuana decriminalization right because the majority wants them -- or were they always right, even when the majority didn't want them?
but here's the real issue, do the vast majority of people even want this problem fixed? I do not think they really care.
Sure, but "most people don't care" isn't always a reason in favor of, or against, a particular policy desire. That's tyrrany of the majority.
what Stallman and other technologists MUST come to grasp is that most people fundamentally do not value privacy much at all, so they are willing to trade it away for nearly anything. You have to start at that point and see how you go about helping people
If you're saying that what Stallman should be doing is explaining why people should care, he's been doing that for 30 years. Just how successful he's been, and how effective his methods are, are subject to debate, but I certainly think it's occurred to him that he needs to make a case for why people should care about privacy (among other things).
not playing whack-a-mole with companies that make use of this fundamental aspect of human nature.
I don't think he's advocating a Whac-a-Mole approach. He's advocating sweeping legal changes that wouldn't just affect Facebook, they'd affect any company taking a similar approach.
I think the better advice is, don't answer security questions truthfully.
Questions like "Where did you go to high school?", "What was your mother's maiden name?", "What city were you born in?", etc. aren't hard to find out with an internet search, or just to guess. Hell, depending on your age, you may even still own your first car, in which case somebody who knows your address could simply plug it into Google Street View and see it parked in your driveway.
If a site wants you to set a security question, don't.
If a site forces you to set a security question, lie, and keep a record (ideally in a password locker -- which, yes, probably defeats the entire purpose of having a security question in the first place) of what lie you used. A "correct-horse-battery-staple"-style password is good for this purpose, in case you have to answer a security question over the phone.
"We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch.
...when you do a thing in response to another thing, that's the definition of reactive.
I've seen people say that Vista was completely unnecessary and existed to fix things that weren't broken. That is, of course, reductive.
It certainly had its problems, chiefly in its UI changes (and the performance issues those changes caused). But on the backend it addressed a lot of significant issues, from creating a viable 64-bit ecosystem to major security improvements (including ASLR and DEP).
Ultimately, it paved the way for Windows 7, which I think it's fair to say is the best version of Windows overall.
Batman v superman and Bright rated equally on Rotten Tomatoes for Critics.
Bright rated significantly higher with audiences than Batman v Superman.
But there are other variables in play. A critic will, presumably, score a theatrical release exactly the same as a Netflix release. An audience member will not. The bar for watching a movie on Netflix is far lower for a typical viewer than the bar for going and seeing a movie in the theater. As such, a mediocre or bad movie in a theater is a more aggravating experience than a mediocre or bad movie on Netflix.
The disconnect between critics and audiences is real (see, for example, the ongoing financial success of the Transformers series), but Bright's performance is categorically different from a theatrical movie's performance, because it didn't cost anything to watch.
Anybody who saw Bright already had a Netflix subscription. Watching Bright cost exactly as much as not watching Bright. The cost/benefit analysis of watching a movie when you're already sitting down and preparing to watch something, on a service you've already paid for (and, optionally, with concessions you've already paid for), which you can also put on in the background while you're doing something else, is fundamentally different from the cost/benefit analysis of going out and paying for movie tickets (and, optionally, expensive concessions) and dedicating 90 minutes of your life to watching a movie and doing nothing else.
Are you suggesting that responsibility is a zero-sum game and can't be shared?
So, if I hire an electrician from London to wire my house because I think his work looks pretty, and he uses the wrong voltage because he doesn't have basic knowledge about how wiring works in my geographic region, and my house burns down, I bear no responsibility whatsoever for making a poor choice based on questionable reasoning?
So, you enjoy fucking pigs? I mean, we're writing sentences that start with "So" and end with question marks; we can just put whatever dumbass strawman argument we want in there, right?
I mean, if your argument is that it's not the richest tech company in the world's fault it hired people who did inferior work because it was aesthetically pleasing, then...that's...an argument, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wayback Machine obeys robots.txt, even retroactively. If a site puts up a robots.txt file, archive.org will remove old versions of the site.
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It isn't just contradiction.
4:3 makes a lot more sense for document editing and web browsing, which is what most people spend the majority of their time doing.
