I'm quite frankly amazed at the hubris that NASA are showing with this ill-conceived plan! I mean, who in the hell are they do decide that it's alright to blast a 100 foot deep hole in a comet just to gather a little bit of data? The Solar System is supposed to be a common resource for all humanity, not just a load of targets for America to test its fancy guidance systems on, even in the name of science.
There are better, if more expensive, ways to obtain this data if it is really needed. But there's no excuse for this kind of brute force Rambo method of information gathering, and I'd hate to think that it marks the start of a new phase of "science" whereby we obtain data by blowing things up. What's next, making a chemical analysis of Martian rock composition from debris thrown up by a nuclear strike on its surface?
There's a lot of paranoia amongst the tech-savvy populace of the net, and yet there seems to be a consistent failure to grasp the fact that current concerns about privacy are unwarranted and overrated.
Why is privacy overrated? After all, we live in a consumer society where we demand value for money and quality service from the corporations that provide everything we need to live, and information is the lifeblood of these ideals. Without reliable information corporations aren't going to be as efficient, and in a free market economy such as ours, this harms us all in the long run, far more than the trivial loss of privacy that comes from a company knowing how often you read/.
There are real privacy concerns out there which we should instead be addressing instead of whining about how companies compile online demographics. For instance, the need for privacy for medical information is paramount, and yet sorely lacking in America. With the increasing use of genetic technology in medicine, we either need safeguards to prevent insurance companies from declining "high risk" people, or a socialised health care system in which we can be guaranteedt treatment no matter what.
But the issue of online privacy is only really of interest to people who spent too much time online, and too little time in the real world.
The real problem with advertising, and especially online advertising, is that people have gotten so inured to it that nobody pays any attention to it any more. In other mediums this isn't quite so much of a problem - there are always new places and ways to attract attention, and innovative ploys by advertising companies still attract a fair amount of attention.
But who really looks at banner ads any more? They're so ubiquitious that they've become part of the background, and the amount of clickthroughs they're generating compared to the number of impressions is rediculously low. So of course all of these companies are going out of business without paying people.
I see this as a worrying trend though. There are plenty of really good sites out there that are supported solely through advertising rather than subscription or per-use charges, and if online advertising dies then many of these websites will disappear as their owners cannot afford the cost of hosting and bandwidth. It also doesn't help when people use things like Junkbuster to further eliminate any chance these companies have of making money.
At this rate it seems like the majority of free sites will either vanish or start having to charge for their services. I can easily imagine a day in the not-so-distant future where even/. has to start charging people in order to pay for the costs of running a website with hundreds of thousands of readers...
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned about my computers, but am I the only one who thinks that it's not what's on the outside that counts, but what's on the inside? Who honestly cares what your machine looks like as long as it can compile the latest Linux kernel in less than a quarter of an hour?
I mean, you could spend the cash some of these cases cost on far more important things like more memory, a new hard drive or even a graphics card if you're not into so much serious stuff. But trying to turn your PC into some shrine to aesthetics is just silly.
So much for geeks being some of the last people to appreciate substance over style. What's next, "How Flash can liven up your website!"?
Whilst I have absolutely no objections to people who wish to void their warranties in order to fiddle with the internals of these kinds of machines, why do they then have to go and announce to the world what they've done?
It only leads to the company in question starting legal proceedings and pulling the product, and it tarnishes all of us with the same brush i.e. irresponsible law-breakers who shouldn't be trusted with a thing. Every time this happens, it strengthens the industry's resolve to get tighter legislation - after all if you can't stop something through technical means, then legislate it away!
This sort of behaviour has already led to such measures as the DMCA. What more do you people want?
You know maybe it's just me, but haven't all of the companies that made such good IPOs last year pretty much bombed out of the market? And recent IPOs haven't exactly managed to inject any sparkle into the Linux market - investors are finally beginning to realise that open source makes good software, not good money, and that they're going to be lucky to ever see a dividend on their shares.
And a company that has wasted this long to get to the IPO stage is obviously lacking something in their corporate makeup - every other company managed it last year, why didn't they?
