I think they'll just encourage people to use digital cash. The lack of taxes has allowed credit cards and even checks to become the common method of payment online. If the government begins taxing these sales it'll encourage people to use digital cash. If there are people willing to use digital cash there will be people that will supply it. Sure most will suck and the rest will battle but eventually one or a couple will become the new defacto standards.
Why would a company provide the framework of digital cash without charging any fees? Simple! You get people to pay you in real money and you give them digital money. You don't have to offer to convert digital money back into real money if you have enough customers that it is practical to buy and sell everything in digital money. Other people would step in to convert currencies if there was enough demand. Therefore you suddenly have a money funnel filling your own bank accounts. Invest that money in land, gold, precious gems, or whatever is pretty stable and you have a fortune and your fortune makes your digital money more valuable thus creating a nice cycle. Just issue yourself whatever paychecks you want and live like kings.
Think of the EBay/PayPal marriage. If they moved their operation out of the US and issued their own currency that was easy and cheap for everyone on EBay to use and made it available to other sites to use as easy as they already use PayPal.. well you see where that goes. It's not that far fetched.
That's a silly thing to say. That is like saying because you went to one theature and it had sticky seats and a projector that jittered that you'd never go to another theature. If you don't pick a good place to download from you won't get good results. Any wank can camcord a movie but good copies are scanned from the film. Of course if you don't mind the wait you can get good copies ripped from dvd too.
Myself, if it's a good movie, I go see it half a dozen times at the theature and either buy or download a good pirate copy to pacify me while waiting for the DVD. Once the DVD is out depending on how much I liked the movie and the extras involved I either rent or buy a copy of the movie and just rip it myself.
Moral of the story: If movie studios don't want me to make pirate copies then should release the DVD as soon as the movie is in the theature (most people don't go to the theature just to see the movie) and release a collectors edition later that includes cool stuff I'd like to have (a nice box, dvd extras, a poster, etc). I will still rip the movie but the movie studio will have more of my $$$ in their pocket too.
If you want to try wxPython there is Boa Constructor which puts some nice IDE touches to development. I don't like coding with IDE tools so I've only just tried it now and then to see how it was progressing but I think it can handle your needs okay.
Of course this is opensource so if you can't find a tool you like, then make your own and share it.:)
I've been working on models of my boat for a couple years. This will be the first life sized version. It'll be sort of a new experience for me. It's a boat designed around a distributed model so that it is built of modules in lego-style. Should be fun.:)
I like wxWindows and especially it's a child project wxPython. wxPython is my favorite way to develop GUI apps because it is easy, flexible, cross-platform, and looks great. My only major wish for it is a Java port so Python/wxPython programs could be made portable to Jython.:)
I work in computers among other things. Programmer, technicial, system admin, security guy, network admin, etc.. all those things that often get put under one hat. Also do various business functions when called upon with quite a lot of experience in shipping and purchasing.
Lately on top of those things I've been helping with farm activities, harvesting trees, and construction.
Come summer when it's warm enough I'm going to build a boat by hand. So I guess you could say I do a little of everything. Right now I'm working something like 18-20 hours a day. Fun eh?;)
I'm 6'6 and I can crush your ass like a tin can. I couldn't use a Segway probably as their top weight limit is around 300lbs and besides I like more active tasks. I move under my own power more in a week probably more than you do in a year - the electrical assist is mostly cus I like gadgets (ebike.com) and sometimes am tired by the time I have to come home. I throw largs logs over my shoulders and haul them around for exercise and each one probably weighs more than your skinny ass so watch who you insult punk.;) I'm sure I probably eat more than you but I also am probably a lot bigger and a lot more active. Just because I'm a geek doesn't mean I can't break you over my knee.;)
That sounds great. I've seen those in small areas usually around a park or pedestrian business section (shopping malls) but have never lived anywhere that covered the majority of the city in that way.
Try getting in cross country travel (especially crossing busy bridges) and things just get worse. I used to walk to work as I lived only a couple miles away and it took me longer to cross a small river than the whole rest of the walk because nobody would let a pedestrian take a minute to cross the short bridge.
