You're forgetting that the human sensory system will also have to be re-engineered to prevent anyone from placing a video camera or a tape recorder in front of their tv/stereo. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that analog sensory inputs were going to be illegal in all children born in the US starting in 2010.
During the first phase (2010-2050), children will be born^H^H^H^Hdecanted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hreleased with webcams in place of eyes and condenser microphones in place of ears to stream audio and video of their immediate environment to a central processing center to have anything inappropriate for minors removed from the signal before it is transmitted back to the child's CPU for visual and auditory processing.
In the second phase (2050-2100), the senses of smell and taste will be likewise replaced with chemical analysis of the air being smelled and the food being masticated. Sensory feedback will be combined with a standardized nutritional IV, allowing version 3 children to eat whatever they want but never gain weight.
In the final phase (2100+), the senses of touch, balance, and motion will all be replaced in a similar fashion, allowing unprecedented advances in the fields of virtual travel and virtual prostitution.
So you're the creep always hiding outside my window, listening to my private conversations. Watch out, Buster, because I've got a potful of boiling oil and catshit waiting for the next time you come by to eavesdrop on me.
My physician has told me to watch my stress level. That is why I try to avoid thinking about the big picture, whenever possible. You have made that impossible for me, so here goes. Bear with me, my line of BS is pretty well developed, even if it is total BS.
The organization of society is necessarily conditioned by the main mode of economic endeavor. During the pre-industrial age, that was agriculture. Consequently, land-based organizations arose to control access to the land. Over the centuries, those organizations took various forms, culminating in the modern nation-state.
At about the same time that the nation-state was coming to maturity, the industrial age was beginning. Because an industrial society relies so heavily on natural resources and therefore the land, the nation-state was already prepared to control industry, and few if any real changes in the structure of society would have been necessary, if things had stopped there.
However, in the past 50 years, the Information Age has turned this whole system on its ear. Information is now the main mode of economic endeavor. Information, as we are now seeing, is exceedingly difficult to control using nation-state-based systems. In fact, the current economy is so different from an agricultural/industrial economy, the very concept of statehood is in the process of becoming irrelevant.
In conclusion, we needn't worry about "the removal of the current oppressive regime"; it will simply wither and die as it becomes less and less relevant, less and less able to cope with the changes the information-based economy wreaks on a daily basis. (I mean, really, software patent? Hello!!??) We should instead turn our attention to developing successor systems and concepts, to ensure that the next phase is an improvement over the current phase.
How's that for constructive? (I might say it was more deconstructive;) Can I wear a gold-toned tinfoil hat now?
Having the government be able to read the mail of people who are known or suspected terrorists is most certainly not unreasonable and not unconstitutional.
What about everyone else whose email passes through Carnivore? It would be relatively easy to have all email to or from a targetted address forwarded to FBI headquarters for inspection, without trampling all over the civil liberties of every single user at a given ISP. Why is it necessary to monitor everyone's email? Are we all to be treated as suspected terrorists?
I am opposed to the killing of children, women, and the elderly by terrorists. You apparently are not.
I am of course opposed to terrorism. (For the record, I am also opposed the killing of men and hermaphrodites by terrorists, which you apparently are not.) It is the nature of a free society to allow people to break its laws. It is the duty of a just society to identify and punish those people. It is a messy system, and it may be pretty dysfunctional, but it's the best we've got.
Sometimes, people break the law in horrifying ways. *Those people* should be punished, in a way that does not infringe on the rights of the rest of us. The only thing more frightening to me than living in a country in which things like OKC can happen would be living in a country that has so little freedom that things like OKC can't happen. Such a country would be no better than a prison with 250 million cells, or for that matter, no better than Stalinist Russia.
I was replying to the troll's contention that the American Government's purpose is to preserve the lives of its citizens, and I was attempting to engage him/her on that level. I will now put on my tinfoil hat so that I may engage you on your level.
[tinfoil]The American Government's main purpose is to keep most of us from noticing while we are being separated from our money and freedom. The elected government is a sham; all of the real power lies with people beyond the reach of the democratic system. It therefore matters not at all what laws are passed as the powers that be will just take whatever they want regardless of the law.[/tinfoil]
Even if the above is true, it's not very constructive, is it? Between you and me, let's just pretend like the democratic system is not hopelessly fscked up, OK? It makes it easier for me to get out of be in the morning, and it also makes for more interesting conversation and troll-baiting.
