Well done. In densely populated US cities, the mesh could work. The problem is, the way these municipal/corporate partnerships work, cities won't permit people to operate a free mesh network of a magnitude necessary to do the job once they twig that they had a free-as-in-beer competitor. I'd think the courts would rule that the cities could regulate the radio space to their advantage, or failing that, the FCC would automatically rule in the corporation's favor.
Dividends. Buybacks mean shennanigans are afoot. I mean when will they start paying some of that 100 billion to the stockholders, who have *never* seen a dividend from MS? Stocks used to be purchased with the understanding that the company would pay a dividend per share every once in a while. Now, they just keep all the cash, give the board billions of bucks in options and salary, and expect the shareholders to buy because the stock price will go up. That ain't ownership -- that's casino gambling.This is a fraud, the current corporate mentality. As an owner, I would like some of the money I've earned as stock or hard cash. But, the "owners" like me who don't own major portions of the company make bupkis while a few special stockholders who got a bite of the good stuff ride off with billions. Truly this is the new Guilded Age. What I've described used to be called "corruption" and "malfeasance". Now we see it as standard practice, beloved by stock analysts, and that top tier of every corporation that eats all the loose profits. The wealth generated by those new corporate practices stays with the very richest people. It's a shell of what it should be.
IF we were permited to do so, we could build a cloud of wireless access points, controlled by people, for people, at no cost other than maintaining our own node. Laser and radio dishes could provide long distance backbones, again, paid for by users and maintained for one and all.
Such was the dream. But, by "municipalizing" the cloud, we introduce political and corporate control of public airwaves, with the usual start-out-low-and-then-gouge monetization scheme that will always boil the frog until he's paying several days of salary a month for a monthly connection.
Am I against businesses monetizing the net? YES. It wasn't designed for them, and they grind the tech down to the lowest costs for themselves and the highest costs for the "consumers". They are opressive, they are in the way, they make us pay for garbage bandwidth and censoring at the drop of a lawyer's pen.
I predicted this back in the late 90's, to general derision. Let the camel's nose in the tent, and pretty soon he's crapping on the bed and eating all the popcorn.
When exactly has Microsoft shared any of its profits with its shareholders? They have something close to 100 billion in the bank. I don't recall any dividends. Where's my piece?
So who exactly are they shaking the money down for, then?
And they don't track you to the foot, they don't keep a running database of your movements using TDOA, and they don't sell that information to anyone who pays up, which is what they do with the GPS-tracking phones.
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them. Your home is accessible by law.
That said, radio devices are not homes, WEP is not a lock, and accessing a device which sole purpose by design is sharing access is not invading private property. Metaphors are not real. Radio is not "yours", ideas are not "yours". Such semantic confusion -- intentional confusion -- leads to things like 17 year old kids going to prison for a crime that only exists in the the minds of hornswoggled. The thing to look out for in the years ahead is the first execution of a person for "stealing" a metaphor. Probably going to happen a lot sooner than even I believe it will.
Diebold, no matter what they do, is a private company. Voting is a transparent, PUBLIC process.
Would you give your paper ballot to a masked man who then goes behind a wall to log your vote, and then shreds it?
It doesn't matter what assurances anyone in the company gives us. They don't know what's actually running on their machines on election day. The programmers don't know either. Neither do the security professionals.
You can secure a system against stupid mistakes, but you can never -- never -- secure it against a malicious attack from the inside. No matter how smart you are, there's always someone smarter and more motivated than you.
Even paper trails can be played with. Who makes the paper trail counting machine? Infinite regression.
Canada does it right. Simple elections, paper ballots, counters observed by both parties, totals carefully checked and forwarded. Easy to recount. And they finish in four hours.
We could stop canning translators because they are gay (no liberty should be exempted from removal in our eternal war against evil, except the liberty from having gays look at your crotch, I guess).
OR
We could start learning some foreign languages. Everyone who graduates high school should learn at least two. Fluently. And no, not Spanish. A language NOT spoken by your neighbors. A *foreign* language. Arabic would be damned helpful.
Diebold filed suit after suit and went ad hominem to kill the paper trail initiatives. They fought like wolverines, insisting that no audit was needed, that the machines were perfect, in the face of all the failures.
For the most part they succeeded.
That, and for no other piece of evidence, convinced me that they were not confident that the paper backup would match the electronic totals. They knew something. They didn't want it out there, dawkins knows, 'cause they would be ruined and go to jail, firstly, and secondly, Occam's Razor says that Republican insider(s) flipped the Ohio election in 2004 at a local level. SOMEone was terrified. They squashed the paper.
