Chelleliberty's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the things-unseen dept

Unintended Consequences

My favorite posts from this week are definitely the ones highlighting 'things unseen'. Many people have been raised on the idea that, for any problem that exists, there must exist some perfect law that the government can create to solve it; and, further, that our governments exist solely to find these laws and bring them into force for no other reason than to benefit the citizenry. Never mind that many of these problems were created by bad laws in the first place: this time perfection will be had and everything will be fixed, as if by magic.

Security through Inanity

For instance, why leave e-security up to companies that will just give up their customers' private information willy-nilly due to the otherwise high costs of protecting it? Certainly, the government will do better than the selfish corporations who clearly have no incentive to be secure! (Because, of course, the silly populace will still flock to sites that are known for constantly turning their customers into victims.) Well, South Korea knows better, and made sure that their citizens were protected.

Well, at least protected from using a free/libre OS like GNU/Linux for e-commerce (or indeed any OS other than Windows) since that wouldn't make any sense, would it? I mean, Microsoft is just a big, evil, monopolistic organization, so clearly there's no better way to protect people from them than to give them a de facto monopoly on the browsers that people use, as well as the websites that sell them stuff. Oh, and even on non-commerce sites because (due to the fact that IE is required to do any sort of shopping online) most average users will just end up using IE for everything.

Imitation: the Sincerest Form of Getting Sued

Few deny that Apple has made some of the more aesthetically pleasing devices that end up in people's hands these days, and, certainly, not allowing people to simply copy their designs should lead to more desirable designs from their competitors. And you don't have to look any further than the Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone to see how well this works in practice. Oh, look at those non-black borders, the slightly asymmetrical shape, and that glorious blobbiness!

Yes, this is clearly a demonstration of how important it is to allow Apple to protect the small team with minimal imagination enormous creativity and investment necessary to come up with a rectangular device with a screen and black borders; and how much innovation the public as a whole gained by forcing another manufacturer to ever-so-slightly deviate from what is an immensely obvious and easier-to-produce innovative design. After several iterations of this method, we can certainly expect to see more awesomeness! Imagine, some day we may have phones shaped like the Mandelbrot set turtle, all because we have laws to lead us.

(Hey, the e-Turtle Phone is gonna be big! Hit me up if you want to invest.)

Win One for the Future

And who could forget the ill-fated SOPA and PIPA that, if passed, would have provided "tools" for the government to "use" to protect us from stuff, since certainly it doesn't already have the authority or power to do what it needs to do to protect big media's our interests. So, fortunately, we now have CISPA in the works, since we all know that absolutely nothing could ever possibly go wrong with this law. Sure, privacy was great and all, but... Pirates! Child Porn! ANARCHISTS! Sometimes you gotta kill a few dolphins to make tuna salad, y'know what I mean? It's not like, as a whole, folks aren't already giving most of their privacy away anyway, via Facebook and other sites. So it's just pretty much admitting to the inevitable anyway, right?

Final Dirt

I unfortunately don't see a quick fix here. The governments and corporate interests will continue to behave badly, and the rest of us will likely find little enough marginal utility in protesting whatever the latest, greatest law is that we won't have the collective power to stop it, much less the power to reverse already long-standing law and precedent. (Well, unless we can find a way to have as much impact on the average citizen as when Wikipedia supported the protests against SOPA.)

But my guess is that, as happened during SOPA/PIPA, government will overplay its hand. The youth and other technically-savvy folks can see through the BS better than the average politician can understand what makes us tick. We've already been seeing an uptick in support for radical ideas of liberty which seemed practically dead in the 1990's and early 2000's, and I think the SOPA protests were a great initial volley in the fight to bring back some sense to things.

One way or another, the multitude of poor decisions being made are unsustainable, and on the day that we do collectively take action, I think a lot of politicians are going to find the real meaning of unintended consequences... right before they start to look for another job.

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  • identicon
    Pat, 12 May 2012 @ 12:12pm

    Over Ripe

    LOL, you had me laughing the pee right out of me. Overly ripe in judgement on all fronts. Wanna play whack-a-mole. LOL

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    justok (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 5:11pm

    South Korea is going to have an easy time once Windows 8 comes out.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      TtfnJohn (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 8:56am

      Re:

      We're all gonna have such an easy time of it when Win8 comes out. To protect us, of course, it will be able to stop us from installing Linux or BSD, say, so we can't dual boot something dangerous.

      Like magic all our fones will suddenly run Win8 instead of those apostate systems like iOS or Android which is really Linux in disguise which didn't take the wizards at MS long to figure out. Probably because it actually worked.

      Not only are there magical perfect laws to protect us which legislatures churn out like popcorn because they're so good at it there are also perfect companies out there like Microsoft and Facebook selflessly dedicated to protect us from ourselves.

      Here endeth the lesson. ;-)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Terry Hancock (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 7:39pm

    Mandelbrot Turtle Phone

    Hey! Don't tease me, man. The Mandelbrot Turtle thing could work! I want a Mandelbrot Turtle Phone! :-D

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      chelleliberty (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 10:08pm

      Re: Mandelbrot Turtle Phone

      I am currently working on a patent for a device to prevent the massive palm injuries this is bound to cause but I'll let you know when the website is set up.

      And it's *e*-Turtle Phone, since of course, Turtle Phone would be untrademarkable and oh how I just love my intellectual property. ;)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      TtfnJohn (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 8:58am

      Re: Mandelbrot Turtle Phone

      I wanna have a dolphin and tuna sandwich shaped phone, mommy! Plllllllleeeeeeeassssseeeeee!

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        chelleliberty (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 6:55pm

        Re: Re: Mandelbrot Turtle Phone

        I'm afraid the tuna-sandwich-shaped phone is out, as it is far too rectangular (I have no doubt they will argue that square=rectangle therefore they have that locked down, too) to avoid the inevitable lawsuits.

        Dolphin shaped, though, now there's a thought. :)

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 May 2012 @ 10:46pm

    Don't count out the politicians just yet

    Politicians are a resiliant lot. No one can better shift from moral outrage to a pity inducing whine-fest like a politician. Other than a 5 year old at least. When the winds of change shift, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the congress-critters fall all over themselves jockeying to the front of whatever pack that can lead another Occupy movement.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      chelleliberty (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 6:57pm

      Re: Don't count out the politicians just yet

      Ugh, well, I do see the pattern there, but eventually people aren't gonna fall for it anymore right? Complete currency collapse, increasing police state until they can't afford it, eventually it's bound to get through to people that we need some other way, right? Right? :)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Mr. Oizo, 12 May 2012 @ 11:59pm

    Porbably the most coherent summary post so far

    subject says it all, but if you want to comment go ahead.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Suzanne Richichi, 13 May 2012 @ 8:59am

    I want

    I want a e-dolphin phone! Can you design one just for me?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      chelleliberty (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 6:56pm

      Re: I want

      Yes, although if it's just for you I'll need to know what customizations you need, as we now have two requests for an e-dolphin phone. :D

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    anderson, 16 Jul 2012 @ 2:38am

    we realized is that despite the fact that almost all Expert Authors are good, decent human Cute Birthday Status beings, many are doing things in their articles that they would never dream of doing in the real world. Their reaction when confronted with this fact is almost always one of confusion.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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