Define the term "works" first. This is not a system that will stop crime or catch criminals for very long; criminals will learn to behave in ways that the system won't flag.
On the other hand, this system will be great at finding people who are not accepting their position in the world, and who might rally others in that position to stand up for themselves. Rather than enforcing laws, what this system will do is enforce the social order -- criminals will learn to disguise their behaviors, but people who might lead a strike or protest will not. This system will give governments and corporations another advantage in maintaining their power and ensuring that they are able to continue to exploit society's "losers."
IOW this system will fight social change. If you belong to a group that has the short end of the stick when this system is deployed, you will be flagged for not accepting that treatment like everyone else.
The W3C DNT spec explicitly says that a browser should not set this by default, yet Microsoft is completely ignoring the spec and turning it on by default.
No, when you first run IE10, it asks if you would like to turn DNT on as a recommended setting. The user has the choice. Before you say, "Nobody reads that anyway!" keep in mind that the justification for privacy invasion by sites like Yahoo is that they "clear" state it in the fine print (which, in fact, fewer people read).
A flight from Canada cannot land at just any airport...It has to go to an airport designated as a port of entry
Yet the TSA body scanners can be found at small, regional airports where international flights cannot land. So much for ports of entry being the issue here.
Generally, international is somewhere in the common name.
Really? Hm, it is not in the name of this airport, where the TSA moron who was patting me down said that video of the pat-down was forbidden because other people might see the procedure, when a crowd of people waiting for their flight were seated ten feet away:
Hm...flights to airports in California, Arizona, Washington, and Colorado...but no international flights... so explain how the border search doctrine applies there?
Like I said originally, the constitution is not really relevant when it comes to the TSA (or any number of other large, expensive, and dangerous programs the US government is involved with). The organization is operating outside of the and ignoring a court order anyway, so why even claim there is a constitutional basis for what they are doing? We are not talking about CBP or ICE, we are talking about a program that was corrupt from its very inception.
Where do you think she was entering from? She didn't parachute into the airport from a foreign plane. If she had been patted down, scanned, or had her fourth amendment rights violated as she was walking up the jetway from an international flight, or perhaps even as she was try to exit an airport where international flights land, your line of reasoning might work. The problem is that she was not exiting a plane or an airport, she was trying to enter an airport.
Really though, even if you want to make the case that the government can search people as they exit the country (and let's just ignore what kind of precedent that sets), the woman in TFA was not crossing any international borders, she was traveling within the United States. At what point did travel within this country suddenly fall under the border search doctrine?
I ask this because it appears you have some insight that the founders didn't in this situation.
Sure do: nobody was crossing an international border,, nor was anyone boarding an oceangoing ship, nor was the search limited to sections of the airport where international flights arrive and depart. The TSA's warrantless search program is not limited to international airports or to international travel; even regional airports with no international flights have TSA agents and body scanners. The border search loophole does not apply here by any stretch of the imagination.
I know, it is not something we really care about in this day and age, but at one time the restrictions on the government that the constitution imposes were considered to be important. People had this notion that we could protect ourselves from tyranny, that the US was somehow going to be a better country than its predecessors, and so forth.
Oh well, enough of that, we need to decide which right-wing candidate to put into office (because voting for the left wing is a waste).
Evil thought: Someone could take the video of her abuse
All nine seconds of it. At least that is how much video me and the woman I was traveling with managed to get when I received my complementary happy ending from the TSA. Then the idiot tasked with massaging me said that he would not continue until he was not being recorded, because the TSA does not want its security measures to be revealed. He had nothing to say when I pointed out that several dozen people were sitting a few feet away, watching the entire thing.
These guys know what they are doing. It's not that they don't understand computers, it's that they want to help big corporations make lots of money, and hackers be damned, that's what they are going to do! What do you expect from people who were appointed by a pro-corporate party?
liddvdcss never paid the license fee and reverse engineered the rather crappy css encryption. I know that isn't what slashdot wants to hear, but the FBI is there to enforce these kinds of laws, and this IS illegal.
This has nothing to do with license fees or with reverse engineering. You have the right to reverse engineer CSS and write your own DVD playing software. You are only a criminal if you tell me how to do it.
