I almost considered this a troll, but in the last 8 years I've worked with enough people who have said the same things. One person's faith is another's troll.
I, too, am an old time Net user, going back to the `70s. But while I find a lot of the Web and Net content useless or annoying, I accept this as part of the cost of getting people away from the one-way flow of commercial media and into somethign where there is some small chance of two-way communication and of them actually learning something.
Over the last eight years I've heard the rather bothersome, at least to me, attitude expressed here : "take back our Internet". Seeing as DARPA was DoD funded, and much of the pre `90s net was directly or indirectly government funded (in the U.S.) one must wonder where the ownership lies.
Claiming the Net as belonging to some small group puts that group in a class along with cattle ranchers who feel that public lands are theirs for grazing, timber companies that feel that public forests are exclusively for harvesting by those companies. In short, one more "the public be damned" group.
Smaller groups lead to community. It can also lead to alienation from other parts of the population, and fragmentation of the society, when taken to extremes.
Nah, ARM processors are used all over in embedded devices. This isn't just PDAs and palmtops, but all those other electronic devices that have some smarts and don't use `70s derived OSes (*nix, MSDOS, WinX (not using those isn't so bad - do you really want to program your micorwave oven from a command line or a GUI? at 5AM Monday morning? after a late night ?)
Yup - EMF (and battery drain) from a cell phone or wireless modem is mostly from the transmitter, not from the rest of the electronics. That's not likely to get much less as the background noise at the cell site tower has nothing to do with support electronics in the portable devices.
If you want wireless you're going to get microwaved.
Consider that plastics, proteins, and cellulose are large molecules; so is diamond. You can make a single molecule that you can see with you eye; I've see one organic molecule many centimeters on a side.
I think it might fly, if done right. The bar code links can take you to updated versions of the story, an expanded version of the story, related information, or for those who don't believe anything that isn't on TV to a video version. Same goes for magazines.
Whomever said that it really makes more sense for PDAs and PCS may be right, given that those are the sort of devices that one might have at hand while reading the paper.
The ability to handle breaking news in this fashion would let the papers answer broadcast medias' quick responses.
Hmmm... buyinh online from a printed ad works, too, don't even have to tear the coupon out of the paper.
then there's polls. Print something on the editor pages, and include links to a set of responses - similar to the dial-a-number polls done now.
As for the privacy invasion : while papers can print individualized versions, it's tough enough that I don't see them so treating every or even many links in a paper. Remember the fact the each copy of the paper is a (hopefully) identical copy is what makes printing them fairly low cost. Offset presses are about as cheap material reproduction as you can get.
Perhaps do something such as leave the PDF on a machine running one of several Microsoft programs that make your drive public on whatever network you are connected to...
HPNA is in effect a xDSL. There are HPNA transceivers that replace the normal 10Base transceivers connected to an Ethernet controller chip or port (like some embeddded CPUs have). There's are 1 and 10 mbps versions of HPNA, the 10 is where everything is going. Range is several hundred feet, up to about 500. Coexists with your xDSL drop.
What's the difference between this and using phone lines or FM radio? With the HPNA interface you're effectively in a 10Base based network, sending the digital form of the data (music) rather that converting to analog and transmitting. It should be a higher quality output at the far end.
What's the diff between using HPNA and your existing network. Not much, unless you're like most of the general computer using public who don't have cat5 throughout their house but can string phone line.
Audio streams are data,unless you're sending analogue, no? Bluetooth does have an existing spec for headset support, but...
A) It's a monophonic headset B) It's speak (telephonic) quality audio,using CSVD, not hifi.
You could try writing your own interface, but you might find that some of the chipsets might not understand what you want to do, if they've built-in enough of the lower levels of protocol. I'm not sure that the bandwidth is there, either.
Hmmm... a quick read of the TCPA doesn't make it out to be targeted at tracking what you do, so much as validating that the hardware, BIOS, & OS are not compromised, and that the user is validated to use the machine (single user log-on model).
It would seem to have the potential of being misused by commercial and governmental interests to indeed track what someone is doing on-line. Making sure that there is input opposing these uses to TCPA wouldn't hurt.
A larger issue to the open and/or free OS communities is making sure that they are not locked out. The BIOS, loader, and OS all interact in the TCPA model; if that model is based on the way a certain large software house does things, and then gets wrapped up in non-disclosure agreements to "protect its security", newer x86 PCs may not boot your favorite OS. Seeing as Apple doesn't seem to be a member of TCPA (yet), this might be a good thing for their sales...
