Either you're a blind patriot or have never visited Europe before.
Actually I grew up in Ireland, spent 5 years living in the UK, travelled all over the EU, and have been living in the US for the last two years.
Second is that we do not live in a perfect world, and trying to make it a perfect world only tends to case problems. Marx and Hilter both though they could do it, neither came close.
Huh? Advocating the rule of law is hardly comparable with Marx vision or Hitler's nurturing of bigotry to political ends. Most countries quite successfully adhere to the rule of law within their borders, why shouldn't those same countries try to adhere to the rule of law on a global scale too? That is the vision of the United Nations that was set up by those that lived through World War II, and is being undermined by the leadership of the US today (many of whom avoided serving their country in prior wars).
Military strength is an important component of political force. It's not the only one, you're right.
It may be a small component, but look at the really important international debates of the moment, from the perspective of the American people. To select one typical example, the debate over Genetically Modified food acceptance in the EU. Wherever you stand on the debate, I suspect you will find that the US military superiority doesn't really make much difference (since any US attack on the EU would likely be met with a devestating French and probably British nuclear response).
This reminds me of the British Empire - which despite its global reach did not really make that much difference from the perspective of the ordinary Briton (who weren't any better off than the citizens of comparable countries that lacked their own empire). The same is true of American military force, it might help the occasional American oil baron, but is of little benefit, positive or negative, for the ordinary American on the street.
Actually, this isn't really true. Just in terms of population: Europe's population after WWII was twice the size of America's. Today, it is 50 million more. By 2050, America's will be bigger.
Based on what statistics? Are you taking into-account the high liklihood that much of the former USSR (including Russia) is likely to join the EU over the next 10 or 15 years? I suspect that whatever statistics you are looking at refer to the current EU membership but do not account for expansion.
As for economic growth, Germany is stagnating, and France isn't doing that great either.
Yeah, and the US economy is just great right now - isn't it?
But it's ability to project power is significantly limited as a result.
One could have made a similar argument in favor of the British Empire back when it meant something - clearly such an argument isn't supported by history.
The Eurocrats are jealous of the fact that the U.S. has the power to act in its own interest with or without anyone's help
Yeah, just like the allies went to war with Hitler because they were "jealous" of him. Get out of the playground politics and into the real world pal!
No, I don't equate Bush with Hitler, but I am making the point that just because you disagree with the schoolyard bully doesn't imply that you are "jealous" of their strength.
Most Europeans (and many Americans) are concerned because they want to live in a world where nations obey the rule of law, not a world where the sheriff is whoever has the biggest gun, which is the world the US is rapidly creating. And lets remember that the UN was created by those brave Americans and Europeans who fought and won the Second World War, and it is being demolished by people who for the most part never risked their own lives at war, nor those of their family.
I always thought that if a black hole existed on Earth there would be a risk that it would start to pull in the matter around it, exponentially increasing its own mass and eventually sucking in the entire planet.
I assume this won't happen, but can anyone explain why?
Note that I'm no fan of the current US administration, but to suggest that creating a European version of GPS is some great step towards making the EU a 'relevant' force in world politics (by which I mean a force capable of doing ~anything~) seems a tad laughable.
And to imply that 'relevant' political force is determined by military strength alone is typically American thinking, and sorely misses the core lesson of 9-11 (namely that you don't need to spend 3% of your GDP on your military to inflict suffering on your enemies, nor will it prevent them from inflicting suffering on you).
The EU is growing rapidly, its population already exceeds that of the US, and it won't be long before its economic strength does too (if it doesn't already). Most European countries have experienced first-hand the real meaning of war on their own soil (think 9-11 thousands of times over), and because of this they seek to create a world where justice doesn't have to be dispensed through Cruise missiles and Cuban concentration camps.
...Free/Open Source software advocates have been claiming for years that Open Software is superior to Microsoft's offerings in more ways than just price - yet now you want to complain when Microsoft tests that assertion?
