> And if Shopify wants to take a cut of every sale from retailers based in California, they should be willing to comply with California law as well,
For the moment, for purpose of consumer protections, fine. But on longer time scales, I'm not sure. Does it really make sense for legacy states to be able to bind transacations on the internet? Doesn't that just make it a very large intranet?
Obviously information refuses to be stopped by borders. Are we going to have a situation where states of various sizes try to claim jurisdiction, but only those with sufficiently violent tendencies (and thus the ability to achieve compliance by fear) succeed? Won't that corrupt the internet even worse than an absence of state-based consumer protections?
If two people who live 500 miles apart in the area currently claimed by the State of California, but do not recognize the State of California, and regard themselves as citizens of the internet, and, who is right, them, of the government of California?
Most of us will probably say that there is some social contract by which, for better or worse, the State of California is right.
But what if, in 100 years, California goes bankrupt. Does that change the calculus? If so, why? And does it change retroactively, for the purposes of historical classification of internet transactions? The diplomatic and economic affairs of state don't change the operation of internet protocols. It's hard to even fully imagine how to create an internet whose shapes are coterminous with the boundaries asserted by various states.
I'm broadly skeptical of any judicial rulings which extend the laws of the legacy states onto the internet, even if they appear to be on the side of short-term justice. This whole thing is starting to feel like a bandaid better ripped off quickly.
> Does it really make sense for legacy states to be able to bind transacations on the internet?
Yes.
We have a problem right now where the only place democracy, sensible laws and due process take place is in meatspace.
The internet - insomuch as it’s a real place, is a feudal society. It’s made up of small fiefdoms (websites) and some larger kingdoms which exert tyrannical power within their borders. They watch everything you do - usually to advertise to you. And they can banish you at a moments notice if doing so would result more profit for their rulers.
There’s an interesting argument you can make that the internet should be its own sovereign space. “Information wants to be free” and all that. Maybe if the internet was created 200 years ago, during the period of time when constitutions were being written everywhere, we would have created one for the internet. And then, maybe, the internet could have policies and courts and rules that uphold the rights of people. But that hasn’t happened. We have, through our collective inaction, delegated judicial oversight of the internet to sovereign states in meatspace. And thank goodness. Somebody needs to tell internet companies that my personal data is not for sale. Or tell Apple that they aren’t entitled to 15-30% of Netflix’s revenue after already selling a user their phone. (And don’t they dare redirect users to their website!)
If us technologists won’t govern ourselves, we delegate that important job to the state of California. To the European Union. To Australia’s department of fair trade & ACCC. And so on. It means we get a fractured Internet. But people have inalienable rights that need to be defended. Those rights must not be undermined just because we’re online and there’s a profit to be made.
Laws are also the most effective tool for destroying rights, arguably much more so than protecting them.
So the flip side of your position that someone needs to be subject to a foreign law when dealing with a foreign party because otherwise that parties right might be stommped is that they also need the means to block interactions with that foreign party so their own rights aren't potentially stomped.
In the case where there are sales you might actually know where the other parties reside, but in the majority of interactions online you don't and there is no great means to control your exposure to other jurisdictions.
they also need the means to block interactions with that foreign party so their own rights aren't potentially stomped
Yes. That's the point. If you choose to do business with someone you also accept the jurisdiction of their local courts and laws. If you don't want that risk then do business locally.
This exposure however isn't limited just to 'business'. When you make comments online or publish open source code you're also potentially exposing yourself to other jurisdictions and their laws.
> Does it really make sense for legacy states to be able to bind transacations on the internet?
Sites like paypal and escrow.com need licenses for every state in the US to carry on business (Mostly called money transmission licenses, but there are a few other names and regulations depending on the state). Yes, it is just as big a compliance nightmare as you'd expect.
So yes, it does happen.
And anyway, as this case shows, if you have customers in a state you need to follow the laws of that state. This is why Pornhub have stopped servicing various states.
I'm kinda surprised the article doesn't mention (and I have no idea the feasibility of) a system that works in the opposite direction as well: somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance (maybe possible through some kind of doppler effect?) of a boat in such a way that whales will perceive and make themselves safe from collision.