Frankly, the dream is over, and people like Eric Raymond are pretty much just as poor as they ever were. The best they can hope for is a low key event which puts then slightly above their asking price, rather than at some rediculously inflated value that will inevitably lead to the market getting scared off and dumping it like a cheap whore you've hit too hard.
Just because they've gone with a definition which is guaranteed to get every frustrated computer user who has ever written a "HELLO WORLD" program out there angry, it doesn't mean that they don't have a point.
If people could forget about being anally-retentive for a while, maybe it would be better to actually look at the treaty itself. Network admins would be exempt from the ban on "hacking tools" (poor choice of words), so they could carry on playing Quake and scratching their armpits without worrying about being arrested. The only people who would then be affected are those using these programs for unethical uses.
The fact that detailed logs will be required from ISPs is also good - it means that tracking down people who do abuse the net will be quicker and more certain.
The truth is that much of this is just extending existing laws into a new domain. There are dubious parts, but the benefits outweigh the costs IMHO...
Please enlighten me how you can correlate presidnetial candiates with dictators that's for Russia.
Hmm, let's see. Both candidates are in favour of things like increased censorship to "protect the children", increasing the amount of un-Constitutional laws in the name of the War on Drugs, and other such Government expanding legislation. It may not be a dictatorship now, but that's what they would do if they could get away with it.
As it is, they're just moving slow enough so that people don't notice.
Foreign policy will effect the people out of the US as well so it does matter vitally.
As I said, thanks to the US arrogance in throwing its weight around on the international arena, other countries will still have to worry about these things. But which candidate makes it to the top won't matter.
P.S. How the hell are you doing that to your HTML? You've got a <BR> tag in between every other tag.
Does it really matter which dictator you elect? Both candidates are identical in pretty much every respect, and we can be sure that whoever wins, the US will still continue to be as arrogant and insular as it always is.
The fact that/. is bothering to provide "coverage" of such a non-event is quite sad really, all it does is provide a forum for the slashbot hordes to propound their particular dogma to people who'd rather use Windows than admit that someone else's politcal views might have validity.
God, I wish it'd hurry up and be over and done with.
I did use to use "(this is a joke:))" before, but then I decided it was far to ugly and looked like a really fat bloke with extra chins was smiling and so I now just use "(this is a joke:)" which would probably confuse grammar checkers, but looks cleaner...
So what you're saying is that it's perfectly all right for me to hack into an account of yours online, find out your personal details and then use, say, your credit card to make a series of purchases? That's fine by you?
Or maybe I could get a photo of you and make some pornographic fakes up and post them around the net? That may not bother you, but I'm sure there would be thousands of people who would be mortified by that.
It's not your fault, it's just that slash introduces a space into very long links in order to prevent people from having cunning goatse.cx links or something.
I'm coming to realise that what Napster claims to be, the best thing in obtaining legal music, is nothing more than a front for what it really is - a tool for organisations like the RIAA to get Congress to impose the most draconian laws possible to ensure that they get to keep their beloved monopoly position.
Sure, it may sound paranoid, but who would really release a piece of software which anyone could have told you was going to be hammered into the ground by litigation and legislation? Maybe Shawn Fanning would have, but their are some savvy people working for Napster, and it's hard to see them as being naive visionaries fighting the corporate foe.
And besides, just look at the software itself. It's hardly a labour of love is it? It looks like someone spent about an hour using VB1 to put a front end on a fairly simple network protocol. And indeed, the very protocol itself is designed to make the service easy to shut down in the event that Napster "loses" in court.
No, I think that the entire company has been funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of vindicating their "you're all thieves and pirates" stance. Maybe Shawn Fanning was for real once, but I'm sure the endless $$$ of the RIAA would have been enough to buy his complicity. And the RIAA has gotten a hell of a lot of leverage off of the back of cases like Metallica and Dr Dre.
It's been said before that Napster is one of the worst things that could have happened in the struggle to promote new business models and remove the RIAA monopoly. I think it's kind of obvious why.
It's a (very) hypothetical situation, and I don't doubt it would be rediculously impossible to enforce and require incredibly draconian legislation on an international scale. But my main point was asking why IP would be invalidated as a consequence of the internet. As long as a majority of people hold to it, then it is still a workable premise, as we see at the moment.
