Didn't we already hash this issue out when Apple sued Microsoft for copying their gui design? Microsoft won that case, and now Hasbro won this one... That strikes me as a bit of a contradiction, but not entirely surprising. It's tradition in America that the richest always win. Microsoft only lost its recent court battles because of the shear force of money against them. Need I even mention O.J. or the MPAA.
Politicians yammer and clammer (both are real words) about campaign finance reform, but what about legal system finance reform? How is anyone who isn't a multibillionare supposed to survive in such a system without caving in to the whim of every large corporation?
With the amount of design effort required to just to come up with the appropriate dna molecules for processing an NP-Complete problem such as the Hamiltonian circuit problem, any hardware designer worth his salt could have created a piece of dedicated hardware to solve the corresponding problem in parallel in the same amount of time.
DNA computing is interesting, but outdated before it came into existence. Sure, things are tiny, and theoretically that lets you do large amounts of things in parallel, but it's not paradigm shifting. You can build electrical circuitry that runs in parallel just as easily, it would just be slightly larger than the corresponding dna molecules, assuming someday they find an effective means of lining up large quantities of them.
However, the most important reason DNA computing is already obsolete is quantum computing. In the past two years there have been some incredible, and to most unexpectedly early, advancements in quantum computing. Quantum computing, unlike dna computing, is paradigm shifting. Instead of attacking hard problems like NP-Complete problems by doing huge amounts of parallel computation, it does them the right way (by Nondeterministic Polynomial theory) and processes phase 1 nondeterministically.
Nondeterministic computation is, from the simplest description, "magically" getting the right result by applying a process to an uncertain piece of data, whereby the actual processing reduces the data down to the correct answer, from which the correct input is then known. In this manner, problems such as the Hamiltonian circuit are no longer difficult, and can be solved in quite reasonable periods of time.
The important difference between nondeterministic computational power and conventional deterministic computing is that when you take a problem like the Hamiltonian circuit problem, and scale it up to a huge number of vertices, dna computing falls apart because you would have to create an enourmous quantity of dna to correspond to the enourmous number of vertices. Quantum computers will scale quite fine in this area.
You referred to the wrong science fiction writer there. Ray Bradbury better described what the Library of Congress is doing. "People shouldn't read books online because it doesn't make them happy" could be a quote straight out of F451. Yes, goodness, you wouldn't want people to have access to books from their own homes, better to hide them in one city where no one outside of the area has access to them so that no one starts thinking, no one questions the establishment, and everyone is happy.
La la la *sticks fingers in ears* the world is pretty... change nothing... la la la.
If you despise telemarketers, attempt the following techniques. First, pay attention when you answer the phone. Anytime there is a 2-3 second pause, then a click before someone answers, you are talking to a telemarketer, so prepare to attempt one of the following tactics:
1. If they are trying to sell you a credit card, pretend to be extremely interested, but then ask them if it's ok that you're an illegal alien. They'll politely explain that they can't give you a card, then you yell at them for discrimination and hang up.
2. If they sound like an inexperienced telemarketer reading from a script (at least 2 out of 3 fit this profile), wait until they say something you can question them on, then interrupt them mid-sentence and ask them a question about the product they are trying to sell you. Pretend to be interested at first, and ask them simple questions. The odds are they will be completely flustered and unable to answer your questions because you aren't following along with the script they have. Then tell them they don't even understand the product they're trying to sell, and hang up.
3. Answer the phone as follows: "Diga! Mis pastanas les gustan el Judo!" If they don't know spanish, they will hang up because they don't think you'll understand them. If they do know spanish, they will hang up because they'll think you're insane.
4. Many telemarketers start with, "Hi, may I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Smith?" Answer "No." This confuses them, pause for a little, then hang up.
5. Politely ask them if they could hold for a second, then hang up.
6. Pretend to be really interested. Make your voice melodramatic as if you are practically having an orgasm over the product they are selling. Wait until at least 5 minutes into their script, pause, and say, "Wait, could you start over again from the beginning? I didn't get that." Then set the phone down and go do something else. Come back in about 5 minutes, say, "Hello," and see if they're still there. Keep statistics on this and then graph your success rate.
