Right, quick question. What region? And from where, would be equally appropriate.
Alright, I checked on that and found that the region the fellow was trying to send to wasn't specified. He was trying to send from California, and remarked that the post office was no longer sending by air. He said at the time, "Hmm. I wonder what they know that we don't know.". My mistake. Put it down to a miscommunication on my part. Still, it does seem odd that they'd stop shipping by air, period, a week before the attack. Then again I don't know when the changeover occurred, just that somebody noticed it about a week ago. On balance, it's probably not as important as I'd thought it was.
Ok, you got my attention. Can you explain a bit further about the USPS. How do you know? Why doesn't anyone else seem to know, or if they do, why haven't they made the connection? Is there really a connection, or is it some kind of coincidence? Any info or links would be appreciated.
It was an office conversation. Other people who tried to ship things to that region during that time period would have encountered the same phenomenon. I don't know if or why those people haven't made the connection. I don't know if it's connection or coincidence, although the timing looks mighty suspicious to me, and the Prez calling it "a national tragedy" was pretty freaking weird. Obviously it was a national tragedy. That that was the only think he could think of to say at first looks as though he's covering something up. That was my first clue. It wasn't until I heard about the USPS that it was confirmed.
What I can't figure out is why they'd stop the USPS planes if they knew it was going to happen. Consider: even if they'd wanted to keep the WTC attack from public knowledge, they couldn't have kept it off the media because enough people had experienced it that it would've been a no-go as a coverup. So why in the heck would they nix the planes ahead of time, when they know people nationwide will have tried mailing things to that region and encountered the change, and then feign surprise? Whoever's in charge of PR in the goverment really seems to be slipping these days. I don't get it.
Difference of opinion... still legal is 43 states.
~gryn~
But I want to ask you this: if you believe that the government allowed the WTC attack to happen, do you not consider that an act of war against the populace?
Don't get me started. I consider a lot of the things they do an act of war against their own people. People put up with it, and not because they don't know this stuff, because it's right there between the lines for anyone to deduce from what's said. My guess is that people just don't want to focus on it. It makes them uncomfortable. So I usually don't saying anything about it. In this case I was on Slashdot where people were genuinely trying to figure it out, so I shared what I could. Generally my concern is keeping the immature decision-making processes of others from infringing on my own life, and trying to help the people I can outgrow them. Best thing I can think of as things stand.
Is that not sufficient reason to depose the government by any means necessary?
Not in my book, no. It's justification to, by all means, but just because a person can do something doesn't mean they neccessarily should. In a scenario like this, the lives of the American people are pretty darn well intertwined with the sort of government that's doing all this. Any such change has got to be both effective and peacable to be successful. If you thought a building going down was bad, imagine rioting and looting in the streets coast to coast as an old regime is deposed. Not a happy thing. At least the system we have has got a decent backbone, and there's no assurance that any new one would be any sounder.
Wouldn't that be enough to start another civil war, if everyone knew and believed?
Maybe, if people would overcome their fostered indolence. But it isn't going to happen, since one voice both cannot reach and cannot convince everybody. And that's jake with me. Martial law is icky, and I'd rather have the tanks sitting in the military bases than rolling down the streets.
If you really believe this, what do you propose doing next? Are you just going to sit back and take it?
I'm no revolutionary, and this isn't a soapbox. I'm someone who happened to overhear something from an office conversation and passed it along. If you're looking for leadership for a call to arms I'm not your man. I tend to think of the problem requiring delicate surgery rather than violent upheaval. There's too much at stake for unplanned hack-and-slash based on unthinking public outrage. If you want to do something, I suggest examining just how everyone's lives are so precariously balanced on the government, and try to come to some solution that can be enacted without jeopardizing them. Perhaps if people in general make more mature choices, they will accept the government's role as a primary caregiver less and less, until we have a system of arbitration rather than an obese shifty-eyed nanny making decisions on our behalf. My own opinion, natch.
Do you have links to some documentation for the USPS bit? I'd like to read more about that.
It came up in conversation last night. My mom mentioned a conversation she'd had with a co-worker about a week beforehand who had tried to send something to the region. Hence, no documentation, just one of those things that happens. I'm sure the post office still isn't air shipping anything there, but it might be interesting to ask them when they started that practice, followed by "Why?". As for me, I'm not inclined to mistrust a simple office conversation mentioned by a close relative.
`I think the best reply one can give to the politicians who want to impose this is: "And Osama Bin Laden is going to throw away his foreign-developed, non-backdoored encryption software and buy US-made backdoored encryption software exactly why?'"
I don't.
The objective here isn't to stop the guy. They could've if they'd wanted to. About a week before the attack the U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering air mail to the region. They knew something we didn't, and opted not to stop it. And I think I know why.
We hear a lot about terrorism against the U.S.. We don't usually hear the other side's complaints. Obviously they don't think of it as terrorism, they think of it as some sort of a protest. I wonder what they're protesting, and why. If our government did something unjust to them, I wouldn't trust our media to tell us about it. But as a tiny little group of malcontents going up against the U.S., about their only recourse is an attack like this. Given that the U.S. government knew about it beforehand, they didn't bargain to prevent it for one of two reasons. Either the price was considered too high, or the U.S. government thought that an attack like this would end up working in their favor. They've been looking for an excuse to nullify cryptography for years now. Anybody remember the Clipper chip? The legislation keeps being defeated, because people are siding with the need for privacy. Now they've been able to demonstrate a supposed need for the U.S. government to know everything that's being said anywhere in the country. Perhaps they think it will sway the common consensus in favor of their legislation.
Galling, isn't it. More impressive (from a logistical standpoint) than crippling a nation with a store-bought knife and their own planes, is the prospect of prying your way into a nation's cryptography with someone else's store-bought knife, someone else's plane, and a bunch of lives you don't care about because you think of them as "your citizens", in the same usage as "your house" and "your car". Oh, and a temporary economic setback which you mitigate by printing more baseless currency. Clever.
Yes, developers. If you're running a software company, creating small components allows you less room to innovate on features. This in turn makes it more difficult to market your products.
So for now at least, Linux developers will probably have to fight this fight alone. In order to convince users to make the shift away from MS Office, et. al., Linux apps have to offer a solution that's easier to use and faster by a factor of at least two.
When people buy desktop PCs, they don't buy one with all the OS and software they'll want. They pick up the software they need as they need it, and upgrade as neccessary. The same concept would appear to hold true with componants within an app. If an app could download componants as needed, invisibly, and keep tabs on which componants were used how often, each copy of the app would be able to determine what the user used the most, and keep copies of those componants on hand. You'd get an app which would do the job seamlessly, and adapt itself to each user's own requirements. It would officially rule, and there's no reason why componants and groups of componants couldn't be improved and upgraded as they interact with and affect each other, with an invisible upgrade method akin to the way current apps self-upgrade when connected to the 'net. It seems simple enough from the standpoint of an end-user like me, and the total effect from an app like that would be astonishing.
