MS owns non-voting stock equal to roughly 10% of the company; they bought the stock as part of a patent licensing deal.
Since it is non-voting stock, and because MS and Inprise/Borland have traditionally been competitors, their influence isn't as large as it might seem it should be from the numbers alone.
It's already too late: privacy is a lost cause; we can't roll back what's happened, and technology is moving too quickly.
Besides, most people don't _want_ privacy. Or, rather, they'd kinda sorta like privacy for themselves, but they don't want their neighbor to have any privacy (because if their neighbor has privacy, then he could be doing something scary), and the instinct to prevent other people from having privacy will win out, every time.
*shrug*
It's hard to get too worked up over it. The world will continue, privacy will be forgotten, and most of the things that people do now will continue to happen, in public view. The range of what is considered 'normal', at least in democratic societies, will broaden --- yeah, my neighbor might be having sex with his pet monkey every night, and I know that (because he has no privacy), but what does it matter?
Both of these ar emore or less tolerated crimes, tho, unless the neighbors complain. For the most part, it isn't worth the effort for the authorities to lock up pot smokers or prostitutes; the prison costs outweigh whatever gain there is in enforcing the law.
The problem with this technology isn't it's potential for misuse, per se. It's that, once misused, it would be pretty much impossible to undo the misuse. It's the public safety equivalent of nuclear tehcnology: great public benefits, normal potential for misuse, but terrifying consequences if it is misused.
Once you end up with a control society in which the controls are enforced via this technology, how do you get back out of it?
I'm _not_ worried about it here. But there will be countries that go down that road. Singapore, anyone?
In a previous job, I was responsible for the smooth, efficient operations of newsgroups run off of a server owned by the company I worked for, devoted to discussion of its products. Most of us involved in the setup of those newsgroups (which replaced forums on CompuServe) were strident free-speech people; we established rules that for all intents and purposes allowed message cancellation _only_ in the cases of spam or obscenity.
For the most part, we haven't had problems. We've had to extend the cancellation rules to include binary attachments, and we tend to snarl at people for posting in HTML. Spam continues to come in, we continue to kill it off, and it's become sort of a subconscious process that isn't even really noticeable any more (although the people responsible for killing the spam might disagree).
This has occasionally caused some uncomfortable moments; it can be hard to justify to management the usefulness of maintaining a server which allows people to bash your products in public. Yet... if the purpose of the server and newsgroups is to provide a venue through which we as a company talk to our customers, censoring their remarks seems to defeat the point.
Still, Yahoo's position is a bit different: they're more like CIS or Prodigy in a way.
is legitimacy. Technical problems can be overcome; that's their nature. But an election system will only work if average, everyday people believe it is legitimate; if everyone expects a particular method of voting to encourage corruption, it won't be adopted, and won't be popular if it is.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with internet voting (which would be easier, and cheaper, than the current systems) is that there is a major legitimacy problem: non-computer people are going to be reluctant to accept that their votes are being counted accurately, and are secure, in an online mechanism.
That's not to say it can't be done: nobody likes the voting mechanism in use in Los Angeles County, and they've had machine-read ballots for decades. But someone's going to have to do a hell of a PR campaign.
I've worked as a polling place official in every election since i was old enough to vote, save one where I was out of the country, and including one where I was drugged up on morphine for a broken arm (it's _not_ just granny mae).
That said, I was... disturbed... when I learned that it was illegal in California for an election official to ask a prospective voter for ID.
Actually.... the treaty still applies. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, it was agreed that the Russian Federation and other successor states to the USSR inherited its treaty obligations; which is why Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up nuclear weapons (non-proliferation treaty) and Russia got the USSR's UN seat.
The ABM treaty actually allows the deployment of two small ABM systems in each country (ostensibly for testing purposes --- the treaty doesn't actually prohibit _development_ of such systems, just the deployment, on a nationwide scale, thereof).
As others have pointed out, the US is trying to renegotiate the treaty. There's been a shift in the geopolitical perception in this country. It used to be that people thought the ABM treaty made us more secure because, if the Russians knew we had no defenses, it would make them less likely to be worried that we would attack, and therefore reduce the likelihood of a first strike. Now, we aren't worried so much about interstate warfare, where that argument worked; we're worried about terrorists or random accidents. In short, we've gone from assuming that the people firing weapons at us are rational (in which case mutual assured destruction is an effective deterrent) to assuming that they're irrational.
