The only thing that has changed is that we now know that Hellman is a weak, over-emotional and unprincipled man.
These fucking arabs are not downloading PGP. They're using AOL and Hotmail when they're in the US, and riding around on donkeys when they're in Towelheadistan.
The government loves to use incidents like the WTC attack as an excuse to restrict freedom. The feds "need" to take away some of our rights in order that they can "fight terrorism" more easily. Who the fuck said fighting terrorism was supposed to be easy? We have rights that are (should be) inviolable, and if that makes the government's job harder, tough shit. Look for a new job.
What this guy Paul McMaster's forgets, is, WE ARE AT WAR! We didn't start it, but we intend to finish it (which will involve 'finishing' lots of arabs--hell yeah!). America has never lost a war, and I see no reason to let our record be sullied now.
If winning the fight against evil means restricting our civil liberties, then so be it. The last thing we need right now is people criticizing the government, and that includes people whining about restrictions on their "civil liberties". Come on, people! It's only by the grace of the US Government that you have those "rights" to begin with. And if, in order to sustain itself and protect the American people, the government needs to take back some of those privileges we've grown used to, you have nothing to complain about. You should be THANKING the government for letting you have freedom of speech for all those years.
Let's examine some of the issues MacMasters is concerned about.
Anti-leaks legislation, dubbed the "official secrets acts" by those who are deeply concerned about its impact on speech and the press and the flow of critical information to the public.
"Critical" information? Well, if it's "critical" to the public, then it must be even more critical to terrorists, who will use it against us. The last thing we need right now is for information to be available to everyone. If you don't absolutely NEED a piece of information, you have no business knowing it, or attempting to get your hands on it. Anyone who has a problem with this is aiding terrorist and is exactly the type of person we need to fight.
The Flag Desecration Act, which would for the first time in the history of our nation amend the First Amendment to prohibit burning the flag as a form of political dissent.
How could anyone have a problem with this? If you are in favor of desecrating Old Glory, you have no business being in this country. Go to Afgahanistan, and join your ideological bedmates.
Let me get this straight--they admit that their robot is hackable PLUS they're releasing the specs? I don't get. Won't the specs just make it easier to hack? Personally, I favor security, even if it happens to be security through obscurity.
I don't know that I'd want to buy a robot if I knew hackers could take control of it. The consequences of hackers infiltrating a robot could range from the merely annoying to the catastrophic (especially if the robot in question is equipped with a rotary saw, a la BattleBots).
As well, has anybody assessed the national security risks associated with hackable robots, in light of the recent terror attacks?
. . . I've been following the chess world for the past few years, and though I've heard of Bobby Fischer a few times, I still don't know exactly who he is . . .
I find it hard to understand how someone who has been interested in chess for the length of time you claim to have been, can be ignorant of Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest players of all time.
Bobby was the youngest International Grandmaster ever. He won 8 US Chess Championships, and won basically every game he played between 1962 and 1972.
Unfortunately, he has become a reclusive paranoid schizophrenic who rants about how the Jews and Russians are out to get him (it should be noted that Bobby is half-Jewish).
By the way, in the future, perhaps you should try Google for queries like this.
I have a hard time trusting the director of the NSA's public assessment of that organizations capabilities. Keep in mind, the very existence of the NSA was classified for decades.
Now, we're supposed to believe that the NSA when they go on national TV and complain about their lack of money? Bullshit! Perhaps if their budget was not classified to begin with, this would warrant looking into. As it stands, I'll take any info from the NSA as the FUD it is.
We know Microsoft is evil, but would Linux even exist in anything approaching it's present magnificent state without the antagonism of Microsoft?
Linux wasn't started as the good guy hero to slay the microsoft evil empire.
Ten years ago it was a geeks toy.
Quite. I never said Linux was started to depose Microsoft. Just as Conan wasn't born to chop off James Earl Jones's head. But Linux wouldn't be as robust and widespread today were it not for Microsoft.
Perhaps it's time to start worrying about the possibility that we're tipping the power balance too far away from Microsoft.
Now we have IBM, number one computer company, and HP/Compaq, soon to be number two, both strongly in the Linux corner. Plus, the dozens of other powerful companies that are fighting against Microsoft. It won't be long before the concentration of power will lie with Linux, rather than Microsoft. What then? Will we demand that the Justice Department break up the Linux Mailing list? I'd really hate to see it go that far (though, given the anti-corporate, pro-hippie bias in government, it strikes me as quite unlikely to happen anyway).
