That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production.
Seems that one of the habits of freemarket fanaticism is contradicting one's own arguments.
In any case, markets will not adjust themselves to reflect the environmental toll taken by their activities. They look for ways to externalize costs (usually to the environment) instead of adopting truly efficient and sustainable practices.
The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects
Flash has a way of stealing focus away from the page its on, causing havoc with input, browser commands, mouse scrolling, etc. I'm not sure to what extent its because of how Flash is written, or because of the browser plugin architecture.
I agree that Firefox goes way too far with its warnings, but this suggestion that a browser should act similar to an http connection for sites bearing self-signed certs seems rather stupid.
If I run a site where I want users to be able to verify my self-signed cert using its fingerprint, or just accepting and saving it for future reference, I want their browsers to present them with some kind of info somewhere in a prompt or the browser frame.
The main problem here is that people wanting to do proper security independently of the CAs don't truly have a vehicle in the browser reserved for that use case. Technically, users can do it but only the most techie users will know not to heed the hysterical screaming in the prompts.
The reason why police/soldiers don't have to guard transactions carried over SSL is the same reason why they're not required by a currency like Bitcoin.
Without someone like him, the moral arguments would be coming entirely from the proprietary camp. As you may recall, Microsoft and others tried to advance a hard moral line against FOSS for a while, saying it was like communism and ought to be illegal.
IMO it didn't work partly because there were clear moral arguments coming from Stallman's software libre corner, and those arguments were associated with the 'GNU' in GNU/Linux enough to lend weight to his views. If people had waited until MS started their anti-FOSS BS to make moral justifications supporting FOSS, I think it would be all over by now and people on/. would be exchanging occasional anecdotes about that embarrassing old slashcode-on-Linux that Slashdot finally got rid of in 2009 because there were no new servers that would recognize OS code signed by FOSS groups (essentially anti-FOSS DRM used to 'protect' people).
IMO Mozilla made a mistake in removing the status bar. Link and other information can now be spoofed by malicious web pages because the user will expect that info to appear within the page rendering area.
Its very hard to fingerprint an anonymous P2P network like I2P. Not only does it use onion-style routing, but every node also defaults to being a router for the rest of the network. What's more, port selection is random.
Even if they throttled everything flowing directly between ISP blocks, they would still only affect the speed marginally.
What does any of this rant after the first paragraph have to do with KDE/Gnome?
If those issues don't concern KDE and Gnome, then there is something fundamentally wrong about their structure/definition in that they are too indifferent to the overall user experience. Distros like Ubuntu may purport to fill the role of holistic designer, but they really don't have the resources or vision to do so.
---
1) Many of them would go along with advertising compatibility if the Linux people made it easy for users to find compatible products. Looking at places like Ubuntu forums and blogs, I see that the practice of "buy it and try it, then cry" still dominates.
2) It's not an SDK if the core APIs and user interface components aren't well-defined and there isn't a clear distinction between the OS and all the stuff that's considered optional. You may think that distro repositories and their dependency management obviate that need, but you would be wrong. Its also not an SDK if the developer docs for the whole spectrum of libraries and services and cannot be accessed in one place in a single format. Its also not an SDK if developer docs are confused as to whether they are addressing application developers or system developers (they are often treated as the same audience in FOSS circles).
3) Check this out: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution#Setting%20xrandr%20changes%20persistently According to Ubuntu, users must add commands to scripts or change xorg.conf manually to make X settings persist. What a joke. The same organization that writes the settings-parsing code must also supply convenient ways to WRITE/SAVE any adjustments to those settings (if the settings involved are even a little bit complex).
In any case, Ubuntu has seen fit to dump X11 for future development. Hopefully they can dump the "we're a Linux too" identity-clusterfk also.
4) Names and branding are extremely important, and 'Linux-Phone' would certainly have died a deservedly horrible death. No one should get away with foisting that must cognitive dissonance onto innocent phone users. The distros you pointed out (by truncating their names in some cases) all prominently identify themselves as Linux products and seek to lump themselves into the "Linux" genre.
