No, creating the MP3 is illegal. Trading it is an issue after the fact.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
MP3 is nothing but a file format. Provided I have a CD I have a perfect right (acknowledged by courts and basically everybody except for RIAA) to make MP3s off the CD tracks and use these MP3s -- at home, at work, in the car -- wherever I want. Making MP3 from my own music is completely legal.
Now, making those MP3s available for public download (what you call trading) happens to be a copyright violation. But making the CD tracks themselves available would be exactly the same violation: there is nothing specific to MP3s here.
Come on, guys! Way, way before inebriation levels appeared in driving games such as Carmageddon, eating mold corpses in Nethack produced wonderful effects.
In fact, I know a 9-year old kid who for a couple of weeks played Nethack only to find the nearest mold, kill it, eat it, and then run around the levels.
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
That depends on what kind of information you want to store. It's easy to do for bitmaps, since what you have to store is well-defined and limited. It's practically impossible to do for word processing files, since you cannot know what additional complexity will be added to the format later. To give a crude example, if a word processor v1.0 does not understand footnotes, and v2.0 does, it's very hard to make a v1.0 program deal intellegently with a footnoted document. I don't really see a way around this.
No, it is not possible with current technology to control someone by plugging electrodes into their brain.
Does the name Jose Delgado mean anything to you?
It's not possible to control a person to the degree of, say, making him believe something or making him rob a bank. However basic stuff like pain centers, pleasure centers, fear centers, etc. is well known. If you can make somebody feel pleasure, pain, fear whenever you want, you effectively control that person.
Let me tell you, it is painful watching a 3,000+ page Word97 manuscript, the fruit of weeks of hard labor, rendered into rubbish by my customer's Word95.
Well, if your customer runs Word95, shouldn't you have checked this before spending all these weeks in Word97? Especially since you clearly spend some time rehashing in what format exactly should the document have been presented.
And I can't really see this a Word failing, too. You are asking for forward compatability -- kinda hard to realize. It's unreasonable to expect a piece of software be able to read file formats from its future versions (unless its plain-vanilla or tagged text).
And how do they know that the files traded were Metallica songs? I'll hazard a guess: they looked at the filename. Since I can call any file anything I damn well please, this doesn't seem to me good enough.
Seems like a good time to prepend "Fuck Metallica" to all my mp3 filenames and see if I get accused of trading their songs...
I don't think it will be possible to have privacy in the information age, the best we can hope for is that nobody (not even our government) will have privacy,
That's the position originally put forward by David Brin, right?
OTOH, long time ago I read a science fiction story on similar lines. In it a kind of a time machine was developed that allowed people to watch anything in the past (but not interact with it). The use of the machine was heavily restricted. A couple of guys thought this was unfair and, to put it in contemporary terms, posted the blueprints of the machine to the 'net. Well, it turned out that the machine could go no deeper than about a hundred years into the past, but it was most useful for watching what has happened a second ago -- it was a total surveilliance device -- and now everybody and his dog could easily have one. The final words of the story were: "Welcome to the new world. I hope you like living in an aquarium".
Most people would recoil in horror from this idea, but consider what kind of a society would result from this.
I have considered it, and I didn't like it one little bit. I don't think that losing one's privacy is compensated by other people losing it, too.
we may not have a choice in the matter.
And why not? Technological inevitability doesn't mean social inevitability. It has been technically feasible to control people by embedding electrodes in their brain for a fairly long time. Somehow the practice didn't become widespread.
In any case, I'm not going to stick a camera out of my bedroom window, even if I could sell the footage to somebody.
"And now, the latest spring styles of the Darth Vader-type helmets..."
Why? There could be a lot of fruitful discussion of morality and ethics. You can persuade other people that your moral system is better -- it has happened often enough.
Everyone do as you please. If I kill and rape*, that's merely because my beliefs differ from yours.
You are mixing up two things. One is moral justification. The other one is consequences in the real world. I may kill a person because in my moral system he had to die. That doesn't mean that the society will not catch me and hang me from the nearest lamppost. One is nor really related to another.
The question that we're discussing is whether there is "objective", absolute good and evil, or they are just social constructs, artifacts of human mind.
