Re:Please help!! I don't understand the article!!
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
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· Score: 2
The article is referring to the capability of (at least newer) cell phones to play music when an incoming call arrives instead of just an ordinary "ring". The alleged problem here is that companies which make ring tones based on copyrighted music available for download aren't paying royalties to the record industry for that music.
"...cell phone usage is pervasive enough that users are looking for ways to distinguish their cell phones' rings
from others."
Funny, I usually have no trouble distinguishing my phone from the others _because it's in my own fucking
pocket_!
Well, if you're in a half-empty restaurant, no big deal--the nearest cell phone other than yours will be far enough away that you can tell the difference. But imagine yourself in a train filled to 200% capacity (this is typical of Japanese trains during rush hour), so many people around you you can barely move, when you hear the sound of a cell phone ringing--loud. You'd better be able to prove it's not yours before the people around you bash your head in for the annoyance.
FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer -
with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
Any single transfer, yes. How about "mget *-src.tar.gz"? And there are people who use that third-party transfer ability--just because you don't isn't enough reason to kill the protocol, unless you can come up with a better alternative.
Blasphemy, I know, but that's probably what's going to happen anyway. People won't just say "oh well, the RFC says we can't do this anymore, let's give up"; look at what happened to HTML, after all. This goes as much for RFCs as for anything else: trying to declare that "you must not do XYZ" when people want to do XYZ just doesn't work (unless you happen to be a dictator)--people will ignore you and do it anyway.
While on the whole I think TILJ makes a good argument against the DMA's claims, it looks like they made one big goof:
D. "Opt-in" reduces the amount of competition in the market [...]
A new
entrant, though forced to beseech consumers for information-permission, could do
so inexpensively through mass e-mailing.
Am I misreading that, or did they just say "it's okay to spam people to tell them about opt-in"? Didn't someone just win a lawsuit on exactly such (or at least very similar) spam?
Secondly, the Directive provides that rightholders either voluntarily or by way of agreements with other parties
have to provide [...] (emphasis added)
While that may sound pretty extreme, think about it for a moment: Do we really still need domain names? Ten or even five years ago, domain names were the only way to access most Internet resources outside of IP addresses, but now:
Nearly every Web page is linked from some index or list or other.
Web browsers have bookmark lists for a user's frequently visited sites.
Non-WWW client programs (FTP, SSH, IRC) have "site lists" that let you select a site without having to enter its full address.
Keyboardless browsing devices (Dreamcasts, cell phones, etc.) are gaining popularity.
So while getting rid of domain names may seem anathema to those of us who have been using the Internet for a while--I know it would take me a while to get used to it--I can't see that it would really cause any significant problems in the long run.
On the contrary, it would solve the myriad problems that have been cropping up recently regarding ownership of domain names and registries. As it is now, this is really not a solvable problem; take the case of, for example, a hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Minnesota and another hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Dallas, both of which want to do business nationwide/worldwide. Which one should get jims-software.com? There is no fair solution to this in the context of domain names, because whatever you do, one of them is going to get a "more visible" name than the other (unless, say, you make them both take jims-software-{1,2}.com, but I won't even try to get into the complexities of that).
Let's take a look at the telephone system for a moment. Just like the Internet, the telephone system can be used for communication between two or more parties anywhere in the world. But the telephone system doesn't have any sort of "domain name"-like system in it. At best, the telephone company will let you pick a number that's easier to remember than others, and even that's only within that particular geographic region; one could see a bit of unfairness here as well, but unlike domain names, telephone numbers are not as closely linked to their owners' identities as domain names are. (A hypothetical 1-800-JIM-SOFT could also be 1-800-LIMP-NET, for example, and if I were Jim I'm not sure I'd be too fond of that phone number in the first place.) And in any case, the advent of speed dial has at least reduced, if not eliminated, the necessity to remember commonly used phone numbers.
So why not do the same thing with the Internet? Scrap domain names, which almost certainly were not designed with an Internet of the size it is today in mind, and use IP addresses as the basic method of contacting a host; let links, bookmarks, site lists, and the like handle the name->address translation, and take domain name registries out of the loop entirely. I seem to recall IPv6 has an address block for geographically-based addresses, so appropriate blocks can be delegated out to countries, which can then assign them individually without having to worry about dealing with ICANN and friends. Moving a host would of course mean its IP address would change, but even that could be dealt with through "forwarding" services such as telephone companies currently provide for phone numbers.
