Yes I'm opposed to ubiquitous tracking of even prisoners. Unlike some of those who call themselves conservatives but who are really far right authoritarians I have some respect for the basic dignity of ALL people even the hundreds of thousands in our gulags for victimless crimes like doing drugs. And if you are in a gated community please stay INSIDE your gilded cage as much as possible and don't darken the day of freedom loving people out and about in the open air.
P.P.S. it's not your ideas that scare me, it's the fact that you work for the phone company and don't believe in freedom and thus can do very real physical things to make us ALL a more un-free society, brrrrrrrrrr...
I can think of another place where you are perfectly safe, prison. If you are so afraid why don't you and your family go live in prison in solitary confinement? That way you'll never have to be afraid again, you'll know where your meals will come from, and no scary bad men will EVER both you. All your calls are lovingly monitored by the state, what not to like? Or you could try the upper middle class version the gated community, which is what a gated community is, a gilded cage.
Some of us will take our chances with freedom, exploration, the unknown, and discovery and the things that go with freedom that carry risks, so be it... I for one will throw off my "mind forged manacles" as William Blake put it and will chose freedom every time.
p.s. 1 in 5 Americans die of hear attacks. "Terrorists" are literally about 8 zilionth on my list of fears. YOU are the one afraid of the wrong things my friend, and willing to crush our 200+ year old precious civil liberties because of it... Have fun and enjoy that Big mac after work asshole, make sure you get the extra large helping of "freedom fries" and the milkshake...
If we let them get off with calling it a conflict then the president can declare what are in fact wars and just not call them wars and flagrantly violate the constitution, that makes things WORSE, not better. Far better to say hey look Mr. Prez you started a WAR in flagrant violation of the powers granted you in the constitution, therefore not only is your war illegitimate but so are your so called war powers, ALL null and void.
This WAR is based on lies and a flagrant violation of the constitution lets stop the damn thing and save some lives and treasure to boot.
Or you could just walk away from it and let it collapse of it's own weight. Or to put it in slashdot speak some of us interpret governments as blockages and route around them.
Akido works too you know, sometimes meeting stupid force with more stupid force only leaves two pointlessly bruised and injured people. If you want to pirate music, or do drugs, or encrypt, or look at porn just do it already, they just don't have that many cops, really our own "internal cops" as William Burroughs put it is a bigger block than the thinly spread actual cops.
I've been to a lot of protests in my day yet recently I'm coming to the conclusion that the best revenge is not to fight the assholes but just live the way you want to live and ignore the assholes. See also the temporary autonomous zone:
See also the postcarbon institute which is people putting in gardens working on solar power and figuring other ways to "re-localize" and live outside leviathan/empire/molach.
Really our effort is better put into figuring out how to practically live in a sustainable, peaceful way,that preserves knowledge and global culture in the 21st century, rather than to fight the dying dinosaur governments.
Some of us are able to be radical in our minds and actions without defacing our bodies with tattoos and piercings, so if you think you're witty you aren't really.
Dumbass, if the American revolution were taking place today you can be sure Thomas Jefferson would have a cell phone and a laptop and the 4th amendment would be written in such way as to keep government snoops OUT of those devices. The INTENT of the 4th amendment is to keep the government out of our "houses, papers, and effects" in the 21st century that means electronic files and phone conversations. YOU may want your rights whittled down to bite sized chunks to be swallowed by the leviathan government, not all of us are sanguine for such a fate.
Just because you put lipstick on a pig doesn't mean it's not a pig. And calling an illegal war a legal conflict is like arguing over what the meaning of is, is... or trying to justify torture, it just makes you like an asshole. The U.S. has engaged in many illegal wars since WWII under the auspices of "police actions" like Korea and Vietnam under both Dems and Reps, this is bi-partisan badness.
This no doubt a troll but I'll bite for all the confused kiddies out there who might take this argument seriously. If you lived in the Soviet Union the spies were OK right because if you weren't doing anything illegal you had nothing to hide right? Same for Nazi Germany, and the "legitimate" government of Britain in the American colonies in 1775.
But it's different now you'll protest those were tyrannies and we are in a democracy. Well listen up my friend it's ISN'T that different, the president is in DIRECT violation of the constitution by declaring war on his own whim only Congress can declare war according to the constitution (and no Congresses rubber stamp allowing the president to declare war was not legit), further that war was declared by the president based on lies (see the Downing Street memos), further we are torturing people, and used Napalm or a Napalm like substance on civilians in Fallujah which is war crime, further NSA wiretaps without a court order are a violation of the bill of rights, further we have by FAR the largest prison population in the industrialized world at over 2 million, 100,000s of which are in there for victimless drug crimes, or pissing off their neighbor and being turned in for "sex crimes." Do you start to see why some of us want to be able to communicate without the government butting into our damn business?