I'd worry more about CALEA, so far as having someone watching what I was doing...go to http://www.eff.org/ and search for CALEA
Thpse new technologies are even truely technologies at this point; at the best they're like the first transistors back in 1947-8 : big, clunky, hard to make. Years before they get to the practical stage, and there's some that believe that some of the new technologies won't pan out, period.
Note that some of these, bio and mechanical nanotech, have the same sort of power dissipation problems that conventional semiconductors have. Computing take power to perform an opperation; you make it fast and it burns a lot of power, so you try to make it smaller to reduce the power per functional unit. There are proposed methods to get around this, see http://www.ai.mit.edu/~mpf/rc/home.html for an example.
Sometimes technologies are delay because the established leaders wan to hold onto their positions - the US phone companies and digital access is an example. Usually the delay is not very large, the old guard is passed by. Sometimes technologies are fueled by the current leaders, who want to hold onto their lead and know a little history.
Might work - you generate trash searchs, visit the sites found, and get junk Email. Fine, tell `m you've no interest in their junk.
Perhaps better, set up the `bot to have "personalities", and send replies explaining that your 85 year old aunt was visiting and search for lavender soup and ping-pong balls, and your 11 year old daughter was searching for [current-preteen-music-idol] and body piercing; then tell them that you've no interest in those products/services, stop annoying you. In the case of your "daughter" tell them if they don't go away you'll site the child protection cops on them.
The purpose would be to both fuzz out your own traffic, and to generate a lot of spurious hits for the people _paying_ PN for the "leads". Those businesses are spending money with the hopes of getting sales; clear feedback that it's not working and is annoying potential customers just might cause them to drop PN.
And don't forget to write on _paper_ to any company that sends unsolicited email and has an actual mailbox. Most companies treat one letter as representing 100s or 1000s of real world consumers that didn't write.
Indeed, business is a major threat to freedom. So are religions, unions, and criminals - all depending on where you live.
When the State/Church/Gang/Boss have power over others without reasonably easy and effective countermeasures being available, then they may (and usually do) restrict the freedoms of others. Even the implied threat of "we're watching you, if you make a mistake you're toast" can be restraining.
Of course the government isn't a real problem. In Seattle Thursday, the police department said that the WTO problems showed that restraints on police surveillance of the public\\\\\guilty bastards\\\\\\\\\suspicious individuals prevented the police from gathering needed information on the protesters. Never mind that those groups were posting open messages on the `Net, and later holding open air meetings using bullhorns to announce plans. Never mind that the SPD had recently been slapped for video taping people at news conferences complaining about police misbehaviour.Need we mention LA and NY ?
Businesses want to monitor employees private life, because "it may impact their work performance". Why not just rate their work performance? Maybe spying is more fun.
Whereever a group has some fair amount of power over others there is a tendency for the group to using information on individuals as a control and buttress for the group's power. Did someone grumble about the group to a friend ? - watch them. Is someone trying to organise to protest the group's actions ? - haul them in before they can get started.
If one can not organise into a powerbase of one's own, as a means of balancing the power of "the establishment", then you may find yourself with very little real freedom - unless you happen to believe just like the established powers. Private communications is an important tool in building countering power bases.
In the US in the `60s there were churches being bombed, riots, buildings being burned, civil rights organizers being beaten and abducted. Good surveillance might have prevented some of that. And it might have been used to surpress the civil rights drive,which often violated local laws, and antiwar movements, which were "anti-patriotic and foreign controlled, and most likely treasonous". Watching out for treason is a good use of surveillance, after all.
I can understand where Neil's coming from when he invisions having remote friends watchign your house when you're away. But I'd feel better knowning that only they can watch it, and that someone else isn't watching the same video for the time I run to the local store and left the front door ajar.
[excerpt] "Celera's mission is to become the definitive source of genomic and related agricultural and medical information. Celera's information will be available on a subscription basis to academic and commercial institutions who will have access to tools for viewing, browsing, analyzing, and integrating data in a way that will assist scientists in accelerating their understanding of the human genetic code."
And then there's the courts and governmetns. Both the UK and the US govs. had indicated that they might not be too happy about a company attempting to patent the human genome. It certainly isn't too clear what it means to patent a gene sequence, that simplier issue is yet to be sorted out.
Well, in the US free speech in the sense of "telling people where something illegal can be found" may _not_ be protected for certain topic. Check US Senate bill 486
title "`Sec. 421. Distribution of information relating to manufacture of controlled substances". While it does exempt service providers that remove such materials or links once notified of their existance on the ISP's system, it does come down on the originator of the material and/or links. It also makes a number of chemistry textbooks and journals sitting in libraries and 2nd hand bookstores illegal.
