One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem. People just pretend that the issue isn't there and just hope it will go away if they put their blinders on. They just go about "trying to do the best they can" while completely ignoring the nature of the big ugly hideous beast breating down their throat.
How do I know that all this talk about giving Chinees the "most freedom that we can" is all bullshit? Because the people saying it are not only censoring, but they are lying. None of them call it like it is, none of them dare say "hey your government is a piece of shit" for fear of offending the Chineese powers that be. Basically, it is a policy of appeasement and to see how it will play out - Chineese history shows very clearly, it will end in disaster.
I agree. You cut out the record company middle man, maximize distribution - and supprise, the demand for concerts goes up driving up the price. This is really proof all along that the labels and the copyright system is not helping artists, and are really really not helping small artists who could never get their music out to enough people in the past. Evfen better, if people don't like the price of a Madonna concert, they now have the option of going to a less demanded artist.
I think the problem here is that there is a big difference between what he calls "liberating" and what we call liberty. Liberty is a universal end in itself, technology may be a means for that, it may be a means for education too, but when all is said and done - if liberty is not an end in itself then people are not going to be what they were desinged to be. Technology doesn't magically secure and respect peoples free will, people half to do that, and it is clear that people who have power in China refuse to respect that.
Now if he was all goo goo about people using technlolgies to secure their rights and liberties, then that would be a different story, but that's not what I'm getting here at all.
Maybe its time we started boycotting Yahoo? This would mean amongst other things replacing people replacing own their Geocities pages with a boycot message.
I hate to say it, but Yahoo is asking for a lot more than a boycot. When you start imprisioning and threatening the livlyhood of people over free speech - it takes things to a whole different level. I wouldn't be supprised at all if people started calling in death threats to Yahoo execs and bomb threats to Yahoo offices. People know darn well that the excuses given by them are bullshit - how much you want to bet that things will change quickly at Yahoo when it starts getting personal and starts hitting ther bottom line.
During the industrial revolution, the southern states tried to isolate themselves from change by fencing themselves off from the rest of the union. Today, industries are trying to isolate themselves from the changes of the information age with DRM.
The difference was that back then there was a clearly divided north and south. Today we are all mixed in together. Then the government was on the side of the industrial interests over the plantation interests. Today the government is on the side of the media interests and not on the side of the Interent. Back then it was about controlling people with coercion (slavery), today it is about controlling people with information. Back then there were racial divides, today it is more of a proprietary divide.
While technology and history is on our side, it is going to be one hell of a battle and all hell is about to break loose.
If a person does something evil, gains a huge amount of power and wealth from it, then does something nice, this does not make him a nice person. Hell, Castro in Cuba gives out candy to the children, and provides free medical care and housing to all women and children - even moreso than the US. But it doesn't take much looking at the fundamentals, past all the children hugging him and giving him flowers, to figure out that the bad tree bears bad fruit and it rotten at the core.
Well, the same is true with Mr Gates. He has choosen time and time again to hate the free flow of information and knowledge in the information age, and lock out productive activity in all areas of the information economy. While the 1st world could afford all the damage caused by all the proprietary crap, the 3rd world was pertty much locked out of the information age 20 years longer then they needed to be to the detrament of billions. This has had a profound effect, the 3rd world desperately neds the free software infrastructure that he has attacked and despised. Sadly our society, and their piece of shit belief systems (especially copyrights) have enabled that behavior, but that still doesn't make it right nor does it make it a non choice.
BTW, it is also disengenuious. The poor in the 3rd world are not some pittifull pleons who need another frebie. They are more than capable of helping themselves if they have freedom. Has the Bill and Melinda increased individual liberty from oppressive governments arround the world? Well, just look who'se visiting his house and that will pretty much answer that question.
What Bill's doing is nice, but what is driving it is that ther are 3 billion people in the 3rd world who are all potential MS product users. That's one huge freakin customer base, charity has nothing to do with it.
