Look at the keyboard, you must not, hmmm?
Look at the screen, you must not.
Shut your eyes, you must.
Guide your fingers, the Force will.
Great coder, you will be, yesss.
Forget Star Trek, the definitive series on this subject is the Beggars trilogy by Nancy Kress. Genetically engineered (genemod) humans completely turn society upside down, changing human existence beyond recognition. It's all quite plausible and very clever, and a good read.
It's funny how in your zeal to detect trolling, you're so convinced of the absolute rightness of "the fallacy of the slippery slope" (it's on a web page, after all, it must be true!) that you apparently don't even bother to apply any thought to what this means or in what contexts it applies.
The slippery slope metaphor arises from the assumption that there are forces that will push in the direction that is considered undesirable. In this case, there are many candidates for such forces: economics would be a simple one, for example if it's cheaper to obtain stem cells from aborted fetuses than to grow them in a lab.
Certainly, you can't use the slippery slope as the reason that things will progress from A to B - and that's really the fallacy that the web page you quoted talks about. But if the forces that result in the slippery slope are either obvious or can be explained, then the slippery slope is a meaningful metaphor that can be used by thinking people to mean something useful in a discussion.
The problem with better weapons is that they cut both ways. The US military may be ahead in the applications of this kind of thing right now, but they're leveraging existing technology, a lot of which is available off the shelf - microcontrollers, MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes, and standard RC gear. How long until terrorists or guerillas are using small unmanned helicopters, planes and cars to deliver explosives inside secure facilities, or to assassinate world leaders?
I'm not a U.S. citizen, but I came to the U.S. specifically because of its freedoms, which I didn't have in my home country. I can tell you from having researched it quite carefully, that if you want an English-speaking country that guarantees your rights in law rather than by convention, it's hard to do better than the U.S. on those theoretical grounds.
However, the theory isn't all there is to it. The U.S. has a large and incredibly powerful government, with some doozies of laws like RICO and DMCA. There's something to be said for living in a country where the government is smaller and less likely or capable of indulging in corrupt negative actions against its own citizens: places where people like Albert Einstein would not have had 1500-page FBI files compiled about them. New Zealand maybe?
I'm happy in the U.S. for the moment though. I find it sad that so many people here don't seem to realize the importance of the freedoms they take for granted. I think they should run oppression simulations in school as part of civics classes...
1. Linux isn't perfect; but it's open, and that's much more important if you know what you're doing.
2. No matter how smart a user is, he can't fix the fundamental flaws in Windows. I've been developing software for Win32 (Win9x/NT/2000/...) since 1992, and I can tell you that the platform sucks in myriad ways, a large number of which don't apply on Linux.
When Microsoft stops designing the OS to restrict the user's choices and to make life more difficult for competing developers, perhaps Windows will become less sucky. Until that cold day in hell arrives, you're going to hear a lot of complaints from people who know much more than you do about it.
You don't understand how the world works. "Very effective law enforcement" is a bad thing, because so much of the smooth functioning of a human society depends on things slipping through the cracks.
Perfect enforcement requires perfect laws, and you should thank your lucky stars that enforcement isn't perfect. The monitor in your car that bills your credit card and charges penalties to your drivers license and insurance rates would have had you stuck at home by now for speeding too much, and you wouldn't be able to cheat and drive anyway, because of the genetic detectors. You wouldn't be able to get work but you wouldn't be able to steal or cheat to get money, either.
Take a look at the economic figures for the "black market" or "shadow economy" in any developed country, or the numbers of illegal aliens that economies depend on. If you think of these as simply problems that are waiting to be solved, I have news for you: with all due respect, you're a latent totalitarian fascist, but you just haven't realized it yet.
Nobody is going to care - ever - that you bought the latest Pratchett, then sold it to your friend, who donated it to a charity shop, who then sold it to a guy who gets drug conviction. There is no nightmare "Enemy of the State" scenario, because it's small potatoes.
Kenneth Starr's office subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky's book receipts from a bookstore she had frequented. That was a classic case of investigating someone for reasons other than the interests of society. Bureaucrats can be dangerous people - just because you've never experienced that directly doesn't mean it can't happen.
You only have to go back to the 1950's, around the time to which the current article applies, to see a truly egregious example, in McCarthyism. The people who think "that can't happen again" don't realize how every one of the freedoms that are chipped away at day by day bring us closer to the day when some person or organization, well-meaning or otherwise, will find themselves in a position to abuse the end result in unfortunate ways.
In the Jurassic Park series of movies, there's the line about "life will find a way". You could make a similar statement about "abuses of power will find a way". History has shown this over and over.
