This view of Internet users is part of the problem. You seem to think that the web or more generally the Internet is just a fancy version of cable TV, where consumers receive their entertainment from creators.
One of the replies points to the non-technical problem with Tor on iOS, which is that Apple rejected it from the App Store as being a "proxy or circumvention tool." This is not terribly surprising, of course: Apple would not want to anger governments by shipping a platform that allows iOS users to evade national firewalls.
Sure, I'm restricted if I'm using Facebook or Apple technologies, but there are literally thousands of places I can post and do whatever I want. The internet is a very big place.
So you think it is good for Internet freedom if the network is divided into little islands of technologies controlled by one specific company or another? Nothing prevents Facebook from interoperating with other social networking or communications systems -- they even have their own Jabber implementation, that could easily exchange messages with other Jabber servers.
The whole point of the Internet is that it is not fractured; another way to state this is that walled gardens are the antithesis of the Internet philosophy.
If Sergey Brin is lamenting Apple's restrictive iOS platform as a threat to internet freedom, then why not get to the root cause of that restrictiveness, which is malware?
Oh please, these apologies for Apple are getting tiresome. Apple did not lock down iOS to keep out malware, they did it so that they could remain in control of the products they sell people long after the sale is made. If this were about malware, why does Apple prevent apps that have absolutely no relation to malware from being in the app store? What the heck do political cartoons have to do with malware?
The root cause is a complete lack of respect for users: a view that users are nothing more than exploitable sources of money that need to be controlled.
The TSA was not created to solve problems, it was created to convince people that problems are being solved. Now that the TSA cannot go away, it has taken on the role of funneling tax dollars into corporations with connections in the government.
Let the experience of other countries (where terrorist attacks are unfortunately common) be a lesson here: big crowds are targets. The TSA's security checkpoints at airports, especially busy airports, create big crowds, and those crowds are not behind any sort of security. A terrorist who wanted to kill a big crowd of Americans could walk in to a major airport just before a holiday and kill hundreds of people without ever dealing with security.
The fact that it has not happened yet is an indication that airport security measures are not what is keeping terrorist at bay.
How is allowing one person to see the received signal from an antenna in any way "rebroadcasting?" Perhaps you should look up the definition of the word "broadcasting."
unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements
Good thing we already put in all that effort when broadband Internet access was being deployed.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?
How is it a different issue? We are seeing the same argument, by the same group of people who are once again not creative enough to innovate and who are once against trying to squash competition through abuses of the court system. Aereo provides a location shifting service, nothing more, and they are not rebroadcasting anything, just renting antennas to people.
The fact that the broadcasters did not come up with this system on their own, and therefore cannot make money from it. This is also known as "a greedy abuse of the court system, for which the plaintiffs should be penalized."
Why not use one antenna per channel, and stream it to multiple customers?
That would be rebroadcasting, effectively making them a cable TV service that has to pay licensing fees. Since only one person has access to a given antenna at any given time, the service is not rebroadcasting, it is location shifting.
No, what they are saying is that if I have a good location for receiving a Fox broadcast, and I allow you to place an antenna on my property and run a cable to your house, I have to pay a licensing fee. Since you got to watch something that you would have had to go through more trouble to watch otherwise.
The broadcasters have no case here, they are wasting court time and trying to destroy innovation through frivolous lawsuits.
So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?
This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.
It is not really a "broadcast" if only one person is receiving it. What Aereo is doing is assigning each customer their own antenna, and sending them the received signal over the Internet. That is not "rebroadcasting."
What the plaintiffs are getting their panties in a twist over is the fact that they did not realize that they could have done this sort of thing, and now someone else might be able to monetize it. I have no sympathy for them, they should lose and be forced to pay Aereo's legal fees plus punitive damages.
more citizens now will be taking the approach of "If a law is stupid, ignore it." -- Which is not healthy for a society
Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for the health of society. Remember Rosa Parks? Fugitive slave laws? Laws that made the teaching of the theory of evolution illegal? Sometimes bad laws need to be ignored before they can be struck down by courts; sometimes governments need to be reminded that their power is not handed down by God.
