Of course if you really want to get all tinfoil hat about it, then the best way to censor/control people is to let them believe they are not being censored/controlled. If you can pull that off then you have complete control.
Just look at what the current US administration has done in the name of the war on terror. The TSA and Homeland Security can get away with almost anything because "the people" have been convinced that it is all for their own good.
Um.. hate to burst your bubble, but *all* companies are about money.
There is no moral compunction for companies to do anything. As can be seen with all sorts of disasters in the past wehere companies have done stuff which was damaging to people/environment/markets/[insert favourite disaster] but to their own profit. Companies are only compelled to do things against their bottom dollar by two main things:
1) People voting with their wallets (but if you don't know what bad practices they have in their closets, how do you know how to vote that way?)
2) Government regulation. ie laws, legislastion etc (But what do you do when the comapny is in bed with the legislators?)
You mean just like the CSIRO here in Oz did with the wirless networking, only to have the big capitalistic cartel in the US take them to court in order to break the patents. Is that the sort of system you are thinking of???
Back in the good old days here in Oz.. we used to celebrate Guy Fawkes night every November. Lots of fireworks, bonfires and burning effigies of politicians. It was all good fun until the government decided that fireworks are dangerous and banned them:-(
The problem is that you forgot to factor in the mortgage that you need to take out in order to fill your tank in the UK.
I'm from Oz, and our petrol prices are well under that of the UK, but the US prices are well and truly under ours.
Currrently in Melbourne we pay on average 102 cents per litre for standard unleaded, which is about: GPB 1.87 Per Imperial gallon $US 3.15 per US gallon
rant Part of the free trade agreement was the pushing through by the US drug companies to stop Australian government subsidies of prescriptiion drugs to our own citizens. The Prescription Benefits Scheme (PBS) is a part of the larger Medicare scheme that all Australians contribute to via their taxes. It is effectively getting the government to make a large co-payement on drugs, so that unfortunate citizens don't get driven broke by huge drug costs iin order to treat afflictations that did not choose to suffer. That co-payment is then amortised across the whole country.
But the US drug industry cried "unfair to us", and got the FDA to screw up our internal systems for the sake of their profits.
As a person who has relied on specialised drugs in the past, this annoys the hell out of me, especially when seeing people I know in teh US suffer from the same affliction but not be able to afford the drugs. So I can see trouble looming ahead for us.
But what really takes the cake is the Bush recently announced his own PBS scheme for seniors in the US. If it is such a good idea, why did he allow the FDA to be manipulated so that it was sqaushed in Oz?
To quote a comedian I once heard (whose name escapes me, but I know he was from the US of A)
"I'd rather live in a country founded by criminals, than one founded by puritans."
Getting a bit off topic
I always laugh at what you can't do in the USA because of wierd laws designed to protect you from yourself, compared to what we can do here in Oz.
I remember back in about '76 or '77 when we had full frontal female nudity on prime time free to air network TV. Yet in the US you made so much hoopla out of Janet Jackson's tit that it seemed like you thought it was the end of the world.
And before you write me off as some whinging foreigner, I spend a lot of time in the US and am getting married there in August. I know that individually you can be nice people, but collectively.. that leaves a lot to be debated.
Though recently I did see a letter to a Melbourne paper that referred to little Johnny Howard as the "Prime Minature" of Australia, and that has now become my fav descripion of our glorious leader.
Of course here in Australia they are starting to implement random drug testing of drivers. So in fact you re-writing of the question is not as outlandish as you think.
Pointing out the reply I made to my own post above about the same topic. The FAI rules allow for a flight to be down to 2/3s of the great circle route distance.
So blame the FAI if you aren't happy with the record.
Yeah I just dug into it and discovered that the FAI rules will award a circumnavigation if it is down to 2/3s of the great circle route distance.
Still, in this day and age of technology I would think that you could toughen up the rules, so you have to exceed the minimum circumference of the planet.
And there is a reason for the current lifestyles not being sustainable.. it's statistics like the US having 5% of the worlds population, but consuming 20% of the energy.
I agree that it would take a drastic change in lifestyle to change theses statistics, but surely a change in lifestyle is the cheapeast and simplest approach to a solution.
