Do you seriously think the established nation states of this world are just going to let a bunch of platforms float outside their jurisdiction and reach?
In fact, nations don't even have to do anything about their landmass, they can simply apply their laws to their citizens in international waters, and they can enforce them there too. So, if you are a US or European citizen, you'll still be subject to DMCA, high taxes, and drug laws. Of course, you can give up all your citizenships, but then you'd have a hard time doing business with anybody on land.
This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.
Are we talking about the handful of crackpots that planned and executed the Sept 11th hijackings, or all the "terrorists/insurgents/criminals/insert name of the month here" created by US foreign policy since 2003 and the invasion/occupation of Iraq?
You are off by five decades; Middle Eastern terrorism is the consequence of half a century of failed US and UK policies.
The latter aren't evil. They think they're doing the right thing by opposing the US, and - newsflash - to be honest most of the world agrees with them.
No, "most of the world" does not agree with targeting civilians, under any circumstances. And if you do, there's something wrong with you.
See the problem now is that the very word "terrorist" has been corrupted far beyond its original meaning
And that is exactly what you are guilty of. Lieberman wants to ban YouTube videos by genuine, old-style terrorists, and you drag in all this bullshit about skate boarding.
No, I'm sorry. If you're looking for evil, I would start with George Bush, and work my way down.
Then you're looking in the wrong place. Iraq was run by a ruthless dictator and it had started numerous wars. Although the US war against Iraq was politically, legally, and financially questionable, it was not "evil". The main people who have cause to complain about it are US tax payers, who didn't get their money's worth. Iraqis have reason to complain about specific things the US should have done better during the war, but they don't have reason to complain about the fact that the US fought a war against their country in the first place.
Ah, mirroring the story, the moderators, too, want to suppress opinions or statements that differ from their own personal views.
You're wrong, and Lieberman is wrong. These terrorists are evil, but it is stupid to try to silence them. Americans need to know about them and their message in order to make informed decisions as citizens.
What does it have to do with it? You might want to read the story this comment is attached to.
I suggest you do that yourself. Then you might look at what Brin actually says, rather than what you imagine him to say.
I said "I suspect", not that I am going to be doing that, since I don't live in a country where this is an issue.
No, you're merely a fool. In any civilized society, you're under nearly constant surveillance when you leave your home, on millions of cameras, owned and operated by private citizens. It's completely legal, and there is actually no other reasonable policy. If you're going to rebel and attack those cameras, you're going to have to attack your neighbors, tourists, shopping mall operators, convenience store clerks, and cab drivers. Good luck.
Apparently, Lieberman prefers if Americans live in ignorance about what's going on in the world.
Lieberman votes reliably on democratic issues, but I'm suspecting more and more that he is an opportunist rather than a man with convictions and backbone. I'm glad he isn't vice president.
Nice theory. Except: the professors assigning the textbooks aren't usually the ones making the money from them.
Like it or not, good textbooks cost a lot of money because few people can write them and students are willing and able to pay those prices.
Why are few people able to write them? Because tenure committees and university boards demand publications and grant money and that's what professors have to spend their time on. Writing a textbook is a career limiting move, and professors simply don't have the time to create their own teaching materials from scratch, given all the other obligations imposed on them.
If you don't like that, go to a teaching oriented school, and/or complain to your university and state legislators that they should set different priorities.
Well, after he sold OLPC 1.0 to Microsoft, how can he trump that for OLPC 2.0? Easy: sell out to Amazon. The device may be $75, but the DRM will be priceless. Instead of running Sugar on Linux, it sounds like it may run Amazon's reader on WinCE.
Seriously, Mr. Negroponte, make up your mind what you want people to volunteer for. An eBook reader? A constructionist learning device? A low-cost laptop to sell stripped down Windows versions to the developing world? When you figure it out, maybe the volunteers will come back.
Don't get my wrong, I love my linux home server. But in no way does even Ubuntu come close to having everything integrated and 'just working'.
Neither, sadly, does Macintosh: spinning beach balls, mystery dialog boxes, crashes, hangs, slowing to a crawl, confusing error messages, broken upgrades, you name the problem, Macintosh has it. How do I know? I have three Macs. The Mac isn't worse than other systems, but it isn't better either, and it certainly doesn't "just work".
Generally, these tools make up for deficiencies in the underlying languages; better languages can guarantee absence of these errors through their type systems and other constructs. Furthermore, these tools can't give you yes/no answers, they only warn you about potential sources of problems, and many of those warnings are spurious.
I've never gotten anything useful out of these tools. Generally, encapsulating unsafe operations, assertions, unit testing, and using valgrind, seem both necessary and sufficient for reliably eliminating bugs in C++. And whenever I can, I simply use better languages.
"The government"? What does "the government" have to do with it?
Brin talks about surveillance by private cameras and sharing of the data on servers and market places. Are you going to hit me with a baseball bat if I dare use a camera in public? Are you going to smash my web cams? Are you going to smash Flickr's servers when I upload my geotagged photos to them?
When you leave your house, you don't have a right to privacy. With few exceptions, anybody can take your picture, publish it, and data mine it. Anybody can can track your phone and share that data as well. That's not an accident, it's a deliberate choice we made long ago as a society that has been reaffirmed by the courts again and again. And it's the right choice, because the alternative would be far worse.
If everyone just gave up privacy rights en masse in some Faustian bargain with the government agreeing to do the same it would be a tragic loss for the idea of liberty. [...] This incorrect assumption is at the heart of those who support CCS cameras and other privacy invading tactics
There's nothing to "give up". With few exceptions, you don't have privacy when you leave your house. In public places, anybody can take your picture, and on private property, the owner can. Those rights are legally protected. Those rights are also important to a free and democratic society.
Brin's ideas are no "solution" to anything. At best, he's misguided, at worst he's on the CIA payroll sewing seeds of dischord among privacy advocates.
Well, fortunately, we don't live in the kind of totalitarian society you seem to be hankering for, in which only ideas that you approve of become part of the public debate.
The parent's "brin would be happy comment" seemed to be partially tongue in cheek
What is tongue in cheek about a suggestion that totally misrepresents Brin's position?
I think the new, cheap subnotebooks are great. If you want better battery life, get a bigger internal or an additional external battery. The HP2133 keyboard is unbeatable, and it has a nice screen, too.
If you want something smaller and lighter still, get a smart phone and an external bluetooth keyboard.
Well, if you "absolutely understand that", then statements like "David Brin should be thrilled [about China's surveillance society]" are either deliberate misrepresentation or unacceptable carelessness.
If Brin believes it's possible to motivate people to all at the same time do something in the public interest that way
What makes you think Brin believes that? Maybe he merely believes that it is already useful to point out that there is a possibility for a solution that people hadn't considered before.
his energy is better spent on getting people to all believe in Global Climate Change, because that's a much more pressing problem and affects us all and yet we can't get people to agree on that either
Perhaps if you stuck to one big topic at a time and organized your thoughts and arguments around that, you, too, could make a contribution to the debate that is as valuable as Brin's. For even if Brin's solution turns out not to work or to be unattainable, it at least got people thinking about the subject in new ways. I don't see any contribution in your writings so far.
Brin doesn't advocate a surveillance state. In Brin's vision, information is available about everyone to everyone, including government officials. The problem with a surveillance state is asymmetric information. In fact, I'm not sure Brin even advocates that; it's rather that he recognizes surveillance as inevitable and tries to make the best of it by reducing the asymmetry.
As for Schneier's criticism, first, I think his arguments is full of holes, and second, he fails to come up with a better alternative. Surveillance is happening. What are you going to do about it?
Well, then RedHat is forgetting how Microsoft started with the desktop to take a large chunk of the server market.
I can tell you this much: unless RedHat seriously figures out how they fit into with our Ubuntu clients, they aren't even in the running for our servers.
Of course not. Who said it was? I just pointed out that the US was highly dependent on the rest of the world, something that doesn't seem to have sunk in. Most Americans already assume that the rest of the world is dependent on the US.
If the American market disappears tomorrow, so does China's prosperity
Your analysis is flawed. China is selling us stuff at cut-rate prices. That means that they are foregoing prosperity in order to gain power by buying up US assets and real estate, and it's working. The trade imbalance with Europe has different causes and is correcting itself as the euro is rising against the dollar.
Touch has been in continuous use where it makes sense: ATMs, cell phones, information panels, etc. Palm has sold touch screen phones for nearly a decade.
Apple's and Microsoft's use of touch is insignificant in comparison. As usual, these companies are late to the party and try to take credit for technologies that others have puoneered.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do something about it. But building floating ocean platforms is simply not going to work.
If you really intend to "fix your own nation" you virtually have to dedicate your entire life to doing so.
You can teach, you can participate in political parties, you can give speeches, you can choose a socially responsible job, etc.
It could be argued that it makes more sense to run away to sea - it may be more efficient!
You simply can't run away; there's no place to go.
It is simply unfair to condemn people because they haven't "fixed their own nation" in the face of their compatriots' ignorance
No, I'm condemning them for whining.
You could jump off a cliff. Or you can do what everybody else is doing and remember that it used to be a lot worse.
Do you seriously think the established nation states of this world are just going to let a bunch of platforms float outside their jurisdiction and reach?