I, for one, will destroy any tagging device I didn't specifically request, on principle. I'm no Luddite, either - I'm a software developer who develops financial services systems, and I love the concept of greater automation in our financial markets (an area of interest of mine) and in our lives. But another cliche is "with great power, comes great responsibility".
Unfortunately, governments, corporations and individuals have shown time and time again that they will abuse that responsibility, if given the opportunity. Don't give them any more of an opportunity than they already have, and certainly not without good reason. There's no good reason to electronically tag books.
You can strip Macrovision either with a hardware box that does this (about $30), or if you have a PC DVD player, with software (which also supports playing out-of-region DVDs, etc.)
I had to do this for my own setup, which originally had an old TV that couldn't handle two inputs, so I had to feed the DVD through the VCR. Macrovision screwed up the color badly when I did that. I used a software solution ("Universal Selector"), and it works great.
I use a PII-450 in my living room, and performance is fine. It has minimal fans and isn't too noisy. I have a Hollywood DVD MPEG hardware decoder, so that helps, since the video for movies comes out of that card, not from the PC. I bought a commercial LCD projector though.
The space (distance from screen) simply determines how big your projected image is. You have to take the entire room size into account, where the seating is, etc. Depending on what we're doing, we sometimes put the projector in between us and the wall/screen, and sometimes behind the sofa. Behind gives a much bigger picture, but it's fainter in bright light, so for everyday use (as opposed to movies where you dim the lights and crank up the Dolby 5.1 surround sound), we have it closer. If you check the specs for commercial projectors, some of them give you these details.
If you have a really small room, the size of your screen may not be worth the trouble. But if you can manage at least about 7 feet to 14 feet, you'll be looking at image sizes that are plenty big - easily up to 100" or more.
I don't think you can really do this kind of stuff very cheaply and get good results. The point as I see it is more to get quality that rivals or exceeds that of your local cinema. You can get in that ballpark for a few thousand dollars these days, although you have to make some compromises at that level.
I think the closest there is to an amendment guaranteeing privacy is the 4th, relating to unreasonable search and seizure. In a criminal investigation with a court order, though, searches are considered reasonable.
The question in the US is what the penalty would be if you refused to give up encryption keys in response to a court order. Since there aren't any specific laws like the UK's RIP (afaik), I'm guessing it'd be something like contempt of court.
Yes, terrorism can be "OK", even morally justifiable, although obviously questions like this can't be answered absolutely for everyone. I think terrorism in South Africa was a good thing, for example, when it was used to help bring down the racist government there. If the populace had been meek, world attention would not have been as intense, and the outcome might have been even slower than it was.
Would you be asking "is terrorism OK" if you found yourself living in a place where your basic rights were virtually nonexistent, where you were being subject to continual harrassment, and you were unable to live in peace and go about your own business without continual interference and oppression from powerful government and social forces?
Terrorism is a weapon most commonly used by the oppressed against the strong. The targets of terrorism don't usually think it's OK, but they're obviously biased.
There's a big difference, though, between terrorism by citizens against their own state, and terrorism by external agents against another state, as on 9/11. The latter is much more like a traditional war, in many respects.
A clearer example of traditional terrorism was the Oklahoma City bombing. That was executed by a misguided and disgruntled American citizen. If there were millions of such citizens attempting to take such actions, you can be sure that their grievances would not be taken lightly. Happily, Timothy McVeigh was a kook, and can't be defended the way the Black Panthers can. It's fairly unlikely that large internal terrorist organizations will arise within a fair and just state, but if and when they do, there's probably a serious problem that needs to be looked at, that goes beyond the symptom of terrorism.
Look at the RIP act (the encryption key one). Say you are coordinating an assault on a convenience store and your communications with your partners in crime are encrypted. The crime will cost you 1-2 years in jail, but if you choose not to give them the evidence to prosecute you by not turning over your encryption keys, you'll get 4 years.
Interesting - I'm thinking this might not be possible quite so directly in the U.S., where the Constitution's Fifth Amendment allows one to avoid self-incrimination. Turning over one's encryption keys would seem to qualify!
Darn, you just ruined the market for my EMP blaster, which message will now no doubt be modded down as redundant and generally ignorant and uncreative...
Erm, the Black Panthers should not be put in the same cattegory as Martin Luther King or the Gay Activists... That's just wrong, do you know what the Panthers really stood for?
Yes, the freedom of themselves and their people from oppression by the racist American government and people of the time. For an alternative to the propaganda you've been exposed to, you might try reading this, or this (the latter with a good and honest summary of pros and cons). Search Google for plenty more.
