I'm a weak amateur in the 12 kyu range, and while you're right - of course - let me add that:
I think 9 stones on a 9x9 would be more equivalent to 9x4=36 stones on a 19x19 (the 9x9 is popular because it has almost exactly 1/4 as many points as the "full" 19x19).
There is an exercise which pro's use to practice attacking - take a 18 point handicap (sometimes more, sometimes less), and try not just to win, but to kill every stone your oppponent plays. In other words, nothing short of total devastation is taken as being good enough. A pro (i.e. anyone over 1 dan) is expected to be able to do this. So a 9 stone handicap on a 9x9 board would mean the expectations on the (human) pro would be much larger than just winning.
Nonetheless, on the programmer's web site, he mentions beating a pro on the 9x9. I assume the web site is simply not quite up-to-date. This might however be the source of the confusion.
I would argue that the vast majority of $100 bills that are used in legitimate transactions get withdrawn
from a bank, spend some time in a wallet, and then are spent at a store and sent right back to a bank.
Remember, you will NEVER get a $100 back as change at a store.
Look at it another way: Will it get me convicted by a jury of my peers? Go back to your original example: I get the $100 from an ATM, and later they find it in the possession of an person who they convict of selling illegal things. So now they drag me before court, since my $100 obviously was used to buy other illegal things from this same person.
Are we to assume that this is the only evidence? Then I'm only in trouble if I live in Texas (something I stopped doing over 10 years ago, thank goodness) and my public defender is sleeping through the trial. Even a rookie attorney on his first case should have heard of the "presumption of innocence". This will just be too weird for a jury.
Are we to assume there's other evidence? Like, if they find the illegal stuff in my possesion...
Ah well then, that's another matter, isn't it?
Frankly, I would be worrying a lot more about the cameras in Tampa Bay
(coming soon to a community near you!) or whatever form thermal imaging will take now to get over that small inconvenience with the constitution... or (as I suggested in the posting that started this) worry more about them tracking my credit cards and any other forms of electronic transfer I may have, than worry about what they store in a passive 128 bit memory.
Finally, you ask Are you going to "argue away" a large database
keeping track of all the large transactions you've ever made?. Well, frankly, yes --- in this case. For cost reasons. One thing to always remember is that, apart from the space aliens or the scientoligists' bugbears (thetans? whatever they call 'em), all the other conspiracies are bound by earthly limitations like finite funding, finite memories, finite amount of time and "human resources" available for storing and maintaining their evil work. One can always argue, of course, that they have much better technology than we could even imagine, but that way leads madness, or at least the lunatic fringe...
Apart from all the paranoia, conspiracy theories, etc. etc., I have a few questions about feasability:
What do these units cost? A friend fresh out of an economics lecture once explained to me how critical the cost/benefit analysis is with currency. You want to make the cost of counterfeiting high enough to deter it, without making the currency more costly than it's face value --- especially not it's resale value. So, this thing will have to be cheap enough --- although not that cheap, since you'd probably introduce it on the larger denominations --- but it also can't be too cheap (so the counterfeiters don't roll their own).
Second, what, pray tell, will they encode in 128 bits of memory? Just the worth of the bill? Or maybe just the same value over and over again on all bills (makes the chance of hitting in randomly minimal, although not at all that low)?
Further, for those of you who didn't read the article, the chip holds a whopping entire 128 bits of data... Not Terabytes, not Gigabytes, not Megabytes, not Kilobytes, not even bytes --- Bits! 128 of them! OK, so, we all know memory grows according to something like Moore's Law, but I suspect by the time they get that thing up to a capacity where it can store enough data to convict one poor soul in a court of law, they will have developed super-duber versions of new-improved (now constitutional!) thermal imagers, Tampa-bay styled survellience, etc. etc., and this will be pretty irrelevant!
Geez, you can't even put much of a PGP Sig in 128 bits...
Oh, and for the people suggesting this could be used as a GPS tracker - wrong! It's 0.4mm, so any
antennae it has is likely to be broadcasting somewhere near microwave frequency...