Re:What can be done? Nothing.
on
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The only effective weapon against terrorism is to do absolutely nothing.
Make any change at all in response, and you are instantly losing. Pandering to the desired effect, which is 'change'.
Not so. In evolution (and in business) a new strategy only succeeds until everyone else has caught onto it and adapted to neutralize it. One can at least shore up the gaps in the way buildings and aircraft are designed to attempt to prevent this sort of thing recurring. Either that or we should reach the comclusion that air travel is inherently risky and no amount of feigned security is going to prevent something like this, and do away with the extra expense and humiliation of what we generously call airport security. I think that concept was common knowledge before all this. All this incident did was make it unavoidable.
Say what you will about the loss of life, and the human tragedy of it, but the fact remains: humans die, whether at the hands of other humans, or by their own doing.
Right, right. Let's trash the whole social contract, shall we? American citizens make increasingly greater concessions of their rights and liberties to their government on the grounds that the government will in turn perform its current function of legislation and taking care of the tough stuff. Do as much as cross the street wrong or talk to a cop or a judge in a way that displeases them and the system penalizes you. People are liable when they don't perform their portion of the social contract, but you seem to be suggesting that when the government fails in its capacity to keep its people safe from harm it should be released from its obligation to do so. Governments, like doctors, bury their mistakes. Now either we have a government that is making ever-more inroads into the liberties and rights of its people in an attempt to shoulder the burden of doing the tough stuff, mainaining a safe system so that people are able to go about their individual pursuits, in which case it needs to ensure that it does so, or we have a government that is only responsible for settling disputes and maintaining internal cohesion as applies to foreign policy, in which case it needs to stop making a power grab in the private lives of its citizenry. Either it's one way, or it's the other. It can't have it both ways, controlling the private lives of its citizenry yet not responsible for them.
If a club does nothing about drug sales going on inside, it gets shut down or fined. If Ebay was selling organs and babies, you damn well bet something would be done. I'm not a big fan of the DMCA or anything, but does this mean I can start buying switch-blades on Ebay?
Just because it's unjust to dismantle their site because others may be trying to use it to violate laws and rights doesn't mean that it's just for them to do so. As I understand it, the site has a procedure for dealing with instances like that, so they evidently take an interest in rectifying those problems. As for your example of switch-blades, I'm not sure. If both the seller and the buyer are in jurisdictions where they aren't contraband, wouldn't it be okay? Anybody know the protocol there?
Think about it: If I provide you with a hammer with the purpose of you using it as a device to pound nails into wood, etc., I really don't expect to be sued if you use it to bash in a guy's head down the street. eBay wasn't created to facilitate the transfer of illegal copies of materials, though some might use it for such.
Yup yup. And this is definately an important precedent to establish. If the site were liable or responsible for infringements on copyright for the simple reason of their existence and that it's possible to distribute copyrighted materials over its service, we would find ourselves trying, based on that flawed rationale, to dismantle the entire Internet on those same grounds. Their site wasn't designed to counter DMCA interests, nor to violate copyrights, just as the 'net wasn't. The copyright holders' approach of using allegations of injury as part of an attempt to alter what (a) they have no jurisdiction over (the structure and existence of proprietary sites), and (b) is being done neither intentionally nor maliciously, needs definate refining.
(from the/. story)
So, Legal Eagles, were Napster, Gnutella, etc. created as P2P systems that were "turned evil," or were they "evil" from the get-go? Therein lies the answer, I think.
I dunno. Did the 'net "turn evil", or was it "evil" from the get-go?
The 'net just is. Try to expurgate from it anything someone finds offensive and we may as well be burning people at the stake. There are filters for the easily-offended. If you feel your copyright is being violated, get your facts together and take it on a case-by-case basis. If you're correct, you'll have a strong case and you'll succeed. If you have no facts, shut the fsck up. Simple as that.
Intel Corp. (INTC - news), in its ongoing dispute with Via Technologies Inc., of Taiwan, is warning computer makers to steer clear of a new chip set from Via that could enable the manufacturers to build cheaper Pentium 4-based PCs by enabling them to use a less costly high-speed memory technology.
Intel, as part of dirty tricks against competitor Via, released anti-Via messages in the media thinly diguised as a public service warning, alerting consumers to the alarmingly lower costs of its competitor's products.
Intel claims that Via does not have the necessary licensing for its Apollo P4X266 chip set.
An Intel executive somehow decided it would be helpful to their profits to inform the public that Via concerns itself with manufacturing products rather than getting into bed with Intel.
Intel representatives have privately cautioned PC and motherboard manufacturers in the United States and overseas against using the product, saying it could draw them into a costly legal battle, said sources with some of those companies.
Determined to go all the way with the bad press, Intel threatened prospective corporate clients of their competitor with legal action if they used the more efficient product.
Intel has repeatedly taken Via to court over licensing disputes and is currently is pursuing a lawsuit involving chip sets designed by Via for use with Athlon processors made by rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Intel has a history of fighting its competition in the courtroom rather than in the marketplace.
According to Intel, Rambus offers the best performance.
Intel apparently considers itself credible enough to offer "impartial" advice to consumers.
Pricing has become a key issue this year as Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., and PC makers struggle through an industrywide slump.
Intel is nervous and jumpy about this, despite claims inferring that Via produces an inferior product.
Amid weaker-than-expected sales of the Pentium 4, Intel has announced it will release an SDRAM chip set next month and a DDR product early next year.
Intel's numbers are down and it's looking to point fingers. Intel itself plans to use similar manufacturing techniques to those it defames, but can't get them into the marketplace as fast as its competition.
But with Via releasing its DDR chip set now, the company, which holds about a 35 percent share of the world chip set market, stands to reap financial rewards by beating Intel to the market by several months.
Whereas Via has all their ducks in a row, stands to profit from it, and Intel doesn't like it, opting for a smear campaign.
Following Via's announcement this week, Intel claimed the company is not authorized to sell the product.
Lacking in actual facts against Via's product, Intel simply repeated the same gripes over again to pad out the press release.
"They are not licensed to sell products that are compatible with the Pentium 4," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said.
And over again.
Mulloy would not say whether Intel was warning its business partners to avoid using Via's product, saying only that "those discussions are typically very private."
Intel refused to admit to telling companies the same thing behind closed doors that it's currently telling the public in a national press release, describing it as a very private matter.
However, a Via representative confirmed that companies had reported such incidences to them.
However, its competitor says they know Intel has.
Brown declined to discuss the licensing controversy, saying only that Via was "comfortable with this."
Brown was reluctant to say anything without running it through Via's legal department first, but suggested he didn't think Intel had a leg to stand on.
In other news, sources at Intel say they've decided to forego this kind of shallow denouncement in favor of simply advertising its competitors products in a line of television and print advertisements.