If they are okay with paper now, it's 'cause perhaps they found the bugger on the inside who probably flipped the votes and showed him the door, and feel confident that the new software is locked down.
What is made public and what is actually running on the machine come the election are two different things. That's why open-source and unsecret systems are useless. A binary can come, replace the original, change the votes, and replace itself with the original. No traces.
And. If only a technical priesthood can understand what is actually happening inside the voting process, the process is useless to a democracy. And the priesthood are like fluffy lambs before corporate criminals, so they aren't all that useful either.
Canada does it all on paper. Opposing parties watch the count. And they have their national election counted and done in four hours. Do the math. Any number of votes can be counted in four hours, because the manual system scales to the population size.
Exactly. Risking flames, Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld could beat any lie detector thrown at them. They believe with all their heart, and nothing can penetrate that rocky certitude.
Being wrong and lying... sociopaths don't believe they are lying, as others pointed out in this forum.
It's not a question asked often, or easy to find asked:
Anybody hear of a way to hack that GPS tracking device in everyone's phones? I'm addressing this to those who understand why liberty is important.
1) I'd like to REALLY shut off the GPS tracker when I don't want to be monitored. Either switch off the power to the chipset, or screen out the RF signal from the satellites.
2) Failing turning off the tracker or screening the Lidless Eye from my phone, how about feeding it false data?
3) Yes, I know they can triangulate. I'm not insane, I know landline phones used to have fixed locations and cell phones are radio devices linked to a specific tower. What I object to is a minute-by-minute location database being maintained by the cell phone companies at government demand -- and access to said system OPEN TO ANYONE WHO PONIES UP THE CASH. Worry about terrorists? O please, how about your location given out to anyone who pops up some cash? I bet they'll give them volume discounts. Or a law enforcement phone call to the bloody phone company or any one of many third parties selling the info gleaned from your signal?
4) To those who don't care, I understand a fixed element of the population has authoritarian tendencies and likes a solid police and corporate control structure. Fine, don't care, but the rest of us grew up reading Jefferson and want to be able to make a phone call without armies of bastards with a corporate credit card capable of spooling out my movements until the day I die. It's just a thing about being a free man, not a prisoner. You're free or you're a slave. Alpha or beta. Pick one.
Is that really true any more? Sadly, can't they drop a dime on local law just to have you sent back? Everyone out there seems so eager to cooperate with the U.S.
Is there a developed country that flips the bird to the U.S. anymore?
Another thought: as the polygraph's inventor was into S&M and B&D, I will bet cash money that when the history of the CIA's torture enablers is written, the ranks of those straight and patriotic men will be heavily weighted with leather boys, S&M club goers, and gay rape fantasy freaks.
Don't take the bet. I don't want to steal your money:)
Or torturing people by the gross. Decent men and women already left the agency because of this; I don't think I'd like the company I'd be keeping if I worked for Cheney's CIA.
Polygraphs have been questionable in American courts since Mr. S&M created the toy. Wishful thinking has carried the day, especially in corporations.
L. Ron Hubbard used a modified verson of the gadget as his E-meter. He instituted a lie-detector during hours-long interviews as a religious ceremony, used on every member of that organization to this day.
The inventor of the polygraph was an S&M afficiando his entire life. Lived with two women in a hush-hush arrangement. And it spilled over into his Wonder Woman comic; she only lost her powers when a man tied her up. Which happened every bloody issue. Not that there's anything wrong with that. He was an early proponent of women's equality, tho he did like tying them up. Life is weird like that.
fMRIs. Here's my big point o'the day. fMRIs are modified MRI machines that scan the brain in real time. They are being sold as super lie detectors. They are coming to a police station near you very soon. Here's the kicker tho: learning a lesson from the polygraph fiasco in the courts, the manufacturers are *obtaining pre-approval* of the fMRI to be used in court as a lie detector, and they are paving the way so that no one can sue or question the efficacy of the fMRI as a law enforcement tool. Bear in mind that no one really knows what the hell they are measuring with the thing. One day this decade a lot of us will be staring at an fMRI tunnel and then being forced into the damned things, and the evidence obtained will be vaild in any American court, and they've quietly removed our ability to protest the piece of junk.
"Sometimes statistics is the truth and smarmy little me say are lies."
