Human civilization can and will devour itself trying to bring this sort of thing to a halt. Why? Because it's always gone on, on some level or another, and always will go on, on some level or another.
Prostitution is more illegal than file-sharing is. There are always efforts in most places in the world to stop it, but the best those efforts are ever able to do is slow it down a little. We're talking tens of thousands of YEARS here, people, and it hasn't been stamped out -- and never will be either.
Want to really stop it, and everything else society at large deems "unacceptable"? Then you need the ability to mass-erase an idea from people's minds all at once, along with every material reference to said idea, because you can't kill an idea: You can't stop the signal, Mal. Ah, but there's a problem there, too, isn't there? If any government or individual had that sort of power over people, then we're living in a world that makes 1984 look like amateur night -- and from there the human race would likely last about another two generations, tops, before completely dying out.
Want another example of what I'm talking about? Drugs. The world, for all of recorded human history and beyond, I'm sure, has had a problem with intoxicants of all kinds. Every culture does or has, at one time or another, tried to stamp them out. They all failed, didn't they, and for the most part our own efforts here in the U.S. are largely a waste of time, money, and resources; none of those efforts have or can really do much of anything to affect the idea of intoxicants. Remember Prohibition? Yeah, that worked real well, didn't it?
As I see it we, as a race, have three directions we can go to address this class of issue:
1) We can stop fighting it, accept it, and try to develop ways to work with it so that it doesn't necessarily have to be a zero-sum game all the time.
2) We can fight it tooth and nail to the last, hoping that it's actually possible to erase an idea from human consciousness.
3) We can continue the cat-and-mouse games that this class of things has always been surrounded by and interwoven with, and the people who get caught at them pay the penalty for being careless.
Where we are now is #3. What I WANT to see is #1 -- but I don't think we're evolved enough to get there yet. Where some authorities and most corporations want to go is #2 -- and they're ice-skating uphill if they try.
Again, if you're so fucking righteous, then don't post anonymously; you obviously don't have the strength of your own alleged convictions to stand on here so you hide behind anonymous posting.
Shouldn't you be identifying yourself as "Cowardly Anonymous content creator"? If you're so righteous then why post anonymously? You're a whiny loser, and I'll bet your so-called "content" isn't worth paying for in the first place, or you're just such an asshat to everyone that they intentionally pirate your worthless crap just to spite you. Go be passive-aggressive somewhere else.
If the world started doing that, then the total bandwidth used of the internet everywhere would drop by about 50%, and there'd be a booming new industry for people sanitizing PCs.
OK then, what ever happened (to address your example) of having Dad go have a little chat with this other older, much larger kid's Dad, on the subject of how inappropriate his actions and behaviour are and how it's got to stop? Why does everyone these days think it's up to The State to raise their kids for them? For cryin' out loud, people, raise your own kids, teach them to be self-reliant as much as possible, and bring "the authorities" in on it when it's appropriate to do so.
I don't believe that Step #1 is any more enforceable than prohibition was, or the maximum speed laws are, or pickpocketing laws are for that matter. They'd have to criminalize everyone who has wifi at home and doesn't secure it, and that's a LOT of people and likely always will be. Then there's always people who don't agree with the law and will do it anyway, and fight it out in court with the media watching. (shakes head) It's just not going to happen.
Sounds to me like what they're really saying is that they want you to use your phone for internet because it makes them all sorts of money. It's just too damned expensive, I actually disabled it completely on my phone just in case I'm tempted.
..when did we stop teaching kids how to deal (internally as well as externally) with bullying? Why does ANYthing like this have to be a subject for legislation? I'm 43 years old; when I was in 7th grade I was being bullied by some kid. We ended up out in the street in front of the school, fist-fighting. I didn't want to resort to that, and I had a fat lip for a few days afterwards, but that kid and I got along more or less OK after that. The school even understood why it had to happen that way, so we both got more or less a slap on the wrists over the incident. When did we stop teaching kids to be self-reliant and to stick up for themselves and deal with being bullied? When did "sticks and stones..etc" stop being true? WTF?
Somehow, I expected this guy to be some blue-haired old codger of a University professor, complete with "get off my lawn!", yearning for the old days before the Internet was something generally accessible. Instead, I find a thirty-something.
