First, some of the laws have already passed (DMCA et al). Some can still be opposed (SSSCA et al); the others can be repealed (or, more likely, struck down by the courts).
Second, note who "I wonder how that works" is threatening to: anyone and everyone who believes in their hearts that finding out how things work is a waste of time. This may seem hard to believe to you and me, but dreaming is a learned skill, and most human beings on Earth - even most human beings in America - have had it drilled into them that dreaming is a waste of time, before they had a chance to seriously think about ways to improve their lives. They honestly think the world is supposed to be black-box and beyond comprehension.
I wonder how long it will be before original thought itself is formally outlawed (with possible, and extremely limited, exceptions for expensively licensed corporate labs)?
To which, may I add: criminals, as a group, tend to make mistakes; this is largely due to most of them being amateurs. (Talk to any veteran law enforcer: the truly "perfect" crime is a very rare beast, as are people who commit enough crimes to make a living at it. This is even moreso for, say, suicide bombers.) Discussing plans in the open, where police can observe or citizens can observe and relay to police, is one such mistake.
Thus the core conflict: the government thinks spyware does work, and has several logical and commonsense arguments why it should. The only problem is, reality proves them wrong on this particular point rather consistently.
Which suggests a solution: convince them of the facts, specifically that spyware does not work.
(Laughing at the absurdity of that yet? Good. I said it was a solution; I didn't say it'd be a practical solution. Get politicians to believe and act upon politically incorrect truths? Yeah, right...)
Would robotic hands attached to the ends of the sleeves, operated by hands within the sleeves, be a good workaround for this? You wouldn't need much insulation for the robot parts; the challenge would be getting them to faithfully mimic the motions of their flesh-and-blood counterparts - basically, complex puppetry. A position-sensing glove for the flesh hand would probably be necessary to gather all the information on the position of each finger, tilt of the wrist, et cetera, but that's been done, no?
Maybe this is the meaning of life. All life being different "Programs". If this is the case, what version is H Sapiens?
Versionless. Evolution just keeps hacking away. Is it and other life open source?
All life on Earth is unlicensed - technically pirated, if one assumes the need for an explicit license. There have been no all-out enforcement attempts thus far, although certain branches of the code tree have been purged, especially by the H. Sapiens branch as it seeks to acquire more resources for its own runtime. Is it stable?
No. In fact, any given instance of any branch is guaranteed to crash sooner or later - though there is work on fixing this bug, especially for the H. Sapiens branch. Can it be ported to Linux?
In theory, although the emulators are severely limited at the moment. Fortunately, emulator development is getting lots of funding. Should the DOJ get involved?
It already is, in some ways.
If we're unsure that our target is guilty, the actual guilty party may be on another continent when we attack, and then we'd be targetting and killing civilians and civilians only - at least, so far as anyone other than our military and the military that attacked us is "civilian".
Even if we are sure the attack was, say, sponsored by some specific country, and we attack the country blindly as opposed to selectively taking out its military and leaders, then the military and leaders are likely to be among those who have forewarning and get out of the way of our attacks - and again, the effect of our attack is to target and kill civilians and civilians only. (No allowance for "but we thought the military would still be there, so we were targetting the military" if we didn't think at all before attacking.)
Very good idea, IMO! At those distances and angles, tasers and batons - and training in martial arts, to use them and be able to fight unarmed if necessary - would seem sufficient. It's not easy to smuggle heavy armor onto a plane, so the variety of situations would probably be limited: terrorists get up from amidst the passengers, possibly bring out a knife or a gun, possibly have one or more bombs on the airliner...
Heck, it'd probably be rather easy to train security against most hijacking situations. One or two security specialists in addition to the stewards...or possibly just have at least one or two stewards on each flight be security-trained and equipped. Most flights, the baton wouldn't come out (and could be hidden under the uniform, so you wouldn't know who's armed unless you know they're all armed), so make sure to refresh the training every so often. This might help against air rage, too.
Killing innocent civilians serves no good purpose. I just hope that principle is remembered even in anger and during calls for revenge. If you can positively identify and kill those responsible, fine, but if you are prepared to see the deaths of innocent civilians in the pursuit of revenge, then you have no moral advantage over the terrorists.