The DTCP spec, which I've seen mentioned in the context of F*r*W*r* / IEEE 1394. It uses SHA-1 and ECC based `crypting, with keys from 64 to 320 bits depending on what part of the protocol suite you're refering to.
It's a @#$%^&* messy spec, with parts released only with signed NDA. I suspect that someone may figure out a fairly fast hack of the "copy-1-time":copy-never" " copy freely" attribute and pass that info around. What this breaking of a key-pair shows is what a brute force attack will cost (today).
So they're offering incentives : T-shirts - gang identification cash - well, cash caps - drugs to turn in other students. Seems to be good old American Know-How to me. More seriously, even "specific symptoms recommended by psychiatric organizations" often appear to have a bias against the oddballs in society; the Soviet Union was rather famous for this, as is mainland China.
The "Wave Promise", while it may read as a somewhat hokey "be nice to one another", is a valid approach to social interactions. What isn't clear to me is what goes along with the basic pledge - what does "Treat others with respect" really mean, how much tolerance for other opinions and lifestyles goes along with that?
A real difficulty is waht happens when someone is tagged as depressed or dangerous, is checked out, and determined to be OK. Someone at the school is going to know that individual or group was checked out, certainly the student who reported them. Do those people become lepers or madmen that somehow are still walking around loose? Or is the program going to give feedback on why these people are not a threat - tough to do with anonymous tips, although the school's adminstration could be given the feedback and then act to attempt to increase tolerance. I personally doubt that they could be very effective in many cases, the inertia , fear of liability and news coverage if someone slips through the screening, and not wanting to publicly label the individuals if it becomes apparent that they had been so tagged. Scarlet letters are hard to get rid of.
I'd be much happier if there was explicit strong support for helping kids with problems, phone numbers for them to call. Work both sides of the problem. Forget incentives, that's just an opening for abuse (although it might be fun to turn the student government in for cash).
Cray does still mean SuperComputer to many, escpecially those who now make budgetary decisions. While low cost clusters are a viable alternative, the more tightly coupled architechures have advantages for some applications. Memory latency and bandwidth has been a problem for a long time, Tera's MTA is just one more approach to getting around those problems.
And again, the boss-weenies don't want to worry about support, he's job is on the line; most of the end users don't want to worry about making the @#$%^&$ computer work, they just want to switch it on and compute. Buying packaged systems is OK by them, be those systems TERA's or a conventional cluster.
Interestingly enough there were movements a decade and more ago that attacked this concept. And them came not from the major corporations, but from artists, mostly non-musicians.
They had two major drivers. One was : A> buys a work of art from nearly unknown artist B, for a small sum. Over time B> becomes famous, commanding top $ for their works. A sells the artwork they purchased years ago for a large amount of money. B demands a percentage of the profits from the sale.
The second was : A buys a work of art from B. A changes that art, painting it, chopping it into bits, whatever. B sues A for that action.
In both cases the arguments is that B retains certain rights to the work of art, in effect the concept expressed there, even if they have some the tangible work and the reproduction rights.
There have been a number of legal battles over this, I remember several involving the modification of the work that were won by the artist (don't remember if there were appeals).
I believe that there is a strong similarity between this and software licences and media distributions. Luckly software seems only to go down in value as it ages.
So the individual artists are fighting for rights that in part overlap with the interests of the big corporations - preventing copying and modification of their products. Luckly the corporations haven't caught onto the "increase in value" idea, when they do that classic car of yours and your inflated value house are going to be financial headaches.
Anyhow, the concept of "I bought it, I own it" isn't the clearest right now. In part this is due to the change in the amount of effort needed to replicate something, in part to changes in the various societies in the last 3 centuries.
Now concepts such as Copyleft take on the ownership issue by opening ownership up to all. If more generally useful (to the general public, not just/.ers) creations were released under copyleft, and promoted as "own what you use" Then there might be a change in the way the general population thinks, and eventually a change in the laws.
Think of the ad campaign - "do you want to just lease something that you can't complain about if it doesn't work, or do you want to own it and hav eaccess to the knowledge of how it works?" While most people don't want to be bothered with understanding how something works, they do get excited about having that something doing things they might not like - browser cookies, Pentium chip ID, Microsoft's document signatures, and so on. People get excited when their tools do things the people don't know about - if it had turned out that Cyber Patrol was blocking a number of Christian Web sites, might not the public reaction (in the US) forced a different outcome ? (remember the '666' in beard and other rumor campaigns that forced major corporations to spend a lot of money). In this case the argument that the consumer needed to know what was being blocked would have been brought to the forefront, and DMCA might have been steamrollered in the letter writing.