Widescreen ratios are great for movies and games. But I sure wish I could still buy a 4:3 monitor for all the time I spend doing things besides watching movies and playing games.
Well, aside from the part where he was commenting on an article whose headline contains the phrase "Facebook's privacy scandal."
...the "free" in "free software" does not refer to cost.
That's the name of my prog rock band.
"The wisdom of crowds" (in this context, at least) assumes that we're talking about groups of people who are reasonably well-informed about the subject under discussion, not the population at large. It's a variation on the "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" maxim.
If your point is that Stallman is not the most effective advocate for his political positions, you won't get any argument from me.
Certainly, but I'd know the maximum amount of data you could possibly be logging.
Stallman's argument is that systems should be designed so that they can't store private data -- or that, where private data is required for their function, that they face tax penalties and tight restrictions on its use.
That introduces all kinds of implementation questions, of course.
The big one is, what about cases where people want to disclose personal information? What should the restrictions be on collection and usage of data that's intentionally disclosed in a public context, but not intended to be used by advertisers or political campaigns? That's a difficult question, to say the least.
Vendor lock-in and difficulties in migration are issues, but I don't think they've got much to do with whether the underlying software is free or proprietary.
That's a fair criticism. But, just as a non-programmer can benefit from the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser, the wisdom of crowds plays a role.
No, not everyone is a programmer. But everyone can benefit from the work of programmers.
Provided there's enough interest in a piece of software, third-party developers will audit the code and disclose their findings. This happens with proprietary software too, of course, but it's not as easy to determine what data Facebook or Google are collecting as it would be with a FOSS piece of software.
I believe I just did.
You're mistaken. It's impossible to know the amount of public support for gay marriage with absolute certainty, but we can state with a very high degree of certainty that it's above 50%.
No, they weren't. Nate Silver:
While most 2016 polls were off, they were within the margin of error. They were off by less than 4 points.
Current polling consistently shows support of gay marriage above 60%. Now, statistics is not an exact science -- the actual number could be a few points below that. 59%, 58%, 57%...sure. But under 50%? No. These are multiple reliable polling agencies. It's entirely possible that they're all off by 2-3 points, as the 2016 election showed us. But the odds that they're all off by more than ten points (and, in some cases, as many as 15) are so low as to be effectively impossible.
Further, current polls on public opinion of gay marriage are consistent with two things: increasing acceptance of gay marriage over time, and historical instances where public opinion on civil rights issues changed following court decisions.
Having a Facebook account is voluntary.
Having your personal data collected by Facebook is not.
Back when Facebook was first taking off, I used to get E-Mails trying to get me to sign up: "Do you know this person?"
Once, I got one that asked me if I knew so-and-so. And, well, I did, because I used to date his daughter in high school.
I never signed up for Facebook. But Facebook's got a profile on me. A profile that was able to determine, based on other people's data and searches, that I have a tenuous, second-degree connection to this particular gentleman. And that was a dozen years ago; who knows how much information it's got on me now?
And that's before we even get into the Facebook tracking scripts hidden on most major websites. A typical Slashdot reader knows those are there and how to block them, but most people don't.
That was ten years ago, though. The majority is now in favor of gay marriage -- now that it was recognized by the Supreme Court as a right, regardless of what the majority thought at the time.
And that's another factor: sometimes, a court decision precedes a shift in public opinion. Gay marriage is legal now, and so people who were against it before have either realized that it's not so bad after all and doesn't affect them, or that the battle is lost and they need to find a new one.
Yes -- but people could audit the code and find out exactly what data was being harvested, make informed decisions, and fork it to create an alternate version that didn't harvest the same data.
(Besides which point, RMS is proposing something beyond software licenses here; he says that such data-gathering should be illegal unless absolutely necessary to the purpose of the business, and heavily taxed if so.)
I was given to understand that the FSF considers Github to be nonfree because it requires the use of nonfree scripts. But I could be mistaken.
It's really not, though. I run uBlock Origin, NoScript, and Privacy Badger, but most users don't. Most people routinely access third-party sites that run Facebook and Google tracking scripts that monitor their browsing habits, and don't even realize it.
