The potential liability issues for having unrestricted terminals in public places are probably too much for a library admin to bear. Especially in an America where there is truly forbidden information on the Internet (DeCSS code, for example), public institutions will be installing filtering software.
Right or wrong, they will want to protect themselves. Without a good faith attempt at filtering, the library system could be open to lawsuits from irate parents. Some of them will blame the library internet access for every screwed up thing their screwed up kids do. But quality parenting is another discussion.
I tried my Rio 300 with Sennheiser and Nakamichi headphones, both in the $100 range. It still sounds like stink. Maybe mine is screwed up. But, like someone said, it was cheap...
>Even people with cable modems aren't *constantly* using them, and those who *are* are usually violating their terms of service by running FTP/HTTP servers (and are usually found, and are usually dealt with).
I am looking forward to the day when running http or mail services from home ISN'T a violation of service. I don't want to have to pay some other hosting facility for my low-impact web server. I don't want to pay for colocation when my house is already wired.
If I am paying for connectivity, I want to be able to use it in any way that I can devise. Note: there is a difference between use and ABUSE. Running a free porn site that saturates the line is abuse. Running mail services so a few friends can have accounts isn't.
I can understand why no cable/dsl lets you run a server, they have to prevent abuse. But there must be a middle ground. Besides just SNEAKING the services, that is.
I think the selling point is that it is a Springboard module, and not a separate gadget you'd have to carry.
There will be some people who will jump on this thing because they are happy with PalmOS, and they want an MP3 player, and they don't want ANOTHER freaking gadget to fill up pockets and belts with.
Question is, are there enough of these people to make this product successful?
IMHO it costs too much... if it was 128MB for about that price, I *might* go for it... but not without listening first. Man, that Rio 300 I bought was a mistake. It sounds like AM radio.
Someday soon, hopefully, we'll grow most of our plastics. I think there is a good chance that in 20-30 years we will use biotechnology to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon polymer chains of any kind we need. After all, plants to this already, turning CO2 into sugar and cellulose. We just need them to build different molecules for us.
This has already been demonstrated, though the technology isn't ready for prime time.
As a long-time player and occasional pro in the field it is nice to see an RPG article that is POSITIVE. I still think Katz missed the boat on a lot of things, mistaking the overwrought White Wolf worldview for something truly revolutionary, but that's life.
I will give WW credit for putting out quality material, even if it all follows the same themes and is a bit derivative at times. It's still some of the best stuff out there for paranormal RPGs. IMHO.
Like someone else above said I was hoping for an article about how pencil & paper gaming is superior to computer gaming, but I was denied.
>...linking any Internet web site, either directly or through a series of links, to any other Internet web site containing DeCSS.
Awesome! We can play "Six Degrees of DeCSS!"
If the law lets you dig as deep as you like, a LOT of sites will be in violation!
Maybe we should all post the DeCSS Link Path on our sites. This text is pretty rough, excuse me...
"This page is illegal. It links to foo.com, which links to bar.com, which links to fubar.com, which links to somesite.com/decss, which contains the source code for DeCSS.
"By the letter of the court order outlawing this activity, the DeCSS source code could be hidden behind any depth of links, but this page would still be in violation.
Do you have a web site? You may be in violation of this court order as well. To avoid prosecution, you should contact your elected representatives and lobby against burdensome, unenforceable laws like the DCMA."
I think the emulator guys may be in trouble from a non-technical standpoint: they could be accused of diluting the strength of Sony's EverQuest brand, not the actual act of reverse-engineering. (which is supposedly strongly protected in the EU anyway.)
Sony tried this with Connectix and failed, as I recall.
Frankly, I hope these guys get away with it. Though I would rather see a full client/server open source MMORPG package...
(off-topic rant begins)
A free client/server MMORPG package with an emphasis on good content creation tools would be a wonderful thing. They say it takes MONTHS just to do the TERRAIN for a new EQ zone. I have worked with custom game development tools and I have to say that sound pathetic -- then again, our coders kicked some serious ass.