Put another way, consider what the terrorists actually did: kill innocent civilians. All of the suspects (Muslims, domestic, etc.) would have been motivated by revenge. If we kill or harrass everyone who might be associated with a terrorists, in the hopes of silencing or scaring our enemies, we will have become terrorists ourselves - literally, acting by terror.
The US is already close enough to ruling by fear (note the "chilling effect" - Supreme Court's legal term - extended by the DMCA and other recent legislation, going far beyond the intent and, often, the letter of the law). It doesn't need to go further down that path just now.
Agreed. Politics certainly play a role. Technology, as it is usually invoked - new technology, especially computer technology - was not involved in the attack itself (unless maybe they communicated by - ooh, scaaary - email). Technology was involved in getting the word out, and in communicating the information of exactly what did happen so people would not dream up demons and react to them...which would have dealt far more damage than the actual attacks. Technology is also being used to coordinate search and rescue, to get as many victims out alive as possible.
Or is damage mitigation istelf what's supposed to be "horrific", since it shortens the time in which the media (including Katz) can meaninglessly pontificate on this topic and still sound non-foolish? "Tragedy: only 10,000 people died out of the 50,000 in those towers. Now we'll only be able to milk one hour of airtime out of listing the names in a 'memorial' (with 'respectful' - we'll take the ad agencies' word on that - silent ads surrounding the content) instead of five!"
Attacks make Americans willing to trade liberty for security. Laws get passed to take away liberty, but are lax on actually implementing security (real security is a lot more expensive than the illusion of security that, for instance, the NSA and CIA have been giving us). However, the take-away in liberty does allow (short term) profits to the currently-largest organizations, which might otherwise be threatened if just anyone could do an innocuous activity that could become a terrorist action. (Anything that can disrupt large organizations, no matter its other uses, is potentially useful to terrorists.) Some of the take-away will be labelled as "temporary", but will happen to remain on the books for a long time (maybe someone will point out that actual "temporary" laws have, at the least, sunset provisions). And, of course, media attention is diverted away from the SSSCA (and maybe other similar issues) just long enough for it to gain momentum.
It'd be totally ironic if it turns out the party responsible was a McVeigh wannabe trying to thwart the American government and the corporations that (in their opinion) bought it. Or if it was some faction that thought the lax, free American culture was threatening their rigidly-controlled police state - in which case, would not this extra security be the fastest way to cave in to their demands?
The problem with arguments like that, is that the only people who will pay them any heed are exactly the people who would care about the morality. If you ask them to stop, they may...but the unethical will continue blithely on. And then [PICK_RESEARCH_FIELD] will be dominated by the unethical: zealots (religious or otherwise) out to make life miserable for those who do not believe as they do, corporations who care for little save their current quarter's bottom line (even at the expense of their own future), and the just plain uninformed (who lack any basic education about the field with which to make moral decisions).
The result, then, is that it is the duty of those with any shred of ethics to aggressively pursue their research at the fastest possible speed, so that [PICK_RESEARCH_FIELD] may be tapped for the benefit of all humanity and countermeasures developed against its negative applications. This ensures that the ethical decisions that matter will be made by those who have some ethics, whether or not they have the fullest possible advantage of foresight. Perhaps the debate can rage while the research goes on, to give them some foresight...but to hold back the research until the ethics have been settled is to ensure catastrophe. (Besides, for many of these fields, the ethics may never be settled. See, for example, the continued debate over abortion, decades after - at least in the US - the issue was settled by the Supreme Court.)
If you could "replicate" anything in the real world, the economy would collapse because no one would buy anything, but people could just make their own food, so you wouldn't *need* to buy anything. (except real estate & electricity/raw materials for replicator, unless that's out of the air)
How about services? Sure, you and I know how to run an Apache server, but that retro rock band down the street who wants to run an "official" fan site as part of their marketing would have a hard time without help (paid in money or barter, maybe even favors or friendship, but still paid for). Likewise, I might want to ride around in a custom mecha just to be wierd, and maybe I don't have the skills to design one nor the patience to learn...but I can hire a designer. (Of course, the designs can be copied and tinkered with once produced, but someone's gotta come up with version 0.0.1 alpha.)
