I do, as do some of my contacts. It is rare, yes, but not unheard of. It is also the case that a lot of businesses use email encryption (S/MIME or IBE, usually not PGP).
If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns.
The problem is that less than 0.05% of the public cares about SOPA or PIPA. Most people just want to watch The Jersey Shore, football, etc., and then post about it on Facebook. They will not overthrow the government as long as they can still get their cheap entertainment. They will not even get their magazines and clips loaded.
You know why IPv6 is taking so long to roll out? It benefits the users, that's why. ISPs could start deploying NAT to home users, who are "not supposed" to be running servers anyway.
Do you really think Time Warner or Comcast would waste any time deploying the equipment needed to follow SOPA or PIPA? If it means giving everyone a new cable modem, you bet that everyone will get new cable modems. A lot of ISPs would benefit from SOPA and PIPA, because they also own TV channels and other businesses that benefit from increased copyright enforcement.
They want the same thing they already have with the cable TV system: a neat little topology where consumers are just endpoints that passively receive entertainment (for a fee), and the powerful network operators and media executives get to decide what people are allowed to see.
The whole point is to break the Internet! The mainstream media hates the Internet, because people can be more than just passive consumers of entertainment and products. SOPA and PIPA are just one more step in a long chain of attacks on the philosophy that underlies the very architecture of the Internet.
For the past few years, the RIAA and MPAA have been working hard to undermine and destroy peer-to-peer networking on the Internet, because it does not fit into the distribution model they are comfortable with. In the view of the mainstream media, the corporations and the politicians that support them, people are supposed to pay for things, and they are not supposed to assist in the distribution chain unless they are being paid to do so. The idea that computing resources or communication resources can be shared is antithetical to the old media barons, because they want to be the center of the universal. To them, distribution costs are paid for by copyright holders, who recoup those costs by selling copies of entertainment in its various forms.
What they want, in other words, is the Cable TV system. They like the way that cable works -- a relatively small number of head ends that distribute the entertainment, which can easily be policed for violations. Set-top boxes are designed to prevent users from stepping outside the bounds of what the copyright holders demand. Restrictions on distribution can be negotiated with a small number of entities that control the entire network.
They want to break the Internet, so that they can rebuild it. They want a star architecture for the network. They want to routers that block access to "rogue websites." DRM was pioneered by Cable TV and its cousin, satellite (see: HBO). They want the same thing to happen on the Internet, which means they need to recreate the entire network to better suit that purpose.
The laws will be changed so that only the police are allowed to fly surveillance drones, which will be defined so broadly that every model aircraft enthusiast will be committing a felony.
Congrats, you just advocated the destruction of police property. I suspect that anyone who shoots down or otherwise disables one of these drones will be arrested and imprisoned. Even if you just build a fancy laser system that tracks that drone and tries to overwhelm its camera with laser light, you will probably be convicted of a felony.
Well, now you can rest assured that people who have feral hemp on their land will be arrested and imprisoned without your house shaking in the process! Be glad, citizen, that the loss of your rights no longer has to be shoved in your face!
And if it's just patrolling, how is that any different than a cop walking his beat?
Do cops frequently flap their wings and fly through the air when they are out on patrol? This is yet another increase in the power of the police, at a time when the United States imprisons more people than any country in the entire world. This is not a question of FUD, it is a matter of whether or not giving the police even more power is a wise thing to do right now; those of us who still desperately cling to the idea that we have rights would say that no, this is not a good time for the police to be getting more power.
Well, the easiest way to show you are not would be to provide us with some sort of evidence that such laws have been passed before. Let me give you a hand with that:
Sometimes, at home, without being paid for it, I even read computer books. Weirdly enough, I like Knuth. I know, I'm a sick, sick man, etc etc.
Two things:
Right there with you, brother! I am actually looking forward to TAoCP 4B.
Nobody is requiring you to do this; if you wanted to stop and take a nap, or switch from reading to vegging out with Youtube, or just go do whatever else, it would be perfectly fine. The point here is that when you are home, you are theoretically free from your work obligations; in some cases, this is not true e.g. you might be on call for something, in which case I would argue your employee should provide you with a cell phone or radio of some sort by which to reach you. It might just be that I have a different take on the philosophy of employment.