If you had killer tools and an adequate client/server package people would rapidly develop some very cool worlds. This seems like a better use of time than reverse-engineering EQ, but I am not going to look a gift emulator in the mouth.
(end rant)
Those are good points. I see another possibility, though... that is, battery technology will improve at a fast enough rate to make Transmeta's extremely low-power CPUs not so neat anymore.
I think there will be a short period where their products will fill a valuable niche. But before too long, we will have new exotic power sources for laptops, and laptop makers will be able to stuff power-hungry chips back in. And at that point I will happily take the extra 10fps in Quake 3.:)
Back in the '50s the NSA -- their precursor organization, I think, really -- went to all the major US cable operators and said, "what say you give us a tape every day of all the traffic you passed?"
All 3 of the major cable companies caved. They knew it was illegal, but they were afraid of what resisting would bring them. So, for years the govertnment was keyword searching every freaking byte of telegram data that those companies passed.
This was called Operation Shamrock. If you think I'm full of it a little Google searching should show you some links to back this up.
I don't have any doubts they'd pull something like Shamrock again if they could. That includes "voice grep" of telephone data streams as well as sniffing internet traffic for interesting bits.
Let me put it another way -- they *will* do as much as we let them get away with. They have the track record to prove it. I assume that every non-encrypted communication I send is captured in a file somewhere.
Apple has always had their own way of doing things. They amaze me because they have no product research like other companies do -- Jobs has admitted that they don't do focus groups, etc. (Wish I still had a link around to back that up. I had always suspected it, and I was delighted to read confirmation a while back.)
Apple makes the products THEY think are neat. It just so happens that that set overlaps with a set of products that are desireable by the public. It's this overlap that keeps them in business. Sometimes, a truly neat product will fail to intersect the set of salable products, and then you have the Newton.
Enough of their products are innovative hits that I can see why they would want to keep them secret. Suing a bunch of EMPLOYEES will have a chilling effect on other folks with loose lips. It would make me shut up for sure.
This is all spot on. I saw this illustrated once when my Editor Buddy and Artist Buddy were having an argument about when to use all-caps.
Editor Buddy made the point about the word's "coastline" and how the shape of the word is used to read, and all-caps has a uniform coastline and is harder to read because of t. Artist Buddy didn't buy it.
Editor Buddy then had Artist Buddy think of a common phrase, and draw it out as BOXES on a page, each box representing the BASIC shape of a letter -- so a "p" would be a box that descended below the text baseline, an "l" would be a box that rose above the baseline, etc.
Editor Buddy got 2 out of 3 phrases right. Artist Buddy saw the light.
> you paid for the content on the DVD that you are DeCSSing...
Well, it's more like you licensed it... you didn't buy it. You bought the right to *use the data in a specific manner.*
It sucks, but the studios, who distribure the software, do have the right to control how you watch it. If a Linux player chaps their hide, tough for Linux users. I don't LIKE it, but it sure seems like this is within their power.
I used to work for the Alderac Entertainment Group -- we made the Legend of the Five Rings card game. (Wizards of the Coast eventually bought the game, but AEG continued to do the design.)
L5R's logo was an ancient Japanese symbol -- 5 interlocked rings in a circle. The IOC found out about it and threatened a lawsuit if we didn't change it. Never mind that it didn't look anything like the Olympics symbol -- the IOC has an interest in any logo that consists of any kind of linked rings.
We managed to get the IOC to stop short of making us change the card backs, which would have been devastating. We had to change the logo on T-shirts, etc. though.
The old logo, threatening to dilute the branding of the Olympics: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/8321/
The new logo, judged safe for the Olympics: http://www.wizards.com/l5r/
At the time, at least, you could not sue the IOC -- they were protected by an international treaty, and were above the law in many respects. It's probably still that way. God help you if they set their sights on you.
>1. If guns are illegal, you can arrest people simply for owning a gun. Remember how hard it was to get Al Capone, and how easy it would have been to get him AND all his henchmen if guns were outlawed?
