Well, it is for "international organizations", but in this context, they have decided to follow the definition used by the International Law on Treaties, in which "international organization" is defined to be "intergovernmental organization", such as the UN, WHO, etc. What they say is that to get a.int, the organization would have to be formed by an international treaty between governments (there is another option: international databases).
However, it should be quite clear that the International Law of Treaties never intended to give a general definition of "international organization", so what has happened is that most organizations that are international has been excluded. I for one think that IAPS belongs in.int.
Now the really bad part of this is that certain organizations has been allowed to get.int though they have not been formed by international treaties, for example YMCA. YMCA has a similar formation history as IAPS, and does certainly not fit the criteria used. I think they do belong in.int, but it kind of makes you wonder what they did to get that name.
Well, I tried to get some.info domains, but I'm still waiting to see if any goes through. Afilias doesn't seem to clued to me. Also, I've spoken with my registrar, it seems like the whole company is in a mess, and nobody really knows what is going on.
Well, I was really going to rant about trademarks. TMs is usually the part of IP regime that I find the least problematic, but. There is something strange there.
Here's my story:
I have for several years maintained a site titled "How to use a compass". Since I've been orienteering
for many years, and just because I could write this, just because the web
allowed me to become a publisher, I did write it up.
It is time for the site to move on, I intend to open it up for many
contributors. I intend to get a few excellent orienteers and
expeditionists to join me in making this site even better, and I intend to
release it under the GNU Free Documentation License (but with some
modifications to allow people to print and distribute printouts more
easily).
Obviously, I should have a domain for it. While I have other options, what
can possibly be more fitting for this site than compass.info?
It is the most used compass tutorial on the web, there are a few of them,
but most are actually using my illustrations... The site is literally
information about the centuries-old gadget called a compass.
However, it has been decided that trademarks owners should have a prior
right to our language (eh, well, English is not my native tongue, I'm
Norwegian). They should be allowed to grab first, and so, compass.info is
gone. Like in some many cases, the compass has been used metaphorically.
There is actually very little information about the gadget compass on the
web, but there is extensive use of the term "compass" used
metaphorically. In fact, this is a problem I've had when designing
metadata for the site.
I'm quite confident (yep, I do have some self-confidence:-) ), that if
the delegation of domain names had been based on what merit a site has for
accurately describing what lies in a name, my site would have won...:-)
So, what is it with trademarks that makes them so valuable for mankind
that it is more important that the domain name compass.info is used do
point to a product that has nothing to do with what has for centuries been
known as a compass, rather than an accurate description on how to use this
gadget....?
I do not doubt that the American College Testing Program, who has been
awarded compass.info has good intentions for it, but still, the question
stands, why is it that trademarks should have that level of protection?
I feel there is something wrong about all this. Names are a scarce
resource, and should be treated with caution. I feel the use of trademarks
needs a review. This isn't what they are supposed to be: My parents went
to China and bought "The North Face" jackets with a Gore-Tex membran for
just about nothing. While they realize it certainly aren't real North
Face jackets, I have yet to convince them it certainly has no Gore-Tex
membran. They are going to get seriously wet one of these days...:-)
That's what trademarks are supposed to do for us: protect us from being
sold crap. They're not supposed to be used for grabbing bits and pieces
of living langauges...
I have signed up for premium some time ago, and I would certainly encourage everybody to do that. Salon needs the money, and you get some very unique content.
However, I would like to pay sites like Salon with micropayments. Really, those ads do very little good. I mean, I would rather pay them directly what they get for each impression, than paying through the products I buy, since the marketing budgets really make the products more expensive. We really don't need marketing in the sense that we see now, what we need are databases with good information about different products.
Unfortunately, W3C closed their micropayments activity for now. There wasn't very much interested in it. However, we need this to fly, soon, or it may threaten the development of good, independent content on the web. If it can't be done within the W3C framework, someone else should get working on it.
There was this old lady who was interviewed by the hole in Pentagon who said that she would right now give up all her liberties to catch the people who did this. Well, if I was the reporter, I would turn that against her, start screaming at her:
"OK, I'm really from the FBI, and we have strong evidence you have sheltered terrorists! So you say you have not?! Prove it! No, I'm not going to reveal the evidence we have, that would jeopardize the investigation. That goes for the court too, the evidence must be kept secret. You want to face your prosecutors? Forget it, they can't be revealed! Admit you have housed terrorists, admit it! You won't? Hell, we can't use torture, but our new allies can, and you bet they have a lot of experience with it. We'll just turn you over, and they'll make you admit it, you bet, and our new laws makes sure we can accept that as evidence in court."