This does leave the problem of how to communicate a host address from one person to another. Personal communcations are easily solved using electronic means: E-mail, IrDA, and such. Advertisements are a bit more difficult, but I can see a couple of solutions to that offhand:
Register one's site on a search engine or menu, and say "We're registered with XYZ". This approach is actually being used in Japan for cell-phone-oriented web sites.
Use an "area code" system much like the current telephone system, where the address is divided into an "area code" and "local number" part; then people in the area can reach the host by using the local number only, and the division will make it easier to read/record in any case.
Flames calling me a hypocrite because I have my own domain name will be ignored. (I'd happily go without it if the rest of the domain-name-less system were in place.)
Um... that Word file tried to change my normal.dot template. Did anyone else encounter this? Is NASA spreading
infected Word files?
For some reason, Word always does that to me whenever I try to open two or more documents at the same time. I don't know why and I wish it would stop, but it doesn't seem to be a virus. (I just scanned with NAV and the document came up clean.)
No, it's you who are confused. The matter is not whether advertising is a good way of generating revenue in the first place, but that, good or bad, whether it's providing revenue. And the answer is, no, it isn't, or at least not nearly as much as it used to. Therefore, it's failing.
If you want to argue that the current advertising model was a bad idea to start with and should fail, then go for it, but don't confuse the issues.
A friend of mine who runs a fairly large website with advertising income showed me some numbers the other day. Between January and September of last year, page views did not change significantly, but advertising income dropped 70%.
If I could work at one company in a nice area which paid me decently, gave me regular raises,
gave me interesting work to do and valued my professional opinion, I'd stick around forever. Instead we're
treated like an expendable commodity.
Every time I see this come up I'm reminded of how different American and Japanese companies are. I'm working for a Japanese software company, and I like it here; granted I've only been here a year as a regular employee (plus nine months as an intern before that), but the environment is pleasant, the work is interesting, the managers are for the most part sensible, and on the whole I find it a nice place to be. My benefits include 20 days of paid vacation a year (from year one) and company-owned housing (I pay $60/month), along with all the usuals.
Of course, you'd have to learn Japanese first, and with increasing competition from foreign companies working conditions are reportedly starting to deteriorate here as well, but it's still better than a lot of stories I hear from the US.
I frankly think this activation scheme will last until exactly that happens, and then either users will get so pissed off that Microsoft will get rid of the activation code entirely, or they'll release a "temporary workaround" to make the software work without activation, which of course is as good as the same.
Well, one can't blame them for trying, I suppose...
As much as I like to bash Microsoft, I can't see any significant problems here. It appears, from reading the article and the Microsoft info, that this "product activation" will only need to be done once, and once it's activated, that's it, end of story; there's no "connect to Microsoft every time and verify the code" (imagine how frustrated that would make modem users). As far as surreptitiously transmitting information, I can't see any way to do that through this code, at least as Microsoft describes it; at worst, you could have your DNS corrupted or packets intercepted, and someone might be able to find out what country you were in or how many computers you have. And if that bothers you, you can always do the registration over the telephone and cut out the network part entirely.
As for destroying the activation info, I don't doubt that sooner or later a virus will come out that deletes that info, but at worst you'll just have to activate the software again. And keep in mind also that killing the activation code doesn't mean you suddenly can't use the software any more; you can make use of the free trial period while you get the re-activation done. (Actually, depending on the implementation this might require a reinstall, but...) Yes, you'd lose some working time, but it wouldn't be too much worse than Melissa, I imagine.
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Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
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Life On Mars: ALH84001
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· Score: 2
(BTW, it was NOT Christopher Colombus that discovered America, but Leif Erikson. It was later surveyed by
Amerigo Vespucci, leading to the naming of this land, "America," probably due to a clerical error.)
Just for the record, I'm well aware of this. The NASA scientists didn't "discover" Mars, either, so the point is moot.
If you're implying something about the destruction of the Native Americans and their way of life, all I can say is
it was not exploration into America that killed the Indians, but ignorant, racist conquerors.
Explorers need not be conquerors.
No, but ignorance can do just as much damage. Just look at the dolphins and whales.