Sure, I read the article. Lots of words, lots of big words, and high concepts. What does it all mean, really? Not much, I think, not much more than what anybody else has to say on the subject. Why? Because it's too big. The Internet has increased it's mass immensely, and with that mass comes an equal amount of inertia. This guy and his big words and big ideas aren't really going to change anything.. unless he's got a few billion dollars to throw at it, in which case he'll only be able to change his small corner of it in his own image.
..that like any good lock or alarm system, the best it will do is stop the casual pirate/thief, and slow down a talented and persistant one. I've heard tell of chip pirates that will actually carefully remove the outer casing on an IC they want to copy, and analyze the actual silicon to get their copy. No reason why they couldn't do that, then engineer their way around the locking mechanism.
They obviously haven't thought through what they're asking to do. They can legislate something like this all they want to, but it's just words on a page as soon as a network cable leaves Australian territory; no other country is obligated to allow them to barge in and search or seize computers. On top of that, I seriously doubt that Australian authorities would agree to authorities from other countries searching and seizing computers within Australia. I'm tempted to say that there's something else going on here.
..then building inductive chargers literally embedded into the freeways.
You've got to be kidding. You want to have huge coils of wire embedded in the roadway, sitting there day and night drawing incredible amounts of current? Oh, and by the way, are you forgetting how a magnetic field diminishes with distance? Iron-core transformers are pretty close to 100% efficient, but you add an air gap, even a small one, and the efficiency dimishes dramatically. In short what you're suggesting is utterly preposterous.
All batteries, even Li-Ion, have voltage discharge curves; Li-Ion batteries just happen to have a flatter curve than other battery chemistries do. The motor speed control would have to include some sort of voltage regulation circuitry, which for power efficiency purposes would likely be some sort of switching regulator, not any sort of energy-wasting series-mode regulator. I don't see where the problem is.
Aluminum is heavier and less abundant than carbon is, and I suspect these sheets are flexible whereas aluminum is rigid. Also, as someone else pointed out, for the same weight these sheets would be many times stronger than aluminum.
This guy, and anyone else who is prosecuted for spamming, is guilty of being excessive more than anything else (aside from actual criminal offenses). Most things advertised with SPAM are complete ripoffs and/or total junk: fake (or even harmful fake) drugs, illegally copied commercial software, fake diplomas, and more gray-market things like porn sites, pseudo-porn sites (pretends to be an 'adult dating site', har har har), etc. These people are incapable of self-regulating or even self-controlling their greed and therefore will do almost anything to amass more money, which is really what brings us to the root of the problem. Technology, legislation, and criminal action will only ever be partially successful at best. The real solution will have to come from society at large.
Ah, I see. I would agree with your original argument in spirit at least, but in practical terms it would never work because you'd more or less be asking spammers to self-regulate, and historically speaking it's already been proven at least a million times over that they're unwilling and incapable of doing so. That leads us right back to where we already are. Really it's a case of excesses, and this chap who is going to be doing jail time is as good a poster-boy for these sorts of excesses as any other spammer could be. Beyond that, if there was some sort of actual cost involved in mass-market direct emailing, then legitimate operators still wouldn't go for it because in their perception they'd be spending twice as much to accomplish the same thing, whereas the draw of spamming is that it costs little to nothing comparatively.
I've got mod points and almost used them, but I think it'll be more useful if I comment on your comment instead.
Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place. I don't know if you're in the United States or not, but what was the last time you really took a look at all the junk snail-mail you get every month? Try this experiment: save all your junk snail-mail for a whole year, and then weigh it, measure it's volume, and multiply that by every household in this country. Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good? Or is it just a waste of natural resources, and furthermore making an already fat, slow, outdated U.S. Postal Service slower than it has to be?
Neither thing, or it's offshoots (telemarketing, junk FAX, etc) should exist, simply because they're all so highly abused, and it's basically impossible IMHO to regulate them.
Whatever this guy is smoking, it must be some powerful stuff, tweaking his cognitive centers out of whack like that. Can you say "monopoly"? I knew you could! What would follow from there would be TelCos completely controlling all the content we have access to, and likely blocking (in some form or other, like BANDWIDTH THROTTLING) competing content. No, thank you, I'll pass, and could someone please get this guy a towel or something? KTHXBYE
Slashdot Mirror
Bastards, why don't they just come out and demand that everyone have an effing barcode tattooed onto the back of their necks?