I wasn't saying it was practical, merely possible. And besides, it doesn't mean that IP would become invalid anyway, as long as it can be enforced in the majority of cases.
Finally, a realist speaks on the inevitability of the demise of IP.
He doesn't actually strike me as much of a "realist". For someone who has managed to get themselves elected so such a post, he seems to have his head in the clouds on a lot of issues.
I dont understand how anyone can deny the obviousness of the final result of a global network.
Why is it obvious?
You cannot stop people from doing what they want. They want to die. They will die. They want to speak. They will speak. They want to spread information. It will spread. I'm glad someone out there sees it.
Yes you can, you could install monitoring and filtering software on every router and only allow people to pass along information that is a) unencrypted and b) legal. Sure, it's an extreme possibility and would require international cooperation, but it's not in principle impossible by any means.
Can we have some more information on why you think these things are "inevitable"?
Sure, copyright needs to taken back to a sensible level, but at the same time there's no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater is there? This man seems to have some kind of intense anti-IP agenda, and, well, anarchist leanings, and whilst it's nice to have a change from corporate whores, it's also not a good thing to have someone so revolutionary that nobody will take them seriously.
I would place open source/free software more towards the commercial end of scale because it also relies on intellectual property concepts like copyrights and licensing in order to acheive its stated goals.
I think great art is inspired by passion, not money.
Yeah, I'm not diagreeing with you here, that wasn't what I said. My point was that it takes a certain amount of time and energy to create a piece of art, and if these people had had to work in other jobs or beg in the streets then they wouldn't have had the time and energy available to exercise their creative talents.
Hell, if they were begging I doubt they'd be able to afford canvas or paper, and they wouldn't have produced at all. It's an analogous situation with record companies/film studios today, you need money to be able to create.
These are extremely bold words which should find favour with all slashbots worried about the current trends in providing increased "security" for intellectual property due to all those nasty thieves and pirates that lurk in warez boards and FTP sites.
And whilst I applaud the stand he has chosen to make, I am (again) forced to ask the question, will he be able to acheive any of this? His policy seems to be in direct violation of what business interests want, and it also seems as though this kind of anarchist manifesto brings its own dangers.
Do we really want one hundred percent freedom from any kind of intellectual property? The existance of the public domain should be fought for, but at the same time people have the right to choose to sell the end-product of their time and effort, not have it stolen and copied the instant they attempt to make it available.
Just look at the difference in quality between public domain software and licensed software. When things are in the public domain they are invariably of a far lower quality than equivalent things in the commercial domain. Without financial reward a lot of work would simply not be done, and we'd all be poorer for the loss of a huge part of our cultural heritage.
Remember, some of the greatest artists of all time were paid to do what they did. If they hadn't have been paid, do you think that we'd have some of the great works of art we have today, or do you think that these people would have led a short, harsh life begging on the streets? I think the answer is obvious.
The guy has some interesting ideas and an actual understanding of the issues involved here beyond what the rest of the ICANN board has, and it's good to see that there is at least one non-corporate on such an important body.
But I have to say, I feel sorry for the guy.
Why? He may have all of these "revolutionary" (from ICANN's point of view anyway) ideas about how to restructure ICANN and make domain names fairer, but he's one man alone on a board with eighteen corporate whores all perfectly happy with the current system. The entire At Large elections were little more than a sop to satisfy geeks who felt, quite rightly, that they no longer had any power online.
Every decision he wants to make is going to be outvoted and quashed by the paid tools of corporate America. How do you think he's going to feel after a year of failure? Pretty bad would be my guess, and that's why I feel sorry for him.
ICANN made sure that the At Large elections would fail to produce any threat to it's domination by corporations. Auerbach's position, whilst gained honestly, is little more than a sham. I feel sorry for him when he comes to realise that.
I really fail to see how anyone can argue that age limits on violent and explicit material are anything other than a sane policy. It has been shown that children are more vulnerable to these things than adults, and so limiting their exposure to these kinds of materials is nothing more than caring for our future.
