There was a (new, late '80s) Twilight Zone story where these kids are preparing for a big test, kind of like the SAT. They're real excited because passing this test allows them to use telephones and have adult rights. The parents of one child are really worried about their particularly bright son, and there are subtle hints that this is a bigger deal than is evident to the kids. It ends with a call to the parents, saying that he finished the test, and oh, btw, where would you like his body interred?
(See, they were living in a police state, a particularly subtle and nasty one. The test weeds out potential troublemakers).
It was terminal based, to an old Cyber mainframe. You could telnet to it and log in with SSN and password. They were still using it for class elections before I graduated two years ago.
Class registration used to be through that system, but started moving over to the web system sometime in '96(?). By the time I graduated, it was all browser based.
Do you realize that I was mocking the belligerent attitute of your first post, and highlighting some discrepancies between your statements and your apparent ideology (or, perhaps, highlighting contradictions that are inherent to your ideology)?
I read _Starship Troopers_ about seven years ago and enjoyed it, because I found it to be a very strong, yet subtle, criticism of fascism hidden inside a juvenile space adventure.
Of course, a lot of people have mistaken it to be *advocating* the society presented in the novel. Even people in this thread.
Along comes the movie, and wow, it's a rather blatant satire of facism, complete with 90's themes, and targeted toward teenagers in a sort of self-deprecating comic book style. I though people would actually get it this time. I really enjoyed it, though I went into it thinking it would royally suck.
But of course, movie critics, stupid as ever, mistake this movie for advocating the society presented within it. "Nazi 90210" is as it was often described.
I even got in arguments about it. No one saw past the violence and militarism. You'd think people would respect a realistic depiction. I mean, they are fighting giant insects with machine guns. Of course they'd be slaughtered.
Now, consider this. How violent was the book? I remember one scene where Rico launches a grenade into a school or church-like building, slaughtering hundreds of civilian skinnies. The movie get's nowhere near that.
I've used some of the "distance learning" techniques while I was in school (primarily as a way to skip class). Mainly lectures on video tape and in RealAudio over the net. And you know, it wasn't really very useful. A boring lecture is three times as boring when you're experiencing it that way. The only advantage is you can pause and replay things, and you can make fun of the lecturer (a la MST3K).
But as for random access, that technology has already existed for thousands of years, in *books*. Books are very useful, and they are a lot cheaper than lectures. And in most cases, they're a heck of a lot more informative. I think of lectures as a way to make things more entertaining in order to hold my attention. But if I'm into something, I'd rather have a dozen books on it than listen to someone run their mouth for an hour or two.
Also, having attended a few company sponsored training classes in the "real world", I have to say that lectures like this are a scam. I can learn more from a book in one morning than what it takes three days to cover in a class setting.
I think any highly motivated person would be better served having access to electronic textbooks than to an electronic "university". And the benefit of free, electronic textbooks, is that they can be integerated in the curiculum of real cash-poor institutions. They can also be more easily translated, and easily updated.
Is anyone aware of any organized efforts to create textbooks of this nature? Something kind of like the Linux Documentation Project, but less specific for scientific and academic subjects.
Dude, go back and read my post, and pay particular attention to the three adjectives that I used to qualify "law".
Remember that a great many forgeigners do business and own property in the United States. And remember that a great many Americans do business and own property in foriegn nations. That's commerce, and you can't have it without stable laws (local laws, and adherance to international treaties). No one wants to do business in nations where governments can come in and steal your trade secrets, or nationalize your property, or have their way with your secretaries, or whatever. This has probably hurt American commercial interets, because even though it might help Boing or GM or whoever recieves these secrets, Joe Schmo Medium Business has now just had his foriegn relationships strained a little more. Why should you do business with Americans, when it invites your company to espionage?
Imagine if tomorrow France nationalized every American owned property on French soil. It's absurd, but no more than your example. What would you say then? "It's their law, they can do what they want."?
Oh, so because the world isn't a nice place, we should violate our own rules? I suppose I should be able to steal secrets from a corporate competitor, because it's in my company's best interests. I mean, why should we obey the law, be it our law, foreign law, or international law, when our government can break it, and claim moral superiority for doing it?
I suppose you think the people who steal American secrets for foriegn interests have the moral high ground too. They're acting in the best interests of their chosen nation.
Looks like DePalma took a really good premise and used it for his own political/social ends. But what do we expect from the Money Machine? Until we stop voting with our pocketbooks, they'll continue to pander to the lowest, most ignorant, Luddite common denominator.
What do you suggest, people should make movies for the good of all mankind, with their political and social agendas screened by some committee for ideological purity? You think people are too stpuid to be allowed to spend their money on what they want? Fucking elitist commie! That so called "Money Machine" is the only thing that keeps you lazy peaceniks alive.
This issue has been explored since, like forever, in science fiction. There is now even a name for it: "The Singularity", coined by writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. My gist of what it means is the point at which any and all "normal" humans will be unable to grasp, predict, or participate in, the further advancement of technology.
