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The Law Can’t Keep Up With Technology…and That’s a Very Good Thing

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:18AM   
from the a-victory-for-the-people dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Today, thanks to political gridlock in the U.S., lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. As government gets slower, tech is going the opposite way. New technologies spread instantly by cloud-based apps and social networks, and take hold with almost no legal oversight. Then, by the time government can act, it's usually too late to wind things back to the way they were.

And this, as it turns out, is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. Lately, the law vs. tech gap is making headlines as it upends the rules around sports gambling. The daily fantasy sports sites FanDuel and DraftKings are showing how fast technology can exploit the gap and put government on its heels.

This problem is as old as law itself. From thrown rocks to spears, bow and arrow to guns, agricultural to industrial economies, government has always had this problem.

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Original Submission

• The ramblings of an irrelevant magazine The ramblings of an irrelevant magazine (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:30AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:30AM (#257815)

  Hi; same AC as the "Someone has read too much Clayton Christensen" post up above. I looked at the URL of the source story, and lo and behold, it's from Newsweek. Time, Newsweek, Bloomberg, and now National Geographic are desperately trying to become more relevant in the news cycle, so they're becoming disruptive and reader-antagonistic, all to attempt to attract attention. Along the way, they are making hilariously awful covers, such as Bloomberg's "Tim Cook's Apple" cover (which Fast Company ridiculed [fastcodesign.com] by saying, "You don't pair THAT s***-eating grin with THAT font and THOSE colors unless you want to make someone look like a clown"), and Time's cover with Palmer Luckey (which Giant Bomb co-founder Jeff Gerstmann lampooned [giantbomb.com] as "some kind of f***** New Age cyberhippie beach fantasy land for complete lunatics"). And now Fox owns National Geographic, who this past month released a terrible cover containing the text "cool it" in "flatten-the-world" design trope traditionalistic sans-serif typeface and ultra-sparse photographic direction. It is probably the worst travesty that could be perpetrated on a publication whose former covers were worthy of exhibition in art galleries (especially that 1988 3D holographic 2-frame cover, complete with a matching 3D holographic 2-frame McDonald's advertisement; how the majestic have fallen).

  This drivel is being spouted by dying publications who know they're obsolete. I forget the author's name, but he edited an article on employment tests, complete with the reader-antagonistic diatribe... and then in the back cover, he wrote a column on how he feels ultra-insecure with his career in the news magazine industry. He would be better served standing aside and letting better authors write articles, prior to when the publication will probably collapse, but at least with some semblance of honor. But instead, these publications will suffocate under a sea of faux-Christensenism snark and browser-hijacking ads.

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• Re:The ramblings of an irrelevant magazine (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:55PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:55PM (#257982)

  You can write "shit" and "fuck" here instead of self-censoring with "****". It's OK. We are free.

  Parent