When violence becomes a part of society that is tolerated, then we must make sure that it does not become accepted. Currently American culture, such as it is, tolerates violence as being an inevitable consequcne of allowing firearms to be possessed by people, but it hasn't gotten to the stage yet where people accept violence as a tool for getting ahead in life. So, in order to make sure that people don't begin to perceive violence as a valid socio-economic tool of advancement, we need to make sure that children don't perceive violence as being "cool".
These kinds of laws, whilst perhaps not being strictly Constituional, are very necessary. We cannot let our children fall into the trap that violence is good, and nothing shouls be allowed to stand in the way of ensuring this. When the Constitution was drafted, if they'd have realised the threats that children face everyday, I'm sure they'd have realised that sometimes, freedom of speech is not an abolute concept.
That's what the serpent said, and look where we are now.
Bah, if such a scene had ever occured outside the fever dreams of wandering Jews, then Eve was entirely right to eat the apple and gain knowledge. Only a cruel and petty god would forbid his creations from gaining knowledge.
Fine. Go ahead and try. You won't succeed, and God won't be pleased. But I've seen enough of your type to know I won't be able to stop you. I hope somebody else can learn from your mistakes, at the very least.
I will succeed, and my successors will become gods in their own right, as is our destiny. If your god exists, then he will be hunted down like the dog he is.
"Irrationality"? I suppose you believe atheism to be rational. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism is simply an excuse to perform evil and immoral acts while keeping your conscience clear in the certainty that there will be no retribution for your crimes.
You forget, my ignorant friend, that a true man can understand their place in the world without needing the crutches of an anachronistic belief system. Nietzche had it right, you have it wrong.
Gain is not the issue. Gain is never the issue. Morality is the issue. Genetic engineering, as tampering with the will of God and God's own creations, is beyond immoral, and there is no excuse for pursuing such anti-human and anti-spiritual studies.
And morality is something you sadly lack, for your rigid system of belief cannot hope to sustain true justice or morality. Anti-humanism is the result of your naive, sad rantings, designed to hide the fact that you feel unable to cope in a world that wasn't designed to make you feel safe.
We will grow beyond people like you, and humanity will be far better for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite frankly amazed at the hubris that NASA are showing with this ill-conceived plan! I mean, who in the hell are they do decide that it's alright to blast a 100 foot deep hole in a comet just to gather a little bit of data? The Solar System is supposed to be a common resource for all humanity, not just a load of targets for America to test its fancy guidance systems on, even in the name of science.
There are better, if more expensive, ways to obtain this data if it is really needed. But there's no excuse for this kind of brute force Rambo method of information gathering, and I'd hate to think that it marks the start of a new phase of "science" whereby we obtain data by blowing things up. What's next, making a chemical analysis of Martian rock composition from debris thrown up by a nuclear strike on its surface?
There's a lot of paranoia amongst the tech-savvy populace of the net, and yet there seems to be a consistent failure to grasp the fact that current concerns about privacy are unwarranted and overrated.
Why is privacy overrated? After all, we live in a consumer society where we demand value for money and quality service from the corporations that provide everything we need to live, and information is the lifeblood of these ideals. Without reliable information corporations aren't going to be as efficient, and in a free market economy such as ours, this harms us all in the long run, far more than the trivial loss of privacy that comes from a company knowing how often you read /.
There are real privacy concerns out there which we should instead be addressing instead of whining about how companies compile online demographics. For instance, the need for privacy for medical information is paramount, and yet sorely lacking in America. With the increasing use of genetic technology in medicine, we either need safeguards to prevent insurance companies from declining "high risk" people, or a socialised health care system in which we can be guaranteedt treatment no matter what.
But the issue of online privacy is only really of interest to people who spent too much time online, and too little time in the real world.
The real problem with advertising, and especially online advertising, is that people have gotten so inured to it that nobody pays any attention to it any more. In other mediums this isn't quite so much of a problem - there are always new places and ways to attract attention, and innovative ploys by advertising companies still attract a fair amount of attention.
But who really looks at banner ads any more? They're so ubiquitious that they've become part of the background, and the amount of clickthroughs they're generating compared to the number of impressions is rediculously low. So of course all of these companies are going out of business without paying people.
I see this as a worrying trend though. There are plenty of really good sites out there that are supported solely through advertising rather than subscription or per-use charges, and if online advertising dies then many of these websites will disappear as their owners cannot afford the cost of hosting and bandwidth. It also doesn't help when people use things like Junkbuster to further eliminate any chance these companies have of making money.
