To get the snark comment out of the way, it's no longer 99-0 against the Tin Foil Hats. They're starting to collect a few victories. So for the Obligatory Tin Foil Hat comment, "the powers that be have no reason to stop their delicious lunch on consumer data."
Okay, with that out of the way, my suggestion is that if you get a big enough pissed-off-big-pocket on our side, get personal data classified as Copyrighted Data. Then when these companies go to share it with their buddies, all those $375,000 copyright penalty fees kick in reverse, and lead to a disaster against these companies. Think of the sports industries. Those are real players, right? Real people doing real things. So why is it magically a copyright violation to broadcast the game for copyright reasons?
Even a patent would be funny, it would buy us some 20 years to punt the problem into the 2030's. "My information is an important part of what makes me, me."
Somehow we mostly got the correct handling on the medical side - you don't see (yet!?) companies offering to show everyone your medical history. Now if we can get that to apply to all personal data, it would be interesting.
"Never mind that - consider that this is the best we can do in 2012. How dumb are we all?"
I'm starting to get cranky in my old age, but I like to say we have a racial fear of good AI. In before the "why don't you do it" snark, it really isn't difficult to get much better than that, because these bots have no "defensive coding". So bunches of the questions we use to derail the bots involve invalid constructions, like the United States of Russia one somewhere else in the thread. Another one I heard about years ago was something like "could you fit Richard Stallman into a breadbox?".
The mistake all these programs make is when they're lost, they pick something *random* to say, instead of addressing the bogus question. "Wait a minute man, do what with that person?" is the right type of "I'm lost" answer, not "talk to me about chicken alfredo".
Actually, we're seeing the first stage of Replicator Technology, aka digital copying, and look at the absolutely thundering effect of the affected industries. In a way, Star Trek was sweet, because I actually recall very few lawyers were ever parts of the plots. Today, it would be more dystopian, with a Copyright Infringement SWAT teams. "Someone copied a Justin Bieber song. Alpha Force, Move Out! Go Go Go! GET the Terrorist Sonofabitch!"
So it looks like I misfired the tone a little on my post. I was trying to capsule summary a couple of the big intersections in Microsoft's role in consumer computing on the net. Isn't that why MS had a Borg Gates icon for some 12 years? Instead I got a chain of insulting AC's. Oh well.
All I meant was that in 1985 people my age were still playing games on their Commodore 64's, and we weren't aware of any way to get online for years later. 1995 was the iconic year of a new Win95 computer running Netscape.
This might be the angle in for the original questioner's method.
Maybe he can reduce the raw theorems by 25%, and instead push harder on media and logical thinking issues.
Instead of too much push on the formal notation, what if he goes into a lot of "biased science" examples from the real media? Showing how slanted presentations produce emotional reactions, etc.
In a sense, "If I were in a position to hire", I'd rather have a smart thinker who's drilled cold on picking up sample bias than a book theoretician who can drill out 18 line proofs but folds the minute he/she gets into something about affordable housing studies and doesn't account for geo-social trends.
Wow, you're basically the only Non-AC guy who mentions Zune.
That is the comparison I see the biggest here, except this time it's right in MS's home camp.
Apple takes world by storm with iPod. MS Scrambles.
They start with their usual "commodity" strategy and license 20 3rd party hardware makers with some cert specs and calls it "Plays For Sure". So far, so fine. Except Apple was on to something with the whole Integration thing, so generic makers aren't working this time. So then MS does a giant evil backstab and makes the Zune, switching from their classic biz style into a Me Too but minus the 5 years of secret R&D that Apple was doing. So it flopped.
Apple crushed the phone market with the iPhone, and I'm a casualty. I had a Win Mobile 6 phone, and I hated it. It was an overgrown brick in my pocket. While I dislike some of Apple's snooping, the iPhone makes it easy to download apps and it doesn't auto ring by itself twice a day like the HTC phone did.
So suddenly Apple figures out that Mac OS isn't actually going anywhere, but it has some good concepts. So they switch the game to Phone & Tablet, and suddenly Microsoft is panicking, after a 20+ year monopoly on Windows? They want to make their own hardware now? THAT has GOT to piss off the OEM network to no end.
MS gave up ever influencing music, and washed their hands of it.
