Virtual Reality is like Reality, man.
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 2
Being online is like being in the real world. When I go into a brick and mortar store, nobody has a profile on me the minute I walk in there. I'm basically anonymous until I whip out my credit card or a check. It should be the same in cyberspace. There are public places we should always be able to go, either online or in the real world, where we don't need to show some goddammed ID card. It reminds me of the WWII movies. "Where are ze papers!!!! Hmmmm?????"
Why is it so hard to understand that just because we have a new medium for communication does not mean we need to whip out an ID (or an ID card), to be used ultimately by some marketing jack-ass. I hate marketing anyway... so much existential inauthenticity...
It's hard to believe one of the inventors of the web could be so stupid. Anonymity is simply one of our "check and balance" systems that we have in this country. Once systems are in place for web licensing, we lose more of our freedoms.
Greed is the driving force in all of this. Tracking illegal child pornography and avoiding offensive sites is simply an excuse. And pay money for no-ad sites? Sheesh! Get junkbuster (http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/) instead.
How secure could it be to do, for example, company accounting over the internet? With all the hacking going on--even by our own government--what's to prevent someone's data from being compromised if not even altered?...to be used later to frame that (competitor) company...
What's to prevent massive "profiling"--data-mining of corporations--only to be sold to the highest bidder?
Also, I think that moving from client side software to ASP computing is like going from cars to public transportation. Most don't want to lose the control they have despite what Larry Ellison says.
One last point: Ziff-Davis, journalistic whores that they are, are going to support these revenue milking schemes more than they would something like open source because that's how they get paid. I can't imagine software treated like an electric utility. You get a bill at the end of the month for 40 hours use of some word-processor, 25 with a spreadsheet, etc?
Bill Gates uses the word "innovation" several times in his response to the findings by Judge Jackson. It's creepy. In a way it's sad too.
Microsoft buys all it's innovation or they stomp it out with dirty tricks. If they didn't they'd have real competition, and they can't deal with that on an equal playing field.
If Microsoft is innovative, it's in the art of the deal, not in creating new products. But then again, Machiavelli's The Prince was written about 500 years ago. Hmmm, so M$ isn't innovative after all. They just read the book.
I think that since the end of the cold war the security agencies have been scrambling to justify their existence. They keep growing despite less need for their existence. The whole spying thing bothers me though. We have a system of checks and balances in our government, but with the ever growing power of the security agencies, one wonders how there can be any real accountability.
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The world may never know.
Why is it so hard to understand that just because we have a new medium for communication does not mean we need to whip out an ID (or an ID card), to be used ultimately by some marketing jack-ass. I hate marketing anyway... so much existential inauthenticity...
It's hard to believe one of the inventors of the web could be so stupid. Anonymity is simply one of our "check and balance" systems that we have in this country. Once systems are in place for web licensing, we lose more of our freedoms.
Greed is the driving force in all of this. Tracking illegal child pornography and avoiding offensive sites is simply an excuse. And pay money for no-ad sites? Sheesh! Get junkbuster (http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/) instead.
What's to prevent massive "profiling"--data-mining of corporations--only to be sold to the highest bidder?
Also, I think that moving from client side software to ASP computing is like going from cars to public transportation. Most don't want to lose the control they have despite what Larry Ellison says.
One last point: Ziff-Davis, journalistic whores that they are, are going to support these revenue milking schemes more than they would something like open source because that's how they get paid. I can't imagine software treated like an electric utility. You get a bill at the end of the month for 40 hours use of some word-processor, 25 with a spreadsheet, etc?
Microsoft buys all it's innovation or they stomp it out with dirty tricks. If they didn't they'd have real competition, and they can't deal with that on an equal playing field.
If Microsoft is innovative, it's in the art of the deal, not in creating new products. But then again, Machiavelli's The Prince was written about 500 years ago. Hmmm, so M$ isn't innovative after all. They just read the book.
I think that since the end of the cold war the security agencies have been scrambling to justify their existence. They keep growing despite less need for their existence. The whole spying thing bothers me though. We have a system of checks and balances in our government, but with the ever growing power of the security agencies, one wonders how there can be any real accountability.