Not even that. They will access a board of their choice and whine that TPB is no longer accessible, then they will be pointed at tor.eff.org (or a similar service) and the whole deal that took months to hash out (and probably a few bucks spent here or there...) is rendered obsolete within mere minutes.
The only reason these measures are even attempted is because so many users don't even know to do that. They think the internet is broken when they can't login to facebook. They don't distinguish between servers, routers, clients, and all that... they know a black box in their house is connected to the internet. And sometimes the black box doesn't work and a geek-friend needs to poke it. They know ctrl+alt+del and unplugging and plugging it back in.
Average people are about habits. They don't know much more than what they're shown and they don't want to learn more than they need to. That's the only reason rulings like this happen (and have an effect)... it takes months to years for the collective knowledge to reach their ears and a new habit to be established.
On one hand, this will deter casual users. On the other, restricting access to the torrent sites does nothing to stop the use of torrents..torrent files are small and with distributed tracking now coming into use... Piratebay can continue to function effectively even though its domain is blacklisted.
So this move has been anticipated, counter-measures deployed, and they are effective. Update the host file in the user's brain and you're good to go. ^_^
And they probably started working on it a decade or two ago, and have a working version now:P
I can't confirm or deny its existance. But I can offer you one reason for the denial: The FBI. If we admitted we had it, they'd want to use it. The last time they asked for forensic analysis, it was for their cross-dressing commander who wanted to know who had shit on his front doorstep. After intensive analysis, it was determined to be a squirrel. Then they called us because they couldn't identify which squirrel. We've been hesitant to offer our services ever since. We did find the squirrel though. In another 23 years, you'll be able to submit an FOIA request for the rest of the story. Footnote 16 is especially amusing.
Time for another insightful discussion on the gender gap in tech. There will be no flames, no attacks, and no blaming. Just quiet, reflective discussion.
Aww, fuck it. RAISE THE PITCH FORKS AND HAAAAAAH! There. I said it slashdot. Happy now?:)
There was no mention of self-education or enlightenment I made.
Quote from your previous post; "...the scope of change the internet has brought." If you want to yell at someone, yell at yourself for being too vague. Nobody would say that improved access to LOLcatz advanced any nobel prize category. You've drifted off topic.
It is a heck of a lot harder for the leadership of a country to convince its citizenship that it is necessary to wage war against another country because of some perceived flaw with the people of that country when that same citizenship spends its evenings talking to those people over the nets.
No. The internet became popularized with the www, which popped into existance 08/06/91. But I wouldn't say it was on the public's radar until about 1994. From 1994 to 2009 (15 years); There was Rwanda, Srebrenica, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From 1978 to 1993 -- Falklands Islands, and Desert Storm. Four wars since the internet became popular, two from the same timeframe before it.
[...](try to) prevent their citizens from accessing or broadcasting information they disapprove of. Information and knowledge are power. The internet allows for the transmission of information and knowledge in previously unimaginably large amounts.
It's never happened historically that the general population, upon the creation of a new communications technology... suddenly started making morally superior decisions.
To compare just the sheer amount and types of information available on the internet to the telegraph is to really minimize the scope of change the internet has brought. It's a frickin' living Library of Alexandria.
...Yeah, about a thousand Library of Alexandrias, at least. But all people care about is watching the next movie, or episode of House. Again, the idea that increased access to information will spur people towards self-education and enlightenment is one of humanity's oldest illusions. Which makes sense historically... Most of the Library of Alexandria was dedicated to poetry, plays, and other forms of entertainment.
Because the Internet has a property that none of those other options have: It's the first time in history, that the general public has a intelligence agency more powerful than anything else on the world.
...And the public has shown a remarkable disinclination towards self-education despite this. The idea that increased access to information will necessarily stir people towards enlightenment is one of humanity's oldest illusions.
The internet is an evolution of these technologies...
I rest my case. The Nobel Prize is awarded for revolutionary changes or significant advancements in the state of the art and our understanding of science, as well as acts which significantly advance peaceful behavior between people. The internet qualifies as neither a revolutionary technology, nor one that advances "peaceful behavior". I also somehow doubt it would win any awards for literature -- 4Chan comes to mind as a reason against.
If I'm reading you right, you're saying that something that is very useful and has a lot of legitimate uses but at the same time has a few illegitimate uses should be considered a bad thing. Huh. Who knew? I guess the RIAA has more influence on us than we thought.
