The objection to metric seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on imperial or without metric altogether. It looks very strongly like just a case of "this is the way I've always done it", which IMHO really doesn't cut it in cases like this when the methods of operation of metric make it considerably better suited to the subject in question.
>The proper way to settle this sort of thing is to use both systems. That way everyone is happy.
No - that way everybody suffers. Half the USA's industry has to waste _huge_ amounts of money on the redundancy of two ranges of equipment, tools, and parts that do exactly the same thing. The auto-shop passes the cost straight back to the consumer, who meanwhile has to do jump through mental hoops because the article he is reading on the ExpressoPC alternates between the standards when describing dimensions. The only people that are happy are those who manufacture measuring instruments, because the market is twice what is desirable.
While I imagine there are people here who are as you describe, most of the commentry I've been reading has been raising legimate points that show your simplified analogy to have a host of problems, some of which are crucial to the issues.
Maybe I have my threashold set too high, but don't paint everyone who opposes what is happening with the same brush - distinct from the "I want free stuff" are issues and ramifications of this that go much deeper than superficial car analogies (though Katz somehow managed to completely miss most of them...)
The most blindingly obvious discrepancy in "the world is simple black&white - theft is theft is theft" approach is that some people have a legitimate right to move an mp3 taken from a copyright work, across the net. And from there, I'd advise you upgrade to a greyscale monitor:-)
>Hear, hear! If Jon Katz has an idea for changing >the system of distributing music, let's hear it. >But until that time, what those 300K people are >doing is stealing. No other way to describe it.
While I agree with your point, I think even Metallica's lawyers would agree that those 300K people are _not_ stealing. They're not people who downloaded free Metallica music, they're people who by using Napster, made the music availible for _other_ people to steal.
This is probably more akin to leaving a book in a photocopier on the street such that anyone can use it to make a copy - your intention might be that only people with a right to make a copy are to use it, but you're not checking up on that right first (mp3.com style), thus you have knowingly left it vulnerable to copyright abusers. I don't think this carries the same moral weight as perpetrating the copyright abuse yourself - you have performed an action with an ostensibly legitimate purpose, but that action also opens the door for someone to perform a criminal action with greater ease. _Lots_ of accepted things fall into that catagory
Hmmm, now that I phrase it that way, I'm not sure I agree that these 300K people can be said to be in the wrong - I _know_ that most of them will, in fact, have done wrong, but opening a HDD containing copyright material to the net should not be an illegal action - the person who abuses the connection to make an illegal copy should take the full responsibility. (Not because HDD owner is entirely innocent, but because in many cases, especially in fields other than mp3's, they _will_ be legitimate and the repercussions of being able to prosecute someone for this action are Bad. Eg extreme, unrealistic example - you get fined because your CD wallet (once you have personal copies on your minidisc) fell out of your pocket and you didn't notice, thus your negligence resulted in a situation where a pirate could have accessed and copied copyright material.)
Hmm, now it's sounding scarier, so I'm thinking that maybe the lawyers can't actually do anything substantial to these people, else they could sue me for losing my CDs on the same point of law. I don't think we've got the full picture here. I sure as hell haven't.
>My thoughts exactly. It would have been a lot better if they put it next to a *ruler* rather than a pencil.
From memory, they did. I'm guessing you might have missed it because you were looking for an inch scale - but when you're dealing with technology, you use modern measurements, like metric millimetres.
>Environmentalists and their sympathisers blind themselves to the facts too often in the pursuit of saving cute and cudly animals
Yeah, and feminists are mostly hairy-legged man-haters. It might save some thought and make you feel more self-rightious to uncritically equate the fringe that is outrageous enough to make the news with the _actual_ movement, but this would reflect very poorly on your judgement or intellect, so I'll hope against all evidence that this is not what is happening:-)
You wouldn't believe the amount of effort that enviromentalists put into overcoming the public reluctance to care about anything that _isn't_ cute and cuddly. It's mostly the non-enviromentalist public that makes saving cute and cuddly animals into a big deal, and unfortunately, it's often the only publicity conservation can get. No-one cares about desperately trying to save some bug or frog or prickly shrub that is the keystone species of an entire ecosystem, except the environmentalists. But it'll never make the news (no cutesy appeal) so people are left with the idiotic assumption that environmentalists are only interested in cuddly animals, when the media and general public should stand accused. Among conservation circles, there is even a term for it. I forget it, but it's something like "LFM syndrome" Where LFM (not the real term) means something like "Large Furry Mammal". If a threatened ecosystem doesn't have one, good luck trying to save it - the public won't care, and that means you'll probably end up carrying the burden alone. And since the media don't care, the public will never know of the magnitude of sacrifice, and write you off as another loonie band-wagon tree-hugger.
The point has been made that this violation might not have been completely accidental, and may have been quite a beneficial "mistake" to have made. On the other hand - people can make mistakes, and open source concepts like GPL are still a new concept to many. I suspect the way forward might be an undefined period of grace during which companies can claim ignorance and get away with a tut-tut, but soon easing into more and more serious prosecution as the excuse loses its plausibility and GPL becomes more established in the commercial world. Once a few settlements have been made, giving profile to the new work ethic, violators get ruthlessly pursued by people who actually get off their butts and act, rather than just talk like I do:-)
>That example does little to disprove my point, though I accept yours that a vigilant >eye must be kept on local authorities. >The victim was a target of surveillance for an intelligence unit of a local police >force. I can't imagine any/every local police force instituting a >national internet screening project. There are not enough law enforcement officials >in the world.
You're lacking the background of the case, which I've been following for a while (and the Choudry SIS break-in case that prompted it). The details are more disturbing than what was reported in that "latest development" article in what is highly regarded as a conservative and reputable newspaper, not some tabloid out for attention.
>Furthermore, this article's headline claims that the victim was surveyed for 15 years, but the evidence presented later in the article only seems to >suggest that the person's picutre was taken once about 12 years ago, and that a decetcive had become aware of his existance 15 years ago, >and with no explicit or implicit surveillance in between. I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the article didn't report it. To me, this smacks of >a sensational headline without the article containing anything to support it.
Like I said, I just provided the article as a recent example and a starting point. While that one brief article does not mention a lot of the things that happened, if you look into the whole sordid affair, you will find a lot of the sorts of things I talk about.