There is nothing holy about the law. If a law is so far out of touch with the realities that face the people it is supposed to govern, then it needs to be repealed and it will be ignored. The right wing of Ameircan politics (which is basically all of American politics at this point) has managed to convince people that the power of the government is absolute, and that the letter of the law is the only thing that matters. You need not look any further than this to see how wrong these fascists are:
We do not need to run thousand year long experiments to gather evidence about the age of the Earth. We have good ways to calibrate radiometric dating techniques, and radiometric dating shows that the Earth is much older than 6000 years. That evidence has been published in journals which can be found at libraries around the world, and you can scrutinize that evidence as much as you wish.
But there's more than one way to understand the Genesis creation narrative
Cool, talk about it during bible study. This is irrelevant to science, because the Christian Bible is not a science textbook. Science is not about developing models in front of a religious background, and squeezing your religion into gaps in scientific understanding is a dangerous thing to do: the gaps get smaller over time.
There is no reason to bring up religion during a science discussion. If you happen to believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, you are free to do so -- but science is about evidence, which can be reproduced by others, and developing models and theories based on that evidence. If you have evidence of a young Earth that can be duplicated by other researchers, cool -- publish it, and we'll start debating how to reconcile your results with the mountain of evidence for an old Earth.
There is no creation/evolution debate; it was manufactured by people who are terrified that the old religious institutions will lose their power if people do not take the Christian Bible (i.e. a poor translation of ancient near east mythology) as absolute truth. Scientists should not be concerned with religion; religious leaders are the ones who need to figure out how to stay relevant in this day and age (it really is not that hard). Scientists are not trying to "disprove God;" deities are simply not part of the picture when it comes to science, because there is no evidence upon which theories and models can be built when it comes to deities.
Believe what you want to believe, but keep it out of science classrooms unless you have evidence on your side.
So the mountain of evidence on which the theory of evolution is based do not enter the picture for you? The difference between ID/creationism arguments and the theory of evolution (and science in general) is that the ID/creationists present nothing but criticism of existing evidence, followed by "OK there must intelligent forces at work," while the scientific theories are based on evidence that has been collected. No scientists claim to know with 100% certainty what happened (that is what young-earth creationists claim), but the fact that there is uncertainty does not make the theory "wrong" as you seem to claim (if that were the case, there would be no point in science at all -- nothing in science has ever been 100% certain).
Except that we are not asking kids to question the theory of evolution. This bill permits teachers to sow doubts about evolution in the minds of their students; it does nothing to encourage the students to think. The net result will be students who spend no more time thinking than they would have otherwise, but with a piss-poor understanding of the scientific method, scientific results, or modern biology.
She was fired for "poor job performance." Nobody is ever fired for political reasons, that looks bad; employers just find some mistake that was made and use that as an excuse. The government is no different.
Nobody is a perfect employee. Everyone makes mistakes, and if your employer wants to fire you they just have to watch you closely until a mistake is made.
How the hell does that make sense, she finally spoke up that the system is broken and got fired?
The system is not really meant to work. Early on, plenty of people pointed out the following:
By creating big crowds at the security checkpoint, you are giving terrorists an easy target.
A clever terrorists could find a way to improvise a weapon inside of the "secure" area (think prison shivs)
The next big terrorist attack will probably not involve airplanes, because that is where everyone is looking.
What the TSA is meant to do is give people the appearence of security, so that they will feel safe and keep flying, and so that they will think that the same people who supported Osama Bin Laden in the 1980s are now "doing something" to protect them. That goal was accomplished years ago, but getting rid of the TSA would undo all of that. Now that the TSA is here for good, corrupt politicians can use it to funnel money into the wallets of their friends -- the people who own high-tech scanner making businesses.
If a TSA employee says that the TSA's procedures are useless, they are threatening the appearance that the TSA is meant to foster, and worse still they are increasing the likelihood that the general population will wake up and realize how idiotic the TSA is.
