You ask is it time to buy? Nope. Time to buy was a year or two ago, not because the cameras then were as good as 35mm film (they weren't, though the 1Ds is and in many ways the 10D/D60/D300 are close). But because the digital experience would change the way you to photography.
For a long time I advocated "shoot on film, but shoot like crazy because you will have to shoot a lot of film to match what you will pay in depreciation on your digital." That stopped being true a while ago.
Asking "Is it time to buy" is like asking, "Is it time to get a PC now?" Well, there are people buying their first PC today, and perhaps it is right for them as late adopters. But the truth is that even though today's PC is much better than yesterday's, and a digital camera will come out much better than the Rebel 300D in another 2 years, it is still time to buy, as it was time to buy 2 years ago.
I wrote a number of popular tools for the Commodore computers in the early days, and it amazes me that over 20 years later people still write to ask about things like the PAL assembler and POWER programmer's toolkit.
And it amazed me to look back at the Vintage fair this weekend and think about what we did. How I wrote a complex disassembler which I trained to help me reverse engineer every new ROM that came out so I could get in and add my stuff. How I used to be able to program 6502 code in hex and read it that way if I had to. How I had a contest with a friend to write the shortest 6502 program that could print a roman numeral. (Mine was 43 bytes, my friend won with a really ugly hack to get a 42 byte one, making me wonder about the ultimate question.)
At the festival, I sat with my friend Dan Kottke, who had been one of Apple's earliest employees and helped debug and make the Apple 1. We were trying to remember how to use the Apple machine language monitor. It had been so long we had forgotten. I was sat down in front of a game I wrote and couldn't remember how to play it. Yet people are still out there using this stuff.
The posters above said it pretty well. You really could understand the machine. You could put yourself in the place of Chuck Peddle, who by designing the 6502 and the PET is one of the true unsung fathers of the PC, and understand everything he did. Today no PC could be built or understood by one person, and so as a learning environment and hobby toy, it's not the same.
Use the techniques I outline on How to read an electronic book particularly on a big monitor, to try it out. It's better than you think. Of course PDAs and laptops are better but you can do much with an ordinary PC.
It's the folks who hold exactly the same views as they did 10 years ago that I wouldn't trust.
The questions about the role of intellectual property on the net have been among the most new in cyberlaw. I've made a number of thoughts and predictions about how they will pan out or how they should. Some right, some wrong.
And I still defend copyright and disagree with those (inside the EFF or out) who want to simply dismantle it. But everybody at the EFF is bothered by the collateral damage caused by copyright holders attacking not infringement, but the underlying technologies which are being used for it.
Re:Maybe he could explain what they actually do
on
EFF Chairman Interviewed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What E-mail address did you mail? While we can't help everybody who needs our help, particularly overseas -- wish we could -- if you mailed into a black hole something wrong happened, and I would like to find the cause and fix it.
We try to respond to all mail (though we get a fair bit of nutcase mail, you would be amazed, that we don't respond to) and we definitely should have given some answer to a plea for help.
If nothing else we would point somebody to the web sites we have built to deal with threats like these, including Chilling Effects and Subpoena Defense.
What I mean is that USENET has stagnated, innovation wise. It's very difficult to do something new (both technologically, and socially) in USENET, and that's not because it's already perfect.
The web is not this way. Anybody can build anything they can think of into a web site over a fairly broad range of possibles. It's their web site, there is nobody there to approve or disapprove. If people like it, they read the site, if not, they don't.
Proposing something new on USENET results in mostly flamewars. Imagine having to have a vote before you can put up a new website!
At the same time USENET retains some core functions not found on the web. In its true form -- reading news from a local or very nearby server at LAN speed -- it provides a response time that is unmatched. Instant response has a profound affect on UI. You can do things you would not tolerate doing with even a 500ms delay on your clicks as is typical even of fast web sites.
And it's aimed at conversation, with good thread support, fancy killfile facilities in many readers, and most importantly a basic understanding of what you have read and what you haven't. You can handle a much larger discussion group in USENET than you can with mailing lists, or web boards for example.
But, counter to this, web boards have had the ability to innovate. Slash was able to add the moderation point system because they wanted it to, and it's vital to a system as big as/. (Even though in total posting volume,/. is a tiny fraction of the size of USENET.)
USENET is not stagnant in terms of discussions, or the creation of alt groups, but go ahead and try to name the recent innovations there. DejaNews/Google is about the last thing to make a big difference, and that didn't even come from USENET.