In Miami it wasn't to bad for pedestrians and bicyclists as a whole but I was hit by cars several times while living there (including once by a limo).
I'm 300lbs plus probably another 100lbs for my bicycle and I travel upwards of 50-60mph with my electrical assist. It isn't always posible or safe for someone on a bicycle to ride in the street (people have been known to try to hit you or just be so busy with rush hour and their cell phone they don't see you) so I admit that at times I ride on the sidewalks. I'm not a big Segway fan but I think that a ban before something has proven to be a problem is shitty behavior. These things are certainly no more dangerous than electric wheelchairs or skaters and certainly are less dangerous than a bicycle or moped.
The real problem is that it isn't safe to ride bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, Segways, etc in the street. Most areas set aside no room for people using such alternative forms of transportation and they don't make any effort to make the streets safe for them. Most areas I've been you're lucky if there is a sidewalk decent enough to ride such things. My sisters wheelchair frequently has to roll out into traffic to get her from point A to point B and it certainly isn't safe for her or the drivers.
As voters we should push for equal access for pedestrians and those using alternative transportation - to much is given over to automobiles. Cheaper, safer, more ecological.. what part don't we like?:)
A decent installer program can do that. I used to do such things when I worked at local schools and had to manage several hundred computers more than mortal man can handle. It's been so long though that I'm not sure what the best installer is these days. That was in the days of Win95/98 only. I used some installer that is free to opensource projects. I can't remember it's name anymore but if you look I bet you can find it or something similar. It could manipulate registry keys.
Copying the directory is pretty much what I'd suggest. Configure one browser for each platform and make a tarball for Linux, a zip installer for Windows, etc and just copy your settings over. For 50 machines it wouldn't be worth the effort of using a client customization kit or anything like that. As far as keeping users from changing their settings that's easy enough in Linux but am not sure how you'd do it in Windows or MacOS. Just change the owner of the config files away from the user and give them read but not write permissions to those files.
True but it reaches the level of reliability the web already has which IMO is probably good enough. Then you know if you click a link from LinuxWorld it'll probably take you to the file you wanted but if you click a link from Bootlicks House of Fish it might not.
In my case the checksum is required to even locate the file and download it. It would be possible to make an evil client that served files that differed from their checksum but the file would be flagged right away and the server it came from would be flagged as bad too. Since each client would have to verify the checksum before making the file available to others only the original evil server would be serving copies of the bad files. Eventually the data on what clients couldn't be trusted would circulate - the only really bad part about that is that other users of the same ISP would be blacklisted too.
It doesn't actually have to be a friend, it can be any trusted user and the developer can include a list of users he trusts when he releases. If you trust the developer enough to run his code on your machine then you may as well trust who he trusts at least until you develop some experience.
Also good software can develop trust relationships for you. If you download a file from system X and don't delete that file with so long a time then it can be concluded that the file was what you wanted and add system X to your list of trusted systems - prehaps bouncing it up your list for each file you download from that system and keep and bumping off points for each file you delete. Simple things like that are good for newbie's as long as they can be turned off if desired.
I have been working on a P2P network (FLOSS) designed to work under a web browser and it addresses all resources via a resource type + hash + code (for a file this would be mime type, hash, and file length) and it is designed to allow users to manage resources with trust ratings and trust relationships. So you could mark a file as trusted, ignored, or untrusted but you can mark an IP or an IP range (each are a type of resource) in the same manner. These trust records are themselves resources so they are managed the same way everything else is. I plan to eventually require anyone accessing my servers to go through my network mostly to distribute the bandwidth load. It's written in Python and so works on Unix, Windows, and MacOS at least.
I've often wondered how I'd go about developing my own BIOS if I should want to do so. I have years of programming experience and decent electronic engineering experience but I'm not really sure how I'd start on writing a BIOS. Are their books devoted to such a thing? Motherboard Design and BIOS Hacking for Dummies? I wouldn't mind tearing up some old mobos to get some practice in.
