Interestingly enough, there's a remaindered book by Berlinski called, 'the advent of the algorhythm' which I found very helpful.
Although its main concern is mathematical logic, Berlinski's explanations of the thought behind the numbers is a nice thing to have. His book makes you think about numbers--about what a numbers really are and how they work.
The book's actual math is broken up by sections of very well-written prose that offer relief when the mathematical ideas leave you feeling hollowed-out and brain-fried.
The advent of the algorhythm is not an easy read without a big math background, but it did a lot to bring me a new understanding and appreciation of what is there in math.
I don't like Berlinski's conclusions, the main point of his book, but the what he teaches along the way is great stuff.
It's black because it would allow an uncorrupted justice system access to a tool by which to solve the crime you committed and convict you so easily that you might not find the guilt and terror of having embezzled a thousand dollars so great that you use your second chance to retreat to a community in the midwest where you devote the rest of your life to helping the poor and needy instead of wearing orange for ten, long and meaningless years.
It's white because, employed judiciously, it might make fewer people laugh and weep at the Texas justice system.
It's Black because, with it, all anyone who wanted to frame you for something in a cheap movie plot (or in real life for that matter) would have to do is to get hold of anything you've ever handled at any time and plant it at the scene of a bank robbery, a terrorist hideout, or a really wet, really nasty murder.
As in, 'Yes, your honor, he is a criminal genius, a modern-day Fu-Manchu or Moriarty, who covered his tracks so well that it required all the power of forensic science to find that he had even been to the scene of the crime. The proof, however, though miniscule, is incontrovertible...'
It's white because with the government going further and further towards genetic fingerprinting and/or trying rapist's dna in absentia, it's use might have great social implications. The paranoia it engenders in clever people might make even the stupidest loser object to it so strongly that everyone agrees that the social cost of the technology exceeds its benefits. Used to review the judicial record (we're back to Texas again!), it might show a such a scary number of false prison terms and false executions, at in a better world, the evidence it provided might end the death penalty.
This might be a little 'late-in-the-day,' but here's a mini-article on rechargeable batteries.
With industry claiming that one set of rechargeable double-A batteries can be charged up to 1000 times, even before you consider the environmental impact of switching to rechargeable batteries, the economic arguments for using them are very convincing.
In my experience, a set of current generation rechargeables cost no more than two to three times what a set of comparable quality disposable batteries do and even if the advertiser's claims with regard to the number of recharging cycles are wild lies--exaggerated by a factor of one hundred--you *STILL* make out like a bandit by using them. As far as I'm concerned, they're the smartest thing going.
Down to brass facts, or, 'more than you ever wanted to know...'
Current rechargeable batteries are an imperfect technological compromise between alkaline batteries and cheaper disposable battery technologies. As such, you find that even the best rechargeables tend to be somewhat underpowered in terms of the voltages they generate. Disposable and recharable double-A batteries share form factors, but the rechargeable is designed to sustain a slightly lower voltage than the disposeable--when you read the fine print on a sampling of rechargeable double-A's, you find that nearly all of them are rated for 1.25 volts instead of the disposable's 1.5---and in some applications requiring a higher voltage, rechargeables might not be all they're cracked up to be. Personally, I have never seen this to be the case.
For a lot of people who thought about buying rechargeables years ago and rejected the idea, one of the things that put them off was having to charge their batteries all night for units that didn't have anything like the stamina of disposables. This is simply no longer true. Rapid chargers are available from a number of well-recognized companies which will rapidly impart an almost full charge to them, often in as little as one to two hours.
The stamina of rechargeables has also improved over the last few years. Rechargeable batteries are rated according to their maker's claim that their batteries will put out useful voltage over time. This is measured in thousandths of an Ampere per hour (aka, milliampere hours, sometimes abbreviated, mAh) with the number of mAh forming the cornerstone of the company's marketing efforts. In theory, the greater the number of mAh on the battery's label, the longer it will last in high-drain devices like digital cameras, where rechargeables are pretty much imperative if you want to avoid going broke while you poison the local groundwater.
Back in the bad old days, rechargeable batteries were nasty beasts with little to offer. You had to be organized and disciplined to use them. They were expensive. They took all night to charge and compared to a set of Duracells alkalines, they were bad joke. All of that has changed. I use rechargeables exclusively in applications ranging from my portable reading lamp to my digital camera and I couldn't be happier.
Names to look out for at your local electronics outlet include, Sony (more for their charger than their batteries), Duracell, and Power2000, who have just come out with a double-A battery that they claim offers a 2100 mAh of power, which, if true, put them at the top of the heap.
Definitely an article that raises a lot of interesting questions along many axes, but in the final analysis, I don't believe him.
Brain sifts many forms of technological change to support his scenario, but he ignores a lot of things as well and those things are probably crucial. First off, anthropomorphic robots have been the science-fiction writer's holy grail for decades, and if we as a society really wanted them and needed them, we would already have devoted the resources necessary to have made them by now--they would be a lot more effective than Honda's Asimo.
Right now, in a lot of ways, computer-controlled automated systems do more today than Brain imagines coming about in the future.
Right now, for five-hundred dollars, you can buy a hobbyist's robotic arm that will do everything from mixing chemicals to throwing a ball. Right now, in industry, computer-controlled robotic arms spot-weld automobile frames. Right now, today, robotic arm systems use a single, high-speed cutting tool to turn a one-ton steel ingot into an engine block in minutes.
Computer-controlled automated systems are pervasive in many forms of heavy industry and have been for decades, but it doesn't follow that it will take anthropomorphic robots to eventually drive much of the population into the government-funded dormitories of a near-future dystopia.
It seems far more likely that the constantly expanding trend towards globalizing the economy; moving employment from the first world to the third to exploit labor-cost differentials, will do things that are simpler and more dangerous.
By seeking and exploiting cheap labor for manufacturing and services, capitalism is busily providing products to societies whose money supply it is decreasing--where the trend is already one of people working longer ours for less money or not working at all.
Current, globalized capitalism in this respect is like a snake eating it's own tail and long, long before a man sitting in business class will have to worry about the maintenance of his airliner's man-shaped robot pilot, he and society will have to come to grips with the danger of unemployment in New York and Los Angeles causing the same in Shanghai and Dhaka.
The debate that arises from Steven Wozniak's company and its innovation is nothing new and neither are the debates surrounding it. The potential convenience applications that the device offers are swallowed up and ignored in the face of the device's obvious potential for applications in security and surveillance.
The most intriguing aspect of all the back-and-forth in the debate is that it is not demonstrable that either side is wrong. What the article in the Times shows is only the prototype of a short-range locator device with the potential for information transfer.
As an examination of William Gibson's work reveals, the problem is one of increasing efficiency and efficacy in that as the technologies behind the technology become more sophisticated--as the devices become smaller and achieve greater range, information-transfer potential and ubiquity--their potential usefulness and their potential for danger can only increase.
