"peer-to-peer data sharing doesn't require a company to centralize the information. Gnutella and Freenet technologies, as well as whatever comes next, allow such sharing with no central control."
. ..a perfect example of "the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it".
aw, *bullshit*. Napster does NOT create an illegal market for copyrighted material. The market is there, it was there before (cassette tapes, prior to that, it was bootleg vinyl, and if you don't believe me, I have a bootleg - very poor quality, LP of a 1972 Pink Floyd concert.) Napster is an enabling technology. It's only a tool man. Napster does have legitimate uses. Who gives a rat's ass what it was intended to be used as. The same can be said about ANY tool.
And, I don't think it's unpopular here, on/., that musicians actually get paid for their work. I think that 99.999% of the punk kids who downloaded Metallica's stuff and got banned would agree that they'd much rather give their money directly to Metallica. (the same is probably not true for pirateers of Brittney Spears).
It is the mass-rejection of the RIAA, record labels, radio stations, narrowly-focused promotion, low-artistic value, and high margins on CD sales that is the issue here. Read some of the other posts. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. And don't read that as an endorsement of piracy. This is civil disobedience. Along with all the nobility that the term implies.
IT doesn't even have to do with MP3. MP3 is a trade-off necessitated by where bandwidth is TODAY. Tomorrow, pirates may not even need MP3, they'll be able to download direct audio-format songs over the internet. Unwatermarked, unencrypted, uncompressed.
This started when the music industry switched from Analog to Digital. It was possible, then, but very difficult, the hardware wasn't quite there yet. As the technology improves, this starts to work on a broader scale.
And if they drive these people off the internet, it will be back to modems, telephones, and BBSes. Private networks.
And we can't stop the tidal wave of bad cliches either, because the cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
The other great thing about this solution is, if you lower the price of CD's that much, people will be much less inclined to steal what they can easily afford to buy. Loss of profit on margin will definately be made up in volume.
Record companies can't hype old artists as well. They need a fresh herd of new young artists to parade across the airwaves to continually sell new CD's to maximize profitability. Also, new artists wear new fashions, which meshes well with current advertising.
This is why Brittney Spears outsells Frank Zappa.
So to sum it up: New Music -> masses = MOST money for RIAA companies.
Old Music -> masses = less mindshare for new artists = less profit optimization.
Old music raped by new artists -> masses = better hype for new artists = even more money for RIAA companies = less artistic integrity overall, and destruction of human history, elimination of posterity.
"If people in the society benefit the most from being backstabbing bastards it kind of won't work, you notice?"
It kind of will work. When you think about it, the human animal is truly only subject to one law. Survival of the fittest. We may make our own laws, and try to enforce our own laws, but that only works within the framework of our society, and when it all comes down to it, it's the motherfucker with the biggest guns who wins out. Currently, that's the US Govt. I don't think there's a damn thing anyone can do to revoke the most basic, fundamental natural law of life for the past 4 billion years.
That's why we all have a choice, and it will always be the backstabbing bastards that make it. When you get the biggest gun, you can apply your passion for your fellow man to break this rule. But then, you become the backstabbing bastard, don't you. Do you think Pol Pot learned this lesson before he died?
" capitalism demands a pyramid structure of wealth and power, "
I've always hated that description, a pyramid is a three-dimensional structure. You're talking about a hierarchy which can be mapped to a simple two-dimensional tree structure. It ticks me off to hear these terms being abused like this in a cheap attempt to over-dramatize an idea - in order to rouse emotional responses from the reader. But that's what Marxism was all about wasn't it? Compassion for one's fellow man, hate for those who could be twisted in one's mind to being non-human, because they're rich.
No, I haven't believed in this system my whole life. In fact, back when I was in college, I was quite taken with the whole Marxist ideal. Now that I've "grown up", and I've become that what I used to hate: A white, employed, middle-class, male, with a wife, two dogs, SUV, two kids, watches sit-coms, has a 401k, etc. etc. - I look back at my childhood, and saw that I hated the rich because I had no hope that I would ever possibly become rich. None at all. It happened quite unexpectedly, after eight years of hard work. I have improved my standing in life, I rose from the level of the proletariat, I took advantage of the opportunities I had in my native-born country, and yes, I played the sick game of consumerism, and was rewarded with a shiny new credit history.