You are not reading me correctly. As to illegitimate uses, the telegraph was used for that as well -- the lines frequently transmitted information about cargo on trains, which criminals used to plot which trains to rob. But that's not my point:
I am looking at the social change that was brought about as a result of the technology. The telegraph allowed realtime worldwide communication, which previously didn't exist. The result was the world got a lot smaller, fast. The internet performs the same function as the telegraph -- it didn't fundamentally change how we looked at the world, it advanced pre-existing social trends. There is nothing the internet has done for social interaction that can't be done by mail or telegraph -- it just does it a lot faster, cheaper, and is available to people of less means.
Telegraph, mail, phone, are basically 1vs1 communications[...]But internet is communication everyone with everyone, usually unfiltered.
TCP/IP is, fundamentally, the same thing: A point to point transmission medium. The telegraph was used to transmit international and regional news to local newspapers, which dutifully printed the news for general distribution. This model continues today; the difference being that the internet decreased the cost per message which meant that people with less means can still take advantage of the network. But the patterns of communication over the internet looks pretty much the same as the telegraph, it just happens orders of magnitude faster and is more versatile in the quantity and kind of information.
The telegraph enabled communication on a very limited level compared to the Internet.
I'm looking at the amount of social change that resulted from a single invention, not its reach. The Nobel Prize likewise looks at how significant the discovery is for its time period.
The Internet, which has virtually revolutionized world communication, has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated? It was the first time people on different continents started talking to each other in real-time. Or radio for that matter. The internet is not the greatest thing in the past hundred years of mass communications; The gutenburg press did more to free the masses from tyranny. If anything, the internet may make the problem worse: one of the side-effects of digitalization is that everything can be tracked, monitored, and recorded in perpetuity. The government doesn't concern itself with how to spy on its citizens... it's busy trying to figure out what to do with all this data. And we want to nominate this for a Nobel Prize?
Forget that... I want "None of the Above" to win the award.
Sadly, you're missing the point. The statement quoted above was not about homosexual behaviour, but about reproduction between same-sex animals. One possiblity is through transgender mutations (like the frog-example quoted from JP), another is asexual reproduction (as some bee species). Scientific terms are (sequential) hermafroditis and parthenogenesis respectively.
That was pretty much what I was getting at. Synthetic life would probably begin with simpler organisms -- and as a general rule, the simpler the organism, the more likely it is to be capable of reproduction with same-sex organisms. Very simple organisms don't even have a sex.
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
As long as they don't use frog DNA, we should be fine. At least that's what Michael Crichton proved.:)
Nobody knows how totalitarian their country will be in 5 years. Best to assume the worst extrapolating from today's trajectory.
Right, because in five years the culture of law enforcement and the country it is a part of is going to radically change. That makes sense. Most people in law enforcement serve out of a genuine desire to help the public. I know it's hard to believe, but most of this legislation is not being passed because they want greater access... They already have it, and the judicial standards for gaining that access remain largely unchanged. What this legislation aims to do is decrease the time between when a search warrant is issued and when the evidence is in custody. It's to cut down on the amount of "fucking around" time -- because right now the cost to investigate high tech crimes is too high for the police to have much effect on it. And that does need to change; They're still using investigative methods (and technology) from the 70s in these cases. That's unacceptable.
Totalitarianism is one group being given absolute authority over all aspects of its citizens lives. This country's law enforcement can't even figure out how to cooperate with each other. It's the same in the military, the different branches of government... well, pretty much everywhere you look. I don't see a "totalitarian" government springing up anytime soon.
And failing that -- consider a simple statistical fact: You're using today's political climate to predict what's going to happen five years from now. Five years ago, Bush was being sworn in for a second term, a black president was inconceivable as a concept, New Orleans was still in one piece, and our unemployment rate looked positively rosy compared to now. The "worst case" scenario for some was a conservative estimate -- and for others, they feel hopeful for the first time ever.
All that said, there's one thing I do think: It shouldn't be the ISPs burden to keep those records. The cost of collection and maintenance of those records should be paid for by the government, either in the form of a tax credit or direct management of those assets.
When you go to my website I know what the cookie name is and I know the default file system location for that cookie. This one seems pretty bad.
You seem to forget that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all have file indexing enabled by default. By accessing those hidden.db files, you can get the complete list of filenames in each directory, including the names of the subdirectories in some cases.