Sometimes, statistics tell the truth, and smarmy little men lie. Values voters, yeah, that's what happened, they voted their values, that's why the polls are off the mark.
Same flaw as the drug use "statistics". The data collection is flawed from the get-go. What idiot admits he breaks the law on a regular basis to a complete stranger? What kind of person would sit down and fill out the form? Like those "declines" in drug use among kids -- what, you asked the kids? Gee, I wonder if they fib.
The problem immigrants come from cultures that value high birthrates. Not big on Malthusian population formula. They are religiously conservative, insular, and due to the high birthrate, have permanent, enormous proportions of teenagers, the numbers growing exponentially.
This leads to unemployment (see insularity, conservatism, and high numbers), mostly for teenagers, who are hormonally supercharged and tend not to have much to lose yet. Inevitably, violence erupts. Religious fundamentalism ALWAYS grows in such a situation. Radical agendas to punish their oppressors, anger, riots, all that.
Solution would be to control the birthrate, which ain't gonna happen. So, Europe is in the crosshairs of a massive 3rd world population bomb. It isn't racism to say that. It just is a fact.
There is only so much land, so much water, so much population that can socially be absorbed before breakdown commences. Thomas Malthus always has the last laugh, tho I don't think he was chuckling much. Nothing can grow forever. It can't even grow a little more. Europe can't become one giant Manhattan to absorb the a tiny proportion of the African and Asian population nuke bomb. I have some idea how such a situation might inevitably pan out, and it won't be to the advantage of the European nations. Lots of violence, increasing backlash against the immigrants, refusal to fund social programs, rising nationalism and racism. No one will win. Eventually the two cultures will start fighting -- don't forget Europeans have angry kids too -- and a kind of fascism will evolve to keep a lid on the violence.
Don't say the population scientists didn't warn ya.
Keep in mind that the U.S. will not recognized dual citizenship. You have to formally renounce American citizenship, and they don't take you back. America is nastier than some other western countries in this regard. They don't play well with other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Well done. In densely populated US cities, the mesh could work. The problem is, the way these municipal/corporate partnerships work, cities won't permit people to operate a free mesh network of a magnitude necessary to do the job once they twig that they had a free-as-in-beer competitor. I'd think the courts would rule that the cities could regulate the radio space to their advantage, or failing that, the FCC would automatically rule in the corporation's favor.
Dividends. Buybacks mean shennanigans are afoot. I mean when will they start paying some of that 100 billion to the stockholders, who have *never* seen a dividend from MS? Stocks used to be purchased with the understanding that the company would pay a dividend per share every once in a while. Now, they just keep all the cash, give the board billions of bucks in options and salary, and expect the shareholders to buy because the stock price will go up. That ain't ownership -- that's casino gambling.This is a fraud, the current corporate mentality. As an owner, I would like some of the money I've earned as stock or hard cash. But, the "owners" like me who don't own major portions of the company make bupkis while a few special stockholders who got a bite of the good stuff ride off with billions. Truly this is the new Guilded Age. What I've described used to be called "corruption" and "malfeasance". Now we see it as standard practice, beloved by stock analysts, and that top tier of every corporation that eats all the loose profits. The wealth generated by those new corporate practices stays with the very richest people. It's a shell of what it should be.
IF we were permited to do so, we could build a cloud of wireless access points, controlled by people, for people, at no cost other than maintaining our own node. Laser and radio dishes could provide long distance backbones, again, paid for by users and maintained for one and all.
Such was the dream. But, by "municipalizing" the cloud, we introduce political and corporate control of public airwaves, with the usual start-out-low-and-then-gouge monetization scheme that will always boil the frog until he's paying several days of salary a month for a monthly connection.
Am I against businesses monetizing the net? YES. It wasn't designed for them, and they grind the tech down to the lowest costs for themselves and the highest costs for the "consumers". They are opressive, they are in the way, they make us pay for garbage bandwidth and censoring at the drop of a lawyer's pen.
I predicted this back in the late 90's, to general derision. Let the camel's nose in the tent, and pretty soon he's crapping on the bed and eating all the popcorn.
When exactly has Microsoft shared any of its profits with its shareholders? They have something close to 100 billion in the bank. I don't recall any dividends. Where's my piece?
So who exactly are they shaking the money down for, then?
And they don't track you to the foot, they don't keep a running database of your movements using TDOA, and they don't sell that information to anyone who pays up, which is what they do with the GPS-tracking phones.
