Protocols don't have licenses, implementations do. I can't really think of a protocol, but the whole OpenDocument standard which has been adopted by some BSD and proprietary software grew out of OpenOffice.org, which was LGPL licensed. So yes, you can go from *GPL only to becoming a widely implemented standard, but it's not going to happen as often as with a BSD reference implementation where you can just integrate it directly.
There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries.
Libraries are generally licensed under the LGPL.
[[citation needed]] The LGPL serve a specific purpose for libraries that want to be GPL internally but allow linking to proprietary software, but there are very many libraries that are GPL licensed. Either because the developers quite intentionally don't want it used in proprietary software, or practically because they wanted to reuse some GPL code from a non-library project. Even though the FSF made it they've also strongly encouraged people to license all their code as GPL, library or not.
Anyway, blame copyright law for any ambiguity here. If you are creating a derivative work, the GPL applies. If you are merely using it without creating a derivative work, the GPL does not apply. It's a wonder the GPL has existed for 20 years and yet it seems nobody can give a straight answer on what exactly a derivative work is when it comes to computer software. Or maybe it's just that nobody wants to push that particular issue in court.
I remain confident that the ISPs -- including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs -- would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest,
And there's absolutely no conflict of interest between their role as ISPs and their role as content providers here, none whatsoever. They don't hate that fact that people can watch other things than their programming and wouldn't like to turn Internet back into cable TV.
If you run an AV how can you tell your computer doesn't have a rootkit that it can't detect?
You don't. But if I'm smart enough to not install 99% of all rootkits and the AV will catch it 90% of the time, then I've just upped the odds to 99.9%. Two layers of defense always beats one. And I've little confidence in running offline scanners from time to time unless you boot from a clean CD, some of these hide very well. You need that warning as you're about to get infected, before it can replace all the system tools with hacked versions.
That single click was to run an EXE that was emailed to them (...) Way to not have any idea whats going on.
"Click a link" doesn't mean the same as "Open an attachment", that you can't explain worth shit is the problem. I don't know any e-mail software that'll run an attached EXE with a single click, nor have I ever seen one of those scams unless the EXE is in a zip file, usually you get a big warning saying do you really want to run this. But I guess they clicked open, run, yes, yes because DHL told them to and forgot or ignored that part and like the sucker you were you believed them. I wouldn't be surprised if they clicked past the UAC prompt too, though that could have been an exploit. Don't confuse the way the user said it happened with the way it really happened.
Well, there's few people but I'm sure they have plenty listening installations and whatnot since it's their closest border to the US. It couldn't be that hard to add a dish pointing up to their satellites.
All those concerns aside, the market voted on this when the iMac came out (well, the idea had been around earlier, in the form of all "portable" PCs). The votes added up to Yes.
It's not like you got much of a choice if you want a "normal" Mac, the Mini and Pro aren't good alternatives. Apple does it, but it hasn't caught on with all the other desktops. I don't think you can say any of the TV producers are even nearly in the same position, nobody wants a smart TV the way Mac users wants a Mac. I guess we'll see if it survives the hype.
Hooking up smart devices like HTPCs, game consoles, cable/fiber boxes and such I can understand. Maybe a really small appliance box to hang off the back of the TV too. But I can't for the life of me understand why tying this to the TV is wise. If it breaks, your ungodly expensive smart TV must go away for repairs. You can't upgrade to better "smarts" or a bigger TV or a projector without paying all over again. You can't use it on any other TV, you can't take it to a friend. I'd much rather take a cheap dumb TV and get the smarts some other way.
Just format and reinstall every 3 or 4 months. Why wait until you are sure your system has been compromised before you do it?
If you reinstall your OS every 3-4 months, then <shatner>Get. A. Life.</shatner>, besides if you don't know what of your software is clean what does installing the same virus going to do? It's like the IT admins that clean someone's PC and they go right back and install weatherbug and bonzai buddy. And that doesn't count the types I mentioned that are an immediate risk no matter how short they're installed, like password stealers. And all that to avoid running a free AV? I'll take my machine that's good for years without reinstalling, thanks.
Yep, our TV and radio signals are practically omnidirectional since we want lots of people to receive them. Also, we haven't used more power than we strictly need so the sum of those factors is that it'd be practically undetectable outside Earth. That said, we have sent much stronger signals than that, we've run SETI experiments that was supposed to detect any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. So a somewhat powerful, directed beam should be plenty.
