That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
Yes, specifically that it'll fragment the entire network and potentially destroy interoperability across it. The internet would no longer be a unified global network. Network neutrality is the key to preventing this, but as we've seen, corporations don't want that: They want to turn the internet into a largely read-only media... just a better version of television.
A classic example of how this is shaping up is with Comcast, the Great Evil of the USA internet: They recently instituted a 250GB transfer limit, and then exempted Hulu from it, which they bought out. Netflix, a competing service at a lower price is now sitting out in the cold. Let's run some numbers and see how much of a problem this is. The average person watches 2.7 hours of TV per day; and it remains the single largest leisure activity in the United States. The average Netflix stream (based on my experience), is about 350KB/s. So that comes out to about 3.24GB per person, per day -- or 98.82 per month (the average length of a month). Now the number of people per household is a bit shaky, since there aren't any current numbers, but it's around 2.6 people per. So the average household will consume 257 GB per month if they used Netflix.
How strange that the bandwith cap is almost exactly the same number eh? Make no mistake -- this is a war between big business, and the only losers will be you and me. This is what happens when you let people into public positions who entertain the notion that capitalism runs best when it isn't regulated. Every infrastructure service in this country runs better with regulation, and the internet (telecommunications) is not an exception. Every time we let the private sector take over, we get crap like Standard Oil, AT&T (pre-breakup), Microsoft, etc. And now we have Montsano eating up our food supply (literally).
If network neutrality isn't given the force of law in the next two years, then two things are going to happen: Either we start building tunneled networks so all traffic through the last mile ISPs is encrypted and cannot be shaped, modified, or tampered with except in terms of bandwidth and latency as a whole... or we abandon the internet and start a new network that has no last mile restrictions (read: wireless, read: pirate radio).
What I mean is the rate of technological progress is constrained by the length of time before a patent expires. Existing technology can't be improved upon and new technology won't have a competitive price (lower prices = greater demand). The only alternatives then is to come up with another method to achieve the same effect (research), wait for the time to run out on the patent, engage in a legal battle which may or may not invalidate the patent, or license the patent. In an ideal capitalist economy, the cost of licensing the patent would be equal to or less than the cost of any of the other options. In practice, this rarely occurs.
The problem is that the duration of the patent is fixed, and since most science and technology is built on previous innovation, the rate of advancement is constrained by the length of the patent. This only becomes a problem when the capacity for advancement for an equal period of time exceeds the period of time the patent exists. In the automotive industry, for example, this is not a big problem. In information technology, it is a massive problem that has gutted the industry for the past decade -- we hit the artificial limit sometime around 2000--2002. Ever since then, progress has become a straight line with advances occuring on a predictable (if slow) time table.
why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."
Doesn't matter. In this country, like many others who have adopted the principle of "intellectual property", technological progress is constrained by the length of time it takes for patents to expire, and the willingness of any new entrants into the market to bear the excessive legal costs of fighting off legal attacks based on patents. In other words, even if the technology became available tomorrow, and had all of the prerequisites met for low cost, high yield industrial processing... it would not enter the market for several years while the incumbent market players played out all possible legal scenarios. At least in the United States, the appeals process is nearly limitless. in Europe, the European Union provides a similar capacity for limitless administrative delay.
Most of these things all revolve around communicating with others. Daughters used to spend all their time talking on the phone (watch an old episode of Gidget for an example). Now it's texting on internet devices.
The internet has always been a communications technology, and women tend to communicate more in both frequency and diversity of content. But it's a leap to say that means women are more important. A lot of internet traffic is streaming media and bittorrent. Does that mean those are the first things people think of when you mention the internet? Probably not. Quantity doesn't always equate to importance.
Conversely, men aged 18-35 have never been social movers and shakers; They're the grunts. Always have been. It's never been any different in IT than anywhere else... that age group is always used for something new and experimental because they're disposable. If young men throw away their lives in war, poor career choices, or develop work-related injuries, etc., we just give them a line about how honorable their sacrifice was and then lead them away from the public spotlight.
I guess my point is that studies like this offer neither wisdom nor insight; The conclusions drawn invariably reflect our own prejudices. And they will continue to do so until the social expectations of men and women, young and old, etc., are equal.
That's a rather good analogy, but with a significant flaw: states know the size of other armies almost exactly...
It wasn't always that way. It's not like satellites have been around since war was invented. Just because the technology and methodology has changed doesn't mean that principles behind control of terrain, force multipliers, offense versus defense, etc., are any less valid.
I'd say that cyberwarfare is a sort of 'supplementary warfare', designed to shorten a war and lessen casualties by causing enough confusion and chaos that the enemy can't mount an effective defense and is forced to surrender.
If you are able to spread a virus that attacks critical infrastructure like the electric grid, water supply, hospitals, etc., you can unbalance the civilian population, which means fewer resources can be devoted to a military response -- it's a lot harder to maintain an army when your own population is starving, in the dark, or cannot receive medical treatment. I wouldn't say it's as "supplementary" as nuclear weapons. Sure, you might not let one off the chain everytime there's a problem, but having the capability constrains the number of options the enemy has.
I've never heard of this. Can you cite or give a proper name to the legislation?