In fact, nations don't even have to do anything about their landmass, they can simply apply their laws to their citizens in international waters, and they can enforce them there too. So, if you are a US or European citizen, you'll still be subject to DMCA, high taxes, and drug laws. Of course, you can give up all your citizenships, but then you'd have a hard time doing business with anybody on land.
This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.
Which terrorist?
The terrorists that the story is talking about.
Are we talking about the handful of crackpots that planned and executed the Sept 11th hijackings, or all the "terrorists/insurgents/criminals/insert name of the month here" created by US foreign policy since 2003 and the invasion/occupation of Iraq?
You are off by five decades; Middle Eastern terrorism is the consequence of half a century of failed US and UK policies.
The latter aren't evil. They think they're doing the right thing by opposing the US, and - newsflash - to be honest most of the world agrees with them.
No, "most of the world" does not agree with targeting civilians, under any circumstances. And if you do, there's something wrong with you.
See the problem now is that the very word "terrorist" has been corrupted far beyond its original meaning
And that is exactly what you are guilty of. Lieberman wants to ban YouTube videos by genuine, old-style terrorists, and you drag in all this bullshit about skate boarding.
No, I'm sorry. If you're looking for evil, I would start with George Bush, and work my way down.
Then you're looking in the wrong place. Iraq was run by a ruthless dictator and it had started numerous wars. Although the US war against Iraq was politically, legally, and financially questionable, it was not "evil". The main people who have cause to complain about it are US tax payers, who didn't get their money's worth. Iraqis have reason to complain about specific things the US should have done better during the war, but they don't have reason to complain about the fact that the US fought a war against their country in the first place.
prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.'
I find Scientology threatening, abusive, and insulting (not to mention idiotic and ridiculous).
So this must mean that Scientology may not display its signs in public anymore, right?
Ah, mirroring the story, the moderators, too, want to suppress opinions or statements that differ from their own personal views.
You're wrong, and Lieberman is wrong. These terrorists are evil, but it is stupid to try to silence them. Americans need to know about them and their message in order to make informed decisions as citizens.
Lieberman is wrong.
What does it have to do with it? You might want to read the story this comment is attached to.
I suggest you do that yourself. Then you might look at what Brin actually says, rather than what you imagine him to say.
I said "I suspect", not that I am going to be doing that, since I don't live in a country where this is an issue.
No, you're merely a fool. In any civilized society, you're under nearly constant surveillance when you leave your home, on millions of cameras, owned and operated by private citizens. It's completely legal, and there is actually no other reasonable policy. If you're going to rebel and attack those cameras, you're going to have to attack your neighbors, tourists, shopping mall operators, convenience store clerks, and cab drivers. Good luck.
Apparently, Lieberman prefers if Americans live in ignorance about what's going on in the world.
Lieberman votes reliably on democratic issues, but I'm suspecting more and more that he is an opportunist rather than a man with convictions and backbone. I'm glad he isn't vice president.
Sqlite is used in many apps (including Firefox), it's small, and it's efficient. It also has bindings to just about every imaginable language.
I find it amazing that you didn't come across it in Googling...
Nice theory. Except: the professors assigning the textbooks aren't usually the ones making the money from them.
Like it or not, good textbooks cost a lot of money because few people can write them and students are willing and able to pay those prices.
Why are few people able to write them? Because tenure committees and university boards demand publications and grant money and that's what professors have to spend their time on. Writing a textbook is a career limiting move, and professors simply don't have the time to create their own teaching materials from scratch, given all the other obligations imposed on them.
If you don't like that, go to a teaching oriented school, and/or complain to your university and state legislators that they should set different priorities.
Well, after he sold OLPC 1.0 to Microsoft, how can he trump that for OLPC 2.0? Easy: sell out to Amazon. The device may be $75, but the DRM will be priceless. Instead of running Sugar on Linux, it sounds like it may run Amazon's reader on WinCE.
Seriously, Mr. Negroponte, make up your mind what you want people to volunteer for. An eBook reader? A constructionist learning device? A low-cost laptop to sell stripped down Windows versions to the developing world? When you figure it out, maybe the volunteers will come back.
But don't bet on it.
Obviously, someone at IBM needed to fill their patent quota for the year again.
Don't get my wrong, I love my linux home server. But in no way does even Ubuntu come close to having everything integrated and 'just working'.
Neither, sadly, does Macintosh: spinning beach balls, mystery dialog boxes, crashes, hangs, slowing to a crawl, confusing error messages, broken upgrades, you name the problem, Macintosh has it. How do I know? I have three Macs. The Mac isn't worse than other systems, but it isn't better either, and it certainly doesn't "just work".