But this one? This feels like a Bet the Farm move. Remind me to look up the news 4 years from now when the fake urgency wears off. But this feels different.
Completely off topic - Why didn't you give your son the awesome name Dante? Why alter the spelling? He would have been able to say he was named after the cool Heaven & Hell Guy from the 13th century.
See, that's just it, everyone keeps saying that Win 7 doesn't exactly do anything spectacular that WinXP didn't, except for its re-architected security. (Vista being the Giant Bluff Beta).
So now that they're moving away from the Aero Shiny thing, why can't they use one of these iteration rounds to really drill down the code, under the hood, and make it absolutely sizzle? Portions of the conversation keep floating around Laptop vs Tablet but there shouldn't be any differences! A Tablet should just be the Final Generation of a Laptop, with solid state memory instead of the spinning drive, and other improvements. Then you make Metro and Classic (Windows Explorer) be alternating interfaces to the same back end code. There really isn't a reason one tablet-sized machine can't do both. You dock the thing in an office to a big screen and "do work", then you undock it to play Angry Birds and read the NY Times (Your Media May Vary) at home. Then Mom checks her email.
In some ways we're almost at the end of the Science Fiction Age because the gaps between what will stay fiction for a long time vs what will show up in 2017 are starting to become clearer. Starships and transporters - not gonna happen in my lifetime. Fully developed augmented reality glasses - 2 more generations of tech away, aka 2014 and then 2017 or so. Pretty easy.
The reason you can't quite "download" information that easily is that people learn by making new live neural pathways among information, and there are hard limits to that. But... wait for it... there aren't for AI's! Once all that is pre-processed somewhere, assuming no money distractions, just buy a module for your AI and plug it in and off you go!
It's up there for the top 5 racial fears we have. We did pretty well for a long time... we kept playing "no true scotsman", scoffing at early stages of things. First it was chess, but then "oh fooey, chess is not intelligence". Then it was Jeopardy. But Jeopardy is more dangerous - because if you can understand *obfuscated* english, then once you get past a few of the knowledge gaps, you can start slamming together expert system modules with the english interface. Think Siri the third generation.
Spinning Drives suk. All the problems of fragility etc.
They're only still here in Hybrid because of legacy synergy. If Seagate is smart, they'll recognize that this product doesn't just need to pay for itself "and yay we have profits", but it is the stopgap to pay for say two hard years of R&D where only SSD is where it's at. The "Oh $hit" dept.
And with Moore's law or even halfsies thereof, solid state durable memory is where it's at. Yeah, First and even Second Gen gets all "phaw toy" from news media that can't/won't think beyond This Week's Page Clicks, but Solid State is it, watch it hit 750 gigs, roughly the point where a normal consumer can't max it out, and then it's lights out.
Maybe that's the new business. Old School accounting used to have something called the "going concern" principle designed mostly against cheap end runs of fraud, but what if the new business is "certain product lines have only 3-4 years of sales before we have to unload them"? Therefore NextGen and Planned Transition costs suddenly show up.
Good, you're the first one to point out part of this problem.
A lot of people learn hands on... so where are you supposed to learn this stuff legally? It kinda makes me laugh in the summary "a drying up supply of hackers". Okay, so we have 100 articles calling hackers terrorists, then you're complaining why people stop hacking?
After all, they didn't do anything. Only "Some of the activities they undertook contributed to the prevailing mood of the time." (Shout out to the Gregory Brothers!)
By "meta-trap" I am referring to how the mood of an age used to include certain tacit understandings of how things worked. Easy example: In the 80's and even 90's, you could make mix tapes and mix CD's with your friends and really didn't have to worry about it. If you weren't selling them, it went below the radar. Now, if you bit-torrent something off the wrong site too many times you risk losing your internet.
Look carefully at the nature of the types of laws being tossed around - SOPA, which we beat, ACTA, which we're barely holding a draw against, and for the sinker, Daryl Issa's "Digitial Bill of Rights". Except that "D. B. R." includes *more* clauses favorable to the media industries than there used to be "under the radar" 14 years ago, circa 1997. That's the Meta-Trap - take away half of what uses we used to enjoy, call it 50% better than the blinding evil of something like SOPA, and then trumpet its praises.