The point is that the argument that "I bought it, I own it" currently is weak when it comes to materials that can be considered "creative works" rather that simple material items. Making open and wholly ownable alternatives available can get around those issues.
Interesting that the first 2 "serious" replies to this are from A.C. While the CPSR tends to be a bit of a Jimmy Carterish outfit, they have pointed out that recent developments in restriciting 1.Section 1201's ban on the circumvention of technological measures should not be used to suppress the production of a competing or alternative compatible device.
Napster - which can used legally; the current trend seems to be to assume that _any_ effort to access digital material except through a standard commerical product is piracy. 2.The Section should not prevent users who have lawfully purchased or licensed the product from choosing a device or medium to view a work other than ones approved by the copyrighted work's vendor.
You by the disk, you can legally make an 8-track tape from it for _your own use_ ; you print out a paid-for ebook in a large typeface to make reading it easier, and that lets you scribble notes on the text as you think of them. Again, the copy is not illegal, it takes away no sales (unless you feel that the publisher should restrict your access to their material to only those they support, and that you should be required to buy a copy in each format you wish to use).
3.The Section should not prevent users who have lawfully purchased or licensed the product from accessing that product in new ways for their own innovative purposes.
IE - the TLCs' DVD player software doesn't run on your machien,and even when it can be run it's tupid and ugly. You write your own player, that works the way you want. You use it to play products that you've purchased. Your friend like it, you put it up on the Net for others, and the TLCs' jump on you. The CSPR and I say that's not right, you have stayed within the law. 4.The Section should not be used to suppress the use of material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Mattel and the revised blocked URL list, the ongoing "reform" of uniform software licensing - which if applied to tangible goods would allow companies to prevent you from reporting on unsafe products.
Given the trend to skipping over many new artist/writers, except possibly when they are virtual clones of current successful artists, have as much access to the previaling distribution methods is A Good Thing, I believe. Generally this may mean reverse engineering a format, or using alternative distribution methods (Napstr vs disks)
I think that many of the larger comapanies in the media world are afraid of electronic media both from the easy-of-copying, which is truely new to mass produced media (photocopies are fairly slow and expensive), and from the possiblity of new, small, responsive publishing companies providing alternatives to clone-media-stars.
Low cost photo-offset printing doomed older print shops, electronic editing and laser printers are making serious inroads on current printshops. Cheap magnetic tape audio recorders made anyone their own "recoding studio", VCRs and lower cost cameras did it for video.
But the publishing houses took little damage from these changes. People still bought records, went to movies, bought books. Now the publishing media industry is facing a threat to the way its business works, it could be very cheap to become a publisher and distributers of books, music, videos. I think they're afraid, the last time there was a change of this magnitude was when sound recording became practical, before that when movies were devised. They're fighting back against the new technologies while trying to use them. Thye see the basic tech changes, and adjust to them, but fight the market changes that go along.
Remember that many of the companies using the legal hammer are big multinationals. The US is the first target, given the numer of online users and legal system. However I'd expect to see similar actions taken in other countries in short order.
Beyond that there is the attempt to regulate content residing outside the US (or your country of choice) by holding the big ISP and backbone hosts responsible for the content they allow users to view. This can have the effect of chopping the `Net up into national nets. Multinational companies and national governments aren't going to care if the objectional material is only available on-line in Lower-Outbackastani.
And beyond that is the arm-twisting the US does to other governments to get them to echo the US legal directions. Plus mutual backscratching between governments where country A regulates something they don't care about one way or another but contry B does, just to get country B to regulate something they way country A feels it should be.
Consider the sate of radio in its early, unregulated days. A few people thought that it would have the same sort of impact the many here feel the Net has. Radio was regualted in the US as a "limited resource" (available frequencies), but in other countries other reasosns were given. (The UK and licenses for radios and TVs). Public decency, protecting against "insurrectionist" talk, halting the spreading of illegal and dangerous information (US Senate bill 486) - the list goes on. All of these are reasons for governments to attempt to regulate and control the Net.
Now, if a IP packet modem that used the unregualted spread spectrum bands were to be marketed, and come into common use, one could see the appearance of an alternative backbone within populated areas of land masses. Everyone passes others packets on down the line, in a distributed web-like network arather than the current trunk and branches. Much harder to apply pressure to the backbone when it's a large number of small sites all over the place.
Might be interesting for 2 versions to come out - one GPL, and one explicitly public domain. Perhaps post the sources without comment, to give them a little time to diffuse.
Note that "as long as Mattel has not notified him of the license change" might be taken to mean "so long as he has not read of the assignment of rights to cphack to Mattel. Those programmers working on new versions had best not be doing any viewing/hearing of news.