Generally, these tools make up for deficiencies in the underlying languages; better languages can guarantee absence of these errors through their type systems and other constructs. Furthermore, these tools can't give you yes/no answers, they only warn you about potential sources of problems, and many of those warnings are spurious.
I've never gotten anything useful out of these tools. Generally, encapsulating unsafe operations, assertions, unit testing, and using valgrind, seem both necessary and sufficient for reliably eliminating bugs in C++. And whenever I can, I simply use better languages.
Of course then the government
"The government"? What does "the government" have to do with it?
Brin talks about surveillance by private cameras and sharing of the data on servers and market places. Are you going to hit me with a baseball bat if I dare use a camera in public? Are you going to smash my web cams? Are you going to smash Flickr's servers when I upload my geotagged photos to them?
When you leave your house, you don't have a right to privacy. With few exceptions, anybody can take your picture, publish it, and data mine it. Anybody can can track your phone and share that data as well. That's not an accident, it's a deliberate choice we made long ago as a society that has been reaffirmed by the courts again and again. And it's the right choice, because the alternative would be far worse.
If everyone just gave up privacy rights en masse in some Faustian bargain with the government agreeing to do the same it would be a tragic loss for the idea of liberty. [...] This incorrect assumption is at the heart of those who support CCS cameras and other privacy invading tactics
There's nothing to "give up". With few exceptions, you don't have privacy when you leave your house. In public places, anybody can take your picture, and on private property, the owner can. Those rights are legally protected. Those rights are also important to a free and democratic society.
Brin's ideas are no "solution" to anything. At best, he's misguided, at worst he's on the CIA payroll sewing seeds of dischord among privacy advocates.
Well, fortunately, we don't live in the kind of totalitarian society you seem to be hankering for, in which only ideas that you approve of become part of the public debate.
The parent's "brin would be happy comment" seemed to be partially tongue in cheek
What is tongue in cheek about a suggestion that totally misrepresents Brin's position?
I think the new, cheap subnotebooks are great. If you want better battery life, get a bigger internal or an additional external battery. The HP2133 keyboard is unbeatable, and it has a nice screen, too.
If you want something smaller and lighter still, get a smart phone and an external bluetooth keyboard.
Oh, I absolutely understand that.
Well, if you "absolutely understand that", then statements like "David Brin should be thrilled [about China's surveillance society]" are either deliberate misrepresentation or unacceptable carelessness.
If Brin believes it's possible to motivate people to all at the same time do something in the public interest that way
What makes you think Brin believes that? Maybe he merely believes that it is already useful to point out that there is a possibility for a solution that people hadn't considered before.
his energy is better spent on getting people to all believe in Global Climate Change, because that's a much more pressing problem and affects us all and yet we can't get people to agree on that either
Perhaps if you stuck to one big topic at a time and organized your thoughts and arguments around that, you, too, could make a contribution to the debate that is as valuable as Brin's. For even if Brin's solution turns out not to work or to be unattainable, it at least got people thinking about the subject in new ways. I don't see any contribution in your writings so far.
Brin doesn't advocate a surveillance state. In Brin's vision, information is available about everyone to everyone, including government officials. The problem with a surveillance state is asymmetric information. In fact, I'm not sure Brin even advocates that; it's rather that he recognizes surveillance as inevitable and tries to make the best of it by reducing the asymmetry.
As for Schneier's criticism, first, I think his arguments is full of holes, and second, he fails to come up with a better alternative. Surveillance is happening. What are you going to do about it?
Wouldn't it be more fun to turn on the pleasure center than to turn off the speech center?
Well, then RedHat is forgetting how Microsoft started with the desktop to take a large chunk of the server market.
I can tell you this much: unless RedHat seriously figures out how they fit into with our Ubuntu clients, they aren't even in the running for our servers.
You, of course, are an expert on the topic?
Yes.
Economic dependency isn't a one-way street.
Of course not. Who said it was? I just pointed out that the US was highly dependent on the rest of the world, something that doesn't seem to have sunk in. Most Americans already assume that the rest of the world is dependent on the US.
If the American market disappears tomorrow, so does China's prosperity
Your analysis is flawed. China is selling us stuff at cut-rate prices. That means that they are foregoing prosperity in order to gain power by buying up US assets and real estate, and it's working. The trade imbalance with Europe has different causes and is correcting itself as the euro is rising against the dollar.
Touch has been in continuous use where it makes sense: ATMs, cell phones, information panels, etc. Palm has sold touch screen phones for nearly a decade.
Apple's and Microsoft's use of touch is insignificant in comparison. As usual, these companies are late to the party and try to take credit for technologies that others have puoneered.