By the same logic that lets bootleggers videotape movies in the theater, bring up whatever image you want, let them stick whatever copyprotection on it they want, and just snapshot the whole damn screen. In X there are a number of programs to do this, in Windows press PrintScreen and paste into a graphics editor. Then proceed to use it for personal use only, of course.
That would make sense if the development of the F-22 wasn't public knowledge for an incredibly long time. Apparently you weren't paying attention back when the military issued a proposal request for the initial ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter), and then when they debated over choosing between the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes, for which specs were available to the public in the 80's (excluding the insides of the weapon bay doors, which to my knowledge are still classified).
Of course that makes the F-22 no less cool, it just makes Congress stupid for pulling the funding on the ATF project so that we now have no measureable quantity of F-22's to show for all the research.
Why are these results posted in a different form on a different less-professional looking site? What happened to the original? Does anyone still have the old url on hand, and does it show these revised results as well?
Re:Slashdot CANNOT house a conspiracy.
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 1
Actually, -2 is mentioned, although I don't recall reading anything about users who start at -2 (so I assume this is new). Regardless, I am certain it is only a result of extremely negative karma, which quite frankly one has to work pretty hard to earn, since a single post is almost never moderated down more than 2 points. It would be kind of them to add a feature to the threshold drop-down list after -1 to simply read all posts regardless of threshhold.
As for off-topic moderation, posting a direct counter-point to a story that's posted isn't generally considered off-topic. Of course there are a few moderators that would misrate a post as such, but that's why there are a lot of moderators.
The best way to minimize subjectivity is to get a large mass of people (moderators) with differing opinions and give them the ability to counterbalance each other. If you have a better suggestion I know I'd love to hear it.
*Ducks the wave of "open source" posts*
on
QNX Crypt Cracked
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· Score: 1
Before there are a ton of "If only they had used open source, this wouldn't have happened" posts, I'd like to post a counterpoint. Certainly, using open source has security benefits, and this is one of its strong points. But couldn't they at least have used a hash algorithm of respected difficulty by the mathematical community at large? That really has nothing to do with open or closed source, it just sounds like a competency issue to me.
There are tons of good algorithms they could have used. For example, they could have simply hashed all passwords with "Competing open source realtime operating systems are for weenies!!"
It is physically impossible for any website that offers free posting of ideas and comments, even to AC's, to host a shadow conspiracy on any topic. Slashdot by design is inherently immune to conspiracy provided they never start deleting posts. (And if they did, the outcry would be so large that this is inherently impossible for them to do.)
I've seen the trolls crying foul over this tech stock issue, and all I can say is that I support you, CmdrTaco, this might be of interest to some, but if the editors don't think it's important, then it really doesn't need to get posted. It's up to the editors of a site to determine what direction the content of the site should take.
If you trolls want to whine about what's not on Slashdot, then kindly unstuff linux from your ass, take the Slash source that is freely available, ask mommy for your $70 registration fee, register stockdot.org, and put up your own damn site. Then you can tell all your little troll friends about all the Wall Street conspiracies and VA Linux plots to storm Redmond with assault rifles and whatever else you can come up with.
A lot of posts are moderated quite highly that contradict Open Source ideas. For the most part, moderators are rational sensible people, which makes sense considering that they're selected from among average contributing slashdotters.
The reason more posts contrary to open source ideas get moderated down is because a large number of them are written as unintelligent and meaningless flamebait posts. In statistics this is called a "correlation", and as the mantra of statistics goes, "correlation does not imply causation". If you don't get that, look it up.
Oh come now, Slashdot posted the same kinds of stories long before VA Linux came into the picture. What is the source of this VA Linux paranoia? Has anyone ever seen or heard of them doing anything detrimental to Slashdot?