I must say I wish I had seen this thread right away and then I could have done a "first post" and had the only such post to get modded up.:-)
V was a great disappointment to me because the miniseries started so well, and ended full of TV Sci-Fi's most stupid cliches.
They came and they looked human. They said this was due to common ancestry, which is something I could almost buy (though it has to be very recent common ancestry, and a lot of the fossil record needs major reinterpretation.) They have a hidden oppressive agenda -- good plot device, to make for good stories.
Then suddenly it is all undone at the end of the miniseries. They are lizards in amazing human suits so good you want to have sex with the women, but which can be peeled off. And they want our water, stuff made from 2 of the most common elements in the universe. How could people who wrote a good beginning like that write such a stupid ending. I don't want them to write more, based on the trend.
Sadly, this is not the only time this happens in TV SF. Look at the Matrix with its "battery" story. Why does it happen so much?
Yes, power is that high. The 4.3 cent power in Ontario is heavily subsidized right now.
Actually, sadly, the 13 cents/kwh in California is also subsidized, sort of. During the manufactured power crisis, it was far more than that, and the state paid $8B to subsidize it which we are still paying back.
So do we have some real power figures for these PCs with big drives, mpeg cards, suitable tv-out video cards etc.? 200w was just an example. Most people have more like a 300w power supply, though of course they don't use all of it. My understanding is most people are using at least 100w.
Depends on your definition of solvable. It unfortunately eliminates the popular idea of repurposing older PCs (which there are vast numbers of) as appliance machines. For the same reason, using an old PC as a NAT box rather than buying a $50 standalone one is crazy too. (Unless you make serious use of the extra firewall features you can get.)
So if you need to buy new PC hardware with new power control features to get your PC based DVR, it isn't as compelling. Because it's going to cost a lot more than the standalone box.
It also doesn't change my main point that people seem to forget about the power cost in the equation when picking PCs for appliance applications. Notebooks, on the other hand, only draw about 15-20 watts, and are a great choice if you can make it work. They usually can't take mpeg encoder cards.
Many people have proposed doing DVRs with old standard PCs using ideally, open source software. Sounds great, more flexible, everything wonderful.
Until you look at the power. Check how much more power that always-on PC takes than a standalone box. Here in California, for example, every watt of 24/7 power costs $1.13 per year or more. So a 200 watt PC costs over $200 per year to run, $150 more than say, a 50 watt standalone device. Not to mention the damage to the environment.
In other words, you can pay for the standalone device pretty quickly, even if you had a "free" PC just stting around.
Now you could fix this problem if you could arrange for the PC to go into a sleep mode when it doesn't have anything to do, at the cost of waiting a little longer to come up when you turn it on to watch something with the remote. This requires the PC have in it a sleep mode with a clock which allows you to say, "Wake up in 3 hours". How many have this? How many have coded for it.
The standalone device can also do this easily.
And you lose the "always recording something to spare disk space" feature that people love about the Tivo.
a) It would avoid OCR errors and verbal transcription errors by not using any two alphanums that look or sound alike. So yes, B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V all mean the same thing (sound-alike), as do 0 and O, 1 and L, 5 and S and so on. Yes, that makes the strings a lot longer
b) Instead of trying to code GPS into this space, sell aliases. Let me pick any alias that maps to my address, and have companies escrow the mapping from them to GPS or street address. My address should be "Brad's House Here" or something like that.
c) When doing the above, each name must have characters added to it which perform an ECC function, so you can detect and correct any transposition or character totally wrong. For some that will mean they pick a nice string and add something random to it. Clever people will find words that meet the ECC test.
d) This way, if I move, my postal address stays the same. And I can register for a global do not mail list.
What I mean is envision a project in the USA where, to make it happen, the entire population of Dallas or Detroit or some similar city had to be displaced, by force if necessary.
Can you imagine a project of sufficient benefit that this would be politically possible in a democratic nation like the USA? Certainly not 18GW of power, or even flood control, for we would not buy displacing all the people who don't live in the flood plain for the sake of protecting those who insist on living within it.
A lot of land was flooded with major U.S. dam projects, but it didn't have a million people living in it!
And even if you can propose something so wonderful, so beneficial that displacing a million people could be sold politically, that's not what we have here. We have various advantages outlined for the dam (flood control, 18GW) but we have many questions -- risk of failure, corruption, inability to do both goals at the same time, predictions by several dam experts that the reservoir will just silt up.