The law was limited to certain jewelry manufacturers inducing the government to force anyone selling a diamond to disclose its manufacturing process; Specifically, whether it was created in a laboratory, or pulled out of the ground. So it was basically a labelling law (administrative), not a ban on the sale of them. But it was the catalyst for the current market -- The rest of the industry used the legislation to discredit synthetic diamonds with marketing propaganda. There are laboratories that sell a few carot diamonds, even pre-cut, at dramatically lower prices directly off their website -- but finding a jeweler to set it for you, and then later reselling it (if desired), is -- shall we say -- a difficult thing to achieve. Now, there's no citation or scientific paper I can point you to, but if you Google it yourself, you'll quickly conclude it's much more time consuming and difficult to get a lab-grown diamond set on a ring on your finger than to just order one online that was dug up using forced labor and slavery.
If the government hadn't stepped in and forced a delineation between the two products, the bottom would have fallen out of the market once new competitors entered and reduced the difference to something akin to a "Pepsi" challenge. And really, as much as you might like the taste of [favorite drink], they can't charge you twice, let alone fifty, times more, before the market shifts as people decide "almost the same" is a better purchasing choice.
Governments want to keep vulnerabilities secret so they can hit the enemy, but the enemy has the same equipment and setup as ours. If you increase resistance to attacks locally, the same happens remotely.
So the decision to be made is, what's more important: Our offensive capability, or our defensive capability? It's a zero sum equation, but with a twist: Every offensive action creates a corresponding signature which can be used to increase defense against that action next time. Effective surveillance increases the chance of detection and remediation. So the tipping point is the ratio of exploitable vulnerabilities (think of this as army size) each party possesses. If you have more than your enemy by a considerable margin, your enemy is unlikely to attack. Conversely, if you don't have sufficient resources to discover and refine vulnerabilities and the intelligence capabilities to know where to use them (and when), your best response is to form alliances with others, so that when a vulnerability is used on their infrastructure, they share their surveillance with all parties; thus creating a force multiplier in favor of defense.
I guess my point is that the problem can be framed using conventional military tactics, rules of engagement, etc.; But I would hesitate to equate it to military action. Otherwise you wind up in a legal quagmire: That would be turning that guy who keeps trying to run Reaver against my router to hack his way onto my network into an enemy combatant or a private citizen into an arms dealer for having a copy of TrueCrypt.
We can make it smaller, but we still can't alter the thermodynamics of the system: Specifically Black's Law -- the more current you pump into a given area, the more heat it's going to give off. Electromigration is a already a significant engineering barrier to further minaturization. Nanowires are going to break down even faster than existing circuit etchings.
I'm sure there's an EE reading this who can provide the grisly details of how circuit pathways would degrade, and the equations showing the reduced MTBF. But it's my lunch break right now, and I'm lazy.:)
Blood diamonds are diamonds that have been mined. And up until science came up with a way to create synthetic and flawless diamonds, they were a rare and valuable natural resource. But like I said, until then. What happened after was laws were passed banning the use of synthetic diamonds in jewelry, and by 'happy' coincidence, their use in industrial process as well. Thus the distributors of diamonds in this (and other) countries could continue to command large sums of money for a rare and natural resource -- even though we now had a common and abundantly available supply via industrial process.
And so, because of the decisions of those individuals, corporations, etc., with the kind help of the majority of Congress and the authorization of the President, we helped make it possible for the exploitation of millions. We assisted in the enslavement of human beings, by trading our dollars for the fruit of those unnecessary labors. And we have allowed this to go on for as long as it has, because as long as we don't have to stare into their faces with a recognition of what they've done -- that our dollars do it for us, we can remain in ignorant or apathetic bliss.
People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature.
So the four crusades, 10 year war, etc., -- all self defense, right? Christianity has a long and bloody history.
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Christian jihad is exempt from the usual scrutiny. It's only people who dress and act differently than us that are terrorists. Everybody knows that. -_- And all this legislation would do is codify our prejudice into law... today it's terrorism, before that it was communism, before that, fascism... there'll always be an intangible "ism" that we're at war with, and this "ism" will be all the justification our government needs to become an "ism" itself to its people.
. if the result is.90 or better it is likely your person.
So what you're saying is, with a copy of the database I could impersonate 1 in 10 people in India. How... very... secure. Point of note: People's irises change over time, unlike fingerprints.
Where does India outsource/their/ IT jobs for managing things like this database?
Erm, the United States. We're the world leaders in the manufacture of sophisticated mass-surveillance and tracking technology. It's our other major export besides financial know-how, bombs, and working-class misery. The NSA is building a data center right now to track every packet of data sent within the borders of this country. And we don't just store biometric hashes -- W're taking complete, high-resolution imagery of our citizens bodies and keeping them on file. The kind of surveillance and tracking we do on our own citizens make this look like a high school science project.
There's no reason to think we wouldn't happily help the corporation of India... er, I mean, the country of India (sorry, I'm American.. it's hard to keep corporations and governments separate).
Obviously copyright is the most important issue of our time. Look at how much went into ACTA/SOPA/PIPA/CISPA and how little is going into fixing our education, healthcare, research and poverty issues.
I think you're mistaken. You, I, and most of the world population, finds education, health care, research, and decent living conditions to be the most important issue of our time -- or any time, for that matter. However, wealth is power and wealth has become highly concentrated amongst, perhaps, a few thousand people in this country -- they have all the say about what that wealth does. It can be used to help the impoverished... or it can be used to further restrict our lives and further impoverish us for their benefit.
