Really? I'm impressed!
on
New Crypto-OS
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· Score: 2
> In my experience, those of you who "really care about privacy" are the suicide bombers, hackers, and child pornographers of the world.
You've really had experience with suicide bombers, hackers, and child pornographers? Wow, I've had a sheltered life then compared to you! I've only met hackers (that's hackers, not crackers, which is a whole different argument).
It's not only important what's on the mind of those proposing legislation (although that is important), it's what the legislation says, and how it can be used.
I can think of several cases where I personally value privacy that are entirely above board:
- I'm involved in contract programming, and need to be able to share source code securely, and I don't trust any government agency to have access to it for whatever reason (what if it 'leaks'?).
- I'm a political activist. While I've done nothing illegal in that regard, I would be very uncomfortable about having every move monitored by a government that is essentially hostile to much of what I support - it would stifle communication. The present government will not do anything to harm me, but if something were to happen here like Nazism or McCarthyism (anti-Greenism?), I'm not too keen on archives being used to declare me a menace to society,
- I'm don't like any more than necesary of my personal information getting into the hands of the big corporates. They'd only use it to try and sell me things.
Now, if all monitoring could be guaranteed to be used only for a narrow intended purpose, was completely secure, and the collection agency was completely trustworthy, my only objections would be philosophical. Unfortunately, very few or no organisations live up to this.
Oh one last thing - it might be argued that that monitoring can be done anyway, without legislation. At least in that case, I do have some legal recourse (whatever that is worth). A while back, someone took the SIS to court for illegally breaking into his house.
Is it possible that pages being stored in memory (as suggested by the memory use going up as more pages are browsed) happened because the memory was available? Might it do something sensible on a memory starved system (like tossing the cached pages out of memory)?
Of course, even if this is the case it is still not good - disk caching would be far better.
> My guess is that although Apple has Aqua running on BSD kernel, Linux users will have no real difficulty either porting Aqua to Linux or just making Quazi-Aqua on Linux.
They won't be able to port it, as there is no way that Apple is going to release the source.
As for making a new Aqua, I would be really delighted if someone wrote a nice consistant user interface (such as Aqua is) for Linux, but I don't see it happening. Sure the KDE and Gnome people do their best, but they just don't have the attention to detail that Apple has. In amoungst it's other messes, that ins one thing that Apple has (usually) got right - a good user experience.
I'm using MacOS X Beta as my main OS and (mostly) loving it. It leaves Windows and the X based window managers I have tried for dead.
Oh, and yes, I tried LinuxPPC - trashed it to install MacOS X.
If you want to protest (i.e. think _none_ of the candidates are any good), the best thing you can do is cast an 'informal vote', i.e. an invalid one. The first time I ever voted, I crossed out all of the names.
STV uses a ranking of all the candidate, which gives you exactly what you want, as far as the voting for the lesser of two evils goes. The algorithm is at http://www.cs.albany.edu/~nvm/stv
Australia uses it, New Zealand uses Mixed Member Proportional representation which is a good system for electing MPs grouped into political parties.
Of course, you'll have no luck getting a change of voting systems in the US where the system favours the people already there. We only got MMP in New Zealand because politicians offered it to us as a distraction.
It is also worth finding out which political parties are likely to be supporting it (parties are likely to vote in blocks on something like this) and targetting MPs from those parties. Most parties try to have some list MP representation in each area that they don't have electorate MPs.
Labour will be supporting it, possibly the Alliance as Labour's coalition partner (although that would be a back down from what I understand to be their policy), but they need at least one other party. This would usually be the Greens, but I can't see us (I am a member) supporting it if we have a clear understanding what this is about. If the Alliance and/or the Greens are supporting this, those MPs are the best ones to target.
Oh, and I can personally second the point about email to MPs not being particularly effective - write a letter, or better, arrange an appointment.
Does anyone have more detail on this proposed law and who is supporting it? Good lobbying requires clear information.
This solution might work if:
(a) the 3 filtering packages were all 'nearly correct'.
(b) they had completely independent heuristics.
As an (extreme) example, if 3 filter programs each blocked a ramdom 20% (1/5) of sites (I'm not saying that they do), this approeach would block an effectively random 10% (13/125) of sites.