At this rate it seems like the majority of free sites will either vanish or start having to charge for their services. I can easily imagine a day in the not-so-distant future where even /. has to start charging people in order to pay for the costs of running a website with hundreds of thousands of readers...
Do you happen to own a lava lamp? What do you use it for?
Generating random numbers for cryptographic purposes to fuel my paranoid fantasies. What else would you use one for?
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned about my computers, but am I the only one who thinks that it's not what's on the outside that counts, but what's on the inside? Who honestly cares what your machine looks like as long as it can compile the latest Linux kernel in less than a quarter of an hour?
I mean, you could spend the cash some of these cases cost on far more important things like more memory, a new hard drive or even a graphics card if you're not into so much serious stuff. But trying to turn your PC into some shrine to aesthetics is just silly.
So much for geeks being some of the last people to appreciate substance over style. What's next, "How Flash can liven up your website!"?
Whilst I have absolutely no objections to people who wish to void their warranties in order to fiddle with the internals of these kinds of machines, why do they then have to go and announce to the world what they've done?
It only leads to the company in question starting legal proceedings and pulling the product, and it tarnishes all of us with the same brush i.e. irresponsible law-breakers who shouldn't be trusted with a thing. Every time this happens, it strengthens the industry's resolve to get tighter legislation - after all if you can't stop something through technical means, then legislate it away!
This sort of behaviour has already led to such measures as the DMCA. What more do you people want?
You know maybe it's just me, but haven't all of the companies that made such good IPOs last year pretty much bombed out of the market? And recent IPOs haven't exactly managed to inject any sparkle into the Linux market - investors are finally beginning to realise that open source makes good software, not good money, and that they're going to be lucky to ever see a dividend on their shares.
And a company that has wasted this long to get to the IPO stage is obviously lacking something in their corporate makeup - every other company managed it last year, why didn't they?
Frankly, the dream is over, and people like Eric Raymond are pretty much just as poor as they ever were. The best they can hope for is a low key event which puts then slightly above their asking price, rather than at some rediculously inflated value that will inevitably lead to the market getting scared off and dumping it like a cheap whore you've hit too hard.
Just because they've gone with a definition which is guaranteed to get every frustrated computer user who has ever written a "HELLO WORLD" program out there angry, it doesn't mean that they don't have a point.
If people could forget about being anally-retentive for a while, maybe it would be better to actually look at the treaty itself. Network admins would be exempt from the ban on "hacking tools" (poor choice of words), so they could carry on playing Quake and scratching their armpits without worrying about being arrested. The only people who would then be affected are those using these programs for unethical uses.
The fact that detailed logs will be required from ISPs is also good - it means that tracking down people who do abuse the net will be quicker and more certain.
The truth is that much of this is just extending existing laws into a new domain. There are dubious parts, but the benefits outweigh the costs IMHO...
Please enlighten me how you can correlate presidnetial candiates with dictators that's for Russia.
Hmm, let's see. Both candidates are in favour of things like increased censorship to "protect the children", increasing the amount of un-Constitutional laws in the name of the War on Drugs, and other such Government expanding legislation. It may not be a dictatorship now, but that's what they would do if they could get away with it.
As it is, they're just moving slow enough so that people don't notice.
Foreign policy will effect the people out of the US as well so it does matter vitally.
As I said, thanks to the US arrogance in throwing its weight around on the international arena, other countries will still have to worry about these things. But which candidate makes it to the top won't matter.
P.S. How the hell are you doing that to your HTML? You've got a <BR> tag in between every other tag.
Does it really matter which dictator you elect? Both candidates are identical in pretty much every respect, and we can be sure that whoever wins, the US will still continue to be as arrogant and insular as it always is.
The fact that /. is bothering to provide "coverage" of such a non-event is quite sad really, all it does is provide a forum for the slashbot hordes to propound their particular dogma to people who'd rather use Windows than admit that someone else's politcal views might have validity.
God, I wish it'd hurry up and be over and done with.