That's all well and good advice for those of us on slashdot. It doesn't fly for a DESKTOP for 99.99% (literally) of the population who use computers. Will no one think of the users?
I know you didn't say Linux was the answer I could tell in fact you were being an M$ b.s. apologist. MY point was that those who complain that Linux is hard to use compared to Windows are only fooling themselves. In order to use Windows as a stable secure platform is just as difficult as using Linux. Only OS X more or less works for a casual user desktop out of the box. Yes perhaps using chat or whatever requires tweaking the firewall, but by default the firewall is on, users run at user level, and application installs are password and drag to the application folder which most average people CAN handle unlike editing ACLs, or editing con fig files to get the sound or xorg to work right.
"Oh, and those that say that you can't run in Limited User on XP (as in the fine article is stated) are completely ignorant. I'm running Limited right now, and I have no problem. Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it's never been very hard. The only program I've never been able to run as non-admin is a game called "Children Of The Nile", and I still don't know how to run it as a Limited User. The user that needed it got the "Run As" option checked in the shortcut. Sure she has Admin access that way, but she's my sister and knows that she shouldn't run Admin."
Jeezus that's as difficult as editing config files to get your mouse or sound to work on Linux. If you really think Joe Six pack is going to edit their access control lists to enable their limited user account on XP you are really dreaming. Even if Joe Sixpack figures out how to use access control lists they are going to be damn annoyed to go to all that work and STILL not have all their programs work, I know I'd be annoyed...
At the risk of sounding like an utter Mac fan boy, OS X gets it exactly right, it creates a user level account and no root account by default and then has a slick gui that (sudos or sus???) and asks for a password ONCE when you install software that modifies system files. Cleanly implemented and secure what's not to like? That's the way a secure simple desktop OUGHT to work.
Ubuntu Linux is set up in a similar fashion though I had to modify xorg conf files to get my mouse working and NEVER got sound working despite RTFM, ubutu forums, blah, blah. Linux/BSD makes a great server but isn't ready for the desktop and NEITHER is Windows.
Ding, ding, ding... I'm going to gladly shell out 8 bucks to Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dicks "A Scanner Darkly." It however will be the first film I will have been excited enough to pay for in many months.
I am however worried about ubiquitous tracking. How can that possible be good? Britain for example wants to track EVERY car on the roads and then store the data for 2 years.
"Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years."
Don't they make the kiddes read 1984 anymore? How much more blatant do things have to get before there is some sort of real effective reaction? Oh I forgot it's for the children, and against the terrorists and pirates, nevermind.
When I read stuff like this, off the grid survivalist/back to the land hippies don't sound tin foil hat crazy, they sound like smart forerunners of an underground resistance to tyranny.
you didn't claim to invent dumbass. Ever heard of prior art? So yes they claimed to invent tabbing between hyperlinks which is clearly bullshit. So yes I win.
The broken patent system is a whole other ball of wax lets deal with broken windows first as that's the subject of this thread.
"Microsoft patents Tab button use Time: 14:26 EST/19:26 GMT | News Source: Geek.com | Posted By: Robert Stein
A patent for which Microsoft applied on March 6, 1997, has been granted: "Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs." In other words, when a computer user uses the Tab key to move the focus from one hyperlink to another on a webpage opened in a browser, the use of that function is now owned by Microsoft. The Tab patent, number 6,785,865, was granted on August 31st, just one among multiple patents granted to the software giant on that day. Another interesting grant is number 6,784,354, with an application date of March 13, 2003: "Generating a music snippet." Yes, you read that right. Now dividing a music stream into portions is Microsoft's domain."
We've been inspired by the comment that Microsoft's anti-spyware software is "the best product they've ever invented". Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't invent their anti-spyware product. They bought it. Just like most of their best products. And those they didn't buy, they copied. Well, possibly not all of them. But when we put our mind to it, we couldn't think of any of their "best products" that hadn't been either bought or copied.
There have to be some, surely. Put your thinking caps on. What has Microsoft actually invented?"
And this about some patent piracy with Micro$oft claiming to own something it didn't:
"Microsoft Was Found To Be A Patent Pirate "The user experience is far from ideal but Microsoft has no choice as a result of the defeat it was handed in a patent infringement suit that was filed against the company by Eolas."
Is the above statement true? Microsoft does have a choice. They could have licensed the technology years ago but chose to steal instead. Now they have an inferior product.