My guess is that with this approach (based on what I've heard about the current filters) is you'd hardly get anything blocked except for anti-censorware sites like Peacefire, or where they have common heuristics (like anything with the word 'breast'). Still worse than useless.
* This only applies to machines that have been assigned to particular people or projects - the undergraduate students are stuch with windows. I was actually talking about staff, not students.
* When someone leaves, their machine will be reverted back to the default and reassigned to someone else.
* All the servers etc. have software installed and maintained by tech support.
So we don't have the problem that you are describing.
It might be because I work in a university department, but our IT people have a very enlightened attitude: "If we install it (Windows NT is their main option), we'll support it, if you install it, you support it but we may help if we can". With that idea, the operating systems running in our office have included Windows NT, Windows 95 (I think), Windows 2000, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, MacOS (OK, that one's pretty obvious on a Mac), and Linux. We are now pretty much settled on Linux, and Linux is slowly spreading through the department (helped by us). There is still the odd bit of software that we need Windows for which is why I still have dual-boot:-(.
When the inevitable M$-Word attachments arrive with email, if it's something we want to read, there will sometimes be a response like "can you please resend this in plain text so that people in the 9th floor research labs can read it?"
Of course, not all the university is like that - I know a person in another departmentment where they use the university's central IT services - and it's something like "You shall use the approved version of (for instance) Netscape (4.07 I think) and no other, and if you install _any_ software not on the approved list (even a later version of the same software) we shall came around and remove it". And they do. Ouch.
Where I live there is an aquarium not far away. They have a row of tanks with things in that you can touch (starfish, sea urchins, etc.). For some reason, they keep the hagfish in a tank on the end of the row, with a cover on. Ugly brute - and imagine, (given it's placement) the sort of accident that could happen if they left the cover off;-). (Actually, the staff said a I could touch it if I really wanted to - I declined).
Also, with the strands in the slime being somewhat silk-like, image it being used as a replacement for silk? "No, it's not silk you are wearing, it's... um... ahh... nevermind"
Actually, it is a problem with both (or maybe not JVM according to another reply). I'd gone offtopic to the extent that I was only looking at JVM in response to another post. I don't actually know what MS.NET/CLR can handle, becuase I don't have the specs.
There are two ways I can see of dealing with this sort of problem:
(1) Try to have a generic object model in the intermediate language that can handle most sorts of source language object model,
(2) Have the intermediate language be very low level (quite near to assembler, but not processor specific) so that it doesn't have an object model at all, and that is built on top. Of course, this still requires some genericity in the linker.
I'd probably personally favour (2) because I am a functional programmer rather than an object programmer. YMMV.
Yes, you can technically compile any language to Java bytecode, but there are a few problems to deal with:
* a fixed set of types. For instance, Java doesn't use unsigned numbers, so Java bytecode has no support for them.
* no tail recursion - this is a biggie. If I have a function that the last thing to do is to call another function, then if I compile it to machine code, I can arrange to remove the stack frame before making the second call, so that if a the call path is f() -> g() -> f() -> g()..., then the stack doesn't blow up. This is really really important for some functional languages.
* Java bytecode assumes that the Java model object orientation is used. This is bad for languages that do things in a different way (such as Eiffel with multiple inheritance), or the many functional/logic languages that aren't object oriented.
These can all be worked around, but at a great cost in efficiency.
What is needed is a bytecode that is designed to be source language independent - able to handle the constructs for any source language without making assumptions about it, and be compiled relatively efficiently into any machine language. Java bytecode is not this language.
With some way of detecting people on the spinning round bit (obviously not a motion sensor!), and a little extra software, you could have a clock that always pointed the time in the direction that you were. Only good for one person though.
Legally, in many ways, corporations are people (OK, I think that is a stupid legal ficton, but that's the way that it currently is).
They get the benefits of being 'people' so they should pay the costs. This includes accountability to the law and paying taxes. At least until we get some sanity in how corporations are regarded, and what rights/power they are allowed to have.
Part of breaking up the current "lesser of two nearly identical" evils is to look at _all_ the candidates, and vote for the one you most support (even if they have no chance of winning), and encourage others to do same. If none of the candidates _really_ has anything to offer, cast an invalid vote (I've done that once).