>Furthermore, you missed my point entirely.
No, I vehemently disagree with your point, and consider it a simple naivety that is uttery belied by some of the evidence on public record. The invasions of privacy do not need to be justified because in the real world, the only people with clearance to access the documents are those working for the agencies. Theoretically the courts can get to them in extreme cases, but this rarely happens. Thus an intelligence officer can go their entire career without obtaining the necessary warrants and have little chance of getting caught. As there is no fear of getting caught by the law, there is no need to comply with it, and what the courts have managed to reveal (in most countries) is that these agencies operate outside the law on a normal, routine basis. On what grounds can you claim this is not going to continue?
>Maybe what I did not make clear is that over time, the economic justifications will >be less immediately correlated to the true justification, and >that members of protest groups and "peace-loving organizations" will soon be >typical targets of the economically-justified surveillance because >their actions will be counter to the capitalist will.
I don't understand this - are you suggesting that voicing a opinion on economic policy can somehow be damaging to a society? Isn't the whole point of our societies that such ideas must always be challenged? I agree that Choudry's home was (illegally) invaded because the SIS didn't like his economic views (the event that led to the search of Dr Small's home), but I can't understand how this can possibly be economically justified - if the people chose to change economic policy, even for the worse, that is their right. Using intelligence agencies to intimidate people who don't fall in line with the dictated ideology is a far greater threat to the wellbeing of a society. Are you suggesting that such abuse is not in fact economically justified, but rather justified in terms of directly serving the interests of a select group, regardless of whether this is to the detriment of the nation (eg Disney)? You say "economically justified", but this infers "justified for the good of the nation on economic grounds" (which I disagree with) as opposed to "justified to a select group on the grounds of maintaining their wealth", which seems to better fit what you're saying.
>You don't have to be planning to DOS Yahoo to be an economic terrorist, you can be >planning a rally at your local Daytons against fur, or publishing material informing >consumers what practices Disney uses to produce movies...
Can you explain how these actions can possibly be economic terrorism? Not buying someone's goods is not terrorism. Publishing true information about the past actions of someone is not terrorism (though in some cases it might constitute espionage, but not the cases we're talking about)
>Lastly, I never said I was okay with a national eavesdropping project, so I don't >know what gave you that impression.
I didn't actually have that impression, I just get irritated at the whole "you've got nothing to fear unless you're a terrorist" myth. I know good people who have been at the wrong end of intelligence prejudice. It might seem implausible that normal people get watched because it wouldn't make sense to watch them, but that's only because you assume these inbred, isolated, paranoid institutions operate with anything resembling common sense, intelligence, or competence. They are entirely free from scrutiny. Since when has that been a breeding ground for anything but incredible ineptness. Since when has anything forced out by the courts shown anything except appalling negligence (giving them the benefit of the doubt)?
>You, sir, should wake up, because no one is out to get you. Not as long as you're a >good consumer.
I'm not a good consumer, and I didn't suggest anyone was out to get me.
James Rusbridger once wrote a letter to the editor of his rural paper critical of MI6. Not political, critical of their performance and competence. Two weeks later a meterman appeared to check the power, asking a few friendly political questions - but a meterman had already been a few weeks earlier. When ID was demanded, he made his excuses and hurridly left. The licence plates disappeared from police records the next day. All he did was write a damn letter to the paper. Hopefully/. is less important than that paper.
But like I said, I'm not at all worried about me, it's the myths that these agencies actually work, and that they are responsible, and that ordinary people have nothing to fear, and so on, that annoy me. By them, the victims are doubly denied justice - they cannot get any from the law (except in incredibly rare cases), and they cannot get sympathy or even acknowledgement from other people that a wrong has even been done to them - they get condemnation and derision instead. Derision born of ignorance, naivety, and gullibility, pure and simple.
What could you do if as soon as you try to say anything of the crime committed against you, people write you off as a paranoid idiot. It's like being put into the metaphorical mental ward when sane and trying to reason your way out - yes of course you're sane dear, now take your pills and be a good patient. Better to suffer in silence. That's not a good state of affairs.
>For some reason it sounds as if you >think anyone and everyone is capable of arousing suspicion. I think that your paranoia is still too broad and mis-focused. >Suspicion will not be randomly meted out and privacy invasions be taken lightly
Ignorance is bliss. I refer you to an article not two weeks old where a man used the courts to confirm he had been the target of surveilence. Why was he targeted? Because he wrote some articles for the journal of a peace-promotion group. Nothing to do with business, or national interest or anything lofty, just a normal citizen doing the right thing.
http://www.press.co.nz/2000/16/000420l05.htm
You can naively assume that intelligence takes your privacy seriously, but I suggest you get into contact with some of the people who have done _nothing_ wrong, yet have had their lives screwed by personal agendas and bigotry using the sheild of "National security". It Happens. This kind of blind gullibility irrates me and is almost as big an obsticle for the innocent victims as the unaccountability of the agencies themselves.
I should also point out that many of the people who get screwed over once held rosy naive notions that they had nothing to fear while they were doing nothing wrong. Kinda like you.
>Would I be happy handing over my decryption key(s) to the police? Would I be happy letting them into my house? It's pretty much the >same question, but I somehow feel that although I'd allow a search warrant, I wouldn't divulge my keys...
Sheesh, I'm the most law-abiding wimp you could ever find and I certainly wouldn't give them my keys if I thought there was the slightest chance of them ever using them. (I _might_ give them them a secure box that contained my keys but could only be opened by me in the event of my locking myself out...:-)
I fit into that demographic where police assume the worst of you however.
>I don't view it as "spying on me" anymore than I view a doctor examining my body to >make sure I am healthy as "spying on me." >If I was committing wholesale violations of the law left and right I might feel differently.
You might also feel differently if your business was run into the ground, or you lost your job, or you had to choose between bankruptcy or having no chance at all of ever clearing your name.
Just because "I'm Fine Jack" doesn't mean there aren't innocent victims who are paying the price for your lack of vigilance. Abuses (and incompetence) of power does happen, and it has real victims - some of whom were _killed_.