All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not living on a commune growing tofu.
And while we're all pretty aware here on/. of the growing threat of corporatism, globalization, and erosion of rights, we're mostly pretty happy that US corporations had the freedom to invent transistors, microchips, software, ethernet, etc. And that the PEOPLE were fleeced with high taxation to fund the development of the internet, or the space program (even if that was just a glorified cold-war pissing contest).
I didn't have this perspective when I was 24, and making $6/hr delivering pizzas. I couldn't have.
. . . and with your "maintenance free" solar cars, there would always be a contingent of VW fanatics out there, rebuilding engines, adjusting valves, thumbing their noses at the EPA smog-testers, etc.
As with Mac OS X, there will always be folks tinkering around with Linux, BSD, and even a few idiot Windows users out there (okay, I'm typing this message from NT). And - even still, there's Darwin. So the shade-tree mechanic analogy doesn't hold.
Actually, unless your retailer has Oil on sale, it's frequently cheaper to get your oil changed at the jiffy-lube, etc.
Another bad analogy; when you change your own oil, you have to take it in somewhere for recycling. Thankfully, there is no such concept in computers. (yet).
I just wanted to know if AppleScript could make Outlook it's bitch as well as VBS does. In my dream world, where Macs have 50% marketshare, this type of TH might spread faster due to people not being able to easily distinguish between executable content or regular attachments, (by looking for the ".vbs" extension) if AppleScript (compiled) didn't have any visible means of identification (type; APPL).
Forks: Yes pain in the ass to edit resource forks if you don't have the proper tools. The proper tools are freely available on Apple's site, and most Mac compilers also ship with Res Edit, etc. The equvalent data on PCs are much more difficult to edit after the fact (resources in DLLs) OS X will use a different scheme, an application will actually be a special type of FOLDER, which contains the discreet files and resources. In Finder, this will still be hidden from the user, because that special folder will be unopenable. (I think there was a/. primer on this a few months back).
NT *does* indeed have something similar to forks, called streams on NTFS. Too FUCKING bad, nobody was smart enough to write a protocol that preserved Mac resource forks when copying them to an NTFS volume by putting them into a stream. You copy a Mac file to NTFS, and NT treats it the same way DOS 1.0 does, it blindly, stupidly, erases critical data. (so does Unix, and every other OS except Novell). Seems like an obvious idea. Streams have been around since NT 3.5, but they are not used for anything other than storing security attributes for files - which in other OS-es, are stored as part of the file system, instead.
I'm in agreement with you about "flat file" systems, if only for universal interoperability purposes, and I think Apple is too, which is why they are abandoning it and going to the system they are for OS X - the Finder will keep users out of the dangerous areas, and treat application folders as files, which is great, IMHO, from a useability standpoint. From a power-user wanting to muck with things, use a special tool to get at them and edit them (like res-edit), or go in using the shell, duh! The command line still lets you get into those folders and see all the nifty contents. Things only an engineer could appreciate, should only be accesible to engineers. My mother in law doesn't need to open up an application folder, see ten million dlls and binaries (and subfolders), and try to figure out which one is the executable.
I'm not a virus writer, but if there are any out there, wouldn't similar functionality be possible through the use of Outlook/Macintosh and an AppleScript attachment?
I just read a news report about the new virus, and the warning they're giving about it is for people to avoid messages with.VBS attachements, because the subject of the new variant changes dynamically. Since ".VBS" is how DOS signifies file types, and since Macintosh uses a less visible means of specifying file types, I began to think of ways, architecturally, this would work on a Mac. It seems like AppleScript would foot the bill. Most machines have it installed by default, it's executable content, a file, and isn't Outlook scriptable? I'm wondering if AppleScript could get Outlook to do the same sorts of things. ..
I don't think that the simple "big fine" solution will work.
This will not prevent Microsoft from engaging in illegal behavior, and they'll simply pass the costs on to consumers, and being a Monopoly, they are free to do that. I'm sure the next move would be something along the lines of:
Well, Apple bundles Works with their OS (on the iMac), so why can't we bundle Office? um - to keep things consistent, we're going to have to NOT produce Office for Mac anymore, by the way. um, Linux bundles a compiler with their OS, so why don't we bundle Visual Studio?