I think they'll find this gag runs out of steam as soon as P2P clients start using checksum techniques. Use trust boundries and individual checksum lists and you can keep the system from being poisoned. It just a little client support and requires that users take the 5 seconds to notice if a file is shit or dangerous and mark it as so in their client. Best of all you don't even have to keep a copy of the actual file to provide the checksum info so you can act as a P2P cop without being set up for feds raiding your basement. The trust boundries is as simple an idea as saying Jack is my friend and I trust his checklist and I trust Jack's friends friends 80% as much as I trust Jack and I trust a friend of Jack's friends 80% as much as I trust Jack's friends.. so that you form a large verification network that eventually peters out unless you raise one of those individuals to your own friend status. This would make it difficult for the RIAA to get into the average users 'friend' list to poison them from there.. and as soon as they did they would be removed from the list and have to start the whole tedious process over again.
We've designed it to be stable enough to cover sections in dirt and grass and raise livestock (cows and chickens etc) assuming that they'd adapt to the mild motion of the ocean that couldn't be absorbed by the structure. We plan on hydroponic, fish and seaweed farming also. Of course you can always buy food from land-dwellers and simply store it too. Really though the ocean is an abundant source of food.
I'm currently working on an intergrated movie/game box for myself based off a 933Mhz mini-itx system. I've set it up to auto-rip new dvd's dropped into the dvd drive (a 3 hour long dvd takes roughly 1 hour to rip) and all movies it has stored are available under a custom gui I've been making with Python/wxPython. Click the movie and it plays full screen (uses xine, mplayer doesn't seem stable enough). Once I finish the movie portion of the GUI I plan to put in support for various Linux and Windows (using WineX) games I have. I also want a menu option to bring up Mozilla for set-based web browsing. The GUI is very easy to use and looks very nice. Because this is such a single-purpose GUI making it user-friendly hasn't been very challenging. I removed all of X's menus and such as in this case they weren't needed.
At this time I have no plans to package my software for the public. It's just what I'm using for my own personal collection. I might consider releasing it as a mini-distro but given how busy I already am I'd probably only support it for people who paid me. So I guess the question is would people pay $50 for a mini-dist that focuses entirely on set-top movie and gaming.. that doesn't include any actual movies or games itself.. just the software to make them easy? Also there is always the question of the legality of including decss in such a product but you could probably get around that by having it download that off the Net when being installed.
I have a tv out so I can use the system on my tv as normal. Playing vob files off the hdd works fine but divx or dvd drops frames noticably. I think it is because of some issues the video drivers still have and the limited power of the system. I've opted for a wireless kbrd/mouse rather than a remote as it was easier to support and offers me the full complement of buttons to do whatever I like - unlike dinky lil remotes.
I am a I'd-rather-play-video-games-than-vote kind of person but pulling out my tools and building stuff is more fun than either games or voting. That's why I'm designing a distributed (in modules) dynamiclly linked (they hook/unhook together easily) floation structure (a boat) complete with solar panels, wind generators, and intergrated wireless network that's made to hook together into sheets of city miles wide all floating out in the middle of no where totally oblivious to the poor land based people (and sturdy enough to take things like torpedos or huricanes). A normal person would bitch, maybe vote, and just bitch some more but we as geeks have a higher calling.. we must do the insane.. build stuff to fix every problem.. and save the world before we run out of quarters.:)
It's only illegal as long as we keep letting the same sort of bastards get elected. If you don't like it vote for someone else. If there is nobody worth voting for run yourself. If you still can't get enough votes to make a difference then go find some shitty third world country trying to modernize and make a deal with them and move in several thousand geeks all at once. If that can't be done then do like I am and work on making a floating city in international waters. (Yes, I'm part of a group actually working on that.) There is always something you can do about it.
As for me I'm currently ripping every bit of media I can lay hands on. It isn't legal to distribute the material now but at least I can keep a copy in case I get a chance to pass such things on. I thought of building a robot that could write (once) and read data off massive stone on metal plates in such a form that it'll take a freaking long time to destroy the data (unlike hdd's, cd's, etc). Besides amussing myself it'd be an interesting way to time capsule data.. and what a conversation piece. "Oh yeh I replaced my backyard with 40 acres of warehoused data engraved on alumnium plates in binary.":)
I can only imagine the hell the music industry will go through if they create a technological war with the geek population. They might pull a nice trick and win the first round but then the worlds geeks would take notice and be shaken out of their lazy habbits and be really pissed off. Once all those geeks fix their security holes I'd imagine their first line of business would be to return the favor. Is the RIAA so sure of it's own systems that they'd pick this kind of a fight? Some of us can do some pretty nasty tricks but tend not to out of laziness and generally being upright citizens but if you attacked us first then all bets would be off. They do realize that everything from their corporate web servers to their home phones and personal bank accounts are suspect to revenge - don't they?