It has nothing to do with ACTA. Really. Read the bill. It's S&T driven: research, education, and having somebody there when standards setting bodies meet.
The internet has been a thorn in the side of every government since it's creation -- it's a place where people can organize against the government, conduct tax-free business, and freely and anonymously congregate. The only 'standards' the governments of the world are interested in, are ones that allow them a greater degree of control over it.
Do you really think they give a damn about whether it runs on IPv4, or IPv6, or whether DNS is secure or not?
You don't have to wonder. This is one of the final moves being put in place to distance themselves from public controversy. They're expressly putting treaty powers into the hands of someone who isn't an elected official. When it finally blows open, they'll conduct an investigation, which will be tied up in committee for years. The investigation will continue until it drops off the media radar and people forget about it. In the meantime, no direct criticism can be made of ACTA -- because the investigation hasn't resolved. It's a standard PR move, and it's been done before. If the public demands blood, they'll pin it on the scapegoat -- "We Were Misled" will be the headline. But the treaty will remain.
This is how bureauacracy deals with things they know will become controversial: They elect a fall guy, and then create a web of deceit to blunt the minds of their critics and hopefully dissipate entirely any demands for their power to be reduced. And most of the time, it works.
The article also says they don't need it because they'd be placed in a destructive orbit anyway. So which is it? Probably both. There's nothing about the design that requires it to be in a certain orbit. Some may be placed in LEO. Others in polar orbit... others, maybe into a non-destructive orbit.
Where's the backup if the primary propulsion system fails? Oh. Right... there isn't one. One loose wire and it'll be up there for centuries, instead of years.
That was my first thought, too. My second thought, after reading TFA, was that this guy has slightly modified the basic design of an inkjet printer and figured out a way to avoid having his business cut into by refill vendors.
At $6,000+ a gallon, we should consider using rocket fuel in our inkjet printers instead. It'd be cheaper...
Slashdot Mirror
Not even that. They will access a board of their choice and whine that TPB is no longer accessible, then they will be pointed at tor.eff.org (or a similar service) and the whole deal that took months to hash out (and probably a few bucks spent here or there...) is rendered obsolete within mere minutes.
The only reason these measures are even attempted is because so many users don't even know to do that. They think the internet is broken when they can't login to facebook. They don't distinguish between servers, routers, clients, and all that... they know a black box in their house is connected to the internet. And sometimes the black box doesn't work and a geek-friend needs to poke it. They know ctrl+alt+del and unplugging and plugging it back in.
Average people are about habits. They don't know much more than what they're shown and they don't want to learn more than they need to. That's the only reason rulings like this happen (and have an effect)... it takes months to years for the collective knowledge to reach their ears and a new habit to be established.
On one hand, this will deter casual users. On the other, restricting access to the torrent sites does nothing to stop the use of torrents. .torrent files are small and with distributed tracking now coming into use... Piratebay can continue to function effectively even though its domain is blacklisted.
So this move has been anticipated, counter-measures deployed, and they are effective. Update the host file in the user's brain and you're good to go. ^_^
And you are doing exactly what you evolved to do. Get resources, attract a female, make offspring...
Well, that sounds like a ringing endorsement of lesbian relationships! I approve.
And they probably started working on it a decade or two ago, and have a working version now :P
I can't confirm or deny its existance. But I can offer you one reason for the denial: The FBI. If we admitted we had it, they'd want to use it. The last time they asked for forensic analysis, it was for their cross-dressing commander who wanted to know who had shit on his front doorstep. After intensive analysis, it was determined to be a squirrel. Then they called us because they couldn't identify which squirrel. We've been hesitant to offer our services ever since. We did find the squirrel though. In another 23 years, you'll be able to submit an FOIA request for the rest of the story. Footnote 16 is especially amusing.
Time for another insightful discussion on the gender gap in tech. There will be no flames, no attacks, and no blaming. Just quiet, reflective discussion.
Aww, fuck it. RAISE THE PITCH FORKS AND HAAAAAAH! There. I said it slashdot. Happy now? :)
Has there ever been a communications technology remotely comparable in terms of scale and (relative) freedom to the internet?
Shortwave radio.
Telegraph didn't have a storage mechanism, while the internet does.
The internet isn't a server. A server is what connects to the internet. -_-
There was no mention of self-education or enlightenment I made.