Happens all the time. TI was slapping most semi comapnies with the Kirby patent, some of them took years to give in. The high tech field, whatever the current "high tech" may be, likes to help feed lawyers with patent squabbles.
There may be big bucks in staking out an area of technology with patent(s); however too agressive of a policy may lead to alternative technologies being developed with the result that the original tech becomes unused. Happen in the chem industry many times.
Lotus, 1-2-3 and Wordpro, and Wordperfect are smaller market slices; plus they aren't Microsoft and don't get the attention of the more simple antoi-MS crowd. I can't count how many files I've had sent to me in Excel or Word format, with the sender assuming that "those are the standards"..
Macros are likely to be the weak point in non-MSWindows ssytems. As common, cross platform, macro and scripting languages become more commonly supported in applications, they'll become targets for cross-platform virii.
It's older than that. The original IBM 360 (, 370,...) line often emulated the 360 architecture in microcode, including the IO channel processors. Microcode hackers would tune and tweak this code, and occasionally turn to tricks of the runtime morphing on top of the microcode changes.
An employer of mine told me of the time the IBM CSE, upon first seeing the mutated machine, said "you're running 3x as many users as this system is supposed to support. Corporate headquarters is going to put a price on your head"
Most of "new computer technologies" have their roots back in the `60s and early `70s. Changes have made some of these more effective or important now, resulting in their resurfacing as "bold new concepts".
From "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby". While this story may be considered racist, the reference isn't. The story has Brer Fox attempting to catch Brer Rabbit by making a manikin of tar. Brer Rabbit sees it, attempt conversation, loses his temper when the tar Baby doesn't reply, and hits it. His hand gets stuck, so he hits it with his other hand, which gets stuck as well. Then he kicks the Tar Baby, and finally butts the Tar Baby with his head.
Thus - a tar baby is anything that gets you trapped, dragging you in further and further. CF "quick sand", "black mail pay-off", "tobacco", and "campaign promises"
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, am an old time Net user, going back to the `70s. But while I find a lot of the Web and Net content useless or annoying, I accept this as part of the cost of getting people away from the one-way flow of commercial media and into somethign where there is some small chance of two-way communication and of them actually learning something.
Over the last eight years I've heard the rather bothersome, at least to me, attitude expressed here : "take back our Internet". Seeing as DARPA was DoD funded, and much of the pre `90s net was directly or indirectly government funded (in the U.S.) one must wonder where the ownership lies.
Claiming the Net as belonging to some small group puts that group in a class along with cattle ranchers who feel that public lands are theirs for grazing, timber companies that feel that public forests are exclusively for harvesting by those companies. In short, one more "the public be damned" group.
Smaller groups lead to community. It can also lead to alienation from other parts of the population, and fragmentation of the society, when taken to extremes.
Nah, ARM processors are used all over in embedded devices. This isn't just PDAs and palmtops, but all those other electronic devices that have some smarts and don't use `70s derived OSes (*nix, MSDOS, WinX (not using those isn't so bad - do you really want to program your micorwave oven from a command line or a GUI? at 5AM Monday morning? after a late night ?)
If you want wireless you're going to get microwaved.
Consider that plastics, proteins, and cellulose are large molecules; so is diamond. You can make a single molecule that you can see with you eye; I've see one organic molecule many centimeters on a side.
Whomever said that it really makes more sense for PDAs and PCS may be right, given that those are the sort of devices that one might have at hand while reading the paper.
The ability to handle breaking news in this fashion would let the papers answer broadcast medias' quick responses.
Hmmm ... buyinh online from a printed ad works, too, don't even have to tear the coupon out of the paper.
then there's polls. Print something on the editor pages, and include links to a set of responses - similar to the dial-a-number polls done now.
As for the privacy invasion : while papers can print individualized versions, it's tough enough that I don't see them so treating every or even many links in a paper. Remember the fact the each copy of the paper is a (hopefully) identical copy is what makes printing them fairly low cost. Offset presses are about as cheap material reproduction as you can get.
Perhaps do something such as leave the PDF on a machine running one of several Microsoft programs that make your drive public on whatever network you are connected to...
What's the difference between this and using phone lines or FM radio? With the HPNA interface you're effectively in a 10Base based network, sending the digital form of the data (music) rather that converting to analog and transmitting. It should be a higher quality output at the far end.
What's the diff between using HPNA and your existing network. Not much, unless you're like most of the general computer using public who don't have cat5 throughout their house but can string phone line.
A) It's a monophonic headset
B) It's speak (telephonic) quality audio,using CSVD, not hifi.