I mentioned Pets.com because it was one of the signature sites of Web 1.0. They were on the Superbowl ad set, etc. Remember basically how carefree it was then. Everyone borrowed from everyone else on Geocities, or Angelfire, radios were filled with Dot-Com 22 year old CEO's, and some of us were having a good time. All the best memes came from about 1997-2003, including Slashdot's. (We haven't had a good new meme in 8 years.) Now look at the stunning array of Lockdown attempts both on the governmental and the corporate level. Notice that the raw technology really hasn't changed! You still sign on to the net, you still do stuff, sure there's more video bandwidth now, but that's it, sorta. Except now the powers that be are doing their desperate best to create potholes that make the web more complicated to use.
And it's going to get worse. I'll go out on a limb and say the current crop of players we have is basically it for a while. Microsoft as usual, Apple is more recent, Google got evil, Facebook obliterated MySpace for marketshare and has the funds to stay put, your choice of three more. Meanwhile on the governmental level, they're pushing hard to reduce both anonymous and internet handles and increasing censorship.
Since both the basic tech is in stasis and so are the corporate players, all that's left is we're staring at ourselves in the big global fishbowl, except the powers of control have had time to catch up. And if you think I'm being paranoid, as I write this look 5 stories up and see that NYCL has just returned with a report on the new Jamie Thomas Appeal by the RIAA.
You are not Our Attorney yet we really appreciate you being "our attorney". This is great "legal advice" without being Legal Advice.
So you basically busted the entire concept behind the story, which then opens up the real can of worms, which is, "why did it take you to bust it when the EFF has a few lawyers of their own on speed dial?"
The best I can think of is this is the "first feeble step in the defense of patent madness". Clearly we're coming to the agreement that there are big flaws in this proposal to solve.
I look at all news from a Gaming Combo perspective. So what is the *other* piece of this combo that really can quiet the patent madness down?
Since we know the **AA and the ISP's are Rule 34'ing with each other, just what if they switched from a lawsuit business model to a data-cap model? There would be a few other things to solve, but I'd consider being satisfied with higher bandwidth caps *if it meant an ironclad guarantee, in law, to no more piracy lawsuits*. So then the user can make a pricing decision if they really want that movie or not. Or that song, or not. Or that Lolcat pic or not.
So get a prepaid cell phone plan and use free wifi for the data. I have almost no use for "always on" phone data - I can just go to McDonald's. (ProTip!) So my home landline is a Magic Jack on a $25/mo dry loop DSL (let's call it the Schrodinger's Voice plan!). Then that makes my $100 block (about three per year) of prepaid minutes last even longer. I don't text. So my yearly communication costs are something around $500 total, instead of about $1300 per year.
It's *worse* than what we *used to have*. The public internet has been here a modestly long time. Remember the good old days of Pets.com, AOL and Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Who Had Mail? Remember that the only thing we really could gripe about was AOL mass marketed CD's, Microsoft's OEM games, and the depressing fall of Netscape?
The Internet hasn't really changed since then. Sure, storage has increased, speeds have increased, so what. It's the same good ol' net that served part star trek fan boards, part porn, part business, and part Your_choice_here.
Why then in years such as 2010-2012 has it become this chilling pall over everything, where every lolcat that doesn't have a data authentication certificate risks sending you to jail?
In one sense it's a feeble hope that it took the forces of evil *fifteen years* to crank up their engine of evil. On the down side, now that is IS cranked up, we'll have a hell of a time dismantling it again. Rule #1 in negotiation such as politics or lobbying is not to cave more than 20% of what you have. So being 400% worse than we were 15 years ago, less 20% Boiled-Frog temporary caving, still leaves us miserable.
Slashdot Mirror
To get the snark comment out of the way, it's no longer 99-0 against the Tin Foil Hats. They're starting to collect a few victories. So for the Obligatory Tin Foil Hat comment, "the powers that be have no reason to stop their delicious lunch on consumer data."
Okay, with that out of the way, my suggestion is that if you get a big enough pissed-off-big-pocket on our side, get personal data classified as Copyrighted Data. Then when these companies go to share it with their buddies, all those $375,000 copyright penalty fees kick in reverse, and lead to a disaster against these companies. Think of the sports industries. Those are real players, right? Real people doing real things. So why is it magically a copyright violation to broadcast the game for copyright reasons?