But it's not going to change because we aren't willing to kill the people who are. I'm not advocating that be the first option considered, but the power of the people depends on being able to make good on the threat of radical modification or destruction of the government; in much the same way Mutually Assurred Destruction kept the peace between the USSR and the USA during the cold war, an armed and educated populace is the best defense against class warfare. You will note the extensive "anti-terror" framework that has acted to prevent any group organizing for political representation, and that gun control laws have become inordinately restrictive. Significant government resources are being devoted to discrediting any ground roots movement or potential political leaders and this framework is most directly put against anyone who directly exposes this framework -- Wikileaks is one example, but the Tor network is another, and there's been remarkably little coverage on the NSA's project to store all information transmitted on the internet that originates or passes through the United States. This is not a project intended to be a resource for foreign surveillance: It is intended to watch US citizens. And recently, high-tech surveillance drones have started to be deployed in major metropolitan areas.
The United States is employing technologically sophisticated measures to create a police state as bad (if not worse) than China; But unlike China, they have created a digital iron curtain to wall off media coverage of this vast change in domestic policy. It is not a coincidence that most of the censorship technologies in use around the world were created here; It is a byproduct of deep and pervasive surveillance technologies already deployed here. We talk about the future of our society as being highly transparent, but that's only true of the average person, who will soon be proverbially naked. Only criminals and the government/corporate superstructure will be allowed to wear clothes; Only they will have privacy.
The naked truth is... copyright law is class warfare. And it's a symptom of a much larger war going on.
It was signed into law by a conservative. Congress at that time was republican-controlled as well. If the law was approved by conservatives, then the law is conservative by definition.
NCLB increased federal control; that is a fact.
That's a point for neither the conservative nor liberal team; Passing federal laws isn't inherently political. The substance of the law is political, and in this case... it was conservative. I'm sorry -- I wish I could tell you that it's all those nasty liberals fault, but believe it or not, your political party of choice makes mistakes too. Worse, they make them about as often as the "other guys".
And then the Federal government took control, which is right about when public education started going downhill.
So when the New Deal legislation came through and the federal government built tens of thousands of schools... that made things worse? And when they allowed blacks and women to attend school -- bad, right? And when, thanks to federal legislation, 8 states in the South that refused to provide public education were overruled and their populations educated anyway... this resulted in a lowered quality of life? That's some fine detective work there, Lou.
Segregation is a different matter. You are being disingenuous by lumping segregationists in with those who simply don't want bureaucrats in Washington dictating one-size-fits-all policy to their local schools.
The "one size fits all" policy is what ended segregation. It's also been what's allowed people to send their kids to school without having them be indoctrinated by religious beliefs they don't agree with. The "one size fits all" policy established accreditation of educators, so only people who had demonstrated ability to teach would be allowed to.
People who want their kids to be properly educated and want to have a say about it are not racists.
Quite a few of them were back then. They aren't that way today thanks to that "one size fits all" legislation you're hating on. I'm glad that everyone has free and full access to an education today -- including blacks, women, and non-catholics. Because in a word without that legislation, only white, catholic, land-owning men would receive an education... and considering that we fled Europe and started this country to get away from the disasterous results of letting that kind of person make decisions for everyone else, I am very, very glad that public education exists today. My only complaints are that it is underfunded, and hamstrung with this particular piece of legislation -- the product of a short-lived chokehold on our government by southern conservatives, which I only hope will be reversed before the damage to society becomes too great to recover from.
To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process,
An act of Congress is what gave us public schools in their modern incarnation to begin with. It's the No Child Left Behind legislation, courtesy of one George W. Bush. It probably would have been dismantled by now, except that it happened in 2001, just before the 9/11 bombings. After that, it was forgotten... and it shouldn't have been.
If you want to blame anything, blame that. Before Congress mandated public education, it was generally only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to school. Early into the industrial revolution, workers gathered together and realized that the only hope their children would have of leaving the farms, or the then-prevalent poverty of the urban areas. At the time, child labor was common-place, as was disfigurement and serious injury due to their use in the factories.
As a result, three major groups worked to build public schools: The irish, with catholic schools -- these dominated the eastern United States. The negros (hey, that's what they were called during that time period), using various Freedmen foundations, primarily in the central and south-central parts of the country, and labor rights activists, which were mostly along the central and western parts of the country. From this patchwork of state-level activity, eventually all of the 'northern' states had mandated elementary-school education by the 1930s. The South, predictably, lagged behind, with only 4 states having such laws. They also generally forbade blacks and women from education.
The modern education system as you see it today didn't exist until the early 1950s, when we achieved the milestone of having more than half of all adults in possession of a high school diploma. At about the same time, federal laws were passed, making every state provide public education. Of course, you know what happened next: The South resisted, as they always have, and we had to send the National Guard in to put a gun in the face of the arrogant asshats and desegregate the schools.
Bush and his conservative allies want to destroy public education, and No Child Left Behind was the perfect vehicle for it: It was specifically designed to weaken the overall educational infrastructure, and as a result, costs are skyrocketing, performance is plummeting, and the divisions between the rich and poor are widening at a record pace. There is nobody more worthy of blame here than southern republicans and Bush -- they masterminded the whole collapse with a single piece of legislation that nobody paid much attention to. Even as educators screamed "Look at this! It's gonna kill your child's future," we were too enamored with fresh imagery of the twin towers collapsing to care about anything. And now, we live with our collective mistake -- we gave too much power to the government during a time of crisis, and now a great many institutions in this country have been reduced to slag because of that moment of weakness.