I do have a serious concern. What happens when Microsoft ceases to be a contender in the computer world? Once the Open Source community has lost it's scapegoat, will it be able to hold together? Is Microsoft the James Earl Jones to Linux's Conan the Barbarian (or, Luke Skywalker, if you prefer)? We know Microsoft is evil, but would Linux even exist in anything approaching it's present magnificent state without the antagonism of Microsoft? Something to think about.
If zionist moderators once again try to silence me, well, I tried.
I could speculate endlessly about why the US is so intent on supporting Israel, and why the US ignores Israeli human rights abuses that would shame even North Korea. But, I really don't know. I am truly puzzled.
I find it really outrageous that the US, greatest military power on earth, is bowing down to a second-rate, third-world Middle-Eastern nation like Israel. This situation is truly getting out of control.
I know this post will get a couple of immediate down-mods by the Zionists in the audience, but the Truth is more important than karma anyway.
The bottomline: the anti-arab bias in the US is a result of US ties with Israel. Israel is, by all counts, a racist, totalitarian state. Throughout the 1980s, the leftists in America loved to denounce South Africa for Apartheid. Where are these same leftist voices now, with regard to Israel? Israel's crimes against the palestinians are truly horrednous. In 1948, the palestinians were made second-class citizens in their homeland of thousands years, in order to recreate the fictional "homeland" of a tribe of eastern europeans. Since then, the palestinians have been, by turn, bombed, gassed, beaten imprisoned, and stripped of their civil rights.
When the UN attempted to speak-out about Israel's racism, the US pulled out of the recent conference on racism. That alone should tell you something about Israeli power of the US.
BTW, don't even get me started on white slavery in Israel. That's right, for decades, Israeli's have been kidnapping gentile Eastern European and Russian girls and keeping them as sex slaves. This practice meets with the tacit approval of the Israeli government. This is not a secret, and I am not making this up. Even 60 minutes and the New York Times, two strongholds of Zionism in the US have discussed the situation.
Do you have some problem with Mozilla that we should know about?
I'm sure some asshole will moderate this post troll or flamebait, but I'm 100% in earnest here.
Did you ever wonder why Mozilla is continually falling behind schedule? Because people like the Konqueror team decide to go off on their own instead of working for the good of the community. Mozilla was there first, and it deserves the support of the community.
If the free software community wants to make a good impression on the business world (and it may already be too late), we must, at all costs, avoid splitting into tiny, useless factions working on useless, duplicate projects.
Here's an idea: before starting your new project, check to see if someone is already working on a similar project. Had the Konqueror team observed this little suggestion, the whole Konqueror fiasco could have been avoided.
I'm sorry, but this action by Sistina is both unethical, and, in fact, illegal (as far as I know--IANAL).
How many of you have read the GPL? If you have read it, I think you'll see that Sistina have clearly violated it; I think we should be quick to report this violation to the FSF enforcement team. Sistina has truly betrayed the trust of the community. Now that they've strayed from the GNU path, they must be dealt with in a swift and severe manner.
We're at a precarious stage in the Free-Software revolution. Stallman, the Lenin to our revolution, is slowly fading into the background as senility and decripitude encroach on his ruling abilities. A Stalin, so to speak, must rise up to fill the power vacuum. There are simply too many enemies-of-GNU about these days, most of them within our own midst (e.g. Sinista; or, for that matter, ESR, the Trotsky of our scenario). There is no place in the Free Software movement for backstabbers and counter-revolutionaries.
What, you think since you don't gamble you're safe? Do you have a driver's license? A bank account? A credit card?
If you have any of the above, a great deal of information about you is already being trafficed through the corporate world, and the amount will only grow with every passing year. To take one seemingly harmless example, if you have a savings club card, you've already handed them on a silver platter to megabytes of data about yourself for your grocery store to sell. Then there's the magazines you subscribe to, the professional organizations you belong to, the ISP you use (don't think they don't mine logs for useful information). And don't forget your medical records. The databanks of the highest bidders certainly never will.
In the future, as storage gets cheaper, and transactions are increasingly done through electronic means, you can expect records to be kept of everything you buy, everywhere you go, everyone you correspond with.