Here is the start of Ubuntu's own description from their home page: "Commercially sponsored Debian-derived Linux distribution that focuses on usability, a regular 6-month release cycle...". Red Hat is really "RHEL" with "Linux" right in name (not that I care... a server product isn't aimed at average users). They all want you to think they're basically the same OS, but from an end users standpoint they aren't -- from a tech support standpoint they aren't, especially if you must guide the user over a phone.
All this is markedly different from how the Android brand/identity is handled. Same thing with WebOS (another success that includes the Linux kernel). These products refused to define themselves as "Linux distros". Even Blackberry avoided the syndrome when they acquired QNX (they do not call their new phone OS a 'QNX distro' or other such idiocy).
I'd also like to point out that Apple's iPhone could have also turned into a clusterfk if they asserted it as just another hardware platform for "Mac OS X". It would have attracted the wrong set of first-adopters harboring unrealistic expectations and the iPhone would be in worse shape than AppleTV. Phones do not adhere to PC expectations (and vice versa) so Apple dubbed the OS X variant with a new name.
5) Yeah, free as in 'go twist in the wind'. Incidentally Mozilla identified and avoided this game long ago, so they refuse to package programs for the many flavors of "Linux". Instead they have a tar file that any experienced tech can knit into their system tree structure with only an hour or two of their time (and before you go there, no, simply untaring does not w
I made to same switch to OS X in 2005 for the same reasons. Welcome, it'll be good to have you!
I don't know if OS X is prettier than some Gnome/KDE distros, but it sure is a lot more coherent. Its also much easier to write a program and just have it work on another system because its defined as a complete system, not just a bunch of optional pieces (which KDE and Gnome are themselves).
If they did know, then they'd realize A) a GUI spec is pointless unless it forms part and parcel of a holistic OS platform, otherwise they might as well be trying to reinvent HTML; and B) being a *nix coding geek imparts a natural INferiority when it comes to GUI expertise, not the superiority that most of them obviously feel; and C) Personal Computing is a consumer culture with certain basic use cases and expectations that must be fulfilled, so you shouldn't be surprised that putting 'candy' on everything doesn't work when you expect people to operate their computers in some profoundly different ways.
What are those profound differences? Here's a few:
1) Leaving users to grope in the dark WRT hardware compatability, instead of marketing your software to hardware vendors by offering a simple test suite and standard, trademarked icon that shoppers can readily identify on the package. Leaving it to each distro to define hardware compatibility lists was wrong: They all sucked and were half-hearted at best. HCLs should be the Linux Foundation's job because hardware compatibility is the kernel's role.
2) Leaving budding programmers and power users without an SDK or standard IDE that allows anyone to get their feet wet and share their work with confidence (as in, it will actually run on another novice's machine instead of going down in a dependency flames). If you think this is stupid or off the mark, consider that Linux is doing really well on handhelds and both Google and the Linux Foundation have their own SDKs. No one will do a Desktop SDK because of the old-hacker politics involved and their loathing of vertical integration; LSB does not go far enough and doesn't even define a way to install software packages (all it has is the package format, but no procedures or interfaces are defined).
3) Leaving users to fight-it-out with their device settings. There are still some influential (old people) who behave like Linux video was good enough with VGA framebuffer support and/dev/dsp output for one audio app at a time. Yet others treat video and audio as simplistic and beneath their concern. This has lead, for example, to subsystems like X11 that could not support the use case of 'Change the display to these new parameters and if the user indicates they work, save those setiings'. Instead we got a situation where every distro had to write their own display settings code, and they all did it badly because the assumption that display settings were just too 'simple' for X11 itself to manage them just wasn't true.
Also, what most PC programmers and techs refer to as 'OS components' (libraries, services, etc) are astoundingly referred to as 'applications' in the Linux world. This distorts the way Linux techs relay help and tips to novice users to the point where the distinction between OS and application tends to disappear.
4) Relating to the "platform" primarily by its Kernel, a piece of software that is formless/invisible to most non-programmers. Suffice it to say that if Google were marketing a handheld "Linux" to phone users, their offering wouldn't be a tenth as successful as Android and there would be all kinds of negative politics involved that called for Gnome and KDE versions just for starters. The whole community is guilty of this misstep, which amounts to a sort of mass geek delusion. Note that Firefox didn't play this game and it succeeded because people knew how it looked and behaved by default, and any third parties changing the Firefox code were forced to change the name of their offering to something other than 'Firefox'. OTOH, "Linux" defines an almost formless sea of non-kernel alterations that we geeks expect users to become familiar with.
