I think it's partly that many of us geeks have a strong sense of right and wrong, sometimes irrationally so: to the point where it's hard to even imagine someone behaving so poorly, because "WTF, WHY!?". I mean... *I* would never do something like that. No one I know would do that. It's not even remotely on the radar of something I'd do to an enemy, let alone a landlord. It's hard to imagine the sort of brain damage (or ethical bankruptcy) which would lead someone to behave that way.
We know they do, we just have a really hard time understanding it.
Re:HD formats are a kind of DOS attack
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
And yet, in time, Moore's law means that in some cases it's more convenient to store an image on disk of the DVD games we own. I expect the same to hold true for any HD format -- it only costs money, after all. Blu-Ray is 50 GB (or ~128 gb in some forms?), which means that a 2TB drive ($70) will hold either 16 or 40 Blu-Ray movie images. That's more movies than I own (in any format), and the storage price is DWARFED by the cost of buying the movies. It seems like it's already quite cost-effective to store copies in disk, if you have the gear for it. (I don't.)
You know, people make mistakes. Especially groups of people when they don't realize that something wasn't someone else's responsibility. I think that RMS's immediate response of "we have to fix this yesterday" (paraphrased) shows that he is NOT a hypocrite, but is rather working fast to rectify the situation.
I was going to question the correctness of your claim that "merely publishing the source isn't enough", and that you can't do it reactively, as that runs counter to how I'd always understood the license, and then decided I should first check the GPL's terms to be sure that I understood it correctly. ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html )
The GPL3 (which I believe Emacs uses, as far as I can tell?)'s section six includes the offer "access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge". It even says that you can store the source and object code on different servers, and that you do not need to require recipients to copy the source along with the object code.
They do appear to have had a written offer (as mentioned in section 6b) to give anyone a copy of the Corresponding Source (6(b)(2)); whether you actually must put the bits on that server at request-time, or at the time of initial publishing doesn't seem to be addressed. One could probably argue that it's not a valid offer if the bits aren't available, and that's likely why they're scrambling to fix it. (That, and they actually DO want to give us the missing sources, and only just realized that they had not.)
As an anonymous poster above mentioned, I believe it's only a GPL violation if they refused to provide it, right? If no one found out until now, that leads me to believe that no one had asked. This certainly seems in the realm of "whoops, my bad" than in any nefarious hypocrisy from RMS and the Emacs developers.
How would he contact the actual seller, if the account's e-mail contact is his own address? (Maybe the Ebay account that uses the paypal account has different info, though, I guess.)
They were a perfect opportunity to paint a horrific personal slide as an idealistic young man with the galaxy laid out before him becomes everything he hates becuase of hubris.
You didn't see that? I thought I did, but I may be reading too much into it. I'm not sure how idealistic he was initially, but Anakin was certainly portrayed as a young, talented Jedi whose late start meant that he hadn't swallowed the moral kool-aid yet, and whose "horrific personal slide" (as you artfully put it) started when Palpatine manipulated him. He had a lot of hubris, and that made him very susceptible to feeling slighted when, for example, he wasn't made a Jedi Master. Couple that with the visions he was having of his wife dying, and Palpatine's promises that he knew how to save her, and I can certainly see how a young father could sacrifice his own soul (effectively) to try to save the ones he loves, not realizing that it was based on someone else's subterfuge. It's tragic. It's sometime hard to remember that when you see the spectacle on the screen, but there is still a core of a plot when you simplify it.
Instead we got Meesa, younglings and _every_ lightsaber duel ending with hands chopped off.
To be fair, it seems pretty believable that wrist removal would be a relatively common way for a saber duel to end. It was a common tactic in kenjutsu, wasn't it?
Precisely. I'm pretty sure that the tech to do so is reasonably priced now, for something with a budget like the NSA. What's the data bandwidth needed per person to track - cell-related movements? - voice calls (full audio)?
We already believe the NSA is doing the latter, and the former is likely less bits/sec, possibly by an order of magnitude or two. So, whatever datacenter in which they store the voice calls likely has a nice little partition or database where they can store any geolocation related things about us that they might find out, with room to spare. The hard(er) part is whether they can get the data from cellular phone carriers... whose past behavior makes me believe it wouldn't be that hard.
