Techdirt has repeatedly criticized proposals for laws against bullying in schools, particularly of the cyber- variety, on the premise that the proposed penalties would ruin the bullies' lives. Well, this is what happens when bullies do not "get their lives ruined." They grow up learning that they can get away with it. As the branch bends, so grows the tree.
The ironic thing about it, though, is the way adult bullying leads to lives literally, not hyperbolically, being ruined. Businesses driven out of business by vicious monopolists. Life-saving medicines being priced at ridiculously unaffordable rates. Wives and children beaten and abused by a person who they should be able to trust absolutely. Police brutality. This is what happens when bullies grow up without being straightened out.
Given the choice between "ruining the life of" a young thug, or letting the young thug grow into an adult thug who's going to ruin many lives--and let's not delude ourselves into thinking that's not exactly what is at stake--the choice is obvious.
Flying cars will never be a thing until, at the very least, autonomous cars are a thing.
Don't believe me? Just try driving somewhere. Look around and see just how many idiot drivers there are out there who can't handle driving in 2 dimensions. Anyone who wants to give them a third dimension to drive recklessly in is someone whose brain is not braining properly.
Not to ignore the fact that it's a major company that should know better, the Government should have double checked if there was redundancy too.
...and then you end up with a fun balancing act. The more copies of your data that exist, and the more places they exist in, the more likely it is that one of these copies will be the subject of a data breach at some point. When dealing with sensitive information, this is something that has to be taken into account.
I have to wonder about this. I'm not an IP lawyer, but it sure seems to me that what a person doesn't have can't be taken away from them.
In other words, if Dupont is not the copyright holder (because Ripoff Report is) then a court order transferring his copyright ownership of the post in question to a third party means absolutely nothing because he has no ownership to transfer, which helps to make the post more censorship-resistant.
How is this a bad thing? (Bearing in mind that people don't write reports like this for commercial purposes, so taking away his copyright interest on something he was never going to make money on doesn't harm him in any way anyway.)
In an era where storage is insanely cheap and the warning to schedule regular backups has been ringing in the ears of computer users for more than four decades, there's seemingly no explanation for the following:
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Making a backup is easy; restoring it afterwards is not always so easy, for a variety of technical reasons. Horror stories about losing everything, thinking you had it backed up, and then not being able to restore from backups abound.
But this sort of math has a low probability of arriving at the correct conclusion. Hence, the FBI also points out that location disclosure would violate the privacy of everyone in the general vicinity.
That actually makes perfect sense. I mean, if the FBI was investigating my next-door neighbor, I certainly wouldn't want someone looking at the data, jumping to the wrong conclusion, and thinking the Feds were trying to bust me!
As we noted in our short post on it, there was a legal question about whether or not its illegal to tell people how to commit suicide online.
Why is this even a thing? I mean, you hear about people committing suicide in various ways all the time. I bet anyone who makes watching TV or movies even an occasional practice already knows a half dozen essentially foolproof ways to kill themselves anyway. Should people who write/direct/produce/brodacast such works be arrested?
As discussed a year ago, some in the EU Commission are all for creating an EU-wide snippet tax,
...and by all appearances, the EU is on the verge of becoming significantly smaller as multiple nations are looking to leave it in the near future, and at least one has a pretty good chance of doing so successfully. So this may not be as big of a problem as it sounds at first.
If I told you that I drove by an elementary school about 4-6 times one day someone would call me a pedo.
I wouldn't. I used to live about a mile from the local elementary school, and it was located on a main road in between my place and downtown. On a busy day if you're running errands there'd be nothing at all weird or unreasonable about driving past it multiple times, and I'd hope people would be able to consider such possibilities before jumping to ridiculous conclusions.
Meh. Replace "Democrat" with "Republican" and "socialism" with "fascism" and the entire rant, word-for-word, would be equally valid, which makes it not particularly valuable as a tool of persuasive argument IMO.
Many of the things Sarah mentioned that credit agencies used to collect are irrelevant, but saying "they would have stuff about whether you drank or gambled," that makes me think "well of course!" It's well-known that there's a strong correlation between a problem with an addiction, whether it be to a drug or to gambling, and problems with handling money, because you'll frequently end up throwing away money to feed the addiction. So why not track this?