While the government does present a danger to privacy*, the corporate world is clearly the largest threat. Corporations already manipulate us with slick marketing. Once highly targetted advertising arrives, we'll be so many fish in the corporate target barrel. We won't stand a chance. Get ready to drop any spare change you still have left.
Besides targetted advertising, blackmail is the other serious threat posed by corporate stockpiling of personal information. I could see a future where corporations solidify their control over our leaders by holding their past misdeeds over their heads. Campaign contributions and corporate political activism are bad enough. Just imagine when the corporations put themselves in a J-Edgar-like postion above the president.
*For example, I expect that within 5 years we'll see legislation forcing ISPs to verify the identities of users and log and store all traffic for a some minimum time frame; this minor step has already been taken over in the EU. I think it makes sense though, as a method to combat computer crime. The internet can't stay the wild-west forever.
This, more than anything else predicted about the 21st century, is true. From what we wear, to the music we listen to, and even the software we access the Internet, it seems that society (at least the organizations that influence it most) ostracizes you if you step outside of the "approved channel"
The period around 1950 was the most conformist in US history. Take a look around, and ask yourself which direction we're going.
When was the last time you got beat up for wearing a leather jacket; or were dragged before a congressional sub-commitee to answer for your political beliefs from a decade ago?
It's comments like yours that tell me the average slashdot user is totally out of touch with reality.
it would certainly make me feel good to know that they weren't going to cut me just to get cheaper labor in the door.
This is INTEL we're talking about. Intel wrote the book on exploiting technical labor.
Take a look at FACE, Former and Current Employees of Intel. There are horror stories on the FACE site that I won't even go into. Suffice it to say, though, that Intel hires the cheapest pakistanis available, and treats their employees like crap.
In a nutshell: they will need sensors to track the motion of your eyeball (otherwise, how will they keep the image projected in the right place?). The type of sensors that are needed are cheap and have been in use for decades.
Basically, if you want to be able to project the image correctly, you are going to need light sensors, and these light sensors, will, obviously, measure the light bouncing off your eye. You don't have to go far from there to map the retina.
They were bouncing lasers onto peoples eyes to identify them long before they tried projecting images onto the retina. The hardware and software to map the retina is now trivially inexpensive and well-researched.
It goes without saying, the ability to map the users retina will be built into any commercial retina display. They need sensors to track eyeball motion, and it is certain that those sensors will (with the proper software) do double duty, and map the retina, as well.
Thalidomide was perfectly safe, no? What possible side-effects could a drug to counteract the effects of motion-sickness have?
Because of irresponsible thinking like that, I can't type like a normal person. No new 'technological innovations' should be foisted onto the general public until they have been proved safe by years (decades, if necessary) of scientific study.
Sure, it's only light; only lasers. What happens when the first wave of users start going blind in 10 years? Are you just going to say, "Oh, we're sorry. We never imagined something like this could have happened."?
That's not good enough, I'm afraid. I want hard scientific facts, not ill-informed opinions.
Before you jump on the Retinal Scanning bandwagon, perhaps you should think about the privacy implications. Retinal scanning, used for video display sounds great. But what you may not realize is that with a few lines of code, your display could be used to identify you with precision.
You thought Real Networks unique identifier was bad, wait until we're all using retinal displays and every piece of corporate software adds interferometry code to map your retina. Once you're in their database, it's like a cookie you can't erase. Any time you use their product with a retinal display, they know it's you, indisputably. They may not have your name, but they'll know who you are on the internet.
And just wait until stores start scanning your retina for identification, before they'll take a check. The databases will be cross-referenced in no time, and then they WILL know who you are, and there will be no hiding it. Big brother, here we come.
Have you stopped to consider the consequences of the information contained in books like this? This type of effort should not be supported by the Free Software community.
Books like this give corporations the tools they need to destroy our privacy and strip us of our rights. How do you think Double Click puts the information about you it sells into useable form? With techniques it learns from this type of book. Same goes for the corporate websites you visit, your supermarket, etc.
Information wants to be free, but not the information in this book. Data mining and Data munging techniques should never have left the hallowed halls of academe. Once they enter the public domain, they are immediately exploited by greedy corporations. The author should have thought about that before writing a book like this.