Russia has been resisting the treaty change for several reasons --- the largest being that, for all that they aren't explicitly hostile to us at the moment, they don't actually trust us; and, as they are to some extent a functioning democracy, the leadership would have to explain to the voters why they'd sold out Russian security. This is made worse by the fact that they couldn't afford to develop or build an ABM system; in their eyes, it looks like we're trying to pull a fast one and change the rules so that we can build an ABM system when nobody else can --- which, if you believe in the logic under which the treaty was negotiated originally, is a terrifying concept; once the US has a missile defense, what is to keep it from attacking?
Of course, it's not like Russia can _do_ anything to prevent deployment if we decide to deploy. Our international reputation would be hurt --- but then it's been hurt anyway by other recent actions, so maybe the effect wouldn't be that bad.
Hopefully this will get talked about in the campaign next year, as it's probably one of the more important foreign policy decisions the next president will have to make.
[At last! a chance to talk on slashdot about the stuff I got my degree in!:)]
This might come out slightly more alarmist than I really intend it, but slower population growth carries with it the danger of economic disaster.
Consider: pension schemes in most countries are really elaborately financed pyramid schemes which, in practice if not in theory, depend on younger workers to pay for the retirement of older people; if the rate at which younger workers are born and enter the workforce decrease, the pension programs become increasingly unstable.
Or consider that 'economic growth', as known in modern times, depends on increased demand for produced goods. If population falls, demand for many items that nobody really needs more than one of (sofas, for example) will fall; this could easily lead to a deflationary depression. (Especially if you consider the likely effect of reduced demand on land values; people who owe $200,000 in mortgage on a house now worth less than that will be reluctant to spend. Demand falls.)
Of course, there may be ways out of this. Rapid technological growth creating new products; goverment-sponsored space exploration creating a boom in certain industries; leaps in medical technology allowing people to work, and spend, longer than they do now.
But i'd still expect the time around the peak of the population curve to be a very... unsettling and unstable... time.
My concern here has less to do with the validity of the test than the intelligence of the people using the test. The test, as used by the FBI, is used by highly trained investigators who should have a reasonably good clue what the test is and what its limitations are.
I'm not sure that giving a similar test to high school principals will replicate the same system: it seems like it's putting an assault rifle in the hands of a three-year old.
> cDc doesn't want to play the Mainstream Game.. so in an ironic twist - my parting words are: fuck 'em. Come back when you're willing to walk the walk and talk the talk.
> I don't think they're script kiddies - they have a solid understanding of how things work
so which talk, and which walk, are you talking about? They understand the tech side of things, so that's clearly not it...
I have a great deal of respect for anyone who can enjoy life, do what they want, and get by without playing the mainstream game. And I see very little reason why tech people, in particular, should give in to the mainstream game if they don't want to.
I'm not into the things CDC is into; i'm one of those evil developers for whom security is a buzzword for nap time. But I think it's incredibly cool that they can stay who they want to be, do stuff that they love, and not be forced into a grey suit and a tie.
OK, granted, i'm not a sysadmin, and I don't usually work on multi-user systems. But I really like the idea of turning the system into an ecosystem. Sure, it would make work more difficult; but as long as all of my processes implemented data persistence, I wouldn't care _that_ much.
Sure, you set things like your compiler and core OS services to be really powerful monsters that it's next to impossible for anyone to take down. But I think i'd get a kick out of working on a system where all the telnet sessions were in a room and, when the room got overpopulated, they started killing each other off. Slightly more randomness, and more playfullness, from the machines I work with every day would brighten my life, not darken it.:)
"COM is really whatever the spec says that it is."
OK, I suppose that's true. And i'd actually prefer that people accept IDispatch as part of the definition --- I think that IDispatch, for all that it is slow, is where the true beauty and magic of COM lies: dynamic determination of an object's capabilities is really cool.
Granted: in order to get a COM object to work correctly you either need to implement a framework that allows your object to interact with the rest of the subsystem, or you need to do this work by hand. That's what I do professionally; I'm often more familiar with the internals of this stuff than I want to be.
But IMarshal isn't needed for COM... hell, the majority of commercially available COM servers use type library marshalling. But type library marshalling implies automation, in which case you're using an extension...
What i've found by having discussions with people over the years is that COM/OLE/Automation/ActiveX tend to be used interchangeably, even by people who work with the technology every day. I tend to draw a distinction that 'Automation' means IDispatch, and 'ActiveX' means 'control' --- IOleInPlaceActivate, etc. But I wouldn't expect random people off the street to have that precision.