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't go; as you said initially, someone eventually will, and I'd rather the people who go be the least ignorant people possible, which probably means scientists rather than "explorers". What concerns me is the attitude you voiced in your comment; if I misinterpreted it, feel free to correct me, but it sounds too much like "as long as we benefit side effects don't matter," or "screw the natives, give us our gold." I don't want to see that attitude become common, or even the scientists may become affected by it, or pressured by government/business into obeying it.
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Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
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· Score: 3
I think the discoveries and new possibilities that arise from exploration vastly outweigh any fear of destroying an
ecosphere.
Imagine those (or similar) words coming out of Christopher Columbus's mouth, and then think back to your 16th-19th century American history...
Great, let's all boycott controlled devices! Sounds good to me! Only it's A.D. 2048, and there ain't no such thing anymore. So, what are you going to do? Give in and get one, or keep up your boycott at all costs? You can probably do without a TV, given the crap that TV programming has turned into, and you can even do without a dishwasher if you don't mind getting your hands dirty every once in a while. But how about your fridge? Will you walk to the store every day for your food--not that you'd have anything to cook it on except your old charcoal grill--or will you build yourself an "unencumbered" bicycle and hope that the authorities don't come and take it away before it breaks down of its own accord?
Or will you just give in and get a fridge with one of those nifty two-way TV screens on it?
The cameras allow you to be followed invisibly, you never know
if someone is watching you through the camera, you're in the panopticon. It's not the same as being seen by
others on the street.
Is it now? Do you really think you could spot a skilled tail in a crowded street, or even a not-so-crowded one? Detective agencies were around long before the Internet and networked video cameras, and they didn't survive through failure. And for that matter, in a crowded street, could you even begin to guess at who might be watching you? I didn't think so.
But being under the "gaze" of a camera isn't like that. . . . [T]he cameras and the people behind the cameras are there specifically to watch. That
plants the question, "are they watching me?"
To which I say, "Do I give a damn? No." End of story. Because they're not watching me, they're watching the city, in which I happen to be (at least in this hypothetical circumstance). As I said in my original comment, they have absolutely no reason to focus in on me in particular, because I don't make a whit of difference in the grand scheme of things. Now, if I pulled out a gun and started shooting people, that's a different story; but in that circumstance I'd deserve what I got anyway.
Suppose you were a cop, assigned to watch the other end of all these cameras. Would you really feel like writing down what every person who passes one of the cameras is doing? For that matter, could you even physically do that in the time available? I didn't think so.
Even computers don't really change the equation that much; they provide a lot more eyes to watch the cameras, but that's all. Even with face recognition, that would at best let you determine when someone was in view of what camera--no more than your typical detective agency could tell you, and probably less. And even if this data was accumulated for every person in the city, and even if it was stored, that still wouldn't make a difference, because nobody cares about you.
Even supposing the face-recognition software failed, and identified you as Jack Q. Serial Killer, computers don't arrest people--cops (i.e. people) arrest people, and they could tell the difference more easily. In the worst case, yes, maybe some people will be falsely arrested, but even then, society will respond as it sees fit, either getting the silly system trashed, or accepting it as one of the costs of a safer city.
(And if they did accept it, and you don't like it, well, just don't go there.)
While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy
dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Oh, I agree with you completely here; it would obviously make things simpler for government if people didn't interfere with them--which is why dictators become dictators and not presidents or prime ministers. Since we have the opportunity to watch and (to an extent) limit what government does, we should absolutely take advantage of that and make sure the government doesn't do things we don't want it to do.
What I'm saying is that that will happen without extensive worrying about the matter. I recall a quote from the article by some political figure saying that privacy would be one of the major issues, if not the major issue, in the next 3-5 years (correct me if I misstated it). That's society saying "we want privacy, give it to us."
As you say, of course, we should definitely be aware of what's going on, and if there is cause for alarm, it would be that government is trying to slip things through behind our backs. But I'm pretty sure that most people are at least aware of privacy issues at this point, which is why I say I don't think we need to jump up and down and panic just yet.
There are some good points here, and I hope people read farther than the bit about the Digital Angel on the first page (there are four pages, in case you didn't notice). I like the author's assertion that business will itself provide an answer to the question of how to control our private information in the "information age"; it's a refreshing change from the doomsayers. But one thing I found a bit disappointing was that the author only touched briefly on just what sort of beast "privacy" is, because I think it's a misunderstanding of that basic area that's causing a lot of unnecessary alarm.