Certainly I do not, and should not, be able to enforce my moral values on you. That's something for a court of law to decide. I can, however, make an argument for a certain course of action
Well, the court of law decides whether certain rules were broken. Whether these rules are connected with morality is a separate question and not a simple one at that. As to the argument for your point of view, of course you can make it. I was not saying that you should not argue your point of view -- it's just that there are people who find it hard to believe that somebody else could think differently than they do...
don't have the knowledge or authority to decide on legal issues
Since when has this stopped anyone, courts included?
I can only speak from a moral point of view,
Your own, I presume. So if you were running Napster, you would honor requests for blocking listings. Fine. Of course, other people will not necessarily have the same set of morals as you do. I have no problems with people who think that what Napster does in morally repugnant. I do have problems with people who think that because they believe so, everybody else should act according to their beliefs.
This is a normal civil suit, right? So it should be appealable. Generally, Circuit Courts tend to show less cluelessness than lower courts. So there is still (some) hope.
Does anybody know if MP3.com plans to appeal? Of course, barring settlement, they don't have much choice -- the decision, if upheld, will bankrupt them and close them down...
Napster may not be "guilty" of anything. But a very good case can be made that Napster should stop listing songs upon request by the copyright owner.
I don't understand. If Napster is not guilty of anything, why should it listen to RIAA? Out of courtesy? That's a bit too much to ask. Out of a moral sense? Well, it's hard to talk about the morals of a corporation, but they are its own business. Because it legally has to? Well, that's the question being asked right now.
Small businesses cannot afford to operate under the conditions imposed by UCITA
And why not? UCITA gives a large stick to the big software companies, but nothing says they have to use it all the time.
The normal rules of the market still apply: a company that fucks over its customers will soon find out that it has no customers. Obviously, the software companies will not go around switching off their product right and left -- they still want to sell it, right?
UCITA does change the balance of power between producers and consumers of software, but this change in the balance does not automatically mean that all consumers will be nailed to the cross as soon as it passes.
Napster plays an active role in the trading of mp3s: the filenames are listed on their servers
So, on the basis of a filename you are willing to make conclusions whether copying the contents is a copyright violation?
And I still don't see what Napster is guilty of. It provides information that makes it easy to commit copyright violations. So what? Anarchist's Cookbook provides information that makes it easy to make bombs. A chemistry textbook provides information that makes it easy to make poison gas.
Napster is sued for the sole reason that it can be sued. The correct defendant should be the users, but it's obvious that going after the users is not going to do any good, money-wise or public-relations-wise.
Besides, what about Usenet? There is a huge load of copyrighted material (most of it porn) that's floating through Usenet every day. So what about the machines that carry news -- shouldn't they install filters, too?
You didn't look at post I was replying to. The original poster said:
We need a system where everyone is equalized, and which would prohibit anyone from being lower or higher than others.
and this is much more than the abolishment of intellectual property which you advocate. This is not about property any more, but rather about whether some people are/can be better than other people.
And your "Digital Socialism" is basically abolishment of copyright, correct? This subject has been rehased many many times, especially in debated between RMS and his opponents.
Are you arguing that whoever got convicted of a criminal offence should not have any rights forever? You know, eternal damnation? Probably easier and cheaper to shoot them after the verdict, then.
Now it is my belief that anyone who engages in any criminal acts should not be praised for what they did, and they certainly shouldn't be allowed to make any money from it.
As to the praise, you seem to have a huge amount of trust in the current law system. Whom I praise depends on my own moral value, not on what the law says. America's founding fathers, for example, clearly were criminals from the British justice system's point of view.
Speaking of money, it's reasonable to prohibit making money from the actual crime. Not that Mitnick made a lot of money (any?) from it. But you want to prohibit a person to use skills which he used in the commission of a crime. That's different, isn't it?
Are you saying that anybody ever convicted of hacking should never be allowed to come near a computer for the rest of their lives? Should thieves be prohibited from using their hands? Should we gouge out the eyes of voyers?
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite. So what is it?
I believe that you have a long hard inflexible object stuffed up your ass. Mitnick is not making money off his crimes. He is making money off his computers skills which at some point in his life he used for criminal ends.
The problem with you is that you think that anybody who was convicted of a crime is not a person any more.
let's say that some turkey writes a program that enables anyone to transfer this obviously illegal material to anyone else in the world instantaneously, furthering the 'theft' of your ideas, per se. You'd be pretty fscking pissed, right?