Quote from your previous post; "...the scope of change the internet has brought." If you want to yell at someone, yell at yourself for being too vague. Nobody would say that improved access to LOLcatz advanced any nobel prize category. You've drifted off topic.
It is a heck of a lot harder for the leadership of a country to convince its citizenship that it is necessary to wage war against another country because of some perceived flaw with the people of that country when that same citizenship spends its evenings talking to those people over the nets.
No. The internet became popularized with the www, which popped into existance 08/06/91. But I wouldn't say it was on the public's radar until about 1994. From 1994 to 2009 (15 years); There was Rwanda, Srebrenica, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From 1978 to 1993 -- Falklands Islands, and Desert Storm. Four wars since the internet became popular, two from the same timeframe before it.
[...](try to) prevent their citizens from accessing or broadcasting information they disapprove of. Information and knowledge are power. The internet allows for the transmission of information and knowledge in previously unimaginably large amounts.
It's never happened historically that the general population, upon the creation of a new communications technology... suddenly started making morally superior decisions.
To compare just the sheer amount and types of information available on the internet to the telegraph is to really minimize the scope of change the internet has brought. It's a frickin' living Library of Alexandria.
...Yeah, about a thousand Library of Alexandrias, at least. But all people care about is watching the next movie, or episode of House. Again, the idea that increased access to information will spur people towards self-education and enlightenment is one of humanity's oldest illusions. Which makes sense historically... Most of the Library of Alexandria was dedicated to poetry, plays, and other forms of entertainment.
Because the Internet has a property that none of those other options have: It's the first time in history, that the general public has a intelligence agency more powerful than anything else on the world.
...And the public has shown a remarkable disinclination towards self-education despite this. The idea that increased access to information will necessarily stir people towards enlightenment is one of humanity's oldest illusions.
The internet is an evolution of these technologies...
I rest my case. The Nobel Prize is awarded for revolutionary changes or significant advancements in the state of the art and our understanding of science, as well as acts which significantly advance peaceful behavior between people. The internet qualifies as neither a revolutionary technology, nor one that advances "peaceful behavior". I also somehow doubt it would win any awards for literature -- 4Chan comes to mind as a reason against.
If I'm reading you right, you're saying that something that is very useful and has a lot of legitimate uses but at the same time has a few illegitimate uses should be considered a bad thing. Huh. Who knew? I guess the RIAA has more influence on us than we thought.
You are not reading me correctly. As to illegitimate uses, the telegraph was used for that as well -- the lines frequently transmitted information about cargo on trains, which criminals used to plot which trains to rob. But that's not my point:
I am looking at the social change that was brought about as a result of the technology. The telegraph allowed realtime worldwide communication, which previously didn't exist. The result was the world got a lot smaller, fast. The internet performs the same function as the telegraph -- it didn't fundamentally change how we looked at the world, it advanced pre-existing social trends. There is nothing the internet has done for social interaction that can't be done by mail or telegraph -- it just does it a lot faster, cheaper, and is available to people of less means.
Telegraph, mail, phone, are basically 1vs1 communications[...]But internet is communication everyone with everyone, usually unfiltered.
TCP/IP is, fundamentally, the same thing: A point to point transmission medium. The telegraph was used to transmit international and regional news to local newspapers, which dutifully printed the news for general distribution. This model continues today; the difference being that the internet decreased the cost per message which meant that people with less means can still take advantage of the network. But the patterns of communication over the internet looks pretty much the same as the telegraph, it just happens orders of magnitude faster and is more versatile in the quantity and kind of information.
The telegraph enabled communication on a very limited level compared to the Internet.
I'm looking at the amount of social change that resulted from a single invention, not its reach. The Nobel Prize likewise looks at how significant the discovery is for its time period.
The Internet, which has virtually revolutionized world communication, has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated? It was the first time people on different continents started talking to each other in real-time. Or radio for that matter. The internet is not the greatest thing in the past hundred years of mass communications; The gutenburg press did more to free the masses from tyranny. If anything, the internet may make the problem worse: one of the side-effects of digitalization is that everything can be tracked, monitored, and recorded in perpetuity. The government doesn't concern itself with how to spy on its citizens... it's busy trying to figure out what to do with all this data. And we want to nominate this for a Nobel Prize?
Forget that... I want "None of the Above" to win the award.
