I think they guy got it right about the way society looks at work. As I grew up, it was always assumed that work wasn't actually ever "fun," or else it wouldn't be called work. The fun you got was in the security you could go to the fridge and grab a sandwitch.
Well that isn't true right now. Labor can be done in one part of the world and instantly realized in another part. I hate to sound marxist, but the internet and the proletariat haven't even started to change the world.
and what part is not right and proper? There's plenty of market in the world, why not trade elsewhere? In the end, if the US continues its policies, I believe the rest of the world will just grow in a different economic direction. The US cannot continue to be the economic powerhouse as the rest of the world slowly catches up to modern standards of living and consuming. The rest of the world is simply too massive.
When my professors said something I disagreed with, I spoke up. When a teacher was obviously giving a politicized speech, I spoke up. When the first thing a teacher said went something like, "if you believe in God, get out of my class"..... guess what, I SPOKE UP.
This "organization" is another version of the thought police. At the college level, teachers can say anything they want. Its up to the students to filter out the BS (which, I'd estimate, is about 90% of what I've been taught).
Ticket stubs will never go away. After I walk out of a movie, the only thing that actually makes me feel like I bought something is the fact that I have my half of the ticket stub. Especially if it wasn't a very good movie and I feel like I just wasted my time and money. What will I do with the electronic one, print it out? Yeah, that's sentimental.
But then again, I haven't gone to see a rip-off $10 movie in years.
In my opinion, the "incorrectness" of the slashdot.org (i.e. slashdot is part of a for-profit business but resides in a typically non-profit domain) only serves to make it more legit. It shows that it started as a simple organization, without the interests of profit. A for-profit enterprise registering a.org domain would be seen as lying.
If something is true, than it is true. These wiki battles about "the truth" aren't proof that wikipedia doesn't work, it's proof that it DOES! It spurs on discussion, it causes investigation. If you make a claim about something and present it as fact, you'd better be ready with evidence to back it up. To me it seems that this pursuit of truth is EXACTLY what wikipedia should be doing.
This is the latest in the government's attempt to gain back some amount of control over human communication. They are quickly hounding ISP's to give the government access to voice over IP traffic. It is not a surprise that they are now targeting universities, because historically that is where most "insurgent" speach comes from.
Very soon, government will realize that you simply can't control communication anymore. For example: what if I choose to run all my calls over an encrypted VoIP channel from my home machine? Am I required by law to wire-tap myself?
How many times have governments and obese space programs spend years and millions developing one thing, only to have it blow up in space because someone didn't convert feet to inches or forgot or because one tiny wire failed resulting in failure to launch a key component. There's so many different parts to these missions, and so many locations for human error, that it is totally impractical to assume a 100% success rate when putting things into space. Back in the age of the space race, money was being poured into space programs; more money means more time, which means more double-checking, which means less failue. We don't have that these days.
NASA, ESA, and other space programs are going about it all wrong. They're trying to adapt old designs and architectures of how to get into space to new technologies, and they just aren't fitting.
On the bridge of the first real starship enterprise, captian Kirk will say, "Hmm, where are we going today" and he will pull out a notepad and a pen and look at his notes.
The printed word is as much a part of humanity as freedom itself. Paper books will never go away.
-dave
Open Source Vehicles
on
VW Goes USB
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I first read the headline, I thought that VW had become the first carmaker to provide an easilly accessable interface into the engine's computer. Then I read that it was so you could "plug in your MP3 player." Idiots.
When will people realize that cars, like computers, work better when open. Expose these meaningless details of how the computer controls the car, and you'll see a revitilization in small business auto repair, no longer requiring car owners to flee to crooked dealerships to get their car fixed.
This is exactly the right direction for anyone who wants to be part of the new media industry. The fundamental way of making money off of music and movies (i.e. selling the media itself) will become obsolete, and other new ideas will take over.
This Freeman/Intel combination is a step in the right track, but it can still be pirated. The move to real free (as in speech) media will take many years and will be (is being?) fought at every turn.
As about all of us can attest to, the amount of spam email is far greater than the amount of real email. This means that our real communications with each other (the signal) is difficult to find within the mass of spam (the noise). In order for Big Brother to keep track of our email and internet communications (a dream of the national "security" bulldogs), they need to find this signal within the noise. The less spam, the easier it will be to find the signal, and the more exposed your sensitive communications will be.