What kind of godawful reporting is this? Intel smear campaigns billed as news... Didn't they bother interviewing the companies in question that Intel was suspected of threatening, rather than getting a very biased "Did not!" "Did too!" from Intel and Via? Sheesh. I'm surprised this was accepted by Slashdot, although it was fun ripping it apart. Blatant corporate hijinx are beat sitcoms hands-down for entertainment value.
It's true, you can't survive in the business world anymore without a cel phone. My hands-free headphone/mike combination is perfect for preventing brain cancer as well as showing off. And you need a PDA to store numbers, take notes, and for scheduling. When I'm out in the field, the majority of my time is spent travelling to and from a site or person I want to see, so I bring my Rio player along on an armband, routing the audio feed through my cel headphones, of course. On the other arm is my business card scanner, for those important contacts. I've strapped a laptop to my chest, feeding the video into my heads-up display visor, although I'm phasing that out soon for direct laser projection lenses. Did you know you can strap four Li-Ion batteries around each leg, easy? People with pacemakers can't get within ten feet of me! I control my desktop with mouse input from a hacked Nintendo PowerGlove. I'm looking to get a stylus implanted into the other hand, and maybe one of those nifty new Toshiba phasers. My productivity will be up another ten percent!
Odd how people have forgotten the humble utility belt. Isn't it commonplace for one to keep the tools of their trade on their belt? Why should it be limited to those whose crafts consist of physical labor? I suppose if it isn't stylish enough, a trenchcoat or sportcoat with inside pockets for a cel phone and PDA would work just fine, and the rest can be stored in a briefcase. I fail to see the problem.
A GPS receiver calculates only its own position - it must be combined with telematics (i.e. cell-phones and the like) before it can communicate that information.
Nanotelemetrics. NanoGPS grouping creates a messenger cluster which either travels to the nearest receiving station, or creates offspring in that direction. Repeat as necessary.
We don't have anything that can reliably self-replicate in a controlled laboratory setting, and the technology to do so is still 8-10 years off. We don't need to even think about nano-tech replicating in the 'wild' for another decade or two beyond that.
If it can be done in the next few decades, bashing out a functional system of legislation and copyright law needs to be done now, not when the grey goo problem has already become an immediate threat. Nanotech will involve a lot of groundwork, and it's not all based in the R&D labs.
First off, because corporations and military/espionage divisions have become comfortable in their current niches, I anticipate a lot of resistance from them in getting this technology released to the general public once it is developed. If you think the RIAA is giving off a lot of static now over music copyright infringement, just imagine the world's corporate and government groups banding together to oppose nano out of sheer self-preservation. That's a lot of static to fight. And I think most people are simply too sedate to bother, frankly.
So it will probably remain military R&D. Not that they'd use it any more responsibly, mind. Once espionage divisions figure out a way to establish a nano equivalent of GPS powered by light or the earth's electromagnetic field (and self-replicating, if the government's greed for surveillance is any gauge), practical omniscience wouldn't be too far off. Chilling, no?
Not that I don't think it would trickle down to the average person here or there. Traditionally, any illicit demand on the part of the public is filled on the black market. While production of nano would require elaborate and costly machines dedicated to that purpose, what does that matter when a group of nanites provided with the appropriate raw materials can set up shop in any basement or apartment? From there it's not a big reach to think that some yokel either won't know what they're doing (or worse yet, will know full well what they're doing) and unleash some grey goo. Not pretty.
I see a couple of solutions here. The first is that any sane person would configure their nanos to replicate only in the presence of some sort of standing field generated in the lab, thus keeping the whole thing remarkably-well contained. Unfortunately, there are a lot of insane people out there. That, and suppose someone is broadcasting to a larger area using the same frequency as that field? All it takes is once.
The second solution, ironically, is that practical omnicience I was talking about on the part of the government. If you think the governments
like to go after rogue hackers with a vengance now, imagine what it would be like with the stakes that much higher. The public will be begging the government to safeguard their lives, something I'm sure the media won't discourage one bit.
Grey goo or governmental omniscience down to the smallest particle, take your pick. (Alright, subatomics will probably be safe. Leptons, everywhere I look there's a fucking lepton...) Personally, government omniscience is starting to look like the lesser of two evils, barely. Does anyone see another potential solution here?
You're taking that Bond movie far too seriously if you're suggesting that CNN starts wars.
Bond movie? Heh, I haven't seen the movie you're talking about. I try to stay away from the mainstream media for the most part. I was thinking more along the lines of Desert Storm actually.
I'm sure we can both agree that complaining to slashdot is nothing more than preaching to the choir.
True. But then, what better environment in which to organize and coordinate change, but in a group of like-minded individuals? Pity the only responses so many articles seem to garner are of the "debating the issue" stage, and get glossed over in favor of more current articles before the/. response gets to the "action" stage. Perhaps liberal use of opt-in mailing lists on each issue would help coordinate long-term interest.
Why does the typical slashdot poster always whine about being a victim of corporate America?
Instead of endlessly complaining about corporate greed, why don't you take a stand? Support the little guy. Speak out against advertising and abuse by corporate America. Turn around the terrible trend of consumerism, and convince others to help. Corporations, just like the government, get their power from you, me, and everyone else. And if enough people get fed up with the abuse, the support for those companies will dry up.
I'm a little confused by your post. I hear you saying that instead of talking about corporate oppression, we should attempt to do something about it, by supporting small businesses and by alerting others to the problem. In other words, shut up and speak out about it. Huh?
This post is mostly just an idealistic rant. But instead of whining about how evil big corporations are, why don't you try doing something to make a difference? You aren't completely powerless, you know.
Why do you assume that the poster was merely talking, rather than taking action as well?
That is the idea isn't it? LEts look with a different eye at this. Lets analyise the reports favorite enemy. Wallmart. Look at how much Wallmart actually employ's in the report? You will see that Wallmart has over a MILLION WORKERS. Now multiple a million times 25k for 25k/y salary. THats 25 billion a year not including the taxes for WALLMART! No wonder they hire them part-time and not offer medical benifeits. WAllmart would go
broke considering they offer the lowest prices which equal less profits.
Lower prices equate to less per unit profit, not less profit in general. The entire point of lowering ones profit margin is to lower the cost of the product, thus enticing more customers and increasing sales. That's the whole idea, to make more money by increasing the number of sales.
I grant you that the salary for 25 million people is sizable. In case you're new to economics, employees are paid out of sales revenues, which are generated by customers as they make purchases enabled by (wait for it) employees. By their very nature employees as a whole generate more revenue for a company than they're being paid for; if they didn't, the company couldn't afford to hire them at that payrate and still turn a profit.
As for going broke hiring employees at full time with medical insurance, they would provided nothing else changed. Your average company hires employees full-time and provides insurance, and yet mysteriously these companies don't go broke. This is because in order to cover these expenses, they take a portion of their revenue and apportion it towards those things, rather than slurping it up as profit. It's just standard business practice. Wal-Mart appears to be cheap-charleying around the legislation mandating equitable treatment of full-time employees by staffing their stores with only part-time employees. This isn't done to offer their customers a better price, although that is a beneficial [to the customer] side-effect. It is done to increase the number of sales, thus increasing revenues and therefore, profit. It's still greed, it's just complex greed rather than simple greed. And it goes against the spirit if not the letter of fair business practices. Saying that they can't afford to abide by accepted business practices because they'd go broke is a fallacy. Prices are set by costs and profit, not the other way around. That's like saying, "I can't pay my rent this month, or I'd go broke!"
Should corporations use sleezy legal tactics to squash compitetion? No. %99 of them don't.
Would you mind citing your source for that statistic please?
I have found no realy abuse by most corporations expect maybe Microsoft, RIAA, AOLTime-warner, and perhaps a few sleezy electric companies in Texas and Oklohoma who have good conenctions wiht some politicians in California. sigh. Other then those half dozen I can't think of any other companies abusing their power.
Thank gods. You haven't encountered abuse from any other corporations, nor can you think of any. Obviously this means that there is none.
We have new jobs being created thanks to the great wealth
One hundred and one ways to cook french-fries and flip burgers, yes.
and you can invest in some of these companies and also experience their wealth and happiness.
The problems of companies supported by investors who put money in and then back out on a whim are enough to fuel a whole nother article. First of all, corporate accountability essentially disappears, secondly corporations are beholden to the needs of shareholders rather than their employees. Better perhaps if the employees were the shareholders, then it would still be a privately-held company, the employeess would have a say in the very business that consumes most of their waking lives, and accountability would have a solid place to land.
Investing in a company to share in its wealth is one thing. As for happiness, I haven't yet found stocks that entitle the bearer to sleep with the CEO's pet bimbo.
Alot of the average workers do not invest in anything and executives do and this is why the gap is getting bigger. You need to stop using credit cards and put down 25 a month towards investments.
You've hit the nail on the head, actually. The upper classes can afford to invest, while most of America's lower classes are living hand-to-mouth, if that. Often they need to lean on credit cards just to get by because their employers (*cough*Wal-Mart*cough*) don't pay wages high enough for anything else. Starting to see it now? I'm not saying that government needs to regulate more, but lower-class employees could certainly do better looking out for their wage prospects as a whole. Pity they seem incapable of banding together for anything more than gang fights.
I hope to make smart finicial discions in my life and hope this great wealth can continue under a new consrvative pro-bussiness government.
I don't know about you, but I've plan to make some really dumb financial decisions in my life, thank you very much.
What I hear you saying is that "Hey, I think I'm better off financially with the way things are!" Fine. You're entitled to that perspective. But I think it's either naive or amoral to make that claim on anything other than your own financial self-interest.
I think we should give medals to the CEO's
You poor lad. I always wondered what they did inside those General Motors indoctrination seminars.
A moment ago you'd said "Corporations make money. So what?". Now you want to give out medals left and right for shafting underclasses in the relentless pursuit of greed. That's taking it a little far, don't you think?
Its almost communism when you attack all those who try to beniefit themselves for being different.
You must've been absent the day they covered communism. At any rate, the concern in the article was entities (in this case corporations) which are growing unchecked in power, and which often display an astonishing lack of conscience in their decisions. The motivation is to keep a careful watch on these entities before they grow too powerful to curtail. Because once they securely adopt that situation, it's essentially inevitable that they will, as you put it, attack all those who try to benefit themselves for being different.
This is above.net's network, their private properties, they have every right to tell anyone that they cannot use it, just like you have the civil right to tell anyone that they cannot drive on your private property too.
It's so sad to see people milling about in response to this situation, unsure of what recourse they have. If above.net wants to block Macromedia on their networks, of course they can. If the body of above.net users disagrees with this business practice, then their recourse is to optionally drop above.net in favor of another ISP. If the consensus opinion is that above.net's surreptitious blocking is undesirable, may the ISP find itself the financial equivalent of a charred, smoking hole in the ground. Additionally, if they're an internet service provider prone to blocking internet service, a breach of contract lawsuit may be in order (if enough people successfully sue, we'll all have the pleasure of watching above.net drown in the red). Lastly, if they're not billing themselves as a filtered content provider and they are filtering content, there are probably grounds for charges of false advertising. Essentially, above.net has taken an extremely large gamble with it's choice of business practices. I wouldn't have, and I'm glad I'm not in their shoes.
None of these things scale polynomially with the input size so claiming that this is a substitute for Qc is nothing more than a trick to get funding.
all parties (many PhD CS and Quantum Physicists among us) agreed that it could not yield the power of a quantum computer.
"Hey John Q. Public! Concerned about the security of your encrypted data transmissions? Wish you had one of those whiz-bang QC's the Important People get to use? Here, buy one based on pure light! See, light is made up of tiny particles, so it's almost like having a QC of your own, without having to declassify the advances we've made on them!"
Just what I want... to compute on an EZ-Bake Oven.
In case you haven't noticed, there is a [so-called] Ten Year Gap in the levels of technology that the military and government R&D comes up with, and what hits the store shelves for us to buy. We get the R&D hand-me-downs that they're unthreatened to release, as well as odds and ends that they never had any real use for in the first place. That means No Such Agency and most of the rest of the alphabet gestapo have at least ten years on us in tech level when it comes to cryptography. Personally, I'm inclined to think of the disparity as a curve. If they can do ten years, they can do twenty or a hundred years. All they have to do is set the pace of R&D release just slightly slower than the rate at which they innovate, and there's a gradually widening chasm of tech levels. And lest we forget, civillian technology is cancellable at a stroke using electromagnetic pulse should they consider it warranted. Reminiscent of Zelazny's Lord of Light.
I dont know about the last two, but pimps and prostitutes? sounds like my idea of a fun weekend....
There's probably an ad campaign in the works for a new calling plan. Now Sprint customers can keep in touch with their friends and relatives, and earn rewards points towards good for lap dancers sent direct to their home or office. The only downside is that their office must also subscribe to Sprint, or find themselves facing a sudden and inexplicable lack of phone-based business.
Here again we see individuals going to extreme lengths to flee out from underneath an ever-expanding tangle of partisan legislation. The ironic part is that any one of us [in the States] could do it right here. We would need only bandwidth, server space, and sovereign citizenship. The last removes one from the jurisdiction of federal legislation altogether, by rejecting the dubious privileges of citizenship under the 14th Amendment and returning to the status of a Citizen of one's State and of the several States. The federal government was only given jurisdiction and scope within a specific limited bailiwick, primarily keeping interstate trade conflicts down and arbiting in cases where two states were involved in a dispute. To the extent that the federal government is involved in legislating on everything from gun ownership to abortion issues to pro-RIAA legislation, it's essentially out of bounds. In order to have the authority to effect legislation of this variety, a new category of citizenship was created under the 14th Amendment (which itself was rushed through into law and never lawfully ratified.) A new category of citizenship was created to be within the scope of the federal government's power (rather than the original class of citizenship, which grants the federal government all of its authority) and to this category of [second-class] citizenship, all legislation created by the federal government applies. It was originally an opt-in system, but due to gradual changes in paperwork and the introduction of new simple-sounding terms with rather treacherous legal definitions ("resident" is one of my favorite examples of this breed, with "driver" not far behind) it became the de facto standard. Rather like opt-in SPAM that quietly became opt-out, and now the details of just how to do that (or that you even can) have become buried in obscurity.
The point of this post is to pass the word around that one can opt out, and be subject to none of this asinine legislation, and that we're not sheep at the mercy of federal and corporate wolves. Anyone with a Napster server can remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the offending legislation and be done with it, keeping the Nap server functioning as-is without liability. I consider the whole thing to be a prop media issue, since the major media is too well-heeled to go anywhere near the sovereignty issue. Talk about a conflict of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, quick question. What region? And from where, would be equally appropriate.
Alright, I checked on that and found that the region the fellow was trying to send to wasn't specified. He was trying to send from California, and remarked that the post office was no longer sending by air. He said at the time, "Hmm. I wonder what they know that we don't know.". My mistake. Put it down to a miscommunication on my part. Still, it does seem odd that they'd stop shipping by air, period, a week before the attack. Then again I don't know when the changeover occurred, just that somebody noticed it about a week ago. On balance, it's probably not as important as I'd thought it was.
Ok, you got my attention. Can you explain a bit further about the USPS. How do you know? Why doesn't anyone else seem to know, or if they do, why haven't they made the connection? Is there really a connection, or is it some kind of coincidence? Any info or links would be appreciated.
It was an office conversation. Other people who tried to ship things to that region during that time period would have encountered the same phenomenon. I don't know if or why those people haven't made the connection. I don't know if it's connection or coincidence, although the timing looks mighty suspicious to me, and the Prez calling it "a national tragedy" was pretty freaking weird. Obviously it was a national tragedy. That that was the only think he could think of to say at first looks as though he's covering something up. That was my first clue. It wasn't until I heard about the USPS that it was confirmed.
What I can't figure out is why they'd stop the USPS planes if they knew it was going to happen. Consider: even if they'd wanted to keep the WTC attack from public knowledge, they couldn't have kept it off the media because enough people had experienced it that it would've been a no-go as a coverup. So why in the heck would they nix the planes ahead of time, when they know people nationwide will have tried mailing things to that region and encountered the change, and then feign surprise? Whoever's in charge of PR in the goverment really seems to be slipping these days. I don't get it.
Difference of opinion... still legal is 43 states.
~gryn~
But I want to ask you this: if you believe that the government allowed the WTC attack to happen, do you not consider that an act of war against the populace?
Don't get me started. I consider a lot of the things they do an act of war against their own people. People put up with it, and not because they don't know this stuff, because it's right there between the lines for anyone to deduce from what's said. My guess is that people just don't want to focus on it. It makes them uncomfortable. So I usually don't saying anything about it. In this case I was on Slashdot where people were genuinely trying to figure it out, so I shared what I could. Generally my concern is keeping the immature decision-making processes of others from infringing on my own life, and trying to help the people I can outgrow them. Best thing I can think of as things stand.
Is that not sufficient reason to depose the government by any means necessary?
Not in my book, no. It's justification to, by all means, but just because a person can do something doesn't mean they neccessarily should. In a scenario like this, the lives of the American people are pretty darn well intertwined with the sort of government that's doing all this. Any such change has got to be both effective and peacable to be successful. If you thought a building going down was bad, imagine rioting and looting in the streets coast to coast as an old regime is deposed. Not a happy thing. At least the system we have has got a decent backbone, and there's no assurance that any new one would be any sounder.
Wouldn't that be enough to start another civil war, if everyone knew and believed?
Maybe, if people would overcome their fostered indolence. But it isn't going to happen, since one voice both cannot reach and cannot convince everybody. And that's jake with me. Martial law is icky, and I'd rather have the tanks sitting in the military bases than rolling down the streets.
If you really believe this, what do you propose doing next? Are you just going to sit back and take it?
I'm no revolutionary, and this isn't a soapbox. I'm someone who happened to overhear something from an office conversation and passed it along. If you're looking for leadership for a call to arms I'm not your man. I tend to think of the problem requiring delicate surgery rather than violent upheaval. There's too much at stake for unplanned hack-and-slash based on unthinking public outrage. If you want to do something, I suggest examining just how everyone's lives are so precariously balanced on the government, and try to come to some solution that can be enacted without jeopardizing them. Perhaps if people in general make more mature choices, they will accept the government's role as a primary caregiver less and less, until we have a system of arbitration rather than an obese shifty-eyed nanny making decisions on our behalf. My own opinion, natch.
Do you have links to some documentation for the USPS bit? I'd like to read more about that.
It came up in conversation last night. My mom mentioned a conversation she'd had with a co-worker about a week beforehand who had tried to send something to the region. Hence, no documentation, just one of those things that happens. I'm sure the post office still isn't air shipping anything there, but it might be interesting to ask them when they started that practice, followed by "Why?". As for me, I'm not inclined to mistrust a simple office conversation mentioned by a close relative.
`I think the best reply one can give to the politicians who want to impose this is: "And Osama Bin Laden is going to throw away his foreign-developed, non-backdoored encryption software and buy US-made backdoored encryption software exactly why?'"
I don't.
The objective here isn't to stop the guy. They could've if they'd wanted to. About a week before the attack the U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering air mail to the region. They knew something we didn't, and opted not to stop it. And I think I know why.
We hear a lot about terrorism against the U.S.. We don't usually hear the other side's complaints. Obviously they don't think of it as terrorism, they think of it as some sort of a protest. I wonder what they're protesting, and why. If our government did something unjust to them, I wouldn't trust our media to tell us about it. But as a tiny little group of malcontents going up against the U.S., about their only recourse is an attack like this. Given that the U.S. government knew about it beforehand, they didn't bargain to prevent it for one of two reasons. Either the price was considered too high, or the U.S. government thought that an attack like this would end up working in their favor. They've been looking for an excuse to nullify cryptography for years now. Anybody remember the Clipper chip? The legislation keeps being defeated, because people are siding with the need for privacy. Now they've been able to demonstrate a supposed need for the U.S. government to know everything that's being said anywhere in the country. Perhaps they think it will sway the common consensus in favor of their legislation.
Galling, isn't it. More impressive (from a logistical standpoint) than crippling a nation with a store-bought knife and their own planes, is the prospect of prying your way into a nation's cryptography with someone else's store-bought knife, someone else's plane, and a bunch of lives you don't care about because you think of them as "your citizens", in the same usage as "your house" and "your car". Oh, and a temporary economic setback which you mitigate by printing more baseless currency. Clever.
Yes, developers. If you're running a software company, creating small components allows you less room to innovate on features. This in turn makes it more difficult to market your products.
So for now at least, Linux developers will probably have to fight this fight alone. In order to convince users to make the shift away from MS Office, et. al., Linux apps have to offer a solution that's easier to use and faster by a factor of at least two.
When people buy desktop PCs, they don't buy one with all the OS and software they'll want. They pick up the software they need as they need it, and upgrade as neccessary. The same concept would appear to hold true with componants within an app. If an app could download componants as needed, invisibly, and keep tabs on which componants were used how often, each copy of the app would be able to determine what the user used the most, and keep copies of those componants on hand. You'd get an app which would do the job seamlessly, and adapt itself to each user's own requirements. It would officially rule, and there's no reason why componants and groups of componants couldn't be improved and upgraded as they interact with and affect each other, with an invisible upgrade method akin to the way current apps self-upgrade when connected to the 'net. It seems simple enough from the standpoint of an end-user like me, and the total effect from an app like that would be astonishing.
The only effective weapon against terrorism is to do absolutely nothing.
Make any change at all in response, and you are instantly losing. Pandering to the desired effect, which is 'change'.
Not so. In evolution (and in business) a new strategy only succeeds until everyone else has caught onto it and adapted to neutralize it. One can at least shore up the gaps in the way buildings and aircraft are designed to attempt to prevent this sort of thing recurring. Either that or we should reach the comclusion that air travel is inherently risky and no amount of feigned security is going to prevent something like this, and do away with the extra expense and humiliation of what we generously call airport security. I think that concept was common knowledge before all this. All this incident did was make it unavoidable.
Say what you will about the loss of life, and the human tragedy of it, but the fact remains: humans die, whether at the hands of other humans, or by their own doing.
Right, right. Let's trash the whole social contract, shall we? American citizens make increasingly greater concessions of their rights and liberties to their government on the grounds that the government will in turn perform its current function of legislation and taking care of the tough stuff. Do as much as cross the street wrong or talk to a cop or a judge in a way that displeases them and the system penalizes you. People are liable when they don't perform their portion of the social contract, but you seem to be suggesting that when the government fails in its capacity to keep its people safe from harm it should be released from its obligation to do so. Governments, like doctors, bury their mistakes. Now either we have a government that is making ever-more inroads into the liberties and rights of its people in an attempt to shoulder the burden of doing the tough stuff, mainaining a safe system so that people are able to go about their individual pursuits, in which case it needs to ensure that it does so, or we have a government that is only responsible for settling disputes and maintaining internal cohesion as applies to foreign policy, in which case it needs to stop making a power grab in the private lives of its citizenry. Either it's one way, or it's the other. It can't have it both ways, controlling the private lives of its citizenry yet not responsible for them.
If a club does nothing about drug sales going on inside, it gets shut down or fined. If Ebay was selling organs and babies, you damn well bet something would be done. I'm not a big fan of the DMCA or anything, but does this mean I can start buying switch-blades on Ebay?
Just because it's unjust to dismantle their site because others may be trying to use it to violate laws and rights doesn't mean that it's just for them to do so. As I understand it, the site has a procedure for dealing with instances like that, so they evidently take an interest in rectifying those problems. As for your example of switch-blades, I'm not sure. If both the seller and the buyer are in jurisdictions where they aren't contraband, wouldn't it be okay? Anybody know the protocol there?
Think about it: If I provide you with a hammer with the purpose of you using it as a device to pound nails into wood, etc., I really don't expect to be sued if you use it to bash in a guy's head down the street. eBay wasn't created to facilitate the transfer of illegal copies of materials, though some might use it for such.
/. story)
Yup yup. And this is definately an important precedent to establish. If the site were liable or responsible for infringements on copyright for the simple reason of their existence and that it's possible to distribute copyrighted materials over its service, we would find ourselves trying, based on that flawed rationale, to dismantle the entire Internet on those same grounds. Their site wasn't designed to counter DMCA interests, nor to violate copyrights, just as the 'net wasn't. The copyright holders' approach of using allegations of injury as part of an attempt to alter what (a) they have no jurisdiction over (the structure and existence of proprietary sites), and (b) is being done neither intentionally nor maliciously, needs definate refining.
(from the
So, Legal Eagles, were Napster, Gnutella, etc. created as P2P systems that were "turned evil," or were they "evil" from the get-go? Therein lies the answer, I think.
I dunno. Did the 'net "turn evil", or was it "evil" from the get-go?
The 'net just is. Try to expurgate from it anything someone finds offensive and we may as well be burning people at the stake. There are filters for the easily-offended. If you feel your copyright is being violated, get your facts together and take it on a case-by-case basis. If you're correct, you'll have a strong case and you'll succeed. If you have no facts, shut the fsck up. Simple as that.
Intel Corp. (INTC - news), in its ongoing dispute with Via Technologies Inc., of Taiwan, is warning computer makers to steer clear of a new chip set from Via that could enable the manufacturers to build cheaper Pentium 4-based PCs by enabling them to use a less costly high-speed memory technology.
Intel, as part of dirty tricks against competitor Via, released anti-Via messages in the media thinly diguised as a public service warning, alerting consumers to the alarmingly lower costs of its competitor's products.
Intel claims that Via does not have the necessary licensing for its Apollo P4X266 chip set.
An Intel executive somehow decided it would be helpful to their profits to inform the public that Via concerns itself with manufacturing products rather than getting into bed with Intel.
Intel representatives have privately cautioned PC and motherboard manufacturers in the United States and overseas against using the product, saying it could draw them into a costly legal battle, said sources with some of those companies.
Determined to go all the way with the bad press, Intel threatened prospective corporate clients of their competitor with legal action if they used the more efficient product.
Intel has repeatedly taken Via to court over licensing disputes and is currently is pursuing a lawsuit involving chip sets designed by Via for use with Athlon processors made by rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Intel has a history of fighting its competition in the courtroom rather than in the marketplace.
According to Intel, Rambus offers the best performance.
Intel apparently considers itself credible enough to offer "impartial" advice to consumers.
Pricing has become a key issue this year as Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., and PC makers struggle through an industrywide slump.
Intel is nervous and jumpy about this, despite claims inferring that Via produces an inferior product.
Amid weaker-than-expected sales of the Pentium 4, Intel has announced it will release an SDRAM chip set next month and a DDR product early next year.
Intel's numbers are down and it's looking to point fingers. Intel itself plans to use similar manufacturing techniques to those it defames, but can't get them into the marketplace as fast as its competition.
But with Via releasing its DDR chip set now, the company, which holds about a 35 percent share of the world chip set market, stands to reap financial rewards by beating Intel to the market by several months.
Whereas Via has all their ducks in a row, stands to profit from it, and Intel doesn't like it, opting for a smear campaign.
Following Via's announcement this week, Intel claimed the company is not authorized to sell the product.
Lacking in actual facts against Via's product, Intel simply repeated the same gripes over again to pad out the press release.
"They are not licensed to sell products that are compatible with the Pentium 4," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said.
And over again.
Mulloy would not say whether Intel was warning its business partners to avoid using Via's product, saying only that "those discussions are typically very private."
Intel refused to admit to telling companies the same thing behind closed doors that it's currently telling the public in a national press release, describing it as a very private matter.
However, a Via representative confirmed that companies had reported such incidences to them.
However, its competitor says they know Intel has.
Brown declined to discuss the licensing controversy, saying only that Via was "comfortable with this."
Brown was reluctant to say anything without running it through Via's legal department first, but suggested he didn't think Intel had a leg to stand on.
In other news, sources at Intel say they've decided to forego this kind of shallow denouncement in favor of simply advertising its competitors products in a line of television and print advertisements.
What kind of godawful reporting is this? Intel smear campaigns billed as news... Didn't they bother interviewing the companies in question that Intel was suspected of threatening, rather than getting a very biased "Did not!" "Did too!" from Intel and Via? Sheesh. I'm surprised this was accepted by Slashdot, although it was fun ripping it apart. Blatant corporate hijinx are beat sitcoms hands-down for entertainment value.
Resistance is futile.
Odd how people have forgotten the humble utility belt. Isn't it commonplace for one to keep the tools of their trade on their belt? Why should it be limited to those whose crafts consist of physical labor? I suppose if it isn't stylish enough, a trenchcoat or sportcoat with inside pockets for a cel phone and PDA would work just fine, and the rest can be stored in a briefcase. I fail to see the problem.
Nanotelemetrics. NanoGPS grouping creates a messenger cluster which either travels to the nearest receiving station, or creates offspring in that direction. Repeat as necessary.
If it can be done in the next few decades, bashing out a functional system of legislation and copyright law needs to be done now, not when the grey goo problem has already become an immediate threat. Nanotech will involve a lot of groundwork, and it's not all based in the R&D labs.
First off, because corporations and military/espionage divisions have become comfortable in their current niches, I anticipate a lot of resistance from them in getting this technology released to the general public once it is developed. If you think the RIAA is giving off a lot of static now over music copyright infringement, just imagine the world's corporate and government groups banding together to oppose nano out of sheer self-preservation. That's a lot of static to fight. And I think most people are simply too sedate to bother, frankly.
So it will probably remain military R&D. Not that they'd use it any more responsibly, mind. Once espionage divisions figure out a way to establish a nano equivalent of GPS powered by light or the earth's electromagnetic field (and self-replicating, if the government's greed for surveillance is any gauge), practical omniscience wouldn't be too far off. Chilling, no?
Not that I don't think it would trickle down to the average person here or there. Traditionally, any illicit demand on the part of the public is filled on the black market. While production of nano would require elaborate and costly machines dedicated to that purpose, what does that matter when a group of nanites provided with the appropriate raw materials can set up shop in any basement or apartment? From there it's not a big reach to think that some yokel either won't know what they're doing (or worse yet, will know full well what they're doing) and unleash some grey goo. Not pretty.
I see a couple of solutions here. The first is that any sane person would configure their nanos to replicate only in the presence of some sort of standing field generated in the lab, thus keeping the whole thing remarkably-well contained. Unfortunately, there are a lot of insane people out there. That, and suppose someone is broadcasting to a larger area using the same frequency as that field? All it takes is once.
The second solution, ironically, is that practical omnicience I was talking about on the part of the government. If you think the governments like to go after rogue hackers with a vengance now, imagine what it would be like with the stakes that much higher. The public will be begging the government to safeguard their lives, something I'm sure the media won't discourage one bit.
Grey goo or governmental omniscience down to the smallest particle, take your pick. (Alright, subatomics will probably be safe. Leptons, everywhere I look there's a fucking lepton...) Personally, government omniscience is starting to look like the lesser of two evils, barely. Does anyone see another potential solution here?
Sure, but I don't remember hearing that AOL claims all information you give it or carry over their service becomes their property, as Passport does.
Bond movie? Heh, I haven't seen the movie you're talking about. I try to stay away from the mainstream media for the most part. I was thinking more along the lines of Desert Storm actually.
True. But then, what better environment in which to organize and coordinate change, but in a group of like-minded individuals? Pity the only responses so many articles seem to garner are of the "debating the issue" stage, and get glossed over in favor of more current articles before the /. response gets to the "action" stage. Perhaps liberal use of opt-in mailing lists on each issue would help coordinate long-term interest.
At least, that's what we're told. By CNN no less.
Instead of endlessly complaining about corporate greed, why don't you take a stand? Support the little guy. Speak out against advertising and abuse by corporate America. Turn around the terrible trend of consumerism, and convince others to help. Corporations, just like the government, get their power from you, me, and everyone else. And if enough people get fed up with the abuse, the support for those companies will dry up.
I'm a little confused by your post. I hear you saying that instead of talking about corporate oppression, we should attempt to do something about it, by supporting small businesses and by alerting others to the problem. In other words, shut up and speak out about it. Huh?
This post is mostly just an idealistic rant. But instead of whining about how evil big corporations are, why don't you try doing something to make a difference? You aren't completely powerless, you know.
Why do you assume that the poster was merely talking, rather than taking action as well?
Lower prices equate to less per unit profit, not less profit in general. The entire point of lowering ones profit margin is to lower the cost of the product, thus enticing more customers and increasing sales. That's the whole idea, to make more money by increasing the number of sales.
I grant you that the salary for 25 million people is sizable. In case you're new to economics, employees are paid out of sales revenues, which are generated by customers as they make purchases enabled by (wait for it) employees. By their very nature employees as a whole generate more revenue for a company than they're being paid for; if they didn't, the company couldn't afford to hire them at that payrate and still turn a profit.
As for going broke hiring employees at full time with medical insurance, they would provided nothing else changed. Your average company hires employees full-time and provides insurance, and yet mysteriously these companies don't go broke. This is because in order to cover these expenses, they take a portion of their revenue and apportion it towards those things, rather than slurping it up as profit. It's just standard business practice. Wal-Mart appears to be cheap-charleying around the legislation mandating equitable treatment of full-time employees by staffing their stores with only part-time employees. This isn't done to offer their customers a better price, although that is a beneficial [to the customer] side-effect. It is done to increase the number of sales, thus increasing revenues and therefore, profit. It's still greed, it's just complex greed rather than simple greed. And it goes against the spirit if not the letter of fair business practices. Saying that they can't afford to abide by accepted business practices because they'd go broke is a fallacy. Prices are set by costs and profit, not the other way around. That's like saying, "I can't pay my rent this month, or I'd go broke!"
Should corporations use sleezy legal tactics to squash compitetion? No. %99 of them don't.
Would you mind citing your source for that statistic please?
I have found no realy abuse by most corporations expect maybe Microsoft, RIAA, AOLTime-warner, and perhaps a few sleezy electric companies in Texas and Oklohoma who have good conenctions wiht some politicians in California. sigh. Other then those half dozen I can't think of any other companies abusing their power.
Thank gods. You haven't encountered abuse from any other corporations, nor can you think of any. Obviously this means that there is none.
We have new jobs being created thanks to the great wealth
One hundred and one ways to cook french-fries and flip burgers, yes.
and you can invest in some of these companies and also experience their wealth and happiness.
The problems of companies supported by investors who put money in and then back out on a whim are enough to fuel a whole nother article. First of all, corporate accountability essentially disappears, secondly corporations are beholden to the needs of shareholders rather than their employees. Better perhaps if the employees were the shareholders, then it would still be a privately-held company, the employeess would have a say in the very business that consumes most of their waking lives, and accountability would have a solid place to land.Investing in a company to share in its wealth is one thing. As for happiness, I haven't yet found stocks that entitle the bearer to sleep with the CEO's pet bimbo.
Alot of the average workers do not invest in anything and executives do and this is why the gap is getting bigger. You need to stop using credit cards and put down 25 a month towards investments.
You've hit the nail on the head, actually. The upper classes can afford to invest, while most of America's lower classes are living hand-to-mouth, if that. Often they need to lean on credit cards just to get by because their employers (*cough*Wal-Mart*cough*) don't pay wages high enough for anything else. Starting to see it now? I'm not saying that government needs to regulate more, but lower-class employees could certainly do better looking out for their wage prospects as a whole. Pity they seem incapable of banding together for anything more than gang fights.
I hope to make smart finicial discions in my life and hope this great wealth can continue under a new consrvative pro-bussiness government.
I don't know about you, but I've plan to make some really dumb financial decisions in my life, thank you very much.
What I hear you saying is that "Hey, I think I'm better off financially with the way things are!" Fine. You're entitled to that perspective. But I think it's either naive or amoral to make that claim on anything other than your own financial self-interest.
I think we should give medals to the CEO's
You poor lad. I always wondered what they did inside those General Motors indoctrination seminars.
A moment ago you'd said "Corporations make money. So what?". Now you want to give out medals left and right for shafting underclasses in the relentless pursuit of greed. That's taking it a little far, don't you think?
Its almost communism when you attack all those who try to beniefit themselves for being different.
You must've been absent the day they covered communism. At any rate, the concern in the article was entities (in this case corporations) which are growing unchecked in power, and which often display an astonishing lack of conscience in their decisions. The motivation is to keep a careful watch on these entities before they grow too powerful to curtail. Because once they securely adopt that situation, it's essentially inevitable that they will, as you put it, attack all those who try to benefit themselves for being different.
It's so sad to see people milling about in response to this situation, unsure of what recourse they have. If above.net wants to block Macromedia on their networks, of course they can. If the body of above.net users disagrees with this business practice, then their recourse is to optionally drop above.net in favor of another ISP. If the consensus opinion is that above.net's surreptitious blocking is undesirable, may the ISP find itself the financial equivalent of a charred, smoking hole in the ground. Additionally, if they're an internet service provider prone to blocking internet service, a breach of contract lawsuit may be in order (if enough people successfully sue, we'll all have the pleasure of watching above.net drown in the red). Lastly, if they're not billing themselves as a filtered content provider and they are filtering content, there are probably grounds for charges of false advertising. Essentially, above.net has taken an extremely large gamble with it's choice of business practices. I wouldn't have, and I'm glad I'm not in their shoes.
None of these things scale polynomially with the input size so claiming that this is a substitute for Qc is nothing more than a trick to get funding.
all parties (many PhD CS and Quantum Physicists among us) agreed that it could not yield the power of a quantum computer.
"Hey John Q. Public! Concerned about the security of your encrypted data transmissions? Wish you had one of those whiz-bang QC's the Important People get to use? Here, buy one based on pure light! See, light is made up of tiny particles, so it's almost like having a QC of your own, without having to declassify the advances we've made on them!"
Just what I want... to compute on an EZ-Bake Oven.
In case you haven't noticed, there is a [so-called] Ten Year Gap in the levels of technology that the military and government R&D comes up with, and what hits the store shelves for us to buy. We get the R&D hand-me-downs that they're unthreatened to release, as well as odds and ends that they never had any real use for in the first place. That means No Such Agency and most of the rest of the alphabet gestapo have at least ten years on us in tech level when it comes to cryptography. Personally, I'm inclined to think of the disparity as a curve. If they can do ten years, they can do twenty or a hundred years. All they have to do is set the pace of R&D release just slightly slower than the rate at which they innovate, and there's a gradually widening chasm of tech levels. And lest we forget, civillian technology is cancellable at a stroke using electromagnetic pulse should they consider it warranted. Reminiscent of Zelazny's Lord of Light.
I dont know about the last two, but pimps and prostitutes? sounds like my idea of a fun weekend....
There's probably an ad campaign in the works for a new calling plan. Now Sprint customers can keep in touch with their friends and relatives, and earn rewards points towards good for lap dancers sent direct to their home or office. The only downside is that their office must also subscribe to Sprint, or find themselves facing a sudden and inexplicable lack of phone-based business.
Here again we see individuals going to extreme lengths to flee out from underneath an ever-expanding tangle of partisan legislation. The ironic part is that any one of us [in the States] could do it right here. We would need only bandwidth, server space, and sovereign citizenship. The last removes one from the jurisdiction of federal legislation altogether, by rejecting the dubious privileges of citizenship under the 14th Amendment and returning to the status of a Citizen of one's State and of the several States. The federal government was only given jurisdiction and scope within a specific limited bailiwick, primarily keeping interstate trade conflicts down and arbiting in cases where two states were involved in a dispute. To the extent that the federal government is involved in legislating on everything from gun ownership to abortion issues to pro-RIAA legislation, it's essentially out of bounds. In order to have the authority to effect legislation of this variety, a new category of citizenship was created under the 14th Amendment (which itself was rushed through into law and never lawfully ratified.) A new category of citizenship was created to be within the scope of the federal government's power (rather than the original class of citizenship, which grants the federal government all of its authority) and to this category of [second-class] citizenship, all legislation created by the federal government applies. It was originally an opt-in system, but due to gradual changes in paperwork and the introduction of new simple-sounding terms with rather treacherous legal definitions ("resident" is one of my favorite examples of this breed, with "driver" not far behind) it became the de facto standard. Rather like opt-in SPAM that quietly became opt-out, and now the details of just how to do that (or that you even can) have become buried in obscurity.
The point of this post is to pass the word around that one can opt out, and be subject to none of this asinine legislation, and that we're not sheep at the mercy of federal and corporate wolves. Anyone with a Napster server can remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the offending legislation and be done with it, keeping the Nap server functioning as-is without liability. I consider the whole thing to be a prop media issue, since the major media is too well-heeled to go anywhere near the sovereignty issue. Talk about a conflict of interest.