Of course, if you really want to work towards improving things, you need to become a activist, possibly for a political party or an organisation advocating electoral reform. Voting is a start though.
It saddens me that your country is so corrupt that who is president could make such a difference in the Microsoft case.
Does anyone have any idea how to get MacOS X Beta in a country that doesn't have an Apple Store? (My understanding is that you can only order from the Apple Store in the country you are in).
Sigh. I guess I try to visit the local dealer first thing in the morning.
$30 is a bit expensive (about NZ$70?), but must be better than the current cycle... use MacOS for networking and most things, reboot to Darwin to do some stuff that only runs under a UNIX environment, reboot back to MacOS so I can check my changes back into CVS...
> "Cell phones cause cancer!" Industry spends $$$ showing good evidence against this.
The jusry is still very much out on this one - there is evidence both ways.
> "Fine, Cell phones psychically kill babies!" "Cell phones ate my plants!" "Cell phones are against God!"...
There is a difference between legitimate concerns and obstruction. If you claim "Cell phones ate my plants!", that should be a statement you can easily prove if it's true. "Cell phones are against God!" is not an environmental or health concern.
> See the problem?
Yes I do see the problem. Most of this is caused by:
(1) Industry mostly spending $$$ only _after_ the technology is in wide use - effectively experimenting on the general population - there is a long long list of things for which this has been done. Many industries are really really good at saying 'we didn't know, but can't do anything about it now' after the damage is done.
(2) Industry is often only interested in results that suit it. This leads to lots of 'bad science' and mistrust of what industry says anyway - for instance, would you trust the tobacco companies?
(3) The highly reductionist approach usually taken by the scientific community. Thy will look at one thing in isolation, and not consider how it might interact with other things in the environment. For example, do we really know anything about the interactions of the hundreds of agri-chemicals that are out there? And BSE wasn't anticipated - feeding rendered down sheep to cattle can't cause any problems, can it, as it's all just proteins, bone and fat?
> I propose a better principle: "The burden of proof is on the party making the claim."
You mean the status quo? I don't know about where you live (maybe there is a place where there is high quality legal and scientific aid available, but I've never heard of it), but in New Zealand this has been a complete failure. The problem is the huge disparity of resources. If I have a dispute with my neighbour about something he is doing that impinges on me, at least it is kind of an even contest. If I try to make any challenge to a big corporation beyond expressing an opinion, I'll be up against a lot of high paid laywers. I know from experience that people can be just worn down by attrition (ever taken time off work to go to a resource consent hearing, knowing you are the only one in the room not being paid?)
What is needed is a good regulatory framework requiring adequate evidence (OK, I know that you can't actually _prove_ anything, but you can do a good job of checking out the possibilities) that there are no unwanted side effects before some new technology is released. And yes, this would be expensive and may even slow some harmless things down, but is better than something dangerous getting out there and causing damage to unsuspecting people. And the industries should pay - they are the ones standing to make big bucks if the tehcnology succeeds.
In New Zealand there are encouraging signs - there is huge opposition to genetically modified foods, not because there has been any particular harm demonstrated, but because industry has tried to snek them in without proving they are safe, and won't even inform consumers what is genetically modified and what isn't.
> People can, and do, just go around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling...
There is a good chance that thy sky _is_ "falling" (if you consider the problems of global warming and ozone depletion). If we wait till it is proved beyond any doubt, it'll be way too late to do anything about it.
I am very uneasy about cell phones (and wireless networking) - they should have been proven (as far as possible) to be safe before even being considered for general use. I'm sufficiently uneasy that I refuse to have a cell phone.
I support the Precautionary Principle:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof."
In this context, it should be up to the industries selling such things as cellphones and wireless networks to give evidence, rather than assurances, that it is safe, and to show (including the research data) that any fears are groundless, or at least be clear on possible risks, so that we can make informed choices about what we use.
Instead, they are reaping the profits on such technology, while we the public are exposed to whatever hazards may be involved (and there may well turn out to be none, but there is a poor track record on this), while adequate reseach on hazards is not a high priority, because it does not meet the financial/economic objectives of research funders.
