just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something.
I think what the GP meant was that there would be some sort of quasi-official authorization. Along the lines of making all of the evidence classified beyond the judges level to ever see the it, or some kind of DHS gag order + infinite postponement of the trial. Simply a classified letter from an FBI big telling the prosecutor or judge not to pursue the matter any further might work just fine. The is a fair amount of risk in challenging it, a risk many people would not like to take. I'm sure there are ways for the security portions of the government to be technically "cooperating" but never actually have to really answer to a judge. There are parallels to this kind of behavior where the politically powerful simply refuse to comply with the law and seem to be getting away with it.
I understand the importance of finding life on another planet.... Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated.
Which is why I am glad to hear there is no life there. If there was any form of life there it might raise moral questions as to if we as humanity should ever have any kind of lasting presence there. In 100 years there will be self sufficient colonies on Mars, because as you pointed out it's one of the few places in space we can actually get to. It's only responsible to check to see that we won't be destroying any life when we go explore or eventually settle there.
I would be curious to see a comparison of total man-hours spent enjoying WoW or EVE vs total man-hours spent watching a production of a Shakespeare play. Wow has about 6.5 million players, if we assume a safe average of 100 hours played per player WoW has been played for 605 million man-hours. Meanwhile, In 1600 the population of London was 200,00 by 1700 the population of London was about 600,000 So assuming every single person in London saw two productions of Shakespeare every year, that's only about 200 million man-hours of Shakespeare enjoyed in 100 years. I would say that by some measures WoW is already a greater cultural influence that Shakespeare.
I really roughed in these numbers
(but do have sources), if someone who is better at figuring these things would be so kind as to try to supply some better total estimates I appreciate it.
do you think that if the US government and manufacturers had publicly announced their agreement, there would have been a calm acceptance by Americans of the importance of paying for a system to invisibly watermark their own printouts?
Yes. I do think everyone would have just accepted it. Sure there may have been some grumbling, but no politician or CEO was going to lose their job over it. No one would have done anything about it. At least not anything that had any negative effects on the people responsible for instituting this in the first place.
Ten years ago I would have considered your several posts in this thread to be calmly level headed, but now they seem a bit blind. Even with the AT&T case you mention, when the rules don't suit our out of control political elites they just change the rules. You want things to be fixable within the system we have in place, but the checks and balances are broken and the ballot box offers no real hope. There is no vote I can cast that is a vote against marijuana prohibition. There is no vote I can cast that against the vastly increased use in SWAT teams. Despite theoretically changing the balance of power in Congress in 2006, there has been no change in the direction of ever growing federal government and increasing internal security.
Yes you are right that it is the breakdown of the rules that is the source of the problem, but it is how that breakdown manifests that is going to be doing the damage to our freedoms. Which in turn make it harder to correct the original problem. Cameras in the sky are not a new thing, but always on cameras with a searchable history are a new thing. Ultimately it is the fact that our government is treating it's own people as the threat that is the new and troubling problem.
Hmmm where did you get Christian Supremacist from that article? He only mentions God once and doesn't specify which god he is talking about. Actually all he says that is even potentially religious is "under God" which is part of our Pledge of Alliance. Now you might take issue with that fact or that "In God We Trust" is on our currency, but to brand author of the GP link as a "Christian Supremacist" is hypersensitive foolishness. On top of that you seem to think that his potential religious views somehow negate the validity of his opinion. There are names for people who dismiss the opinions of someone simply because they of a different religious persuasion. Perhaps if you can manage to overcome your bigotry long enough to read the entire article, you will see that he is speaking as a former police officer not a religious nut. That is why I quoted him, because even many of the police can see that the policing in this country is becoming ever more oppresive.
I love how she throws in the cost of music and video on her lost computer into her justification for suing for so much.
As the RIAA has pointed out each copy of a song in digital form is potentially worth $150,000. She's only suing for about 360 songs worth. That's only 30 CDs, I'm sure she has that much in her collection.
