Relativity generalised Newton's laws making them applicable to a wider domain, that of relativistic speeds and high gravitational fields. Similarly quantum mechanics generalised classical physics to the domain of the very small.
Superstrings (or whatever) are a further generalisation of both relativity and QM into the Planck-scale domain which is both very small and contains strong gravitational effects. Each further "step" in physics is a generalisation to a new domain.
There was a story on kuro5hin about someone who run a website with open file access, and his computers have just been seized by the FBI after some companies complained about illegal stuff that was uploaded. This sounds all too similar.
And the "evidence" of a few pieces of bone consist of the entire basis for the rediculous claims of the evolutionists. Pieces of bone which exist in no order and are often found in places which contradict evolutionary "theory". But thanks to the anti-Christian dogma which the scientists and liberals have spread throughout the Western world these signs are kept quiet and most people never hear about the flaws from which evolution suffer.
As for the Truth of the Bible, something which should be self-evident to anyone that searches for the meaning of creation, you dismiss it out of hand. After all did not Jesus really exist - he is mentioned in the records of Rome in several places. Your prejudices are overcoming your ability to make reasoned arguments on this matter.
And truly, God is the only argument that fits all of the facts. No "blind watchmaker" could have come up with something like the eye or the human soul, and it is foolish to believe otherwise.
Born and raised there, although I'm living in England at the moment due to work. At least there they aren't afraid to face up to the liberal establishment in charge of education and teach that evolution is not a fact, but merely one (and not a good one!) interpretation of shaky evidence.
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children. Whilst there are important moral differences between the two, we live under a code of laws which attempts to follow morality but in order to be effective must sometimes be harder than is perhaps necessary.
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
And you can bet that this episode will be used as the basis for more punitive legislation by a US government already dedicated to eliminating all vestiges of freedom on the net as it is.
Whilst I appreciate the good intention of DeCSS I think the people involved in this case acted foolishly and wrongly, and should face the consequences, no matter how much we might wish things had turned out otherwise.
If you conquer the labs (and Linux is moving pretty fast in this direction), all new features (including new desktop ideas) will be yours eventually.
But given Linux's (and other open source projects) history has borne out the fact that open source imitates rather than innovating, the lag behind development of a concept and its inclusion in open source projects will be unacceptable in the marketplace. Users don't want an open source version five years down the line, they want any version now.
As for Linux users attitude - that's not Linux fault. Choose better friends for yourself:)
I'm not talking about my friends - most of whom aren't involved in the computer industry in any way - I'm talking about the attitudes I see here and on newsgroups and mailing lists. It seems to be the prevalent attitude towards "newbies" (a condescending term at best).
Same goes for your 10-years-old canned Linux myths ("no docs", "hard to install", "too many choices", etc., etc.) Believe me, every word you say here was said and proven false years ago. Please don't start this again.
Yeah, proven true by Linux users for Linux users. I'm talking about the average person who isn't particularly literate. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to have to search through/usr/lib/X11/doc/install or whatever just to find the "Configuring X Windows HOWTO", no matter how easy it is to read - and they might be easy to read for you, but Joe doesn't want to read through some huge, poorly-formatted text file for the information he wants.
Linux has already succeeded, and because of the proliferation of choices, not in spite of it.
Unfortunately, outside of a small group of people who follow RMS's Open Source creed and support free software, the fact is that Linux hasn't truly succeeded anywhere yet. Sure it is becoming the platform of choice for running webservers, but that is mainly because of the proliferation of small- to medium-sized net startups for whom cost is more of a factor than having a tried and tested rock solid enterprise platform such as Solaris. As these companies die out or grow Linux's share of the server market will once again fall.
Anyway, the desktop market, both for home and business use is where true mindshare comes from. And in this arena Linux has made little headway against the Windows or Mac platforms, both of which cater far better for the average home user than the "RTFM" attitude many Linux users display when it comes to offering advice. And when the only documentation is a couple of man pages (since documentation doesn't get you any "kudos") that is of no use whatsoever.
