As for obtaining video records from government agencies, good luck: "Do you know the number of the video tape on which the alleged action was recorded?" Of course not. You couldn't possibly.
Maybe Kazinski wasn't completely wrong about everything.
We live in societies bound by two webs. One of trust and one of deceit. Some people are constantly stradlling lines from both.
Shoving packets over the power grid is not a swift move, given the problems of interference, atmospheric effects, solar wind effects, surges and brownouts, NOISE from industrial equipment, uncontrolled attenuation (do you really want your packets going all over the neighbourhood? In Nevada, maybe in NYC, the collisions would make it unusable.)
If you tried this in politics, you'd make the papers followed eventually by your untimely demise. (Lenin and Stalin to the contrary, nobody who's tried this blatant form of control in this century has gotten from cradle to tomb without either getting terminated with extreme prejudice.)
ROTFL... FUD doesn't work on people with competitive pressure. Its delivered goods that count.
M$ takes three tries to get anything right and takes too long to do it. That may work with IT wanks but if you wanna sell something that somebody wants to watch something TONIGHT, you can't afford to wait a year or more as M$ tries to scare off the competition while stealing all their ideas.
A Linux box just trumped M$ where it hurts. In the real world market place.
Our government is less intrusive and far less restrictive that the US's. (We get cable porn disguised as "art," we smoke pot and don't risk arrest, a criminal record and anal probes by nasty goons for a crummy joint.:-)
At least Chretien knows how many mukes everybody's got. Did you see Dubya's face when somebody told him how many he's got to play with.
The rest of the world needs a shield from the US, NOT the other way around.
You elected him...Uh, you didn't. Bwahaha...
No I sit corrected. You're not a democracy either.
Look on the bright side, the doctor who will see you will be using a VR rig because he can afford to live in TO while you have to live in Hamilton because of your tax bill.
If ever there was an idea promoted through mendacity, audacity and testicles made of cheap amalgam, CueCat: was IT!
I threw away Wired magazine, canceled my subscription and vowed to do the same to anyone who would be so callous as to treat my and my privacy that way.
The "top n" artists aren't their's., They produce nothing. They have no artists or pressing/burning facilities.
They are the music mafia. They exist to maximise profits. New artists cost money to produce and to promote. Old trash is pure gravy to them. The deader the artist, the happier they are.
Ever wonder why Elvis is still selling albums? Who gets the money?
Why would anyone invest in yet another Boxcar Willy record?
Its not because they like 'em. Its that the artist gets squat (public domain,) they shuffle the playlist, it costs squat to make (25 cents a CD including cover art [its some old photo scanned with a different photoshop text layer,]) and they are rolling in it.
They are parasites on the artists' efforts.
But the blood suckers have become so engorged that they now control the show. Its like a leech on your ass guiding you to chairs with holes in them, (you know the room and what happens there,) so they don't get squashed.
End result, you get to listen to shit.
The MPAA's the same. But you get brown shoved in your face instead of having it crammed in your ears.
You're paying for music but you're not the one who bought it. Ever wonder what the elevators are filled with? The malls, that theatres, every public gathering place. Ever wonder why? Its not for your benefit. Its not for your enjoyment. This stuff is bought by people who don't listen to it.
Now the RIAA & MPAA have a major threat to their business model.
CD burning and the internet can absolutely wipe them out, so they get some kid arrested in Europe and drag his ass to New York, they get CD-ROM burner manufacturers to add all kinds of crap to make recording and copying impossible.
Supposedly its anti-piracy, but its not. Pirates use equipment that can do bit copies and never even attempt to interpret the stream. Its anti-YOU. If they lose control they are history.
Like the mafia going to the matresses, there's a lot of collateral damage and they really don't give a shit if a few civilians get killed in China or their rights get trampled in Europe.
They are going to make money if they have to rip your pants off. But there are laws that not even they can break. And if you have no money, they don't get any either...
I've turned off the TV and radio, stopped going to the movies and my advice to the xxAAs out there is to get other jobs.
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that nobody believes the problem is widespread. (Like the dust bowl pictures of Okies in Life magazine right next to ads for luxury items.)
Then the problem with statistics is that nobody believes them because they're just faceless numbers.
Having spent the first six months of Y2K in Manhattan ($ all around but none for a job for me,) I was an anecdote. I found something but the burn rate hurt like you can't believe. I can no longer afford to retire for twenty years and I'm living from paycheck to paycheck retiring debt instead.
