I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, but I think the biggest deficiency of Babbage's design was the base-10 numbering paradigm. Sure, he had the computer architecture down, to what we would now call the Von Neumann architecture, with the load, compute, store instructions. But making it all work in base-10 was incredibly messy, and I would think that is mostly why it was so difficult for him to implement.
It was not until 1854 that George Bool invented what we now call Boolean Algebra.
Boolean logic allowed us to simplify computing circuitry, improving it's efficiency and size. Take a look at this famous YouTube video, it shows a mechanical calculator built with marbles, where a marble indicates a one and no marble indicates a zero. AND and OR gates are incredibly simple lever mechanisms, and it is powered by gravity and the weight of the marbles. What if Babbage had thought to use marbles and base-2 numbering instead of gears and base-10 numbering to do computations? He couldn't have because Bool's idea had not been thought of until some 30 years after his death, and even after that, it was not until Alan Turing (120 years after Babbage) that anyone was clever enough to realize that Boolean logic, as any other logic, could be used to program a computer. Before Turing, Boolean logic was more or lest a reasoning language for testing the logical soundness of true/false propositions.
So, architecturally, Babbage was ahead of his time, and perhaps had his idea succeeded, it may have encouraged research and development leading to the use of Boolean logic in computing much earlier. But that wasn't the case. It is fun to think of what may have happened though: we may have seen immense computing factories powered by mills which lifted grounded marbles into a giant bin above the factory, and all of that weight would filter through the mechanisms of the computer to produce results. Such a thing would have been unbearably noisy, but fast, simple, easily reparable, and effective. And it would have continued that way until someone thought of using electrical charges instead of marbles.
In all, I think if Babbage's design had succeeded, it may have made the computer revolution happen 30 or 40 years earlier, in which case, I would have been born in the the mostly ignorant generation of kids comprising the social-networking and internet revolution, and not in the more down-to-earth generation of 8-bit gaming, Q-BASIC and assembler-programming, personal computer revolution folk.
I often will listen to either Rammstein or Pink Floyd while coding with Vim, updating my files with Bash, all within the Gnome terminal emulator, while sitting in a well-lit room.
This might be too optimistic, but it may encourage more open-source software. Problems due to in-house proprietary solutions that do not follow proper coding standards, and are not peer reviewed by the hacking-community at large may well be identified as a major risk and drive-up the cost of non-open code, encouraging more code to be opened.
Or it will just wind-up creating a huge racket for proprietary solutions, only benefiting huge companies with lots of capital that can afford the huge cost of developing insurable, standards-compliant proprietary code without opening their code to peer review from the larger hacking community. In this case, I hope the Linux Foundation can afford to get Linux to comply with the insurance companies standards.
I think errors and omissions only covers expensive accidental data loss, or profit losses due to down-time, but not actual theft of data. I think cyber insurance is more for protection of a system that was otherwise functioning normally but suffered losses due to deliberate, malicious break-in through unseen holes in the system's security. It wouldn't surprise me if errors and omissions policies explicitly exclude coverage of damages due to malicious hacking.
Theft insurance is different from accident insurance because assessing risk for each scenario is entirely different.
I don't use a file manager, but I do build most things with GNOME support (if proper), so Nautilus is kinda/sorta there. I'm also not a big panel user - I don't like having tachometers, usage monitors, or any extra stuff filling up my workspace. (I take minimalism to new lows.) Others will have to help you in those respects.
Minimalist users UNITE!
I'll contradict you on this point: I like a tachometer because I like to know if I do something in the terminal that I expect the computer to work really hard on, I like to see that it is actually working hard. If CPU usage drops to idle levels too soon, there must have been a problem.
I use a netbook now so I need all the screen space I can get. I was also a long-time Apple fan-boy. So I love the global menubar in Ubuntu's Unity, and the fact you can access it with the F10 key. I'm also a sucker for compositing windows, even though they are more computationally intensive. Stripping-out all the other stuff you don't need, which involves turning off a bunch of plug-ins in Compiz, you can minimize Unity while keeping the global menu, and you don't need to resort to Xfce which has no (easily installed) global menu.