When the average user comes to set up their Linux box for doing all the stuff they do using Windows they are faced with a bewildering array of choices - which distribution, which window manager, which desktop, which web browser etc etc. How are they supposed to decide on which is best for them, let alone set up and configure these applications?
The only Linux project which has even attempted to make Linux accessible to the average person is Corel Linux, and what did they get for their trouble? Irate Linux gods flaming them for "dumbing down" their operating system and making it more accessible to all.
Well finally people in the Linux world seem to be paying attention to what the "real world" wants from a computer rather than what the open source community does, and this can only be a good thing for everyone involved in Linux. By creating a UI that looks almost as slick as Windows 2000, and without the $$$ spent on UI R&D, the KDE team are making a step foward for Linux's penetration into the non-tech-savvy market.
Whilst I appreciate that the GNOME team are also doing a good job of copying the whole Windows "look and feel", I have to say that what Linux needs is more distinction between its GUI and the Windows GUI, not less. Sure, it should be roughly equivalent to aid in user migration from MS to Linux, but it also needs to be distinctive to aid in brand recognition, and KDE has acheived this.
As a top professional consultant I've worked with a lot of startups in the last few years, and the one thing that is of crucial importance in a market dominated by existing players is a distinctive brand that clearly differentiates the product in the eyes of its customers, whether or not the product is any different! Linux has been moving in this direction with its whole penguin theme, and I think that KDE should become the standard desktop in order to facilitate a distinctive brand and consumer recognition.
As long as there is more than one desktop available a lot of the less tech-savvy out there are going to be confused about what exactly Linux is - I've had people ask whether Red Hat or Mandrake was the better operating system - which means they'll be more likely to stick with Windows, which has a very well realised brand. In order for Linux to succeed, it needs to drop all of the proliferation of choices and focus on a single, distinctive brand image.
Don't forget a lot of the technology behind E-commerce started from pay-to-view porn sites on the net, along with streaming audio/video for viewing the stuff. It wouldn't suprise me if the real intention of the WWW was to exchange porn either:)
I have to disagree that the increasing intrusion of the media into the lives of politicians and public figures is a bad thing, at least for the rest of us. These people accept that they are to have their lives scrutinised to a far greater extent than normal people - it's part and parcel of being in the public eye.
Having journalists who are unafraid to dig into the private lives of politicians means that there is a far greater chance of scandal and corruption being uncovered and exposed, something which can only benefit society in the long run - who wants corrupt leaders?
There was a case in Belgium IIRC where a paedophile ring had been running for years thanks to press cover-ups from people in power. This sort of thing is a direct consequence of having a press whose ability to speak is curtailed, and is not something that any freedom-loving person would want.
I've lived both here and in the US and both countries have a vocal press who aren't afraid to dig out and publicize political scandal and corruption. Sure it may look bad at the time, but who knows what goes on in countries where the press can't or won't let people know what's going on?
What can I say? I think you're wrong in assuming that small B2C sites are viable in the long term, and you're going to be wasting your time unless you're offering something that cannot be found elsewhere. And let's face it, this isn't likely. Most specialised market sectors already have thriving international mail order areas, and you'd be competing with those.
Only a few of the major players around today will be the ones to survive the B2C backlash which has begun. Amazon probably will since it has a decent customer base and a good brand name, but smaller sites, such as yours I assume, will find it hard to compete against larger and/or more established competitors that can make savings you cannot.
On top of that the security issue is a major one. As a consultant I've often seen companies involved in managing online financial transactions that could be hacked into by my little sister, let alone someone who knows what they're doing. To be truly secure you either need to go with a large, established player who has a decent reputation or, even better, develop your own. Not easy, but secure and you know nobody's going to be selling your customer's information but you.
It's from Rob saying he'd delay releasing the Slash code by 24 hours every time someone asked him for it. See, showing how 31337 I am because I know that...:)
(1) Information is power. If I know a lot about you, I can forecast what you will do in a given situation. I will know how to manipulate you and what buttons to push to get the response I need. Surrendering privacy means becoming powerless.
