Science Fiction is, to me, largely about one thing: "What if". A SF-setting enables the Author to depict societies and situations which do not exist, which might exist someday, which might exist if something in the past would have turned different.
It is of course possible to write anything (including wild west novels, history, crime stories or soap operas like Star Trek) in a Science-Fiction setting. But thats beside the point; and disregarding the biggest advantage of SF above all other settings.
And asking the right "what if"-question is where SF really gets interesting. From Orwell to a lot of Heinleins work, to Le Guin, Dick, Bester, Lem, up to more recent Cyberpunk-Authors. "How would a real anarchy (not chaos and rule of the strong) look like?", "What happens if fascism really wins?", "How might we try to communicate with something really alien?", "How would a telepathic society look like?" and so on. All of these interesting questions each with possible answers in the form of a Science-Fiction works.
And this kind of Science-Fiction is definitly not "opiate of the masses", but the opposite. Things to make you think, to wake you up.
Bob Dylan is an asshole. He lobbied for the extension of the copyright-terms -- and guess who exactly is playing old traditionals which copyright has expired? Exactly. What a hipocrite.
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Hackers, Meet Microsoft
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These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
I don't think so. Of course they are now taking security a bit more serious, but there are so many big conceptual mistakes, so many design flaws, they won't and can't fix, or they would break thousands of applications which you can't just recompile...
Like: - case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames) - active X and other unsafe scripting languages all over the place. Its not just the browser, its also word, excel and lots of other programs. - rpc for just about everything. - unsafe program interfaces. some application will happily accept any malformed events from some other components. - writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
> As usual, it was pioneered abroad (much like a > lot of the stupid copyright laws we've been > seeing for the last few decades) and is being > pushed on the US for no good reason other than > to standardize on whatever everyone else is > doing.
Very wrong. You've just been had by your governement. YOUR governement brings this in somewhere at the WIPO or UN; makes them write harsh regulations so YOUR governement can go back to the US and tell everyone "its international standard, we have to do this".
We see this with the EU as well. Local governments effectively drive through regulations by lobbying for them in the EU and using "it's official, the EU says it, we have to" in front of their own people.
That's what patents are in the first place. And not just software-patents.
We're being swamped by genetically modified whatever, just because some company managed to get a patent on it and thus has no incentive to keep its bacteria in the tank. So what if the whatever just produces some disaster like polluting fields of non genetically modified crops? Its patented, you can sue the victim of the pollution.
And even better, some companies managed to patent parts of viruses (which they didn't invent, of course) -- now, whoever wants to identify them in something like a HIV-test has to pay royalties. The international red cross who wants donated blood checked for instance..
Now talk about "growing costs in health-care". The whole affair is just stacking up costs everywhere, in the judical system, taxes, health-care, ecology, you name it. Patents are a frigging financial catastrophe.
That's fucked up beyond any repair, the whole thing has to be ditched.
> but how far can the government go protecting its > people before it undermines the people's trust in > the government?
Boil the frog slowly, so he won't jump.
So the answer is: Pretty far; with the current course set, you'll end up the most extreme fascist nation that ever existed (and sadly enough, the rest of the world not much behind).
That the current US-government considers the pure display of primary sexual parts most probably as obscene. Whereas the rest of the world (well, certainly europe) does not.
The question is "which and whose obscenity rules?"
> For starters, let any peace officer carry his > off-duty piece when boarding a plane.
Right. So any Hijacker can impersonate an officer in order to carry his gun aboard. Or even better, identify any officer (or the disguised designated armed flight-guards) and take over his gun..
Allowing firearms (or other ranged weapons like crossbows) aboard a plane is a very bad idea. Not only you can pierce the planes hull with it by accident, but also its much more difficult for unarmed forces (the passengers!) to overcome an opponent with a ranged weapon.
> If you've got nothing to hide, > may I see you naked?
This is probably a very good argument concerning the crypto-prohibition debate and other privacy-invading technologies and laws, particularly with conservative people who would not mind being identified by security cameras and having their emails read by spooks.
- Plastic pistol up your ass. - Ingest explosives. - False body-parts. - Extreme obesity. Seems there are plenty of ideas. I'm sure you will come up with more. That's probably why they're not soo much convinced that this is the panacea to all security dangers.
You're so right. Only, it started a long time ago. Suddenly Tom & Jerry weren't bashing each other in some house (and nobody wins in the end), but Jerry always started to win, and the settings incorporated more and more elaborate props used by them, making them more "humanized". Bah.
And even worse, the cartoons lost their "cartoon"-being, and they started to be more and more small movies or series with a plot, which would just as well work with human actors. And of course, with dialogs -- in the Tom & Jerry-case completely superfluous. The impossible stuff vanishing more and more.