You mean ftp, right? We should all go and sue everybody whose code ever got into any ftp software. Or maybe you mean Usenet? That's even better -- let's sue all sites that carry news. Or maybe you mean the web -- you know, this newfangled way to "transfer material to anyone else in the world instantaneously"? Then we can sue AOL (current owners of Netscape) and Microsoft -- woo-hoo! We'll be coming into some serious money!
And, of course, it does nothing about the man-in-the-middle attack.
Yes, it does. The man-in-the-middle can't re-generate the signal fast enough. Have a look at this for more detail.
You don't understand what the man-in-the-middle attack is.
Alice intitiates a communication with Bob. Unknown to her, Mallory inserts himself into the communication channel and replies to her telling her he is Bob. In the absence of authentication, Alice communicates with Mallory believing him to be Bob. Simultaneously (or later, doesn't really matter) Mallory initiates a communication with Bob, telling him he is Alice. Mallory may or may not pass Alice's messages to Bob -- it's up to him.
I looked at the reference you supplied. It talks about eavesdropping: using a beam splitter to listen (or, actually, watch) the communication. This has nothing to do with the man-in-the-middle attack.
This was news at least half a year ago. IIRC a couple of Brits already implemented a "quantum-secure" communication channel, if only a mile or so in length. There are some problems with it being used for long distances, though.
In any case, this just gives you eavesdropping-proof communication channels. There are plenty of crypto protocols which work fine when a third party is listening. And, of course, it does nothing about the man-in-the-middle attack.
So: old news, tasty geeky titbit, little practical applications.
I submit that one obtains two main benefits from going to college: social interaction with other people, access to facilities.
I disagree. First of all, if you are talking about going to college as opposed to not going, then I would argue that the main benefit is intellectual stimulation: your brain is forced to learn/understand stuff and that's good for it. The key word (when speaking about colleges) is "forced" -- sure, you can learn the same stuff by yourself in half time, but people in general are too lazy to do it without a big stick (e.g. a project deadline) hanging over them.
Second, if your are talking about going to a first-rank college as opposed to a fifth-rank college, then IMHO the main benefit is the quality of people around you. I know that IQ tests (like SAT) are not perfect, but so far nobody has come up with anything better. And I don't think anybody wants to dispute that an average student at MIT is way smarter than an average student at Bumfuck, South Dakota community college.
The requirement reeks of elitism and discrimination against those who do not have the opportunity to take review courses or other such techniques to artifically increase a person's score
Highly doubtful. [brag] I've never taken any review courses "or other such techniques", but in all three standardized tests that I passed I scored in the 99% percentile. [/brag] Does it prove that I am very smart? No. All it proves is that I am very good at taking standardized tests. Review courses, as far as I've heard, can help somewhat but they are not going to increase your score by 50%.
Now, what about color printers embedding hidden codes?
Wasn't it color copiers? Consumer-level ink-jet doesn't really have enough resolution for all the dirty tricks.
Or your ISP selling your browsing habits?
I am unaware of any. I think that anytime an ISP tries to market the 'net access logs, a huge outcry will result.
What about doubleclick consolidating cookies with real world users?
What about it? They own the data, they can cross-reference it all they want. The problem is not doubleclick, the problem is ownership (or lack thereof) of personal information.
Why does the NY Times require me to sign in? Or for that matter, dozens of other websites?
Doh! Cause it's their site. They are under no obligation to let anybody in. You don't like it, don't go there. Or are you arguing for the younger RMS habits (who, as the story goes, went around the network forcing all the users' passwords to be the same -- on the Thou Shall Not Hide Any Information principle)?
Where is the outrage over the HTTP standard being encoded to tell the next website you visit where you came from
And why the outrage? This doesn't look like a huge threat to privacy. There are a lot of more important things.
But what about going after the root of the problem - marketing and insufficient legal protections?
I wonder what you propose to do about marketing -- outlaw it, maybe?
And insufficient legal protections for what? Privacy? That's a good thing, but has to be done carefully and precisely. I myself favor introducing property rights over personal information: you have unalienable (can't sell it) copyright to your own personal info. Anybody who collects such info automatically gets a license to use it, but not to transfer it (otherwise you couldn't e.g. take pictures of people in the streets or log IP traffic).
I think you're making the (incorrect) assumption that easy to use means simple.