Nonsense. No set of statistics and information can encompass all the data required to predict what somone is going to do in any given situation. At best it'll allow you to predict broad trends with a little better precision than today's marketeers acheive already. Unless of course you're a hardcore sociobiologist and believe that your genetic makeup determines all of your actions...
(2) I would link privacy to territoriality: both have the idea "this is mine and you can't have it". And territoriality is biologically determined in humans -- you cannot say that this is a product of some specific society.
And we should let our biological urges rule us then? So no condoms or birth control for you then. Making biological arguments is rediculous, technology has allowed us to go beyond what our genes would have us do.
And privacy is a cultural thing - the Japanese place far less emphasis on privacy due to the differences in the way they live.
A lot of security == police state. Security is intrinsically opposed to freedom because security is about setting limits and predictability -- both necessary is certain amounts, but both limiting freedom.
But without security anyone can choose to do whatever they like to you and get away with it. What kind of freedom is that?
In the example above, a drug company is requesting that you reveal your DNA profile so that they can offer a targeted medical treatment. This is perfectly ok. However, if my DNA profile was available to any drug company that wanted it - without my permission - it would be an invasion of privacy.
Yes, but what if they need your information to develop said treatments in the first place? The process is likely to take a long time to calculate the correct compunds/amounts so they'd need your information in advance to make this work. What then?
You don't understand what privacy is. It is not hiding any and all information about yourself. Privacy is control over personal information. It means *I* get to choose who knows what about me.
You know full well what I meant, you're just being anal about terminology. I was talking about how the concept of choosing to keep your personal data private is becoming outdated. Better?
If I get to choose whether to submit my DNA profile (understanding I'll get a worse/none medicine if I don't), then I have no objection. If everybody is required to submit their DNA "for the public good" whether they want it or not, privacy has been violated.
Sure, I'm advocating a choice here, otherwise that'd be rather totalitarian wouldn't it? But give it a generation or two and your concerns won't be something people care about - they'll be used to having their information open to all.
Privacy is a product of today's society rather than being an inherent right. It's got a lot to do with the hang-ups that people have when it comes to their personal life. The Puritans have a lot to answer for IMHO.
Threats to my personal safety are moving to the internet? Huh? Let's say my machine gets owned and my hard drive published for all and sundry to see. What does it have to do with personal safety?
Wait till direct neural interfaces become available and see what threats to personal safety can be acheived through the net.
You are arguing for a police state. You seem to like the idea of living in a police state. That's a value choice and cannot really be argued.
Security != police state. I'm not in favour of totalitarian police powers, just giving law enforcement agencies an advantage over criminals. That's hardly objectionable is it?
Here we see yet another Katz rant about privacy and how we should all be alarmed about the rate at which we are throwing it away due to ignorance and apathy. It's good to know that Katz is at least consisten, if not original:)
But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is somewhat outdated and needs to be reevaluated in light of social and technological changes. Our society is increasingly reliant upon the fruits of technology, and despite what people think, this change is inherently at odds with the notion of personal privacy.
Why? Because to provide the services which people desire, providers are going to need more information. For instance consider the possibility for gentically tailored medicines, something that isn't too far ahead in the future. In order to personalise such medicines drug companies are going to require your DNA profile. Are you willing to give up on advances like this for the sake of some nebulous concept like privacy?
More personal information is the key to any number of services and advances that will benefit you as an individual rather than being for the use of a generic person made up of statistically generated market profiles. You may not like it, but the likes and dislikes of the average/.er are not those of the man on the street.
And the increased opportunities of all of this technology mean that threats to your personal safety and freedom are moving from the physical world to the internet. Whilst at the moment you're more likely to be shot by some nut with a gun than have your online details hacked, this will change as more and more of your personal information will be stored online.
When it gets to the stage that all of your most important business is stored and done online, privacy is something that favours the criminal rather than the innocent user. Thanks to the banner of privacy, criminals can hack your details with a much greater chance of getting away with it than if the internet is logged, verified and secured. Hopefully something like an online version of identity cards, already in use in some countries, will become the norm.