It's already illegal to own a gun if you are a felon. They could scoop up a LOT of criminals based on that alone. They CHOOSE not to. We have a TON of laws that area aimed at "gun criminals," but we just don't use them effectively.
> 2. A criminal faced with an unarmed civilian will most likely not fire. A criminal faced with an armed civilian most likely will. Count the bodies.
I think you are nuts. You can choose to be defenseless, if you like, but you don't have the right to force others to. And while I don't have a link, I have read reports that indicate people who resist crime, with force, are more likely to come out alive than people who don't resist at all.
I have some personal experience with this. Some friends of our family, long ago, ran a Qwick-E-Mart of some kind. They were robbed. Though they were unarmed, the robbers shot them both anyway, and one of them died. If they had a weapon, they might have come out ahead.
So, if someone breaks into my house I am going to give them a terminal case of kinetic energy poisoning, no matter what the statistics say.
The drug stuff I might be able to agree on. But I should have the right to defend myself with lethal force. And if you check the stats for places like Florida, where concealed weapons are common, you will see that your fears of a blood bath Old West style scene are unfounded. Heck, crime rates DROPPED in FL after they started handing out the permits! How can you refute that?
Self-defense is a very primal right of all living things. You try to hurt me, I try to stop you -- what's so hard to understand about that?
>After all that time looking, I was getting nowhere...so I checked the BIOS settings and low and behold, his computer was overclocked...he had been told that it was normal & natural...no big deal. Except that this machine was crashing about every 20 minutes...
Overclocking is like drinking. Know your limits. Do it responsibly. Don't judge all OCers by this one guy. He learned his lesson.
>So before you get excited about this, I just wanted to point out that sometimes the better solution is to not try and get that extra 20% or get that extra 20% through distributed computing (e.g. Seti@home).
I can't get increased frame rates in games through distributed computing.
The gasoline example -- it's not an example of Einsteinian mass-energy equivalence. Gas burning is a chemical reaction, not a nuclear one, and E=MC^2 has nothing to do with it. In a chemical reaction, energy stored n chemical bonds is liberated. Matter is not destroyed, only re-ordered. All the elements stick around in the same quantities.
In a nuclear reaction, the difference in mass between what you start with and what you end with is where the energy comes from. That's where the famous equation is useful.
>Tinkering with the natural order of things which God has decreed is not a "bit of fun", it is both dangerous and amoral and needs to be stopped.
Let's see how enthusiastic you are about that belief when you or a loved one are saved from some horrible disease by a cure produced through biotechnology. Know any diabetics? Where do you think that insulin comes from?
And as far as the GOD angle -- well, I am not religious, But let me say this: He gave us BRAINS, and HANDS, and DRIVE, and we are supposed to sit idle? Where do you draw the line between progress and "tinkering with the natural order of things?"
I could not worship a god who gave us such wonderful minds, yet expected us to sit around in mud hovels. No thanks.
>Genetic "engineering" is not a bit of fun, it is the greatest threat to humanity we have ever faced.
This I will agree with you on. Genetic engineering has the potential to ruin the planet like nothing since atomic weapons. It also has the potential to transform our world in wonderful ways. We MUST proceed. The benefits are too great to ignore. But we must be cautious. Circumspect. Scientific. Patient.
"Gattaca" does a good job of presenting how things will be in 50-100 years. I'm a biochemist -- well, used to be -- and a cynic, and I think that the future portrayed in that movie is inevitable. Everyone should see it.
(Well, ok, the advanced space travel they had in the film, we won't be doing that, no one seems to be fired up for it. But fscking you over because of your genes -- yes, sir, that's something business can get behind!)
>a woman stated that she had heard Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on a telephone wire tap in an Echelon center... Any such intrusion is not only in breach of Echelon's internal policy as stated by the NSA (no spying on US citizens) but a severe breach of the Senator's civil rights.
