Thats pretty much my opinion too. The last two episodes of the TV series were just there to screw with the minds of everyone who sat through the rest of the series thinking "what a great action show", and were done as cheaply as possible with leftover scraps of film from all over the place.
Btw, you might want to update your sig, this morning I got 250,000,000 hits for b, in 0.09 seconds.
I find it amusing that your sig is "If you do not get invovled with your government, you are a dumb-ass whiner."
Its amusing because the government has long since quit caring about individual citizens. Just take a look at all the actions it taken against its own citizens over the years, usually in favor of fake "people" (corporations) or its own lust for power.
So, if you're not super-rich and buying campaign ads for your government officials, or else telling the officials what they already wanted to hear, then "getting involved" means nothing, unless you're going to run for office.
I'd vote for anyone who runs for office on the platform of "not bought by corporate interests".
The sad fact is that the false allegations are just as capable of ruining lives as the abuse itself. My home town here is currently undergoing a scandal as DNA tests for the past years are being redone, since the police lab decided it wasn't important enough to actually do the DNA testing correctly, and that swearing in court that their results matched the cops' expectations was enough for them, since they could get the bignums in "solved" cases.
Now imagine that you're the one falsely accused. Maybe your neighbor doesn't like your lawn. Or the person you cut off in the parking lot a few weeks back held a grudge. Maybe the cops are corrupt enough to have dna "evidence" done up against you. If you've got a ton of money, you get a good lawyer and manage to get off (public defense? pfff forget it), but what for? You're no longer innocent in the eyes of the public, you're the pedo who got away. It's sad that mankind has come up with crimes so horrible that the accusation alone is a permanent taint on your life, but that is how sex offenses with a minor are treated by many people.
Besides, remember that for every time a cop arrests the wrong person, the right person is out on the streets still. (Assuming that a crime has been committed in the first place.) People whine about how guilty people slip by because we're too worried about the innocents, but what happens to the guilty person when the innocent one is arrested? The case is closed, the guilty person has won.
This is convoluted, of course, since you can't copy something if you can't access it. But legislators never seemed to get that far in their reasoning.
Which in the case of DVDs is absolutely incorrect. CSS is a block encryption method, which means that if you copy a dvd block for block and maintain the position of a given byte on the disc, you never have to decrypt the data. There is nothing physically intrinsic to the original media that is required for decryption.
My understanding of the DMCA is that the anticircumvention provisions only apply to copyrighted works. Once the copyright expires, it becomes legal to circumvent the copy protection
Why, you're absolutely right. The DMCA only protects copy protection which is in use to protect copyrighted materials, which means that if the DVD consortium still uses CSS to encrypt discs in 500 years, then it will STILL be illegal to watch Die Hard in Linux.
The distinction between P2P and not-P2P is "is there a distinction between servers and clients?". IRC has servers which manage connections and get communications from one user to another. Napster had servers which catalog everyone's mp3s and tells them where to find the mp3s they want. These are not P2P.
Kazaa has no servers in the actual implementation of the protocol. It does have default IPs to check to get into the network, but you could replace these with any IP you know to be running a client and it would work just as well. All communication (search queries) in kazaa is done from client to client, over however many clients is needed to reach the destination.
Probably the distinction they will make will be between publicly-available blogging space (livejournal,deadjournal,pitas, and so on) and a personal website that is or contains a blog. This would be the easiest way, since it comes down to setting aside a few hostnames for the new search engine to crawl.
Google is a web search engine, P2P networks are a distribution mechanism.
You fail to realize that http is a perfectly good P2P protocol with a hop count of (almost always) 1 (you to the server, in the cases where no caches or proxies are in between). Just because it doesn't come with a l33t -ster name like "napster" doesn't make it any less P2P. And google operates over this p2p protocol, just like kazaa's (and the others) search engine operates over its p2p protocol.