Watch the remaining futile competition vanish. Watch the marketshare climb, watch the prices skyrocket.
Oh come on now! konstant has been a/.-er for years, a good contributor, a member of the family, if you will.
Your pressuring him to quit Microsoft on moral grounds sounds suspiciously like tactics and logic used by McCarthyism. To ask a guy to quit his job, his livelyhood, like that, is pretty, well, harsh. He's an engineer, not a manager, not a marketer, not a lawyer, not a veep. Lay off the poor guy. We're lucky any MS employees bother to respond here at all.
konstant- Thanks for your thoughtful input to this conversation, and especially THANK YOU (whether you were involved in the decision or coding or not) for Microsoft's FINALLY fixing the Outlook ILOVEYOU bug, by securing the execution of mail content. However, I think you're wrong. MS will lose this one and lose the appeal as well. Sorry. Your bosses were bad, and need to be spanked. Sorry to be cynical here, but I don't think absolute law has anything to do with it. The only way MS will get out of this mess is by dragging it out until Bush is president, and obtaining his aid and comfort.
Think of the millions of man-hours that have been wasted on fixing, trying to get to run, or waiting for their OS. Think of the families that have broken up because hubby couldn't get home from work on time, because he was trying to arrange drivers in some insane config.sys so the damn machine would boot, run windows, connect to the network, and still leave 530k RAM free in DOS so they could run some needed application.
Time folks could have spent doing productive things. Or even reflective things.
I'm willing to bet the next step is court. Sorry to say, but I think that, even though morally and ethically your response was right, and damn good burn dude, MS is not going to respond to this.
90MPH? No mass-produced-for-the-consumer electric car could dream of doing it, but there is plenty of material on the web from companies that make electric cars (iow - I'm too lazy to look up and post the URLs), and some electric cars are high-performance racers. You pay a LOT extra for a little extra performance, but in theory, electric cars have much better potential to be high-performance racers than Internal Combustion. It's mostly a question of range-vs-weight, and as always, speed's just a question of money. How fast do you want to go?
When you think of it, the atom bomb was a perfect model for testing out humanity's capabilities for dealing responsibly with "absolute power".
How do we handle it? Well, one very powerful entity (the US) gains cultural, economic, and political stranglehold on a large portion of the world, using this tool (A-bomb=death star, Hiroshima=Alderan), and spends the next 30 years attempting to bribe/beg the rest of the world into not developing or using such terrible weapons. Eventually, someone uncooperative is going to get and/or use the bomb - and we'll have two choices. Strict authoritarian control of the entire world by a single political entity capable of enforcing limits on such devices: ie. the US takes over the entire world, and forces mandatory inspections everywhere to eliminate any chance that "weapons of mass destruction" can be produced by terrorists. OR, we'll end up destroying all humaninty in the process of trying.
Who's to say that the same won't possibly happen with AI/nano. Certainly, "accidents" are possible when it comes to loosing "AI", or any mechanical/computational system which is self-reliant. Assuming that doesn't happen, we're still at the mercy of the people who control such technology, and we already know how that works. The first person to learn how to make it, uses it in a terrible display of power. That power is then used to control the rest of the world to prevent them from developing that technology (and, of course there are all kinds of economic bonuses associated with that position). Eventually, either draconian measures must be taken to prevent that technology's spread, or it gets out of control and we all die.
Either way, doesn't look like a bright, happy future for any of us. Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle (or as many are fond of putting it otherwise, the toothpaste is already out of the tube).
Slashdot Mirror
"What's everyone else's opinion on this? "
um. cool? I wasn't going to be buying any Intel chips anyway.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
The new Xeons will be used in a 32-processor server from Unisys that Compaq also is selling,
.
Ambrose said
No, that's wrong, they will be used in the design of those systems, to figure out how to most efficiently dissipate heat. .
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"Nobody needs SMP. People need a certain level of performance. SMP is just one way of
achieving that level, and even then only for certain tasks. "
oh, then you "get" the joke. . . riotous, isn't it?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"peer-to-peer data sharing doesn't require a company to centralize
.a perfect example of "the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it".
the information. Gnutella and Freenet technologies, as well as whatever comes next, allow such
sharing with no central control."