Sad but True:
If you have ever left the United States for foreign soil, the laws about how you can be surveilled are very different than for someone who has never left home. Leave the US even ONCE and you basically forfeit any sort of privacy rights you had WRT being spied on for "national security" purposes.
The Senator has certainly been abroad, and though IANAL, it would seem that his civil rights have not been violated by the LETTER of the law.
Of course the law is BULLSHIT, and it's another tool the NSA uses to keep an eye on us.
Anyone who is interested in the history of the NSA and what they have pulled in the past, and what they may be up to now -- well, in the 80s, when the book was written -- should read "The Puzzle Palace." Sorry, I don't have the author's name handy.
In the good old days, if the FBI wanted to wiretap you, they had to go climb up a pole or whatever and monkey with the phone lines. They still got their taps done.
Today, the telcos are forced to make wiretaps easier, by building the "back door" into the system to start with. But why the hell should I have to pay for that? The costs are probably not insignificant, and the telcos sure as hell aren't going to absorb them. They are going to pass them on. Uncool. Unjust. Let the FBI monkeys keep climbing the telephone poles.
(and this is coming from someone with a raifly rabid pro-law-enforcement agenda -- I just happen to have an even more rabid pro-freedom agenda.)
However, I am seriously worried about him becoming a Jedi. Can't you just see him bein' all clumsy with the lightsaber, accidentally deflecting blaster bolts and inflicting non-lethat, yet incapacitating damage on enemies? That's exaclty the kind of crap I expect if Ep. 2 follows the path set by Ep. 1.
Like I said in another post, I will wait until it shows up on my satellite tv.
Slashdot Mirror
The potential liability issues for having unrestricted terminals in public places are probably too much for a library admin to bear. Especially in an America where there is truly forbidden information on the Internet (DeCSS code, for example), public institutions will be installing filtering software.
Right or wrong, they will want to protect themselves. Without a good faith attempt at filtering, the library system could be open to lawsuits from irate parents. Some of them will blame the library internet access for every screwed up thing their screwed up kids do. But quality parenting is another discussion.
I tried my Rio 300 with Sennheiser and Nakamichi headphones, both in the $100 range. It still sounds like stink. Maybe mine is screwed up. But, like someone said, it was cheap...
>Even people with cable modems aren't *constantly* using them, and those who *are* are usually violating their terms of service by running FTP/HTTP servers (and are usually found, and are usually dealt with).
I am looking forward to the day when running http or mail services from home ISN'T a violation of service. I don't want to have to pay some other hosting facility for my low-impact web server. I don't want to pay for colocation when my house is already wired.
If I am paying for connectivity, I want to be able to use it in any way that I can devise. Note: there is a difference between use and ABUSE. Running a free porn site that saturates the line is abuse. Running mail services so a few friends can have accounts isn't.
I can understand why no cable/dsl lets you run a server, they have to prevent abuse. But there must be a middle ground. Besides just SNEAKING the services, that is.
Oh boy! Another overclocking article. This time around, let's observe a few rules of conduct.
1. No dropping snide comments about how all these overclocking chumps need to keep buying new CPUs because they burn them out. Ha Ha, I'm so clever.
2. No dropping snide comments about how all these non-overclocking chumps are paying extra to the Man. Ha Ha, I'm so 1337.
If we can avoid these posts maybe we'll get somewhere.
I think the selling point is that it is a Springboard module, and not a separate gadget you'd have to carry.
There will be some people who will jump on this thing because they are happy with PalmOS, and they want an MP3 player, and they don't want ANOTHER freaking gadget to fill up pockets and belts with.
Question is, are there enough of these people to make this product successful?
IMHO it costs too much... if it was 128MB for about that price, I *might* go for it... but not without listening first. Man, that Rio 300 I bought was a mistake. It sounds like AM radio.
Someday soon, hopefully, we'll grow most of our plastics. I think there is a good chance that in 20-30 years we will use biotechnology to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon polymer chains of any kind we need. After all, plants to this already, turning CO2 into sugar and cellulose. We just need them to build different molecules for us.