The task itself imposes the minimum level of complexity. Bad user interface can increase the complexity that the user has to deal with, but even the best user interface can never decrease complexity below what the task demands.
In fact, it's rather dangerous to make complex tasks appear simple. Clicking buttons without understanding what's happening can lead to Bad Things Happening (tm) as many NT administrators have found out.
It's legal to have the MP3's if you own the album, right?
Actually, I believe one of our more recent "loves" (DMCA) will tell you otherwise.
Actually, no, you're wrong. The standard CDs are not encrypted in any way and so do not fall under DMCA. Under the "fair use" provisions it's completely legal to make copies for your personal use, including in different formats such as MP3. It's only the distribution that's illegal.
i'm worried about the device trying to be a full featured computer. The palmOS is so successful because it's an organizer that can function like a computer... WindowsCE (and from the looks of pocketPC we're in for more of the same) is a computer that can act like an organizer.
Why is it that people assume that whatever can fit in their pocket can never be more than a glorified phonebook? Palm, being first and very simple, taught people not to expect much from a PDA and now everybody is worried (!) that a PDA might do more than what they are used to.
You may want nothing more than a very basic organizer. But why do you think that all other people are the same? I, for example, don't want an organizer. I want a computer that happens to fit in my pocket. Provided that it's small enough and its battery will last at least for the whole day, I want it to do as much as possible, starting from twiddling a spreadsheet to listening to MP3s.
it would be cool to be able to switch to another tty on my palm and start some hacking
No, it wouldn't. Remember that there is no keyboard. It's very doubtful that CLI is a good interface for a PDA. It should be there, "just in case", but user-interface-wise a PDA is radically different from a desktop.
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Stealing MP3s is illegal. Get over it.
No, creating the MP3 is illegal. Trading it is an issue after the fact.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
MP3 is nothing but a file format. Provided I have a CD I have a perfect right (acknowledged by courts and basically everybody except for RIAA) to make MP3s off the CD tracks and use these MP3s -- at home, at work, in the car -- wherever I want. Making MP3 from my own music is completely legal.
Now, making those MP3s available for public download (what you call trading) happens to be a copyright violation. But making the CD tracks themselves available would be exactly the same violation: there is nothing specific to MP3s here.
Kaa
Come on, guys! Way, way before inebriation levels appeared in driving games such as Carmageddon, eating mold corpses in Nethack produced wonderful effects.
In fact, I know a 9-year old kid who for a couple of weeks played Nethack only to find the nearest mold, kill it, eat it, and then run around the levels.
Kaa
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
That depends on what kind of information you want to store. It's easy to do for bitmaps, since what you have to store is well-defined and limited. It's practically impossible to do for word processing files, since you cannot know what additional complexity will be added to the format later. To give a crude example, if a word processor v1.0 does not understand footnotes, and v2.0 does, it's very hard to make a v1.0 program deal intellegently with a footnoted document. I don't really see a way around this.
Kaa
No, it is not possible with current technology to control someone by plugging electrodes into their brain.
Does the name Jose Delgado mean anything to you?
It's not possible to control a person to the degree of, say, making him believe something or making him rob a bank. However basic stuff like pain centers, pleasure centers, fear centers, etc. is well known. If you can make somebody feel pleasure, pain, fear whenever you want, you effectively control that person.
Kaa
Let me tell you, it is painful watching a 3,000+ page Word97 manuscript, the fruit of weeks of hard labor, rendered into rubbish by my customer's Word95.
Well, if your customer runs Word95, shouldn't you have checked this before spending all these weeks in Word97? Especially since you clearly spend some time rehashing in what format exactly should the document have been presented.
And I can't really see this a Word failing, too. You are asking for forward compatability -- kinda hard to realize. It's unreasonable to expect a piece of software be able to read file formats from its future versions (unless its plain-vanilla or tagged text).
Kaa
And how do they know that the files traded were Metallica songs? I'll hazard a guess: they looked at the filename. Since I can call any file anything I damn well please, this doesn't seem to me good enough.
Seems like a good time to prepend "Fuck Metallica" to all my mp3 filenames and see if I get accused of trading their songs...
Kaa
I don't think it will be possible to have privacy in the information age, the best we can hope for is that nobody (not even our government) will have privacy,
That's the position originally put forward by
David Brin, right?
