Village Idiot 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (107) comment rss

  • On the post: Court Says USTR Can Continue To Keep The Public From Seeing The Trade Agreements They'll Be Subjected To

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 01 Oct, 2015 @ 07:23pm

    Re: Illusory might makes right

    Responding just to the TL;DR...
    The part that makes resistance nearly impossible, even with open discussion and group action, is that the laws will be acting on companies. Companies will have very little incentive to act contrary to the law and a lot to comply. People will not even have the choice not to comply.

  • On the post: CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, But Never Sent To The Senate For Illegally Spying On It

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 17 Aug, 2015 @ 04:31pm

    Re:

    I voted insightful, but I really wanted to vote depressing.

  • On the post: CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, But Never Sent To The Senate For Illegally Spying On It

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 17 Aug, 2015 @ 04:29pm

    Fixed

    "...the CIA knew what it did was clearly wrong (and certainly illegal)"



    FTFY

  • On the post: Chicago's Secret Homan Square Detention Facility Way Worse Than Anyone Thought

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2015 @ 06:26am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS Targeting

    Wait, really? Man, when did having common sense make you a conspiracy nut?

  • On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2015 @ 12:41pm

    Re: Alignment of interests

    Would say it is more accurate that they represent the interests of a small minority of authors. Those interests often aligning closely with those of the legacy publishing industry?

  • On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2015 @ 12:28pm

    "The government has the responsibility to maintain an open, competitive, free, unsupervised, and undistorted market for books… "

    Where does copyright fit into this vision?


    I love ebooks. I almost always prefer a PDF copy of a book over one made from dead plant material. The difference really is immense when I am using a technical reference and need to perform a word search. Paper book indexes are far from comprehensive.
    With that said, I will never purchase an ebook from Amazon. Being locked in to their proprietary reader and really only being a glorified renter rather than an owner is just too much for me. Every time I Google to find a book, I take the information from the Amazon page and find it available elsewhere, hopefully directly from the author. If they only sell through Amazon, I consider other options...

  • On the post: Director Of National Intelligence Hammers Final Official Nail Into Bulk Phone Records Program

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 28 Jul, 2015 @ 08:20am

    The more I learn about these programs and watch the intelligence community react, the more certain I am that much of what Snowden revealed was in fact a limited hangout propagated to protect the real assets.


    Of what have we learned? Techniques and programs that are many years old and that have likely already been replaced. While we fight over the scraps left by the activities of the IC over the last decade, they are free to continue their current activities, largely unabated.


    Welcome to the land of the free.

  • On the post: Washington Post Observes Encryption War 2.0 For Several Months, Learns Absolutely Nothing

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2015 @ 06:49am

    Come on guys, I'm pretty sure the Post article is satire...

    "for a good actor, like the police..."

  • On the post: As Hollywood Lobbied State Department, It Built Free Home Theaters For US Embassies

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 08 Jul, 2015 @ 12:15pm

    The only thing that makes me feel better about how absurdly tyrannical the MPAA acts is that both them and their copyright have an expiration date. Technological progress is not held by their impotent attempts to stifle innovation and keep the public behind the gates they control.

    We won't even have to legislate or lobby the MPAA out of power. As tech improves and the cost of production plummets, we will simply walk right around their gates and completely forget about them.


    The MPAA is a flailing beast that sees its own demise on the horizon. Expect them to continue to get more absurd and vicious as they near their inevitable end. Good luck MPAA, it was hell while it lasted.

  • On the post: Copyright Takes Down High-Profile Translation Of Thomas Piketty's Comments On Germany & Greek Debt

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2015 @ 02:00pm

    Re: No

    Translating articles into another language makes newspapers die? The only way for the public to be informed is via "traditional journalism?"

    It sounds like "you have NO clue about what journalism is."

    Traditional journalism has been dying a slow death at the hands of traditional journalists. When infotainment and parroting become an organizations primary content at the expense of actual journalism, reporting sourced information with as little bias as possible, who then is to blame for killing "traditional journalism?"

    Must be those damn pirates.

  • On the post: Sprint Tries To 'Compete' By Throttling All Video To 600 Kbps, Then Talking Some Shit On Twitter

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 03:43pm

    Re:

    One thing that is nice about the device unbundling is that it makes it easier to see for what and how much you are actually paying.