I'm not familiar with those medieval terms when applied to modern technology. Could anyone explain these in plain english, like in kilometres per litre?
As a small department with a lot of area to cover, piracy is the LAST concern any of us have. I sure hope so, except if your department covers a lot of open sea.
Don't call copyright infringement piracy. Because there is REAL piracy out there: Weekly Piracy Report
I don't know, might it sometimes be a question of age? I mean, I liked Police Academy when I was about 10 or something like this. If you gear a movie to a ten year old audience, you don't have to be surprised when a mature audience just thinks its flat, stupid and not funny.
Of course there are a lot of american comedies geared towards a little older public which are profoundly un-funny. Especially when "sex" or "marihuana" are part of the theme (I'm from switzerland, I know what I'm talking of, the swiss comedy consists entirely of "sex", "marihuana" and "gays" and is of course very bad. But at least, its not as uptight as the mainstream US). American Pie for instance. Its just embarrassing. And I can't stand Jim Carrey.
The good ones? Well, I love Mel Brooks and I think the holy trinity consists of Groucho, Chico and Harpo (on the other hand, "God" is spelled "Marty Feldman", who was a brit).
The technology isn't the problem. The means to get a monopoly on it is, because it will enable those corporations to be careless and spread it in any they want or don't care. After all, nobody else may legally use it.
On the other hand, if you don't have a granted monopoly, you sure will be careful that none of your precious insuline-manufacturing bacteriae will leak out.
I do that right now to save me the friday. Anyway, the idea is good. Simple yet effective. Just hope people don't start going to vacation in droves on friday;).
If piracy is a "gray area," then so is violating the GPL. Please, for the love of God, stop being hypocrites.
Piracy is NOT a grey area, piracy is armed robbery at sea, nothing more. Everyone calling "copyright infringement" piracy is showing disrespect to hundreds of piracy-victims every year. And of course, spreading the propaganda-FUD of the "intellectual property" mafia.
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Science Fiction is, to me, largely about one thing: "What if". A SF-setting enables the Author to depict societies and situations which do not exist, which might exist someday, which might exist if something in the past would have turned different.
It is of course possible to write anything (including wild west novels, history, crime stories or soap operas like Star Trek) in a Science-Fiction setting. But thats beside the point; and disregarding the biggest advantage of SF above all other settings.
And asking the right "what if"-question is where SF really gets interesting. From Orwell to a lot of Heinleins work, to Le Guin, Dick, Bester, Lem, up to more recent Cyberpunk-Authors. "How would a real anarchy (not chaos and rule of the strong) look like?", "What happens if fascism really wins?", "How might we try to communicate with something really alien?", "How would a telepathic society look like?" and so on. All of these interesting questions each with possible answers in the form of a Science-Fiction works.
And this kind of Science-Fiction is definitly not "opiate of the masses", but the opposite. Things to make you think, to wake you up.
Bob Dylan is an asshole. He lobbied for the extension of the copyright-terms -- and guess who exactly is playing old traditionals which copyright has expired? Exactly. What a hipocrite.
These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
I don't think so. Of course they are now taking security a bit more serious, but there are so many big conceptual mistakes, so many design flaws, they won't and can't fix, or they would break thousands of applications which you can't just recompile...
Like:
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
- active X and other unsafe scripting languages all over the place. Its not just the browser, its also word, excel and lots of other programs.
- rpc for just about everything.
- unsafe program interfaces. some application will happily accept any malformed events from some other components.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
... They are SO last-millenium.
> As usual, it was pioneered abroad (much like a
> lot of the stupid copyright laws we've been
> seeing for the last few decades) and is being
> pushed on the US for no good reason other than
> to standardize on whatever everyone else is
> doing.
Very wrong. You've just been had by your governement. YOUR governement brings this in somewhere at the WIPO or UN; makes them write harsh regulations so YOUR governement can go back to the US and tell everyone "its international standard, we have to do this".
We see this with the EU as well. Local governments effectively drive through regulations by lobbying for them in the EU and using "it's official, the EU says it, we have to" in front of their own people.
That's what patents are in the first place. And not just software-patents.
We're being swamped by genetically modified whatever, just because some company managed to get a patent on it and thus has no incentive to keep its bacteria in the tank. So what if the whatever just produces some disaster like polluting fields of non genetically modified crops? Its patented, you can sue the victim of the pollution.
And even better, some companies managed to patent parts of viruses (which they didn't invent, of course) -- now, whoever wants to identify them in something like a HIV-test has to pay royalties. The international red cross who wants donated blood checked for instance..
Now talk about "growing costs in health-care". The whole affair is just stacking up costs everywhere, in the judical system, taxes, health-care, ecology, you name it. Patents are a frigging financial catastrophe.
That's fucked up beyond any repair, the whole thing has to be ditched.