You can take finances as an analogy. If your finances are in trouble, getting a better paid job will help you out in the short term, but learning to spend less will help you out in the long term.
As a foreigner living in the US, I have always been amazed at the lack of repsect paid to speed limits on freeways. Here in Virginia, the cops won't touch you for 20 mile an hour over the limit, while back home the cops will ding you for 1 mph over the limit. I have always wondered what would happen to the US dependency on foreign oil if people obeyed the speed limits on freeways. Even a small change in fuel consumption would drastically affect oil usage.
As a foreigner living here, I am continually amazed at the persecution of the fruit cake by North Americans. What is the deal here? Were you all traumatised by a fruit cake when you were children? (And no, I don't mean parents).
Good fruit cake is delicious (and I would say that the best I have had, was one I bought in Heathrow airport - chock full of nice moist fruit, and about 1/2 litre of scotch). I can only presume that nobody around here actually knows how to make a good one.
So enlighten me - what is so bad about fruit cake?
I would argue that your answer does not exonerate the failure of the link, as you imply the only way that I should know about it is to have read specific comments on sprecific slashdot threads at arbitrary points in the past.
There is still nothing inherent in the link that points to CoralCache, or any caching strategy what so ever.
Given this lack of knowledge, how am I supposed to parse the link to actually get to the story without asking someone else? I could google myself, but on what term? The only possible search term is 8090, which I just tried for the hell of it, and it turned up all sorts of irrelevant pages.
Thus I still contend that the link itself has failed a usability test.
Thanks for the info, though I did see the direct link from a previous post. But this begs the question:
How does a person wanting to access the supplied link:
a) Know ahead of time that it was a fancy caching scheme?
b) Know that removing the stated parts would give me direct access?
I have never seen this system before, and from a few other posts it seems that I am not the only person in this boat. It is only by happenstance that more knowledgable people in this forum know the methods inolved, and have graciously supplied the answers.
Thus I posit that:
The article link itself has FAILED a usability test
Hmm.. I'd still argue for the benefit to future generations. Some of the most interesting photographers from history were only documenting what was around them. At the time what they were doing was not really that interesting compared to special events etc. Yet now, after they are dead, their works are forming important historical records. How do you do that with instantaneous digital?
And yes, I also shoot digital - why do think I have a D-70???
Is my data somehow less worthwhile if I am not around to copy it? Compare this with mediums that do not need to be replicated in order to be accessed (ie books, paintings, negatives).
Look at works that have been overlooked for centuries and then found to be relevant/important. How would they have faired if the climate of the time had been "Well if you think it's important, then *you* copy it".
Building systems that are not inherently stable (in this case requiring active copying in order to be accessible) has a marked cost that I don't belive many people actually consider.
Um.. I hate to burst your bubble, but can I remind you about the dutch group (name escapes me and I can't be bothered to google, and I was sure it was reported here) who stored a variety of CDs away for 2 years and found significant degredation in over half of them? You may argue that CDs are archival under good conditions, but how many of them are actually stored under good conditions.
As for perfect savings of digital data, the data is only as good as long as someone has the desire to copy from an older to newer medium. Once that desire is not there, your data is practically useless after 2 or 3 generations of memory devices have come along. And this hampers future generations from handling data that we archive now. Just look at the number of 8 inch floppy drives around, and think about how hard it is to re-copy the data on them. Now extrapolate that 100 years down the track. Plus once the mechanisms are no longer readily available, the desire to replicate them drops off. How many people think that data on 8 inch floppys is as inmportant as what is on their 200+GB drives now???
One of the reasons I still shoot B&W film (even though I have a D-70) is that I know a negative is more likely to be readable/appreciated by the least technological means well after I am long gone and pushing up the daisies
Slashdot Mirror
Of course if you really want to get all tinfoil hat about it, then the best way to censor/control people is to let them believe they are not being censored/controlled. If you can pull that off then you have complete control.
Just look at what the current US administration has done in the name of the war on terror. The TSA and Homeland Security can get away with almost anything because "the people" have been convinced that it is all for their own good.
Um .. hate to burst your bubble, but *all* companies are about money.