By that time, the old lady should be crying. And she should, because this is really, really scary. If you lower the standards for courts, then you open up to prosecutions, witch-hunts, that are very, very bad, and you'll get a lot of false convictions.
Even easier: "We have evidence you are an illegal immigrant!! You've lived your whole life here? Don't make me laugh! Prove it? Yeah, sure an identity card proves nothing, they're easily forged. You know what we do with illegal immigrants: Indefinite detention."
The problem here is that those who have nothing to hide, they have no less reason to be worried, because any lowered standards means that if you're just unfortunate to look like somebody who committed a crime, have been using the same computer as somebody who committed a crime, you'll be as deep shit as anybody.
This is a really strong reason why also those with nothing to hide should oppose legislation that takes away essential liberty.
In the particular case of encryption, it makes society stronger, more likely to withstand attacks. When you are attacked, crypto should be used more extensively, and greater efforts should be made to make sure there are no holes, not the other way around.
Hehe, ActiveISP is a Norwegian ISP, and one with a Very Bad Reputation. The CEO said to a newspaper a couple of years ago "we're spending tons and tons of money on marketing, because in this market, you have to establish yourself within a year or two if you want to become rich, or your out. And I'm going to be very rich", or something like that.
They had a few persistent spammers too, that they didn't want to terminate. Spammers were good for their business. Then, a stupid admin there managed to tell a nanaeity "Fuck off, you shouldn't tell me what spam is!", but fortunately, they realize soon thereafter that being RBLed was even worse for business.:-)
Well, I wouldn't want to do business with these guys, that's for sure...
There are many who get this right, you just need to start listening to your political scientist. Consider it a criminal investigation, not a military attack. The terrorists wants you to look at it as a military attack. Don't play it on their premises.
It is a criminal act, and an international tribunal for dealing with international terrorism, and indeed terrorism in general should be established with a mandate from the U.N. General Assembly (not only the Security Council).
A criminal investigation would serve the purpose of getting to those who did this better, because nobody likes terrorists. Really. Then, playing the cards right, it should be possible to hand suspected terrorists over to the Terrorist Tribunal, which will weigh the evidence.
Further, one has to rebuild the countries where all this hatred builds up. A military reaction that is followed by humanitarian help might work well. You know, the people of Afghanistan is so tired of war, that if you land there with food, medicine and clothing, they are not very likely to view you as enemies. If you want to win the people, give them what they need to survive. They'll happily hand over those that caused them so much pain. Now they're convinced you are the ones who are causing them pain, because that is what the Taliban and bin Laden is telling them. If you feed them, it is a very effective way of proving that the Taliban lied.
OK, first, on the first point, my answer was a bit sloppy. What you are talking about there is police law enforcement, that is a different issue.
Whose legion are you referring to?
Oh, come on! I was quoting Latin, right? Talking about Romans. You're not that stupid.
I agree. That is why they must be hunted down and killed, along with all who support their activities.
In the first month of that fight, those who support them will amount to a few thousand people. In the following month, the numbers of supporters will increase exponentially. So, you'll have to commit genocide. But that's OK, of course, in your eyes. The end of story will be that somebody pollutes your drinking waters, nuke Manhattan, DC, LA, San Fransisco. Kill millions. I don't want that to happen. When that happens, it's too late to ask what "security" really means...
What you should do now, is to take a few of Milosevic's speeches and substitute "Americans" for "Serbs", and so on. I think you'll be shocked. The "with us or against us" rhetoric is exactly the kind of anti-democratic totalitarian bullshit that Milosevic is rightfully sitting in Hague for right now.
Our great nation must continue to defend itself against those thieves.
Well, it'll kill you.
You must be prepared to make war if you want to live in peace.
Ah,
Si vis pacem, para bellum. The old Roman dogma. It's two thousand years old. Time to think differently. No legion could destroy the entire world. That's the issue here: For decades, some of the major nations has had that ability. Fortunately, no insane leader arised.