I say keep the spam and work on developing spam filter tools. Its best for all of us we keep most of the flashing lights on the internet just white noise.
If she was using trains and busses all the time, it would be a lot harder to track her, now wouldn't it. I might not notice a cell phone taped under the hood of my car, but I think I would notice if there was a cell phone shoved up my ass (but I'm a sensitive guy, so who knows).
Of course, this is nearly impossible in 99% of america (outside of NYC, Frisco, and Chicago), since basically zero public transport exists. I believe one of the keys to privacy is getting people out of their 2 ton metal boxes and into the public itself.
For the last time: big brother watching you is always a good thing because big bro is the law, and the law is there to protect people, right?
The damning argument for high surveillence isn't that it invades privacy. Yes, many criminals have been caught with these cameras (but it should be noted that probably few have been prevented). The question is who is watching the people who aren't criminals? There are many people who have access to these tapes. Perhaps one of them has a crush on the sexy blond who goes jogging every morning. Perhaps he watches her as she goes to the store, sees what she buys, sees which bank she goes to, where her boyfriend lives, where her parents live... get my point?
Or perhaps you are a member of a subversive publishing house printing media scathing to the government. You aren't breaking any laws, but you're really pissing off the people who control those cameras. They begin to follow you, invade you life, and pretty soon you find you cannot be a member of their society anymore.
All of this happens today, without the help of cameras. Big Brother just makes it easier to commit the crime. Every politician is corrupt, and most of the police are too. Are these the people with which we are to trust our private lives?
On Saturday, a wrongly set valve caused one of the four days of delays by accidentally dumping thousands of gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen, one of two fuels used, off the rocket.
Now, forgive me for being an environmentalist wacko, but isn't this a Good Thing? In order to put rockets into space, we use liquid oxygen and hydrogen (aka water), but to get to the local grocery store we use the blood of dead dinosaurs (aka oil). Does anyone else see a disconnect? Was hazmat called because this rocket dumped thousands of gallons of OXYGEN? No. If it had been petrol, they would have evacuated the county.
Ah, this is classic! An old man's uninformed belief that somehow we can protect people from thinking!
"I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it."
Re-he-he-heally. Don't you realize that once ONE person breaks it (out of, oh, maybe, 3 billion hackers worldwide), then you've got the raw data, which you can copy directly to whatever and whomever you want. This is some sort of religious belief in encryption and obfuscation that is not shared by anyone who knows anything about scientific computing. CSS was broken, AES, DES, RCA, VHS, MP3, GTFO, and WTF have all been broken. And guess what? The future ones will be too!
Piracy will always be here. Since software is only a collection of electrical impulses, I can always make a set of impulses which is exactly the same as the original. What we need is to move away from selling the software and toward the service model (perhaps not in is current form, but something like it). This works even for PC games.
Software is free, whether you want it to be or not. Forget the moral bullshit arguments. This is the way it IS. We've got to find some other way of making a living.
First of all, when the world trade centeres existed, they were air conditioned using the waters of the hudson river, so this is an old idea. Secondly, what kind of environmental consequences will happen when the bottom of the lake starts to warm up? The great lakes make up a large part of the weather system in the northeast of the US. If they change, the whole weather pattern could change. I, for one, am skeptical.
But then again, I'm sitting in Hungary, in a room with no air conditioning, on a hot august day, and there's at least 15 big fat room-heaters in this little office. I would kill for some air conditioning.
Web paintbursh and whatnot may be cool, but they're just eye candy really. What we DO need is some useful web connection tunneling tools. For example, if I want to ssh to my home server from a free internet tent which allows only web access, I should be able to go to a site with a neato-cool java app that will tunnel my connection through their web server and out to my home server.
Of course, it won't happen because of potential for abuse, but it would be cool.
I don't believe that the current trend of providers giving away phones as "hooks" to sign up for service will have much of a future. Here in Europe, the system is almost entirely based on pre-paid phone cards. There are no contracts, no commitments (of course, if you want to sign a contract, you can, but most people don't). This means if you have no money, you just can't make calls. Its much more inexpensive.