And yet another military technology is turned against the citizens.... As the local police accept money and "special training" from the feds they become a military for controlling the citizens. In the words of a former State Trooper:
The idea for that game sounds interesting and slightly disturbing from a philosophical point of view. (At least my philosophical point of view) If you have a simulated person with a simulated soul, feeling simulated feelings, living the simulated life that you give them, then you are simulated god. That sounds great until you stop to consider if you then have moral obligations to your sims. That might sound ridiculous until you think about all the people in this world who ask questions like, "If there is a God why does he allow war, or disease, or evil tyrants, etc." But how often will people give their sims peaceful harmonious pain free lives? If someone torments their sim, because it makes the game much more interesting, how does that reflect upon them morally?
nor a privacy policy of how my name and e-mail would be used, and I would like to know both before I give them my details.Your e-mail will be stored on a laptop and then taken on several international flights. DHS will then sell your e-mail address to Wal-Mart to help revitalize the economy.
my employer has made it clear that they want their employees to cooperate fully with these searches, and afterwards tell corporate security. Realistically, it's the only reasonable thing for the company to expect.
Is this explained to your clients in your companies privacy policy? I'm rather interested in knowing what my credit card companies policy is regarding data safety. Unfortunately, that part of the web site doesn't work. Some of the information being seized may be my information, even though I am not the one traveling. Do I have legal recourse if my information is copied from the laptop of a company I do business with?
If we had taken the nearly 1 trillion dollars we have currently spent on the war and invested in this country's infrastructure we would not be in so many shit holes at once.
I have to assume you mean our energy infrastructure. Our raw materials and manufacturing capacity loss is more about pay scale than infrastructure. I think improving our energy infrastructure would be great, but it wouldn't have much immediate quality of life improvements for most civilian Americans. A different handful of people would be getting rich right now, but that's about it. One of the longer term dangers to our economy is the loss of the dollar as the international currency. That loss is largely caused by our ballooning deficit. A "New Deal" spending spree at home wouldn't help any more than the current military spending spree. Currently the national debt is about $30k per citizen, so assume you had a $30k lower quality of life and that is what we are likely to balance out at when China stops funding our spending habits.
Given that you have to take the pillbox to get refilled and reset every two weeks any how, I'm not sure, other than education, there is any good way to encourage people to finish their antibiotic prescription once they are feeling better. If it wasn't for the development of resistant viruses, I wouldn't even try to solve that problem beyond pointing out the story of someone who stopped taking their TB meds and died because of it. But with resistant strains developing because of this I would be tempted to use a Norplant type delivery system for all antibiotics that are in danger of becoming useless due to resistant strains. In some ways the taking of a strong anti-biotic is using a public commodity, the effectiveness of that drug. If it is abused then the public commodity can be damaged when resistant strains develop. However, industrial livestock are much more problematic in this area than negligent patients.
No, hydro is renewable, but it isn't cool. You can't have an old reliable tech and not expect treehuggers to bitch about it. I consider treehuggers a very small portion of the environmentally conscious population, treehuggers will only be happy when everyone lives in crappy mud brick communes and conserving water by only showering weekly. These are the very same people who bitch about wind farms disrupting the birds. I'm sure even solar furnace towers will be bad once some rare bird tries to roost in the tower. The dams in the Northwest make lakes where there didn't used to be lakes (how unnatural!) and make it impossible for salmon to spawn up river. After 80 years, I think the parts of the river ecosystem that could adjust adjusted and the rest died a long time ago.
I just find the idea interesting, how hard it would be to convince people, that you actually have something like this.
I had a similar thought, immediately followed by "How would I prove this tech?" My solution, I would hook it up to a dynamo and start selling power back to the electric company. I would use the profits to build more and more invention+dynamo, until I could sell back enough power to pay my mortgage. Then I would have a talk with my local power company about how I am able to make such a nice profit selling them electricity. Because while careful scientific review certainly adds validity, proven profitability adds a very different kind of validity.
less wage than any unskilled union laborer....everyone I know who went to college makes less than those who didn't.