As the author of the article points out, privacy is, above all, a social phenomenon. In other words, privacy is something that exists because society (i.e. people) considers it a Good Thing. But what a lot of people seem to forget is that that works both ways; because it is a social phenomenon, ordinary people won't take advantage of it even if they had the ability to, such as via a cracked server. If you noticed that someone had dropped their diary, you might pick it up and return it to them, but you wouldn't open it up and start reading, would you? (I hope not, anyway.) That's what privacy is.
Besides, if someone really wants to find out stuff about you, they can do that just fine with or without computer/Internet assistance. Hidden cameras, bribes and/or threats to friends or neighbors, that sort of thing. Investigation agencies don't make their money sitting at their desks and hacking into servers, either. But the fact is that no one cares about you, in that sense. We are still a long way from anything like 1984, despite what the doomsayers would tell you; nobody cares enough about what individual people are doing to monitor everyone (not that people would stand for it; such a proposal would go down in seconds, I think, at least in the US). Even the video camera surveillance system in Britain mentioned on Slashdot occasionally is a far cry from Orwell's world; some people seem to have forgotten that when you're in public, well, you're in public, and you shouldn't have any expectation of privacy anyway. Or perhaps that's just British society's view, and U.S. society is different? I don't know.
If society changes its collective mind and decides that it doesn't need privacy any more, then yes, of course you should be afraid (if you like privacy). But I haven't seen any massive shift in people's thinking that would suggest anything like that; if anything, as the article points out, people these days are looking for more privacy, not less. So let's stop the panicking now, okay?
Hey, if you want to strain your eyes to blindness, go ahead. I happen to find ink on paper much easier to read.
Incidentally, there have been studies done that show that reflected light, as in ink on paper, has a greater effect on the human brain and is thus easier to process and recall than direct light, as in a computer monitor. I don't have any links on hand, unfortunately.
How does one do this? I'm using Eudora 4.01 (Japanese version) and I can't find any option anywhere to disable HTML in incoming messages. I even hacked the binary to change all occurrences of "HTML" to "XTML", and all that gave me is an outbox full of messages containing ... (even though I told it to send in plain text!). Is it just not possible in this version?
Here's the part about the AMD-760MP, as well as I can make out: (I'm not too well versed in the hardware aspect of things, so pardon any unnatural phrasing)
AMD had a dual-Athlon AMD-760MP motherboard from Tyan on display. Although dual-CPU systems have been shown before, this was the first time the motherboard itself has been seen.
The AMD-760MP chipset consists of the AMD-762 "north bridge" and the AMD-766 "south bridge" chips. Unfortunately, we couldn't get a good look at the AMD-762 because of the heat sink attached to it, but seen from the side, the packaging appeared different from the BGA used in the AMD-766 or 761 (the "north bridge" of the AMD-760). Also, no data sheet has yet been released so we do not know the details specs of the board.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is referring to the capability of (at least newer) cell phones to play music when an incoming call arrives instead of just an ordinary "ring". The alleged problem here is that companies which make ring tones based on copyrighted music available for download aren't paying royalties to the record industry for that music.
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"...cell phone usage is pervasive enough that users are looking for ways to distinguish their cell phones' rings from others."
Funny, I usually have no trouble distinguishing my phone from the others _because it's in my own fucking pocket_!
Well, if you're in a half-empty restaurant, no big deal--the nearest cell phone other than yours will be far enough away that you can tell the difference. But imagine yourself in a train filled to 200% capacity (this is typical of Japanese trains during rush hour), so many people around you you can barely move, when you hear the sound of a cell phone ringing--loud. You'd better be able to prove it's not yours before the people around you bash your head in for the annoyance.
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BTW, 256 bps = 16 hex digits a second.
Not last time I checked... 0xF = 1111b = 4 bits; 256 / 4 = 64 hex digits per second.
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FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer - with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
Any single transfer, yes. How about "mget *-src.tar.gz"? And there are people who use that third-party transfer ability--just because you don't isn't enough reason to kill the protocol, unless you can come up with a better alternative.
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Blasphemy, I know, but that's probably what's going to happen anyway. People won't just say "oh well, the RFC says we can't do this anymore, let's give up"; look at what happened to HTML, after all. This goes as much for RFCs as for anything else: trying to declare that "you must not do XYZ" when people want to do XYZ just doesn't work (unless you happen to be a dictator)--people will ignore you and do it anyway.