But you do have to buy the phone outright. I got my old motorola for $15. No features, but I hate cell phones so it works for what I need. The cell phone market will trend AWAY from contracts and commitments, and toward specialization, until we finally have an all-in-one communicator which includes all current (and probably future) forms of communication.
This is exactly what so many people should be doing in the open-source and free-software communities. We need to prove that many of these tools are only considered "evil" because they take away money from corporations. They are not, by themselves, tools of the devil.
This type of idea can be applied to many more things which can encourage social reform. Not just spreading information and accessing it easily (P2P and the Internet are doing just fine), but with opening tools and software/hardware solutions into the public domain. We need to figure out a way to develop software without fear of piracy (by making it free), and which still compensates those who spend thousands of hours toiling over it.
We should apply this idea at all levels. Move out of the dark realms of piracy and software cracks, and prove that we really DO have better ideas than the current industry.
Any device that would be "broadcasting" music
(or whatever) across some sort of medium would
then fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The
laws would be changed which regulate the ability of small devices to communicate with each other (i.e. wireless phones with their bases, remote controles, etc.) and would then include any communication between two devices not purchased simultaneously (for example). Failing that, the RIAA would make it
illegal to allow any music playing device to collect said music without the expressed concent of the user, inserting "annoyance" into the equation, which negates the entire process. Not to mention all other types of "community" communication devices have failed (all those cute little beepers which go off if anyone else in the area has one), and this would only work if EVERYONE did it, which they wouldn't.
Face it, you can't fight city hall. If you play their game, you will lose. Music is (and IMO, should be) a product which people can charge money for. Yes, the system is old and should change, but a free-for-all is not the answer.
The short story is, we met on the intra
(not a plug, because the site sux, but
it was at friendfinder.com) out
of arguments about politics, we agreed to
meet a few months later just for the hell of
it, and we fell for each other.
Good 'net girls are few and faaaaaaaaar
between, but they're there. Don't give up.
Have you ever noticed that whenever people allow themselves to think about the apocalypse or
the end times, they always get this sort of strange air about them? Like we like to
think about the end of the world (I know I do,
sometimes). I mean, there are countless movies on it, it seems to be a bit of our culture.
So why is that?
My theory is that if we know that there is some sort of timeline that we are all walking on, then it gives our empty lives a sense of meaning. Like we're actually making a difference,
no matter how little, in this big cosmic play that we're putting on. It makes life seem, well, more real in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they guy got it right about the way society looks at work. As I grew up, it was always assumed that work wasn't actually ever "fun," or else it wouldn't be called work. The fun you got was in the security you could go to the fridge and grab a sandwitch.
Well that isn't true right now. Labor can be done in one part of the world and instantly realized in another part. I hate to sound marxist, but the internet and the proletariat haven't even started to change the world.
-dave
and what part is not right and proper? There's plenty of market in the world, why not trade elsewhere? In the end, if the US continues its policies, I believe the rest of the world will just grow in a different economic direction. The US cannot continue to be the economic powerhouse as the rest of the world slowly catches up to modern standards of living and consuming. The rest of the world is simply too massive.
-dave
When my professors said something I disagreed with, I spoke up. When a teacher was obviously giving a politicized speech, I spoke up. When the first thing a teacher said went something like, "if you believe in God, get out of my class" ..... guess what, I SPOKE UP.
This "organization" is another version of the thought police. At the college level, teachers can say anything they want. Its up to the students to filter out the BS (which, I'd estimate, is about 90% of what I've been taught).
-dave
Ticket stubs will never go away. After I walk out of a movie, the only thing that actually makes me feel like I bought something is the fact that I have my half of the ticket stub. Especially if it wasn't a very good movie and I feel like I just wasted my time and money. What will I do with the electronic one, print it out? Yeah, that's sentimental.
But then again, I haven't gone to see a rip-off $10 movie in years.
-dave
In my opinion, the "incorrectness" of the slashdot.org (i.e. slashdot is part of a for-profit business but resides in a typically non-profit domain) only serves to make it more legit. It shows that it started as a simple organization, without the interests of profit. A for-profit enterprise registering a .org domain would be seen as lying.
my 2c
-dave
log this
/bin/true ; do /dev/null http://grokster.com > /dev/null 2>&1
#!/bin/bash
while
wget -O
printf "\r%d " $i
i=$((i+1))
done
If something is true, than it is true. These wiki battles about "the truth" aren't proof that wikipedia doesn't work, it's proof that it DOES! It spurs on discussion, it causes investigation. If you make a claim about something and present it as fact, you'd better be ready with evidence to back it up. To me it seems that this pursuit of truth is EXACTLY what wikipedia should be doing.
