In comparing the fiber glut to the railroad boom, let's not forget the dark side of history. The construction of the railroads enabled the massing of enormous fortunes for tycoons such as Pullman, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Gould -- all names both famous and infamous in American history. All of these people, and many others whom I didn't name, were ruthless competitors, satisfied with nothing less than total monopoly and willing to use any means to accomplish this.
Such means included bribing government officials (even entire legislatures), sabotoging competitors' operations, illegally appropriating land through manipulation of the legal system, paying workers rock-bottom wages while showing reckless disregard for basic safety, and firing and brutalizing workers who had the temerity to join a labor union.
Perhaps an ominous reminder of all this, many cables today are in fact laid down alongside (you guessed it!) railroad tracks.
I think McNealy's right... partially. For the most part, privacy is gone, and there's a case to be made for having less privacy. BUT...
A database of peoples personal/medical/financial information is a tool. Like any tool (especially the powerful ones), it can be used to help or harm people. I can use gasoline to drive my car -- or to set someone's house on fire. Few if any worthwhile tools fail to possess this dual characteristic.
What this means is that those who collect and distribute information have a moral obligation to use the information responsibly. If my doctor can view my genetic profile and conclude that a particular drug would be especially effective, that is responsible use. When my insurance provider views the same profile and uses it to deny coverage for a variety of conditions, that's irresponsible.
This should be the focus of new legislation. There ought to be stiff penalties for the abuse of people's personal information. It's clear that not all information belongs in everyone's hands and that people often will make judgements in their own self-interest that cause me personal harm. As a government, we need to pass laws which motivate individuals and businesses to behave thoughtfully and responsibly about whom they give my personal information to and what they do with it.
So, let me see if I get this: television broadcasters want to encrypt digital transmissions of conventional broadcasts as well as movies, thereby controlling the hardware on which I view them, the frequency, times and locations where I may view them, as well as the price I pay. Those are their terms.
Unfortunately, those aren't my terms. I watch very little TV anyway, and in any event I have no desire to watch the ads. If I can't see the show when it's convenient for me and without advertisements, then I guess I'll just have to do without TV and miss the show.
But that's OK. It's not as if there's much in the way of quality on TV, the movies, or radio anyway.
In fact, the amount of time devoted to ads has been increasing and the show quality has been decreasing for quite some time now, making the service *less* valuable.
In short, what they're forgetting is that I'm a customer and if I can't buy what I want, I won't spend the money. The best way to get these guys to listen is to speak with one's pocketbook.
If we all did this, TV manufacturers would see sales plummet and balk at making the new sets. Advertisers would see their now very accurate Nielsen ratings plummet (no doubt every TV set made would digitally transmit back to the broadcaster minute-by-minute viewership results) and advertising slots would sink in value.
A little while back, there was a story posted about an LA Times reporter who followed up on all SPAM that came into his mailbox for a week. I noticed that nearly all the spammers fell into a small number of categories:
1. Multi-level marketing promotions, sometimes referred to as "pyramid" schemes.
2. Businesses either blatantly illegal, banned from doing business in certain states, or operating offshore.
3. Businesses making false or questionable claims.
In each of these cases, there are already other legal recourses, and in many instances listed by the author, some legal action had in fact been taken. Yet they still persist in sending SPAM.
In short, our legal system is already overwhelmed by these losers, and passing another law (even if it is a good one) isn't likely to have a significant effect. What we really need is to increase significantly the chances of actually CATCHING and CONVICTIING the scofflaws. That's the only thing that really will help.
When I read the bit about rigging the laptop case so that it would destroy the data on the hard drive if opened I thought, "short of physically destroying the disk, it won't work."
Unfortunately, erasing data is harder than you think. There was an article on rootprompt sometime back (sadly, I only saved a text copy of the article, not the URL; the author is Dr. Peter Gutmann of the CS Department at the University of Auckland) which went into some detail on what you would have to do. It was a long article and had many technical details, but the one sentence summary is this: "you have to overwrite the entire drive at least 35 times with a special set of bit patterns". Think how long that would take on a 20G drive (what my own laptop has)! I doubt the battery would be up to it, even if they didn't detach it.
Back in the late 70s, Frank Herbert wrote a book called "The Dosadi Experiment" in which he made some keen observations about our legal system. Sadly, it is out of print. I quote now from p. 336 of the Ace paperback edition:
"ConSentient Law always makes aristocrats of its practitioners. Gowachin Law stands beneath that pretension. Gowachin Law asks: `Who knows the people? Only such a one is fit to judge in the Courtarena..."
This is what I see as the real problem. The legal profession has a strong self-interest in making the law as burdensome and as complicated as possible. That way, people must consult an attorney much more frequently than they otherwise might, which increases their power, status, wealth and influence in our society.
I agree. There is a severe lack of information, at least in the ZDNet article. I saw some discussion in the comments of the disadvantages of using a microkernel architecture (especially the Mach), mostly having to do with context switching. However, I didn't see a detailed listing of the litany of "design mistakes" to which Linus refers. Of which design decicions is he so un-fond and why? Does he still have the same opinion now? Finally, is OSX, like NT before it, making compromises in order to support the popular legacy software of an installed base they can ill afford to lose?
