How can Facebook messaging even be compared with email? Can you exchange messages with people who do not use one company's services? Can you run your own Facebook message server?
On the one hand, a cartel that charges ridiculous prices for messaging. On the other, a service which will not allow you to send messages to users of other services.
The system is new but I believe it has a chance of succeeding and even thriving given enough time and work
Can you back that up? You are talking about a system that:
Encourages deflation
Has an inherently weak source of demand (nobody will lose their property if they have no Bitcoin, unlike currencies that are accepted for tax payment).
Cannot offer secure offline transactions.
Does not offer secure online transactions if the goods must be delivered in less than 10 minutes.
Is not really anonymous, despite anonymity being one of the features that is driving demand.
It is not a matter of authoritarianism, it is a matter of economics and cryptography. On the economic side, Bitcoin has big disadvantages that it must overcome, and nobody is really working to help Bitcoin overcome those disadvantages. On the technical side, Bitcoin is vulnerable to double spending attacks and cannot replace paper money for common uses of currency. So how do you justify the claim that Bitcoin has a chance?
No they are not; the demand for Bitcoin is microscopic by comparison with the demand for other currencies, and when the hype dies down people are going to be selling Bitcoin more than they will buy. Without the ability to pay taxes etc. with Bitcoin, it is doomed -- and there is no incentive for any government to accept Bitcoin for tax payment, nor for any court to assess damages in terms of Bitcoin, nor for any bank to issue a Bitcoin loan, etc. The economic shortcomings alone are enough to kill Bitcoin; it is riding on hype about anonymous payments (which is really just hype -- anonymous Bitcoin payments are hard to get right) and badly thought out theories about the value of deflationary currencies.
Bitcoin's technical shortcomings do not help either. Without a central authority, Bitcoin cannot offer secure offline transactions (see Chaum's extensive work on digital cash if you are curious why), which basically means you will never see Bitcoin compete with paper money (and do not think for a second that people are going to invest in fast Internet connections just to accept Bitcoin payments). Even worse, it was recently shown that online transactions in Bitcoin are not secure:
Now, can we stop giving digital cash a bad name, and start deploying better developed digital cash systems (yes, the ones that involve banks / currency issuing authorities)?
CALEA was basically a hand out to law enforcement, letting them sit back and eat doughnuts instead of going into the field when they need a wiretap. Now they are complaining that they do not get a similar hand out when it comes to the Internet, and dishonestly claiming that they do not want to revive the cryptowars? No thank you, FBI -- we are not going to give up secure communication systems or plant backdoors all over the Internet just because you long for the "good old days" when wiretapping-on-demand was enough to violate our privacy.
Not true; I am telling you, and I am not the only person to experience this, that Gmail started moving messages to a folder that I had no IMAP subscription to without asking my permission. Here is someone who had that problem with the email program from Mac OS X:
I simply do not log in to Google's web interface -- I have no reason to, claws-mail is set up on any computer I need to use and I prefer it to Google's design. A few months ago, I noticed that important messages were not in my Inbox, but in the "All Mail" folder, and eventually I figured out that those messages had been moved to the "Important" folder. This was done without Google asking if I wanted it, and I had to take the time to log in to Google's website to fix it. It is not a common problem, since most people do not use IMAP exclusively, but people like myself do exist.
Blatantly abusing the copyright of a full 9 lines of code? When I was teaching introductory CS courses, we would not even accuse students of cheating over 9 identical lines of code.
Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud
Sure, but in terms of the cost to tax payers, incompetence is much worse. Yes, it sounds shocking when we hear that some contractor overbilled the state and essentially stole thousands of tax dollars; yet it should be far more shocking to hear that incompetence resulted in millions of dollars wasted, when that money could have been spent on something that benefits the tax payers, or perhaps not spent at all and paid back to the tax payers, starting with the poorest residents of West Virginia.
It is not as though there was no need for money anywhere. Government money comes loaded with problems, though:
The people who know where the money needs to be spent are many layers down the management hierarchy and get basically no say in how it actually is spent.
There are long lists of restrictions; for example, if a government money is used to pay for a library's connection to the Internet, the library must have a special firewall that blocks "objectionable" websites.
Corruption -- it is ever-present in politics, and decisions about what equipment to buy are frequently influenced by less-than-ethical political favors and deals.
Surely you realize that "Congress shall make no law" is open to interpretation -- "no" obviously means "no, except when doing so will protect those who are in power."