There is no moral compunction for companies to do anything. As can be seen with all sorts of disasters in the past wehere companies have done stuff which was damaging to people/environment/markets/[insert favourite disaster] but to their own profit. Companies are only compelled to do things against their bottom dollar by two main things:
1) People voting with their wallets (but if you don't know what bad practices they have in their closets, how do you know how to vote that way?)
2) Government regulation. ie laws, legislastion etc (But what do you do when the comapny is in bed with the legislators?)
You mean just like the CSIRO here in Oz did with the wirless networking, only to have the big capitalistic cartel in the US take them to court in order to break the patents. Is that the sort of system you are thinking of???
Back in the good old days here in Oz .. we used to celebrate Guy Fawkes night every November. Lots of fireworks, bonfires and burning effigies of politicians. It was all good fun until the government decided that fireworks are dangerous and banned them :-(
The problem is that you forgot to factor in the mortgage that you need to take out in order to fill your tank in the UK.
I'm from Oz, and our petrol prices are well under that of the UK, but the US prices are well and truly under ours.
Currrently in Melbourne we pay on average 102 cents per litre for standard unleaded, which is about:
GPB 1.87 Per Imperial gallon
$US 3.15 per US gallon
Ahhh Roy and HG .. what a pair .. another couple of Aussies that I will miss when I depart *sniff*.
.. I was bloody well OS during the olympics and missed all that great stuff.
But infortunatley no
Part of the free trade agreement was the pushing through by the US drug companies to stop Australian government subsidies of prescriptiion drugs to our own citizens. The Prescription Benefits Scheme (PBS) is a part of the larger Medicare scheme that all Australians contribute to via their taxes. It is effectively getting the government to make a large co-payement on drugs, so that unfortunate citizens don't get driven broke by huge drug costs iin order to treat afflictations that did not choose to suffer. That co-payment is then amortised across the whole country.
But the US drug industry cried "unfair to us", and got the FDA to screw up our internal systems for the sake of their profits.
As a person who has relied on specialised drugs in the past, this annoys the hell out of me, especially when seeing people I know in teh US suffer from the same affliction but not be able to afford the drugs. So I can see trouble looming ahead for us.
But what really takes the cake is the Bush recently announced his own PBS scheme for seniors in the US. If it is such a good idea, why did he allow the FDA to be manipulated so that it was sqaushed in Oz?
Free trade agreement? I think not.
To quote a comedian I once heard (whose name escapes me, but I know he was from the US of A)
.. that leaves a lot to be debated.
"I'd rather live in a country founded by criminals, than one founded by puritans."
Getting a bit off topic
I always laugh at what you can't do in the USA because of wierd laws designed to protect you from yourself, compared to what we can do here in Oz.
I remember back in about '76 or '77 when we had full frontal female nudity on prime time free to air network TV. Yet in the US you made so much hoopla out of Janet Jackson's tit that it seemed like you thought it was the end of the world.
And before you write me off as some whinging foreigner, I spend a lot of time in the US and am getting married there in August. I know that individually you can be nice people, but collectively
The miniMate of George Bush
Though recently I did see a letter to a Melbourne paper that referred to little Johnny Howard as the "Prime Minature" of Australia, and that has now become my fav descripion of our glorious leader.
And it worked so well for me that all I think about when I hear Rick's name is what Dan got it named for .. lol
(puts on tinfoil hat) :-)
What an awsome application of social engineering to get everyone to turn their phones off
Of course here in Australia they are starting to implement random drug testing of drivers. So in fact you re-writing of the question is not as outlandish as you think.
Pointing out the reply I made to my own post above about the same topic. The FAI rules allow for a flight to be down to 2/3s of the great circle route distance.
So blame the FAI if you aren't happy with the record.
Yeah I just dug into it and discovered that the FAI rules will award a circumnavigation if it is down to 2/3s of the great circle route distance.
Still, in this day and age of technology I would think that you could toughen up the rules, so you have to exceed the minimum circumference of the planet.
Yeah .. especially as the Space Shuttle goes around the world on one tank of gas .. just happens to be a bloody big tank.
I'd be one of the first to congratulate him for his flight, but how do you define "Around the earth"?? Especially when:
a) He was 3000 km shy of the circumference at the equator.
b) I don't belive he made it into the southern hemisphere.
And there is a reason for the current lifestyles not being sustainable .. it's statistics like the US having 5% of the worlds population, but consuming 20% of the energy.