As to your Doctors analogy of it necessary for good health, the Rainbow Warrior incident in the previous post makes a convincing counter-example - the Doctor gives you painful enemas because he has an enema fetish rather than because you need it, and as a result of his obsession, he fails to diagnose a cancer that posses a lethal threat to you. But that doesn't matter because his constant barium enemas have given you another cancer anyway. Who exactly are the intelligence agencies protecting you from? It's obviously not the other intelligence agencies (see Echelon, or the Rainbow Warrior example again). It's obviously not Rogue States (learn something about how Iraq's intentions prior to the gulf war were in hindsight practically broadcast broadband, yet still took the CIA by complete surprise), it's obviously not the evil hackers (though like the rogue states, this is the result of extreme incompetence as much as anything). The thing that intelligence agencies are most adept at is blocking off information from the public. The problem is that so much of this information is the political duplicity and screw-ups that the people have every right to know about, but which is awfully convenient to keep classified.
Or you could just accept the reassurances that it's all for your own good, and the world will end overnight if their powers were restricted. But it would be better to hear both sides of the story so that an informed decision can be made. Try "The Intelligence Game - Illusions and delusions of International Espionage" by James Rusbridger. Or just take a look at the record these agencies have.
The price of having these inept organisations is extremely high. We will probably never know if it comes even close to worth it.
>First off, YOU (yes, YOU) are not interesting enough for them to watch you.
You are labouring under the common misconception that the agencies take a well balanced and sensible approach to surveillance. As touched on in a/. post above, (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/04/29/2362 14&cid=125) there are cases where the courts have occasionally exposed them watching the exact people you would claim have nothing to fear. Which kind of makes a mockery of your claims. I agree that some moderation of paranoia is _definitely_ in order, and that there are greater, less exotic threats that are _far_ more deserving of our attention, but let's not kid ourselves when the proof is on public record.
The photograph "Main Board Circuit Diagram" showing the finished board seems to lack an awful lot of the componentry shown in the circuit diagram. Looking at the photo, I'd say that not only could I build one, but I could build it in 1/4 to 1/8th the volume. Looking at the circuit diagram however, I'm a bit more worried.
It might be that some of the circuitry is useful but not strictly necessary, but I'm guessing there is a shitload more componentry on the other side of the board, not seen in the photgraph. Anyone know?
Also, I'm unfamiliar with the type of project/base board that he used to solder the components to - do the sockets connect to each other in horizontal rows or vertical columns, or some of each, or via wiring that you solder on the back, or what?
>I'm very tempted to purchase a classified ad in the NY Times and publish the DeCSS code in my ad...
No-one would clue on to what you were doing if you stuck it in the personals - it'd look like just a secret communication between pen-friends (and it is even addressed "To the caring and honest person who enjoyed that movie last week".):-)
Next day, post a reply: "To the coded letter-writer, from the person who enjoys movies - Thanks for posting the DeCSS sourcecode in this column yesterday. I appreciate your help in preserving my "fair use" rights under copyright law."
The punchline is, if they pull the second ad (they won't have pulled the first), then that's almost as funny as if they don't pull it:-)
>If you're willing to open yourself up to charges of perjury, feel free.
Not necessarily. My bet is that the CoS has not opened itself up to perjury in this way - the letter will threaten legal action rather than make a non-vague legal claim, and E-bay will act on it because E-bay couldn't care less about losing one sale in a million - it's easier than running even a small risk of legal proceedings. Like the case of ISPs in the UK - they _know_ they could win the court case if it came to court, but it's easier to just pull the thing.
Is there any way we could get a copy of the CoS letter to E-bay? Get a free lesson from the Pro's?:-)
>Won't releasing the code for the robots make it easier for Supervillons to create their army of >killer robots out of some code origionally designed to dust my house and feed my cat?
Archvillain for hire... http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3210/archv illain.htm
As you can see from the streaming web-cam, there are still perfectly adequate options even without the killer robots.
No, at first glance it would seem that until you can design circuits, you're stuck building someone else's designs, but this is not the case, and kits like this one figure into why:
Most good kits have information on how and why the circuit works, and break it down into its various simpler subsystems. This allows you to understand what is happening on a basic level, and gives you an idea as to the various methods and approaches to problems. There is also often "alternative things to try" info, which shows how to derive different behaviour from a circuit by changing different component values. Thus you get a hands-on feel for what is going on. After you've built or looked at a few kits, and have even a basic grasp of what components do, you can follow the circuits a bit closer, and get a lot more out of the "how it works" info. Then you can experiment with your own changes, and start making your own circuits by finding one that does roughly what you want and then altering it slightly to fit the bill. Now you really start learning. As you get better at altering circuits, you can achieve your goals from circuits less and less suited to your task. Futhermore, as you are familiar with the subsystems that make up a robot (eg motor drivers, sensor circuits etc), you can design your own robot by building it out of the various subsystems that will do the stuff you want (or close enough that you can modify them). By now, you're building a sort of "clip-art" library in your head of circuit sub-subsysytems - useful component configurations that crop up everywhere. Then you start cut&pasting these configurations to make major differences in circuit functionality. And soon you can actually design your own circuits (to a limited degree - but becoming less and less limited), but by now you've been designing original robots for a fair time. Qualities like optimisation, elegance, efficiency, simplicity, etc are harder to learn by osmosis and are probably easier to aquire via a solid education.
The point is that you don't have to be able to design circuits before you can design robots - there is a gradual progression of being able to modify circuits to your own unique ends, and additionally of being able make new complex circuits by combining existing subsystems, thus you can create new and original designs long before you have full mastery of the field.
The length of the process would depend on how much time you spend on the hobby. I've spent very little time on it, so it's taken over a year to get to the point where I can design new circuits but much prefer to find a really well-designed and efficient circuit optimised-to-hell-and-back, and modify that (even if of significantly different purpose), thus benefiting from the brilliance of someone who knows a lot more than me:-)
Just thought I'd note - while it's almost universal now, the UI breakthrough that takes my vote as one of the most important was the elimination of the need to hold down the mouse button when browsing drop-down menus and the like. It makes a world of difference, and its absence makes a UI feel like obsolete junk from the 80's or early 90's.
Er... yeah, that about sums up the only contribution I can make here...
