Which is a sign that something is wrong with the law. The police are supposed to protect people by enforcing the law, and if that were the case, there would be wide support for the police. Unfortunately, most laws having nothing to do with protecting the majority of people -- drug laws, censorship laws, laws against wearing religious clothing, etc. The police also have a habit of attacking protesters, which adds little to their reputation. Throw in a little corruption, and it is not hard to see why someone would create this sort of website.
Hmm that would mean the physical paper cash in my wallet is worthless, because I can only pay my taxes by personal check, so no one will ever use cash. I donno about that. Well, technically, I can pay sales and gasoline taxes at point of sale using cash, but everything else requires a check, property, fed/state income, most licenses, etc. Lets agree I can only pay about 5% of my taxes using cash and the other 95% require personal checks.
Except that a check is an instruction to transfer some amount of dollars to the recipient (the government, in the case of taxes). You have not switched currencies, $1 on a check is redeemable for a $1 bill or four quarters, etc. In the case of Bitcoin, you need to switch currencies -- selling your Bitcoin tokens for dollars, which are then used to pay taxes. Since nobody needs to sell their dollars for Bitcoin tokens in order to pay taxes, there is an imbalance in the demand for Bitcoins. It is not something that will kill Bitcoin on its own, but it is a problem with the currency.
The technical limit assumes the tokens grow in size faster than computing power increases in speed and capacity.
This will always be the case. There are physical limits on computational power, and if your currency is going to keep requiring more computational power even when the economy is not growing then eventually you are going to have a problem. This is assuming that Bitcoin can even be successful without running on less powerful devices -- smartcards, vending machines, gas pumps, etc.
To a Really crude first approximation our planetary wide economy only exists because computers already handle all transactions and record keeping
...and the only time we need to increase that computational power is when the economy grows. If the same number of transactions were processed every day, the only thing that would be increased is the size of the archive of previous transactions. A currency like Bitcoin adds a new cost: each day, the amount of computational power needs to increase, because the amount of data processed in every single transaction will increase as a result of the previous day's transactions (or the previous nanosecond's, since every transaction increases the size of the tokens used in the transaction).
I do agree, though, that Bitcoin will not be killed by its technical limitations. We are nowhere near hitting the wall in terms of token sizes and computational power. Bitcoin will die because it makes no economic sense: a deflation oriented currency without any legal structure to give it value. Cryptoanarchists are entitled to their wet dreams, but Bitcoin is going to fail and the last people to buy into the system are going to be the ones who go home crying.
The real issue is that a "more traditional cryptocurrency" would need to be issued by a bank, which means some reputable institution would need to guarantee the value of the cryptocurrency. It seems unlikely that any reputable institution will ever do this, since the law enforcement agencies of the world are strongly against allowing anonymous transfers. Any company/bank that started advertising that they allow "truly anonymous transfers" would have more law enforcement on them then white on rice.
Alternatively, LEAs might take the same approach to cryptocurrency that they take with physical cash and require banks to report large digital cash transactions. I would not bet the rent on this scenario, though -- your scenario of a LEA pressure preventing bank issued digital cash from becoming a reality is more likely. In the end, as with just about all things related to LEAs and crypto, it is the law-abiding citizens who wind up losing.
Money IRL is also backed by the fact that people must obtain money in order to settle government debts (e.g. taxes). Bitcoin still fails under this theory, since no government will accept Bitcoin as a tax payment.
Except that decentralized digital cash is inherently flawed, since the tokens will always grow linearly in the number of transactions they are used for. In other digital cash systems, this problem is solved by having an issuing authority (bank, government, etc.) that accepts old tokens and issues fresh tokens. In the case of Bitcoin, no such authority exists, so the tokens are just going to keep getting bigger, and eventually they will be too large to be useful.
Not that the technical problems are going to be what kills Bitcoin. In terms of economics, Bitcoin has a shaky basis to begin with: people only accept Bitcoin because they believe that they can exchange their Bitcoin tokens for some other currency. Eventually people need to make that exchange, in order to pay their taxes, but there is no similar need to obtain Bitcoin tokens. The gap in demand is not really filled by Bitcoin's utility as a digital cash system, which is questionable to begin with because of the technical limitations on Bitcoin.
Even if somehow that did not become a problem, there is the fact that Bitcoin is an inherently deflationary currency. This creates problems with hoarding (which we are already seeing), and makes it harder to repay loans (loans are crucial to a functioning economy, despite what those "occupy" protesters tell you).