5) Inserting the OS people between the user and the app authors, ensuring that only the biggest enthusiasts and coder-types make an effort to interact directly with the authors. This is part of what I call 'distro culture' which itself has many ill effects. Contrast this with the App Store concept where authors upload their wares themselves, and get a communication channel to/from users.
Someone from outside (Ubuntu in this case) is applying pressure for us to change/move something to emulate Apple, so we'll remove most of that feature instead.
It's called taking your ball and going home. Ha! That'll teach em!
KDE would do the opposite: Make the feature user-relocatable and put little black arrows on each widget turning them into drop-down menus. They would also add a new section to the browsing tree in Konqueror allowing you to browse windows that are minimized/maximized and to save 'favorites' for the windows you minimize/maximize the most. This, in turn, would send people who try KDE because 'its more like Windows' running and screaming away from the environment days or weeks earlier than they had been before.
I think you got a sampling of the physics and precious little about the market. Either that or you're just very biased, because your responses are disingenuous. Where did you go after physics? Public Relations?
Nuclear construction costs started on an exponential growth curve in the 1960s.
Reprocessing was initially halted by Gerald Ford in response to India's bomb test (proliferation fears).
The reprocessing ban was lifted in 1981! (What gives? Oh yeah... the fearmongering)
If fearmongering is a problem, then why do the biggest political proponents for nuclear power in the USA spread so much hysteria over nuclear power in non-NATO-aligned countries? It seems that from a certain mindset, nuclear power is very much an "its for us but not for you" technology.
Why are nuclear's biggest proponents against environmental regulations in general? Why their zeal for advancing the police/surveillance state (starting with War On Drugs)? Why the domestic "dirty-bomb" hysteria? Why do they work in the interest of highly concentrated wealth for a very few?
Why are they war mongers??
The nuclear industry was originally promoted to make our society more energy-intensive, not greener or more efficient. In our society that attracted the power-mad people like a magnet, and the rest of us got suspicious. More than the energy itself, what pervasive nuclear power provides is the ultimate justification for repressive police state mentality -- To that I say No, without the 'thanks'.
Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad".
Thank you, Rush Limbaugh (who blamed the oil spill on environmentalists using similar illogic).
I get the sense that you don't know much about the nuclear energy market. And I am no expert either; What I do know is that France was forced recently to revise their 95% fuel reprocessing figure down to 10%.
Ten percent.
They lied through their teeth about the feasibility of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and were shipping the stuff (i.e. waste) off to foreign countries like Russia where it just sat.
There is also the interesting contradiction that the nuclear industry has the fewest liabilities in power generation due to Bush-2 legislation, but the market still lacks enthusiasm for investment and the price for building and retiring nuclear plants is sky high compared to what was promised. Nuclear is now even more expensive than solar, with the former continuing to rise in price while the latter keeps dropping in price. In the meantime wind is still kicking nuclear's ass, so to speak.
Environmentalists (who couldn't even get subsidies for renewables to anywhere approach the subsidies per unit of energy that fossil fuels receive) are supposed to have stopped the nuclear industry in its tracks. But it seems to me that Wall St. could not see enough short-term gains to be had from nuclear generation and that nuclear technology failed in the market. Indeed, the less market-oriented a country is, the less likely it is to push hard for nuclear energy.
As for nuclear's mid-to-long term, I remain unconvinced. Five years ago, the industry was calling for a more than 40-fold expansion. But from what I've seen, a twofold expansion would exhaust easily mined and processed uranium in short order. Perhaps reprocessing would become attractive at that point. But as the number of decommissioned nuclear plants and weapons proliferation risks mount for the industry, the overall picture may look less and less compelling.
He mentioned encryption and seems to imply an anonymizing network layer, too (at least that's how his idea sounds to me) which of course cannot be tapped. Moglen is saying this new system should help with an Egypt-like scenario, and I know Tor was deployed to get some Egyptians back online during the riots. Problem is Tor is limited (in speed and mainly to the web) and interaction with authority nodes can be identified & blocked relatively easily.
