the First Amendment makes it impossible to prohibit criticism of software (there's an even longer line of cases on that).
Bzzz, sorry, wrong answer. The First Amendment protects your free speech rights from the government and only from the government. You can perfectly well waive your rights to speak of something under a contract (NDA is a very common example). The sequence is as follows:
> You agree to a license which, among other things, says "I agree not to discuss this software".
> You go to Usenet and post an article saying "This software sucks"
> You are sued for breach of contract: you agreed to do something, you broke your promise, the counterparty suffered damages because of this. Where does First Amendment come into this?
standardized testing is a poor indicator of value/intelligence/leadership
Compared to what?
Yes, deep, personal knowledge of the applicant's strengths and weaknesses is to be preferred, but is not realistic in the context.
I won't even get into the issues of what does 'value' or 'intelligence' mean...
if they're still bent on using tests (an ultimately doomed approach) instead of interviewing potential students
I don't believe reliance on interviews will work out well. Interviews have many major problems, including:
> What if a reviewer is a brainless twit? > What if a reviewer has a major hangover today? (but did not have one yesterday?) > Out of two equally valuable/intelligent/etc. persons one of whom looks like [non-petrified:)] Natalie Portman, and another one is a fat pasty-faced clumsy stuttering geek -- who is going to be admitted?
etc. etc. Basically, interviewing measures the (admittedly important) skill of making other people take a liking to you. This is a far cry from intelligence.
The distinction between "human interface" and "programming language" is so blurry as to be meaningless.
Maybe to you -- I still see them as separate realms. Yes, there are links between the two -- like UNIX command shells -- but even then I would argue that these shells are just two-faced tools: one face is that of a command-line interface, and another face is that of a programming language.
First of all, 'language' is a very wide concept, almost so wide as to be meaningless. I could call the correct sequence of buttons on my VCR a language and still have some justification in doing so. For the purposes of our discussion I would define a language as a set of symbols and accompanying them rules that can be used by humans to express complicated concepts. Of course this is also very vague, but will serve its purpose.
I would probably say that the two major qualities dividing interfaces and languages are complexity and responsiveness. Interfaces are much more simple and more limited than languages. Besides, interfaces are oriented towards the command -> response -> next command -> next response type of operation, while languages work in a different way (formulate -> solve -> implement -> test -> etc.).
Consider this. When you are using a computer as an interface, you, in a sense, directly control it like you would control a car: open this window, delete this file, connect to that host. When you use a programming language to solve a problem, what you do is express a solution to the problem, and the computer is just an incidental tool that happens to execute this program.
and how it [portsentry] responds to a portscan, which is to drop the route to the attacker completely by appending the ipchains ruleset.
Not to defend your PHB, but a lot of people consider this to be a misfeature. The problem is with DOS by spoofed attacks. If you don't want host B to talk to host A and A is running portsentry, just spoof attack from B to A.
Nmap, for example, has an option to spoof attack source and warns about the potential side effects on portsentry.
Every programmer knows that computer languages are one form of human-computer interface.
No, that's not true except in a trivial sense. A programming language is not an interface, it it rather a framework and a set of tools for structuring the problem and the solution. That's a very big difference and probably the one that confused Tog.
Programming languages are not (and should not be) designed to provide a better interface to the machine. They are designed to make problem solving easy, or at least easier. Good languages, essentially, provide a useful framework for thinking about the problem domain and supply you with proper tools to express the solution you have found. None of this has anything to do with human-computer interface.
There is a book called "Permutation City", a sci-fi novel, that basically explores what would happen if a person's mind could be copied to software. A tasting: if you are a "copy", do you care about the speed of hardware on which you run? What about try -> switch off -> reload -> try ->... situations? If you are a "copy" and you can redefine your mind through system calls ("increase_current_happiness(42)"), what is "you"? How would you feel talking to a "copy" of yourself? If you fork() a copy to explore both alternatives, is is OK to terminate (kill?) the copy that went down the branch you liked less?
The book is not great fiction, but recommended for mind stimulation.