But now that companies, including the one that hired me, have stopped "wasting money" for head hunter commissions, life for the recently unemployed (some of whom are head-hunters,) has got a lot tougher.
The objective reality is that its chaos out there.
I have house cats with a higher IQ than the most powerful man in the country (USA.)
He's out in Europe making Canada look good, trying to sell a useless pork barrel boondoggle that nobody wants and which utterly fails to address the threat from smaller nations rightfully angry about being so callously abused for their resources.
McVeigh didn't use a missile. He used a truck. Will the missile shield cover the interstate too?
Hurtling to oblivion racing to get there faster than the heat death of the universe.
Copying software, for free or for money, doesn't means a thing.
People, and I mean every techie, IT manager or dweeb who can handle a mouse and type "make install", figures that they can do it better and then they proceed to try (and usually fail because they didn't understand the magnitude of the problem.)
I've given away designs that I could/should have charged for and the fact remains that GPL and Gnu/Linux is the first (and perhaps only) place since 1978 where the community and the concept of a community has actually had a chance.
You can give people a map of where to go and directions on how to get there and they will stumble around engendering bankruptcy after failure before admitting that they don't know it all.
You can't get more object oriented than Smalltalk. The IDE is what all the CASE and developer tools want to be when they grow up.
The only systemic failing that Smalltalk has is that contained objects only know about their containers if they are explicitely made aware and passed in a reference at instantiation time.
Java is a wanna be. C++ is even worse. The rest of the languages and development environments are left standing on the shore.
Use Smalltalk. You can find a free version at http://www.squeak.org/
Go try it out. But be warned, you'll be utterly spoiled by it.
If somebody has a problem with web content, let them solve it the simplest way possible, unplug.
The concept of Taliban having problems with the Web when they don't have (or want,) infrastructure worth crap is laughable.
The next possibility is squeezing the pipe.
If France has a problem with Yahoo, they know where the fibre connections are across their borders and they can filter the packets from and to Yahoo's IP addresses.
If anybody has a problem, they can unplug or apply IP filters. That's it. But its their problem and its up to them to solve it.
M$ in its facist wisdom will now decide to route you anywhere M$ wants you to go today (namely, to where ever someone has given them money to get their tags to the top of the list.)
There will be no possibility of garanteeing that the links that a visitor to your page has available on what they might surmise is your page are the ones that you, the author, actually placed there.
This gives M$ the possibility to redirect the entire content of the internet to their own advantage.
Imagine that you're a fundamentalist group and fork over enough dough to M$ to insure that links to your site's pages are used ahead of the competition WHEN PEOPLE WERE CLICKING TO GET TO THE COMPETITION'S PAGES!
The potential for misuse is staggering. I'm no sci-fi writer but I can follow this train of thought "five minutes into the future" and it smacks of every "benign humanitarian experiment gone wrong" scenario I've ever read or watched.
Crackers defacing a web-site for nothing but kicks have nothing on the potential for one-sided misdirection and misinformation of such a distopian web of deceit.
It make the WorldWideWeb into the WorldWideLie, by default!
I hope that we can find the moron who came up with this scheme, strap him down and McVeigh the idiot.
No planes will be able to fly without paying me ten bucks and the army will have to pay me too when they lob shells at the enemy. (like the offices where these idiots hang out.)
I often end up working for morons with no specs and no documentation, ridiculous deadlines and THEN they take away my resources (human & other,) but they don't want to know about the schedule slipping.
I earn my salary to buy my Aspirin and Tums. I had it a lot easier before I got into this racket.
Reality is beginning to creep in on cyberspace. How can we be surprized about this.
Cyberspace is concensual. Not democratic, not authoritarian but concensual. It exists but it is a direct reflection of its virtual inhabitant.
Face it. Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Both utopia (a paradox is ever there was one,) and distopia (the same paradox in reverse,) will find limited existence there.
Bet on limited chaos but be aware that history courses are litanies of faded civilizations and vanished ones.
The same medium is being used to transmit porn and Taliban edicts against wome showing themselves in public (at all!)
Its just that the absurdity of the cacophony is becoming hard to avoid. Its all based on an economy of scarcety.
For the entire realm of data (or even information, and perhaps knowledge,) having essentially infinite bandwidth, a cpu cycle being so cheap as to be essentially unmeasurable and storage capacity doubling even faster than Moore's Law flies in the face of that ethos. We are creatures of information.