William Gibson's main perception in one of his least-enjoyable stories, 'The Gernsbach Continuum,' contains the central idea of his one of his most important themes: 'the street finds it's own uses for things.'
Gibson's greatest perceptions is that technical innovations in the use and shaping of society in unpredictable ways that the creators of the technology can't foresee and can't consider as the humble telephone pager illustrates.
Originally, the pager allowed busy people to whom other people needed access to get out of their offices and hospitals. It freed doctors and lawyers to either live more life or get more done. The unpredictable, socially transformative downside of the technology entered into the equation the moment it became available to the masses.
Among the many changes that the spread of pager technology made was that it made drug-dealers a lot safer and set the police new problems: instead of having to stay in one place where they and their contacts could be subject to observation or chained to specific telephone landlines that could be tapped by law-enforcement agencies, the pager cut the link between the drug-dealer and his territory and allowed street-level dealers to arrange meetings with their clients in locations of their own choosing.
This phenomenon was the source of a small but very real transformation in society as the rise of cheap pagers changed things. A block of Motorola circuitry in a casing, changed society; it changed the notion of presence and absence and leisure time and physical distance. It changed the law and investigative procedure, the notion of privacy and tens of other things that no one had any tiniest inkling might spring up from using radio receivers attached to a POTs telephone system to transmit phone numbers.
As it concerns the debate here, it is easy to see that the notes talking about pedophiles are actually a valid cause of concern as are a thousand other things that are just as wonderful as the police's finding a lost child and just as dangerous as a pedophile's doing the same that we'll just have to wait for.
The single largest company ever to warn people not to use their software for life-and-death situations, is now going to have an exclusive with the government to help prevent the next 9/11 attack.
Considering that the only (repeat: only) effective Microsoft security measures to date are the ones that prevent people who've already stolen Windows-XP from upgrading it, it's pretty safe to say that we can all prepare to live with having any enemy who wants to know something knowing it while substantial numbers of us sit around glowing in the dark.
Today's bonus question: 'will the government's relationship with Microsoft include a EULA that precludes the government's suing them when they screw up?'
It's amazing what you can do to a society with enough money.
This is an interesting thread. I mean, the original battlestar galactica was one of the worst pieces of crap ever and I don't understand the source of the passion for it.
I mean, I can understand someone's objecting to the remake of Galactica on the basis of its being bad television, but I can't understand anyone disliking it from the perspective of someone who is 'preserving a classic.'
I am not, repeat, not, a troll. I just want to express thought that I feel is truthful: Battlestar Galactica was pure seventies nonsense--a show with Hanna-Barbera-cartoon production values, ludicrous plotlines and resolutions. How ludicrous? it's this way:
'look, that basestar has gone close to the surface, blow up the unstable planet under it!'
Its key feature was a cloying, low-brow virtuousness that was painful to watch back in the day, and that is only watchable now because of the series's nostalgia factor for someone who was fourteen at the time.
I can understand someone saying the new version sucks, but, Really, ror anyone to say that the remake betraying it is saying something very, very strange...
You're welcome to follow me around, on condition that I can do the same to you, and that I know where you are and when you are following me.
That is the idea. ..everyone watches everyone. Not just that the state knows all about my actions, but that I know about the actions of the state. The argument is: the cameras are coming -- who's going to control them? the citizens, or the Government®?
I have to say I found your response amazing.
Before seeing it, I thought, in my shameful arrogance that I wrote convincingly. Before your response, I thought I could get the point across to anyone and make them see it no matter what went 'a dancing and a vibrating' through their heads. I see now that that was all illusion. I understand now that the words I wrote were just words and that all they made anyone else hear was static and the distant sound of breaking glass...
You're right. So long as the private citizen controls the cameras and computers of the future that the government installs, mans and maintains, everyone's civil rights will be guaranteed and everything will be hunky-dory.
AC wrote: This kind of article will always bring the knee-jerk concern for our 'civil liberties', but can anyone actually name one?
What liberty would an action like this deprive us from? Unless you're doing something illegal, as the old saying goes, you have very little to worry about.
The civil liberties question is almost always a question either potential until someone whose rights someone else cares about gets burned. Then, usually years, after the fact, some act is done to redress the injustice in question and some court decision makes the question of free speech clearer.
When it comes to Civil Liberties, cameras everywhere (soon to be backed up by face-recognition software) does not follow the principle of the government's 'treading lightly.' In fact, it is very much the opposite. It is telling to note that ability to foster the belief that one is under constant observation is a weapon employed by tyrannies.
The now extinct communist regime of East Germany turned one fifth of its citizens into informers as a means of assuring control and destroying the conditions necessary for dissent: it didn't work because everyone knew they were spied on constantly, but because they were made to believe that it was a real possibility. The fact that one might be under observation worked to try and create a culture of sheep.
Now, in democratic nations, technology is working to give the state (pick one) similar tools and whether or not the state chooses to use them and against whom are irrelevant questions. The 'real,' real question is whether or not, given a choice, you would choose to create or participate in a culture that feels its possession of those tools is a good thing.
In countries that consider themselves democracies, the atmosphere of perpetual observation is a poisonous one that puts the citizen in a position similar to that of a soldier having to cross a minefield; it slows things down by creating the belief that any step you take may be the wrong one, and as a concept, nothing better illustrates the 'chilling effect,' one hears about so often in regard to free speech issues.
The big philosphical question of cameras everywhere is whether or not you would like to live in a society where the state's ignorance of your actions is lessened. The furthest extension of the idea postulates a civilization of ultimate discipline: it would be a world with definite benefits--one where there would be less rape, robbery, murder embezzlement, etc.--but it would also be one where there would be less privacy; not less privacy in the sense that the police simply didn't know, for example, that you stepped behind a tree and urinated when you couldn't find a restroom, but less privacy because you had to depend on the good will of the police and/or whatever other organs of the state that concern themselves with what you do to regard your step behind the tree as a triviality and take no action.
In the end, the effects of technological observation involve a value theory and you cannot 'prove,' that the less-observation model is better than the more-observation one. However, you can argue very powerfully that the idea is wrong with a thought exercise.
If you think there's nothing wrong with being under constant observation, tell me who you are and where you live and during my next vacation, I will follow you at a distance of three to five feet from the moment you leave your house to the moment you go back to it.
While this is going on, I will do everything I can to record everything you say and do. By your way of looking at things, you should welcome me; no one will be able to accuse you of a crime since I will personally know where you are and what you are doing at all times during my time with you. Should you be accused of a crime, the fact that I had you under observation is sure to exonerate you since I am incapable of giving the state information which they can misinterpret. You'll love it.
"I'm being a bit pedantic here, but surely those are Bernie Taupin's lyrics? (Elton John wrote the music)."
