If I could mod this higher than 5 I would. The day is not so far off when everyone will have to prove themselves innocent on a regular basis. That's the reason I'm against drug testing. Not because doing drugs is a good thing, but because it's a matter of privacy.
It started with the testing of transportation and safety workers because, well, nobody wants their train driver to be spaced out on drugs. Then it spread to testing grade school and high school students because no parents want their kids on drugs.
Now it has spread to professional sports in a big way. Somebody tell me again, please, why it's so important that Congress get involved in the whole steroid issue? Who's lives are at stake if Major league Baseball doesn't test for steroids and there are players using them?
We really need a Constitutional Ammendment that strongly protects citizens' privacy in no uncertain terms. But I'm not holding my breath. Every special interest group in the country would fight against it tooth and nail, from marketing firms to law enforcement.
The cops admit they can't rely on technology alone, they have to get back to basics: gumshoe work, people-on-the-ground, infiltration of the bad guys.
Good for them. Now will lawmakers begin to realize that Law Enforcement for the most part already has all the tools they need to fight crime? There is no need to keep ramping up the powers they are granting to the cops every damn year that directly or indirectly erode personal liberty in this country?
The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.
It's even more unfortunate that the industry can't seem to face the fact that its business model is evaporating in the face of modern distribution technology. Their grip on the channels that distribute entertainment is slipping. What they should do is accept the fact that their business model is becoming obsolete.
"If any of you want to do orbital advertising you're going to have to pay us a lot of money to change this regulation. The promise of future lucrative consulting contracts with lobbying firms will do nicely, thank you."
That's nothing compared to what's right around the corner now. The gubmint has been fingerprinting foreign nationals entering the U.S. for some time now. In a short while they will also be fingerprinting them on the way out as well. In Iraq, the military routinely rounds up people in the streets and not only fingerprints them at the start of their detention, but does retinal scans on them too and takes pictures of them for entry into a database. This is happening on a large scale. The fact that none of these people actually has any connection to Al Qaida doesn't seem to matter.
All it takes is for Congress to give the word and the fingerprint-the-foreigners policy could be used on American citizens as well at the nations airports. That will happen within a few years, I have no doubt about it. Congress has already mandated a national ID card for everyone. U.S. passports will contain biometric information starting later this year. The military is gaining a lot of experience and knowledge in how to round people up and get them into The System en masse.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Too bad Americans have been asleep at the switch for so long. We are already past the point of no return with respect to the loss of so many liberties we took for granted.
Nonsense. No state is forced to do anything. Just as no state is forced to set the drinking age to 21.
Seriously, your state is free to ignore this bit of Big Brother government. Of course you will be unable to procure any federal services or benefits if your state chooses to ignore it. The tyrrany grows. While the sheeple watch American Idol the coporatists laugh all the way to the bank with the politicians in their pockets.
Welcome to Amerika. I will examine your papers now.
True, in general, but in many cases there are deadlines imposed by the court to get things done. Telling a judge you need months to examine a mountain of paperwork and electronic documents doesn't work when the deadline is next week. In most cases, anyway.
Then there are lawyers who work on contingency. They want to reduce the hours spent on a case since their fees don't directly depend on hous billed. In most cases.
Are you naive enough to think Boeing's commercial aircraft business is not effectively subsidized by their military business? Please. Markets are desirable and efficient, I agree, when the playing field is level. There's nothing level about the field on which passenger jet manufacturers compete.
You would have us think not one red cent of American taxpayer money ever went towards Boeing's passenger jet business. You're either naive or a fool.
Why should anyone have to take any action whatsoever to unsubscribe from something they never subscribed to in the first place? What's the "popular website" you speak of? I'll wager 1,000 quatloos that there are documented spam complaints against it. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but Spammers Lie and that's a fact.
OT Aside: I wish/. would provide categories or labels I could apply when marking someone as "Friend" or "Foe". Thinks like "MS Shill", "Spam Friendly" or "Supports Bush" would be very handy.
This will be like Crusoe. Solid technology basis. Involves significant tradeoffs. Market fails to materialize. Technology goes back on the shelf where if can be "discovered" again in 5 or 10 years.
