That's ridiculous. Users should expect, no, demand privacy, not have to pay for it. Privacy should already be there, because the user has to trust the company to handle their data correctly.
You mean, people should be more willing to buy at all from a company with a good privacy policy? Isn't that one of the things the summary says that the study found?
What, exactly, of what is actually in the summary/article, do you find ridiculous?
After all, the usual argument is that if something can develop into a human then it should be considered to be a human even before it develops into a human.
Well, no, that's a frequent characterization of the argument by people who themselves believe that an entity does not become human until it emerges from the womb and who fail to understand that not everyone shares that belief, and who therefore create a rationalization for their opponents arguments based on a premise that those opponents reject, and pretend the argument is about treating things that the opponents believe is not yet human as human.
Photosynth allows the aggregation of social picture networks (a la Flickr) into a completed image in addition to allowing a level of depth to image browsing previously unavailable.
That appears to be syntactically tolerable English. Semantically, though, WTF?
If compilers keep abstracting away the interface between the programmer and the cpu, programmers will be less likely to write better code or learn new techniques that take advantage of all the power a few extra cores can provide right?
The people writing the compilers are "programmers" too. If the compiler programmers make the compiler do more effective optimization when turning platform-agnostic source into platform-specific binaries, that just means that burden of worrying about platform optimization is shifted to them from application programmers, who then are freed to spend more time and effort on the higher-level design and implementation of their application, and less on platform-specific tweaking.
This is a good thing, I would think, for everyone.
Well, something that allows software to adapt to the hardware its running on sounds to me a lot like an optimizing compiler, but only if the software is distributed in source form.
Can you honestly tell me, with a straight face, that if
everyone got along peacefully (voluntarily) with each other...
everyone could provide for themselves and their families through voluntary (non-coercive) means...
everyone was content to be equal in power to everyone else (i.e. nobody has it)...
that you would still have a use for the special right to employ coercion which defines government?
No, but what relevance does that have? Sure, I can invent counterfactual circumstances in which anything that would be bad and counterproductive in the real world would be the best policy, and sure, if people were angels and their was no scarcity of goods, then government would be a bad idea.
But we're talking about policies in the real world, and governments in the real world. What would be desirable in hypothetical situations that bear no relationship to the real world is of little value in discussing that.
Think about it. Yes, logically, the ultimate utopia is absolutely, positively devoid of government.
Sure, if the ultimate utopia already existed, there would be no reason for government. When we find ourselves in Paradise and want to figure out how to deal with that, we can consider that a relevant consideration.
I'm against Internet taxes. I'm also opposed to income taxes. I'm vehemently opposed to the renegade government spending and accumulation of debt that has been occurring throughout my years in the full time work force. I'm opposed to the government's use of tax dollars for imperialistic crusades in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and to fund a massive and perpetual worldwide military force. I oppose the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, illegal immigration and the war on drugs.
WHO exactly is "representing" me?
You are, when you vote. Whether that translates into having people in Congress that share your views depends on how good a job you do at convincing other people that those views are correct. Democracy doesn't mean that every individual citizen is a dictator, it means that every individual citizen has the right to participate in directing policy by voting. If you want your policies implemented, you still have to convince other people to vote the way you'd like.
Re:It's stunning how readily the US feds up taxes
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Internet Tax Imminent?
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So you feel represented by the US government?
Do I think it does a good job of representing my interests? No, then again, its not supposed to represent me alone.
Care to tell us what corporation you work for?
I don't work for a corporation, nor do I think the US government does a better job at representing people that work for corporations than anyone else.
It represents the people that vote, and what they reward and punish with their votes. Now, many of those people are unduly swayed, when voting, by the propaganda poured out by people that own corporations, or the various institutes that they fund and sponsor to advance their interests, that's true. And its something I 'm rather concerned about and work against. But the situation is not at all parallel to the pre-revolutionary situation in the US, where Americans simply had no voice no matter how much they cared, worked to penetrate propaganda, and tried to change things in the central government.
Professor Moglen mentioned that in many cases businesses _want_ to buy locked-down hardware where they cannot change the software (perhaps for regulatory reasons).
And I'm sure many consumers value the sense of security that comes from knowing that only software certified by the manufacture can be installed in some of their boxes, too. If one accepts that this can be valuable to businesses, why should it be denied to consumers?
Regardless of how you look at it, Tivoization turns free software into proprietary software.
I don't think it really does. It restricts what a particular piece of hardware will run, not what you are allowed to do with the software. It would seem more consistent with the rest of the (old) GPL to acheive the kind of openness against "tivoization" sought to require hardware that incorporates free software to have likewise open design (the equivalent of hardware "source"), but Tivoization doesn't restrict software freedom anymore than distributing binaries of open software on read-only media does, the issue with tivoization is not "software freedom" but something that extends beyond that.