Well...we are getting close to the point where medical science adds a year of average expected lifespan for every year that goes by. In a few decades, it could be that almost no one does die anymore.
So why not prepare children for the world they will face, instead of the world we have faced?
Well...if one wanted to shape a relatively low-melt-point metal, then could one not just make the fabber out of high-melt-point material (say, graphite) and pour each layer on molten, then quickly cool it? You'd have to be careful not to spill drops from the new layer, and make sure not to deform the lower layers too much (thus the quick cool, and maybe other precautions), but if one did that...
Agreed...for less structured data. If you've got a poorly understood problem you're documenting, where the lack of understanding precludes even putting together a DTD for the docs, Wiki works well. And given as "poorly understood" tends to mean "interesting"...
Why not take that thought to its logical conclusion? Give incentives to the unmotivated to bulk themselves up (no steroids, please) and line up at the nearest slaughterhouse. Sufficient sterilization and other treatment of the meat should be able to obviate any health risks from eating human flesh.
(For the clue-impaired: the above said with tongue firmly in cheek, as I hope the parent post was.)
Precisely...except that if it's only conduct remedies that are sought, and not fines (they're already in violation of earlier conduct remedies), well...
(Ignoring the fact that this is costing them legal bills. But that's a relative pittance to them.)
I did my Master's thesis on exactly that, back in '96. It was possible then. (One of my professors went further: back in the '60s, she wired up a cat's audio nerves to a radio transmitter, then listened to the signals. With minimal modulation, she was able to hear what the cat heard.) It's interesting to see the work being done, but this isn't as much of a breakthrough as some people think. The breakthrough was learning that nerves carry signals that can be electrically measured and generated. Once that was done, the main requirement is someone brave enough to wire up severed neurons in a living being to a mechanical limb and sensors.
That said, this research - and its publicity - will hopefully alert people that the tech is available, and thus maybe inspire someone to try.
A hammer might work, if you could position it so that the hammer's end hit the spinning supports close to the base (where they're not moving as fast) without having the outer parts of the spinner hitting the hammer's shaft. Alternately, you could just send in another spinbot, with hard and sharp blades on the end, trying to rip apart SOW from the outside in...
Do you really think Hitler would have cared if Germany was erased from the face of the earth, if he could make sure England was erased too...?
Why, yes, I do. I believe he was fighting to make the world a better place for Nazi Germany. I believe he, and his forces, would have eagerly accepted England's surrender were it offered. I believe that most of the German military thought they were fighting on the side of good and right, and that extermination was only justified to ensure their own survival and wellbeing.
Of course, I also believe they were incorrect to think that WW2 could make the world better for them, even without the benefit of post-WW2 hindsight...
It most definitely is news, at the least. Dropping the pursuit of the breakup after they'd already won it? (Granted, it got overturned on appeal, but they could have pressed for it again with the new judge.)
As for the breakup...Microsoft has demonstrated that it can and will ignore (not flout, not workaround, but outright ignore) any conduct remedy imposed on it that inconveniences it. Let's take a look at the conduct remedies listed in the CNN article as examples:
prohibiting Microsoft from punishing companies working on competing products - a business deal is a business deal. If Microsoft starts giving away Office - one of its currently most profitable products - to try to eliminate competition, the government may eventually sue them (if they can be convinced to)...but merely filing the lawsuit and getting things to court will take long enough that any non-free competitors would be dead well before opening arguments were heard.
prohibiting it from favoring companies that helped Microsoft exclude competitors - same deal. If Microsoft were to hand the MPAA or RIAA, or even just Real, a billion dollars tomorrow, the money would be invested and gone before the government even noticed.
requiring Microsoft to license Windows to PC makers under uniform prices and terms according to a publicly available schedule - watch Microsoft simple ignore this, and go on as if this order never existed. Alternately, perhaps it will comply...by posting all kinds of different editions of Windows, 100% identical except for certain logos and title strings, but with prices varying by as much as 1000%. The higher-priced ones are readily available to anyone, while the lower-priced ones are by special order only...and only certain companies ever seem to have these special orders processed, or even seem able to find out how to place orders for them to begin with.
barring Microsoft from interfering with the way PC makers set up startup screens et al - and what happens when Microsoft's contracts continue to enforce this? Government sues to get enforcement...and the contracts persist. Government sues again...and the contracts persist.