Even a patent would be funny, it would buy us some 20 years to punt the problem into the 2030's. "My information is an important part of what makes me, me."
Somehow we mostly got the correct handling on the medical side - you don't see (yet!?) companies offering to show everyone your medical history. Now if we can get that to apply to all personal data, it would be interesting.
"Never mind that - consider that this is the best we can do in 2012. How dumb are we all?"
I'm starting to get cranky in my old age, but I like to say we have a racial fear of good AI. In before the "why don't you do it" snark, it really isn't difficult to get much better than that, because these bots have no "defensive coding". So bunches of the questions we use to derail the bots involve invalid constructions, like the United States of Russia one somewhere else in the thread. Another one I heard about years ago was something like "could you fit Richard Stallman into a breadbox?".
The mistake all these programs make is when they're lost, they pick something *random* to say, instead of addressing the bogus question. "Wait a minute man, do what with that person?" is the right type of "I'm lost" answer, not "talk to me about chicken alfredo".
Actually, we're seeing the first stage of Replicator Technology, aka digital copying, and look at the absolutely thundering effect of the affected industries. In a way, Star Trek was sweet, because I actually recall very few lawyers were ever parts of the plots. Today, it would be more dystopian, with a Copyright Infringement SWAT teams. "Someone copied a Justin Bieber song. Alpha Force, Move Out! Go Go Go! GET the Terrorist Sonofabitch!"
"Or, a coding error ends up causing everyone convicted of a certain, obscure offense ... is condemned to death."
Okay, so commit Copyright Infringement of a movie about a child Natalie Portman (minus grits) who studies to become a Terrorist!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/
"The Professional"
Hallo, me again.
So it looks like I misfired the tone a little on my post. I was trying to capsule summary a couple of the big intersections in Microsoft's role in consumer computing on the net. Isn't that why MS had a Borg Gates icon for some 12 years? Instead I got a chain of insulting AC's. Oh well.
All I meant was that in 1985 people my age were still playing games on their Commodore 64's, and we weren't aware of any way to get online for years later. 1995 was the iconic year of a new Win95 computer running Netscape.
Damn, in 1985?
We really didn't even get this until about 1995!
The next wave didn't latch on until the rise of Windows XP (patched a few times) circa 2002.
This might be the angle in for the original questioner's method.
Maybe he can reduce the raw theorems by 25%, and instead push harder on media and logical thinking issues.
Instead of too much push on the formal notation, what if he goes into a lot of "biased science" examples from the real media? Showing how slanted presentations produce emotional reactions, etc.
In a sense, "If I were in a position to hire", I'd rather have a smart thinker who's drilled cold on picking up sample bias than a book theoretician who can drill out 18 line proofs but folds the minute he/she gets into something about affordable housing studies and doesn't account for geo-social trends.
Wow, you're basically the only Non-AC guy who mentions Zune.
That is the comparison I see the biggest here, except this time it's right in MS's home camp.
Apple takes world by storm with iPod. MS Scrambles.
They start with their usual "commodity" strategy and license 20 3rd party hardware makers with some cert specs and calls it "Plays For Sure". So far, so fine. Except Apple was on to something with the whole Integration thing, so generic makers aren't working this time. So then MS does a giant evil backstab and makes the Zune, switching from their classic biz style into a Me Too but minus the 5 years of secret R&D that Apple was doing. So it flopped.
Apple crushed the phone market with the iPhone, and I'm a casualty. I had a Win Mobile 6 phone, and I hated it. It was an overgrown brick in my pocket. While I dislike some of Apple's snooping, the iPhone makes it easy to download apps and it doesn't auto ring by itself twice a day like the HTC phone did.
So suddenly Apple figures out that Mac OS isn't actually going anywhere, but it has some good concepts. So they switch the game to Phone & Tablet, and suddenly Microsoft is panicking, after a 20+ year monopoly on Windows? They want to make their own hardware now? THAT has GOT to piss off the OEM network to no end.
MS gave up ever influencing music, and washed their hands of it.
But this one? This feels like a Bet the Farm move. Remind me to look up the news 4 years from now when the fake urgency wears off. But this feels different.
"Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!"
Completely off topic - Why didn't you give your son the awesome name Dante? Why alter the spelling? He would have been able to say he was named after the cool Heaven & Hell Guy from the 13th century.
