The major Linux distributions, like Red Hat, would probably chip in. Part of the reason that Linux has any desktop market share at all is because Firefox runs on it, and many major sites support it. If people couldn't access their banking sites, YouTube, etc. with their Linux browser, they would replace their Linux desktop with Windows. Or, in the case of netbooks, buy the Windows version instead of the Linux one.
A better term might be "discoverable". If you can play with it and figure out what it does without consulting the manual or asking someone else, then it has high "discover-ability". Combine that with "consistent": knowledge of one part of the system helps you to use other parts of the system that you haven't tried yet. Those terms together get at what many people mean when they say "intuitive"
From the time I've spent playing with demo iPhones and Touches the interface was pretty easy to understand. When you turn the phone sideways, it goes into landscape mode and it pretty much does that everywhere, so it is consistent. It is also consistent with what I would expect in the real world; if I'm orienting the screen sideways, I probably want to use it so the long edge is the top now. You can also learn that pretty easily just by trying it, so it is also discoverable. When the iPhone breaks consistency, like the lack of a landscape keyboard in some apps, people complain, which indicates that consistent behavior is part of what we think of as "intuitive".
Zooming in and out works by pinching and pulling, which isn't very discoverable, but it makes sense a certain amount of real-world logical sense ( I'm stretching a photo to make it bigger, squishing it to make it smaller). Once you learn it, you can try that same action in other places and it will do pretty much what you expect (discoverable and consistent). Of course, you can get away with some of those things on a media player because many operations aren't really destructive; you can play with the device to see how it works. If stretching a word processing document ripped it in half and deleted it, that would probably be a different story.
I've tried the Android emulator a bit, so I have some familiarity with the interface. I think I could pretty much figure out how to do most things I'd want to do with it, but it definitely has the feeling of a computer interface shrunk to fit a phone. I think it is discoverable, but from playing with it and reading the reviews, it isn't consistent, so it ultimately isn't as discoverable as the iPhone is.
The iPhone software, on the other hand, feels more like it is purpose-built for the phone; like a part of the device as opposed to running on it. Even the main screen evokes a keypad layout like a touch tone phone rather than the desktop metaphor that Android shoehorns in.
Ultimately, I think that is Android's major challenge. It can't easily become part of a device out of the box because it could run on a range of hardware, while the iPhone software only has to support the iPhone and can blend smoothly with the hardware experience. This is in some ways more important than the relationship of Windows and OS X to their various hardware since we have certain expectations about how a phone should perform that PC's don't have. There is potential for Android to become more discoverable and consistent; personally I'm going to wait for the next Android phone to see if it has improved.
Steve's keynote slides explicitly show that Xcode can publish the code to your personal iPhone for testing purposes. This image from Engadget's coverage (see the 10:30am post for context) shows an iMac remote debugging on the phone using an iPod dock. Whether that means an end user can load an app without going through the store is hard to say.
To mangle ESR (I think), "Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send." Web browsers have always made an effort to gracefully degrade when it receives poorly formed markup and bad data from mis-configured web servers. The fact the web browsers were forgiving about bad markup is part of the reason why the Web grew to the size it has. If it was difficult to develop basic pages because the rendering software threw errors for everything, people wouldn't have bothered and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Remember, SGML came before HTML and XML and it was never used as widely as the two later standards.
In effect, you are arguing for the ivory tower: let the technorati decide what is good and proper and let the peasants receive it. I don't really care for MySpace or Facebook either, but the same technology also lets me enjoy Slashdot, XKCD, and other sites that have value to me. In some sense, Facebook and MySpace are positive for web standards: they can change their rendering layer to be more compliant without their users even noticing.
In any case, the problem isn't with browsers being too permissive. The problem is that IE doesn't support the various web standards to the same level that other browsers do. If IE renders the CSS, SVG, XHTML, etc. specs properly but degrades gracefully when it gets a non-compliant page, that is fine with me.
I'm not as quick to let the Feds off the hook. I don't mind if the government has my data as long as they follow due process of law. That means warrants issued by judicial approval after showing probable cause, habeas corpus, and open trials as much as humanly possible. The govermnent may or may not need to know as much about me as they do (I think they don't), but the real problem here is lack of oversight. Intelligence services follow the principle of need-to-know. I think we need to follow that with the government. They should know only the little bit about me that they absolutely need to know. The only way to determine that is openness in the laws and in judicial process.
You stated that it isn't likely that the Feds will be knocking down your door, so it isn't a concern. The problem is: the Feds can knock down your door while, ostensibly, Equifax can't. The government needs to be under greater scrutiny than the private sector because they have the power to deprive you of your liberty. With the PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters we don't know exactly why the Feds are knocking down your door and you can't tell us why. It might be for a good reason or it might not be. And if someone can abuse the power for a bad reason, they will abuse the power. And they have! The GAO has reported many abuses of the PATRIOT Act by the FBI since it was passed and nothing gets done about it.
In every generation, outside threats have always triggered a response to "increase security" while eliminating civil liberties and those responses have always been proven wrong by history. Japanese-American internment camps and the McCarthy-era black lists are the most recent examples. Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and temporary safety may be a cliche now, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth in it.
All of your objections are also true of DRM right now, with the exception of point f. At this point, with DRM, users have a greater incentive to download from peer to peer, since it is difficult for the average user to strip it out. However, by downloading from P2P networks you take the risk that:
1) The file does not have the content you thought it does, but actually has advertisments or completely different content. 2) The files may have viruses, trojans, or other malicious code. 3) The video may be a low quality camera capture with lousy sound.
I would rather buy a digital copy of my music and movies from a reputable source as long as I can control where I play it. Then I know what I am buying. However, DRM stops me from using the content I bought on every device I own. If the file is only watermarked, at least I can convert it to other formats, back it up, and not worry that broken hardware will remove access to my media.
Watermarking isn't perfect, but significantly improves usability for consumers. If the studios and recording labels release watermarked media that is fast to download, reasonably priced, and simple to find, I think they could easily beat pirates at their own game. Pirates don't have access to consumer outlets like Amazon, Wal-Mart, X-Box Live, Playstation Home, and the Wii Shop Channel. The mainstream markets would eat up a fair download service wrapped in a brand they trust from their couch, rather than having to download obscure file sharing clients and sitting in front of their PC's all night watching progress bars.
I was trying to avoid Godwin's law, since there are many other examples that can be appealed to besides Nazi Germany. The genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Darfur works as well. Saying Gitmo is "one of the worst" is not the same as "is the worst". I am certainly aware of the Holocaust, know a great deal about it and certainly acknowledge that it happened and was terrible. I have no problem with the Holocaust being the worst, but Gitmo is clearly wrong and abusive. In a way, is there any point in ranking these things? They are each violations of human rights; some are certainly more horrific than others, but a violation is a violation just the same.
I debated adding illegality as a criteria for terrorism, but assumed it was implied. I wouldn't mind amending my definition. I agree with you that lawful force can be necessary, but the keyword is 'lawful'. International laws are laws as well and need to be respected until they can be changed to address the situation. We have standards for when invading other countries is allowed; we can't just choose to enforce our laws on other people's sovereign territory without getting a legal mandate to do so. If you argued that the U.N. is not up to addressing these issues, I would agree, and suggest that fixing the U.N. to be a more effective organization would help.
This is Slashdot, of course, so you are certainly free to ignore my suggestions, but I would hope that the due process of law falls under "doing it right".
1. It is important to use the correct names for things. The word "terrorist" is subset of "criminal". My working definition of 'terrorist', which can doubtless be improved on, is: one who uses violence to create terror or panic within a populace in order to achieve political ends. Without the political component, a terrorist is simply a criminal guilty of assault, murder, theft, etc. and should be caught and prosecuted accordingly. By using this term incorrectly, you are just as guilty of spreading FUD as the U.S. government. While this may be an effective way to get attention, it is alarmist, unethical, and immoral.
By expanding the meaning of the term, the government has been able to greatly expand its power at the expense of its citizens. It certainly is important to catch and prosecute cyber-criminals, but discuss it rationally and pass appropriate, targeted laws to deal with the problem. More importantly, enforce the ones that already exist.
2. In most cases, a non-anonymous network would probably be fine, as long as encryption was used to keep data private. Unfortunately, we live in a world where, in some places, using encryption will get you tossed in jail, regardless of the content. In other words, it can be important to hide not only what you sent, but the fact that you sent it. A concrete example would be blogging in China. Given recent events with the NSA, I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. government starts to take a more active role in discouraging personal strong encryption. How do we solve that problem?
3. Guantanamo is one of the worst violations of human rights in recent history. Even the basest criminals are entitled to due process. That's what makes our system justice and not revenge. The United States is NOT the world police. There is a process to be followed to enforce change in other countries. The lack of serious international backing is part of our problem in Iraq. The U.S., despite being the last world superpower, does not have the resources to fight every battle and prosecute every crime that other countries won't deal with.
You are right that we need effective computer crime laws and effective enforcement of them. The way to do it is to lobby other countries for this and establish treaties with them. Use diplomacy and sanctions where necessary. It isn't impossible; if we can get intellectual property laws perverted across the globe, surely we can expend the effort needed to reach cyber-criminals where ever they choose to hide.
4. The government is supposed to work for us, but it needs watching. One of the most important lessons of modern history is that we have to be active and mistrustful of government, in order for it to function correctly. The Bay of Pigs was the first warning and the Watergate scandal made this manifest. The Iraq war, NSA wiretapping, and the PATRIOT Act are examples of what happens when we fail to perform our role of government watchdog. I'm not going to trust the government on who the bad guys are. I want the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, etc. to gather evidence and arrest criminals and bring them before the appropriate judicial authority and prove their case before the public.
You are correct that this is a serious international problem and needs serious international intervention, but it also has to be done right.
I'm pretty sure Ted Lupin would have lived with Tonk's mother. That's where they left the baby when they went to fight at Hogwart's. I believe the book mentions that Tonk's father was killed, but they say that her mother would be okay because she is a pure-blood wizard.
If the price would have naturally dropped lower due to competition from a similar product or another retailer with lower overhead, then yes, this is bad. Theoretically, in the case of competing products, a manufacturer should realize that they are being killed by their lower-priced competitor and adjust prices, but then, the market isn't always rational. This also doesn't let retailers with lower overhead gain customers by leveraging their competitive advantage.
It is hard to say in the long run what the effects might be. I started this comment thinking that the Supreme Court has shafted us again, but in thinking about it, I'm not so sure. As it stands, many electronic goods are pretty much the same price everywhere (e.g. iPods, TV's of the same model), or within a minor deviation. Usually the downward pressure on price occurs when a new model appears or a manufacturer lowers prices to capture more business. Cars also seem to be fairly responsive to consumers demand, or lack thereof. I think the only area where this decision might be bad is for a product that has no equivalent in the marketplace, though generally those types of items are priced high anyway.
I guess we'll have to see, and petition Congress (ha!) if the Supreme Court has made too big a loophole.
I'm not normally one to defend Bush, but I think this is a 'politian' problem not a 'Bush' problem per se. Everyone gets up in arms over incidents like this and try to 'do something' even if it isn't the right thing. Let's save the criticism for issues where Bush's leadership really is the problem, like Iraq and NSA wiretapping.
I'd hardly hold up UPS as a model. I've had the counter staff at the UPS customer service center tell me not to bother checking with the on-line tool because it never matched reality during the holiday season. Operations that seemed to work fine during the rest of the year, like having a delivery held for pickup, took two or three tries to take effect, resulting in a couple of wasted visits to the center. Never mind the fact that UPS refused to leave packages at my apartment complex office and then would never show up for the next delivery attempt at the time they claimed on the slip they left at my house. This year, I'm going to shop locally. It may be a pain to travel between stores, but that is nothing compared to the frustration of dealing with UPS.
why not just create a Certificate Authority for the Federal Government? Then mandate that all driver's licenses and passports have a smart chip with a certificate signed by the government and your own personal public key, also signed by the government. A separate card could be issued with your private key on it. As a backup, encode the certificate for the ID card in a barcode on the back, so your ID can be verified even if the chip fails.
If you want to get rid of the separate card for the private key, come up with an algorithm for hashing other biometric data to make a private key: retinal scan and/or thumbprint.
If properly implemented, there would be two virtues to this system. The first is, after the initial check by the issuer that the issuee is who they say they are, no central database query is need to authenticate the ID. Each ID reader just needs a copy of the government's public key. After almost 10 years of Web Browser PKI experience, this system should be well-understood. The second virtue is, if every citizen has a public and private key pair, then check and credit card fraud could be eliminated. Those systems currently rely on insecure methods like written signatures, very short pins, or codes on the back of the physical cards. It would also be possible to easily encrypt e-mail, keep phone calls private, and transmit legally binding electronic documents.
Bruce Schneier points out that any ID card system will be flawed from the start because there is a human element in issuing and checking ID's. Biometrics and PKI would help, but perhaps not enough. At the very least, my proposal wouldn't be a worse ID system then we currently have, and actually provides two possible benefits we didn't have before. On the other hand, governments don't like strong encryption in the hands of citizens, so we would have to watch for backdoors in the system. There may also be a concern with the fact that your public key can now tie you to your various activities. Of course, this is pretty much the case now. Though, there are many virtues to a world where PKI is widely used.
Actually, your links don't dispute the parent's statement. QWERTY was created to reduce mechanical failures as its primary design goal. The myths involved in the QWERTY design are:
QWERTY was arranged to slow the typist down as the solution to the mechanical problem.
DVORAK is faster, but the lack of DVORAK typists and the lack of machines led to a chicken and egg problem.
In fact, your links point out that:
QWERTY was actually designed so typing common English letter combinations wouldn't cause mechanical failure. The designers were not actively trying to influence the typist's speed in either direction. They just tried to arrange the letters so that faster speeds wouldn't lock the machine.
Despite several deficiencies in the design from a typist's point of view, QWERTY is generally as fast as Dvorak. In fact, some qualities of QWERTY actually may help typing speed. At the very least, Dvorak didn't result in enough measurable improvements to make it worth
people switching.
FWIW, I've used D-Skins, and my impression was that I wasted $10. I tried it on my DVD's and my DVD player couldn't read the disk. The skin also didn't seem to fit on tight enough to use in my slot load PC DVD drive. I had visions of ejecting the disk and watching the drive strip the skin off and screw up the internal mechanisms. I have no proof that it would do that, but the build quality of the skins seemed so flimsy I didn't want to risk it.
It's cheap enough that you might want to see for yourself, but I wouldn't recommend them.
By not looking away? By not fast-forwarding? By diligently taking notes on every commericial? Consumers are very good at ignoring ads they don't want to see; they might as well edit out the ads for all the good it will do. The only way to make this really work is to either embed the ads so the consumers can't take them out without destroying the program (e.g. product placement) or coming up with a model for sustaining production without using advertising.
I think the pay per season or pay per download model will ultimately be the winner here. My family would often add HBO for a season of the Sopranos and then cancel it when the show's run was over. Most of the time, HBO is repeating the same movies ad infinitum anyway; the only interesting bits were the original programming. After catching up on a few shows I liked via BitTorrent, I can't stand regular TV and all of the advertising. Ultimately, I'm only interested in a handful of programs anyway; I could pay $5 a month for each show I like and still pay less then my cable bill.
The content producers really have an opportunity here: the costs of production are relatively fixed and the costs of distribution are nearly free. Once you've paid to produce a show, you can distribute it as much as you want. People still love old TV shows and they have already earned back their costs; you can offer it relatively cheaply and still make a killing on volume. If you have broad enough appeal, who cares about piracy? It would be a drop in the bucket compared to the audience size. High-quality, low cost, and immediate access would be the best selling points.
Ad-free entertainment generally takes more risks and is more interesting work because it doesn't have to be sale-able to advertisers; it just has to satisfy its audience. I think we should look forward to a future where entertainment is paid for by people who want to see it. Narrow-casting would also make it easier to control access of mature content without restricting access to people who do want to see it (think rated-R movies at 8pm with no edits for people with no kids).
Advertisement should be shifting toward search results anyway: let people who are actively seeking a product get the ads for it. That's guaranteed interest. That is what advertising used to be: give people information on what you are selling. Perhaps biased information, but actual information.
Actually, it isn't right now. I was in Poland during the German elections (yeah, I know that sounds weird, but the election was all over the news) and the big issue of the campaign was that the economy is tanking and no one seemed to have a plan for it. This was compounded by the fact that no party gained a significant majority in the assembly there, so the government will most likely be a power share between the two largest parties. This arrangement will most likely result in a hobbled attempt at economic reform.
How much of this is a legacy of a socialist leaning system, or continued pains from absorbing East Germany into a new country, or other factors, is up for debate. The fact is, however, that Germany is NOT doing just fine right now.
Television ads basically are supplied to me free and don't impact my reception of programs. Same with magazines and newspapers; I can choose to just flip past them and keep reading.
Internet ads take time and bandwidth to download which could be better spent getting the actual content I want. If I'm on a metered connection, like a pay WiFi access point, then all of those kilobytes count. I've also run across sites where the ad server doesn't respond fast enough. Then I'm waiting for the browser to finish downloading the ad so it can layout the page and show it to me. I've run into sites that are literally unusable until I block the ads. Then the page loads quickly and lays out correctly. This is the major reason why I block out ads; they affect the user experience to a much greater degree than in other mediums.
I also have to agree with other posters here: most of the time, the ads aren't relevant to me or are scams. I also don't block Google Ad Words; partially because they are unintrusive text that can be ignore, partly because the blocking tools are mostly geared to images and Flash, and partly because the ads are sometimes relevant to what I am looking at.
If your two file theory is true, then I think the easiest way to solve this is: mandate by law that the 'second file' (obviously some different legal terminology could be used here) be available to the consumer for free. These companies are obviously making a lot of money off the residue of our consumer lives, so this wouldn't affect their revenue stream. But I would love to have a record of every transaction I make, if only because I'm not the world's greatest bookkeeper. Then I would see some actual value from providing this information to retailers, rather than feeling f*&ked over when asked for it.
And if people become upset about how much information truly is stored, then public outcry may see some changes made. As long as the information collection is effectively invisible, then it will be difficult to get the public excited about this.
Slashdot Mirror
The major Linux distributions, like Red Hat, would probably chip in. Part of the reason that Linux has any desktop market share at all is because Firefox runs on it, and many major sites support it. If people couldn't access their banking sites, YouTube, etc. with their Linux browser, they would replace their Linux desktop with Windows. Or, in the case of netbooks, buy the Windows version instead of the Linux one.
A better term might be "discoverable". If you can play with it and figure out what it does without consulting the manual or asking someone else, then it has high "discover-ability". Combine that with "consistent": knowledge of one part of the system helps you to use other parts of the system that you haven't tried yet. Those terms together get at what many people mean when they say "intuitive"
From the time I've spent playing with demo iPhones and Touches the interface was pretty easy to understand. When you turn the phone sideways, it goes into landscape mode and it pretty much does that everywhere, so it is consistent. It is also consistent with what I would expect in the real world; if I'm orienting the screen sideways, I probably want to use it so the long edge is the top now. You can also learn that pretty easily just by trying it, so it is also discoverable. When the iPhone breaks consistency, like the lack of a landscape keyboard in some apps, people complain, which indicates that consistent behavior is part of what we think of as "intuitive".
Zooming in and out works by pinching and pulling, which isn't very discoverable, but it makes sense a certain amount of real-world logical sense ( I'm stretching a photo to make it bigger, squishing it to make it smaller). Once you learn it, you can try that same action in other places and it will do pretty much what you expect (discoverable and consistent). Of course, you can get away with some of those things on a media player because many operations aren't really destructive; you can play with the device to see how it works. If stretching a word processing document ripped it in half and deleted it, that would probably be a different story.
I've tried the Android emulator a bit, so I have some familiarity with the interface. I think I could pretty much figure out how to do most things I'd want to do with it, but it definitely has the feeling of a computer interface shrunk to fit a phone. I think it is discoverable, but from playing with it and reading the reviews, it isn't consistent, so it ultimately isn't as discoverable as the iPhone is.
The iPhone software, on the other hand, feels more like it is purpose-built for the phone; like a part of the device as opposed to running on it. Even the main screen evokes a keypad layout like a touch tone phone rather than the desktop metaphor that Android shoehorns in.
Ultimately, I think that is Android's major challenge. It can't easily become part of a device out of the box because it could run on a range of hardware, while the iPhone software only has to support the iPhone and can blend smoothly with the hardware experience. This is in some ways more important than the relationship of Windows and OS X to their various hardware since we have certain expectations about how a phone should perform that PC's don't have. There is potential for Android to become more discoverable and consistent; personally I'm going to wait for the next Android phone to see if it has improved.
Steve's keynote slides explicitly show that Xcode can publish the code to your personal iPhone for testing purposes. This image from Engadget's coverage (see the 10:30am post for context) shows an iMac remote debugging on the phone using an iPod dock. Whether that means an end user can load an app without going through the store is hard to say.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with this gentleman who inspired this English adjective.
To mangle ESR (I think), "Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send." Web browsers have always made an effort to gracefully degrade when it receives poorly formed markup and bad data from mis-configured web servers. The fact the web browsers were forgiving about bad markup is part of the reason why the Web grew to the size it has. If it was difficult to develop basic pages because the rendering software threw errors for everything, people wouldn't have bothered and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Remember, SGML came before HTML and XML and it was never used as widely as the two later standards.
In effect, you are arguing for the ivory tower: let the technorati decide what is good and proper and let the peasants receive it. I don't really care for MySpace or Facebook either, but the same technology also lets me enjoy Slashdot, XKCD, and other sites that have value to me. In some sense, Facebook and MySpace are positive for web standards: they can change their rendering layer to be more compliant without their users even noticing.
In any case, the problem isn't with browsers being too permissive. The problem is that IE doesn't support the various web standards to the same level that other browsers do. If IE renders the CSS, SVG, XHTML, etc. specs properly but degrades gracefully when it gets a non-compliant page, that is fine with me.
Don't pretend to understand it, just enforce it.
I'm not as quick to let the Feds off the hook. I don't mind if the government has my data as long as they follow due process of law. That means warrants issued by judicial approval after showing probable cause, habeas corpus, and open trials as much as humanly possible. The govermnent may or may not need to know as much about me as they do (I think they don't), but the real problem here is lack of oversight. Intelligence services follow the principle of need-to-know. I think we need to follow that with the government. They should know only the little bit about me that they absolutely need to know. The only way to determine that is openness in the laws and in judicial process.
You stated that it isn't likely that the Feds will be knocking down your door, so it isn't a concern. The problem is: the Feds can knock down your door while, ostensibly, Equifax can't. The government needs to be under greater scrutiny than the private sector because they have the power to deprive you of your liberty. With the PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters we don't know exactly why the Feds are knocking down your door and you can't tell us why. It might be for a good reason or it might not be. And if someone can abuse the power for a bad reason, they will abuse the power. And they have! The GAO has reported many abuses of the PATRIOT Act by the FBI since it was passed and nothing gets done about it.
In every generation, outside threats have always triggered a response to "increase security" while eliminating civil liberties and those responses have always been proven wrong by history. Japanese-American internment camps and the McCarthy-era black lists are the most recent examples. Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and temporary safety may be a cliche now, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth in it.
All of your objections are also true of DRM right now, with the exception of point f. At this point, with DRM, users have a greater incentive to download from peer to peer, since it is difficult for the average user to strip it out. However, by downloading from P2P networks you take the risk that:
1) The file does not have the content you thought it does, but actually has advertisments or completely different content.
2) The files may have viruses, trojans, or other malicious code.
3) The video may be a low quality camera capture with lousy sound.
I would rather buy a digital copy of my music and movies from a reputable source as long as I can control where I play it. Then I know what I am buying. However, DRM stops me from using the content I bought on every device I own. If the file is only watermarked, at least I can convert it to other formats, back it up, and not worry that broken hardware will remove access to my media.
Watermarking isn't perfect, but significantly improves usability for consumers. If the studios and recording labels release watermarked media that is fast to download, reasonably priced, and simple to find, I think they could easily beat pirates at their own game. Pirates don't have access to consumer outlets like Amazon, Wal-Mart, X-Box Live, Playstation Home, and the Wii Shop Channel. The mainstream markets would eat up a fair download service wrapped in a brand they trust from their couch, rather than having to download obscure file sharing clients and sitting in front of their PC's all night watching progress bars.
I was trying to avoid Godwin's law, since there are many other examples that can be appealed to besides Nazi Germany. The genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Darfur works as well. Saying Gitmo is "one of the worst" is not the same as "is the worst". I am certainly aware of the Holocaust, know a great deal about it and certainly acknowledge that it happened and was terrible. I have no problem with the Holocaust being the worst, but Gitmo is clearly wrong and abusive.
In a way, is there any point in ranking these things? They are each violations of human rights; some are certainly more horrific than others, but a violation is a violation just the same.
I debated adding illegality as a criteria for terrorism, but assumed it was implied. I wouldn't mind amending my definition. I agree with you that lawful force can be necessary, but the keyword is 'lawful'. International laws are laws as well and need to be respected until they can be changed to address the situation. We have standards for when invading other countries is allowed; we can't just choose to enforce our laws on other people's sovereign territory without getting a legal mandate to do so. If you argued that the U.N. is not up to addressing these issues, I would agree, and suggest that fixing the U.N. to be a more effective organization would help.
This is Slashdot, of course, so you are certainly free to ignore my suggestions, but I would hope that the due process of law falls under "doing it right".
1. It is important to use the correct names for things. The word "terrorist" is subset of "criminal". My working definition of 'terrorist', which can doubtless be improved on, is: one who uses violence to create terror or panic within a populace in order to achieve political ends. Without the political component, a terrorist is simply a criminal guilty of assault, murder, theft, etc. and should be caught and prosecuted accordingly. By using this term incorrectly, you are just as guilty of spreading FUD as the U.S. government. While this may be an effective way to get attention, it is alarmist, unethical, and immoral.
By expanding the meaning of the term, the government has been able to greatly expand its power at the expense of its citizens. It certainly is important to catch and prosecute cyber-criminals, but discuss it rationally and pass appropriate, targeted laws to deal with the problem. More importantly, enforce the ones that already exist.
2. In most cases, a non-anonymous network would probably be fine, as long as encryption was used to keep data private. Unfortunately, we live in a world where, in some places, using encryption will get you tossed in jail, regardless of the content. In other words, it can be important to hide not only what you sent, but the fact that you sent it. A concrete example would be blogging in China. Given recent events with the NSA, I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. government starts to take a more active role in discouraging personal strong encryption. How do we solve that problem?
3. Guantanamo is one of the worst violations of human rights in recent history. Even the basest criminals are entitled to due process. That's what makes our system justice and not revenge. The United States is NOT the world police. There is a process to be followed to enforce change in other countries. The lack of serious international backing is part of our problem in Iraq. The U.S., despite being the last world superpower, does not have the resources to fight every battle and prosecute every crime that other countries won't deal with.
You are right that we need effective computer crime laws and effective enforcement of them. The way to do it is to lobby other countries for this and establish treaties with them. Use diplomacy and sanctions where necessary. It isn't impossible; if we can get intellectual property laws perverted across the globe, surely we can expend the effort needed to reach cyber-criminals where ever they choose to hide.
4. The government is supposed to work for us, but it needs watching. One of the most important lessons of modern history is that we have to be active and mistrustful of government, in order for it to function correctly. The Bay of Pigs was the first warning and the Watergate scandal made this manifest. The Iraq war, NSA wiretapping, and the PATRIOT Act are examples of what happens when we fail to perform our role of government watchdog. I'm not going to trust the government on who the bad guys are. I want the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, etc. to gather evidence and arrest criminals and bring them before the appropriate judicial authority and prove their case before the public.
You are correct that this is a serious international problem and needs serious international intervention, but it also has to be done right.
I'm pretty sure Ted Lupin would have lived with Tonk's mother. That's where they left the baby when they went to fight at Hogwart's. I believe the book mentions that Tonk's father was killed, but they say that her mother would be okay because she is a pure-blood wizard.
If the price would have naturally dropped lower due to competition from a similar product or another retailer with lower overhead, then yes, this is bad. Theoretically, in the case of competing products, a manufacturer should realize that they are being killed by their lower-priced competitor and adjust prices, but then, the market isn't always rational. This also doesn't let retailers with lower overhead gain customers by leveraging their competitive advantage.
It is hard to say in the long run what the effects might be. I started this comment thinking that the Supreme Court has shafted us again, but in thinking about it, I'm not so sure. As it stands, many electronic goods are pretty much the same price everywhere (e.g. iPods, TV's of the same model), or within a minor deviation. Usually the downward pressure on price occurs when a new model appears or a manufacturer lowers prices to capture more business. Cars also seem to be fairly responsive to consumers demand, or lack thereof. I think the only area where this decision might be bad is for a product that has no equivalent in the marketplace, though generally those types of items are priced high anyway.
I guess we'll have to see, and petition Congress (ha!) if the Supreme Court has made too big a loophole.
I'm not normally one to defend Bush, but I think this is a 'politian' problem not a 'Bush' problem per se. Everyone gets up in arms over incidents like this and try to 'do something' even if it isn't the right thing. Let's save the criticism for issues where Bush's leadership really is the problem, like Iraq and NSA wiretapping.
That has to be the weirdest Wikipedia entry I've ever read. It's like finding out that Nicole Kidman is a theoretical physicist in her spare time.
I'd hardly hold up UPS as a model. I've had the counter staff at the UPS customer service center tell me not to bother checking with the on-line tool because it never matched reality during the holiday season. Operations that seemed to work fine during the rest of the year, like having a delivery held for pickup, took two or three tries to take effect, resulting in a couple of wasted visits to the center. Never mind the fact that UPS refused to leave packages at my apartment complex office and then would never show up for the next delivery attempt at the time they claimed on the slip they left at my house. This year, I'm going to shop locally. It may be a pain to travel between stores, but that is nothing compared to the frustration of dealing with UPS.
Proving that where writers are, editors follow (except on Slashdot). :-) It should be:
Last on Earth. Knock on door.
The door wasn't knocking, the mysterious entity on the other side was knocking.
Bite our wide, geeky, asses!
SCO to Unix Developers: Yeah, well, we're going to have our own conference. With giveaways! And hookers! In fact, forget the giveaways!
why not just create a Certificate Authority for the Federal Government? Then mandate that all driver's licenses and passports have a smart chip with a certificate signed by the government and your own personal public key, also signed by the government. A separate card could be issued with your private key on it. As a backup, encode the certificate for the ID card in a barcode on the back, so your ID can be verified even if the chip fails.
If you want to get rid of the separate card for the private key, come up with an algorithm for hashing other biometric data to make a private key: retinal scan and/or thumbprint.
If properly implemented, there would be two virtues to this system. The first is, after the initial check by the issuer that the issuee is who they say they are, no central database query is need to authenticate the ID. Each ID reader just needs a copy of the government's public key. After almost 10 years of Web Browser PKI experience, this system should be well-understood. The second virtue is, if every citizen has a public and private key pair, then check and credit card fraud could be eliminated. Those systems currently rely on insecure methods like written signatures, very short pins, or codes on the back of the physical cards. It would also be possible to easily encrypt e-mail, keep phone calls private, and transmit legally binding electronic documents.
Bruce Schneier points out that any ID card system will be flawed from the start because there is a human element in issuing and checking ID's. Biometrics and PKI would help, but perhaps not enough. At the very least, my proposal wouldn't be a worse ID system then we currently have, and actually provides two possible benefits we didn't have before. On the other hand, governments don't like strong encryption in the hands of citizens, so we would have to watch for backdoors in the system. There may also be a concern with the fact that your public key can now tie you to your various activities. Of course, this is pretty much the case now. Though, there are many virtues to a world where PKI is widely used.