Yes, you read that correctly: you are a criminal if you explain to someone else how you defeated a copy restriction system. Unless you are a researcher, publishing your work in a journal (no, your blog does not count), because as we all know, scientific journals are supposed to sit around on shelves in university libraries collecting dust. Oh, yeah, and researchers never make their code available to anyone, and should you dare to make a hyperlink to some other person's webpage that explains how to crack a restriction system, you are also a criminal. Or maybe not, because Google has plenty of those links, and nobody has prosecuted them.
Get back to your corporate job, citizen. What the hell are you doing programming your computer without being paid for it, and why the hell would you share your knowledge or skills with other commoners? Why can't you just be like everyone else and separate your work from your hobbies?
This will change when you get an entry-level job where you are the idiot among your peers
It's not your peers that you'll be cocky towards; it's your boss, the clients, etc. Let's put it this way:
"It keeps saying, 'Insert Disk.' What should I do?"
"Did you put the disk in the DVD drive?"
"What's that?"
"The small, rectangular thing with the button to open it."
"No, what's 'the disk'?"
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new and our society has not really become computerized in a social sense. I am sure that when the idea of writing with a pen was brand new, there were scribes who looked down on people who didn't know what ink was, or who thought that ink was for making markings on their bodies and that writing was about pressing shapes into clay. In a few decades or centuries, computers will be so integrated into society that this will not be an issue; in the mean time, people are unhappy (and they think the answer lies in moving green pieces of paper around).
What are you talking about? Elections observers are sent in when there is a concern that voters might be disenfranchised, that elections might be fraudulent, that opposition parties might be excluded, and so forth. All of the above applies to the US.
Nobody talks about how dangerous it is for elections observers to be sent to Afghanistan.
Except that there are serious and legitimate questions about whether or not US elections are being carried out fairly and properly. So here we are telling elections observers that they are not allowed to actually observe the voting process. You don't see a problem here?
At least when it comes to software and computers, innovation will happen at a glacial pace. Look at cars -- the same basic design, the same set of features, and only moderate improvements in fuel efficiency (and only when the government demands it). You have the big corporations designing your car, making the parts for it, and decided who is allowed to do maintenance; now just shut up and go about your life, because cars are always going to work this way.
Is that really what you want to see happen with computers? Do you really want this decade's design patterns, protocols, and languages to be cemented for a century? Had this been the mindset in the 1980s, there would have been no web, just online services, and the Internet would only be a way for those online services to exchange email (which would be as expensive as text messaging). Had this been the mindset in the 1960s, we would just have terminals, and we'd be paying for every CPU-minute and every byte of RAM that we used, and there would be no GUI (nobody would be able to afford such a computationally intensive application, and anyway, how are you going to use a GUI over that 22.8kbaud modem?).
Do you think walled gardens encourage innovation? Where is the innovation in the cable TV system (i.e. the innovation that is not just copying things we can do with our PCs)? Smartphone innovation comes from outside of the walled garden -- from developers using their PCs (i.e. computers without walled gardens) to write programs for those devices, or to create websites that can be accessed from those devices.
most of us have better things to do than some of the nonsense in this article
Yeah, most people have better things to do than to worry about making the world a better place. You just happen to be conflating that with thinking it is acceptable to prevent people who do want to make innovative solutions to problems from doing so.
Also good for people who value their time (not having to worry so much about fraud and malware, research, etc.) more than their ability to do things with a device that they would never bother doing anyway.
Only if those people are content with things staying the way they are i.e. if they do not want the next technological revolution to occur. Disruptive technologies do not happen in walled gardens; that is the point of walled gardens, to protect their curators from the fate that buggy-whip makers faced.
The World Wide Web could not have happened in a walled garden; if everything was locked behind walled gardens in the late 80s, we would have never had a web, we would still be using online services and the Internet would just be a way for online services to exchange email (if even that). If you want to see what a computer network where everything is either a walled garden or run by a service provider looks like, you need not look any further than digital cable TV systems. That is what walled gardens do: stunt innovation.
as I've gotten older my interests have shifted and I simply don't want to spend my very limited time on vetting everything that goes into my mobile device
Hm...how can we create a system where other people vet software for you, but still leave open the possibility of using software that was not vetted...