Sadly, you're missing the point. The statement quoted above was not about homosexual behaviour, but about reproduction between same-sex animals. One possiblity is through transgender mutations (like the frog-example quoted from JP), another is asexual reproduction (as some bee species). Scientific terms are (sequential) hermafroditis and parthenogenesis respectively.
That was pretty much what I was getting at. Synthetic life would probably begin with simpler organisms -- and as a general rule, the simpler the organism, the more likely it is to be capable of reproduction with same-sex organisms. Very simple organisms don't even have a sex.
"You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?"
Contrary to popular legend, homosexual behavior is prevalent in the animal kingdom. So yes, they will breed. It just won't do them much good. :\
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
As long as they don't use frog DNA, we should be fine. At least that's what Michael Crichton proved. :)
Nobody knows how totalitarian their country will be in 5 years. Best to assume the worst extrapolating from today's trajectory.
Right, because in five years the culture of law enforcement and the country it is a part of is going to radically change. That makes sense. Most people in law enforcement serve out of a genuine desire to help the public. I know it's hard to believe, but most of this legislation is not being passed because they want greater access... They already have it, and the judicial standards for gaining that access remain largely unchanged. What this legislation aims to do is decrease the time between when a search warrant is issued and when the evidence is in custody. It's to cut down on the amount of "fucking around" time -- because right now the cost to investigate high tech crimes is too high for the police to have much effect on it. And that does need to change; They're still using investigative methods (and technology) from the 70s in these cases. That's unacceptable.
Totalitarianism is one group being given absolute authority over all aspects of its citizens lives. This country's law enforcement can't even figure out how to cooperate with each other. It's the same in the military, the different branches of government... well, pretty much everywhere you look. I don't see a "totalitarian" government springing up anytime soon.
And failing that -- consider a simple statistical fact: You're using today's political climate to predict what's going to happen five years from now. Five years ago, Bush was being sworn in for a second term, a black president was inconceivable as a concept, New Orleans was still in one piece, and our unemployment rate looked positively rosy compared to now. The "worst case" scenario for some was a conservative estimate -- and for others, they feel hopeful for the first time ever.
All that said, there's one thing I do think: It shouldn't be the ISPs burden to keep those records. The cost of collection and maintenance of those records should be paid for by the government, either in the form of a tax credit or direct management of those assets.
When you go to my website I know what the cookie name is and I know the default file system location for that cookie. This one seems pretty bad.
You seem to forget that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all have file indexing enabled by default. By accessing those hidden .db files, you can get the complete list of filenames in each directory, including the names of the subdirectories in some cases.
It has nothing to do with ACTA. Really. Read the bill. It's S&T driven: research, education, and having somebody there when standards setting bodies meet.
The internet has been a thorn in the side of every government since it's creation -- it's a place where people can organize against the government, conduct tax-free business, and freely and anonymously congregate. The only 'standards' the governments of the world are interested in, are ones that allow them a greater degree of control over it.
Do you really think they give a damn about whether it runs on IPv4, or IPv6, or whether DNS is secure or not?
You don't have to wonder. This is one of the final moves being put in place to distance themselves from public controversy. They're expressly putting treaty powers into the hands of someone who isn't an elected official. When it finally blows open, they'll conduct an investigation, which will be tied up in committee for years. The investigation will continue until it drops off the media radar and people forget about it. In the meantime, no direct criticism can be made of ACTA -- because the investigation hasn't resolved. It's a standard PR move, and it's been done before. If the public demands blood, they'll pin it on the scapegoat -- "We Were Misled" will be the headline. But the treaty will remain.
This is how bureauacracy deals with things they know will become controversial: They elect a fall guy, and then create a web of deceit to blunt the minds of their critics and hopefully dissipate entirely any demands for their power to be reduced. And most of the time, it works.
The article also says they don't need it because they'd be placed in a destructive orbit anyway. So which is it? Probably both. There's nothing about the design that requires it to be in a certain orbit. Some may be placed in LEO. Others in polar orbit... others, maybe into a non-destructive orbit.
Where's the backup if the primary propulsion system fails? Oh. Right... there isn't one. One loose wire and it'll be up there for centuries, instead of years.
That was my first thought, too. My second thought, after reading TFA, was that this guy has slightly modified the basic design of an inkjet printer and figured out a way to avoid having his business cut into by refill vendors.
At $6,000+ a gallon, we should consider using rocket fuel in our inkjet printers instead. It'd be cheaper...