I've been listening to midi's on the web since who knows when. I don't see how that's much different. You can sample Bach on a midi to promote interest in it if you are trying to sell cds, that isn't exactly a novel ideal.
I've heard lecturers speak before that they theorize that application serving will become the future method of software acquisition once bandwidth increases sufficiently to cover it. I have always considered that it would be something like downloading a small volatile copy of the program to run locally each time you launch it.
This is an interesting twist on the concept of application serving, since it presents a real-world useful application, gimp, through a standard interface, html, and provides remote processing and storage of data. Could this become a significant means of software distribution in the future?
And most importantly, what does this mean for the GPL? Clearly this usage of gimp is not a violation of GPL, by the very design of the license. They could make all the modifications they want to gimp, but as long as they do not distribute the binary, they do not need to distribute the source. Is this a potential loophole in the GPL that should be taken care of, is it a necessary evil, or is this a positive combination of open source software and closed business models?
> "The limits on today's Internet are no longer determined by raw bandwidth, but rather by how > well the different network components work together," said Brian Valentine, senior vice > president of the Windows Division at Microsoft.
It is clear to me that Microsoft and I do not share the same uplink provider...
> (1) Plain-vanilla: rapidly dump (and continue dumping) a lot of random-noise content > into Freenet from multiple launch points (DDOS). Soon enough the random noise will crowd > out the real information.
If I understand his description of the protocol correctly, then no. Who is going to search for random noise? It's about as likely as typing "nonrelativistic quantum mechanics" into google.com and coming up with some a website that posts random numbers.
> (2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' > that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it > into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection at will. > Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly.
Again, if I understand his description of the protocol correctly, no. If people have been accessing the real/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats (which I find likely... the accessing that is), then it will accumulate votes. So if J. Random Jerk inserts a bunch of dummy files with the same name, they would come up later in the search than the established copy that already has all the positive votes.
All in all, it sounds like a very well thought-out protocol to me, which is impressive for a product so early in its developmental stage. Even napster hasn't quite gotten to this point, we still can't access unknown artists very effectively on napster, which is something I would love to do if I could.
Cosource.com has tried linking buyers and programmers. It's an excellent idea, but from what I've seen of the completed projects, the prices paid really don't even come close to the hours that it would take an average programmer to do the job. It doesn't compare to my day job. I think open source programming is a viable business model, but I don't think we're quite at the point where we can implement it as a big open market on a website.
First it needs more recognition from big corporations that realize they can actually get their products for cheaper if they allow open source components to be used by then releasing it as open source again.
Not at all. I've never been harassed by a criminal, but by police a number of times while conducting myself in a safe, civil, respectable manner. Their heads get too big when they think of themselves as simply "general police". It is important to maintain strict guidelines dictating what they can and cannot do. And once these guidelines are in place (such as the Bill of Rights), they need to be strictly enforced, not ignored like the Fourth Ammendment is so frequently ignored (can we say wire-taps, crypto law, Echelon, etc).
I think the intelligent half of Slashdotters could put together a better system than the FBI is today. As computer geeks and scientists, we're familiar with the extreme benefits of peer review. It is the only way to get exactly what you are looking for, whether it is a piece of software, an accurate scientific theory, or a fair and just policing force.
You cannot run a democracy in the middle of a shroud of secrecy. Every American needs to know exactly what its government is doing, otherwise democracy falls apart because we can't make any informed decisions. Since the days of JFK we've been voting for a pretty face and a smooth talker. The reason we're resorting to superficial means is that we really don't know what our leaders and agencies are doing. If we knew what decisions our president made behind closed doors, we might not have reelected Clinton, maybe not even Reagan.
It's easy to argue that a degree of secrecy is required to run a government, that we have to keep secrets from other nations, but I think this arguement falls apart under close scrutiny. The method of government by secrecy is no different from the concept of security-by-obscurity that has been ripped to shreds so many times by computer security experts. It simply is not the best way to do it.