Would you support such a project in a free country? If not, how could you support it here?
The point is that the meaning of freedom is you don't choose what another person's freedom means for them.
Yes, both types of freedom are worthwhile. But the families who have lived in the same house for 400 years aren't the ones polluting the air. Should they be "relocated" because we want to stop the people burning the coal?
If you say you have freedom unless it's impractical for the good of the state, you don't have freedom.
You may have forgotten your Franklin quote in your signature. Do you not see the tremendous irony? Up to 3 million people forcefully uprooted from their homes -- I say that's giving up more than a little liberty for this. Yes, burning the coal is terrible. (Though this dam won't reduce the coal burnt, though it will avoid the need for 18GW of additional coal power as Chinese needs expand.)
However, note that they are trying to serve two goals here. One is flood control (which could be done with a project much smaller than this, or a set of dams on major tributaries) and the other is power, which requires the reservoir be kept high (making it not as effective at flood control.)
And it might end up just silting up, though we in/. are not qualified to resolve that debate.
We do need cleaner forms of power. (Modern nuke designs don't melt down, by the way, but they still can have waste.) One wishes the Chinese could find a way to do the solar research that the U.S. won't.
With many arguments positive and negative. Remarkably, however, nobody after reading the arguments think the pro-dam case is a "slam dunk." At most it's slightly on the positive side.
Yet if you step back, you realize that in a free country, there is no way a project of this sort could go ahead, unless it was such an immense and overwhelmingly positive step, a necessity -- and even then I have doubts that you could arrange for the relocation of 1 to 3 million people, even with bribes of nicer houses on less fertile land.
So if you couldn't approve of this in a free country, how can you approve of usuing authoritarian techniques to make it happen, if the benefits are under any question at all?
I toured the dam and the river last year. You may be interested in my many photos and notes, which are on my China and Yangtse photo pages
Alas, if only it were that simple. Two things in the real situation are different.
a) A number of blacklisters use blacklisting as a threat not aginast the spammer, but the ISP, to get the ISP to do things they want, like changing/enforcing spam TOS and so on. Some of these blacklisters openly state that they know they are blocking the mail of the innocent network neighbours of the spammer in order to cause the innocents to put pressure on the ISP, or to choose another ISP. Punish the innocent to get at the guilty. Effective, but not my style.
b) Some blacklists have poor checks and balances on mistakes. They list sites by accident, or through the malice of reporters or the blacklist itself, and it's a burden for the innocent party to get off the list.
So alas, many of them are about punishment, not of the spammer, but of the spammer's neighbours. I'm all for cutting off the spammer; I just advise caution in the tools we use.
I mean this is if you think an end to end network is a good idea. In an end to end network, ISPs just provide bandwidth and routers, not policy. If you don't support the end to end network concept, you can happily try to enforce policy at the routing nodes.
I'm not American (though I am here now) but that was my point. The U.S. 1st amendment isn't just a law, it's a good idea. It's a principle to be followed in our private lives, too.
It's absolutely your choice. But the first amendment is not just the law, it's a good idea. What people worry about is not the actions of you on your system -- though we might question the wisdom of you refusing mail from innocent people as a means to pressure them -- but the actions of large groups of people, acting in concert, to block the communications of non-spammers.
Even those people have a right to gather and do that, but it can still be a bad idea, worthy of opposition.
The question I ask is not what should we wish to punish (for we all would like to see spammers get what they deserve) but who should be responsible for the punishing and who should get the punishment.
Blacklisters say, "punish the ISP for providing bandwidth to the spammer."
I see the ISP more like the phone company. You don't blame the phone company because people can trade kiddie porn or plot crimes or terrorism over the phone. You don't call for the phone company and all the people with phones in the same phone exchange to be punished until they rise up against the child pornographer among them.
If we say "it's OK to blame and make accountable the ISP for the actions of the spammer" you turn the ISP into a policeman of the bits rather than just a provider of bandwidth.
I worry about the precedent in doing that. There are a lot of other internet activities people want to punish, as I pointed out, and how do we tell them they can't use the ISP as their tool of punishment.
As we've seen in the Verizon case, the RIAA can force an ISP to hand over your real identity without proving you did anything. We want to be careful about where this leads.
Many have complained about the perpetuation of the battery story. For me, it's a real serious blow to see it confirmed.
