Jeffrey Nonken 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: US Copyright Office, MPAA Celebrate Handing Hollywood Stars Their Own Special Copyright Monopoly Powers

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 28 Jun, 2012 @ 09:22am

    Re: Re: Re:

    I can't tell if this is trolling or reverse trolling.

  • On the post: $29 Billion Spent Dealing With Patent Trolls In The US Alone Last Year

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2012 @ 12:34pm

    Re:

    You and I have very different views of what constitutes a "patent troll". Apple is a company that innovates, makes popular products, and sometimes uses its patents to beat up on competitors. It's an unfortunate behavior, it's anti-competitive, possibly trollish, certainly bullying, but it doesn't make Apple a "patent troll".

    Whereas a patent troll is a company who exists solely for the purpose of using patents to suck money out of innovative companies.

  • On the post: $29 Billion Spent Dealing With Patent Trolls In The US Alone Last Year

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2012 @ 12:28pm

    Re: Re: I take exception to something you said

    Cue old joke: Q: what's the difference between a lawyer and a prostitute? A: There are some things a prostitute won't do for money.

  • On the post: In Round Two, Apple Succeeds In Getting Samsung Tablet Banned In The US

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2012 @ 10:34am

    Every time I see Apple doing this, I want to buy a Galaxy Tab. Not because I need or want a tablet; not because I know anything about it; not because I even know if it's worth the money. Or worth ANY money. Just to send Apple a message to F**K THE H*LL OFF.

    Actually, I think my daughter would like one. And my wife. Well, heck, maybe my other daughter too.

    *sigh* Unfortunately it won't fit my budget.

    Damn.

  • On the post: Trojan Author Includes Integrated Chat, Challenges Security Researchers Digging Through His Code

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2012 @ 10:02am

    Re: I don't get it

    "Why is this on techdirt?"

    Because Mike decided to blog about it. Sorry if he did it without your permission. ... Oh wait, I'm not sorry. Forget I said that.

    You know what I do when Mike writes an article I don't find interesting? I write comments whining about it and complain that it's not relevant and try to explain why Mike owes me a better blog. ... Oh wait, no I don't. I STFU AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT DAMNED ARTICLE.

    Mike and his minions will occasionally write an article you don't care for. Just pick up the broken pieces of your shattered life and move on.

  • On the post: Former Righthaven CEO Secretly Hires Lawyers For The Company He No Longer Has Anything To Do With

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2012 @ 05:33pm

    I'd say that The Gibson Effect has a chance to beat out The Carreon Effect for doubling-down on hole-digging.

    And Gibson did start first.

  • On the post: Get Ready For The Political Fight Against Encryption

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2012 @ 01:47pm

    We're going to protect your data by forcing you to do everything in plain text. Then we'll collect all the data into a centralized database with a single point of failure (and all passwords stored and transmitted in plain text).

    This will keep all your data safe. We promise! We also promise not to abuse your data. Cross our hearts and hope to die.

    We're from the government, and we're here to help.

  • On the post: Speech-Via-Algorithm Is Still Speech, And Censoring It Is Still Censorship

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2012 @ 01:38pm

    Don't be silly. NO mechanical reproduction should be protected by the first amendment. That includes hand writing, which of course is just the pen expressing itself!

  • On the post: Sherry Turkle Says Younger Kids Can't Handle Facebook Because Teens Fret About Looking Cool Online

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2012 @ 01:34pm

    Re:

    Bah. Forgot to log in.

  • On the post: Your Genome, Your Data

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2012 @ 01:31pm

    Consider if use of a pregnancy test required medical intervention?

    I've got a sphygmomanometer. But maybe I should be required to make a doctor's appointment to check my blood pressure every day?

    Blood sugar testers are pretty darned cheap and easy to get these days. Again, should I have to consult my doctor and have his lab run the test every time I need to check my sugar levels? Imagine the benefits to the diabetic community!

  • On the post: Lamar Smith & House Judiciary Committee Don't Want To Know How Often The NSA Spies On Americans

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2012 @ 07:44pm

    Hey NSA: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

    Right?

  • On the post: Should We Want A 'Cyberwar'? It's A Lot Less Bloody Than A Real War

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2012 @ 03:38pm

    Thesis on cyberwar

    A friend of mine recently wrote this thesis (and successfully defended it this morning).