We are entering an era where we need to start acting like a planet rather than a huge tribe trying to make sure the other tribes don't step on our land. The internet has done some wonderful things for international communication, and it's just getting started. Once the communication infrastructure is in place, it starts to redefine the way people think. Within the next 50 years, nationalism will fall apart. People will not define themselves as Americans, British, French, or Japanese, but as people. Boundaries between people can only exist so long as boundaries to communication exists.
When people start thinking as one, the governments must follow suit and stop trying to function by isolation. The U.S. has traditionally been the slowest to notice this. We have blatantly stupid crypto laws because our government thinks for some reasons that only American programmers can write good crypto software, and if we isolate them from the rest of the world, the rest of the world won't get crypto. Yeah, maybe America used to be the software center of the world, but as the internet boomed, suddenly the shift focused. Everyone was shocked when no U.S. universities scored in the top ten at the ACM World Programming Finals. I would have been more shocked if we had maintained dominance.
There have been talks on here before about getting some sort of geek political action committee. We need way more than that, we need to get our ideas and philosophies, the wisdoms we take for granted, and apply them to our system of government in a practical way. The concepts we consider obvious aren't just for world domination of our operating systems, they can actually improve the world. The FBI could learn a lot from slashdotters if we could only teach it how to effectively apply what we know.
In the words of my father, shortly after I explained to him the current problems with mp3s and dvds, "Why don't you people who are making open source software start making music and movies the same way?"
The future structure of entertainment will be decentralized. The artist on the street will be able to be an artist, and the suits will go on building factories to manufacture suits.
Ok, so maybe it's a few days later, but the only story I see on Alternet is "Congratulations, if you see this page it means you successfully installed Apache."
I can purchase any copyrighted book I want, walk to a photocopy machine, and xerox the whole thing if I prefer to read books off of xeroxed pieces of paper. That's perfectly legal (at least under U.S. law) as you're allowed to make copies of anything for personal use.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we already hash this issue out when Apple sued Microsoft for copying their gui design? Microsoft won that case, and now Hasbro won this one... That strikes me as a bit of a contradiction, but not entirely surprising. It's tradition in America that the richest always win. Microsoft only lost its recent court battles because of the shear force of money against them. Need I even mention O.J. or the MPAA.
Politicians yammer and clammer (both are real words) about campaign finance reform, but what about legal system finance reform? How is anyone who isn't a multibillionare supposed to survive in such a system without caving in to the whim of every large corporation?
With the amount of design effort required to just to come up with the appropriate dna molecules for processing an NP-Complete problem such as the Hamiltonian circuit problem, any hardware designer worth his salt could have created a piece of dedicated hardware to solve the corresponding problem in parallel in the same amount of time.
DNA computing is interesting, but outdated before it came into existence. Sure, things are tiny, and theoretically that lets you do large amounts of things in parallel, but it's not paradigm shifting. You can build electrical circuitry that runs in parallel just as easily, it would just be slightly larger than the corresponding dna molecules, assuming someday they find an effective means of lining up large quantities of them.
However, the most important reason DNA computing is already obsolete is quantum computing. In the past two years there have been some incredible, and to most unexpectedly early, advancements in quantum computing. Quantum computing, unlike dna computing, is paradigm shifting. Instead of attacking hard problems like NP-Complete problems by doing huge amounts of parallel computation, it does them the right way (by Nondeterministic Polynomial theory) and processes phase 1 nondeterministically.
Nondeterministic computation is, from the simplest description, "magically" getting the right result by applying a process to an uncertain piece of data, whereby the actual processing reduces the data down to the correct answer, from which the correct input is then known. In this manner, problems such as the Hamiltonian circuit are no longer difficult, and can be solved in quite reasonable periods of time.
The important difference between nondeterministic computational power and conventional deterministic computing is that when you take a problem like the Hamiltonian circuit problem, and scale it up to a huge number of vertices, dna computing falls apart because you would have to create an enourmous quantity of dna to correspond to the enourmous number of vertices. Quantum computers will scale quite fine in this area.