So, you're saying that using the people which the company already owns to support it (point to ONE company with servers who does not have someone running the servers.) is "not free". By the strictest sense of the word, if you're starting a new company from scratch, sure. But guess what: Company X, with servers and a pre-existing support staff can install linux on these servers for a grand total added expense of $0, over what the company is already paying the support staff anyways.
So yeah. That's free.
The whole point is moot anyway, since in any case "Linux is free", and "Linux support is not free". They are two distinct products, just like when you buy a product, and you buy a support contract from the vendor covering that product.
Nowadays, just about everyone graduating has some kind of computer programming experience. The ability has become a commodity, programmers are a dime a dozen, especially in foreign labor pools.
So no, its not dead, its just not going to pay like it used to.
I don't want minors to receive the message that violence is trivial and even fun.
I think you're overstepping your bounds here. You don't want YOUR minors to receive this message.
I want to be sure my children understand that there are sick people out there who enjoy hurting others, and that I would be very disappointed in them if they became like that.
But no, people like you run our country and arbitrarially decide that YOUR way of teaching our kids what is right and what is wrong is somehow the best way. Just remember, its the pastor's kids who always seem to rebel in the worst ways.
Think what is silly? "Childish" TV comics? (btw, before you claim they "cripple your ability to read", try watching one subbed. I suggest Excel Saga or His and Her Circumstances)
Try watching Serial Experiments Lain. You might have interesting discussion material for your next mensa club meeting. If you have an environmentalist bent or a strong stomach, watch Arjuna. Interested in the future of relationships? Watch Chobits. Interested in the future of mankind? Watch Saishuu Heiki Kanojo/The Last Love Song on This Little Planet.
Sex and nudity aside, these titles all deal with themes that are far from "childish". Lain deals with how the internet affects everyones lives and relationships. Free access to information... everyone, everywhere connected together. Arjuna deals with a girl who is tasked to save the world, but then she discovers that the true threat is mankind itself. Chobits is the story of a not-too-distant future, where computers come in all shapes and sizes, but mostly in the form of sexy androids. What purpose is the human relationship when your lifelike android can be programmed to be the perfect mate? What about the feelings of those who reject mechanical companionship, but find there is no human left to love them (the analogous situation described by a children's book, The City Where No-One Lives in the story). Finally, the Last Love Song is about a couple learning to love each other even as the world is literally falling apart around them as war ravages the planet, kills their friends, and finally seperates them.
So yeah. Thats a lot less "childish" than most live action shows you see on TV. Imagine that, dealing with real issues, instead of creating and solving a crisis in 30 minutes (they take an hour in some time slots!).
By the way, if any of those books you read happen to have any substantiated claims about the nature of friendships on the internet, I'd love to read them.
Hear hear! I'm never going to watch those 20 HBOs and 2042 Showtimes that my cable carrier has. All these channels are just making it more expensive for me, so I'm going to demand that the cable companies drop them all!
My guess is that whoever called it "collapse stories" was thinking "Lets call this operation 'collapsing' all of the various sites stories into one list."
I can see children taught this way being utterly helpless when they can't find the video game that will teach them C++ or how to question their cell phone bill.
I've seen people brought up on traditional training that couldn't pull off either, game or no game.
Come to think of it, starting in elementary school, all of my learning has emphasized rote memorization over gathering information. Just about the only information gathering I ever did was for book reports, and later, the occasional research paper.
That's why a major new feature in Windows Server 2003 was a much-improved set of command-line tools.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"
I assure you that most of the people who laugh at windows are doing so with a very critical, cautious eye. Sure, there are a few people on COLA and/. who rant and rave without caring, but as someone who admins servers of several OSes, uses computers of several other OSes, and developed software on quite a few OSes, I've seen the best and worst of each, and everything has quite a lot that could be improvable from the user standpoint.
That, and XML configuration files for IIS.
Just one question: "Why?". XML was designed to facilitate interchange between systems. What benefit does anyone get out of this? Sure its human readable, but so are most other text based formats.