Why does this site exist in the first place? Officially it's "to improve the quality of republican websites", but in political speak "improve the quality of" almost always means "make more to my liking."
My bet is this is a result of some sort of power struggle within the republican party. I'm sure that the house republican caucus would love to get a jump on the national committee: it would give them much more control over the agenda.
[Of course, there's a certain amount of unfairness here: I'm sure that if Bernie Sanders, the one Congressman outside the two party system, tried to create www.socialists.gov, he wouldn't be allowed to.]
ObSideNote: www.gop.com exists. It's been poached by www.politics.com.
That largely depends on mood, and what type of programming i'm doing.
When i literally don't understand a thing that's going on, I can't handle music at all.
When i'm debugging, I like techno/trance/rave: steady beat that I can leech energy off of without it distracting me too much.
When things are going really well, and i'm adding code that i don't have to think about too much (tedious busywork type of stuff), early 90s grunge rock.
It also goes in seasons: celtic music in winter, more techno in spring. *Shrug*
I don't think that follows. I'm a professional programmer at a well-respected company, and if (a) I didn't have a deadline of yesterday (b) it were reasonably inexpensive to fly to Atlanta
I would have done this.
The goal, for me, isn't money. It's about the joy of interacting with a large system, and coming to understand it, and seeing how to improve it; it's about encountering something bigger than I am, and merging with it in such a way that it and I both come out better for it.
There is nothing in the computer industry that I find more sad than people doing it for money and hating it; selling your soul for money is something I had hoped went out with the dark ages.
COM = IUnknown. _Everything_ else is an extension.
And what does IUnknown get you? AddRef(), Release(), and QueryInterface().
Now, granted, as commonly used 'COM' means 'those set of interfaces derived from IUnknown which are commonly used'. But, as commonly used, the terms COM, OLE, and ActiveX are indistinguishable from one another. (I know: I just interviewed recently a guy who 'knew ActiveX' but couldn't explain what IDispatch was!) So, I guess what i'm saying is:
definition flames, when applied to COM, are sillier than definition flames usually are; please don't engage in them.:)
Re:But not necessarily a physicist...
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
I think the problem with science editing for news media is that there are actually two issues that need to be considered, and there are very few people who are competent at considering both of them.
(1) is the 'science' actually scientific? (this is not the same as 'is it valid', but rather, was it developed using scientific research principles, etc)
(2) is it 'newsworthy'. (would people care if this were on the front page of our newspaper?)
The problem, of course, is that scientists, while theoretically good at answering #1 (although not always, as personal ideology can get involved), are usually going to be pretty bad at answering #2; and most people trained to answer #2 are totally incapable of answering #1.
This suggests that the ideal process would be two-step: someone who answers #1 passes those press releases which embody real science over to #2, who decides if they are newsworthy. But that's expensive, so doesn't happen often.
I think that's the first thing i've _ever_ seen on slashdot that made me cry.
I took two classes from him. Barely passed one, failed the other --- his classes were incredibly difficult, but I learned more from them than from just about any other computer-related classes I took in school. For all that his classes were hard, he was a great guy, too: i remember getting a ride to class from him (until he had a flat), and the class buying pizza and delivering it to a study session, to his surprise, the night before the final.
While I guess it's cool that post offices are starting to wake up to the competition posed by the internet, I haven't quite figured out what I'd want to use a post office's internet services for... My bills are automagically paid by the bank. E-mail is free. Certificate verification is handled reasonably well by private companies, and if I'm going to be really concerned about security, the answer is something along the lines of PGP... What does an online post office have to offer that isn't already offered better somewhere else? This may be a case of an ancient dinosaur responding just a little bit too late.
Aside from the censorship issue itself, there are a number of... silly... concepts in the draft legislation. My favorite is the idea that a web page is consider to be analagous to showing a movie.
Huh? I've always thought of a "web page" as being analagous to print publication --- a newspaper, or a flyer tacked on a light pole, or a magazine (depending on the content). Or, for something like/., the correct analogy seems more to be a cafe where you go and sip coffee and talk about the issues of the day. But a movie? What web sites are the australian politicians looking at that this analogy makes sense to them?
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually often incredibly difficult to do anything important under win9x, unfortunately.
MS owns non-voting stock equal to roughly 10% of the company; they bought the stock as part of a patent licensing deal.