. .
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
aw, *bullshit*. Napster does NOT create an illegal market for copyrighted material. The market is there, it was there before (cassette tapes, prior to that, it was bootleg vinyl, and if you don't believe me, I have a bootleg - very poor quality, LP of a 1972 Pink Floyd concert.) Napster is an enabling technology. It's only a tool man. Napster does have legitimate uses. Who gives a rat's ass what it was intended to be used as. The same can be said about ANY tool.
/., that musicians actually get paid for their work. I think that 99.999% of the punk kids who downloaded Metallica's stuff and got banned would agree that they'd much rather give their money directly to Metallica. (the same is probably not true for pirateers of Brittney Spears).
And, I don't think it's unpopular here, on
It is the mass-rejection of the RIAA, record labels, radio stations, narrowly-focused promotion, low-artistic value, and high margins on CD sales that is the issue here. Read some of the other posts. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. And don't read that as an endorsement of piracy. This is civil disobedience. Along with all the nobility that the term implies.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
I've always wondered about how many enviornmental and property laws Moses violated by changing the Nile to blood.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
IT doesn't even have to do with MP3. MP3 is a trade-off necessitated by where bandwidth is TODAY. Tomorrow, pirates may not even need MP3, they'll be able to download direct audio-format songs over the internet. Unwatermarked, unencrypted, uncompressed.
This started when the music industry switched from Analog to Digital. It was possible, then, but very difficult, the hardware wasn't quite there yet. As the technology improves, this starts to work on a broader scale.
And if they drive these people off the internet, it will be back to modems, telephones, and BBSes. Private networks.
And we can't stop the tidal wave of bad cliches either, because the cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
The other great thing about this solution is, if you lower the price of CD's that much, people will be much less inclined to steal what they can easily afford to buy. Loss of profit on margin will definately be made up in volume.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Record companies can't hype old artists as well. They need a fresh herd of new young artists to parade across the airwaves to continually sell new CD's to maximize profitability. Also, new artists wear new fashions, which meshes well with current advertising.
This is why Brittney Spears outsells Frank Zappa.
So to sum it up:
New Music -> masses = MOST money for RIAA companies.
Old Music -> masses = less mindshare for new artists = less profit optimization.
Old music raped by new artists -> masses = better hype for new artists = even more money for RIAA companies = less artistic integrity overall, and destruction of human history, elimination of posterity.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"If people in the society benefit the most from being backstabbing bastards it kind of won't work,
you notice?"
It kind of will work. When you think about it, the human animal is truly only subject to one law. Survival of the fittest. We may make our own laws, and try to enforce our own laws, but that only works within the framework of our society, and when it all comes down to it, it's the motherfucker with the biggest guns who wins out. Currently, that's the US Govt. I don't think there's a damn thing anyone can do to revoke the most basic, fundamental natural law of life for the past 4 billion years.
That's why we all have a choice, and it will always be the backstabbing bastards that make it. When you get the biggest gun, you can apply your passion for your fellow man to break this rule. But then, you become the backstabbing bastard, don't you. Do you think Pol Pot learned this lesson before he died?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
" capitalism demands a pyramid structure of wealth and power, "
/. of the growing threat of corporatism, globalization, and erosion of rights, we're mostly pretty happy that US corporations had the freedom to invent transistors, microchips, software, ethernet, etc. And that the PEOPLE were fleeced with high taxation to fund the development of the internet, or the space program (even if that was just a glorified cold-war pissing contest).
I've always hated that description, a pyramid is a three-dimensional structure. You're talking about a hierarchy which can be mapped to a simple two-dimensional tree structure. It ticks me off to hear these terms being abused like this in a cheap attempt to over-dramatize an idea - in order to rouse emotional responses from the reader. But that's what Marxism was all about wasn't it? Compassion for one's fellow man, hate for those who could be twisted in one's mind to being non-human, because they're rich.