BTW, as I first met this approach in Win95, it was a _big_ feather in the cap for '95, which overnight made the acclaimed Mac UI of the time painful to use. Did it originate with Win95, or was it already in some major packages that I wasn't using at the time? (Retarded morons note carefully: taking the question into stupid platform advocacy crap is not helpful, useful, intelligent, or desirable).
I'd just like to be pedantic and point out that reading and writing (and spelling) are learned skills rather than innate mental agility, thus a lack of intelligence has a fairly insignificant detrimental effect on them when compared to say, never having learned them in the first place...:-)
Of course, the greatest crisis facing literary education today is how to spell "spelling" with an "r" so that it can be successfully alliterated with "Reading, 'Riting & 'Rithmatic". Any suggestions?
I suspect that like the new Mac's touted as being supercomputers according to the law and thus under export restrictions, this is likewise a marketing hype appealing to the same tendancy - a lot of customers _love_ the idea that their purchase is so powerful that it's almost classified technology.
A donkey and cart also works well. If the Jones's wankmobile performs better due to (technically unnecessary) complications, the Smiths will engage their free will and individual taste and buy it too:) Besides, unnecessary complications that might help ease the damage caused by the predominance of previous unnecessary complications are probably a good thing.:-)
Why can't we ditch this reliance on such stone-age technology as the wheel and axial, burning things, and so forth. I want a solid-state car. Preferably a solid-state hovercar. Preferably not running on WindowsCE.
>One obvious fallacy in your argument is that if only the criminal has a gun, he does not need to fire and >thus alert everybody. Most unarmed civillians do not exactly pose a threat to an armed mugger... so >now the THREAT of the firearm suffices.
This is amusing - I live in an area where the gun laws result in criminals choosing to not carry guns, I try to illustrate out one of the (many) reasons why they make this choice, and here you are trying to argue why they _would_ carry guns, when it is already the case that they don't.
Let me address this so-called fallacy. A criminal doesn't need to fire a gun to alert everybody - firing it just removes all possibility of _not_ alerting everyone - removes all chance of success. Just carrying one is an extra, unnecessary risk that is simply not worth it to most criminals - this is the thing that people who have never lived outside the USA seem to find hard to grasp. Besides, getting a restricted weapon (once they have been restricted for long enough) is a big enough hassle to put off all but the fairly determined.
>Which IS more intimidating, since now a mugger doesn't have to way 300#... >In addition, this allows for easier hot burglaries, as British statistics demonstrate.
Hmmm, muggings? What are they? I don't actually know of anyone I know actually having been mugged (with the exception of those mugged in the US of course). Let me see - the criminal wants money, and with an unarmed populace, he can get it by property theft (as you point out), but with an armed populace this is very risky and a safer form of property theft is to physically ambush people where he controls the game (mug them). Now which do I prefer - property theft without physical harm (burglary), or property theft with physical threat, harm and possible murder (mugging). (Hey - if you can indulge in self-serving naive theorising, then so can I:-)
>Whereas in the US, anybody who tries such a thing is decently likely to encounter one VERY angry >homeowner with a handgun, and therefore simply TRYING is stupid.
As you point out, a criminal in the US is forced to carry (and even use) a gun whether they want to or not, (else they are a threat to no-one and outgunned by everyone). With sane gun laws, criminals are free to not use guns, and generally choose to avoid them. Crime isn't going to go away, but virtually all crime is about profit (money, drugs, etc.), and murder is a highly unwanted extra complication to the crime. Working gun laws indirectly take guns out of the hands of criminals, and the result is fewer deaths from crime (and also a somewhat different distribution of the criminal activity, as you point out, but I fail to appreciate much relevance), not to mention accidents in the home...
Before you theorise as to why gun restrictions can't work, live for a significant period of your life in an area where they already are working (you give the impression you haven't done this). Find out why they do work, and think about what systems could translate those elements into the US.
I'm not in favour of much gun control - a diminished gun-culture seems far better, but to pretend that restrictions can't possibly work when they frequently so clearly do is just silly, especially from people who have never even lived in places with successful systems in place, as is all too often the case.
>If a law is passed to ban guns or severly restrict them, it will not impede criminals at all. >Unless you are under some delusion that a gun ban will actually keep criminals from getting guns.
You sound like you haven't lived very long in countries other than the USA, as you miss what is common knowledge in areas with successful gun control - once the laws are in place and the transition period is over, criminals almost universally choose not to use guns because things are so much more in their favour if they don't have a gun. If your experience of gun law systems and culture is restricted to just the USA, you probably can't even imagine how this could possibly be. And to be fair, the US currently has such entrenched gun-culture that the transition period could take a decade - heaps of time to point out that the laws aren't working (and blindly assume this means they won't work) and get them repelled.
The facts of criminal gun use in restricted-use countries is that if someone breaks into my house (I'm not living in the USA anymore), I know with a fair degree of certainty that they are not carrying a gun. How can this be?!? Why would they not leap at the opportunity to carry a gun when they know I won't have one?!?
How it all works is actually pretty complex, but one contributing factor is this:
A single gunshot, anywhere. Even a single sighting of someone carrying a gun, and the equivalent of a SWAT team cordons off the area of the city. The criminal has virtually no chance of escape and a very good chance of being shot like a dog in the street. Criminal gun use is rare enough that a massive police response is both called for and available. Compare this to a criminal choosing to not carry a gun - you have a far greater chance of success, you suffer no loss of intimidation (your victims are not armed), and even if you get caught - not only will you survive, but the penalties are drastically smaller.
IOW, only stupid criminals carry guns, and stupid criminals get caught anyway.
This is only one factor in why criminals rarely use guns where guns are restricted. I can (and do) walk down any street in any part of the city at any time of night or day and not have the slightest fear of being held up at gunpoint. When I'm in the USA, things are completely different.
The best solution would be to change gun culture, but gun laws eventually do change gun culture, and claiming that they don't work based on US gun-culture thinking (eg people need guns or else criminals will use them more), leads to assumptions that just don't live up to life under gun restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
>Many of us prefer not to use metric units.
The objection to metric seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on imperial or without metric altogether. It looks very strongly like just a case of "this is the way I've always done it", which IMHO really doesn't cut it in cases like this when the methods of operation of metric make it considerably better suited to the subject in question.