The difference however, is that the USA reflects on its past in a much more transparent way than China does today.
Transparency must be why, after Vietnam, we stopped broadcasting live coverage of the war and made sure every embedded journalist turns in his/her footage to be edited for "homeland security" reasons prior to being sent in for publication.
Transparency is why we have our own Star Chamber now, where suspected terrorists are tried, convicted, and sentenced, in secret trials where they cannot see the evidence presented against them, nor offer testimony in their defense.
Transparency is why at the bottom of most google search results, is the phrase "In response to a complaint we received under the 'US Digital Millenium Copyright Act' we have removed n results."
And transparency is most certainly why the founder of Wikileaks found his assets frozen because of a request by Homeland Security to PayPal through extrajudicial means, and then we discovered a secret unit within Homeland Security who's sole purpose is to discredit citizens who express "politically undesireable" viewpoints.
We don't "reflect on our past" any more transparently than China does -- we just have a higher threshold before the government decides to assassinate someone they disagree with. A threshold, I might add, that's been on a downward trend for some time.
You know who "protects and saves lives"? Medical personnel, doctors, nurses, firemen, police.
Your police must be magical. Where I live, they kill people for holding things like screwdrivers, bags of skittles, or picket signs.
Armies do the bidding of the most powerful, which almost always means some very bad days for regular people.
If by "regular people" you mean "armed insurgents", yes.
You can dress it up with all the lovely rhetoric you want, but if you listen to the sales pitches, read the brochures, of all that great "protecting, life-saving" hardware at a weapons show, you'll hear about killing people, hurting people, depriving them of life.
"Please hold still while I murder you with this water purifier."
We say it to make the young men and women who do the fighting and end up dying or being mutilated feel better,
Er, people who are dead can't be made to feel better... or anything for that matter.
but all that business about "protecting liberty" and "fighting for our freedom" is just a canard.
Yeah, it's true... everyone loves America. We're like a big purple dinosaur that sings love songs in the international community. No need to defend ourselves... who'd ever attack such a loveable country?
What was the last time in American history when we actually fought for our "freedom"?
Every day someone is unjustly arrested. Every time someone stops to put a dollar in a jar to help cure a disease. Right now, someone, somewhere, is getting up from their seat to speak out against an injustice. Freedom isn't fought with just guns.
I wonder what was the last time that one single item at that weapons show was actually used for something that didn't end with regular people being dead or displaced.
You mean, like a water purifier?
Do you really believe that only the "good guys" shop at those weapons shows? That they ask for affidavits that the weapons will only be used morally?
Weapons aren't good or bad, and morality isn't an absolute... it is constantly being challenged by changes in circumstances and environment. Having known many members of the armed forces, I can say that the overwhelming majority of them are moral and decent people. Very often, they are faced with the decision to shoot someone to save their own life, or to shoot someone to save many more lives.
Let me posit a hypothetical: Say there are two train tracks branching off from a central line. And say you are standing at the switch, and a train is coming. Now everyone's been told not to use the one on the left, but there are ten people who are sitting on that track. On the right, there is only one person. Presently, the switch is set so the train goes to the track on the left. There is no time to warn anyone, they are too far away. Do you throw the switch, or leave it alone? Why?
Do you consider yourself responsible for the deaths of the 10 people if you do nothing? What about if you switch the train to the other track -- are you responsible for the death of that 1 person? And which is better -- saving the lives of 10 people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the cost of 1, or saving 1 who was doing what they were told, at the cost of 10 others. Would it make any difference if it was just one person on each track? What if there were a thousand on the left side instead of just ten?
It's very easy to judge people first, then come up with reasons to support the judgement. It's a lot harder to ask "Well, why did they do that?" -- You have to seek to understand first, then judge. You can't judge, then understand.
Their business is protecting and saving lives, which sometimes means having overwhelming firepower. Mutually Assured Destruction was the most successful peace policy ever. Don't assume that everything we send into a war zone is meant to either kill, or die. That kind of thinking is 20+ years out of date.
Unfortunately, at the weapons show, more of the attendees were probably interested in ways to keep this product out of the hands of "certain people" than buying it for themselves.
There's no reason for that. We've offered to assist in the setup nuclear power plants to North Korea in exchange for discontinuing their weapons development program. If we're willing to do that, a few water purifiers is hardly anything to worry about. Besides, I think fresh water is a better diplomat than a Predator drone.
Actually, those booths should be sitting next to each other. All the high tech drones, big guns, fighters, bombers, and armor doesn't mean much if your soldiers starve or run out of water. Sun Tzu said as much -- it was pretty much chapter 1 of The Art of War. It may not be very sexy, but it's like saying the internet is important... and electricity isn't.
You lost me. What in the name of the mighty Zeus does copyright and patent law have to do with this? I mean I know this is slashdot and all, but please, spare us the drama.
Yeah, it's dramatic to be wasting billions in labor to invent devices, methods, and software that's only different enough to get past some patent or copyright restriction. But as you said, this is slashdot, and big picture thinking is a rarity here... you know, seems too... dramatic.
use something like Dropbox. It works fine, does exactly what you want, what's the point in reinventing the wheel?
Thousands of IT workers ask that question every day -- when they show up at work and exciting new technology can't be used because of copyright and patent law.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
Yes, specifically that it'll fragment the entire network and potentially destroy interoperability across it. The internet would no longer be a unified global network. Network neutrality is the key to preventing this, but as we've seen, corporations don't want that: They want to turn the internet into a largely read-only media... just a better version of television.