And my browser extensions don't prevent other people from disclosing data about me. I don't use Facebook, but of course I know people who do. They've searched for my name, and allowed Facebook to build a pretty good profile of my mutual friends and acquaintances. Some have probably even tagged me in photos.
Of course, I post under my own name and I've posted photos of myself online. And you're right: those disclosures were my choice. But that's not true of everybody. Even if you don't use your real name, even if you don't use social networks, even if you don't post photos of yourself, you still have limited control over that information.
Man, that typo on "tyranny" is really bugging me. Wish I could go back and fix it.
Did you read the full interview?
He's not just advocating legislative changes; he's advocating cultural and ideological ones too.
Wow, you packed an awful lot of straw into that man.
Yes -- now.
As recently as a few years ago, this was not the case; a majority were against those things.
So, are gay rights and marijuana decriminalization right because the majority wants them -- or were they always right, even when the majority didn't want them?
Sure, but "most people don't care" isn't always a reason in favor of, or against, a particular policy desire. That's tyrrany of the majority.
If you're saying that what Stallman should be doing is explaining why people should care, he's been doing that for 30 years. Just how successful he's been, and how effective his methods are, are subject to debate, but I certainly think it's occurred to him that he needs to make a case for why people should care about privacy (among other things).
I don't think he's advocating a Whac-a-Mole approach. He's advocating sweeping legal changes that wouldn't just affect Facebook, they'd affect any company taking a similar approach.
I think the better advice is, don't answer security questions truthfully.
Questions like "Where did you go to high school?", "What was your mother's maiden name?", "What city were you born in?", etc. aren't hard to find out with an internet search, or just to guess. Hell, depending on your age, you may even still own your first car, in which case somebody who knows your address could simply plug it into Google Street View and see it parked in your driveway.
If a site wants you to set a security question, don't.
If a site forces you to set a security question, lie, and keep a record (ideally in a password locker -- which, yes, probably defeats the entire purpose of having a security question in the first place) of what lie you used. A "correct-horse-battery-staple"-style password is good for this purpose, in case you have to answer a security question over the phone.
I've seen people say that Vista was completely unnecessary and existed to fix things that weren't broken. That is, of course, reductive.
It certainly had its problems, chiefly in its UI changes (and the performance issues those changes caused). But on the backend it addressed a lot of significant issues, from creating a viable 64-bit ecosystem to major security improvements (including ASLR and DEP).
Ultimately, it paved the way for Windows 7, which I think it's fair to say is the best version of Windows overall.
But there are other variables in play. A critic will, presumably, score a theatrical release exactly the same as a Netflix release. An audience member will not. The bar for watching a movie on Netflix is far lower for a typical viewer than the bar for going and seeing a movie in the theater. As such, a mediocre or bad movie in a theater is a more aggravating experience than a mediocre or bad movie on Netflix.
The disconnect between critics and audiences is real (see, for example, the ongoing financial success of the Transformers series), but Bright's performance is categorically different from a theatrical movie's performance, because it didn't cost anything to watch.
Anybody who saw Bright already had a Netflix subscription. Watching Bright cost exactly as much as not watching Bright. The cost/benefit analysis of watching a movie when you're already sitting down and preparing to watch something, on a service you've already paid for (and, optionally, with concessions you've already paid for), which you can also put on in the background while you're doing something else, is fundamentally different from the cost/benefit analysis of going out and paying for movie tickets (and, optionally, expensive concessions) and dedicating 90 minutes of your life to watching a movie and doing nothing else.
Are you suggesting that responsibility is a zero-sum game and can't be shared?
So, if I hire an electrician from London to wire my house because I think his work looks pretty, and he uses the wrong voltage because he doesn't have basic knowledge about how wiring works in my geographic region, and my house burns down, I bear no responsibility whatsoever for making a poor choice based on questionable reasoning?
So, you enjoy fucking pigs? I mean, we're writing sentences that start with "So" and end with question marks; we can just put whatever dumbass strawman argument we want in there, right?
Everybody knows what they call a quarter-pounder with cheese in France, and it's not a 113-Grammer with Cheese.
I mean, if your argument is that it's not the richest tech company in the world's fault it hired people who did inferior work because it was aesthetically pleasing, then...that's...an argument, I guess.