>The proper way to settle this sort of thing is to use both systems. That way everyone is happy.
No - that way everybody suffers. Half the USA's industry has to waste _huge_ amounts of money on the redundancy of two ranges of equipment, tools, and parts that do exactly the same thing. The auto-shop passes the cost straight back to the consumer, who meanwhile has to do jump through mental hoops because the article he is reading on the ExpressoPC alternates between the standards when describing dimensions.
The only people that are happy are those who manufacture measuring instruments, because the market is twice what is desirable.
>Lose the dual standards.
:-)
While I imagine there are people here who are as you describe, most of the commentry I've been reading has been raising legimate points that show your simplified analogy to have a host of problems, some of which are crucial to the issues.
Maybe I have my threashold set too high, but don't paint everyone who opposes what is happening with the same brush - distinct from the "I want free stuff" are issues and ramifications of this that go much deeper than superficial car analogies (though Katz somehow managed to completely miss most of them...)
The most blindingly obvious discrepancy in "the world is simple black&white - theft is theft is theft" approach is that some people have a legitimate right to move an mp3 taken from a copyright work, across the net. And from there, I'd advise you upgrade to a greyscale monitor
>>Actually those were metric pounds. A metric pound = 1.32 firkins of rasberry jam at 283 degrees kelvin. Hope that helps.
:-)
>You post a troll at +2? How innovative.
Hell, I'd give a [+1 Funny], but then, that's probably why I'm not a moderator
>Hear, hear! If Jon Katz has an idea for changing
>the system of distributing music, let's hear it.
>But until that time, what those 300K people are
>doing is stealing. No other way to describe it.
While I agree with your point, I think even Metallica's lawyers would agree that those 300K people are _not_ stealing. They're not people who downloaded free Metallica music, they're people who by using Napster, made the music availible for _other_ people to steal.
This is probably more akin to leaving a book in a photocopier on the street such that anyone can use it to make a copy - your intention might be that only people with a right to make a copy are to use it, but you're not checking up on that right first (mp3.com style), thus you have knowingly left it vulnerable to copyright abusers. I don't think this carries the same moral weight as perpetrating the copyright abuse yourself - you have performed an action with an ostensibly legitimate purpose, but that action also opens the door for someone to perform a criminal action with greater ease. _Lots_ of accepted things fall into that catagory
Hmmm, now that I phrase it that way, I'm not sure I agree that these 300K people can be said to be in the wrong - I _know_ that most of them will, in fact, have done wrong, but opening a HDD containing copyright material to the net should not be an illegal action - the person who abuses the connection to make an illegal copy should take the full responsibility. (Not because HDD owner is entirely innocent, but because in many cases, especially in fields other than mp3's, they _will_ be legitimate and the repercussions of being able to prosecute someone for this action are Bad. Eg extreme, unrealistic example - you get fined because your CD wallet (once you have personal copies on your minidisc) fell out of your pocket and you didn't notice, thus your negligence resulted in a situation where a pirate could have accessed and copied copyright material.)
Hmm, now it's sounding scarier, so I'm thinking that maybe the lawyers can't actually do anything substantial to these people, else they could sue me for losing my CDs on the same point of law.
I don't think we've got the full picture here. I sure as hell haven't.
>My thoughts exactly. It would have been a lot better if they put it next to a *ruler* rather than a pencil.
From memory, they did. I'm guessing you might have missed it because you were looking for an inch scale - but when you're dealing with technology, you use modern measurements, like metric millimetres.
>Environmentalists and their sympathisers blind themselves to the facts too often in the pursuit of saving cute and cudly animals
:-)
Yeah, and feminists are mostly hairy-legged man-haters.
It might save some thought and make you feel more self-rightious to uncritically equate the fringe that is outrageous enough to make the news with the _actual_ movement, but this would reflect very poorly on your judgement or intellect, so I'll hope against all evidence that this is not what is happening
You wouldn't believe the amount of effort that enviromentalists put into overcoming the public reluctance to care about anything that _isn't_ cute and cuddly. It's mostly the non-enviromentalist public that makes saving cute and cuddly animals into a big deal, and unfortunately, it's often the only publicity conservation can get. No-one cares about desperately trying to save some bug or frog or prickly shrub that is the keystone species of an entire ecosystem, except the environmentalists. But it'll never make the news (no cutesy appeal) so people are left with the idiotic assumption that environmentalists are only interested in cuddly animals, when the media and general public should stand accused.
Among conservation circles, there is even a term for it. I forget it, but it's something like "LFM syndrome" Where LFM (not the real term) means something like "Large Furry Mammal". If a threatened ecosystem doesn't have one, good luck trying to save it - the public won't care, and that means you'll probably end up carrying the burden alone. And since the media don't care, the public will never know of the magnitude of sacrifice, and write you off as another loonie band-wagon tree-hugger.
The point has been made that this violation might not have been completely accidental, and may have been quite a beneficial "mistake" to have made. :-)
On the other hand - people can make mistakes, and open source concepts like GPL are still a new concept to many.
I suspect the way forward might be an undefined period of grace during which companies can claim ignorance and get away with a tut-tut, but soon easing into more and more serious prosecution as the excuse loses its plausibility and GPL becomes more established in the commercial world. Once a few settlements have been made, giving profile to the new work ethic, violators get ruthlessly pursued by people who actually get off their butts and act, rather than just talk like I do
>That example does little to disprove my point, though I accept yours that a vigilant >eye must be kept on local authorities.
/. is less important than that paper.
>The victim was a target of surveillance for an intelligence unit of a local police
>force. I can't imagine any/every local police force instituting a
>national internet screening project. There are not enough law enforcement officials >in the world.
You're lacking the background of the case, which I've been following for a while (and the Choudry SIS break-in case that prompted it). The details are more disturbing than what was reported in that "latest development" article in what is highly regarded as a conservative and reputable newspaper, not some tabloid out for attention.
>Furthermore, this article's headline claims that the victim was surveyed for 15 years, but the evidence presented later in the article only seems to
>suggest that the person's picutre was taken once about 12 years ago, and that a decetcive had become aware of his existance 15 years ago,
>and with no explicit or implicit surveillance in between. I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the article didn't report it. To me, this smacks of
>a sensational headline without the article containing anything to support it.