God (yet another paradox,) is telling people through his annointed and illuminated emmisaries, to love one and other but to kill those people in the neighboring valley because they're different (they're too tall, short, pale, tanned, hairy, short, don't or do wear hats,) and therefore evil.
RIAA and MPAA, who produce no content what-so-ever, are in control of the transmission and therefore the production of music and motion pictures. But don't ask them to carry a tune because they'll charge you for the privilege of proving they're tone-deaf and unimaginative.
Terrorism isn't as effective as dentistry at scaring the crap out of people.
And Leibnitz can now be generalized to: "The power of < whatever > belongs to those who own one."
My respect for this individual is heading deeper and deeper into negative territory.
FUD works with whispers and subtle calimnies.
This guy is going at it hammer and tongs and starting to look like his grip on reality is slipping.
They will try to keep the world on the x86 long past the point where it can be demonstrated that security on that platform is lousy because they are too inept to move off of it and the alternative it oblivion for M$.
The dialog will be munged and the closest sounding words will be used to synch with the lip movement but that doesn't matter anyway.
If "Jesus of Montreal" taught you anything (they were dubbing porno movies from English to French,) as long as the word sound believable, the lip synch doesn't matter that much.
The actors being digital doesn't make any difference. It might as well be Marylin Monroe (or Marylin Chambers) on the screen. You don't get a re-shoot. Just say the words in te right voice and it'll do.
Just don't get Hoss Cartwright's part spoken by a fouteen year old girl and you'll be okay.
Slashdot Mirror
Who will watch the watchers? Not you obviously.
As for obtaining video records from government agencies, good luck: "Do you know the number of the video tape on which the alleged action was recorded?" Of course not. You couldn't possibly.
Maybe Kazinski wasn't completely wrong about everything.
We live in societies bound by two webs. One of trust and one of deceit. Some people are constantly stradlling lines from both.
They gotta recoup their cost.
Shoving packets over the power grid is not a swift move, given the problems of interference, atmospheric effects, solar wind effects, surges and brownouts, NOISE from industrial equipment, uncontrolled attenuation (do you really want your packets going all over the neighbourhood? In Nevada, maybe in NYC, the collisions would make it unusable.)
And screw what the guy who wrote the page wanted.
If you tried this in politics, you'd make the papers followed eventually by your untimely demise. (Lenin and Stalin to the contrary, nobody who's tried this blatant form of control in this century has gotten from cradle to tomb without either getting terminated with extreme prejudice.)
ROTFL... FUD doesn't work on people with competitive pressure. Its delivered goods that count.
M$ takes three tries to get anything right and takes too long to do it. That may work with IT wanks but if you wanna sell something that somebody wants to watch something TONIGHT, you can't afford to wait a year or more as M$ tries to scare off the competition while stealing all their ideas.
A Linux box just trumped M$ where it hurts. In the real world market place.
Kick 'em in the balls.
Our government is less intrusive and far less restrictive that the US's. (We get cable porn disguised as "art," we smoke pot and don't risk arrest, a criminal record and anal probes by nasty goons for a crummy joint. :-)
At least Chretien knows how many mukes everybody's got. Did you see Dubya's face when somebody told him how many he's got to play with.
The rest of the world needs a shield from the US, NOT the other way around.
You elected him...Uh, you didn't. Bwahaha...
No I sit corrected. You're not a democracy either.
Look on the bright side, the doctor who will see you will be using a VR rig because he can afford to live in TO while you have to live in Hamilton because of your tax bill.
But you'll still get a good doctor.
If ever there was an idea promoted through mendacity, audacity and testicles made of cheap amalgam, CueCat: was IT!
I threw away Wired magazine, canceled my subscription and vowed to do the same to anyone who would be so callous as to treat my and my privacy that way.
The "top n" artists aren't their's., They produce nothing. They have no artists or pressing/burning facilities.
They are the music mafia. They exist to maximise profits. New artists cost money to produce and to promote. Old trash is pure gravy to them. The deader the artist, the happier they are.
Ever wonder why Elvis is still selling albums? Who gets the money?
Why would anyone invest in yet another Boxcar Willy record?
Its not because they like 'em. Its that the artist gets squat (public domain,) they shuffle the playlist, it costs squat to make (25 cents a CD including cover art [its some old photo scanned with a different photoshop text layer,]) and they are rolling in it.
They are parasites on the artists' efforts.
But the blood suckers have become so engorged that they now control the show. Its like a leech on your ass guiding you to chairs with holes in them, (you know the room and what happens there,) so they don't get squashed.