Getting back to the article, all it says is that "there's still no evidence that mobile phones will mangle your memories or give you cancer". That is really not good enough - it is part of the "line up the bodies" (require proof that it is harmful before doing anything to stop it) approach that is usually taken when there is big money involved.
"I'm sure horse stables sued the first automobile manufacturers, and lobbied to make cars illegal. (Nasty smelly noisy things, dangerous. They run people over. Shouldn't be allowed.)"
I like that idea:-) Were Americans lawsuit-happy even back then?
Seriously... that's one flaw in the "consumers know best" argument - where there is some possible safety or environmental damage caused by a new technology. (OK, this doesn't apply to any of the technologies that he talks about). Of course, in that case it should be the lawmakers rather than lawsuits that are involved.
Roy Ward.
Can't be the same article I read then ...
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Lawsuits Suck
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I read about how all these bad things are happening, and very few people are trying to to anything effective about it.
It takes real effort (or money) to change laws. That's the lesson that corporations have learned that we haven't... Oh, and I _know_ it's really uphill for the little guy to try and change things. The powers that be like us to think we are powerless, too. If enough of us act, we can make a difference.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
Might this be one of the "malformed analogies" that he was writing about?;-)
The trouble is, he's partly right
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
Not that complete bullshit about "Because if anybody needs a lesson in the way the real world works, it's the geeks" - no-one deserves that sort of "lesson" - but that preaching to the choir is a waste of time.
If you really care about internet freedom (or any other freedom for that matter), find something to _do_ about it - whether to contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or ACLU, get involved in a political party that supports your views (I'm not going to bother arguing about which one, but I suspect the major two parties are a worthless), arrange to _visit_ your representative, lobby your workplace or other organisations you belong to to have policies supporting open source or whatever you regard as 'freedom' , lot's of things I haven't thought of - nearly everyone can do _something_ constructive.
Think of the column as a 'call to arms', or at least a call to find some _effective_ action.
Slashdot Mirror
> In my experience, those of you who "really care about privacy" are the suicide bombers, hackers, and child pornographers of the world.
You've really had experience with suicide bombers, hackers, and child pornographers? Wow, I've had a sheltered life then compared to you! I've only met hackers (that's hackers, not crackers, which is a whole different argument).
It's not only important what's on the mind of those proposing legislation (although that is important), it's what the legislation says, and how it can be used.
I can think of several cases where I personally value privacy that are entirely above board:
- I'm involved in contract programming, and need to be able to share source code securely, and I don't trust any government agency to have access to it for whatever reason (what if it 'leaks'?).
- I'm a political activist. While I've done nothing illegal in that regard, I would be very uncomfortable about having every move monitored by a government that is essentially hostile to much of what I support - it would stifle communication. The present government will not do anything to harm me, but if something were to happen here like Nazism or McCarthyism (anti-Greenism?), I'm not too keen on archives being used to declare me a menace to society,
- I'm don't like any more than necesary of my personal information getting into the hands of the big corporates. They'd only use it to try and sell me things.
Now, if all monitoring could be guaranteed to be used only for a narrow intended purpose, was completely secure, and the collection agency was completely trustworthy, my only objections would be philosophical. Unfortunately, very few or no organisations live up to this.
Oh one last thing - it might be argued that that monitoring can be done anyway, without legislation. At least in that case, I do have some legal recourse (whatever that is worth). A while back, someone took the SIS to court for illegally breaking into his house.
Is it possible that pages being stored in memory (as suggested by the memory use going up as more pages are browsed) happened because the memory was available? Might it do something sensible on a memory starved system (like tossing the cached pages out of memory)?
Of course, even if this is the case it is still not good - disk caching would be far better.
Or better yet, stick with a less bloated browser.
> My guess is that although Apple has Aqua running on BSD kernel, Linux users will have no real difficulty either porting Aqua to Linux or just making Quazi-Aqua on Linux.
They won't be able to port it, as there is no way that Apple is going to release the source.
As for making a new Aqua, I would be really delighted if someone wrote a nice consistant user interface (such as Aqua is) for Linux, but I don't see it happening. Sure the KDE and Gnome people do their best, but they just don't have the attention to detail that Apple has. In amoungst it's other messes, that ins one thing that Apple has (usually) got right - a good user experience.