Like I said, I just provided the article as a recent example and a starting point. While that one brief article does not mention a lot of the things that happened, if you look into the whole sordid affair, you will find a lot of the sorts of things I talk about.
>Furthermore, you missed my point entirely.
No, I vehemently disagree with your point, and consider it a simple naivety that is uttery belied by some of the evidence on public record.
The invasions of privacy do not need to be justified because in the real world, the only people with clearance to access the documents are those working for the agencies. Theoretically the courts can get to them in extreme cases, but this rarely happens. Thus an intelligence officer can go their entire career without obtaining the necessary warrants and have little chance of getting caught. As there is no fear of getting caught by the law, there is no need to comply with it, and what the courts have managed to reveal (in most countries) is that these agencies operate outside the law on a normal, routine basis. On what grounds can you claim this is not going to continue?
>Maybe what I did not make clear is that over time, the economic justifications will >be less immediately correlated to the true justification, and
>that members of protest groups and "peace-loving organizations" will soon be >typical targets of the economically-justified surveillance because
>their actions will be counter to the capitalist will.
I don't understand this - are you suggesting that voicing a opinion on economic policy can somehow be damaging to a society? Isn't the whole point of our societies that such ideas must always be challenged?
I agree that Choudry's home was (illegally) invaded because the SIS didn't like his economic views (the event that led to the search of Dr Small's home), but I can't understand how this can possibly be economically justified - if the people chose to change economic policy, even for the worse, that is their right. Using intelligence agencies to intimidate people who don't fall in line with the dictated ideology is a far greater threat to the wellbeing of a society.
Are you suggesting that such abuse is not in fact economically justified, but rather justified in terms of directly serving the interests of a select group, regardless of whether this is to the detriment of the nation (eg Disney)?
You say "economically justified", but this infers "justified for the good of the nation on economic grounds" (which I disagree with) as opposed to "justified to a select group on the grounds of maintaining their wealth", which seems to better fit what you're saying.
>You don't have to be planning to DOS Yahoo to be an economic terrorist, you can be
>planning a rally at your local Daytons against fur, or publishing material informing
>consumers what practices Disney uses to produce movies...
Can you explain how these actions can possibly be economic terrorism? Not buying someone's goods is not terrorism. Publishing true information about the past actions of someone is not terrorism (though in some cases it might constitute espionage, but not the cases we're talking about)
>Lastly, I never said I was okay with a national eavesdropping project, so I don't
>know what gave you that impression.
I didn't actually have that impression, I just get irritated at the whole "you've got nothing to fear unless you're a terrorist" myth. I know good people who have been at the wrong end of intelligence prejudice. It might seem implausible that normal people get watched because it wouldn't make sense to watch them, but that's only because you assume these inbred, isolated, paranoid institutions operate with anything resembling common sense, intelligence, or competence. They are entirely free from scrutiny. Since when has that been a breeding ground for anything but incredible ineptness. Since when has anything forced out by the courts shown anything except appalling negligence (giving them the benefit of the doubt)?
>You, sir, should wake up, because no one is out to get you. Not as long as you're a >good consumer.
I'm not a good consumer, and I didn't suggest anyone was out to get me.
James Rusbridger once wrote a letter to the editor of his rural paper critical of MI6. Not political, critical of their performance and competence. Two weeks later a meterman appeared to check the power, asking a few friendly political questions - but a meterman had already been a few weeks earlier. When ID was demanded, he made his excuses and hurridly left. The licence plates disappeared from police records the next day. All he did was write a damn letter to the paper.
Hopefully
But like I said, I'm not at all worried about me, it's the myths that these agencies actually work, and that they are responsible, and that ordinary people have nothing to fear, and so on, that annoy me. By them, the victims are doubly denied justice - they cannot get any from the law (except in incredibly rare cases), and they cannot get sympathy or even acknowledgement from other people that a wrong has even been done to them - they get condemnation and derision instead. Derision born of ignorance, naivety, and gullibility, pure and simple.
What could you do if as soon as you try to say anything of the crime committed against you, people write you off as a paranoid idiot. It's like being put into the metaphorical mental ward when sane and trying to reason your way out - yes of course you're sane dear, now take your pills and be a good patient. Better to suffer in silence. That's not a good state of affairs.
>For some reason it sounds as if you
>think anyone and everyone is capable of arousing suspicion. I think that your paranoia is still too broad and mis-focused.
>Suspicion will not be randomly meted out and privacy invasions be taken lightly
Ignorance is bliss. I refer you to an article not two weeks old where a man used the courts to confirm he had been the target of surveilence. Why was he targeted? Because he wrote some articles for the journal of a peace-promotion group. Nothing to do with business, or national interest or anything lofty, just a normal citizen doing the right thing.
http://www.press.co.nz/2000/16/000420l05.htm
You can naively assume that intelligence takes your privacy seriously, but I suggest you get into contact with some of the people who have done _nothing_ wrong, yet have had their lives screwed by personal agendas and bigotry using the sheild of "National security". It Happens. This kind of blind gullibility irrates me and is almost as big an obsticle for the innocent victims as the unaccountability of the agencies themselves.
I should also point out that many of the people who get screwed over once held rosy naive notions that they had nothing to fear while they were doing nothing wrong. Kinda like you.
Wake up.
>Would I be happy handing over my decryption key(s) to the police? Would I be happy letting them into my house? It's pretty much the
:-)
>same question, but I somehow feel that although I'd allow a search warrant, I wouldn't divulge my keys...
Sheesh, I'm the most law-abiding wimp you could ever find and I certainly wouldn't give them my keys if I thought there was the slightest chance of them ever using them. (I _might_ give them them a secure box that contained my keys but could only be opened by me in the event of my locking myself out...
I fit into that demographic where police assume the worst of you however.
>I don't view it as "spying on me" anymore than I view a doctor examining my body to
>make sure I am healthy as "spying on me."
>If I was committing wholesale violations of the law left and right I might feel differently.
You might also feel differently if your business was run into the ground, or you lost your job, or you had to choose between bankruptcy or having no chance at all of ever clearing your name.
Just because "I'm Fine Jack" doesn't mean there aren't innocent victims who are paying the price for your lack of vigilance. Abuses (and incompetence) of power does happen, and it has real victims - some of whom were _killed_.