Last week Microsoft and Research in Motion (RIM) were whining at a hearing they had bought with money they made on others inventions to members of congress about patent trolls. A patent troll is someone who owns rights to an invention and kicks the crap out of patent pirates who dare to steal.
Microsoft is infamous for having a huge appetite for other's technological property. Eolas is a good example of this. Mike Doyle produced a real invention and has been subjected to years abuse at the hands of a patent pirate.
Microsoft whines about forty or so pending litigations. Most of those inventor's cases probably have considerable merit and that is why Microsoft and other patent pirates are desperate to reform (or is it deform) the patent system into one where they can avoid the consequences of pirating others inventions.
Society functions because of the rule of law. Microsoft has been found to be a patent pirate and in the process they were caught committing fraud on the court. In fact RIM was also caught committing fraud. Gateway was caught destroying evidence. There is an epidemic of technology companies lying, cheating, and stealing others property. They abuse the process of law to bankrupt and brutalize inventors and compound the sin with public relations campaigns which try to paint their victims as the bad players."
Virtual folders you mean like the saved query spotlight searches OS X Tiger has had since last summer, that in turn is just a gui over standard Unix file system metadata? Wow Weeeee Yippee. Of course I'm sure Micro$oft will have claimed to invent it, even though metadata has been available on Unix based systems for years. Yawn, next...
Not only do they stop "piracy" but they keep the means for making digital media from becoming too cheap. The reason is this, in practical terms the corporation will cease to manufacture digital recorders (or operating systems?) for "consumers" and will enable these features on on multi-thousand dollar "professional" level equipment. After all we can't let the rabble have an independent media and report things the corporations don't want us to know right? Fortunately I can always keep Tiger on my OS X G5 box, or put Linux on a generic box, but watch "consumer" level (cheap) digital recorders and OSs (end to end encryption ring a bell) fade out not, for technical reasons but so the corporations can gain ever more control on what content is made and how it's distributed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I'm opposed to ubiquitous tracking of even prisoners. Unlike some of those who call themselves conservatives but who are really far right authoritarians I have some respect for the basic dignity of ALL people even the hundreds of thousands in our gulags for victimless crimes like doing drugs. And if you are in a gated community please stay INSIDE your gilded cage as much as possible and don't darken the day of freedom loving people out and about in the open air.
P.P.S. it's not your ideas that scare me, it's the fact that you work for the phone company and don't believe in freedom and thus can do very real physical things to make us ALL a more un-free society, brrrrrrrrrr...
I can think of another place where you are perfectly safe, prison. If you are so afraid why don't you and your family go live in prison in solitary confinement? That way you'll never have to be afraid again, you'll know where your meals will come from, and no scary bad men will EVER both you. All your calls are lovingly monitored by the state, what not to like? Or you could try the upper middle class version the gated community, which is what a gated community is, a gilded cage.
Some of us will take our chances with freedom, exploration, the unknown, and discovery and the things that go with freedom that carry risks, so be it... I for one will throw off my "mind forged manacles" as William Blake put it and will chose freedom every time.
p.s. 1 in 5 Americans die of hear attacks. "Terrorists" are literally about 8 zilionth on my list of fears. YOU are the one afraid of the wrong things my friend, and willing to crush our 200+ year old precious civil liberties because of it... Have fun and enjoy that Big mac after work asshole, make sure you get the extra large helping of "freedom fries" and the milkshake...
I agree to disagree with you agent Smith...
The "terrorists" scare me FAR less than people like you. Stay the fuck out of MY phone calls, and electronic files.
If we let them get off with calling it a conflict then the president can declare what are in fact wars and just not call them wars and flagrantly violate the constitution, that makes things WORSE, not better. Far better to say hey look Mr. Prez you started a WAR in flagrant violation of the powers granted you in the constitution, therefore not only is your war illegitimate but so are your so called war powers, ALL null and void.
This WAR is based on lies and a flagrant violation of the constitution lets stop the damn thing and save some lives and treasure to boot.
Or you could just walk away from it and let it collapse of it's own weight. Or to put it in slashdot speak some of us interpret governments as blockages and route around them.
Akido works too you know, sometimes meeting stupid force with more stupid force only leaves two pointlessly bruised and injured people. If you want to pirate music, or do drugs, or encrypt, or look at porn just do it already, they just don't have that many cops, really our own "internal cops" as William Burroughs put it is a bigger block than the thinly spread actual cops.