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In comparing the fiber glut to the railroad boom, let's not forget the dark side of history. The construction of the railroads enabled the massing of enormous fortunes for tycoons such as Pullman, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Gould -- all names both famous and infamous in American history. All of these people, and many others whom I didn't name, were ruthless competitors, satisfied with nothing less than total monopoly and willing to use any means to accomplish this.
Such means included bribing government officials (even entire legislatures), sabotoging competitors' operations, illegally appropriating land through manipulation of the legal system, paying workers rock-bottom wages while showing reckless disregard for basic safety, and firing and brutalizing workers who had the temerity to join a labor union.
Perhaps an ominous reminder of all this, many cables today are in fact laid down alongside (you guessed it!) railroad tracks.
I think McNealy's right... partially. For the most part, privacy is gone, and there's a case to be made for having less privacy. BUT...
A database of peoples personal/medical/financial information is a tool. Like any tool (especially the powerful ones), it can be used to help or harm people. I can use gasoline to drive my car -- or to set someone's house on fire. Few if any worthwhile tools fail to possess this dual characteristic.
What this means is that those who collect and distribute information have a moral obligation to use the information responsibly. If my doctor can view my genetic profile and conclude that a particular drug would be especially effective, that is responsible use. When my insurance provider views the same profile and uses it to deny coverage for a variety of conditions, that's irresponsible.
This should be the focus of new legislation. There ought to be stiff penalties for the abuse of people's personal information. It's clear that not all information belongs in everyone's hands and that people often will make judgements in their own self-interest that cause me personal harm. As a government, we need to pass laws which motivate individuals and businesses to behave thoughtfully and responsibly about whom they give my personal information to and what they do with it.
So, let me see if I get this: television broadcasters want to encrypt digital transmissions of conventional broadcasts as well as movies, thereby controlling the hardware on which I view them, the frequency, times and locations where I may view them, as well as the price I pay. Those are their terms.
Unfortunately, those aren't my terms. I watch very little TV anyway, and in any event I have no desire to watch the ads. If I can't see the show when it's convenient for me and without advertisements, then I guess I'll just have to do without TV and miss the show.
But that's OK. It's not as if there's much in the way of quality on TV, the movies, or radio anyway.
In fact, the amount of time devoted to ads has been increasing and the show quality has been decreasing for quite some time now, making the service *less* valuable.
In short, what they're forgetting is that I'm a customer and if I can't buy what I want, I won't spend the money. The best way to get these guys to listen is to speak with one's pocketbook.
If we all did this, TV manufacturers would see sales plummet and balk at making the new sets. Advertisers would see their now very accurate Nielsen ratings plummet (no doubt every TV set made would digitally transmit back to the broadcaster minute-by-minute viewership results) and advertising slots would sink in value.
A little while back, there was a story posted about an LA Times reporter who followed up on all SPAM that came into his mailbox for a week. I noticed that nearly all the spammers fell into a small number of categories:
1. Multi-level marketing promotions, sometimes referred to as "pyramid" schemes.
2. Businesses either blatantly illegal, banned from doing business in certain states, or operating offshore.
3. Businesses making false or questionable claims.
In each of these cases, there are already other legal recourses, and in many instances listed by the author, some legal action had in fact been taken. Yet they still persist in sending SPAM.
In short, our legal system is already overwhelmed by these losers, and passing another law (even if it is a good one) isn't likely to have a significant effect. What we really need is to increase significantly the chances of actually CATCHING and CONVICTIING the scofflaws. That's the only thing that really will help.
IANAL, but unless I'm mistaken, fraud is a criminal charge, not a civil matter. If I am found guilty of fraud, I go to jail or pay a heavy fine.
When I read the bit about rigging the laptop case so that it would destroy the data on the hard drive if opened I thought, "short of physically destroying the disk, it won't work."
Unfortunately, erasing data is harder than you think. There was an article on rootprompt sometime back (sadly, I only saved a text copy of the article, not the URL; the author is Dr. Peter Gutmann of the CS Department at the University of Auckland) which went into some detail on what you would have to do. It was a long article and had many technical details, but the one sentence summary is this: "you have to overwrite the entire drive at least 35 times with a special set of bit patterns". Think how long that would take on a 20G drive (what my own laptop has)! I doubt the battery would be up to it, even if they didn't detach it.
Back in the late 70s, Frank Herbert wrote a book called "The Dosadi Experiment" in which he made some keen observations about our legal system. Sadly, it is out of print. I quote now from p. 336 of the Ace paperback edition:
"ConSentient Law always makes aristocrats of its practitioners. Gowachin Law stands beneath that pretension. Gowachin Law asks: `Who knows the people? Only such a one is fit to judge in the Courtarena..."
This is what I see as the real problem. The legal profession has a strong self-interest in making the law as burdensome and as complicated as possible. That way, people must consult an attorney much more frequently than they otherwise might, which increases their power, status, wealth and influence in our society.
I agree. There is a severe lack of information, at least in the ZDNet article. I saw some discussion in the comments of the disadvantages of using a microkernel architecture (especially the Mach), mostly having to do with context switching. However, I didn't see a detailed listing of the litany of "design mistakes" to which Linus refers. Of which design decicions is he so un-fond and why? Does he still have the same opinion now? Finally, is OSX, like NT before it, making compromises in order to support the popular legacy software of an installed base they can ill afford to lose?