Since it is non-voting stock, and because MS and Inprise/Borland have traditionally been competitors, their influence isn't as large as it might seem it should be from the numbers alone.
--Robert West
Delphi R&D
It's already too late: privacy is a lost cause; we can't roll back what's happened, and technology is moving too quickly.
Besides, most people don't _want_ privacy. Or, rather, they'd kinda sorta like privacy for themselves, but they don't want their neighbor to have any privacy (because if their neighbor has privacy, then he could be doing something scary), and the instinct to prevent other people from having privacy will win out, every time.
*shrug*
It's hard to get too worked up over it. The world will continue, privacy will be forgotten, and most of the things that people do now will continue to happen, in public view. The range of what is considered 'normal', at least in democratic societies, will broaden --- yeah, my neighbor might be having sex with his pet monkey every night, and I know that (because he has no privacy), but what does it matter?
Both of these ar emore or less tolerated crimes, tho, unless the neighbors complain. For the most part, it isn't worth the effort for the authorities to lock up pot smokers or prostitutes; the prison costs outweigh whatever gain there is in enforcing the law.
The problem with this technology isn't it's potential for misuse, per se. It's that, once misused, it would be pretty much impossible to undo the misuse. It's the public safety equivalent of nuclear tehcnology: great public benefits, normal potential for misuse, but terrifying consequences if it is misused.
Once you end up with a control society in which the controls are enforced via this technology, how do you get back out of it?
I'm _not_ worried about it here. But there will be countries that go down that road. Singapore, anyone?
In a previous job, I was responsible for the smooth, efficient operations of newsgroups run off of a server owned by the company I worked for, devoted to discussion of its products. Most of us involved in the setup of those newsgroups (which replaced forums on CompuServe) were strident free-speech people; we established rules that for all intents and purposes allowed message cancellation _only_ in the cases of spam or obscenity.
... if the purpose of the server and newsgroups is to provide a venue through which we as a company talk to our customers, censoring their remarks seems to defeat the point.
For the most part, we haven't had problems. We've had to extend the cancellation rules to include binary attachments, and we tend to snarl at people for posting in HTML. Spam continues to come in, we continue to kill it off, and it's become sort of a subconscious process that isn't even really noticeable any more (although the people responsible for killing the spam might disagree).
This has occasionally caused some uncomfortable moments; it can be hard to justify to management the usefulness of maintaining a server which allows people to bash your products in public. Yet
Still, Yahoo's position is a bit different: they're more like CIS or Prodigy in a way.
is legitimacy. Technical problems can be overcome; that's their nature. But an election system will only work if average, everyday people believe it is legitimate; if everyone expects a particular method of voting to encourage corruption, it won't be adopted, and won't be popular if it is.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with internet voting (which would be easier, and cheaper, than the current systems) is that there is a major legitimacy problem: non-computer people are going to be reluctant to accept that their votes are being counted accurately, and are secure, in an online mechanism.
That's not to say it can't be done: nobody likes the voting mechanism in use in Los Angeles County, and they've had machine-read ballots for decades. But someone's going to have to do a hell of a PR campaign.
I've worked as a polling place official in every election since i was old enough to vote, save one where I was out of the country, and including one where I was drugged up on morphine for a broken arm (it's _not_ just granny mae).
... disturbed ... when I learned that it was illegal in California for an election official to ask a prospective voter for ID.
That said, I was
*blink*
Actually .... the treaty still applies. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, it was agreed that the Russian Federation and other successor states to the USSR inherited its treaty obligations; which is why Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up nuclear weapons (non-proliferation treaty) and Russia got the USSR's UN seat.
The ABM treaty actually allows the deployment of two small ABM systems in each country (ostensibly for testing purposes --- the treaty doesn't actually prohibit _development_ of such systems, just the deployment, on a nationwide scale, thereof).
:)]
As others have pointed out, the US is trying to renegotiate the treaty. There's been a shift in the geopolitical perception in this country. It used to be that people thought the ABM treaty made us more secure because, if the Russians knew we had no defenses, it would make them less likely to be worried that we would attack, and therefore reduce the likelihood of a first strike. Now, we aren't worried so much about interstate warfare, where that argument worked; we're worried about terrorists or random accidents. In short, we've gone from assuming that the people firing weapons at us are rational (in which case mutual assured destruction is an effective deterrent) to assuming that they're irrational.