I've been to a lot of protests in my day yet recently I'm coming to the conclusion that the best revenge is not to fight the assholes but just live the way you want to live and ignore the assholes. See also the temporary autonomous zone:
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
See also the postcarbon institute which is people putting in gardens working on solar power and figuring other ways to "re-localize" and live outside leviathan/empire/molach.
http://www.postcarbon.org/
Really our effort is better put into figuring out how to practically live in a sustainable, peaceful way,that preserves knowledge and global culture in the 21st century, rather than to fight the dying dinosaur governments.
Some of us are able to be radical in our minds and actions without defacing our bodies with tattoos and piercings, so if you think you're witty you aren't really.
Dumbass, if the American revolution were taking place today you can be sure Thomas Jefferson would have a cell phone and a laptop and the 4th amendment would be written in such way as to keep government snoops OUT of those devices.
The INTENT of the 4th amendment is to keep the government out of our "houses, papers, and effects" in the 21st century that means electronic files and phone conversations. YOU may want your rights whittled down to bite sized chunks to be swallowed by the leviathan government, not all of us are sanguine for such a fate.
Just because you put lipstick on a pig doesn't mean it's not a pig. And calling an illegal war a legal conflict is like arguing over what the meaning of is, is... or trying to justify torture, it just makes you like an asshole. The U.S. has engaged in many illegal wars since WWII under the auspices of "police actions" like Korea and Vietnam under both Dems and Reps, this is bi-partisan badness.
This no doubt a troll but I'll bite for all the confused kiddies out there who might take this argument seriously. If you lived in the Soviet Union the spies were OK right because if you weren't doing anything illegal you had nothing to hide right? Same for Nazi Germany, and the "legitimate" government of Britain in the American colonies in 1775.
But it's different now you'll protest those were tyrannies and we are in a democracy. Well listen up my friend it's ISN'T that different, the president is in DIRECT violation of the constitution by declaring war on his own whim only Congress can declare war according to the constitution (and no Congresses rubber stamp allowing the president to declare war was not legit), further that war was declared by the president based on lies (see the Downing Street memos), further we are torturing people, and used Napalm or a Napalm like substance on civilians in Fallujah which is war crime, further NSA wiretaps without a court order are a violation of the bill of rights, further we have by FAR the largest prison population in the industrialized world at over 2 million, 100,000s of which are in there for victimless drug crimes, or pissing off their neighbor and being turned in for "sex crimes." Do you start to see why some of us want to be able to communicate without the government butting into our damn business?
That's all well and good advice for those of us on slashdot. It doesn't fly for a DESKTOP for 99.99% (literally) of the population who use computers. Will no one think of the users?
I know you didn't say Linux was the answer I could tell in fact you were being an M$ b.s. apologist. MY point was that those who complain that Linux is hard to use compared to Windows are only fooling themselves. In order to use Windows as a stable secure platform is just as difficult as using Linux. Only OS X more or less works for a casual user desktop out of the box. Yes perhaps using chat or whatever requires tweaking the firewall, but by default the firewall is on, users run at user level, and application installs are password and drag to the application folder which most average people CAN handle unlike editing ACLs, or editing con fig files to get the sound or xorg to work right.
Jawtheshark sed:
"Oh, and those that say that you can't run in Limited User on XP (as in the fine article is stated) are completely ignorant. I'm running Limited right now, and I have no problem. Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it's never been very hard. The only program I've never been able to run as non-admin is a game called "Children Of The Nile", and I still don't know how to run it as a Limited User. The user that needed it got the "Run As" option checked in the shortcut. Sure she has Admin access that way, but she's my sister and knows that she shouldn't run Admin."
Jeezus that's as difficult as editing config files to get your mouse or sound to work on Linux. If you really think Joe Six pack is going to edit their access control lists to enable their limited user account on XP you are really dreaming. Even if Joe Sixpack figures out how to use access control lists they are going to be damn annoyed to go to all that work and STILL not have all their programs work, I know I'd be annoyed...
At the risk of sounding like an utter Mac fan boy, OS X gets it exactly right, it creates a user level account and no root account by default and then has a slick gui that (sudos or sus???) and asks for a password ONCE when you install software that modifies system files. Cleanly implemented and secure what's not to like? That's the way a secure simple desktop OUGHT to work.
Ubuntu Linux is set up in a similar fashion though I had to modify xorg conf files to get my mouse working and NEVER got sound working despite RTFM, ubutu forums, blah, blah. Linux/BSD makes a great server but isn't ready for the desktop and NEITHER is Windows.
Ding, ding, ding... I'm going to gladly shell out 8 bucks to Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dicks "A Scanner Darkly." It however will be the first film I will have been excited enough to pay for in many months.
I am however worried about ubiquitous tracking. How can that possible be good? Britain for example wants to track EVERY car on the roads and then store the data for 2 years.
e 334686.ece
"Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years."