"because Jesus was killed and ressurected years before..."
I wasn't aware this was a historical fact. But, well done nonetheless...
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them. Your home is accessible by law.
That said, radio devices are not homes, WEP is not a lock, and accessing a device which sole purpose by design is sharing access is not invading private property. Metaphors are not real. Radio is not "yours", ideas are not "yours". Such semantic confusion -- intentional confusion -- leads to things like 17 year old kids going to prison for a crime that only exists in the the minds of hornswoggled. The thing to look out for in the years ahead is the first execution of a person for "stealing" a metaphor. Probably going to happen a lot sooner than even I believe it will.
Diebold, no matter what they do, is a private company. Voting is a transparent, PUBLIC process.
Would you give your paper ballot to a masked man who then goes behind a wall to log your vote, and then shreds it?
It doesn't matter what assurances anyone in the company gives us. They don't know what's actually running on their machines on election day. The programmers don't know either. Neither do the security professionals.
You can secure a system against stupid mistakes, but you can never -- never -- secure it against a malicious attack from the inside. No matter how smart you are, there's always someone smarter and more motivated than you.
Even paper trails can be played with. Who makes the paper trail counting machine? Infinite regression.
Canada does it right. Simple elections, paper ballots, counters observed by both parties, totals carefully checked and forwarded. Easy to recount. And they finish in four hours.
And everyone trusts it.
We could stop canning translators because they are gay (no liberty should be exempted from removal in our eternal war against evil, except the liberty from having gays look at your crotch, I guess).
OR
We could start learning some foreign languages. Everyone who graduates high school should learn at least two. Fluently. And no, not Spanish. A language NOT spoken by your neighbors. A *foreign* language. Arabic would be damned helpful.
Diebold filed suit after suit and went ad hominem to kill the paper trail initiatives. They fought like wolverines, insisting that no audit was needed, that the machines were perfect, in the face of all the failures.
For the most part they succeeded.
That, and for no other piece of evidence, convinced me that they were not confident that the paper backup would match the electronic totals. They knew something. They didn't want it out there, dawkins knows, 'cause they would be ruined and go to jail, firstly, and secondly, Occam's Razor says that Republican insider(s) flipped the Ohio election in 2004 at a local level. SOMEone was terrified. They squashed the paper.
If they are okay with paper now, it's 'cause perhaps they found the bugger on the inside who probably flipped the votes and showed him the door, and feel confident that the new software is locked down.
What is made public and what is actually running on the machine come the election are two different things. That's why open-source and unsecret systems are useless. A binary can come, replace the original, change the votes, and replace itself with the original. No traces.
And. If only a technical priesthood can understand what is actually happening inside the voting process, the process is useless to a democracy. And the priesthood are like fluffy lambs before corporate criminals, so they aren't all that useful either.
Canada does it all on paper. Opposing parties watch the count. And they have their national election counted and done in four hours. Do the math. Any number of votes can be counted in four hours, because the manual system scales to the population size.
Yep. B&D crowd really not part of the torture scene. Different class of critter.
Exactly. Risking flames, Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld could beat any lie detector thrown at them. They believe with all their heart, and nothing can penetrate that rocky certitude.
Being wrong and lying... sociopaths don't believe they are lying, as others pointed out in this forum.
It's not a question asked often, or easy to find asked:
Anybody hear of a way to hack that GPS tracking device in everyone's phones? I'm addressing this to those who understand why liberty is important.
1) I'd like to REALLY shut off the GPS tracker when I don't want to be monitored. Either switch off the power to the chipset, or screen out the RF signal from the satellites.
2) Failing turning off the tracker or screening the Lidless Eye from my phone, how about feeding it false data?
3) Yes, I know they can triangulate. I'm not insane, I know landline phones used to have fixed locations and cell phones are radio devices linked to a specific tower. What I object to is a minute-by-minute location database being maintained by the cell phone companies at government demand -- and access to said system OPEN TO ANYONE WHO PONIES UP THE CASH. Worry about terrorists? O please, how about your location given out to anyone who pops up some cash? I bet they'll give them volume discounts. Or a law enforcement phone call to the bloody phone company or any one of many third parties selling the info gleaned from your signal?