But, that aside, I agree with you that the inconsistency here reveals that the GPLv3 isn't being driven by any coherent vision of "freedom" whether in the sense of software freedoms or something more expansive.
Our Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves. Wasn't "taxation without representation" our rallying cry?
Yes, because Americans couldn't vote for members of the body imposing taxes on the colonies. A situation that (federal taxes imposed in the District of Columbia, and the like, aside) is not the case in modern US taxes.
You seem to understand only 1/3 of that three word slogan.
Re:It's stunning how readily the US feds up taxes
on
Internet Tax Imminent?
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· Score: 1
I mean, unless I got my US history wrong, I remember dimly that the US people already overthrew a government and fought a war against it over unjustified taxation...
You got your US history wrong.
The US people broke off from a remote government over a number of grievances including, but not limited to, anger at taxation imposed by bodies in which the citizenry of the US had no voting representation.
Now, admittedly, residents of the District of Columbia might have a similar beef over federal taxes, having no voting representation in the US Congress, but as a general rule, "taxation without representation" isn't what is happening in the modern US.
I'm not so sure that's the quote from Smith's work most relevant to the effort by online retailers to maintain a unique advantage through special prohibition on taxing transactions carried out over the internet the same way in-person transactions are taxed. Consider:
[The labourer's] employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. It is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labour of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two. [...] The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11, Conclusion of the Chapter.
A less powerful Government is always a good thing.
If that were true, then of logical necessity a government with no power at all would be best. However, in the real world, in places where the power of the government approaches "no power at all", things fairly consistently seem far worse off than in places like the United States, which have a fairly substantial government.
It seems to me quite clearly that there are many factors which go into making a government better or worse, and less power is not, contrary to your assertion, always better.
"Final Draft" is the language used outside of software for the rough equivalent of a "Release Candidate" in software, the "Final" is a statement of intent, not fact.
Honestly, consumers just need to start voting with their dollars - don't buy copy-protected DVDs, don't buy CDs until RIAA knocks off intimidating people, don't patronize lawsuit-happy companies.
I think the bigger thing people need to do is start voting with their votes. If giving in to the RIAA and MPAA cost elected representatives their jobs, they'd stop doing it no matter how much money was being dangled: the reason they want the money is to turn it into votes and maximize their own political prospects, but that only works because the people **AA's have lots of money, and there isn't a significant voting block that responds negatively to officials serving the **AA's interests. If that changed, then the **AA's money would be of no (or even negative) interest to politicians, and they'd start working to distance themselves from them.
Wait... so you're saying that if I record an MLB game on my VCR, then carry the tape with my to a hotel room and watch it there, I'm violating copyright?
No, first, because that's not what I'm describing, and second, because I'm not claiming that any particular act is a violation of copyright, I'm describing (not endorsing) MLB's position.
Course there should be documented exit procedures for HR and IT when people leave.
And, a critical step that many places I've seen with "documented procedures" for all kinds of important thing seem to miss: those procedures need to be (1) communicated to those responsible for implementing them, and (2) actually followed consistently.
It doesn't make any sense to me that placeshifting would be more questionable than time shifting.
I'm not saying it should sense. I'm saying that, AFAIK, there is fairly clear case law on the latter, the case law is not as clear on the former, and while intuitively I think that placeshifting ought to be considered at least as much "fair use" as timeshifting, the courts might well disagree.
That, and the fact that isn't something that keeps people watching MLB games good for the MLB?
Maybe, maybe not. It increases the value of the TV rights, but hurts ticket sales. The reason there are local blackout provisions in the broadcast agreements is specifically because the MLB believes that letting people watch games that aren't sold out hurts ticket sales more than it increases the sale value of the broadcast rights, so presumably it is going to feel the same way about anything that allows evading those restrictions.
Does it break geographical boundaries if I make a tape of the game and carry it with me to watch on my trip?
It certainly enables you to do that, yes.
Can I be sued for doing that?
No. Because making the recording is legal, so the fact that it causes MLB harm doesn't give them a cause of action. Their argument here is that "placeshifting" by retransmitting over the internet is a violation of copyright (I think they are wrong, but I don't think the case law is clear on that so that it is as certain as a matter of law) and therefore the harm done to them by circumventing the regional distribution agreements they have are damages attributable to that legal wrong that they can recover.
Why should consumers abide by or even care about an agreement between the MLB and the broadcaster?
Legally, they don't have to. They can receive the broadcast anywhere they can legally receive it.
And they can legally timeshift it by recording it to, say, a videotape. And they can legally take that physical video tape anywhere they want and watch it.