I always wondered to myself, "how could people who could write such a cool movie put in something as stupid as the battery story? If so, how did it get past everybody who saw the script or rushes?"
It made no sense. Small as it may seem, it takes the movie down several notches in my book, and the book of anybody with an education.
So I started thinking to myself -- maybe they aren't so stupid. Maybe Morpheus is LYING. Maybe Morpheus has been lied to, and we'll get a cool story of the reason behind the lie.
But no, if these animated shorts are canon, neither of these are true. Sure, movies have bad science all the time but the best movies in part make their mark either by not having the bad science, or by there being an obvious dramatic reason for the bad science. Sure, spaceships don't whoosh, but we accept it because it's fun and more dramatic in a space opera. Sure, you can't go FTL but you can't have interstellar SF that's dramatic without it.
But this battery thing has no excuse. It's as interchangeable with any other reason you might come up with for the humans to be kept alive. It doesn't affect the plot, all we need to care is that they are being kept alive and there is some reason.
Like the Hyperion reason, or a core bit of Asimovian twisted-first-law programming forcing them to keep the Humans alive and happy, with the Matrix being the makes-sense-only-to-the-AIs result. That would make more sense, and in fact be far more tragic than the battery story.
The ISP was indeed shut down, just from the load. This is not something to be proud of, the ISP was entirely innocent in all of this and suffered quite a bit. There was no reason for "them to get the message." They were the victims, not the perps. Especially then, before spam was common. Any ISP could have been victimized in this way. Later, a lot of sympathy came out for the ISP after people felt some guilt over what they had done to the ISP.
Sadly, we continue to blame the ISPs for the actions of their users when it comes to spam, but defend proudly their non-responsiblity when it comes to their users running filesharing tools, or putting up "offensive" websites etc.
The Jesus spam, and several of the earlier ones were also not crossposted. Check the links included in my history. I point to the original sources. What C&S did that was new was the sleaze of it, and the fact that while their ISP got wiped out (they just switched) they were unrecalcitrant, and even published their silly book.
Slashdot Mirror
I working out a way to break up ICANN and allow lots of competing, innovating domain registrars, I designed the following way to allow the governing body to exist independent of any country.
No government would have the power to change its policies, other than by passing laws on its own citizens.
Is that it gives us great screen captures like this one which you could never have gotten people to believe when the movie came out.
You ask is it time to buy? Nope. Time to buy was a year or two ago, not because the cameras then were as good as 35mm film (they weren't, though the 1Ds is and in many ways the 10D/D60/D300 are close). But because the digital experience would change the way you to photography.
For a long time I advocated "shoot on film, but shoot like crazy because you will have to shoot a lot of film to match what you will pay in depreciation on your digital." That stopped being true a while ago.
Asking "Is it time to buy" is like asking, "Is it time to get a PC now?" Well, there are people buying their first PC today, and perhaps it is right for them as late adopters. But the truth is that even though today's PC is much better than yesterday's, and a digital camera will come out much better than the Rebel 300D in another 2 years, it is still time to buy, as it was time to buy 2 years ago.
I wrote a number of popular tools for the Commodore computers in the early days, and it amazes me that over 20 years later people still write to ask about things like the PAL assembler and POWER programmer's toolkit.
And it amazed me to look back at the Vintage fair this weekend and think about what we did. How I wrote a complex disassembler which I trained to help me reverse engineer every new ROM that came out so I could get in and add my stuff. How I used to be able to program 6502 code in hex and read it that way if I had to. How I had a contest with a friend to write the shortest 6502 program that could print a roman numeral. (Mine was 43 bytes, my friend won with a really ugly hack to get a 42 byte one, making me wonder about the ultimate question.)
At the festival, I sat with my friend Dan Kottke, who had been one of Apple's earliest employees and helped debug and make the Apple 1. We were trying to remember how to use the Apple machine language monitor. It had been so long we had forgotten. I was sat down in front of a game I wrote and couldn't remember how to play it. Yet people are still out there using this stuff.
The posters above said it pretty well. You really could understand the machine. You could put yourself in the place of Chuck Peddle, who by designing the 6502 and the PET is one of the true unsung fathers of the PC, and understand everything he did. Today no PC could be built or understood by one person, and so as a learning environment and hobby toy, it's not the same.
Use the techniques I outline on How to read an electronic book particularly on a big monitor, to try it out. It's better than you think. Of course PDAs and laptops are better but you can do much with an ordinary PC.