Seems at least worth researching.
> Zitterbart’s aim is for ship captains to receive zero false alerts, so that every ping truly requires their attention. Removing human oversight risks flooding ship captains with false reports
This sounds great, as long as we're still on track for the whole "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
I don't want to be the one to explain to the whales, "No, look, it's not our fault that we killed your singing partner - the AI told us this was the correct route. See?"
"somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance ..."
You'll need to speak "whale" first with this awful scheme.
A small whale is a few tonnes in mass a large one can be 150 tonnes. That is very easy to detect via SONAR.
Funnily enough a few specialised Japanese and Chinese ships are capable of detecting whales with amazing accuracy to the point of delivering small warheads.
You just need to broadcast a made-up word of phrase with similar tones as the whales use, without you knowing what this means to the whales. The same noise should be used every time. Whales are smart, so they will learn to associate that incoherent utterance with ships.
That would be statistically unlikely. Whales have far more safe encounters with ships than lethal ones.
Persist in using the system for a while, on as many ships as possible, and the odds will get even better as time goes on. Whales aren't dumb, they'll figure it out and probably even tell each other about it.
Using the heavy hand of the state to threaten violence against people who make a particular tone... yes that is really so ridiculous.
The tone is question is quite close to G2. So, if your guitar is slightly sharp, you'll be making this tone when playing one of the most common chords.
Nobody is threatening violence against you for playing your guitar sharp. I have no idea where violence even came into play here.
It’s a registered trademark. A registered trademark is a legal designation that provides exclusive rights to a brand name, logo, or other distinctive symbol used to identify a specific product or service; they registered Spice Sound or whatever as a trademark.
They did not patent 100Hz.
You would only be liable if you walked around playing your sharp guitar with a sign that said “Get your Spice Sound here” heh
I’m not defending it, and it reminds me of that woman in Baltimore who pissed everyone off by trademarking “Hon”, causing the whole city to
revolt against her.
But it’s far from “threatening violence,” and they’re not patenting the sound.
> Nobody is threatening violence against you for playing your guitar sharp. I have no idea where violence even came into play here.
It’s a registered trademark. A registered trademark is a legal designation that provides exclusive rights to a brand name, logo, or other distinctive symbol used to identify a specific product or service; they registered Spice Sound or whatever as a trademark.
And what happens to you if you don’t abide by the legal protections of the trademark? The government must ultimately use violence or the threat of violence to enforce its rules.
That’s not how audio trademarks work. A sound trademark can represent a product (think Intel jiggle, MGM lion roar) but it can’t be the product.
So in this case I suppose they might be able to Trademark ’Antivomotone’ as a word mark to describe the tone, but no-one is going to be able to trademark the tone itself.
> let's focus on solving the original funding disaster
The _original_ funding disaster is that this problem was delegated to the economic machinery of a nation-state, and humanity is presently in the process of evolving beyond nation-states.
Innovation in communication and information archival is an extremely long evolutionary process, persisting across aeons in the case of media like DNA and language, while the trivial shuffling through different varieties of state happens on comparatively extremely short (sometimes century or shorter) scales.
So, any solution that truly addresses the _original_ funding disaster must be future-compatible with an internet in which we've overcome the burden of nation-states.
> humanity is presently in the process of evolving beyond nation-states
No, it isn't. This is some Curtis Yarvin BS.
> So, any solution that truly addresses the _original_ funding disaster must be future-compatible with an internet in which we've overcome the burden of nation-states.
What does this even mean? How do you envision a "future-compatible" CVE database? And what does it have to do with nation states?
> What's the difference between that which optimized for what you call "engagement" and what the average user wants?
People want joy, education, entertainment, etc. from watching a video.
But there may be other ways of appealing to people (addiction, insecurity, base stimulation) which boost engagement but which do not give users what they want.
Obviously on even slightly longer time scales, users will gravitate toward services that do not trade their health for engagement, but equally obvious is that many of today's apps are not optimizing for long time scales.
We're working on a parser for our band's setlists, and we want it to be compatible (and eventually, to be able to cross-reference included songs with) setlists from Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, Widespread Panic, Travelin' McCourys, Leftover Salmon, Billy Strings, etc.