If you buy or support books like this, you have lost any right to complain about your privacy being violated. If you are serious about privacy, boycott this book!
Perhaps Slashdot users and the internet community as a whole should put in for some serious self-examination. Maybe you'll find that the real problem isn't so-called 'spammers', but, rather, yourselves.
Which would strike a normal person as more reasonable? In one corner, we see a business using a novel marketing scheme to get the word out about its useful product, whilst growing the economy, providing jobs, and stress testing the infrastructure of the internet (and don't tell me that last one won't be useful when the next infowar rolls around; quality assurance is too often overlooked, and 'spammers' help out in that department). In the other corner, we have a whining little snot who spends eight hours a day on the 'net but who can't be bothered to take half a second to hit the delete key? I know which one wins the 'freak' test in my mind.
But apparently, the \. community can't see the forest for the trees. Have you any idea how ridiculous this makes you look? Trying to legislate and litigate away a 'problem' that costs you, say, 5 seconds a day, and which is not in fact a problem for normal people.
Who's going to get hurt when you drive a small-businessesman out of business just because he had the nerve to assume you might be interested in his product? The big corporations won't, that much is for sure. You're playing right into the hands of the corporate hegemony: tying the arms of the little guy, hobbling him, denying him any opportunity to compete with the billion dollar marketing department of the average super-mega-conglomerate.
The internet was supposed to change things, wasn't it? It was supposed to be revolutionary; level the playing field. You got an idea? Great, tell people about it. Bypass traditional channels. Wait, what's this. Slashdot user doesn't like unsolicited email. BAM! You're history. There goes your new idea. Down the drain, along with free speech.
And free speech really is the issue. You can't argue with that. Denying people the opportunity to share their views, spread their message, advertise their product. We're talking nothing short of gross 1st amendment and civil rights violations, on a vast scale. This whole situation is just a little too Orwellian for me.
A final thought:
We are all outraged over ridiculous sham verdicts like the one in the McDonalds coffee spill incident. Yet, in the case at hand, you seem to consider a totally analogous set of frivolous lawsuits okay, as long as they're directed at so-called 'spammers'. Who is in need of self-examination? You are. Go ahead an mod this post 'Troll' or 'Flamebait'; when you do, you'll only be proving my point. BTW, who are you going after once you've 'eliminated' 'spammers'? The Jews, perhaps? Hasn't history taught us anything?
All too often, people opt for a little temporary gratifacation at the expense of compromising their ideals.
Hopefully, people, or at least slashdotters, will realize that they are hurting themselves when they support corporations that want to restrict their rights. The only way you can vote with corporations is with your dollar. Companies usually get the point pretty quick. An organized, internet-wide boycott of Sony and other RIAA/MPAA parents, would have a real chance of being effective.
If you only want to is listen to a few MP3s, you probably don't need MMJB. But if you have lots o MP3s that aren't organized particularly well, it is great. It can scan your HD for MP3s and create a library with Artist, Title, Album, Genre info from the ID3 tags. This is the main thing I like about it.
You can also use it to rip and burn CDs easily. (Though a few snobs may bitch about the quality, it's certainly as good as anything you're likely to download off Napster.)
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that has changed is that we now know that Hellman is a weak, over-emotional and unprincipled man.
These fucking arabs are not downloading PGP. They're using AOL and Hotmail when they're in the US, and riding around on donkeys when they're in Towelheadistan.
The government loves to use incidents like the WTC attack as an excuse to restrict freedom. The feds "need" to take away some of our rights in order that they can "fight terrorism" more easily. Who the fuck said fighting terrorism was supposed to be easy? We have rights that are (should be) inviolable, and if that makes the government's job harder, tough shit. Look for a new job.
If winning the fight against evil means restricting our civil liberties, then so be it. The last thing we need right now is people criticizing the government, and that includes people whining about restrictions on their "civil liberties". Come on, people! It's only by the grace of the US Government that you have those "rights" to begin with. And if, in order to sustain itself and protect the American people, the government needs to take back some of those privileges we've grown used to, you have nothing to complain about. You should be THANKING the government for letting you have freedom of speech for all those years.
Let's examine some of the issues MacMasters is concerned about.