Wow! We can have app stores without creating walled gardens! The crazy thing is that we have been doing that for more than a decade.
the limitations imposed by the "walled garden" don't really affect my interests
Only because there are still free and open systems in the world, where hackers can create new innovations without having to ask permission. The problem is that everyone is trying to make a system where that is not the case. In 20 years, it is possible that there will be no PCs -- only computers with the same form factor as today's PCs, but with a pile of restrictions, fees, and DRM to ensure that only the people working at big corporations can actually write their own software (the fees will be designed drive away anyone who is not already a dedicated hacker, and within a generation or two there will hardly be any hackers left). The next web might not even happen, because nobody will be able to write new protocols; the walled garden will not even allow developers to access something that low-level.
The problem is that virus writers are coming out with 100,000 plus variants each day.
The solution is to create less exploitable OSes and to make resetting a system to its factory state less painful. Walled gardens are a cheap way to achieve the first, do nothing to help with the second, and carry the cost of making hacking and innovation (i.e. disruptive technologies -- like the PC itself) more difficult.
Most Americans are not CEOs or wealthy investors; which party are we supposed to vote for? The problem with the Democrats and the Republicans is that both parties are basically fascist: the government is right, the policy are soldiers, and if you disagree you go to jail. Unless you run a big corporation; then you get to call the shots and command the fascist system.
When you have police officers with automatic weapons and grenades attacking civilian homes in your country, you know that the people in power probably do not represent you. When anti-aircraft missiles and considered to be part of providing Honduras with law enforcement assistance, you know that the minor differences between Democrats and Republicans are too small to really matter.
Who do you think is on the fringe -- the person who says, "Never mind the fact that the US has the largest prison population of any country, and never mind the fact that unarmed civilians are being attacked by paramilitary teams, you should be focused on whether or not the wealthy are taxed at 15% or 18%!!!!!" or the person who says, "Let's use tax money for constructive programs rather than destructive programs!!!" ?
...and thus we continue to have politicians who work against our interests. This is sounding like a classic case of the Pareto optimum being different from the Nash equilibrium.
Did I say anything about Mitt Romney being better? No, I did not, all I said was that Obama supporters seem to run to the "Well he's better than Romney!" angle -- which is, for example, what you opened your post with. I am voting third party; get back to me when your candidate is not throwing his support behind corporate greed and paramilitary police (yes, nice list you have there, but all you are doing is pointing to the little things, when the problems I mentioned are big -- unless you think that teams of heavily armed men attacking and killing unarmed American civilians is nothing to worry about).
Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation
Except that we do not live in jungles, where we needed to be able to very quickly divert our attention from creating termite-harvesting tools to running away from a predator. In today's world, we need to be able to focus on a single task for extended periods of time; in other words, we need (or we are expected) to do things that we did not evolve to do.
You start tweaking that on your own, and while you might get something you want, and may not notice a downside right away -- eventually, one will become apparent. And it could be irreversible.
Amphetamine is a well-studied drug, having been used and observed for many generations now (it was, in fact, first synthesized more than a century ago). In large doses, all drugs in the amphetamine family (including the constituents of Adderall) can cause brain damage. In therapeutic doses (~10mg Adderall), however, brain damage is not known to occur (if this sounds like a shocking concept -- that high doses cause brain damage and low doses are safe -- then perhaps you should think about the different between drinking a single beer and dying of alcohol poisoning).
So the next time you get the notion in your head that tweaking your brain with chemicals
You will probably get this notion while walking past Starbucks. Why pretend that pharmaceuticals are the only drugs that can improve your cognitive performance? Caffeine and nicotine are also used to improve productivity, both are available OTC, and both can be home-grown.
Every evolutionary step is a tradeoff. Every. Single. One.
People use drugs to overcome those tradeoffs. You feel pain when a scalpel cuts your flesh, because that is what your body evolved to do; that's why anesthetics are used. Do you think that people should just bite down on a piece of wood during surgery?