Everyone makes less than the unskilled union laborer, or less than the skilled union laborer? Unskilled labor tends to be cheap, because basically anyone who is healthy can do it, skilled labor can be quite expensive, because so few people want to be laborers as a career choice. You can make a decent living as an iron worker. But with that comes a career working in all weather doing potentially dangerous work. If your job is making you bitter then maybe it's your employer, maybe it's your career. If you suspect that's it's the latter, I would suggest getting a few weekends of work unloading trucks. You will either discover that you love getting paid for physical work, or you will have a fresh appreciation for your current job. Full disclosure: I am an IATSE(union) stagehand and I load/unload trucks on a regular basis. Sometimes in the rain or snow, frequently without a loading dock. I love my job.
Well for starters, Google could very publicly protract this case for as long as possible. They could do lip service to the PRC while making sure that Guo Quan gets as much airtime and pundit discussion as possible. Google is in a tight spot in China, as are most of the Chinese. Simply by being there to be sued they have done more to illuminate this man's plight then they could have every done if they did no business with the PRC at all. Now they just have to take this opportunity and use it to do some good.
Speaking as someone who is in the entertainment industry and has been on strike in the recent past I just want to say; Going on strike is not an easy decision. There is a great deal of consideration that goes into what the industry itself can bare. There is also a great deal of consideration about the long term effects of not going on strike would be. You say that there are have been people that would have been fine with the old contract. True. There are probably people who would be willing to do your job for much less money as well. But what would the long term effects be? In the case of the writers, it would be the end of writing as a viable career option. They were fighting to have the same royalties on internet distribution as they currently have on DVD distribution. Everyone knows that in ten years the vast majority of the distribution will be via the internet, so in essence they were fight to have royalties at all. Royalties are what allow for writing to be career. It was clear from the outset of this strike that the writers would have to do some short term damage to the industry as a whole, in order to preserve the long term existence of their jobs. The reason this was obvious was because the management on the other side of the bargaining table was putting forward a proposal that would have short term gains and long term damage. In the short term they would have profited 3% more on internet sales, but in the long term they would have destroyed the position of professional screen writer, leaving only those who would pursue writing as a hobby. Sure they could always get some starry eyed recently graduated newcomers to fill the job, but as those people tried to do things like buy a house or raise a family, they would be forced out the job by the financial realities of the "old contract". There would be no one around with 20 years of professional experience, there would be no one to really refine the craft, there would only be glorified interns. That isn't good for the industry.
I agree that the world could be a much better place without sophisticated tools of violence. I do not agree that the world would be a better place if all of the tools of violence are concentrated into the hands of people who are supposed to be working for us, yet we have none. There is a purpose to civilian gun ownership, it is the distribution of power. People treat other people differently if they have close to equal amounts of power. When I was a sophomore in highschool I started the year at 5'4" 120lbs. by the start of junior year I was 6'0" 185 lbs. I had the same personality and same friends, but for some reason no one who found fun in pushing me or insulting me my sophomore year felt the same way my junior year. Simply having more physical power allowed me to never have to use it. I didn't get in a single fight or aggressive argument my junior year. It is much the same with the government and the police with their casual abuses of power. The current trend is towards the government and police treating us as sheep to be shepherded, not equals to be provided a service. A well armed populace isn't about rising up and overthrowing a bad government, it is about the ability to do so.
Oddly enough it is my liberties and rights that are being taken by force. Yet I am no more "secure" than I was before they were gone. I was in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11th and I felt far less threat to my freedom on that day than I do since the creation of DHS.
Unless your a hunter, a gun is used for shooting people.
Which makes them completely useless in a civilized society.
The military also only uses their guns to shoot people. The police only use their guns to shoot people. So, the military and the police have no place in civilized society. I hope one day to live in a civilized society.
Slashdot Mirror
Proof.
just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something.