"Critical" information? Well, if it's "critical" to the public, then it must be even more critical to terrorists, who will use it against us. The last thing we need right now is for information to be available to everyone. If you don't absolutely NEED a piece of information, you have no business knowing it, or attempting to get your hands on it. Anyone who has a problem with this is aiding terrorist and is exactly the type of person we need to fight.
How could anyone have a problem with this? If you are in favor of desecrating Old Glory, you have no business being in this country. Go to Afgahanistan, and join your ideological bedmates.
I don't know that I'd want to buy a robot if I knew hackers could take control of it. The consequences of hackers infiltrating a robot could range from the merely annoying to the catastrophic (especially if the robot in question is equipped with a rotary saw, a la BattleBots).
As well, has anybody assessed the national security risks associated with hackable robots, in light of the recent terror attacks?
I find it hard to understand how someone who has been interested in chess for the length of time you claim to have been, can be ignorant of Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest players of all time.
Bobby was the youngest International Grandmaster ever. He won 8 US Chess Championships, and won basically every game he played between 1962 and 1972.
Unfortunately, he has become a reclusive paranoid schizophrenic who rants about how the Jews and Russians are out to get him (it should be noted that Bobby is half-Jewish).
By the way, in the future, perhaps you should try Google for queries like this.
Now, we're supposed to believe that the NSA when they go on national TV and complain about their lack of money? Bullshit! Perhaps if their budget was not classified to begin with, this would warrant looking into. As it stands, I'll take any info from the NSA as the FUD it is.
Quite. I never said Linux was started to depose Microsoft. Just as Conan wasn't born to chop off James Earl Jones's head. But Linux wouldn't be as robust and widespread today were it not for Microsoft.
Now we have IBM, number one computer company, and HP/Compaq, soon to be number two, both strongly in the Linux corner. Plus, the dozens of other powerful companies that are fighting against Microsoft. It won't be long before the concentration of power will lie with Linux, rather than Microsoft. What then? Will we demand that the Justice Department break up the Linux Mailing list? I'd really hate to see it go that far (though, given the anti-corporate, pro-hippie bias in government, it strikes me as quite unlikely to happen anyway).
I do have a serious concern. What happens when Microsoft ceases to be a contender in the computer world? Once the Open Source community has lost it's scapegoat, will it be able to hold together? Is Microsoft the James Earl Jones to Linux's Conan the Barbarian (or, Luke Skywalker, if you prefer)? We know Microsoft is evil, but would Linux even exist in anything approaching it's present magnificent state without the antagonism of Microsoft? Something to think about.
Israel/Occupied Territories: Israel shows reckless disregard for human life
ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: UNITED NATIONS CALLS FOR HALT TO TORTURE
CAT: ISRAEL CONTINUES TO DEFY THE COMMITTEE AGAINST TORTURE
ISRAEL: Human Rights Abuses Affecting Trafficked Women in Isreal's Sex Industry
An article on slave trafficking in Israel, from the Jerusalem Post
Google search results for "human rights" + israel" (have reading the 281,000 results)
If zionist moderators once again try to silence me, well, I tried.
I could speculate endlessly about why the US is so intent on supporting Israel, and why the US ignores Israeli human rights abuses that would shame even North Korea. But, I really don't know. I am truly puzzled.
I know this post will get a couple of immediate down-mods by the Zionists in the audience, but the Truth is more important than karma anyway.
The bottomline: the anti-arab bias in the US is a result of US ties with Israel. Israel is, by all counts, a racist, totalitarian state. Throughout the 1980s, the leftists in America loved to denounce South Africa for Apartheid. Where are these same leftist voices now, with regard to Israel? Israel's crimes against the palestinians are truly horrednous. In 1948, the palestinians were made second-class citizens in their homeland of thousands years, in order to recreate the fictional "homeland" of a tribe of eastern europeans. Since then, the palestinians have been, by turn, bombed, gassed, beaten imprisoned, and stripped of their civil rights.
When the UN attempted to speak-out about Israel's racism, the US pulled out of the recent conference on racism. That alone should tell you something about Israeli power of the US.
BTW, don't even get me started on white slavery in Israel. That's right, for decades, Israeli's have been kidnapping gentile Eastern European and Russian girls and keeping them as sex slaves. This practice meets with the tacit approval of the Israeli government. This is not a secret, and I am not making this up. Even 60 minutes and the New York Times, two strongholds of Zionism in the US have discussed the situation.