Anyway, privacy is something that will become increasingly irrelevent in the face of technological advances. The benefits of abandoning it are just too clear.
After all this case has been destined to fail from the very beginning thanks to the vast and unfied forces lined up against it. Whilst we all know that DeCSS is a perfectly legal piece of software designed to facilitate playback under Linux, I think that very few people outside of/. and similar sites has any clue that this is anything other than a tool for the rampant piracy of DVDs.
Unfortunately since this case involves media corporations which are notorious for having their fingers in as many different pies as possible the coverage of this has been extremely biased in many places. And now we hear that the judge has helped the MPAA on DVD issues before? I suppose I should be suprised, but considering how the MPAA has twisted things so far I can't really say that I am.
Until America puts some kind of control on its corporate sector this kind of flagrant abuse of wealth and power seems likely to continue, at the expense of the little guy. Unfortunately since these corporations make so much money for the US government thanks to their freedom to gouge consumers and engage in dodgy business practices, it seems like the government has little inclination to change things.
Sure MS have been taken to court, but they were an extreme example of abuse of power and position. If they weren't so public they probably would have gotten away with it - hundreds of other companies do.
Unfortunately whilst it's still profitable for the government to allow it, you're going to keep getting situations like this where it is the commercial sector that gets the deck stacked in its favour.
Is the Age of Apocolypse series, which IMHO is the best story ever run in the history of the X-Men. Since it's a (relatively) short story which by X-Men standards is fairly disconnected with what preceeds it, the jump from comic to film could be made a lot easier. And the very dark setting would make for a great film.
Of course, it'll never happen:(
Still, I've pretty much given up on ever seeing a film based on a book/comic/graphic novel that isn't at best a poor approximation of the original. The things that are the most deserving of moving to film are those which will make the transition the worst - they're too long, too detailed, too intelligent or just too bizarre for Hollywood to either accept or do well.
No, the book to film genre will remain at best a poor copy of the original for a long time to come. Maybe when we can create fully realistic, 100-hour CGI epics we'll get faithful versions of classic books and comic stories, but until then it'll be much like this film sounds.
No, it wasn't the result of moderation, it was the result of Rob's "bitchslap" script. At one point both "DumbMarketingGuy" and "The Glorious Meept!!" posted with a -2 default on all of their posts, thus eliminating them from general visibility. And occasionally I saw odd posts at -2 as well. IIRC there was one at -5 linked to on sid=moderation.
However since the MS Kerboros story where Rob and co. were going on about how they never censored posts all of these -2 defaulters now default at -1 instead. It could be coincidence, but I doubt it.
You can set your threshold to whatever you want by hacking the users.pl page and changing the values in the drop-down threshold list. I've got mine set to -5... But no, you can't get there without that hack, so it is effectively deleting them.
I've already read comments about how this is premature, downloads are still too slow etc. etc. but I don' think that's the point of this at all. My thought is that rather than attempting to be a "finished" product this is more an attempt at a proof of concept - that the Napster model can be used in a way that the industry (movies in this case) can accept.
Using this they can test out different approaches to things like security, validation, pricing and so on without the dangers of designing a system from scratch to be their Big Thing. The things they learn from this will be used to then develop future systems when using the Internet to stream TV-on-demand and feature-length films is viable.
Slashdot Mirror
Relativity generalised Newton's laws making them applicable to a wider domain, that of relativistic speeds and high gravitational fields. Similarly quantum mechanics generalised classical physics to the domain of the very small.
Superstrings (or whatever) are a further generalisation of both relativity and QM into the Planck-scale domain which is both very small and contains strong gravitational effects. Each further "step" in physics is a generalisation to a new domain.
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Jon E. Erikson
There was a story on kuro5hin about someone who run a website with open file access, and his computers have just been seized by the FBI after some companies complained about illegal stuff that was uploaded. This sounds all too similar.