OTOH, long time ago I read a science fiction story on similar lines. In it a kind of a time machine was developed that allowed people to watch anything in the past (but not interact with it). The use of the machine was heavily restricted. A couple of guys thought this was unfair and, to put it in contemporary terms, posted the blueprints of the machine to the 'net. Well, it turned out that the machine could go no deeper than about a hundred years into the past, but it was most useful for watching what has happened a second ago -- it was a total surveilliance device -- and now everybody and his dog could easily have one. The final words of the story were: "Welcome to the new world. I hope you like living in an aquarium".
Most people would recoil in horror from this idea, but consider what kind of a society would result from this.
I have considered it, and I didn't like it one little bit. I don't think that losing one's privacy is compensated by other people losing it, too.
we may not have a choice in the matter.
And why not? Technological inevitability doesn't mean social inevitability. It has been technically feasible to control people by embedding electrodes in their brain for a fairly long time. Somehow the practice didn't become widespread.
In any case, I'm not going to stick a camera out of my bedroom window, even if I could sell the footage to somebody.
"And now, the latest spring styles of the Darth Vader-type helmets..."
Kaa
So according to you, all morality is relative
Morality is relative, yes.
There's no room for a discussion of ethics
Why? There could be a lot of fruitful discussion of morality and ethics. You can persuade other people that your moral system is better -- it has happened often enough.
Everyone do as you please. If I kill and rape*, that's merely because my beliefs differ from yours.
You are mixing up two things. One is moral justification. The other one is consequences in the real world. I may kill a person because in my moral system he had to die. That doesn't mean that the society will not catch me and hang me from the nearest lamppost. One is nor really related to another.
The question that we're discussing is whether there is "objective", absolute good and evil, or they are just social constructs, artifacts of human mind.
Certainly I do not, and should not, be able to enforce my moral values on you. That's something for a court of law to decide. I can, however, make an argument for a certain course of action
Well, the court of law decides whether certain rules were broken. Whether these rules are connected with morality is a separate question and not a simple one at that. As to the argument for your point of view, of course you can make it. I was not saying that you should not argue your point of view -- it's just that there are people who find it hard to believe that somebody else could think differently than they do...
Kaa
don't have the knowledge or authority to decide on legal issues
Since when has this stopped anyone, courts included?
I can only speak from a moral point of view,
Your own, I presume. So if you were running Napster, you would honor requests for blocking listings. Fine. Of course, other people will not necessarily have the same set of morals as you do. I have no problems with people who think that what Napster does in morally repugnant. I do have problems with people who think that because they believe so, everybody else should act according to their beliefs.
Kaa
This is a normal civil suit, right? So it should be appealable. Generally, Circuit Courts tend to show less cluelessness than lower courts. So there is still (some) hope.
Does anybody know if MP3.com plans to appeal? Of course, barring settlement, they don't have much choice -- the decision, if upheld, will bankrupt them and close them down...
Kaa
Napster may not be "guilty" of anything. But a very good case can be made that Napster should stop listing songs upon request by the copyright owner.
I don't understand. If Napster is not guilty of anything, why should it listen to RIAA? Out of courtesy? That's a bit too much to ask. Out of a moral sense? Well, it's hard to talk about the morals of a corporation, but they are its own business. Because it legally has to? Well, that's the question being asked right now.
Kaa
Small businesses cannot afford to operate under the conditions imposed by UCITA
And why not? UCITA gives a large stick to the big software companies, but nothing says they have to use it all the time.
The normal rules of the market still apply: a company that fucks over its customers will soon find out that it has no customers. Obviously, the software companies will not go around switching off their product right and left -- they still want to sell it, right?
UCITA does change the balance of power between producers and consumers of software, but this change in the balance does not automatically mean that all consumers will be nailed to the cross as soon as it passes.
Kaa
Napster plays an active role in the trading of mp3s: the filenames are listed on their servers
So, on the basis of a filename you are willing to make conclusions whether copying the contents is a copyright violation?
And I still don't see what Napster is guilty of. It provides information that makes it easy to commit copyright violations. So what? Anarchist's Cookbook provides information that makes it easy to make bombs. A chemistry textbook provides information that makes it easy to make poison gas.
Napster is sued for the sole reason that it can be sued. The correct defendant should be the users, but it's obvious that going after the users is not going to do any good, money-wise or public-relations-wise.