There certainly is no evidence that people think in their native language at all, and considerable evidence agsinst the idea
That's weird. I'm bilingual and I know that sometimes I think specifically in one language, sometimes I think in the other one, and sometimes I think in kinda 'mental symbols' that are later verbalized in one of these languages.
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you? Disk space is very cheap now and the general public has no need to know. So I see no reason why stores would not keep a database cross-indexing credit card numbers and CDs serial numbers. Easy as pie.
[people] They really don't need to play mp3s and watch movies. They want an easy way to manage their calendar and contacts.
Speak for yourself. I, for example, don't need to manage my calendar and all the phone numbers I need fit in my watch. I *do* want to play MP3s and watch movies. If only there was a decent OS for hardware like Casio's...
Generally public broadcasting of stuff without compensation to the authors is prohibited.
I thought that applied only if you are commercial. If you can show that you get no monetary gain, you can broadcast all you like. Am I wrong about this?
...not that is it reasonably low-powered. The interesting thing is that Transmeta is actively trying to prevent people from writing in its native instruction set, thus creating historic compatibility problems. If successful, Transmeta will be able to change chip architecture, instruction set, etc. etc. without breaking any existing applications.
This is a big thing -- consider that PIIIs and Athlons still have to be able to pretend they are 8088 processors. If you believes that does not put a huge cramp in their style, think again. If Crusoe manages to be free from this limitation, it could evolve much faster than the usual CPUs. That could be a decisive advantage several years down the road.
These things are fats enough to run something larger. Why not run lux with KDE or windows 2000. All you need is some additional applications to provide alternative means for input.
That's what Microsoft thought, and look where it got it (WinCE).
Unfortunately, the user interface on a palmtop with a small screen necessarily has to be very different form the user interface for a desktop. It is fairly obvious, but people for some reason have a hard time realizing this. Putting, say, Gnome on a palmtop is NOT going to work.
Now, let's just hope the Palm OS will run on one of these...
Palm OS is a bit too simple-minded for me. Something like EPOC32 would be much better.
Now that there's a low-power CPU available,
Sorry to burst your bubble, but low-power CPUs have been available for a long time. StrongARM, for example, draws *less* power than Crusoe. The Crusoe's claim to fame is that it is both low-powered and x86 compatible.
I'd love to see a Palm or Visor with a Crusoe CPU, a colour screen, MP3 playback and recording, WAP,
Take a look at Casio E-105. If there were a way to purge WinCE from it and load a decent OS, it would be a great piece of hardware (and yes, you can plug hard drives and digital cameras into it).
The beast still running on 2 AAA batteries that I'd change once a month.
Not going to happen in the near future. The CPU is *not* the main power drain in a hand-held. The color screen is.
A Web pad -- an appliance for browsing the web... Okay, I can see the market for those. But then: price from $500 to $1000??? Battery life of 4-5 hours only???
Sorry guys, you have to do better than that. A web pad should cost below $200 and run for the whole day (~12 hours) to be viable (IMHO and YMMV of course).
And here is an example (quote from the datasheet for the 400MHz processor):
Other than having execution hardware for logical, arithmetic, shift, and floating point instructions, as in conventional processors, the Crusoe Processor has very distinctive features from traditional x86 designs. To ease the translation process from x86 to the core VLIW instruction set, the hardware generates the same condition codes as conven-tional x86 processors and operates on the same 80-bit floating point numbers. Also, the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) has the same protection bits and address mapping as x86 processors. The software component of this solution is used to emulate all other features of the x86 architecture.
So all the people that were thinking about 128-bit floats are SOL. I think that emulating non-x86 architectures on Crusoe is going to be possible, but noticeably harder and slower than x86.
And here is an example (quote from the datasheet for the 400MHz processor):
Other than having execution hardware for logical, arithmetic, shift, and floating point instructions, as in conventional processors, the Crusoe Processor has very distinctive features from traditional x86 designs. To ease the translation process from x86 to the core VLIW instruction set, the hardware generates the same condition codes as conven-tional x86 processors and operates on the same 80-bit floating point numbers. Also, the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) has the same protection bits and address mapping as x86 processors. The software component of this solution is used to emulate all other features of the x86 architecture.