In short: laws only matter if they can be enforced. Conduct remedies can't effectively be enforced in this case, therefore they are equivalent to nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
First, some of the laws have already passed (DMCA et al). Some can still be opposed (SSSCA et al); the others can be repealed (or, more likely, struck down by the courts).
Second, note who "I wonder how that works" is threatening to: anyone and everyone who believes in their hearts that finding out how things work is a waste of time. This may seem hard to believe to you and me, but dreaming is a learned skill, and most human beings on Earth - even most human beings in America - have had it drilled into them that dreaming is a waste of time, before they had a chance to seriously think about ways to improve their lives. They honestly think the world is supposed to be black-box and beyond comprehension.
I wonder how long it will be before original thought itself is formally outlawed (with possible, and extremely limited, exceptions for expensively licensed corporate labs)?
To which, may I add: criminals, as a group, tend to make mistakes; this is largely due to most of them being amateurs. (Talk to any veteran law enforcer: the truly "perfect" crime is a very rare beast, as are people who commit enough crimes to make a living at it. This is even moreso for, say, suicide bombers.) Discussing plans in the open, where police can observe or citizens can observe and relay to police, is one such mistake.
Thus the core conflict: the government thinks spyware does work, and has several logical and commonsense arguments why it should. The only problem is, reality proves them wrong on this particular point rather consistently.
Which suggests a solution: convince them of the facts, specifically that spyware does not work.
(Laughing at the absurdity of that yet? Good. I said it was a solution; I didn't say it'd be a practical solution. Get politicians to believe and act upon politically incorrect truths? Yeah, right...)
Would robotic hands attached to the ends of the sleeves, operated by hands within the sleeves, be a good workaround for this? You wouldn't need much insulation for the robot parts; the challenge would be getting them to faithfully mimic the motions of their flesh-and-blood counterparts - basically, complex puppetry. A position-sensing glove for the flesh hand would probably be necessary to gather all the information on the position of each finger, tilt of the wrist, et cetera, but that's been done, no?
Maybe this is the meaning of life. All life being different "Programs". If this is the case, what version is H Sapiens?
Versionless. Evolution just keeps hacking away.
Is it and other life open source?
All life on Earth is unlicensed - technically pirated, if one assumes the need for an explicit license. There have been no all-out enforcement attempts thus far, although certain branches of the code tree have been purged, especially by the H. Sapiens branch as it seeks to acquire more resources for its own runtime.
Is it stable?
No. In fact, any given instance of any branch is guaranteed to crash sooner or later - though there is work on fixing this bug, especially for the H. Sapiens branch.
Can it be ported to Linux?
In theory, although the emulators are severely limited at the moment. Fortunately, emulator development is getting lots of funding.
Should the DOJ get involved?
It already is, in some ways.
Very good idea, IMO! At those distances and angles, tasers and batons - and training in martial arts, to use them and be able to fight unarmed if necessary - would seem sufficient. It's not easy to smuggle heavy armor onto a plane, so the variety of situations would probably be limited: terrorists get up from amidst the passengers, possibly bring out a knife or a gun, possibly have one or more bombs on the airliner...
Heck, it'd probably be rather easy to train security against most hijacking situations. One or two security specialists in addition to the stewards...or possibly just have at least one or two stewards on each flight be security-trained and equipped. Most flights, the baton wouldn't come out (and could be hidden under the uniform, so you wouldn't know who's armed unless you know they're all armed), so make sure to refresh the training every so often. This might help against air rage, too.
Killing innocent civilians serves no good purpose. I just hope that principle is remembered even in anger and during calls for revenge. If you can positively identify and kill those responsible, fine, but if you are prepared to see the deaths of innocent civilians in the pursuit of revenge, then you have no moral advantage over the terrorists.
Put another way, consider what the terrorists actually did: kill innocent civilians. All of the suspects (Muslims, domestic, etc.) would have been motivated by revenge. If we kill or harrass everyone who might be associated with a terrorists, in the hopes of silencing or scaring our enemies, we will have become terrorists ourselves - literally, acting by terror.