Besides, what about Usenet? There is a huge load of copyrighted material (most of it porn) that's floating through Usenet every day. So what about the machines that carry news -- shouldn't they install filters, too?
Kaa
You didn't look at post I was replying to. The original poster said:
We need a system where everyone is equalized, and which would prohibit anyone from being lower or higher than others.
and this is much more than the abolishment of intellectual property which you advocate. This is not about property any more, but rather about whether some people are/can be better than other people.
And your "Digital Socialism" is basically abolishment of copyright, correct? This subject has been rehased many many times, especially in debated between RMS and his opponents.
Kaa
That's right, he was a criminal, pure and simple.
So? I don't see your point.
Are you arguing that whoever got convicted of a criminal offence should not have any rights forever? You know, eternal damnation? Probably easier and cheaper to shoot them after the verdict, then.
Now it is my belief that anyone who engages in any criminal acts should not be praised for what they did, and they certainly shouldn't be allowed to make any money from it.
As to the praise, you seem to have a huge amount of trust in the current law system. Whom I praise depends on my own moral value, not on what the law says. America's founding fathers, for example, clearly were criminals from the British justice system's point of view.
Speaking of money, it's reasonable to prohibit making money from the actual crime. Not that Mitnick made a lot of money (any?) from it. But you want to prohibit a person to use skills which he used in the commission of a crime. That's different, isn't it?
Are you saying that anybody ever convicted of hacking should never be allowed to come near a computer for the rest of their lives? Should thieves be prohibited from using their hands? Should we gouge out the eyes of voyers?
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite. So what is it?
I believe that you have a long hard inflexible object stuffed up your ass. Mitnick is not making money off his crimes. He is making money off his computers skills which at some point in his life he used for criminal ends.
The problem with you is that you think that anybody who was convicted of a crime is not a person any more.
Kaa
let's say that some turkey writes a program that enables anyone to transfer this obviously illegal material to anyone else in the world instantaneously, furthering the 'theft' of your ideas, per se. You'd be pretty fscking pissed, right?
You mean ftp, right? We should all go and sue everybody whose code ever got into any ftp software. Or maybe you mean Usenet? That's even better -- let's sue all sites that carry news. Or maybe you mean the web -- you know, this newfangled way to "transfer material to anyone else in the world instantaneously"? Then we can sue AOL (current owners of Netscape) and Microsoft -- woo-hoo! We'll be coming into some serious money!
Kaa
I think everyone's just greedy. We need a system where everyone is equalized, and which would prohibit anyone from being lower or higher than others.
Ah, the classic "cut everybody down to the lowest common denominator" idea, aka socialism (communism to the West).
Sorry to disappoint you, but it has been tried. Didn't work all that well. The price of the experiment has been quite high, though.
Kaa
And, of course, it does nothing about the man-in-the-middle attack.
Yes, it does. The man-in-the-middle can't re-generate the signal fast enough. Have a look at this for more detail.
You don't understand what the man-in-the-middle attack is.
Alice intitiates a communication with Bob. Unknown to her, Mallory inserts himself into the communication channel and replies to her telling her he is Bob. In the absence of authentication, Alice communicates with Mallory believing him to be Bob. Simultaneously (or later, doesn't really matter) Mallory initiates a communication with Bob, telling him he is Alice. Mallory may or may not pass Alice's messages to Bob -- it's up to him.
I looked at the reference you supplied. It talks about eavesdropping: using a beam splitter to listen (or, actually, watch) the communication. This has nothing to do with the man-in-the-middle attack.
Kaa
This was news at least half a year ago. IIRC a couple of Brits already implemented a "quantum-secure" communication channel, if only a mile or so in length. There are some problems with it being used for long distances, though.
In any case, this just gives you eavesdropping-proof communication channels. There are plenty of crypto protocols which work fine when a third party is listening. And, of course, it does nothing about the man-in-the-middle attack.
So: old news, tasty geeky titbit, little practical applications.
Kaa
I submit that one obtains two main benefits from going to college: social interaction with other people, access to facilities.
I disagree. First of all, if you are talking about going to college as opposed to not going, then I would argue that the main benefit is intellectual stimulation: your brain is forced to learn/understand stuff and that's good for it. The key word (when speaking about colleges) is "forced" -- sure, you can learn the same stuff by yourself in half time, but people in general are too lazy to do it without a big stick (e.g. a project deadline) hanging over them.
