Those god damn Republicans continuing to erode our rights like this, first Bush and the Patriot Act and now . . . what? They're Democrats? Oh, well then, carry on.
Show me one person saying this is fine due to their Democrat affiliation?
If you can't remember a simple file path, how can you remember the start menu hierarchy? It's the exact same thing really, the start menu hierarchy is even implemented as a directory tree. Finding things in Start->Programs is exactly the same problem as finding things in c:/programs/.
No, it isn't. The whole point of the start menu when properly organised is that it's based on human logic rather than the arbitrary placement of files on a hard disk. So for example I might have no idea where I installed Firefox, but I know that if I go start->internet it's likely that the link will be in that part of the start menu.
And when it comes to sport, you should be able to pay for a particular league or match only at a proportionally reduced price. Preferally streamed live in HD.
Unless it's a EULA of course:
In that example, there are several positive steps taken - paying for the product in question, and then proceeding to install and use the product rather than return it.
Although IANAL, I am just a bastard!
YANAL, indeed.
You can't form a contract by simply sending someone a unilateral set of terms and relying on their silence to confirm their assent to it.
...which contain detailed prophecies about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The criticism against the Bible used to be that books like Isaiah contained way too much details about Jesus' death especially that the critics used to say "Isaiah must have been written/altered after Jesus of Nazareth came about because Isaiah couldn't have predicted all these details!". However, the dating of the DSS prove that the book of Isaiah was written at least before BC100 and had not been altered since.
So, applying Occam's razor, we conclude that Jesus never existed and the "prophecies" were transposed into "events which happened" by later writers.
I mean, on your case, you have:
100BC - detailed "prophecies" about this guy and what's going to happen to him
0 - no actual historical evidence of anything at all to do with "Jesus"
100AD - detailed account of how the "prophecies" all came true, PS please join my cult
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
Anyway, the point is that robot vs robot is war by proxy. Without the violence, the bloodshed, the impetus to end the war just won't be the same. They'll drag on for longer and longer, and resolution will be even less certain than it is today. I'm not sure that's necessarily such a good thing.
Isn't the problem with this really that robot v robot doesn't actually resolve anything? I.e., one side will simply destroy the other side's robots eventually, but then what happens? Just because their robots are gone, doesn't mean the loser of that part of the war simply surrenders. Instead the humans then pick up guns and fight the remaining robots/other humans from the other side.
E.g. if China is invading your homeland, and their robots beat your robots, does your homeland just surrender after the robot phase? I think not. For the same reasons that wars aren't decided by cricket matches or playing poker, they won't be decided by robots blowing each other up. War, by its nature and implications, will ultimately still require the killing of humans.
I suppose one plausible scenario is that robots get so good that once your robots kill the other robots, it would be pointless for the enemy humans to resist further (i.e. or they'll just be massacred by your death drones and T-800s). I find it hard to imagine that though.
And of course behind all of this, there'll still be nukes. No major power is going to start a serious war with any other major power while the possibility of being nuked remains. Proxy wars in unstable/valuable regions will remain the norm.
Yeah, Slashdot is only interesting when there's a story about some random unpopular Linux distro getting a minor update every 12 hours, not when there are stories about the OS used by hundreds of millions of people around the world!
This is where you went off the rails and into space
You do not need a "specific piece of software" to play AAC files. I can play them on a Zune...
Not to play, to buy. Can I BUY these files without itunes and an account with Apple? No, I can't.
For music, Apple is the company that finally ended DRM. For that you should thank and support them, not curse them.
So, I guess I can go to itunes.com, pay on-line and download DRM-free music files to whatever device I'm using at my leisure?
No? What's that you say, I must be running a copy of a specific piece of software on my machine and logged in to Apple's on-line service before I can buy anything? And it will remain perpetually linked to my account, which I will always need itunes to access? And Apple can update itunes at their leisure to break compatibility with non-approved devices?* And they price discriminate by detecting your region?
Sound like DRM to me. Call me when I can download high quality MP3/FLAC from a website without running itunes.