The more practical issue with us accidentally intercepting any broadcast is that we've pretty quickly moved to complex compression algorithms that resemble pure noise. And while we're now using a lot more mobile equipment, for the long haul more and more goes via cable and fiber, not broadcasts. In short, neither side is likely to discover each other by accident. Most likely we will need to "ping" planets, set up some powerful array, send a simple sequence like for example the primes they can detect and some message after that. Or try finding someone that's pinged us.
Plenty of very tech savy people can safely use a computer with no AV with little to no risk,
Possibly, but how could you tell? I'd say even the tech savvy should run anti-virus for verification, not for prevention. Of course there's the "trash my computer" or "hold it hostage" viruses that you'd know pretty fast after the fact, but there's also the "use as spambot", "steal my identity", "use as DDoS bot", "steal game accounts and CC info", "empty online bank account", "turn into illegal dumpsite", "use as platform for hacking" and probably some more varieties that won't announce themselves.
I know many people use it thoughtlessly, if the virus scanner doesn't find a virus they'll run anything. I only run things from places I think is safe, so if I ever had the AV stop me that'd be a surprise but if you don't use it at all I think you're arrogant. I'd maybe make a small exception if you're running only open source software from your distro's repositories, but any time you're running binaries, particularly binaries downloaded from the Internet then please give me my AV. Even if the software is perfectly legitimate there's no knowing if someone has compromised their download servers.
Either it was more than a single click, or your story is missing a remote code execution exploit in the browser/plugins they were using. You're in trouble on any OS if you have hostile code running, even if it's just under a normal user account.
I think my tl;dr opinion is "It's easier to look for life we know can exist than life that may exist". We look for Earth-like planets because we know Earth has life. We look for Earth-like lifeforms because we know life can look like that. That doesn't mean we've excluded other planets or other lifeforms, but they are only theoretical while Earth is real. Given limited resources, why should we try finding life that may not even be possible when we know so little about whether there's life like ours?
Besides, if we should stumble onto other forms of life we're not that ill equipped to find it. If there had been lifeforms crawling around on the Martian surface we'd have seen them in pictures. I'm sure someone's put a microscope to the soil and found that it isn't full of life like you'd find in a pile of dirt here on Earth. Our assumptions mostly come into play when we're trying to find indirect signs of life, that even if there's no life here right now there has been or that they're hiding deep underground there's traces left.
I really doubt the judge checked to see if everything on The Pirate Bay is available elsewhere, if anyone but the judge made such an unsubstantiated claim it'd be "objection, your honor". What's more important is that the moment you decide user-submitted content isn't clean enough, it'll just move around. Those "other sites" are going to disappear one by one, until the only places left are big organizations running their own servers. The average person isn't going to be allowed to publish anything, because he's an unknown that could be trying to upload something pirated and the sites won't have time to check.
Then again, it's not like the world will go under if TPB goes down. They're #76 on the TOP500, but MegaUpload is #68 and if you think that's all or even mostly legal traffic I got a bridge to sell you. File hosters are now willing to let you download huge files just for giving you a few ads and the chance to nag you into paying a few bucks for the bandwidth, they're the modern version of Usenet. Oh, not the Usenet from the 1980s but the "Full binary groups, long retention, look at how cheap our $/GB rates are" late Usenet. Plus the downloaders can't be charged with sharing, like on torrents.
What keeps the ball rolling is that the TPB verdict is still not final, once it is - and unless they miraculously are found not guilty, which you can hope for but don't put money on it - they're not going try blocking it at the border, they're going to go for the kill. And like Napster I think they'll win another battle and still be losing the war because nothing they do change the fact that there's a very large number of people out there that want to pirate and will find a new way of doing it.
In their defense, do you realize how heavy a suitcase full of cash really is?
Well, one 500 euro bill is 1.1g so 2.2kg / million euro. The MAFIAA has it much harder though, with $100 bills it's about 10kg / million dollars but then nobody's heard of "walking distance" either.
It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to.