I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I really would prefer that buttheads like yourself emigrate to allowing you to turn our country into a police state. Do you believe in any civil liberties at all? No really, I want you to sit and think about this: do you really believe in any kind of civil liberty? Should alcohol be outlawed because of the violence and death caused by its consumption? Should automobiles capable of exceeding the speed limit be declared illegal because of the carnage on the highways? I will defend my freedom from the likes of you with my dying breath. I have no doubt which side of the Revolutionary War you'd have been on, and I'm beginning to wonder if you wouldn't have found yourself right at home in Stalinist Russia.
The American Government's primary function is to preserve the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You seem to have forgotten, but liberty is one of those rights. We fought a war over two hundred years ago so that we could live in a free society. The state of New Hampshire's motto, "Live free or die" comes to mind. Why don't you and your beloved family move to some third world police state, where you will be safe from the chaos that necessarily accompanies freedom?
IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT ME AND MY FAMILY. It already has the ability to tap telephone lines (as it should!), why in the WORLD would e-mail be any different?
Exactly. Why should e-mail be different? The FBI can only tap a specific phone number *after* showing just cause and obtaining a court order. Carnivore will pre-emptively monitor *all* e-mail traffic. Phone taps are narrow in scope; only the suspected bad guy's phone is tapped. Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
An e-mail surveillance system that could be compared apples-to-apples with phone taps would be one whereby only traffic into or out of a specific mailbox was monitored. Imagine the FBI with phonetaps on every phone; that is what Carnivore wants to do.
This is a pretty basic distinction, but I guess it gets a little lost while you scream, "Won't someone think of the children!" at the top of your lungs. If you personally lost loved ones in OKC, I feel for you, but I don't think we should all just hand over our civil liberties as a result of that tragedy.
What good would Carnivore do in catching any but the stupidest of criminals anyway? That is to say, if a criminal enterprise were to use strong encryption on their e-mail, wouldn't that secure the e-mail from being read by Carnivore? Given the fact that e-mail can persist for years on every mail server between the sender and receiver, only an idiot would send anything confidential and/or possibly incriminating over unsecured e-mail. It would seem to me that catching anyone this stupid would be easily enough done without Carnivore.
What's wrong with the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac? They're much more consistent than on the PC, and they're better thought out. All the important ones are within reach of your left hand.
There are not enough of them. In the windoze world, I can go through my day without ever touching my mouse. I have found that almost everything is more efficiently done with the keyboard, especially anything in a text editor, because I never need to lift my hand from the keyboard.
To say that the keyboard shortcuts on the Macintosh are consistent is like saying the average slashdot reader's dating life is consistent. It may be true, but most of us would agree that more would be better, even if we had to sacrifice a bit of the predictability of our Saturday nights.
meta-clicking is easy and intuitive, and allows you to operate the mouse without locking your hand into the three-fingered-claw position over it that you gotta stay in to make sure you are using the correct button each time you click on something.
I suggest tying different colored pieces of string to your fingers to help you distinguish your index, middle, and ring fingers from one another. (I'll bet you're having no trouble finding your middle finger right about now!)
Seriously, though, I used Macintoshes for years in a previous life as a desktop publisher and all-around support serf for a quick print company. In my experience, meta-clicking is *not* intuitive. If it were, it would not have been so difficult to explain to my users, who could never remember whether to use the "propeller" key or the "opt" key, couldn't remember whether to just press the key or hold it, etc., etc. I also found it frustrating in my own work that I had to use two hands to work my mouse properly.
I would have to put this limitation of the MacOS into the same category as the generally lacking implementation of keyboard accelerators in the MacOS and most application programs for the Mac. These decisions, made for the sake of newbies, make it more difficult for those of us who use the tools day in and day out to operate at peak efficiency.
You will say that these issues only cost me a second or two at a time, but I know from experience that those seconds can add up pretty quickly. When I migrated to Windows 95, I found that I could get things done much more quickly by using the keyboard accelerators and additional mouse buttons, even with the slightly more frequent crashing. Maybe you don't care how much work you get done in a day, but I'll bet your boss does.
I can't believe it would be impossible for Apple to design an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that is also optimized for efficient use by power users. Unfortunately, the fact that most Mac users feel a need to defend of every decision made by Apple may prevent that from happening.
Is it just a coincidence that the "Common Era" started at the same time agreed on by Christians as the birth year of Jesus? What other than the fact that the Christians were successful in getting the rest of the world to adopt their calendar makes the era "common"?
You call that a flame? I guess I need to have my phaser re-calibrated. I'd have sworn it was set to "light stun". But seriously, "Yahoo News"? It doesn't strike you as a bit odd-sounding? I mean, who would subscribe to a newspaper named "The Idiot Times"?
