I actually think Manna is too optimistic. I doubt that people would care enough to build the terrafoam camps. I expect the normal home to be more like an african refugee camp.
Consider what the filthy rich spend their money on. Apart from entertainment (actors, musicians, artworks and so on), personal servants, and sex, there isn't much that actually needs any human intervention as such. This means that if robots are cheap and reliable enough and you already have the manufacturing capability to make more, you don't need to sell very much because you don't need to spend much either.
In such a scenario, I expect that eventually perhaps the richest 10000 or so households will own most of the desirable land, most of which will be unused parkland, with a few large towns containing the aforesaid artists, and most of the rest of the population living in the more polluted or hard to clear areas of current cities, or in places of no particular value or beauty. Most likely, such regions would be guarded (by robots), with very little interaction between the privileged few and the downtrodden masses (apart from those when rich people seek "entertainment").
I think the only way that this dystopia would be avoided would be strongly socialist intervention before things got too out of hand (and I say that as a conservative), if sufficiently strong AI was ever practical.
Lets say I have a website in some socially-liberal country with no requirement to use these labels. Now lets say it has some pictures which you find obscene on it, say photos from a topless beach or the like.
My local community wouldn't think that was obscene (after all, they allowed the beach in the first place), so they aren't going to make me put the adult tags on it, and likely as not, I wouldn't have any personal reason to bother to put them there either. Now what are you going to do? Marking only adult content isn't going to work.
What happens if I write a sex ed site for children, a perfectly legitimate one? Lets pretend it is used in schools here, but is too progressive for your moral guardians. Lets say it is suitable, in my community, for children 13+ to read, and I mark it accordingly, but your moral guardians decide that something that mentions homosexuality in a non-negative manner, or that suggests that condoms are a good idea, isn't suitable for anyone under the age of, say 16. What are you (or they) going to do about that? Obviously, the ratings need some sort of coordination.
We could let site owners assert that it meets the rules for specific countries ratings systems, but what about the "evil scary pornographers" who the moral guardians seem to think are going to try to show their precious babies porn "for teh evulz" or some other perfectly sensible reason? We can't go around trusting website owners, so we will have to use some sort of signed approval.
Now, lets say I have a legitimate site with a certification which has been hacked by the "bad men" and it has porn on it! Worse still, I could have had a legitimate site, but then replaced it with a porn site (because evil is fun). We can't let that happen, we'll have to sign the content of each page and image (you can't just fine me, I'm in another country). That's going to get expensive, so who's going to pay for that? Maybe you could refuse certification to any site not controlled from within your country, but that has other problems.
Wouldn't a.child.$CC (like.kids.us) be much simpler and cleaner? To register such a domain, I could be required to have a presence in that country, and that makes things much easier. If you feel that a country's rules are strict enough for your family, whitelist their children's subdomain. If you don't trust their list, or they don't have one, then don't use it.
If no-one wants to put a site on that subdomain, then you'll just ahve to face the fact that a whitelist isn't a good idea, and keep using existing filters.
Mod parent up ! This is exactly the right way to go about it: each country has its own rules about what is suitable for children, and not just in terms of nudity. Many places have laws regarding advertising for children, profanity, drug and alcohol use, and so on, and these are so varied it would be impractical to choose a set of rules which are suitable even just between the Western nations, let alone the rest of the world.
They say 3rd of October, and don't think its awkward. It's just a question of what you are used to hearing, like so many of the differences between en-US and en-GB.
I have always interpreted this asa meaning that information wants to be free just like apples want to fall: information has a tendency to get out, and you ahve to actually try to stop it.
"I mean really, what in god's name made the UN believe that it was ok to throw a few million Jews in the middle of several different groups of people that hate them?"
The U.N. had nothing to do with it. Jews had lived there for three thousand years; it's where Jews come from. Jews lived throughout the Middle East for two thousand years, with a significant minority population in all of the Arab states until the pogroms following Israel's independence. The "few million" Jews moving to Israel were refugees fleeing persecution in Europe who bought the land they moved onto and had every right to move there. The Arabs at the time were not opposed to Zionism (the progressive idea of social equality between the Jews and everyone else) except for a few rogue right-wingers who started riots, gained control of the mosques through violence, and were continually appeased and promoted by the British occupation until they became the predominant force. The 1948 war came at the end of a thirty year pro-war propaganda campaign that included the executions of dozens of Arab leaders who supported peace with the Jews. The U.N. only signed off on the deal after Israel survived what the Arab League had promised would be the greatest massacre since the Mongol invasions.