You could try writing your own interface, but you might find that some of the chipsets might not understand what you want to do, if they've built-in enough of the lower levels of protocol. I'm not sure that the bandwidth is there, either.
It would seem to have the potential of being misused by commercial and governmental interests to indeed track what someone is doing on-line. Making sure that there is input opposing these uses to TCPA wouldn't hurt.
A larger issue to the open and/or free OS communities is making sure that they are not locked out. The BIOS, loader, and OS all interact in the TCPA model; if that model is based on the way a certain large software house does things, and then gets wrapped up in non-disclosure agreements to "protect its security", newer x86 PCs may not boot your favorite OS. Seeing as Apple doesn't seem to be a member of TCPA (yet), this might be a good thing for their sales...
I'd worry more about CALEA, so far as having someone watching what I was doing ...go to
http://www.eff.org/
and search for CALEA
Note that some of these, bio and mechanical nanotech, have the same sort of power dissipation problems that conventional semiconductors have. Computing take power to perform an opperation; you make it fast and it burns a lot of power, so you try to make it smaller to reduce the power per functional unit. There are proposed methods to get around this, see
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~mpf/rc/home.html
for an example.
Sometimes technologies are delay because the established leaders wan to hold onto their positions - the US phone companies and digital access is an example. Usually the delay is not very large, the old guard is passed by. Sometimes technologies are fueled by the current leaders, who want to hold onto their lead and know a little history.
Perhaps better, set up the `bot to have "personalities", and send replies explaining that your 85 year old aunt was visiting and search for lavender soup and ping-pong balls, and your 11 year old daughter was searching for [current-preteen-music-idol] and body piercing; then tell them that you've no interest in those products/services, stop annoying you. In the case of your "daughter" tell them if they don't go away you'll site the child protection cops on them.
The purpose would be to both fuzz out your own traffic, and to generate a lot of spurious hits for the people _paying_ PN for the "leads". Those businesses are spending money with the hopes of getting sales; clear feedback that it's not working and is annoying potential customers just might cause them to drop PN.
And don't forget to write on _paper_ to any company that sends unsolicited email and has an actual mailbox. Most companies treat one letter as representing 100s or 1000s of real world consumers that didn't write.
When the State/Church/Gang/Boss have power over others without reasonably easy and effective countermeasures being available, then they may (and usually do) restrict the freedoms of others. Even the implied threat of "we're watching you, if you make a mistake you're toast" can be restraining.
Of course the government isn't a real problem. In Seattle Thursday, the police department said that the WTO problems showed that restraints on police surveillance of the public\\\\\guilty bastards\\\\\\\\\suspicious individuals prevented the police from gathering needed information on the protesters. Never mind that those groups were posting open messages on the `Net, and later holding open air meetings using bullhorns to announce plans. Never mind that the SPD had recently been slapped for video taping people at news conferences complaining about police misbehaviour.Need we mention LA and NY ?
Businesses want to monitor employees private life, because "it may impact their work performance". Why not just rate their work performance? Maybe spying is more fun.
Whereever a group has some fair amount of power over others there is a tendency for the group to using information on individuals as a control and buttress for the group's power. Did someone grumble about the group to a friend ? - watch them. Is someone trying to organise to protest the group's actions ? - haul them in before they can get started.
If one can not organise into a powerbase of one's own, as a means of balancing the power of "the establishment", then you may find yourself with very little real freedom - unless you happen to believe just like the established powers. Private communications is an important tool in building countering power bases.
In the US in the `60s there were churches being bombed, riots, buildings being burned, civil rights organizers being beaten and abducted. Good surveillance might have prevented some of that. And it might have been used to surpress the civil rights drive,which often violated local laws, and antiwar movements, which were "anti-patriotic and foreign controlled, and most likely treasonous". Watching out for treason is a good use of surveillance, after all.
I can understand where Neil's coming from when he invisions having remote friends watchign your house when you're away. But I'd feel better knowning that only they can watch it, and that someone else isn't watching the same video for the time I run to the local store and left the front door ajar.
http://www.pecorporation.com/press/prccorp011000.h tml
[excerpt] "Celera's mission is to become the definitive source of genomic and related agricultural and medical information. Celera's information will be available on a subscription basis to academic and commercial institutions who will have access to tools for viewing, browsing, analyzing, and integrating data in a way that will assist scientists in accelerating their understanding of the human genetic code."