When every advance in technology carries a government-imposed requirement that the police must not be hampered in any way, that is what you call a police state. The police - law enforcement agencies - have enough power already to do their jobs effectively.
Scare-e-oke is bad enough. Does the world really need another flavor of delusion? Standard karaoke makes me ill. I have to summon all my energy when in a karaoke bar/setting/whatever - usually against my will - to not shout out loud: "You suck! Shut the f*ck up!"
Now people who aren't funny will be just as annoying as those who can't sing. They all think they're great, though.
Adobe is a company that just doesn't care that its products fail to adhere to common WIndows GUI guidelines *. I doubt they care about this. One example is their brain-dead "Save A Copy" function. That's just not "Windows", and what it does could have been handled with "Save As". Maybe it's Mac-like and they're trying to retain cross-platform look-and-feel but it just doesn't "feel" like WIndows and that goes for Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. When it comes to the user interface they don't care so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to "fix" something they don't feel is broken.
* other offenders: Macromedia, Autodesk products. You realy notice when a program requires your UI neural pathways to shift gears.
You would think they'd be tripping over themselves to get out of there. Of course another possibility is that other states think this is a good idea and pass similar laws. Or the Feds might decide to make the other states follow suit. They can't directly mandate such a thing but hey, they technically can't mandate a drinking age either. You want your highway funds? Raise your drinking age to 21. Or else.
The Federal Election Commission, of all things, is currently thinking about prohibiting websites from endorsing candidates or political parties. Any website that wants to say "The RebuboCrat candidate is a scumbag" will have to host outside of the U.S. Maybe that's what happens to pr0n sites too. Then, because of The Children, the FBICIA will be authorized to track all web usage all the time. Paranoid? Maybe, but if you look at how things have transpired over the last 15 or 20 years, every bad thing you could have predicted to happen has come true. Why should it change now?
In some states - like mine - it is against the law for a cashier to ask for backup ID. Never mind backwater hicks who actually want store clerks to check another form of identification. You see the signature on the back of a CC is not a security feature, and where I live it's considered an inconvenience to have clerks ask for and examine corroborating ID. Putting CID or SEEID on the back of a cradit card? How quaint.
Ever since I've been in this field the allure of computers for me has been that you have a general-purpose device that, with a little ingenuity, can be made to do just about anything. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do. Now your average PC buyer can't even appreciate the difference between not knowing and not caring about what's inside their shiny new computers. But I can and I'll be damned if I ever spend any of my hard-earned cash on a device that will do what someone else tells it to do and not what I tell it to do.
Can't say I'm surprised. We knew this was coming several years ago. I bought a new keyboard last week and was shocked at the number of MS keyboards on display featuring the little fingerprint reader built right in. Within a few years we'll probably have the gubmint mandating all new PCs be equipped with TC elements. To keep us safe from terrorists no doubt.
On the bright side this will be hacked from here to kingdom come. In that sense it's good they're showing their hand now so intrepid BIOS hackers and EEs can start peeling away the mystery. What's that? The latest software won't work without TC? TC-compliant apps will work better together? Yeah. Right.
Even an organization with top-flite staff and impeccable integrity is going to have their problems with security at some point. We are compelled to submit information to organizations at times, yes, and it is naive to think that you can go through life without doing it. My point was that we have rushed to adopt (and adapt to) all these new technologies. Some of them are more mature than others but even the most mature is still not really up to the task in all cases. Especially where data security and privacy is concerned. I make my living with these technologies so I'm no Luddite, nor am I against progress per se. I just think too many people think the technology of the internet today can deliver everything they want it to do. I'm saying it can't. Not yet. The risks are enormous. Much more work needs to be done.
If you don't want your information to be hacked, don't put in on an internet connected machine. It's as simple as that. We think we have a decade of web and internet wisdom to guide us but the fact is that all of this technology is still in its infancy. Was the hack ethical? No, but ethics aside, only an idiot would subject their important and confidential information to exposure on the web and then complain when it was hacked. Sorry, flamebait me if you must but the reports of vulnerabilities come fast and furious, regardless of platform, and nobody seems to care.
Don't want your data exposed? Don't put in on the web.
It's an indictment of the judicial system when a company like SCO can file a meritless lawsuit like this and then drag it out for years without a SINGLE SHRED OF EVIDENCE to back up their claims. It's a travesty, really.