Human civilization can and will devour itself trying to bring this sort of thing to a halt. Why? Because it's always gone on, on some level or another, and always will go on, on some level or another.
Prostitution is more illegal than file-sharing is. There are always efforts in most places in the world to stop it, but the best those efforts are ever able to do is slow it down a little. We're talking tens of thousands of YEARS here, people, and it hasn't been stamped out -- and never will be either.
Want to really stop it, and everything else society at large deems "unacceptable"? Then you need the ability to mass-erase an idea from people's minds all at once, along with every material reference to said idea, because you can't kill an idea: You can't stop the signal, Mal. Ah, but there's a problem there, too, isn't there? If any government or individual had that sort of power over people, then we're living in a world that makes 1984 look like amateur night -- and from there the human race would likely last about another two generations, tops, before completely dying out.
Want another example of what I'm talking about? Drugs. The world, for all of recorded human history and beyond, I'm sure, has had a problem with intoxicants of all kinds. Every culture does or has, at one time or another, tried to stamp them out. They all failed, didn't they, and for the most part our own efforts here in the U.S. are largely a waste of time, money, and resources; none of those efforts have or can really do much of anything to affect the idea of intoxicants. Remember Prohibition? Yeah, that worked real well, didn't it?
As I see it we, as a race, have three directions we can go to address this class of issue:
1) We can stop fighting it, accept it, and try to develop ways to work with it so that it doesn't necessarily have to be a zero-sum game all the time.
2) We can fight it tooth and nail to the last, hoping that it's actually possible to erase an idea from human consciousness.
3) We can continue the cat-and-mouse games that this class of things has always been surrounded by and interwoven with, and the people who get caught at them pay the penalty for being careless.
Where we are now is #3. What I WANT to see is #1 -- but I don't think we're evolved enough to get there yet. Where some authorities and most corporations want to go is #2 -- and they're ice-skating uphill if they try.
Again, if you're so fucking righteous, then don't post anonymously; you obviously don't have the strength of your own alleged convictions to stand on here so you hide behind anonymous posting.
Shouldn't you be identifying yourself as "Cowardly Anonymous content creator"? If you're so righteous then why post anonymously? You're a whiny loser, and I'll bet your so-called "content" isn't worth paying for in the first place, or you're just such an asshat to everyone that they intentionally pirate your worthless crap just to spite you. Go be passive-aggressive somewhere else.
If the world started doing that, then the total bandwidth used of the internet everywhere would drop by about 50%, and there'd be a booming new industry for people sanitizing PCs.
OK then, what ever happened (to address your example) of having Dad go have a little chat with this other older, much larger kid's Dad, on the subject of how inappropriate his actions and behaviour are and how it's got to stop? Why does everyone these days think it's up to The State to raise their kids for them? For cryin' out loud, people, raise your own kids, teach them to be self-reliant as much as possible, and bring "the authorities" in on it when it's appropriate to do so.
I don't believe that Step #1 is any more enforceable than prohibition was, or the maximum speed laws are, or pickpocketing laws are for that matter. They'd have to criminalize everyone who has wifi at home and doesn't secure it, and that's a LOT of people and likely always will be. Then there's always people who don't agree with the law and will do it anyway, and fight it out in court with the media watching. (shakes head) It's just not going to happen.
Sounds to me like what they're really saying is that they want you to use your phone for internet because it makes them all sorts of money. It's just too damned expensive, I actually disabled it completely on my phone just in case I'm tempted.
..when did we stop teaching kids how to deal (internally as well as externally) with bullying? Why does ANYthing like this have to be a subject for legislation? I'm 43 years old; when I was in 7th grade I was being bullied by some kid. We ended up out in the street in front of the school, fist-fighting. I didn't want to resort to that, and I had a fat lip for a few days afterwards, but that kid and I got along more or less OK after that. The school even understood why it had to happen that way, so we both got more or less a slap on the wrists over the incident. When did we stop teaching kids to be self-reliant and to stick up for themselves and deal with being bullied? When did "sticks and stones..etc" stop being true? WTF?
In truth, yes, might make more sense than the article itself did.
Sure, I read the article. Lots of words, lots of big words, and high concepts. What does it all mean, really? Not much, I think, not much more than what anybody else has to say on the subject. Why? Because it's too big. The Internet has increased it's mass immensely, and with that mass comes an equal amount of inertia. This guy and his big words and big ideas aren't really going to change anything.. unless he's got a few billion dollars to throw at it, in which case he'll only be able to change his small corner of it in his own image.