And then there's the courts and governmetns. Both the UK and the US govs. had indicated that they might not be too happy about a company attempting to patent the human genome. It certainly isn't too clear what it means to patent a gene sequence, that simplier issue is yet to be sorted out.
http://rs9.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c106:3:./temp/~ c106QAfgFN:e59696:
title "`Sec. 421. Distribution of information relating to manufacture of controlled substances". While it does exempt service providers that remove such materials or links once notified of their existance on the ISP's system, it does come down on the originator of the material and/or links. It also makes a number of chemistry textbooks and journals sitting in libraries and 2nd hand bookstores illegal.
It's a @#$%^&* messy spec, with parts released only with signed NDA. I suspect that someone may figure out a fairly fast hack of the "copy-1-time" :copy-never" " copy freely" attribute and pass that info around. What this breaking of a key-pair shows is what a brute force attack will cost (today).
T-shirts - gang identification
cash - well, cash
caps - drugs
to turn in other students. Seems to be good old American Know-How to me. More seriously, even "specific symptoms recommended by psychiatric organizations" often appear to have a bias against the oddballs in society; the Soviet Union was rather famous for this, as is mainland China.
The "Wave Promise", while it may read as a somewhat hokey "be nice to one another", is a valid approach to social interactions. What isn't clear to me is what goes along with the basic pledge - what does "Treat others with respect" really mean, how much tolerance for other opinions and lifestyles goes along with that?
A real difficulty is waht happens when someone is tagged as depressed or dangerous, is checked out, and determined to be OK. Someone at the school is going to know that individual or group was checked out, certainly the student who reported them. Do those people become lepers or madmen that somehow are still walking around loose? Or is the program going to give feedback on why these people are not a threat - tough to do with anonymous tips, although the school's adminstration could be given the feedback and then act to attempt to increase tolerance. I personally doubt that they could be very effective in many cases, the inertia , fear of liability and news coverage if someone slips through the screening, and not wanting to publicly label the individuals if it becomes apparent that they had been so tagged. Scarlet letters are hard to get rid of.
I'd be much happier if there was explicit strong support for helping kids with problems, phone numbers for them to call. Work both sides of the problem. Forget incentives, that's just an opening for abuse (although it might be fun to turn the student government in for cash).
And again, the boss-weenies don't want to worry about support, he's job is on the line; most of the end users don't want to worry about making the @#$%^&$ computer work, they just want to switch it on and compute. Buying packaged systems is OK by them, be those systems TERA's or a conventional cluster.
They had two major drivers. One was :
A> buys a work of art from nearly unknown artist B, for a small sum.
Over time B> becomes famous, commanding top $ for their works.
A sells the artwork they purchased years ago for a large amount of money.
B demands a percentage of the profits from the sale.
The second was : A buys a work of art from B.
A changes that art, painting it, chopping it into bits, whatever.
B sues A for that action.
In both cases the arguments is that B retains certain rights to the work of art, in effect the concept expressed there, even if they have some the tangible work and the reproduction rights.
There have been a number of legal battles over this, I remember several involving the modification of the work that were won by the artist (don't remember if there were appeals).
I believe that there is a strong similarity between this and software licences and media distributions. Luckly software seems only to go down in value as it ages.
So the individual artists are fighting for rights that in part overlap with the interests of the big corporations - preventing copying and modification of their products. Luckly the corporations haven't caught onto the "increase in value" idea, when they do that classic car of yours and your inflated value house are going to be financial headaches.
Anyhow, the concept of "I bought it, I own it" isn't the clearest right now. In part this is due to the change in the amount of effort needed to replicate something, in part to changes in the various societies in the last 3 centuries.
Now concepts such as Copyleft take on the ownership issue by opening ownership up to all. If more generally useful (to the general public, not just /.ers) creations were released under copyleft, and promoted as "own what you use" Then there might be a change in the way the general population thinks, and eventually a change in the laws.
Think of the ad campaign - "do you want to just lease something that you can't complain about if it doesn't work, or do you want to own it and hav eaccess to the knowledge of how it works?" While most people don't want to be bothered with understanding how something works, they do get excited about having that something doing things they might not like - browser cookies, Pentium chip ID, Microsoft's document signatures, and so on. People get excited when their tools do things the people don't know about - if it had turned out that Cyber Patrol was blocking a number of Christian Web sites, might not the public reaction (in the US) forced a different outcome ? (remember the '666' in beard and other rumor campaigns that forced major corporations to spend a lot of money). In this case the argument that the consumer needed to know what was being blocked would have been brought to the forefront, and DMCA might have been steamrollered in the letter writing.
The point is that the argument that "I bought it, I own it" currently is weak when it comes to materials that can be considered "creative works" rather that simple material items. Making open and wholly ownable alternatives available can get around those issues.