Before that I used XMonad, which is a tiling window manager (similar to awesome-wm but uses Haskell instead of Lua). You can probably go days without using a mouse, letting the window manager compute the best window layout every time a window is opened. That is about as minimal and un-invasive as you can get. The deal-breaker for me was that I had trouble getting the global menu to work consistently. So I stick with the stripped-down Unity. Call me crazy.
It won't be long before the anti-vaccination crowed and the religious fundamentalists officially join forces to become the most efficient enforcers of pain and suffering the world has ever seen.
@Eric S. Raymond, you talk about campaign finance reform as if it were some leftist big-government plot. It may be a leftist plot, but how the FUCK is it pro-big-government? The problem here is that politicians are in the pockets of special interest groups, and reforming that is a bad thing because somehow it increases regulation? This is the same bullshit Utopian mantra, that any increase in government is bad, that caused the problem to begin with. I'll spell it out for you, though I think it may be an idea too complex for you to understand: the left wants minimal government too, just not to the degree you that want to minimize it. What you shithead libertarians want is an all-out anarchy: minimal (i.e. zero) government by any means necessary.
Then he goes on to bash a straw-man, claiming that liberals only know how to ask the government for stuff when things go wrong. Excuse me, SOPA is unconstitutional because it eliminates our fundamental right to free speech and the technological means to do so. What fundamental rights does Obamacare take away from you? The right for your wife to get an abortion? Your right to NOT be taxed? Oh yeah, your a right-wing retard who thinks the whole world is so fucking simple that if you just minimize government we will turn into some kind of Utopian paradise, all you do you cry and whine all day about our president being a socialist. I bet you also like the fact that some billionaire has bought-up the NYPD and commanded them to beat the shit out of people practicing their first amendment right to peaceably assemble, because you fucking LOVE freedom don't you?
Liberals hate SOPA. Social conservatives also hate SOPA, but in their delusional, twisted little imaginations, SOPA is just another socialist big-government plot, when it was the special interest groups, and a republican-controlled congress that caused it all. Amazing how they are able to turn it on its head and blame the left for this. Fuck Eric S. Raymond in his every one of his Rush-Limbaugh-parroting, Fox-News-bullshit spewing orifices.
Yep pretty sure us Yankees invented the concept, along w the personal computer and the internet, shame some of us are getting schooled on it, a glimpse into American decay? Or the start of a security renaissance?
"Security renaissance?" How about a death-blow to the concept of information property. So you can tie down you product with patents, spend billions on litigation, legally destroy all competition, and donate money to your priest who wants to teach that intelligent design is science... and in the end, some enormous state with billions of people (a good number of them better-educated in science than the average Joe in your country) who don't play by your rules just steals your intellectual property and uses it for themselves anyway.
So what was the point of all those patents, litigation, anti-competitive maneuvering, and anti-science-education lobbying? All it did in the end was stifle innovation in your own country and let the renegade Chinese and Russians win the day in science and technology.
But the king of the United States (the top 1%) will never learn that lesson in time to save us. The only remaining question is: is the US just dying, or it's already completely dead?
This is the right way to make a tablet UI; keep the desktop UI, and create an entirely new one for touch screens.
I disagree. The engineering challenge is here to automate the construction of user interfaces. So an engineer looking for a challenge asks, why do you need two program two completely different interfaces just because one device has a smaller screen and a keyboard? I know it sounds crazy, but it actually would make developers lives easier if they could focus on the logic and design of their program, and have a computer pick the best interface for them automatically and for all devices regardless of their screens and input devices.
However, unfortunately, that is not the route KDE, Gnome, Windows, or Apple is taking; rather it seems they would create one general interface for everything regardless of how easy it is to use, and let the users get used to it.
In fact, I think what KDE has done here is a step in the wrong direction. I would rather not have a computer waste cycles on trying to predict what I like to do, and what am going to do next. Here's a novel idea: why not give me a computer to which I can issue commands, and the computer outputs exactly the result that I commanded to output, error or otherwise. Why can't we see more novel, creative ways of doing this, after all this usage pattern has worked pretty well for us these past 70 or so years.
I'll chime in with the correct answer. If we all programmed in Haskell or OCaml the world would be a better place. Lisp even.
But I won't go on with a full rant. Functional programming is silently winning the war.