Slashdot Mirror
When are ordinary, yet intelligent people going to refuse to live in and contribute to such a state ?
Never, because:
Define the term "works" first. This is not a system that will stop crime or catch criminals for very long; criminals will learn to behave in ways that the system won't flag.
On the other hand, this system will be great at finding people who are not accepting their position in the world, and who might rally others in that position to stand up for themselves. Rather than enforcing laws, what this system will do is enforce the social order -- criminals will learn to disguise their behaviors, but people who might lead a strike or protest will not. This system will give governments and corporations another advantage in maintaining their power and ensuring that they are able to continue to exploit society's "losers."
IOW this system will fight social change. If you belong to a group that has the short end of the stick when this system is deployed, you will be flagged for not accepting that treatment like everyone else.
The W3C DNT spec explicitly says that a browser should not set this by default, yet Microsoft is completely ignoring the spec and turning it on by default.
No, when you first run IE10, it asks if you would like to turn DNT on as a recommended setting. The user has the choice. Before you say, "Nobody reads that anyway!" keep in mind that the justification for privacy invasion by sites like Yahoo is that they "clear" state it in the fine print (which, in fact, fewer people read).
A flight from Canada cannot land at just any airport...It has to go to an airport designated as a port of entry
Yet the TSA body scanners can be found at small, regional airports where international flights cannot land. So much for ports of entry being the issue here.
Generally, international is somewhere in the common name.
Really? Hm, it is not in the name of this airport, where the TSA moron who was patting me down said that video of the pat-down was forbidden because other people might see the procedure, when a crowd of people waiting for their flight were seated ten feet away:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Barbara_Airport
Hm...flights to airports in California, Arizona, Washington, and Colorado...but no international flights... so explain how the border search doctrine applies there?
Like I said originally, the constitution is not really relevant when it comes to the TSA (or any number of other large, expensive, and dangerous programs the US government is involved with). The organization is operating outside of the and ignoring a court order anyway, so why even claim there is a constitutional basis for what they are doing? We are not talking about CBP or ICE, we are talking about a program that was corrupt from its very inception.
Really though, even if you want to make the case that the government can search people as they exit the country (and let's just ignore what kind of precedent that sets), the woman in TFA was not crossing any international borders, she was traveling within the United States. At what point did travel within this country suddenly fall under the border search doctrine?
I ask this because it appears you have some insight that the founders didn't in this situation.
Sure do: nobody was crossing an international border, , nor was anyone boarding an oceangoing ship, nor was the search limited to sections of the airport where international flights arrive and depart. The TSA's warrantless search program is not limited to international airports or to international travel; even regional airports with no international flights have TSA agents and body scanners. The border search loophole does not apply here by any stretch of the imagination.
No fuckhead, this is not a police state.
Yes, as we all know, a police state would be a country where:
Oh, wait, that would be the United States.
Sigh. She went to the airport. What did she think would happen if she refused to use the scanners she knew were there?
Allow me to introduce you to the highest law of the United States, the law that governs the government itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution
I know, it is not something we really care about in this day and age, but at one time the restrictions on the government that the constitution imposes were considered to be important. People had this notion that we could protect ourselves from tyranny, that the US was somehow going to be a better country than its predecessors, and so forth.
Oh well, enough of that, we need to decide which right-wing candidate to put into office (because voting for the left wing is a waste).
Evil thought: Someone could take the video of her abuse
All nine seconds of it. At least that is how much video me and the woman I was traveling with managed to get when I received my complementary happy ending from the TSA. Then the idiot tasked with massaging me said that he would not continue until he was not being recorded, because the TSA does not want its security measures to be revealed. He had nothing to say when I pointed out that several dozen people were sitting a few feet away, watching the entire thing.
These guys know what they are doing. It's not that they don't understand computers, it's that they want to help big corporations make lots of money, and hackers be damned, that's what they are going to do! What do you expect from people who were appointed by a pro-corporate party?
liddvdcss never paid the license fee and reverse engineered the rather crappy css encryption. I know that isn't what slashdot wants to hear, but the FBI is there to enforce these kinds of laws, and this IS illegal.