I'll repeat a shorter version of my theme to you.
There's gonna come a time when they're almost all the same, except phones. "Desktop" = "Portable In a Dock to a screen".
They're struggling a little on Moore's law this generation, but one good boost of game changing technology will kick it all back into overdrive.
You see the first hints of it in the All In One Screen-Computers.
See, that's just it, everyone keeps saying that Win 7 doesn't exactly do anything spectacular that WinXP didn't, except for its re-architected security. (Vista being the Giant Bluff Beta).
So now that they're moving away from the Aero Shiny thing, why can't they use one of these iteration rounds to really drill down the code, under the hood, and make it absolutely sizzle? Portions of the conversation keep floating around Laptop vs Tablet but there shouldn't be any differences! A Tablet should just be the Final Generation of a Laptop, with solid state memory instead of the spinning drive, and other improvements. Then you make Metro and Classic (Windows Explorer) be alternating interfaces to the same back end code. There really isn't a reason one tablet-sized machine can't do both. You dock the thing in an office to a big screen and "do work", then you undock it to play Angry Birds and read the NY Times (Your Media May Vary) at home. Then Mom checks her email.
"Has Been" launched a patent attack against "who" "Who" and "Who".
I don't trust anything Nokia does anymore now that Elop is there.
You almost had it ...
In some ways we're almost at the end of the Science Fiction Age because the gaps between what will stay fiction for a long time vs what will show up in 2017 are starting to become clearer. Starships and transporters - not gonna happen in my lifetime. Fully developed augmented reality glasses - 2 more generations of tech away, aka 2014 and then 2017 or so. Pretty easy.
The reason you can't quite "download" information that easily is that people learn by making new live neural pathways among information, and there are hard limits to that. But ... wait for it ... there aren't for AI's! Once all that is pre-processed somewhere, assuming no money distractions, just buy a module for your AI and plug it in and off you go!
It's up there for the top 5 racial fears we have. We did pretty well for a long time ... we kept playing "no true scotsman", scoffing at early stages of things. First it was chess, but then "oh fooey, chess is not intelligence". Then it was Jeopardy. But Jeopardy is more dangerous - because if you can understand *obfuscated* english, then once you get past a few of the knowledge gaps, you can start slamming together expert system modules with the english interface. Think Siri the third generation.
Oh! I know this one!
http://kickassapp.com/
Spinning Drives suk. All the problems of fragility etc.
They're only still here in Hybrid because of legacy synergy. If Seagate is smart, they'll recognize that this product doesn't just need to pay for itself "and yay we have profits", but it is the stopgap to pay for say two hard years of R&D where only SSD is where it's at. The "Oh $hit" dept.
And with Moore's law or even halfsies thereof, solid state durable memory is where it's at. Yeah, First and even Second Gen gets all "phaw toy" from news media that can't/won't think beyond This Week's Page Clicks, but Solid State is it, watch it hit 750 gigs, roughly the point where a normal consumer can't max it out, and then it's lights out.
Maybe that's the new business. Old School accounting used to have something called the "going concern" principle designed mostly against cheap end runs of fraud, but what if the new business is "certain product lines have only 3-4 years of sales before we have to unload them"? Therefore NextGen and Planned Transition costs suddenly show up.
Good, you're the first one to point out part of this problem.
A lot of people learn hands on... so where are you supposed to learn this stuff legally? It kinda makes me laugh in the summary "a drying up supply of hackers". Okay, so we have 100 articles calling hackers terrorists, then you're complaining why people stop hacking?
Or Goldman Sachs.
After all, they didn't do anything. Only "Some of the activities they undertook contributed to the prevailing mood of the time." (Shout out to the Gregory Brothers!)
Hi there.
By "meta-trap" I am referring to how the mood of an age used to include certain tacit understandings of how things worked. Easy example: In the 80's and even 90's, you could make mix tapes and mix CD's with your friends and really didn't have to worry about it. If you weren't selling them, it went below the radar. Now, if you bit-torrent something off the wrong site too many times you risk losing your internet.