My local HR was freaked out about my temporary lack of a landline
They need to reach you instantly, at any hour of the day? Then they need to buy you a cell phone. Maybe you spent the past few nights at your new girlfriend's house, or you had to accompany your spouse to a funeral, or you decided to spend a few hours walking along the beach to center yourself.
Ended up listing my cellphone as both home and cellphone
So you are basically paying by the minute when your employer calls you. Yes, I know modern cell phone plans sell you blocks of hundreds or thousands of minutes, but the point here is that you are paying to make yourself available to your employer when you are not even at your office/job site. It may be rude to say this, but this is not really a situation that you should be in.
The problem is that there is undoubtedly someone at your job who does not feel that way, and who is willing to buy their own equipment -- and then they are going to get promoted while you are being laid off. This assumes, of course, that you are not a member of union or that if you are in a union the union does not have the backbone needed to stand up to your employer, which I think is a fair assumption in this day and age.
Though perhaps it would allow the Slashdot admins to build a site that works
By my recollection, we had such a site just a few years ago. Somehow, we were not dealing with a bunch of 503 errors, javascript issues, and other failures that make the new/. a pain in the ass to use. I guess all that code was deleted or something...
People in Kazakhstan are reading the Washington Post? Has it occurred to you that that Kazakh government is more concerned about what its own citizens know than about what the citizens of other countries know?
No because those laws were only supposed to apply to individuals. The courts try to figure out the intent of Congress when they interpret these laws, and it is pretty clear that the intent of Congress was to punish anyone who does not fit the "passive consumer" mold. Basically, if you are an individual, you are supposed to buy everything, and if you are a corporation the law protects you from individuals who try to save money by "gaming" the system.
This shit is why there should be penalties for abuse
No, because that puts the burden on the website operators or the users. Why should copyright holders get to shortcut the legal system with the takedown notice procedure? Let them go to court, prove to the court that they have a case, and get a court order. If the courts think the MPAA is overburdening them, overreaching, etc., let them deny the court order and demand that the MPAA pay court fees for wasting the court's time.
There are some good sections of the DMCA -- safe harbor provisions, specific protections for researchers, etc. Some good sections, but then there are the sections that need to be repealed as soon as humanly possible. The anti-circumvention provisions are nothing more than a hand-out to the copyright lobby, the blurring of software and hardware implementations severely restrict an entire class of otherwise protected speech, and the take-down-notice procedure has been widely abused.
In all, no DMCA would have been better -- at least the public would have seen just how out-of-control copyright has become when their favorite websites were driven out of business by lawsuits. Right now the public is shielded from the consequences of overly-broad copyright -- only the hackers and intellectuals who do not fit the mold suffer. If we could keep only the good parts of the DMCA and get rid of the bad, that would be ideal -- yet without broad public support, that will never happen, and as long as it is only the hackers who suffer, there will never be such support.
If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?
If I had to make a decision on matters that I have no expertise in, I would get the opinion of a panel of experts. Our politicians are not even going that far -- they are dismissing the need for a panel of experts while admitting that they have no clue about the technical matters they are voting on. It is funny when they try to paraphrase expert testimony and get it wrong; it is not funny when they do not bother to listen to expert testimony because their real goal is to give a hand-out to some industry.
I expect them to call in experts when it comes to matters they are unfamiliar with. From TFA:
...Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting âoeIâ(TM)m not a nerdâ before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didnâ(TM)t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts.
"Don't let the Internet turn into a fancy cable TV system"
When I was a kid, people spoke of "illegal cable" -- modified set-top boxes that allowed them to receive cable TV without paying, or to receive premium channels without paying. Some of the earliest DRM systems were designed to prevent people from accessing cable TV channels and satellite broadcasts without paying. The entire cable TV system is the antithesis of the PC and Internet revolutions: centralized control over users and their actions, permission required to do anything, and extra fees left and right.
Now the mainstream media wants to turn the Internet into the same sort of system: centralized control, DRM, fees, and users being pigeonholed as passive consumers of everything. At issue with net neutrality is whether or not websites should be treated like "channels," and forced to negotiate with ISPs for the right to transmit over the ISPs' networks. At issue with SOPA is whether or not there should be a central authority that is allowed to disconnect systems from the network when those systems do not follow the rules imposed by the central authority.