Sure, there are cryptic commands in Linux, but there are equally cryptic commands in DOS/windows. Start with "dir". Sure, its short for "directory", but imagine someone who has never used a computer before, and they want all the files in a certain place on the computer. Do you think they would ask for a "list" of files? Or a "directory" of files? Once you're in the UI, its not much better. If you use more than one version of windows you'll notice real quick that the File Explorer is completely different from version to version starting with win98 (98 worked like 95's browser with some html extensions)
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
I'll just take a moment to point out that this has been a tried and true method for several millenia now. Your example is pretty moot, since it took several revisions of windows before it could search into the text of files (without buying Microsoft Office and using its Find Fast utility)
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
Have you ever used a UI and wished that someone had added a checkbox for a feature you knew was possible? Added extra blanks in window's Find Files panel/dialog to do boolean searching? Unfortunately, when designing a UI, you're designing the limits of the human's interaction with the system. Someone said "I'll just put one blank there, therefore people can search for only one thing at a time." While the same goes for console user interfaces, things like screen real estate are no longer an issue, the only worry is if the user is willing to type the entire command.
D) The X-Windows Disaster.
Do you have a better idea? Something that works portably across many systems? Runs on a thin client over the network? Supports multiple color depths including monochrome? Extensible by modules? Operates transparently locally or remotely?
Doesn't have a per user licensing restriction? Doesn't use "foundation classes" that change every version of the compiler?
I hardly call X a disaster, when you consider its goals. I'm sorry you had to use Motif, but nowadays we get to choose from plenty of different widget libraries and languages, and can choose one we like.
E) Make
I don't know what you're doing to make using make so hard. Automake is tough, but for a single project, which you dont intend to be porting to other systems, a Makefile containing the targets, the sourcefiles, and the commands to compile each takes about 30-60 seconds of typing per target (especially with copy and paste and variables for compiler options), assuming you know how your source files fit together. If you want to do fancy stuff, buy a book. (See B. Not all wisdom is oral.)
Well, given that the "average" game is never ported to Linux, I would say that it takes an infinite amount of time...
But seriously, porting applications requires two major sets of changes. First is I/O (this includes everything - display, sound, user input, networking code, filesystem interaction). The second is process control.
For I/O, design decisions can have serious impact on the time it takes to develop a port. Are you writing your own libraries from scratch? If so, these must be ported as well. If not, are there Linux versions of these libraries available? Are there wrappers to fake availability of these libraries (eg, wine's library replacements)?
Process control is a similar situation, however, process control is fundamentally different in Windows and Linux environments (for example, last time I checked windows lacked a process-copying fork() call). If an application makes heavy use of threading and IPC, then there will be more work required in converting these to the "Unix Way" of doing things.
as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ?
Careful there, you live in a world of single mothers and laws allowing people to drop their children off at the local fire station. To claim that some scientist has some vague obligation to the child when even parents don't, is a little skewed.
Now, if you're saying that the scientist should be responsible for medical bills for the child should something go wrong, that would be understandable.
If enough people did this, it might get some attention. When arrested, you could even state on the record that you were searching for your rights which the RIAA stole from you.
Would make an interesting half-column article on the 18th page of the local section of the paper.
Obviously the idea of the cellphone charging itself by using its battery power to vibrate to recharge the battery is bunk, but that aside, there are plenty of other vibration sources. Your cellphone could just clip onto your dashboard and charge with every little bump you drive over (of course, newer suspensions would make that a little harder to do;). There are a lot of other vibration sources out there as well.
Vibration can also easily be produced from renewable resources, or as a byproduct of other processes. Imagine on the street above a subway, having a "charging table" which vibrated every few minutes as the train passed under it. Or a wind-powered system to do the same thing.
Everyone involved knows it poses health threats. Everyone has known that particles cause breathing problems ever since shortly after the industrial revolution filled the air with them. This is not news.
