You could argue some of the land parcels in question are owned by growing numbers of family members with each new generation, and that therefore it's likely some (even most) owners wouldn't utilize the land. However, it's also interesting to digest this situation alongside Oxfam's report [1] on 62 people accumulating more wealth than half the world's population combined. Zuckerberg owns 700 acres of Kauai[2]. Why isn't that enough?
According to the article, the owners of the parcels have the right to traverse the land he already bought. From the sound of the article, this is making a mountain out of a molehill.
He wants his privacy and, thanks to bizarre land ownership practices in Hawaii, these parcels are fractionally owned by hundreds of individuals making it impossible to make a traditional offer. This legal process, far from being abusive, is the standard process when dealing with these sorts of parcels since it clarifies who actually owns the properties. It sounds like once the list of owners is established by the court, he'll make a traditional offer rather than forcing an auction.
It's only Bizarre to you, it's not Bizarre to the people who own the property I'm sure. What's Bizarre is being forced to sell land that you've owned for generations.
Some of these pieces of land have hundreds of owners. In this case one of the owners has an interest of less than a one-hundredth of a percent. Most of the owners do not even know what they own. The legal fees to establish who has a fractional interest in the property would outweigh the value of the property normally for each individual owner, but with Zuckerberg footing to bill to find out the family tree all of the owners will benefit.
This sounds like the sort of thing where you have to sue someone to force the court to sort out legalities. Sort of like the RIAA/MPAA suing Joe Does that are associated with an IP to figure out who is on the other end of it.
If Zuck is using the court to force a sale, then it's a total asshole/dick move. If he's using the court to sort out ownership of land so that he knows who he needs to deal with to buy it (as a normal transaction), that's another story.
Something I learnt from the Martin Shkreli drug price increase story is that if you're going to defend someone who's being abused, first see if they even exist. Even then, see if their culture and laws make this an actual horrible suffering or not. What this isn't is some poor low income native being forced out of his house that he inherited from his family on land that he grew up on.
That kind of law exists in other places too, if your property cuts access to other people's property they have the right to cross it. It's not only in Hawaii, i've seen it in many other places , in Spain in rural areas is quite common.
Who has the right to 700 acres of privacy? I don't care how rich you are, there should be reasonable limits on what you can deny the public access to. In Sweden and Norway (and other places, I'm sure), they have a law called allemansrätten, which states that anyone has the right to roam on and camp on all land, as long as you don't cause any damage and reasonably respect others privacy. If the US had such a law, he probably wouldn't be engaging in this lawsuit.
To take the discussion a little wider - land is a finite and productive resource unlike almost all other property. History is full of land reappropriation when it falls into ineffiecent use - whether as goverened as such or through violence when governments fail to do so. As a simple premise governments shouldnt allow land to remain significantly underutilised
Yes in a way. My point is really that land ownership should not be seen as a fundamental 'right' in the same way as other more fundamental 'rights'. Its actually treated this way in most international instruments (not as a right or given serious caveats) although in common conception many in the west assume otherwise.
Your argument is weird. How would mark zuckerburg use 700 acres of property? Who decides what effective use of property is? This is an absurd act of bullying people who may have otherwise had no desire or intention to sell their property, legal loophole or not.
It's a well known fact that fuckerburg is a cylon and needs the 700 acres to build a fleet to go looking for kobol. The sooner he jumps out of the solar system the better for humanity. So my appeal to everyone is to please just give him what he needs.
Who is to judge how much is and is not enough? Do you want an international tribunal allocating a "fair and equitable" amount of square meterage of various quality levels of real estate to individuals?
While there may be no legal entity making a decision on the question "how much is enough," people are allowed to make value judgements on the actions of others based on how much they personally think is "enough" for said others.
Assuming you aren't joking, why would you trust the members of the tribunal? I have yet to see any evidence that humans have found a way to overcome the principal-agent problem in governing bodies.
Elected == accountable...generally speaking. Of course there would be corruption and errors. I would trust it over a hegemonic oligopoly though. Have to google the principal-agent problem though. I'm not familiar with that term.
How so? It's clear that voters don't know how (in aggregate) to make rational choices.
Given the (for a single example) well-known strong-arm get-out-the-vote collusion between Chicago's elected city officials and Chicago's regional street gangs, I'm not sure that I would trust a hegemonic oligopoly any less.
The book that this is based on is pretty interesting:
> You could argue some of the land parcels in question are owned by growing numbers of family members with each new generation, and that therefore it's likely some (even most) owners wouldn't utilize the land.
Interestingly, there's a similar "dilution of ownership" in FOSS projects. Unless the project is operating under one of the nonprofits that foster/require copyright assignment for contribution, the IP of a FOSS project under a license like the GPL is effectively "owned" in part by every individual contributor. But each claim to the copyright of the work as a whole is very, very diluted.
