771–780 of 835 posts
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You cannot even read an ebook without copying it from storage to RAM, to CPU cache, to video RAM, and so on; by your thinking, all owners of ebooks commit multiple instances of copyright infringement every time they read an ebook.
Making a copy in RAM, cache etc does not involve distributing it to other people.
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The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the pr…
It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much better our lives are, and how much more just life is in western society now than all of the millions of years of human life before. 200 years ago some people were literal property, 150 years ago women couldn’t vote almost anywhere, less than 75 years ago Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Huge, meaningful strides have been made for equally and fair…
Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless.
Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.
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Blockchains don't really do this well though. A blockchain is useful when you need a publicly accessible, canonical shared record of a consensus, obfuscated or otherwise. They're not for storing arbitrary data. If you want to store arbitrary data, and you want peer to peer decentralized kind of features and you want identities obfuscated, currently you're looking at BitTorrent over Tor. I don't know if i2p or Tor or…
Blockchains can absolutely be used for storing arbitrary data (see Filecoin.) Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned. What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
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What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in th…
>wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless. Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem. > or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still el…
Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right?
> The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.
And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now).
Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design.
If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.
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How many times must we have the discussion about the differences between stealing a physical item and copying a digital one?
It’s not the same, but the OP is talking about free access to information. So under that logic stealing the physical book is fine. Or I can amend my original comment and say stealing the physical book, creating a copy using a commodity printer and leaving the copy , while keeping the original, is fine.
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Democracy will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today.
It might, as history has cycles. But not because it will be replaced with something "better". Democracy just means everybody has a say on decisions affecting them and the society they are in. If your replacement is closer to "only informed people should have a say", that is even older then democracy, and is much worse in practice.
Our current situation is that (in theory) the elected politicians listen to the general "mood" of the population, and then listen to the experts how to implement the needed changes. I can't think of a better system, we just need to figure out how to make it resistant to abuse.
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It’s not the same, but the OP is talking about free access to information. So under that logic stealing the physical book is fine. Or I can amend my original comment and say stealing the physical book, creating a copy using a commodity printer and leaving the copy , while keeping the original, is fine.
Why "leaving the copy whole keeping the original"? If the issue here is theft of information , than keeping the copy and leaving the original is just as bad, no? Why make that meaningless distinction in your point? Theyre equivalent, according to you.
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Oh, I get it. You think that my disagreement stems from a lack of understanding and that if I disagree it is because I don't understand what you're saying.
Most of the cries for abolishing the Electoral College come around election time from the losing side, of which both sides of the political aisle have been guilty of. Republicans cried for it when Clinton won, Democrats cried for it when Bush won, Republicans cried for it when Obama won, Democrats cried for it when Trump won, Republicans cried for it when Biden won, etc. This indicates most of it is all politically m…
That's the original reason, but it doesn't have any real benefit. Everyone knows why this fence was built. You're not specially enlightened among a bunch of fools.
But it causes people's votes for president to have different strengths, which is bad. And nudging the presidential vote up or down by 5% doesn't do jack shit against the tyranny of the masses.
It's a complication with no upsides and mild downsides.
Edit: it really only benefits large companies who have managed to exploit it.