Wait! That's it! That's what those funny metallic stripes on some country's bills are for! The gubbermint must have seen this coming years ago and anticipated! The stripes are the antennas!! Yeah, and, and, probably there's a backup power-supply woven into the fabric, solar-powerd --- no, that's no good, not in a wallet --- sucking power from my biomagnetic bioenergetic energy field, reading my thoughts, planting voices in my head, telling me to go out now and buy a 3 liter bottle of Coca-Cola and say rude things to the man sweeping the streets and...
Actually, two replies to this, one about whether this chip is "not going to work", and another about whether holograms work --- in reverse order.
First, do holograms work? Well, there's more than one treasury in the world and --- guess what? --- not all of them decided against them! Kinda...
I'm sitting in Germany at the moment, in my wallet I have deutsche Marks, let's see, pull some out... the 10 DM just has some shiny stripes for the Mind Control Robots (see earlier post), ditto for the 20 DM, but starting with the 50 DM bill we have a little diamond-shaped dingy which is probably not, technically speaking, a hologram, but is a rather a similar tricky little bit of material for playing with light and messing up counterfeiters who thought they could get by with a simple color photocopier.
Will my 50DM survive all the abuse you can imagine? Probably not. Doesn't have to. The point is not to obtain perfect counterfeit detection, with no false positives, but rather just to flag some suspicous bills for careful manual inspection, and to intimidate the less intelligent, less resourceful, and/or less determined counterfeiters.
Now, back to the real point: Can the chip described (barely) on CNET survive as much abuse as a Timex watch on a TV commercial (if you're old enough to remember those)? Who cares? We don't have to get it working 100% of the time, for the reasons outlined above!
Nonsense. Tell me one, just one, "constitutional right" which a counter-counterfeiting device like this would infringe on.
Now, if the device could listen to my conversations from the saftey of my wallet, we'd have a problem. If it were on my credit card so that it could amass information about me, we would have a problem. But this way, I get a $20 bill, with a certain history, maybe as change for a $100, keep it a few hours and then spend it on a 6-pack or something, and it's gone --- and what possible information could it have gathered, stored or transmitted about me in the process?
OH! I get it! It's got a GPS receiver and a radio transmitter and is tracking me at all times so that he CIA-Mind-Control satellites can get a better fix on my cranium! Why didn't I see that right away?!?
If there's a chip on my credit card it can track what I spend because it stays with me (until it gets stolen, lost or revoked). But a chip on my Ben Franklin leaves my possesion when I hand him to the lady at the cash register. Moral of the story: They can't track me or my purchases with it, they can just track what was bought by a lot of different people with one and the same bill.
Reminds me a lot of this news item that floated around in the 80's about how 99% of all $100 bills (or was it $20 bills?) have cocaine traces on them. As if that meant 99% of the population were snorting coke, instead of that almost every bill goes through so many hands that it eventually goes up somebody's nose, if you see what I mean.
No, this doesn't sound like Big Brother to me, and if it is, then it's the legal tender that needs to be worried, not the citizens.
Very good work, finding that URL! I was quite close (one click away), but gave up too soon...
However, none of the publications are downloadable, and all the most recent ones are from "Seventh Electronics New Zealand Conference, Lower Hutt, August, 2000", which I doubt my library has a copy of.
And please, don't offer to sell me a copy, dear slashdotters, I'm not that interested... anymore...
The MSN Article is datelined July 4, the Yahoo story is datelined July 2, so maybe she is going, but all these stories have a certain lead time, so maybe it's still undecided...
Further, when you consider that it's becoming a well-established tradition for these actors to state they're leaving loudly and publicly, only to return after getting promised more money, better scripts, whatever, it could very well be that both stories are equally inaccurate, and that Slashdot fell for a non-news story. "Stuff that matters" indeed.
And to think of all the fascinating stories I submitted that got rejected because we weren't in the summer news-vacuum yet...