2-3 months? Try 2-3 years, if you let them. I remember back in 2009, when there was a huge campaign to kill IE6 here in Norway, like a majority of the news sites in the country including all the top ones, government sites, our version of eBay and such had banners saying you're using an outdated browser, upgrade now. It just became one big flash mob, it even hit slashdot. Now IE7 was released in 2006 so this had been coming for years. But at a client of mine I talked to a guy in IT and he was embarrassed to work there. Why? Because they had just recently deployed a big new system image, that they promised would bring them up to modern platforms and standards and all that blah blah. As you've probably guessed by now, it still shipped with IE6 because they had some troublesome internal apps. So the first thing that happened when people got this wonderful new image and went to check the headlines were huge banners saying "You're horribly outdated, upgrade now!". Or well the message was a little nicer, but that was the gist of it. Without that much egg on their face, they'd probably use it another few years...
The "problem" is that these people are usually at each their end of a tug-of-war. The developers are trying to produce solid, working but conservative and boring products, but hopefully not outdated and unsellable. The sales people are trying to sell dreams and solutions with those products, but hopefully not things that can't you can't possibly deliver. At least not the kind that's expressed in a contract, failing to live up to the sales pitch in other ways is usually okay.
However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.
So he doesn't know bits from bytes and you don't know giga from tera, but together you're dynamite;)
It seems you don't understand the difference between private and public communication. There's no such thing as real private communication on Facebook, it's always a three way conversation between you, the other person and Facebook. And possibly identity thieves, snoopers, hackers, three letter agencies and whatever lurks the Internets. Private communication should be point-to-point between the parties I want to network with, okay so it's not entirely true since I do need phone companies and ISPs and email and MSN and the postal service but they're a damn much better approximation than Facebook. Of course I can't control what they do with it, but you've given up all privacy before you've tried.
Perhaps the solution is to live such a virtuous life that no skeletons, no actionable information, exists?
There'll always be small minded, bigoted people that will object to the way you live, even if they're a small minority and you the majority that's no guarantee that person won't be your potential landlord or the HR guy processing your application and things like that. There's no such life that nobody would object to, at least not any such life that I'd like to live. Privacy is the right to say "none of your fucking business", if you want to live in a glass house that's your choice but don't pretend that's what most of the people in your life network want either.
I doubt we'll colonize the galaxy with generational ships. More likely we'll send a probe that will build DNA from scratch using sequences stored in the computer, letting them grow in an artificial womb and raise the first generation of settlers with robots. Building a bacterial genome from a sequence stored in a computer has already actually been done. We've successfully done tests of fertilization in artificial wombs terminated after six days and we've saved babies born after 22 weeks, closing that gap is only a matter of will and moderate research in creating an artificial umbilical cord. Being raised by robots may cause psychological damage but there have been much worse hellholes to grow up in. They'll survive to raise another generation the old fashioned way.
Not so cozy but no generations are trapped in space and if the probe fails before landing or fails in any way to build or power the planned habitat or surface conditions are not as predicted it can abort - no lives will be lost. Compared to a generational ship it'll also be much smaller and simpler in design and can handle acceleration and radiation much easier. Combined with a momentum limited Orion starship powered by fusion bombs you should be able to get the travel time down to a few centuries. So far the Voyager I has operated for 34 years using plutonium with a half-life of 87 years, which is stable and easily predictable and there's probably other longer lasting isotopes we could use. If CPUs can last that long I don't know, but I don't really see why not as long as they're radiation hardened and operated at very modest speeds and voltages.
Yes, it's still sci-fi but it's not warp drive "pie in the sky" sci-fi. If the search for exoplanets should come up with a candidate for a true parallel earth within a "reasonable" distance from earth - I'd say max 50 ly since you're maxing out around 0.1c so 50 ly = 500 years then it's doable with an Apollo+ size program. Of course then we're also down to <2000 candidate stars and only 62 G class stars like our own. Beyond that, well light speed is kind of limiting here, with anti-matter drives we could possibly do up to 400 ly. But like the Milky Way is 100,000+ light years across and that means 100,000+ years with our current understanding of physics. We might be able to do a short interstellar hop with a lot of patience, but we're not colonizing the galaxy.
Sure, but those convoluted circumvention techniques tend to get wrapped into simple point and click tools for the masses. Say for example small service for Swedes to run that'll proxy just TPB and share the proxy as a "seed" on a torrent and a Firefox plugin to pick a proxy at random to use just for that site. Let them try banning all dynamic IP ranges in Sweden, that'll go over well... just as an example.