Besides there are those of us developing our own much more advanced P2P networks with 100's of gigs of high quality data of our own. Networks that would make it very hard to disrupt things. Squash the shitty P2P networks to much and it just makes it easier for us to get enough users on our networks to reach critical mass.
I didn't say anything about not letting children use the Internet and I think disallowing them Internet access is a crime against the future.
What I said is that it is unfair to make negative exceptions without making positive exceptions. IF you are going to make things children can do that are so bad that they should be punished as an adult then there should be things they can do right to be rewarded as an adult.
You're also under the misconception that laws make the world a safer place. That is a fully unrealistic idea. Laws exist to give people an excuse to seek revenge against others they feel have wronged them. People don't stop and think before doing - they just do it or at best do it but try not to get caught.
Lots of businesses let their systems get cracked because it's cheaper than paying for properly trained people dedicated to security and easier than actually following through with their security experts policies. I've worked several places that I gave them warning of top priority security holes and had them just totally ignored. Thousands of credit card numbers exposed to anyone that bothered to run a script against one of their servers, customer and supplier data exposed, etc. If their customers had any idea probably 90% wouldn't shop there but it's a very common problem.
I'd probably agree that the better the sites security the harsher the penalty should be for breaking in and doing naughty stuff. Really they don't any new laws for Internet crimes. Hacking into a system is breaking and entry, defacement is vandalism, stealing is stealing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they'll just encourage people to use digital cash. The lack of taxes has allowed credit cards and even checks to become the common method of payment online. If the government begins taxing these sales it'll encourage people to use digital cash. If there are people willing to use digital cash there will be people that will supply it. Sure most will suck and the rest will battle but eventually one or a couple will become the new defacto standards.
Why would a company provide the framework of digital cash without charging any fees? Simple! You get people to pay you in real money and you give them digital money. You don't have to offer to convert digital money back into real money if you have enough customers that it is practical to buy and sell everything in digital money. Other people would step in to convert currencies if there was enough demand. Therefore you suddenly have a money funnel filling your own bank accounts. Invest that money in land, gold, precious gems, or whatever is pretty stable and you have a fortune and your fortune makes your digital money more valuable thus creating a nice cycle. Just issue yourself whatever paychecks you want and live like kings.
Think of the EBay/PayPal marriage. If they moved their operation out of the US and issued their own currency that was easy and cheap for everyone on EBay to use and made it available to other sites to use as easy as they already use PayPal.. well you see where that goes. It's not that far fetched.
That's a silly thing to say. That is like saying because you went to one theature and it had sticky seats and a projector that jittered that you'd never go to another theature. If you don't pick a good place to download from you won't get good results. Any wank can camcord a movie but good copies are scanned from the film. Of course if you don't mind the wait you can get good copies ripped from dvd too.
Myself, if it's a good movie, I go see it half a dozen times at the theature and either buy or download a good pirate copy to pacify me while waiting for the DVD. Once the DVD is out depending on how much I liked the movie and the extras involved I either rent or buy a copy of the movie and just rip it myself.
Moral of the story: If movie studios don't want me to make pirate copies then should release the DVD as soon as the movie is in the theature (most people don't go to the theature just to see the movie) and release a collectors edition later that includes cool stuff I'd like to have (a nice box, dvd extras, a poster, etc). I will still rip the movie but the movie studio will have more of my $$$ in their pocket too.
I clicked a random link on their site and got this error:
/ipage.asp, line 16
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: '[string: "86 height=0 Marginwi"]'
If you want to try wxPython there is Boa Constructor which puts some nice IDE touches to development. I don't like coding with IDE tools so I've only just tried it now and then to see how it was progressing but I think it can handle your needs okay.