You referred to the wrong science fiction writer there. Ray Bradbury better described what the Library of Congress is doing. "People shouldn't read books online because it doesn't make them happy" could be a quote straight out of F451. Yes, goodness, you wouldn't want people to have access to books from their own homes, better to hide them in one city where no one outside of the area has access to them so that no one starts thinking, no one questions the establishment, and everyone is happy.
La la la *sticks fingers in ears* the world is pretty... change nothing... la la la.
If you despise telemarketers, attempt the following techniques. First, pay attention when you answer the phone. Anytime there is a 2-3 second pause, then a click before someone answers, you are talking to a telemarketer, so prepare to attempt one of the following tactics:
1. If they are trying to sell you a credit card, pretend to be extremely interested, but then ask them if it's ok that you're an illegal alien. They'll politely explain that they can't give you a card, then you yell at them for discrimination and hang up.
2. If they sound like an inexperienced telemarketer reading from a script (at least 2 out of 3 fit this profile), wait until they say something you can question them on, then interrupt them mid-sentence and ask them a question about the product they are trying to sell you. Pretend to be interested at first, and ask them simple questions. The odds are they will be completely flustered and unable to answer your questions because you aren't following along with the script they have. Then tell them they don't even understand the product they're trying to sell, and hang up.
3. Answer the phone as follows: "Diga! Mis pastanas les gustan el Judo!" If they don't know spanish, they will hang up because they don't think you'll understand them. If they do know spanish, they will hang up because they'll think you're insane.
4. Many telemarketers start with, "Hi, may I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Smith?" Answer "No." This confuses them, pause for a little, then hang up.
5. Politely ask them if they could hold for a second, then hang up.
6. Pretend to be really interested. Make your voice melodramatic as if you are practically having an orgasm over the product they are selling. Wait until at least 5 minutes into their script, pause, and say, "Wait, could you start over again from the beginning? I didn't get that." Then set the phone down and go do something else. Come back in about 5 minutes, say, "Hello," and see if they're still there. Keep statistics on this and then graph your success rate.
By the same logic that lets bootleggers videotape movies in the theater, bring up whatever image you want, let them stick whatever copyprotection on it they want, and just snapshot the whole damn screen. In X there are a number of programs to do this, in Windows press PrintScreen and paste into a graphics editor. Then proceed to use it for personal use only, of course.
When will they learn?
That would make sense if the development of the F-22 wasn't public knowledge for an incredibly long time. Apparently you weren't paying attention back when the military issued a proposal request for the initial ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter), and then when they debated over choosing between the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes, for which specs were available to the public in the 80's (excluding the insides of the weapon bay doors, which to my knowledge are still classified).
Of course that makes the F-22 no less cool, it just makes Congress stupid for pulling the funding on the ATF project so that we now have no measureable quantity of F-22's to show for all the research.
Why are these results posted in a different form on a different less-professional looking site? What happened to the original? Does anyone still have the old url on hand, and does it show these revised results as well?
Actually, -2 is mentioned, although I don't recall reading anything about users who start at -2 (so I assume this is new). Regardless, I am certain it is only a result of extremely negative karma, which quite frankly one has to work pretty hard to earn, since a single post is almost never moderated down more than 2 points. It would be kind of them to add a feature to the threshold drop-down list after -1 to simply read all posts regardless of threshhold.
As for off-topic moderation, posting a direct counter-point to a story that's posted isn't generally considered off-topic. Of course there are a few moderators that would misrate a post as such, but that's why there are a lot of moderators.
The best way to minimize subjectivity is to get a large mass of people (moderators) with differing opinions and give them the ability to counterbalance each other. If you have a better suggestion I know I'd love to hear it.
Before there are a ton of "If only they had used open source, this wouldn't have happened" posts, I'd like to post a counterpoint. Certainly, using open source has security benefits, and this is one of its strong points. But couldn't they at least have used a hash algorithm of respected difficulty by the mathematical community at large? That really has nothing to do with open or closed source, it just sounds like a competency issue to me.