Thus demonstrating one of the most important differences between a PC and a smartphone: you can upgrade your PC's OS on your own, without having to buy a new PC, without having to wait for your PC or OS vendor to do it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I do, as do some of my contacts. It is rare, yes, but not unheard of. It is also the case that a lot of businesses use email encryption (S/MIME or IBE, usually not PGP).
If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns.
The problem is that less than 0.05% of the public cares about SOPA or PIPA. Most people just want to watch The Jersey Shore, football, etc., and then post about it on Facebook. They will not overthrow the government as long as they can still get their cheap entertainment. They will not even get their magazines and clips loaded.
You know why IPv6 is taking so long to roll out? It benefits the users, that's why. ISPs could start deploying NAT to home users, who are "not supposed" to be running servers anyway.
Do you really think Time Warner or Comcast would waste any time deploying the equipment needed to follow SOPA or PIPA? If it means giving everyone a new cable modem, you bet that everyone will get new cable modems. A lot of ISPs would benefit from SOPA and PIPA, because they also own TV channels and other businesses that benefit from increased copyright enforcement.
They want the same thing they already have with the cable TV system: a neat little topology where consumers are just endpoints that passively receive entertainment (for a fee), and the powerful network operators and media executives get to decide what people are allowed to see.
The whole point is to break the Internet! The mainstream media hates the Internet, because people can be more than just passive consumers of entertainment and products. SOPA and PIPA are just one more step in a long chain of attacks on the philosophy that underlies the very architecture of the Internet.
For the past few years, the RIAA and MPAA have been working hard to undermine and destroy peer-to-peer networking on the Internet, because it does not fit into the distribution model they are comfortable with. In the view of the mainstream media, the corporations and the politicians that support them, people are supposed to pay for things, and they are not supposed to assist in the distribution chain unless they are being paid to do so. The idea that computing resources or communication resources can be shared is antithetical to the old media barons, because they want to be the center of the universal. To them, distribution costs are paid for by copyright holders, who recoup those costs by selling copies of entertainment in its various forms.
What they want, in other words, is the Cable TV system. They like the way that cable works -- a relatively small number of head ends that distribute the entertainment, which can easily be policed for violations. Set-top boxes are designed to prevent users from stepping outside the bounds of what the copyright holders demand. Restrictions on distribution can be negotiated with a small number of entities that control the entire network.
They want to break the Internet, so that they can rebuild it. They want a star architecture for the network. They want to routers that block access to "rogue websites." DRM was pioneered by Cable TV and its cousin, satellite (see: HBO). They want the same thing to happen on the Internet, which means they need to recreate the entire network to better suit that purpose.
The laws will be changed so that only the police are allowed to fly surveillance drones, which will be defined so broadly that every model aircraft enthusiast will be committing a felony.
Congrats, you just advocated the destruction of police property. I suspect that anyone who shoots down or otherwise disables one of these drones will be arrested and imprisoned. Even if you just build a fancy laser system that tracks that drone and tries to overwhelm its camera with laser light, you will probably be convicted of a felony.
Well, now you can rest assured that people who have feral hemp on their land will be arrested and imprisoned without your house shaking in the process! Be glad, citizen, that the loss of your rights no longer has to be shoved in your face!
And if it's just patrolling, how is that any different than a cop walking his beat?
Do cops frequently flap their wings and fly through the air when they are out on patrol? This is yet another increase in the power of the police, at a time when the United States imprisons more people than any country in the entire world. This is not a question of FUD, it is a matter of whether or not giving the police even more power is a wise thing to do right now; those of us who still desperately cling to the idea that we have rights would say that no, this is not a good time for the police to be getting more power.
perhaps I'm just a cynical bastard.
Well, the easiest way to show you are not would be to provide us with some sort of evidence that such laws have been passed before. Let me give you a hand with that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23cnceavesdropping.html?pagewanted=all
Sometimes, at home, without being paid for it, I even read computer books. Weirdly enough, I like Knuth. I know, I'm a sick, sick man, etc etc.
Two things:
My local HR was freaked out about my temporary lack of a landline
They need to reach you instantly, at any hour of the day? Then they need to buy you a cell phone. Maybe you spent the past few nights at your new girlfriend's house, or you had to accompany your spouse to a funeral, or you decided to spend a few hours walking along the beach to center yourself.