End result, you get to listen to shit.
The MPAA's the same. But you get brown shoved in your face instead of having it crammed in your ears.
You're paying for music but you're not the one who bought it. Ever wonder what the elevators are filled with? The malls, that theatres, every public gathering place. Ever wonder why? Its not for your benefit. Its not for your enjoyment. This stuff is bought by people who don't listen to it.
Now the RIAA & MPAA have a major threat to their business model.
CD burning and the internet can absolutely wipe them out, so they get some kid arrested in Europe and drag his ass to New York, they get CD-ROM burner manufacturers to add all kinds of crap to make recording and copying impossible.
Supposedly its anti-piracy, but its not. Pirates use equipment that can do bit copies and never even attempt to interpret the stream. Its anti-YOU. If they lose control they are history.
Like the mafia going to the matresses, there's a lot of collateral damage and they really don't give a shit if a few civilians get killed in China or their rights get trampled in Europe.
They are going to make money if they have to rip your pants off. But there are laws that not even they can break. And if you have no money, they don't get any either...
I've turned off the TV and radio, stopped going to the movies and my advice to the xxAAs out there is to get other jobs.
Been There, Done that.. Its a bitch ...
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that nobody believes the problem is widespread. (Like the dust bowl pictures of Okies in Life magazine right next to ads for luxury items.)
Then the problem with statistics is that nobody believes them because they're just faceless numbers.
Having spent the first six months of Y2K in Manhattan ($ all around but none for a job for me,) I was an anecdote. I found something but the burn rate hurt like you can't believe. I can no longer afford to retire for twenty years and I'm living from paycheck to paycheck retiring debt instead.
But now that companies, including the one that hired me, have stopped "wasting money" for head hunter commissions, life for the recently unemployed (some of whom are head-hunters,) has got a lot tougher.
The objective reality is that its chaos out there.
I have house cats with a higher IQ than the most powerful man in the country (USA.)
He's out in Europe making Canada look good, trying to sell a useless pork barrel boondoggle that nobody wants and which utterly fails to address the threat from smaller nations rightfully angry about being so callously abused for their resources.
McVeigh didn't use a missile. He used a truck. Will the missile shield cover the interstate too?
Hurtling to oblivion racing to get there faster than the heat death of the universe.
Copying software, for free or for money, doesn't means a thing.
People, and I mean every techie, IT manager or dweeb who can handle a mouse and type "make install", figures that they can do it better and then they proceed to try (and usually fail because they didn't understand the magnitude of the problem.)
I've given away designs that I could/should have charged for and the fact remains that GPL and Gnu/Linux is the first (and perhaps only) place since 1978 where the community and the concept of a community has actually had a chance.
You can give people a map of where to go and directions on how to get there and they will stumble around engendering bankruptcy after failure before admitting that they don't know it all.
I hope that the Potchlatch society continues...
It gives me hope.
They weren't called "Zero Knowledge" for nothing I guess.
And nobody took it seriously for fourty years (to date.)
You can't get more object oriented than Smalltalk. The IDE is what all the CASE and developer tools want to be when they grow up.
The only systemic failing that Smalltalk has is that contained objects only know about their containers if they are explicitely made aware and passed in a reference at instantiation time.
Java is a wanna be. C++ is even worse. The rest of the languages and development environments are left standing on the shore.
Use Smalltalk. You can find a free version at http://www.squeak.org/
Go try it out. But be warned, you'll be utterly spoiled by it.
If somebody has a problem with web content, let them solve it the simplest way possible, unplug.
The concept of Taliban having problems with the Web when they don't have (or want,) infrastructure worth crap is laughable.
The next possibility is squeezing the pipe.
If France has a problem with Yahoo, they know where the fibre connections are across their borders and they can filter the packets from and to Yahoo's IP addresses.
If anybody has a problem, they can unplug or apply IP filters. That's it. But its their problem and its up to them to solve it.
M$ in its facist wisdom will now decide to route you anywhere M$ wants you to go today (namely, to where ever someone has given them money to get their tags to the top of the list.)
There will be no possibility of garanteeing that the links that a visitor to your page has available on what they might surmise is your page are the ones that you, the author, actually placed there.
This gives M$ the possibility to redirect the entire content of the internet to their own advantage.
Imagine that you're a fundamentalist group and fork over enough dough to M$ to insure that links to your site's pages are used ahead of the competition WHEN PEOPLE WERE CLICKING TO GET TO THE COMPETITION'S PAGES!