Lately I've been spreading the word about I2P, which is relatively fast, less centralized and is more general-purpose so that media transmission and P2P are realistic activities on this network. I would recommend that anyone concerned about privacy and centralization give it a try.
The long name is "Invisible Internet Project" and the I2P acronym was chosen to signal that its P2P-friendly. Technically the software is called a "router" because it routes as it anonymizes, much like Tor.
Fundamentally I2P is a network transport layer (like IP, whereas Tor is more like TCP) that comes with a few applications to handle email, web and torrents. You can get plugins for it now that provide things like a distributed filesystem (a port of Tahoe-LAFS) on top of which distributed websites (called deepsites) are being built.
I know that I2P has weathered some attacks. I think it can do this mainly because the network is less centralized than Tor (there are no directory or other 'authorities' programmed into I2P).
I agree wholeheartedly. Creating an environment where users can't casually tell the difference between a local program and a website is just evil. It robs users of what little cluefulness they can already grab onto in modern systems, and the resulting confusion can be used to shift control of users' applications away from them without them realizing it.
Agreed, but... Superhero stories have done much the same thing too. The 'lesser' people are expected to simply stand aside for the 'ubermenschen' that have identified themselves with the national interest (e.g. "the American way"). The superheroes' methods and goals are rarely if ever scrutinized or reigned-in.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one am glad that someone forced the government to actually go after bin Laden instead of keeping him around as a convenient boogeyman.
You better believe they're corrupt!
http://www.vimeo.com/18417770
He also suggests DNSCurve as an alternative. Would be interesting to try setting up both on the same name server.
I predict that IPv4-only access will become a sort of hallmark for services that prefer to cater to the relatively well-off.
TFA talks about an "incentive" for everyone to get on IPv6, but markets often have the opposite effect.
That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production.
Seems that one of the habits of freemarket fanaticism is contradicting one's own arguments.
In any case, markets will not adjust themselves to reflect the environmental toll taken by their activities. They look for ways to externalize costs (usually to the environment) instead of adopting truly efficient and sustainable practices.
The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects
Flash has a way of stealing focus away from the page its on, causing havoc with input, browser commands, mouse scrolling, etc. I'm not sure to what extent its because of how Flash is written, or because of the browser plugin architecture.
...for not being a friend or follower of Big Brother.
This has absolutely no relation to the subject at hand. The person who runs the blog isn't a public official or state employee.
Also the link you posted doesn't single out any one type of political group. It could be used by conservatives too.
Lastly, the laws protecting the emails and the political donation info of private citizens are very different.
I agree that Firefox goes way too far with its warnings, but this suggestion that a browser should act similar to an http connection for sites bearing self-signed certs seems rather stupid.
If I run a site where I want users to be able to verify my self-signed cert using its fingerprint, or just accepting and saving it for future reference, I want their browsers to present them with some kind of info somewhere in a prompt or the browser frame.
The main problem here is that people wanting to do proper security independently of the CAs don't truly have a vehicle in the browser reserved for that use case. Technically, users can do it but only the most techie users will know not to heed the hysterical screaming in the prompts.
Its enforced by cryptography.
The reason why police/soldiers don't have to guard transactions carried over SSL is the same reason why they're not required by a currency like Bitcoin.
Without someone like him, the moral arguments would be coming entirely from the proprietary camp. As you may recall, Microsoft and others tried to advance a hard moral line against FOSS for a while, saying it was like communism and ought to be illegal.
IMO it didn't work partly because there were clear moral arguments coming from Stallman's software libre corner, and those arguments were associated with the 'GNU' in GNU/Linux enough to lend weight to his views. If people had waited until MS started their anti-FOSS BS to make moral justifications supporting FOSS, I think it would be all over by now and people on /. would be exchanging occasional anecdotes about that embarrassing old slashcode-on-Linux that Slashdot finally got rid of in 2009 because there were no new servers that would recognize OS code signed by FOSS groups (essentially anti-FOSS DRM used to 'protect' people).