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If we used hexadecimal, and a good phone transfer specialist, we could get up to around 256 bps.
64 hex digits a second? By voice? Now that's impressive...
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While on the whole I think TILJ makes a good argument against the DMA's claims, it looks like they made one big goof:
Am I misreading that, or did they just say "it's okay to spam people to tell them about opt-in"? Didn't someone just win a lawsuit on exactly such (or at least very similar) spam?
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While that may sound pretty extreme, think about it for a moment: Do we really still need domain names? Ten or even five years ago, domain names were the only way to access most Internet resources outside of IP addresses, but now:
- Nearly every Web page is linked from some index or list or other.
- Web browsers have bookmark lists for a user's frequently visited sites.
- Non-WWW client programs (FTP, SSH, IRC) have "site lists" that let you select a site without having to enter its full address.
- Keyboardless browsing devices (Dreamcasts, cell phones, etc.) are gaining popularity.
So while getting rid of domain names may seem anathema to those of us who have been using the Internet for a while--I know it would take me a while to get used to it--I can't see that it would really cause any significant problems in the long run.On the contrary, it would solve the myriad problems that have been cropping up recently regarding ownership of domain names and registries. As it is now, this is really not a solvable problem; take the case of, for example, a hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Minnesota and another hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Dallas, both of which want to do business nationwide/worldwide. Which one should get jims-software.com? There is no fair solution to this in the context of domain names, because whatever you do, one of them is going to get a "more visible" name than the other (unless, say, you make them both take jims-software-{1,2}.com, but I won't even try to get into the complexities of that).
Let's take a look at the telephone system for a moment. Just like the Internet, the telephone system can be used for communication between two or more parties anywhere in the world. But the telephone system doesn't have any sort of "domain name"-like system in it. At best, the telephone company will let you pick a number that's easier to remember than others, and even that's only within that particular geographic region; one could see a bit of unfairness here as well, but unlike domain names, telephone numbers are not as closely linked to their owners' identities as domain names are. (A hypothetical 1-800-JIM-SOFT could also be 1-800-LIMP-NET, for example, and if I were Jim I'm not sure I'd be too fond of that phone number in the first place.) And in any case, the advent of speed dial has at least reduced, if not eliminated, the necessity to remember commonly used phone numbers.
So why not do the same thing with the Internet? Scrap domain names, which almost certainly were not designed with an Internet of the size it is today in mind, and use IP addresses as the basic method of contacting a host; let links, bookmarks, site lists, and the like handle the name->address translation, and take domain name registries out of the loop entirely. I seem to recall IPv6 has an address block for geographically-based addresses, so appropriate blocks can be delegated out to countries, which can then assign them individually without having to worry about dealing with ICANN and friends. Moving a host would of course mean its IP address would change, but even that could be dealt with through "forwarding" services such as telephone companies currently provide for phone numbers.
This does leave the problem of how to communicate a host address from one person to another. Personal communcations are easily solved using electronic means: E-mail, IrDA, and such. Advertisements are a bit more difficult, but I can see a couple of solutions to that offhand:
Flames calling me a hypocrite because I have my own domain name will be ignored. (I'd happily go without it if the rest of the domain-name-less system were in place.)
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Um... that Word file tried to change my normal.dot template. Did anyone else encounter this? Is NASA spreading infected Word files?
For some reason, Word always does that to me whenever I try to open two or more documents at the same time. I don't know why and I wish it would stop, but it doesn't seem to be a virus. (I just scanned with NAV and the document came up clean.)
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If you want to argue that the current advertising model was a bad idea to start with and should fail, then go for it, but don't confuse the issues.
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The advertising model is NOT failing.
A friend of mine who runs a fairly large website with advertising income showed me some numbers the other day. Between January and September of last year, page views did not change significantly, but advertising income dropped 70%.
How is this "not failing?"
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If I could work at one company in a nice area which paid me decently, gave me regular raises, gave me interesting work to do and valued my professional opinion, I'd stick around forever. Instead we're treated like an expendable commodity.