I think what the GP meant was that there would be some sort of quasi-official authorization. Along the lines of making all of the evidence classified beyond the judges level to ever see the it, or some kind of DHS gag order + infinite postponement of the trial. Simply a classified letter from an FBI big telling the prosecutor or judge not to pursue the matter any further might work just fine. The is a fair amount of risk in challenging it, a risk many people would not like to take. I'm sure there are ways for the security portions of the government to be technically "cooperating" but never actually have to really answer to a judge. There are parallels to this kind of behavior where the politically powerful simply refuse to comply with the law and seem to be getting away with it.
I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. ... Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated.
Which is why I am glad to hear there is no life there. If there was any form of life there it might raise moral questions as to if we as humanity should ever have any kind of lasting presence there. In 100 years there will be self sufficient colonies on Mars, because as you pointed out it's one of the few places in space we can actually get to. It's only responsible to check to see that we won't be destroying any life when we go explore or eventually settle there.
WoW has been played for 605 million man-hours.
err. 650 million man-hours...
WoW will go down in history as a classic game.
I would be curious to see a comparison of total man-hours spent enjoying WoW or EVE vs total man-hours spent watching a production of a Shakespeare play. Wow has about 6.5 million players, if we assume a safe average of 100 hours played per player WoW has been played for 605 million man-hours. Meanwhile, In 1600 the population of London was 200,00 by 1700 the population of London was about 600,000 So assuming every single person in London saw two productions of Shakespeare every year, that's only about 200 million man-hours of Shakespeare enjoyed in 100 years. I would say that by some measures WoW is already a greater cultural influence that Shakespeare.
I really roughed in these numbers (but do have sources), if someone who is better at figuring these things would be so kind as to try to supply some better total estimates I appreciate it.
do you think that if the US government and manufacturers had publicly announced their agreement, there would have been a calm acceptance by Americans of the importance of paying for a system to invisibly watermark their own printouts?
Yes. I do think everyone would have just accepted it. Sure there may have been some grumbling, but no politician or CEO was going to lose their job over it. No one would have done anything about it. At least not anything that had any negative effects on the people responsible for instituting this in the first place.
Ten years ago I would have considered your several posts in this thread to be calmly level headed, but now they seem a bit blind. Even with the AT&T case you mention, when the rules don't suit our out of control political elites they just change the rules. You want things to be fixable within the system we have in place, but the checks and balances are broken and the ballot box offers no real hope. There is no vote I can cast that is a vote against marijuana prohibition. There is no vote I can cast that against the vastly increased use in SWAT teams. Despite theoretically changing the balance of power in Congress in 2006, there has been no change in the direction of ever growing federal government and increasing internal security.
Yes you are right that it is the breakdown of the rules that is the source of the problem, but it is how that breakdown manifests that is going to be doing the damage to our freedoms. Which in turn make it harder to correct the original problem. Cameras in the sky are not a new thing, but always on cameras with a searchable history are a new thing. Ultimately it is the fact that our government is treating it's own people as the threat that is the new and troubling problem.
Only if they can use the images without a search warrant.
Didn't you hear? The 4th amendment has been repealed.
Hmmm where did you get Christian Supremacist from that article? He only mentions God once and doesn't specify which god he is talking about. Actually all he says that is even potentially religious is "under God" which is part of our Pledge of Alliance. Now you might take issue with that fact or that "In God We Trust" is on our currency, but to brand author of the GP link as a "Christian Supremacist" is hypersensitive foolishness. On top of that you seem to think that his potential religious views somehow negate the validity of his opinion. There are names for people who dismiss the opinions of someone simply because they of a different religious persuasion. Perhaps if you can manage to overcome your bigotry long enough to read the entire article, you will see that he is speaking as a former police officer not a religious nut. That is why I quoted him, because even many of the police can see that the policing in this country is becoming ever more oppresive.
I love how she throws in the cost of music and video on her lost computer into her justification for suing for so much.