A classic example of how this is shaping up is with Comcast, the Great Evil of the USA internet: They recently instituted a 250GB transfer limit, and then exempted Hulu from it, which they bought out. Netflix, a competing service at a lower price is now sitting out in the cold. Let's run some numbers and see how much of a problem this is. The average person watches 2.7 hours of TV per day; and it remains the single largest leisure activity in the United States. The average Netflix stream (based on my experience), is about 350KB/s. So that comes out to about 3.24GB per person, per day -- or 98.82 per month (the average length of a month). Now the number of people per household is a bit shaky, since there aren't any current numbers, but it's around 2.6 people per. So the average household will consume 257 GB per month if they used Netflix.
How strange that the bandwith cap is almost exactly the same number eh? Make no mistake -- this is a war between big business, and the only losers will be you and me. This is what happens when you let people into public positions who entertain the notion that capitalism runs best when it isn't regulated. Every infrastructure service in this country runs better with regulation, and the internet (telecommunications) is not an exception. Every time we let the private sector take over, we get crap like Standard Oil, AT&T (pre-breakup), Microsoft, etc. And now we have Montsano eating up our food supply (literally).
If network neutrality isn't given the force of law in the next two years, then two things are going to happen: Either we start building tunneled networks so all traffic through the last mile ISPs is encrypted and cannot be shaped, modified, or tampered with except in terms of bandwidth and latency as a whole... or we abandon the internet and start a new network that has no last mile restrictions (read: wireless, read: pirate radio).
What I mean is the rate of technological progress is constrained by the length of time before a patent expires. Existing technology can't be improved upon and new technology won't have a competitive price (lower prices = greater demand). The only alternatives then is to come up with another method to achieve the same effect (research), wait for the time to run out on the patent, engage in a legal battle which may or may not invalidate the patent, or license the patent. In an ideal capitalist economy, the cost of licensing the patent would be equal to or less than the cost of any of the other options. In practice, this rarely occurs.
The problem is that the duration of the patent is fixed, and since most science and technology is built on previous innovation, the rate of advancement is constrained by the length of the patent. This only becomes a problem when the capacity for advancement for an equal period of time exceeds the period of time the patent exists. In the automotive industry, for example, this is not a big problem. In information technology, it is a massive problem that has gutted the industry for the past decade -- we hit the artificial limit sometime around 2000--2002. Ever since then, progress has become a straight line with advances occuring on a predictable (if slow) time table.
why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."
Doesn't matter. In this country, like many others who have adopted the principle of "intellectual property", technological progress is constrained by the length of time it takes for patents to expire, and the willingness of any new entrants into the market to bear the excessive legal costs of fighting off legal attacks based on patents. In other words, even if the technology became available tomorrow, and had all of the prerequisites met for low cost, high yield industrial processing... it would not enter the market for several years while the incumbent market players played out all possible legal scenarios. At least in the United States, the appeals process is nearly limitless. in Europe, the European Union provides a similar capacity for limitless administrative delay.
When they do, they will have to deal with a nation half-full of slackers. Be careful what you wish for.
Everyone here will tell you that women have been calling men lazy since [poster's year of birth].
Most of these things all revolve around communicating with others. Daughters used to spend all their time talking on the phone (watch an old episode of Gidget for an example). Now it's texting on internet devices.
The internet has always been a communications technology, and women tend to communicate more in both frequency and diversity of content. But it's a leap to say that means women are more important. A lot of internet traffic is streaming media and bittorrent. Does that mean those are the first things people think of when you mention the internet? Probably not. Quantity doesn't always equate to importance.
Conversely, men aged 18-35 have never been social movers and shakers; They're the grunts. Always have been. It's never been any different in IT than anywhere else... that age group is always used for something new and experimental because they're disposable. If young men throw away their lives in war, poor career choices, or develop work-related injuries, etc., we just give them a line about how honorable their sacrifice was and then lead them away from the public spotlight.
I guess my point is that studies like this offer neither wisdom nor insight; The conclusions drawn invariably reflect our own prejudices. And they will continue to do so until the social expectations of men and women, young and old, etc., are equal.
That's a rather good analogy, but with a significant flaw: states know the size of other armies almost exactly...
It wasn't always that way. It's not like satellites have been around since war was invented. Just because the technology and methodology has changed doesn't mean that principles behind control of terrain, force multipliers, offense versus defense, etc., are any less valid.
I'd say that cyberwarfare is a sort of 'supplementary warfare', designed to shorten a war and lessen casualties by causing enough confusion and chaos that the enemy can't mount an effective defense and is forced to surrender.
If you are able to spread a virus that attacks critical infrastructure like the electric grid, water supply, hospitals, etc., you can unbalance the civilian population, which means fewer resources can be devoted to a military response -- it's a lot harder to maintain an army when your own population is starving, in the dark, or cannot receive medical treatment. I wouldn't say it's as "supplementary" as nuclear weapons. Sure, you might not let one off the chain everytime there's a problem, but having the capability constrains the number of options the enemy has.
I've never heard of this. Can you cite or give a proper name to the legislation?
