I don't even know why they bother turning up to Lucy Koh's trials in the first place, it's such a kangaroo court with her they've lost the second she's named as the judge.
She used to work as a lawyer for Apple for crying out loud and her courtroom is basically in Apple's back garden. Everything about cases involving her stink of stitch up.
Hint: It's not the sex that makes you gay. It's genetic.
But you're obviously too stupid to understand this topic, because apparently some people are also born to be stupid given you provide a perfect example.
I absolutely agree for what it's worth, I'm concerned that DRM is given such a free pass here on Slashdot - Valve is positively worshipped here and barely a word wrong can be said about them, yet they're responsible for arguably the greatest proliferation of some of the most intrusive DRM on the PC to date. When they do hashes of DNS cache of suspected cheaters and so forth they're made excuses for and so on "Oh, it's only suspected cheaters" - so fucking what? A game isn't important enough to commit a flagrant invasion of privacy over.
So you're preaching to the converted here, I believe no company deserves a free ride of DRM whoever they are, and I believe no DRM is ever acceptable because it has no logical benefit for the consumer ever, under any circumstance, it's only ever detrimental and it uses our CPU cycles, bandwidth, and memory to cause that detriment to our experiences.
So apologies if I gave the impression I was suggesting we shouldn't fight it - I agree we absolutely should. I was more making the point that I suspect it's doomed to fail precisely because people will fight it, especially when there's an economic incentive in selling devices that don't screw the consumer with it.
On a PC you get far more control, it's far less easy to conceal things, outbound connections are trivially spotted with firewalls and netstat etc. and access to personal data can be controlled much more easily with permissions, encrypted files and so forth.
"Nobody except its users gave a shit about it before and whether the users are still there has nothing to do with FB, since FB didn't change anything!"
Well like I say it was in the news all the time, the media wouldn't shut up about it. That certainly went silent after acquisition.
But for what it's worth I think FB has an effect on it's users regardless of whether it changes anything - people don't trust their data being stored by Facebook, or a company owned by Facebook, because Facebook has earned itself such a bad reputation for looking after user data sensibly.
"Does everybody really think FB is so dumb that they'd all of a sudden get Michael start working on social code instead of getting a working hardware/software interface?"
Apparently they are, because I've seen such arguments too, but I agree with you it's a stupid nonsense argument. What people who are a bit more sane are concerned about though is that Oculus will in fact develop into an incredible product, but it'll be tied right into Facebook. People are scared that you wont be able to use Oculus without Facebook but you'll have to use Oculus if you want to play the next latest and greatest thing your friends are playing. People are concerned they'll be left with a choice of get left behind, or accept that you're going to have to let Facebook farm the shit out of your personal data and try and sell you stuff you may not want when you don't want to be harassed with being sold stuff.
"The US is a funny place. They admire rich people but then they always assume that they are smarter than the rich person and feel that they, sans billion dollar company, actually have some useful insight."
To be fair that happens here in the UK and most of the rest of the world too. For what it's worth though I don't think money is a good way to judge insight given that most people get rich through right place, right time blind luck. Zuckerberg only got where he did with Facebook because he was born to parents wealthy enough to send him to a uni full of other rich kids where he could be friends with rich kids rich enough and well connected enough to fund the starting up of his own company. There are millions of people as smart and insightful as Zuckerberg but far less wealthy, simply because they never had the parents to send them to a well connected institution. Sarah Palin is wealthy, but it doesn't change the fact she's well below average on the intelligence and insight scale. As a developer in the financial sector I earn more than most university professors, but I wouldn't for a second pretend to have more insight than many of them do on topics that interest me such as mathematics.
The problem is one of humility, most people just aren't humble enough to admit when they're wrong, for whatever reason this problem is exacerbated on the internet. It's not bad to be wrong, that's how you learn, but most people don't get that, and I think that's the sort of person you're describing and I agree, it's frustrating. I see three types of people here on Slashdot - those who openly admit when they're wrong, and avoid posting on topics where they're not confident their views are correct (rare, 10%?), those who just go quiet when they're wrong and no longer bother responding, but at least back down quietly and don't continue arguing anyway (much less rare, 40%?), and those who just carry on arguing despite the fact they're wrong, even if they've had every bit of evidence and all the facts plastered in their face repeatedly (most common, 50%?).
Yes, the problem is for it to work you need civilised nations that actually listen. Unfortunately that doesn't apply to any of those you listed (and I add my own nation to the list - the UK).
Getting Putin to listen though when he's off on a paranoid rant about how the EU wants to make him eat croissants is a no-go, much less Kim Jong Un who actually thinks he's a good leader and the whole of the rest of the world is always wrong about everything.
This is one of those rare occasions where it's actually worked because the loser has accepted the ruling rather than saying "Okay, I lost, but I don't care, I'm going to carry on as I was anyway" or alternatively, "Fuck that, I'm not even going to go to that court because deep down I know I'm wrong and know I'll lose", the latter of which is what Argentina has done each time the UK has offered to let the court rule on the Falklands for example.
It's not so much how the UN can enforce it, it's the fact that it makes it legal for other countries to take action against Japan over it without themselves becoming victims of legal cases from Japan.
For example, Japanese ships entered New Zealand's exclusive economic zone earlier this year - something boats are normally allowed to do without needing explicit permission. Now however there's nothing to stop the New Zealand coast guard from arresting them and seizing their ship for carrying out an illegal activity if they were to pass through that zone again. Effectively Japan could no longer call such act an act of piracy which would be the risk of New Zealand or similar decided to go ahead and do that without this ruling.
This is why Japan has said it will abide by the ruling, because whilst it's embarassing for them to lose their whaling argument at long last, it'd be even more embarassing if they said "fuck the UN" and then got their ships legally seized by a foreign government and the Japanese crew paraded on TV as arrested for engaging in illegal activity. They'd then have to stop whaling for the reason that their ships had been seized, rather than that they'd accepted the ruling and given it up themselves - this is the least embarrassing route for them now, hence why they're taking it.
I agree the Android permissions system is part of the problem in this particular scenario, but see my post here as to why I don't want them to access data that isn't essential to the use of the application:
Long story short, accessing my contact list just allows them to add fluff, and the fluff to risk of privacy violation ratio is too high. I used their application fine without that option in the past, I don't need it now.
Yes I believe that's the claim, but I'm more than content to just have a "Copy link to clipboard" button so I can paste it wherever I want - all they need to do is let me take the link where I want.
Too many companies use such data for other purposes in the background (and ship your contacts etc. off to their servers) that it's a poison chalice to even ask for such permissions if it's not necessary to the underlying point of the application.
I get that they want to make it easier for some users and I fully sympathise with the usability reasons for doing so, but ultimately when they do shit like this it just reinforces my view that it's not a permission I can trust most such companies with.
They say they'll never do something, and they resist for a while, then they finally break, "just this once" they tell themselves. Like fuck "just this once".
I used to have the Facebook app on my phone and I did give that permission - not because I trust them, but because I was going in knowing full well what they were going to do with it, but I drew the line at that app when it started asking permission to draw over other apps and such - what the fuck? No. Just no. There's not a chance in hell you're having permissions to view and render over the pixels on screen on my banking app or whatever.
Now I'm far more tough with apps in general, which is why I wouldn't touch drop box anymore with this permissions change. Tired of being told our data wont be read, will be held securely and then suddenly such data turns up in completely unrelated places, like when contacts I only had through my MSN messenger list magically turned up as recommendations on LinkedIn despite me never having given permission for MS to share that data with LinkedIn nor LinkedIn permission to receive that data from MS.
I used to be more laissez faire with my data, because I was lazy enough to put convenience over privacy, but each time I gave a company the trust they asked for based on the assurances they gave they really did lie and abuse it, so fuck them.
Even something as innocent as a university course I did in my spare time has me getting text messages (2), e-mails (about 5), phone calls (7 of - land line and mobile), letters through the post (3) telling me to fill in the UK's student survey. Eventually I relented, any other comments? Yes, "Fuck your survey, all data I filled in is false. Leave me alone". Apparently I should've opted out of said survey, now if only I was ever given that choice.
You literally can't put your data anywhere anymore without it being used to harass you. The convenience is no longer worth the inevitable follow on harassment which is anti-convenient, it's a distraction, a disruption, a pain in the fucking arse.
I buy a TV and I have to give a postcode and house number so they can pass it on to the TV licensing authorities "It wont get used for junk mail, just for licensing" and what comes through the door after a year? "Your warranty is due to expire, your TV wont be covered if it breaks blah blah blah" - no it's fucking not, I'm covered by the consumer protection act you lying dipshits. Last time I bought one I gave the shop the postcode and number of their very own store, knowing full well the question would be coming having looked it up before hand, amusingly my theory that the sales drones would be too fucking dumb to notice was proven right.
So it may be to let you more conveniently send a link directly, but you always pay in the end, that convenience doesn't come free, you lose the time gained by that convenience dealing with advertising crap, being sent friend invites from people you don't want, sorting junk mail into a recycle bin and phoning them to ask never to spam you again, or dealing with security nightmares because some retard company holding far more of your data than it ever needed got hacked.
And that's why they can take their lame little "share this" or whatever button and fuck themselves with it.
Things like this never work though, we saw it with DVDs where companies were told they couldn't provide region free players if they wanted to be certified, well guess what? China didn't give a shit, and started churning out cheap unbranded players that were region free - no one gave a fuck that they weren't certified because, well, they all still worked like any other and had other features like being able to play DivX movies and so forth to boot.
It wasn't long before the likes of Toshiba and Samsung said fuck this, we're not losing the market because the movie industry is lame and started to follow suit.
The problem is when you start making it profitable to break such DRM methods then that DRM wont last long and the market will start to get flooded with devices that ignore that DRM rendering it useless. All the industry manages to do in the process is piss off legitimate consumers and lump manufacturers and themselves with returned products that don't work costing them a fortune.