But guess what, the researchers who work with this stuff take steps to avoid exposure to them. This "researcher" makes it sound like scientists do crazy stuff after hours: "Dude! Guess what! Today I invented some crazy shit to coat glass with that makes it clean itself!" "Sweet! I'll go grab my wife and we can snort lines of it off her belly!" If this were really the case, I would agree with banning pretty much anything from the laboratory.
Hopefully since this report (not even qualifying as research) was funded by the ETC Group and failed to get published anywhere respectable, it will get the ignorance it deserves.
(The ETC group isn't all that bad by themselves, they just tend to get involved with stuff they shouldn't. If they stick to fighting for farmers' rights with respect to GM crops, they'd be pretty decent, but outside of the agribusiness arena, they come off as "if the technology doesn't put food in starving peoples' mouths, it is the spawn of satan and should be banned so the money can be spent on the holy pursuit of feeding the world")
Yes, the same could be said, but unlike photography where you have to take a picture of a child to make child porn, did you know that a major entertainment company once convinced a judge that your DVD player makes a copy of the DVD to play it (naturally, this copying was only authorized in authorized DVD players, using any other player was to be considered unauthorized copying, they insisted). Just keeping your nose clean means nothing when the RIAA starts to insist that because your speaker level was above 20%, you owe royalties for every one of your neighbors because they might have been able to hear your music too.
The fact is, the people in charge are so technologically incompetant that the laws they wrote are being rewritten in legal precedents as companies twist them and the weak minds of judges and juries. The DMCA could have been a great copyright protection tool. Too bad it now covers everything from Wal Mart's prices to garage door openers, a far cry from its intent. How long before the internet is illegal under the DMCA and everyone with a computer is fined for possession of a circumvention device?
So yeah. You have free will. You can choose to live your life on the straight and narrow. And you'll even get away with it as long as the MPAA, RIAA, or someone else doesn't want your money. Or you can sell your computers and live like a hermit.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats pretty much my opinion too. The last two episodes of the TV series were just there to screw with the minds of everyone who sat through the rest of the series thinking "what a great action show", and were done as cheaply as possible with leftover scraps of film from all over the place.
Btw, you might want to update your sig, this morning I got 250,000,000 hits for b, in 0.09 seconds.
I find it amusing that your sig is "If you do not get invovled with your government, you are a dumb-ass whiner."
Its amusing because the government has long since quit caring about individual citizens. Just take a look at all the actions it taken against its own citizens over the years, usually in favor of fake "people" (corporations) or its own lust for power.
So, if you're not super-rich and buying campaign ads for your government officials, or else telling the officials what they already wanted to hear, then "getting involved" means nothing, unless you're going to run for office.
I'd vote for anyone who runs for office on the platform of "not bought by corporate interests".
The sad fact is that the false allegations are just as capable of ruining lives as the abuse itself. My home town here is currently undergoing a scandal as DNA tests for the past years are being redone, since the police lab decided it wasn't important enough to actually do the DNA testing correctly, and that swearing in court that their results matched the cops' expectations was enough for them, since they could get the bignums in "solved" cases.
Now imagine that you're the one falsely accused. Maybe your neighbor doesn't like your lawn. Or the person you cut off in the parking lot a few weeks back held a grudge. Maybe the cops are corrupt enough to have dna "evidence" done up against you. If you've got a ton of money, you get a good lawyer and manage to get off (public defense? pfff forget it), but what for? You're no longer innocent in the eyes of the public, you're the pedo who got away. It's sad that mankind has come up with crimes so horrible that the accusation alone is a permanent taint on your life, but that is how sex offenses with a minor are treated by many people.
Besides, remember that for every time a cop arrests the wrong person, the right person is out on the streets still. (Assuming that a crime has been committed in the first place.) People whine about how guilty people slip by because we're too worried about the innocents, but what happens to the guilty person when the innocent one is arrested? The case is closed, the guilty person has won.
This is convoluted, of course, since you can't copy something if you can't access it. But legislators never seemed to get that far in their reasoning.