    I haven't read it through yet, but so far it looks good.

  • On the post: Once More, With Feeling: Having Open WiFi Does Not Make You 'Negligent' Under The Law

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2012 @ 12:31pm

    Re:

    We could get Arlo Guthrie to sing it for us in four-part harmony!

  • On the post: The Politicians Who Cried 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Wolf

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2012 @ 02:22pm

    Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't

    "It reminds me of Y2K. That had all the hallmarks of a catastrophe in the making..."

    Your electric bill could have been late. Gasp!

    "...and a lot of people don't even know how big it might have been."

    Your phone bill might have been late, too.

    "My uncle is in the nuclear power industry, and some of the things he had to say about the very real Y2K issues they were facing in the late 90s had positively hair-curling implications."

    Nice. Nice way to throw in an unsupported assertion by basing a claim on somebody else's alleged expertise.

    "Problem is, it's completely wrong. It was a very serious catastrophe in the making, and the only reason it *didn't* happen is because all the people getting worked up about it caused people to put forth the Herculean efforts required to fix it! It's a bit of a paradox: the only reason it didn't happen was because it really was going to happen."

    Whereas you seem to be claiming that the fact that it didn't happen is proof that it would have.

    Name one catastrophe and give us a credible causation chain. Details are important: "the Nuclear plant would have blown up because it had the date wrong" would be a really, really bad example of a credible, detailed causation chain.

    By the way, I wasn't in the Nuclear anything industry, nor any related power industry. I was in the embedded process controls industry and I am led to believe that some of our products were used in some power plants. However, that makes my expertise... zero. Because so far I haven't even told you what I DID.

    I was an embedded systems software engineer (and I still am, though I bill myself as "firmware developer" these days), so actually I have a pretty darned good idea how small, embedded systems work. Things like, for example, controllers for stuff like power systems and manufacturing. I currently work making airplane simulators, so I also have a pretty good idea how airplane systems and flight navigation systems work.

    Most of 'em don't give a rat's ass what the date is.

    Do you actually KNOW what the so-called Y2K bug was? Most people don't seem to. The media at the time was all hype and no substance.

    It's just that decades ago computer memory was expensive, so people would save space (and therefore money) by programming dates as 2-digit numbers. Why not? The year 2000 was decades away, along with any problems associated with it.

    Or maybe they were just lazy. Or some combination. Either way, the result was the same. Two-digit dates, based on the assumption that the date is in the 1900s, and that either their programs would be obsolete by 2000 or they wouldn't be working their anymore anyway, and it wouldn't be their problem.

    Well, sometimes programmers and engineers do such a good job that their code lives on well past its expected lifetime, and as long as a system is working well, nobody is going to just spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions) to replace it. And if the system doesn't change, and it works, there's no reason to change the software.

    And then one day you realize that the year 2000 is looming, and if you type 00 into the date field, suddenly Joe Schmoe is negative 30 years old and not eligible for social security. Or Jane Jackson's pension plan won't be vested for 95 years.

    Most of the Y2K issues were accounting problems. Why do your traffic lights care whether it's 1900 or 2000? They can still change every 30 seconds, and they can still make sure I have to stop at every #$^*! intersection without knowing the date. I'd tell you about the guy I know (actually sitting about 15 feet away as I type this) who worked on military aircraft at the time, but then I'd be guilty of making unsupported assertions based on somebody else's alleged expertise, and I do hate being a hypocrite.

    I'd much rather be making my own unsupported assertions based on my own alleged expertise. ;)

    If you want anybody to take you seriously, you might consider at least giving an example of a disaster averted, and, as I've said, a credible chain of causation. Why would the nuclear plant have blown up, shut down, melted down, or whatever results your uncle described? Or airplanes fall out of the sky? Traffic lights cause massive pile-ups? Automobiles slam into reverse? Microwave ovens irradiate their owners? Cell phones call ex-wives and invite them to join you and your girlfriend for a 3-way? (...OK, I just made that one up.)


    What disasters, how could they actually happen because somebody used a 2-digit year, or it's not real.

    Note: late bills because somebody realized that customers were either being charged or credited huge sums, or some other unrealistic numbers, and had to do everything by hand. Or had to wait for some emergency programming to fix the problem.


    Note 2: A lot of stuff WAS averted because in the last 2 or 3 years before 2000, a massive effort was made to prevent the problems, or certify that it wasn't required. (My group had exactly one product that even knew the date, and I was able to certify that it would be good until sometime in February, 2037.) However, MUCH more work was done than needed to be. Because most of it was hype. Most of the work was either done by people who were panicked, or by companies who knew better but wanted to make their customers happy.

  • On the post: The Politicians Who Cried 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Wolf

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2012 @ 01:17pm

    Airplanes will fall out of the sky! OMG!

    I always love this claim. They said the same thing in 1999.

    - ATC doesn't need to be connected to the Internet. I presume it isn't, but I don't personally know that for sure. If it is, all we have to do is disconnect it.
    - ATC doesn't actually control the airplanes. It just directs them. If you blow up the tower, the airplanes will keep flying. There could be problems at congested airports but the airplanes do not depend on ATC to fly.
    - The GPS isn't connected to the Internet. It just isn't.
    - Most airplanes don't have fly-by-wire. Your average 737 will continue to obey the laws of aerodynamics even if you fry every electrical system on the airplane. Granted, it will become more difficult to fly. But even if you somehow hacked into their electronics (which ones? How?) the worst you could do is cause temporary confusion until the captain or FO overrode the autopilot.
    - The airplanes that do have fly-by-wire aren't connected to the Internet. Really, I don't think you can do a web search and find access to the flight going overhead and turn it around with iAirplane running on your iPad.

    The airplanes' electronics are self-contained. They aren't connected to the Internet any more than the average microwave.

    You know that scene in Die Hard II: Even More Unbelievable Than The First Movie where he dials in a 100 foot negative displacement and causes an airplane to crash? Hah hah hah hah! Very funny. The ILS and, more importantly, Glide Slope directional radios are fixed radios on the ground at the ends of the runways. The guy in control of the airport may be able to turn them off, but reconfiguring them would mean physically moving them.

    So I'm still waiting to hear how it is airplanes are going to just "fall out of the sky" because somebody in Asia is a hacker.

    There's a broken link in the cause-and-effect chain that you could, say, fly a C-5 through.

  • On the post: Techno-Panic Headlines: 'Enhanced Ebooks Are Bad For Children'

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2012 @ 11:43am

    Oddly enough, just this morning I was reading a quote that George Takei shared on his FB.

    ?We?ve bought into the idea that education is about training and ?success?, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.?
    ― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

    I think it particularly appropriate. Nice synchronicity.

  • On the post: The Oatmeal v. Funnyjunk: How The Court Of Public Opinion Beats The Court Of Baseless Legal Threats

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2012 @ 08:54am

    Re: Re:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/12/inman_dmca_dumb/

    Personally, I thought his viewpoint was a bit vituperative.

  • On the post: Commerce Department's Own Study Debunks Commerce Department's Defense Of Said Study

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 11 Jun, 2012 @ 12:35pm

    Cats are black. Cannonballs are black. Therefore, cats are cannonballs.

  • On the post: Sprint Changes 'Unlimited' Broadband To 5 Gigs… While Still Advertising Unlimited Broadband

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 05 Jun, 2012 @ 01:18pm

    Re: I still have unlimited data bandwidth through T-Mobile

    I was just looking at my T-Mobile account and noticed they're offering a family plan for $100 (for 2 lines), though it doesn't include data. Everything else is unlimited.

    So... kinda, but not really. And unless I simply missed it before, it looks like they've added it in the past month or so.

    At this time I'm paying $20/mo for unlimited data for my G1 (required with the G1). I've switched to a Crackberry and hope to kill the data plan. I hardly use it at all. But the point is that it's probably $20/mo per line to add unlimited data.

  • On the post: In Which I Debate The UK Publisher's Association Boss Who Attacked The British Library

    Jeffrey Nonken ( profile ), 04 Jun, 2012 @ 03:45pm

    Sorry, Mike, you're wrong. Seriously, grievously wrong.

    You two DO live on different planets.

    On the planet he lives on, he's not a pathetic, lying, hypocritical jerk with the morals of a cat in heat.

    Please note that I expect the population of that planet to die out soon, as its gene pool is too shallow to survive.

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