Hmmm... I'd better be careful here...
I, the respondent to your post, which was in response to my own, earlier, post do hereby stipulate the following points enumerated by bullets which will be indicted in this text by hyphens (-). My stipulation shall be limited to and only to the following three (3) enumerated points.
- You, the respondent to my post, are almost certainly right in the latter point of your sentence (q.v., above).
- Considering that the songs that Elton John (b. Reginald Dwight) sang, either while recording albums or in public, during performances for which he was paid, onstage, on one or more occassions while playing the piano, are the result of the Reginald Dwight/Bernie Taupin collaboration, and therefore there is a high probability that the lyric in question is B. Taupin's (i.e., that they were written by the aforementioned B. Taupin.)
- I also freely stipulate that you are correct in the former point of your sentence (q.v., above). You are being pedantic.:-D
That's nice, but with the new vision system, you get all of what you mention and you don't have to wait until all the church-goers are asleep for half an hour before you can afford to use your data services.
In areas where it's up and working, Sprintpcs Vision is *tons* faster than 14.4 running from as little as 56k on average to a 144K theoretical maximum, hovering around 100k on average. You can sign onto it whenever you like and it has nothing to do with your night and weekends minutes, period. You can stay on until your battery dies starting whenever you like.
Better still, if you have the right software, phone and cable, you can use your Sprint phone as a very high-speed modem for your laptop.
Sprint really doesn't want you to do this but it's an almost irresistable perquisite of using vision.
It brought us the England the Dickens complained about. It makes us the only rich, industrialized nation on earth without a cohesive health-care system (your private cancer is less important than an insurance company's private profit ) and now it has brought us the beauty, the joy and wonder of society which tolerates a president whose only successes involve nepotism and the favors attendent to having very rich friends.
Money rocks! It slices. It dices.
According to the theory we all read in civics and economics, capitalism forces businesses operating in societies to respond to changes in the market by bettering production, distribution, marketing, pricing and anything else that will make everyone happy. That's the theory.
The practice, circa 2003, is something we never talk about here. Basically, what the record companies are working toward is an efficacious solution which makes the most efficient use of the market power that accrues to a well-funded, well-connected oligopoly: it is cheaper for them to buy nonsense lawmaking and policy for the protection of a loathsome business model than it would be for them to adapt to the world's dislike for coughing up billions that it's tight economies can't afford for digital information. YOu've got to admire it, just before you puke.
Where is all this going?
Essentially, there is nothing new to be found here. The Microsoft Case demonstrated that current administration never met a rich person or organization that wasn't worth a oving pearl necklace, while the legislative branches seem happy to pass legislation for the executive branch to sign without really worrying themselves overmuch about abstractions like your rights.
What's the solution: live somewhere else. Consider it. There are a lot of English-speaking countries in the world. You probaby won't get rich, but the odds are against that here, too.
Hell, with socilized medicine, might even live longer.
I'm sure that someone else must have noted this by now, but one of the greatest things about our system coupled with one of its worst problems for dealing with technological innovation is that the Supreme Court is our "Court of Last Appeal."
In the real world, Once the Supreme Court has ruled, a change in the law requires considerable political pressure and motion through a federal appelate court system that the administrations of the last two decades have stacked with appointees who were often picked more for their ideological reliability than for their objective jurisprudential acumen. That is, more for how likely it is believed that they would rule 'against' on cases involving issues disliked by conservatives; issues like affirmative action, privacy, worker-safety or reproductive issues.
Having travelled through that minefield, the Supreme Court would then have to collectively acknowledge that there was some new issue at stake for the Court to examine and then finally, the decision would have to overcome the ideological-stacking of the court by previous conservative administrations. Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have often worked to generate some truly hideous law IMHO, and their finding the 'protection of children,' of greater weight than publicly-available access to information from sources paid for by the tax-payer is not surprising.
In the final analysis, a successful review of the matter would all come down to a question of how small the issue was as a hotspot in an ideologically polarized judicial branch where a partnership between wealth, religion and the desire for social inertia in the face of social change have worked together to produce a court capable of making, um, uh... counterintuitive rulings on important issues.
All things considered, don't hold your breath and hope the border to Canada stays open for as long as possible.
Determining what is and is not âbusiness-as-usualâ(TM) is difficult with nothing more than a blurb-length report to go on.
There have been a lot of threads here, some philosophically/politically loaded with arguments of varying quality: the first thread talked about control of the economy under Mussoliniâ(TM)s Fascism. Another attacked that one, praising raw capitalism while yet another early note gave what might or might not be an informed view of how the Naziâ(TM)s handled capitalism under the third Reich. Somehow, the subject became very dramatic and youâ(TM)ve got to ask if high drama is justifiable when you look at the core of the thing.
Without drama, there are good reasons to say that there is nothing new in the FBI being made to favor the interests of American businessâ"even businesses whose actions are as loathsome as the music industryâ(TM)s with regard to file-sharing. The proposition of the bill can be looked at as a (sad) comment on the nature of our government: people and organizations with vast sums have influence which often overrides the interests of the massesâ"thatâ(TM)s, âyou and me,â(TM) bud.
We live in a representative democracy and the systemâ(TM)s oddest and ugliest flaw is that wealthy people and organizations direct the actions of government more directly, and more immediately than the slower processes of ordinary governance: this is the âno surpriseâ(TM) factor. The FBI is directed by the federal government, the federal government is run by societyâ(TM)s loudest voices and money is an amplifier that drowns out other voices (If you think this is untrue, you probably like the âBig-Mac-for-you/your salary-x-ten for them,â(TM) tax-cuts).
In the final analysis, it really is a matter of voices. Many of us want to say, âthe music industry has been at the trough for too long and the net has changed everything.â(TM) For their part, maybe a dozen multibillion-dollar corporations with the money to make a politicianâ(TM)s re-election campaigns with their contributions alone want the government to wage a campaign to frighten nameless, faceless people who are costing them money.
This raises two key questions: âWhy is this surprising news?â(TM) and âWhom do you expect to win?â(TM)
The article that the link points to informs the reader that the delays in implimenting LNP that the cellular carriers all seem to want will no longer be granted.
With a growing tendency towards cellphone's playing an important role in multiple sphere's of a consumer's life, the absence of number portablity is a free stick for cellular providers that they can use to beat consumers into silently accepting less-than-optimal cellular service and the desire to delay on the part of the major cellular carriers is understandable, if vile.
With this in mind, it would seem that the 1996 law mentioned in the article demands that cellular providers finally give consumers the number portability that is currently denied them.
In other words, the article tells us that government is actually working to *enforce* a provision of the law to the benefit of consumers.
first pill - and it isn't going to be the company that develops the drug. A generic company makes cheap pills by never making the first one. This is essentially a tragedy of the commons - knowledge of new drugs benefits everyone but costs only those who develop the drugs. Unless those who develop the drugs are adequately compensated, they will find something else to do with their lives.