Which in the case of DVDs is absolutely incorrect. CSS is a block encryption method, which means that if you copy a dvd block for block and maintain the position of a given byte on the disc, you never have to decrypt the data. There is nothing physically intrinsic to the original media that is required for decryption.
Turn it off, no RF energy. Simple.
You pushed the power button and the screen went off and you thought it was OFF? hahaha
Next time, try taking the battery out and holding down all the buttons to try and drain the capacitors.
My understanding of the DMCA is that the anticircumvention provisions only apply to copyrighted works. Once the copyright expires, it becomes legal to circumvent the copy protection
Why, you're absolutely right. The DMCA only protects copy protection which is in use to protect copyrighted materials, which means that if the DVD consortium still uses CSS to encrypt discs in 500 years, then it will STILL be illegal to watch Die Hard in Linux.
bzzzt
The distinction between P2P and not-P2P is "is there a distinction between servers and clients?". IRC has servers which manage connections and get communications from one user to another. Napster had servers which catalog everyone's mp3s and tells them where to find the mp3s they want. These are not P2P.
Kazaa has no servers in the actual implementation of the protocol. It does have default IPs to check to get into the network, but you could replace these with any IP you know to be running a client and it would work just as well. All communication (search queries) in kazaa is done from client to client, over however many clients is needed to reach the destination.
Probably the distinction they will make will be between publicly-available blogging space (livejournal,deadjournal,pitas, and so on) and a personal website that is or contains a blog. This would be the easiest way, since it comes down to setting aside a few hostnames for the new search engine to crawl.
Google is a web search engine, P2P networks are a distribution mechanism.
You fail to realize that http is a perfectly good P2P protocol with a hop count of (almost always) 1 (you to the server, in the cases where no caches or proxies are in between). Just because it doesn't come with a l33t -ster name like "napster" doesn't make it any less P2P. And google operates over this p2p protocol, just like kazaa's (and the others) search engine operates over its p2p protocol.
So, you're saying that using the people which the company already owns to support it (point to ONE company with servers who does not have someone running the servers.) is "not free". By the strictest sense of the word, if you're starting a new company from scratch, sure. But guess what: Company X, with servers and a pre-existing support staff can install linux on these servers for a grand total added expense of $0, over what the company is already paying the support staff anyways.
So yeah. That's free.
The whole point is moot anyway, since in any case "Linux is free", and "Linux support is not free". They are two distinct products, just like when you buy a product, and you buy a support contract from the vendor covering that product.
Nowadays, just about everyone graduating has some kind of computer programming experience. The ability has become a commodity, programmers are a dime a dozen, especially in foreign labor pools.
So no, its not dead, its just not going to pay like it used to.
I don't want minors to receive the message that violence is trivial and even fun.
I think you're overstepping your bounds here. You don't want YOUR minors to receive this message.
I want to be sure my children understand that there are sick people out there who enjoy hurting others, and that I would be very disappointed in them if they became like that.
But no, people like you run our country and arbitrarially decide that YOUR way of teaching our kids what is right and what is wrong is somehow the best way. Just remember, its the pastor's kids who always seem to rebel in the worst ways.
Warning to anime fans - this one's got spoilers.
Think what is silly? "Childish" TV comics? (btw, before you claim they "cripple your ability to read", try watching one subbed. I suggest Excel Saga or His and Her Circumstances)
Try watching Serial Experiments Lain. You might have interesting discussion material for your next mensa club meeting. If you have an environmentalist bent or a strong stomach, watch Arjuna. Interested in the future of relationships? Watch Chobits. Interested in the future of mankind? Watch Saishuu Heiki Kanojo/The Last Love Song on This Little Planet.
Sex and nudity aside, these titles all deal with themes that are far from "childish". Lain deals with how the internet affects everyones lives and relationships. Free access to information... everyone, everywhere connected together. Arjuna deals with a girl who is tasked to save the world, but then she discovers that the true threat is mankind itself. Chobits is the story of a not-too-distant future, where computers come in all shapes and sizes, but mostly in the form of sexy androids. What purpose is the human relationship when your lifelike android can be programmed to be the perfect mate? What about the feelings of those who reject mechanical companionship, but find there is no human left to love them (the analogous situation described by a children's book, The City Where No-One Lives in the story). Finally, the Last Love Song is about a couple learning to love each other even as the world is literally falling apart around them as war ravages the planet, kills their friends, and finally seperates them.