As to your Doctors analogy of it necessary for good health, the Rainbow Warrior incident in the previous post makes a convincing counter-example - the Doctor gives you painful enemas because he has an enema fetish rather than because you need it, and as a result of his obsession, he fails to diagnose a cancer that posses a lethal threat to you. But that doesn't matter because his constant barium enemas have given you another cancer anyway.
Who exactly are the intelligence agencies protecting you from? It's obviously not the other intelligence agencies (see Echelon, or the Rainbow Warrior example again). It's obviously not Rogue States (learn something about how Iraq's intentions prior to the gulf war were in hindsight practically broadcast broadband, yet still took the CIA by complete surprise), it's obviously not the evil hackers (though like the rogue states, this is the result of extreme incompetence as much as anything).
The thing that intelligence agencies are most adept at is blocking off information from the public. The problem is that so much of this information is the political duplicity and screw-ups that the people have every right to know about, but which is awfully convenient to keep classified.
Or you could just accept the reassurances that it's all for your own good, and the world will end overnight if their powers were restricted. But it would be better to hear both sides of the story so that an informed decision can be made. Try "The Intelligence Game - Illusions and delusions of International Espionage" by James Rusbridger. Or just take a look at the record these agencies have.
The price of having these inept organisations is extremely high. We will probably never know if it comes even close to worth it.
What is freenet? Could someone provide a FAQ link or a quick description?
>First off, YOU (yes, YOU) are not interesting enough for them to watch you.
/. post above, (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/04/29/2362 14&cid=125) there are cases where the courts have occasionally exposed them watching the exact people you would claim have nothing to fear. Which kind of makes a mockery of your claims.
You are labouring under the common misconception that the agencies take a well balanced and sensible approach to surveillance. As touched on in a
I agree that some moderation of paranoia is _definitely_ in order, and that there are greater, less exotic threats that are _far_ more deserving of our attention, but let's not kid ourselves when the proof is on public record.
The photograph "Main Board Circuit Diagram" showing the finished board seems to lack an awful lot of the componentry shown in the circuit diagram. Looking at the photo, I'd say that not only could I build one, but I could build it in 1/4 to 1/8th the volume. Looking at the circuit diagram however, I'm a bit more worried.
It might be that some of the circuitry is useful but not strictly necessary, but I'm guessing there is a shitload more componentry on the other side of the board, not seen in the photgraph. Anyone know?
Also, I'm unfamiliar with the type of project/base board that he used to solder the components to - do the sockets connect to each other in horizontal rows or vertical columns, or some of each, or via wiring that you solder on the back, or what?
>I'm very tempted to purchase a classified ad in the NY Times and publish the DeCSS code in my ad...
:-)
:-)
No-one would clue on to what you were doing if you stuck it in the personals - it'd look like just a secret communication between pen-friends (and it is even addressed "To the caring and honest person who enjoyed that movie last week".)
Next day, post a reply: "To the coded letter-writer, from the person who enjoys movies - Thanks for posting the DeCSS sourcecode in this column yesterday. I appreciate your help in preserving my "fair use" rights under copyright law."
The punchline is, if they pull the second ad (they won't have pulled the first), then that's almost as funny as if they don't pull it
>If you're willing to open yourself up to charges of perjury, feel free.
:-)
Not necessarily. My bet is that the CoS has not opened itself up to perjury in this way - the letter will threaten legal action rather than make a non-vague legal claim, and E-bay will act on it because E-bay couldn't care less about losing one sale in a million - it's easier than running even a small risk of legal proceedings. Like the case of ISPs in the UK - they _know_ they could win the court case if it came to court, but it's easier to just pull the thing.
Is there any way we could get a copy of the CoS letter to E-bay? Get a free lesson from the Pro's?
>Won't releasing the code for the robots make it easier for Supervillons to create their army of
v illain.htm
>killer robots out of some code origionally designed to dust my house and feed my cat?
Archvillain for hire...
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3210/arch
As you can see from the streaming web-cam, there are still perfectly adequate options even without the killer robots.
No, at first glance it would seem that until you can design circuits, you're stuck building someone else's designs, but this is not the case, and kits like this one figure into why:
:-)
Most good kits have information on how and why the circuit works, and break it down into its various simpler subsystems. This allows you to understand what is happening on a basic level, and gives you an idea as to the various methods and approaches to problems. There is also often "alternative things to try" info, which shows how to derive different behaviour from a circuit by changing different component values. Thus you get a hands-on feel for what is going on. After you've built or looked at a few kits, and have even a basic grasp of what components do, you can follow the circuits a bit closer, and get a lot more out of the "how it works" info. Then you can experiment with your own changes, and start making your own circuits by finding one that does roughly what you want and then altering it slightly to fit the bill. Now you really start learning. As you get better at altering circuits, you can achieve your goals from circuits less and less suited to your task. Futhermore, as you are familiar with the subsystems that make up a robot (eg motor drivers, sensor circuits etc), you can design your own robot by building it out of the various subsystems that will do the stuff you want (or close enough that you can modify them).
By now, you're building a sort of "clip-art" library in your head of circuit sub-subsysytems - useful component configurations that crop up everywhere. Then you start cut&pasting these configurations to make major differences in circuit functionality. And soon you can actually design your own circuits (to a limited degree - but becoming less and less limited), but by now you've been designing original robots for a fair time.
Qualities like optimisation, elegance, efficiency, simplicity, etc are harder to learn by osmosis and are probably easier to aquire via a solid education.
The point is that you don't have to be able to design circuits before you can design robots - there is a gradual progression of being able to modify circuits to your own unique ends, and additionally of being able make new complex circuits by combining existing subsystems, thus you can create new and original designs long before you have full mastery of the field.
The length of the process would depend on how much time you spend on the hobby. I've spent very little time on it, so it's taken over a year to get to the point where I can design new circuits but much prefer to find a really well-designed and efficient circuit optimised-to-hell-and-back, and modify that (even if of significantly different purpose), thus benefiting from the brilliance of someone who knows a lot more than me
Just thought I'd note - while it's almost universal now, the UI breakthrough that takes my vote as one of the most important was the elimination of the need to hold down the mouse button when browsing drop-down menus and the like. It makes a world of difference, and its absence makes a UI feel like obsolete junk from the 80's or early 90's.