I'm using MacOS X Beta as my main OS and (mostly) loving it. It leaves Windows and the X based window managers I have tried for dead.
Oh, and yes, I tried LinuxPPC - trashed it to install MacOS X.
If you want to protest (i.e. think _none_ of the candidates are any good), the best thing you can do is cast an 'informal vote', i.e. an invalid one. The first time I ever voted, I crossed out all of the names.
STV uses a ranking of all the candidate, which gives you exactly what you want, as far as the voting for the lesser of two evils goes. The algorithm is at http://www.cs.albany.edu/~nvm/stv
Australia uses it, New Zealand uses Mixed Member Proportional representation which is a good system for electing MPs grouped into political parties.
Of course, you'll have no luck getting a change of voting systems in the US where the system favours the people already there. We only got MMP in New Zealand because politicians offered it to us as a distraction.
It is also worth finding out which political parties are likely to be supporting it (parties are likely to vote in blocks on something like this) and targetting MPs from those parties. Most parties try to have some list MP representation in each area that they don't have electorate MPs.
Labour will be supporting it, possibly the Alliance as Labour's coalition partner (although that would be a back down from what I understand to be their policy), but they need at least one other party. This would usually be the Greens, but I can't see us (I am a member) supporting it if we have a clear understanding what this is about. If the Alliance and/or the Greens are supporting this, those MPs are the best ones to target.
Oh, and I can personally second the point about email to MPs not being particularly effective - write a letter, or better, arrange an appointment.
Does anyone have more detail on this proposed law and who is supporting it? Good lobbying requires clear information.
This would only work if either:
* it was read-only cache
* the cache was write-through.
Writes to cache in most setups typically get written back to main storage sometime later, so flakey RAM would still be bad.
This solution might work if:
(a) the 3 filtering packages were all 'nearly correct'.
(b) they had completely independent heuristics.
As an (extreme) example, if 3 filter programs each blocked a ramdom 20% (1/5) of sites (I'm not saying that they do), this approeach would block an effectively random 10% (13/125) of sites.
My guess is that with this approach (based on what I've heard about the current filters) is you'd hardly get anything blocked except for anti-censorware sites like Peacefire, or where they have common heuristics (like anything with the word 'breast'). Still worse than useless.
(-288-32)*5/9 = -178 C
Of course, I suspect that both these numbers have spurious accuracy.
I should perhaps have been clearer:
* This only applies to machines that have been assigned to particular people or projects - the undergraduate students are stuch with windows. I was actually talking about staff, not students.
* When someone leaves, their machine will be reverted back to the default and reassigned to someone else.
* All the servers etc. have software installed and maintained by tech support.
So we don't have the problem that you are describing.
It might be because I work in a university department, but our IT people have a very enlightened attitude: "If we install it (Windows NT is their main option), we'll support it, if you install it, you support it but we may help if we can". With that idea, the operating systems running in our office have included Windows NT, Windows 95 (I think), Windows 2000, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, MacOS (OK, that one's pretty obvious on a Mac), and Linux. We are now pretty much settled on Linux, and Linux is slowly spreading through the department (helped by us). There is still the odd bit of software that we need Windows for which is why I still have dual-boot :-(.
When the inevitable M$-Word attachments arrive with email, if it's something we want to read, there will sometimes be a response like "can you please resend this in plain text so that people in the 9th floor research labs can read it?"
Of course, not all the university is like that - I know a person in another departmentment where they use the university's central IT services - and it's something like "You shall use the approved version of (for instance) Netscape (4.07 I think) and no other, and if you install _any_ software not on the approved list (even a later version of the same software) we shall came around and remove it". And they do. Ouch.
Where I live there is an aquarium not far away. They have a row of tanks with things in that you can touch (starfish, sea urchins, etc.). For some reason, they keep the hagfish in a tank on the end of the row, with a cover on. Ugly brute - and imagine, (given it's placement) the sort of accident that could happen if they left the cover off ;-). (Actually, the staff said a I could touch it if I really wanted to - I declined).
... um ... ahh ... nevermind"
Also, with the strands in the slime being somewhat silk-like, image it being used as a replacement for silk? "No, it's not silk you are wearing, it's
Actually, it is a problem with both (or maybe not JVM according to another reply). I'd gone offtopic to the extent that I was only looking at JVM in response to another post. I don't actually know what MS .NET/CLR can handle, becuase I don't have the specs.
There are two ways I can see of dealing with this sort of problem:
(1) Try to have a generic object model in the intermediate language that can handle most sorts of source language object model,
(2) Have the intermediate language be very low level (quite near to assembler, but not processor specific) so that it doesn't have an object model at all, and that is built on top. Of course, this still requires some genericity in the linker.
I'd probably personally favour (2) because I am a functional programmer rather than an object programmer. YMMV.
Yes, you can technically compile any language to Java bytecode, but there are a few problems to deal with:
..., then the stack doesn't blow up. This is really really important for some functional languages.
* a fixed set of types. For instance, Java doesn't use unsigned numbers, so Java bytecode has no support for them.
* no tail recursion - this is a biggie. If I have a function that the last thing to do is to call another function, then if I compile it to machine code, I can arrange to remove the stack frame before making the second call, so that if a the call path is f() -> g() -> f() -> g()
* Java bytecode assumes that the Java model object orientation is used. This is bad for languages that do things in a different way (such as Eiffel with multiple inheritance), or the many functional/logic languages that aren't object oriented.
These can all be worked around, but at a great cost in efficiency.
What is needed is a bytecode that is designed to be source language independent - able to handle the constructs for any source language without making assumptions about it, and be compiled relatively efficiently into any machine language. Java bytecode is not this language.
With some way of detecting people on the spinning round bit (obviously not a motion sensor!), and a little extra software, you could have a clock that always pointed the time in the direction that you were. Only good for one person though.
Legally, in many ways, corporations are people (OK, I think that is a stupid legal ficton, but that's the way that it currently is).
They get the benefits of being 'people' so they should pay the costs. This includes accountability to the law and paying taxes. At least until we get some sanity in how corporations are regarded, and what rights/power they are allowed to have.
Part of breaking up the current "lesser of two nearly identical" evils is to look at _all_ the candidates, and vote for the one you most support (even if they have no chance of winning), and encourage others to do same. If none of the candidates _really_ has anything to offer, cast an invalid vote (I've done that once).
Of course, if you really want to work towards improving things, you need to become a activist, possibly for a political party or an organisation advocating electoral reform. Voting is a start though.
It saddens me that your country is so corrupt that who is president could make such a difference in the Microsoft case.
Roy Ward.
Does anyone have any idea how to get MacOS X Beta in a country that doesn't have an Apple Store? (My understanding is that you can only order from the Apple Store in the country you are in).
... use MacOS for networking and most things, reboot to Darwin to do some stuff that only runs under a UNIX environment, reboot back to MacOS so I can check my changes back into CVS ...
Sigh. I guess I try to visit the local dealer first thing in the morning.
$30 is a bit expensive (about NZ$70?), but must be better than the current cycle
Roy Ward.
> "Cell phones cause cancer!" Industry spends $$$ showing good evidence against this.
The jusry is still very much out on this one - there is evidence both ways.
> "Fine, Cell phones psychically kill babies!" "Cell phones ate my plants!" "Cell phones are against God!"...
There is a difference between legitimate concerns and obstruction. If you claim "Cell phones ate my plants!", that should be a statement you can easily prove if it's true. "Cell phones are against God!" is not an environmental or health concern.
> See the problem?
Yes I do see the problem. Most of this is caused by:
(1) Industry mostly spending $$$ only _after_ the technology is in wide use - effectively experimenting on the general population - there is a long long list of things for which this has been done. Many industries are really really good at saying 'we didn't know, but can't do anything about it now' after the damage is done.
(2) Industry is often only interested in results that suit it. This leads to lots of 'bad science' and mistrust of what industry says anyway - for instance, would you trust the tobacco companies?
(3) The highly reductionist approach usually taken by the scientific community. Thy will look at one thing in isolation, and not consider how it might interact with other things in the environment. For example, do we really know anything about the interactions of the hundreds of agri-chemicals that are out there? And BSE wasn't anticipated - feeding rendered down sheep to cattle can't cause any problems, can it, as it's all just proteins, bone and fat?
> I propose a better principle: "The burden of proof is on the party making the claim."