Do you have some problem with Mozilla that we should know about?
I'm sure some asshole will moderate this post troll or flamebait, but I'm 100% in earnest here.
Did you ever wonder why Mozilla is continually falling behind schedule? Because people like the Konqueror team decide to go off on their own instead of working for the good of the community. Mozilla was there first, and it deserves the support of the community.
If the free software community wants to make a good impression on the business world (and it may already be too late), we must, at all costs, avoid splitting into tiny, useless factions working on useless, duplicate projects.
Here's an idea: before starting your new project, check to see if someone is already working on a similar project. Had the Konqueror team observed this little suggestion, the whole Konqueror fiasco could have been avoided.
How many of you have read the GPL? If you have read it, I think you'll see that Sistina have clearly violated it; I think we should be quick to report this violation to the FSF enforcement team. Sistina has truly betrayed the trust of the community. Now that they've strayed from the GNU path, they must be dealt with in a swift and severe manner.
We're at a precarious stage in the Free-Software revolution. Stallman, the Lenin to our revolution, is slowly fading into the background as senility and decripitude encroach on his ruling abilities. A Stalin, so to speak, must rise up to fill the power vacuum. There are simply too many enemies-of-GNU about these days, most of them within our own midst (e.g. Sinista; or, for that matter, ESR, the Trotsky of our scenario). There is no place in the Free Software movement for backstabbers and counter-revolutionaries.
Until you present some evidence, or Rob confirms the payments from Microsoft, I will have to assume you are a troll.
If you have any of the above, a great deal of information about you is already being trafficed through the corporate world, and the amount will only grow with every passing year. To take one seemingly harmless example, if you have a savings club card, you've already handed them on a silver platter to megabytes of data about yourself for your grocery store to sell. Then there's the magazines you subscribe to, the professional organizations you belong to, the ISP you use (don't think they don't mine logs for useful information). And don't forget your medical records. The databanks of the highest bidders certainly never will.
In the future, as storage gets cheaper, and transactions are increasingly done through electronic means, you can expect records to be kept of everything you buy, everywhere you go, everyone you correspond with.
While the government does present a danger to privacy*, the corporate world is clearly the largest threat. Corporations already manipulate us with slick marketing. Once highly targetted advertising arrives, we'll be so many fish in the corporate target barrel. We won't stand a chance. Get ready to drop any spare change you still have left.
Besides targetted advertising, blackmail is the other serious threat posed by corporate stockpiling of personal information. I could see a future where corporations solidify their control over our leaders by holding their past misdeeds over their heads. Campaign contributions and corporate political activism are bad enough. Just imagine when the corporations put themselves in a J-Edgar-like postion above the president.
*For example, I expect that within 5 years we'll see legislation forcing ISPs to verify the identities of users and log and store all traffic for a some minimum time frame; this minor step has already been taken over in the EU. I think it makes sense though, as a method to combat computer crime. The internet can't stay the wild-west forever.
Looks like someone hasn't been reading labels.
14. Chemical removal of facial hair
This is available, though not widely used.
25. $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) to fly from Chicago to Paris
Have you priced a trip on the Concorde?
The period around 1950 was the most conformist in US history. Take a look around, and ask yourself which direction we're going.
When was the last time you got beat up for wearing a leather jacket; or were dragged before a congressional sub-commitee to answer for your political beliefs from a decade ago?
It's comments like yours that tell me the average slashdot user is totally out of touch with reality.
This is INTEL we're talking about. Intel wrote the book on exploiting technical labor.
Take a look at FACE, Former and Current Employees of Intel. There are horror stories on the FACE site that I won't even go into. Suffice it to say, though, that Intel hires the cheapest pakistanis available, and treats their employees like crap.
In a nutshell: they will need sensors to track the motion of your eyeball (otherwise, how will they keep the image projected in the right place?). The type of sensors that are needed are cheap and have been in use for decades.
Basically, if you want to be able to project the image correctly, you are going to need light sensors, and these light sensors, will, obviously, measure the light bouncing off your eye. You don't have to go far from there to map the retina.
It goes without saying, the ability to map the users retina will be built into any commercial retina display. They need sensors to track eyeball motion, and it is certain that those sensors will (with the proper software) do double duty, and map the retina, as well.