If they were all hobbyists, then maybe. But Canonical is a commercial company and it's not interested in extinguishing itself any more than Red Hat, Suse etc. are interested in all merging to the "Linux Server" project. Sure, when Red Hat contributes something to the kernel it might benefit all Linux servers but primarily they're interested in selling Red Hat. It's part for themselves and part for the community, if you take away that win-win and say they must fully sacrifice themselves to the community they'll just go away.
The other part is that the bigger the organization, the slower it moves. Rather than try to get everybody on board that this is the right way of doing it, it's sometimes easier to just do it and let the evidence speak for itself. They say in business that 90%+ of all companies fail within the first few years, well that's the way with OSS forks and distros as well. A few people try and either it fails to gather any mainstream momentum or their upstream adopted the same changes. If you're a hobbyist that may mean mission accomplished, it was done to provoke a change and it happened.
The funny thing is that I've heard a lot of creationists saying his condition is a result of defying God (by being a scientist apparently). If I were a creationist, then the fact that he's defied his condition for half a century would tell me that either 1) Hawkings is stronger than God or 2) someone up there is looking out for.
Whenever evil flourishes, the innocent and the righteous are slaughtered or struck by injury or disease the fanatics always rewrite reality until it fits their religion. The innocent weren't truly innocent, the righteous weren't truly righteous, evil exists as a punishment for our sins and so on. God is perfect and infallible so if you punched them in the face and said "If God didn't want you to get punched in the face, why didn't he stop me?" they'd secretly accept that as some sort of punishment or trial by God for their pride or to test their faith. If I'd given them a gracious donation to their church, they'd see it as a blessing from God.
There's always some explanation that fits reality, and when it really doesn't you just say he works in "mysterious ways" that us humans can't comprehend. If he'd died, that is God. If he continues to live with the disease, that's also God prolonging it. If he'd been miraculously cured, that would be by the grace of God. It's like a game show with God behind every door, no matter which you pick. Religion is the anthropomorphization of reality, that behind everything there's an invisible man pulling invisible strings. And no matter what you say you can't prove the strings don't exist.
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Protocols don't have licenses, implementations do. I can't really think of a protocol, but the whole OpenDocument standard which has been adopted by some BSD and proprietary software grew out of OpenOffice.org, which was LGPL licensed. So yes, you can go from *GPL only to becoming a widely implemented standard, but it's not going to happen as often as with a BSD reference implementation where you can just integrate it directly.
There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries.
Libraries are generally licensed under the LGPL.
[[citation needed]] The LGPL serve a specific purpose for libraries that want to be GPL internally but allow linking to proprietary software, but there are very many libraries that are GPL licensed. Either because the developers quite intentionally don't want it used in proprietary software, or practically because they wanted to reuse some GPL code from a non-library project. Even though the FSF made it they've also strongly encouraged people to license all their code as GPL, library or not.
Anyway, blame copyright law for any ambiguity here. If you are creating a derivative work, the GPL applies. If you are merely using it without creating a derivative work, the GPL does not apply. It's a wonder the GPL has existed for 20 years and yet it seems nobody can give a straight answer on what exactly a derivative work is when it comes to computer software. Or maybe it's just that nobody wants to push that particular issue in court.
I remain confident that the ISPs -- including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs -- would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest,
And there's absolutely no conflict of interest between their role as ISPs and their role as content providers here, none whatsoever. They don't hate that fact that people can watch other things than their programming and wouldn't like to turn Internet back into cable TV.
If you run an AV how can you tell your computer doesn't have a rootkit that it can't detect?
You don't. But if I'm smart enough to not install 99% of all rootkits and the AV will catch it 90% of the time, then I've just upped the odds to 99.9%. Two layers of defense always beats one. And I've little confidence in running offline scanners from time to time unless you boot from a clean CD, some of these hide very well. You need that warning as you're about to get infected, before it can replace all the system tools with hacked versions.
That single click was to run an EXE that was emailed to them (...) Way to not have any idea whats going on.
"Click a link" doesn't mean the same as "Open an attachment", that you can't explain worth shit is the problem. I don't know any e-mail software that'll run an attached EXE with a single click, nor have I ever seen one of those scams unless the EXE is in a zip file, usually you get a big warning saying do you really want to run this. But I guess they clicked open, run, yes, yes because DHL told them to and forgot or ignored that part and like the sucker you were you believed them. I wouldn't be surprised if they clicked past the UAC prompt too, though that could have been an exploit. Don't confuse the way the user said it happened with the way it really happened.