The law was limited to certain jewelry manufacturers inducing the government to force anyone selling a diamond to disclose its manufacturing process; Specifically, whether it was created in a laboratory, or pulled out of the ground. So it was basically a labelling law (administrative), not a ban on the sale of them. But it was the catalyst for the current market -- The rest of the industry used the legislation to discredit synthetic diamonds with marketing propaganda. There are laboratories that sell a few carot diamonds, even pre-cut, at dramatically lower prices directly off their website -- but finding a jeweler to set it for you, and then later reselling it (if desired), is -- shall we say -- a difficult thing to achieve. Now, there's no citation or scientific paper I can point you to, but if you Google it yourself, you'll quickly conclude it's much more time consuming and difficult to get a lab-grown diamond set on a ring on your finger than to just order one online that was dug up using forced labor and slavery.
If the government hadn't stepped in and forced a delineation between the two products, the bottom would have fallen out of the market once new competitors entered and reduced the difference to something akin to a "Pepsi" challenge. And really, as much as you might like the taste of [favorite drink], they can't charge you twice, let alone fifty, times more, before the market shifts as people decide "almost the same" is a better purchasing choice.
Governments want to keep vulnerabilities secret so they can hit the enemy, but the enemy has the same equipment and setup as ours. If you increase resistance to attacks locally, the same happens remotely.
So the decision to be made is, what's more important: Our offensive capability, or our defensive capability? It's a zero sum equation, but with a twist: Every offensive action creates a corresponding signature which can be used to increase defense against that action next time. Effective surveillance increases the chance of detection and remediation. So the tipping point is the ratio of exploitable vulnerabilities (think of this as army size) each party possesses. If you have more than your enemy by a considerable margin, your enemy is unlikely to attack. Conversely, if you don't have sufficient resources to discover and refine vulnerabilities and the intelligence capabilities to know where to use them (and when), your best response is to form alliances with others, so that when a vulnerability is used on their infrastructure, they share their surveillance with all parties; thus creating a force multiplier in favor of defense.
I guess my point is that the problem can be framed using conventional military tactics, rules of engagement, etc.; But I would hesitate to equate it to military action. Otherwise you wind up in a legal quagmire: That would be turning that guy who keeps trying to run Reaver against my router to hack his way onto my network into an enemy combatant or a private citizen into an arms dealer for having a copy of TrueCrypt.
We can make it smaller, but we still can't alter the thermodynamics of the system: Specifically Black's Law -- the more current you pump into a given area, the more heat it's going to give off. Electromigration is a already a significant engineering barrier to further minaturization. Nanowires are going to break down even faster than existing circuit etchings.
I'm sure there's an EE reading this who can provide the grisly details of how circuit pathways would degrade, and the equations showing the reduced MTBF. But it's my lunch break right now, and I'm lazy. :)
Blood diamonds are diamonds that have been mined. And up until science came up with a way to create synthetic and flawless diamonds, they were a rare and valuable natural resource. But like I said, until then. What happened after was laws were passed banning the use of synthetic diamonds in jewelry, and by 'happy' coincidence, their use in industrial process as well. Thus the distributors of diamonds in this (and other) countries could continue to command large sums of money for a rare and natural resource -- even though we now had a common and abundantly available supply via industrial process.
And so, because of the decisions of those individuals, corporations, etc., with the kind help of the majority of Congress and the authorization of the President, we helped make it possible for the exploitation of millions. We assisted in the enslavement of human beings, by trading our dollars for the fruit of those unnecessary labors. And we have allowed this to go on for as long as it has, because as long as we don't have to stare into their faces with a recognition of what they've done -- that our dollars do it for us, we can remain in ignorant or apathetic bliss.
People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature.
So the four crusades, 10 year war, etc., -- all self defense, right? Christianity has a long and bloody history.
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Christian jihad is exempt from the usual scrutiny. It's only people who dress and act differently than us that are terrorists. Everybody knows that. -_- And all this legislation would do is codify our prejudice into law... today it's terrorism, before that it was communism, before that, fascism... there'll always be an intangible "ism" that we're at war with, and this "ism" will be all the justification our government needs to become an "ism" itself to its people.
. if the result is .90 or better it is likely your person.
So what you're saying is, with a copy of the database I could impersonate 1 in 10 people in India. How... very... secure. Point of note: People's irises change over time, unlike fingerprints.
Where does India outsource /their/ IT jobs for managing things like this database?
Erm, the United States. We're the world leaders in the manufacture of sophisticated mass-surveillance and tracking technology. It's our other major export besides financial know-how, bombs, and working-class misery. The NSA is building a data center right now to track every packet of data sent within the borders of this country. And we don't just store biometric hashes -- W're taking complete, high-resolution imagery of our citizens bodies and keeping them on file. The kind of surveillance and tracking we do on our own citizens make this look like a high school science project.
There's no reason to think we wouldn't happily help the corporation of India... er, I mean, the country of India (sorry, I'm American.. it's hard to keep corporations and governments separate).
Obviously copyright is the most important issue of our time. Look at how much went into ACTA/SOPA/PIPA/CISPA and how little is going into fixing our education, healthcare, research and poverty issues.
I think you're mistaken. You, I, and most of the world population, finds education, health care, research, and decent living conditions to be the most important issue of our time -- or any time, for that matter. However, wealth is power and wealth has become highly concentrated amongst, perhaps, a few thousand people in this country -- they have all the say about what that wealth does. It can be used to help the impoverished... or it can be used to further restrict our lives and further impoverish us for their benefit.