This has nothing to do with license fees or with reverse engineering. You have the right to reverse engineer CSS and write your own DVD playing software. You are only a criminal if you tell me how to do it.
Yes, you read that correctly: you are a criminal if you explain to someone else how you defeated a copy restriction system. Unless you are a researcher, publishing your work in a journal (no, your blog does not count), because as we all know, scientific journals are supposed to sit around on shelves in university libraries collecting dust. Oh, yeah, and researchers never make their code available to anyone, and should you dare to make a hyperlink to some other person's webpage that explains how to crack a restriction system, you are also a criminal. Or maybe not, because Google has plenty of those links, and nobody has prosecuted them.
Get back to your corporate job, citizen. What the hell are you doing programming your computer without being paid for it, and why the hell would you share your knowledge or skills with other commoners? Why can't you just be like everyone else and separate your work from your hobbies?
This will change when you get an entry-level job where you are the idiot among your peers
It's not your peers that you'll be cocky towards; it's your boss, the clients, etc. Let's put it this way:
"It keeps saying, 'Insert Disk.' What should I do?"
"Did you put the disk in the DVD drive?"
"What's that?"
"The small, rectangular thing with the button to open it."
"No, what's 'the disk'?"
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new and our society has not really become computerized in a social sense. I am sure that when the idea of writing with a pen was brand new, there were scribes who looked down on people who didn't know what ink was, or who thought that ink was for making markings on their bodies and that writing was about pressing shapes into clay. In a few decades or centuries, computers will be so integrated into society that this will not be an issue; in the mean time, people are unhappy (and they think the answer lies in moving green pieces of paper around).
The same reasoning applies to Texas...
What are you talking about? Elections observers are sent in when there is a concern that voters might be disenfranchised, that elections might be fraudulent, that opposition parties might be excluded, and so forth. All of the above applies to the US.
Nobody talks about how dangerous it is for elections observers to be sent to Afghanistan.
Except that there are serious and legitimate questions about whether or not US elections are being carried out fairly and properly. So here we are telling elections observers that they are not allowed to actually observe the voting process. You don't see a problem here?
Is that really what you want to see happen with computers? Do you really want this decade's design patterns, protocols, and languages to be cemented for a century? Had this been the mindset in the 1980s, there would have been no web, just online services, and the Internet would only be a way for those online services to exchange email (which would be as expensive as text messaging). Had this been the mindset in the 1960s, we would just have terminals, and we'd be paying for every CPU-minute and every byte of RAM that we used, and there would be no GUI (nobody would be able to afford such a computationally intensive application, and anyway, how are you going to use a GUI over that 22.8kbaud modem?).
Do you think walled gardens encourage innovation? Where is the innovation in the cable TV system (i.e. the innovation that is not just copying things we can do with our PCs)? Smartphone innovation comes from outside of the walled garden -- from developers using their PCs (i.e. computers without walled gardens) to write programs for those devices, or to create websites that can be accessed from those devices.
most of us have better things to do than some of the nonsense in this article
Yeah, most people have better things to do than to worry about making the world a better place. You just happen to be conflating that with thinking it is acceptable to prevent people who do want to make innovative solutions to problems from doing so.
Also good for people who value their time (not having to worry so much about fraud and malware, research, etc.) more than their ability to do things with a device that they would never bother doing anyway.
Only if those people are content with things staying the way they are i.e. if they do not want the next technological revolution to occur. Disruptive technologies do not happen in walled gardens; that is the point of walled gardens, to protect their curators from the fate that buggy-whip makers faced.