So true. Thanks for posting before everyone else. If you don't understand why functional programming is the most important programming paradigm in history, you are doomed. I am so sick of hearing about new languages that aren't functional, as if there weren't enough useless programming languages out there.
That, and the system actually needs to benefit lawyers too, since lawyers are a disproportionate part of politicians and political contributors and lobbyists. They have right now a system that serves them well, they'll fight change or find a way to make it better for them (ie, even more litigious).
EXACTLY. The the US Supreme court isn't there to benefit anyone but the large law firms, to hell with ordinary citizens and technology companies, and anyone who does any actual work. It is all one big extortion racket, designed to make money for lawyers.
No matter how devastating this patent situation becomes to tech companies, change WILL NOT be affected.
China is one of the largest CO2 polluters in the world. Traveling wave reactors are known to be incredibly clean and safe. If you give the Chinese abundant safe and clean energy, this is going to really help the global warming problem.
The reason traveling wave reactors were never used, even though the technology has been know for half a century, is that they produce no waste that is useful to making nuclear weapons. That is only reason why all nuclear power nations wanted the more dangerous reactors that ran on uranium and plutonium fission.
But modernizing the safer, non-weaponizable form of nuclear power is a great way to go.
I'm afraid if you want it actually locked-down, you're pretty screwed. You can't really disable things like switching to a tty with ctrl-alt-f1 without "changing the OS configuration."
Still, if the students don't have a login and password to the lab computer, switching to a frame buffer TTY console won't do them any good, unless one of the operators makes the mistake of logging in to a TTY, then switching back to X without logging out.
I would say, don't sweat the frame buffer TTY. Just un-install ELinks, wget, ftp, ssh, firefox, empathy, epiphany, chromium-browser, knoqueror, xchat, or anything the students could use to connect to the internet. Put these apps back after the test is over.
I know tablets are popular, but I don't have one yet because I type faster on real keyboards.
What sucks even more is that back in 2009, it looked like Netbooks were going to take over. 2 years later, almost all Netbooks are exactly the same as they were back then. No innovation, no competition. The Netbook market died with the introduction of the iPad, even though netbooks are clearly more useful portable computers for people who need to type.
Now we are stuck with these stupid pad computers and these stupid silicone rubber hacks to substitute a keyboard, and we have to download all of our software from some walled garden.
Give me a netbook with a fucking keyboard, and let me install my own fucking software. Fuck the iPad.
I tried YaCy years ago when I first heard about it. I really like the idea, and it could work quite well in academic environments. And its great, because the Internet is inherently peer-to-peer, and if just enough of us get together we can make an excellent and totally peer-to-peer search engine right?
Wrong! Lets face it, the internet requires corporate and governmental control in order to work. If you can de-centralize the Internet away from major corporations and government influence, then I might devote my spare computing cycles to YaCy. But can a community of individuals really launch satellites, or maintain an under-sea cable that goes from Los Angeles to Tokyo?
The reason net neutrality and anti-trust regulations is so important is that we need government to make sure the Internet is free. If we don't, it will become what they want it to become -- just another propaganda tool, like what has happened in China. The anarchist in me loves the idea of YaCy, but we need functioning governments with truly protected free speech and true competition between corporations in order to for good search engines to emerge from market forces. Unfortunately, we have neither true competition, nor do we have true free speech. Google will suit me just fine for now.
Tax the internet, raise costs on everyone, and put that money straight into the music industry lobbyist groups.
I'll bet you a million bucks (or however much it costs to defend yourself in a DMCA lawsuit) that they will take this free government money and use it redouble efforts in their litigation campaign, and to further lobby the government to change the laws to their favor.
Oh great, attach more bits of entropy to your browser's set of environment variables that can uniquely identify you to malicious web applications.
The best way not to be tracked is to make your browser spoof the default configurations of very common browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer, and then switch randomly between which profiles it spoofs as you navigate from site to site.
But if they get their way, and more competition appears, the record labels will be able to raise prices and make more money?
Yes, because is not the record companies competing for customers, it is exactly the opposite: the customers are competing for content (music they love to listen to) in a sort of auction, and whoever pays the most money gets a "license" to temporarily listen to the music.