After reading the article on ZDNet, I thought I might point out that the "truncated" lines you refer to are in fact headlines in the original article. Perhaps if you had had *your* coffee this morning, you'd have thought to look at the original article before picking nits. Just a thought. At any rate, trusting a news source whose name is "Yahoo" (as in "Some yahoo told me that Microsoft is filing a patent on binary notation.") seems to me kinda dumb.
One of the major reasons for the buky packaging is theft in the retail stores. You simply do not want someone pocketing the cd in their jacket, and leave the box behind.
This is why some video stores, most used music stores, etc., etc., leave an empty package on the shelf and keep the valuable contents behind the counter. Using a similar approach, marketing arrangements could be made whereby a retailer would promise to grant a software product x inches of shelf space until its sales tail off. The manufacturer could send only enough display packages to fill that amount of space, and have a smaller package behind the counter. The display packaging could be as big, heavy, and elaborate as the manufacturer's marketing department wanted. Customers could even be given the choice of purchasing the display packaging for a slightly higher price, if they are collectors of such rubbish.
I know of at least one product that is advertised on the web with a beautifully designed box that does not exist; the box is just a concept. I imagine if this product is ever promoted at a trade show, prop boxes will be printed for stacking, but the product will never actually see the inside of the box.
The unifying theme here is that packaging (of any product, software or otherwise) is no longer primarily designed for the purposes of containing, it is designed first and foremost as point-of-sale advertising. A sane approach would be to design point of sale advertising separately from the packaging.
The real issue is not whether this will work; it is whether such an idea could ever work for this specific application. What if I break/burn or otherwise injure my hand and want to listen to the soothing sounds of my favorite record while I recover? What about quadriplegics or those otherwise unable to type? In the cases where this technology has been used, for instance, the security of a workstation, it can be assumed that persons unable to type will not be at work. For the public sale of music, the technology is just not a good fit. Really, there is no way to apply this to recorded music. Let the idiots who don't know any better blow their time and money working on this. It will never gain acceptance.
Am I the only one who thinks that the real reason the MPAA is fighting DeCSS is precisely to control the how, when, and where of viewing copyrighted content? Am I the only one who envisions a brave new world in which you can no longer *buy* books, but must license the content for a limited time and for specific purposes?
We talk about how we live in the Information Age, but noone seems to understand how that fact will change our society and its laws. When our societies were land-based and agricultural, the owners of the land organized society in such a way as to protect their own interests at the cost of the poor saps who worked the land. It stands to reason that in the Information Age, the owners of the information (i.e., copyright holders) will do the same.
Picture yourself as an Information-Age serf and you will have a clear idea of what the MPAA has in mind. We are presented with two choices: lie back and enjoy it, or become authors ourselves and use our copyright/copyleft authority set up an alternative to their vision of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting that the human sensory system will also have to be re-engineered to prevent anyone from placing a video camera or a tape recorder in front of their tv/stereo. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that analog sensory inputs were going to be illegal in all children born in the US starting in 2010.
During the first phase (2010-2050), children will be born^H^H^H^Hdecanted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hreleased with webcams in place of eyes and condenser microphones in place of ears to stream audio and video of their immediate environment to a central processing center to have anything inappropriate for minors removed from the signal before it is transmitted back to the child's CPU for visual and auditory processing.
In the second phase (2050-2100), the senses of smell and taste will be likewise replaced with chemical analysis of the air being smelled and the food being masticated. Sensory feedback will be combined with a standardized nutritional IV, allowing version 3 children to eat whatever they want but never gain weight.
In the final phase (2100+), the senses of touch, balance, and motion will all be replaced in a similar fashion, allowing unprecedented advances in the fields of virtual travel and virtual prostitution.
Isn't progress amazing?
Thought I'd point out that you should get much better performance from Nat32 than you're getting with ICS. Check out www.nat32.com.
So you're the creep always hiding outside my window, listening to my private conversations. Watch out, Buster, because I've got a potful of boiling oil and catshit waiting for the next time you come by to eavesdrop on me.
My physician has told me to watch my stress level. That is why I try to avoid thinking about the big picture, whenever possible. You have made that impossible for me, so here goes. Bear with me, my line of BS is pretty well developed, even if it is total BS.
The organization of society is necessarily conditioned by the main mode of economic endeavor. During the pre-industrial age, that was agriculture. Consequently, land-based organizations arose to control access to the land. Over the centuries, those organizations took various forms, culminating in the modern nation-state.