Is that money is not in the sales and distribution of software, but in software related services. So make your product free software (as in GPL) from the beginning and maximize distribution and third party access so that you can place a wedge in the market place to offer value added services
If Netscape was GPL'd from the beginning, it would have totaly changed their market focus, it would have totally changed their business strategy, it would have totally changed their development style, and they probably would have been in FireFox's shoes today rather than out of business and sold like second hand colthing to AOL. In fact, IE would probalby have never gotten to the point it is now and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to apply their anti-compettitive stratigies, just like they wern't able to apply them to Red Hat, or SUSE, or Apache, or sendmail with very much success.
... flock together. They're both controll freaks, they both hate freedom and individual liberty, they both lie about free markets (China's while getting freer is not truely free, nor is MS which relies strictly on license monopolies and not competition), they both think they're smart and have large number of resources, they're both more interested in power and prestige than making a mark. Bill wants a billion people in his market, China wants total information controll over their citizens. In all truth, I wouldn't be suprosed if they slept together.
A lot of times what I see in the industry, is that you take something that can be done with a simple programming language or a simple interface, add a lot of complicated layers on top of it that nobody can intuitively learn, call it middleware, and then charge out the nose for it.
Now, I'm not sure if that's what Red Hat is planning to do, but it sure smells lkie it and the smell is a stinky smell not a rose smell.
Also, I'm not sure if I like the approach either. The best way to have a successfull complicated system is to keep the high level parts simple (like the IP protocool on the Internet), but it doesn't seem like Jboss is going in that direction. I'm really not sure about this - I don't understand their vision.
Most high level glossy corporate visions that I hear about turn out to be pipe dreams. I've seen all sorts of high level unified information architecture corporate visions come out of Microsoft and they all turned out to be crap. I know the rules are different with open source, but from my experience - higher level implementations are driven by needs, not theories. This seems like it's driven by theories, not needs. The fact that there are all these buzzwords floating arround - COBRA, SOAP, J2EEE, Middleware, but not universal/intuitive use (like TCP/IP, HTML) smells like a big warning to me.
Because Linux doesn't provide content, and as one other person already posted, that's what people want.
Ahh, but code is content.
Nothing. However, imagine your life with no content: little to no movies, no TV, little music, very few magazines, very few books. That's a life without content. You can manage in that environment, but most people wouldn't want to.
Don't be silly, just because people don't have a distribution monopoly on content doesn't mean that there isn't going to be any contnet created or any worth looking at. Notice that uncontrolled internet lately, where's the content shortage?
One nice thing (IMHO) about free markets is that free markets are about freedom and not about markets. People who have the freedom to do as they choose tend to make more profitable decisions over time. That's why when you take the moral high ground about controlling people (eg not controlling how they use information to preserve a distribution monopoly in the case of copyrights) - economics and markets will eventually back you up over time.
If you want success: grow If you want spectacular success: grow and use leverage
My point is that I don't see any reason in the world why we shouldn't be trying to use Linux as leverage against people who are trying to impose DRM. Market forces are clearly pushing Linux in spite of them anyhow. What do people who controll content really have to offer us that we somehow can't manage without? The truth is that the future is not about extracting revenue from content, but instead extracting revenue from content related services.
IMHO, just as the plantation system tried to deal with the industrial revolution by fencing off the south and breaking off from the Union, the media system today is trying to deal with the information age by using DRM to fence off all content. Both are doomed stratigies, and the sooner we kill copyright and tools used to impose them, the sooner we will be doing ourselves and the information age a big favor.
Well the end tag about Gold was a little off topic, but your analsys is wrong. It's clear that you don't understand what drove it up to $600 (todays close), so it's also clear that you don't understand why the switch to Gold as a trade currency means that it has to reach a mininum of $1600/oz to reach equilibrium. Where it goes from there is anyones guess, but given the track record of other governments (including confederate money) in similar situations it does not look pretty.
As for the US dollar - we've always had inflation and the means to slow it down.
You don't know what you're talking about. If they deflate (by raising interest rates) it will kill the dollar in the international trade market, if they don't it will kill the dollar in the currency markets. The US system has too much debt and too little savings to deflate without a chain reaction of cascading defaults, but too much dowanward wage pressure to inflate without hyperinflating. Notice how US average pay has stayed about the same while almost every commodity has doubbled in price over the last 5 years. Why hasn't pay caught up????? Hmmmmmm. How will people pay down their debts if that trend contiunes??? Hmmmmmm. Why did commodities doubble in price to begin with???? Hmmmmmmm. Think about it.