This has already been demonstrated, though the technology isn't ready for prime time.
http://www.monsantoindia.com/news/archives/octo
(yes I am too lazy to hyperlink that. deal with it.)
As a long-time player and occasional pro in the field it is nice to see an RPG article that is POSITIVE. I still think Katz missed the boat on a lot of things, mistaking the overwrought White Wolf worldview for something truly revolutionary, but that's life.
I will give WW credit for putting out quality material, even if it all follows the same themes and is a bit derivative at times. It's still some of the best stuff out there for paranormal RPGs. IMHO.
Like someone else above said I was hoping for an article about how pencil & paper gaming is superior to computer gaming, but I was denied.
>...linking any Internet web site, either directly or through a series of links, to any other Internet web site containing DeCSS.
Awesome! We can play "Six Degrees of DeCSS!"
If the law lets you dig as deep as you like, a LOT of sites will be in violation!
Maybe we should all post the DeCSS Link Path on our sites. This text is pretty rough, excuse me...
"This page is illegal. It links to foo.com, which links to bar.com, which links to fubar.com, which links to somesite.com/decss, which contains the source code for DeCSS.
"By the letter of the court order outlawing this activity, the DeCSS source code could be hidden behind any depth of links, but this page would still be in violation.
Do you have a web site? You may be in violation of this court order as well. To avoid prosecution, you should contact your elected representatives and lobby against burdensome, unenforceable laws like the DCMA."
Or something. You get the idea.
I think the emulator guys may be in trouble from a non-technical standpoint: they could be accused of diluting the strength of Sony's EverQuest brand, not the actual act of reverse-engineering. (which is supposedly strongly protected in the EU anyway.)
Sony tried this with Connectix and failed, as I recall.
Frankly, I hope these guys get away with it. Though I would rather see a full client/server open source MMORPG package...
(off-topic rant begins)
A free client/server MMORPG package with an emphasis on good content creation tools would be a wonderful thing. They say it takes MONTHS just to do the TERRAIN for a new EQ zone. I have worked with custom game development tools and I have to say that sound pathetic -- then again, our coders kicked some serious ass.
If you had killer tools and an adequate client/server package people would rapidly develop some very cool worlds. This seems like a better use of time than reverse-engineering EQ, but I am not going to look a gift emulator in the mouth.
(end rant)
If that's Buckaroo Banzai in your sig, the exact wording is:
Where are we going?
Planet Ten!
When?
Real soon!
Those are good points. I see another possibility, though... that is, battery technology will improve at a fast enough rate to make Transmeta's extremely low-power CPUs not so neat anymore.
I think there will be a short period where their products will fill a valuable niche. But before too long, we will have new exotic power sources for laptops, and laptop makers will be able to stuff power-hungry chips back in. And at that point I will happily take the extra 10fps in Quake 3.
Anyone know about Operation Shamrock?
Back in the '50s the NSA -- their precursor organization, I think, really -- went to all the major US cable operators and said, "what say you give us a tape every day of all the traffic you passed?"
All 3 of the major cable companies caved. They knew it was illegal, but they were afraid of what resisting would bring them. So, for years the govertnment was keyword searching every freaking byte of telegram data that those companies passed.
This was called Operation Shamrock. If you think I'm full of it a little Google searching should show you some links to back this up.
I don't have any doubts they'd pull something like Shamrock again if they could. That includes "voice grep" of telephone data streams as well as sniffing internet traffic for interesting bits.
Let me put it another way -- they *will* do as much as we let them get away with. They have the track record to prove it. I assume that every non-encrypted communication I send is captured in a file somewhere.
Apple has always had their own way of doing things. They amaze me because they have no product research like other companies do -- Jobs has admitted that they don't do focus groups, etc. (Wish I still had a link around to back that up. I had always suspected it, and I was delighted to read confirmation a while back.)
Apple makes the products THEY think are neat. It just so happens that that set overlaps with a set of products that are desireable by the public. It's this overlap that keeps them in business. Sometimes, a truly neat product will fail to intersect the set of salable products, and then you have the Newton.