Apple is facilitating these auctions, but there is no competition so Apple can do price-fixing, which is good for consumers. If Google enters the market, then record companies can threaten to stop providing licenses to Apple and instead provide licenses to a corporation who is more willing to kiss their asses and hike-up prices. This is bad for consumers because now the RIAA is setting the rules of the auction, rather than Apple.
Fortunately, Google has been pissing off the RIAA instead of consumers, because they refuse to let the RIAA dictate terms to them. Score one for the consumers, and thank Google for that.
But I'll bet you anything ordinary people will overlook this victory on their behalf, and still think of Google as some evil privacy-infringing corporation.
Chinese chip manufacturers hack the VHDL source to install back-doors in all chips. The Chinese military then uses these back doors to install key-logging software on any computer controlled by these chips, then use the key-loggers to steal passwords from people who have control over very dangerous things. They then forge identities and start taking control of stuff that needs more than just a password to access.
Really, this is beyond their capabilities? A bit optimistic, aren't we?
Well, to be sure, Ron Paul is stupid, but he isn't arrogant, which is an improvement. I've heard him say "evolution is just a theory", but he seems like the kind of guy who would at least hear-out scientists if he were ever forced into a position where he had to make a tough choice on education. So I would never vote for him, but I sure wouldn't mind having him for president.
You can do that without killing anyone right this minute. Just unplug your computer from the Internet, and from now on just buy all of your software on CD's or on memory sticks from people who can afford security. Rent videos from the video store instead of watching YouTube. Go to the public library to use e-mail. And never ever use a credit card. Always pay with cash, always withdrawn from the bank by a human bank teller, not an ATM.
Then, you can use can use your computer and any other non-internet connected gadget safely to your hearts content.
If you are willing to sacrifice social networking, cell phones, and the use of e-mail in your home, you never have to worry about cyber crime. I'm not being sarcastic, this is totally possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, but I think the biggest deficiency of Babbage's design was the base-10 numbering paradigm. Sure, he had the computer architecture down, to what we would now call the Von Neumann architecture, with the load, compute, store instructions. But making it all work in base-10 was incredibly messy, and I would think that is mostly why it was so difficult for him to implement.
It was not until 1854 that George Bool invented what we now call Boolean Algebra.
Boolean logic allowed us to simplify computing circuitry, improving it's efficiency and size. Take a look at this famous YouTube video, it shows a mechanical calculator built with marbles, where a marble indicates a one and no marble indicates a zero. AND and OR gates are incredibly simple lever mechanisms, and it is powered by gravity and the weight of the marbles. What if Babbage had thought to use marbles and base-2 numbering instead of gears and base-10 numbering to do computations? He couldn't have because Bool's idea had not been thought of until some 30 years after his death, and even after that, it was not until Alan Turing (120 years after Babbage) that anyone was clever enough to realize that Boolean logic, as any other logic, could be used to program a computer. Before Turing, Boolean logic was more or lest a reasoning language for testing the logical soundness of true/false propositions.
So, architecturally, Babbage was ahead of his time, and perhaps had his idea succeeded, it may have encouraged research and development leading to the use of Boolean logic in computing much earlier. But that wasn't the case. It is fun to think of what may have happened though: we may have seen immense computing factories powered by mills which lifted grounded marbles into a giant bin above the factory, and all of that weight would filter through the mechanisms of the computer to produce results. Such a thing would have been unbearably noisy, but fast, simple, easily reparable, and effective. And it would have continued that way until someone thought of using electrical charges instead of marbles.
In all, I think if Babbage's design had succeeded, it may have made the computer revolution happen 30 or 40 years earlier, in which case, I would have been born in the the mostly ignorant generation of kids comprising the social-networking and internet revolution, and not in the more down-to-earth generation of 8-bit gaming, Q-BASIC and assembler-programming, personal computer revolution folk.
And lose the techno...put on some pink floyd!
I often will listen to either Rammstein or Pink Floyd while coding with Vim, updating my files with Bash, all within the Gnome terminal emulator, while sitting in a well-lit room.
This might be too optimistic, but it may encourage more open-source software. Problems due to in-house proprietary solutions that do not follow proper coding standards, and are not peer reviewed by the hacking-community at large may well be identified as a major risk and drive-up the cost of non-open code, encouraging more code to be opened.