This is the latest in the government's attempt to gain back some amount of control over human communication. They are quickly hounding ISP's to give the government access to voice over IP traffic. It is not a surprise that they are now targeting universities, because historically that is where most "insurgent" speach comes from.
Very soon, government will realize that you simply can't control communication anymore. For example: what if I choose to run all my calls over an encrypted VoIP channel from my home machine? Am I required by law to wire-tap myself?
-dave
How many times have governments and obese space programs spend years and millions developing one thing, only to have it blow up in space because someone didn't convert feet to inches or forgot or because one tiny wire failed resulting in failure to launch a key component. There's so many different parts to these missions, and so many locations for human error, that it is totally impractical to assume a 100% success rate when putting things into space. Back in the age of the space race, money was being poured into space programs; more money means more time, which means more double-checking, which means less failue. We don't have that these days.
NASA, ESA, and other space programs are going about it all wrong. They're trying to adapt old designs and architectures of how to get into space to new technologies, and they just aren't fitting.
-dave
Answer: no.
On the bridge of the first real starship enterprise, captian Kirk will say, "Hmm, where are we going today" and he will pull out a notepad and a pen and look at his notes.
The printed word is as much a part of humanity as freedom itself. Paper books will never go away.
-dave
When I first read the headline, I thought that VW had become the first carmaker to provide an easilly accessable interface into the engine's computer. Then I read that it was so you could "plug in your MP3 player." Idiots.
When will people realize that cars, like computers, work better when open. Expose these meaningless details of how the computer controls the car, and you'll see a revitilization in small business auto repair, no longer requiring car owners to flee to crooked dealerships to get their car fixed.
-dave
This is exactly the right direction for anyone who wants to be part of the new media industry. The fundamental way of making money off of music and movies (i.e. selling the media itself) will become obsolete, and other new ideas will take over.
This Freeman/Intel combination is a step in the right track, but it can still be pirated. The move to real free (as in speech) media will take many years and will be (is being?) fought at every turn.
-dave
As about all of us can attest to, the amount of spam email is far greater than the amount of real email. This means that our real communications with each other (the signal) is difficult to find within the mass of spam (the noise). In order for Big Brother to keep track of our email and internet communications (a dream of the national "security" bulldogs), they need to find this signal within the noise. The less spam, the easier it will be to find the signal, and the more exposed your sensitive communications will be.
I say keep the spam and work on developing spam filter tools. Its best for all of us we keep most of the flashing lights on the internet just white noise.
-Dave
If she was using trains and busses all the time, it would be a lot harder to track her, now wouldn't it. I might not notice a cell phone taped under the hood of my car, but I think I would notice if there was a cell phone shoved up my ass (but I'm a sensitive guy, so who knows).
Of course, this is nearly impossible in 99% of america (outside of NYC, Frisco, and Chicago), since basically zero public transport exists. I believe one of the keys to privacy is getting people out of their 2 ton metal boxes and into the public itself.
-Dave
The damning argument for high surveillence isn't that it invades privacy. Yes, many criminals have been caught with these cameras (but it should be noted that probably few have been prevented). The question is who is watching the people who aren't criminals? There are many people who have access to these tapes. Perhaps one of them has a crush on the sexy blond who goes jogging every morning. Perhaps he watches her as she goes to the store, sees what she buys, sees which bank she goes to, where her boyfriend lives, where her parents live... get my point?
Or perhaps you are a member of a subversive publishing house printing media scathing to the government. You aren't breaking any laws, but you're really pissing off the people who control those cameras. They begin to follow you, invade you life, and pretty soon you find you cannot be a member of their society anymore.
All of this happens today, without the help of cameras. Big Brother just makes it easier to commit the crime. Every politician is corrupt, and most of the police are too. Are these the people with which we are to trust our private lives?
-Dave
Mod me offtopic, please.
-Dave
Ah, this is classic! An old man's uninformed belief that somehow we can protect people from thinking!
"I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it."