I saw those mail delivery robots at two different companies back in the 1980's: Lear Siegler (sp?) in Grand Rapids, MI, and Texas Instruments in Dallas. In both cases, a favorite prank was to lay down new stripes on the floor with masking tape. If you ran a dead-end path into someone's cubicle, the machine would get stuck there, start beeping madly, and have to be shoved around and basically removed by brute force.
Sounds like this 'bot is at least a small improvement on those wonders of yesteryear, but I found the article quite low on details to convince me that it's really newsworthy. And surfing around it's creators' web site(s) didn't prove terribly informative either... (see my other postings)...
OK, I've found a few non-informative links, which
at least indicate that the story is not a hoax:
Here
is a link at the University in question,
indicating that work really is being done on a
"robocop",
and
here
is the home page of Dr. Dale A. Carnegie,
the person behind the project, who however (unfortunately) does not seem to have a list of publications so that one could find out a bit more about his robocop...
Enough kiwi hunting for today. Maybe some other slashdotter can find more info, I'm giving up.
Whoever modded this up to "3 informative" shoulda followed the link first, only to see that the link leads not to an informative, on-topic page, but to a rather off-topic bit of fiction/porn...
Or is that what the moderators find informative these days?
Anyone got a real link about this 'bot?
I'm surfing around it's University in another window but have yet to find this "mechatronic lab"...
Anyone else find it interesting that the machine's creator is (allegedly) named Dale Carnegie?
As in, how to win friends and influence people? At 35 km/h?
Another question: Anyone got a link to the people doing this research to find out if this thing is more than a toy? I mean, we had an automated post-cart at the company I used to work at in the 80's... Is this really much more?
I've found the URL for the Univ. where this supposedly was developed:
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/, but, although they have a search page, I've yet to find any mention of their "mechatronic lab" or this project --- but then, I have only begun to search...
OK, right, I'm back with the URL I promised before. First of all, I got the name of the gov't agency wrong, it's the "Bayerischer Staatsministerium des Innern" which they officially translate as the "Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior", for what that's worth.
The top of their tree is
here,
most of the site is in German, but a few links are in English, such as this one
here (which is also available in German, French and Spanish).
Their arguments that the CO$ is not a church,
nor scientology a religion, can be found (in German)
here.
That's Question 6 on a 25 Question
FAQ, by the way.
I thought it was available in English, but I can't seem to find it.
Not enough to give URLs, I want to close by making a valiant attempt to get back on-topic.
The Germans' argument (as I understand it) against the CO$ is that they don't play by the rules of a fair or law-abiding society. Having extremely bad experience with people who did not respect basic human rights, the Germans have basically decided (and I'm simplifying radically here) that basic civil rights extend only to those who respect the basic civil rights of others.
Now, this may seem too restrictive to many Americans (I myself am not at all comfortable with it), but we see a similar thing going on here with the Church of the Swimming Elephant (cotse.com). They've been doing their best to support freedom of speech for anyone, and now, because of that, they're wide open to attacks from people who don't respect exactly that basic right. Thus, we return to the basic central issue in this story: How do we protect the 'net against net-vandalism of the sort which (allegedly) is costing the cotse.com folks all sorts of time and trouble?
This has to be quick because I'm on the run, but, frankly, I think you're making the common mistake of mistaking the CO$ for a religious organization and not what it really is, namely, a money-making bilko scheme.
Of course, it would be good if I could back up such a claim with some evidence, and in fact, the Bayerische Verfassungschutz (German Constitution Police, very roughly translated), if memory serves, has some very good arguments about this on-line, but I don't have the URL bookmarked here (I'll post it when I've more time) -- but maybe you found it while you were "reading some more on this"?
can somebody tell me what's funny about what I said? I meant it seriously (*sniff*)
Well, I'm not sure about anyone else, but I (aka Ron Obvious) only made fun of your misspelling "crassly", that is, with a "k". It's kind of funny because there are a lot of words which differ only in spelling between German and English in that a "k" appears in German where a "c" appears in English, eg "Amerika".