So yeah. Thats a lot less "childish" than most live action shows you see on TV. Imagine that, dealing with real issues, instead of creating and solving a crisis in 30 minutes (they take an hour in some time slots!).
By the way, if any of those books you read happen to have any substantiated claims about the nature of friendships on the internet, I'd love to read them.
Hear hear! I'm never going to watch those 20 HBOs and 2042 Showtimes that my cable carrier has. All these channels are just making it more expensive for me, so I'm going to demand that the cable companies drop them all!
Premium Channels? Whats that?
My guess is that whoever called it "collapse stories" was thinking "Lets call this operation 'collapsing' all of the various sites stories into one list."
I can see children taught this way being utterly helpless when they can't find the video game that will teach them C++ or how to question their cell phone bill.
I've seen people brought up on traditional training that couldn't pull off either, game or no game.
Come to think of it, starting in elementary school, all of my learning has emphasized rote memorization over gathering information. Just about the only information gathering I ever did was for book reports, and later, the occasional research paper.
That's why a major new feature in Windows Server 2003 was a much-improved set of command-line tools.
/. who rant and rave without caring, but as someone who admins servers of several OSes, uses computers of several other OSes, and developed software on quite a few OSes, I've seen the best and worst of each, and everything has quite a lot that could be improvable from the user standpoint.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"
I assure you that most of the people who laugh at windows are doing so with a very critical, cautious eye. Sure, there are a few people on COLA and
That, and XML configuration files for IIS.
Just one question: "Why?". XML was designed to facilitate interchange between systems. What benefit does anyone get out of this? Sure its human readable, but so are most other text based formats.
Well, we can play tit-for-tat here...
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux
Sure, there are cryptic commands in Linux, but there are equally cryptic commands in DOS/windows. Start with "dir". Sure, its short for "directory", but imagine someone who has never used a computer before, and they want all the files in a certain place on the computer. Do you think they would ask for a "list" of files? Or a "directory" of files? Once you're in the UI, its not much better. If you use more than one version of windows you'll notice real quick that the File Explorer is completely different from version to version starting with win98 (98 worked like 95's browser with some html extensions)
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
I'll just take a moment to point out that this has been a tried and true method for several millenia now. Your example is pretty moot, since it took several revisions of windows before it could search into the text of files (without buying Microsoft Office and using its Find Fast utility)
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
Have you ever used a UI and wished that someone had added a checkbox for a feature you knew was possible? Added extra blanks in window's Find Files panel/dialog to do boolean searching? Unfortunately, when designing a UI, you're designing the limits of the human's interaction with the system. Someone said "I'll just put one blank there, therefore people can search for only one thing at a time." While the same goes for console user interfaces, things like screen real estate are no longer an issue, the only worry is if the user is willing to type the entire command.
D) The X-Windows Disaster.
Do you have a better idea? Something that works portably across many systems? Runs on a thin client over the network? Supports multiple color depths including monochrome? Extensible by modules? Operates transparently locally or remotely?
Doesn't have a per user licensing restriction? Doesn't use "foundation classes" that change every version of the compiler?
I hardly call X a disaster, when you consider its goals. I'm sorry you had to use Motif, but nowadays we get to choose from plenty of different widget libraries and languages, and can choose one we like.
E) Make
I don't know what you're doing to make using make so hard. Automake is tough, but for a single project, which you dont intend to be porting to other systems, a Makefile containing the targets, the sourcefiles, and the commands to compile each takes about 30-60 seconds of typing per target (especially with copy and paste and variables for compiler options), assuming you know how your source files fit together. If you want to do fancy stuff, buy a book. (See B. Not all wisdom is oral.)