Re-he-he-heally. Don't you realize that once ONE person breaks it (out of, oh, maybe, 3 billion hackers worldwide), then you've got the raw data, which you can copy directly to whatever and whomever you want. This is some sort of religious belief in encryption and obfuscation that is not shared by anyone who knows anything about scientific computing. CSS was broken, AES, DES, RCA, VHS, MP3, GTFO, and WTF have all been broken. And guess what? The future ones will be too!
Find a new path.
-Dave
Piracy will always be here. Since software is only a collection of electrical impulses, I can always make a set of impulses which is exactly the same as the original. What we need is to move away from selling the software and toward the service model (perhaps not in is current form, but something like it). This works even for PC games.
Software is free, whether you want it to be or not. Forget the moral bullshit arguments. This is the way it IS. We've got to find some other way of making a living.
-Dave
First of all, when the world trade centeres existed, they were air conditioned using the waters of the hudson river, so this is an old idea. Secondly, what kind of environmental consequences will happen when the bottom of the lake starts to warm up? The great lakes make up a large part of the weather system in the northeast of the US. If they change, the whole weather pattern could change. I, for one, am skeptical.
But then again, I'm sitting in Hungary, in a room with no air conditioning, on a hot august day, and there's at least 15 big fat room-heaters in this little office. I would kill for some air conditioning.
-Dave
Web paintbursh and whatnot may be cool, but they're just eye candy really. What we DO need is some useful web connection tunneling tools. For example, if I want to ssh to my home server from a free internet tent which allows only web access, I should be able to go to a site with a neato-cool java app that will tunnel my connection through their web server and out to my home server.
Of course, it won't happen because of potential for abuse, but it would be cool.
-Dave
I don't believe that the current trend of providers giving away phones as "hooks" to sign up for service will have much of a future. Here in Europe, the system is almost entirely based on pre-paid phone cards. There are no contracts, no commitments (of course, if you want to sign a contract, you can, but most people don't). This means if you have no money, you just can't make calls. Its much more inexpensive.
But you do have to buy the phone outright. I got my old motorola for $15. No features, but I hate cell phones so it works for what I need. The cell phone market will trend AWAY from contracts and commitments, and toward specialization, until we finally have an all-in-one communicator which includes all current (and probably future) forms of communication.
-Dave
This is exactly what so many people should be doing in the open-source and free-software communities. We need to prove that many of these tools are only considered "evil" because they take away money from corporations. They are not, by themselves, tools of the devil.
This type of idea can be applied to many more things which can encourage social reform. Not just spreading information and accessing it easily (P2P and the Internet are doing just fine), but with opening tools and software/hardware solutions into the public domain. We need to figure out a way to develop software without fear of piracy (by making it free), and which still compensates those who spend thousands of hours toiling over it.
We should apply this idea at all levels. Move out of the dark realms of piracy and software cracks, and prove that we really DO have better ideas than the current industry.
-Dave
Any device that would be "broadcasting" music (or whatever) across some sort of medium would then fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The laws would be changed which regulate the ability of small devices to communicate with each other (i.e. wireless phones with their bases, remote controles, etc.) and would then include any communication between two devices not purchased simultaneously (for example). Failing that, the RIAA would make it illegal to allow any music playing device to collect said music without the expressed concent of the user, inserting "annoyance" into the equation, which negates the entire process. Not to mention all other types of "community" communication devices have failed (all those cute little beepers which go off if anyone else in the area has one), and this would only work if EVERYONE did it, which they wouldn't.
Face it, you can't fight city hall. If you play their game, you will lose. Music is (and IMO, should be) a product which people can charge money for. Yes, the system is old and should change, but a free-for-all is not the answer.
-d
I hate to say it, dude, but I have found it.
The short story is, we met on the intra (not a plug, because the site sux, but it was at friendfinder.com) out of arguments about politics, we agreed to meet a few months later just for the hell of it, and we fell for each other.
Good 'net girls are few and faaaaaaaaar between, but they're there. Don't give up.
-dave
So why is that?
My theory is that if we know that there is some sort of timeline that we are all walking on, then it gives our empty lives a sense of meaning. Like we're actually making a difference, no matter how little, in this big cosmic play that we're putting on. It makes life seem, well, more real in my opinion.
-davek