Soon, a bunch of terrorists can. They have insane leaders.
People who want to hurt you can find a way to do it.
Oh yes. And that is why the only option is to make sure nobody wants to hurt you. From the Russell-Einstein Manifesto:
Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?
Yeah, and when I posted a question to PRZ about what we should do about it yesterday, somebody modded me a troll. If people like this highly relevant question to be asked to PRZ, somebody please go and mod me up again...:-)
The reason I chose this CD drive is that it was the cheapest one I could get that reportedly worked under Linux. I'm not sure I want a DVD drive at this time....
It looks like the whole DVD industry is busy abusing consumers as much as they possibly can. Obviously, you have the DVD-CCA, I would certainly not want any of my money getting into their hands.
But you have zoning and stuff too, and while I hear it is easy to work around it, and that it is probably even legal to do that here in Norway, I still don't feel like it. As long as the industry doesn't respect their customers, they should not exist.
That's why I figured I would just get a cheap CD-ROM drive right now, and get a DVD drive or whatever later, when the industry gets a clue.
However, I might be barking up the wrong tree, I guess, so if anybody is aware of a manufacturer who aren't in on this, I would certainly consider it.
It is relevant to linux advocacy: If there were a few Linux firms out there who could say: "You know what Gartner said, and we can transfer your web services tonight, no downtime, to a Linux+Apache system", it could actually make an impression on those making the decisions.
Wow, this comes in at the right time... I'll Ask/. this:
I'm going to buy some stuff and build a computer. Actually it is going to be my first personal (it took me 15 years to get my own...). I want a quite powerful box, but I don't care too much about the graphics on the screen or the sound. What I care a lot about is that the manufacturers I buy from are Good Guys. Also, everything I buy has to be well supported on Linux (I plan to get Debian Woody on it). I plan to get a 1.2-1.4 GHz AMD chip and 512 MB of RAM.
Now, what do you think, is this chipset something I should go for? Would it work well with Woody, do think? Are the NVIDIA guys Good?
I was looking for this stuff on Saturday, and I came up with the following stuff:
CPU: AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHz Socket A 266MHz
RAM: DDR SDRAM 2100 2 * 256 MB Socket A
Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 40 GB
Motherboard: Asus A7M266, AMD761-chipsett, Socket A
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024
Video Card: Matrox Millenium G450 32MB DDR-Ram, Bulk
CRT: Samtron 96P
CD-ROM-drive: Creative 52x IDE
Does that sound like something good to use with Linux?
They make individuals less vulnerable and more powerful, which can be used for all sorts of good and bad purposes.
Not really... A bullett-proof west makes you less vulnerable. If you get shot at, it really makes no difference if you carry a gun or not. Here in Norway, police are unarmed, and because of a few recent shootings, they did a extensive two-year study which showed that armed officers were more likely to get shot at in similar situations, to unarmed officers. Based on this officer's organizations were the ones that most strongly objected to wearing arms (instead, they wanted more easy access to arms in patrol cars).
OK, this might be flamebait here.... You know, I'm a hunter, and I live in a country with a very high density of firearms, but you know, the american love-affair with hand-guns looks very weird from my point of view.
Encryption is very different from guns, in that guns can kill and does kill a lot of people by simple carelessness. Carelessness you can't do anything about. The idea that a hand-gun is a protective measure for everybody is just very, very weird idea, and kills a lot more people than terrorists will ever do...;-)
Encryption on the other hand, is a tool you can use for preventing people to do Bad Things[tm] against you. If everyone just cared enough to use PGP as a daily routine, all the simple identity thefts we see that is being pulled to bully people would go away.
But I agree that biomedical research is mostly Good[tm] but I disagree about the bomb.
Even if this may be quoted out of context, it is something we need to be extremely vigilant about. For some time, I have seen such clauses coming, and this is just the beginning.
What needs emphasizing is that the standards we use to communicate must be in the public domain. If not, if an industry standard controlled by a company becomes widespread, the company can put in such clauses in effectively prohibit certain unwanted kinds of speech, typically we will see first speech that critizes the company.
Now, mark that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically grants the right to express yourself in any medium. If, say one company owns an industry standard that is the only way to communicate by speech, this human right does no longer exist.
That is why Ogg is so important. It will make a standard for the public domain, and this standard is the only thing that saves free speech in the multimedia age. No Ogg, no free speech.