Placeshifting probably ought to be equally legal, but there is a lot less clear case law on it that I am aware of, and in the absence of clear case law, MLB probably has a colorable (though, IMO, wrong) claim that placeshifting is a violation of copyright. The fact that it enables violation of the distribution agreement isn't the basis of the claim of illegality, but it is part of the basis for the claim of damages stemming from the illegality.
It's about rich media, and Java has only dveleopment tools.
What is the "It" you are talking about? Certainly not the whole market in "offline web apps" (or "remote syncable desktop apps", the two are pretty much different routes to the same thing); a lot of that is the kind of text-number-fact heavy business use that doesn't benefit much, if at all, from "rich media".
You might as well create your own traditional app so that you don't have to deal with compatibility and security issues with a multitude of browsers and platforms.
If you create a "traditional app", you have to deal with compatibility and security issues with a multitude of different platforms, unless you only target one platform. But if you intend on targeting only one platform, chances are you aren't going to build an offline web app, you'll build a traditional app with somekind of synchronization logic: building an offline web app is a way to get a crossplatform desktop app with remote synchronization.
You could use Java, instead, but presumably one goal of offline web apps is to reduce the perceived burden for users (even if there is just as much installing actually going on.)
Xerox expects that over time, the technology will be used in personalized checks that will have the account holder's signature printed in a fluorescent stripe.
"A merchant could easily compare the fluorescent signature with the actual one to validate the check," said Eschbach.
Of course, a thief with a flourescent lamp could easily determine what your signature should look like, and so how does that provide any kind of security? I suppose it provides the same degree of security as the signature on a credit card receipt (which also provides no real security), but that kind of "security", clearly, doesn't require "invisible" ink in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, people should be more willing to buy at all from a company with a good privacy policy? Isn't that one of the things the summary says that the study found?
What, exactly, of what is actually in the summary/article, do you find ridiculous?
Well, no, that's a frequent characterization of the argument by people who themselves believe that an entity does not become human until it emerges from the womb and who fail to understand that not everyone shares that belief, and who therefore create a rationalization for their opponents arguments based on a premise that those opponents reject, and pretend the argument is about treating things that the opponents believe is not yet human as human.
That appears to be syntactically tolerable English. Semantically, though, WTF?
The people writing the compilers are "programmers" too. If the compiler programmers make the compiler do more effective optimization when turning platform-agnostic source into platform-specific binaries, that just means that burden of worrying about platform optimization is shifted to them from application programmers, who then are freed to spend more time and effort on the higher-level design and implementation of their application, and less on platform-specific tweaking.
This is a good thing, I would think, for everyone.
Well, something that allows software to adapt to the hardware its running on sounds to me a lot like an optimizing compiler, but only if the software is distributed in source form.
Not in the real world.
No, but what relevance does that have? Sure, I can invent counterfactual circumstances in which anything that would be bad and counterproductive in the real world would be the best policy, and sure, if people were angels and their was no scarcity of goods, then government would be a bad idea.
But we're talking about policies in the real world, and governments in the real world. What would be desirable in hypothetical situations that bear no relationship to the real world is of little value in discussing that.
Sure, if the ultimate utopia already existed, there would be no reason for government. When we find ourselves in Paradise and want to figure out how to deal with that, we can consider that a relevant consideration.
You are, when you vote. Whether that translates into having people in Congress that share your views depends on how good a job you do at convincing other people that those views are correct. Democracy doesn't mean that every individual citizen is a dictator, it means that every individual citizen has the right to participate in directing policy by voting. If you want your policies implemented, you still have to convince other people to vote the way you'd like.
Do I think it does a good job of representing my interests? No, then again, its not supposed to represent me alone.
I don't work for a corporation, nor do I think the US government does a better job at representing people that work for corporations than anyone else.
It represents the people that vote, and what they reward and punish with their votes. Now, many of those people are unduly swayed, when voting, by the propaganda poured out by people that own corporations, or the various institutes that they fund and sponsor to advance their interests, that's true. And its something I 'm rather concerned about and work against. But the situation is not at all parallel to the pre-revolutionary situation in the US, where Americans simply had no voice no matter how much they cared, worked to penetrate propaganda, and tried to change things in the central government.
And I'm sure many consumers value the sense of security that comes from knowing that only software certified by the manufacture can be installed in some of their boxes, too. If one accepts that this can be valuable to businesses, why should it be denied to consumers?
I don't think it really does. It restricts what a particular piece of hardware will run, not what you are allowed to do with the software. It would seem more consistent with the rest of the (old) GPL to acheive the kind of openness against "tivoization" sought to require hardware that incorporates free software to have likewise open design (the equivalent of hardware "source"), but Tivoization doesn't restrict software freedom anymore than distributing binaries of open software on read-only media does, the issue with tivoization is not "software freedom" but something that extends beyond that.