Well, there's few people but I'm sure they have plenty listening installations and whatnot since it's their closest border to the US. It couldn't be that hard to add a dish pointing up to their satellites.
All those concerns aside, the market voted on this when the iMac came out (well, the idea had been around earlier, in the form of all "portable" PCs). The votes added up to Yes.
It's not like you got much of a choice if you want a "normal" Mac, the Mini and Pro aren't good alternatives. Apple does it, but it hasn't caught on with all the other desktops. I don't think you can say any of the TV producers are even nearly in the same position, nobody wants a smart TV the way Mac users wants a Mac. I guess we'll see if it survives the hype.
Hooking up smart devices like HTPCs, game consoles, cable/fiber boxes and such I can understand. Maybe a really small appliance box to hang off the back of the TV too. But I can't for the life of me understand why tying this to the TV is wise. If it breaks, your ungodly expensive smart TV must go away for repairs. You can't upgrade to better "smarts" or a bigger TV or a projector without paying all over again. You can't use it on any other TV, you can't take it to a friend. I'd much rather take a cheap dumb TV and get the smarts some other way.
Just format and reinstall every 3 or 4 months. Why wait until you are sure your system has been compromised before you do it?
If you reinstall your OS every 3-4 months, then <shatner>Get. A. Life.</shatner>, besides if you don't know what of your software is clean what does installing the same virus going to do? It's like the IT admins that clean someone's PC and they go right back and install weatherbug and bonzai buddy. And that doesn't count the types I mentioned that are an immediate risk no matter how short they're installed, like password stealers. And all that to avoid running a free AV? I'll take my machine that's good for years without reinstalling, thanks.
Yep, our TV and radio signals are practically omnidirectional since we want lots of people to receive them. Also, we haven't used more power than we strictly need so the sum of those factors is that it'd be practically undetectable outside Earth. That said, we have sent much stronger signals than that, we've run SETI experiments that was supposed to detect any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. So a somewhat powerful, directed beam should be plenty.
The more practical issue with us accidentally intercepting any broadcast is that we've pretty quickly moved to complex compression algorithms that resemble pure noise. And while we're now using a lot more mobile equipment, for the long haul more and more goes via cable and fiber, not broadcasts. In short, neither side is likely to discover each other by accident. Most likely we will need to "ping" planets, set up some powerful array, send a simple sequence like for example the primes they can detect and some message after that. Or try finding someone that's pinged us.
Plenty of very tech savy people can safely use a computer with no AV with little to no risk,
Possibly, but how could you tell? I'd say even the tech savvy should run anti-virus for verification, not for prevention. Of course there's the "trash my computer" or "hold it hostage" viruses that you'd know pretty fast after the fact, but there's also the "use as spambot", "steal my identity", "use as DDoS bot", "steal game accounts and CC info", "empty online bank account", "turn into illegal dumpsite", "use as platform for hacking" and probably some more varieties that won't announce themselves.
I know many people use it thoughtlessly, if the virus scanner doesn't find a virus they'll run anything. I only run things from places I think is safe, so if I ever had the AV stop me that'd be a surprise but if you don't use it at all I think you're arrogant. I'd maybe make a small exception if you're running only open source software from your distro's repositories, but any time you're running binaries, particularly binaries downloaded from the Internet then please give me my AV. Even if the software is perfectly legitimate there's no knowing if someone has compromised their download servers.
Either it was more than a single click, or your story is missing a remote code execution exploit in the browser/plugins they were using. You're in trouble on any OS if you have hostile code running, even if it's just under a normal user account.
I think my tl;dr opinion is "It's easier to look for life we know can exist than life that may exist". We look for Earth-like planets because we know Earth has life. We look for Earth-like lifeforms because we know life can look like that. That doesn't mean we've excluded other planets or other lifeforms, but they are only theoretical while Earth is real. Given limited resources, why should we try finding life that may not even be possible when we know so little about whether there's life like ours?
Besides, if we should stumble onto other forms of life we're not that ill equipped to find it. If there had been lifeforms crawling around on the Martian surface we'd have seen them in pictures. I'm sure someone's put a microscope to the soil and found that it isn't full of life like you'd find in a pile of dirt here on Earth. Our assumptions mostly come into play when we're trying to find indirect signs of life, that even if there's no life here right now there has been or that they're hiding deep underground there's traces left.