Get it?
No offense intended.
Ron Obvious
P.S. Further, while "krass" is used fairly often in (street-level) German, it's heard less often in English, which also makes it sound a bit... Germanic, if you see what I mean...
Geez, whose country wants to ban software made by Scientologists?
Boy, did you get that one wrong.
First, the Germans never tried to ban the Windows defrag program. The German gov't, and two very large German churches just didn't want to buy it, and if they had to take it with Windows 2K, they at least wanted to disinstall it, which is very very different from banning it.
And, given the CO$'s history of respect for privacy, individuals' rights, and so on and so on (see the links way up at the top of the page just for starters), can you really blame them?
No, you can accuse the Germans of lots of things, but not this one. What I really don't get is why so many folks in the US of A think the Germans are so weird on this point?
I mean, clearly, the best thing to do is to go Linux, but assuming hypothetically you were somehow forced to use W2K, would you really want a CO$ defrag program with rights to read and write to any sector of your hard disk? And if you were a giant customer buying thousands, if not millions of licenses, wouldn't you want M$oft to at least give you a choice about it?
Think about it. This may seem off-topic, but it's not. They did, eventually, by the way, but not until the Germans raised a holy stink about it. Which, frankly, I found quite logical.
The source of the problem is human nature, and sadly, it's always good for a disappointment.
In other words, first, you're quite right when you say that "It's interesting to not that Mr. Gielda doesn't cite corporations or the US Government as the biggest
problem, but instead cites ordinary people...", a point a lot of other posters here missed.
But I think we can all do more than not hold our breaths until the day when "we'll actually show enough responsibility to deserve the rights we have". First of all, that day will never come.
Look at the
most recent News of the Weird", where we read that, recently,
"A 34-year-old man was shot to death over a piece of sweet potato pie (Atlanta, January). A man
was stabbed to death allegedly by his girlfriend when he brought her home a McDonald's ham,
egg and cheese bagel instead of the two Egg McMuffins she requested (Martinez, Calif., March).
A 48-year-old man was shot to death, allegedly by his wife, after a fight over their satellite-TV
controls (Orlando, April). A 37-year-old man was beaten to death, allegedly by his roommate, in
a fight over the thermostat setting..."
My point being, people are reliably inclined, all over the world, to lose all sense of proportion over things wackier and less important than usenet posts.
And, given this, my real point is: The source of the problem is technical! The internet has given us a wonderful system for facilitating communication, but it's immature. How can we (technogeek slashdotters) make it better? How can we implement noble ideas like "anonymous with accountability"? How can we get real free speech to places like China or Saudi Arabia, while still doing something to increase the responsibility of people who unleash ddos attachs and the thousand and one more interesting forms of abuse mentioned in the original article?
How can we, that is, truley best support and protect the work of those noble few who keep the net running from the inevitable depths of human nature?
As an American living in Germany, I'm not at all sure you get it. Did you read the original article at the Church of the Swimming Elephant (cotse.com)? If so, what "breaches of constitutional law" are you talking about?
Granted, the original post here on/. sorta gives the impression that this is about corporations, the DMCA, or some such, but it's not. Reading the original article shows it's about the harassment by individuals --- individuals who confused usenet with reality, and got all bent out of shape by something someone else said.
The real point here is not "laws which are krassly [sic (lovely Germanism there, are you sure you're not a troll?)] against the constitution", but rather the immaturity of the technology we call "internet" --- it allows us unimagined new possibilities to communicate, anonymously or otherwise, with or without accountability, but this also opens those who actively provide the service up to a thousand and one variations on "road rage". The real question is how we can protect those brave souls without "krassly" limiting other folks' freedom of speech.
Ron Obvious
P.S. Just out of curiousity, if you're really German and not a Troll, what do you think of verbotene Parteien?