Long story short, there's no natural positive economic model in DRM, hence it's doomed to fail in the fact of competing economic interests that do have natural markets - i.e. consumers that just want to play their content.
I didn't even know Cinavia was a thing until I read this thread and I've been playing films on my PC, consoles and smart TVs regularly. I probably watch more films on a wider range of devices than most people yet I've never even seen or heard of this thing previously.
No, the web is platform agnostic, Facebook just uses it.
This utter bastardisation of the truth implies you have a brutally pro-Facebook agenda. Given there's a mass increase in Facebook shills here lately I have to ask, how much do they pay?
Right, but to be fair that's as much as Abrash's fault as anything - I know him from his work in the 90s, but what has he done in the last 14 to 17 or so years?
There's no doubt he's incredibly talented, and did some amazing work, but I find it hard to fault people for not knowing who he is when he just hasn't been relevant since the world wide web was in it's infancy (it's now 25).
Looking at his Wikipedia entry and Googling him it's not clear that he has done much of public interest in a long long time, short of quietly working on Intel's largely failed Larrabee project.
Perhaps working back with Carmack they'll be able to do amazing things, and his name will be reborn back into public knowledge, though with the long shadow of Facebook over them I'm still not convinced even these two greats can make people happy about Oculus with it's new evil overlord.
"We don't have to get the balance 'right', we just have to get the balance 'better' than it is right now."
I absolutely agree, which is why I support carefully planned and well assessed change.
"You are also making the bizarre assumption that health costs will go up, which doesn't seem to mesh with reality."
You say this as if it's a fact and this is precisely the problem I'm highlighting - too many people on both sides of the argument keep parroting their "facts" which actually aren't, they're just guesses in the dark.
"Prohibition hasn't reduced usage"
How do you know this? The only alternatives we have to compare against are places like Afghanistan and parts of Africa where opiate and khat users and so forth are widespread and far more problematic than drug use in prohibited nations (even those with equal poverty problems etc.) but this doesn't tell the full story because it's still hard to compare these nations to Western nations. The point is though that you're again stating something as fact when it's just an outright unknown. You've decided to fall on one side of the argument without there being anything to back up your viewpoint - you've decided it's fact for no other reason than it suits your personal bias.
You can look at alcohol and tobacco in Western countries over the last couple of decades and you'll note that a trend towards more regulation has actually solved the problem. Ontario's use of LCBO to control alcohol distribution for example means they have far less problems with alcoholism than we have here in the UK where you can go to your local supermarket and stock up on enough alcohol to give an entire family fatal alcohol poisoning for less than £20. I realise you said before that your recognise that some regulation is probably necessary so I think you probably agree with me here that complete unregulated legalisation isn't the ideal option anyway, but I give the example of alcohol and tobacco as a demonstration that actually more regulation can sometimes be better - something many people arguing for legalisation believe, is actually false.
"You can't buy your PD a tank if you don't have money, and the money comes largely from drugs."
Most equipment expenditure has been justified by the war on terror in recent decades, if they weren't getting it from forfeiture they'd be getting it by claiming it was essential for terror funding. The money may just have been redirected from the actual military to fund it.
As I said before I don't disagree with you on a fundamental level that change is necessary, I'm largely just pointing out that the debate is so riddled with people on both sides deciding things are facts, not understanding all the variables involved and hence failing to understand why progress is so slow. It's slow for a reason - if you're a politician in charge of making the call, you think legalisation is the answer, but then you ask the question "Well, can we be certain there wont be other major problems?" and you get the response "No sir, we really can't, we don't think there will be but we can't be sure" then are you really willing to bet your career on it? It takes a brave politician to make that call because they're literally putting their career on the line.
So I also understand why things are going as slow as they are, the practicalities of change are difficult, and the effects are awkward - that's why I both understand the reason for and in many ways support very slow change. As I say the last thing you want is complete national or worse, even international legalisation overnight putting tens to hundreds of thousands of violent armed drugs trade employees out of a job. It may be a bitter pill to swallow but if we want rapid change we may have to look at allowing the cartels to become legal business entities and allow amnesties, but how are we going to convince families of their victims that that's even a rational option? If that's not acceptable then it has to happen slowly.
No it's not, you're just speculating. The point is that there are so many side effects that we just do not know. The point is that if you tax to cover healthcare costs then there'll still be a black market with all those associated, if you don't tax then you have non-users subsidising users who can't control themselves which isn't fair on non-users - why should they subsidise someone elses habit? simply because they're holding a gun to their head and saying "Well it'll cost you anyway because we'll just use the black market if you tax us"? Hardly fair.
"Finding the ideal laws is no simple matter, but having better laws is a piece of cake."
If you don't get the balance of regulation right and you end up with taxes on drugs to pay for some of the likely increase in health problems meaning the cost is high enough that poorer people can't afford them and stick with maintaining a black market anyway, whilst rich kids go and get off their heads and kill themselves and others in their parents cars more frequently in drug driving incidents then you've clearly fucked up. Do you know what the ideal balance of regulation and deregulation is? I know I don't, I very much doubt you do, and I suspect anyone who says they do is full of shit. The fact is the more regulation you have, the more of a black market you have - it's not a binary either or thing, and the more deregulation you have, the higher incidences of deaths through overdose/drug driving and other health problems.
We can't even get the balance right with alcohol and tobacco and we've been trying for a rather long time.
"And you really are downplaying the role the war on drugs has played on the militarization of police forces and the curtailing of our rights."
No, I'm just making the claim that you can't prove such laws wouldn't have come about anyway and that the issue can be dealt with entirely separately.
If you deregulate drugs and dent the cartels in Mexico you'll see higher incidences of other arguably more harmful trades with just as much violence such as sex slave trafficking and kidnapping. You'll also likely see more ex-cartel members ending up as guns for hire in destabilised areas like Syria - hell, you might even see a resurgence of groups like FARC as they find a sudden influx of willing supporters, as well as engaging in higher levels of weapons trafficking. I think this sort of thing has to be factored in and it has to be considered as to how you go about solving these problems as they arise beforehand, not after it's already happened. You would need coordinated action to disarm and dismember the cartels around the same time you perform whatever degree of legalisation you intend to implement.
For what it's worth I am actually for some degree of change, because I agree that I think we can improve on the status quo, but I do not think that it is a given that if we deregulate that it will automatically be better, I think it has to happen slowly and carefully with plenty of funding available for academia to transparently measure and assess the effects of change.
So I repeat my earlier point - anyone who thinks it's simple does not grasp the full scale of the problem and the multitude of factors involved. The global drug trade is worth over $300bn, that's not the sort of industry you can just make drastic and far reaching changes to overnight without there being massive consequences and effects. I agree that cannot be allowed to be an excuse for inaction on the issue, but it's also a warning that the problem needs to be better understood and argued by all sides so that a sensible plan for change can be implemented, not a "OMG JUST LEGALISE IT'LL ALL BE OKAY" plan.
I think the status quo of slow legalisation of Cannabis state by state, nation by nation over a period of years is probably not actually a bad start. At least it's not going to send shockwaves through the industry and disrupt it too rapidly and uncontrollably.
I'm not rich, but I stand on my principles. I refused to work for any Murdoch related companies even though I've had offers, and I refused to accept offers that offered anything less than 25 days leave + 8 days bank holiday per year because I believe that's the minimum any company that gives a shit about their employees should offer.
You don't have to be rich to stand on your principles, you just have to be fucking stubborn enough to cut your nose off to spite your face.
I agree it's much harder if you're living on the poverty line but most people aren't, for most people it's not that they're not willing to trade survival and food or heat for principles, it's that they're not willing to trade buying the latest video game next month instead of this month for their principles, which is a shit excuse.
Couldn't Kickstarter just act as the majority investor and vote based on a poll of people who contributed?
So Kickstarter becomes the sole investor, with a 51% share or whatever of voting power, they put up a poll to all who contributed saying "Should we allow the Facebook acquisition?" and if 70% of contributors say no, Kickstarter blocks it?
To be fair though that doesn't mean drug legalisation is the solution to the particular problem you're describing, the solution to the problem you take issue with is simply to end the war on drugs.
That doesn't have to imply legalisation, it's perfectly possible to keep drugs illegal but not militiarise the prohibition of them, that's what most countries do - America is exceptional in the extremes is goes to to police illegality.
The problem you're describing is more symptomatic of America's powerful military industrial complex being out of control than it is legality of drugs because the problems you describe have been seen in it's war on terror, anti-arms trafficking operations, and in fact in general - proliferation of SWAT units and their use for minor things that have nothing even to do with drugs for example.
What you're talking about is merely an example of the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself. Legalise drugs and that problem will still exist, legalisation will solve some different problems however, though it may also create others (e.g. increase in drug driving deaths). Neither the growth of the US' military industrial complex nor the legal status of drugs are a simple problem, and neither have simple solutions. Those claiming legalisation is a panacea that will end organised crime and remove all drug related health problems are as full of shit as those that claim legalisation will cause the downfall of society and turn a nation into a nation of addicts. Long story short, there are very few rational and sensible voices in that particular debate, but at least the discussion about the problem you cite - the strength of the military industrial complex is a much more clear cut problem that can be dealt with in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even know why they bother turning up to Lucy Koh's trials in the first place, it's such a kangaroo court with her they've lost the second she's named as the judge.
She used to work as a lawyer for Apple for crying out loud and her courtroom is basically in Apple's back garden. Everything about cases involving her stink of stitch up.
Hint: It's not the sex that makes you gay. It's genetic.
But you're obviously too stupid to understand this topic, because apparently some people are also born to be stupid given you provide a perfect example.
I absolutely agree for what it's worth, I'm concerned that DRM is given such a free pass here on Slashdot - Valve is positively worshipped here and barely a word wrong can be said about them, yet they're responsible for arguably the greatest proliferation of some of the most intrusive DRM on the PC to date. When they do hashes of DNS cache of suspected cheaters and so forth they're made excuses for and so on "Oh, it's only suspected cheaters" - so fucking what? A game isn't important enough to commit a flagrant invasion of privacy over.
So you're preaching to the converted here, I believe no company deserves a free ride of DRM whoever they are, and I believe no DRM is ever acceptable because it has no logical benefit for the consumer ever, under any circumstance, it's only ever detrimental and it uses our CPU cycles, bandwidth, and memory to cause that detriment to our experiences.
So apologies if I gave the impression I was suggesting we shouldn't fight it - I agree we absolutely should. I was more making the point that I suspect it's doomed to fail precisely because people will fight it, especially when there's an economic incentive in selling devices that don't screw the consumer with it.
On a PC you get far more control, it's far less easy to conceal things, outbound connections are trivially spotted with firewalls and netstat etc. and access to personal data can be controlled much more easily with permissions, encrypted files and so forth.
Phones are still too much of a black box.
Which is a shame, because even if Darth Vader were real then electing him couldn't exactly be worse than being ruled by old Vladolf Putler.
At least Darth didn't hate people just for being born gay for example. At least with Darth it was purely about hating freedom and wanting an empire.
Because they've said they will?
That was kind of a big pointer. It does require you to RTFA though.
The quote in question from TFA:
"Japan said it would abide by the decision but added it "regrets and is deeply disappointed by the decision"."
"Nobody except its users gave a shit about it before and whether the users are still there has nothing to do with FB, since FB didn't change anything!"
Well like I say it was in the news all the time, the media wouldn't shut up about it. That certainly went silent after acquisition.
But for what it's worth I think FB has an effect on it's users regardless of whether it changes anything - people don't trust their data being stored by Facebook, or a company owned by Facebook, because Facebook has earned itself such a bad reputation for looking after user data sensibly.
"Does everybody really think FB is so dumb that they'd all of a sudden get Michael start working on social code instead of getting a working hardware/software interface?"
Apparently they are, because I've seen such arguments too, but I agree with you it's a stupid nonsense argument. What people who are a bit more sane are concerned about though is that Oculus will in fact develop into an incredible product, but it'll be tied right into Facebook. People are scared that you wont be able to use Oculus without Facebook but you'll have to use Oculus if you want to play the next latest and greatest thing your friends are playing. People are concerned they'll be left with a choice of get left behind, or accept that you're going to have to let Facebook farm the shit out of your personal data and try and sell you stuff you may not want when you don't want to be harassed with being sold stuff.
"The US is a funny place. They admire rich people but then they always assume that they are smarter than the rich person and feel that they, sans billion dollar company, actually have some useful insight."
To be fair that happens here in the UK and most of the rest of the world too. For what it's worth though I don't think money is a good way to judge insight given that most people get rich through right place, right time blind luck. Zuckerberg only got where he did with Facebook because he was born to parents wealthy enough to send him to a uni full of other rich kids where he could be friends with rich kids rich enough and well connected enough to fund the starting up of his own company. There are millions of people as smart and insightful as Zuckerberg but far less wealthy, simply because they never had the parents to send them to a well connected institution. Sarah Palin is wealthy, but it doesn't change the fact she's well below average on the intelligence and insight scale. As a developer in the financial sector I earn more than most university professors, but I wouldn't for a second pretend to have more insight than many of them do on topics that interest me such as mathematics.
The problem is one of humility, most people just aren't humble enough to admit when they're wrong, for whatever reason this problem is exacerbated on the internet. It's not bad to be wrong, that's how you learn, but most people don't get that, and I think that's the sort of person you're describing and I agree, it's frustrating. I see three types of people here on Slashdot - those who openly admit when they're wrong, and avoid posting on topics where they're not confident their views are correct (rare, 10%?), those who just go quiet when they're wrong and no longer bother responding, but at least back down quietly and don't continue arguing anyway (much less rare, 40%?), and those who just carry on arguing despite the fact they're wrong, even if they've had every bit of evidence and all the facts plastered in their face repeatedly (most common, 50%?).
Yes, the problem is for it to work you need civilised nations that actually listen. Unfortunately that doesn't apply to any of those you listed (and I add my own nation to the list - the UK).
Getting Putin to listen though when he's off on a paranoid rant about how the EU wants to make him eat croissants is a no-go, much less Kim Jong Un who actually thinks he's a good leader and the whole of the rest of the world is always wrong about everything.
This is one of those rare occasions where it's actually worked because the loser has accepted the ruling rather than saying "Okay, I lost, but I don't care, I'm going to carry on as I was anyway" or alternatively, "Fuck that, I'm not even going to go to that court because deep down I know I'm wrong and know I'll lose", the latter of which is what Argentina has done each time the UK has offered to let the court rule on the Falklands for example.
It's not so much how the UN can enforce it, it's the fact that it makes it legal for other countries to take action against Japan over it without themselves becoming victims of legal cases from Japan.
For example, Japanese ships entered New Zealand's exclusive economic zone earlier this year - something boats are normally allowed to do without needing explicit permission. Now however there's nothing to stop the New Zealand coast guard from arresting them and seizing their ship for carrying out an illegal activity if they were to pass through that zone again. Effectively Japan could no longer call such act an act of piracy which would be the risk of New Zealand or similar decided to go ahead and do that without this ruling.
This is why Japan has said it will abide by the ruling, because whilst it's embarassing for them to lose their whaling argument at long last, it'd be even more embarassing if they said "fuck the UN" and then got their ships legally seized by a foreign government and the Japanese crew paraded on TV as arrested for engaging in illegal activity. They'd then have to stop whaling for the reason that their ships had been seized, rather than that they'd accepted the ruling and given it up themselves - this is the least embarrassing route for them now, hence why they're taking it.
I agree the Android permissions system is part of the problem in this particular scenario, but see my post here as to why I don't want them to access data that isn't essential to the use of the application:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Long story short, accessing my contact list just allows them to add fluff, and the fluff to risk of privacy violation ratio is too high. I used their application fine without that option in the past, I don't need it now.
Yes I believe that's the claim, but I'm more than content to just have a "Copy link to clipboard" button so I can paste it wherever I want - all they need to do is let me take the link where I want.
Too many companies use such data for other purposes in the background (and ship your contacts etc. off to their servers) that it's a poison chalice to even ask for such permissions if it's not necessary to the underlying point of the application.
I get that they want to make it easier for some users and I fully sympathise with the usability reasons for doing so, but ultimately when they do shit like this it just reinforces my view that it's not a permission I can trust most such companies with.
They say they'll never do something, and they resist for a while, then they finally break, "just this once" they tell themselves. Like fuck "just this once".
I used to have the Facebook app on my phone and I did give that permission - not because I trust them, but because I was going in knowing full well what they were going to do with it, but I drew the line at that app when it started asking permission to draw over other apps and such - what the fuck? No. Just no. There's not a chance in hell you're having permissions to view and render over the pixels on screen on my banking app or whatever.
Now I'm far more tough with apps in general, which is why I wouldn't touch drop box anymore with this permissions change. Tired of being told our data wont be read, will be held securely and then suddenly such data turns up in completely unrelated places, like when contacts I only had through my MSN messenger list magically turned up as recommendations on LinkedIn despite me never having given permission for MS to share that data with LinkedIn nor LinkedIn permission to receive that data from MS.
I used to be more laissez faire with my data, because I was lazy enough to put convenience over privacy, but each time I gave a company the trust they asked for based on the assurances they gave they really did lie and abuse it, so fuck them.
Even something as innocent as a university course I did in my spare time has me getting text messages (2), e-mails (about 5), phone calls (7 of - land line and mobile), letters through the post (3) telling me to fill in the UK's student survey. Eventually I relented, any other comments? Yes, "Fuck your survey, all data I filled in is false. Leave me alone". Apparently I should've opted out of said survey, now if only I was ever given that choice.
You literally can't put your data anywhere anymore without it being used to harass you. The convenience is no longer worth the inevitable follow on harassment which is anti-convenient, it's a distraction, a disruption, a pain in the fucking arse.
I buy a TV and I have to give a postcode and house number so they can pass it on to the TV licensing authorities "It wont get used for junk mail, just for licensing" and what comes through the door after a year? "Your warranty is due to expire, your TV wont be covered if it breaks blah blah blah" - no it's fucking not, I'm covered by the consumer protection act you lying dipshits. Last time I bought one I gave the shop the postcode and number of their very own store, knowing full well the question would be coming having looked it up before hand, amusingly my theory that the sales drones would be too fucking dumb to notice was proven right.
So it may be to let you more conveniently send a link directly, but you always pay in the end, that convenience doesn't come free, you lose the time gained by that convenience dealing with advertising crap, being sent friend invites from people you don't want, sorting junk mail into a recycle bin and phoning them to ask never to spam you again, or dealing with security nightmares because some retard company holding far more of your data than it ever needed got hacked.
And that's why they can take their lame little "share this" or whatever button and fuck themselves with it.
I stopped using DropBox when it's Android app started asking for access to my contacts etc.
Anything that asks for permissions unnecessary to its key purpose is dead to me.
Things like this never work though, we saw it with DVDs where companies were told they couldn't provide region free players if they wanted to be certified, well guess what? China didn't give a shit, and started churning out cheap unbranded players that were region free - no one gave a fuck that they weren't certified because, well, they all still worked like any other and had other features like being able to play DivX movies and so forth to boot.
It wasn't long before the likes of Toshiba and Samsung said fuck this, we're not losing the market because the movie industry is lame and started to follow suit.