Are you saying that in similar circumstances, you would just suck it up? When a people's pride, dignity and survival is at stake, in an unjust society and under unjust laws, conventions and law enforcement, some may claim that they would not choose violence as a solution - and a few might follow through, like King and Gandhi. Others may choose the coward's path, and suffer in silence.
But in these circumstances, violent rhetoric and violence is a very understandable and natural (as in human nature) course of action, and if you condemn the Black Panthers for that, it's only because you've never remotely been in a similar position.
You're probably a white male (as am I), and you probably grew up in an environment in which the closest you ever came to "oppression" was being grounded for not doing your homework.
The Black Panthers originated partly in response to police brutality in Oakland, CA. Police brutality against blacks in American cities is hardly a solved problem, but today, it gets dealt with much more effectively by society and the government. That wasn't the case in 1966. You can thank the Black Panthers directly for the relatively peaceful society you enjoy today, because they clearly demonstrated what can happen if you don't deal with issues such as police brutality and discrimination in a fair and open manner.
Unless you have been living in a cave you will
know that Google bought the usenet and renamed
it to google groups.
Uhm. Here, I must disagree with you. [trollee response snipped]
I bet you are the life of the parties huh?
The problem on/. is that the saying:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere incompetence"
is turned on its head:
"Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by ironic/trollish humor"
It's the perfect trap for literal-minded nerds, hence the popularity of trolling on/. Like shooting fish in a barrel, it's not much of a challenge, but you get a lot of fish!
This page describes the myth about Kennedy and his supposed gaffe. Kennedy, Bablefish, and all experts agree that his statement was absolutely correct, although it's true that the phrase "Berliner" also refers to a kind of jelly-filled pastry.
Most people have no idea the kind of impact the space programs of the world have had on everyday life. Freeze dried foods, powdered drinks, plastics, computers, digital cameras, compsite materials, GPS, cell phones, long distance phone calls, satellite TV... The list goes on and on.
You're not making a distinction between direct and indirect spinoffs, though. GPS and satellite-based communication are not a side-effect of investment in space, they were one of the prime justifications for it. Freeze dried food and pens that write upside down, on the other hand, were a side effect.
I'm a unwavering supporter of space exploration and exploitation in general, but I don't think you can legitimately justify the space program or its cost based on its side effects. The side effects can be considered a form of indirect and partial cost recovery, but to justify the cost of the program, you'd have to show that the return on investment in space is greater than investment in some other area would be.
For example, instead of investing in a government agency with a monopoly on space, an equivalent investment in high-tech R&D grants to private industry might have yielded far greater technical innovation. Projects like that would also have been less likely to waste money in inefficient ways, as in the case of the space shuttle.
The spinoff argument can also come back to bite you, since it can be used to justify any large government program that involves research, such as a missile defense "shield".
Space exploration can quite easily be justified based on its direct impact, so I don't think it's necessary to introduce red herrings into the equation. The excessive cost of the space shuttle is a real issue which arises from questionably decisions by NASA in the past, which they became stuck with for political reasons.
for that nostalgic win3.1 look, with the added bounus that ur machine boot loads faster, and since progman dont load/run all the stuff in reg, it has less crap loaded, and to me is far more stable.
That stability is not an illusion: Explorer and its evil cousin, Internet Explorer, are responsible for 95% of the crashes and hangs that ordinary users experience on Windows, even on Windows NT & 2000. Windows NT 3.51 was quite a stable product, but then the Explorer UI came along and ruined that. Progman is the last stable user interface product Microsoft wrote (stable when running on NT or above, that is)...
Slashdot Mirror
SICP is fantastic, but tough going for many. Here's one that's being used even at the high school level, with some success: How To Design Programs (HTDP).
Look at the screen, you must not.
Shut your eyes, you must.
Guide your fingers, the Force will.
Great coder, you will be, yesss.
C'mon, moderators, a comment like that deserves at least *one* mod point!
Forget Star Trek, the definitive series on this subject is the Beggars trilogy by Nancy Kress. Genetically engineered (genemod) humans completely turn society upside down, changing human existence beyond recognition. It's all quite plausible and very clever, and a good read.
The slippery slope metaphor arises from the assumption that there are forces that will push in the direction that is considered undesirable. In this case, there are many candidates for such forces: economics would be a simple one, for example if it's cheaper to obtain stem cells from aborted fetuses than to grow them in a lab.
Certainly, you can't use the slippery slope as the reason that things will progress from A to B - and that's really the fallacy that the web page you quoted talks about. But if the forces that result in the slippery slope are either obvious or can be explained, then the slippery slope is a meaningful metaphor that can be used by thinking people to mean something useful in a discussion.