I tried it. It sucked.
IMO Mozilla made a mistake in removing the status bar. Link and other information can now be spoofed by malicious web pages because the user will expect that info to appear within the page rendering area.
Its very hard to fingerprint an anonymous P2P network like I2P. Not only does it use onion-style routing, but every node also defaults to being a router for the rest of the network. What's more, port selection is random.
Even if they throttled everything flowing directly between ISP blocks, they would still only affect the speed marginally.
What does any of this rant after the first paragraph have to do with KDE/Gnome?
If those issues don't concern KDE and Gnome, then there is something fundamentally wrong about their structure/definition in that they are too indifferent to the overall user experience. Distros like Ubuntu may purport to fill the role of holistic designer, but they really don't have the resources or vision to do so.
---
1) Many of them would go along with advertising compatibility if the Linux people made it easy for users to find compatible products. Looking at places like Ubuntu forums and blogs, I see that the practice of "buy it and try it, then cry" still dominates.
2) It's not an SDK if the core APIs and user interface components aren't well-defined and there isn't a clear distinction between the OS and all the stuff that's considered optional. You may think that distro repositories and their dependency management obviate that need, but you would be wrong. Its also not an SDK if the developer docs for the whole spectrum of libraries and services and cannot be accessed in one place in a single format. Its also not an SDK if developer docs are confused as to whether they are addressing application developers or system developers (they are often treated as the same audience in FOSS circles).
3) Check this out: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution#Setting%20xrandr%20changes%20persistently
According to Ubuntu, users must add commands to scripts or change xorg.conf manually to make X settings persist. What a joke. The same organization that writes the settings-parsing code must also supply convenient ways to WRITE/SAVE any adjustments to those settings (if the settings involved are even a little bit complex).
In any case, Ubuntu has seen fit to dump X11 for future development. Hopefully they can dump the "we're a Linux too" identity-clusterfk also.
4) Names and branding are extremely important, and 'Linux-Phone' would certainly have died a deservedly horrible death. No one should get away with foisting that must cognitive dissonance onto innocent phone users. The distros you pointed out (by truncating their names in some cases) all prominently identify themselves as Linux products and seek to lump themselves into the "Linux" genre.
Here is the start of Ubuntu's own description from their home page: "Commercially sponsored Debian-derived Linux distribution that focuses on usability, a regular 6-month release cycle...". Red Hat is really "RHEL" with "Linux" right in name (not that I care... a server product isn't aimed at average users). They all want you to think they're basically the same OS, but from an end users standpoint they aren't -- from a tech support standpoint they aren't, especially if you must guide the user over a phone.
All this is markedly different from how the Android brand/identity is handled. Same thing with WebOS (another success that includes the Linux kernel). These products refused to define themselves as "Linux distros". Even Blackberry avoided the syndrome when they acquired QNX (they do not call their new phone OS a 'QNX distro' or other such idiocy).
I'd also like to point out that Apple's iPhone could have also turned into a clusterfk if they asserted it as just another hardware platform for "Mac OS X". It would have attracted the wrong set of first-adopters harboring unrealistic expectations and the iPhone would be in worse shape than AppleTV. Phones do not adhere to PC expectations (and vice versa) so Apple dubbed the OS X variant with a new name.
5) Yeah, free as in 'go twist in the wind'. Incidentally Mozilla identified and avoided this game long ago, so they refuse to package programs for the many flavors of "Linux". Instead they have a tar file that any experienced tech can knit into their system tree structure with only an hour or two of their time (and before you go there, no, simply untaring does not w
I made to same switch to OS X in 2005 for the same reasons. Welcome, it'll be good to have you!
I don't know if OS X is prettier than some Gnome/KDE distros, but it sure is a lot more coherent. Its also much easier to write a program and just have it work on another system because its defined as a complete system, not just a bunch of optional pieces (which KDE and Gnome are themselves).
...what they're doing.
If they did know, then they'd realize A) a GUI spec is pointless unless it forms part and parcel of a holistic OS platform, otherwise they might as well be trying to reinvent HTML; and B) being a *nix coding geek imparts a natural INferiority when it comes to GUI expertise, not the superiority that most of them obviously feel; and C) Personal Computing is a consumer culture with certain basic use cases and expectations that must be fulfilled, so you shouldn't be surprised that putting 'candy' on everything doesn't work when you expect people to operate their computers in some profoundly different ways.