The problem is when you start making it profitable to break such DRM methods then that DRM wont last long and the market will start to get flooded with devices that ignore that DRM rendering it useless. All the industry manages to do in the process is piss off legitimate consumers and lump manufacturers and themselves with returned products that don't work costing them a fortune.
Long story short, there's no natural positive economic model in DRM, hence it's doomed to fail in the fact of competing economic interests that do have natural markets - i.e. consumers that just want to play their content.
I didn't even know Cinavia was a thing until I read this thread and I've been playing films on my PC, consoles and smart TVs regularly. I probably watch more films on a wider range of devices than most people yet I've never even seen or heard of this thing previously.
That's how irrelevant it is.
You have a fucking weird definition of "fact".
Normally fact has a definition related to being true in it, most of the points listed are completely and utterly false.
"Lot's of people got their panties in a bunch over instagram and what happened there? "
It went from media darling to "what the fuck is that again?"
I'm not sure you really helped your point with that example, really no one gives a shit about instagram anymore since then.
"10: FB is platform agnostic."
No, the web is platform agnostic, Facebook just uses it.
This utter bastardisation of the truth implies you have a brutally pro-Facebook agenda. Given there's a mass increase in Facebook shills here lately I have to ask, how much do they pay?
Right, but to be fair that's as much as Abrash's fault as anything - I know him from his work in the 90s, but what has he done in the last 14 to 17 or so years?
There's no doubt he's incredibly talented, and did some amazing work, but I find it hard to fault people for not knowing who he is when he just hasn't been relevant since the world wide web was in it's infancy (it's now 25).
Looking at his Wikipedia entry and Googling him it's not clear that he has done much of public interest in a long long time, short of quietly working on Intel's largely failed Larrabee project.
Perhaps working back with Carmack they'll be able to do amazing things, and his name will be reborn back into public knowledge, though with the long shadow of Facebook over them I'm still not convinced even these two greats can make people happy about Oculus with it's new evil overlord.
"We don't have to get the balance 'right', we just have to get the balance 'better' than it is right now."
I absolutely agree, which is why I support carefully planned and well assessed change.
"You are also making the bizarre assumption that health costs will go up, which doesn't seem to mesh with reality."
You say this as if it's a fact and this is precisely the problem I'm highlighting - too many people on both sides of the argument keep parroting their "facts" which actually aren't, they're just guesses in the dark.
"Prohibition hasn't reduced usage"
How do you know this? The only alternatives we have to compare against are places like Afghanistan and parts of Africa where opiate and khat users and so forth are widespread and far more problematic than drug use in prohibited nations (even those with equal poverty problems etc.) but this doesn't tell the full story because it's still hard to compare these nations to Western nations. The point is though that you're again stating something as fact when it's just an outright unknown. You've decided to fall on one side of the argument without there being anything to back up your viewpoint - you've decided it's fact for no other reason than it suits your personal bias.
You can look at alcohol and tobacco in Western countries over the last couple of decades and you'll note that a trend towards more regulation has actually solved the problem. Ontario's use of LCBO to control alcohol distribution for example means they have far less problems with alcoholism than we have here in the UK where you can go to your local supermarket and stock up on enough alcohol to give an entire family fatal alcohol poisoning for less than £20. I realise you said before that your recognise that some regulation is probably necessary so I think you probably agree with me here that complete unregulated legalisation isn't the ideal option anyway, but I give the example of alcohol and tobacco as a demonstration that actually more regulation can sometimes be better - something many people arguing for legalisation believe, is actually false.
"You can't buy your PD a tank if you don't have money, and the money comes largely from drugs."
Most equipment expenditure has been justified by the war on terror in recent decades, if they weren't getting it from forfeiture they'd be getting it by claiming it was essential for terror funding. The money may just have been redirected from the actual military to fund it.
As I said before I don't disagree with you on a fundamental level that change is necessary, I'm largely just pointing out that the debate is so riddled with people on both sides deciding things are facts, not understanding all the variables involved and hence failing to understand why progress is so slow. It's slow for a reason - if you're a politician in charge of making the call, you think legalisation is the answer, but then you ask the question "Well, can we be certain there wont be other major problems?" and you get the response "No sir, we really can't, we don't think there will be but we can't be sure" then are you really willing to bet your career on it? It takes a brave politician to make that call because they're literally putting their career on the line.
So I also understand why things are going as slow as they are, the practicalities of change are difficult, and the effects are awkward - that's why I both understand the reason for and in many ways support very slow change. As I say the last thing you want is complete national or worse, even international legalisation overnight putting tens to hundreds of thousands of violent armed drugs trade employees out of a job. It may be a bitter pill to swallow but if we want rapid change we may have to look at allowing the cartels to become legal business entities and allow amnesties, but how are we going to convince families of their victims that that's even a rational option? If that's not acceptable then it has to happen slowly.
No it's not, you're just speculating. The point is that there are so many side effects that we just do not know. The point is that if you tax to cover healthcare costs then there'll still be a black market with all those associated, if you don't tax then you have non-users subsidising users who can't control themselves which isn't fair on non-users - why should they subsidise someone elses habit? simply because they're holding a gun to their head and saying "Well it'll cost you anyway because we'll just use the black market if you tax us"? Hardly fair.