Or it will just wind-up creating a huge racket for proprietary solutions, only benefiting huge companies with lots of capital that can afford the huge cost of developing insurable, standards-compliant proprietary code without opening their code to peer review from the larger hacking community. In this case, I hope the Linux Foundation can afford to get Linux to comply with the insurance companies standards.
I think errors and omissions only covers expensive accidental data loss, or profit losses due to down-time, but not actual theft of data. I think cyber insurance is more for protection of a system that was otherwise functioning normally but suffered losses due to deliberate, malicious break-in through unseen holes in the system's security. It wouldn't surprise me if errors and omissions policies explicitly exclude coverage of damages due to malicious hacking.
Theft insurance is different from accident insurance because assessing risk for each scenario is entirely different.
I don't use a file manager, but I do build most things with GNOME support (if proper), so Nautilus is kinda/sorta there. I'm also not a big panel user - I don't like having tachometers, usage monitors, or any extra stuff filling up my workspace. (I take minimalism to new lows.) Others will have to help you in those respects.
Minimalist users UNITE!
I'll contradict you on this point: I like a tachometer because I like to know if I do something in the terminal that I expect the computer to work really hard on, I like to see that it is actually working hard. If CPU usage drops to idle levels too soon, there must have been a problem.
I use a netbook now so I need all the screen space I can get. I was also a long-time Apple fan-boy. So I love the global menubar in Ubuntu's Unity, and the fact you can access it with the F10 key. I'm also a sucker for compositing windows, even though they are more computationally intensive. Stripping-out all the other stuff you don't need, which involves turning off a bunch of plug-ins in Compiz, you can minimize Unity while keeping the global menu, and you don't need to resort to Xfce which has no (easily installed) global menu.
Before that I used XMonad, which is a tiling window manager (similar to awesome-wm but uses Haskell instead of Lua). You can probably go days without using a mouse, letting the window manager compute the best window layout every time a window is opened. That is about as minimal and un-invasive as you can get. The deal-breaker for me was that I had trouble getting the global menu to work consistently. So I stick with the stripped-down Unity. Call me crazy.
I have this sneaking suspicion that if genome 'brakes' are present in most animals, they're probably there for a reason.
I wonder what sort of long term side effects you'd be looking at with vastly increased muscle growth.
Probably the inability to consume enough food to keep those muscles functioning.
It won't be long before the anti-vaccination crowed and the religious fundamentalists officially join forces to become the most efficient enforcers of pain and suffering the world has ever seen.
@Eric S. Raymond, you talk about campaign finance reform as if it were some leftist big-government plot. It may be a leftist plot, but how the FUCK is it pro-big-government? The problem here is that politicians are in the pockets of special interest groups, and reforming that is a bad thing because somehow it increases regulation? This is the same bullshit Utopian mantra, that any increase in government is bad, that caused the problem to begin with. I'll spell it out for you, though I think it may be an idea too complex for you to understand: the left wants minimal government too, just not to the degree you that want to minimize it. What you shithead libertarians want is an all-out anarchy: minimal (i.e. zero) government by any means necessary.
Then he goes on to bash a straw-man, claiming that liberals only know how to ask the government for stuff when things go wrong. Excuse me, SOPA is unconstitutional because it eliminates our fundamental right to free speech and the technological means to do so. What fundamental rights does Obamacare take away from you? The right for your wife to get an abortion? Your right to NOT be taxed? Oh yeah, your a right-wing retard who thinks the whole world is so fucking simple that if you just minimize government we will turn into some kind of Utopian paradise, all you do you cry and whine all day about our president being a socialist. I bet you also like the fact that some billionaire has bought-up the NYPD and commanded them to beat the shit out of people practicing their first amendment right to peaceably assemble, because you fucking LOVE freedom don't you?
Liberals hate SOPA. Social conservatives also hate SOPA, but in their delusional, twisted little imaginations, SOPA is just another socialist big-government plot, when it was the special interest groups, and a republican-controlled congress that caused it all. Amazing how they are able to turn it on its head and blame the left for this. Fuck Eric S. Raymond in his every one of his Rush-Limbaugh-parroting, Fox-News-bullshit spewing orifices.
Yep pretty sure us Yankees invented the concept, along w the personal computer and the internet, shame some of us are getting schooled on it, a glimpse into American decay? Or the start of a security renaissance?