It is clear that the author of this article has absolutely no understanding of the real web "mob" (which isn't even called that BTW). This article is total BS and probably some kind of government set up.
For people who want to understand the "real" "mob", they need to understand the Underground Economy (UE). What they need to understand is business and commerce. 90% of UE transactions is just regular business trying to aviod taxes and regulations. They have an elaborate offshore finance network that can transfer money arround the world faster than governments can track it. Most of the money is gained thru (some) female services, hotels, casinos, people smuggeling, and (some) drugs, and the biggest one - tax free duty free trade - and not thru online hacking nor thru draining peoples bank accounts or even defrauding people. In fact, they try to distance themselves from these activities because they want return customers built on a trust relationship. Most fortune 500 companies have regular dealings in the UE.
It is highly factioned, and some people do try to blackmale, eg (give us money, or don't report us when we rob you or else such and such government will find out about your hidden transactions) - but this is mostly on a rogue individual level and not a large commercial level. In fact, when the FBI trackes these people down - it helps the UE, because it lowers their transaction costs and liabilities. Also, if they need access to secure systems, they don't need to hack into them. They have a lot of high level bank officers and government officials in their pockets. The real UE also hates terrorisim which in the last few years has increased their transaction costs several fold. The goal is to hide financial transactions from taxes, regulation, and rogue lawsuits, not to hide finances for terrorisim. Also most of the UE is split between drugs. Many try to distance themselves from the drug trade to avoid the higher costs of business, but the money is so big that it can't be ignored all together.
Another thing that most people don't understand is that the war on drugs and the financial part of the war on terrorisim is really just an excuse to wage war on the UE. When corporate money associates the UE with drug lords and terrorisim, then they tend to keep their money at home more where their respective governments can tax the living daylights out of them. Given the costs of the war on terror, the big welfare states of most governments, and really really bad fundamentals of the US dollar lately - this has become a high proiroty for the US government in recent times.
One more thing, the US dollar is in deep deep shit. The US economy can't pay off it's debts without watering down the dollar (or default which they can't do because it will cause a cascading chain of defaults), but they cant water down the dollar without sparking a stagflation spiral. When it spirals out of controll it will cause hell in the US and every country in the world. Anyone who doesn't have precious metals is either stupid, poor, or going to be poor. It used to be that the dollar was the currency of choice for the UE, then when the dollar devalued the currency of choice became the Euro, now the currency of choice has been moving quickly torard Gold.
...This has to be considered decidedly anti-Homeland Defense by the current administration. If so, when will we see it if ever?"
Well, unless I can varify the code or make the chip from a copy of it's mask myself - I am pretty much taking it on faith from IBM that it is secure from the eyes of the government. (no offense IBM, but I prefer the security of open review) Untill independent sources can take the chip and put it under an electron microscope and say: Yes it's designed secure - then it's pretty much not secure. An if it's firmware that can be re-programmed, then it is especially not secure if the governments hands get on it anywhere in the distribution chain.
Has anyone else been looking for the next frontier of freedom. What I mean is that for the longest time, the USA was the last frontier in freedom. If people in the world wanted to be free, they would find their way to the United States. While the USA is still more free than most places, the deterioration over the last 80 years has been notable.
Since most of the land in the world is claimed by less than free governments, I'm wondering if the next frontier in freedom needs to be sea based. I suppose for the next few decades people can probably use technologies to secure their freedoms, crypto, open source, etc..., but that won't get arround the physical controll problem. Eventually people will need to physically secure their freedoms.
Maybe the solution is for a bunch of liberty minded people to collaberate together to take controll of a small despot country, but that still would make it very vulnerable to larger military powers. Moving to more free states, juridistictions, and countries would probably help, but doen't seem like a permanent solution. Maybe it would be possible to convince all the freedom hating overloards to go somewhere else, but that seems unlikely too.
This is still all just hype
on
Nanotech Gone Awry?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The truth still is that there are a lot of huge entrenched industries that see nanotech as a competitive threat and are desperate to regulate it before it eats into their revenue stream. Just ignore this, it is just another trumpet horning in the wind. It is just another excuse looking for a problem to regulate. Compaired to the potential benefits that nanotech has to offer, problems like these are like the hairline scratch on a 3 ton statue of gold. The nano age is here to stay like it or not.