But it's not going to change because we aren't willing to kill the people who are. I'm not advocating that be the first option considered, but the power of the people depends on being able to make good on the threat of radical modification or destruction of the government; in much the same way Mutually Assurred Destruction kept the peace between the USSR and the USA during the cold war, an armed and educated populace is the best defense against class warfare. You will note the extensive "anti-terror" framework that has acted to prevent any group organizing for political representation, and that gun control laws have become inordinately restrictive. Significant government resources are being devoted to discrediting any ground roots movement or potential political leaders and this framework is most directly put against anyone who directly exposes this framework -- Wikileaks is one example, but the Tor network is another, and there's been remarkably little coverage on the NSA's project to store all information transmitted on the internet that originates or passes through the United States. This is not a project intended to be a resource for foreign surveillance: It is intended to watch US citizens. And recently, high-tech surveillance drones have started to be deployed in major metropolitan areas.
The United States is employing technologically sophisticated measures to create a police state as bad (if not worse) than China; But unlike China, they have created a digital iron curtain to wall off media coverage of this vast change in domestic policy. It is not a coincidence that most of the censorship technologies in use around the world were created here; It is a byproduct of deep and pervasive surveillance technologies already deployed here. We talk about the future of our society as being highly transparent, but that's only true of the average person, who will soon be proverbially naked. Only criminals and the government/corporate superstructure will be allowed to wear clothes; Only they will have privacy.
The naked truth is... copyright law is class warfare. And it's a symptom of a much larger war going on.
NCLB is not conservative legislation
It was signed into law by a conservative. Congress at that time was republican-controlled as well. If the law was approved by conservatives, then the law is conservative by definition.
NCLB increased federal control; that is a fact.
That's a point for neither the conservative nor liberal team; Passing federal laws isn't inherently political. The substance of the law is political, and in this case... it was conservative. I'm sorry -- I wish I could tell you that it's all those nasty liberals fault, but believe it or not, your political party of choice makes mistakes too. Worse, they make them about as often as the "other guys".
And then the Federal government took control, which is right about when public education started going downhill.
So when the New Deal legislation came through and the federal government built tens of thousands of schools... that made things worse? And when they allowed blacks and women to attend school -- bad, right? And when, thanks to federal legislation, 8 states in the South that refused to provide public education were overruled and their populations educated anyway... this resulted in a lowered quality of life? That's some fine detective work there, Lou.
Segregation is a different matter. You are being disingenuous by lumping segregationists in with those who simply don't want bureaucrats in Washington dictating one-size-fits-all policy to their local schools.
The "one size fits all" policy is what ended segregation. It's also been what's allowed people to send their kids to school without having them be indoctrinated by religious beliefs they don't agree with. The "one size fits all" policy established accreditation of educators, so only people who had demonstrated ability to teach would be allowed to.
People who want their kids to be properly educated and want to have a say about it are not racists.
Quite a few of them were back then. They aren't that way today thanks to that "one size fits all" legislation you're hating on. I'm glad that everyone has free and full access to an education today -- including blacks, women, and non-catholics. Because in a word without that legislation, only white, catholic, land-owning men would receive an education... and considering that we fled Europe and started this country to get away from the disasterous results of letting that kind of person make decisions for everyone else, I am very, very glad that public education exists today. My only complaints are that it is underfunded, and hamstrung with this particular piece of legislation -- the product of a short-lived chokehold on our government by southern conservatives, which I only hope will be reversed before the damage to society becomes too great to recover from.
What happens when someone needs to look at the money to verify it's not counterfeit?
They get a cat that might be alive.
To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process,
An act of Congress is what gave us public schools in their modern incarnation to begin with. It's the No Child Left Behind legislation, courtesy of one George W. Bush. It probably would have been dismantled by now, except that it happened in 2001, just before the 9/11 bombings. After that, it was forgotten... and it shouldn't have been.
If you want to blame anything, blame that. Before Congress mandated public education, it was generally only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to school. Early into the industrial revolution, workers gathered together and realized that the only hope their children would have of leaving the farms, or the then-prevalent poverty of the urban areas. At the time, child labor was common-place, as was disfigurement and serious injury due to their use in the factories.
As a result, three major groups worked to build public schools: The irish, with catholic schools -- these dominated the eastern United States. The negros (hey, that's what they were called during that time period), using various Freedmen foundations, primarily in the central and south-central parts of the country, and labor rights activists, which were mostly along the central and western parts of the country. From this patchwork of state-level activity, eventually all of the 'northern' states had mandated elementary-school education by the 1930s. The South, predictably, lagged behind, with only 4 states having such laws. They also generally forbade blacks and women from education.
The modern education system as you see it today didn't exist until the early 1950s, when we achieved the milestone of having more than half of all adults in possession of a high school diploma. At about the same time, federal laws were passed, making every state provide public education. Of course, you know what happened next: The South resisted, as they always have, and we had to send the National Guard in to put a gun in the face of the arrogant asshats and desegregate the schools.
Bush and his conservative allies want to destroy public education, and No Child Left Behind was the perfect vehicle for it: It was specifically designed to weaken the overall educational infrastructure, and as a result, costs are skyrocketing, performance is plummeting, and the divisions between the rich and poor are widening at a record pace. There is nobody more worthy of blame here than southern republicans and Bush -- they masterminded the whole collapse with a single piece of legislation that nobody paid much attention to. Even as educators screamed "Look at this! It's gonna kill your child's future," we were too enamored with fresh imagery of the twin towers collapsing to care about anything. And now, we live with our collective mistake -- we gave too much power to the government during a time of crisis, and now a great many institutions in this country have been reduced to slag because of that moment of weakness.