:)
Of course this is opensource so if you can't find a tool you like, then make your own and share it.
I've been working on models of my boat for a couple years. This will be the first life sized version. It'll be sort of a new experience for me. It's a boat designed around a distributed model so that it is built of modules in lego-style. Should be fun. :)
I like wxWindows and especially it's a child project wxPython. wxPython is my favorite way to develop GUI apps because it is easy, flexible, cross-platform, and looks great. My only major wish for it is a Java port so Python/wxPython programs could be made portable to Jython. :)
I work in computers among other things. Programmer, technicial, system admin, security guy, network admin, etc.. all those things that often get put under one hat. Also do various business functions when called upon with quite a lot of experience in shipping and purchasing.
;)
Lately on top of those things I've been helping with farm activities, harvesting trees, and construction.
Come summer when it's warm enough I'm going to build a boat by hand. So I guess you could say I do a little of everything. Right now I'm working something like 18-20 hours a day. Fun eh?
I'm 6'6 and I can crush your ass like a tin can. I couldn't use a Segway probably as their top weight limit is around 300lbs and besides I like more active tasks. I move under my own power more in a week probably more than you do in a year - the electrical assist is mostly cus I like gadgets (ebike.com) and sometimes am tired by the time I have to come home. I throw largs logs over my shoulders and haul them around for exercise and each one probably weighs more than your skinny ass so watch who you insult punk. ;) I'm sure I probably eat more than you but I also am probably a lot bigger and a lot more active. Just because I'm a geek doesn't mean I can't break you over my knee. ;)
That sounds great. I've seen those in small areas usually around a park or pedestrian business section (shopping malls) but have never lived anywhere that covered the majority of the city in that way.
Try getting in cross country travel (especially crossing busy bridges) and things just get worse. I used to walk to work as I lived only a couple miles away and it took me longer to cross a small river than the whole rest of the walk because nobody would let a pedestrian take a minute to cross the short bridge.
In Miami it wasn't to bad for pedestrians and bicyclists as a whole but I was hit by cars several times while living there (including once by a limo).
I'm 300lbs plus probably another 100lbs for my bicycle and I travel upwards of 50-60mph with my electrical assist. It isn't always posible or safe for someone on a bicycle to ride in the street (people have been known to try to hit you or just be so busy with rush hour and their cell phone they don't see you) so I admit that at times I ride on the sidewalks. I'm not a big Segway fan but I think that a ban before something has proven to be a problem is shitty behavior. These things are certainly no more dangerous than electric wheelchairs or skaters and certainly are less dangerous than a bicycle or moped.
:)
The real problem is that it isn't safe to ride bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, Segways, etc in the street. Most areas set aside no room for people using such alternative forms of transportation and they don't make any effort to make the streets safe for them. Most areas I've been you're lucky if there is a sidewalk decent enough to ride such things. My sisters wheelchair frequently has to roll out into traffic to get her from point A to point B and it certainly isn't safe for her or the drivers.
As voters we should push for equal access for pedestrians and those using alternative transportation - to much is given over to automobiles. Cheaper, safer, more ecological.. what part don't we like?
A decent installer program can do that. I used to do such things when I worked at local schools and had to manage several hundred computers more than mortal man can handle. It's been so long though that I'm not sure what the best installer is these days. That was in the days of Win95/98 only. I used some installer that is free to opensource projects. I can't remember it's name anymore but if you look I bet you can find it or something similar. It could manipulate registry keys.
You forgot an important one..
Aliens kidnap geeks - force them into weight loss camps; Linus brainwashed and forced to run WinCE; Escaped Transmeta CPU eats Tokyo.
Who knew it, Bill Gates really is Borg!
Copying the directory is pretty much what I'd suggest. Configure one browser for each platform and make a tarball for Linux, a zip installer for Windows, etc and just copy your settings over. For 50 machines it wouldn't be worth the effort of using a client customization kit or anything like that. As far as keeping users from changing their settings that's easy enough in Linux but am not sure how you'd do it in Windows or MacOS. Just change the owner of the config files away from the user and give them read but not write permissions to those files.