Nvidia, ATI, Xilinx, ARM and every other fabless foundry's entire business model is based on IP laws. These companies do not manufacture anything. I'm also sure many would not approve of Intel stealing AMD's IP and manufacturing it on their own process.
You don't know what you're talking about. The whole reason why the intel has ammounted to anything more than nothing was because the intel architecture could be immitated more or less freely inspite of the fact that it had an inferoir design. Unlike Motorolla, they didn't have zero based addressing, they had a segmented address space instead of an elloquent 32 bit one, they had variable length instructions that were hard to pipeline and optimize instead of fixed length ones that are easier to optimize, and they had a small amount ot registers compaired to many in the motorolla chips. By every technical standard Intel sucked, but because they were less proprietary they were more willing to negotiate with IBM than Motorolla was, and because they were less proprietary, AMD and others were able to make pin compatable chips which created competition that cuased the x86 market to explode like a nuclear bomb while the other PC models fizzled inspite of being light years ahead. Renember Amiga, Atri...?
The same thing happened between ethernet and token ring. The same thing happened between TCP vs Novell. In fact almost every major market move in technology over the last 100 years down to the typerwriter has favored the least proprietary technology, yet people still have their head up their ass when it comes to understanding patents and markets. WTF is it going to take for people to get it?!?!?
The problem is that SONY isn't a software company, or a media company - they are a hardware (electronic device) company. They have alienated a lot of their customers with DRM crap and content controlls and have lost a lot of hardware sales because of it. So now the hardware side of the business is getting weaker, but the content side is getting stronger. Because of that, they will almost certinly impose more DRM crap, piss off more customers, kill more hardware sales and feed a vicious cycle that could kill the whole company.
If the EPA was wrong, the consequences would be way less severe -- OK, so we spent billions on better protecting the planet when the shielding was unnecessary.
If Bush is wrong, millions of people would be forced by rising sea levels to relocate over a few decades -- and the government would have taken zero steps to prepare for it.
More taxation vs. millions upheaved. Think about it.
Speack for yourself. If this was such an overwhelming and compelling issue, then I'm sure that they will have no problem getting people to give by the billions (assuming that the government hasn't taken it already). In fact, the meer observation that they need such coercive measures in place to ensure the research and fund the "solutions" is a very compelling argument that it is indeed not founded at all. History is lettered with hundreds of millions of dead people in the name of governments that have exercised powers for the sake of urgent issues, but it almost has no examples of societies that have been ripped apart because government didn't do enough. How many laws did the government need to impose to get people to prepare for the y2k bug? How many did they need to pass to get 3 exact replicas of the US stock markets at discrete locations? Even more important, how many disasters have government laws stopped? New Orleans? San Fran earthquakes? Mississipi flood basin?
Perhaps it's a difference in personal perspective - most of my peers and I up here in Canada think there is no question that global warming is real, and that it's our fault. We hear a lot more media coverage on the issue, where it seems the US is mostly blanketed by negative propaganda
That's the problem though. People think this is an environmental debate, it's not, it's a political debate. It's a debate about wether the government should microregulate and controll millions of people and millions of industries. And all those studies, people think they are environemtal studies, they are not, they are political battles. I wish it wasn't so, but that's the way they have made it. If they were willing to get rid of the premise that the only solution to promote the environemnt is the microregulation of millions and drop the billions in government funding and subsidies, then we could have an honest debate about the environment tommorow, but they won't and so a real debate about the environment won't happen.
In all fairness, when govt regulations are imposed that cost millions to comply with - that expense is passed on by big mega smokestack industries, but small, efficient, and innovative competitors are put out of business. I don't think people understand that the big polluters are the ones who want these regulations the most because they lock out small, efficient, and cheap competitors.
In all fairness, nobody talks about how government orgs like the EPA allocate funds for climate reasearch with heavy biases in favor of research that tends to promote the necissity of a larger EPA. But then when it goes the other way around, people scream bloody murder.