"Security renaissance?" How about a death-blow to the concept of information property. So you can tie down you product with patents, spend billions on litigation, legally destroy all competition, and donate money to your priest who wants to teach that intelligent design is science... and in the end, some enormous state with billions of people (a good number of them better-educated in science than the average Joe in your country) who don't play by your rules just steals your intellectual property and uses it for themselves anyway.
So what was the point of all those patents, litigation, anti-competitive maneuvering, and anti-science-education lobbying? All it did in the end was stifle innovation in your own country and let the renegade Chinese and Russians win the day in science and technology.
But the king of the United States (the top 1%) will never learn that lesson in time to save us. The only remaining question is: is the US just dying, or it's already completely dead?
This is the right way to make a tablet UI; keep the desktop UI, and create an entirely new one for touch screens.
I disagree. The engineering challenge is here to automate the construction of user interfaces. So an engineer looking for a challenge asks, why do you need two program two completely different interfaces just because one device has a smaller screen and a keyboard? I know it sounds crazy, but it actually would make developers lives easier if they could focus on the logic and design of their program, and have a computer pick the best interface for them automatically and for all devices regardless of their screens and input devices.
However, unfortunately, that is not the route KDE, Gnome, Windows, or Apple is taking; rather it seems they would create one general interface for everything regardless of how easy it is to use, and let the users get used to it.
In fact, I think what KDE has done here is a step in the wrong direction. I would rather not have a computer waste cycles on trying to predict what I like to do, and what am going to do next. Here's a novel idea: why not give me a computer to which I can issue commands, and the computer outputs exactly the result that I commanded to output, error or otherwise. Why can't we see more novel, creative ways of doing this, after all this usage pattern has worked pretty well for us these past 70 or so years.
I considered the 50*3 approach for an instant, but decided that 40*3 + 7*3 was easier because I do addition faster than subtraction.
I had the exact same thought process as you.
Wow - either Ballmer is an A-grade ignoramus or (more likely) an A-grade liar!
Ballmer is so full of shit, his density is comparable to that of a pulsar. Since when has Microsoft EVER had any (truly) open software of any kind?
I'll chime in with the correct answer. If we all programmed in Haskell or OCaml the world would be a better place. Lisp even.
But I won't go on with a full rant. Functional programming is silently winning the war.
So true. Thanks for posting before everyone else. If you don't understand why functional programming is the most important programming paradigm in history, you are doomed. I am so sick of hearing about new languages that aren't functional, as if there weren't enough useless programming languages out there.
That, and the system actually needs to benefit lawyers too, since lawyers are a disproportionate part of politicians and political contributors and lobbyists. They have right now a system that serves them well, they'll fight change or find a way to make it better for them (ie, even more litigious).
EXACTLY.
The the US Supreme court isn't there to benefit anyone but the large law firms, to hell with ordinary citizens and technology companies, and anyone who does any actual work. It is all one big extortion racket, designed to make money for lawyers.
No matter how devastating this patent situation becomes to tech companies, change WILL NOT be affected.
China is one of the largest CO2 polluters in the world. Traveling wave reactors are known to be incredibly clean and safe. If you give the Chinese abundant safe and clean energy, this is going to really help the global warming problem.
The reason traveling wave reactors were never used, even though the technology has been know for half a century, is that they produce no waste that is useful to making nuclear weapons. That is only reason why all nuclear power nations wanted the more dangerous reactors that ran on uranium and plutonium fission.
But modernizing the safer, non-weaponizable form of nuclear power is a great way to go.
I'm afraid if you want it actually locked-down, you're pretty screwed. You can't really disable things like switching to a tty with ctrl-alt-f1 without "changing the OS configuration."
Still, if the students don't have a login and password to the lab computer, switching to a frame buffer TTY console won't do them any good, unless one of the operators makes the mistake of logging in to a TTY, then switching back to X without logging out.
I would say, don't sweat the frame buffer TTY. Just un-install ELinks, wget, ftp, ssh, firefox, empathy, epiphany, chromium-browser, knoqueror, xchat, or anything the students could use to connect to the internet. Put these apps back after the test is over.
I know tablets are popular, but I don't have one yet because I type faster on real keyboards.