True but it reaches the level of reliability the web already has which IMO is probably good enough. Then you know if you click a link from LinuxWorld it'll probably take you to the file you wanted but if you click a link from Bootlicks House of Fish it might not.
In my case the checksum is required to even locate the file and download it. It would be possible to make an evil client that served files that differed from their checksum but the file would be flagged right away and the server it came from would be flagged as bad too. Since each client would have to verify the checksum before making the file available to others only the original evil server would be serving copies of the bad files. Eventually the data on what clients couldn't be trusted would circulate - the only really bad part about that is that other users of the same ISP would be blacklisted too.
It doesn't actually have to be a friend, it can be any trusted user and the developer can include a list of users he trusts when he releases. If you trust the developer enough to run his code on your machine then you may as well trust who he trusts at least until you develop some experience.
Also good software can develop trust relationships for you. If you download a file from system X and don't delete that file with so long a time then it can be concluded that the file was what you wanted and add system X to your list of trusted systems - prehaps bouncing it up your list for each file you download from that system and keep and bumping off points for each file you delete. Simple things like that are good for newbie's as long as they can be turned off if desired.
I have been working on a P2P network (FLOSS) designed to work under a web browser and it addresses all resources via a resource type + hash + code (for a file this would be mime type, hash, and file length) and it is designed to allow users to manage resources with trust ratings and trust relationships. So you could mark a file as trusted, ignored, or untrusted but you can mark an IP or an IP range (each are a type of resource) in the same manner. These trust records are themselves resources so they are managed the same way everything else is. I plan to eventually require anyone accessing my servers to go through my network mostly to distribute the bandwidth load. It's written in Python and so works on Unix, Windows, and MacOS at least.
I've often wondered how I'd go about developing my own BIOS if I should want to do so. I have years of programming experience and decent electronic engineering experience but I'm not really sure how I'd start on writing a BIOS. Are their books devoted to such a thing? Motherboard Design and BIOS Hacking for Dummies? I wouldn't mind tearing up some old mobos to get some practice in.
I think they'll find this gag runs out of steam as soon as P2P clients start using checksum techniques. Use trust boundries and individual checksum lists and you can keep the system from being poisoned. It just a little client support and requires that users take the 5 seconds to notice if a file is shit or dangerous and mark it as so in their client. Best of all you don't even have to keep a copy of the actual file to provide the checksum info so you can act as a P2P cop without being set up for feds raiding your basement. The trust boundries is as simple an idea as saying Jack is my friend and I trust his checklist and I trust Jack's friends friends 80% as much as I trust Jack and I trust a friend of Jack's friends 80% as much as I trust Jack's friends.. so that you form a large verification network that eventually peters out unless you raise one of those individuals to your own friend status. This would make it difficult for the RIAA to get into the average users 'friend' list to poison them from there.. and as soon as they did they would be removed from the list and have to start the whole tedious process over again.
We've designed it to be stable enough to cover sections in dirt and grass and raise livestock (cows and chickens etc) assuming that they'd adapt to the mild motion of the ocean that couldn't be absorbed by the structure. We plan on hydroponic, fish and seaweed farming also. Of course you can always buy food from land-dwellers and simply store it too. Really though the ocean is an abundant source of food.
I'm currently working on an intergrated movie/game box for myself based off a 933Mhz mini-itx system. I've set it up to auto-rip new dvd's dropped into the dvd drive (a 3 hour long dvd takes roughly 1 hour to rip) and all movies it has stored are available under a custom gui I've been making with Python/wxPython. Click the movie and it plays full screen (uses xine, mplayer doesn't seem stable enough). Once I finish the movie portion of the GUI I plan to put in support for various Linux and Windows (using WineX) games I have. I also want a menu option to bring up Mozilla for set-based web browsing. The GUI is very easy to use and looks very nice. Because this is such a single-purpose GUI making it user-friendly hasn't been very challenging. I removed all of X's menus and such as in this case they weren't needed.
At this time I have no plans to package my software for the public. It's just what I'm using for my own personal collection. I might consider releasing it as a mini-distro but given how busy I already am I'd probably only support it for people who paid me. So I guess the question is would people pay $50 for a mini-dist that focuses entirely on set-top movie and gaming.. that doesn't include any actual movies or games itself.. just the software to make them easy?