As enviro-friendly as it sounds, replacing those pounds of paper with pounds of dead batteries, isn't something Mother Nature is likely to thank you for;-)
Two replies:
(0) My Palm Pilot is running on rechargeable's... still poison, but not as many, not as often, although for all I know more poison per battery...
(1) Actually I was thinking more about being friendly to my back, not requiring it to carry all that paper, than I was thinking about being environmentally friendly. But on that point you may have something, paper being surprisingly ecological, after all...
Still, at this point, we're so far off topic that it might be well to consider the environmental impact of the bandwidth we're wasting, the electrons we're utilizing that could be out there doing something more natural (like zapping trees, whatever), and the poison on the hard disks whose space we're taking up...
...plus, the thing that used to drive me mad with paper and pencil was getting a new calender at the beginning of every year, throwing out the old one, and all that. It's a little thing, but it's fascinating to think how many pounds of paper the perpertual calender in a PDA replaces...
However, I eventually got real tired of even the better-than-average handwriting recognition in the Palm. Have since installed the
fitaly
hack, and now that's not a problem either (or least, not so much, not so often).
So, you can feel smug being a traditionalist all day long, I'm not going back to dead trees any time soon --- not until they pry my PDA... you get the idea...
Get down off your high horse. Observing the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the UNIVAC I machine in no way excludes interest in Turing, or for that matter in the various Polish Mathematicians/Logicians which made the work in Betchley possible, or their predecessors, or any other of the many fascinating figures in the history of what we today call a "computer". Quite the opposite. If you look at this whole discussion, you'll see it's inspired a lot of digging for the details, unearthed the names of a lot of people who made important contributions (yes, Turing, of course, but also Eckert and Mauchly and von Neumann and Konrad Zuse and quite a few others), and has in no way concentrated on "commercial" computers.
The point is not that "commercial" computers are important, but rather that the UNIVAC I was important, that it's charming to know that the anniversary was yesterday (meanwhile), and to use that for an excuse to go looking into the whole context. Particularly when you consider that Ecker and Mauchly were the actual fathers of the so-called "von Neumann architecture", which everyone who has any serious interest in Computers must have heard of by now (see my last post and/or Hennessy and Patterson, 2nd Edition).
Finally, I've read Robert Harris's "Enigma" and it has to be about the least informative, most run-of-the-mill depiction of Betchley Park yet to be put to print. See the cryptography FAQ for several good non-fiction references if you want the history, of if you insist on non-fiction, read Stevenson's Cryptonomicon, which I suspect is written is a style a lot closer to a Slashdotter's taste than Harris's tired old war novel style.
"we all must bow before John Von Neumann who just so
happened to suggest silly things like serial computation (ie, computing htings in order (believe it or not
this was NOT how the early designs worked, parallel computing predates serial computing)..."
it is interesting to note that Eckert and Mauchly actually deserve credit (it has been argued) for much of the things von Neumann gets credit for, in particular, that the "von Neumann architecture" should actually be called the "Eckert and Mauchly" architecture. See Hennessy and Patterson ("Computer Archtiecture: A Wuantitative Approach"), 2nd Edition, Section 1.10, p. 53-54.
I'm not saying this to decrease anyone's respect for von Neumann -- he was clearly a pivotal figure -- but rather to show how important Eckert and Mauchly (and ENIAC and UNIVAC) were.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a weak amateur in the 12 kyu range, and while you're right - of course - let me add that:
Look at it another way: Will it get me convicted by a jury of my peers? Go back to your original example: I get the $100 from an ATM, and later they find it in the possession of an person who they convict of selling illegal things. So now they drag me before court, since my $100 obviously was used to buy other illegal things from this same person.
Are we to assume that this is the only evidence? Then I'm only in trouble if I live in Texas (something I stopped doing over 10 years ago, thank goodness) and my public defender is sleeping through the trial. Even a rookie attorney on his first case should have heard of the "presumption of innocence". This will just be too weird for a jury.
Are we to assume there's other evidence? Like, if they find the illegal stuff in my possesion... Ah well then, that's another matter, isn't it?
Frankly, I would be worrying a lot more about the cameras in Tampa Bay (coming soon to a community near you!) or whatever form thermal imaging will take now to get over that small inconvenience with the constitution... or (as I suggested in the posting that started this) worry more about them tracking my credit cards and any other forms of electronic transfer I may have, than worry about what they store in a passive 128 bit memory.
Finally, you ask Are you going to "argue away" a large database keeping track of all the large transactions you've ever made?. Well, frankly, yes --- in this case. For cost reasons. One thing to always remember is that, apart from the space aliens or the scientoligists' bugbears (thetans? whatever they call 'em), all the other conspiracies are bound by earthly limitations like finite funding, finite memories, finite amount of time and "human resources" available for storing and maintaining their evil work. One can always argue, of course, that they have much better technology than we could even imagine, but that way leads madness, or at least the lunatic fringe...
Ron Obvious
Ron Obvious
Geez, you can't even put much of a PGP Sig in 128 bits...
Ron Obvious
Wait! That's it! That's what those funny metallic stripes on some country's bills are for! The gubbermint must have seen this coming years ago and anticipated! The stripes are the antennas!! Yeah, and, and, probably there's a backup power-supply woven into the fabric, solar-powerd --- no, that's no good, not in a wallet --- sucking power from my biomagnetic bioenergetic energy field, reading my thoughts, planting voices in my head, telling me to go out now and buy a 3 liter bottle of Coca-Cola and say rude things to the man sweeping the streets and...
Enuf here... Gotta run!!!
Ron Obvious
First, do holograms work? Well, there's more than one treasury in the world and --- guess what? --- not all of them decided against them! Kinda...
I'm sitting in Germany at the moment, in my wallet I have deutsche Marks, let's see, pull some out... the 10 DM just has some shiny stripes for the Mind Control Robots (see earlier post), ditto for the 20 DM, but starting with the 50 DM bill we have a little diamond-shaped dingy which is probably not, technically speaking, a hologram, but is a rather a similar tricky little bit of material for playing with light and messing up counterfeiters who thought they could get by with a simple color photocopier.
Will my 50DM survive all the abuse you can imagine? Probably not. Doesn't have to. The point is not to obtain perfect counterfeit detection, with no false positives, but rather just to flag some suspicous bills for careful manual inspection, and to intimidate the less intelligent, less resourceful, and/or less determined counterfeiters.
Now, back to the real point: Can the chip described (barely) on CNET survive as much abuse as a Timex watch on a TV commercial (if you're old enough to remember those)? Who cares? We don't have to get it working 100% of the time, for the reasons outlined above!
Ron Obvious
Now, if the device could listen to my conversations from the saftey of my wallet, we'd have a problem. If it were on my credit card so that it could amass information about me, we would have a problem. But this way, I get a $20 bill, with a certain history, maybe as change for a $100, keep it a few hours and then spend it on a 6-pack or something, and it's gone --- and what possible information could it have gathered, stored or transmitted about me in the process?
OH! I get it! It's got a GPS receiver and a radio transmitter and is tracking me at all times so that he CIA-Mind-Control satellites can get a better fix on my cranium! Why didn't I see that right away?!?
Ron Obvious
If there's a chip on my credit card it can track what I spend because it stays with me (until it gets stolen, lost or revoked). But a chip on my Ben Franklin leaves my possesion when I hand him to the lady at the cash register. Moral of the story: They can't track me or my purchases with it, they can just track what was bought by a lot of different people with one and the same bill.
Reminds me a lot of this news item that floated around in the 80's about how 99% of all $100 bills (or was it $20 bills?) have cocaine traces on them. As if that meant 99% of the population were snorting coke, instead of that almost every bill goes through so many hands that it eventually goes up somebody's nose, if you see what I mean.
No, this doesn't sound like Big Brother to me, and if it is, then it's the legal tender that needs to be worried, not the citizens.
Or am I missing something here?
Ron Obvious
However, none of the publications are downloadable, and all the most recent ones are from "Seventh Electronics New Zealand Conference, Lower Hutt, August, 2000", which I doubt my library has a copy of.
And please, don't offer to sell me a copy, dear slashdotters, I'm not that interested... anymore...
Ron Obvious
The MSN Article is datelined July 4, the Yahoo story is datelined July 2, so maybe she is going, but all these stories have a certain lead time, so maybe it's still undecided...
Further, when you consider that it's becoming a well-established tradition for these actors to state they're leaving loudly and publicly, only to return after getting promised more money, better scripts, whatever, it could very well be that both stories are equally inaccurate, and that Slashdot fell for a non-news story. "Stuff that matters" indeed.
And to think of all the fascinating stories I submitted that got rejected because we weren't in the summer news-vacuum yet...
Ron Obvious
Sounds like this 'bot is at least a small improvement on those wonders of yesteryear, but I found the article quite low on details to convince me that it's really newsworthy. And surfing around it's creators' web site(s) didn't prove terribly informative either... (see my other postings)...
Ron Obvious
Go buy some survellience cameras from the Tampa Bay Police if you want to know that sort of thing!
Ron Obvious
Enough kiwi hunting for today. Maybe some other slashdotter can find more info, I'm giving up.
Ron Obvious
Or is that what the moderators find informative these days?
Anyone got a real link about this 'bot? I'm surfing around it's University in another window but have yet to find this "mechatronic lab"...
Ron Obvious
As in, how to win friends and influence people? At 35 km/h?
Another question: Anyone got a link to the people doing this research to find out if this thing is more than a toy? I mean, we had an automated post-cart at the company I used to work at in the 80's... Is this really much more? I've found the URL for the Univ. where this supposedly was developed: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/, but, although they have a search page, I've yet to find any mention of their "mechatronic lab" or this project --- but then, I have only begun to search...
Ron Obvious
Not enough to give URLs, I want to close by making a valiant attempt to get back on-topic. The Germans' argument (as I understand it) against the CO$ is that they don't play by the rules of a fair or law-abiding society. Having extremely bad experience with people who did not respect basic human rights, the Germans have basically decided (and I'm simplifying radically here) that basic civil rights extend only to those who respect the basic civil rights of others. Now, this may seem too restrictive to many Americans (I myself am not at all comfortable with it), but we see a similar thing going on here with the Church of the Swimming Elephant (cotse.com). They've been doing their best to support freedom of speech for anyone, and now, because of that, they're wide open to attacks from people who don't respect exactly that basic right. Thus, we return to the basic central issue in this story: How do we protect the 'net against net-vandalism of the sort which (allegedly) is costing the cotse.com folks all sorts of time and trouble?
Of course, it would be good if I could back up such a claim with some evidence, and in fact, the Bayerische Verfassungschutz (German Constitution Police, very roughly translated), if memory serves, has some very good arguments about this on-line, but I don't have the URL bookmarked here (I'll post it when I've more time) -- but maybe you found it while you were "reading some more on this"?
Ron Obvious
Well, I'm not sure about anyone else, but I (aka Ron Obvious) only made fun of your misspelling "crassly", that is, with a "k". It's kind of funny because there are a lot of words which differ only in spelling between German and English in that a "k" appears in German where a "c" appears in English, eg "Amerika".
Get it?
No offense intended.
Ron Obvious
P.S. Further, while "krass" is used fairly often in (street-level) German, it's heard less often in English, which also makes it sound a bit... Germanic, if you see what I mean...
Boy, did you get that one wrong.
First, the Germans never tried to ban the Windows defrag program. The German gov't, and two very large German churches just didn't want to buy it, and if they had to take it with Windows 2K, they at least wanted to disinstall it, which is very very different from banning it.
And, given the CO$'s history of respect for privacy, individuals' rights, and so on and so on (see the links way up at the top of the page just for starters), can you really blame them?