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Jon E. Erikson
Damn right :) Bug fixing sucks in a major way.
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Jon E. Erikson
And the "evidence" of a few pieces of bone consist of the entire basis for the rediculous claims of the evolutionists. Pieces of bone which exist in no order and are often found in places which contradict evolutionary "theory". But thanks to the anti-Christian dogma which the scientists and liberals have spread throughout the Western world these signs are kept quiet and most people never hear about the flaws from which evolution suffer.
As for the Truth of the Bible, something which should be self-evident to anyone that searches for the meaning of creation, you dismiss it out of hand. After all did not Jesus really exist - he is mentioned in the records of Rome in several places. Your prejudices are overcoming your ability to make reasoned arguments on this matter.
And truly, God is the only argument that fits all of the facts. No "blind watchmaker" could have come up with something like the eye or the human soul, and it is foolish to believe otherwise.
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Jon E. Erikson
Born and raised there, although I'm living in England at the moment due to work. At least there they aren't afraid to face up to the liberal establishment in charge of education and teach that evolution is not a fact, but merely one (and not a good one!) interpretation of shaky evidence.
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Jon E. Erikson
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children. Whilst there are important moral differences between the two, we live under a code of laws which attempts to follow morality but in order to be effective must sometimes be harder than is perhaps necessary.
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
And you can bet that this episode will be used as the basis for more punitive legislation by a US government already dedicated to eliminating all vestiges of freedom on the net as it is.
Whilst I appreciate the good intention of DeCSS I think the people involved in this case acted foolishly and wrongly, and should face the consequences, no matter how much we might wish things had turned out otherwise.
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Jon E. Erikson
If you conquer the labs (and Linux is moving pretty fast in this direction), all new features (including new desktop ideas) will be yours eventually.
But given Linux's (and other open source projects) history has borne out the fact that open source imitates rather than innovating, the lag behind development of a concept and its inclusion in open source projects will be unacceptable in the marketplace. Users don't want an open source version five years down the line, they want any version now.
As for Linux users attitude - that's not Linux fault. Choose better friends for yourself :)
I'm not talking about my friends - most of whom aren't involved in the computer industry in any way - I'm talking about the attitudes I see here and on newsgroups and mailing lists. It seems to be the prevalent attitude towards "newbies" (a condescending term at best).
Same goes for your 10-years-old canned Linux myths ("no docs", "hard to install", "too many choices", etc., etc.) Believe me, every word you say here was said and proven false years ago. Please don't start this again.
Yeah, proven true by Linux users for Linux users. I'm talking about the average person who isn't particularly literate. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to have to search through /usr/lib/X11/doc/install or whatever just to find the "Configuring X Windows HOWTO", no matter how easy it is to read - and they might be easy to read for you, but Joe doesn't want to read through some huge, poorly-formatted text file for the information he wants.
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Jon E. Erikson
Linux has already succeeded, and because of the proliferation of choices, not in spite of it.
Unfortunately, outside of a small group of people who follow RMS's Open Source creed and support free software, the fact is that Linux hasn't truly succeeded anywhere yet. Sure it is becoming the platform of choice for running webservers, but that is mainly because of the proliferation of small- to medium-sized net startups for whom cost is more of a factor than having a tried and tested rock solid enterprise platform such as Solaris. As these companies die out or grow Linux's share of the server market will once again fall.
Anyway, the desktop market, both for home and business use is where true mindshare comes from. And in this arena Linux has made little headway against the Windows or Mac platforms, both of which cater far better for the average home user than the "RTFM" attitude many Linux users display when it comes to offering advice. And when the only documentation is a couple of man pages (since documentation doesn't get you any "kudos") that is of no use whatsoever.
When the average user comes to set up their Linux box for doing all the stuff they do using Windows they are faced with a bewildering array of choices - which distribution, which window manager, which desktop, which web browser etc etc. How are they supposed to decide on which is best for them, let alone set up and configure these applications?
The only Linux project which has even attempted to make Linux accessible to the average person is Corel Linux, and what did they get for their trouble? Irate Linux gods flaming them for "dumbing down" their operating system and making it more accessible to all.
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Jon E. Erikson
Well finally people in the Linux world seem to be paying attention to what the "real world" wants from a computer rather than what the open source community does, and this can only be a good thing for everyone involved in Linux. By creating a UI that looks almost as slick as Windows 2000, and without the $$$ spent on UI R&D, the KDE team are making a step foward for Linux's penetration into the non-tech-savvy market.
Whilst I appreciate that the GNOME team are also doing a good job of copying the whole Windows "look and feel", I have to say that what Linux needs is more distinction between its GUI and the Windows GUI, not less. Sure, it should be roughly equivalent to aid in user migration from MS to Linux, but it also needs to be distinctive to aid in brand recognition, and KDE has acheived this.
As a top professional consultant I've worked with a lot of startups in the last few years, and the one thing that is of crucial importance in a market dominated by existing players is a distinctive brand that clearly differentiates the product in the eyes of its customers, whether or not the product is any different! Linux has been moving in this direction with its whole penguin theme, and I think that KDE should become the standard desktop in order to facilitate a distinctive brand and consumer recognition.
As long as there is more than one desktop available a lot of the less tech-savvy out there are going to be confused about what exactly Linux is - I've had people ask whether Red Hat or Mandrake was the better operating system - which means they'll be more likely to stick with Windows, which has a very well realised brand. In order for Linux to succeed, it needs to drop all of the proliferation of choices and focus on a single, distinctive brand image.
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Jon E. Erikson
Don't forget a lot of the technology behind E-commerce started from pay-to-view porn sites on the net, along with streaming audio/video for viewing the stuff. It wouldn't suprise me if the real intention of the WWW was to exchange porn either :)
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Jon E. Erikson
The porn industry in the US makes twice as much as all of Hollywood does each year. Says something about the American psyche huh? :)
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Jon E. Erikson
Informative! Informative! More, more! I can't believe I ever thought he was serious. Thank you, mister AC, for enlighening us all.
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Jon E. Erikson
I have to disagree that the increasing intrusion of the media into the lives of politicians and public figures is a bad thing, at least for the rest of us. These people accept that they are to have their lives scrutinised to a far greater extent than normal people - it's part and parcel of being in the public eye.
Having journalists who are unafraid to dig into the private lives of politicians means that there is a far greater chance of scandal and corruption being uncovered and exposed, something which can only benefit society in the long run - who wants corrupt leaders?
There was a case in Belgium IIRC where a paedophile ring had been running for years thanks to press cover-ups from people in power. This sort of thing is a direct consequence of having a press whose ability to speak is curtailed, and is not something that any freedom-loving person would want.
I've lived both here and in the US and both countries have a vocal press who aren't afraid to dig out and publicize political scandal and corruption. Sure it may look bad at the time, but who knows what goes on in countries where the press can't or won't let people know what's going on?
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Jon E. Erikson
What can I say? I think you're wrong in assuming that small B2C sites are viable in the long term, and you're going to be wasting your time unless you're offering something that cannot be found elsewhere. And let's face it, this isn't likely. Most specialised market sectors already have thriving international mail order areas, and you'd be competing with those.
Only a few of the major players around today will be the ones to survive the B2C backlash which has begun. Amazon probably will since it has a decent customer base and a good brand name, but smaller sites, such as yours I assume, will find it hard to compete against larger and/or more established competitors that can make savings you cannot.
On top of that the security issue is a major one. As a consultant I've often seen companies involved in managing online financial transactions that could be hacked into by my little sister, let alone someone who knows what they're doing. To be truly secure you either need to go with a large, established player who has a decent reputation or, even better, develop your own. Not easy, but secure and you know nobody's going to be selling your customer's information but you.
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Jon E. Erikson
It's from Rob saying he'd delay releasing the Slash code by 24 hours every time someone asked him for it. See, showing how 31337 I am because I know that... :)
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Jon E. Erikson
(1) Information is power. If I know a lot about you, I can forecast what you will do in a given situation. I will know how to manipulate you and what buttons to push to get the response I need. Surrendering privacy means becoming powerless.
Nonsense. No set of statistics and information can encompass all the data required to predict what somone is going to do in any given situation. At best it'll allow you to predict broad trends with a little better precision than today's marketeers acheive already. Unless of course you're a hardcore sociobiologist and believe that your genetic makeup determines all of your actions...
(2) I would link privacy to territoriality: both have the idea "this is mine and you can't have it". And territoriality is biologically determined in humans -- you cannot say that this is a product of some specific society.
And we should let our biological urges rule us then? So no condoms or birth control for you then. Making biological arguments is rediculous, technology has allowed us to go beyond what our genes would have us do.
And privacy is a cultural thing - the Japanese place far less emphasis on privacy due to the differences in the way they live.
A lot of security == police state. Security is intrinsically opposed to freedom because security is about setting limits and predictability -- both necessary is certain amounts, but both limiting freedom.
But without security anyone can choose to do whatever they like to you and get away with it. What kind of freedom is that?
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Jon E. Erikson
In the example above, a drug company is requesting that you reveal your DNA profile so that they can offer a targeted medical treatment. This is perfectly ok. However, if my DNA profile was available to any drug company that wanted it - without my permission - it would be an invasion of privacy.
Yes, but what if they need your information to develop said treatments in the first place? The process is likely to take a long time to calculate the correct compunds/amounts so they'd need your information in advance to make this work. What then?
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Jon E. Erikson
You don't understand what privacy is. It is not hiding any and all information about yourself. Privacy is control over personal information. It means *I* get to choose who knows what about me.
You know full well what I meant, you're just being anal about terminology. I was talking about how the concept of choosing to keep your personal data private is becoming outdated. Better?
If I get to choose whether to submit my DNA profile (understanding I'll get a worse/none medicine if I don't), then I have no objection. If everybody is required to submit their DNA "for the public good" whether they want it or not, privacy has been violated.
Sure, I'm advocating a choice here, otherwise that'd be rather totalitarian wouldn't it? But give it a generation or two and your concerns won't be something people care about - they'll be used to having their information open to all.
Privacy is a product of today's society rather than being an inherent right. It's got a lot to do with the hang-ups that people have when it comes to their personal life. The Puritans have a lot to answer for IMHO.
Threats to my personal safety are moving to the internet? Huh? Let's say my machine gets owned and my hard drive published for all and sundry to see. What does it have to do with personal safety?
Wait till direct neural interfaces become available and see what threats to personal safety can be acheived through the net.
You are arguing for a police state. You seem to like the idea of living in a police state. That's a value choice and cannot really be argued.
Security != police state. I'm not in favour of totalitarian police powers, just giving law enforcement agencies an advantage over criminals. That's hardly objectionable is it?
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Jon E. Erikson
Here we see yet another Katz rant about privacy and how we should all be alarmed about the rate at which we are throwing it away due to ignorance and apathy. It's good to know that Katz is at least consisten, if not original :)
But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is somewhat outdated and needs to be reevaluated in light of social and technological changes. Our society is increasingly reliant upon the fruits of technology, and despite what people think, this change is inherently at odds with the notion of personal privacy.
Why? Because to provide the services which people desire, providers are going to need more information. For instance consider the possibility for gentically tailored medicines, something that isn't too far ahead in the future. In order to personalise such medicines drug companies are going to require your DNA profile. Are you willing to give up on advances like this for the sake of some nebulous concept like privacy?
More personal information is the key to any number of services and advances that will benefit you as an individual rather than being for the use of a generic person made up of statistically generated market profiles. You may not like it, but the likes and dislikes of the average /.er are not those of the man on the street.
And the increased opportunities of all of this technology mean that threats to your personal safety and freedom are moving from the physical world to the internet. Whilst at the moment you're more likely to be shot by some nut with a gun than have your online details hacked, this will change as more and more of your personal information will be stored online.