Slashdot Mirror
OUR best interest as WEB consumers
This view of Internet users is part of the problem. You seem to think that the web or more generally the Internet is just a fancy version of cable TV, where consumers receive their entertainment from creators.
This, perhaps:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.tor.devel/1099
One of the replies points to the non-technical problem with Tor on iOS, which is that Apple rejected it from the App Store as being a "proxy or circumvention tool." This is not terribly surprising, of course: Apple would not want to anger governments by shipping a platform that allows iOS users to evade national firewalls.
Sure, I'm restricted if I'm using Facebook or Apple technologies, but there are literally thousands of places I can post and do whatever I want. The internet is a very big place.
So you think it is good for Internet freedom if the network is divided into little islands of technologies controlled by one specific company or another? Nothing prevents Facebook from interoperating with other social networking or communications systems -- they even have their own Jabber implementation, that could easily exchange messages with other Jabber servers.
The whole point of the Internet is that it is not fractured; another way to state this is that walled gardens are the antithesis of the Internet philosophy.
If Sergey Brin is lamenting Apple's restrictive iOS platform as a threat to internet freedom, then why not get to the root cause of that restrictiveness, which is malware?
Oh please, these apologies for Apple are getting tiresome. Apple did not lock down iOS to keep out malware, they did it so that they could remain in control of the products they sell people long after the sale is made. If this were about malware, why does Apple prevent apps that have absolutely no relation to malware from being in the app store? What the heck do political cartoons have to do with malware?
The root cause is a complete lack of respect for users: a view that users are nothing more than exploitable sources of money that need to be controlled.
The TSA was not created to solve problems, it was created to convince people that problems are being solved. Now that the TSA cannot go away, it has taken on the role of funneling tax dollars into corporations with connections in the government.
Let the experience of other countries (where terrorist attacks are unfortunately common) be a lesson here: big crowds are targets. The TSA's security checkpoints at airports, especially busy airports, create big crowds, and those crowds are not behind any sort of security. A terrorist who wanted to kill a big crowd of Americans could walk in to a major airport just before a holiday and kill hundreds of people without ever dealing with security.
The fact that it has not happened yet is an indication that airport security measures are not what is keeping terrorist at bay.
How is allowing one person to see the received signal from an antenna in any way "rebroadcasting?" Perhaps you should look up the definition of the word "broadcasting."
unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements
Good thing we already put in all that effort when broadband Internet access was being deployed.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?
How is it a different issue? We are seeing the same argument, by the same group of people who are once again not creative enough to innovate and who are once against trying to squash competition through abuses of the court system. Aereo provides a location shifting service, nothing more, and they are not rebroadcasting anything, just renting antennas to people.
So what's the issue here?
The fact that the broadcasters did not come up with this system on their own, and therefore cannot make money from it. This is also known as "a greedy abuse of the court system, for which the plaintiffs should be penalized."
Why not use one antenna per channel, and stream it to multiple customers?
That would be rebroadcasting, effectively making them a cable TV service that has to pay licensing fees. Since only one person has access to a given antenna at any given time, the service is not rebroadcasting, it is location shifting.
No, what they are saying is that if I have a good location for receiving a Fox broadcast, and I allow you to place an antenna on my property and run a cable to your house, I have to pay a licensing fee. Since you got to watch something that you would have had to go through more trouble to watch otherwise.
The broadcasters have no case here, they are wasting court time and trying to destroy innovation through frivolous lawsuits.
So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?
This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.
It is not really a "broadcast" if only one person is receiving it. What Aereo is doing is assigning each customer their own antenna, and sending them the received signal over the Internet. That is not "rebroadcasting."
What the plaintiffs are getting their panties in a twist over is the fact that they did not realize that they could have done this sort of thing, and now someone else might be able to monetize it. I have no sympathy for them, they should lose and be forced to pay Aereo's legal fees plus punitive damages.
more citizens now will be taking the approach of "If a law is stupid, ignore it." -- Which is not healthy for a society
Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for the health of society. Remember Rosa Parks? Fugitive slave laws? Laws that made the teaching of the theory of evolution illegal? Sometimes bad laws need to be ignored before they can be struck down by courts; sometimes governments need to be reminded that their power is not handed down by God.