What are those profound differences? Here's a few:
1) Leaving users to grope in the dark WRT hardware compatability, instead of marketing your software to hardware vendors by offering a simple test suite and standard, trademarked icon that shoppers can readily identify on the package. Leaving it to each distro to define hardware compatibility lists was wrong: They all sucked and were half-hearted at best. HCLs should be the Linux Foundation's job because hardware compatibility is the kernel's role.
2) Leaving budding programmers and power users without an SDK or standard IDE that allows anyone to get their feet wet and share their work with confidence (as in, it will actually run on another novice's machine instead of going down in a dependency flames). If you think this is stupid or off the mark, consider that Linux is doing really well on handhelds and both Google and the Linux Foundation have their own SDKs. No one will do a Desktop SDK because of the old-hacker politics involved and their loathing of vertical integration; LSB does not go far enough and doesn't even define a way to install software packages (all it has is the package format, but no procedures or interfaces are defined).
3) Leaving users to fight-it-out with their device settings. There are still some influential (old people) who behave like Linux video was good enough with VGA framebuffer support and /dev/dsp output for one audio app at a time. Yet others treat video and audio as simplistic and beneath their concern. This has lead, for example, to subsystems like X11 that could not support the use case of 'Change the display to these new parameters and if the user indicates they work, save those setiings'. Instead we got a situation where every distro had to write their own display settings code, and they all did it badly because the assumption that display settings were just too 'simple' for X11 itself to manage them just wasn't true.
Also, what most PC programmers and techs refer to as 'OS components' (libraries, services, etc) are astoundingly referred to as 'applications' in the Linux world. This distorts the way Linux techs relay help and tips to novice users to the point where the distinction between OS and application tends to disappear.
4) Relating to the "platform" primarily by its Kernel, a piece of software that is formless/invisible to most non-programmers. Suffice it to say that if Google were marketing a handheld "Linux" to phone users, their offering wouldn't be a tenth as successful as Android and there would be all kinds of negative politics involved that called for Gnome and KDE versions just for starters. The whole community is guilty of this misstep, which amounts to a sort of mass geek delusion. Note that Firefox didn't play this game and it succeeded because people knew how it looked and behaved by default, and any third parties changing the Firefox code were forced to change the name of their offering to something other than 'Firefox'. OTOH, "Linux" defines an almost formless sea of non-kernel alterations that we geeks expect users to become familiar with.
5) Inserting the OS people between the user and the app authors, ensuring that only the biggest enthusiasts and coder-types make an effort to interact directly with the authors. This is part of what I call 'distro culture' which itself has many ill effects. Contrast this with the App Store concept where authors upload their wares themselves, and get a communication channel to/from users.
The KDE maximize vertical/horizontal using middle-click was something I got constant use out of. The rest of KDE however drove me away.
Someone from outside (Ubuntu in this case) is applying pressure for us to change/move something to emulate Apple, so we'll remove most of that feature instead.
It's called taking your ball and going home. Ha! That'll teach em!
KDE would do the opposite: Make the feature user-relocatable and put little black arrows on each widget turning them into drop-down menus. They would also add a new section to the browsing tree in Konqueror allowing you to browse windows that are minimized/maximized and to save 'favorites' for the windows you minimize/maximize the most. This, in turn, would send people who try KDE because 'its more like Windows' running and screaming away from the environment days or weeks earlier than they had been before.
Even many ISPs are against some of the crap governments try to pull.
Just wait for them to merge with some media conglomerates and that opposition, too, shall pass.
And for those who can enable both P2P and anon connections within the same technology, more power to them!
I think you got a sampling of the physics and precious little about the market. Either that or you're just very biased, because your responses are disingenuous. Where did you go after physics? Public Relations?
Nuclear construction costs started on an exponential growth curve in the 1960s.
Reprocessing was initially halted by Gerald Ford in response to India's bomb test (proliferation fears).