Every time I see this come up I'm reminded of how different American and Japanese companies are. I'm working for a Japanese software company, and I like it here; granted I've only been here a year as a regular employee (plus nine months as an intern before that), but the environment is pleasant, the work is interesting, the managers are for the most part sensible, and on the whole I find it a nice place to be. My benefits include 20 days of paid vacation a year (from year one) and company-owned housing (I pay $60/month), along with all the usuals.
Of course, you'd have to learn Japanese first, and with increasing competition from foreign companies working conditions are reportedly starting to deteriorate here as well, but it's still better than a lot of stories I hear from the US.
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I frankly think this activation scheme will last until exactly that happens, and then either users will get so pissed off that Microsoft will get rid of the activation code entirely, or they'll release a "temporary workaround" to make the software work without activation, which of course is as good as the same.
Well, one can't blame them for trying, I suppose...
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As much as I like to bash Microsoft, I can't see any significant problems here. It appears, from reading the article and the Microsoft info, that this "product activation" will only need to be done once, and once it's activated, that's it, end of story; there's no "connect to Microsoft every time and verify the code" (imagine how frustrated that would make modem users). As far as surreptitiously transmitting information, I can't see any way to do that through this code, at least as Microsoft describes it; at worst, you could have your DNS corrupted or packets intercepted, and someone might be able to find out what country you were in or how many computers you have. And if that bothers you, you can always do the registration over the telephone and cut out the network part entirely.
As for destroying the activation info, I don't doubt that sooner or later a virus will come out that deletes that info, but at worst you'll just have to activate the software again. And keep in mind also that killing the activation code doesn't mean you suddenly can't use the software any more; you can make use of the free trial period while you get the re-activation done. (Actually, depending on the implementation this might require a reinstall, but...) Yes, you'd lose some working time, but it wouldn't be too much worse than Melissa, I imagine.
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(BTW, it was NOT Christopher Colombus that discovered America, but Leif Erikson. It was later surveyed by Amerigo Vespucci, leading to the naming of this land, "America," probably due to a clerical error.)
Just for the record, I'm well aware of this. The NASA scientists didn't "discover" Mars, either, so the point is moot.
If you're implying something about the destruction of the Native Americans and their way of life, all I can say is it was not exploration into America that killed the Indians, but ignorant, racist conquerors.
Explorers need not be conquerors.
No, but ignorance can do just as much damage. Just look at the dolphins and whales.
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't go; as you said initially, someone eventually will, and I'd rather the people who go be the least ignorant people possible, which probably means scientists rather than "explorers". What concerns me is the attitude you voiced in your comment; if I misinterpreted it, feel free to correct me, but it sounds too much like "as long as we benefit side effects don't matter," or "screw the natives, give us our gold." I don't want to see that attitude become common, or even the scientists may become affected by it, or pressured by government/business into obeying it.
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I think the discoveries and new possibilities that arise from exploration vastly outweigh any fear of destroying an ecosphere.
Imagine those (or similar) words coming out of Christopher Columbus's mouth, and then think back to your 16th-19th century American history...
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Great, let's all boycott controlled devices! Sounds good to me! Only it's A.D. 2048, and there ain't no such thing anymore. So, what are you going to do? Give in and get one, or keep up your boycott at all costs? You can probably do without a TV, given the crap that TV programming has turned into, and you can even do without a dishwasher if you don't mind getting your hands dirty every once in a while. But how about your fridge? Will you walk to the store every day for your food--not that you'd have anything to cook it on except your old charcoal grill--or will you build yourself an "unencumbered" bicycle and hope that the authorities don't come and take it away before it breaks down of its own accord?
Or will you just give in and get a fridge with one of those nifty two-way TV screens on it?
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The cameras allow you to be followed invisibly, you never know if someone is watching you through the camera, you're in the panopticon. It's not the same as being seen by others on the street.
Is it now? Do you really think you could spot a skilled tail in a crowded street, or even a not-so-crowded one? Detective agencies were around long before the Internet and networked video cameras, and they didn't survive through failure. And for that matter, in a crowded street, could you even begin to guess at who might be watching you? I didn't think so.
But being under the "gaze" of a camera isn't like that. . . . [T]he cameras and the people behind the cameras are there specifically to watch. That plants the question, "are they watching me?"
To which I say, "Do I give a damn? No." End of story. Because they're not watching me, they're watching the city, in which I happen to be (at least in this hypothetical circumstance). As I said in my original comment, they have absolutely no reason to focus in on me in particular, because I don't make a whit of difference in the grand scheme of things. Now, if I pulled out a gun and started shooting people, that's a different story; but in that circumstance I'd deserve what I got anyway.