I posted that from a machine logged in with a friend's account. Yes, it's really me who wrote the above
So migration in your views is ironic?
It's the folks who hold exactly the same views as they did 10 years ago that I wouldn't trust.
The questions about the role of intellectual property on the net have been among the most new in cyberlaw. I've made a number of thoughts and predictions about how they will pan out or how they should. Some right, some wrong.
And I still defend copyright and disagree with those (inside the EFF or out) who want to simply dismantle it. But everybody at the EFF is bothered by the collateral damage caused by copyright holders attacking not infringement, but the underlying technologies which are being used for it.
What E-mail address did you mail? While we can't help everybody who needs our help, particularly overseas -- wish we could -- if you mailed into a black hole something wrong happened, and I would like to find the cause and fix it.
We try to respond to all mail (though we get a fair bit of nutcase mail, you would be amazed, that we don't respond to) and we definitely should have given some answer to a plea for help.
If nothing else we would point somebody to the web sites we have built to deal with threats like these, including
Chilling Effects and Subpoena Defense.
What I mean is that USENET has stagnated, innovation wise. It's very difficult to do something new (both technologically, and socially) in USENET, and that's not because it's already perfect.
/. (Even though in total posting volume, /. is a tiny fraction of the size of USENET.)
:-)
The web is not this way. Anybody can build anything they can think of into a web site over a fairly broad range of possibles. It's their web site, there is nobody there to approve or disapprove. If people like it, they read the site, if not, they don't.
Proposing something new on USENET results in mostly flamewars. Imagine having to have a vote before you can put up a new website!
At the same time USENET retains some core functions not found on the web. In its true form -- reading news from a local or very nearby server at LAN speed -- it provides a response time that is unmatched. Instant response has a profound affect on UI. You can do things you would not tolerate doing with even a 500ms delay on your clicks as is typical even of fast web sites.
And it's aimed at conversation, with good thread support, fancy killfile facilities in many readers, and most importantly a basic understanding of what you have read and what you haven't. You can handle a much larger discussion group in USENET than you can with mailing lists, or web boards for example.
But, counter to this, web boards have had the ability to innovate. Slash was able to add the moderation point system because they wanted it to, and it's vital to a system as big as
USENET is not stagnant in terms of discussions, or the creation of alt groups, but go ahead and try to name the recent innovations there. DejaNews/Google is about the last thing to make a big difference, and that didn't even come from USENET.
I must say I wish I had seen this thread right away and then I could have done a "first post" and had the only such post to get modded up.
V was a great disappointment to me because the miniseries started so well, and ended full of TV Sci-Fi's most stupid cliches.
They came and they looked human. They said this was due to common ancestry, which is something I could almost buy (though it has to be very recent common ancestry, and a lot of the fossil record needs major reinterpretation.) They have a hidden oppressive agenda -- good plot device, to make for good stories.
Then suddenly it is all undone at the end of the miniseries. They are lizards in amazing human suits so good you want to have sex with the women, but which can be peeled off. And they want our water, stuff made from 2 of the most common elements in the universe. How could people who wrote a good beginning like that write such a stupid ending. I don't want them to write more, based on the trend.
Sadly, this is not the only time this happens in TV SF. Look at the Matrix with its "battery" story. Why does it happen so much?
Yes, power is that high. The 4.3 cent power in Ontario is heavily subsidized right now.
Actually, sadly, the 13 cents/kwh in California is also subsidized, sort of. During the manufactured power crisis, it was far more than that, and the state paid $8B to subsidize it which we are still paying back.
So do we have some real power figures for these PCs with big drives, mpeg cards, suitable tv-out video cards etc.? 200w was just an example. Most people have more like a 300w power supply, though of course they don't use all of it. My understanding is most people are using at least 100w.
Depends on your definition of solvable. It unfortunately eliminates the popular idea of repurposing older PCs (which there are vast numbers of) as appliance machines. For the same reason, using an old PC as a NAT box rather than buying a $50 standalone one is crazy too. (Unless you make serious use of the extra firewall features you can get.)
So if you need to buy new PC hardware with new power control features to get your PC based DVR, it isn't as compelling. Because it's going to cost a lot more than the standalone box.
It also doesn't change my main point that people seem to forget about the power cost in the equation when picking PCs for appliance applications. Notebooks, on the other hand, only draw about 15-20 watts, and are a great choice if you can make it work. They usually can't take mpeg encoder cards.