The reprocessing ban was lifted in 1981! (What gives? Oh yeah... the fearmongering)
If fearmongering is a problem, then why do the biggest political proponents for nuclear power in the USA spread so much hysteria over nuclear power in non-NATO-aligned countries? It seems that from a certain mindset, nuclear power is very much an "its for us but not for you" technology.
Why are nuclear's biggest proponents against environmental regulations in general? Why their zeal for advancing the police/surveillance state (starting with War On Drugs)? Why the domestic "dirty-bomb" hysteria? Why do they work in the interest of highly concentrated wealth for a very few?
Why are they war mongers??
The nuclear industry was originally promoted to make our society more energy-intensive, not greener or more efficient. In our society that attracted the power-mad people like a magnet, and the rest of us got suspicious. More than the energy itself, what pervasive nuclear power provides is the ultimate justification for repressive police state mentality -- To that I say No, without the 'thanks'.
Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad".
Thank you, Rush Limbaugh (who blamed the oil spill on environmentalists using similar illogic).
I get the sense that you don't know much about the nuclear energy market. And I am no expert either; What I do know is that France was forced recently to revise their 95% fuel reprocessing figure down to 10%.
Ten percent.
They lied through their teeth about the feasibility of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and were shipping the stuff (i.e. waste) off to foreign countries like Russia where it just sat.
There is also the interesting contradiction that the nuclear industry has the fewest liabilities in power generation due to Bush-2 legislation, but the market still lacks enthusiasm for investment and the price for building and retiring nuclear plants is sky high compared to what was promised. Nuclear is now even more expensive than solar, with the former continuing to rise in price while the latter keeps dropping in price. In the meantime wind is still kicking nuclear's ass, so to speak.
Environmentalists (who couldn't even get subsidies for renewables to anywhere approach the subsidies per unit of energy that fossil fuels receive) are supposed to have stopped the nuclear industry in its tracks. But it seems to me that Wall St. could not see enough short-term gains to be had from nuclear generation and that nuclear technology failed in the market. Indeed, the less market-oriented a country is, the less likely it is to push hard for nuclear energy.
As for nuclear's mid-to-long term, I remain unconvinced. Five years ago, the industry was calling for a more than 40-fold expansion. But from what I've seen, a twofold expansion would exhaust easily mined and processed uranium in short order. Perhaps reprocessing would become attractive at that point. But as the number of decommissioned nuclear plants and weapons proliferation risks mount for the industry, the overall picture may look less and less compelling.
He mentioned encryption and seems to imply an anonymizing network layer, too (at least that's how his idea sounds to me) which of course cannot be tapped. Moglen is saying this new system should help with an Egypt-like scenario, and I know Tor was deployed to get some Egyptians back online during the riots. Problem is Tor is limited (in speed and mainly to the web) and interaction with authority nodes can be identified & blocked relatively easily.
Lately I've been spreading the word about I2P, which is relatively fast, less centralized and is more general-purpose so that media transmission and P2P are realistic activities on this network. I would recommend that anyone concerned about privacy and centralization give it a try.
The long name is "Invisible Internet Project" and the I2P acronym was chosen to signal that its P2P-friendly. Technically the software is called a "router" because it routes as it anonymizes, much like Tor.
Fundamentally I2P is a network transport layer (like IP, whereas Tor is more like TCP) that comes with a few applications to handle email, web and torrents. You can get plugins for it now that provide things like a distributed filesystem (a port of Tahoe-LAFS) on top of which distributed websites (called deepsites) are being built.
I know that I2P has weathered some attacks. I think it can do this mainly because the network is less centralized than Tor (there are no directory or other 'authorities' programmed into I2P).
geti2p.net
I agree wholeheartedly. Creating an environment where users can't casually tell the difference between a local program and a website is just evil. It robs users of what little cluefulness they can already grab onto in modern systems, and the resulting confusion can be used to shift control of users' applications away from them without them realizing it.
Agreed, but... Superhero stories have done much the same thing too. The 'lesser' people are expected to simply stand aside for the 'ubermenschen' that have identified themselves with the national interest (e.g. "the American way"). The superheroes' methods and goals are rarely if ever scrutinized or reigned-in.