It wasn't broken. HR and his boss were just making sure he's corrupt enough to keep working for a major bank.
"Finding the ideal laws is no simple matter, but having better laws is a piece of cake."
If you don't get the balance of regulation right and you end up with taxes on drugs to pay for some of the likely increase in health problems meaning the cost is high enough that poorer people can't afford them and stick with maintaining a black market anyway, whilst rich kids go and get off their heads and kill themselves and others in their parents cars more frequently in drug driving incidents then you've clearly fucked up. Do you know what the ideal balance of regulation and deregulation is? I know I don't, I very much doubt you do, and I suspect anyone who says they do is full of shit. The fact is the more regulation you have, the more of a black market you have - it's not a binary either or thing, and the more deregulation you have, the higher incidences of deaths through overdose/drug driving and other health problems.
We can't even get the balance right with alcohol and tobacco and we've been trying for a rather long time.
"And you really are downplaying the role the war on drugs has played on the militarization of police forces and the curtailing of our rights."
No, I'm just making the claim that you can't prove such laws wouldn't have come about anyway and that the issue can be dealt with entirely separately.
If you deregulate drugs and dent the cartels in Mexico you'll see higher incidences of other arguably more harmful trades with just as much violence such as sex slave trafficking and kidnapping. You'll also likely see more ex-cartel members ending up as guns for hire in destabilised areas like Syria - hell, you might even see a resurgence of groups like FARC as they find a sudden influx of willing supporters, as well as engaging in higher levels of weapons trafficking. I think this sort of thing has to be factored in and it has to be considered as to how you go about solving these problems as they arise beforehand, not after it's already happened. You would need coordinated action to disarm and dismember the cartels around the same time you perform whatever degree of legalisation you intend to implement.
For what it's worth I am actually for some degree of change, because I agree that I think we can improve on the status quo, but I do not think that it is a given that if we deregulate that it will automatically be better, I think it has to happen slowly and carefully with plenty of funding available for academia to transparently measure and assess the effects of change.
So I repeat my earlier point - anyone who thinks it's simple does not grasp the full scale of the problem and the multitude of factors involved. The global drug trade is worth over $300bn, that's not the sort of industry you can just make drastic and far reaching changes to overnight without there being massive consequences and effects. I agree that cannot be allowed to be an excuse for inaction on the issue, but it's also a warning that the problem needs to be better understood and argued by all sides so that a sensible plan for change can be implemented, not a "OMG JUST LEGALISE IT'LL ALL BE OKAY" plan.
I think the status quo of slow legalisation of Cannabis state by state, nation by nation over a period of years is probably not actually a bad start. At least it's not going to send shockwaves through the industry and disrupt it too rapidly and uncontrollably.
I'm not rich, but I stand on my principles. I refused to work for any Murdoch related companies even though I've had offers, and I refused to accept offers that offered anything less than 25 days leave + 8 days bank holiday per year because I believe that's the minimum any company that gives a shit about their employees should offer.
You don't have to be rich to stand on your principles, you just have to be fucking stubborn enough to cut your nose off to spite your face.
I agree it's much harder if you're living on the poverty line but most people aren't, for most people it's not that they're not willing to trade survival and food or heat for principles, it's that they're not willing to trade buying the latest video game next month instead of this month for their principles, which is a shit excuse.
Couldn't Kickstarter just act as the majority investor and vote based on a poll of people who contributed?
So Kickstarter becomes the sole investor, with a 51% share or whatever of voting power, they put up a poll to all who contributed saying "Should we allow the Facebook acquisition?" and if 70% of contributors say no, Kickstarter blocks it?
To be fair though that doesn't mean drug legalisation is the solution to the particular problem you're describing, the solution to the problem you take issue with is simply to end the war on drugs.
That doesn't have to imply legalisation, it's perfectly possible to keep drugs illegal but not militiarise the prohibition of them, that's what most countries do - America is exceptional in the extremes is goes to to police illegality.
The problem you're describing is more symptomatic of America's powerful military industrial complex being out of control than it is legality of drugs because the problems you describe have been seen in it's war on terror, anti-arms trafficking operations, and in fact in general - proliferation of SWAT units and their use for minor things that have nothing even to do with drugs for example.
What you're talking about is merely an example of the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself. Legalise drugs and that problem will still exist, legalisation will solve some different problems however, though it may also create others (e.g. increase in drug driving deaths). Neither the growth of the US' military industrial complex nor the legal status of drugs are a simple problem, and neither have simple solutions. Those claiming legalisation is a panacea that will end organised crime and remove all drug related health problems are as full of shit as those that claim legalisation will cause the downfall of society and turn a nation into a nation of addicts. Long story short, there are very few rational and sensible voices in that particular debate, but at least the discussion about the problem you cite - the strength of the military industrial complex is a much more clear cut problem that can be dealt with in itself.