"Somewhere between the 70's and the 90's, we all collectively lost an intelligence level that our prior generation had."
The blame for this lies squarely at the feet of television. I don't mean this to be flamebait, but come on, look at the junk tailored for kids, and the vast bulk of it evolved in the exact time period you noted. Add in the fact that network news departments were absorbed into their entertainment divisions and this is what you get. A manufactured culture that glorifies beauty and entertainment above all else. I don't think schools are geared to turning out factory workers anymore simply because there are so few factories left. Now they're geared toward turning out consumers.
"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."
Hey, it was good enough to score a few million for Ken Jennings!
But seriously, who thinks blogs are where great literatire is to be found anyway? The best blogs-with-a-purpose seem to be the ones that report news stories the mainstream media won't cover. The blurring of the Tinfoil Hat as it were. Anyway, when I want good literature I usually turn to a book. For example in the wake of last weekend's suicide by one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to finally crack open a copy of Hey Rube given to me last year which I had not gotten around to reading. I found this in the Author's Note at the very beginning:
"What has gone wrong with our communication system since then? Why are we more ignorant and less informed today than we were in 1941?... If World War III can start in a vacuum of silence and stonewalling by the White House, we are doomed like rats in a maze of fear. We are slaves to mendacity and hostile disinformation. Bread and circuses were not enough to sustain the Roman Empire and they will not be enough for the United States of America."
You don't need to wear a Tinfoil Hat these days to see that the plutocracy now in power in the U.S. controls the message and the media. Bloggers who attempt the lost art of Journalism can become a powerful force for truth and justice, keeping the old-guard media whores honest (if that's even possible anymore). But I don't think the ALA has to worry about dumbing down Americans' interest in literature. For 90% of the masses television finished that off decades ago.
Stay away from Steam and Valve. It was hard but I decided I didn't want to give my hard-earned dollars to scum like this. Now, maybe I'm missing a great game, but... I'm NOT steamed tonight. Fuck them and, sorry to say, fuck their users too for subscribing to their techno-voodoo distribution scheme. Boo-freaking-hoo.
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If I could mod this higher than 5 I would. The day is not so far off when everyone will have to prove themselves innocent on a regular basis. That's the reason I'm against drug testing. Not because doing drugs is a good thing, but because it's a matter of privacy.
It started with the testing of transportation and safety workers because, well, nobody wants their train driver to be spaced out on drugs. Then it spread to testing grade school and high school students because no parents want their kids on drugs.
Now it has spread to professional sports in a big way. Somebody tell me again, please, why it's so important that Congress get involved in the whole steroid issue? Who's lives are at stake if Major league Baseball doesn't test for steroids and there are players using them?
We really need a Constitutional Ammendment that strongly protects citizens' privacy in no uncertain terms. But I'm not holding my breath. Every special interest group in the country would fight against it tooth and nail, from marketing firms to law enforcement.
The cops admit they can't rely on technology alone, they have to get back to basics: gumshoe work, people-on-the-ground, infiltration of the bad guys.
Good for them. Now will lawmakers begin to realize that Law Enforcement for the most part already has all the tools they need to fight crime? There is no need to keep ramping up the powers they are granting to the cops every damn year that directly or indirectly erode personal liberty in this country?
I'm not holding my breath.
The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.
It's even more unfortunate that the industry can't seem to face the fact that its business model is evaporating in the face of modern distribution technology. Their grip on the channels that distribute entertainment is slipping. What they should do is accept the fact that their business model is becoming obsolete.
"If any of you want to do orbital advertising you're going to have to pay us a lot of money to change this regulation. The promise of future lucrative consulting contracts with lobbying firms will do nicely, thank you."
That's nothing compared to what's right around the corner now. The gubmint has been fingerprinting foreign nationals entering the U.S. for some time now. In a short while they will also be fingerprinting them on the way out as well. In Iraq, the military routinely rounds up people in the streets and not only fingerprints them at the start of their detention, but does retinal scans on them too and takes pictures of them for entry into a database. This is happening on a large scale. The fact that none of these people actually has any connection to Al Qaida doesn't seem to matter.