I did use to use "(this is a joke :))" before, but then I decided it was far to ugly and looked like a really fat bloke with extra chins was smiling and so I now just use "(this is a joke :)" which would probably confuse grammar checkers, but looks cleaner...
So what you're saying is that it's perfectly all right for me to hack into an account of yours online, find out your personal details and then use, say, your credit card to make a series of purchases? That's fine by you?
Or maybe I could get a photo of you and make some pornographic fakes up and post them around the net? That may not bother you, but I'm sure there would be thousands of people who would be mortified by that.
But obviously, this, and more, is fine by you.
It's not your fault, it's just that slash introduces a space into very long links in order to prevent people from having cunning goatse.cx links or something.
No, really, why the laughter? Do you have unresolved issues or something?
I'm coming to realise that what Napster claims to be, the best thing in obtaining legal music, is nothing more than a front for what it really is - a tool for organisations like the RIAA to get Congress to impose the most draconian laws possible to ensure that they get to keep their beloved monopoly position.
Sure, it may sound paranoid, but who would really release a piece of software which anyone could have told you was going to be hammered into the ground by litigation and legislation? Maybe Shawn Fanning would have, but their are some savvy people working for Napster, and it's hard to see them as being naive visionaries fighting the corporate foe.
And besides, just look at the software itself. It's hardly a labour of love is it? It looks like someone spent about an hour using VB1 to put a front end on a fairly simple network protocol. And indeed, the very protocol itself is designed to make the service easy to shut down in the event that Napster "loses" in court.
No, I think that the entire company has been funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of vindicating their "you're all thieves and pirates" stance. Maybe Shawn Fanning was for real once, but I'm sure the endless $$$ of the RIAA would have been enough to buy his complicity. And the RIAA has gotten a hell of a lot of leverage off of the back of cases like Metallica and Dr Dre.
It's been said before that Napster is one of the worst things that could have happened in the struggle to promote new business models and remove the RIAA monopoly. I think it's kind of obvious why.
It's a (very) hypothetical situation, and I don't doubt it would be rediculously impossible to enforce and require incredibly draconian legislation on an international scale. But my main point was asking why IP would be invalidated as a consequence of the internet. As long as a majority of people hold to it, then it is still a workable premise, as we see at the moment.
I wasn't saying it was practical, merely possible. And besides, it doesn't mean that IP would become invalid anyway, as long as it can be enforced in the majority of cases.
Finally, a realist speaks on the inevitability of the demise of IP.
He doesn't actually strike me as much of a "realist". For someone who has managed to get themselves elected so such a post, he seems to have his head in the clouds on a lot of issues.
I dont understand how anyone can deny the obviousness of the final result of a global network.
Why is it obvious?
You cannot stop people from doing what they want. They want to die. They will die. They want to speak. They will speak. They want to spread information. It will spread. I'm glad someone out there sees it.
Yes you can, you could install monitoring and filtering software on every router and only allow people to pass along information that is a) unencrypted and b) legal. Sure, it's an extreme possibility and would require international cooperation, but it's not in principle impossible by any means.
Can we have some more information on why you think these things are "inevitable"?
Sure, copyright needs to taken back to a sensible level, but at the same time there's no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater is there? This man seems to have some kind of intense anti-IP agenda, and, well, anarchist leanings, and whilst it's nice to have a change from corporate whores, it's also not a good thing to have someone so revolutionary that nobody will take them seriously.
I would place open source/free software more towards the commercial end of scale because it also relies on intellectual property concepts like copyrights and licensing in order to acheive its stated goals.
I think great art is inspired by passion, not money.
Yeah, I'm not diagreeing with you here, that wasn't what I said. My point was that it takes a certain amount of time and energy to create a piece of art, and if these people had had to work in other jobs or beg in the streets then they wouldn't have had the time and energy available to exercise their creative talents.
Hell, if they were begging I doubt they'd be able to afford canvas or paper, and they wouldn't have produced at all. It's an analogous situation with record companies/film studios today, you need money to be able to create.
These are extremely bold words which should find favour with all slashbots worried about the current trends in providing increased "security" for intellectual property due to all those nasty thieves and pirates that lurk in warez boards and FTP sites.