There are tons of good algorithms they could have used. For example, they could have simply hashed all passwords with "Competing open source realtime operating systems are for weenies!!"
It is physically impossible for any website that offers free posting of ideas and comments, even to AC's, to host a shadow conspiracy on any topic. Slashdot by design is inherently immune to conspiracy provided they never start deleting posts. (And if they did, the outcry would be so large that this is inherently impossible for them to do.)
I've seen the trolls crying foul over this tech stock issue, and all I can say is that I support you, CmdrTaco, this might be of interest to some, but if the editors don't think it's important, then it really doesn't need to get posted. It's up to the editors of a site to determine what direction the content of the site should take.
If you trolls want to whine about what's not on Slashdot, then kindly unstuff linux from your ass, take the Slash source that is freely available, ask mommy for your $70 registration fee, register stockdot.org, and put up your own damn site. Then you can tell all your little troll friends about all the Wall Street conspiracies and VA Linux plots to storm Redmond with assault rifles and whatever else you can come up with.
A lot of posts are moderated quite highly that contradict Open Source ideas. For the most part, moderators are rational sensible people, which makes sense considering that they're selected from among average contributing slashdotters.
The reason more posts contrary to open source ideas get moderated down is because a large number of them are written as unintelligent and meaningless flamebait posts. In statistics this is called a "correlation", and as the mantra of statistics goes, "correlation does not imply causation". If you don't get that, look it up.
Oh come now, Slashdot posted the same kinds of stories long before VA Linux came into the picture. What is the source of this VA Linux paranoia? Has anyone ever seen or heard of them doing anything detrimental to Slashdot?
Funny. VHS prices dropped, DVD is flooded with incompetent idiocy, and I watch my movies linearly anyway. I swore off DVD's.
I've been listening to midi's on the web since who knows when. I don't see how that's much different. You can sample Bach on a midi to promote interest in it if you are trying to sell cds, that isn't exactly a novel ideal.
I've heard lecturers speak before that they theorize that application serving will become the future method of software acquisition once bandwidth increases sufficiently to cover it. I have always considered that it would be something like downloading a small volatile copy of the program to run locally each time you launch it.
This is an interesting twist on the concept of application serving, since it presents a real-world useful application, gimp, through a standard interface, html, and provides remote processing and storage of data. Could this become a significant means of software distribution in the future?
And most importantly, what does this mean for the GPL? Clearly this usage of gimp is not a violation of GPL, by the very design of the license. They could make all the modifications they want to gimp, but as long as they do not distribute the binary, they do not need to distribute the source. Is this a potential loophole in the GPL that should be taken care of, is it a necessary evil, or is this a positive combination of open source software and closed business models?
> "The limits on today's Internet are no longer determined by raw bandwidth, but rather by how
> well the different network components work together," said Brian Valentine, senior vice
> president of the Windows Division at Microsoft.
It is clear to me that Microsoft and I do not share the same uplink provider...
Looks like all those kiddieporn people on FreeNet are going to love this one. :)
> (1) Plain-vanilla: rapidly dump (and continue dumping) a lot of random-noise content
/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats (which I find likely... the accessing that is), then it will accumulate votes. So if J. Random Jerk inserts a bunch of dummy files with the same name, they would come up later in the search than the established copy that already has all the positive votes.
> into Freenet from multiple launch points (DDOS). Soon enough the random noise will crowd
> out the real information.
If I understand his description of the protocol correctly, then no. Who is going to search for random noise? It's about as likely as typing "nonrelativistic quantum mechanics" into google.com and coming up with some a website that posts random numbers.
> (2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats'
> that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it
> into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection at will.
> Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly.
Again, if I understand his description of the protocol correctly, no. If people have been accessing the real
All in all, it sounds like a very well thought-out protocol to me, which is impressive for a product so early in its developmental stage. Even napster hasn't quite gotten to this point, we still can't access unknown artists very effectively on napster, which is something I would love to do if I could.