The difference however, is that the USA reflects on its past in a much more transparent way than China does today.
Transparency must be why, after Vietnam, we stopped broadcasting live coverage of the war and made sure every embedded journalist turns in his/her footage to be edited for "homeland security" reasons prior to being sent in for publication.
Transparency is why we have our own Star Chamber now, where suspected terrorists are tried, convicted, and sentenced, in secret trials where they cannot see the evidence presented against them, nor offer testimony in their defense.
Transparency is why at the bottom of most google search results, is the phrase "In response to a complaint we received under the 'US Digital Millenium Copyright Act' we have removed n results."
And transparency is most certainly why the founder of Wikileaks found his assets frozen because of a request by Homeland Security to PayPal through extrajudicial means, and then we discovered a secret unit within Homeland Security who's sole purpose is to discredit citizens who express "politically undesireable" viewpoints.
We don't "reflect on our past" any more transparently than China does -- we just have a higher threshold before the government decides to assassinate someone they disagree with. A threshold, I might add, that's been on a downward trend for some time.
You know who "protects and saves lives"? Medical personnel, doctors, nurses, firemen, police.
Your police must be magical. Where I live, they kill people for holding things like screwdrivers, bags of skittles, or picket signs.
Armies do the bidding of the most powerful, which almost always means some very bad days for regular people.
If by "regular people" you mean "armed insurgents", yes.
You can dress it up with all the lovely rhetoric you want, but if you listen to the sales pitches, read the brochures, of all that great "protecting, life-saving" hardware at a weapons show, you'll hear about killing people, hurting people, depriving them of life.
"Please hold still while I murder you with this water purifier."
We say it to make the young men and women who do the fighting and end up dying or being mutilated feel better,
Er, people who are dead can't be made to feel better... or anything for that matter.
but all that business about "protecting liberty" and "fighting for our freedom" is just a canard.
Yeah, it's true... everyone loves America. We're like a big purple dinosaur that sings love songs in the international community. No need to defend ourselves... who'd ever attack such a loveable country?
What was the last time in American history when we actually fought for our "freedom"?
Every day someone is unjustly arrested. Every time someone stops to put a dollar in a jar to help cure a disease. Right now, someone, somewhere, is getting up from their seat to speak out against an injustice. Freedom isn't fought with just guns.
I wonder what was the last time that one single item at that weapons show was actually used for something that didn't end with regular people being dead or displaced.
You mean, like a water purifier?
Do you really believe that only the "good guys" shop at those weapons shows? That they ask for affidavits that the weapons will only be used morally?
Weapons aren't good or bad, and morality isn't an absolute... it is constantly being challenged by changes in circumstances and environment. Having known many members of the armed forces, I can say that the overwhelming majority of them are moral and decent people. Very often, they are faced with the decision to shoot someone to save their own life, or to shoot someone to save many more lives.
Let me posit a hypothetical: Say there are two train tracks branching off from a central line. And say you are standing at the switch, and a train is coming. Now everyone's been told not to use the one on the left, but there are ten people who are sitting on that track. On the right, there is only one person. Presently, the switch is set so the train goes to the track on the left. There is no time to warn anyone, they are too far away. Do you throw the switch, or leave it alone? Why?
Do you consider yourself responsible for the deaths of the 10 people if you do nothing? What about if you switch the train to the other track -- are you responsible for the death of that 1 person? And which is better -- saving the lives of 10 people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the cost of 1, or saving 1 who was doing what they were told, at the cost of 10 others. Would it make any difference if it was just one person on each track? What if there were a thousand on the left side instead of just ten?
It's very easy to judge people first, then come up with reasons to support the judgement. It's a lot harder to ask "Well, why did they do that?" -- You have to seek to understand first, then judge. You can't judge, then understand.
Their business is killing,
Their business is protecting and saving lives, which sometimes means having overwhelming firepower. Mutually Assured Destruction was the most successful peace policy ever. Don't assume that everything we send into a war zone is meant to either kill, or die. That kind of thinking is 20+ years out of date.
Unfortunately, at the weapons show, more of the attendees were probably interested in ways to keep this product out of the hands of "certain people" than buying it for themselves.
There's no reason for that. We've offered to assist in the setup nuclear power plants to North Korea in exchange for discontinuing their weapons development program. If we're willing to do that, a few water purifiers is hardly anything to worry about. Besides, I think fresh water is a better diplomat than a Predator drone.
Actually, those booths should be sitting next to each other. All the high tech drones, big guns, fighters, bombers, and armor doesn't mean much if your soldiers starve or run out of water. Sun Tzu said as much -- it was pretty much chapter 1 of The Art of War. It may not be very sexy, but it's like saying the internet is important... and electricity isn't.
You lost me. What in the name of the mighty Zeus does copyright and patent law have to do with this? I mean I know this is slashdot and all, but please, spare us the drama.
Yeah, it's dramatic to be wasting billions in labor to invent devices, methods, and software that's only different enough to get past some patent or copyright restriction. But as you said, this is slashdot, and big picture thinking is a rarity here... you know, seems too... dramatic.
use something like Dropbox. It works fine, does exactly what you want, what's the point in reinventing the wheel?
Thousands of IT workers ask that question every day -- when they show up at work and exciting new technology can't be used because of copyright and patent law.