But, that aside, I agree with you that the inconsistency here reveals that the GPLv3 isn't being driven by any coherent vision of "freedom" whether in the sense of software freedoms or something more expansive.
Yes, because Americans couldn't vote for members of the body imposing taxes on the colonies. A situation that (federal taxes imposed in the District of Columbia, and the like, aside) is not the case in modern US taxes.
You seem to understand only 1/3 of that three word slogan.
You got your US history wrong.
The US people broke off from a remote government over a number of grievances including, but not limited to, anger at taxation imposed by bodies in which the citizenry of the US had no voting representation.
Now, admittedly, residents of the District of Columbia might have a similar beef over federal taxes, having no voting representation in the US Congress, but as a general rule, "taxation without representation" isn't what is happening in the modern US.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11, Conclusion of the Chapter.
If that were true, then of logical necessity a government with no power at all would be best. However, in the real world, in places where the power of the government approaches "no power at all", things fairly consistently seem far worse off than in places like the United States, which have a fairly substantial government.
It seems to me quite clearly that there are many factors which go into making a government better or worse, and less power is not, contrary to your assertion, always better.
"Final Draft" is the language used outside of software for the rough equivalent of a "Release Candidate" in software, the "Final" is a statement of intent, not fact.
I think the bigger thing people need to do is start voting with their votes. If giving in to the RIAA and MPAA cost elected representatives their jobs, they'd stop doing it no matter how much money was being dangled: the reason they want the money is to turn it into votes and maximize their own political prospects, but that only works because the people **AA's have lots of money, and there isn't a significant voting block that responds negatively to officials serving the **AA's interests. If that changed, then the **AA's money would be of no (or even negative) interest to politicians, and they'd start working to distance themselves from them.
No, first, because that's not what I'm describing, and second, because I'm not claiming that any particular act is a violation of copyright, I'm describing (not endorsing) MLB's position.
And, a critical step that many places I've seen with "documented procedures" for all kinds of important thing seem to miss: those procedures need to be (1) communicated to those responsible for implementing them, and (2) actually followed consistently.
I'm not saying it should sense. I'm saying that, AFAIK, there is fairly clear case law on the latter, the case law is not as clear on the former, and while intuitively I think that placeshifting ought to be considered at least as much "fair use" as timeshifting, the courts might well disagree.
Maybe, maybe not. It increases the value of the TV rights, but hurts ticket sales. The reason there are local blackout provisions in the broadcast agreements is specifically because the MLB believes that letting people watch games that aren't sold out hurts ticket sales more than it increases the sale value of the broadcast rights, so presumably it is going to feel the same way about anything that allows evading those restrictions.
It certainly enables you to do that, yes.
No. Because making the recording is legal, so the fact that it causes MLB harm doesn't give them a cause of action. Their argument here is that "placeshifting" by retransmitting over the internet is a violation of copyright (I think they are wrong, but I don't think the case law is clear on that so that it is as certain as a matter of law) and therefore the harm done to them by circumventing the regional distribution agreements they have are damages attributable to that legal wrong that they can recover.
Legally, they don't have to. They can receive the broadcast anywhere they can legally receive it.
And they can legally timeshift it by recording it to, say, a videotape. And they can legally take that physical video tape anywhere they want and watch it.
Placeshifting probably ought to be equally legal, but there is a lot less clear case law on it that I am aware of, and in the absence of clear case law, MLB probably has a colorable (though, IMO, wrong) claim that placeshifting is a violation of copyright. The fact that it enables violation of the distribution agreement isn't the basis of the claim of illegality, but it is part of the basis for the claim of damages stemming from the illegality.
What is the "It" you are talking about? Certainly not the whole market in "offline web apps" (or "remote syncable desktop apps", the two are pretty much different routes to the same thing); a lot of that is the kind of text-number-fact heavy business use that doesn't benefit much, if at all, from "rich media".
If you create a "traditional app", you have to deal with compatibility and security issues with a multitude of different platforms, unless you only target one platform. But if you intend on targeting only one platform, chances are you aren't going to build an offline web app, you'll build a traditional app with somekind of synchronization logic: building an offline web app is a way to get a crossplatform desktop app with remote synchronization.
You could use Java, instead, but presumably one goal of offline web apps is to reduce the perceived burden for users (even if there is just as much installing actually going on.)
Of course, a thief with a flourescent lamp could easily determine what your signature should look like, and so how does that provide any kind of security? I suppose it provides the same degree of security as the signature on a credit card receipt (which also provides no real security), but that kind of "security", clearly, doesn't require "invisible" ink in the first place.
so, apparently, plastic surgery doesn't exist.