I would love to have a player that simply played the damn movie that I paid for
How will you get the movie studio's permission without all that extra work? Do you really think that you, as a consumer, have interests that matter? You get to be entertained at the content producers pleasure, when you have supplied them with a sufficient amount of money.
Is that common though? It seems to me that once the speed of a elevator is calibrated, it should not need to change -- the calibration should be for the building itself, which should not frequently change. Sensors may malfunction and necessitate a recalibration, but if that still does not explain why the settings would need to be changed by the control system's software.
This was because you accepted the new settings when it was offered to you on screen and you clicked it away instead of reading. Next time tell the full story.
The full story includes nothing about "the screen," because Google cannot rewrite the email program that I use, which is claws-mail. I had not logged in to Gmail's web interface about several years when the change happened, and was basically forced to do so to stop Google from applying filters I did not create.
I am not really seeing your point -- am I supposed to care more about my neighbor fantasizing about experimenting with plutonium? No, I do not think I have any business inspecting my neighbors' thoughts. They can fantasize about pink pony themed websites, or they can fantasize about vivisecting human beings, as long as they are not going out and harming people I really do not care.
Demand does not magically create supply. Child pornography is extremely risky to produce and distribute; nobody is going to do it just to satisfy demand, they do it because they expect to receive some form of payment, which may or may not be money.
The illegality has never been based on having paid for it
Yes it is; the law covering possession of child pornography is an extension of the law covering the distribution of child pornography, which itself was found to be constitution because distribution encourages the creation of those images. The entire point of these laws is to attack the production of child pornography, not to outlaw people fantasizing about child abuse. These laws were written, and the relevant court cases were decided, at a time when the only way to procure child pornography was to pay for it.
In fact, the early cases specifically found that the government was not trying to regulate what people think, and was only trying to protect children from being harmed during the production of child pornography. The only reason possessing child pornography was made illegal was to fight distribution chains, which in turn were only made illegal to fight production. Without the economic aspect -- that is, the trade or payment -- none of these laws could have been upheld.
So then why are you looking for justification of why it shouldn't be illegal to possess child pornography?
I have, repeatedly: the purpose of child pornography laws is to protect children, and someone who possesses child pornography is not necessarily someone who has encouraged harm to children. The distribution of child pornography is substantially different today than it was in the 1980s. People obtain child pornography without paying it all the time, and unless you are arguing that every time an image is copied or viewed the children in that image are being harmed, I am not really seeing how you are connecting the possession of child pornography with its production.
What I did say is that since I agree with those laws as being fairly self evident
Laws that ban people from possessing particular images are self evident and do not need any further justification? That is an interesting view to take...
You're the one saying it should be okay to have child pornography unless you bought it, as if the act of purchasing it is what exclusively makes the possession of it illegal. I can't even begin to fathom why you might differentiate on the basis of if you paid for it or not.
...because paying for it encourages people to produce it i.e. you are paying for people to abuse children? Taking the payment aspect (which includes non-monetary trades) out of there, and what are you left with? A person who possesses images, and nothing more.
if you're the kind of person who wants to keep pictures which commemorate and perpetuate an illegal act, then your personal culpability for that illegal act is the same as if you were involved.
So people who have pictures of concentration camps are culpable for genocide? That is basically what you just said: if someone retains pictures of illegal acts, they should be considered guilty of committing those acts.
You're the one saying we should be having the argument to the contrary, but you've yet to say a single thing in defense of that position.
Do I have to come over there and shout it in your ear? Someone who did not pay for child pornography did not encourage any child abuse, and therefore does not need to be imprisoned. Simple and straightforward, because in my view of the world the only people who should be imprisoned are people who either harm others or join a conspiracy to harm others, and only when it can be proved that they were knowingly part of that conspiracy. Some guy who downloaded some child pornography without paying for it, trading for it, etc. is not someone who has harmed others.
I am not going to repeat the argument again. Come back when you have more than, "it is self evident," to explain why possessing child pornography is harmful in and of itself.
Which in all likelihood will be spent on some proprietary software package that most students will never benefit from. Meanwhile, students are at the mercy of Google when it comes to feature changes, compatibility, and even getting to keep their email account (which at least here Google can terminate on its own if they want).
We are at the mercy of Google now. When Google decides to roll out a new "feature," it is not as though we can choose not to use it. I thought that perhaps I could shield myself by using an email client, but guess what? When Google decided to start classifying some of my mail as "important," messages started disappearing from my inbox and appearing in a folder I had not subscribed to. It took me a few days to figure out what was happening, and to disable the "feature."
That and the fact that official communication basically shuts down if our Internet service is ever interrupted, which has happened a few times.