Get the government money out of the freakin cliamte research studies to begin with, and they might actually become credible.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem. People just pretend that the issue isn't there and just hope it will go away if they put their blinders on. They just go about "trying to do the best they can" while completely ignoring the nature of the big ugly hideous beast breating down their throat.
How do I know that all this talk about giving Chinees the "most freedom that we can" is all bullshit? Because the people saying it are not only censoring, but they are lying. None of them call it like it is, none of them dare say "hey your government is a piece of shit" for fear of offending the Chineese powers that be. Basically, it is a policy of appeasement and to see how it will play out - Chineese history shows very clearly, it will end in disaster.
I agree. You cut out the record company middle man, maximize distribution - and supprise, the demand for concerts goes up driving up the price. This is really proof all along that the labels and the copyright system is not helping artists, and are really really not helping small artists who could never get their music out to enough people in the past. Evfen better, if people don't like the price of a Madonna concert, they now have the option of going to a less demanded artist.
I think the problem here is that there is a big difference between what he calls "liberating" and what we call liberty. Liberty is a universal end in itself, technology may be a means for that, it may be a means for education too, but when all is said and done - if liberty is not an end in itself then people are not going to be what they were desinged to be. Technology doesn't magically secure and respect peoples free will, people half to do that, and it is clear that people who have power in China refuse to respect that.
Now if he was all goo goo about people using technlolgies to secure their rights and liberties, then that would be a different story, but that's not what I'm getting here at all.
Maybe its time we started boycotting Yahoo? This would mean amongst other things replacing people replacing own their Geocities pages with a boycot message.
I hate to say it, but Yahoo is asking for a lot more than a boycot. When you start imprisioning and threatening the livlyhood of people over free speech - it takes things to a whole different level. I wouldn't be supprised at all if people started calling in death threats to Yahoo execs and bomb threats to Yahoo offices. People know darn well that the excuses given by them are bullshit - how much you want to bet that things will change quickly at Yahoo when it starts getting personal and starts hitting ther bottom line.
During the industrial revolution, the southern states tried to isolate themselves from change by fencing themselves off from the rest of the union. Today, industries are trying to isolate themselves from the changes of the information age with DRM.
The difference was that back then there was a clearly divided north and south. Today we are all mixed in together. Then the government was on the side of the industrial interests over the plantation interests. Today the government is on the side of the media interests and not on the side of the Interent. Back then it was about controlling people with coercion (slavery), today it is about controlling people with information. Back then there were racial divides, today it is more of a proprietary divide.
While technology and history is on our side, it is going to be one hell of a battle and all hell is about to break loose.
If a person does something evil, gains a huge amount of power and wealth from it, then does something nice, this does not make him a nice person. Hell, Castro in Cuba gives out candy to the children, and provides free medical care and housing to all women and children - even moreso than the US. But it doesn't take much looking at the fundamentals, past all the children hugging him and giving him flowers, to figure out that the bad tree bears bad fruit and it rotten at the core.
Well, the same is true with Mr Gates. He has choosen time and time again to hate the free flow of information and knowledge in the information age, and lock out productive activity in all areas of the information economy. While the 1st world could afford all the damage caused by all the proprietary crap, the 3rd world was pertty much locked out of the information age 20 years longer then they needed to be to the detrament of billions. This has had a profound effect, the 3rd world desperately neds the free software infrastructure that he has attacked and despised. Sadly our society, and their piece of shit belief systems (especially copyrights) have enabled that behavior, but that still doesn't make it right nor does it make it a non choice.
BTW, it is also disengenuious. The poor in the 3rd world are not some pittifull pleons who need another frebie. They are more than capable of helping themselves if they have freedom. Has the Bill and Melinda increased individual liberty from oppressive governments arround the world? Well, just look who'se visiting his house and that will pretty much answer that question.
What Bill's doing is nice, but what is driving it is that ther are 3 billion people in the 3rd world who are all potential MS product users. That's one huge freakin customer base, charity has nothing to do with it.
Is that money is not in the sales and distribution of software, but in software related services. So make your product free software (as in GPL) from the beginning and maximize distribution and third party access so that you can place a wedge in the market place to offer value added services
If Netscape was GPL'd from the beginning, it would have totaly changed their market focus, it would have totally changed their business strategy, it would have totally changed their development style, and they probably would have been in FireFox's shoes today rather than out of business and sold like second hand colthing to AOL. In fact, IE would probalby have never gotten to the point it is now and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to apply their anti-compettitive stratigies, just like they wern't able to apply them to Red Hat, or SUSE, or Apache, or sendmail with very much success.