What sucks even more is that back in 2009, it looked like Netbooks were going to take over. 2 years later, almost all Netbooks are exactly the same as they were back then. No innovation, no competition. The Netbook market died with the introduction of the iPad, even though netbooks are clearly more useful portable computers for people who need to type.
Now we are stuck with these stupid pad computers and these stupid silicone rubber hacks to substitute a keyboard, and we have to download all of our software from some walled garden.
Give me a netbook with a fucking keyboard, and let me install my own fucking software. Fuck the iPad.
I tried YaCy years ago when I first heard about it. I really like the idea, and it could work quite well in academic environments. And its great, because the Internet is inherently peer-to-peer, and if just enough of us get together we can make an excellent and totally peer-to-peer search engine right?
Wrong! Lets face it, the internet requires corporate and governmental control in order to work. If you can de-centralize the Internet away from major corporations and government influence, then I might devote my spare computing cycles to YaCy. But can a community of individuals really launch satellites, or maintain an under-sea cable that goes from Los Angeles to Tokyo?
The reason net neutrality and anti-trust regulations is so important is that we need government to make sure the Internet is free. If we don't, it will become what they want it to become -- just another propaganda tool, like what has happened in China. The anarchist in me loves the idea of YaCy, but we need functioning governments with truly protected free speech and true competition between corporations in order to for good search engines to emerge from market forces. Unfortunately, we have neither true competition, nor do we have true free speech. Google will suit me just fine for now.
Tax the internet, raise costs on everyone, and put that money straight into the music industry lobbyist groups.
I'll bet you a million bucks (or however much it costs to defend yourself in a DMCA lawsuit) that they will take this free government money and use it redouble efforts in their litigation campaign, and to further lobby the government to change the laws to their favor.
Oh great, attach more bits of entropy to your browser's set of environment variables that can uniquely identify you to malicious web applications.
The best way not to be tracked is to make your browser spoof the default configurations of very common browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer, and then switch randomly between which profiles it spoofs as you navigate from site to site.
But if they get their way, and more competition appears, the record labels will be able to raise prices and make more money?
Yes, because is not the record companies competing for customers, it is exactly the opposite: the customers are competing for content (music they love to listen to) in a sort of auction, and whoever pays the most money gets a "license" to temporarily listen to the music.
Apple is facilitating these auctions, but there is no competition so Apple can do price-fixing, which is good for consumers. If Google enters the market, then record companies can threaten to stop providing licenses to Apple and instead provide licenses to a corporation who is more willing to kiss their asses and hike-up prices. This is bad for consumers because now the RIAA is setting the rules of the auction, rather than Apple.
Fortunately, Google has been pissing off the RIAA instead of consumers, because they refuse to let the RIAA dictate terms to them. Score one for the consumers, and thank Google for that.
But I'll bet you anything ordinary people will overlook this victory on their behalf, and still think of Google as some evil privacy-infringing corporation.
Chinese chip manufacturers hack the VHDL source to install back-doors in all chips. The Chinese military then uses these back doors to install key-logging software on any computer controlled by these chips, then use the key-loggers to steal passwords from people who have control over very dangerous things. They then forge identities and start taking control of stuff that needs more than just a password to access.
Really, this is beyond their capabilities? A bit optimistic, aren't we?
Bureau of Applied Stalinism
Or how about:
American
Stalinist
Security for
Managing
Unpatriotic
National
Citizenry in the
Homeland
Well, to be sure, Ron Paul is stupid, but he isn't arrogant, which is an improvement. I've heard him say "evolution is just a theory", but he seems like the kind of guy who would at least hear-out scientists if he were ever forced into a position where he had to make a tough choice on education. So I would never vote for him, but I sure wouldn't mind having him for president.
You can do that without killing anyone right this minute. Just unplug your computer from the Internet, and from now on just buy all of your software on CD's or on memory sticks from people who can afford security. Rent videos from the video store instead of watching YouTube. Go to the public library to use e-mail. And never ever use a credit card. Always pay with cash, always withdrawn from the bank by a human bank teller, not an ATM.
Then, you can use can use your computer and any other non-internet connected gadget safely to your hearts content.
If you are willing to sacrifice social networking, cell phones, and the use of e-mail in your home, you never have to worry about cyber crime. I'm not being sarcastic, this is totally possible.