Slashdot Mirror
At best, facebook is an email supplement
How can Facebook messaging even be compared with email? Can you exchange messages with people who do not use one company's services? Can you run your own Facebook message server?
On the one hand, a cartel that charges ridiculous prices for messaging. On the other, a service which will not allow you to send messages to users of other services.
The system is new but I believe it has a chance of succeeding and even thriving given enough time and work
Can you back that up? You are talking about a system that:
It is not a matter of authoritarianism, it is a matter of economics and cryptography. On the economic side, Bitcoin has big disadvantages that it must overcome, and nobody is really working to help Bitcoin overcome those disadvantages. On the technical side, Bitcoin is vulnerable to double spending attacks and cannot replace paper money for common uses of currency. So how do you justify the claim that Bitcoin has a chance?
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248
Bitcoins are the tender of the future
No they are not; the demand for Bitcoin is microscopic by comparison with the demand for other currencies, and when the hype dies down people are going to be selling Bitcoin more than they will buy. Without the ability to pay taxes etc. with Bitcoin, it is doomed -- and there is no incentive for any government to accept Bitcoin for tax payment, nor for any court to assess damages in terms of Bitcoin, nor for any bank to issue a Bitcoin loan, etc. The economic shortcomings alone are enough to kill Bitcoin; it is riding on hype about anonymous payments (which is really just hype -- anonymous Bitcoin payments are hard to get right) and badly thought out theories about the value of deflationary currencies.
Bitcoin's technical shortcomings do not help either. Without a central authority, Bitcoin cannot offer secure offline transactions (see Chaum's extensive work on digital cash if you are curious why), which basically means you will never see Bitcoin compete with paper money (and do not think for a second that people are going to invest in fast Internet connections just to accept Bitcoin payments). Even worse, it was recently shown that online transactions in Bitcoin are not secure:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248
Now, can we stop giving digital cash a bad name, and start deploying better developed digital cash systems (yes, the ones that involve banks / currency issuing authorities)?
This is not about establishing the panopticon, it is about maintaining it. We already established the panopticon decades ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALEA
CALEA was basically a hand out to law enforcement, letting them sit back and eat doughnuts instead of going into the field when they need a wiretap. Now they are complaining that they do not get a similar hand out when it comes to the Internet, and dishonestly claiming that they do not want to revive the cryptowars? No thank you, FBI -- we are not going to give up secure communication systems or plant backdoors all over the Internet just because you long for the "good old days" when wiretapping-on-demand was enough to violate our privacy.
http://notavailablein.ca/2012/05/googles-infringement-against-oracle-9-lines-of-code/
Not true; I am telling you, and I am not the only person to experience this, that Gmail started moving messages to a folder that I had no IMAP subscription to without asking my permission. Here is someone who had that problem with the email program from Mac OS X:
http://www.seifi.org/email/lion-mail-app-deletes-imap-emails-without-notice-gmail-important-fix.html
I simply do not log in to Google's web interface -- I have no reason to, claws-mail is set up on any computer I need to use and I prefer it to Google's design. A few months ago, I noticed that important messages were not in my Inbox, but in the "All Mail" folder, and eventually I figured out that those messages had been moved to the "Important" folder. This was done without Google asking if I wanted it, and I had to take the time to log in to Google's website to fix it. It is not a common problem, since most people do not use IMAP exclusively, but people like myself do exist.
Clearly, if Google had not developed Android, Oracle would have been able to market its own smartphone/tablet OS using Java, right?
Blatantly abusing the copyright of a full 9 lines of code? When I was teaching introductory CS courses, we would not even accuse students of cheating over 9 identical lines of code.
side-note: How does this post fail the lameness filter and look like ASCII art?
Too many capital letters. Try s/ALL/<b>all<\/b>/
Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud
Sure, but in terms of the cost to tax payers, incompetence is much worse. Yes, it sounds shocking when we hear that some contractor overbilled the state and essentially stole thousands of tax dollars; yet it should be far more shocking to hear that incompetence resulted in millions of dollars wasted, when that money could have been spent on something that benefits the tax payers, or perhaps not spent at all and paid back to the tax payers, starting with the poorest residents of West Virginia.
Surely you realize that "Congress shall make no law" is open to interpretation -- "no" obviously means "no, except when doing so will protect those who are in power."
I would love to have a player that simply played the damn movie that I paid for
How will you get the movie studio's permission without all that extra work? Do you really think that you, as a consumer, have interests that matter? You get to be entertained at the content producers pleasure, when you have supplied them with a sufficient amount of money.