* yes, they actually do this
Oh and: a recording creates an independent record of a conversation. You can trust the other person as much as you like, but that record exists beyond their mind and can, and in some cases will, be obtained by third parties who were not part of the original implied agreement about the level of privacy of the conversation.
I mean, what if your confidant dies? Is arrested themself? Has their house burgled? Loses the recording? Forgets about it? Stores it in the fricking all-singing all-dancing data cloud?
A) In 38 states your conversations can be secretly recorded without your knowledge. Humanity has not crumbled under the weight.
A bit less privacy wouldn't cause society to crumble but would still be a bad thing. Ref: Soviet Union.
B) "Privacy does not stop at one individual". Correct, but it requires the consent of all of those people to maintain the privacy. You are trusting the other party to not repeat what you said, therefore you trust they won't use the recordings.
Yes, but also because it creates the inherent doubt of "my word against yours". Anyone can claim that something was said, a recording proves it with a much, much higher degree of reliability.
C) "You might tell someone something off-the-record in a conversation which you would never put in writing." Security via obscurity. If you don't want anyone to know you think it, don't write it or speak it.
...or just don't let them record it and tell them in person. Which is a tried and true technique used by people since, I would guess, writing was invented. What if I do want them to know what I think, but I don't want them to record it and republish it? Would it be ok with you if I am concerned about secret recording in that situation?
D) "What is the problem with simply telling someone you are going to record them?" Because in interactions with people with authority, they can use this to force you to stop doing so. See my original post. The right to record conversations you are a party to is a defensive one.
Since when is there a positive "right" to record conversations you are a party to? You seem to have a lust for entrapment - presumably you would enjoy living in a panopticon-type society where everyone records everyone else. Personally, I prefer a society where people can't covertly record one another in private interactions.
At the end of the day, the prohibition on 2nd party recording is to protect liars, cheats and thieves by removing the ability to accurately capture evidence of the conversation one was a party to and does nothing for privacy.
Yes, liars, cheats. Confiders. Penitants. Those seeking advice. Those seeking support. Those seeking comfort. Whistleblowers. People engaging in conduct which, while not wrong, would be judged by many. Those trying to show empathy or build camaraderie.
To be honest, your views on all this seem quite sociopathic to me. Human interaction is built on trust. Secret recording of conversations utterly destroys the scope for trust.
It is of course a totally different question as to whether police should be subject to secret or open recording. I happen to think that so long as they are acting as instruments of the state, they should be subject to recording. But private citizens should not without their informed consent.
So for an example, if party A has a conversation with B, A can't record it because B supposedly has a REP privacy right yet A has heard everything B said. They were having a conversation for christ's sake. B gave up their privacy to the statements once they engaged in said conversation. So A can detail the conversation to whomever will listen but if B denies what was said or that the conversation even took place, it becomes a he said, she said situation. Now, who does this protect? It protects B. It protects liars, cheats and thieves. Because it allows them to lie about what took place.
Interesting comments although I disagree with the above. It is perfectly reasonable to not want part of a conversation to be recorded without your knowledge or consent. Privacy does not stop at one individual - a conversation between two people can also be private.
I also think you have an unrealistic view of human relationships if you think that the constant threat of secret recording wouldn't make our interactions awkward at best, and unmanageable at worst.
For example, you might in a private conversation with another person choose to express views which are unpopular, or offensive, or in some other way not views you would choose to express to a larger audience. You might tell someone something off-the-record in a conversation which you would never put in writing. A person secretly recording you takes away your right to choose your audience if they then republish the recording.
Look at in on the flipside. What is the problem with simply telling someone you are going to record them? Then they may choose how to proceed, instead of you misleading them (because most humans assume that they are NOT being recorded at all times, so your non-disclosure is misleading).
The author is also engaging in time compression with respect to history.
How can you write an article about how ideas are dead when we are quite literally in the middle of the biggest technological revolutions in human history? First, computers and the internet. Second, biomedical and biotech.
Day to day it looks like there are "no good ideas" blah blah - but step back even to the decade scale and we are in the middle of an explosion of amazing ideas.
Australia has working, cheap healthcare yet mysteriously we are not required to carry around compulsory ID cards.
The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them. -- Nicolaides