As the RIAA has pointed out each copy of a song in digital form is potentially worth $150,000. She's only suing for about 360 songs worth. That's only 30 CDs, I'm sure she has that much in her collection.
The idea for that game sounds interesting and slightly disturbing from a philosophical point of view. (At least my philosophical point of view) If you have a simulated person with a simulated soul, feeling simulated feelings, living the simulated life that you give them, then you are simulated god. That sounds great until you stop to consider if you then have moral obligations to your sims. That might sound ridiculous until you think about all the people in this world who ask questions like, "If there is a God why does he allow war, or disease, or evil tyrants, etc." But how often will people give their sims peaceful harmonious pain free lives? If someone torments their sim, because it makes the game much more interesting, how does that reflect upon them morally?
nor a privacy policy of how my name and e-mail would be used, and I would like to know both before I give them my details.Your e-mail will be stored on a laptop and then taken on several international flights. DHS will then sell your e-mail address to Wal-Mart to help revitalize the economy.
my employer has made it clear that they want their employees to cooperate fully with these searches, and afterwards tell corporate security. Realistically, it's the only reasonable thing for the company to expect.
Is this explained to your clients in your companies privacy policy? I'm rather interested in knowing what my credit card companies policy is regarding data safety. Unfortunately, that part of the web site doesn't work. Some of the information being seized may be my information, even though I am not the one traveling. Do I have legal recourse if my information is copied from the laptop of a company I do business with?
If we had taken the nearly 1 trillion dollars we have currently spent on the war and invested in this country's infrastructure we would not be in so many shit holes at once.
I have to assume you mean our energy infrastructure. Our raw materials and manufacturing capacity loss is more about pay scale than infrastructure. I think improving our energy infrastructure would be great, but it wouldn't have much immediate quality of life improvements for most civilian Americans. A different handful of people would be getting rich right now, but that's about it. One of the longer term dangers to our economy is the loss of the dollar as the international currency. That loss is largely caused by our ballooning deficit. A "New Deal" spending spree at home wouldn't help any more than the current military spending spree. Currently the national debt is about $30k per citizen, so assume you had a $30k lower quality of life and that is what we are likely to balance out at when China stops funding our spending habits.
Given that you have to take the pillbox to get refilled and reset every two weeks any how, I'm not sure, other than education, there is any good way to encourage people to finish their antibiotic prescription once they are feeling better. If it wasn't for the development of resistant viruses, I wouldn't even try to solve that problem beyond pointing out the story of someone who stopped taking their TB meds and died because of it. But with resistant strains developing because of this I would be tempted to use a Norplant type delivery system for all antibiotics that are in danger of becoming useless due to resistant strains. In some ways the taking of a strong anti-biotic is using a public commodity, the effectiveness of that drug. If it is abused then the public commodity can be damaged when resistant strains develop. However, industrial livestock are much more problematic in this area than negligent patients.
Do you mean hydroelectric power isn't renewable?
No, hydro is renewable, but it isn't cool. You can't have an old reliable tech and not expect treehuggers to bitch about it. I consider treehuggers a very small portion of the environmentally conscious population, treehuggers will only be happy when everyone lives in crappy mud brick communes and conserving water by only showering weekly. These are the very same people who bitch about wind farms disrupting the birds. I'm sure even solar furnace towers will be bad once some rare bird tries to roost in the tower. The dams in the Northwest make lakes where there didn't used to be lakes (how unnatural!) and make it impossible for salmon to spawn up river. After 80 years, I think the parts of the river ecosystem that could adjust adjusted and the rest died a long time ago.
I just find the idea interesting, how hard it would be to convince people, that you actually have something like this.
I had a similar thought, immediately followed by "How would I prove this tech?" My solution, I would hook it up to a dynamo and start selling power back to the electric company. I would use the profits to build more and more invention+dynamo, until I could sell back enough power to pay my mortgage. Then I would have a talk with my local power company about how I am able to make such a nice profit selling them electricity. Because while careful scientific review certainly adds validity, proven profitability adds a very different kind of validity.
less wage than any unskilled union laborer....everyone I know who went to college makes less than those who didn't.