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/articl
Don't they make the kiddes read 1984 anymore? How much more blatant do things have to get before there is some sort of real effective reaction?
Oh I forgot it's for the children, and against the terrorists and pirates, nevermind.
When I read stuff like this, off the grid survivalist/back to the land hippies don't sound tin foil hat crazy, they sound like smart forerunners of an underground resistance to tyranny.
I'm not really worried about 666 and his noodly appendage either, it was a joke son.
And no I'm not a Christian fundie but implants creep me out to the max. Frist post?
you didn't claim to invent dumbass. Ever heard of prior art? So yes they claimed to invent tabbing between hyperlinks which is clearly bullshit. So yes I win.
The broken patent system is a whole other ball of wax lets deal with broken windows first as that's the subject of this thread.
which it clearly didn't "invent."
I ndex=29479&Group=2
/ 08/microsoft_and_i.html
t hreadID=19810&messageID=381579&start=-1
"Microsoft patents Tab button use
Time: 14:26 EST/19:26 GMT | News Source: Geek.com | Posted By: Robert Stein
A patent for which Microsoft applied on March 6, 1997, has been granted: "Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs." In other words, when a computer user uses the Tab key to move the focus from one hyperlink to another on a webpage opened in a browser, the use of that function is now owned by Microsoft. The Tab patent, number 6,785,865, was granted on August 31st, just one among multiple patents granted to the software giant on that day. Another interesting grant is number 6,784,354, with an application date of March 13, 2003: "Generating a music snippet." Yes, you read that right. Now dividing a music stream into portions is Microsoft's domain."
http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?Thread
Or how about this:
"Microsoft and invention
We've been inspired by the comment that Microsoft's anti-spyware software is "the best product they've ever invented". Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't invent their anti-spyware product. They bought it. Just like most of their best products. And those they didn't buy, they copied. Well, possibly not all of them. But when we put our mind to it, we couldn't think of any of their "best products" that hadn't been either bought or copied.
There have to be some, surely. Put your thinking caps on. What has Microsoft actually invented?"
http://www.bleedingedge.com.au/blog/archives/2005
And this about some patent piracy with Micro$oft claiming to own something it didn't:
"Microsoft Was Found To Be A Patent Pirate
"The user experience is far from ideal but Microsoft has no choice as a result of the defeat it was handed in a patent infringement suit that was filed against the company by Eolas."
Is the above statement true? Microsoft does have a choice. They could have licensed the technology years ago but chose to steal instead. Now they have an inferior product.
Last week Microsoft and Research in Motion (RIM) were whining at a hearing they had bought with money they made on others inventions to members of congress about patent trolls. A patent troll is someone who owns rights to an invention and kicks the crap out of patent pirates who dare to steal.
Microsoft is infamous for having a huge appetite for other's technological property. Eolas is a good example of this. Mike Doyle produced a real invention and has been subjected to years abuse at the hands of a patent pirate.
Microsoft whines about forty or so pending litigations. Most of those inventor's cases probably have considerable merit and that is why Microsoft and other patent pirates are desperate to reform (or is it deform) the patent system into one where they can avoid the consequences of pirating others inventions.
Society functions because of the rule of law. Microsoft has been found to be a patent pirate and in the process they were caught committing fraud on the court. In fact RIM was also caught committing fraud. Gateway was caught destroying evidence. There is an epidemic of technology companies lying, cheating, and stealing others property. They abuse the process of law to bankrupt and brutalize inventors and compound the sin with public relations campaigns which try to paint their victims as the bad players."
http://www.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&
I am the winner, do I get a prize?
Virtual folders you mean like the saved query spotlight searches OS X Tiger has had since last summer, that in turn is just a gui over standard Unix file system metadata? Wow Weeeee Yippee. Of course I'm sure Micro$oft will have claimed to invent it, even though metadata has been available on Unix based systems for years. Yawn, next...
...perhaps Micro$ofts goose will finally get good and cooked like they have deserved for so long.
Not only do they stop "piracy" but they keep the means for making digital media from becoming too cheap. The reason is this, in practical terms the corporation will cease to manufacture digital recorders (or operating systems?) for "consumers" and will enable these features on on multi-thousand dollar "professional" level equipment. After all we can't let the rabble have an independent media and report things the corporations don't want us to know right? Fortunately I can always keep Tiger on my OS X G5 box, or put Linux on a generic box, but watch "consumer" level (cheap) digital recorders and OSs (end to end encryption ring a bell) fade out not, for technical reasons but so the corporations can gain ever more control on what content is made and how it's distributed.
Clap, clap, clap I bow to you...