Second, if your are talking about going to a first-rank college as opposed to a fifth-rank college, then IMHO the main benefit is the quality of people around you. I know that IQ tests (like SAT) are not perfect, but so far nobody has come up with anything better. And I don't think anybody wants to dispute that an average student at MIT is way smarter than an average student at Bumfuck, South Dakota community college.
The requirement reeks of elitism and discrimination against those who do not have the opportunity to take review courses or other such techniques to artifically increase a person's score
Highly doubtful. [brag] I've never taken any review courses "or other such techniques", but in all three standardized tests that I passed I scored in the 99% percentile. [/brag] Does it prove that I am very smart? No. All it proves is that I am very good at taking standardized tests. Review courses, as far as I've heard, can help somewhat but they are not going to increase your score by 50%.
Kaa
Prove that the Pentium III processor really does make the Internet more fun
You can run more pr0n movies simultaneously?
Kaa
Now, what about color printers embedding hidden codes?
Wasn't it color copiers? Consumer-level ink-jet doesn't really have enough resolution for all the dirty tricks.
Or your ISP selling your browsing habits?
I am unaware of any. I think that anytime an ISP tries to market the 'net access logs, a huge outcry will result.
What about doubleclick consolidating cookies with real world users?
What about it? They own the data, they can cross-reference it all they want. The problem is not doubleclick, the problem is ownership (or lack thereof) of personal information.
Why does the NY Times require me to sign in? Or for that matter, dozens of other websites?
Doh! Cause it's their site. They are under no obligation to let anybody in. You don't like it, don't go there. Or are you arguing for the younger RMS habits (who, as the story goes, went around the network forcing all the users' passwords to be the same -- on the Thou Shall Not Hide Any Information principle)?
Where is the outrage over the HTTP standard being encoded to tell the next website you visit where you came from
And why the outrage? This doesn't look like a huge threat to privacy. There are a lot of more important things.
But what about going after the root of the problem - marketing and insufficient legal protections?
I wonder what you propose to do about marketing -- outlaw it, maybe?
And insufficient legal protections for what? Privacy? That's a good thing, but has to be done carefully and precisely. I myself favor introducing property rights over personal information: you have unalienable (can't sell it) copyright to your own personal info. Anybody who collects such info automatically gets a license to use it, but not to transfer it (otherwise you couldn't e.g. take pictures of people in the streets or log IP traffic).
Kaa
I think you're making the (incorrect) assumption that easy to use means simple.
The task itself imposes the minimum level of complexity. Bad user interface can increase the complexity that the user has to deal with, but even the best user interface can never decrease complexity below what the task demands.
In fact, it's rather dangerous to make complex tasks appear simple. Clicking buttons without understanding what's happening can lead to Bad Things Happening (tm) as many NT administrators have found out.
Kaa
It's legal to have the MP3's if you own the album, right?
Actually, I believe one of our more recent "loves" (DMCA) will tell you otherwise.
Actually, no, you're wrong. The standard CDs are not encrypted in any way and so do not fall under DMCA. Under the "fair use" provisions it's completely legal to make copies for your personal use, including in different formats such as MP3. It's only the distribution that's illegal.
Kaa
i'm worried about the device trying to be a full featured computer. The palmOS is so successful because it's an organizer that can function like a computer... WindowsCE (and from the looks of pocketPC we're in for more of the same) is a computer that can act like an organizer.
Why is it that people assume that whatever can fit in their pocket can never be more than a glorified phonebook? Palm, being first and very simple, taught people not to expect much from a PDA and now everybody is worried (!) that a PDA might do more than what they are used to.
You may want nothing more than a very basic organizer. But why do you think that all other people are the same? I, for example, don't want an organizer. I want a computer that happens to fit in my pocket. Provided that it's small enough and its battery will last at least for the whole day, I want it to do as much as possible, starting from twiddling a spreadsheet to listening to MP3s.
it would be cool to be able to switch to another tty on my palm and start some hacking
No, it wouldn't. Remember that there is no keyboard. It's very doubtful that CLI is a good interface for a PDA. It should be there, "just in case", but user-interface-wise a PDA is radically different from a desktop.
Kaa