Everyone makes less than the unskilled union laborer, or less than the skilled union laborer? Unskilled labor tends to be cheap, because basically anyone who is healthy can do it, skilled labor can be quite expensive, because so few people want to be laborers as a career choice. You can make a decent living as an iron worker. But with that comes a career working in all weather doing potentially dangerous work. If your job is making you bitter then maybe it's your employer, maybe it's your career. If you suspect that's it's the latter, I would suggest getting a few weekends of work unloading trucks. You will either discover that you love getting paid for physical work, or you will have a fresh appreciation for your current job. Full disclosure: I am an IATSE(union) stagehand and I load/unload trucks on a regular basis. Sometimes in the rain or snow, frequently without a loading dock. I love my job.
how can you not do evil?
Well for starters, Google could very publicly protract this case for as long as possible. They could do lip service to the PRC while making sure that Guo Quan gets as much airtime and pundit discussion as possible. Google is in a tight spot in China, as are most of the Chinese. Simply by being there to be sued they have done more to illuminate this man's plight then they could have every done if they did no business with the PRC at all. Now they just have to take this opportunity and use it to do some good.
Speaking as someone who is in the entertainment industry and has been on strike in the recent past I just want to say; Going on strike is not an easy decision. There is a great deal of consideration that goes into what the industry itself can bare. There is also a great deal of consideration about the long term effects of not going on strike would be. You say that there are have been people that would have been fine with the old contract. True. There are probably people who would be willing to do your job for much less money as well. But what would the long term effects be? In the case of the writers, it would be the end of writing as a viable career option. They were fighting to have the same royalties on internet distribution as they currently have on DVD distribution. Everyone knows that in ten years the vast majority of the distribution will be via the internet, so in essence they were fight to have royalties at all. Royalties are what allow for writing to be career. It was clear from the outset of this strike that the writers would have to do some short term damage to the industry as a whole, in order to preserve the long term existence of their jobs. The reason this was obvious was because the management on the other side of the bargaining table was putting forward a proposal that would have short term gains and long term damage. In the short term they would have profited 3% more on internet sales, but in the long term they would have destroyed the position of professional screen writer, leaving only those who would pursue writing as a hobby. Sure they could always get some starry eyed recently graduated newcomers to fill the job, but as those people tried to do things like buy a house or raise a family, they would be forced out the job by the financial realities of the "old contract". There would be no one around with 20 years of professional experience, there would be no one to really refine the craft, there would only be glorified interns. That isn't good for the industry.
I agree that the world could be a much better place without sophisticated tools of violence. I do not agree that the world would be a better place if all of the tools of violence are concentrated into the hands of people who are supposed to be working for us, yet we have none. There is a purpose to civilian gun ownership, it is the distribution of power. People treat other people differently if they have close to equal amounts of power. When I was a sophomore in highschool I started the year at 5'4" 120lbs. by the start of junior year I was 6'0" 185 lbs. I had the same personality and same friends, but for some reason no one who found fun in pushing me or insulting me my sophomore year felt the same way my junior year. Simply having more physical power allowed me to never have to use it. I didn't get in a single fight or aggressive argument my junior year. It is much the same with the government and the police with their casual abuses of power. The current trend is towards the government and police treating us as sheep to be shepherded, not equals to be provided a service. A well armed populace isn't about rising up and overthrowing a bad government, it is about the ability to do so.
Oddly enough it is my liberties and rights that are being taken by force. Yet I am no more "secure" than I was before they were gone. I was in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11th and I felt far less threat to my freedom on that day than I do since the creation of DHS.
This site here might be of help.
Unless your a hunter, a gun is used for shooting people. Which makes them completely useless in a civilized society.
The military also only uses their guns to shoot people. The police only use their guns to shoot people. So, the military and the police have no place in civilized society. I hope one day to live in a civilized society.