Similarily, we must make sure that similar bodies, working on other public domain standards, such as the W3C are successful. Without them, we're screwed.
An for those saying that "just don't use FP", well, you see, we all know M$ wants to control these commodity protocols, and M$ hardly cares about a bunch of geeks anyway, so us boycotting M$ doesn't help. Joe Sixpack must understand the problem, cause if he doesn't, they'll win, and turn the web into their network, and make sure FP is the only authoring tool you can use. It'll be the end of free speech too...
Ensuring that the standards are in the public domain is even more important than that software is Free (as in speech).
Yep, and that would hardly be surprising, since Taliban has banned the Internet, and there is only one computer in Afghanistand connected to the Internet, in the president's office (ok, I couldn't find the link).
To some, this may sound strange, but remember there are very few phone lines there. Such a law would be extremely easy to enforce.
You know, I think scientists are starting to wake up. For one thing, the equally prestigious magazine Nature had a short note recently about Dmitry's case, which was clearly sympathetic towards him.
Also, you have 27758 scientists signing the Open Letter of the Public Library of Science, and you've got physicists publishing pretty much all their material as pre-prints.
I don't think the open systems that science requires to function can co-exist with the closed systems wanted by the entertainment industry. If an open system exists, it can always be used to circumvent a closed system.
Now, it is easy to demonize "hackers" but it is harder to demonize scientists. Therefore, I think the first real battle will be over scientific publishing, and I want to be there when it happens.
Now, I don't think it will be a battle between scientists and artists, though the entertainment industry may try to portray it as such. The openness established by scientists and scientific publishing will be good for the whole of society, stimulate cultural diversity, and art will flourish along with science.
If pages had been well coded from the start, with good HTML and good metadata, proper separation of content from presentation and all that, I think access to the full web from cell phones would have been great.
Obviously, nobody wants to use a service that has so little features as WAP, but if you could actually access the whole web, it would have been great. But it would require people to code for device independence.
However, there is a difference in the interpretation of "Jihad" between sunni and shia muslims, isn't there...? The interpretation you quoted is the sunni interpretation, right? (this is what I was told when visiting Egypt).
The problem with backdoors is that the terrorists might get access to them too, or enemy nations, etc.
Yep, what occured to me in a slightly dramatic event (well it was dramatic when it happened, but not in light of last week's events), but I don't have time to explain right now, is that you don't get more security than what is provided to you by your fellow humans.
The next attack might not be by blowing things up, but by attacking e.g. financial markets by M$ Office trojans.... It'll be incredibly easy, and the govt has hardly no role in preventing that (they should have perhaps, but they don't). It'll be incredibly powerful. Now, the protection here is more encryption, not less. And higher security, not less. If the security of these systems are left to the government, by allowing them to access backdoors, terrorists will most likely seek these backdoors, and might very well find them.
Don't trust your government with your security.
Now, mark the extension of getting security from your fellow humans: Real security is achieved if mankind manages to come together and get over these stupid fights. That's the only security we can have.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it is for "international organizations", but in this context, they have decided to follow the definition used by the International Law on Treaties, in which "international organization" is defined to be "intergovernmental organization", such as the UN, WHO, etc. What they say is that to get a .int, the organization would have to be formed by an international treaty between governments (there is another option: international databases).
However, it should be quite clear that the International Law of Treaties never intended to give a general definition of "international organization", so what has happened is that most organizations that are international has been excluded. I for one think that IAPS belongs in .int.
Now the really bad part of this is that certain organizations has been allowed to get .int though they have not been formed by international treaties, for example YMCA. YMCA has a similar formation history as IAPS, and does certainly not fit the criteria used. I think they do belong in .int, but it kind of makes you wonder what they did to get that name.
Well, I was really going to rant about trademarks. TMs is usually the part of IP regime that I find the least problematic, but. There is something strange there.
Here's my story:
I have for several years maintained a site titled "How to use a compass". Since I've been orienteering for many years, and just because I could write this, just because the web allowed me to become a publisher, I did write it up.
It is time for the site to move on, I intend to open it up for many contributors. I intend to get a few excellent orienteers and expeditionists to join me in making this site even better, and I intend to release it under the GNU Free Documentation License (but with some modifications to allow people to print and distribute printouts more easily).