At about the same time that the nation-state was coming to maturity, the industrial age was beginning. Because an industrial society relies so heavily on natural resources and therefore the land, the nation-state was already prepared to control industry, and few if any real changes in the structure of society would have been necessary, if things had stopped there.
However, in the past 50 years, the Information Age has turned this whole system on its ear. Information is now the main mode of economic endeavor. Information, as we are now seeing, is exceedingly difficult to control using nation-state-based systems. In fact, the current economy is so different from an agricultural/industrial economy, the very concept of statehood is in the process of becoming irrelevant.
In conclusion, we needn't worry about "the removal of the current oppressive regime"; it will simply wither and die as it becomes less and less relevant, less and less able to cope with the changes the information-based economy wreaks on a daily basis. (I mean, really, software patent? Hello!!??) We should instead turn our attention to developing successor systems and concepts, to ensure that the next phase is an improvement over the current phase.
How's that for constructive? (I might say it was more deconstructive;) Can I wear a gold-toned tinfoil hat now?
I am of course opposed to terrorism. (For the record, I am also opposed the killing of men and hermaphrodites by terrorists, which you apparently are not.) It is the nature of a free society to allow people to break its laws. It is the duty of a just society to identify and punish those people. It is a messy system, and it may be pretty dysfunctional, but it's the best we've got.
Sometimes, people break the law in horrifying ways. *Those people* should be punished, in a way that does not infringe on the rights of the rest of us. The only thing more frightening to me than living in a country in which things like OKC can happen would be living in a country that has so little freedom that things like OKC can't happen. Such a country would be no better than a prison with 250 million cells, or for that matter, no better than Stalinist Russia.
I was replying to the troll's contention that the American Government's purpose is to preserve the lives of its citizens, and I was attempting to engage him/her on that level. I will now put on my tinfoil hat so that I may engage you on your level.
[tinfoil]The American Government's main purpose is to keep most of us from noticing while we are being separated from our money and freedom. The elected government is a sham; all of the real power lies with people beyond the reach of the democratic system. It therefore matters not at all what laws are passed as the powers that be will just take whatever they want regardless of the law.[/tinfoil]
Even if the above is true, it's not very constructive, is it? Between you and me, let's just pretend like the democratic system is not hopelessly fscked up, OK? It makes it easier for me to get out of be in the morning, and it also makes for more interesting conversation and troll-baiting.
I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I really would prefer that buttheads like yourself emigrate to allowing you to turn our country into a police state. Do you believe in any civil liberties at all? No really, I want you to sit and think about this: do you really believe in any kind of civil liberty? Should alcohol be outlawed because of the violence and death caused by its consumption? Should automobiles capable of exceeding the speed limit be declared illegal because of the carnage on the highways? I will defend my freedom from the likes of you with my dying breath. I have no doubt which side of the Revolutionary War you'd have been on, and I'm beginning to wonder if you wouldn't have found yourself right at home in Stalinist Russia.
The American Government's primary function is to preserve the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You seem to have forgotten, but liberty is one of those rights. We fought a war over two hundred years ago so that we could live in a free society. The state of New Hampshire's motto, "Live free or die" comes to mind. Why don't you and your beloved family move to some third world police state, where you will be safe from the chaos that necessarily accompanies freedom?
Exactly. Why should e-mail be different? The FBI can only tap a specific phone number *after* showing just cause and obtaining a court order. Carnivore will pre-emptively monitor *all* e-mail traffic. Phone taps are narrow in scope; only the suspected bad guy's phone is tapped. Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
An e-mail surveillance system that could be compared apples-to-apples with phone taps would be one whereby only traffic into or out of a specific mailbox was monitored. Imagine the FBI with phonetaps on every phone; that is what Carnivore wants to do.
This is a pretty basic distinction, but I guess it gets a little lost while you scream, "Won't someone think of the children!" at the top of your lungs. If you personally lost loved ones in OKC, I feel for you, but I don't think we should all just hand over our civil liberties as a result of that tragedy.
What good would Carnivore do in catching any but the stupidest of criminals anyway? That is to say, if a criminal enterprise were to use strong encryption on their e-mail, wouldn't that secure the e-mail from being read by Carnivore? Given the fact that e-mail can persist for years on every mail server between the sender and receiver, only an idiot would send anything confidential and/or possibly incriminating over unsecured e-mail. It would seem to me that catching anyone this stupid would be easily enough done without Carnivore.
To say that the keyboard shortcuts on the Macintosh are consistent is like saying the average slashdot reader's dating life is consistent. It may be true, but most of us would agree that more would be better, even if we had to sacrifice a bit of the predictability of our Saturday nights.