WRT "decentralized identity", I think the thing that the co-host is missing out on is that centralized identity does more than simply associate a person with a unique identity; it performs the equally-important converse operation of associating an identity with a unique person. He mentioned Reddit; well, just as an example, I have 5 different Reddit accounts that I use for various different purposes, to more easily compartmentalize the different things I use Reddit for. That's just fine for Reddit--it's a positive feature on a service like that--but for something like personal identity, having a person being able to have multiple personal identities is a bug, not a feature.
Also, Sarah's absolutely right about Bitcoin. The system has been plagued by fraud and dysfunction almost from day 1. At the moment, the cost in energy to run the computations necessary to mine 1 Bitcoin is greater than the value of 1 Bitcoin. The developers behind Bitcoin want to try to fix things, but they can't because too much of the Bitcoin network's processing power is run by a small handful of Chinese syndicates, and they don't want the system to be fixed. (So much for a "decentralized" system!)
It's a bit depressing to see that (the Democratic portion of) the American people was dumb enough to nominate a Clinton again. I would blame it on voters too young to remember the neverending scandal that was the first Clinton administration, except that polls indicate that they overwhelmingly voted for Bernie Sanders! So I guess there are just a lot of mature people out there with really poor memories...
The Presidential election could similarly culminate in a total dismantling of the current FCC and a restrocking of the agency with ISP-allies eager to roll back the protections
If you prefer a classic American muscle car, you can get 95% of the parts for a 1964-66 Ford Mustang straight from Ford. You could build a classic Mustang on your own assembly line if you wanted, but it wouldn't be cheap
Judge Grimes' opinion patiently lays out its reasoning, citing that Grimes' views on whether nutrition is removed by microwaving food was not actually all that clear at the time the film was produced,
His given name was Cassius Clay. He legally changed it to a stereotypical Arabic name (despite not being Arabic) after joining a radical Islamist hate group, the Nation of Islam.
What part of any of those facts makes a person who refers to his original name a "racist peace of garbage"?
On the post: Highly-Dubious Spiritualist Making Highly-Dubious Claims Loses Highly-Dubious Defamation Lawsuit Against Critic
On the post: Harrisburg, PA Mayor Picks And Chooses Who The 'Real' Journalists Are
This feels like a typo to me. It feels like it should say "When asked if even hate speech should be considered free speech..."
Also, "hoarded" is properly spelled with an A. "Horded" describes what happens to those in the path of a barbarian army.
On the post: Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Allow Researchers To Check E-Voting Software
Re:
On the post: Vice Media Settles With Indie Band ViceVersa, Showing That Trademark Bullying Totally Works
Yes, because that's what they learned as kids.
Techdirt has repeatedly criticized proposals for laws against bullying in schools, particularly of the cyber- variety, on the premise that the proposed penalties would ruin the bullies' lives. Well, this is what happens when bullies do not "get their lives ruined." They grow up learning that they can get away with it. As the branch bends, so grows the tree.
The ironic thing about it, though, is the way adult bullying leads to lives literally, not hyperbolically, being ruined. Businesses driven out of business by vicious monopolists. Life-saving medicines being priced at ridiculously unaffordable rates. Wives and children beaten and abused by a person who they should be able to trust absolutely. Police brutality. This is what happens when bullies grow up without being straightened out.
Given the choice between "ruining the life of" a young thug, or letting the young thug grow into an adult thug who's going to ruin many lives--and let's not delude ourselves into thinking that's not exactly what is at stake--the choice is obvious.
On the post: DailyDirt: Flying Around Everywhere..?
Don't believe me? Just try driving somewhere. Look around and see just how many idiot drivers there are out there who can't handle driving in 2 dimensions. Anyone who wants to give them a third dimension to drive recklessly in is someone whose brain is not braining properly.
On the post: Air Force, Lockheed Martin Combine Forces To 'Lose' 100,000 Inspector General Investigations
Re:
...and then you end up with a fun balancing act. The more copies of your data that exist, and the more places they exist in, the more likely it is that one of these copies will be the subject of a data breach at some point. When dealing with sensitive information, this is something that has to be taken into account.