Many people have proposed doing DVRs with old standard PCs using ideally, open source software. Sounds great, more flexible, everything wonderful.
Until you look at the power. Check how much more power that always-on PC takes than a standalone box. Here in California, for example, every watt of 24/7 power costs $1.13 per year or more. So a 200 watt PC costs over $200 per year to run, $150 more than say, a 50 watt standalone device. Not to mention the damage to the environment.
In other words, you can pay for the standalone device pretty quickly, even if you had a "free" PC just stting around.
Now you could fix this problem if you could arrange for the PC to go into a sleep mode when it doesn't have anything to do, at the cost of waiting a little longer to come up when you turn it on to watch something with the remote. This requires the PC have in it a sleep mode with a clock which allows you to say, "Wake up in 3 hours". How many have this? How many have coded for it.
The standalone device can also do this easily.
And you lose the "always recording something to spare disk space" feature that people love about the Tivo.
A good system would have the following criteria:
a) It would avoid OCR errors and verbal transcription errors by not using any two alphanums that look or sound alike. So yes, B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V all mean the same thing (sound-alike), as do 0 and O, 1 and L, 5 and S and so on. Yes, that makes the strings a lot longer
b) Instead of trying to code GPS into this space, sell aliases. Let me pick any alias that maps to my address, and have companies escrow the mapping from them to GPS or street address. My address should be "Brad's House Here" or something like that.
c) When doing the above, each name must have characters added to it which perform an ECC function, so you can detect and correct any transposition or character totally wrong. For some that will mean they pick a nice string and add something random to it. Clever people will find words that meet the ECC test.
d) This way, if I move, my postal address stays the same. And I can register for a global do not mail list.
What I mean is envision a project in the USA where, to make it happen, the entire population of Dallas or Detroit or some similar city had to be displaced, by force if necessary.
Can you imagine a project of sufficient benefit that this would be politically possible in a democratic nation like the USA? Certainly not 18GW of power, or even flood control, for we would not buy displacing all the people who don't live in the flood plain for the sake of protecting those who insist on living within it.
A lot of land was flooded with major U.S. dam projects, but it didn't have a million people living in it!
And even if you can propose something so wonderful, so beneficial that displacing a million people could be sold politically, that's not what we have here. We have various advantages outlined for the dam (flood control, 18GW) but we have many questions -- risk of failure, corruption, inability to do both goals at the same time, predictions by several dam experts that the reservoir will just silt up.
Would you support such a project in a free country? If not, how could you support it here?
The point is that the meaning of freedom is you don't choose what another person's freedom means for them.
Yes, both types of freedom are worthwhile. But the families who have lived in the same house for 400 years aren't the ones polluting the air. Should they be "relocated" because we want to stop the people burning the coal?
If you say you have freedom unless it's impractical for the good of the state, you don't have freedom.
You may have forgotten your Franklin quote in your signature. Do you not see the tremendous irony? Up to 3 million people forcefully uprooted from their homes -- I say that's giving up more than a little liberty for this. Yes, burning the coal is terrible. (Though this dam won't reduce the coal burnt, though it will avoid the need for 18GW of additional coal power as Chinese needs expand.)
/. are not qualified to resolve that debate.
However, note that they are trying to serve two goals here. One is flood control (which could be done with a project much smaller than this, or a set of dams on major tributaries) and the other is power, which requires the reservoir be kept high (making it not as effective at flood control.)
And it might end up just silting up, though we in
We do need cleaner forms of power. (Modern nuke designs don't melt down, by the way, but they still can have waste.) One wishes the Chinese could find a way to do the solar research that the U.S. won't.
With many arguments positive and negative. Remarkably, however, nobody after reading the arguments think the pro-dam case is a "slam dunk." At most it's slightly on the positive side.
Yet if you step back, you realize that in a free country, there is no way a project of this sort could go ahead, unless it was such an immense and overwhelmingly positive step, a necessity -- and even then I have doubts that you could arrange for the relocation of 1 to 3 million people, even with bribes of nicer houses on less fertile land.
So if you couldn't approve of this in a free country, how can you approve of usuing authoritarian techniques to make it happen, if the benefits are under any question at all?