Even if the creation of Israel was a morally good thing to do, it wasn't very good from a practical point of view. Supporting Zionism put the western powers at odds with the Arab states which control a significant part of the world's oil supplies and exacerbated the instability in the region. It would surely have been more cost-effective to have maintained a large Anglo-American base in Palestine (which could have been done legitimately, since Palestine was held by the British under a League of Nations Mandate since WWI).
One should remember that the justification for government is that the government will look after the interests of its citizens, and that, with the benefit of hindsight, creating Israel was probably not in the best interests of the citizens of the countries which agreed to it.
Anyway, the Canaanites were there there before the Israelites:) (More seriously, if you are following a literal-historical view of the description of the Israelites going down into Egypt, remember that Ishmael was Abraham's heir under Mesopotamian law, and that his family remained in the Holy Land. Then consider whom folklore considers to be his descendants. The Torah doesn't help if you want to consider who was there first, and if God/YHWH wants the Israelis to have the region, he can help them get it himself.)
I am not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word, nor do I care about anyone else's private religious practices. Nor do I have any connection with anti-Israeli organisations, or give a pair of foetid dingoes kidneys what someone's race is (especially given that many Israelites are ethnically European, not Semitic anyway)
The point is that most people will listen to their iPods with the default earbuds, which aren't bad, but they aren't soundproof and when you're outside with all the other noise, you get to a point where the quality of the audio file is irrelevant because the playback environment is too bad to hear the improvement.
You can already use gzip to compress the transport stream.
SSL is a pretty good standard, although a better technique for certification of keys would be nice. TBH, though, most content does not need to be encrypted because you are serving up the same content to whoever asks for it.
Codec errors are pretty much a thing of the past, unless you are suffering from software patents. Browser detection is an utter nuisance, but one thing I would like to see in HTML5.1 is a novideo tag, which would act like noscript but is also used if the browser can't handle the codec as well, to allow formatting or a flash alternative, which a mere alt-text can't do.
Couldn't you base-64 encode images in HTML documents for ages? It's not very efficient to do it that way, but since the documents would then be sent as [X]HTML+gzip, it wouldn't be that unreasonable to use that as the basis for a simple package format. A better way to do it would be to use a gzipped MIME multipart/related document for the entire application (which browsers would probably just unzip and extract into individual temp files and treat almost normally).
I suggest gzip simply because it is commonly used for compressed HTTP, so browsers can already handle it. After all, we want to make things as easy for browser writers to get right, because we all know that certain companies tend to be pretty bad at this sort of thing, and getting a single, easy to use, package format into use quickly is important.
It is already freely available on the net, and everyone knows that. Where I am, the penalty of non-commercial downloading is less than the retail price of the product, and yet people still buy software, films, CDs, and so on.
Everyone knows that paper books end up on the net pretty quickly, especially university textbooks and so on, yet people still write and sell them. E-books aren't going to be much worse, and at least there's less overhead to produce an e-book only edition.
You could do a work-around for the GPL argument by making agreeing to a contract functionally identical to the licence a pre-condition for accessing the program. The only problem with that is that it raises questions of liability for bugs.
Anyway, the first paragraph of your post didn't relate to GPL infringements, because mostly GPL authors don't care about non-commercial infringement, because it doesn't really matter. Commercial infringement would still be illegal, so the problematic infringements are not affected.
Of course we should be wary of them, but hopefully this sort of thing will help drive enough people to use secure email to get a critical mass.
As it is, I can't encrypt most of my outbound mail, because people don't have public keys (even unsigned ones are a lot better than nothing), and most people's clients don't seem to automatically save keys and then apply them when replying, which is really needed if we want non-technical people to use encryption.
IMO, all mail programs should prompt the user to choose a key when they add an account, and if they don't have one already, create one and start using it.
Slashdot Mirror
A sufficiently high-altitude "woosh" is equivalent to the wind whistling inside the person's empty skull.
I actually think Manna is too optimistic. I doubt that people would care enough to build the terrafoam camps. I expect the normal home to be more like an african refugee camp.