So all the people that were thinking about 128-bit floats are SOL. I think that emulating non-x86 architectures on Crusoe is going to be possible, but noticeably harder and slower than x86.
Personally, I can't see why the owner of a registered trademark shouldn't be allowed to selectively decide who may or may not use the trademark for their own pursuits.
He can. You can give permissions to use your trademark to anybody you like as often as you like. What you should NOT do is selectively prosecute *unauthorized* use. In other words, you can allow Alice to use your trademark, but if both Bob and Charlie use it without your permission, going only after Bob and ignoring Charlie will weaken the trademark.
>If somebody shoots and kills me, that is power over me.
Not power over you, power applied to you.
Yes, power over you. If you were going to find a cure for cancer, get married and raise kids, finally debug that piece of code -- now you cannot, you are dead. That IS power over you.
If they did it because you wouldn't give them what they wanted, who retains the power?
Imagine yourself in a refugee camp in Mozambique. A soldier walks by, he notices your blanket and takes a fancy to it. You refuse to give it up, so the soldier shoots you and takes the blanket. Who retains the power?
Funny how you would mention this the day after MLK day, he sure lost a lot of power after he died, same for Jesus.
Well, first of all Jesus is a special case, isn't he? I don't think Christianity considers him dead. Second, you are confusing a person and his ideas. MLK as a person had no power after he died. His ideas, on the other hand, grew by his death.
We're all gonna die anyway, if I get to choose when and for what, that's power.
It depends on the choices that you have. If you break your leg on a hunting trip into the Canadian Northern Territories and have no way of communicating, your choices are: (1) Freeze/starve to death; (2) Shoot yourself. Where is power here?
Money is power. Control the money and you control the power.
Yes and no. Money could and often does convert to power, but there are plenty of exceptions and special cases. Three points, cameos if you wish, to illustrate:
(a) In the former Soviet Union, and, I assume, most of the so-called "communist" countries money did not lead to power. One got power basically by climbing in the party/government bureaucracy and not by accumulating cash (not to mention bank accounts). Generally, the less free (politically) the country is, the less important is money.
(b) Tobacco companies were (are) very rich. And what did it buy them besides a bunch of lawsuits and a gaggle of very expensive lawyers?
(c) "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun". There are more direct and more efficient ways to power than by money. If you don't live in the West (USA/Japan/Western Europe) you should be very much aware of this.
Information, alone, is actually pretty valueless.
What do you mean, alone? If somebody knows that I bought a can of soda today at the cafeteria, that is not very useful. If somebody has a database of all my purchases (think credit cards), it's very easy to build my profile and describe my lifestyle pretty accurately. Knowing that I, being married, bought a pack of condoms during a business trip can be quite effective for leaning on me for whatever reason. And no, I don't subscribe to the theory that all your actions should be what you would do if all the world were watching.
You can be as hard to exploit as -you- choose.
Yes, but there is a price. I can avoid credit cards, but I would have a lot of problems renting cars. I can avoid getting a passport, but then how do I travel abroad? I can post to Slashdot only through anonymizing proxies, but they are slow and can be a hassle.
It is possible to maintain levels of privacy and anonymity that would make it very difficult to collect info about you (short of putting a watch team on your tail), but they tend to be expensive in terms of time and effort. The great majority of people do not and will not pay the price.
How much power anyone has over you is your choice. Nobody can -make- you do anything. What -you- do is always your choice
That's a banal triviality. Yes, my muscles are under my control, so technically I only do what I want to. That is neither useful, nor interesting observation.
If you decide to always do your own thing, and never mind the consequences, then nobody in the world will ever have any power over you at all.
That statement does not have much connection to reality, does it? If somebody shoots and kills me, that is power over me. If the government decided to put me in prison, that is power over me. If a robber holds a gun to the head of my child, I will give him my PIN number -- that is also power over me.
power is an illusion created by the person you believe yourself to have power over.
Utter bullshit. First of all, there is pure physical reality power, for example, power to kill. If I shoot a gun at you and kill you, will your ghost still think it was all an illusion? If I have you locked in a cage and can feed you or let you starve, is it still an illusion?
