tanderson11

Pretty sure the early adopters are going to be any one who wants to have sex ...

Follow up to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867715

Your comment misses the point of much of the dissent revolving around the Supreme Court's decision. Aereo may very well have secondary liability for copyright infringement enabled by its services, but that was not the question brought before the court.

The question brought to the court was whether or not Aero has direct liability for copyright infringement. This direct liability is only found if Aero "volitionally" "performs" copyrighted material.

The opinion of the court uses a "looks-like-cable-TV" justification for its treatment of Aero, as Scalia (dissenting) notes:

"The injury claimed is not violation of a law that says operations similar to cable TV are subject to copyright liability, but violation of §106(4) of the Copyright Act. And whatever soothing reasoning the Court uses to reach its result (“this looks like cable TV”), the consequence of its holding is that someone who implements this technology “perform[s]” under that provision. That greatly disrupts settled jurisprudence which, before today, applied the straightforward, bright-line test of volitional conduct directed at the copyrighted work."

Whether or not Aero has secondary liability does not matter; the Supreme Court's vague ruling destabilizes existing jurisprudence and eliminates a concrete test in favour of the immaterial "looks-like-cable-TV" criterion.

EDIT: formatting.

All P problems are in NP. If you can solve a problem in polynomial time, you could simply "check" the problem on an input by solving the problem and seeing if the test input were in the set of solutions. It will clearly take P time to perform that "check" (because you can solve the problem in P time). This means all problem in P must be in NP.

The error is that not all problems in NP are "extremely difficult for computers to solve". The difficulty of solving problems in NP varies drastically between particular problems.

The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies.

In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime.

I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing...

These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant.

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"And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'"

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"The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'"

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In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails.

As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy.

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"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."

Even using one of the most ridiculous straw-man arguments I have ever seen, you still fail to make your point. Surely the benefits of being able to participate in the immense amount of activities that exist outside your house is worth the risk. In other words, the benefits outweigh the costs. Asking consent comes at negligible cost. Correct me if I am wrong, but I tend to think rape and assault is worse than opening my mouth.

Furthermore, the risk of being struck by lightning is one you accept when you exit the house. The same is not true in the actual object of the discussion because the victim of your actions will primarily be your would-be partner.

Finally, I find it extremely offense that you assert that the amount of sexual assaults that can be attributed to failure to obtain adequate consent to the chances of being struck by lightning upon exiting your house.

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Assuming that you do not present the best arguments for your side (at this point, I feel very safe in this assumption), I will acknowledge that, in a committed and well established relationship, it is possible to have sex without first asking for consent. Still, I am reluctant to encourage people to do so, and many sexual assaults occur in committed relationships. It is so easy to ask; I cannot see why someone would refrain from doing so.

EDIT: On further thought, I feel comfortable saying that after having asked consent each time a relationship progresses, that, in a committed relationship,it is safe to rely on non-verbal cues.

Isn't a culture where rape and sexual assault happens a pretty steep price to pay for the allure and romantic nature of non-verbal communication?

Most of the time, nothing bad will happen if you depend on non-verbal cues, but in the minority of times your advances may unwanted, and the person feels uncomfortably verbally rebuffing them. In these instances, assault or even rape can and_does_happen.

Simply asking for consent is hardly difficult and the insurance it provides that your partner does in fact like your advances is very valuable.

Also: in that scenario, trying to touch your date’s shoulder or leg, or approaching to kiss her, isn’t rape. It’s an opportunity for her to let you know whether you’ve interpreted her signals correctly.

How do you know it is not rape (or assault in this circumstance)? Non-verbal queues are not infallible; without asking, you must trust your judgment. While you probably judged correctly, that does not mean it is advisable behavior to proceed without asking.

The cultural acceptability and effectiveness of the asking for consent is incidental to the issue at stake.

I honestly find it shocking that so many people on HN are having such difficulty accepting the principal of expressly verbalized consent. Surely we can move on from the notion that men need to "be dominant" and "force her to rebuff your advances".

While a particular culture may call for certain shifts in attitude, that does not mean verbalized consent is not important.

I think Neil Gaiman's thoughts "Why defend freedom of icky speech" is particularly relevant here.

I think a key distinction between the subject of Gaiman's thoughts and the material at hand is that "Above the Game" purports to offer advice applicable to real word scenarios. This advice, however, will, unquestionably, lead to sexual assault if followed (not in every case, but in some).

I would certainly find it dubious for the United States Government to condemn the book, but I feel that Kickstarter's stance is defensible from the position of not wanting to be associated with such dangerous and callous material.

In fact, every woman I've talked to about the subject has told me that it's specifically unwanted.

Is it so hard to believe that a woman (or man) may be uncomfortable expressly saying "No" in a given circumstance? Just because you have anecdotal evidence about woman you have talked to does not mean that we should adopt practices that those woman would like the most.

If 1 in 100, 1,000, or even 10,000 people do not like forward advances and feel paralyzed to say no in such circumstances, we should ask for consent because otherwise 1 in however many thousand times it would be rape or assault.

Shockingly, the correct course of action may not actually optimize people's chances of picking up women or men. Yet a culture of rape is a far greater price to pay than having a little more trouble getting dates or having sex. You might, in fact, actually have to ask someone, before touching them or 'shoving your penis in their vagina'.