Consider what the filthy rich spend their money on. Apart from entertainment (actors, musicians, artworks and so on), personal servants, and sex, there isn't much that actually needs any human intervention as such. This means that if robots are cheap and reliable enough and you already have the manufacturing capability to make more, you don't need to sell very much because you don't need to spend much either.
In such a scenario, I expect that eventually perhaps the richest 10000 or so households will own most of the desirable land, most of which will be unused parkland, with a few large towns containing the aforesaid artists, and most of the rest of the population living in the more polluted or hard to clear areas of current cities, or in places of no particular value or beauty. Most likely, such regions would be guarded (by robots), with very little interaction between the privileged few and the downtrodden masses (apart from those when rich people seek "entertainment").
I think the only way that this dystopia would be avoided would be strongly socialist intervention before things got too out of hand (and I say that as a conservative), if sufficiently strong AI was ever practical.
Humans are cheaper now, but improvements in AI will probably change that eventually.
POWDER became a W3C recommendation as of 9th of September last year. try reading your own link!
Lets say I have a website in some socially-liberal country with no requirement to use these labels. Now lets say it has some pictures which you find obscene on it, say photos from a topless beach or the like.
My local community wouldn't think that was obscene (after all, they allowed the beach in the first place), so they aren't going to make me put the adult tags on it, and likely as not, I wouldn't have any personal reason to bother to put them there either. Now what are you going to do? Marking only adult content isn't going to work.
What happens if I write a sex ed site for children, a perfectly legitimate one? Lets pretend it is used in schools here, but is too progressive for your moral guardians. Lets say it is suitable, in my community, for children 13+ to read, and I mark it accordingly, but your moral guardians decide that something that mentions homosexuality in a non-negative manner, or that suggests that condoms are a good idea, isn't suitable for anyone under the age of, say 16. What are you (or they) going to do about that? Obviously, the ratings need some sort of coordination.
We could let site owners assert that it meets the rules for specific countries ratings systems, but what about the "evil scary pornographers" who the moral guardians seem to think are going to try to show their precious babies porn "for teh evulz" or some other perfectly sensible reason? We can't go around trusting website owners, so we will have to use some sort of signed approval.
Now, lets say I have a legitimate site with a certification which has been hacked by the "bad men" and it has porn on it! Worse still, I could have had a legitimate site, but then replaced it with a porn site (because evil is fun). We can't let that happen, we'll have to sign the content of each page and image (you can't just fine me, I'm in another country). That's going to get expensive, so who's going to pay for that? Maybe you could refuse certification to any site not controlled from within your country, but that has other problems.
Wouldn't a .child.$CC (like .kids.us) be much simpler and cleaner? To register such a domain, I could be required to have a presence in that country, and that makes things much easier. If you feel that a country's rules are strict enough for your family, whitelist their children's subdomain. If you don't trust their list, or they don't have one, then don't use it.
If no-one wants to put a site on that subdomain, then you'll just ahve to face the fact that a whitelist isn't a good idea, and keep using existing filters.
Mod parent up ! This is exactly the right way to go about it: each country has its own rules about what is suitable for children, and not just in terms of nudity. Many places have laws regarding advertising for children, profanity, drug and alcohol use, and so on, and these are so varied it would be impractical to choose a set of rules which are suitable even just between the Western nations, let alone the rest of the world.
They say 3rd of October, and don't think its awkward. It's just a question of what you are used to hearing, like so many of the differences between en-US and en-GB.
I have always interpreted this asa meaning that information wants to be free just like apples want to fall: information has a tendency to get out, and you ahve to actually try to stop it.
The U.N. had nothing to do with it. Jews had lived there for three thousand years; it's where Jews come from. Jews lived throughout the Middle East for two thousand years, with a significant minority population in all of the Arab states until the pogroms following Israel's independence. The "few million" Jews moving to Israel were refugees fleeing persecution in Europe who bought the land they moved onto and had every right to move there. The Arabs at the time were not opposed to Zionism (the progressive idea of social equality between the Jews and everyone else) except for a few rogue right-wingers who started riots, gained control of the mosques through violence, and were continually appeased and promoted by the British occupation until they became the predominant force. The 1948 war came at the end of a thirty year pro-war propaganda campaign that included the executions of dozens of Arab leaders who supported peace with the Jews. The U.N. only signed off on the deal after Israel survived what the Arab League had promised would be the greatest massacre since the Mongol invasions.