... flock together. They're both controll freaks, they both hate freedom and individual liberty, they both lie about free markets (China's while getting freer is not truely free, nor is MS which relies strictly on license monopolies and not competition), they both think they're smart and have large number of resources, they're both more interested in power and prestige than making a mark. Bill wants a billion people in his market, China wants total information controll over their citizens. In all truth, I wouldn't be suprosed if they slept together.
A lot of times what I see in the industry, is that you take something that can be done with a simple programming language or a simple interface, add a lot of complicated layers on top of it that nobody can intuitively learn, call it middleware, and then charge out the nose for it.
Now, I'm not sure if that's what Red Hat is planning to do, but it sure smells lkie it and the smell is a stinky smell not a rose smell.
Also, I'm not sure if I like the approach either. The best way to have a successfull complicated system is to keep the high level parts simple (like the IP protocool on the Internet), but it doesn't seem like Jboss is going in that direction. I'm really not sure about this - I don't understand their vision.
Most high level glossy corporate visions that I hear about turn out to be pipe dreams. I've seen all sorts of high level unified information architecture corporate visions come out of Microsoft and they all turned out to be crap. I know the rules are different with open source, but from my experience - higher level implementations are driven by needs, not theories. This seems like it's driven by theories, not needs. The fact that there are all these buzzwords floating arround - COBRA, SOAP, J2EEE, Middleware, but not universal/intuitive use (like TCP/IP, HTML) smells like a big warning to me.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182378&cid=150 76075
Anyone who figures out the (tax) money, can figure out what the truth is in the climate debate.
Because Linux doesn't provide content, and as one other person already posted, that's what people want.
Ahh, but code is content.
Nothing. However, imagine your life with no content: little to no movies, no TV, little music, very few magazines, very few books. That's a life without content. You can manage in that environment, but most people wouldn't want to.
Don't be silly, just because people don't have a distribution monopoly on content doesn't mean that there isn't going to be any contnet created or any worth looking at. Notice that uncontrolled internet lately, where's the content shortage?
This argument has been hashed out many times .... http://davidlita.googlepages.com/copyrights
One nice thing (IMHO) about free markets is that free markets are about freedom and not about markets. People who have the freedom to do as they choose tend to make more profitable decisions over time. That's why when you take the moral high ground about controlling people (eg not controlling how they use information to preserve a distribution monopoly in the case of copyrights) - economics and markets will eventually back you up over time.
There is an old saying....
If you want success: grow
If you want spectacular success: grow and use leverage
My point is that I don't see any reason in the world why we shouldn't be trying to use Linux as leverage against people who are trying to impose DRM. Market forces are clearly pushing Linux in spite of them anyhow. What do people who controll content really have to offer us that we somehow can't manage without? The truth is that the future is not about extracting revenue from content, but instead extracting revenue from content related services.
IMHO, just as the plantation system tried to deal with the industrial revolution by fencing off the south and breaking off from the Union, the media system today is trying to deal with the information age by using DRM to fence off all content. Both are doomed stratigies, and the sooner we kill copyright and tools used to impose them, the sooner we will be doing ourselves and the information age a big favor.
Well the end tag about Gold was a little off topic, but your analsys is wrong. It's clear that you don't understand what drove it up to $600 (todays close), so it's also clear that you don't understand why the switch to Gold as a trade currency means that it has to reach a mininum of $1600/oz to reach equilibrium. Where it goes from there is anyones guess, but given the track record of other governments (including confederate money) in similar situations it does not look pretty.
As for the US dollar - we've always had inflation and the means to slow it down.
You don't know what you're talking about. If they deflate (by raising interest rates) it will kill the dollar in the international trade market, if they don't it will kill the dollar in the currency markets. The US system has too much debt and too little savings to deflate without a chain reaction of cascading defaults, but too much dowanward wage pressure to inflate without hyperinflating. Notice how US average pay has stayed about the same while almost every commodity has doubbled in price over the last 5 years. Why hasn't pay caught up????? Hmmmmmm. How will people pay down their debts if that trend contiunes??? Hmmmmmm. Why did commodities doubble in price to begin with???? Hmmmmmmm. Think about it.