I agree that it would take a drastic change in lifestyle to change theses statistics, but surely a change in lifestyle is the cheapeast and simplest approach to a solution.
You can take finances as an analogy. If your finances are in trouble, getting a better paid job will help you out in the short term, but learning to spend less will help you out in the long term.
As a foreigner living in the US, I have always been amazed at the lack of repsect paid to speed limits on freeways. Here in Virginia, the cops won't touch you for 20 mile an hour over the limit, while back home the cops will ding you for 1 mph over the limit. I have always wondered what would happen to the US dependency on foreign oil if people obeyed the speed limits on freeways. Even a small change in fuel consumption would drastically affect oil usage.
As a foreigner living here, I am continually amazed at the persecution of the fruit cake by North Americans. What is the deal here? Were you all traumatised by a fruit cake when you were children? (And no, I don't mean parents).
Good fruit cake is delicious (and I would say that the best I have had, was one I bought in Heathrow airport - chock full of nice moist fruit, and about 1/2 litre of scotch). I can only presume that nobody around here actually knows how to make a good one.
So enlighten me - what is so bad about fruit cake?
I would argue that your answer does not exonerate the failure of the link, as you imply the only way that I should know about it is to have read specific comments on sprecific slashdot threads at arbitrary points in the past.
There is still nothing inherent in the link that points to CoralCache, or any caching strategy what so ever.
Given this lack of knowledge, how am I supposed to parse the link to actually get to the story without asking someone else? I could google myself, but on what term? The only possible search term is 8090, which I just tried for the hell of it, and it turned up all sorts of irrelevant pages.
Thus I still contend that the link itself has failed a usability test.
Thanks for the info, though I did see the direct link from a previous post. But this begs the question:
How does a person wanting to access the supplied link:
a) Know ahead of time that it was a fancy caching scheme?
b) Know that removing the stated parts would give me direct access?
I have never seen this system before, and from a few other posts it seems that I am not the only person in this boat. It is only by happenstance that more knowledgable people in this forum know the methods inolved, and have graciously supplied the answers.
Thus I posit that:
The article link itself has FAILED a usability test
I can't look at the article because:
Access Denied by SmartFilter: Forbidden, this page (http://www.uiweb.com.nyud.net:8090/about.htm) is categorized as: Anonymizer/Translator.
I love my job.
Hmm .. I'd still argue for the benefit to future generations. Some of the most interesting photographers from history were only documenting what was around them. At the time what they were doing was not really that interesting compared to special events etc. Yet now, after they are dead, their works are forming important historical records. How do you do that with instantaneous digital?
And yes, I also shoot digital - why do think I have a D-70???
I think you missed my main point.
Who copies my data when I am dead?
Is my data somehow less worthwhile if I am not around to copy it? Compare this with mediums that do not need to be replicated in order to be accessed (ie books, paintings, negatives).
Look at works that have been overlooked for centuries and then found to be relevant/important. How would they have faired if the climate of the time had been "Well if you think it's important, then *you* copy it".
Building systems that are not inherently stable (in this case requiring active copying in order to be accessible) has a marked cost that I don't belive many people actually consider.
Um .. I hate to burst your bubble, but can I remind you about the dutch group (name escapes me and I can't be bothered to google, and I was sure it was reported here) who stored a variety of CDs away for 2 years and found significant degredation in over half of them? You may argue that CDs are archival under good conditions, but how many of them are actually stored under good conditions.
As for perfect savings of digital data, the data is only as good as long as someone has the desire to copy from an older to newer medium. Once that desire is not there, your data is practically useless after 2 or 3 generations of memory devices have come along. And this hampers future generations from handling data that we archive now. Just look at the number of 8 inch floppy drives around, and think about how hard it is to re-copy the data on them. Now extrapolate that 100 years down the track. Plus once the mechanisms are no longer readily available, the desire to replicate them drops off. How many people think that data on 8 inch floppys is as inmportant as what is on their 200+GB drives now???
One of the reasons I still shoot B&W film (even though I have a D-70) is that I know a negative is more likely to be readable/appreciated by the least technological means well after I am long gone and pushing up the daisies
Hmm .. did you realise that you are dead? and have been since '97 .. and cremated after that??