There is nothing holy about the law. If a law is so far out of touch with the realities that face the people it is supposed to govern, then it needs to be repealed and it will be ignored. The right wing of Ameircan politics (which is basically all of American politics at this point) has managed to convince people that the power of the government is absolute, and that the letter of the law is the only thing that matters. You need not look any further than this to see how wrong these fascists are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
We do not need to run thousand year long experiments to gather evidence about the age of the Earth. We have good ways to calibrate radiometric dating techniques, and radiometric dating shows that the Earth is much older than 6000 years. That evidence has been published in journals which can be found at libraries around the world, and you can scrutinize that evidence as much as you wish.
But there's more than one way to understand the Genesis creation narrative
Cool, talk about it during bible study. This is irrelevant to science, because the Christian Bible is not a science textbook. Science is not about developing models in front of a religious background, and squeezing your religion into gaps in scientific understanding is a dangerous thing to do: the gaps get smaller over time.
There is no reason to bring up religion during a science discussion. If you happen to believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, you are free to do so -- but science is about evidence, which can be reproduced by others, and developing models and theories based on that evidence. If you have evidence of a young Earth that can be duplicated by other researchers, cool -- publish it, and we'll start debating how to reconcile your results with the mountain of evidence for an old Earth.
There is no creation/evolution debate; it was manufactured by people who are terrified that the old religious institutions will lose their power if people do not take the Christian Bible (i.e. a poor translation of ancient near east mythology) as absolute truth. Scientists should not be concerned with religion; religious leaders are the ones who need to figure out how to stay relevant in this day and age (it really is not that hard). Scientists are not trying to "disprove God;" deities are simply not part of the picture when it comes to science, because there is no evidence upon which theories and models can be built when it comes to deities.
Believe what you want to believe, but keep it out of science classrooms unless you have evidence on your side.
So the mountain of evidence on which the theory of evolution is based do not enter the picture for you? The difference between ID/creationism arguments and the theory of evolution (and science in general) is that the ID/creationists present nothing but criticism of existing evidence, followed by "OK there must intelligent forces at work," while the scientific theories are based on evidence that has been collected. No scientists claim to know with 100% certainty what happened (that is what young-earth creationists claim), but the fact that there is uncertainty does not make the theory "wrong" as you seem to claim (if that were the case, there would be no point in science at all -- nothing in science has ever been 100% certain).
Except that we are not asking kids to question the theory of evolution. This bill permits teachers to sow doubts about evolution in the minds of their students; it does nothing to encourage the students to think. The net result will be students who spend no more time thinking than they would have otherwise, but with a piss-poor understanding of the scientific method, scientific results, or modern biology.
http://chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
She was fired for "poor job performance." Nobody is ever fired for political reasons, that looks bad; employers just find some mistake that was made and use that as an excuse. The government is no different.
Nobody is a perfect employee. Everyone makes mistakes, and if your employer wants to fire you they just have to watch you closely until a mistake is made.
I thought they were designed to transport tax dollars into the hands of particular corporate stock holders.
How the hell does that make sense, she finally spoke up that the system is broken and got fired?
The system is not really meant to work. Early on, plenty of people pointed out the following:
What the TSA is meant to do is give people the appearence of security, so that they will feel safe and keep flying, and so that they will think that the same people who supported Osama Bin Laden in the 1980s are now "doing something" to protect them. That goal was accomplished years ago, but getting rid of the TSA would undo all of that. Now that the TSA is here for good, corrupt politicians can use it to funnel money into the wallets of their friends -- the people who own high-tech scanner making businesses.
If a TSA employee says that the TSA's procedures are useless, they are threatening the appearance that the TSA is meant to foster, and worse still they are increasing the likelihood that the general population will wake up and realize how idiotic the TSA is.