This is a classic version of the slippery-slope fallacy. In essence, you are saying, âunless society allows the maximum possible return on investment for pharmaceutical makers, they will turn their money to something else that they can do with their equipment and expertise.â(TM)
When you talk about pharmaceutical companies and their actions in the real world, you imply that this pursuit of profit should include the ability to price a great number of Africans and other people in the third world out of survival. In other words, if pharmaceutical companies canâ(TM)t get huge profits, theyâ(TM)ll just set up steel mills, or take up basket-weaving and weâ(TM)ll all run out of aspirin.
That argument draws a curtain over an important factor even as it does violence to logic.
In the United States and in other countries which support fundamental scientific research at universities and in national laboratories like the NIH, it is the taxpayer who pays for the research that leads to the profitable compounds and recouping R&D costs are a much smaller factor in drug prices than most people would believe. Big hint: Pfizer, Inc. and the other Pharmaceutical giants didnâ(TM)t do the fundamental work in discovering, isolating and containing the several AIDs viruses, government laboratories in the U.S. and France did.
This is not left-wing hyperbole, but a fact.
Publicly-funded institutions do much of the fundamental research into illnesses and the compounds that alleviate them and it is one of the beauties of our system that the taxpayer ends up paying much of the R&D costs for the drugs that make pharmaceutical companies rich *before* we pay hefty prices for the drugs themselves. As far as pricing in the third world and elsewhere is concerned, the actions of drug-companies are disturbing in the extreme. The premium prices paid by American health consumers is, in fact, so great that there is at present a controversial trend in various states entrepreneurs have set up operations like small shops and even âTupperware parties,â(TM) to funnel drug orders to Canadian pharmacists to exploit the cross-border price differential according to an article in the New York Times, this week.
The compensation demanded by drug-manufacturers so they can maximize profit is one of our patent lawâ(TM)s biggest and most philosophically âdebatableâ(TM) problems in the world economy.
If I withhold a drug from a person for profit and he dies as a result, it is extortion and murder. If a pharmaceutical concern does the same thing to millions of people and they do anything to short circuit this process, the United States government will apply economic sanctions. Any way you slice it, itâ(TM)s ugly.
Education is not just a process but a complex set of ideas about how you define education and what it is supposed to do.
In Europe, my European expatriate professors all told me, education existed to give you the tools you would need to think, and the ability to do intellectual work flowed from this almost as an afterthought. In the United States, our love of pragmatism (or our distrust of "thought for its own sake") has led us to generally construe education as a process which teaches one to do things (e.g., courses in advertising and the obligatory and sometimes meaningless MBA).
For better or for worse, this attitude leaves a lot of wiggle room, a large gap into which nonsense flows. What nearly everyone seems to forget no matter what their viewpoint is that education is a matter of delivering to the student not mere information which he can get from a book on his own, but an expansion of the student's capabilities.
This thing, this real increase in real capacity, is something that is beyond a great many teachers if not the majority of them in a way that only real education can equip one to recognize; to know it and articulate it, you have to have achieved an intuitive understanding of the difference between the words, 'teacher,' 'professor,' and 'mentor.'
Considering the state of our education system and its lacunae, the fact that few seem to is only a small surprise.
In 1996, North Korea sent well-trained and well-armed infiltration agents into South Korea on an information-gathering mission and if it hadn't been for one sharp-eyed cabdriver, we might never have known that it had even happened.
With leadership resembling a Stalinist 'cult of personality' possessing total information control at its disposal, the North Korean government can create and has created effective personel resources in areas pertaining to espionage and infiltration. This well-documented fact makes the idea of North Korea's running a military 'cyberacademy' a lot more credible than the Iraq-obsessed U.S. Government which has a stake in playing down a North Korean threat would have you believe.
Two incidents show go far to prove this:
The first is the aforementioned infiltration of Nouth Korean reconnaisance troops by submarine.
After the infiltrator's accidental discovery, they were hunted down by south Korean Military and police units. After a series of bloody firefights, rather than face capture some of the infiltrators and submarine crew were shot to death by their own officers.
The second is the discovery after thirty years, that North Korea sent agents into Japan to kidnap individuals to serve as tutors in masquerading as Japanese nationals for the North Korean intelligence services. These people, among others, were flown to Japan for a brief reunion after decades of captivity during which their families had long since given them up for dead.
North Korea may have a very low GNP by western standards, but it is an industrialized nation and the ability of its government to divert resources from one segment of society to another certainly lends strong credence to the threat described in the article.
Of the two people in the man story, Johnson is by far the more scary. In fact both of them are *way* scary followed by the judge in the case who is scary AND ignorant.
Tucker is a creep. The man is an IQ-test for women living in a modern, pluralistic society where women are free to choose sexual partners. In any place like the United States or Western Europe where women can choose one, many, or no sexual partners, women learn to avoid the Tuckers of the world, usually in high school, or they fail to and it isn't anyone's business.
The fact that Johnson hadn't learned it and didn't avoid Tucker is telling with respect to her... a cautionary tale about classic prudery and its abstinence-as-ignorance-as-virtue attitude. In the real world, Johnson got off lucky in that She could have gotten more than just a Tucker: she could have gotten a Tucker with a disease.
The judge in the case is a horror who in a better world would wake up covered in a sweat of realization and retire from the bench after reversing herself.
Yes, Tucker's portrayal of Johnson is painful to Johnson. Tucker is an egotistical turd, a man an earlier age would have called a cad, but the judge's decision sacrifices Tucker's right to free speech -- and by precedent, anyone's who comes before a court in a similar case -- in order to protect Johnson's right to hypocrisy; essentially, her right to foist on young women a standard of behavior that she herself obviously coudln't live up to and that was just as obviously harmful to her.
Johnson couldn't keep her legs closed when a Tucker rolled around, and she is selling the same set of attitudes that made her situation possible to impressionable young women; basically setting them up with the same sexual ignorance and social naivete that lead to her experience. Tucker's rebuttal, as nasty as it might be, would have provided a counterbalance to Johnson's B.S. and denial, working exactly as our free-speech provision is supposed to, and the judge shot that down. Honestly, that judge shouldn't be a judge anymore.
I can't stand the Tuckers of the world but I can only hope he appeals and wins.
Yes, privacy advocates and the simply paranoid do blame the technology, but only because they have nothing else to shoot at.
It's true that every technology provides both foreseen and unforeseen uses, but in today's climate where people are willing to exchange privacy (anyone's) for security on the basis of only one foreign terrorist attack, the technology is an especially attractive target.
With politicians in the administration working hard to tear down our structures of fundamental rights (read up on the second patriot act), a technology which could be adapted to creating undetectable surveillance devices and unbreachable security systems is frightening in a sense that most people don't like to talk about. The point is a simple question, but also one of historic moment: does anyone anywhere really imagine that nano-technological bugs in the hands of a national security state would a good thing?