No, I haven't believed in this system my whole life. In fact, back when I was in college, I was quite taken with the whole Marxist ideal. Now that I've "grown up", and I've become that what I used to hate: A white, employed, middle-class, male, with a wife, two dogs, SUV, two kids, watches sit-coms, has a 401k, etc. etc. - I look back at my childhood, and saw that I hated the rich because I had no hope that I would ever possibly become rich. None at all. It happened quite unexpectedly, after eight years of hard work. I have improved my standing in life, I rose from the level of the proletariat, I took advantage of the opportunities I had in my native-born country, and yes, I played the sick game of consumerism, and was rewarded with a shiny new credit history.
All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not living on a commune growing tofu.
And while we're all pretty aware here on
I didn't have this perspective when I was 24, and making $6/hr delivering pizzas. I couldn't have.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
. . . and with your "maintenance free" solar cars, there would always be a contingent of VW fanatics out there, rebuilding engines, adjusting valves, thumbing their noses at the EPA smog-testers, etc.
As with Mac OS X, there will always be folks tinkering around with Linux, BSD, and even a few idiot Windows users out there (okay, I'm typing this message from NT). And - even still, there's Darwin. So the shade-tree mechanic analogy doesn't hold.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Actually, unless your retailer has Oil on sale, it's frequently cheaper to get your oil changed at the jiffy-lube, etc.
Another bad analogy; when you change your own oil, you have to take it in somewhere for recycling. Thankfully, there is no such concept in computers. (yet).
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Was there ANY MENTION ANYWHERE regarding licensing of Cocoa for Windows (ie. openstep NT runtime?).
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
ah - I knew all that.
/. primer on this a few months back).
I just wanted to know if AppleScript could make Outlook it's bitch as well as VBS does. In my dream world, where Macs have 50% marketshare, this type of TH might spread faster due to people not being able to easily distinguish between executable content or regular attachments, (by looking for the ".vbs" extension) if AppleScript (compiled) didn't have any visible means of identification (type; APPL).
Forks: Yes pain in the ass to edit resource forks if you don't have the proper tools. The proper tools are freely available on Apple's site, and most Mac compilers also ship with Res Edit, etc. The equvalent data on PCs are much more difficult to edit after the fact (resources in DLLs) OS X will use a different scheme, an application will actually be a special type of FOLDER, which contains the discreet files and resources. In Finder, this will still be hidden from the user, because that special folder will be unopenable. (I think there was a
NT *does* indeed have something similar to forks, called streams on NTFS. Too FUCKING bad, nobody was smart enough to write a protocol that preserved Mac resource forks when copying them to an NTFS volume by putting them into a stream. You copy a Mac file to NTFS, and NT treats it the same way DOS 1.0 does, it blindly, stupidly, erases critical data. (so does Unix, and every other OS except Novell). Seems like an obvious idea. Streams have been around since NT 3.5, but they are not used for anything other than storing security attributes for files - which in other OS-es, are stored as part of the file system, instead.
I'm in agreement with you about "flat file" systems, if only for universal interoperability purposes, and I think Apple is too, which is why they are abandoning it and going to the system they are for OS X - the Finder will keep users out of the dangerous areas, and treat application folders as files, which is great, IMHO, from a useability standpoint. From a power-user wanting to muck with things, use a special tool to get at them and edit them (like res-edit), or go in using the shell, duh! The command line still lets you get into those folders and see all the nifty contents. Things only an engineer could appreciate, should only be accesible to engineers. My mother in law doesn't need to open up an application folder, see ten million dlls and binaries (and subfolders), and try to figure out which one is the executable.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
I'm not a virus writer, but if there are any out there, wouldn't similar functionality be possible through the use of Outlook/Macintosh and an AppleScript attachment?
.VBS attachements, because the subject of the new variant changes dynamically. Since ".VBS" is how DOS signifies file types, and since Macintosh uses a less visible means of specifying file types, I began to think of ways, architecturally, this would work on a Mac. It seems like AppleScript would foot the bill. Most machines have it installed by default, it's executable content, a file, and isn't Outlook scriptable? I'm wondering if AppleScript could get Outlook to do the same sorts of things. . .
I just read a news report about the new virus, and the warning they're giving about it is for people to avoid messages with
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
I don't think that the simple "big fine" solution will work.
This will not prevent Microsoft from engaging in illegal behavior, and they'll simply pass the costs on to consumers, and being a Monopoly, they are free to do that. I'm sure the next move would be something along the lines of:
Well, Apple bundles Works with their OS (on the iMac), so why can't we bundle Office? um - to keep things consistent, we're going to have to NOT produce Office for Mac anymore, by the way. um, Linux bundles a compiler with their OS, so why don't we bundle Visual Studio?
