Actually, no, that's a complete misreading of the intent & point of such laws.
Imagine you invented The Next Great Thing in your garage. Without these laws, Supermegacorp, seeing your great idea, could (for a trvial investment on their part) copy your idea and annihilate you competitively.
These laws protect innovation PARTICULARLY when the innovator is poor of resources to compete with rich&powerful opponents.
Personally, I wonder if this might be the psychological root-event of the persistent and widespread human eschatological theme of 'world destruction by fire' etc. One might even see a parallel event in the Christian Bible's expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden - prevented from returning by "...a flaming sword which turned every way..." (KJV).
It seems that since Troy, we're finding that all the great myths and legends that have come down to us through the ages seem to have some kernel of truth at the core, overlaid by 00's if not 000's of generations of encrustations of ignorance, superstition, and the (apparent) human compulsion to make a sensible story out of the chaotic universe.
"...private space companies rely on "unsubstantiated claims" and need to overcome major technical hurdles before they can safely carry astronauts into orbit..."
Of COURSE they warn that. They are bloated bureaucrats who are trembling at the idea of the free market possibly threatening their sinecure.
Look, we ALL know that space travel is dangerous. (NASA doesn't exactly have a 100% safety record EITHER...) Personally, I think the private industry space travel isn't quite ready for prime-time either, and that could be a basis for a sincere warning being issued by NASA. But that industry isn't going to see any reason to invest and improve if space travel remains locked in as a government-only business.
OTOH, it's more likely that you have an entrenched bunch of government employees that don't like the sound of the word 'competition'.
"Most interesting to me was that in the sample, less than 4% used any non alpha-numerics in their #$#%'ing passwords."
Not surprising at all, because the rules for what you CAN use as passwords are so inconsistent. Some places REQUIRE non alphanumerics, but have a limited choice of what you can use. Some don't accept ANY non alphanumerics, some will accept them but again it's different from site to site.
I don't know about you, but I've probably got 100 different passwords rattling around in my brain. I'd guess most people are like me in that they see passwords as a necessary evil but otherwise a giant pain in the ass, and so accept the slight increase in security risk by using a system that changes predictably (at least for me) from site to site. So I'm not going to use a base-password or base-concept that includes any characters that might be disallowed on some other site.
Resisting videotape....resisting DVD....DiVX (the ridiculous original one, not the codec today)...and then releasing a cutting-edge 3d library to the world for free?
Cognitive dissonance on Disney is tearing me apart. Do we hate them or love them?
To me it seems a commercial opportunity - which I'll lay out here freely since while I'd love to get some $$ out of the idea, I have none of the technical skills/connections to make it happen:
Digital cameras are wonderful for many reasons ASIDE from the easily-edited medium. Wouldn't there be a number of customers for digital camera tech that would provide non-falsifiable digital pics?
The idea: hardware that imprints steganographically both a checksum for the picture, an identity of the camera (a s/n), and the date/time of imaging - stored with some sort of public-key method, so that the origin of the image could both be made certain, and the inviolability of the unedited picture can be confirmed? It seems that police, lawyers, insurance co's, as well as a host of other professions would find such a thing useful. Edit the pic, the checksum for the image would be changed. If there was a legal case, you could provide the image, and if necessary the hardware to corroborate the data.
This is HOLLYWOOD we're talking about, where they f*ck their best friend over 2x before breakfast.
I'm pretty certain that this technology will be used to REPLACE extras by the 000's within 10 years, and prima donna actors within 25 years.
Once you've mo-capped 10,000 people walking in a straight line in your database, how hard would it be for a director to tell his cgi guy 'yeah, I want the actor to cross the room', and the cgi can pull up a menu and reply 'you want a sashay, swagger, jaunty gait, stalk, slide, stomp, amble, limp,or other sort of walk; also, do you want John Wayne, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, or Carrot Top as the main feel?'
Sure, you might need/want mo-cap for some sort of core framework, but any doofus off the street could do that for 0.0001% of what Tom Cruise would want for it.
Sorry, but your self-righteousness makes you stupid. Nothing is free. Yes, 3000 extra people died...and yes, that's as trivial a number in reality as 9/11 should have been regarded.
See, your example of 9/11 only proves the point: the MISDIRECTED fearmongering in the case of 9/11 cost hundreds of $billion$, the swine flu is going to cost hundreds of $millions$, bird flu cost I-dont-know how much, how much is that greatest of FUDs going to cost, the 'fight against global warming'?