Obviously, I should have a domain for it. While I have other options, what can possibly be more fitting for this site than compass.info? It is the most used compass tutorial on the web, there are a few of them, but most are actually using my illustrations... The site is literally information about the centuries-old gadget called a compass.
However, it has been decided that trademarks owners should have a prior right to our language (eh, well, English is not my native tongue, I'm Norwegian). They should be allowed to grab first, and so, compass.info is gone. Like in some many cases, the compass has been used metaphorically. There is actually very little information about the gadget compass on the web, but there is extensive use of the term "compass" used metaphorically. In fact, this is a problem I've had when designing metadata for the site.
I'm quite confident (yep, I do have some self-confidence :-) ), that if
the delegation of domain names had been based on what merit a site has for
accurately describing what lies in a name, my site would have won... :-)
So, what is it with trademarks that makes them so valuable for mankind that it is more important that the domain name compass.info is used do point to a product that has nothing to do with what has for centuries been known as a compass, rather than an accurate description on how to use this gadget....?
I do not doubt that the American College Testing Program, who has been awarded compass.info has good intentions for it, but still, the question stands, why is it that trademarks should have that level of protection?
I feel there is something wrong about all this. Names are a scarce resource, and should be treated with caution. I feel the use of trademarks needs a review. This isn't what they are supposed to be: My parents went to China and bought "The North Face" jackets with a Gore-Tex membran for just about nothing. While they realize it certainly aren't real North Face jackets, I have yet to convince them it certainly has no Gore-Tex membran. They are going to get seriously wet one of these days... :-)
That's what trademarks are supposed to do for us: protect us from being
sold crap. They're not supposed to be used for grabbing bits and pieces
of living langauges...
However, I would like to pay sites like Salon with micropayments. Really, those ads do very little good. I mean, I would rather pay them directly what they get for each impression, than paying through the products I buy, since the marketing budgets really make the products more expensive. We really don't need marketing in the sense that we see now, what we need are databases with good information about different products.
Unfortunately, W3C closed their micropayments activity for now. There wasn't very much interested in it. However, we need this to fly, soon, or it may threaten the development of good, independent content on the web. If it can't be done within the W3C framework, someone else should get working on it.
There was this old lady who was interviewed by the hole in Pentagon who said that she would right now give up all her liberties to catch the people who did this. Well, if I was the reporter, I would turn that against her, start screaming at her:
"OK, I'm really from the FBI, and we have strong evidence you have sheltered terrorists! So you say you have not?! Prove it! No, I'm not going to reveal the evidence we have, that would jeopardize the investigation. That goes for the court too, the evidence must be kept secret. You want to face your prosecutors? Forget it, they can't be revealed! Admit you have housed terrorists, admit it! You won't? Hell, we can't use torture, but our new allies can, and you bet they have a lot of experience with it. We'll just turn you over, and they'll make you admit it, you bet, and our new laws makes sure we can accept that as evidence in court."
By that time, the old lady should be crying. And she should, because this is really, really scary. If you lower the standards for courts, then you open up to prosecutions, witch-hunts, that are very, very bad, and you'll get a lot of false convictions.
Even easier: "We have evidence you are an illegal immigrant!! You've lived your whole life here? Don't make me laugh! Prove it? Yeah, sure an identity card proves nothing, they're easily forged. You know what we do with illegal immigrants: Indefinite detention."
The problem here is that those who have nothing to hide, they have no less reason to be worried, because any lowered standards means that if you're just unfortunate to look like somebody who committed a crime, have been using the same computer as somebody who committed a crime, you'll be as deep shit as anybody.
This is a really strong reason why also those with nothing to hide should oppose legislation that takes away essential liberty.
In the particular case of encryption, it makes society stronger, more likely to withstand attacks. When you are attacked, crypto should be used more extensively, and greater efforts should be made to make sure there are no holes, not the other way around.
They had a few persistent spammers too, that they didn't want to terminate. Spammers were good for their business. Then, a stupid admin there managed to tell a nanaeity "Fuck off, you shouldn't tell me what spam is!", but fortunately, they realize soon thereafter that being RBLed was even worse for business. :-)
Well, I wouldn't want to do business with these guys, that's for sure...