I toured the dam and the river last year. You may be interested in my many photos and notes, which are on my China and Yangtse photo pages
Alas, if only it were that simple. Two things in the real situation are different.
a) A number of blacklisters use blacklisting as a threat not aginast the spammer, but the ISP, to get the ISP to do things they want, like changing/enforcing spam TOS and so on. Some of these blacklisters openly state that they know they are blocking the mail of the innocent network neighbours of the spammer in order to cause the innocents to put pressure on the ISP, or to choose another ISP. Punish the innocent to get at the guilty. Effective, but not my style.
b) Some blacklists have poor checks and balances on mistakes. They list sites by accident, or through the malice of reporters or the blacklist itself, and it's a burden for the innocent party to get off the list.
So alas, many of them are about punishment, not of the spammer, but of the spammer's neighbours. I'm all for cutting off the spammer; I just advise caution in the tools we use.
I mean this is if you think an end to end network is a good idea. In an end to end network, ISPs just provide bandwidth and routers, not policy. If you don't support the end to end network concept, you can happily try to enforce policy at the routing nodes.
I'm not American (though I am here now) but that was my point. The U.S. 1st amendment isn't just a law, it's a good idea. It's a principle to be followed in our private lives, too.
It's absolutely your choice. But the first amendment is not just the law, it's a good idea. What people worry about is not the actions of you on your system -- though we might question the wisdom of you refusing mail from innocent people as a means to pressure them -- but the actions of large groups of people, acting in concert, to block the communications of non-spammers.
Even those people have a right to gather and do that, but it can still be a bad idea, worthy of opposition.
The question I ask is not what should we wish to punish (for we all would like to see spammers get what they deserve) but who should be responsible for the punishing and who should get the punishment.
Blacklisters say, "punish the ISP for providing bandwidth to the spammer."
I see the ISP more like the phone company. You don't blame the phone company because people can trade kiddie porn or plot crimes or terrorism over the phone. You don't call for the phone company and all the people with phones in the same phone exchange to be punished until they rise up against the child pornographer among them.
If we say "it's OK to blame and make accountable the ISP for the actions of the spammer" you turn the ISP into a policeman of the bits rather than just a provider of bandwidth.
I worry about the precedent in doing that. There are a lot of other internet activities people want to punish, as I pointed out, and how do we tell them they can't use the ISP as their tool of punishment.
As we've seen in the Verizon case, the RIAA can force an ISP to hand over your real identity without proving you did anything. We want to be careful about where this leads.
They say that an infinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of typewriters will produce literature greater than Shakespeare.
Thanks to the internet, we now know that this is not true.
Many have complained about the perpetuation of the battery story. For me, it's a real serious blow to see it confirmed.
I always wondered to myself, "how could people who could write such a cool movie put in something as stupid as the battery story? If so, how did it get past everybody who saw the script or rushes?"
It made no sense. Small as it may seem, it takes the movie down several notches in my book, and the book of anybody with an education.
So I started thinking to myself -- maybe they aren't so stupid. Maybe Morpheus is LYING. Maybe Morpheus has been lied to, and we'll get a cool story of the reason behind the lie.
But no, if these animated shorts are canon, neither of these are true. Sure, movies have bad science all the time but the best movies in part make their mark either by not having the bad science, or by there being an obvious dramatic reason for the bad science. Sure, spaceships don't whoosh, but we accept it because it's fun and more dramatic in a space opera. Sure, you can't go FTL but you can't have interstellar SF that's dramatic without it.
But this battery thing has no excuse. It's as interchangeable with any other reason you might come up with for the humans to be kept alive. It doesn't affect the plot, all we need to care is that they are being kept alive and there is some reason.
Like the Hyperion reason, or a core bit of Asimovian twisted-first-law programming forcing them to keep the Humans alive and happy, with the Matrix being the makes-sense-only-to-the-AIs result. That would make more sense, and in fact be far more tragic than the battery story.
Grrrrrr.
The ISP was indeed shut down, just from the load. This is not something to be proud of, the ISP was entirely innocent in all of this and suffered quite a bit. There was no reason for "them to get the message." They were the victims, not the perps. Especially then, before spam was common. Any ISP could have been victimized in this way. Later, a lot of sympathy came out for the ISP after people felt some guilt over what they had done to the ISP.
Sadly, we continue to blame the ISPs for the actions of their users when it comes to spam, but defend proudly their non-responsiblity when it comes to their users running filesharing tools, or putting up "offensive" websites etc.
The Jesus spam, and several of the earlier ones were also not crossposted. Check the links included in my history. I point to the original sources. What C&S did that was new was the sleaze of it, and the fact that while their ISP got wiped out (they just switched) they were unrecalcitrant, and even published their silly book.