Russia has been resisting the treaty change for several reasons --- the largest being that, for all that they aren't explicitly hostile to us at the moment, they don't actually trust us; and, as they are to some extent a functioning democracy, the leadership would have to explain to the voters why they'd sold out Russian security. This is made worse by the fact that they couldn't afford to develop or build an ABM system; in their eyes, it looks like we're trying to pull a fast one and change the rules so that we can build an ABM system when nobody else can --- which, if you believe in the logic under which the treaty was negotiated originally, is a terrifying concept; once the US has a missile defense, what is to keep it from attacking?
Of course, it's not like Russia can _do_ anything to prevent deployment if we decide to deploy. Our international reputation would be hurt --- but then it's been hurt anyway by other recent actions, so maybe the effect wouldn't be that bad.
Hopefully this will get talked about in the campaign next year, as it's probably one of the more important foreign policy decisions the next president will have to make.
[At last! a chance to talk on slashdot about the stuff I got my degree in!
This might come out slightly more alarmist than I really intend it, but slower population growth carries with it the danger of economic disaster.
... unsettling and unstable ... time.
Consider: pension schemes in most countries are really elaborately financed pyramid schemes which, in practice if not in theory, depend on younger workers to pay for the retirement of older people; if the rate at which younger workers are born and enter the workforce decrease, the pension programs become increasingly unstable.
Or consider that 'economic growth', as known in modern times, depends on increased demand for produced goods. If population falls, demand for many items that nobody really needs more than one of (sofas, for example) will fall; this could easily lead to a deflationary depression. (Especially if you consider the likely effect of reduced demand on land values; people who owe $200,000 in mortgage on a house now worth less than that will be reluctant to spend. Demand falls.)
Of course, there may be ways out of this. Rapid technological growth creating new products; goverment-sponsored space exploration creating a boom in certain industries; leaps in medical technology allowing people to work, and spend, longer than they do now.
But i'd still expect the time around the peak of the population curve to be a very
It is possible to be too alarmist, yes.
My concern here has less to do with the validity of the test than the intelligence of the people using the test. The test, as used by the FBI, is used by highly trained investigators who should have a reasonably good clue what the test is and what its limitations are.
I'm not sure that giving a similar test to high school principals will replicate the same system: it seems like it's putting an assault rifle in the hands of a three-year old.
> cDc doesn't want to play the Mainstream Game.. so in an ironic twist - my parting words are: fuck 'em. Come back when you're willing to walk the walk and talk the talk.
...
> I don't think they're script kiddies - they have a solid understanding of how things work
so which talk, and which walk, are you talking about? They understand the tech side of things, so that's clearly not it
I have a great deal of respect for anyone who can enjoy life, do what they want, and get by without playing the mainstream game. And I see very little reason why tech people, in particular, should give in to the mainstream game if they don't want to.
I'm not into the things CDC is into; i'm one of those evil developers for whom security is a buzzword for nap time. But I think it's incredibly cool that they can stay who they want to be, do stuff that they love, and not be forced into a grey suit and a tie.
OK, granted, i'm not a sysadmin, and I don't usually work on multi-user systems. But I really like the idea of turning the system into an ecosystem. Sure, it would make work more difficult; but as long as all of my processes implemented data persistence, I wouldn't care _that_ much.
:)
Sure, you set things like your compiler and core OS services to be really powerful monsters that it's next to impossible for anyone to take down. But I think i'd get a kick out of working on a system where all the telnet sessions were in a room and, when the room got overpopulated, they started killing each other off. Slightly more randomness, and more playfullness, from the machines I work with every day would brighten my life, not darken it.
"COM is really whatever the spec says that it is."
OK, I suppose that's true. And i'd actually prefer that people accept IDispatch as part of the definition --- I think that IDispatch, for all that it is slow, is where the true beauty and magic of COM lies: dynamic determination of an object's capabilities is really cool.
Granted: in order to get a COM object to work correctly you either need to implement a framework that allows your object to interact with the rest of the subsystem, or you need to do this work by hand. That's what I do professionally; I'm often more familiar with the internals of this stuff than I want to be.
... hell, the majority of commercially available COM servers use type library marshalling. But type library marshalling implies automation, in which case you're using an extension ...
But IMarshal isn't needed for COM
What i've found by having discussions with people over the years is that COM/OLE/Automation/ActiveX tend to be used interchangeably, even by people who work with the technology every day. I tend to draw a distinction that 'Automation' means IDispatch, and 'ActiveX' means 'control' --- IOleInPlaceActivate, etc. But I wouldn't expect random people off the street to have that precision.