> the Democrats elect far left wing candidates
Doesn't exactly look like that. I'd call most of them democrats as "conservative center". Otherwise the PATRIOT-act would never have passed.
> but how far can the government go protecting its
> people before it undermines the people's trust in
> the government?
Boil the frog slowly, so he won't jump.
So the answer is: Pretty far; with the current course set, you'll end up the most extreme fascist nation that ever existed (and sadly enough, the rest of the world not much behind).
> what am i not getting?
That the current US-government considers the pure display of primary sexual parts most probably as obscene. Whereas the rest of the world (well, certainly europe) does not.
The question is "which and whose obscenity rules?"
> Did you just turn "Asymptote" into a verb?!?!?
You probably didn't know, but all nouns can be verbed. And of course, all verbs can be nouned too. Its even jargon filed.
> For starters, let any peace officer carry his
> off-duty piece when boarding a plane.
Right. So any Hijacker can impersonate an officer in order to carry his gun aboard. Or even better, identify any officer (or the disguised designated armed flight-guards) and take over his gun..
Allowing firearms (or other ranged weapons like crossbows) aboard a plane is a very bad idea. Not only you can pierce the planes hull with it by accident, but also its much more difficult for unarmed forces (the passengers!) to overcome an opponent with a ranged weapon.
> If you've got nothing to hide,
> may I see you naked?
This is probably a very good argument concerning the crypto-prohibition debate and other privacy-invading technologies and laws, particularly with conservative people who would not mind being identified by security cameras and having their emails read by spooks.
- Plastic pistol up your ass.
- Ingest explosives.
- False body-parts.
- Extreme obesity.
Seems there are plenty of ideas. I'm sure you will come up with more. That's probably why they're not soo much convinced that this is the panacea to all security dangers.
Probably throw a cream pie at him...
You're so right. Only, it started a long time ago. Suddenly Tom & Jerry weren't bashing each other in some house (and nobody wins in the end), but Jerry always started to win, and the settings incorporated more and more elaborate props used by them, making them more "humanized". Bah.
And even worse, the cartoons lost their "cartoon"-being, and they started to be more and more small movies or series with a plot, which would just as well work with human actors. And of course, with dialogs -- in the Tom & Jerry-case completely superfluous. The impossible stuff vanishing more and more.
I'm not familiar with those medieval terms when applied to modern technology. Could anyone explain these in plain english, like in kilometres per litre?
A Cracker is a person who breaks copy-protection. I don't see him to have anything to do with that.
--
As a small department with a lot of area to cover, piracy is the LAST concern any of us have.
I sure hope so, except if your department covers a lot of open sea.
Don't call copyright infringement piracy. Because there is REAL piracy out there: Weekly Piracy Report
I don't know, might it sometimes be a question of age? I mean, I liked Police Academy when I was about 10 or something like this. If you gear a movie to a ten year old audience, you don't have to be surprised when a mature audience just thinks its flat, stupid and not funny.
Of course there are a lot of american comedies geared towards a little older public which are profoundly un-funny. Especially when "sex" or "marihuana" are part of the theme (I'm from switzerland, I know what I'm talking of, the swiss comedy consists entirely of "sex", "marihuana" and "gays" and is of course very bad. But at least, its not as uptight as the mainstream US). American Pie for instance. Its just embarrassing. And I can't stand Jim Carrey.
The good ones? Well, I love Mel Brooks and I think the holy trinity consists of Groucho, Chico and Harpo (on the other hand, "God" is spelled "Marty Feldman", who was a brit).
The technology isn't the problem. The means to get a monopoly on it is, because it will enable those corporations to be careless and spread it in any they want or don't care. After all, nobody else may legally use it.
On the other hand, if you don't have a granted monopoly, you sure will be careful that none of your precious insuline-manufacturing bacteriae will leak out.
You mean, just like how genetically modified foods was handled?
If you give 'em the means to monopolize it, they will spread all around, sueing you for the damage they did.
Because you violated their patents by letting your garden run over with their genetically modified plants/grey goo.
I do that right now to save me the friday. Anyway, the idea is good. Simple yet effective. Just hope people don't start going to vacation in droves on friday ;).
If piracy is a "gray area," then so is violating the GPL. Please, for the love of God, stop being hypocrites.
Piracy is NOT a grey area, piracy is armed robbery at sea, nothing more. Everyone calling "copyright infringement" piracy is showing disrespect to hundreds of piracy-victims every year. And of course, spreading the propaganda-FUD of the "intellectual property" mafia.
It is also a fact, that the term "cracker" was used by people who break copyprotection to refer to themselves.
And any misnaming of "malicious hackers" as "crackers" by ESR doesn't make them crackers.
Well, now I've got this actor on screen who looks like me, and has the voice of Mickey Mouse?