It is a criminal act, and an international tribunal for dealing with international terrorism, and indeed terrorism in general should be established with a mandate from the U.N. General Assembly (not only the Security Council).
A criminal investigation would serve the purpose of getting to those who did this better, because nobody likes terrorists. Really. Then, playing the cards right, it should be possible to hand suspected terrorists over to the Terrorist Tribunal, which will weigh the evidence.
Further, one has to rebuild the countries where all this hatred builds up. A military reaction that is followed by humanitarian help might work well. You know, the people of Afghanistan is so tired of war, that if you land there with food, medicine and clothing, they are not very likely to view you as enemies. If you want to win the people, give them what they need to survive. They'll happily hand over those that caused them so much pain. Now they're convinced you are the ones who are causing them pain, because that is what the Taliban and bin Laden is telling them. If you feed them, it is a very effective way of proving that the Taliban lied.
Oh, come on! I was quoting Latin, right? Talking about Romans. You're not that stupid.
In the first month of that fight, those who support them will amount to a few thousand people. In the following month, the numbers of supporters will increase exponentially. So, you'll have to commit genocide. But that's OK, of course, in your eyes. The end of story will be that somebody pollutes your drinking waters, nuke Manhattan, DC, LA, San Fransisco. Kill millions. I don't want that to happen. When that happens, it's too late to ask what "security" really means...
What you should do now, is to take a few of Milosevic's speeches and substitute "Americans" for "Serbs", and so on. I think you'll be shocked. The "with us or against us" rhetoric is exactly the kind of anti-democratic totalitarian bullshit that Milosevic is rightfully sitting in Hague for right now.
Well, it'll kill you.
Ah, Si vis pacem, para bellum. The old Roman dogma. It's two thousand years old. Time to think differently. No legion could destroy the entire world. That's the issue here: For decades, some of the major nations has had that ability. Fortunately, no insane leader arised. Soon, a bunch of terrorists can. They have insane leaders.
Oh yes. And that is why the only option is to make sure nobody wants to hurt you. From the Russell-Einstein Manifesto:
It's up to you.
Yeah, and when I posted a question to PRZ about what we should do about it yesterday, somebody modded me a troll. If people like this highly relevant question to be asked to PRZ, somebody please go and mod me up again... :-)
The reason I chose this CD drive is that it was the cheapest one I could get that reportedly worked under Linux. I'm not sure I want a DVD drive at this time....
It looks like the whole DVD industry is busy abusing consumers as much as they possibly can. Obviously, you have the DVD-CCA, I would certainly not want any of my money getting into their hands.
But you have zoning and stuff too, and while I hear it is easy to work around it, and that it is probably even legal to do that here in Norway, I still don't feel like it. As long as the industry doesn't respect their customers, they should not exist.
That's why I figured I would just get a cheap CD-ROM drive right now, and get a DVD drive or whatever later, when the industry gets a clue.
However, I might be barking up the wrong tree, I guess, so if anybody is aware of a manufacturer who aren't in on this, I would certainly consider it.
Yeah, but IBM is a BSA member, and BSA is on my boycott list...
It is relevant to linux advocacy: If there were a few Linux firms out there who could say: "You know what Gartner said, and we can transfer your web services tonight, no downtime, to a Linux+Apache system", it could actually make an impression on those making the decisions.
I'm going to buy some stuff and build a computer. Actually it is going to be my first personal (it took me 15 years to get my own...). I want a quite powerful box, but I don't care too much about the graphics on the screen or the sound. What I care a lot about is that the manufacturers I buy from are Good Guys. Also, everything I buy has to be well supported on Linux (I plan to get Debian Woody on it). I plan to get a 1.2-1.4 GHz AMD chip and 512 MB of RAM.
Now, what do you think, is this chipset something I should go for? Would it work well with Woody, do think? Are the NVIDIA guys Good?
I was looking for this stuff on Saturday, and I came up with the following stuff:
Does that sound like something good to use with Linux?
There are backdoors in airplanes. I walked through one one month ago... :-)
Not really... A bullett-proof west makes you less vulnerable. If you get shot at, it really makes no difference if you carry a gun or not. Here in Norway, police are unarmed, and because of a few recent shootings, they did a extensive two-year study which showed that armed officers were more likely to get shot at in similar situations, to unarmed officers. Based on this officer's organizations were the ones that most strongly objected to wearing arms (instead, they wanted more easy access to arms in patrol cars).