Suppose you were a cop, assigned to watch the other end of all these cameras. Would you really feel like writing down what every person who passes one of the cameras is doing? For that matter, could you even physically do that in the time available? I didn't think so.
Even computers don't really change the equation that much; they provide a lot more eyes to watch the cameras, but that's all. Even with face recognition, that would at best let you determine when someone was in view of what camera--no more than your typical detective agency could tell you, and probably less. And even if this data was accumulated for every person in the city, and even if it was stored, that still wouldn't make a difference, because nobody cares about you.
Even supposing the face-recognition software failed, and identified you as Jack Q. Serial Killer, computers don't arrest people--cops (i.e. people) arrest people, and they could tell the difference more easily. In the worst case, yes, maybe some people will be falsely arrested, but even then, society will respond as it sees fit, either getting the silly system trashed, or accepting it as one of the costs of a safer city. (And if they did accept it, and you don't like it, well, just don't go there.)
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While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Oh, I agree with you completely here; it would obviously make things simpler for government if people didn't interfere with them--which is why dictators become dictators and not presidents or prime ministers. Since we have the opportunity to watch and (to an extent) limit what government does, we should absolutely take advantage of that and make sure the government doesn't do things we don't want it to do.
What I'm saying is that that will happen without extensive worrying about the matter. I recall a quote from the article by some political figure saying that privacy would be one of the major issues, if not the major issue, in the next 3-5 years (correct me if I misstated it). That's society saying "we want privacy, give it to us."
As you say, of course, we should definitely be aware of what's going on, and if there is cause for alarm, it would be that government is trying to slip things through behind our backs. But I'm pretty sure that most people are at least aware of privacy issues at this point, which is why I say I don't think we need to jump up and down and panic just yet.
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There are some good points here, and I hope people read farther than the bit about the Digital Angel on the first page (there are four pages, in case you didn't notice). I like the author's assertion that business will itself provide an answer to the question of how to control our private information in the "information age"; it's a refreshing change from the doomsayers. But one thing I found a bit disappointing was that the author only touched briefly on just what sort of beast "privacy" is, because I think it's a misunderstanding of that basic area that's causing a lot of unnecessary alarm.
As the author of the article points out, privacy is, above all, a social phenomenon. In other words, privacy is something that exists because society (i.e. people) considers it a Good Thing. But what a lot of people seem to forget is that that works both ways; because it is a social phenomenon, ordinary people won't take advantage of it even if they had the ability to, such as via a cracked server. If you noticed that someone had dropped their diary, you might pick it up and return it to them, but you wouldn't open it up and start reading, would you? (I hope not, anyway.) That's what privacy is.
Besides, if someone really wants to find out stuff about you, they can do that just fine with or without computer/Internet assistance. Hidden cameras, bribes and/or threats to friends or neighbors, that sort of thing. Investigation agencies don't make their money sitting at their desks and hacking into servers, either. But the fact is that no one cares about you, in that sense. We are still a long way from anything like 1984, despite what the doomsayers would tell you; nobody cares enough about what individual people are doing to monitor everyone (not that people would stand for it; such a proposal would go down in seconds, I think, at least in the US). Even the video camera surveillance system in Britain mentioned on Slashdot occasionally is a far cry from Orwell's world; some people seem to have forgotten that when you're in public, well, you're in public, and you shouldn't have any expectation of privacy anyway. Or perhaps that's just British society's view, and U.S. society is different? I don't know.
If society changes its collective mind and decides that it doesn't need privacy any more, then yes, of course you should be afraid (if you like privacy). But I haven't seen any massive shift in people's thinking that would suggest anything like that; if anything, as the article points out, people these days are looking for more privacy, not less. So let's stop the panicking now, okay?
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Then they came for the raw dripping human brains and by that time no one was left to speak up.
So what's the big deal? Just produce more brains. Like the spiders produce silk, and all.
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Hey, if you want to strain your eyes to blindness, go ahead. I happen to find ink on paper much easier to read.
Incidentally, there have been studies done that show that reflected light, as in ink on paper, has a greater effect on the human brain and is thus easier to process and recall than direct light, as in a computer monitor. I don't have any links on hand, unfortunately.
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