Oh geez, IHBT...
The problem with better weapons is that they cut both ways. The US military may be ahead in the applications of this kind of thing right now, but they're leveraging existing technology, a lot of which is available off the shelf - microcontrollers, MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes, and standard RC gear. How long until terrorists or guerillas are using small unmanned helicopters, planes and cars to deliver explosives inside secure facilities, or to assassinate world leaders?
Lucky for me I get all this info for free from my gf, who is a news-TV junkie. :)
However, the theory isn't all there is to it. The U.S. has a large and incredibly powerful government, with some doozies of laws like RICO and DMCA. There's something to be said for living in a country where the government is smaller and less likely or capable of indulging in corrupt negative actions against its own citizens: places where people like Albert Einstein would not have had 1500-page FBI files compiled about them. New Zealand maybe?
I'm happy in the U.S. for the moment though. I find it sad that so many people here don't seem to realize the importance of the freedoms they take for granted. I think they should run oppression simulations in school as part of civics classes...
1. Linux isn't perfect; but it's open, and that's much more important if you know what you're doing.
2. No matter how smart a user is, he can't fix the fundamental flaws in Windows. I've been developing software for Win32 (Win9x/NT/2000/...) since 1992, and I can tell you that the platform sucks in myriad ways, a large number of which don't apply on Linux.
When Microsoft stops designing the OS to restrict the user's choices and to make life more difficult for competing developers, perhaps Windows will become less sucky. Until that cold day in hell arrives, you're going to hear a lot of complaints from people who know much more than you do about it.
Perfect enforcement requires perfect laws, and you should thank your lucky stars that enforcement isn't perfect. The monitor in your car that bills your credit card and charges penalties to your drivers license and insurance rates would have had you stuck at home by now for speeding too much, and you wouldn't be able to cheat and drive anyway, because of the genetic detectors. You wouldn't be able to get work but you wouldn't be able to steal or cheat to get money, either.
Take a look at the economic figures for the "black market" or "shadow economy" in any developed country, or the numbers of illegal aliens that economies depend on. If you think of these as simply problems that are waiting to be solved, I have news for you: with all due respect, you're a latent totalitarian fascist, but you just haven't realized it yet.
Kenneth Starr's office subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky's book receipts from a bookstore she had frequented. That was a classic case of investigating someone for reasons other than the interests of society. Bureaucrats can be dangerous people - just because you've never experienced that directly doesn't mean it can't happen.
You only have to go back to the 1950's, around the time to which the current article applies, to see a truly egregious example, in McCarthyism. The people who think "that can't happen again" don't realize how every one of the freedoms that are chipped away at day by day bring us closer to the day when some person or organization, well-meaning or otherwise, will find themselves in a position to abuse the end result in unfortunate ways.
In the Jurassic Park series of movies, there's the line about "life will find a way". You could make a similar statement about "abuses of power will find a way". History has shown this over and over.
I, for one, will destroy any tagging device I didn't specifically request, on principle. I'm no Luddite, either - I'm a software developer who develops financial services systems, and I love the concept of greater automation in our financial markets (an area of interest of mine) and in our lives. But another cliche is "with great power, comes great responsibility".
Unfortunately, governments, corporations and individuals have shown time and time again that they will abuse that responsibility, if given the opportunity. Don't give them any more of an opportunity than they already have, and certainly not without good reason. There's no good reason to electronically tag books.
I had to do this for my own setup, which originally had an old TV that couldn't handle two inputs, so I had to feed the DVD through the VCR. Macrovision screwed up the color badly when I did that. I used a software solution ("Universal Selector"), and it works great.
I use a PII-450 in my living room, and performance is fine. It has minimal fans and isn't too noisy. I have a Hollywood DVD MPEG hardware decoder, so that helps, since the video for movies comes out of that card, not from the PC. I bought a commercial LCD projector though.
The space (distance from screen) simply determines how big your projected image is. You have to take the entire room size into account, where the seating is, etc. Depending on what we're doing, we sometimes put the projector in between us and the wall/screen, and sometimes behind the sofa. Behind gives a much bigger picture, but it's fainter in bright light, so for everyday use (as opposed to movies where you dim the lights and crank up the Dolby 5.1 surround sound), we have it closer. If you check the specs for commercial projectors, some of them give you these details.
If you have a really small room, the size of your screen may not be worth the trouble. But if you can manage at least about 7 feet to 14 feet, you'll be looking at image sizes that are plenty big - easily up to 100" or more.