I really doubt the judge checked to see if everything on The Pirate Bay is available elsewhere, if anyone but the judge made such an unsubstantiated claim it'd be "objection, your honor". What's more important is that the moment you decide user-submitted content isn't clean enough, it'll just move around. Those "other sites" are going to disappear one by one, until the only places left are big organizations running their own servers. The average person isn't going to be allowed to publish anything, because he's an unknown that could be trying to upload something pirated and the sites won't have time to check.
Then again, it's not like the world will go under if TPB goes down. They're #76 on the TOP500, but MegaUpload is #68 and if you think that's all or even mostly legal traffic I got a bridge to sell you. File hosters are now willing to let you download huge files just for giving you a few ads and the chance to nag you into paying a few bucks for the bandwidth, they're the modern version of Usenet. Oh, not the Usenet from the 1980s but the "Full binary groups, long retention, look at how cheap our $/GB rates are" late Usenet. Plus the downloaders can't be charged with sharing, like on torrents.
What keeps the ball rolling is that the TPB verdict is still not final, once it is - and unless they miraculously are found not guilty, which you can hope for but don't put money on it - they're not going try blocking it at the border, they're going to go for the kill. And like Napster I think they'll win another battle and still be losing the war because nothing they do change the fact that there's a very large number of people out there that want to pirate and will find a new way of doing it.
In their defense, do you realize how heavy a suitcase full of cash really is?
Well, one 500 euro bill is 1.1g so 2.2kg / million euro. The MAFIAA has it much harder though, with $100 bills it's about 10kg / million dollars but then nobody's heard of "walking distance" either.
It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to.
2-3 months? Try 2-3 years, if you let them. I remember back in 2009, when there was a huge campaign to kill IE6 here in Norway, like a majority of the news sites in the country including all the top ones, government sites, our version of eBay and such had banners saying you're using an outdated browser, upgrade now. It just became one big flash mob, it even hit slashdot. Now IE7 was released in 2006 so this had been coming for years. But at a client of mine I talked to a guy in IT and he was embarrassed to work there. Why? Because they had just recently deployed a big new system image, that they promised would bring them up to modern platforms and standards and all that blah blah. As you've probably guessed by now, it still shipped with IE6 because they had some troublesome internal apps. So the first thing that happened when people got this wonderful new image and went to check the headlines were huge banners saying "You're horribly outdated, upgrade now!". Or well the message was a little nicer, but that was the gist of it. Without that much egg on their face, they'd probably use it another few years...
The "problem" is that these people are usually at each their end of a tug-of-war. The developers are trying to produce solid, working but conservative and boring products, but hopefully not outdated and unsellable. The sales people are trying to sell dreams and solutions with those products, but hopefully not things that can't you can't possibly deliver. At least not the kind that's expressed in a contract, failing to live up to the sales pitch in other ways is usually okay.
However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.
So he doesn't know bits from bytes and you don't know giga from tera, but together you're dynamite ;)
It seems you don't understand the difference between private and public communication. There's no such thing as real private communication on Facebook, it's always a three way conversation between you, the other person and Facebook. And possibly identity thieves, snoopers, hackers, three letter agencies and whatever lurks the Internets. Private communication should be point-to-point between the parties I want to network with, okay so it's not entirely true since I do need phone companies and ISPs and email and MSN and the postal service but they're a damn much better approximation than Facebook. Of course I can't control what they do with it, but you've given up all privacy before you've tried.
Perhaps the solution is to live such a virtuous life that no skeletons, no actionable information, exists?
There'll always be small minded, bigoted people that will object to the way you live, even if they're a small minority and you the majority that's no guarantee that person won't be your potential landlord or the HR guy processing your application and things like that. There's no such life that nobody would object to, at least not any such life that I'd like to live. Privacy is the right to say "none of your fucking business", if you want to live in a glass house that's your choice but don't pretend that's what most of the people in your life network want either.