If this petition went through, and the relevant case law were set, one could perhaps claim to be able to freely violate the GPL by creating a derivative commercial work, under the argument that because so many people each own so little of the project, nobody really owns it enough to be able to sue over it. (After all, nobody owns enough to be able to do other things requiring majority-ownership, like relicensing the project!)
Identifying one edge case doesn't really prove an argument. Net wealth is not a perfect metric, but is probably the best one we have.
You can be sure 95%+ of brain surgeons have paid off all their student debts and have a lot more wealth than a homeless guy, considering their median salary is $395k per year.
Those wealth statistics really are dodgy. Another edge case: you're earning so little that you don't save, but spend it all on food/housing/etc. Now your country's economy takes off and you suddenly earn 20% more. You're still spending it all, enjoying much better and healthier food. To those statistics, nothing changed.
Well, show me a perfect metric that doesn't have similar edge cases?
For example, income has its own issues -- a retiree can have little income but a big retirement fund to draw down.
In an ideal world, you'd probably measure something like current net wealth + discounted expected future earnings, and maybe use PPP instead of GDP, except now you're trying to measure two things accurately instead of one, and making guesses about the future too.
Right! One of the famous initial iPhone OS exploits involved a vulnerability in LibTiff. Decoding a crafted .tiff in Safari would grant the site's javascript root access.
Android has a lot of information leaks. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but as of last year Google gives every app you install access to your cellphone number without them needing to ask for an extra permission (READ_PHONE_STATE is now a freebie as far as the app store is concerned, it isn't listed, in fact it will say "no special permissions" if READ_PHONE_STATE alone is in the manifest).
I honestly think Android's permission system is a joke, and a sceptical Google will fix the majority of the information leaks with this up-coming update.
PS - It is "interesting" that getting your google account address requires a special permission on Android, but getting your phone number does not. Wonder why that is? IMEI too.
If they've found that users almost always say yes to it, that might be the correct choice for being consistently usable even if you (and I) dislike that choice.
I am not sure how it should be handled.
Allowing an app to automatically propose the user's email in a login form is pretty good in terms of UX ... but it means that the app can access to that data.
It seems pretty clear how this should be handled, no? If the app wants to do it, then, as with anything else that might make the user experience better at a privacy cost, let it ask for permission to do it!
Having to ask for the permission to display the email just for the autocomplete makes sense from a privacy perspective, but defeats its UX purpose.
A better solution would probably be to continue to move away from email + password logins and ask the user to login once in an OCD platform and then only propose this in order to signup/login to an app.
I believe these are certainly the result of deliberate decisions.
Remember when Google introduced fine-grained permission control, received much praise for it, then removed it almost immediately afterwards? To me, that showed they clearly valued the interests of themselves and their monetising "appvertiser" developers over the freedom of the users.
Even the actual SSID name is probably more than an ordinary app needs to know.
Unless it needs some sort of location data to provide functionality, what is the minimum set of facts that would cover app behaviour?
I guess they might want to know:
- if the connection is secure and/or explicitly trusted
- if the connection is bandwidth-metered
- if the connection can route to the internet
Then, it can check those flags and decide if it wants to download those 3GB of your personal banking details or whatever.
Or, perhaps better still, it registers one or more 'acceptable network profiles' based on the above fields, and the OS gives it a callback when is becomes available/unavailable.
That would prevent it from polling and building a neighbourhood network map, but I suppose it could still register for all possible combinations, and beacon out to a remote host which can then geo-IP backtrack it to you-ish.
I'm definitely not happy with the carefully secreted privacy options scattered around the android UI. I'm still getting used to it, and every time I poke around in a settings menu I'll probably find at least one thing I would much prefer to default off.
The SoCs included with virtually every mobile device today have circuits designed specifically for encoding/decoding H.264 video and AAC audio. This is how your mobile device's native camera app reliably records HD video. Whether it's 640p or 1080p, there isn't a significant drain on system resources.
These chips were traditionally accessed via a standard OMX[1] library (Think OpenGL for Video hardware), but the OMX implementations were device specific, making it nearly impossible to write custom video software with mass market appeal.
Just recently (July '13 on Android), the video hardware has become somewhat controllable by the standard Android / iOS platform APIs allowing us to write a truly compatible video product.
We currently only offer single stream output. When we do offer multiple bitrate outputs (transcoding), we'll do that work serverside.
If you only offer a single stream, your claims of being better than cloud-based transcoders have no meaning. You don't transcode, they do.
You push a single stream, which any client can already do, and they can already live without transcodes. Your app doesn't add value by freeing them from the cost of cloud-based transcoders.
Our current offer is a significant cost reduction for a single high-quality broadcast to a large audience. On top of that we handle all the plumbing related to your iOS/Android cloud video app. Our SDK can manage all your application's broadcasts and users (if you choose).
I'm excited for our open-source Android and iOS clients to stimulate development of some novel video apps. Maybe Security monitoring systems or even Phone + $20 Weather balloon = Weather satellite!
[1] http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...