Those dollars could have saved serious numbers of people dying from real,preventable (but unsexy) things like oh malnutrition, treatable diseases - hell, traffic accidents.
No, scientists and doctors are human with human motivations and fallibilities, and the trend to think stupider in larger herds like normal people. Trust them blindly - as you seem to advocate - at your peril.
"...it makes you seem very insecure. Now gtfo."...says the person who posted as "Anonymous Coward"?
Ironic, +2?
To your point: I see where you might draw that conclusion, taking the discussion as if it began with the original/. post.
HOWEVER, let's recall that the original impetus behind Galileo and Glonass more than a decade ago was the US military's ability to 'fuzz' GPS (since discontinued) and probable ability to either encrypt (burying useful data into a constant stream, for example) or simply deny GPS usage somehow to selected receivers.
The point behind Galileo, Compass, and Glonass was to provide a system 'not owned by the US' DESPITE THE FACTS THAT: - the US developed the tech - the US put up the system at its own expense - the made it available to ANYONE (from the start) - the US GPS system has - as far as I know - functioned pretty much flawlessly since start.
So...the question would be: if the SOLE goal was 'reliability', why would Europe, China, Russia all develop THEIR OWN SYSTEMS? Why not support (ie help fund) the US program, making it more and more redundant, instead of offering competitive systems that, while yes, they can operate complementarily, essentially only improve in overlap, not intrinsically.
"You know, I'm suspicious of that darn US government, they might arbitrarily turn off the GPS system at any time...so I'm going to use either the Chinese or Russian systems, because those governments have a FAR longer history of openness, tolerance, and a lack of autocratic behaviors than that darn America!"
Basically, if you believe that the Russians or Chinese aren't even MORE likely to turn off their systems when geopolitically convenient than the US, truly, you need - a history lesson - an understanding of 'willful cognitive dissonance' - to have your tinfoil hat checked for 'unreasonable' bias.
Before the inevitable flame replies, let me state clearly: the US has done some bad stuff. No question. But by ANY measure I'd say it hardly quivers the needle on a Russianor Chinese-calibrated scale.
I'd agree, although the excessive narcissism is probably the more significant root cause.
Since the 1960s (Surprised? No.) the emphasis on social promotion, 'feeling good about yourself', rewards for non-achievement, and a slippery sort of moral relativism all have combined to leave our children emotionally retarded, and frankly incapable of dealing with reality.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and evolution is fucking painful. Deadly, in fact. Remove the pain from growing up, and you end up with emotionally undeveloped people, with no ability to cope with hardship, no capacity to comprehend the shitty things life is going to inevitably hand them, and (seemingly) very little resilience to survive.
Go back and read Generation X. His book describes the glimmerings of the future. I'm 42 - a real GenX'er (turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990), and I see the beginnings of it in myself and my demographic. Lack of ambition, ennui, a juvenile inability to focus, as well as a difficulty being happy with much of anything. I'd attribute it in myself to a lack of hardship and challenge, and believe me it's a bastard to cope with on a day to day basis.
And yes, I'm aware that I'm essentially yelling "Get off my lawn!" but when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. They have a facility with electronics that amazes me, and I thought myself a fairly gadget-oriented guy. I regard them as "ignorant" because they don't know basic facts of geography, history, or culture - but then if one is permanently connected (as this twittering generation pretty much assumes) does one really need to store facts in their wetware? I think its necessary to have a basis of knowledge to understand the things going on around us, and to be usefully participatory adults, but then I'm old, I guess.
Oh, by the way, ROCK THE VOTE!! Ha ha ha/cry. And we thought we're screwed already....
Yes, I played MULE. I also played Doom, and going before that I played Empire, Sword of Aragon, Ancient Art of War, Star Viking, Star Raiders, Wizardry, Ultima, and Oregon Trail (on a MECC line terminal) as well as a host of other games that are stored fondly in my nostalgia-vault as 'awesome games'.
But do you know what? My suggestion is DON'T PLAY THEM AGAIN. Like watching the original Star Wars, the memory of "greatness" is tied inextricably with context - the state of tech of the time, my age, and the whole novelty of the thing. They don't age very well.
Go to the abondonware sites, you can (thankfully) find all these games - play them, and then you can (if you're honest) admit "Meh, this is unappealing". Yes, diehards will whinge about 'gameplay over graphics' and to a point that's true; but ultimately that's not the whole story - there are a heck of a lot of advances in things other than graphics that go a LONG way toward making a game fun: credible AI that's not easily gamed, UI usability, ease of patching, online play, and (usually) a whole host of rationalizations that we accepted at the time because it was such a huge step forward from where we'd been, and it was cool just to be using a computer in the FIRST place.