Or as it's been known since 1980: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
I doubt we'll colonize the galaxy with generational ships. More likely we'll send a probe that will build DNA from scratch using sequences stored in the computer, letting them grow in an artificial womb and raise the first generation of settlers with robots. Building a bacterial genome from a sequence stored in a computer has already actually been done. We've successfully done tests of fertilization in artificial wombs terminated after six days and we've saved babies born after 22 weeks, closing that gap is only a matter of will and moderate research in creating an artificial umbilical cord. Being raised by robots may cause psychological damage but there have been much worse hellholes to grow up in. They'll survive to raise another generation the old fashioned way.
Not so cozy but no generations are trapped in space and if the probe fails before landing or fails in any way to build or power the planned habitat or surface conditions are not as predicted it can abort - no lives will be lost. Compared to a generational ship it'll also be much smaller and simpler in design and can handle acceleration and radiation much easier. Combined with a momentum limited Orion starship powered by fusion bombs you should be able to get the travel time down to a few centuries. So far the Voyager I has operated for 34 years using plutonium with a half-life of 87 years, which is stable and easily predictable and there's probably other longer lasting isotopes we could use. If CPUs can last that long I don't know, but I don't really see why not as long as they're radiation hardened and operated at very modest speeds and voltages.
Yes, it's still sci-fi but it's not warp drive "pie in the sky" sci-fi. If the search for exoplanets should come up with a candidate for a true parallel earth within a "reasonable" distance from earth - I'd say max 50 ly since you're maxing out around 0.1c so 50 ly = 500 years then it's doable with an Apollo+ size program. Of course then we're also down to <2000 candidate stars and only 62 G class stars like our own. Beyond that, well light speed is kind of limiting here, with anti-matter drives we could possibly do up to 400 ly. But like the Milky Way is 100,000+ light years across and that means 100,000+ years with our current understanding of physics. We might be able to do a short interstellar hop with a lot of patience, but we're not colonizing the galaxy.
At the moment, humans are stored RAID 0 here on Earth.
One person dies and all is lost? More like seven billion disks in RAID1 all hooked to the same AC and PSU.
Sure, but those convoluted circumvention techniques tend to get wrapped into simple point and click tools for the masses. Say for example small service for Swedes to run that'll proxy just TPB and share the proxy as a "seed" on a torrent and a Firefox plugin to pick a proxy at random to use just for that site. Let them try banning all dynamic IP ranges in Sweden, that'll go over well... just as an example.
If they were all hobbyists, then maybe. But Canonical is a commercial company and it's not interested in extinguishing itself any more than Red Hat, Suse etc. are interested in all merging to the "Linux Server" project. Sure, when Red Hat contributes something to the kernel it might benefit all Linux servers but primarily they're interested in selling Red Hat. It's part for themselves and part for the community, if you take away that win-win and say they must fully sacrifice themselves to the community they'll just go away.
The other part is that the bigger the organization, the slower it moves. Rather than try to get everybody on board that this is the right way of doing it, it's sometimes easier to just do it and let the evidence speak for itself. They say in business that 90%+ of all companies fail within the first few years, well that's the way with OSS forks and distros as well. A few people try and either it fails to gather any mainstream momentum or their upstream adopted the same changes. If you're a hobbyist that may mean mission accomplished, it was done to provoke a change and it happened.
The funny thing is that I've heard a lot of creationists saying his condition is a result of defying God (by being a scientist apparently). If I were a creationist, then the fact that he's defied his condition for half a century would tell me that either 1) Hawkings is stronger than God or 2) someone up there is looking out for.
Whenever evil flourishes, the innocent and the righteous are slaughtered or struck by injury or disease the fanatics always rewrite reality until it fits their religion. The innocent weren't truly innocent, the righteous weren't truly righteous, evil exists as a punishment for our sins and so on. God is perfect and infallible so if you punched them in the face and said "If God didn't want you to get punched in the face, why didn't he stop me?" they'd secretly accept that as some sort of punishment or trial by God for their pride or to test their faith. If I'd given them a gracious donation to their church, they'd see it as a blessing from God.
There's always some explanation that fits reality, and when it really doesn't you just say he works in "mysterious ways" that us humans can't comprehend. If he'd died, that is God. If he continues to live with the disease, that's also God prolonging it. If he'd been miraculously cured, that would be by the grace of God. It's like a game show with God behind every door, no matter which you pick. Religion is the anthropomorphization of reality, that behind everything there's an invisible man pulling invisible strings. And no matter what you say you can't prove the strings don't exist.