Because of irresponsible thinking like that, I can't type like a normal person. No new 'technological innovations' should be foisted onto the general public until they have been proved safe by years (decades, if necessary) of scientific study.
Sure, it's only light; only lasers. What happens when the first wave of users start going blind in 10 years? Are you just going to say, "Oh, we're sorry. We never imagined something like this could have happened."?
That's not good enough, I'm afraid. I want hard scientific facts, not ill-informed opinions.
You thought Real Networks unique identifier was bad, wait until we're all using retinal displays and every piece of corporate software adds interferometry code to map your retina. Once you're in their database, it's like a cookie you can't erase. Any time you use their product with a retinal display, they know it's you, indisputably. They may not have your name, but they'll know who you are on the internet.
And just wait until stores start scanning your retina for identification, before they'll take a check. The databases will be cross-referenced in no time, and then they WILL know who you are, and there will be no hiding it. Big brother, here we come.
Books like this give corporations the tools they need to destroy our privacy and strip us of our rights. How do you think Double Click puts the information about you it sells into useable form? With techniques it learns from this type of book. Same goes for the corporate websites you visit, your supermarket, etc.
Information wants to be free, but not the information in this book. Data mining and Data munging techniques should never have left the hallowed halls of academe. Once they enter the public domain, they are immediately exploited by greedy corporations. The author should have thought about that before writing a book like this.
If you buy or support books like this, you have lost any right to complain about your privacy being violated. If you are serious about privacy, boycott this book!
Which would strike a normal person as more reasonable? In one corner, we see a business using a novel marketing scheme to get the word out about its useful product, whilst growing the economy, providing jobs, and stress testing the infrastructure of the internet (and don't tell me that last one won't be useful when the next infowar rolls around; quality assurance is too often overlooked, and 'spammers' help out in that department). In the other corner, we have a whining little snot who spends eight hours a day on the 'net but who can't be bothered to take half a second to hit the delete key? I know which one wins the 'freak' test in my mind.
But apparently, the \. community can't see the forest for the trees. Have you any idea how ridiculous this makes you look? Trying to legislate and litigate away a 'problem' that costs you, say, 5 seconds a day, and which is not in fact a problem for normal people.
Who's going to get hurt when you drive a small-businessesman out of business just because he had the nerve to assume you might be interested in his product? The big corporations won't, that much is for sure. You're playing right into the hands of the corporate hegemony: tying the arms of the little guy, hobbling him, denying him any opportunity to compete with the billion dollar marketing department of the average super-mega-conglomerate.
The internet was supposed to change things, wasn't it? It was supposed to be revolutionary; level the playing field. You got an idea? Great, tell people about it. Bypass traditional channels. Wait, what's this. Slashdot user doesn't like unsolicited email. BAM! You're history. There goes your new idea. Down the drain, along with free speech.
And free speech really is the issue. You can't argue with that. Denying people the opportunity to share their views, spread their message, advertise their product. We're talking nothing short of gross 1st amendment and civil rights violations, on a vast scale. This whole situation is just a little too Orwellian for me.
A final thought:
We are all outraged over ridiculous sham verdicts like the one in the McDonalds coffee spill incident. Yet, in the case at hand, you seem to consider a totally analogous set of frivolous lawsuits okay, as long as they're directed at so-called 'spammers'. Who is in need of self-examination? You are. Go ahead an mod this post 'Troll' or 'Flamebait'; when you do, you'll only be proving my point. BTW, who are you going after once you've 'eliminated' 'spammers'? The Jews, perhaps? Hasn't history taught us anything?
Hopefully, people, or at least slashdotters, will realize that they are hurting themselves when they support corporations that want to restrict their rights. The only way you can vote with corporations is with your dollar. Companies usually get the point pretty quick. An organized, internet-wide boycott of Sony and other RIAA/MPAA parents, would have a real chance of being effective.
Something to look into, perhaps.
I have MP3s bigger than that.
If you only want to is listen to a few MP3s, you probably don't need MMJB. But if you have lots o MP3s that aren't organized particularly well, it is great. It can scan your HD for MP3s and create a library with Artist, Title, Album, Genre info from the ID3 tags. This is the main thing I like about it.
You can also use it to rip and burn CDs easily. (Though a few snobs may bitch about the quality, it's certainly as good as anything you're likely to download off Napster.)
musicmatch.com