Napster - which can used legally; the current trend seems to be to assume that _any_ effort to access digital material except through a standard commerical product is piracy. 2.The Section should not prevent users who have lawfully purchased or licensed the product from choosing a device or medium to view a work other than ones approved by the copyrighted work's vendor.
You by the disk, you can legally make an 8-track tape from it for _your own use_ ; you print out a paid-for ebook in a large typeface to make reading it easier, and that lets you scribble notes on the text as you think of them. Again, the copy is not illegal, it takes away no sales (unless you feel that the publisher should restrict your access to their material to only those they support, and that you should be required to buy a copy in each format you wish to use).
3.The Section should not prevent users who have lawfully purchased or licensed the product from accessing that product in new ways for their own innovative purposes.
IE - the TLCs' DVD player software doesn't run on your machien ,and even when it can be run it's tupid and ugly. You write your own player, that works the way you want. You use it to play products that you've purchased. Your friend like it, you put it up on the Net for others, and the TLCs' jump on you. The CSPR and I say that's not right, you have stayed within the law. 4.The Section should not be used to suppress the use of material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Mattel and the revised blocked URL list, the ongoing "reform" of uniform software licensing - which if applied to tangible goods would allow companies to prevent you from reporting on unsafe products.
Given the trend to skipping over many new artist/writers, except possibly when they are virtual clones of current successful artists, have as much access to the previaling distribution methods is A Good Thing, I believe. Generally this may mean reverse engineering a format, or using alternative distribution methods (Napstr vs disks)
I think that many of the larger comapanies in the media world are afraid of electronic media both from the easy-of-copying, which is truely new to mass produced media (photocopies are fairly slow and expensive), and from the possiblity of new, small, responsive publishing companies providing alternatives to clone-media-stars.
Low cost photo-offset printing doomed older print shops, electronic editing and laser printers are making serious inroads on current printshops. Cheap magnetic tape audio recorders made anyone their own "recoding studio", VCRs and lower cost cameras did it for video.
But the publishing houses took little damage from these changes. People still bought records, went to movies, bought books. Now the publishing media industry is facing a threat to the way its business works, it could be very cheap to become a publisher and distributers of books, music, videos. I think they're afraid, the last time there was a change of this magnitude was when sound recording became practical, before that when movies were devised. They're fighting back against the new technologies while trying to use them. Thye see the basic tech changes, and adjust to them, but fight the market changes that go along.
Beyond that there is the attempt to regulate content residing outside the US (or your country of choice) by holding the big ISP and backbone hosts responsible for the content they allow users to view. This can have the effect of chopping the `Net up into national nets. Multinational companies and national governments aren't going to care if the objectional material is only available on-line in Lower-Outbackastani.
And beyond that is the arm-twisting the US does to other governments to get them to echo the US legal directions. Plus mutual backscratching between governments where country A regulates something they don't care about one way or another but contry B does, just to get country B to regulate something they way country A feels it should be.
Consider the sate of radio in its early, unregulated days. A few people thought that it would have the same sort of impact the many here feel the Net has. Radio was regualted in the US as a "limited resource" (available frequencies), but in other countries other reasosns were given. (The UK and licenses for radios and TVs). Public decency, protecting against "insurrectionist" talk, halting the spreading of illegal and dangerous information (US Senate bill 486) - the list goes on. All of these are reasons for governments to attempt to regulate and control the Net.
Now, if a IP packet modem that used the unregualted spread spectrum bands were to be marketed, and come into common use, one could see the appearance of an alternative backbone within populated areas of land masses. Everyone passes others packets on down the line, in a distributed web-like network arather than the current trunk and branches. Much harder to apply pressure to the backbone when it's a large number of small sites all over the place.
Note that "as long as Mattel has not notified him of the license change" might be taken to mean "so long as he has not read of the assignment of rights to cphack to Mattel. Those programmers working on new versions had best not be doing any viewing/hearing of news.
There may be big bucks in staking out an area of technology with patent(s); however too agressive of a policy may lead to alternative technologies being developed with the result that the original tech becomes unused. Happen in the chem industry many times.
Macros are likely to be the weak point in non-MSWindows ssytems. As common, cross platform, macro and scripting languages become more commonly supported in applications, they'll become targets for cross-platform virii.
An employer of mine told me of the time the IBM CSE, upon first seeing the mutated machine, said "you're running 3x as many users as this system is supposed to support. Corporate headquarters is going to put a price on your head"
Most of "new computer technologies" have their roots back in the `60s and early `70s. Changes have made some of these more effective or important now, resulting in their resurfacing as "bold new concepts".
Thus - a tar baby is anything that gets you trapped, dragging you in further and further. CF "quick sand", "black mail pay-off", "tobacco", and "campaign promises"