Saying "Terrorists are terrorists because they're nasty bad evil people" may in many cases be true -- but it would be more useful to know what made them into nasty, bad, evil people in order to try to avoid making too many more of them.
The problem is that there is no incentive to do anything but dehumanize them. The government and media are doing the same thing that was done back during WWII with the Japanese: Turn them into monstrous unhuman demons. A soldier is more likely to shoot a "monster" than he is a human, and the public are more likely to back a war against "monsters" than people. If this is the overall goal, why would anyone want to be educating anyone about who these terrorists really are, aside from trying to dehumanize them even more?
Having used firesheep myself, I can tell you that it doesn't work to login to gmail. I was able to sniff my own google account (using a separate computer), but was not able to get past my iGoogle homepage. Attempting to go to gmail prompted a login, even using the firesheeped session cookie. I think I may have tried google docs too, and it also required a login, but I am not sure about that one.
I agree that copyright law needs revising, but I have yet to see someone suggest a decent alternative that benefits both the consumer AND the producer of the consumed good.
Remember, despite all their flaws, the copyright laws we have today did and still do serve a purpose. They keep people from stealing ideas. They work wonderfully for solid non-digital things, like the thousands of goods we buy in stores-its only when we try to apply them to electronic data and ideas that we start having problems.
Legal costs can be arbitrarily high. I can just see the bill now:
Cost of game pirated: $50
Various legal fees: $100,000
Total bill to be paid: $100,050
Honestly, the only people who are winning at all in this are the lawyers.
This brings up a good point: Pirating a game may get you a free game that you will play for a year or so and then forget about, but if enough people pirate games and there isn't enough money for development of new games... Fewer new games every year, which means fewer choices for you to pirate.
A cheaper development budget also means that fewer game companies will be shelling out cash to develop for the newest technologies, since the dev kits for older platforms have already been paid. Welcome to the world of instant gratification: because you and a million others decided to pirate a game instead of paying for it, because you wanted it NOW, the small game design studio that created that blockbuster game is out of business and the sequel will be released by EA. And no one wants that.
That would make a lot of sense. Considering that ANY launch into space is probably gonna be noticed, it would be a lot easier just to piggyback satellites than try to make a secret unnoticed launch. Maybe that's why it's really so big? Instead of launching one massive satellite they could be launching two or three smaller ones.
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Saying "Terrorists are terrorists because they're nasty bad evil people" may in many cases be true -- but it would be more useful to know what made them into nasty, bad, evil people in order to try to avoid making too many more of them.
The problem is that there is no incentive to do anything but dehumanize them. The government and media are doing the same thing that was done back during WWII with the Japanese: Turn them into monstrous unhuman demons. A soldier is more likely to shoot a "monster" than he is a human, and the public are more likely to back a war against "monsters" than people. If this is the overall goal, why would anyone want to be educating anyone about who these terrorists really are, aside from trying to dehumanize them even more?
Not gonna be a problem for the geeks who live in mother's basement and don't ever come out
Having used firesheep myself, I can tell you that it doesn't work to login to gmail. I was able to sniff my own google account (using a separate computer), but was not able to get past my iGoogle homepage. Attempting to go to gmail prompted a login, even using the firesheeped session cookie. I think I may have tried google docs too, and it also required a login, but I am not sure about that one.
I agree that copyright law needs revising, but I have yet to see someone suggest a decent alternative that benefits both the consumer AND the producer of the consumed good.
Remember, despite all their flaws, the copyright laws we have today did and still do serve a purpose. They keep people from stealing ideas. They work wonderfully for solid non-digital things, like the thousands of goods we buy in stores-its only when we try to apply them to electronic data and ideas that we start having problems.
Legal costs can be arbitrarily high. I can just see the bill now:
Cost of game pirated: $50
Various legal fees: $100,000
Total bill to be paid: $100,050
Honestly, the only people who are winning at all in this are the lawyers.
This brings up a good point: Pirating a game may get you a free game that you will play for a year or so and then forget about, but if enough people pirate games and there isn't enough money for development of new games... Fewer new games every year, which means fewer choices for you to pirate.
A cheaper development budget also means that fewer game companies will be shelling out cash to develop for the newest technologies, since the dev kits for older platforms have already been paid. Welcome to the world of instant gratification: because you and a million others decided to pirate a game instead of paying for it, because you wanted it NOW, the small game design studio that created that blockbuster game is out of business and the sequel will be released by EA. And no one wants that.
That would make a lot of sense. Considering that ANY launch into space is probably gonna be noticed, it would be a lot easier just to piggyback satellites than try to make a secret unnoticed launch. Maybe that's why it's really so big? Instead of launching one massive satellite they could be launching two or three smaller ones.