We have run into this question already a few times: when we have a guest, and we play an original written by that guest, how is it best reflected in the setlist?
I haven’t programmed this issue specifically, but Billy Strings has sat in with Trey Anastasio a few times. For me if they do a cover of the guests song, I would say it’s a cover until that member is added to the lineup. I would check how the PhishNet API handles it (I think they have a is_original Boolean). Phish does “covers” of the 2001 theme, I’d wonder if that’s considered a cover even though it was just a small tone poem from 100+ years ago??
He's another one, you might call it the Music of Theseus.
A band records and releases a song on its first album.
Several years or decades later,
after numerous personnel changes,
none of the musicians that were in the band at the time the song was released are still with the group.
The band plays the song in concert.
Is that original or a cover?
Indeed this is an interesting edge case. Is there a real-world example of this to use as fodder for conversation?
It'd be especially relevant if the material is widely covered by other bands, and is intermixed with traditional music.
I'm guessing this is a thing that Lynard Skynard fans have to think about? I'm not familiar with the setlist culture surrounding that band, but my guess is that there is a vibrant one.
I do know of cases where a band split up, then the various members formed new bands and each claimed the song. Roger Waters e.g. left the band and tried to stop the remaining members from using the name Pink Floyd. It was a bit of a legal mess. Waters still plays Pink Floyd songs.
Great question. Is there a particular setlist which you think is notable and which has such an instance? I'd love to converse about how to properly parse it.
Oh my goodness, I second that nomination. :-) I had never heard of them (or The Saints, their kin). Are they good? What a crazy perfect name though.
I see that they did some touring as recently as 2019. Do you have a good enough understanding of the lineage(s) in question to know whether the setlist.fm parser does justice per the thread topic (and related important edge cases)?
In most cases it looks like "The Saints" songs are listed as covers. I wonder if there's a totally different designation trying to emerge here.
Certainly curious to hear long-form thoughts on any specific song in a specific setlist that might provide insight.
> Do you have a good enough understanding of the lineage(s) in question to know whether the setlist.fm parser does justice per the thread topic (and related important edge cases)?
I have a rich inner grasp of lineages I've followed .. it's a tough domain to expand into uniform generic meta data form.
WRT The Saints I'm less a fan of Chris Bailey (one co-founder) more a fan of Ed Kuepper (another founder).
The Saints are arguably (let's not do that now) the progenitor punk band (well, ok, one of them .. not first to record as such)
With their debut single "(I'm) Stranded", released in September 1976, they became the first punk band outside the US to release a record, ahead of the first UK punk releases from the Damned, the Sex Pistols and the Clash.
Eternally Yours (Laughing Clowns from the album Law Of Nature (1983))
The setlist.fm for The Aint's is really reflecting Ed Kuepper's musical history featuring works and reworkings of anything he's ever touched.
Here's Ed Kuepper and the Kowalski Collective closing out a set in Sept. 2020 with a 10 minute extended encore of Electrical Storm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zekVdws3020
I can't think of a real one. The only good reason I can think of for all the original members of a band to reunite under a different name would be if they had lost the legal right to use their old one, like when Prince became the Artist Formerly Known As Prince. It happens to solo artists from time to time, but I can't think of a band example.
Not sure the future of SMS in my life, but dang for whatever reason, people still want to use it.
I don't have as much need for email-=>sms gateways, but what about the other way? I much prefer to handle comms on my desktop, and presently I use google voice for SMS. It leaves plenty to be desired, though. Are there better alternatives?
The line of thinking you've displayed here is so obviously the inevitable trajectory of the internet; it's baffling that states are still clinging to denial.
> Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the highest fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my home. Then I use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal and isolate the song’s true audio. Is this theft?
If the answer to this becomes "yes" for some motion down this spectrum, then it seems to me that it's tantamount to prohibiting general-purpose computing.
If you can evaluate any math of your fancy using hardware that you own, then indeed you can run this tooling, and indeed your thoughts can be repaired into something closely resembling the source material.
...and by then, the requests for performance are somewhere between onerous and ridiculous.
I'm as wary of premature optimization as anyone, but I also have a healthy fear of future-proofed sluggishness.
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