Once disseminated, Would it be a good technology for the Chinese or the North Koreans to have to place in the homes of suspected dissidents or defectors? Or for that matter, in every home? On each citizen's person?
Concentrating more on human nature than on circuit diagrams for a moment, can anyone honestly say that the applications that this technology promises, Would be something you would like to see in the hands of anyone's secret police?
You can't blame the technology, but then, what do you blame? Governments are often beyond the reach of their citizens and some technologies just take them further.
Sorry, but I can't see this as anything but a purely temporary issue. The fact of the matter is, yes, some of the current equipment used by radio stations might not be able to handle copyright protection, but as is almost universally the case with digital technologies, this is by no means written in stone.
Sooner rather than later, the simbiosis between radio station and record industry will repair itself and things will return to a state where there will be no need for this news item.
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Interestingly enough, there's a remaindered book by Berlinski called, 'the advent of the algorhythm' which I found very helpful.
Although its main concern is mathematical logic, Berlinski's explanations of the thought behind the numbers is a nice thing to have. His book makes you think about numbers--about what a numbers really are and how they work.
The book's actual math is broken up by sections of very well-written prose that offer relief when the mathematical ideas leave you feeling hollowed-out and brain-fried.
The advent of the algorhythm is not an easy read without a big math background, but it did a lot to bring me a new understanding and appreciation of what is there in math.
I don't like Berlinski's conclusions, the main point of his book, but the what he teaches along the way is great stuff.
I hope this helps.
It's black because it would allow an uncorrupted justice system access to a tool by which to solve the crime you committed and convict you so easily that you might not find the guilt and terror of having embezzled a thousand dollars so great that you use your second chance to retreat to a community in the midwest where you devote the rest of your life to helping the poor and needy instead of wearing orange for ten, long and meaningless years.
It's white because, employed judiciously, it might make fewer people laugh and weep at the Texas justice system.
It's Black because, with it, all anyone who wanted to frame you for something in a cheap movie plot (or in real life for that matter) would have to do is to get hold of anything you've ever handled at any time and plant it at the scene of a bank robbery, a terrorist hideout, or a really wet, really nasty murder.
As in, 'Yes, your honor, he is a criminal genius, a modern-day Fu-Manchu or Moriarty, who covered his tracks so well that it required all the power of forensic science to find that he had even been to the scene of the crime. The proof, however, though miniscule, is incontrovertible...'
It's white because with the government going further and further towards genetic fingerprinting and/or trying rapist's dna in absentia, it's use might have great social implications. The paranoia it engenders in clever people might make even the stupidest loser object to it so strongly that everyone agrees that the social cost of the technology exceeds its benefits. Used to review the judicial record (we're back to Texas again!), it might show a such a scary number of false prison terms and false executions, at in a better world, the evidence it provided might end the death penalty.
And you could go on and on and on...
This might be a little 'late-in-the-day,' but here's a mini-article on rechargeable batteries.
With industry claiming that one set of rechargeable double-A batteries can be charged up to 1000 times, even before you consider the environmental impact of switching to rechargeable batteries, the economic arguments for using them are very convincing.
In my experience, a set of current generation rechargeables cost no more than two to three times what a set of comparable quality disposable batteries do and even if the advertiser's claims with regard to the number of recharging cycles are wild lies--exaggerated by a factor of one hundred--you *STILL* make out like a bandit by using them. As far as I'm concerned, they're the smartest thing going.
Down to brass facts, or, 'more than you ever wanted to know...'
Current rechargeable batteries are an imperfect technological compromise between alkaline batteries and cheaper disposable battery technologies. As such, you find that even the best rechargeables tend to be somewhat underpowered in terms of the voltages they generate. Disposable and recharable double-A batteries share form factors, but the rechargeable is designed to sustain a slightly lower voltage than the disposeable--when you read the fine print on a sampling of rechargeable double-A's, you find that nearly all of them are rated for 1.25 volts instead of the disposable's 1.5---and in some applications requiring a higher voltage, rechargeables might not be all they're cracked up to be. Personally, I have never seen this to be the case.
For a lot of people who thought about buying rechargeables years ago and rejected the idea, one of the things that put them off was having to charge their batteries all night for units that didn't have anything like the stamina of disposables. This is simply no longer true. Rapid chargers are available from a number of well-recognized companies which will rapidly impart an almost full charge to them, often in as little as one to two hours.
The stamina of rechargeables has also improved over the last few years. Rechargeable batteries are rated according to their maker's claim that their batteries will put out useful voltage over time. This is measured in thousandths of an Ampere per hour (aka, milliampere hours, sometimes abbreviated, mAh) with the number of mAh forming the cornerstone of the company's marketing efforts. In theory, the greater the number of mAh on the battery's label, the longer it will last in high-drain devices like digital cameras, where rechargeables are pretty much imperative if you want to avoid going broke while you poison the local groundwater.
Back in the bad old days, rechargeable batteries were nasty beasts with little to offer. You had to be organized and disciplined to use them. They were expensive. They took all night to charge and compared to a set of Duracells alkalines, they were bad joke. All of that has changed. I use rechargeables exclusively in applications ranging from my portable reading lamp to my digital camera and I couldn't be happier.
Names to look out for at your local electronics outlet include, Sony (more for their charger than their batteries), Duracell, and Power2000, who have just come out with a double-A battery that they claim offers a 2100 mAh of power, which, if true, put them at the top of the heap.
Happy trails.
Definitely an article that raises a lot of interesting questions along many axes, but in the final analysis, I don't believe him.
Brain sifts many forms of technological change to support his scenario, but he ignores a lot of things as well and those things are probably crucial. First off, anthropomorphic robots have been the science-fiction writer's holy grail for decades, and if we as a society really wanted them and needed them, we would already have devoted the resources necessary to have made them by now--they would be a lot more effective than Honda's Asimo.
Right now, in a lot of ways, computer-controlled automated systems do more today than Brain imagines coming about in the future.
Right now, for five-hundred dollars, you can buy a hobbyist's robotic arm that will do everything from mixing chemicals to throwing a ball. Right now, in industry, computer-controlled robotic arms spot-weld automobile frames. Right now, today, robotic arm systems use a single, high-speed cutting tool to turn a one-ton steel ingot into an engine block in minutes.
Computer-controlled automated systems are pervasive in many forms of heavy industry and have been for decades, but it doesn't follow that it will take anthropomorphic robots to eventually drive much of the population into the government-funded dormitories of a near-future dystopia.
It seems far more likely that the constantly expanding trend towards globalizing the economy; moving employment from the first world to the third to exploit labor-cost differentials, will do things that are simpler and more dangerous.