..that like any good lock or alarm system, the best it will do is stop the casual pirate/thief, and slow down a talented and persistant one. I've heard tell of chip pirates that will actually carefully remove the outer casing on an IC they want to copy, and analyze the actual silicon to get their copy. No reason why they couldn't do that, then engineer their way around the locking mechanism.
..so would a hawk or eagle in the mix qualify as a BITM (Bird In The Middle) attack, or DoP (Denial of Pigeon) attack?
They obviously haven't thought through what they're asking to do. They can legislate something like this all they want to, but it's just words on a page as soon as a network cable leaves Australian territory; no other country is obligated to allow them to barge in and search or seize computers. On top of that, I seriously doubt that Australian authorities would agree to authorities from other countries searching and seizing computers within Australia. I'm tempted to say that there's something else going on here.
You've got to be kidding. You want to have huge coils of wire embedded in the roadway, sitting there day and night drawing incredible amounts of current? Oh, and by the way, are you forgetting how a magnetic field diminishes with distance? Iron-core transformers are pretty close to 100% efficient, but you add an air gap, even a small one, and the efficiency dimishes dramatically. In short what you're suggesting is utterly preposterous.
All batteries, even Li-Ion, have voltage discharge curves; Li-Ion batteries just happen to have a flatter curve than other battery chemistries do. The motor speed control would have to include some sort of voltage regulation circuitry, which for power efficiency purposes would likely be some sort of switching regulator, not any sort of energy-wasting series-mode regulator. I don't see where the problem is.
Yeah, that 0.1% that it backfires on, that's not enough people to really care about now is it? A few nice bribes to the FDA and no problems, right?
I will accept your source at face value; however, carbon is the 6th most abundant element in the Universe. ;-)
Aluminum is heavier and less abundant than carbon is, and I suspect these sheets are flexible whereas aluminum is rigid. Also, as someone else pointed out, for the same weight these sheets would be many times stronger than aluminum.
..and again, I still have them and wish I could use them now, effing Flamebait! :P
This guy, and anyone else who is prosecuted for spamming, is guilty of being excessive more than anything else (aside from actual criminal offenses). Most things advertised with SPAM are complete ripoffs and/or total junk: fake (or even harmful fake) drugs, illegally copied commercial software, fake diplomas, and more gray-market things like porn sites, pseudo-porn sites (pretends to be an 'adult dating site', har har har), etc. These people are incapable of self-regulating or even self-controlling their greed and therefore will do almost anything to amass more money, which is really what brings us to the root of the problem. Technology, legislation, and criminal action will only ever be partially successful at best. The real solution will have to come from society at large.
Ah, I see. I would agree with your original argument in spirit at least, but in practical terms it would never work because you'd more or less be asking spammers to self-regulate, and historically speaking it's already been proven at least a million times over that they're unwilling and incapable of doing so. That leads us right back to where we already are. Really it's a case of excesses, and this chap who is going to be doing jail time is as good a poster-boy for these sorts of excesses as any other spammer could be. Beyond that, if there was some sort of actual cost involved in mass-market direct emailing, then legitimate operators still wouldn't go for it because in their perception they'd be spending twice as much to accomplish the same thing, whereas the draw of spamming is that it costs little to nothing comparatively.
Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place. I don't know if you're in the United States or not, but what was the last time you really took a look at all the junk snail-mail you get every month? Try this experiment: save all your junk snail-mail for a whole year, and then weigh it, measure it's volume, and multiply that by every household in this country. Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good? Or is it just a waste of natural resources, and furthermore making an already fat, slow, outdated U.S. Postal Service slower than it has to be?
Neither thing, or it's offshoots (telemarketing, junk FAX, etc) should exist, simply because they're all so highly abused, and it's basically impossible IMHO to regulate them.
Facism much? :-/
Whatever this guy is smoking, it must be some powerful stuff, tweaking his cognitive centers out of whack like that. Can you say "monopoly"? I knew you could! What would follow from there would be TelCos completely controlling all the content we have access to, and likely blocking (in some form or other, like BANDWIDTH THROTTLING) competing content. No, thank you, I'll pass, and could someone please get this guy a towel or something? KTHXBYE