Even setting aside all the manifestations of raw power and focusing just on persuasion, power is basically the ability to create proper stimuli (carrot or stick or both) to make you behave in the way I want. If you insist on do your own thing, and never mind the consequences, then all it means is that the stimuli were picked incorrectly (notice the side point of the value of information here?) or insufficient power was applied.
Try to think outside of the upper-middle or middle-class suburbia in the US. Imagine yourself living in, say, Uganda, and think about what power is.
It isn't the governments of the world that I fear when I protect my data. It isn't worth much to them. This will help protect it from the people who want a piece of my bank account.
Well, first of all it depends on the tendencies of your government and the size of your bank account -- some people worry more about one, and some people worry more about the other.
Second, the security of your bank account is 99% dependent on security policies of your bank that you can do zilch about (other than taking your account to another bank, that is). Remember, these are the same people who think that a social security number and a mother's maiden name authenticates a person.
Third, you usually have recourse against banks (if they lose your money, they have to make it up to you), but not against governments (if you spend a year in prison as a suspect in a criminal investigation and then let go because it wasn't you, the best you can hope for is an apology).
Fourth, you have your priorities bass-ackwards. If your bank account gets raided, all you lose is money. If a government takes a dislike to you, your problems are likely to be rather more significant.
And as to "It isn't worth much to them.", remember that governments are interested not in money, but in power. Don't think of how much money can somebody who knows your data can make. Think about how much power will he have over you.
Slashdot Mirror
This coming from a guy who doesn't supply an email address? ;>
Well, that's what the "figure out" part means.
Kaa
the First Amendment makes it impossible to prohibit criticism of software (there's an even longer line of cases on that).
Bzzz, sorry, wrong answer. The First Amendment protects your free speech rights from the government and only from the government. You can perfectly well waive your rights to speak of something under a contract (NDA is a very common example). The sequence is as follows:
> You agree to a license which, among other things, says "I agree not to discuss this software".
> You go to Usenet and post an article saying "This software sucks"
> You are sued for breach of contract: you agreed to do something, you broke your promise, the counterparty suffered damages because of this. Where does First Amendment come into this?
Kaa
Each group member is allowed to look at the robot, one at a time without taking notes.
Oh, I see. It's a visual memory test.
Kaa
standardized testing is a poor indicator of value/intelligence/leadership
:)] Natalie Portman, and another one is a fat pasty-faced clumsy stuttering geek -- who is going to be admitted?
Compared to what?
Yes, deep, personal knowledge of the applicant's strengths and weaknesses is to be preferred, but is not realistic in the context.
I won't even get into the issues of what does 'value' or 'intelligence' mean...
if they're still bent on using tests (an ultimately doomed approach) instead of interviewing potential students
I don't believe reliance on interviews will work out well. Interviews have many major problems, including:
> What if a reviewer is a brainless twit?
> What if a reviewer has a major hangover today? (but did not have one yesterday?)
> Out of two equally valuable/intelligent/etc. persons one of whom looks like [non-petrified
etc. etc. Basically, interviewing measures the (admittedly important) skill of making other people take a liking to you. This is a far cry from intelligence.
>
Kaa
Has there ever been a service that facillitates true anonymous publishing of digital works?
www.freedom.net or
www.zeroknowledge.com
They claim complete anonymity, and their credentials look good.
Kaa
The distinction between "human interface" and "programming language" is so blurry as to be meaningless.
Maybe to you -- I still see them as separate realms. Yes, there are links between the two -- like UNIX command shells -- but even then I would argue that these shells are just two-faced tools: one face is that of a command-line interface, and another face is that of a programming language.
First of all, 'language' is a very wide concept, almost so wide as to be meaningless. I could call the correct sequence of buttons on my VCR a language and still have some justification in doing so. For the purposes of our discussion I would define a language as a set of symbols and accompanying them rules that can be used by humans to express complicated concepts. Of course this is also very vague, but will serve its purpose.
I would probably say that the two major qualities dividing interfaces and languages are complexity and responsiveness. Interfaces are much more simple and more limited than languages. Besides, interfaces are oriented towards the command -> response -> next command -> next response type of operation, while languages work in a different way (formulate -> solve -> implement -> test -> etc.).