By seeking and exploiting cheap labor for manufacturing and services, capitalism is busily providing products to societies whose money supply it is decreasing--where the trend is already one of people working longer ours for less money or not working at all.
Current, globalized capitalism in this respect is like a snake eating it's own tail and long, long before a man sitting in business class will have to worry about the maintenance of his airliner's man-shaped robot pilot, he and society will have to come to grips with the danger of unemployment in New York and Los Angeles causing the same in Shanghai and Dhaka.
The debate that arises from Steven Wozniak's company and its innovation is nothing new and neither are the debates surrounding it. The potential convenience applications that the device offers are swallowed up and ignored in the face of the device's obvious potential for applications in security and surveillance.
The most intriguing aspect of all the back-and-forth in the debate is that it is not demonstrable that either side is wrong. What the article in the Times shows is only the prototype of a short-range locator device with the potential for information transfer.
As an examination of William Gibson's work reveals, the problem is one of increasing efficiency and efficacy in that as the technologies behind the technology become more sophisticated--as the devices become smaller and achieve greater range, information-transfer potential and ubiquity--their potential usefulness and their potential for danger can only increase.
William Gibson's main perception in one of his least-enjoyable stories, 'The Gernsbach Continuum,' contains the central idea of his one of his most important themes: 'the street finds it's own uses for things.'
Gibson's greatest perceptions is that technical innovations in the use and shaping of society in unpredictable ways that the creators of the technology can't foresee and can't consider as the humble telephone pager illustrates.
Originally, the pager allowed busy people to whom other people needed access to get out of their offices and hospitals. It freed doctors and lawyers to either live more life or get more done. The unpredictable, socially transformative downside of the technology entered into the equation the moment it became available to the masses.
Among the many changes that the spread of pager technology made was that it made drug-dealers a lot safer and set the police new problems: instead of having to stay in one place where they and their contacts could be subject to observation or chained to specific telephone landlines that could be tapped by law-enforcement agencies, the pager cut the link between the drug-dealer and his territory and allowed street-level dealers to arrange meetings with their clients in locations of their own choosing.
This phenomenon was the source of a small but very real transformation in society as the rise of cheap pagers changed things. A block of Motorola circuitry in a casing, changed society; it changed the notion of presence and absence and leisure time and physical distance. It changed the law and investigative procedure, the notion of privacy and tens of other things that no one had any tiniest inkling might spring up from using radio receivers attached to a POTs telephone system to transmit phone numbers.
As it concerns the debate here, it is easy to see that the notes talking about pedophiles are actually a valid cause of concern as are a thousand other things that are just as wonderful as the police's finding a lost child and just as dangerous as a pedophile's doing the same that we'll just have to wait for.
The single largest company ever to warn people not to use their software for life-and-death situations, is now going to have an exclusive with the government to help prevent the next 9/11 attack.
Considering that the only (repeat: only ) effective Microsoft security measures to date are the ones that prevent people who've already stolen Windows-XP from upgrading it, it's pretty safe to say that we can all prepare to live with having any enemy who wants to know something knowing it while substantial numbers of us sit around glowing in the dark.
Today's bonus question: 'will the government's relationship with Microsoft include a EULA that precludes the government's suing them when they screw up?'
It's amazing what you can do to a society with enough money.
This is an interesting thread. I mean, the original battlestar galactica was one of the worst pieces of crap ever and I don't understand the source of the passion for it.
I mean, I can understand someone's objecting to the remake of Galactica on the basis of its being bad television, but I can't understand anyone disliking it from the perspective of someone who is 'preserving a classic.'
I am not, repeat, not, a troll. I just want to express thought that I feel is truthful: Battlestar Galactica was pure seventies nonsense--a show with Hanna-Barbera-cartoon production values, ludicrous plotlines and resolutions. How ludicrous? it's this way:
'look, that basestar has gone close to the surface, blow up the unstable planet under it!'
Its key feature was a cloying, low-brow virtuousness that was painful to watch back in the day, and that is only watchable now because of the series's nostalgia factor for someone who was fourteen at the time.
I can understand someone saying the new version sucks, but, Really, ror anyone to say that the remake betraying it is saying something very, very strange...
You're welcome to follow me around, on condition that I can do the same to you, and that I know where you are and when you are following me.
.everyone watches everyone. Not just that the state knows all about my actions, but that I know about the actions of the state. The argument is: the cameras are coming -- who's going to control them? the citizens, or the Government®?
That is the idea. .
I have to say I found your response amazing.
Before seeing it, I thought, in my shameful arrogance that I wrote convincingly. Before your response, I thought I could get the point across to anyone and make them see it no matter what went 'a dancing and a vibrating' through their heads. I see now that that was all illusion. I understand now that the words I wrote were just words and that all they made anyone else hear was static and the distant sound of breaking glass...
You're right. So long as the private citizen controls the cameras and computers of the future that the government installs, mans and maintains, everyone's civil rights will be guaranteed and everything will be hunky-dory.
Have a good one.
"I'm being a bit pedantic here, but surely those are Bernie Taupin's lyrics? (Elton John wrote the music)."
:-D
Hmmm... I'd better be careful here...
I, the respondent to your post, which was in response to my own, earlier, post do hereby stipulate the following points enumerated by bullets which will be indicted in this text by hyphens (-). My stipulation shall be limited to and only to the following three (3) enumerated points.
- You, the respondent to my post, are almost certainly right in the latter point of your sentence (q.v., above).
- Considering that the songs that Elton John (b. Reginald Dwight) sang, either while recording albums or in public, during performances for which he was paid, onstage, on one or more occassions while playing the piano, are the result of the Reginald Dwight/Bernie Taupin collaboration, and therefore there is a high probability that the lyric in question is B. Taupin's (i.e., that they were written by the aforementioned B. Taupin.)
- I also freely stipulate that you are correct in the former point of your sentence (q.v., above). You are being pedantic.
Jokes aside, it was a very nice catch.
Two different pieces by Times editorialists in one day?! I'm loving it!
More! More!
Annonymous Coward wrote:
'I'm boycotting all RIAA products until they stop suing everyone and bribing my congressman.'
Which only makes me wonder if quoting Elton John Lyrics counts as theft:
' and I think it's gonna be a long, long time...
('till touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man the think I am at home
oh, no, no, no... I'm a rocket man.')
Personally, I think considering the foot-smelly 'FUD' quality of the targeted lawsuits, I imagine the nastiness is only beginning...
That's nice, but with the new vision system, you get all of what you mention and you don't have to wait until all the church-goers are asleep for half an hour before you can afford to use your data services.
In areas where it's up and working, Sprintpcs Vision is *tons* faster than 14.4 running from as little as 56k on average to a 144K theoretical maximum, hovering around 100k on average. You can sign onto it whenever you like and it has nothing to do with your night and weekends minutes, period. You can stay on until your battery dies starting whenever you like.