I don't think you can really do this kind of stuff very cheaply and get good results. The point as I see it is more to get quality that rivals or exceeds that of your local cinema. You can get in that ballpark for a few thousand dollars these days, although you have to make some compromises at that level.
The question in the US is what the penalty would be if you refused to give up encryption keys in response to a court order. Since there aren't any specific laws like the UK's RIP (afaik), I'm guessing it'd be something like contempt of court.
Would you be asking "is terrorism OK" if you found yourself living in a place where your basic rights were virtually nonexistent, where you were being subject to continual harrassment, and you were unable to live in peace and go about your own business without continual interference and oppression from powerful government and social forces?
Terrorism is a weapon most commonly used by the oppressed against the strong. The targets of terrorism don't usually think it's OK, but they're obviously biased.
There's a big difference, though, between terrorism by citizens against their own state, and terrorism by external agents against another state, as on 9/11. The latter is much more like a traditional war, in many respects.
A clearer example of traditional terrorism was the Oklahoma City bombing. That was executed by a misguided and disgruntled American citizen. If there were millions of such citizens attempting to take such actions, you can be sure that their grievances would not be taken lightly. Happily, Timothy McVeigh was a kook, and can't be defended the way the Black Panthers can. It's fairly unlikely that large internal terrorist organizations will arise within a fair and just state, but if and when they do, there's probably a serious problem that needs to be looked at, that goes beyond the symptom of terrorism.
Interesting - I'm thinking this might not be possible quite so directly in the U.S., where the Constitution's Fifth Amendment allows one to avoid self-incrimination. Turning over one's encryption keys would seem to qualify!
Yeah, I know - everyone but me figured out the microwave solution right away. I guess I haven't spent enough time roasting CDs...
Darn, you just ruined the market for my EMP blaster, which message will now no doubt be modded down as redundant and generally ignorant and uncreative...
And to think there was controversy over the subpoena of Monica Lewinsky's bookstore receipts - what an innocent time that was!
Yes, the freedom of themselves and their people from oppression by the racist American government and people of the time. For an alternative to the propaganda you've been exposed to, you might try reading this, or this (the latter with a good and honest summary of pros and cons). Search Google for plenty more.
Are you saying that in similar circumstances, you would just suck it up? When a people's pride, dignity and survival is at stake, in an unjust society and under unjust laws, conventions and law enforcement, some may claim that they would not choose violence as a solution - and a few might follow through, like King and Gandhi. Others may choose the coward's path, and suffer in silence.
But in these circumstances, violent rhetoric and violence is a very understandable and natural (as in human nature) course of action, and if you condemn the Black Panthers for that, it's only because you've never remotely been in a similar position.
You're probably a white male (as am I), and you probably grew up in an environment in which the closest you ever came to "oppression" was being grounded for not doing your homework.
The Black Panthers originated partly in response to police brutality in Oakland, CA. Police brutality against blacks in American cities is hardly a solved problem, but today, it gets dealt with much more effectively by society and the government. That wasn't the case in 1966. You can thank the Black Panthers directly for the relatively peaceful society you enjoy today, because they clearly demonstrated what can happen if you don't deal with issues such as police brutality and discrimination in a fair and open manner.
Don't let Sun stop you from using Java. It's not like they can *really* control it any more.
This page describes the myth about Kennedy and his supposed gaffe. Kennedy, Bablefish, and all experts agree that his statement was absolutely correct, although it's true that the phrase "Berliner" also refers to a kind of jelly-filled pastry.
You're not making a distinction between direct and indirect spinoffs, though. GPS and satellite-based communication are not a side-effect of investment in space, they were one of the prime justifications for it. Freeze dried food and pens that write upside down, on the other hand, were a side effect.
I'm a unwavering supporter of space exploration and exploitation in general, but I don't think you can legitimately justify the space program or its cost based on its side effects. The side effects can be considered a form of indirect and partial cost recovery, but to justify the cost of the program, you'd have to show that the return on investment in space is greater than investment in some other area would be.
For example, instead of investing in a government agency with a monopoly on space, an equivalent investment in high-tech R&D grants to private industry might have yielded far greater technical innovation. Projects like that would also have been less likely to waste money in inefficient ways, as in the case of the space shuttle.
The spinoff argument can also come back to bite you, since it can be used to justify any large government program that involves research, such as a missile defense "shield".
Space exploration can quite easily be justified based on its direct impact, so I don't think it's necessary to introduce red herrings into the equation. The excessive cost of the space shuttle is a real issue which arises from questionably decisions by NASA in the past, which they became stuck with for political reasons.