As for wondering whether Microsoft is doing this for philanthropic reasons - the simple answer is "of course not". If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I would want to sack any Microsoft board of directors that used the company's resources for anything other than increasing the bottom-line.
Paul MacReady made human-powered flight work two decades ago. Nobody has done it since. Gregg Williams designed almost all the really small jet aircraft engines - he did his first one in the 1950s, and he designed the engines for cruise missiles, and he's still designing them. One person, Ed Kleinschmidt, designed all the mechanical teletype machines from the 1930s to the last one in the 1970s.
Clearly all of these people subscribe to the Perl doctrine of job preservation: "If nobody else can figure out how it works - they can't fire you".
Total configurability... you can choose anything from wm2 [all-day-breakfast.com] to KDE [kde.org] to act as your environment and at least once, you could make your environment behave in almost any way you wanted (remember dotfiles?)
Themability simply isn't a priority for the vast majority of users, and it often stands in the way of usability. I would prefer one UI that works well than have the choice of hundreds of inconsistent and incompatable UIs.
Linux began as almost pure innovation
Uh? Linux is a reimplementation of Unix - there is very little in Linux that wasn't originally in a commercial unix. Placing it under the GPL may have been innovative philosophically, but there has been very little innovation technically.
The last Linux UI innovation I can recall is themeability - and I am still not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Surely there are adacemic researchers out there probing the frontier of human-computer interaction that could use Linux as the basis for their work? Could it be that X is slowing us down somehow? I mean, think of how much fuss there was over minor and superficial enhancements antialiased fonts and transparent windows. Where are the big ideas?
The Open Source community has demonstrated that it can play catch-up and play it well, but when are we going to see Windows and Apple stealing important UI features from Linux?
...think that discussion of the "brand loyalty" of a 2 year old is a somewhat scary concept?
Start the corporate brainwashing early I guess.
Re:Dragged kicking and screaming...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I know people who would do this if they could.
If people want to do that, then good for them - but you can be sure that the music industry won't be happy unless people are forced to use such software.
Dragged kicking and screaming...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The entertainment industry always needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into new business models. Look at how hard they fought against VCRs, and now 2/3rds of their revenue comes from video sales and rentals.
It is quite likely that at some point the music industry will end up making more money out of Internet distribution of their music than they do out of selling CDs. It is also entirely likely that they will continue fighting against P2P tooth and nail until they have exhausted all possible options.
The problem is that right now the lawyers are making the decisions. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you are a laywer - you often assume that all problems can be solved with a law suit. This mentality will likely continue to persist until it is absolutely obvious, even to the lawyers, that it can't work.
What does this mean? Well, for one it means that we should fully expect legal attacks against users of P2P networks to continue. This will simply serve to encourage greater use of Freenet and other future systems which protect user anonymity (Freenet still needs work to make it well suited to this task - but if there is a demand, someone will create a suitable third-party app which uses Freenet as a back end).
After Freenet or its successors have finally demonstrated the futility of trying to use the law to halt progress in communications technology - the music industry may eventually accept that it needs to adapt, but don't hold your breath for it to happen any time soon.
Care to say what you mean by permanent ? It's no more permanent than BitTorrent; if nobody wants the file, it dies off quickly.
When people stop "sharing" a particular file on BitTorrent, nobody can get to it. On Freenet, the file will persist so long as there is a demand for it. In other words, availability on Freenet tracks the actual demand for a file more closely than BitTorrent.
"but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular."... It will also use the bandwidth avaiable in a rather suboptimal way, to insure privacy and security. BitTorrent does not waste bandwidth, at the price of anonymity.
You assume that Freenet could only achieve anonymity by wasting bandwidth, yet provide little evidence for this. In many ways Freenet's caching algorithm makes more efficient use of bandwidth than many P2P architectures, and unlikely BitTorrent - it requires no centralized coordination for file distribution. Yes Freenet imposes some overhead for anonymity, but the other advantages of its content distribution algorithm more than compensate for this.