In short, the odds are against Bitcoin being successful. Really, more traditional cryptocurrency is needed, where a bank issues tokens but the tokens can still be transferred anonymously. Sadly, Bitcoin's failure will make it even harder to start a digital cash bank, since everyone will associate digital cash with Bitcoin and think that all digital cash systems suffer the same problems.
it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
"The masses" must refer to people who had the money to spend on a Lisa or a Macintosh. Most people did not see a GUI until Windows 95.
As for Ritchie, his most important contribution was not C, but rather his work on UNIX. You know about Unix (as it is now capitalized), right? That's the operating system on which the World Wide Web was originally built, the operating system that popularized the "everything is a file" abstraction, and yes, the operating system that Mac OS X is based on. Steve Jobs' contribution was in identifying things that could marketed, but it was men like Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and Lee Felsenstein, and many other unknown engineers and researchers, who provided Jobs with something to identify in the first place.
Sure, all these things would have "eventually" been created by someone else, but guess what? The GUI, tablet computers, etc. would have also been "eventually" marketed by someone else. We care about Steve Jobs because he brought things to market before other people did, and that is why we care about C, Unix, and Ritchie.
If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.
How many people are willing to stand up to their friends and say, "No, I am not on Facebook, please send me an email if you want to invite me to an event?" How many people are knowledgeable enough to take the time to set up ABP and NoScript, or to configure the equivalent in their browser of choice? The problem with not participating in Facebook is that it is spread out all over the web, large numbers of people use it as their primary means of communicating, and many people simply assume that everyone in their social circle is on Facebook.
Really, Facebook is entitled to its trade secrets: the algorithms that it uses to compile their profile of you (which is definitely not what most people think of as their "Facebook profile"). Why should the results of those algorithms be considered trade secrets, and why should the people whose lives were analyzed not be entitled to know what the results of the analysis are?
Indeed, although there is not much personal information on Slashdot. The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that Facebook greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private." The information Facebook collects is much broader in scope than Slashdot, and extends beyond what people actively post on Facebook.
There is also the matter that supposedly private messages on Facebook are not really private at all, a classic case of the "third party server" problem. Unlike email, for which there are well-developed (but rarely used) methods of keeping private messages private, Facebook is designed to thwart such efforts (e.g. to encrypt an email, I can just hit a checkbox, assuming keys have been set up; to encrypt a Facebook message, I have to manually invoke a cryptosystem, copy and paste, and so forth -- a pain even for technically competent users). For most people, the "privacy" issue on Facebook is related to what their friends, coworkers, and potential future contacts can see -- very few people give any thought to the amount of information that Facebook itself has, and for many Facebook has become the primary means of communication.
When two parties, each willingly, exchange information than that exchange is protected by free speech.
That excludes large categories of speech that even the Supreme Court recognizes are protected. It has been found that outlawing all unsolicited email is unconstitutional because legitimate political or religious messages would be made illegal.
by visiting the page with said comment the other party implied consent. They were in no way forced to view it.
What if I create a page that automatically redirects you to the offending page?
The quote is not at all out of context. The report is arguing that since we already restrict free speech rights, we should go ahead and restrict those rights further. Every time the law chips away a bit more of our free speech rights, someone makes the argument, "Where does this end?" and this report proves that point: where does it end? What future arguments will be made to erode free speech just a little bit further, if the recommendations from this report are enacted?
The problem here is that these politicians are proposing that we further restrict what is considered free speech, and that they are advocating that free speech be viewed as a privilege rather than a right. What different does it make what the original blog said, considering what the politicians themselves said?
And ever since then, I've laughed to myself every time someone mentions the yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater meme.
I cry a little bit inside every time I hear it, when I remember that the meme originated with a SCOTUS opinion that it was acceptable to arrest someone for passing out anti-draft literature during World War I.
Eh, I don't know about that. I use FVWM, and I set up a menu, but to be honest there are only four programs I ever really needed -- so I adjusted the menu to present those programs at the top of the top level. People generally want symbolic icons, and they hate having to read through a list of things just to find what they are looking for. A combination of a short menu with just the essentials and a search box for rarely used programs is probably a better idea (in my case, xterm is one of the four programs I mentioned, which serves as a way to launch less commonly used programs).
There is no money in going after home users. They would have to basically drive around looking for WiFi hotspots, and the money they would spend doing so would never be recouped. Much more profitable to just go after businesses.
What you seem to be arguing for is additional DRM, ie., a technical protection measure in order to enforce the wishes of the developer.
How is that? What I said should be done is for upgrades to be distributed as patches, which are incomplete unless you already have a copy of the older version (since most software systems are built on older versions of the same code). It is not DRM to simply not give someone some code, and it solves the upgrade disc issue very elegantly. Right now, an upgrade disc is a complete copy of the software, that refuses to install if cannot detect a previous copy of the system -- that is DRM.