And whilst I applaud the stand he has chosen to make, I am (again) forced to ask the question, will he be able to acheive any of this? His policy seems to be in direct violation of what business interests want, and it also seems as though this kind of anarchist manifesto brings its own dangers.
Do we really want one hundred percent freedom from any kind of intellectual property? The existance of the public domain should be fought for, but at the same time people have the right to choose to sell the end-product of their time and effort, not have it stolen and copied the instant they attempt to make it available.
Just look at the difference in quality between public domain software and licensed software. When things are in the public domain they are invariably of a far lower quality than equivalent things in the commercial domain. Without financial reward a lot of work would simply not be done, and we'd all be poorer for the loss of a huge part of our cultural heritage.
Remember, some of the greatest artists of all time were paid to do what they did. If they hadn't have been paid, do you think that we'd have some of the great works of art we have today, or do you think that these people would have led a short, harsh life begging on the streets? I think the answer is obvious.
The guy has some interesting ideas and an actual understanding of the issues involved here beyond what the rest of the ICANN board has, and it's good to see that there is at least one non-corporate on such an important body.
But I have to say, I feel sorry for the guy.
Why? He may have all of these "revolutionary" (from ICANN's point of view anyway) ideas about how to restructure ICANN and make domain names fairer, but he's one man alone on a board with eighteen corporate whores all perfectly happy with the current system. The entire At Large elections were little more than a sop to satisfy geeks who felt, quite rightly, that they no longer had any power online.
Every decision he wants to make is going to be outvoted and quashed by the paid tools of corporate America. How do you think he's going to feel after a year of failure? Pretty bad would be my guess, and that's why I feel sorry for him.
ICANN made sure that the At Large elections would fail to produce any threat to it's domination by corporations. Auerbach's position, whilst gained honestly, is little more than a sham. I feel sorry for him when he comes to realise that.
I really fail to see how anyone can argue that age limits on violent and explicit material are anything other than a sane policy. It has been shown that children are more vulnerable to these things than adults, and so limiting their exposure to these kinds of materials is nothing more than caring for our future.
When violence becomes a part of society that is tolerated, then we must make sure that it does not become accepted. Currently American culture, such as it is, tolerates violence as being an inevitable consequcne of allowing firearms to be possessed by people, but it hasn't gotten to the stage yet where people accept violence as a tool for getting ahead in life. So, in order to make sure that people don't begin to perceive violence as a valid socio-economic tool of advancement, we need to make sure that children don't perceive violence as being "cool".
These kinds of laws, whilst perhaps not being strictly Constituional, are very necessary. We cannot let our children fall into the trap that violence is good, and nothing shouls be allowed to stand in the way of ensuring this. When the Constitution was drafted, if they'd have realised the threats that children face everyday, I'm sure they'd have realised that sometimes, freedom of speech is not an abolute concept.
That's what the serpent said, and look where we are now.
Bah, if such a scene had ever occured outside the fever dreams of wandering Jews, then Eve was entirely right to eat the apple and gain knowledge. Only a cruel and petty god would forbid his creations from gaining knowledge.
Fine. Go ahead and try. You won't succeed, and God won't be pleased. But I've seen enough of your type to know I won't be able to stop you. I hope somebody else can learn from your mistakes, at the very least.
I will succeed, and my successors will become gods in their own right, as is our destiny. If your god exists, then he will be hunted down like the dog he is.
"Irrationality"? I suppose you believe atheism to be rational. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism is simply an excuse to perform evil and immoral acts while keeping your conscience clear in the certainty that there will be no retribution for your crimes.
You forget, my ignorant friend, that a true man can understand their place in the world without needing the crutches of an anachronistic belief system. Nietzche had it right, you have it wrong.
Gain is not the issue. Gain is never the issue. Morality is the issue. Genetic engineering, as tampering with the will of God and God's own creations, is beyond immoral, and there is no excuse for pursuing such anti-human and anti-spiritual studies.
And morality is something you sadly lack, for your rigid system of belief cannot hope to sustain true justice or morality. Anti-humanism is the result of your naive, sad rantings, designed to hide the fact that you feel unable to cope in a world that wasn't designed to make you feel safe.
We will grow beyond people like you, and humanity will be far better for it.