All it takes is for Congress to give the word and the fingerprint-the-foreigners policy could be used on American citizens as well at the nations airports. That will happen within a few years, I have no doubt about it. Congress has already mandated a national ID card for everyone. U.S. passports will contain biometric information starting later this year. The military is gaining a lot of experience and knowledge in how to round people up and get them into The System en masse.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Too bad Americans have been asleep at the switch for so long. We are already past the point of no return with respect to the loss of so many liberties we took for granted.
Let's see....
Space.com = a trustworthy news source
Washington Times = put that in your litter box and your cat won't shit there.
50-50 split. My time is limited as it is. Pass.
Nonsense. No state is forced to do anything. Just as no state is forced to set the drinking age to 21.
Seriously, your state is free to ignore this bit of Big Brother government. Of course you will be unable to procure any federal services or benefits if your state chooses to ignore it. The tyrrany grows. While the sheeple watch American Idol the coporatists laugh all the way to the bank with the politicians in their pockets.
Welcome to Amerika. I will examine your papers now.
Thank you. You told me what /. didn't in the summary. If I could mod you above +5 I wouold.
How about the amazing set of ITT companies back in the early '70's
If memory serves, Jack Valenti, or RIAA infamy, was a key player in the ITT conglomerate.
True, in general, but in many cases there are deadlines imposed by the court to get things done. Telling a judge you need months to examine a mountain of paperwork and electronic documents doesn't work when the deadline is next week. In most cases, anyway.
Then there are lawyers who work on contingency. They want to reduce the hours spent on a case since their fees don't directly depend on hous billed. In most cases.
Are you naive enough to think Boeing's commercial aircraft business is not effectively subsidized by their military business? Please. Markets are desirable and efficient, I agree, when the playing field is level. There's nothing level about the field on which passenger jet manufacturers compete.
You would have us think not one red cent of American taxpayer money ever went towards Boeing's passenger jet business. You're either naive or a fool.
Why should anyone have to take any action whatsoever to unsubscribe from something they never subscribed to in the first place? What's the "popular website" you speak of? I'll wager 1,000 quatloos that there are documented spam complaints against it. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but Spammers Lie and that's a fact.
/. would provide categories or labels I could apply when marking someone as "Friend" or "Foe". Thinks like "MS Shill", "Spam Friendly" or "Supports Bush" would be very handy.
OT Aside: I wish
This will be like Crusoe. Solid technology basis. Involves significant tradeoffs. Market fails to materialize. Technology goes back on the shelf where if can be "discovered" again in 5 or 10 years.
When every advance in technology carries a government-imposed requirement that the police must not be hampered in any way, that is what you call a police state. The police - law enforcement agencies - have enough power already to do their jobs effectively.
Scare-e-oke is bad enough. Does the world really need another flavor of delusion? Standard karaoke makes me ill. I have to summon all my energy when in a karaoke bar/setting/whatever - usually against my will - to not shout out loud: "You suck! Shut the f*ck up!"
Now people who aren't funny will be just as annoying as those who can't sing. They all think they're great, though.
Adobe is a company that just doesn't care that its products fail to adhere to common WIndows GUI guidelines *. I doubt they care about this. One example is their brain-dead "Save A Copy" function. That's just not "Windows", and what it does could have been handled with "Save As". Maybe it's Mac-like and they're trying to retain cross-platform look-and-feel but it just doesn't "feel" like WIndows and that goes for Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. When it comes to the user interface they don't care so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to "fix" something they don't feel is broken.
* other offenders: Macromedia, Autodesk products. You realy notice when a program requires your UI neural pathways to shift gears.
You would think they'd be tripping over themselves to get out of there. Of course another possibility is that other states think this is a good idea and pass similar laws. Or the Feds might decide to make the other states follow suit. They can't directly mandate such a thing but hey, they technically can't mandate a drinking age either. You want your highway funds? Raise your drinking age to 21. Or else.
The Federal Election Commission, of all things, is currently thinking about prohibiting websites from endorsing candidates or political parties. Any website that wants to say "The RebuboCrat candidate is a scumbag" will have to host outside of the U.S. Maybe that's what happens to pr0n sites too. Then, because of The Children, the FBICIA will be authorized to track all web usage all the time. Paranoid? Maybe, but if you look at how things have transpired over the last 15 or 20 years, every bad thing you could have predicted to happen has come true. Why should it change now?