Consider this. When you are using a computer as an interface, you, in a sense, directly control it like you would control a car: open this window, delete this file, connect to that host. When you use a programming language to solve a problem, what you do is express a solution to the problem, and the computer is just an incidental tool that happens to execute this program.
Kaa
and how it [portsentry] responds to a portscan, which is to drop the route to the attacker completely by appending the ipchains ruleset.
Not to defend your PHB, but a lot of people consider this to be a misfeature. The problem is with DOS by spoofed attacks. If you don't want host B to talk to host A and A is running portsentry, just spoof attack from B to A.
Nmap, for example, has an option to spoof attack source and warns about the potential side effects on portsentry.
Kaa
Every programmer knows that computer languages are one form of human-computer interface.
No, that's not true except in a trivial sense. A programming language is not an interface, it it rather a framework and a set of tools for structuring the problem and the solution. That's a very big difference and probably the one that confused Tog.
Programming languages are not (and should not be) designed to provide a better interface to the machine. They are designed to make problem solving easy, or at least easier. Good languages, essentially, provide a useful framework for thinking about the problem domain and supply you with proper tools to express the solution you have found. None of this has anything to do with human-computer interface.
Kaa
There is a book called "Permutation City", a sci-fi novel, that basically explores what would happen if a person's mind could be copied to software. A tasting: if you are a "copy", do you care about the speed of hardware on which you run? What about try -> switch off -> reload -> try -> ... situations? If you are a "copy" and you can redefine your mind through system calls ("increase_current_happiness(42)"), what is "you"? How would you feel talking to a "copy" of yourself? If you fork() a copy to explore both alternatives, is is OK to terminate (kill?) the copy that went down the branch you liked less?
The book is not great fiction, but recommended for mind stimulation.
Kaa
There certainly is no evidence that people think in their native language at all, and considerable evidence agsinst the idea
That's weird. I'm bilingual and I know that sometimes I think specifically in one language, sometimes I think in the other one, and sometimes I think in kinda 'mental symbols' that are later verbalized in one of these languages.
Kaa
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you? Disk space is very cheap now and the general public has no need to know. So I see no reason why stores would not keep a database cross-indexing credit card numbers and CDs serial numbers. Easy as pie.
Kaa
[people] They really don't need to play mp3s and watch movies. They want an easy way to manage their calendar and contacts.
Speak for yourself. I, for example, don't need to manage my calendar and all the phone numbers I need fit in my watch. I *do* want to play MP3s and watch movies. If only there was a decent OS for hardware like Casio's...
Kaa
Generally public broadcasting of stuff without compensation to the authors is prohibited.
I thought that applied only if you are commercial. If you can show that you get no monetary gain, you can broadcast all you like. Am I wrong about this?
Kaa
what do you think would happen if they found out people were broadcasting "illegal" mp3's
And what makes you think they'll be illegal? I can perfectly well rip my CDs and broadcast them (provided I get no commercial gain), cannot I?
Kaa
...not that is it reasonably low-powered. The interesting thing is that Transmeta is actively trying to prevent people from writing in its native instruction set, thus creating historic compatibility problems. If successful, Transmeta will be able to change chip architecture, instruction set, etc. etc. without breaking any existing applications.
This is a big thing -- consider that PIIIs and Athlons still have to be able to pretend they are 8088 processors. If you believes that does not put a huge cramp in their style, think again. If Crusoe manages to be free from this limitation, it could evolve much faster than the usual CPUs. That could be a decisive advantage several years down the road.
Kaa
These things are fats enough to run something larger. Why not run lux with KDE or windows 2000. All you need is some additional applications to provide alternative means for input.
That's what Microsoft thought, and look where it got it (WinCE).
Unfortunately, the user interface on a palmtop with a small screen necessarily has to be very different form the user interface for a desktop. It is fairly obvious, but people for some reason have a hard time realizing this. Putting, say, Gnome on a palmtop is NOT going to work.
Kaa
Now, let's just hope the Palm OS will run on one of these...
Palm OS is a bit too simple-minded for me. Something like EPOC32 would be much better.
Now that there's a low-power CPU available,
Sorry to burst your bubble, but low-power CPUs have been available for a long time. StrongARM, for example, draws *less* power than Crusoe. The Crusoe's claim to fame is that it is both low-powered and x86 compatible.
I'd love to see a Palm or Visor with a Crusoe CPU, a colour screen, MP3 playback and recording, WAP,
Take a look at Casio E-105. If there were a way to purge WinCE from it and load a decent OS, it would be a great piece of hardware (and yes, you can plug hard drives and digital cameras into it).
The beast still running on 2 AAA batteries that I'd change once a month.
Not going to happen in the near future. The CPU is *not* the main power drain in a hand-held. The color screen is.
Kaa
A Web pad -- an appliance for browsing the web... Okay, I can see the market for those. But then: price from $500 to $1000??? Battery life of 4-5 hours only???
Sorry guys, you have to do better than that. A
web pad should cost below $200 and run for the whole day (~12 hours) to be viable (IMHO and YMMV of course).
Kaa
Again, some quotes from the datasheets for the processors:
for the TM5400: (the future one)
while playing a DVD: 1.8 W
while playing a MP3: 1.0 W
for the TM3120: (the current one)
while playing a DVD: 2.9 W
while playing a MP3: 1.4 W
Kaa
And here is an example (quote from the datasheet for the 400MHz processor):
Other than having execution hardware for logical, arithmetic, shift, and floating point instructions, as in conventional processors, the Crusoe Processor has very distinctive features from traditional x86 designs. To ease the translation process from x86 to the core VLIW instruction set, the hardware generates the same condition codes as conven-tional x86 processors and operates on the same 80-bit floating point numbers. Also, the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) has the same protection bits and address mapping as x86 processors. The software component of this solution is used to emulate all other features of the x86 architecture.
So all the people that were thinking about 128-bit floats are SOL. I think that emulating non-x86 architectures on Crusoe is going to be possible, but noticeably harder and slower than x86.
Kaa
And here is an example (quote from the datasheet for the 400MHz processor):
Other than having execution hardware for logical, arithmetic, shift, and floating point instructions, as in conventional processors, the Crusoe Processor has very distinctive features from traditional x86 designs. To ease the translation process from x86 to the core VLIW instruction set, the hardware generates the same condition codes as conven-tional x86 processors and operates on the same 80-bit floating point numbers. Also, the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) has the same protection bits and address mapping as x86 processors. The software component of this solution is used to emulate all other features of the x86 architecture.
So all the people that were thinking about 128-bit floats are SOL. I think that emulating non-x86 architectures on Crusoe is going to be possible, but noticeably harder and slower than x86.
Kaa
Personally, I can't see why the owner of a registered trademark shouldn't be allowed to selectively decide who may or may not use the trademark for their own pursuits.
He can. You can give permissions to use your trademark to anybody you like as often as you like. What you should NOT do is selectively prosecute *unauthorized* use. In other words, you can allow Alice to use your trademark, but if both Bob and Charlie use it without your permission, going only after Bob and ignoring Charlie will weaken the trademark.
Kaa
>If somebody shoots and kills me, that is power over me.
Not power over you, power applied to you.
Yes, power over you. If you were going to find a cure for cancer, get married and raise kids, finally debug that piece of code -- now you cannot, you are dead. That IS power over you.
If they did it because you wouldn't give them what they wanted, who retains the power?
Imagine yourself in a refugee camp in Mozambique. A soldier walks by, he notices your blanket and takes a fancy to it. You refuse to give it up, so the soldier shoots you and takes the blanket. Who retains the power?
Funny how you would mention this the day after MLK day, he sure lost a lot of power after he died, same for Jesus.
Well, first of all Jesus is a special case, isn't he? I don't think Christianity considers him dead. Second, you are confusing a person and his ideas. MLK as a person had no power after he died. His ideas, on the other hand, grew by his death.
We're all gonna die anyway, if I get to choose when and for what, that's power.