Hmm. I got a download rate of over 1mbyte/s on the torrent for that; and there were a LOT of people getting fast speeds (I have the logs to prove it;-)
I believe the 120kb/sec rate was over a cable modem with a maximum downstream of 160kb/sec - I would like to see BitTorrent achieve 1mb/sec in that situation;-) Generally, I generally see Freenet downloads at about 70% of my maximum downstream capacity, even when I am behind a NAT, and Freenet doesn't take 20 minutes to ramp up to its maximum download speed as i have seen with BitTorrent.
Yeah, the link only goes down when the generous storage & bandwidth providers on the freenet network don't feel like providing this free service anymore...
Oh, so BitTorrent doesn't rely on people's generosity with storage and bandwidth? I must have misunderstood how it worked. One could argue that Freenet's more noble goals will make people more inclined to be generous with their resources than with BitTorrent.
Don't get me wrong, FreeNet is a nice system... Its goals are different from BitTorrent though (anonymity vs. efficient use of bandwidth, privacy vs. speed, everything vs. single-uri, etc.), and in this case, BT is probably the better choice.
You are assuming that just because Freenet has more ambitious goals than BitTorrent, that it couldn't possibly beat BT at its own game while still maintaining anonymity. Given my experience of both systems, I wouldn't be so quick to make such an assumption.
Perhaps some kind of head-to-head comparison would be interesting.
One of the main reasons viruses don't spread as easily on Linux is simply that normal users don't have permission to mess with system files.
I really think that Linux users are kidding themselves when they use this argument. The main reason that there are so few Linux viruses out there is that there are so few desktop Linux installations relative to Windows, making it less fun to write Linux viruses, and less likely for them to spread.
A Linux virus could do significant damage without root access, and there are a variety of ways that such a virus could trick the user into giving it root access. Trojan a RPM or DEB, or even just ask the user for their root password with some excuse like "Your hard disk has reached a fragmentation level of 30%, we recommend that you defragment it now. Please enter your root password").
It sounds like they are proposing that people will only be liable for bugs that they know about and don't disclose - not exactly a serious problem in the Open Source world.
Forcing companies to disclose bugs in this way could only serve to allow users to make more educated purchasing decisions on the basis of software reliability.
Imagine that I wrote some software that I *knew* was buggy, and then sold it to a hospital or into another situation where people's lives were at risk. Imagine then that one of the bugs I knew about before selling the software killed someone. Why shouldn't I be responsible for that?
Firstly, IANAL - but I do watch this stuff closely:
The crux of the ruling seems to stem from the inherent deniability of the gnutella proto...
i.e. the plaintiffs could NOT prove contributory infringment, unlike in the Napster case.
Exactly, if the defendants can't stop it - then they can't be blamed for it. If this holds true for Fasttrack and Gnutella, then it definitely holds true for Freenet.
If this decision is not overturned, then it will create even greater incentive for the RIAA to go after individual users - as they have already been doing. Unfortunately neither Fastrrack nor Gnutella provide anonymity for users of the system. See this article for a good analysis of Freenet from a legal perspective - with this ruling Freenet just got stronger.
No offense to you personally, but I trust the biologists and astrophysicists with PhD's a little more about what types of life might be out there than most Slashdot couch scientists.
Well, I have a degree in Artificial Intelligence and have done quite a bit of work in the area of Artificial Life - so I think that makes me more qualified than most "couch scientists". I would also be wary of the opinions of biologists, their definition of life is probably quite narrowly based on what they have observed on this planet.
It is by no means "must" - it is simply considered most likely. The scientists are going with the best probabilities based on, surprise, the science we know.
Er, the science we know tells us that you can't deduce anything from a sample size of 1, which is exactly what these people are doing.
good thing there already are things like this in place
That site doesn't seem to do what I described at all, I am talking about something that warns you of upcoming lobbying opportunities in your area (public forums etc). The only thing that site seems to do that is location-specific is to tell you who your representatives are.