The US is already close enough to ruling by fear (note the "chilling effect" - Supreme Court's legal term - extended by the DMCA and other recent legislation, going far beyond the intent and, often, the letter of the law). It doesn't need to go further down that path just now.
Agreed. Politics certainly play a role. Technology, as it is usually invoked - new technology, especially computer technology - was not involved in the attack itself (unless maybe they communicated by - ooh, scaaary - email). Technology was involved in getting the word out, and in communicating the information of exactly what did happen so people would not dream up demons and react to them...which would have dealt far more damage than the actual attacks. Technology is also being used to coordinate search and rescue, to get as many victims out alive as possible.
Or is damage mitigation istelf what's supposed to be "horrific", since it shortens the time in which the media (including Katz) can meaninglessly pontificate on this topic and still sound non-foolish? "Tragedy: only 10,000 people died out of the 50,000 in those towers. Now we'll only be able to milk one hour of airtime out of listing the names in a 'memorial' (with 'respectful' - we'll take the ad agencies' word on that - silent ads surrounding the content) instead of five!"
Good point. If I may toss out a theory...
Attacks make Americans willing to trade liberty for security. Laws get passed to take away liberty, but are lax on actually implementing security (real security is a lot more expensive than the illusion of security that, for instance, the NSA and CIA have been giving us). However, the take-away in liberty does allow (short term) profits to the currently-largest organizations, which might otherwise be threatened if just anyone could do an innocuous activity that could become a terrorist action. (Anything that can disrupt large organizations, no matter its other uses, is potentially useful to terrorists.) Some of the take-away will be labelled as "temporary", but will happen to remain on the books for a long time (maybe someone will point out that actual "temporary" laws have, at the least, sunset provisions). And, of course, media attention is diverted away from the SSSCA (and maybe other similar issues) just long enough for it to gain momentum.
It'd be totally ironic if it turns out the party responsible was a McVeigh wannabe trying to thwart the American government and the corporations that (in their opinion) bought it. Or if it was some faction that thought the lax, free American culture was threatening their rigidly-controlled police state - in which case, would not this extra security be the fastest way to cave in to their demands?
Someone's posting disinformation. Kudos to whichever of you it is.
The problem with arguments like that, is that the only people who will pay them any heed are exactly the people who would care about the morality. If you ask them to stop, they may...but the unethical will continue blithely on. And then [PICK_RESEARCH_FIELD] will be dominated by the unethical: zealots (religious or otherwise) out to make life miserable for those who do not believe as they do, corporations who care for little save their current quarter's bottom line (even at the expense of their own future), and the just plain uninformed (who lack any basic education about the field with which to make moral decisions).
The result, then, is that it is the duty of those with any shred of ethics to aggressively pursue their research at the fastest possible speed, so that [PICK_RESEARCH_FIELD] may be tapped for the benefit of all humanity and countermeasures developed against its negative applications. This ensures that the ethical decisions that matter will be made by those who have some ethics, whether or not they have the fullest possible advantage of foresight. Perhaps the debate can rage while the research goes on, to give them some foresight...but to hold back the research until the ethics have been settled is to ensure catastrophe. (Besides, for many of these fields, the ethics may never be settled. See, for example, the continued debate over abortion, decades after - at least in the US - the issue was settled by the Supreme Court.)
But it is funny - in the ironic, sad, twisted, sick sort of way that many truths are...
If you could "replicate" anything in the real world, the economy would collapse because no one would buy anything, but people could just make their own food, so you wouldn't *need* to buy anything. (except real estate & electricity/raw materials for replicator, unless that's out of the air)
How about services? Sure, you and I know how to run an Apache server, but that retro rock band down the street who wants to run an "official" fan site as part of their marketing would have a hard time without help (paid in money or barter, maybe even favors or friendship, but still paid for). Likewise, I might want to ride around in a custom mecha just to be wierd, and maybe I don't have the skills to design one nor the patience to learn...but I can hire a designer. (Of course, the designs can be copied and tinkered with once produced, but someone's gotta come up with version 0.0.1 alpha.)
Read "everybody" as "everybody that contributes to the politicos", and the argument works just fine. And that's likely how it will work in practice.
Well...we are getting close to the point where medical science adds a year of average expected lifespan for every year that goes by. In a few decades, it could be that almost no one does die anymore.