It depends on the choices that you have. If you break your leg on a hunting trip into the Canadian Northern Territories and have no way of communicating, your choices are: (1) Freeze/starve to death; (2) Shoot yourself. Where is power here?
Kaa
Money is power. Control the money and you control the power.
Yes and no. Money could and often does convert to power, but there are plenty of exceptions and special cases. Three points, cameos if you wish, to illustrate:
(a) In the former Soviet Union, and, I assume, most of the so-called "communist" countries money did not lead to power. One got power basically by climbing in the party/government bureaucracy and not by accumulating cash (not to mention bank accounts). Generally, the less free (politically) the country is, the less important is money.
(b) Tobacco companies were (are) very rich. And what did it buy them besides a bunch of lawsuits and a gaggle of very expensive lawyers?
(c) "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun". There are more direct and more efficient ways to power than by money. If you don't live in the West (USA/Japan/Western Europe) you should be very much aware of this.
Information, alone, is actually pretty valueless.
What do you mean, alone? If somebody knows that I bought a can of soda today at the cafeteria, that is not very useful. If somebody has a database of all my purchases (think credit cards), it's very easy to build my profile and describe my lifestyle pretty accurately. Knowing that I, being married, bought a pack of condoms during a business trip can be quite effective for leaning on me for whatever reason. And no, I don't subscribe to the theory that all your actions should be what you would do if all the world were watching.
You can be as hard to exploit as -you- choose.
Yes, but there is a price. I can avoid credit cards, but I would have a lot of problems renting cars. I can avoid getting a passport, but then how do I travel abroad? I can post to Slashdot only through anonymizing proxies, but they are slow and can be a hassle.
It is possible to maintain levels of privacy and anonymity that would make it very difficult to collect info about you (short of putting a watch team on your tail), but they tend to be expensive in terms of time and effort. The great majority of people do not and will not pay the price.
How much power anyone has over you is your choice. Nobody can -make- you do anything. What -you- do is always your choice
That's a banal triviality. Yes, my muscles are under my control, so technically I only do what I want to. That is neither useful, nor interesting observation.
If you decide to always do your own thing, and never mind the consequences, then nobody in the world will ever have any power over you at all.
That statement does not have much connection to reality, does it? If somebody shoots and kills me, that is power over me. If the government decided to put me in prison, that is power over me. If a robber holds a gun to the head of my child, I will give him my PIN number -- that is also power over me.
power is an illusion created by the person you believe yourself to have power over.
Utter bullshit. First of all, there is pure physical reality power, for example, power to kill. If I shoot a gun at you and kill you, will your ghost still think it was all an illusion? If I have you locked in a cage and can feed you or let you starve, is it still an illusion?
Even setting aside all the manifestations of raw power and focusing just on persuasion, power is basically the ability to create proper stimuli (carrot or stick or both) to make you behave in the way I want. If you insist on do your own thing, and never mind the consequences, then all it means is that the stimuli were picked incorrectly (notice the side point of the value of information here?) or insufficient power was applied.
Try to think outside of the upper-middle or middle-class suburbia in the US. Imagine yourself living in, say, Uganda, and think about what power is.
Kaa
It isn't the governments of the world that I fear when I protect my data. It isn't worth much to them. This will help protect it from the people who want a piece of my bank account.
Well, first of all it depends on the tendencies of your government and the size of your bank account -- some people worry more about one, and some people worry more about the other.
Second, the security of your bank account is 99% dependent on security policies of your bank that you can do zilch about (other than taking your account to another bank, that is). Remember, these are the same people who think that a social security number and a mother's maiden name authenticates a person.
Third, you usually have recourse against banks (if they lose your money, they have to make it up to you), but not against governments (if you spend a year in prison as a suspect in a criminal investigation and then let go because it wasn't you, the best you can hope for is an apology).
Fourth, you have your priorities bass-ackwards. If your bank account gets raided, all you lose is money. If a government takes a dislike to you, your problems are likely to be rather more significant.
And as to "It isn't worth much to them.", remember that governments are interested not in money, but in power. Don't think of how much money can somebody who knows your data can make. Think about how much power will he have over you.
Kaa