I'm not saying that these games weren't great IN THEIR TIME. They were. But, like these ancient much-remembered games, just because my grandpa was cool doesn't mean I need to drag his corpse out and re-animate him today because I've got no ideas of my own.
"Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders"...except the eco-stupid and eco-shortsighted have been opposed to the expansion of nuclear power, and the same groups have opposed the creation of any nuclear waste repositories, so power companies have been FORCED to meet demand by building plants in ND because it's really their only solution.
So, we have an increasing demand, an insistence that these needs be met, and walls dropped around any solution EXCEPT out-of-state coal or ng plants, and now they're going to be punished for choosing the cheaper solution.
...the whole concept of 'renting' software (as the Forces of Evil would describe it) that needs validation from a company server, is bullshit.
You sell me a game at $50-$60 price point, I want to own it forever, and have the media to install it when I want without requiring some crappy check-in procedure. You claim I'm only 'renting' it? Then 'rent' it to me at a rental price-point, like $10.
I'm pleased to believe that I was a participant in the event that first uncovered the hypocrisy in the Lindens' operation of SL, ie the War of the Jesse Wall. Too long a story to tell here (you can google it) but their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate, including a truly free-for all zone called Jesse. The first culture to display their nascent fascism were the liberal peacniks, who objected to ardent patriotism of a number of players during the Iraq war. They tried to bottle up and hem in the pro-US players, who reacted violently (within the rules of the Jesse zone, where killing was possible). This escalated to a full scale war which, when the peacniks (who'd been joined by socialists and other fellow travelers) begged the Lindens to intervene, and they did. Their actions to enforce 'peace' in some Left-Coast sort of utopian view directly contravened their own stated rules of non-intervention, and showed them for the hypocrites they are.
Projects like this make me laugh on a number of levels.
First, "...This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as the US federal government ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage..." Funny, I thought the US was collapsing and falling apart? Where's all the investment and research $$ for all this essential international infrastructure from say, China? India? Europe? Do we want to talk again about 'internationalizing' the TLD registration and expanding the urls to non-Latin characters, or do we want to wait until the US has (again) made all the primary development investment first?
Second, 'rebuilding the internet' is a bit like reworking the Constitution, isn't it? I mean, the confluence of the varying and irreconcilable intrests of the RIAA, MPAA, EFF, NSA, commercial companies, research organizations, politicians, and even perhaps the needs of the public somewhere near the bottom (presuming you can even get a coherent picture of what 'the public' wants, from the Evangelical Christians, to the Scientologists, to NAMBLA, to people stealing torrents of movies, to 4chan users) all react against each other to make the idea of such a fundamental reworking conceptually impossible. They simply cannot all win, and NONE of them have ever shown a willingness to compromise in any meaningful way. Stalemate. Your choice is to try to cobble together some ridiculously bloated thing that tries to be everything to everyone (witness the Euro constitution, lol), or, you have some neo-fascist organization promulgating their own standard and trying to enforce it on everyone, no matter how much they clearly don't want it (witness again the Euro constitution, lol).
So what will happen, I expect, is that we're going to continue to use the same old creaky, leaky, insecure decrepit system until someone figures out ways to improve it piecemeal, so that as people have specific needs that can be met technologically and modularly (like better authentication, etc.) they can spend what they need to, implement what they need and no more. It's all about $, and perceived cost-benefit. When the need is perceived to be great enough, proprietary solutions will be developed. They'll compete in the marketplace, and the most usable (note I didn't say "best") will win, probably eventually going from proprietary to standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no, that's a complete misreading of the intent & point of such laws.
Imagine you invented The Next Great Thing in your garage.
Without these laws, Supermegacorp, seeing your great idea, could (for a trvial investment on their part) copy your idea and annihilate you competitively.
These laws protect innovation PARTICULARLY when the innovator is poor of resources to compete with rich&powerful opponents.
Personally, I wonder if this might be the psychological root-event of the persistent and widespread human eschatological theme of 'world destruction by fire' etc. One might even see a parallel event in the Christian Bible's expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden - prevented from returning by "...a flaming sword which turned every way..." (KJV).