Is that common though? It seems to me that once the speed of a elevator is calibrated, it should not need to change -- the calibration should be for the building itself, which should not frequently change. Sensors may malfunction and necessitate a recalibration, but if that still does not explain why the settings would need to be changed by the control system's software.
That, and perhaps someone can explain what, if any, need there is for an elevator's speed to change after it has been calibrated?
This was because you accepted the new settings when it was offered to you on screen and you clicked it away instead of reading. Next time tell the full story.
The full story includes nothing about "the screen," because Google cannot rewrite the email program that I use, which is claws-mail. I had not logged in to Gmail's web interface about several years when the change happened, and was basically forced to do so to stop Google from applying filters I did not create.
I am not really seeing your point -- am I supposed to care more about my neighbor fantasizing about experimenting with plutonium? No, I do not think I have any business inspecting my neighbors' thoughts. They can fantasize about pink pony themed websites, or they can fantasize about vivisecting human beings, as long as they are not going out and harming people I really do not care.
Demand does not magically create supply. Child pornography is extremely risky to produce and distribute; nobody is going to do it just to satisfy demand, they do it because they expect to receive some form of payment, which may or may not be money.
consuming child pornography is a pretty clear statement of intent
It sounds more like a statement of a person's own fantasies to me, or in some cases just their curiosity.
The illegality has never been based on having paid for it
Yes it is; the law covering possession of child pornography is an extension of the law covering the distribution of child pornography, which itself was found to be constitution because distribution encourages the creation of those images. The entire point of these laws is to attack the production of child pornography, not to outlaw people fantasizing about child abuse. These laws were written, and the relevant court cases were decided, at a time when the only way to procure child pornography was to pay for it.
In fact, the early cases specifically found that the government was not trying to regulate what people think, and was only trying to protect children from being harmed during the production of child pornography. The only reason possessing child pornography was made illegal was to fight distribution chains, which in turn were only made illegal to fight production. Without the economic aspect -- that is, the trade or payment -- none of these laws could have been upheld.
So then why are you looking for justification of why it shouldn't be illegal to possess child pornography?
I have, repeatedly: the purpose of child pornography laws is to protect children, and someone who possesses child pornography is not necessarily someone who has encouraged harm to children. The distribution of child pornography is substantially different today than it was in the 1980s. People obtain child pornography without paying it all the time, and unless you are arguing that every time an image is copied or viewed the children in that image are being harmed, I am not really seeing how you are connecting the possession of child pornography with its production.
What I did say is that since I agree with those laws as being fairly self evident
Laws that ban people from possessing particular images are self evident and do not need any further justification? That is an interesting view to take...
You're the one saying it should be okay to have child pornography unless you bought it, as if the act of purchasing it is what exclusively makes the possession of it illegal. I can't even begin to fathom why you might differentiate on the basis of if you paid for it or not.
if you're the kind of person who wants to keep pictures which commemorate and perpetuate an illegal act, then your personal culpability for that illegal act is the same as if you were involved.
So people who have pictures of concentration camps are culpable for genocide? That is basically what you just said: if someone retains pictures of illegal acts, they should be considered guilty of committing those acts.
You're the one saying we should be having the argument to the contrary, but you've yet to say a single thing in defense of that position.
Do I have to come over there and shout it in your ear? Someone who did not pay for child pornography did not encourage any child abuse, and therefore does not need to be imprisoned. Simple and straightforward, because in my view of the world the only people who should be imprisoned are people who either harm others or join a conspiracy to harm others, and only when it can be proved that they were knowingly part of that conspiracy. Some guy who downloaded some child pornography without paying for it, trading for it, etc. is not someone who has harmed others.
I am not going to repeat the argument again. Come back when you have more than, "it is self evident," to explain why possessing child pornography is harmful in and of itself.
which could go better spent on other things
Which in all likelihood will be spent on some proprietary software package that most students will never benefit from. Meanwhile, students are at the mercy of Google when it comes to feature changes, compatibility, and even getting to keep their email account (which at least here Google can terminate on its own if they want).
We are at the mercy of Google now. When Google decides to roll out a new "feature," it is not as though we can choose not to use it. I thought that perhaps I could shield myself by using an email client, but guess what? When Google decided to start classifying some of my mail as "important," messages started disappearing from my inbox and appearing in a folder I had not subscribed to. It took me a few days to figure out what was happening, and to disable the "feature."
That and the fact that official communication basically shuts down if our Internet service is ever interrupted, which has happened a few times.