In some states - like mine - it is against the law for a cashier to ask for backup ID. Never mind backwater hicks who actually want store clerks to check another form of identification. You see the signature on the back of a CC is not a security feature, and where I live it's considered an inconvenience to have clerks ask for and examine corroborating ID. Putting CID or SEEID on the back of a cradit card? How quaint.
Ever since I've been in this field the allure of computers for me has been that you have a general-purpose device that, with a little ingenuity, can be made to do just about anything. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do. Now your average PC buyer can't even appreciate the difference between not knowing and not caring about what's inside their shiny new computers. But I can and I'll be damned if I ever spend any of my hard-earned cash on a device that will do what someone else tells it to do and not what I tell it to do.
Can't say I'm surprised. We knew this was coming several years ago. I bought a new keyboard last week and was shocked at the number of MS keyboards on display featuring the little fingerprint reader built right in. Within a few years we'll probably have the gubmint mandating all new PCs be equipped with TC elements. To keep us safe from terrorists no doubt.
On the bright side this will be hacked from here to kingdom come. In that sense it's good they're showing their hand now so intrepid BIOS hackers and EEs can start peeling away the mystery. What's that? The latest software won't work without TC? TC-compliant apps will work better together? Yeah. Right.
Even an organization with top-flite staff and impeccable integrity is going to have their problems with security at some point. We are compelled to submit information to organizations at times, yes, and it is naive to think that you can go through life without doing it. My point was that we have rushed to adopt (and adapt to) all these new technologies. Some of them are more mature than others but even the most mature is still not really up to the task in all cases. Especially where data security and privacy is concerned. I make my living with these technologies so I'm no Luddite, nor am I against progress per se. I just think too many people think the technology of the internet today can deliver everything they want it to do. I'm saying it can't. Not yet. The risks are enormous. Much more work needs to be done.
If you don't want your information to be hacked, don't put in on an internet connected machine. It's as simple as that. We think we have a decade of web and internet wisdom to guide us but the fact is that all of this technology is still in its infancy. Was the hack ethical? No, but ethics aside, only an idiot would subject their important and confidential information to exposure on the web and then complain when it was hacked. Sorry, flamebait me if you must but the reports of vulnerabilities come fast and furious, regardless of platform, and nobody seems to care.
Don't want your data exposed? Don't put in on the web.
It's an indictment of the judicial system when a company like SCO can file a meritless lawsuit like this and then drag it out for years without a SINGLE SHRED OF EVIDENCE to back up their claims. It's a travesty, really.
The blame for this lies squarely at the feet of television. I don't mean this to be flamebait, but come on, look at the junk tailored for kids, and the vast bulk of it evolved in the exact time period you noted. Add in the fact that network news departments were absorbed into their entertainment divisions and this is what you get. A manufactured culture that glorifies beauty and entertainment above all else. I don't think schools are geared to turning out factory workers anymore simply because there are so few factories left. Now they're geared toward turning out consumers.
But seriously, who thinks blogs are where great literatire is to be found anyway? The best blogs-with-a-purpose seem to be the ones that report news stories the mainstream media won't cover. The blurring of the Tinfoil Hat as it were. Anyway, when I want good literature I usually turn to a book. For example in the wake of last weekend's suicide by one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to finally crack open a copy of Hey Rube given to me last year which I had not gotten around to reading. I found this in the Author's Note at the very beginning:
You don't need to wear a Tinfoil Hat these days to see that the plutocracy now in power in the U.S. controls the message and the media. Bloggers who attempt the lost art of Journalism can become a powerful force for truth and justice, keeping the old-guard media whores honest (if that's even possible anymore). But I don't think the ALA has to worry about dumbing down Americans' interest in literature. For 90% of the masses television finished that off decades ago.
Stay away from Steam and Valve. It was hard but I decided I didn't want to give my hard-earned dollars to scum like this. Now, maybe I'm missing a great game, but ... I'm NOT steamed tonight. Fuck them and, sorry to say, fuck their users too for subscribing to their techno-voodoo distribution scheme. Boo-freaking-hoo.