I have read so many articles predicting the death of this industry or that technique...the only one I remember being partially right was on about 16 years ago forecasting the birth of fiber optic backbones for telecommunications. And even then, the copper networks are still here, plaguing our ability to get high speed access and video-on-demand. Think about all the predictions we've seen: the PC isn't dead, Windows isn't dead, Unix isn't dead, the internal combustion engine isn't dead, agri-business isn't dead, the world didn't end on Y2K. Doomsayers will go right on predicting the end of this or that...and we'll go right on living. Evolution is as evolution does.
What seems to happen within society is a trade-off between safety and rights. Many of the classic libertarians in the 17th and 18th century wrote about these ideas, even as far back as Hobbes' Leviathan. We trade some of our natural freedoms and liberties for security. Some philosophers believed that once those rights were surrendered to the state, they could not be reclaimed, others - such as the Founding Fathers - believed that those rights could be reclaimed when the State overstepped its bounds, as England did with the unfair taxation and lack of colonial representation. As this article suggests, State's change; the US was founded on ideals that in part proclaimed a natural right to rebel against tyranny. Today, our government has taken - and we have tacitly given - many more of our rights than was previously permissable. We all accept that forced immunization is a wonderful idea; some of us (not me) think that laws requiring seat belts usage are good (though I would never ride in a car without one). The State is increasingly 'nanny'ing its people. We are accepting further and further intrusions intoour lives, accepting mandates, ingnoring invasions. One of my grad instructor's worked for a big financial corp that went under for fraud. He said, quietly, that with any one piece of info, he could know everything about anyone who had ever entered into any transaction in North America. My current prof came from the Intelligence community. He left in part because the technology being used and being developed was really beginning to frighten him.
It may be too late to take back the rights we've given the State in the past 50 years. We traded them for safety from the Reds. We may want the State to keep them to protect us from sex offenders, terrorists, and sociopaths. Just pray that the State doesn't convince us we need to be protected against dissendent thought or dangerous diversity. The technology for Thought Police exists...
Having many friends and relatives in the armed forces and a couple in Intelligence fields, I have heard enough to question the 'state-of-the- art" equipment in the military. Take any of the axioms in the tech industry, like Moore's Law, and you have to wonder about the speed at we they are able to deliver new advances to the services. Just b/c it always has taken so long is no justification for to take so long.
I find it somewhat ironic that on one hand we are angry that Congress gets involved with TLD controversies but on the other hand, we expect laws and court ruling to prevent Verio from 'boting Register. Like it or not, the gov. is and always will be a part of the 'Net experience. The trick is educating Congress and law enforcement about what the 'Net really is before they enact the policies that will guide it. Letters, phone calls, votes: they are all needed.
Or maybe poisonous snakes in strategic areas...
I think I can sleep easier tonight knowing that in 8+ years, we'll have last year's technology defending us for tomorrow's threats. I guess they can't open soure it, can they.
And thic Col Pedro makes an interesting point:"instantly at the speed of light". I had something funny to say about that, but I think it speaks for itself.
http://www.unholyrouter.com
The ruling itself is good, but it seems like there needs to be a better logic behind future rulings. What happens when a company is affected as Register was but cannot show an appreciable system burden, or at least one that a judge will accept? Using trespassing as part of the arguement makes some sense, as a website or database could be construed as a property, though I wonder whether trespass laws are written to sufficently to cover virtual property? There comes a point when trying to use analogies for the Interent becomes futile. The Internet isn't necessarily like anything else. The Internet is its own thing. Its time we had policymakers that understand that and deal with it appropriately.
http://unholyrouter.com
A lot of my comrades, and even myself sometimes, will buy a book on some topic - PHP, Exchange Server, Sex, whatever - b/c they feel inferior in their understanding of the topic. Owning the book gives them a level of confidence just through the knowledge of having it. Never mind that they may never even have opened it. Their worries are ameliorated and they go on living their lives of quiet desperation. I think that when companies buy software like that, or bring in a consultant, or invoke a new mantra, they are trying to make themselves feel better about some inferiority. And ususally, the answers are already there, they just refuse to see them.
I couldn't agree more that we (i.e. the people who are generally part of the/. community and our comrades) should be allowed to hear what goes on up there. Its fascinating to us, and we are going to demand they stop funding it if we learn of problems. There are, however, plenty of people across the country that see the ISS as a big waste of money, that believe we shouldn't be in space, that believe we shouldn't be working with the Russians, etc. They are also surprisingly willing to write their "congresscritters" and raise a ruckus. Its more than a digital divide that separates 'us' from 'them'...sometimes its like a whole other country...
Yeah, I'm an elitist bastard. Get over it.
This case represents another issue where social/legal policy has not kept pace with technology. So many of the laws and mores that define how we interact in the public forum were crafted in such a different atmosphere that they cannot hope to answer the problems of today. I think that we will see more and more cases where the courts - of and of public opinion - are challenged to decide whether action X is permissable in situation Y (which they never encountered) using an analogy to make it seem like situation Z with which they are comfortable. OF course, the trick is find the right analogy, and there-in lay the problem. Blah blah blah - http://www.hyperorg.com makes a lot more sense about the analogy issue than I do.
Exactly, voice is one of the most important tools we have in a (hypothetically)free market. Change comes from not only our dollars, but also what we say. They seem DOA, but pagecreators.com is not the only one out there trying to cajole the naive and the hasty. So speak, loudly. Really, louder. Or, ummm, type loudly. Or something.
"That's an interesting point considering there has yet to be a single instance of a Biblical event being 'debunked' by science. A human interpretation of a Biblical event, maybe, but never an actual event itself..."
You can go right on believing that one as long as you want. Considering that such concepts as evolution, the age of the universe, the inconsistencies of historical events - particularly battles - are all, at best, contradictory to the Bible's accounts. According to a Discovery channel show the other noght, the only archealogical proof of any battle described in the bible was found not that long ago at a fortress 25 south and west of Jerusalem. Other evidence implies that Judaism may have begun as a ditheistic, not monothesitic, religion, though this is speculative. At the very least, the timeline put forward in the old testament is way off.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Slashdot Mirror
I have read so many articles predicting the death of this industry or that technique...the only one I remember being partially right was on about 16 years ago forecasting the birth of fiber optic backbones for telecommunications. And even then, the copper networks are still here, plaguing our ability to get high speed access and video-on-demand. Think about all the predictions we've seen: the PC isn't dead, Windows isn't dead, Unix isn't dead, the internal combustion engine isn't dead, agri-business isn't dead, the world didn't end on Y2K. Doomsayers will go right on predicting the end of this or that...and we'll go right on living. Evolution is as evolution does.
As Mark Twain once said: There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.
What seems to happen within society is a trade-off between safety and rights. Many of the classic libertarians in the 17th and 18th century wrote about these ideas, even as far back as Hobbes' Leviathan. We trade some of our natural freedoms and liberties for security. Some philosophers believed that once those rights were surrendered to the state, they could not be reclaimed, others - such as the Founding Fathers - believed that those rights could be reclaimed when the State overstepped its bounds, as England did with the unfair taxation and lack of colonial representation. As this article suggests, State's change; the US was founded on ideals that in part proclaimed a natural right to rebel against tyranny. Today, our government has taken - and we have tacitly given - many more of our rights than was previously permissable. We all accept that forced immunization is a wonderful idea; some of us (not me) think that laws requiring seat belts usage are good (though I would never ride in a car without one). The State is increasingly 'nanny'ing its people. We are accepting further and further intrusions intoour lives, accepting mandates, ingnoring invasions. One of my grad instructor's worked for a big financial corp that went under for fraud. He said, quietly, that with any one piece of info, he could know everything about anyone who had ever entered into any transaction in North America. My current prof came from the Intelligence community. He left in part because the technology being used and being developed was really beginning to frighten him. It may be too late to take back the rights we've given the State in the past 50 years. We traded them for safety from the Reds. We may want the State to keep them to protect us from sex offenders, terrorists, and sociopaths. Just pray that the State doesn't convince us we need to be protected against dissendent thought or dangerous diversity. The technology for Thought Police exists...
Having many friends and relatives in the armed forces and a couple in Intelligence fields, I have heard enough to question the 'state-of-the- art" equipment in the military. Take any of the axioms in the tech industry, like Moore's Law, and you have to wonder about the speed at we they are able to deliver new advances to the services. Just b/c it always has taken so long is no justification for to take so long.
I find it somewhat ironic that on one hand we are angry that Congress gets involved with TLD controversies but on the other hand, we expect laws and court ruling to prevent Verio from 'boting Register. Like it or not, the gov. is and always will be a part of the 'Net experience. The trick is educating Congress and law enforcement about what the 'Net really is before they enact the policies that will guide it. Letters, phone calls, votes: they are all needed. Or maybe poisonous snakes in strategic areas...
I think I can sleep easier tonight knowing that in 8+ years, we'll have last year's technology defending us for tomorrow's threats. I guess they can't open soure it, can they.
And thic Col Pedro makes an interesting point:"instantly at the speed of light". I had something funny to say about that, but I think it speaks for itself.
http://www.unholyrouter.com
The ruling itself is good, but it seems like there needs to be a better logic behind future rulings. What happens when a company is affected as Register was but cannot show an appreciable system burden, or at least one that a judge will accept? Using trespassing as part of the arguement makes some sense, as a website or database could be construed as a property, though I wonder whether trespass laws are written to sufficently to cover virtual property? There comes a point when trying to use analogies for the Interent becomes futile. The Internet isn't necessarily like anything else. The Internet is its own thing. Its time we had policymakers that understand that and deal with it appropriately. http://unholyrouter.com
A lot of my comrades, and even myself sometimes, will buy a book on some topic - PHP, Exchange Server, Sex, whatever - b/c they feel inferior in their understanding of the topic. Owning the book gives them a level of confidence just through the knowledge of having it. Never mind that they may never even have opened it. Their worries are ameliorated and they go on living their lives of quiet desperation. I think that when companies buy software like that, or bring in a consultant, or invoke a new mantra, they are trying to make themselves feel better about some inferiority. And ususally, the answers are already there, they just refuse to see them.
I couldn't agree more that we (i.e. the people who are generally part of the /. community and our comrades) should be allowed to hear what goes on up there. Its fascinating to us, and we are going to demand they stop funding it if we learn of problems. There are, however, plenty of people across the country that see the ISS as a big waste of money, that believe we shouldn't be in space, that believe we shouldn't be working with the Russians, etc. They are also surprisingly willing to write their "congresscritters" and raise a ruckus. Its more than a digital divide that separates 'us' from 'them'...sometimes its like a whole other country...
Yeah, I'm an elitist bastard. Get over it.
This case represents another issue where social/legal policy has not kept pace with technology. So many of the laws and mores that define how we interact in the public forum were crafted in such a different atmosphere that they cannot hope to answer the problems of today. I think that we will see more and more cases where the courts - of and of public opinion - are challenged to decide whether action X is permissable in situation Y (which they never encountered) using an analogy to make it seem like situation Z with which they are comfortable. OF course, the trick is find the right analogy, and there-in lay the problem. Blah blah blah - http://www.hyperorg.com makes a lot more sense about the analogy issue than I do.
So if you can't understand quantum physics, it must be impossible? That's quite solopcist of you.
Dude, if that is the biggest frustration you run into...
Exactly, voice is one of the most important tools we have in a (hypothetically)free market. Change comes from not only our dollars, but also what we say. They seem DOA, but pagecreators.com is not the only one out there trying to cajole the naive and the hasty. So speak, loudly. Really, louder. Or, ummm, type loudly. Or something.
"That's an interesting point considering there has yet to be a single instance of a Biblical event being 'debunked' by science. A human interpretation of a Biblical event, maybe, but never an actual event itself..." You can go right on believing that one as long as you want. Considering that such concepts as evolution, the age of the universe, the inconsistencies of historical events - particularly battles - are all, at best, contradictory to the Bible's accounts. According to a Discovery channel show the other noght, the only archealogical proof of any battle described in the bible was found not that long ago at a fortress 25 south and west of Jerusalem. Other evidence implies that Judaism may have begun as a ditheistic, not monothesitic, religion, though this is speculative. At the very least, the timeline put forward in the old testament is way off. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH