Unless you're a painter, and frequently have to make minor tweaks to brush settings etc. in the menus (and gimp btw doesn't seem to offer a popup-menu for that at the click of a button like photoshop), in which case you probably first of all have your pen mapped to just one of the screens, and even if you have a quickpoint area or a toggle switch to switch control to another display, you don't want to drag your cursor across all that screen real estate every few seconds. In this case using tab to hide the menus is the way to go, except that behaves a bit funny, in my Gimp at least. One press of tab hides all menus, another brings the tool menu bar back, and a third tap brings the rest of the menus back. Then to hide the menus again I have to click somewhere on the canvas, and THEN press tab again. That's a lot of clicking and key-pressing over time, let me tell you.
All the signs seem to point to privacy being a forgotten concept in the near future, maybe within 25 years. It is becoming impossible to do anything without someone knowing, there's too much tech coming out that makes it too easy to keep track of people. And the thing with tech is, once it's been invented, all the laws and policies in the world won't keep it from being used. So we're going to see increasingly sophisticated surveillance solutions come out of the research labs, and all the viable ones will see use in the real world. In the end it'll be so ubiquitous and hard to detect you just can't protect yourself against it: for example, Airborne bacteria engineered to print out circuitry that can record sound, EM emissions, track keyboard presses, you name it.
Of course, for now, you can try to make it harder to watch what you're doing. On the internet it's easier, since you can use encryption, Freenet, Tor or other solutions, but to avoid a camera in the street, you'll have to wear a mask, alter your gait, change your general body shape and who knows what else. In any case, laws will not stop surveillance from increasing, it's just too easy. The only option for anyone who cares about privacy is to make snooping impossible somehow. But already, most people don't care enough to do that.
So what'll happen? People will adapt. The current media system is doing a pretty good job of preparing the younger generations for the surveillance society, with all the reality shows ("Big Brother"), publicly-accessible social networking sites and what have you. People are living their lives in front of cameras and it's all getting broadcast on TV, who cares if some government agency or private operator tapes you in the streets, in the office, at the toilet...? Maybe this insistence on privacy is becoming just one of those quaint little hangups people in eras gone past had.
The total isn't much more than you pay in a month just for the service, right? Holy hell,what kind of piracy do the telcos practice there? I pay 10 euros flat for unlimited 3g usage (128 kbps, faster would cost more, around 30+ euros for 512 kbps if I recall), and calls on top, usually it comes to 20-30 euros a month for me. From your comment I get the impression 100 dollars is a reasonable amount to pay for service there. If that's what you're saying - let me tell you, it isn't.
Good, then they won't have any trouble convicting you of speaking ill of the next democractic president, once criticising the president has been made a capital offense, and they won't have any trouble convicting you of treason for criticizing the law that you can't criticize presidents, an act of treason as well.
Rights you give away in relatively good times are not magically granted back to you when the shit really does hit the fan, politically speaking.
From what I gather, what you'd be paying for here is transparency: someone calls your cell number, they re-route it via voip if you're in a wi-fi zone. Now, according to the article it should be possible to walk in and out of wifi coverage during a call and not notice a thing, which, if true, is pretty good. Sounds like it will more likely "sort of" work, though.
Better yet, why not make it mandatory for the party applying for the patent to check it? That would be a horrible burden on anyone seeking a patent, how could you possibly check if any of the 6 billion people on the planet have thought of your idea before? Even checking for what US residents alone have thought of would be pretty impossible to do exhaustively. It would mean only those with enough capital to be able to pay the fines now and then would even seek patents, making the whole system even more inequal than it is now.
I never said the BBC trust was the same thing as the BBC, all I was saying is that based on this you can expect nothing to happen for at least half a year, since that is the first deadline for them to have done something, whatever that maybe, and whatever may happen if they are seen to not have done enough. 6 months here isn't even necessarily an ultimate deadline for having support for non-windows operating systems, it's just a checkpoint. Not exactly ASAP in my view.
we are working to ensure this happens as soon as possible and the BBC Trust will be monitoring progress on a six monthly basis. Huh? So in other words, they've given the BBC at minimum 6 months to come up with a solution, after which they will presumably see that nothing has happened, wave their finger a little and forget about it for another half a year. This doesn't quite fit the sense of urgency I feel goes with the term "as soon as possible".
Why DO you have to buy their landline service with it? I have ADSL and I don't have a telephone contract with anyone, just the broadband. Then again, I think over here the ISPs are legally barred from requiring customers to get a phone contract if they just want broadband.
This is a written medium, what people do or don't do when speaking is irrelevant. There's a long tradition of satire in writing, and I don't really think Voltaire, for example, would quite read the same with sarcasm tags... If you can't get your point across without, in effect, starting and ending your comment with a "HEY GUYS, THIS IS NOT WHAT I REALLY THINK", then maybe you're better off just saying what you do think, and leave sarcasm to those who are capable of using it. It's like a joke you have to explain, it's just not funny.
Thank you SO much for the informative sarcasm tags, truly it is a boon not to have to think for myself. Sometimes I read texts from times past, and I am filled with anger at the absolutely ludicrous views espoused by the writers. Sometimes I think it might be this sarcasm thing, but without having it spelled out for me, how could I know? It is a miracle that writers in ages before the invention of this simple notation were not all murdered, and I am grateful that we are no longer held back from expressly denoting sarcasm whereever needed by old-fashioned notions of style and taste.
I'm in the market for a laptop currently, and as I was asking for advice, someone suggested getting a Mac. I hadn't even thought of it, mainly because I believed the price would be prohibitive. Not to miss out on a potential good deal, though, I went and compared the stats. I was looking at an Acer travelmate 7514, which comes with 2 gigabytes of ram, an AMD Turion X2 processor @ 1.8 GHz, 160 gb drive, 17" widescreen display and a Geforce Go 7600 SE. That would come to about 900 euros over here. What could I get from Apple for that? Well, I couldn't of course, the closest is a 970-Euro Macbook, which comes with a Core Duo processor, 512 mb of ram, 13" display, 60 gigabyte hard disk and integrated graphics. I think I'll go with the Acer instead.
Now, of course, you might say that sub-1000 euro prices are low-end and apple just doesn't do that, but looking at the specs of that Acer, I don't feel it's exactly a low-end machine, even though the Turion processor isn't exactly the greatest thing out there. The Macbook, on the other hand, can't be described as anything else than low-end, it just has a big pricetag on it.
Easy.
Constant surveillance has one very clear effect: It reminds you you are a subject, not a free individual. It conditions you to monitor your actions at all times for signs of "undesirable" behaviour. In effect, the knowledge of being watched makes people police their own actions and thoughts. It is the worst kind of erosion of liberty, because it erodes your freedom to be yourself.
A truecrypt container, even a first-level one so to speak, is indistinguishable from random data - hence when mounting you can't have the truecrypt app look for truecrypt containers but must specify the right one yourself - you can't identify one without mounting it. So having a container in a container shouldn't be necessary if the adversary isn't aware and able to prove you are using truecrypt in the first place. And even if they did, I'm not sure how they can force you to unlock a container whose password you have forgotten...
Correct. Banning DRM would result in banning commercial DVDs from Norway.
Anyway, the very reason we have laws banning circumvention of DRM is that the technology doesn't work. A law banning circumvention of DRM is in effect the same as a law banning copying of works labeled with a "do not copy" sticker.
To those who think this will shut up evolution-deniers: Keep dreaming.
Creationism has nothing to do with science, the only thing that will change a creationist's mind is a potent hallucination of God telling them evolution is real. No amount of scientific evidence, however persuasive, can sway a delusional mind.
I can't help but wonder if it is too late in the game to be introducing new physical distribution formats. Here's why:
The benefits of HD can only be appreciated on an HD-capable TV-set. I don't see the masses rushing out to buy new sets until their old ones fail. Certainly, there are some who are willing to pay for the quality upgrade even if their old set works fine, and anyone buying a new TV now may well get an HD-capable one, if the price is right. But I do think that it will be up to 10 years before the transition to HD is truly widespread. Now, look 10 years into the future. Is it likely that physical media will still be a significant form of distribution for consumer entertainment? I find that very doubtful. To sum up, by the time there is real demand for HD content, there will not be much demand for content distributed on discs.
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Unless you're a painter, and frequently have to make minor tweaks to brush settings etc. in the menus (and gimp btw doesn't seem to offer a popup-menu for that at the click of a button like photoshop), in which case you probably first of all have your pen mapped to just one of the screens, and even if you have a quickpoint area or a toggle switch to switch control to another display, you don't want to drag your cursor across all that screen real estate every few seconds. In this case using tab to hide the menus is the way to go, except that behaves a bit funny, in my Gimp at least. One press of tab hides all menus, another brings the tool menu bar back, and a third tap brings the rest of the menus back. Then to hide the menus again I have to click somewhere on the canvas, and THEN press tab again. That's a lot of clicking and key-pressing over time, let me tell you.
All the signs seem to point to privacy being a forgotten concept in the near future, maybe within 25 years. It is becoming impossible to do anything without someone knowing, there's too much tech coming out that makes it too easy to keep track of people. And the thing with tech is, once it's been invented, all the laws and policies in the world won't keep it from being used. So we're going to see increasingly sophisticated surveillance solutions come out of the research labs, and all the viable ones will see use in the real world. In the end it'll be so ubiquitous and hard to detect you just can't protect yourself against it: for example, Airborne bacteria engineered to print out circuitry that can record sound, EM emissions, track keyboard presses, you name it. Of course, for now, you can try to make it harder to watch what you're doing. On the internet it's easier, since you can use encryption, Freenet, Tor or other solutions, but to avoid a camera in the street, you'll have to wear a mask, alter your gait, change your general body shape and who knows what else. In any case, laws will not stop surveillance from increasing, it's just too easy. The only option for anyone who cares about privacy is to make snooping impossible somehow. But already, most people don't care enough to do that. So what'll happen? People will adapt. The current media system is doing a pretty good job of preparing the younger generations for the surveillance society, with all the reality shows ("Big Brother"), publicly-accessible social networking sites and what have you. People are living their lives in front of cameras and it's all getting broadcast on TV, who cares if some government agency or private operator tapes you in the streets, in the office, at the toilet...? Maybe this insistence on privacy is becoming just one of those quaint little hangups people in eras gone past had.
Good, then they won't have any trouble convicting you of speaking ill of the next democractic president, once criticising the president has been made a capital offense, and they won't have any trouble convicting you of treason for criticizing the law that you can't criticize presidents, an act of treason as well. Rights you give away in relatively good times are not magically granted back to you when the shit really does hit the fan, politically speaking.
From what I gather, what you'd be paying for here is transparency: someone calls your cell number, they re-route it via voip if you're in a wi-fi zone. Now, according to the article it should be possible to walk in and out of wifi coverage during a call and not notice a thing, which, if true, is pretty good. Sounds like it will more likely "sort of" work, though.
Personally, I don't care if each and every one of these huge media companies bites the bullet, preferably taking their "artists" with them.
Well, presumably uncontrollable laughter in a patient would make it rather hard to operate delicate instruments in their mouth...
I never said the BBC trust was the same thing as the BBC, all I was saying is that based on this you can expect nothing to happen for at least half a year, since that is the first deadline for them to have done something, whatever that maybe, and whatever may happen if they are seen to not have done enough. 6 months here isn't even necessarily an ultimate deadline for having support for non-windows operating systems, it's just a checkpoint. Not exactly ASAP in my view.
Why DO you have to buy their landline service with it? I have ADSL and I don't have a telephone contract with anyone, just the broadband. Then again, I think over here the ISPs are legally barred from requiring customers to get a phone contract if they just want broadband.