Actually, your links don't dispute the parent's statement. QWERTY was created to reduce mechanical failures as its primary design goal. The myths involved in the QWERTY design are:
In fact, your links point out that:
FWIW, I've used D-Skins, and my impression was that I wasted $10. I tried it on my DVD's and my DVD player couldn't read the disk. The skin also didn't seem to fit on tight enough to use in my slot load PC DVD drive. I had visions of ejecting the disk and watching the drive strip the skin off and screw up the internal mechanisms. I have no proof that it would do that, but the build quality of the skins seemed so flimsy I didn't want to risk it.
It's cheap enough that you might want to see for yourself, but I wouldn't recommend them.
as if millions of USB keys and MP3 players suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
and the viewers follow said system
By not looking away? By not fast-forwarding? By diligently taking notes on every commericial? Consumers are very good at ignoring ads they don't want to see; they might as well edit out the ads for all the good it will do. The only way to make this really work is to either embed the ads so the consumers can't take them out without destroying the program (e.g. product placement) or coming up with a model for sustaining production without using advertising.
I think the pay per season or pay per download model will ultimately be the winner here. My family would often add HBO for a season of the Sopranos and then cancel it when the show's run was over. Most of the time, HBO is repeating the same movies ad infinitum anyway; the only interesting bits were the original programming. After catching up on a few shows I liked via BitTorrent, I can't stand regular TV and all of the advertising. Ultimately, I'm only interested in a handful of programs anyway; I could pay $5 a month for each show I like and still pay less then my cable bill.
The content producers really have an opportunity here: the costs of production are relatively fixed and the costs of distribution are nearly free. Once you've paid to produce a show, you can distribute it as much as you want. People still love old TV shows and they have already earned back their costs; you can offer it relatively cheaply and still make a killing on volume. If you have broad enough appeal, who cares about piracy? It would be a drop in the bucket compared to the audience size. High-quality, low cost, and immediate access would be the best selling points.
Ad-free entertainment generally takes more risks and is more interesting work because it doesn't have to be sale-able to advertisers; it just has to satisfy its audience. I think we should look forward to a future where entertainment is paid for by people who want to see it. Narrow-casting would also make it easier to control access of mature content without restricting access to people who do want to see it (think rated-R movies at 8pm with no edits for people with no kids).
Advertisement should be shifting toward search results anyway: let people who are actively seeking a product get the ads for it. That's guaranteed interest. That is what advertising used to be: give people information on what you are selling. Perhaps biased information, but actual information.
Actually, it isn't right now. I was in Poland during the German elections (yeah, I know that sounds weird, but the election was all over the news) and the big issue of the campaign was that the economy is tanking and no one seemed to have a plan for it. This was compounded by the fact that no party gained a significant majority in the assembly there, so the government will most likely be a power share between the two largest parties. This arrangement will most likely result in a hobbled attempt at economic reform.
How much of this is a legacy of a socialist leaning system, or continued pains from absorbing East Germany into a new country, or other factors, is up for debate. The fact is, however, that Germany is NOT doing just fine right now.
Television ads basically are supplied to me free and don't impact my reception of programs. Same with magazines and newspapers; I can choose to just flip past them and keep reading.
Internet ads take time and bandwidth to download which could be better spent getting the actual content I want. If I'm on a metered connection, like a pay WiFi access point, then all of those kilobytes count. I've also run across sites where the ad server doesn't respond fast enough. Then I'm waiting for the browser to finish downloading the ad so it can layout the page and show it to me. I've run into sites that are literally unusable until I block the ads. Then the page loads quickly and lays out correctly. This is the major reason why I block out ads; they affect the user experience to a much greater degree than in other mediums.
I also have to agree with other posters here: most of the time, the ads aren't relevant to me or are scams. I also don't block Google Ad Words; partially because they are unintrusive text that can be ignore, partly because the blocking tools are mostly geared to images and Flash, and partly because the ads are sometimes relevant to what I am looking at.
If your two file theory is true, then I think the easiest way to solve this is: mandate by law that the 'second file' (obviously some different legal terminology could be used here) be available to the consumer for free. These companies are obviously making a lot of money off the residue of our consumer lives, so this wouldn't affect their revenue stream. But I would love to have a record of every transaction I make, if only because I'm not the world's greatest bookkeeper. Then I would see some actual value from providing this information to retailers, rather than feeling f*&ked over when asked for it.
And if people become upset about how much information truly is stored, then public outcry may see some changes made. As long as the information collection is effectively invisible, then it will be difficult to get the public excited about this.