So why not prepare children for the world they will face, instead of the world we have faced?
Well...if one wanted to shape a relatively low-melt-point metal, then could one not just make the fabber out of high-melt-point material (say, graphite) and pour each layer on molten, then quickly cool it? You'd have to be careful not to spill drops from the new layer, and make sure not to deform the lower layers too much (thus the quick cool, and maybe other precautions), but if one did that...
Which leads to something like Fabster...
Agreed...for less structured data. If you've got a poorly understood problem you're documenting, where the lack of understanding precludes even putting together a DTD for the docs, Wiki works well. And given as "poorly understood" tends to mean "interesting"...
Why not take that thought to its logical conclusion? Give incentives to the unmotivated to bulk themselves up (no steroids, please) and line up at the nearest slaughterhouse. Sufficient sterilization and other treatment of the meat should be able to obviate any health risks from eating human flesh.
(For the clue-impaired: the above said with tongue firmly in cheek, as I hope the parent post was.)
Precisely...except that if it's only conduct remedies that are sought, and not fines (they're already in violation of earlier conduct remedies), well...
(Ignoring the fact that this is costing them legal bills. But that's a relative pittance to them.)
I did my Master's thesis on exactly that, back in '96. It was possible then. (One of my professors went further: back in the '60s, she wired up a cat's audio nerves to a radio transmitter, then listened to the signals. With minimal modulation, she was able to hear what the cat heard.) It's interesting to see the work being done, but this isn't as much of a breakthrough as some people think. The breakthrough was learning that nerves carry signals that can be electrically measured and generated. Once that was done, the main requirement is someone brave enough to wire up severed neurons in a living being to a mechanical limb and sensors.
That said, this research - and its publicity - will hopefully alert people that the tech is available, and thus maybe inspire someone to try.
A hammer might work, if you could position it so that the hammer's end hit the spinning supports close to the base (where they're not moving as fast) without having the outer parts of the spinner hitting the hammer's shaft. Alternately, you could just send in another spinbot, with hard and sharp blades on the end, trying to rip apart SOW from the outside in...
Do you really think Hitler would have cared if Germany was erased from the face of the earth, if he could make sure England was erased too...?
Why, yes, I do. I believe he was fighting to make the world a better place for Nazi Germany. I believe he, and his forces, would have eagerly accepted England's surrender were it offered. I believe that most of the German military thought they were fighting on the side of good and right, and that extermination was only justified to ensure their own survival and wellbeing.
Of course, I also believe they were incorrect to think that WW2 could make the world better for them, even without the benefit of post-WW2 hindsight...
As for the breakup...Microsoft has demonstrated that it can and will ignore (not flout, not workaround, but outright ignore) any conduct remedy imposed on it that inconveniences it. Let's take a look at the conduct remedies listed in the CNN article as examples:
- prohibiting Microsoft from punishing companies working on competing products - a business deal is a business deal. If Microsoft starts giving away Office - one of its currently most profitable products - to try to eliminate competition, the government may eventually sue them (if they can be convinced to)...but merely filing the lawsuit and getting things to court will take long enough that any non-free competitors would be dead well before opening arguments were heard.
- prohibiting it from favoring companies that helped Microsoft exclude competitors - same deal. If Microsoft were to hand the MPAA or RIAA, or even just Real, a billion dollars tomorrow, the money would be invested and gone before the government even noticed.
- requiring Microsoft to license Windows to PC makers under uniform prices and terms according to a publicly available schedule - watch Microsoft simple ignore this, and go on as if this order never existed. Alternately, perhaps it will comply...by posting all kinds of different editions of Windows, 100% identical except for certain logos and title strings, but with prices varying by as much as 1000%. The higher-priced ones are readily available to anyone, while the lower-priced ones are by special order only...and only certain companies ever seem to have these special orders processed, or even seem able to find out how to place orders for them to begin with.
- barring Microsoft from interfering with the way PC makers set up startup screens et al - and what happens when Microsoft's contracts continue to enforce this? Government sues to get enforcement...and the contracts persist. Government sues again...and the contracts persist.
In short: laws only matter if they can be enforced. Conduct remedies can't effectively be enforced in this case, therefore they are equivalent to nothing.