Watch the remaining futile competition vanish. Watch the marketshare climb, watch the prices skyrocket.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
they don't bundle office and studio because they don't need to. They already have those markets bound tight. There is NO real competition there.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Oh come on now! /.-er for years, a good contributor, a member of the family, if you will.
konstant has been a
Your pressuring him to quit Microsoft on moral grounds sounds suspiciously like tactics and logic used by McCarthyism. To ask a guy to quit his job, his livelyhood, like that, is pretty, well, harsh. He's an engineer, not a manager, not a marketer, not a lawyer, not a veep. Lay off the poor guy. We're lucky any MS employees bother to respond here at all.
konstant-
Thanks for your thoughtful input to this conversation, and especially THANK YOU (whether you were involved in the decision or coding or not) for Microsoft's FINALLY fixing the Outlook ILOVEYOU bug, by securing the execution of mail content.
However, I think you're wrong. MS will lose this one and lose the appeal as well. Sorry. Your bosses were bad, and need to be spanked. Sorry to be cynical here, but I don't think absolute law has anything to do with it. The only way MS will get out of this mess is by dragging it out until Bush is president, and obtaining his aid and comfort.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Think of the millions of man-hours that have been wasted on fixing, trying to get to run, or waiting for their OS. Think of the families that have broken up because hubby couldn't get home from work on time, because he was trying to arrange drivers in some insane config.sys so the damn machine would boot, run windows, connect to the network, and still leave 530k RAM free in DOS so they could run some needed application.
Time folks could have spent doing productive things. Or even reflective things.
To me, that is tantamount to murder.
Hang em high!
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
does anyone have any idea how much $ Microsoft has donated to G. Dubya's campaign?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"Of course you know, this means war."
I'm willing to bet the next step is court. Sorry to say, but I think that, even though morally and ethically your response was right, and damn good burn dude, MS is not going to respond to this.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Hey Metallica!
I just copied 3 of your albums of MP3's across our LAN via SMB, from one NT server to another.
Since Network Neighborhood is what allowed me to freely violate your copyright, then you ought to sue Microsoft!
(sorry, cheap shot)
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
90MPH? No mass-produced-for-the-consumer electric car could dream of doing it, but there is plenty of material on the web from companies that make electric cars (iow - I'm too lazy to look up and post the URLs), and some electric cars are high-performance racers. You pay a LOT extra for a little extra performance, but in theory, electric cars have much better potential to be high-performance racers than Internal Combustion. It's mostly a question of range-vs-weight, and as always, speed's just a question of money. How fast do you want to go?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
When you think of it, the atom bomb was a perfect model for testing out humanity's capabilities for dealing responsibly with "absolute power".
How do we handle it?
Well, one very powerful entity (the US) gains cultural, economic, and political stranglehold on a large portion of the world, using this tool (A-bomb=death star, Hiroshima=Alderan), and spends the next 30 years attempting to bribe/beg the rest of the world into not developing or using such terrible weapons.
Eventually, someone uncooperative is going to get and/or use the bomb - and we'll have two choices. Strict authoritarian control of the entire world by a single political entity capable of enforcing limits on such devices: ie. the US takes over the entire world, and forces mandatory inspections everywhere to eliminate any chance that "weapons of mass destruction" can be produced by terrorists. OR, we'll end up destroying all humaninty in the process of trying.
Who's to say that the same won't possibly happen with AI/nano. Certainly, "accidents" are possible when it comes to loosing "AI", or any mechanical/computational system which is self-reliant. Assuming that doesn't happen, we're still at the mercy of the people who control such technology, and we already know how that works. The first person to learn how to make it, uses it in a terrible display of power. That power is then used to control the rest of the world to prevent them from developing that technology (and, of course there are all kinds of economic bonuses associated with that position). Eventually, either draconian measures must be taken to prevent that technology's spread, or it gets out of control and we all die.
Either way, doesn't look like a bright, happy future for any of us. Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle (or as many are fond of putting it otherwise, the toothpaste is already out of the tube).
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .