If this was used movies and used CD's, the various **AA's would be all over it. Can someone explain the difference between the latest book, the latest movie and the latest music CD as it pertains to property?
NO. They wouldn't be. Such things exist without harassment from the **AAs. And we aren't talking about new media anyway; we're talking about used books.
Although your post is clearly a troll, you're a little bit right. No one is contesting the sale of used stuff right now, not even the **AA...just give 'em some time. However, book publishers have attacked libraries as piracy facilitators in the past, without much luck. One thing they've found: It's a hell of a lot harder to demonize a library, paid for by the public and heralded as an educational treasure, than it is to demonize college students and the Internet.
Which makes me wonder: What if a library put together something to "check out" books, music, and videos on the Internet? Yeah, we've got a few things like it, but they're in their infancy and, to my knowledge, not a public project; they're done by one company or another. With a public library behind sharing of books/music/videos, doing what they're already doing in real life, the **AAs might have little choice but to back down.
My library (Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR) already loans music and videos along with books. It has hookups to the Internet for anyone coming in, and people volunteer for work at the library. It's just a matter of adding these ingredients together, and we could have public filesharing...how sweet is that? I'm getting carried away...but it's nice to think about.
Before object oriented things, structures, etc, the fundamental thing a student needs to know about programming is that it's a list of instructions to the computer.
I know BASIC teaches bad habits, but hell...teach them some rudimentary BASIC if you have to for a few classes (Pascal might be still better since I've heard it gives less bad habits, but I have no experience w/ Pascal). Once they know what code does, then it's time to teach higher levels of abstraction, with structured programming (C), OOP (C++/Java), or even something outside the declarative type of language (Prolog, which most people who aren't pure, theoretical CS will hate).
At the risk of sounding old, I'd say that most colleges today don't teach that long enough before they jump to C++/Java. You get one "Hello world", using C++-style cin and cout, and then it's off to classes, overloading, etc...without even giving more than a passing mention of pointers or even arrays (these concepts are pretty tough for a first-time student).
Abstractions are a programmer's tool. They're OK, but one must remember that they're only a human interface to what is essentially a list of commands to the computer. Teaching abstractions in a language without teaching how to write a simple program in it is confusing and demoralizing...and the sad thing is that I suspect most universities probably just teach C++ or Java to first-years because it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
What I don't believe in is risking human life and probably tens of billions of dollars in toto for a damned boondoggle while we've got terrorists bombing buildings and one in six of us without health care.
That's a common argument against space exploration: "We've got problems here on earth, let's fix all those first, then we can go into space!"
No one really wants to fix these problems. Many of them are not technological problems; they're problems related to the human mind and heart that have NEVER had a definite solution. We have the Scientific Method, but we still have no empirical way of making everybody happy.
The above problems you mentioned: One involves turning "have-nots" into "haves", which requires the "haves" to give up some of their capital...which requires them to make a sacrifice. The other problem you mentioned: It requires, among other things, getting two kinds of people who have killed each other for at least five thousand years to get along.
America is one of the greatest countries ever to exist in history, but when it comes down to it, it's still made up of humans, who do the same thing humans everywhere do. We can throw more money at a problem, but we don't have morally superior people. If our legislators try to deal with a problem, they throw money and laws at it, which is great for technology, but not so great for human problems. Look at the problem of terrorism; people bomb our buildings, so we shoot some people and try to build better ways of spying on everybody.
When it all comes down to it, I'd rather shoot somebody into space. It has a MUCH better chance of success than solving health care problems or terrorism.
As far as I can tell, the argument goes like this: "Let's see...we can move our pollution problems to a lifeless rock in outer space, learn more about life in space than we've ever known before, and advance the human race....or we can keep that lifeless rock looking purty and avoid all of the former. Hmmm, what to do?"
I don't know about you, but I think the guy trying to preserve the "pristine environment" of space is completely off his rocker. Space is not pristine, and never has been. Space is dirty, cold, dead everywhere we've looked, and full of things that can destroy organic life.
Human life, in any area, almost always alters the way things were before. If we have to, let's do our dirty work in space rather than here.
Re:There ARE other ways
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Fair IP Laws?
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But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."
"Ulysees"? I THINK you mean Homer. The former never wrote anything (although he did take Troy); the latter told a story about him.
Now that the quibbling is out of the way, I should add that all the people you mentioned had patrons; the royal court of country X, the church, etc. And Shakespeare is a poor example; if I recall correctly (and I may not), there is record of his pursuing a couple of lawsuits against people performing his plays.
In my opinion, the author needs to be the final judge of whether his works get released into the public domain. If he's dead, they should go into public domain by default. Publishing companies last forever, and if they can make a cent off a work, they won't let others publish it. If they can't, they won't let people anyway, because it will set a precedent...AND they won't publish it themselves! Thus the work gets lost.
One of the main arguments that publishers use is "What about an author's children? How can they live without the royalties?" Not only do we have systems for this (trust funds, etc), but the whole concept of generations doing nothing but living off an ancestor's achievement is, I think, abhorrent to the American mind. The only reason why it's been slowly worked in as an argument is because nowadays people get misty-eyed when children of any age are mentioned, and therefore can't see clearly.
Authors need to control their own works. When they die, the work must not be lost in the bowels of a publishing company. The people the previous poster named came from a different kind of system; we can preserve their art because it has been passed down to us; but the 20th century itself could stand to lose many important works simply because of corrupt lawmakers, greedy publishers, and an apathetic public.
I'm mostly talking about books here, but this could apply to other art as well. I suppose that if the works of Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, and N'Sync were all lost, I wouldn't cry too hard.;)
I think you are confusing privacy and anonymity. A nationally unique form of ID doesn't remove privacy. In fact it does not necessarily remove anonymity in many cases.
I don't know about other states, but the State of Oregon requires your current address to be on your driver's license...which you need to show for identification. You're right, I'm confusing privacy and anonymity a bit, but that's OK; they're confused a bit in real life. It's difficult (although not impossible) to have privacy without anonymity.
Biometrics are like fingerprints; they're not provably unique. A criminal who puts his mind to it could likely forge biometric information on his card anyway.
If it's abused, it could certainly remove anonymity. However, I'm not sure how an ID card removes your privacy, unless it's got a listening device built in.
We need to assume such a form of ID will be abused, not just hope it won't. And NOT just by criminals! Oregon used to sell their DMV database on CDROM to anybody who wanted it. I'm not really sure what the average person could do w/ my biometric information (I'll leave that to the paranoid among us), but I don't care to give the State free access to it. We need our governments to follow a minimalist strategy of information-keeping, because the average State Department takes a diabolical joy in keeping trivia, no matter how useless, about anyone under their jurisdiction. If they don't ABSOLUTELY need it...I don't want 'em to have it!
What does the Slashdot community think about having your retinal pattern embedded on a smart card?"
The same as ALL THE OTHER attempts to remove our privacy...NO! NO! How often does this need to be repeated before people finally understand that "NO" really does mean "NO"?
It's not the method of privacy removal that we find disgusting. It's the removal of the privacy in the first place.
I think you underestimate the quality of foreign tech support. There's a fear that exporting tech support means talking to a poorly-trained Korean who speaks broken, slurry Engrish. This is just unfounded xenophobia.
You have GOT to be kidding me. This is not a fear. This is a fact. The foreign techie may be motivated...and knowledgable. But I CAN'T UNDERSTAND A WORD THEY SAY! I have had this happen time and again with Indian, Filipino, Chinese, and South American accents. Oh yeah, and most of them are motivated...by the company...to get the call over with as soon as possible. They get rewarded for this...as do American call centers.
Want an answer that's not in the book? In the best case, they'll say, "I need to get back to you on that", and call a real techie, then RELAY the info to you. At the worst, they just reiterate the script.
Not only haven't you probably ever called anyone and been through the HELL that is foreign tech support, but by now it's clear that you're scrabbling for replies to the angry mob who says, with good reason, that you are overflowing with balls, poppycock, and bullshit. If you post another response to all this, it's going to be pure fabrication.
The companies that outsource their tech support to third world countries do it only because it costs them less money to pay the poor bastards there. It costs MORE money to do any of the things that you claim, without foundation, that they do. You've got to remember why companies do this...and it ain't out of the goodness of their hearts. </flame>
Before you damn the Cybiko completely, keep in mind that it contained some SWEET concepts...sure, the games and address-book part sucks...but am I the only one who starts drooling when they casually mention the Cybiko's local P2P networking abilities?! Sure, the Cybiko sucks by itself...but think of the hacks you could do with something like this...hell, even if you couldn't, the concept is still great. It's the implementation that's flawed.
Heh. If anyone doesn't want their Cybiko, I'll be more than happy to take it off their hands.
In my spare time, I'm actually working on building a Cybiko-like gadget that'll do a lot of the wireless networking it does...right now it's 68k-based, but that's just so I can nail down my shaky computer engineering concepts (I almost flunked Computer Architecture class) and figure out how to fabricate this thing.;) I've worked out a flash-ROM memory and a memory-mapped parallel interface so far, and have fabricated a few boards, although I still have been nailing down bugs and am really just doing this for fun.
Kids' PDA makers are trying things that adult PDA makers never would attempt, just because kids have lower expectations of a computer and won't care if something only works half the time, as long as they can play with it. It may be crummy from our viewpoint at present, but this is where some great pioneer work gets done.
Teenagers, by contrast, hate things that aren't perfect....dude, try playing with it...hacking it...taking it apart. Your life w/ a Cybiko will take a turn for the happier.
Yes, you can do a word-for-word translation of most words in any language. No, you'll need a very sophisticated system to get the meaning to a reader.
The main problem is that sentence structures are different, idioms get in the way, and words have more than one meaning. A human translator has the power to take a set of words, convert it to an idea, and put out a different set of words, something no machine can do.
Here's a lamebrained example: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." Convert that to Russian and back and you might get, "The liquor will do it but the meat is bad." For a hands-on example, try converting the first few paragraphs of a news article into French using The Fish. On a personal note, I had a conversation with a German guy on ICQ once, using the fish. The results were...interesting. I also read Indonesian newspapers, and I assure you that a literal translator would hurt itself quite badly on this...let alone a less English-like language such as Arabic or Japanese.
That being said, why not use distributed human computing for the thing it's good at? Instead of translating words, how about sentences? You can get at the ideas much better this way. Those sentences that hadn't been translated yet could show up as literal words; those words that hadn't been translated would show up natively. I mean, if you've got human translators for this, you can do things that are not restricted to computers. I can think of a lot neater things the guy proposing this can do with this idea than what he's come up with so far.
At one time, spectre was the Big Hype game of the year, available on both PC and Mac. Something about it's graphics.. dunno.
No, it's because it wasn't just called "Spectre". It was called "Spectre VR". VR? VR means Virtual Reality! I've got to buy that game!
You can probably snag a copy at Classic Trash if you've got an old PC that has DOS on it. Though WHY it doesn't have Linux and HAS something as old and crummy as DOS would be a good question to ask yourself...;)
A program rigged like a time-bomb? Perhaps a program doesn't have a security hole, but is merely not maintained anymore. Under this plan, it dies in x number of years, and suddenly a perfectly good system goes down the crapper. And perhaps the guy who installed it has moved on to greener pa$ture$....leaving the current admins to figure out why something that was never touched blew up in their faces.
I don't even know why I'm replying to this obvious troll of an article. One of the things you hear from every frustrated admin is, "What did they change? This box has worked for three years! And where the HELL is the documentation?"
This is such an amazingly bad idea I think it should be preserved somewhere in a museum, along with the recipe for New Coke and the plans for Galloping Gertie (bridge in Washington that used to ripple in the wind).
I work with a lot of older people who don't read Slashdot, but have Yahoo. I made sure to tell them about this new disgrace. For all those at work, please do the same; it's a courteous thing to do, and your workplace will be a helluva lot happier.
There was a report on this on Channel 12 News in Portland, OR. The EFF guy in the article seems to think no one will fall prey to such a cheesy scam, but according to the TV report, people were (big surprise here) quite stupid enough to become victims. I guess one guy in the Portland area lost his savings or something to it.
Apparently, the first part required something like $5,000 to be deposited. They said the money was in Canada first. Then it went to the UK. Then...well, it got withdrawn one way or another and the people lost track of it. The scammer then sent them another message telling them that they had to put in more money to get past some customs post or another, and they sobered up and didn't give him any more of their dough.
You might say, "jeeze these guys are bloody idiots!" Well yes they are...heh...but to the layman it is pretty convincing. According to the report, the fellow who the TV victims responded to sent them all manner of official-looking waste paper to convince them. If one is not up on this sort of thing, I can see how he could be taken in.
Humans have also survived for millions of years without the telephone, the automobile, and the electric light. I expect there will be a lot of replies to this article from neo-Luddites who, one day, decided that everything was just OK the way it was and the old coin-op phone was the only way people should be able to talk away from home.
Cellphones are not necessary. They are extremely useful if you are out in the middle of nowhere, don't have 0.25 (oh wait, they jacked it up to 0.35 in my area), and need to call home.
Cellphones don't cause accidents. Stupid people do. I thought most Slashdotters would know this, but let me say it again: Legislating against tech as a way of saving people from themselves has been tried before, and it DOESN'T WORK!
"Everybody's problem" is that America was founded on a distrust of the government. And the majority of Slashdot is American.
It's not recent events that have made us mistrust the government (although that sure as hell didn't make us trust it any further). Keep in mind that America used to be a colony that had gotten very angry at the arrogance of the government of a country thousands of miles away that said, "We won't provide much in the way of benefits...but keep those taxes coming!"
Britain needed to pay off a war against France that had been fought much of the time in America. "Well, we fought for the colonies, surely they'll accept higher taxes". If they'd been careful about it, been a little more diplomatic, and not pissed people off, we might still have Kings and Queens on our coins, but they weren't, and the rest is history. When we gave ourselves the right to bear arms, free speech, and so on, we were still thinking, however unconsciously, as a colony, and these rights were designed to protect us from the government (that "right to bear arms" rule? It's NOT just for criminals...although that fact often gets neglected). The same planning went into the formation of the three branches of government.
Some liberals on here might say, "Oh, these rights were just to pacify the people. The ones who really wanted to be in control, and got it, were the 'aristocracy'." I'm not disagreeing, but the mentality of the time was such that the "American aristocracy" would have gotten it anyway without argument; it was just the Way Things Were Done....and anyway, once liberty has been fixed upon as a goal, it's hard to dissuade people without a disturbance (check your local history book for several such disturbances before the Bill of Rights was drafted). The point is still valid.
And that, CakerX, is my long-winded explanation of "what the fuck is everyone's problem", as you put it. I think Germany's idea is great, but if there's one thing Americans have learned, it's to question all governments' motives. All the time.
Hitler supposedly did a lot of experiments on prisoners. I didn't hear of anyone seriously saying, "It's bloody inevitable! They'll create a superhuman! We must do it too, because otherwise they'll do it first. After all, we're more ethical, so we must do what they're doing." Isn't that the arrogant attitude that most leftists detest about the US? Since we're more ethical, we can do the unethical because it's more right when we do it.
Has it ever occured to you that it may not be right at all?
I'm pro-life, and do not think that stem-cell research is murder, the way abortion is. But an attitude of "they might succeed in something unethical, so let's do it before they can" is a trip to a very slippery slope.
No. People won't pay 500% more than they need for it. It's because of the way computers are perceived.
A computer is a utilitarian thing that's kept in the house and usually tucked out of the way. Cars, clothes, home furnishings, and sporting goods all get seen by a lot of people. They're meant to be seen. When have you seen a designer wastebasket? Or a designer TV? In 99% of people's homes, the TV is still a big black box. If they want to show it off, it's because it does its function better than anyone else's; in the case of the TV, it's because it has a bigger screen or better sound, perhaps. There are some exceptions; speakers are often works of art.
I'm not shooting down your original idea. I'm sure people will love designer computer cases. But don't expect people to pay $5k just because it's "prettier"; they'd rather stick it out of the way and show its power off to the Joneses who come to visit. A rich nerd might pay that kind of money for a more powerful or more reliable machine, but I don't believe that he would just for the case.
That said, I would modify the idea by saying: Package a computer with a more beautiful case design (note to designers: Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman) at about the same price. People love different stuff as long as it doesn't cost them any more effort to use. Once everyone is used to showing off their PC (which they aren't now), you can go with the original idea, make more beautiful b0xes, and everyone who wants to be hip will buy your box.
Actually, and some may be surprised to know this...there is no definite standard. It works on an agency-by-agency basis, in my experience. So MS might get the "government" to buy, but what government? State? Federal? DoD? DoE? And which agencies of that department?
My agency has just decided to support Linux, although they're keeping desktops on NT4 at present. There's always someone who wants to experiment, and we're under pressure from upper management to support users who shoot themselves in the foot. One of the problems when you talk to management about supporting Linux, they say, "Hmmm...we could have Linux and decide on (slackware redhat debian etc etc...), or we could have MICROSOFT! Microsoft it is!" That is because as soon as Linux is mentioned, every zealot (you know who you are) launches a jihad in favor of his distro, and they all go down in a kicking, biting tangle like crazed ferrets.
In addition, corporations like Microsoft and Sun are trusted for support. I'm NOT saying Linux has no support, I'm saying that it is put out by a series of different providers and supported by a series of different consultants, none of which have withstood the fires of the dotcom crash. Linux has a reputation for being a hobbyist OS; no manager wants to get support from some bozo in a garage somewhere. There is also the concern of interoperability;.doc,.xls,.ppt, etc are not supported by Linux without a lot of tinkering. Unless we're just talking about servers...and even then many managers will probably get antsy. "What's a server? Why isn't this one Microsoft too?" My managers aren't clueless, but they're leery of Linux for the support reasons.
<rant> That being said, I don't even know why I'm mentioning this stuff. From the comments I've seen so far on this topic, most Slashdotters don't really want to know why the US Government (or any other) doesn't accept Linux. They just want another chance to scream "Why?", like kids who ask for every piece of candy/junk food they see in the supermarket and then wail when Mom says No. "Why is the government using software made by a monopoly? Why is this article US-centric? Why are my rights being violated? Why is everything just so unfair?" </rant> I'm being harsh, but this article is so clearly a troll that I'm hard-pressed not to laugh. Until I see myself replying to it.:)
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If this was used movies and used CD's, the various **AA's would be all over it. Can someone explain the difference between the latest book, the latest movie and the latest music CD as it pertains to property?
NO. They wouldn't be. Such things exist without harassment from the **AAs. And we aren't talking about new media anyway; we're talking about used books.
Although your post is clearly a troll, you're a little bit right. No one is contesting the sale of used stuff right now, not even the **AA...just give 'em some time. However, book publishers have attacked libraries as piracy facilitators in the past, without much luck. One thing they've found: It's a hell of a lot harder to demonize a library, paid for by the public and heralded as an educational treasure, than it is to demonize college students and the Internet.
Which makes me wonder: What if a library put together something to "check out" books, music, and videos on the Internet? Yeah, we've got a few things like it, but they're in their infancy and, to my knowledge, not a public project; they're done by one company or another. With a public library behind sharing of books/music/videos, doing what they're already doing in real life, the **AAs might have little choice but to back down.
My library (Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR) already loans music and videos along with books. It has hookups to the Internet for anyone coming in, and people volunteer for work at the library. It's just a matter of adding these ingredients together, and we could have public filesharing...how sweet is that? I'm getting carried away...but it's nice to think about.
Before object oriented things, structures, etc, the fundamental thing a student needs to know about programming is that it's a list of instructions to the computer.
I know BASIC teaches bad habits, but hell...teach them some rudimentary BASIC if you have to for a few classes (Pascal might be still better since I've heard it gives less bad habits, but I have no experience w/ Pascal). Once they know what code does, then it's time to teach higher levels of abstraction, with structured programming (C), OOP (C++/Java), or even something outside the declarative type of language (Prolog, which most people who aren't pure, theoretical CS will hate).
At the risk of sounding old, I'd say that most colleges today don't teach that long enough before they jump to C++/Java. You get one "Hello world", using C++-style cin and cout, and then it's off to classes, overloading, etc...without even giving more than a passing mention of pointers or even arrays (these concepts are pretty tough for a first-time student).
Abstractions are a programmer's tool. They're OK, but one must remember that they're only a human interface to what is essentially a list of commands to the computer. Teaching abstractions in a language without teaching how to write a simple program in it is confusing and demoralizing...and the sad thing is that I suspect most universities probably just teach C++ or Java to first-years because it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
What I don't believe in is risking human life and probably tens of billions of dollars in toto for a damned boondoggle while we've got terrorists bombing buildings and one in six of us without health care.
That's a common argument against space exploration: "We've got problems here on earth, let's fix all those first, then we can go into space!"
No one really wants to fix these problems. Many of them are not technological problems; they're problems related to the human mind and heart that have NEVER had a definite solution. We have the Scientific Method, but we still have no empirical way of making everybody happy.
The above problems you mentioned: One involves turning "have-nots" into "haves", which requires the "haves" to give up some of their capital...which requires them to make a sacrifice. The other problem you mentioned: It requires, among other things, getting two kinds of people who have killed each other for at least five thousand years to get along.
America is one of the greatest countries ever to exist in history, but when it comes down to it, it's still made up of humans, who do the same thing humans everywhere do. We can throw more money at a problem, but we don't have morally superior people. If our legislators try to deal with a problem, they throw money and laws at it, which is great for technology, but not so great for human problems. Look at the problem of terrorism; people bomb our buildings, so we shoot some people and try to build better ways of spying on everybody.
When it all comes down to it, I'd rather shoot somebody into space. It has a MUCH better chance of success than solving health care problems or terrorism.
As far as I can tell, the argument goes like this: "Let's see...we can move our pollution problems to a lifeless rock in outer space, learn more about life in space than we've ever known before, and advance the human race....or we can keep that lifeless rock looking purty and avoid all of the former. Hmmm, what to do?"
I don't know about you, but I think the guy trying to preserve the "pristine environment" of space is completely off his rocker. Space is not pristine, and never has been. Space is dirty, cold, dead everywhere we've looked, and full of things that can destroy organic life.
Human life, in any area, almost always alters the way things were before. If we have to, let's do our dirty work in space rather than here.
But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."
;)
"Ulysees"? I THINK you mean Homer. The former never wrote anything (although he did take Troy); the latter told a story about him.
Now that the quibbling is out of the way, I should add that all the people you mentioned had patrons; the royal court of country X, the church, etc. And Shakespeare is a poor example; if I recall correctly (and I may not), there is record of his pursuing a couple of lawsuits against people performing his plays.
In my opinion, the author needs to be the final judge of whether his works get released into the public domain. If he's dead, they should go into public domain by default. Publishing companies last forever, and if they can make a cent off a work, they won't let others publish it. If they can't, they won't let people anyway, because it will set a precedent...AND they won't publish it themselves! Thus the work gets lost.
One of the main arguments that publishers use is "What about an author's children? How can they live without the royalties?" Not only do we have systems for this (trust funds, etc), but the whole concept of generations doing nothing but living off an ancestor's achievement is, I think, abhorrent to the American mind. The only reason why it's been slowly worked in as an argument is because nowadays people get misty-eyed when children of any age are mentioned, and therefore can't see clearly.
Authors need to control their own works. When they die, the work must not be lost in the bowels of a publishing company. The people the previous poster named came from a different kind of system; we can preserve their art because it has been passed down to us; but the 20th century itself could stand to lose many important works simply because of corrupt lawmakers, greedy publishers, and an apathetic public.
I'm mostly talking about books here, but this could apply to other art as well. I suppose that if the works of Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, and N'Sync were all lost, I wouldn't cry too hard.
+1 DUNE!
Mod the parent up...this is a clever Dune reference. You know, the novel...or the movie, for those who didn't see the novel.
No kudos to the people who were stupid and thought the dude was talking about the Spice girls.
I think you are confusing privacy and anonymity. A nationally unique form of ID doesn't remove privacy. In fact it does not necessarily remove anonymity in many cases.
:)
I don't know about other states, but the State of Oregon requires your current address to be on your driver's license...which you need to show for identification. You're right, I'm confusing privacy and anonymity a bit, but that's OK; they're confused a bit in real life. It's difficult (although not impossible) to have privacy without anonymity.
Biometrics are like fingerprints; they're not provably unique. A criminal who puts his mind to it could likely forge biometric information on his card anyway.
If it's abused, it could certainly remove anonymity. However, I'm not sure how an ID card removes your privacy, unless it's got a listening device built in.
We need to assume such a form of ID will be abused, not just hope it won't. And NOT just by criminals! Oregon used to sell their DMV database on CDROM to anybody who wanted it. I'm not really sure what the average person could do w/ my biometric information (I'll leave that to the paranoid among us), but I don't care to give the State free access to it. We need our governments to follow a minimalist strategy of information-keeping, because the average State Department takes a diabolical joy in keeping trivia, no matter how useless, about anyone under their jurisdiction. If they don't ABSOLUTELY need it...I don't want 'em to have it!
OK, I'm shouting now. I'll simmer down a bit.
What does the Slashdot community think about having your retinal pattern embedded on a smart card?"
The same as ALL THE OTHER attempts to remove our privacy...NO! NO! How often does this need to be repeated before people finally understand that "NO" really does mean "NO"?
It's not the method of privacy removal that we find disgusting. It's the removal of the privacy in the first place.
...it'll be more than just a day of silence.
I think you underestimate the quality of foreign tech support. There's a fear that exporting tech support means talking to a poorly-trained Korean who speaks broken, slurry Engrish. This is just unfounded xenophobia.
You have GOT to be kidding me. This is not a fear. This is a fact. The foreign techie may be motivated...and knowledgable. But I CAN'T UNDERSTAND A WORD THEY SAY! I have had this happen time and again with Indian, Filipino, Chinese, and South American accents. Oh yeah, and most of them are motivated...by the company...to get the call over with as soon as possible. They get rewarded for this...as do American call centers.
Want an answer that's not in the book? In the best case, they'll say, "I need to get back to you on that", and call a real techie, then RELAY the info to you. At the worst, they just reiterate the script.
Not only haven't you probably ever called anyone and been through the HELL that is foreign tech support, but by now it's clear that you're scrabbling for replies to the angry mob who says, with good reason, that you are overflowing with balls, poppycock, and bullshit. If you post another response to all this, it's going to be pure fabrication.
The companies that outsource their tech support to third world countries do it only because it costs them less money to pay the poor bastards there. It costs MORE money to do any of the things that you claim, without foundation, that they do. You've got to remember why companies do this...and it ain't out of the goodness of their hearts. </flame>
Before you damn the Cybiko completely, keep in mind that it contained some SWEET concepts...sure, the games and address-book part sucks...but am I the only one who starts drooling when they casually mention the Cybiko's local P2P networking abilities?! Sure, the Cybiko sucks by itself...but think of the hacks you could do with something like this...hell, even if you couldn't, the concept is still great. It's the implementation that's flawed.
;) I've worked out a flash-ROM memory and a memory-mapped parallel interface so far, and have fabricated a few boards, although I still have been nailing down bugs and am really just doing this for fun.
Heh. If anyone doesn't want their Cybiko, I'll be more than happy to take it off their hands.
In my spare time, I'm actually working on building a Cybiko-like gadget that'll do a lot of the wireless networking it does...right now it's 68k-based, but that's just so I can nail down my shaky computer engineering concepts (I almost flunked Computer Architecture class) and figure out how to fabricate this thing.
Kids' PDA makers are trying things that adult PDA makers never would attempt, just because kids have lower expectations of a computer and won't care if something only works half the time, as long as they can play with it. It may be crummy from our viewpoint at present, but this is where some great pioneer work gets done.
Teenagers, by contrast, hate things that aren't perfect....dude, try playing with it...hacking it...taking it apart. Your life w/ a Cybiko will take a turn for the happier.
Yes, you can do a word-for-word translation of most words in any language. No, you'll need a very sophisticated system to get the meaning to a reader.
The main problem is that sentence structures are different, idioms get in the way, and words have more than one meaning. A human translator has the power to take a set of words, convert it to an idea, and put out a different set of words, something no machine can do.
Here's a lamebrained example: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." Convert that to Russian and back and you might get, "The liquor will do it but the meat is bad." For a hands-on example, try converting the first few paragraphs of a news article into French using The Fish. On a personal note, I had a conversation with a German guy on ICQ once, using the fish. The results were...interesting. I also read Indonesian newspapers, and I assure you that a literal translator would hurt itself quite badly on this...let alone a less English-like language such as Arabic or Japanese.
That being said, why not use distributed human computing for the thing it's good at? Instead of translating words, how about sentences? You can get at the ideas much better this way. Those sentences that hadn't been translated yet could show up as literal words; those words that hadn't been translated would show up natively. I mean, if you've got human translators for this, you can do things that are not restricted to computers. I can think of a lot neater things the guy proposing this can do with this idea than what he's come up with so far.
At one time, spectre was the Big Hype game of the year, available on both PC and Mac. Something about it's graphics.. dunno.
No, it's because it wasn't just called "Spectre". It was called "Spectre VR". VR? VR means Virtual Reality! I've got to buy that game!
You can probably snag a copy at Classic Trash if you've got an old PC that has DOS on it. Though WHY it doesn't have Linux and HAS something as old and crummy as DOS would be a good question to ask yourself...;)
A program rigged like a time-bomb? Perhaps a program doesn't have a security hole, but is merely not maintained anymore. Under this plan, it dies in x number of years, and suddenly a perfectly good system goes down the crapper. And perhaps the guy who installed it has moved on to greener pa$ture$....leaving the current admins to figure out why something that was never touched blew up in their faces.
I don't even know why I'm replying to this obvious troll of an article. One of the things you hear from every frustrated admin is, "What did they change? This box has worked for three years! And where the HELL is the documentation?"
This is such an amazingly bad idea I think it should be preserved somewhere in a museum, along with the recipe for New Coke and the plans for Galloping Gertie (bridge in Washington that used to ripple in the wind).
I work with a lot of older people who don't read Slashdot, but have Yahoo. I made sure to tell them about this new disgrace. For all those at work, please do the same; it's a courteous thing to do, and your workplace will be a helluva lot happier.
What happens if, while walking down the street, you see a hot teenage girl walking the other direction and your jaw drops? How would it vocalize that?
Why, as a wolf-whistle, of course. Which brings up another point; a mute button on these devices might be an excellent idea. :)
There was a report on this on Channel 12 News in Portland, OR. The EFF guy in the article seems to think no one will fall prey to such a cheesy scam, but according to the TV report, people were (big surprise here) quite stupid enough to become victims. I guess one guy in the Portland area lost his savings or something to it.
Apparently, the first part required something like $5,000 to be deposited. They said the money was in Canada first. Then it went to the UK. Then...well, it got withdrawn one way or another and the people lost track of it. The scammer then sent them another message telling them that they had to put in more money to get past some customs post or another, and they sobered up and didn't give him any more of their dough.
You might say, "jeeze these guys are bloody idiots!" Well yes they are...heh...but to the layman it is pretty convincing. According to the report, the fellow who the TV victims responded to sent them all manner of official-looking waste paper to convince them. If one is not up on this sort of thing, I can see how he could be taken in.
Spam is bad enough, wouldn't want to run into the guys that actually send it out :)
Maybe the above person wouldn't, but I would. Especially if I had a staplegun full of sharp, rusty staples. ;)
Humans have also survived for millions of years without the telephone, the automobile, and the electric light. I expect there will be a lot of replies to this article from neo-Luddites who, one day, decided that everything was just OK the way it was and the old coin-op phone was the only way people should be able to talk away from home.
Cellphones are not necessary. They are extremely useful if you are out in the middle of nowhere, don't have 0.25 (oh wait, they jacked it up to 0.35 in my area), and need to call home.
Cellphones don't cause accidents. Stupid people do. I thought most Slashdotters would know this, but let me say it again: Legislating against tech as a way of saving people from themselves has been tried before, and it DOESN'T WORK!
"Everybody's problem" is that America was founded on a distrust of the government. And the majority of Slashdot is American.
It's not recent events that have made us mistrust the government (although that sure as hell didn't make us trust it any further). Keep in mind that America used to be a colony that had gotten very angry at the arrogance of the government of a country thousands of miles away that said, "We won't provide much in the way of benefits...but keep those taxes coming!"
Britain needed to pay off a war against France that had been fought much of the time in America. "Well, we fought for the colonies, surely they'll accept higher taxes". If they'd been careful about it, been a little more diplomatic, and not pissed people off, we might still have Kings and Queens on our coins, but they weren't, and the rest is history. When we gave ourselves the right to bear arms, free speech, and so on, we were still thinking, however unconsciously, as a colony, and these rights were designed to protect us from the government (that "right to bear arms" rule? It's NOT just for criminals...although that fact often gets neglected). The same planning went into the formation of the three branches of government.
Some liberals on here might say, "Oh, these rights were just to pacify the people. The ones who really wanted to be in control, and got it, were the 'aristocracy'." I'm not disagreeing, but the mentality of the time was such that the "American aristocracy" would have gotten it anyway without argument; it was just the Way Things Were Done....and anyway, once liberty has been fixed upon as a goal, it's hard to dissuade people without a disturbance (check your local history book for several such disturbances before the Bill of Rights was drafted). The point is still valid.
And that, CakerX, is my long-winded explanation of "what the fuck is everyone's problem", as you put it. I think Germany's idea is great, but if there's one thing Americans have learned, it's to question all governments' motives. All the time.
Hitler supposedly did a lot of experiments on prisoners. I didn't hear of anyone seriously saying,
"It's bloody inevitable! They'll create a superhuman! We must do it too, because otherwise they'll do it first. After all, we're more ethical, so we must do what they're doing."
Isn't that the arrogant attitude that most leftists detest about the US? Since we're more ethical, we can do the unethical because it's more right when we do it.
Has it ever occured to you that it may not be right at all?
I'm pro-life, and do not think that stem-cell research is murder, the way abortion is. But an attitude of "they might succeed in something unethical, so let's do it before they can" is a trip to a very slippery slope.
No. People won't pay 500% more than they need for it. It's because of the way computers are perceived.
A computer is a utilitarian thing that's kept in the house and usually tucked out of the way. Cars, clothes, home furnishings, and sporting goods all get seen by a lot of people. They're meant to be seen. When have you seen a designer wastebasket? Or a designer TV? In 99% of people's homes, the TV is still a big black box. If they want to show it off, it's because it does its function better than anyone else's; in the case of the TV, it's because it has a bigger screen or better sound, perhaps. There are some exceptions; speakers are often works of art.
I'm not shooting down your original idea. I'm sure people will love designer computer cases. But don't expect people to pay $5k just because it's "prettier"; they'd rather stick it out of the way and show its power off to the Joneses who come to visit. A rich nerd might pay that kind of money for a more powerful or more reliable machine, but I don't believe that he would just for the case.
That said, I would modify the idea by saying: Package a computer with a more beautiful case design (note to designers: Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman) at about the same price. People love different stuff as long as it doesn't cost them any more effort to use. Once everyone is used to showing off their PC (which they aren't now), you can go with the original idea, make more beautiful b0xes, and everyone who wants to be hip will buy your box.
If you really wanted to go for "the cute one", the CowboyNeal option was NOT the one to pick. Even if you didn't know any of the other candidates. :)
My guess is that there will be many responses to this article...and the gist of most of those postings will be:
"D00d M$ sux...anyone got that keygen yuo're talking about I wanna crack it and be l33t oki? I just want ot use XP with my RedHat Linux b0x..."
Etc etc etc. :)
Actually, and some may be surprised to know this...there is no definite standard. It works on an agency-by-agency basis, in my experience. So MS might get the "government" to buy, but what government? State? Federal? DoD? DoE? And which agencies of that department?
My agency has just decided to support Linux, although they're keeping desktops on NT4 at present. There's always someone who wants to experiment, and we're under pressure from upper management to support users who shoot themselves in the foot. One of the problems when you talk to management about supporting Linux, they say, "Hmmm...we could have Linux and decide on (slackware redhat debian etc etc...), or we could have MICROSOFT! Microsoft it is!" That is because as soon as Linux is mentioned, every zealot (you know who you are) launches a jihad in favor of his distro, and they all go down in a kicking, biting tangle like crazed ferrets.
In addition, corporations like Microsoft and Sun are trusted for support. I'm NOT saying Linux has no support, I'm saying that it is put out by a series of different providers and supported by a series of different consultants, none of which have withstood the fires of the dotcom crash. Linux has a reputation for being a hobbyist OS; no manager wants to get support from some bozo in a garage somewhere. There is also the concern of interoperability; .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc are not supported by Linux without a lot of tinkering. Unless we're just talking about servers...and even then many managers will probably get antsy. "What's a server? Why isn't this one Microsoft too?" My managers aren't clueless, but they're leery of Linux for the support reasons.
<rant> That being said, I don't even know why I'm mentioning this stuff. From the comments I've seen so far on this topic, most Slashdotters don't really want to know why the US Government (or any other) doesn't accept Linux. They just want another chance to scream "Why?", like kids who ask for every piece of candy/junk food they see in the supermarket and then wail when Mom says No. "Why is the government using software made by a monopoly? Why is this article US-centric? Why are my rights being violated? Why is everything just so unfair?" </rant> I'm being harsh, but this article is so clearly a troll that I'm hard-pressed not to laugh. Until I see myself replying to it. :)