Look carefully at the nature of the types of laws being tossed around - SOPA, which we beat, ACTA, which we're barely holding a draw against, and for the sinker, Daryl Issa's "Digitial Bill of Rights". Except that "D. B. R." includes *more* clauses favorable to the media industries than there used to be "under the radar" 14 years ago, circa 1997. That's the Meta-Trap - take away half of what uses we used to enjoy, call it 50% better than the blinding evil of something like SOPA, and then trumpet its praises.
I mentioned Pets.com because it was one of the signature sites of Web 1.0. They were on the Superbowl ad set, etc. Remember basically how carefree it was then. Everyone borrowed from everyone else on Geocities, or Angelfire, radios were filled with Dot-Com 22 year old CEO's, and some of us were having a good time. All the best memes came from about 1997-2003, including Slashdot's. (We haven't had a good new meme in 8 years.) Now look at the stunning array of Lockdown attempts both on the governmental and the corporate level. Notice that the raw technology really hasn't changed! You still sign on to the net, you still do stuff, sure there's more video bandwidth now, but that's it, sorta. Except now the powers that be are doing their desperate best to create potholes that make the web more complicated to use.
And it's going to get worse. I'll go out on a limb and say the current crop of players we have is basically it for a while. Microsoft as usual, Apple is more recent, Google got evil, Facebook obliterated MySpace for marketshare and has the funds to stay put, your choice of three more. Meanwhile on the governmental level, they're pushing hard to reduce both anonymous and internet handles and increasing censorship.
Since both the basic tech is in stasis and so are the corporate players, all that's left is we're staring at ourselves in the big global fishbowl, except the powers of control have had time to catch up. And if you think I'm being paranoid, as I write this look 5 stories up and see that NYCL has just returned with a report on the new Jamie Thomas Appeal by the RIAA.
I want to see how long it takes a site specializing in guys good at CompSci in the age of Google to find that answer!
Heh - if you'll permit the puns.
You are not Our Attorney yet we really appreciate you being "our attorney". This is great "legal advice" without being Legal Advice.
So you basically busted the entire concept behind the story, which then opens up the real can of worms, which is, "why did it take you to bust it when the EFF has a few lawyers of their own on speed dial?"
The best I can think of is this is the "first feeble step in the defense of patent madness". Clearly we're coming to the agreement that there are big flaws in this proposal to solve.
I look at all news from a Gaming Combo perspective. So what is the *other* piece of this combo that really can quiet the patent madness down?
I'll take it to the next level!
Since we know the **AA and the ISP's are Rule 34'ing with each other, just what if they switched from a lawsuit business model to a data-cap model? There would be a few other things to solve, but I'd consider being satisfied with higher bandwidth caps *if it meant an ironclad guarantee, in law, to no more piracy lawsuits*. So then the user can make a pricing decision if they really want that movie or not. Or that song, or not. Or that Lolcat pic or not.
So get a prepaid cell phone plan and use free wifi for the data. I have almost no use for "always on" phone data - I can just go to McDonald's. (ProTip!) So my home landline is a Magic Jack on a $25/mo dry loop DSL (let's call it the Schrodinger's Voice plan!). Then that makes my $100 block (about three per year) of prepaid minutes last even longer. I don't text. So my yearly communication costs are something around $500 total, instead of about $1300 per year.
Dammit, you're falling into the meta-trap.
It's *worse* than what we *used to have*. The public internet has been here a modestly long time. Remember the good old days of Pets.com, AOL and Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Who Had Mail? Remember that the only thing we really could gripe about was AOL mass marketed CD's, Microsoft's OEM games, and the depressing fall of Netscape?
The Internet hasn't really changed since then. Sure, storage has increased, speeds have increased, so what. It's the same good ol' net that served part star trek fan boards, part porn, part business, and part Your_choice_here.
Why then in years such as 2010-2012 has it become this chilling pall over everything, where every lolcat that doesn't have a data authentication certificate risks sending you to jail?
In one sense it's a feeble hope that it took the forces of evil *fifteen years* to crank up their engine of evil. On the down side, now that is IS cranked up, we'll have a hell of a time dismantling it again. Rule #1 in negotiation such as politics or lobbying is not to cave more than 20% of what you have. So being 400% worse than we were 15 years ago, less 20% Boiled-Frog temporary caving, still leaves us miserable.
Weren't there cases of people getting in more trouble recording their police encounters?
Is that six degrees from Godwinning the thread?