Cosource.com has tried linking buyers and programmers. It's an excellent idea, but from what I've seen of the completed projects, the prices paid really don't even come close to the hours that it would take an average programmer to do the job. It doesn't compare to my day job. I think open source programming is a viable business model, but I don't think we're quite at the point where we can implement it as a big open market on a website.
First it needs more recognition from big corporations that realize they can actually get their products for cheaper if they allow open source components to be used by then releasing it as open source again.
Not at all. I've never been harassed by a criminal, but by police a number of times while conducting myself in a safe, civil, respectable manner. Their heads get too big when they think of themselves as simply "general police". It is important to maintain strict guidelines dictating what they can and cannot do. And once these guidelines are in place (such as the Bill of Rights), they need to be strictly enforced, not ignored like the Fourth Ammendment is so frequently ignored (can we say wire-taps, crypto law, Echelon, etc).
I think the intelligent half of Slashdotters could put together a better system than the FBI is today. As computer geeks and scientists, we're familiar with the extreme benefits of peer review. It is the only way to get exactly what you are looking for, whether it is a piece of software, an accurate scientific theory, or a fair and just policing force.
You cannot run a democracy in the middle of a shroud of secrecy. Every American needs to know exactly what its government is doing, otherwise democracy falls apart because we can't make any informed decisions. Since the days of JFK we've been voting for a pretty face and a smooth talker. The reason we're resorting to superficial means is that we really don't know what our leaders and agencies are doing. If we knew what decisions our president made behind closed doors, we might not have reelected Clinton, maybe not even Reagan.
It's easy to argue that a degree of secrecy is required to run a government, that we have to keep secrets from other nations, but I think this arguement falls apart under close scrutiny. The method of government by secrecy is no different from the concept of security-by-obscurity that has been ripped to shreds so many times by computer security experts. It simply is not the best way to do it.
We are entering an era where we need to start acting like a planet rather than a huge tribe trying to make sure the other tribes don't step on our land. The internet has done some wonderful things for international communication, and it's just getting started. Once the communication infrastructure is in place, it starts to redefine the way people think. Within the next 50 years, nationalism will fall apart. People will not define themselves as Americans, British, French, or Japanese, but as people. Boundaries between people can only exist so long as boundaries to communication exists.
When people start thinking as one, the governments must follow suit and stop trying to function by isolation. The U.S. has traditionally been the slowest to notice this. We have blatantly stupid crypto laws because our government thinks for some reasons that only American programmers can write good crypto software, and if we isolate them from the rest of the world, the rest of the world won't get crypto. Yeah, maybe America used to be the software center of the world, but as the internet boomed, suddenly the shift focused. Everyone was shocked when no U.S. universities scored in the top ten at the ACM World Programming Finals. I would have been more shocked if we had maintained dominance.
There have been talks on here before about getting some sort of geek political action committee. We need way more than that, we need to get our ideas and philosophies, the wisdoms we take for granted, and apply them to our system of government in a practical way. The concepts we consider obvious aren't just for world domination of our operating systems, they can actually improve the world. The FBI could learn a lot from slashdotters if we could only teach it how to effectively apply what we know.
This story has been up for a few hours, and nobody has said anything stupid about processing the genome on distributed.net yet. :)
In the words of my father, shortly after I explained to him the current problems with mp3s and dvds, "Why don't you people who are making open source software start making music and movies the same way?"
The future structure of entertainment will be decentralized. The artist on the street will be able to be an artist, and the suits will go on building factories to manufacture suits.
Ok, so maybe it's a few days later, but the only story I see on Alternet is "Congratulations, if you see this page it means you successfully installed Apache."
I can purchase any copyrighted book I want, walk to a photocopy machine, and xerox the whole thing if I prefer to read books off of xeroxed pieces of paper. That's perfectly legal (at least under U.S. law) as you're allowed to make copies of anything for personal use.
Reference: U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 1.