Ended up listing my cellphone as both home and cellphone
So you are basically paying by the minute when your employer calls you. Yes, I know modern cell phone plans sell you blocks of hundreds or thousands of minutes, but the point here is that you are paying to make yourself available to your employer when you are not even at your office/job site. It may be rude to say this, but this is not really a situation that you should be in.
The problem is that there is undoubtedly someone at your job who does not feel that way, and who is willing to buy their own equipment -- and then they are going to get promoted while you are being laid off. This assumes, of course, that you are not a member of union or that if you are in a union the union does not have the backbone needed to stand up to your employer, which I think is a fair assumption in this day and age.
Though perhaps it would allow the Slashdot admins to build a site that works
By my recollection, we had such a site just a few years ago. Somehow, we were not dealing with a bunch of 503 errors, javascript issues, and other failures that make the new /. a pain in the ass to use. I guess all that code was deleted or something...
FTFY.
Really, why buy equipment for your employees when you can just make them buy it on their own?
People in Kazakhstan are reading the Washington Post? Has it occurred to you that that Kazakh government is more concerned about what its own citizens know than about what the citizens of other countries know?
No because those laws were only supposed to apply to individuals. The courts try to figure out the intent of Congress when they interpret these laws, and it is pretty clear that the intent of Congress was to punish anyone who does not fit the "passive consumer" mold. Basically, if you are an individual, you are supposed to buy everything, and if you are a corporation the law protects you from individuals who try to save money by "gaming" the system.
This shit is why there should be penalties for abuse
No, because that puts the burden on the website operators or the users. Why should copyright holders get to shortcut the legal system with the takedown notice procedure? Let them go to court, prove to the court that they have a case, and get a court order. If the courts think the MPAA is overburdening them, overreaching, etc., let them deny the court order and demand that the MPAA pay court fees for wasting the court's time.
There are some good sections of the DMCA -- safe harbor provisions, specific protections for researchers, etc. Some good sections, but then there are the sections that need to be repealed as soon as humanly possible. The anti-circumvention provisions are nothing more than a hand-out to the copyright lobby, the blurring of software and hardware implementations severely restrict an entire class of otherwise protected speech, and the take-down-notice procedure has been widely abused.
In all, no DMCA would have been better -- at least the public would have seen just how out-of-control copyright has become when their favorite websites were driven out of business by lawsuits. Right now the public is shielded from the consequences of overly-broad copyright -- only the hackers and intellectuals who do not fit the mold suffer. If we could keep only the good parts of the DMCA and get rid of the bad, that would be ideal -- yet without broad public support, that will never happen, and as long as it is only the hackers who suffer, there will never be such support.
Perhaps this has something to do with it:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/01/14/2226219/obama-appointee-sunstein-favors-infiltrating-online-groups
If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?
If I had to make a decision on matters that I have no expertise in, I would get the opinion of a panel of experts. Our politicians are not even going that far -- they are dismissing the need for a panel of experts while admitting that they have no clue about the technical matters they are voting on. It is funny when they try to paraphrase expert testimony and get it wrong; it is not funny when they do not bother to listen to expert testimony because their real goal is to give a hand-out to some industry.
...Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting âoeIâ(TM)m not a nerdâ before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didnâ(TM)t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts.
I would phrase it more like this:
"Don't let the Internet turn into a fancy cable TV system"
When I was a kid, people spoke of "illegal cable" -- modified set-top boxes that allowed them to receive cable TV without paying, or to receive premium channels without paying. Some of the earliest DRM systems were designed to prevent people from accessing cable TV channels and satellite broadcasts without paying. The entire cable TV system is the antithesis of the PC and Internet revolutions: centralized control over users and their actions, permission required to do anything, and extra fees left and right.
Now the mainstream media wants to turn the Internet into the same sort of system: centralized control, DRM, fees, and users being pigeonholed as passive consumers of everything. At issue with net neutrality is whether or not websites should be treated like "channels," and forced to negotiate with ISPs for the right to transmit over the ISPs' networks. At issue with SOPA is whether or not there should be a central authority that is allowed to disconnect systems from the network when those systems do not follow the rules imposed by the central authority.
What? Slashdot users agree on something?!
* betterunixthanunix has entered his bunker
Thus demonstrating one of the most important differences between a PC and a smartphone: you can upgrade your PC's OS on your own, without having to buy a new PC, without having to wait for your PC or OS vendor to do it for you.