4) To those who don't care, I understand a fixed element of the population has authoritarian tendencies and likes a solid police and corporate control structure. Fine, don't care, but the rest of us grew up reading Jefferson and want to be able to make a phone call without armies of bastards with a corporate credit card capable of spooling out my movements until the day I die. It's just a thing about being a free man, not a prisoner. You're free or you're a slave. Alpha or beta. Pick one.
more like the incredulous ones. Those who believe in authority and don't question revealed truth.
For that matter, why are we relying on the interrogator's lie detection abilities? What's his error rate? Where's the data?
Is that really true any more? Sadly, can't they drop a dime on local law just to have you sent back? Everyone out there seems so eager to cooperate with the U.S.
Is there a developed country that flips the bird to the U.S. anymore?
Another thought: as the polygraph's inventor was into S&M and B&D, I will bet cash money that when the history of the CIA's torture enablers is written, the ranks of those straight and patriotic men will be heavily weighted with leather boys, S&M club goers, and gay rape fantasy freaks.
:)
Don't take the bet. I don't want to steal your money
Or torturing people by the gross. Decent men and women already left the agency because of this; I don't think I'd like the company I'd be keeping if I worked for Cheney's CIA.
Weird facts for you:
Polygraphs have been questionable in American courts since Mr. S&M created the toy. Wishful thinking has carried the day, especially in corporations.
L. Ron Hubbard used a modified verson of the gadget as his E-meter. He instituted a lie-detector during hours-long interviews as a religious ceremony, used on every member of that organization to this day.
The inventor of the polygraph was an S&M afficiando his entire life. Lived with two women in a hush-hush arrangement. And it spilled over into his Wonder Woman comic; she only lost her powers when a man tied her up. Which happened every bloody issue. Not that there's anything wrong with that. He was an early proponent of women's equality, tho he did like tying them up. Life is weird like that.
fMRIs. Here's my big point o'the day. fMRIs are modified MRI machines that scan the brain in real time. They are being sold as super lie detectors. They are coming to a police station near you very soon. Here's the kicker tho: learning a lesson from the polygraph fiasco in the courts, the manufacturers are *obtaining pre-approval* of the fMRI to be used in court as a lie detector, and they are paving the way so that no one can sue or question the efficacy of the fMRI as a law enforcement tool. Bear in mind that no one really knows what the hell they are measuring with the thing. One day this decade a lot of us will be staring at an fMRI tunnel and then being forced into the damned things, and the evidence obtained will be vaild in any American court, and they've quietly removed our ability to protest the piece of junk.
Wish I had mod points for ya, buddy.
"Sometimes statistics is the truth and smarmy little me say are lies."
Sometimes, statistics tell the truth, and smarmy little men lie. Values voters, yeah, that's what happened, they voted their values, that's why the polls are off the mark.
Same flaw as the drug use "statistics". The data collection is flawed from the get-go. What idiot admits he breaks the law on a regular basis to a complete stranger? What kind of person would sit down and fill out the form? Like those "declines" in drug use among kids -- what, you asked the kids? Gee, I wonder if they fib.
The problem immigrants come from cultures that value high birthrates. Not big on Malthusian population formula. They are religiously conservative, insular, and due to the high birthrate, have permanent, enormous proportions of teenagers, the numbers growing exponentially.
This leads to unemployment (see insularity, conservatism, and high numbers), mostly for teenagers, who are hormonally supercharged and tend not to have much to lose yet. Inevitably, violence erupts. Religious fundamentalism ALWAYS grows in such a situation. Radical agendas to punish their oppressors, anger, riots, all that.
Solution would be to control the birthrate, which ain't gonna happen. So, Europe is in the crosshairs of a massive 3rd world population bomb. It isn't racism to say that. It just is a fact.
There is only so much land, so much water, so much population that can socially be absorbed before breakdown commences. Thomas Malthus always has the last laugh, tho I don't think he was chuckling much. Nothing can grow forever. It can't even grow a little more. Europe can't become one giant Manhattan to absorb the a tiny proportion of the African and Asian population nuke bomb. I have some idea how such a situation might inevitably pan out, and it won't be to the advantage of the European nations. Lots of violence, increasing backlash against the immigrants, refusal to fund social programs, rising nationalism and racism. No one will win. Eventually the two cultures will start fighting -- don't forget Europeans have angry kids too -- and a kind of fascism will evolve to keep a lid on the violence.
Don't say the population scientists didn't warn ya.
Keep in mind that the U.S. will not recognized dual citizenship. You have to formally renounce American citizenship, and they don't take you back. America is nastier than some other western countries in this regard. They don't play well with other countries.