It is clear that the author of this article has absolutely no understanding of the real web "mob" (which isn't even called that BTW). This article is total BS and probably some kind of government set up.
For people who want to understand the "real" "mob", they need to understand the Underground Economy (UE). What they need to understand is business and commerce. 90% of UE transactions is just regular business trying to aviod taxes and regulations. They have an elaborate offshore finance network that can transfer money arround the world faster than governments can track it. Most of the money is gained thru (some) female services, hotels, casinos, people smuggeling, and (some) drugs, and the biggest one - tax free duty free trade - and not thru online hacking nor thru draining peoples bank accounts or even defrauding people. In fact, they try to distance themselves from these activities because they want return customers built on a trust relationship. Most fortune 500 companies have regular dealings in the UE.
It is highly factioned, and some people do try to blackmale, eg (give us money, or don't report us when we rob you or else such and such government will find out about your hidden transactions) - but this is mostly on a rogue individual level and not a large commercial level. In fact, when the FBI trackes these people down - it helps the UE, because it lowers their transaction costs and liabilities. Also, if they need access to secure systems, they don't need to hack into them. They have a lot of high level bank officers and government officials in their pockets. The real UE also hates terrorisim which in the last few years has increased their transaction costs several fold. The goal is to hide financial transactions from taxes, regulation, and rogue lawsuits, not to hide finances for terrorisim. Also most of the UE is split between drugs. Many try to distance themselves from the drug trade to avoid the higher costs of business, but the money is so big that it can't be ignored all together.
Another thing that most people don't understand is that the war on drugs and the financial part of the war on terrorisim is really just an excuse to wage war on the UE. When corporate money associates the UE with drug lords and terrorisim, then they tend to keep their money at home more where their respective governments can tax the living daylights out of them. Given the costs of the war on terror, the big welfare states of most governments, and really really bad fundamentals of the US dollar lately - this has become a high proiroty for the US government in recent times.
One more thing, the US dollar is in deep deep shit. The US economy can't pay off it's debts without watering down the dollar (or default which they can't do because it will cause a cascading chain of defaults), but they cant water down the dollar without sparking a stagflation spiral. When it spirals out of controll it will cause hell in the US and every country in the world. Anyone who doesn't have precious metals is either stupid, poor, or going to be poor. It used to be that the dollar was the currency of choice for the UE, then when the dollar devalued the currency of choice became the Euro, now the currency of choice has been moving quickly torard Gold.
Well, unless I can varify the code or make the chip from a copy of it's mask myself - I am pretty much taking it on faith from IBM that it is secure from the eyes of the government. (no offense IBM, but I prefer the security of open review) Untill independent sources can take the chip and put it under an electron microscope and say: Yes it's designed secure - then it's pretty much not secure. An if it's firmware that can be re-programmed, then it is especially not secure if the governments hands get on it anywhere in the distribution chain.
Has anyone else been looking for the next frontier of freedom. What I mean is that for the longest time, the USA was the last frontier in freedom. If people in the world wanted to be free, they would find their way to the United States. While the USA is still more free than most places, the deterioration over the last 80 years has been notable.
Since most of the land in the world is claimed by less than free governments, I'm wondering if the next frontier in freedom needs to be sea based. I suppose for the next few decades people can probably use technologies to secure their freedoms, crypto, open source, etc..., but that won't get arround the physical controll problem. Eventually people will need to physically secure their freedoms.
Maybe the solution is for a bunch of liberty minded people to collaberate together to take controll of a small despot country, but that still would make it very vulnerable to larger military powers. Moving to more free states, juridistictions, and countries would probably help, but doen't seem like a permanent solution. Maybe it would be possible to convince all the freedom hating overloards to go somewhere else, but that seems unlikely too.
The truth still is that there are a lot of huge entrenched industries that see nanotech as a competitive threat and are desperate to regulate it before it eats into their revenue stream. Just ignore this, it is just another trumpet horning in the wind. It is just another excuse looking for a problem to regulate. Compaired to the potential benefits that nanotech has to offer, problems like these are like the hairline scratch on a 3 ton statue of gold. The nano age is here to stay like it or not.