The potential for misuse is staggering. I'm no sci-fi writer but I can follow this train of thought "five minutes into the future" and it smacks of every "benign humanitarian experiment gone wrong" scenario I've ever read or watched.
Crackers defacing a web-site for nothing but kicks have nothing on the potential for one-sided misdirection and misinformation of such a distopian web of deceit.
It make the WorldWideWeb into the WorldWideLie, by default!
I hope that we can find the moron who came up with this scheme, strap him down and McVeigh the idiot.
I find it amusing that M$ will enforce the DMCA and any other restrictive copyright technologies but ignore them whenever its inconvenient.
I own a web site. I write pages. They contain what I want them to contain, including links that I found relevant when I wrote the page.
I definitely do NOT want M$ or anybody else defacing my page by adding or altering MY links.
If they were sixteen year old european kids, they'd be hauled from their homes by the police.
No planes will be able to fly without paying me ten bucks and the army will have to pay me too when they lob shells at the enemy. (like the offices where these idiots hang out.)
WTF? Are these guys morons or what...
I often end up working for morons with no specs and no documentation, ridiculous deadlines and THEN they take away my resources (human & other,) but they don't want to know about the schedule slipping.
I earn my salary to buy my Aspirin and Tums. I had it a lot easier before I got into this racket.
Wadda you think?
Maybe Steve Jobs was right about those damn fans for home machines?
The only person more brain dead that the writer was the moron who uttered the phrase: ""It's an opportunity to redefine our feature"
People who even talk like that deserve to have someone change their minds, with a cinder block.
If you're too devoid of critical throught processes to realize that you're an idiol. you ought to be begging people for spare change.
But instead you become record industry exec who wouldn't know talent if it ripped open your scrotum with its bare teeth.
I really hate these gormless twirps, (in case you couldn't tell.)
Reality is beginning to creep in on cyberspace. How can we be surprized about this.
Cyberspace is concensual. Not democratic, not authoritarian but concensual. It exists but it is a direct reflection of its virtual inhabitant.
Face it. Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Both utopia (a paradox is ever there was one,) and distopia (the same paradox in reverse,) will find limited existence there.
Bet on limited chaos but be aware that history courses are litanies of faded civilizations and vanished ones.
The same medium is being used to transmit porn and Taliban edicts against wome showing themselves in public (at all!)
Its just that the absurdity of the cacophony is becoming hard to avoid. Its all based on an economy of scarcety.
For the entire realm of data (or even information, and perhaps knowledge,) having essentially infinite bandwidth, a cpu cycle being so cheap as to be essentially unmeasurable and storage capacity doubling even faster than Moore's Law flies in the face of that ethos. We are creatures of information.
God (yet another paradox,) is telling people through his annointed and illuminated emmisaries, to love one and other but to kill those people in the neighboring valley because they're different (they're too tall, short, pale, tanned, hairy, short, don't or do wear hats,) and therefore evil.
RIAA and MPAA, who produce no content what-so-ever, are in control of the transmission and therefore the production of music and motion pictures. But don't ask them to carry a tune because they'll charge you for the privilege of proving they're tone-deaf and unimaginative.
Terrorism isn't as effective as dentistry at scaring the crap out of people.
And Leibnitz can now be generalized to: "The power of < whatever > belongs to those who own one."
Apple's mistake is that they didn't make an ugly little titanium box instead of that sexy 8" lucite cube with the rounded edges.
Wadda you think? Razor sharp edges, a blue corodized finish and the plugs on the bottom and the Cube can sell now?
If you want to sell it in Vegas, dimple it and make it look like a die? (Hell sell pair of 'em!)
My respect for this individual is heading deeper and deeper into negative territory.
FUD works with whispers and subtle calimnies.
This guy is going at it hammer and tongs and starting to look like his grip on reality is slipping.
They will try to keep the world on the x86 long past the point where it can be demonstrated that security on that platform is lousy because they are too inept to move off of it and the alternative it oblivion for M$.
The dialog will be munged and the closest sounding words will be used to synch with the lip movement but that doesn't matter anyway.
If "Jesus of Montreal" taught you anything (they were dubbing porno movies from English to French,) as long as the word sound believable, the lip synch doesn't matter that much.
The actors being digital doesn't make any difference. It might as well be Marylin Monroe (or Marylin Chambers) on the screen. You don't get a re-shoot. Just say the words in te right voice and it'll do.
Just don't get Hoss Cartwright's part spoken by a fouteen year old girl and you'll be okay.