Why does this site exist in the first place? Officially it's "to improve the quality of republican websites", but in political speak "improve the quality of" almost always means "make more to my liking."
My bet is this is a result of some sort of power struggle within the republican party. I'm sure that the house republican caucus would love to get a jump on the national committee: it would give them much more control over the agenda.
[Of course, there's a certain amount of unfairness here: I'm sure that if Bernie Sanders, the one Congressman outside the two party system, tried to create www.socialists.gov, he wouldn't be allowed to.]
ObSideNote: www.gop.com exists. It's been poached by www.politics.com.
That largely depends on mood, and what type of programming i'm doing.
When i literally don't understand a thing that's going on, I can't handle music at all.
When i'm debugging, I like techno/trance/rave: steady beat that I can leech energy off of without it distracting me too much.
When things are going really well, and i'm adding code that i don't have to think about too much (tedious busywork type of stuff), early 90s grunge rock.
It also goes in seasons: celtic music in winter, more techno in spring. *Shrug*
I don't think that follows. I'm a professional programmer at a well-respected company, and if
(a) I didn't have a deadline of yesterday
(b) it were reasonably inexpensive to fly to Atlanta
I would have done this.
The goal, for me, isn't money. It's about the joy of interacting with a large system, and coming to understand it, and seeing how to improve it; it's about encountering something bigger than I am, and merging with it in such a way that it and I both come out better for it.
There is nothing in the computer industry that I find more sad than people doing it for money and hating it; selling your soul for money is something I had hoped went out with the dark ages.
Except that, in a manner of speaking, he's right:
:)
COM = IUnknown. _Everything_ else is an extension.
And what does IUnknown get you? AddRef(), Release(), and QueryInterface().
Now, granted, as commonly used 'COM' means 'those set of interfaces derived from IUnknown which are commonly used'. But, as commonly used, the terms COM, OLE, and ActiveX are indistinguishable from one another. (I know: I just interviewed recently a guy who 'knew ActiveX' but couldn't explain what IDispatch was!) So, I guess what i'm saying is:
definition flames, when applied to COM, are sillier than definition flames usually are; please don't engage in them.
I think the problem with science editing for news media is that there are actually two issues that need to be considered, and there are very few people who are competent at considering both of them.
(1) is the 'science' actually scientific? (this is not the same as 'is it valid', but rather, was it developed using scientific research principles, etc)
(2) is it 'newsworthy'. (would people care if this were on the front page of our newspaper?)
The problem, of course, is that scientists, while theoretically good at answering #1 (although not always, as personal ideology can get involved), are usually going to be pretty bad at answering #2; and most people trained to answer #2 are totally incapable of answering #1.
This suggests that the ideal process would be two-step: someone who answers #1 passes those press releases which embody real science over to #2, who decides if they are newsworthy. But that's expensive, so doesn't happen often.
www.barrapunto.com
I think that's the first thing i've _ever_ seen on slashdot that made me cry.
I took two classes from him. Barely passed one, failed the other --- his classes were incredibly difficult, but I learned more from them than from just about any other computer-related classes I took in school. For all that his classes were
hard, he was a great guy, too: i remember
getting a ride to class from him (until he
had a flat), and the class buying pizza and
delivering it to a study session, to his surprise,
the night before the final.
I'll miss him. More than I would have expected.
While I guess it's cool that post offices are starting to wake up to the competition posed by the internet, I haven't quite figured out what I'd want to use a post office's internet services for ... ...
My bills are automagically paid by the bank. E-mail is free. Certificate verification is handled reasonably well by private companies, and if I'm going to be really concerned about security, the answer is something along the lines of PGP
What does an online post office have to offer that isn't already offered better somewhere else? This may be a case of an ancient dinosaur responding just a little bit too late.
Aside from the censorship issue itself, there are a number of ... silly ... concepts in the draft legislation. My favorite is the idea that a web page is consider to be analagous to showing a movie.
/., the correct analogy seems more to be a cafe where you go and sip coffee and talk about the issues of the day. But a movie? What web sites are the australian politicians looking at that this analogy makes sense to them?
Huh? I've always thought of a "web page" as being analagous to print publication --- a newspaper, or a flyer tacked on a light pole, or a magazine (depending on the content). Or, for something like