Nvidia, ATI, Xilinx, ARM and every other fabless foundry's entire business model is based on IP laws. These companies do not manufacture anything. I'm also sure many would not approve of Intel stealing AMD's IP and manufacturing it on their own process.
You don't know what you're talking about. The whole reason why the intel has ammounted to anything more than nothing was because the intel architecture could be immitated more or less freely inspite of the fact that it had an inferoir design. Unlike Motorolla, they didn't have zero based addressing, they had a segmented address space instead of an elloquent 32 bit one, they had variable length instructions that were hard to pipeline and optimize instead of fixed length ones that are easier to optimize, and they had a small amount ot registers compaired to many in the motorolla chips. By every technical standard Intel sucked, but because they were less proprietary they were more willing to negotiate with IBM than Motorolla was, and because they were less proprietary, AMD and others were able to make pin compatable chips which created competition that cuased the x86 market to explode like a nuclear bomb while the other PC models fizzled inspite of being light years ahead. Renember Amiga, Atri...?
The same thing happened between ethernet and token ring. The same thing happened between TCP vs Novell. In fact almost every major market move in technology over the last 100 years down to the typerwriter has favored the least proprietary technology, yet people still have their head up their ass when it comes to understanding patents and markets. WTF is it going to take for people to get it?!?!?
The problem is that SONY isn't a software company, or a media company - they are a hardware (electronic device) company. They have alienated a lot of their customers with DRM crap and content controlls and have lost a lot of hardware sales because of it. So now the hardware side of the business is getting weaker, but the content side is getting stronger. Because of that, they will almost certinly impose more DRM crap, piss off more customers, kill more hardware sales and feed a vicious cycle that could kill the whole company.
If the EPA was wrong, the consequences would be way less severe -- OK, so we spent billions on better protecting the planet when the shielding was unnecessary.
If Bush is wrong, millions of people would be forced by rising sea levels to relocate over a few decades -- and the government would have taken zero steps to prepare for it.
More taxation vs. millions upheaved. Think about it.
Speack for yourself. If this was such an overwhelming and compelling issue, then I'm sure that they will have no problem getting people to give by the billions (assuming that the government hasn't taken it already). In fact, the meer observation that they need such coercive measures in place to ensure the research and fund the "solutions" is a very compelling argument that it is indeed not founded at all. History is lettered with hundreds of millions of dead people in the name of governments that have exercised powers for the sake of urgent issues, but it almost has no examples of societies that have been ripped apart because government didn't do enough. How many laws did the government need to impose to get people to prepare for the y2k bug? How many did they need to pass to get 3 exact replicas of the US stock markets at discrete locations? Even more important, how many disasters have government laws stopped? New Orleans? San Fran earthquakes? Mississipi flood basin?
Perhaps it's a difference in personal perspective - most of my peers and I up here in Canada think there is no question that global warming is real, and that it's our fault. We hear a lot more media coverage on the issue, where it seems the US is mostly blanketed by negative propaganda
That's the problem though. People think this is an environmental debate, it's not, it's a political debate. It's a debate about wether the government should microregulate and controll millions of people and millions of industries. And all those studies, people think they are environemtal studies, they are not, they are political battles. I wish it wasn't so, but that's the way they have made it. If they were willing to get rid of the premise that the only solution to promote the environemnt is the microregulation of millions and drop the billions in government funding and subsidies, then we could have an honest debate about the environment tommorow, but they won't and so a real debate about the environment won't happen.
In all fairness, when govt regulations are imposed that cost millions to comply with - that expense is passed on by big mega smokestack industries, but small, efficient, and innovative competitors are put out of business. I don't think people understand that the big polluters are the ones who want these regulations the most because they lock out small, efficient, and cheap competitors.
In all fairness, nobody talks about how government orgs like the EPA allocate funds for climate reasearch with heavy biases in favor of research that tends to promote the necissity of a larger EPA. But then when it goes the other way around, people scream bloody murder.
Get the government money out of the freakin cliamte research studies to begin with, and they might actually become credible.