Even if the creation of Israel was a morally good thing to do, it wasn't very good from a practical point of view. Supporting Zionism put the western powers at odds with the Arab states which control a significant part of the world's oil supplies and exacerbated the instability in the region. It would surely have been more cost-effective to have maintained a large Anglo-American base in Palestine (which could have been done legitimately, since Palestine was held by the British under a League of Nations Mandate since WWI).
One should remember that the justification for government is that the government will look after the interests of its citizens, and that, with the benefit of hindsight, creating Israel was probably not in the best interests of the citizens of the countries which agreed to it.
Anyway, the Canaanites were there there before the Israelites :) (More seriously, if you are following a literal-historical view of the description of the Israelites going down into Egypt, remember that Ishmael was Abraham's heir under Mesopotamian law, and that his family remained in the Holy Land. Then consider whom folklore considers to be his descendants. The Torah doesn't help if you want to consider who was there first, and if God/YHWH wants the Israelis to have the region, he can help them get it himself.)
I am not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word, nor do I care about anyone else's private religious practices. Nor do I have any connection with anti-Israeli organisations, or give a pair of foetid dingoes kidneys what someone's race is (especially given that many Israelites are ethnically European, not Semitic anyway)
Over and over you play me that old-fashioned sound. Don't you know that the middlemen are what music is all about! :)
(I know that's from the wrong band, but it was too good a chance to pass up.)
Lazercat is a lolcat, and he demands moar lazer.
So, It turns out that both dev teams went forwards in time and stole features from the other.
Now, what I'd like to know is why they can't get the patches while they're at it, so they have bug-free products.
The point is that most people will listen to their iPods with the default earbuds, which aren't bad, but they aren't soundproof and when you're outside with all the other noise, you get to a point where the quality of the audio file is irrelevant because the playback environment is too bad to hear the improvement.
You can already use gzip to compress the transport stream.
SSL is a pretty good standard, although a better technique for certification of keys would be nice. TBH, though, most content does not need to be encrypted because you are serving up the same content to whoever asks for it.
Codec errors are pretty much a thing of the past, unless you are suffering from software patents. Browser detection is an utter nuisance, but one thing I would like to see in HTML5.1 is a novideo tag, which would act like noscript but is also used if the browser can't handle the codec as well, to allow formatting or a flash alternative, which a mere alt-text can't do.
Couldn't you base-64 encode images in HTML documents for ages? It's not very efficient to do it that way, but since the documents would then be sent as [X]HTML+gzip, it wouldn't be that unreasonable to use that as the basis for a simple package format. A better way to do it would be to use a gzipped MIME multipart/related document for the entire application (which browsers would probably just unzip and extract into individual temp files and treat almost normally).
I suggest gzip simply because it is commonly used for compressed HTTP, so browsers can already handle it. After all, we want to make things as easy for browser writers to get right, because we all know that certain companies tend to be pretty bad at this sort of thing, and getting a single, easy to use, package format into use quickly is important.
They only have 2 candidates so far, I don't know if they are in marginals or not.
YMBNH.
It is already freely available on the net, and everyone knows that. Where I am, the penalty of non-commercial downloading is less than the retail price of the product, and yet people still buy software, films, CDs, and so on.
Everyone knows that paper books end up on the net pretty quickly, especially university textbooks and so on, yet people still write and sell them. E-books aren't going to be much worse, and at least there's less overhead to produce an e-book only edition.
You could do a work-around for the GPL argument by making agreeing to a contract functionally identical to the licence a pre-condition for accessing the program. The only problem with that is that it raises questions of liability for bugs.
Anyway, the first paragraph of your post didn't relate to GPL infringements, because mostly GPL authors don't care about non-commercial infringement, because it doesn't really matter. Commercial infringement would still be illegal, so the problematic infringements are not affected.
ITYM http://www.bash.org/?244321
You assume he hadn't cleared out his mailbox first, then they only get whet comes in before he changes his password again.
Of course we should be wary of them, but hopefully this sort of thing will help drive enough people to use secure email to get a critical mass.
As it is, I can't encrypt most of my outbound mail, because people don't have public keys (even unsigned ones are a lot better than nothing), and most people's clients don't seem to automatically save keys and then apply them when replying, which is really needed if we want non-technical people to use encryption.
IMO, all mail programs should prompt the user to choose a key when they add an account, and if they don't have one already, create one and start using it.
Of course, otherwise where's the Paris Hilton angle?