...for this type of thing. The hearing in question took place at 10am on a Wednesday - how many people don't even find out about these opportunities in time?
Someone (not me, I have things to do) needs to set up a website tracking this type of event, which allows people to enter their zipcodes and email addresses to be alerted when a lobbying opportunity arises in their area. I would be the first to sign up for Southern California.
If you feel you are up to the task - email me at ian[@]locut.us and I will do what I can to help, within the time contraints of my other projects.
Biochemists have done substantial analysis regarding what other chemical families might support life.
And in one implicit assumption (that all life must be based on the same kind of chemical interactions that we are) you have duplicated the mistake made by these SETI people.
For all we know, the universe could be full of intelligent life based, not on chemical interactions, but on quantum interactions, or perhaps complex interactions of particles based on gravity, or perhaps some subtle physical effect we don't even know about yet.
Many appear to be arguing that the reason the grant was withdrawn was because Theo expressed an anti-war opinion. This is misleading, the reason the grant was withdrawn was more likely due to the manner in which Theo expressed that opinion, namely by expressing concern about DARPA's motives.
If Theo was really concerned about DARPA's motives, he should have expressed his opinion by not accepting the money, not by taking it then using the fact that he had taken it as a vehicle for his political opinions.
I am saddened that a silly mistake could have denied the public good the benefit of this funding, but this is the real world - and in the real world - you don't take money from someone then openly question their motives for giving it to you.
Many appear to be arguing that the reason the grant was withdrawn was because Theo expressed an anti-war opinion. This is misleading, the reason the grant was withdrawn was more likely due to the manner in which Theo expressed that opinion, namely by expressing concern about DARPA's motives.
If Theo was really concerned about DARPA's motives, he should have expressed his opinion by not accepting the money, not by taking it then using the fact that he had taken it as a vehicle for his political opinions.
I am saddened that a silly mistake could have denied the public good the benefit of this funding, but this is the real world - and in the real world - you don't take money from someone then openly question their motives for giving it to you.
The attack on the SpamKing is definitely funny. But the paper seems like an overly windy article describing how to perpetrate the old misdirected pizza/taxi cab gag on the information superhighway. While mischeiveious and a nuisance it can hardly be described as a denial of service attack now can it ?
Sure it can - it renders your mailbox useless, and this can be more than an irritation for people who need to be able to receive snailmail (which I suspect is most people in the United States).
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the British Empire - which despite its global reach did not really make that much difference from the perspective of the ordinary Briton (who weren't any better off than the citizens of comparable countries that lacked their own empire). The same is true of American military force, it might help the occasional American oil baron, but is of little benefit, positive or negative, for the ordinary American on the street.
Based on what statistics? Are you taking into-account the high liklihood that much of the former USSR (including Russia) is likely to join the EU over the next 10 or 15 years? I suspect that whatever statistics you are looking at refer to the current EU membership but do not account for expansion. Yeah, and the US economy is just great right now - isn't it? One could have made a similar argument in favor of the British Empire back when it meant something - clearly such an argument isn't supported by history.No, I don't equate Bush with Hitler, but I am making the point that just because you disagree with the schoolyard bully doesn't imply that you are "jealous" of their strength.
Most Europeans (and many Americans) are concerned because they want to live in a world where nations obey the rule of law, not a world where the sheriff is whoever has the biggest gun, which is the world the US is rapidly creating. And lets remember that the UN was created by those brave Americans and Europeans who fought and won the Second World War, and it is being demolished by people who for the most part never risked their own lives at war, nor those of their family.
I assume this won't happen, but can anyone explain why?
The EU is growing rapidly, its population already exceeds that of the US, and it won't be long before its economic strength does too (if it doesn't already). Most European countries have experienced first-hand the real meaning of war on their own soil (think 9-11 thousands of times over), and because of this they seek to create a world where justice doesn't have to be dispensed through Cruise missiles and Cuban concentration camps.