The requirement for people reading ballots to count them is less of a problem, because it means that the problem is now massively distributable,and points of failure (or corruption) are spread out enough that one bad data point will have less of an effect (and mass bad data points will be likely to be noticed).
Even if it's a clean-room implementation, would that make them safe from claims of patent infringement? It ought to work for copyright, but I think they'd have to start proving that the techniques were unpatentable, or something.
I wish there were a more worksafe (or pre-school safe?) term for it that captured it just as well (as opposed to "deindividualization"), because it's such a good point. If you (or your kids, or your parents) experience chat with people who are effectively anonymous, a significant portion of those people may act like jerks.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but I believe you mean "err" on the side of caution.
Great points about there being many kinds of indicators that are much more indicative of abuse than of a normal active lifestyle. Good pediatricians (and neighbors that know what kinds of things your kids do) go a long way. However, all it takes is one crackpot saying, "How did he REALLY break his arm?", and the authorities often are obligated to interfere. One guidance counselor at school who doesn't know your kid does gymnastics or rock climbing or martial arts or parkour, one fellow church attendee that sees your kid's black eye and broken arm, and decides that it's better call CPS "to be on the safe side" or "just in case".
There was a comment a few days ago (yesterday?) about an SCA fighter lady (who regularly gets LARGE bruises from full-contact hitting-with-sticks sports) who is constantly having to explain that no, her husband doesn't beat her, and sometimes feels it's easier to give photo/video evidence of her participating in the active sports. People tend not to listen to kids as much when they say such things.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes you wonder how long it will be before the TSA has groped enough people to have pissed everyone off (or enough people to get policy changed).
They can guess the first five, and the last 4 are frequently used (at colleges) to report test scores in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
It may be that they don't bother with people that are underage, or wait until they are no longer underage before trying to pin them with charges?
I think it's partly that many of us geeks have a strong sense of right and wrong, sometimes irrationally so: to the point where it's hard to even imagine someone behaving so poorly, because "WTF, WHY!?". I mean ... *I* would never do something like that. No one I know would do that. It's not even remotely on the radar of something I'd do to an enemy, let alone a landlord. It's hard to imagine the sort of brain damage (or ethical bankruptcy) which would lead someone to behave that way.
We know they do, we just have a really hard time understanding it.
And yet, in time, Moore's law means that in some cases it's more convenient to store an image on disk of the DVD games we own. I expect the same to hold true for any HD format -- it only costs money, after all. Blu-Ray is 50 GB (or ~128 gb in some forms?), which means that a 2TB drive ($70) will hold either 16 or 40 Blu-Ray movie images. That's more movies than I own (in any format), and the storage price is DWARFED by the cost of buying the movies. It seems like it's already quite cost-effective to store copies in disk, if you have the gear for it. (I don't.)
Wow. That's actually really brilliant.
You know, people make mistakes. Especially groups of people when they don't realize that something wasn't someone else's responsibility. I think that RMS's immediate response of "we have to fix this yesterday" (paraphrased) shows that he is NOT a hypocrite, but is rather working fast to rectify the situation.
Fortunately, RMS knows that we like source code in our source code. (yay Lisp!)
I was going to question the correctness of your claim that "merely publishing the source isn't enough", and that you can't do it reactively, as that runs counter to how I'd always understood the license, and then decided I should first check the GPL's terms to be sure that I understood it correctly. ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html )
The GPL3 (which I believe Emacs uses, as far as I can tell?)'s section six includes the offer "access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge". It even says that you can store the source and object code on different servers, and that you do not need to require recipients to copy the source along with the object code.
They do appear to have had a written offer (as mentioned in section 6b) to give anyone a copy of the Corresponding Source (6(b)(2)); whether you actually must put the bits on that server at request-time, or at the time of initial publishing doesn't seem to be addressed. One could probably argue that it's not a valid offer if the bits aren't available, and that's likely why they're scrambling to fix it. (That, and they actually DO want to give us the missing sources, and only just realized that they had not.)
As an anonymous poster above mentioned, I believe it's only a GPL violation if they refused to provide it, right? If no one found out until now, that leads me to believe that no one had asked. This certainly seems in the realm of "whoops, my bad" than in any nefarious hypocrisy from RMS and the Emacs developers.