  • On the post: New Zealand Parliament Overwhelmingly Decides Free Speech Must Take A Backseat To Cyberbullying Concerns

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 02:06pm

    |Harmful to Digital Communications Bill

  • On the post: Leaked TPP Chapter Shows How It's A Massive Gift To Big Pharma And Against Public Health

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2015 @ 05:08pm

    Re:

    You know one of the worst parts?
    It's that the U.S. is an extremely important country in certain ways and this importance lends it inappropriate weight in the international community.
    A large reason it has this importance is because the U.S. is a massive consumer country. We buy relatively more shit than anyone else. So the bitter and dark irony(?) of the situation is that our government is using our own purchasing power to effectively erode our rights.
    If we truly had control of Congress, TPP would never become law. These modern "trade agreements" are a literal collusion of government bodies with corporate/business interests against their citizens and constituents.

    TPP is and will be a massive failure of the American democratic process. Probably more of an indicator of how much of it has largely been illusory.

  • On the post: Let's Encrypt Releases Transparency Report — All Zeroes Across The Board

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2015 @ 12:25pm

    Re: Re: Re: A better (tech) option

    I think the point is that the government cannot come to them and require a change without first having a "legal" reason to do so, as in a gag order. A gag order really cannot be ordered on the basis of "we will probably require they let us spy on their future user base." So by doing this before launch, the government has no grounds to issue any requirements of any kind.

  • On the post: TSA Asks America To LOL At Traveler Who Had $75,000 Taken From Him By Federal Agents

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2015 @ 02:20pm

    Re:

    Yep, just sitting over here letting armed thugs take all of our shit. ...no

    I let my neighbor borrow some tools. The moment that neighbor brings armed thugs and a privately run prison for me to live in if I don't comply, that is when letting leaves the equation.

  • On the post: TSA Asks America To LOL At Traveler Who Had $75,000 Taken From Him By Federal Agents

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2015 @ 01:18pm

    Re:

    If there was nothing outside of the interaction with the TSA, there should not be an investigation. the passenger should not have had their funds removed. Having cash is not a crime, and it does not constitute a reasonable and articulable suspicion.

    Just the idea that the government feels they can open an "investigation" based on whim really irritates me.

    "We have looked into Mr. Passenger and concluded that there was no crime that took place. Since our investigation has shown that he broke no laws while engaging in his legal activity, we have returned his money. Less the admin fee."

  • On the post: TSA Asks America To LOL At Traveler Who Had $75,000 Taken From Him By Federal Agents

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2015 @ 12:32pm

    Re: What a relieve

    Yeah, I mean, at least they did not shoot him in the back...

  • On the post: Legal Giant Dentons Demonstrates Exactly How Not To Respond To Critical Media Coverage

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2015 @ 04:48pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Except what JoeCool said was basically they should have told the cop (in your scenario) that they are no longer consenting to searches. Rather than lash out with immature insults.

  • On the post: YouTube's Inane Response To Handing Popular YouTuber's Channel To Cosmetics Company: Blame The Algorithms

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2015 @ 02:10pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: So we're back to the feudal era...

    I think Uriel-238 is questioning the legitimacy of the system, not whether anyone "earned" their money legitimately within the system. Using communist as a pejorative does not lend itself to me taking your comment seriously.

    Do you claim capitalism is the absolute superior among economic models? True, it has been the most efficient at allocating resources of the systems tested by modern societies. Much of economic theory exists within a "clean room" so to speak and has never dealt with reality, IMO. There is more to interactions between people than efficient resource allocation.

    Doesn't really matter, capitalism as a system is simply unsustainable and its expiration date is likely within my lifetime. An economy and the market largely exist because people are more productive when they specialize. When machines do almost everything, then I (currently called a consumer) will no longer need (almost any!) external producers.

  • On the post: Torrent Madness: UK Cybercrime Official Argues That File Sharing Is A Gateway Drug To Crime

    Village Idiot ( profile ), 09 Jun, 2015 @ 07:40am

    Re: Re: Re:

    If we don't sin, then Jesus died for nothing.

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