Better still, if you have the right software, phone and cable, you can use your Sprint phone as a very high-speed modem for your laptop.
Sprint really doesn't want you to do this but it's an almost irresistable perquisite of using vision.
One thing you should consider: there are a number of companies that offer 'screen protectors' for your PDA.
If you need an aftermarket item to prevent scratches, you could always buy one and cut it down to size.
Raw Capitalism, you've gotta love it.
It brought us the England the Dickens complained about. It makes us the only rich, industrialized nation on earth without a cohesive health-care system (your private cancer is less important than an insurance company's private profit ) and now it has brought us the beauty, the joy and wonder of society which tolerates a president whose only successes involve nepotism and the favors attendent to having very rich friends.
Money rocks! It slices. It dices.
According to the theory we all read in civics and economics, capitalism forces businesses operating in societies to respond to changes in the market by bettering production, distribution, marketing, pricing and anything else that will make everyone happy. That's the theory.
The practice, circa 2003, is something we never talk about here. Basically, what the record companies are working toward is an efficacious solution which makes the most efficient use of the market power that accrues to a well-funded, well-connected oligopoly: it is cheaper for them to buy nonsense lawmaking and policy for the protection of a loathsome business model than it would be for them to adapt to the world's dislike for coughing up billions that it's tight economies can't afford for digital information. YOu've got to admire it, just before you puke.
Where is all this going?
Essentially, there is nothing new to be found here. The Microsoft Case demonstrated that current administration never met a rich person or organization that wasn't worth a oving pearl necklace, while the legislative branches seem happy to pass legislation for the executive branch to sign without really worrying themselves overmuch about abstractions like your rights.
What's the solution: live somewhere else. Consider it. There are a lot of English-speaking countries in the world. You probaby won't get rich, but the odds are against that here, too.
Hell, with socilized medicine, might even live longer.
I'm sure that someone else must have noted this by now, but one of the greatest things about our system coupled with one of its worst problems for dealing with technological innovation is that the Supreme Court is our "Court of Last Appeal."
In the real world, Once the Supreme Court has ruled, a change in the law requires considerable political pressure and motion through a federal appelate court system that the administrations of the last two decades have stacked with appointees who were often picked more for their ideological reliability than for their objective jurisprudential acumen. That is, more for how likely it is believed that they would rule 'against' on cases involving issues disliked by conservatives; issues like affirmative action, privacy, worker-safety or reproductive issues.
Having travelled through that minefield, the Supreme Court would then have to collectively acknowledge that there was some new issue at stake for the Court to examine and then finally, the decision would have to overcome the ideological-stacking of the court by previous conservative administrations. Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have often worked to generate some truly hideous law IMHO, and their finding the 'protection of children,' of greater weight than publicly-available access to information from sources paid for by the tax-payer is not surprising.
In the final analysis, a successful review of the matter would all come down to a question of how small the issue was as a hotspot in an ideologically polarized judicial branch where a partnership between wealth, religion and the desire for social inertia in the face of social change have worked together to produce a court capable of making, um, uh... counterintuitive rulings on important issues.
All things considered, don't hold your breath and hope the border to Canada stays open for as long as possible.
Determining what is and is not âbusiness-as-usualâ(TM) is difficult with nothing more than a blurb-length report to go on.
There have been a lot of threads here, some philosophically/politically loaded with arguments of varying quality: the first thread talked about control of the economy under Mussoliniâ(TM)s Fascism. Another attacked that one, praising raw capitalism while yet another early note gave what might or might not be an informed view of how the Naziâ(TM)s handled capitalism under the third Reich. Somehow, the subject became very dramatic and youâ(TM)ve got to ask if high drama is justifiable when you look at the core of the thing.
Without drama, there are good reasons to say that there is nothing new in the FBI being made to favor the interests of American businessâ"even businesses whose actions are as loathsome as the music industryâ(TM)s with regard to file-sharing. The proposition of the bill can be looked at as a (sad) comment on the nature of our government: people and organizations with vast sums have influence which often overrides the interests of the massesâ"thatâ(TM)s, âyou and me,â(TM) bud.
We live in a representative democracy and the systemâ(TM)s oddest and ugliest flaw is that wealthy people and organizations direct the actions of government more directly, and more immediately than the slower processes of ordinary governance: this is the âno surpriseâ(TM) factor. The FBI is directed by the federal government, the federal government is run by societyâ(TM)s loudest voices and money is an amplifier that drowns out other voices (If you think this is untrue, you probably like the âBig-Mac-for-you/your salary-x-ten for them,â(TM) tax-cuts).
In the final analysis, it really is a matter of voices. Many of us want to say, âthe music industry has been at the trough for too long and the net has changed everything.â(TM) For their part, maybe a dozen multibillion-dollar corporations with the money to make a politicianâ(TM)s re-election campaigns with their contributions alone want the government to wage a campaign to frighten nameless, faceless people who are costing them money.
This raises two key questions: âWhy is this surprising news?â(TM) and âWhom do you expect to win?â(TM)
The article that the link points to informs the reader that the delays in implimenting LNP that the cellular carriers all seem to want will no longer be granted.
With a growing tendency towards cellphone's playing an important role in multiple sphere's of a consumer's life, the absence of number portablity is a free stick for cellular providers that they can use to beat consumers into silently accepting less-than-optimal cellular service and the desire to delay on the part of the major cellular carriers is understandable, if vile.
With this in mind, it would seem that the 1996 law mentioned in the article demands that cellular providers finally give consumers the number portability that is currently denied them.
In other words, the article tells us that government is actually working to *enforce* a provision of the law to the benefit of consumers.
first pill - and it isn't going to be the company that develops the drug. A generic company makes cheap pills by never making the first one. This is essentially a tragedy of the commons - knowledge of new drugs benefits everyone but costs only those who develop the drugs. Unless those who develop the drugs are adequately compensated, they will find something else to do with their lives.
This is a classic version of the slippery-slope fallacy. In essence, you are saying, âunless society allows the maximum possible return on investment for pharmaceutical makers, they will turn their money to something else that they can do with their equipment and expertise.â(TM)
When you talk about pharmaceutical companies and their actions in the real world, you imply that this pursuit of profit should include the ability to price a great number of Africans and other people in the third world out of survival. In other words, if pharmaceutical companies canâ(TM)t get huge profits, theyâ(TM)ll just set up steel mills, or take up basket-weaving and weâ(TM)ll all run out of aspirin.
That argument draws a curtain over an important factor even as it does violence to logic.
In the United States and in other countries which support fundamental scientific research at universities and in national laboratories like the NIH, it is the taxpayer who pays for the research that leads to the profitable compounds and recouping R&D costs are a much smaller factor in drug prices than most people would believe. Big hint: Pfizer, Inc. and the other Pharmaceutical giants didnâ(TM)t do the fundamental work in discovering, isolating and containing the several AIDs viruses, government laboratories in the U.S. and France did.