Er... yeah, that about sums up the only contribution I can make here...
BTW, as I first met this approach in Win95, it was a _big_ feather in the cap for '95, which overnight made the acclaimed Mac UI of the time painful to use. Did it originate with Win95, or was it already in some major packages that I wasn't using at the time?
(Retarded morons note carefully: taking the question into stupid platform advocacy crap is not helpful, useful, intelligent, or desirable).
I'd just like to be pedantic and point out that reading and writing (and spelling) are learned skills rather than innate mental agility, thus a lack of intelligence has a fairly insignificant detrimental effect on them when compared to say, never having learned them in the first place... :-)
Of course, the greatest crisis facing literary education today is how to spell "spelling" with an "r" so that it can be successfully alliterated with "Reading, 'Riting & 'Rithmatic".
Any suggestions?
I suspect that like the new Mac's touted as being supercomputers according to the law and thus under export restrictions, this is likewise a marketing hype appealing to the same tendancy - a lot of customers _love_ the idea that their purchase is so powerful that it's almost classified technology.
:-)
Wank on.
A donkey and cart also works well. If the Jones's wankmobile performs better due to (technically unnecessary) complications, the Smiths will engage their free will and individual taste and buy it too :) :-)
Besides, unnecessary complications that might help ease the damage caused by the predominance of previous unnecessary complications are probably a good thing.
Why can't we ditch this reliance on such stone-age technology as the wheel and axial, burning things, and so forth.
I want a solid-state car.
Preferably a solid-state hovercar.
Preferably not running on WindowsCE.
>One obvious fallacy in your argument is that if only the criminal has a gun, he does not need to fire and
:-)
>thus alert everybody. Most unarmed civillians do not exactly pose a threat to an armed mugger... so
>now the THREAT of the firearm suffices.
This is amusing - I live in an area where the gun laws result in criminals choosing to not carry guns, I try to illustrate out one of the (many) reasons why they make this choice, and here you are trying to argue why they _would_ carry guns, when it is already the case that they don't.
Let me address this so-called fallacy. A criminal doesn't need to fire a gun to alert everybody - firing it just removes all possibility of _not_ alerting everyone - removes all chance of success. Just carrying one is an extra, unnecessary risk that is simply not worth it to most criminals - this is the thing that people who have never lived outside the USA seem to find hard to grasp. Besides, getting a restricted weapon (once they have been restricted for long enough) is a big enough hassle to put off all but the fairly determined.
>Which IS more intimidating, since now a mugger doesn't have to way 300#...
>In addition, this allows for easier hot burglaries, as British statistics demonstrate.
Hmmm, muggings? What are they? I don't actually know of anyone I know actually having been mugged (with the exception of those mugged in the US of course). Let me see - the criminal wants money, and with an unarmed populace, he can get it by property theft (as you point out), but with an armed populace this is very risky and a safer form of property theft is to physically ambush people where he controls the game (mug them). Now which do I prefer - property theft without physical harm (burglary), or property theft with physical threat, harm and possible murder (mugging). (Hey - if you can indulge in self-serving naive theorising, then so can I
>Whereas in the US, anybody who tries such a thing is decently likely to encounter one VERY angry
>homeowner with a handgun, and therefore simply TRYING is stupid.
As you point out, a criminal in the US is forced to carry (and even use) a gun whether they want to or not, (else they are a threat to no-one and outgunned by everyone). With sane gun laws, criminals are free to not use guns, and generally choose to avoid them. Crime isn't going to go away, but virtually all crime is about profit (money, drugs, etc.), and murder is a highly unwanted extra complication to the crime. Working gun laws indirectly take guns out of the hands of criminals, and the result is fewer deaths from crime (and also a somewhat different distribution of the criminal activity, as you point out, but I fail to appreciate much relevance), not to mention accidents in the home...
Before you theorise as to why gun restrictions can't work, live for a significant period of your life in an area where they already are working (you give the impression you haven't done this). Find out why they do work, and think about what systems could translate those elements into the US.
I'm not in favour of much gun control - a diminished gun-culture seems far better, but to pretend that restrictions can't possibly work when they frequently so clearly do is just silly, especially from people who have never even lived in places with successful systems in place, as is all too often the case.
>If a law is passed to ban guns or severly restrict them, it will not impede criminals at all.
>Unless you are under some delusion that a gun ban will actually keep criminals from getting guns.
You sound like you haven't lived very long in countries other than the USA, as you miss what is common knowledge in areas with successful gun control - once the laws are in place and the transition period is over, criminals almost universally choose not to use guns because things are so much more in their favour if they don't have a gun. If your experience of gun law systems and culture is restricted to just the USA, you probably can't even imagine how this could possibly be. And to be fair, the US currently has such entrenched gun-culture that the transition period could take a decade - heaps of time to point out that the laws aren't working (and blindly assume this means they won't work) and get them repelled.
The facts of criminal gun use in restricted-use countries is that if someone breaks into my house (I'm not living in the USA anymore), I know with a fair degree of certainty that they are not carrying a gun. How can this be?!? Why would they not leap at the opportunity to carry a gun when they know I won't have one?!?
How it all works is actually pretty complex, but one contributing factor is this:
A single gunshot, anywhere. Even a single sighting of someone carrying a gun, and the equivalent of a SWAT team cordons off the area of the city. The criminal has virtually no chance of escape and a very good chance of being shot like a dog in the street. Criminal gun use is rare enough that a massive police response is both called for and available. Compare this to a criminal choosing to not carry a gun - you have a far greater chance of success, you suffer no loss of intimidation (your victims are not armed), and even if you get caught - not only will you survive, but the penalties are drastically smaller.
IOW, only stupid criminals carry guns, and stupid criminals get caught anyway.
This is only one factor in why criminals rarely use guns where guns are restricted. I can (and do) walk down any street in any part of the city at any time of night or day and not have the slightest fear of being held up at gunpoint. When I'm in the USA, things are completely different.
The best solution would be to change gun culture, but gun laws eventually do change gun culture, and claiming that they don't work based on US gun-culture thinking (eg people need guns or else criminals will use them more), leads to assumptions that just don't live up to life under gun restrictions.