It seems that since Troy, we're finding that all the great myths and legends that have come down to us through the ages seem to have some kernel of truth at the core, overlaid by 00's if not 000's of generations of encrustations of ignorance, superstition, and the (apparent) human compulsion to make a sensible story out of the chaotic universe.
"...private space companies rely on "unsubstantiated claims" and need to overcome major technical hurdles before they can safely carry astronauts into orbit..."
Of COURSE they warn that.
They are bloated bureaucrats who are trembling at the idea of the free market possibly threatening their sinecure.
Look, we ALL know that space travel is dangerous. (NASA doesn't exactly have a 100% safety record EITHER...) Personally, I think the private industry space travel isn't quite ready for prime-time either, and that could be a basis for a sincere warning being issued by NASA. But that industry isn't going to see any reason to invest and improve if space travel remains locked in as a government-only business.
OTOH, it's more likely that you have an entrenched bunch of government employees that don't like the sound of the word 'competition'.
"Most interesting to me was that in the sample, less than 4% used any non alpha-numerics in their #$#%'ing passwords."
Not surprising at all, because the rules for what you CAN use as passwords are so inconsistent. Some places REQUIRE non alphanumerics, but have a limited choice of what you can use. Some don't accept ANY non alphanumerics, some will accept them but again it's different from site to site.
I don't know about you, but I've probably got 100 different passwords rattling around in my brain. I'd guess most people are like me in that they see passwords as a necessary evil but otherwise a giant pain in the ass, and so accept the slight increase in security risk by using a system that changes predictably (at least for me) from site to site. So I'm not going to use a base-password or base-concept that includes any characters that might be disallowed on some other site.
Resisting videotape....resisting DVD....DiVX (the ridiculous original one, not the codec today)...and then releasing a cutting-edge 3d library to the world for free?
Cognitive dissonance on Disney is tearing me apart. Do we hate them or love them?
I just happened to be thinking about that.
To me it seems a commercial opportunity - which I'll lay out here freely since while I'd love to get some $$ out of the idea, I have none of the technical skills/connections to make it happen:
Digital cameras are wonderful for many reasons ASIDE from the easily-edited medium. Wouldn't there be a number of customers for digital camera tech that would provide non-falsifiable digital pics?
The idea: hardware that imprints steganographically both a checksum for the picture, an identity of the camera (a s/n), and the date/time of imaging - stored with some sort of public-key method, so that the origin of the image could both be made certain, and the inviolability of the unedited picture can be confirmed? It seems that police, lawyers, insurance co's, as well as a host of other professions would find such a thing useful. Edit the pic, the checksum for the image would be changed. If there was a legal case, you could provide the image, and if necessary the hardware to corroborate the data.
This is HOLLYWOOD we're talking about, where they f*ck their best friend over 2x before breakfast.
I'm pretty certain that this technology will be used to REPLACE extras by the 000's within 10 years, and prima donna actors within 25 years.
Once you've mo-capped 10,000 people walking in a straight line in your database, how hard would it be for a director to tell his cgi guy 'yeah, I want the actor to cross the room', and the cgi can pull up a menu and reply 'you want a sashay, swagger, jaunty gait, stalk, slide, stomp, amble, limp,or other sort of walk; also, do you want John Wayne, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, or Carrot Top as the main feel?'
Sure, you might need/want mo-cap for some sort of core framework, but any doofus off the street could do that for 0.0001% of what Tom Cruise would want for it.
Because attention-whore scientists have always been about the short-term political points, and not about their (stated) long term altruistic goals.
It was true in the 40's. It was true in the 80s. It's true today.
Sorry, but your self-righteousness makes you stupid. Nothing is free. Yes, 3000 extra people died...and yes, that's as trivial a number in reality as 9/11 should have been regarded.
See, your example of 9/11 only proves the point: the MISDIRECTED fearmongering in the case of 9/11 cost hundreds of $billion$, the swine flu is going to cost hundreds of $millions$, bird flu cost I-dont-know how much, how much is that greatest of FUDs going to cost, the 'fight against global warming'?
Those dollars could have saved serious numbers of people dying from real,preventable (but unsexy) things like oh malnutrition, treatable diseases - hell, traffic accidents.
No, scientists and doctors are human with human motivations and fallibilities, and the trend to think stupider in larger herds like normal people. Trust them blindly - as you seem to advocate - at your peril.
"...it makes you seem very insecure. Now gtfo." ...says the person who posted as "Anonymous Coward"?
Ironic, +2?
To your point: I see where you might draw that conclusion, taking the discussion as if it began with the original /. post.
HOWEVER, let's recall that the original impetus behind Galileo and Glonass more than a decade ago was the US military's ability to 'fuzz' GPS (since discontinued) and probable ability to either encrypt (burying useful data into a constant stream, for example) or simply deny GPS usage somehow to selected receivers.
The point behind Galileo, Compass, and Glonass was to provide a system 'not owned by the US' DESPITE THE FACTS THAT:
- the US developed the tech
- the US put up the system at its own expense
- the made it available to ANYONE (from the start)
- the US GPS system has - as far as I know - functioned pretty much flawlessly since start.
So...the question would be: if the SOLE goal was 'reliability', why would Europe, China, Russia all develop THEIR OWN SYSTEMS? Why not support (ie help fund) the US program, making it more and more redundant, instead of offering competitive systems that, while yes, they can operate complementarily, essentially only improve in overlap, not intrinsically.
"You know, I'm suspicious of that darn US government, they might arbitrarily turn off the GPS system at any time...so I'm going to use either the Chinese or Russian systems, because those governments have a FAR longer history of openness, tolerance, and a lack of autocratic behaviors than that darn America!"
Basically, if you believe that the Russians or Chinese aren't even MORE likely to turn off their systems when geopolitically convenient than the US, truly, you need
- a history lesson
- an understanding of 'willful cognitive dissonance'
- to have your tinfoil hat checked for 'unreasonable' bias.
Before the inevitable flame replies, let me state clearly: the US has done some bad stuff. No question. But by ANY measure I'd say it hardly quivers the needle on a Russianor Chinese-calibrated scale.
What they need to do is reward the AI for self-referential behavior, and then allow it to post on slashdot.
And once they make it recurse occasionally and repeat some earlier navel-contemplating two or three times, then they can be editors.
I'd agree, although the excessive narcissism is probably the more significant root cause.
Since the 1960s (Surprised? No.) the emphasis on social promotion, 'feeling good about yourself', rewards for non-achievement, and a slippery sort of moral relativism all have combined to leave our children emotionally retarded, and frankly incapable of dealing with reality.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and evolution is fucking painful. Deadly, in fact. Remove the pain from growing up, and you end up with emotionally undeveloped people, with no ability to cope with hardship, no capacity to comprehend the shitty things life is going to inevitably hand them, and (seemingly) very little resilience to survive.
Go back and read Generation X. His book describes the glimmerings of the future. I'm 42 - a real GenX'er (turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990), and I see the beginnings of it in myself and my demographic. Lack of ambition, ennui, a juvenile inability to focus, as well as a difficulty being happy with much of anything. I'd attribute it in myself to a lack of hardship and challenge, and believe me it's a bastard to cope with on a day to day basis.
And yes, I'm aware that I'm essentially yelling "Get off my lawn!" but when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. They have a facility with electronics that amazes me, and I thought myself a fairly gadget-oriented guy. I regard them as "ignorant" because they don't know basic facts of geography, history, or culture - but then if one is permanently connected (as this twittering generation pretty much assumes) does one really need to store facts in their wetware? I think its necessary to have a basis of knowledge to understand the things going on around us, and to be usefully participatory adults, but then I'm old, I guess.
Oh, by the way, ROCK THE VOTE!! Ha ha ha /cry. And we thought we're screwed already....
...the MOST unlocked hotspots? SWEET.
The fact that most of them connected to the web at something around 48kbps, not so sweet.
We have the largest tin-can-and-string network IN THE WORLD, BITCHES.
"I recall when I was 12, all nudity was sexual, precisely because I was never allowed to see any "naughty bits". "
As The Escapist points out, at least that had one benefit: it made the movie Heavy Metal a cult hit.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies
BECAUSE IN MY DAY BOOBIES WERE HARD TO GET A LOOK AT.
Rose-Colored nostalgia, +1.
Yes, I played MULE. I also played Doom, and going before that I played Empire, Sword of Aragon, Ancient Art of War, Star Viking, Star Raiders, Wizardry, Ultima, and Oregon Trail (on a MECC line terminal) as well as a host of other games that are stored fondly in my nostalgia-vault as 'awesome games'.
But do you know what? My suggestion is DON'T PLAY THEM AGAIN. Like watching the original Star Wars, the memory of "greatness" is tied inextricably with context - the state of tech of the time, my age, and the whole novelty of the thing. They don't age very well.