Also there is always the question of the legality of including decss in such a product but you could probably get around that by having it download that off the Net when being installed.
I have a tv out so I can use the system on my tv as normal. Playing vob files off the hdd works fine but divx or dvd drops frames noticably. I think it is because of some issues the video drivers still have and the limited power of the system. I've opted for a wireless kbrd/mouse rather than a remote as it was easier to support and offers me the full complement of buttons to do whatever I like - unlike dinky lil remotes.
I am a I'd-rather-play-video-games-than-vote kind of person but pulling out my tools and building stuff is more fun than either games or voting. That's why I'm designing a distributed (in modules) dynamiclly linked (they hook/unhook together easily) floation structure (a boat) complete with solar panels, wind generators, and intergrated wireless network that's made to hook together into sheets of city miles wide all floating out in the middle of no where totally oblivious to the poor land based people (and sturdy enough to take things like torpedos or huricanes). A normal person would bitch, maybe vote, and just bitch some more but we as geeks have a higher calling.. we must do the insane.. build stuff to fix every problem.. and save the world before we run out of quarters. :)
It's only illegal as long as we keep letting the same sort of bastards get elected. If you don't like it vote for someone else. If there is nobody worth voting for run yourself. If you still can't get enough votes to make a difference then go find some shitty third world country trying to modernize and make a deal with them and move in several thousand geeks all at once. If that can't be done then do like I am and work on making a floating city in international waters. (Yes, I'm part of a group actually working on that.) There is always something you can do about it.
:)
As for me I'm currently ripping every bit of media I can lay hands on. It isn't legal to distribute the material now but at least I can keep a copy in case I get a chance to pass such things on. I thought of building a robot that could write (once) and read data off massive stone on metal plates in such a form that it'll take a freaking long time to destroy the data (unlike hdd's, cd's, etc). Besides amussing myself it'd be an interesting way to time capsule data.. and what a conversation piece. "Oh yeh I replaced my backyard with 40 acres of warehoused data engraved on alumnium plates in binary."
I can only imagine the hell the music industry will go through if they create a technological war with the geek population. They might pull a nice trick and win the first round but then the worlds geeks would take notice and be shaken out of their lazy habbits and be really pissed off. Once all those geeks fix their security holes I'd imagine their first line of business would be to return the favor. Is the RIAA so sure of it's own systems that they'd pick this kind of a fight? Some of us can do some pretty nasty tricks but tend not to out of laziness and generally being upright citizens but if you attacked us first then all bets would be off. They do realize that everything from their corporate web servers to their home phones and personal bank accounts are suspect to revenge - don't they?
Besides there are those of us developing our own much more advanced P2P networks with 100's of gigs of high quality data of our own. Networks that would make it very hard to disrupt things. Squash the shitty P2P networks to much and it just makes it easier for us to get enough users on our networks to reach critical mass.
I didn't say anything about not letting children use the Internet and I think disallowing them Internet access is a crime against the future.
What I said is that it is unfair to make negative exceptions without making positive exceptions. IF you are going to make things children can do that are so bad that they should be punished as an adult then there should be things they can do right to be rewarded as an adult.
You're also under the misconception that laws make the world a safer place. That is a fully unrealistic idea. Laws exist to give people an excuse to seek revenge against others they feel have wronged them. People don't stop and think before doing - they just do it or at best do it but try not to get caught.
Lots of businesses let their systems get cracked because it's cheaper than paying for properly trained people dedicated to security and easier than actually following through with their security experts policies. I've worked several places that I gave them warning of top priority security holes and had them just totally ignored. Thousands of credit card numbers exposed to anyone that bothered to run a script against one of their servers, customer and supplier data exposed, etc. If their customers had any idea probably 90% wouldn't shop there but it's a very common problem.
I'd probably agree that the better the sites security the harsher the penalty should be for breaking in and doing naughty stuff. Really they don't any new laws for Internet crimes. Hacking into a system is breaking and entry, defacement is vandalism, stealing is stealing, etc.