No, you can accuse the Germans of lots of things, but not this one. What I really don't get is why so many folks in the US of A think the Germans are so weird on this point?
I mean, clearly, the best thing to do is to go Linux, but assuming hypothetically you were somehow forced to use W2K, would you really want a CO$ defrag program with rights to read and write to any sector of your hard disk? And if you were a giant customer buying thousands, if not millions of licenses, wouldn't you want M$oft to at least give you a choice about it?
Think about it. This may seem off-topic, but it's not. They did, eventually, by the way, but not until the Germans raised a holy stink about it. Which, frankly, I found quite logical.
Ron Obvious
In other words, first, you're quite right when you say that "It's interesting to not that Mr. Gielda doesn't cite corporations or the US Government as the biggest problem, but instead cites ordinary people...", a point a lot of other posters here missed.
But I think we can all do more than not hold our breaths until the day when "we'll actually show enough responsibility to deserve the rights we have". First of all, that day will never come. Look at the most recent News of the Weird", where we read that, recently,
My point being, people are reliably inclined, all over the world, to lose all sense of proportion over things wackier and less important than usenet posts.
And, given this, my real point is: The source of the problem is technical! The internet has given us a wonderful system for facilitating communication, but it's immature. How can we (technogeek slashdotters) make it better? How can we implement noble ideas like "anonymous with accountability"? How can we get real free speech to places like China or Saudi Arabia, while still doing something to increase the responsibility of people who unleash ddos attachs and the thousand and one more interesting forms of abuse mentioned in the original article?
How can we, that is, truley best support and protect the work of those noble few who keep the net running from the inevitable depths of human nature?
Ron Obvious
Granted, the original post here on /. sorta gives the impression that this is about corporations, the DMCA, or some such, but it's not. Reading the original article shows it's about the harassment by individuals --- individuals who confused usenet with reality, and got all bent out of shape by something someone else said.
The real point here is not "laws which are krassly [sic (lovely Germanism there, are you sure you're not a troll?)] against the constitution", but rather the immaturity of the technology we call "internet" --- it allows us unimagined new possibilities to communicate, anonymously or otherwise, with or without accountability, but this also opens those who actively provide the service up to a thousand and one variations on "road rage". The real question is how we can protect those brave souls without "krassly" limiting other folks' freedom of speech.
Ron Obvious
P.S. Just out of curiousity, if you're really German and not a Troll, what do you think of verbotene Parteien?
Still, at this point, we're so far off topic that it might be well to consider the environmental impact of the bandwidth we're wasting, the electrons we're utilizing that could be out there doing something more natural (like zapping trees, whatever), and the poison on the hard disks whose space we're taking up...
Ron Obvious
However, I eventually got real tired of even the better-than-average handwriting recognition in the Palm. Have since installed the fitaly hack, and now that's not a problem either (or least, not so much, not so often).
So, you can feel smug being a traditionalist all day long, I'm not going back to dead trees any time soon --- not until they pry my PDA... you get the idea...
Ron Obvious
The point is not that "commercial" computers are important, but rather that the UNIVAC I was important, that it's charming to know that the anniversary was yesterday (meanwhile), and to use that for an excuse to go looking into the whole context. Particularly when you consider that Ecker and Mauchly were the actual fathers of the so-called "von Neumann architecture", which everyone who has any serious interest in Computers must have heard of by now (see my last post and/or Hennessy and Patterson, 2nd Edition).
Finally, I've read Robert Harris's "Enigma" and it has to be about the least informative, most run-of-the-mill depiction of Betchley Park yet to be put to print. See the cryptography FAQ for several good non-fiction references if you want the history, of if you insist on non-fiction, read Stevenson's Cryptonomicon, which I suspect is written is a style a lot closer to a Slashdotter's taste than Harris's tired old war novel style.
Ron Obvious
I'm not saying this to decrease anyone's respect for von Neumann -- he was clearly a pivotal figure -- but rather to show how important Eckert and Mauchly (and ENIAC and UNIVAC) were.
Ron Obvious