Enough of their products are innovative hits that I can see why they would want to keep them secret. Suing a bunch of EMPLOYEES will have a chilling effect on other folks with loose lips. It would make me shut up for sure.
This is all spot on. I saw this illustrated once when my Editor Buddy and Artist Buddy were having an argument about when to use all-caps.
Editor Buddy made the point about the word's "coastline" and how the shape of the word is used to read, and all-caps has a uniform coastline and is harder to read because of t. Artist Buddy didn't buy it.
Editor Buddy then had Artist Buddy think of a common phrase, and draw it out as BOXES on a page, each box representing the BASIC shape of a letter -- so a "p" would be a box that descended below the text baseline, an "l" would be a box that rose above the baseline, etc.
Editor Buddy got 2 out of 3 phrases right. Artist Buddy saw the light.
> you paid for the content on the DVD that you are DeCSSing...
Well, it's more like you licensed it... you didn't buy it. You bought the right to *use the data in a specific manner.*
It sucks, but the studios, who distribure the software, do have the right to control how you watch it. If a Linux player chaps their hide, tough for Linux users. I don't LIKE it, but it sure seems like this is within their power.
I used to work for the Alderac Entertainment Group -- we made the Legend of the Five Rings card game. (Wizards of the Coast eventually bought the game, but AEG continued to do the design.)
L5R's logo was an ancient Japanese symbol -- 5 interlocked rings in a circle. The IOC found out about it and threatened a lawsuit if we didn't change it. Never mind that it didn't look anything like the Olympics symbol -- the IOC has an interest in any logo that consists of any kind of linked rings.
We managed to get the IOC to stop short of making us change the card backs, which would have been devastating. We had to change the logo on T-shirts, etc. though.
The old logo, threatening to dilute the branding of the Olympics:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/8321/
The new logo, judged safe for the Olympics:
http://www.wizards.com/l5r/
At the time, at least, you could not sue the IOC -- they were protected by an international treaty, and were above the law in many respects. It's probably still that way. God help you if they set their sights on you.
Bstards.
>1. If guns are illegal, you can arrest people simply for owning a gun. Remember how hard it was to get Al Capone, and how easy it would have been to get him AND all his henchmen if guns were outlawed?
It's already illegal to own a gun if you are a felon. They could scoop up a LOT of criminals based on that alone. They CHOOSE not to. We have a TON of laws that area aimed at "gun criminals," but we just don't use them effectively.
> 2. A criminal faced with an unarmed civilian will most likely not fire. A criminal faced with an armed civilian most likely will. Count the bodies.
I think you are nuts. You can choose to be defenseless, if you like, but you don't have the right to force others to. And while I don't have a link, I have read reports that indicate people who resist crime, with force, are more likely to come out alive than people who don't resist at all.
I have some personal experience with this. Some friends of our family, long ago, ran a Qwick-E-Mart of some kind. They were robbed. Though they were unarmed, the robbers shot them both anyway, and one of them died. If they had a weapon, they might have come out ahead.
So, if someone breaks into my house I am going to give them a terminal case of kinetic energy poisoning, no matter what the statistics say.
The drug stuff I might be able to agree on. But I should have the right to defend myself with lethal force. And if you check the stats for places like Florida, where concealed weapons are common, you will see that your fears of a blood bath Old West style scene are unfounded. Heck, crime rates DROPPED in FL after they started handing out the permits! How can you refute that?
Self-defense is a very primal right of all living things. You try to hurt me, I try to stop you -- what's so hard to understand about that?
>After all that time looking, I was getting nowhere...so I checked the BIOS settings and low and behold, his computer was overclocked...he had been told that it was normal & natural...no big deal. Except that this machine was crashing about every 20 minutes...
Overclocking is like drinking. Know your limits. Do it responsibly. Don't judge all OCers by this one guy. He learned his lesson.