When it gets to the stage that all of your most important business is stored and done online, privacy is something that favours the criminal rather than the innocent user. Thanks to the banner of privacy, criminals can hack your details with a much greater chance of getting away with it than if the internet is logged, verified and secured. Hopefully something like an online version of identity cards, already in use in some countries, will become the norm.
Anyway, privacy is something that will become increasingly irrelevent in the face of technological advances. The benefits of abandoning it are just too clear.
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Jon E. Erikson
After all this case has been destined to fail from the very beginning thanks to the vast and unfied forces lined up against it. Whilst we all know that DeCSS is a perfectly legal piece of software designed to facilitate playback under Linux, I think that very few people outside of /. and similar sites has any clue that this is anything other than a tool for the rampant piracy of DVDs.
Unfortunately since this case involves media corporations which are notorious for having their fingers in as many different pies as possible the coverage of this has been extremely biased in many places. And now we hear that the judge has helped the MPAA on DVD issues before? I suppose I should be suprised, but considering how the MPAA has twisted things so far I can't really say that I am.
Until America puts some kind of control on its corporate sector this kind of flagrant abuse of wealth and power seems likely to continue, at the expense of the little guy. Unfortunately since these corporations make so much money for the US government thanks to their freedom to gouge consumers and engage in dodgy business practices, it seems like the government has little inclination to change things.
Sure MS have been taken to court, but they were an extreme example of abuse of power and position. If they weren't so public they probably would have gotten away with it - hundreds of other companies do.
Unfortunately whilst it's still profitable for the government to allow it, you're going to keep getting situations like this where it is the commercial sector that gets the deck stacked in its favour.
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Jon E. Erikson
I, for one, would dearly love to see them do God Loves, Man Kills, or the Weapon-X saga that the flick so clearly set up.
Agreed - God Loves, Man Kills was a great story and probably about the right length for a movie adaption too.
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Jon E. Erikson
Is the Age of Apocolypse series, which IMHO is the best story ever run in the history of the X-Men. Since it's a (relatively) short story which by X-Men standards is fairly disconnected with what preceeds it, the jump from comic to film could be made a lot easier. And the very dark setting would make for a great film.
Of course, it'll never happen :(
Still, I've pretty much given up on ever seeing a film based on a book/comic/graphic novel that isn't at best a poor approximation of the original. The things that are the most deserving of moving to film are those which will make the transition the worst - they're too long, too detailed, too intelligent or just too bizarre for Hollywood to either accept or do well.
No, the book to film genre will remain at best a poor copy of the original for a long time to come. Maybe when we can create fully realistic, 100-hour CGI epics we'll get faithful versions of classic books and comic stories, but until then it'll be much like this film sounds.
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Jon E. Erikson
No, it wasn't the result of moderation, it was the result of Rob's "bitchslap" script. At one point both "DumbMarketingGuy" and "The Glorious Meept!!" posted with a -2 default on all of their posts, thus eliminating them from general visibility. And occasionally I saw odd posts at -2 as well. IIRC there was one at -5 linked to on sid=moderation.
However since the MS Kerboros story where Rob and co. were going on about how they never censored posts all of these -2 defaulters now default at -1 instead. It could be coincidence, but I doubt it.
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Jon E. Erikson
You can set your threshold to whatever you want by hacking the users.pl page and changing the values in the drop-down threshold list. I've got mine set to -5... But no, you can't get there without that hack, so it is effectively deleting them.
-- spiralx
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Jon E. Erikson
I've already read comments about how this is premature, downloads are still too slow etc. etc. but I don' think that's the point of this at all. My thought is that rather than attempting to be a "finished" product this is more an attempt at a proof of concept - that the Napster model can be used in a way that the industry (movies in this case) can accept.
Using this they can test out different approaches to things like security, validation, pricing and so on without the dangers of designing a system from scratch to be their Big Thing. The things they learn from this will be used to then develop future systems when using the Internet to stream TV-on-demand and feature-length films is viable.
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Jon E. Erikson