This is not left-wing hyperbole, but a fact.
Publicly-funded institutions do much of the fundamental research into illnesses and the compounds that alleviate them and it is one of the beauties of our system that the taxpayer ends up paying much of the R&D costs for the drugs that make pharmaceutical companies rich *before* we pay hefty prices for the drugs themselves. As far as pricing in the third world and elsewhere is concerned, the actions of drug-companies are disturbing in the extreme. The premium prices paid by American health consumers is, in fact, so great that there is at present a controversial trend in various states entrepreneurs have set up operations like small shops and even âTupperware parties,â(TM) to funnel drug orders to Canadian pharmacists to exploit the cross-border price differential according to an article in the New York Times, this week.
The compensation demanded by drug-manufacturers so they can maximize profit is one of our patent lawâ(TM)s biggest and most philosophically âdebatableâ(TM) problems in the world economy.
If I withhold a drug from a person for profit and he dies as a result, it is extortion and murder. If a pharmaceutical concern does the same thing to millions of people and they do anything to short circuit this process, the United States government will apply economic sanctions. Any way you slice it, itâ(TM)s ugly.
Education is not just a process but a complex set of ideas about how you define education and what it is supposed to do.
In Europe, my European expatriate professors all told me, education existed to give you the tools you would need to think, and the ability to do intellectual work flowed from this almost as an afterthought. In the United States, our love of pragmatism (or our distrust of "thought for its own sake") has led us to generally construe education as a process which teaches one to do things (e.g., courses in advertising and the obligatory and sometimes meaningless MBA).
For better or for worse, this attitude leaves a lot of wiggle room, a large gap into which nonsense flows. What nearly everyone seems to forget no matter what their viewpoint is that education is a matter of delivering to the student not mere information which he can get from a book on his own, but an expansion of the student's capabilities.
This thing, this real increase in real capacity, is something that is beyond a great many teachers if not the majority of them in a way that only real education can equip one to recognize; to know it and articulate it, you have to have achieved an intuitive understanding of the difference between the words, 'teacher,' 'professor,' and 'mentor.'
Considering the state of our education system and its lacunae, the fact that few seem to is only a small surprise.
In 1996, North Korea sent well-trained and well-armed infiltration agents into South Korea on an information-gathering mission and if it hadn't been for one sharp-eyed cabdriver, we might never have known that it had even happened.
With leadership resembling a Stalinist 'cult of personality' possessing total information control at its disposal, the North Korean government can create and has created effective personel resources in areas pertaining to espionage and infiltration. This well-documented fact makes the idea of North Korea's running a military 'cyberacademy' a lot more credible than the Iraq-obsessed U.S. Government which has a stake in playing down a North Korean threat would have you believe.
Two incidents show go far to prove this:
The first is the aforementioned infiltration of Nouth Korean reconnaisance troops by submarine.
After the infiltrator's accidental discovery, they were hunted down by south Korean Military and police units. After a series of bloody firefights, rather than face capture some of the infiltrators and submarine crew were shot to death by their own officers.
Here is a link to the story. http://www.koreascope.org/english/sub/2/nk10_7.ht
The second is the discovery after thirty years, that North Korea sent agents into Japan to kidnap individuals to serve as tutors in masquerading as Japanese nationals for the North Korean intelligence services. These people, among others, were flown to Japan for a brief reunion after decades of captivity during which their families had long since given them up for dead.
North Korea may have a very low GNP by western standards, but it is an industrialized nation and the ability of its government to divert resources from one segment of society to another certainly lends strong credence to the threat described in the article.
Of the two people in the man story, Johnson is by far the more scary. In fact both of them are *way* scary followed by the judge in the case who is scary AND ignorant.
.
Tucker is a creep. The man is an IQ-test for women living in a modern, pluralistic society where women are free to choose sexual partners. In any place like the United States or Western Europe where women can choose one, many, or no sexual partners, women learn to avoid the Tuckers of the world, usually in high school, or they fail to and it isn't anyone's business.
The fact that Johnson hadn't learned it and didn't avoid Tucker is telling with respect to her... a cautionary tale about classic prudery and its abstinence-as-ignorance-as-virtue attitude. In the real world, Johnson got off lucky in that She could have gotten more than just a Tucker: she could have gotten a Tucker with a disease.
The judge in the case is a horror who in a better world would wake up covered in a sweat of realization and retire from the bench after reversing herself
Yes, Tucker's portrayal of Johnson is painful to Johnson. Tucker is an egotistical turd, a man an earlier age would have called a cad, but the judge's decision sacrifices Tucker's right to free speech -- and by precedent, anyone's who comes before a court in a similar case -- in order to protect Johnson's right to hypocrisy; essentially, her right to foist on young women a standard of behavior that she herself obviously coudln't live up to and that was just as obviously harmful to her.
Johnson couldn't keep her legs closed when a Tucker rolled around, and she is selling the same set of attitudes that made her situation possible to impressionable young women; basically setting them up with the same sexual ignorance and social naivete that lead to her experience. Tucker's rebuttal, as nasty as it might be, would have provided a counterbalance to Johnson's B.S. and denial, working exactly as our free-speech provision is supposed to, and the judge shot that down. Honestly, that judge shouldn't be a judge anymore.
I can't stand the Tuckers of the world but I can only hope he appeals and wins.
Yes, privacy advocates and the simply paranoid do blame the technology, but only because they have nothing else to shoot at.
It's true that every technology provides both foreseen and unforeseen uses, but in today's climate where people are willing to exchange privacy (anyone's) for security on the basis of only one foreign terrorist attack, the technology is an especially attractive target.
With politicians in the administration working hard to tear down our structures of fundamental rights (read up on the second patriot act), a technology which could be adapted to creating undetectable surveillance devices and unbreachable security systems is frightening in a sense that most people don't like to talk about. The point is a simple question, but also one of historic moment: does anyone anywhere really imagine that nano-technological bugs in the hands of a national security state would a good thing?
Once disseminated, Would it be a good technology for the Chinese or the North Koreans to have to place in the homes of suspected dissidents or defectors? Or for that matter, in every home? On each citizen's person?
Concentrating more on human nature than on circuit diagrams for a moment, can anyone honestly say that the applications that this technology promises, Would be something you would like to see in the hands of anyone's secret police?
You can't blame the technology, but then, what do you blame? Governments are often beyond the reach of their citizens and some technologies just take them further.
All I can say is, "Arrh, Matey!"
Sorry, but I can't see this as anything but a purely temporary issue. The fact of the matter is, yes, some of the current equipment used by radio stations might not be able to handle copyright protection, but as is almost universally the case with digital technologies, this is by no means written in stone.
Sooner rather than later, the simbiosis between radio station and record industry will repair itself and things will return to a state where there will be no need for this news item.