Seriously, though, I used Macintoshes for years in a previous life as a desktop publisher and all-around support serf for a quick print company. In my experience, meta-clicking is *not* intuitive. If it were, it would not have been so difficult to explain to my users, who could never remember whether to use the "propeller" key or the "opt" key, couldn't remember whether to just press the key or hold it, etc., etc. I also found it frustrating in my own work that I had to use two hands to work my mouse properly.
I would have to put this limitation of the MacOS into the same category as the generally lacking implementation of keyboard accelerators in the MacOS and most application programs for the Mac. These decisions, made for the sake of newbies, make it more difficult for those of us who use the tools day in and day out to operate at peak efficiency.
You will say that these issues only cost me a second or two at a time, but I know from experience that those seconds can add up pretty quickly. When I migrated to Windows 95, I found that I could get things done much more quickly by using the keyboard accelerators and additional mouse buttons, even with the slightly more frequent crashing. Maybe you don't care how much work you get done in a day, but I'll bet your boss does.
I can't believe it would be impossible for Apple to design an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that is also optimized for efficient use by power users. Unfortunately, the fact that most Mac users feel a need to defend of every decision made by Apple may prevent that from happening.
(Postus Interruptus)
Is it just a coincidence that the "Common Era" started at the same time agreed on by Christians as the birth year of Jesus? What other than the fact that the Christians were successful in getting the rest of the world to adopt their calendar makes the era "common"?
For all you know, the poster is Christian and means BC, not BCE. Furthermore, isn't this whole "Common Era" thing a bit of bowdlerian BS?
You call that a flame? I guess I need to have my phaser re-calibrated. I'd have sworn it was set to "light stun". But seriously, "Yahoo News"? It doesn't strike you as a bit odd-sounding? I mean, who would subscribe to a newspaper named "The Idiot Times"?
After reading the article on ZDNet, I thought I might point out that the "truncated" lines you refer to are in fact headlines in the original article. Perhaps if you had had *your* coffee this morning, you'd have thought to look at the original article before picking nits. Just a thought. At any rate, trusting a news source whose name is "Yahoo" (as in "Some yahoo told me that Microsoft is filing a patent on binary notation.") seems to me kinda dumb.
One of the major reasons for the buky packaging is theft in the retail stores. You simply do not want someone pocketing the cd in their jacket, and leave the box behind.
This is why some video stores, most used music stores, etc., etc., leave an empty package on the shelf and keep the valuable contents behind the counter. Using a similar approach, marketing arrangements could be made whereby a retailer would promise to grant a software product x inches of shelf space until its sales tail off. The manufacturer could send only enough display packages to fill that amount of space, and have a smaller package behind the counter. The display packaging could be as big, heavy, and elaborate as the manufacturer's marketing department wanted. Customers could even be given the choice of purchasing the display packaging for a slightly higher price, if they are collectors of such rubbish.
I know of at least one product that is advertised on the web with a beautifully designed box that does not exist; the box is just a concept. I imagine if this product is ever promoted at a trade show, prop boxes will be printed for stacking, but the product will never actually see the inside of the box.
The unifying theme here is that packaging (of any product, software or otherwise) is no longer primarily designed for the purposes of containing, it is designed first and foremost as point-of-sale advertising. A sane approach would be to design point of sale advertising separately from the packaging.
The real issue is not whether this will work; it is whether such an idea could ever work for this specific application. What if I break/burn or otherwise injure my hand and want to listen to the soothing sounds of my favorite record while I recover? What about quadriplegics or those otherwise unable to type? In the cases where this technology has been used, for instance, the security of a workstation, it can be assumed that persons unable to type will not be at work. For the public sale of music, the technology is just not a good fit. Really, there is no way to apply this to recorded music. Let the idiots who don't know any better blow their time and money working on this. It will never gain acceptance.
Am I the only one who thinks that the real reason the MPAA is fighting DeCSS is precisely to control the how, when, and where of viewing copyrighted content? Am I the only one who envisions a brave new world in which you can no longer *buy* books, but must license the content for a limited time and for specific purposes?
We talk about how we live in the Information Age, but noone seems to understand how that fact will change our society and its laws. When our societies were land-based and agricultural, the owners of the land organized society in such a way as to protect their own interests at the cost of the poor saps who worked the land. It stands to reason that in the Information Age, the owners of the information (i.e., copyright holders) will do the same.
Picture yourself as an Information-Age serf and you will have a clear idea of what the MPAA has in mind. We are presented with two choices: lie back and enjoy it, or become authors ourselves and use our copyright/copyleft authority set up an alternative to their vision of the future.