On the post: EFF, Public Citizen Enter Legal Battle That Started With Defamation But Is Somehow Now All About Copyright
In other words, if Dupont is not the copyright holder (because Ripoff Report is) then a court order transferring his copyright ownership of the post in question to a third party means absolutely nothing because he has no ownership to transfer, which helps to make the post more censorship-resistant.
How is this a bad thing? (Bearing in mind that people don't write reports like this for commercial purposes, so taking away his copyright interest on something he was never going to make money on doesn't harm him in any way anyway.)
On the post: Air Force, Lockheed Martin Combine Forces To 'Lose' 100,000 Inspector General Investigations
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Making a backup is easy; restoring it afterwards is not always so easy, for a variety of technical reasons. Horror stories about losing everything, thinking you had it backed up, and then not being able to restore from backups abound.
On the post: FBI Sues To Block Disclosure Of Surveillance Cameras Locations Because It Would Violate The Privacy Of Those Surveilled
That actually makes perfect sense. I mean, if the FBI was investigating my next-door neighbor, I certainly wouldn't want someone looking at the data, jumping to the wrong conclusion, and thinking the Feds were trying to bust me!
On the post: Google's Arbitrary Morality Police Threaten Us Yet Again; Media Sites Probably Shouldn't Use Google Ads
Why is this even a thing? I mean, you hear about people committing suicide in various ways all the time. I bet anyone who makes watching TV or movies even an occasional practice already knows a half dozen essentially foolproof ways to kill themselves anyway. Should people who write/direct/produce/brodacast such works be arrested?
On the post: Europe Is About To Create A Link Tax: Time To Speak Out Against It
...and by all appearances, the EU is on the verge of becoming significantly smaller as multiple nations are looking to leave it in the near future, and at least one has a pretty good chance of doing so successfully. So this may not be as big of a problem as it sounds at first.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 77: The Link Between Credit And Surveillance
Re: Re:
I wouldn't. I used to live about a mile from the local elementary school, and it was located on a main road in between my place and downtown. On a busy day if you're running errands there'd be nothing at all weird or unreasonable about driving past it multiple times, and I'd hope people would be able to consider such possibilities before jumping to ridiculous conclusions.
On the post: Hillary Clinton's Paperback Memoir Deletes Inconvenient Support Of TPP That Was In The Hard Cover Version
Re: Re: She's a Clinton. What did you expect?
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 77: The Link Between Credit And Surveillance
WRT "decentralized identity", I think the thing that the co-host is missing out on is that centralized identity does more than simply associate a person with a unique identity; it performs the equally-important converse operation of associating an identity with a unique person. He mentioned Reddit; well, just as an example, I have 5 different Reddit accounts that I use for various different purposes, to more easily compartmentalize the different things I use Reddit for. That's just fine for Reddit--it's a positive feature on a service like that--but for something like personal identity, having a person being able to have multiple personal identities is a bug, not a feature.
Also, Sarah's absolutely right about Bitcoin. The system has been plagued by fraud and dysfunction almost from day 1. At the moment, the cost in energy to run the computations necessary to mine 1 Bitcoin is greater than the value of 1 Bitcoin. The developers behind Bitcoin want to try to fix things, but they can't because too much of the Bitcoin network's processing power is run by a small handful of Chinese syndicates, and they don't want the system to be fixed. (So much for a "decentralized" system!)
On the post: Hillary Clinton's Paperback Memoir Deletes Inconvenient Support Of TPP That Was In The Hard Cover Version
She's a Clinton. What did you expect?
On the post: Appeals Court Fully Upholds FCC's Net Neutrality Rules
Restrocking?
On the post: DailyDirt: Classic Cars 2.0
Kinda reminds me of Johnny Cash's solution...
On the post: Watch The President Use Fair Use To Support A Trade Deal That Undermines Fair Use
Re: Yeah wow.
On the post: Appeals Court Bounces Defamation Suit Against American Hustle Over Microwave Scene
Whose views?
On the post: Jesse Jackson Likens FCC Cable Box Reform Plan To 'Snarling Dogs, Water Hoses And Church Bombings'
Re: Hi Name Was "Muhammad Ali"
What part of any of those facts makes a person who refers to his original name a "racist peace of garbage"?
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