Well, given that the "average" game is never ported to Linux, I would say that it takes an infinite amount of time...
But seriously, porting applications requires two major sets of changes. First is I/O (this includes everything - display, sound, user input, networking code, filesystem interaction). The second is process control.
For I/O, design decisions can have serious impact on the time it takes to develop a port. Are you writing your own libraries from scratch? If so, these must be ported as well. If not, are there Linux versions of these libraries available? Are there wrappers to fake availability of these libraries (eg, wine's library replacements)?
Process control is a similar situation, however, process control is fundamentally different in Windows and Linux environments (for example, last time I checked windows lacked a process-copying fork() call). If an application makes heavy use of threading and IPC, then there will be more work required in converting these to the "Unix Way" of doing things.
as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ?
Careful there, you live in a world of single mothers and laws allowing people to drop their children off at the local fire station. To claim that some scientist has some vague obligation to the child when even parents don't, is a little skewed.
Now, if you're saying that the scientist should be responsible for medical bills for the child should something go wrong, that would be understandable.
If enough people did this, it might get some attention. When arrested, you could even state on the record that you were searching for your rights which the RIAA stole from you.
Would make an interesting half-column article on the 18th page of the local section of the paper.
Obviously the idea of the cellphone charging itself by using its battery power to vibrate to recharge the battery is bunk, but that aside, there are plenty of other vibration sources. Your cellphone could just clip onto your dashboard and charge with every little bump you drive over (of course, newer suspensions would make that a little harder to do ;). There are a lot of other vibration sources out there as well.
Vibration can also easily be produced from renewable resources, or as a byproduct of other processes. Imagine on the street above a subway, having a "charging table" which vibrated every few minutes as the train passed under it. Or a wind-powered system to do the same thing.
Everyone involved knows it poses health threats. Everyone has known that particles cause breathing problems ever since shortly after the industrial revolution filled the air with them. This is not news.
But guess what, the researchers who work with this stuff take steps to avoid exposure to them. This "researcher" makes it sound like scientists do crazy stuff after hours: "Dude! Guess what! Today I invented some crazy shit to coat glass with that makes it clean itself!" "Sweet! I'll go grab my wife and we can snort lines of it off her belly!" If this were really the case, I would agree with banning pretty much anything from the laboratory.
Hopefully since this report (not even qualifying as research) was funded by the ETC Group and failed to get published anywhere respectable, it will get the ignorance it deserves.
(The ETC group isn't all that bad by themselves, they just tend to get involved with stuff they shouldn't. If they stick to fighting for farmers' rights with respect to GM crops, they'd be pretty decent, but outside of the agribusiness arena, they come off as "if the technology doesn't put food in starving peoples' mouths, it is the spawn of satan and should be banned so the money can be spent on the holy pursuit of feeding the world")
very local judges are elected. Above that, they're all friends of important people and they get appointed to the position.
Yes, the same could be said, but unlike photography where you have to take a picture of a child to make child porn, did you know that a major entertainment company once convinced a judge that your DVD player makes a copy of the DVD to play it (naturally, this copying was only authorized in authorized DVD players, using any other player was to be considered unauthorized copying, they insisted). Just keeping your nose clean means nothing when the RIAA starts to insist that because your speaker level was above 20%, you owe royalties for every one of your neighbors because they might have been able to hear your music too.
The fact is, the people in charge are so technologically incompetant that the laws they wrote are being rewritten in legal precedents as companies twist them and the weak minds of judges and juries. The DMCA could have been a great copyright protection tool. Too bad it now covers everything from Wal Mart's prices to garage door openers, a far cry from its intent. How long before the internet is illegal under the DMCA and everyone with a computer is fined for possession of a circumvention device?
So yeah. You have free will. You can choose to live your life on the straight and narrow. And you'll even get away with it as long as the MPAA, RIAA, or someone else doesn't want your money. Or you can sell your computers and live like a hermit.
Just like the unibomber.