As for wondering whether Microsoft is doing this for philanthropic reasons - the simple answer is "of course not". If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I would want to sack any Microsoft board of directors that used the company's resources for anything other than increasing the bottom-line.
...have spent the last 50 years discovering exactly how intelligence doesn't work, but are no closer to discovering how it does.
Surely there are adacemic researchers out there probing the frontier of human-computer interaction that could use Linux as the basis for their work? Could it be that X is slowing us down somehow? I mean, think of how much fuss there was over minor and superficial enhancements antialiased fonts and transparent windows. Where are the big ideas?
The Open Source community has demonstrated that it can play catch-up and play it well, but when are we going to see Windows and Apple stealing important UI features from Linux?
Start the corporate brainwashing early I guess.
It is quite likely that at some point the music industry will end up making more money out of Internet distribution of their music than they do out of selling CDs. It is also entirely likely that they will continue fighting against P2P tooth and nail until they have exhausted all possible options.
The problem is that right now the lawyers are making the decisions. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you are a laywer - you often assume that all problems can be solved with a law suit. This mentality will likely continue to persist until it is absolutely obvious, even to the lawyers, that it can't work.
What does this mean? Well, for one it means that we should fully expect legal attacks against users of P2P networks to continue. This will simply serve to encourage greater use of Freenet and other future systems which protect user anonymity (Freenet still needs work to make it well suited to this task - but if there is a demand, someone will create a suitable third-party app which uses Freenet as a back end).
After Freenet or its successors have finally demonstrated the futility of trying to use the law to halt progress in communications technology - the music industry may eventually accept that it needs to adapt, but don't hold your breath for it to happen any time soon.
Perhaps some kind of head-to-head comparison would be interesting.
A Linux virus could do significant damage without root access, and there are a variety of ways that such a virus could trick the user into giving it root access. Trojan a RPM or DEB, or even just ask the user for their root password with some excuse like "Your hard disk has reached a fragmentation level of 30%, we recommend that you defragment it now. Please enter your root password").
Forcing companies to disclose bugs in this way could only serve to allow users to make more educated purchasing decisions on the basis of software reliability.
Imagine that I wrote some software that I *knew* was buggy, and then sold it to a hospital or into another situation where people's lives were at risk. Imagine then that one of the bugs I knew about before selling the software killed someone. Why shouldn't I be responsible for that?
If this decision is not overturned, then it will create even greater incentive for the RIAA to go after individual users - as they have already been doing. Unfortunately neither Fastrrack nor Gnutella provide anonymity for users of the system. See this article for a good analysis of Freenet from a legal perspective - with this ruling Freenet just got stronger.
Someone (not me, I have things to do) needs to set up a website tracking this type of event, which allows people to enter their zipcodes and email addresses to be alerted when a lobbying opportunity arises in their area. I would be the first to sign up for Southern California.
If you feel you are up to the task - email me at ian[@]locut.us and I will do what I can to help, within the time contraints of my other projects.
For all we know, the universe could be full of intelligent life based, not on chemical interactions, but on quantum interactions, or perhaps complex interactions of particles based on gravity, or perhaps some subtle physical effect we don't even know about yet.
If Theo was really concerned about DARPA's motives, he should have expressed his opinion by not accepting the money, not by taking it then using the fact that he had taken it as a vehicle for his political opinions.
I am saddened that a silly mistake could have denied the public good the benefit of this funding, but this is the real world - and in the real world - you don't take money from someone then openly question their motives for giving it to you.
If Theo was really concerned about DARPA's motives, he should have expressed his opinion by not accepting the money, not by taking it then using the fact that he had taken it as a vehicle for his political opinions.
I am saddened that a silly mistake could have denied the public good the benefit of this funding, but this is the real world - and in the real world - you don't take money from someone then openly question their motives for giving it to you.