Go to the abondonware sites, you can (thankfully) find all these games - play them, and then you can (if you're honest) admit "Meh, this is unappealing". Yes, diehards will whinge about 'gameplay over graphics' and to a point that's true; but ultimately that's not the whole story - there are a heck of a lot of advances in things other than graphics that go a LONG way toward making a game fun: credible AI that's not easily gamed, UI usability, ease of patching, online play, and (usually) a whole host of rationalizations that we accepted at the time because it was such a huge step forward from where we'd been, and it was cool just to be using a computer in the FIRST place.
I'm not saying that these games weren't great IN THEIR TIME. They were. But, like these ancient much-remembered games, just because my grandpa was cool doesn't mean I need to drag his corpse out and re-animate him today because I've got no ideas of my own.
"Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders" ...except the eco-stupid and eco-shortsighted have been opposed to the expansion of nuclear power, and the same groups have opposed the creation of any nuclear waste repositories, so power companies have been FORCED to meet demand by building plants in ND because it's really their only solution.
So, we have an increasing demand, an insistence that these needs be met, and walls dropped around any solution EXCEPT out-of-state coal or ng plants, and now they're going to be punished for choosing the cheaper solution.
Government by the people...brilliant.
...the whole concept of 'renting' software (as the Forces of Evil would describe it) that needs validation from a company server, is bullshit.
You sell me a game at $50-$60 price point, I want to own it forever, and have the media to install it when I want without requiring some crappy check-in procedure. You claim I'm only 'renting' it? Then 'rent' it to me at a rental price-point, like $10.
"That would probably send some paranoid folks nucular." ...or give the White House some new ideas. Thanks a bunch.
Since they have found the plane, that then means that the search really wasn't 'fruitless', was it?
I'm pleased to believe that I was a participant in the event that first uncovered the hypocrisy in the Lindens' operation of SL, ie the War of the Jesse Wall. Too long a story to tell here (you can google it) but their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate, including a truly free-for all zone called Jesse. The first culture to display their nascent fascism were the liberal peacniks, who objected to ardent patriotism of a number of players during the Iraq war. They tried to bottle up and hem in the pro-US players, who reacted violently (within the rules of the Jesse zone, where killing was possible).
This escalated to a full scale war which, when the peacniks (who'd been joined by socialists and other fellow travelers) begged the Lindens to intervene, and they did. Their actions to enforce 'peace' in some Left-Coast sort of utopian view directly contravened their own stated rules of non-intervention, and showed them for the hypocrites they are.
wife? sex?
checks that he's in the same reality.
Projects like this make me laugh on a number of levels.
First, "...This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as the US federal government ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage..." Funny, I thought the US was collapsing and falling apart? Where's all the investment and research $$ for all this essential international infrastructure from say, China? India? Europe? Do we want to talk again about 'internationalizing' the TLD registration and expanding the urls to non-Latin characters, or do we want to wait until the US has (again) made all the primary development investment first?
Second, 'rebuilding the internet' is a bit like reworking the Constitution, isn't it? I mean, the confluence of the varying and irreconcilable intrests of the RIAA, MPAA, EFF, NSA, commercial companies, research organizations, politicians, and even perhaps the needs of the public somewhere near the bottom (presuming you can even get a coherent picture of what 'the public' wants, from the Evangelical Christians, to the Scientologists, to NAMBLA, to people stealing torrents of movies, to 4chan users) all react against each other to make the idea of such a fundamental reworking conceptually impossible. They simply cannot all win, and NONE of them have ever shown a willingness to compromise in any meaningful way. Stalemate. Your choice is to try to cobble together some ridiculously bloated thing that tries to be everything to everyone (witness the Euro constitution, lol), or, you have some neo-fascist organization promulgating their own standard and trying to enforce it on everyone, no matter how much they clearly don't want it (witness again the Euro constitution, lol).
So what will happen, I expect, is that we're going to continue to use the same old creaky, leaky, insecure decrepit system until someone figures out ways to improve it piecemeal, so that as people have specific needs that can be met technologically and modularly (like better authentication, etc.) they can spend what they need to, implement what they need and no more. It's all about $, and perceived cost-benefit. When the need is perceived to be great enough, proprietary solutions will be developed. They'll compete in the marketplace, and the most usable (note I didn't say "best") will win, probably eventually going from proprietary to standard.
Again, one of those tropes that's often repeated by people who don't bother to think.
If the "medium is the message" then all books say the same thing. Really? Even figuratively, does that make ANY sense whatsoever?
+1 True
+1 Fscking sad.