While I'm not keen on being a first or second generation adopter, I suppose that for some it's a matter of living and not, and thus an easier choice.
Guns ("Accept my currency!") or commodities ("If you give me X of my currency, I'll give you these cows"), I imagine.
How would he contact the actual seller, if the account's e-mail contact is his own address? (Maybe the Ebay account that uses the paypal account has different info, though, I guess.)
They were a perfect opportunity to paint a horrific personal slide as an idealistic young man with the galaxy laid out before him becomes everything he hates becuase of hubris.
You didn't see that? I thought I did, but I may be reading too much into it. I'm not sure how idealistic he was initially, but Anakin was certainly portrayed as a young, talented Jedi whose late start meant that he hadn't swallowed the moral kool-aid yet, and whose "horrific personal slide" (as you artfully put it) started when Palpatine manipulated him. He had a lot of hubris, and that made him very susceptible to feeling slighted when, for example, he wasn't made a Jedi Master. Couple that with the visions he was having of his wife dying, and Palpatine's promises that he knew how to save her, and I can certainly see how a young father could sacrifice his own soul (effectively) to try to save the ones he loves, not realizing that it was based on someone else's subterfuge. It's tragic. It's sometime hard to remember that when you see the spectacle on the screen, but there is still a core of a plot when you simplify it.
Instead we got Meesa, younglings and _every_ lightsaber duel ending with hands chopped off.
To be fair, it seems pretty believable that wrist removal would be a relatively common way for a saber duel to end. It was a common tactic in kenjutsu, wasn't it?
I'm pretty sure that most countries have laws prohibiting spying by foreign agents on their citizens, otherwise espionage would not be a crime. :)
Precisely. I'm pretty sure that the tech to do so is reasonably priced now, for something with a budget like the NSA. What's the data bandwidth needed per person to track
- cell-related movements?
- voice calls (full audio)?
We already believe the NSA is doing the latter, and the former is likely less bits/sec, possibly by an order of magnitude or two. So, whatever datacenter in which they store the voice calls likely has a nice little partition or database where they can store any geolocation related things about us that they might find out, with room to spare. The hard(er) part is whether they can get the data from cellular phone carriers ... whose past behavior makes me believe it wouldn't be that hard.
Crime 101 should be "don't commit crimes". Sadly, it doesn't seem to be.
Yours In Miami,
Anonymous
... but not to the NSA.
The requirement for people reading ballots to count them is less of a problem, because it means that the problem is now massively distributable,and points of failure (or corruption) are spread out enough that one bad data point will have less of an effect (and mass bad data points will be likely to be noticed).
Even if it's a clean-room implementation, would that make them safe from claims of patent infringement? It ought to work for copyright, but I think they'd have to start proving that the techniques were unpatentable, or something.
You can type misspelled words into Google, and it will suggest what it thinks you mean. He might have done that:
Google search: http://www.google.com/search?&q=homofone
The top item is "Did you mean homophone"?
I wish there were a more worksafe (or pre-school safe?) term for it that captured it just as well (as opposed to "deindividualization"), because it's such a good point. If you (or your kids, or your parents) experience chat with people who are effectively anonymous, a significant portion of those people may act like jerks.
Wow, that was a nice collection of interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing! I'll have toget a copy of those books.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but I believe you mean "err" on the side of caution.
Great points about there being many kinds of indicators that are much more indicative of abuse than of a normal active lifestyle. Good pediatricians (and neighbors that know what kinds of things your kids do) go a long way. However, all it takes is one crackpot saying, "How did he REALLY break his arm?", and the authorities often are obligated to interfere. One guidance counselor at school who doesn't know your kid does gymnastics or rock climbing or martial arts or parkour, one fellow church attendee that sees your kid's black eye and broken arm, and decides that it's better call CPS "to be on the safe side" or "just in case".
There was a comment a few days ago (yesterday?) about an SCA fighter lady (who regularly gets LARGE bruises from full-contact hitting-with-sticks sports) who is constantly having to explain that no, her husband doesn't beat her, and sometimes feels it's easier to give photo/video evidence of her participating in the active sports. People tend not to listen to kids as much when they say such things.
Just because you've gotten surgical implants which Do Illegal Stuff doesn't mean that the act now becomes legal.