The World Wide Web could not have happened in a walled garden; if everything was locked behind walled gardens in the late 80s, we would have never had a web, we would still be using online services and the Internet would just be a way for online services to exchange email (if even that). If you want to see what a computer network where everything is either a walled garden or run by a service provider looks like, you need not look any further than digital cable TV systems. That is what walled gardens do: stunt innovation.
as I've gotten older my interests have shifted and I simply don't want to spend my very limited time on vetting everything that goes into my mobile device
Hm...how can we create a system where other people vet software for you, but still leave open the possibility of using software that was not vetted...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager
Wow! We can have app stores without creating walled gardens! The crazy thing is that we have been doing that for more than a decade.
the limitations imposed by the "walled garden" don't really affect my interests
Only because there are still free and open systems in the world, where hackers can create new innovations without having to ask permission. The problem is that everyone is trying to make a system where that is not the case. In 20 years, it is possible that there will be no PCs -- only computers with the same form factor as today's PCs, but with a pile of restrictions, fees, and DRM to ensure that only the people working at big corporations can actually write their own software (the fees will be designed drive away anyone who is not already a dedicated hacker, and within a generation or two there will hardly be any hackers left). The next web might not even happen, because nobody will be able to write new protocols; the walled garden will not even allow developers to access something that low-level.
The problem is that virus writers are coming out with 100,000 plus variants each day.
The solution is to create less exploitable OSes and to make resetting a system to its factory state less painful. Walled gardens are a cheap way to achieve the first, do nothing to help with the second, and carry the cost of making hacking and innovation (i.e. disruptive technologies -- like the PC itself) more difficult.
americans are not libertarians
Most Americans are not CEOs or wealthy investors; which party are we supposed to vote for? The problem with the Democrats and the Republicans is that both parties are basically fascist: the government is right, the policy are soldiers, and if you disagree you go to jail. Unless you run a big corporation; then you get to call the shots and command the fascist system.
When you have police officers with automatic weapons and grenades attacking civilian homes in your country, you know that the people in power probably do not represent you. When anti-aircraft missiles and considered to be part of providing Honduras with law enforcement assistance, you know that the minor differences between Democrats and Republicans are too small to really matter.
Who do you think is on the fringe -- the person who says, "Never mind the fact that the US has the largest prison population of any country, and never mind the fact that unarmed civilians are being attacked by paramilitary teams, you should be focused on whether or not the wealthy are taxed at 15% or 18%!!!!!" or the person who says, "Let's use tax money for constructive programs rather than destructive programs!!!" ?
If we wanted real change,
The system we have today fights against meaningful change...
...and thus we continue to have politicians who work against our interests. This is sounding like a classic case of the Pareto optimum being different from the Nash equilibrium.
Did I say anything about Mitt Romney being better? No, I did not, all I said was that Obama supporters seem to run to the "Well he's better than Romney!" angle -- which is, for example, what you opened your post with. I am voting third party; get back to me when your candidate is not throwing his support behind corporate greed and paramilitary police (yes, nice list you have there, but all you are doing is pointing to the little things, when the problems I mentioned are big -- unless you think that teams of heavily armed men attacking and killing unarmed American civilians is nothing to worry about).
Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation
Except that we do not live in jungles, where we needed to be able to very quickly divert our attention from creating termite-harvesting tools to running away from a predator. In today's world, we need to be able to focus on a single task for extended periods of time; in other words, we need (or we are expected) to do things that we did not evolve to do.
You start tweaking that on your own, and while you might get something you want, and may not notice a downside right away -- eventually, one will become apparent. And it could be irreversible.
Amphetamine is a well-studied drug, having been used and observed for many generations now (it was, in fact, first synthesized more than a century ago). In large doses, all drugs in the amphetamine family (including the constituents of Adderall) can cause brain damage. In therapeutic doses (~10mg Adderall), however, brain damage is not known to occur (if this sounds like a shocking concept -- that high doses cause brain damage and low doses are safe -- then perhaps you should think about the different between drinking a single beer and dying of alcohol poisoning).
So the next time you get the notion in your head that tweaking your brain with chemicals
You will probably get this notion while walking past Starbucks. Why pretend that pharmaceuticals are the only drugs that can improve your cognitive performance? Caffeine and nicotine are also used to improve productivity, both are available OTC, and both can be home-grown.
Every evolutionary step is a tradeoff. Every. Single. One.
People use drugs to overcome those tradeoffs. You feel pain when a scalpel cuts your flesh, because that is what your body evolved to do; that's why anesthetics are used. Do you think that people should just bite down on a piece of wood during surgery?
Addictive and dangerous substances...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol
Slashdot must be full of coffee-drinking Nazgul then...