>So before you get excited about this, I just wanted to point out that sometimes the better solution is to not try and get that extra 20% or get that extra 20% through distributed computing (e.g. Seti@home).
I can't get increased frame rates in games through distributed computing.
Not to pick nits... OK, I am picking nits.
The gasoline example -- it's not an example of Einsteinian mass-energy equivalence. Gas burning is a chemical reaction, not a nuclear one, and E=MC^2 has nothing to do with it. In a chemical reaction, energy stored n chemical bonds is liberated. Matter is not destroyed, only re-ordered. All the elements stick around in the same quantities.
In a nuclear reaction, the difference in mass between what you start with and what you end with is where the energy comes from. That's where the famous equation is useful.
>Tinkering with the natural order of things which God has decreed is not a "bit of fun", it is both dangerous and amoral and needs to be stopped.
Let's see how enthusiastic you are about that belief when you or a loved one are saved from some horrible disease by a cure produced through biotechnology. Know any diabetics? Where do you think that insulin comes from?
And as far as the GOD angle -- well, I am not religious, But let me say this: He gave us BRAINS, and HANDS, and DRIVE, and we are supposed to sit idle? Where do you draw the line between progress and "tinkering with the natural order of things?"
I could not worship a god who gave us such wonderful minds, yet expected us to sit around in mud hovels. No thanks.
>Genetic "engineering" is not a bit of fun, it is the greatest threat to humanity we have ever faced.
This I will agree with you on. Genetic engineering has the potential to ruin the planet like nothing since atomic weapons. It also has the potential to transform our world in wonderful ways. We MUST proceed. The benefits are too great to ignore. But we must be cautious. Circumspect. Scientific. Patient.
"Gattaca" does a good job of presenting how things will be in 50-100 years. I'm a biochemist -- well, used to be -- and a cynic, and I think that the future portrayed in that movie is inevitable. Everyone should see it.
(Well, ok, the advanced space travel they had in the film, we won't be doing that, no one seems to be fired up for it. But fscking you over because of your genes -- yes, sir, that's something business can get behind!)
>a woman stated that she had heard Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on a telephone wire tap in an Echelon center... Any such intrusion is not only in breach of Echelon's internal policy as stated by the NSA (no spying on US citizens) but a severe breach of the Senator's civil rights.
Sad but True:
If you have ever left the United States for foreign soil, the laws about how you can be surveilled are very different than for someone who has never left home. Leave the US even ONCE and you basically forfeit any sort of privacy rights you had WRT being spied on for "national security" purposes.
The Senator has certainly been abroad, and though IANAL, it would seem that his civil rights have not been violated by the LETTER of the law.
Of course the law is BULLSHIT, and it's another tool the NSA uses to keep an eye on us.
Anyone who is interested in the history of the NSA and what they have pulled in the past, and what they may be up to now -- well, in the 80s, when the book was written -- should read "The Puzzle Palace." Sorry, I don't have the author's name handy.
In the good old days, if the FBI wanted to wiretap you, they had to go climb up a pole or whatever and monkey with the phone lines. They still got their taps done.
Today, the telcos are forced to make wiretaps easier, by building the "back door" into the system to start with. But why the hell should I have to pay for that? The costs are probably not insignificant, and the telcos sure as hell aren't going to absorb them. They are going to pass them on. Uncool. Unjust. Let the FBI monkeys keep climbing the telephone poles.
(and this is coming from someone with a raifly rabid pro-law-enforcement agenda -- I just happen to have an even more rabid pro-freedom agenda.)
I'm not worried about Jar Jar becoming Boba Fett.
However, I am seriously worried about him becoming a Jedi. Can't you just see him bein' all clumsy with the lightsaber, accidentally deflecting blaster bolts and inflicting non-lethat, yet incapacitating damage on enemies? That's exaclty the kind of crap I expect if Ep. 2 follows the path set by Ep. 1.
Like I said in another post, I will wait until it shows up on my satellite tv.
I'm going to wait for Ep. 2 to show up on satellite. I was really disappointed by Ep. 1.