However, compared to a purely social and legal framework, where customers and people in general are simply expected to be adults and do the right thing, there are significant downsides.
Who gets to define what "the right thing" is? Very few software users think about copyright law, which is why so many companies ship software with "license compliance routines" that force people to abide by (some of) the terms of the license. Copyright law is something that only really makes sense in the context of businesses, as a regulation on industry. Expecting someone outside of an industry that depends on copyright to spend their time thinking about whether or not what they are doing constitutes copyright infringement is absurd: experience has shown that it is too much to expect most people to even read the EULA before they agree to it.
Under your scenario, things become much more complicated to no value. To upgrade, you first need to go and dig up your old install media and install that?
So you frequently buy upgrade media for a system that has nothing installed on it? So much for the "do the right thing" attitude. The point of an upgrade disc is to upgrade the software on a system that already has the software installed on it, at least the last time I used such a thing (admittedly, this is a while ago -- maybe times are different now?).
Finally, if there is no rule of law and society involved, but merely technical protection, I see no way around the economic incentive to ever more heavily restrict stuff.
Welcome to the modern reality of developing software for home and small business users. Only large organizations can afford to pay enough lawyers to go through license agreements and audit themselves for compliance. From the beginning of the PC revolution, individual users have been freely copying software and exchanging it with each other with no regard for copyright law. Your "let's get everyone to agree to only use upgrade discs for upgrades" approach is absurd when weighed against the reality of the world. That is why video game companies have such ludicrously unfriendly DRM in their games: people do not actually give a damn about license compliance, and there is no reason to believe that they ever will. It is far too difficult to go after noncompliant users -- they do not have a legal department that you can just call up on the phone, they do not necessary have published contact information, and there are far too many of them for anyone to actually keep track of.
My personal approach to compliance is simple: I only use free as in free speech software, and I have read and understood all of the relevant licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Police get a lot of flack just for being police
Which is a sign that something is wrong with the law. The police are supposed to protect people by enforcing the law, and if that were the case, there would be wide support for the police. Unfortunately, most laws having nothing to do with protecting the majority of people -- drug laws, censorship laws, laws against wearing religious clothing, etc. The police also have a habit of attacking protesters, which adds little to their reputation. Throw in a little corruption, and it is not hard to see why someone would create this sort of website.
So being a police officer is equivalent to being a CIA agent now? Nobody knows who you are or where you live?
Except that any secure digital cash system must have the property that I mentioned -- the tokens must grow with the number of transactions:
ftp://www.hacktic.nl/pub/mirrors/Advances%20in%20Cryptology/HTML/PDF/E92/390.PDF
Hmm that would mean the physical paper cash in my wallet is worthless, because I can only pay my taxes by personal check, so no one will ever use cash. I donno about that. Well, technically, I can pay sales and gasoline taxes at point of sale using cash, but everything else requires a check, property, fed/state income, most licenses, etc. Lets agree I can only pay about 5% of my taxes using cash and the other 95% require personal checks.
Except that a check is an instruction to transfer some amount of dollars to the recipient (the government, in the case of taxes). You have not switched currencies, $1 on a check is redeemable for a $1 bill or four quarters, etc. In the case of Bitcoin, you need to switch currencies -- selling your Bitcoin tokens for dollars, which are then used to pay taxes. Since nobody needs to sell their dollars for Bitcoin tokens in order to pay taxes, there is an imbalance in the demand for Bitcoins. It is not something that will kill Bitcoin on its own, but it is a problem with the currency.
The technical limit assumes the tokens grow in size faster than computing power increases in speed and capacity.
This will always be the case. There are physical limits on computational power, and if your currency is going to keep requiring more computational power even when the economy is not growing then eventually you are going to have a problem. This is assuming that Bitcoin can even be successful without running on less powerful devices -- smartcards, vending machines, gas pumps, etc.
To a Really crude first approximation our planetary wide economy only exists because computers already handle all transactions and record keeping
I do agree, though, that Bitcoin will not be killed by its technical limitations. We are nowhere near hitting the wall in terms of token sizes and computational power. Bitcoin will die because it makes no economic sense: a deflation oriented currency without any legal structure to give it value. Cryptoanarchists are entitled to their wet dreams, but Bitcoin is going to fail and the last people to buy into the system are going to be the ones who go home crying.
The real issue is that a "more traditional cryptocurrency" would need to be issued by a bank, which means some reputable institution would need to guarantee the value of the cryptocurrency. It seems unlikely that any reputable institution will ever do this, since the law enforcement agencies of the world are strongly against allowing anonymous transfers. Any company/bank that started advertising that they allow "truly anonymous transfers" would have more law enforcement on them then white on rice.