Damn it, how much more of our freedoms will we sacrifice to that cursed scientific progress before we put an end to it once and for all?!
This is a written medium, what people do or don't do when speaking is irrelevant. There's a long tradition of satire in writing, and I don't really think Voltaire, for example, would quite read the same with sarcasm tags... If you can't get your point across without, in effect, starting and ending your comment with a "HEY GUYS, THIS IS NOT WHAT I REALLY THINK", then maybe you're better off just saying what you do think, and leave sarcasm to those who are capable of using it. It's like a joke you have to explain, it's just not funny.
Thank you SO much for the informative sarcasm tags, truly it is a boon not to have to think for myself. Sometimes I read texts from times past, and I am filled with anger at the absolutely ludicrous views espoused by the writers. Sometimes I think it might be this sarcasm thing, but without having it spelled out for me, how could I know? It is a miracle that writers in ages before the invention of this simple notation were not all murdered, and I am grateful that we are no longer held back from expressly denoting sarcasm whereever needed by old-fashioned notions of style and taste.
I'm in the market for a laptop currently, and as I was asking for advice, someone suggested getting a Mac. I hadn't even thought of it, mainly because I believed the price would be prohibitive. Not to miss out on a potential good deal, though, I went and compared the stats. I was looking at an Acer travelmate 7514, which comes with 2 gigabytes of ram, an AMD Turion X2 processor @ 1.8 GHz, 160 gb drive, 17" widescreen display and a Geforce Go 7600 SE. That would come to about 900 euros over here. What could I get from Apple for that? Well, I couldn't of course, the closest is a 970-Euro Macbook, which comes with a Core Duo processor, 512 mb of ram, 13" display, 60 gigabyte hard disk and integrated graphics. I think I'll go with the Acer instead. Now, of course, you might say that sub-1000 euro prices are low-end and apple just doesn't do that, but looking at the specs of that Acer, I don't feel it's exactly a low-end machine, even though the Turion processor isn't exactly the greatest thing out there. The Macbook, on the other hand, can't be described as anything else than low-end, it just has a big pricetag on it.
Easy. Constant surveillance has one very clear effect: It reminds you you are a subject, not a free individual. It conditions you to monitor your actions at all times for signs of "undesirable" behaviour. In effect, the knowledge of being watched makes people police their own actions and thoughts. It is the worst kind of erosion of liberty, because it erodes your freedom to be yourself.
I thought it was more of a amazing video!
A truecrypt container, even a first-level one so to speak, is indistinguishable from random data - hence when mounting you can't have the truecrypt app look for truecrypt containers but must specify the right one yourself - you can't identify one without mounting it. So having a container in a container shouldn't be necessary if the adversary isn't aware and able to prove you are using truecrypt in the first place. And even if they did, I'm not sure how they can force you to unlock a container whose password you have forgotten...
Correct. Banning DRM would result in banning commercial DVDs from Norway. Anyway, the very reason we have laws banning circumvention of DRM is that the technology doesn't work. A law banning circumvention of DRM is in effect the same as a law banning copying of works labeled with a "do not copy" sticker.
To those who think this will shut up evolution-deniers: Keep dreaming. Creationism has nothing to do with science, the only thing that will change a creationist's mind is a potent hallucination of God telling them evolution is real. No amount of scientific evidence, however persuasive, can sway a delusional mind.
I can't help but wonder if it is too late in the game to be introducing new physical distribution formats. Here's why: The benefits of HD can only be appreciated on an HD-capable TV-set. I don't see the masses rushing out to buy new sets until their old ones fail. Certainly, there are some who are willing to pay for the quality upgrade even if their old set works fine, and anyone buying a new TV now may well get an HD-capable one, if the price is right. But I do think that it will be up to 10 years before the transition to HD is truly widespread. Now, look 10 years into the future. Is it likely that physical media will still be a significant form of distribution for consumer entertainment? I find that very doubtful. To sum up, by the time there is real demand for HD content, there will not be much demand for content distributed on discs.