You mean the status quo? I don't know about where you live (maybe there is a place where there is high quality legal and scientific aid available, but I've never heard of it), but in New Zealand this has been a complete failure. The problem is the huge disparity of resources. If I have a dispute with my neighbour about something he is doing that impinges on me, at least it is kind of an even contest. If I try to make any challenge to a big corporation beyond expressing an opinion, I'll be up against a lot of high paid laywers. I know from experience that people can be just worn down by attrition (ever taken time off work to go to a resource consent hearing, knowing you are the only one in the room not being paid?)
What is needed is a good regulatory framework requiring adequate evidence (OK, I know that you can't actually _prove_ anything, but you can do a good job of checking out the possibilities) that there are no unwanted side effects before some new technology is released. And yes, this would be expensive and may even slow some harmless things down, but is better than something dangerous getting out there and causing damage to unsuspecting people. And the industries should pay - they are the ones standing to make big bucks if the tehcnology succeeds.
In New Zealand there are encouraging signs - there is huge opposition to genetically modified foods, not because there has been any particular harm demonstrated, but because industry has tried to snek them in without proving they are safe, and won't even inform consumers what is genetically modified and what isn't.
> People can, and do, just go around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling...
There is a good chance that thy sky _is_ "falling" (if you consider the problems of global warming and ozone depletion). If we wait till it is proved beyond any doubt, it'll be way too late to do anything about it.
Roy Ward.
I am very uneasy about cell phones (and wireless networking) - they should have been proven (as far as possible) to be safe before even being considered for general use. I'm sufficiently uneasy that I refuse to have a cell phone.
I support the Precautionary Principle:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof."
In this context, it should be up to the industries selling such things as cellphones and wireless networks to give evidence, rather than assurances, that it is safe, and to show (including the research data) that any fears are groundless, or at least be clear on possible risks, so that we can make informed choices about what we use.
Instead, they are reaping the profits on such technology, while we the public are exposed to whatever hazards may be involved (and there may well turn out to be none, but there is a poor track record on this), while adequate reseach on hazards is not a high priority, because it does not meet the financial/economic objectives of research funders.
Getting back to the article, all it says is that "there's still no evidence that mobile phones will mangle your memories or give you cancer". That is really not good enough - it is part of the "line up the bodies" (require proof that it is harmful before doing anything to stop it) approach that is usually taken when there is big money involved.
"I'm sure horse stables sued the first automobile manufacturers, and lobbied to make cars illegal. (Nasty smelly noisy things, dangerous. They run people over. Shouldn't be allowed.)"
:-) Were Americans lawsuit-happy even back then?
... that's one flaw in the "consumers know best" argument - where there is some possible safety or environmental damage caused by a new technology. (OK, this doesn't apply to any of the technologies that he talks about). Of course, in that case it should be the lawmakers rather than lawsuits that are involved.
I like that idea
Seriously
Roy Ward.
I read about how all these bad things are happening, and very few people are trying to to anything effective about it.
... Oh, and I _know_ it's really uphill for the little guy to try and change things. The powers that be like us to think we are powerless, too. If enough of us act, we can make a difference.
It takes real effort (or money) to change laws. That's the lesson that corporations have learned that we haven't
Might this be one of the "malformed analogies" that he was writing about? ;-)
Not that complete bullshit about "Because if anybody needs a lesson in the way the real world works, it's the geeks" - no-one deserves that sort of "lesson" - but that preaching to the choir is a waste of time.
If you really care about internet freedom (or any other freedom for that matter), find something to _do_ about it - whether to contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or ACLU, get involved in a political party that supports your views (I'm not going to bother arguing about which one, but I suspect the major two parties are a worthless), arrange to _visit_ your representative, lobby your workplace or other organisations you belong to to have policies supporting open source or whatever you regard as 'freedom' , lot's of things I haven't thought of - nearly everyone can do _something_ constructive.
Think of the column as a 'call to arms', or at least a call to find some _effective_ action.
Cheers,
Roy Ward.
An example of progress:
It took over 1000 years for the Olympics to be killed the first time around by religion and politics.
We look like we are going to do it in a little over 100 because of politics, corporatization and greed.
Roy Ward.