Alternatively, LEAs might take the same approach to cryptocurrency that they take with physical cash and require banks to report large digital cash transactions. I would not bet the rent on this scenario, though -- your scenario of a LEA pressure preventing bank issued digital cash from becoming a reality is more likely. In the end, as with just about all things related to LEAs and crypto, it is the law-abiding citizens who wind up losing.
I think someone needs to look up the definition of "fiat." Bitcoin is not a fiat currency since there is no government or law involved.
Money IRL is also backed by the fact that people must obtain money in order to settle government debts (e.g. taxes). Bitcoin still fails under this theory, since no government will accept Bitcoin as a tax payment.
I think BitCoin is a great concept
Except that decentralized digital cash is inherently flawed, since the tokens will always grow linearly in the number of transactions they are used for. In other digital cash systems, this problem is solved by having an issuing authority (bank, government, etc.) that accepts old tokens and issues fresh tokens. In the case of Bitcoin, no such authority exists, so the tokens are just going to keep getting bigger, and eventually they will be too large to be useful.
Not that the technical problems are going to be what kills Bitcoin. In terms of economics, Bitcoin has a shaky basis to begin with: people only accept Bitcoin because they believe that they can exchange their Bitcoin tokens for some other currency. Eventually people need to make that exchange, in order to pay their taxes, but there is no similar need to obtain Bitcoin tokens. The gap in demand is not really filled by Bitcoin's utility as a digital cash system, which is questionable to begin with because of the technical limitations on Bitcoin.
Even if somehow that did not become a problem, there is the fact that Bitcoin is an inherently deflationary currency. This creates problems with hoarding (which we are already seeing), and makes it harder to repay loans (loans are crucial to a functioning economy, despite what those "occupy" protesters tell you).
In short, the odds are against Bitcoin being successful. Really, more traditional cryptocurrency is needed, where a bank issues tokens but the tokens can still be transferred anonymously. Sadly, Bitcoin's failure will make it even harder to start a digital cash bank, since everyone will associate digital cash with Bitcoin and think that all digital cash systems suffer the same problems.
Frankly we need to raise the retirement age to 80 NOW. Make the boomers work for another 25 years or retire on their own money.
What do you suppose the younger people who would have taken those jobs will do?
it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
"The masses" must refer to people who had the money to spend on a Lisa or a Macintosh. Most people did not see a GUI until Windows 95.
As for Ritchie, his most important contribution was not C, but rather his work on UNIX. You know about Unix (as it is now capitalized), right? That's the operating system on which the World Wide Web was originally built, the operating system that popularized the "everything is a file" abstraction, and yes, the operating system that Mac OS X is based on. Steve Jobs' contribution was in identifying things that could marketed, but it was men like Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and Lee Felsenstein, and many other unknown engineers and researchers, who provided Jobs with something to identify in the first place.
Sure, all these things would have "eventually" been created by someone else, but guess what? The GUI, tablet computers, etc. would have also been "eventually" marketed by someone else. We care about Steve Jobs because he brought things to market before other people did, and that is why we care about C, Unix, and Ritchie.
Thus explaining why they track people on other websites.
If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.
How many people are willing to stand up to their friends and say, "No, I am not on Facebook, please send me an email if you want to invite me to an event?" How many people are knowledgeable enough to take the time to set up ABP and NoScript, or to configure the equivalent in their browser of choice? The problem with not participating in Facebook is that it is spread out all over the web, large numbers of people use it as their primary means of communicating, and many people simply assume that everyone in their social circle is on Facebook.
Really, Facebook is entitled to its trade secrets: the algorithms that it uses to compile their profile of you (which is definitely not what most people think of as their "Facebook profile"). Why should the results of those algorithms be considered trade secrets, and why should the people whose lives were analyzed not be entitled to know what the results of the analysis are?
Indeed, although there is not much personal information on Slashdot. The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that Facebook greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private." The information Facebook collects is much broader in scope than Slashdot, and extends beyond what people actively post on Facebook.
There is also the matter that supposedly private messages on Facebook are not really private at all, a classic case of the "third party server" problem. Unlike email, for which there are well-developed (but rarely used) methods of keeping private messages private, Facebook is designed to thwart such efforts (e.g. to encrypt an email, I can just hit a checkbox, assuming keys have been set up; to encrypt a Facebook message, I have to manually invoke a cryptosystem, copy and paste, and so forth -- a pain even for technically competent users). For most people, the "privacy" issue on Facebook is related to what their friends, coworkers, and potential future contacts can see -- very few people give any thought to the amount of information that Facebook itself has, and for many Facebook has become the primary means of communication.