OK, this might be flamebait here.... You know, I'm a hunter, and I live in a country with a very high density of firearms, but you know, the american love-affair with hand-guns looks very weird from my point of view.
Encryption is very different from guns, in that guns can kill and does kill a lot of people by simple carelessness. Carelessness you can't do anything about. The idea that a hand-gun is a protective measure for everybody is just very, very weird idea, and kills a lot more people than terrorists will ever do... ;-)
Encryption on the other hand, is a tool you can use for preventing people to do Bad Things[tm] against you. If everyone just cared enough to use PGP as a daily routine, all the simple identity thefts we see that is being pulled to bully people would go away.
But I agree that biomedical research is mostly Good[tm] but I disagree about the bomb.
Come on, I'm Karma Kapped, I can take it! :-)
Also, I would like to thank you for PGP. Indeed, it is making the world a better place, and to me it is even more apparent in light of recent events.
Kjetil (Keyid: 6A6A0BBC)
What needs emphasizing is that the standards we use to communicate must be in the public domain. If not, if an industry standard controlled by a company becomes widespread, the company can put in such clauses in effectively prohibit certain unwanted kinds of speech, typically we will see first speech that critizes the company.
Now, mark that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically grants the right to express yourself in any medium. If, say one company owns an industry standard that is the only way to communicate by speech, this human right does no longer exist.
That is why Ogg is so important. It will make a standard for the public domain, and this standard is the only thing that saves free speech in the multimedia age. No Ogg, no free speech.
Similarily, we must make sure that similar bodies, working on other public domain standards, such as the W3C are successful. Without them, we're screwed.
An for those saying that "just don't use FP", well, you see, we all know M$ wants to control these commodity protocols, and M$ hardly cares about a bunch of geeks anyway, so us boycotting M$ doesn't help. Joe Sixpack must understand the problem, cause if he doesn't, they'll win, and turn the web into their network, and make sure FP is the only authoring tool you can use. It'll be the end of free speech too...
Ensuring that the standards are in the public domain is even more important than that software is Free (as in speech).
Well, but they can return it for a refund. Even more fun... :-)
To some, this may sound strange, but remember there are very few phone lines there. Such a law would be extremely easy to enforce.
You know, I think scientists are starting to wake up. For one thing, the equally prestigious magazine Nature had a short note recently about Dmitry's case, which was clearly sympathetic towards him.
Also, you have 27758 scientists signing the Open Letter of the Public Library of Science, and you've got physicists publishing pretty much all their material as pre-prints.
I don't think the open systems that science requires to function can co-exist with the closed systems wanted by the entertainment industry. If an open system exists, it can always be used to circumvent a closed system.
Now, it is easy to demonize "hackers" but it is harder to demonize scientists. Therefore, I think the first real battle will be over scientific publishing, and I want to be there when it happens.
Now, I don't think it will be a battle between scientists and artists, though the entertainment industry may try to portray it as such. The openness established by scientists and scientific publishing will be good for the whole of society, stimulate cultural diversity, and art will flourish along with science.
Obviously, nobody wants to use a service that has so little features as WAP, but if you could actually access the whole web, it would have been great. But it would require people to code for device independence.
However, there is a difference in the interpretation of "Jihad" between sunni and shia muslims, isn't there...? The interpretation you quoted is the sunni interpretation, right? (this is what I was told when visiting Egypt).
Yep, what occured to me in a slightly dramatic event (well it was dramatic when it happened, but not in light of last week's events), but I don't have time to explain right now, is that you don't get more security than what is provided to you by your fellow humans.
The next attack might not be by blowing things up, but by attacking e.g. financial markets by M$ Office trojans.... It'll be incredibly easy, and the govt has hardly no role in preventing that (they should have perhaps, but they don't). It'll be incredibly powerful. Now, the protection here is more encryption, not less. And higher security, not less. If the security of these systems are left to the government, by allowing them to access backdoors, terrorists will most likely seek these backdoors, and might very well find them.
Don't trust your government with your security.
Now, mark the extension of getting security from your fellow humans: Real security is achieved if mankind manages to come together and get over these stupid fights. That's the only security we can have.
I have a 180MHz Pentium PRO too, but I kind of intended to use that as the main e-mail and web server.