When two parties, each willingly, exchange information than that exchange is protected by free speech.
That excludes large categories of speech that even the Supreme Court recognizes are protected. It has been found that outlawing all unsolicited email is unconstitutional because legitimate political or religious messages would be made illegal.
by visiting the page with said comment the other party implied consent. They were in no way forced to view it.
What if I create a page that automatically redirects you to the offending page?
shouting fire in a crowded theatre
Why does nobody bother to cite the actual case this came from? Probably because it flies in the face of the first amendment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
No, that is not a joke, the Supreme Court really did rule that Schenck did not have the right to speak against the draft during World War I.
The quote is not at all out of context. The report is arguing that since we already restrict free speech rights, we should go ahead and restrict those rights further. Every time the law chips away a bit more of our free speech rights, someone makes the argument, "Where does this end?" and this report proves that point: where does it end? What future arguments will be made to erode free speech just a little bit further, if the recommendations from this report are enacted?
The problem here is that these politicians are proposing that we further restrict what is considered free speech, and that they are advocating that free speech be viewed as a privilege rather than a right. What different does it make what the original blog said, considering what the politicians themselves said?
And ever since then, I've laughed to myself every time someone mentions the yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater meme.
I cry a little bit inside every time I hear it, when I remember that the meme originated with a SCOTUS opinion that it was acceptable to arrest someone for passing out anti-draft literature during World War I.
I like...being able to group my applications by purpose in a *menu*.
That is too techincally advanced for the majority of Windows users. Yes, really, it is.
Eh, I don't know about that. I use FVWM, and I set up a menu, but to be honest there are only four programs I ever really needed -- so I adjusted the menu to present those programs at the top of the top level. People generally want symbolic icons, and they hate having to read through a list of things just to find what they are looking for. A combination of a short menu with just the essentials and a search box for rarely used programs is probably a better idea (in my case, xterm is one of the four programs I mentioned, which serves as a way to launch less commonly used programs).
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
There is no money in going after home users. They would have to basically drive around looking for WiFi hotspots, and the money they would spend doing so would never be recouped. Much more profitable to just go after businesses.
They could not recoup their losses going after home users the way they can with business users.
What you seem to be arguing for is additional DRM, ie., a technical protection measure in order to enforce the wishes of the developer.
How is that? What I said should be done is for upgrades to be distributed as patches, which are incomplete unless you already have a copy of the older version (since most software systems are built on older versions of the same code). It is not DRM to simply not give someone some code, and it solves the upgrade disc issue very elegantly. Right now, an upgrade disc is a complete copy of the software, that refuses to install if cannot detect a previous copy of the system -- that is DRM.
However, compared to a purely social and legal framework, where customers and people in general are simply expected to be adults and do the right thing, there are significant downsides.
Who gets to define what "the right thing" is? Very few software users think about copyright law, which is why so many companies ship software with "license compliance routines" that force people to abide by (some of) the terms of the license. Copyright law is something that only really makes sense in the context of businesses, as a regulation on industry. Expecting someone outside of an industry that depends on copyright to spend their time thinking about whether or not what they are doing constitutes copyright infringement is absurd: experience has shown that it is too much to expect most people to even read the EULA before they agree to it.
Under your scenario, things become much more complicated to no value. To upgrade, you first need to go and dig up your old install media and install that?
So you frequently buy upgrade media for a system that has nothing installed on it? So much for the "do the right thing" attitude. The point of an upgrade disc is to upgrade the software on a system that already has the software installed on it, at least the last time I used such a thing (admittedly, this is a while ago -- maybe times are different now?).
Finally, if there is no rule of law and society involved, but merely technical protection, I see no way around the economic incentive to ever more heavily restrict stuff.
Welcome to the modern reality of developing software for home and small business users. Only large organizations can afford to pay enough lawyers to go through license agreements and audit themselves for compliance. From the beginning of the PC revolution, individual users have been freely copying software and exchanging it with each other with no regard for copyright law. Your "let's get everyone to agree to only use upgrade discs for upgrades" approach is absurd when weighed against the reality of the world. That is why video game companies have such ludicrously unfriendly DRM in their games: people do not actually give a damn about license compliance, and there is no reason to believe that they ever will. It is far too difficult to go after noncompliant users -- they do not have a legal department that you can just call up on the phone, they do not necessary have published contact information, and there are far too many of them for anyone to actually keep track of.
My personal approach to compliance is simple: I only use free as in free speech software, and I have read and understood all of the relevant licenses.
What is the difference?
When you install software, you make a copy of it.