And you know, so what? It's not like a paleolithic man could grasp modern society. And just because you want be able to follow what your grandchildren are doing (whether they be humans, machines, or something inbetween), doesn't mean they won't still love and protect their feeble and slow grandparents.
Of course, Bill is right. Nanotechnology could be nasty shit in malicious hands. That's why we need to stay involved in the development of space, because there is no greater protective barrier than a few million miles of hard vacuume and radiation.
Georgia Tech's student government elections have been done by computer for many years. Sorry!
(And FYI, it was the first to have online class registration, the first large school to have web-based class registration, and the first to have a web-based course critique).
What is ludicrous in nature is lengths these politicians will go to in blaming the worlds problems on pornography and "subversive" influences on the internet. It is all about getting themselves in the media and creating fear and misunderstanding to further their agendas. Protecting children is only a convenient excuse.
Why do you think so many of these products block political sites and sites critical of censorship?
How do you expect a modern economy to develop without a telecommunications infrastructure? The Internet is more than a toy for downloading mp3z and pr0n.
Anonymity is great when you're being hounded by criminals or an oppressive governments. But it is a temporary refuge, because generally those oppressive powers that want to know who you are have resources available to find out who you are. If you want long term freedom, anonymity is a crutch that will eventually fail you. You'd do much better to stand up and demand your rights. There is a reason the phrase is "Anonymous Coward", because the anonymous have no credibility. When you can't tell a leader from a crank or the honest from the criminal, what good does it do you? All criminals want anonymity, while only a portion of the honest desire it. Therefore it is safer to distrust all anonymous people.
Would you give your credit card number to anonymous individual to buy something? Anonymity and security have opposite agendas. Authentication and non-repudiation, hear those words before? Ever used PGP, SSL, certificates or digitally signed something? It is all about trusting the party you are talking to, and holding those people to their word. You can't do that anonymously. Sure, you can have a proxy identifier, like my "0xdeadbeef" handle, but it is still an identity on slashdot, and there more I use it, the more tracable it is to my "RL" identity.
Anonymity is not privacy. Privacy is about protecting your sensitive information when information can be collected, bought and sold more easily than air. The anonymous have no need for privacy, because they have no information. They might generate it, but it is not linked to them. The anonymous have no "state" in the world, so they can't do anything that requires trust.
Re:Are you sure it was a dumpster diver?
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
Geez, Rob, please fix the Extrans option. I thought I was defaulted to HTML (hence the
tags), but now I look like a bigger dufus than usual. Am I the only experiencing this? Because I don't see many bare tags in other posts, and this bug has been here for weeks. Perhaps it is related to user options?
(I'm using lightweight mode, sorted by score, posts expanded).
Are you sure it was a dumpster diver?
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 3
a friend of mine bought a shredder after her credit card fell victim to a Dumpster diver
<p> How does she know it wasn't a clerk at a store she used the card, or a relative or coworker snooping in her purse, or an employee of the credit card company, or someone stealing her mail, etc..
<p> It bugs me when people come up with grand conspiracy theories or elaborite scenarios for how simple thefts take place. All it does is serve the interests of the people selling security solutions, or the credit card companies who know full well how insecure credit cards are.
<p> People hype about how "insecure" online transactions are, when they are many times as secure as physical transactions, because there are less people involved.* It's the same with blaming a dumpster diver for stealing a number. Yes, you should probably shred things with your number on it. But no, it's not the most likely scenario. The poor security of credit cards is a fundamental flaw in using an identifer as a secret key. Don't go blaming our eroding privacy for credit card theft.
<p> * One cavet about that. Foolish companies that store credit card numbers on their web server are asking for trouble. In that case, it probably is easier to steal numbers from online merchants. *
The key difference is that the phone and power networks can be locally managed. A private mail system will have to be very integrated between regions. I don't think the result would be better than what we've got now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Regarding 60 Minutes, do you think private corporations don't have theives and psycopaths working for them?
You, like many other people in here, seem to think that all of society's fundamental transactions are government regulated. Take a visit to your bank sometime and ask them if their wire transfers are government regulated (which is the most important type of "email" there is).
Dude, I write banking software.:) Every wire transfer is reported to the Federal Reserve. Heck, if I remember correctly, every wire goes through a Fed mainframe. The ACH network (aka direct deposit) is run by an independant organization, but the Fed has influence there as well. Most regulation is by a consortium of banks, but led by the Fed, whose leaders are appointed by the government. Besides, Congress has passed banking regulation. Laws to detect fraud and tax cheats, and fair lending come to mind.
Speaking of the Fed, there's another public institution that is effective and self suffucient. More evidence to the contrary that anything and everything "government" or "public" is wasteful and stupid.
Exactly. FBI, NSA, CIA, Verisign, Network Solutions, U.S. Postal Service. Which one of these has the most trustworthy reputation?
Who funds these audits? As a Verisign customer, am I authorized to conduct a security audit over their entire certificate operation? Even if I get every one of their customers to participate, short of a class action lawsuit, is there any way I can demand they comply?
Remember, the Mindcraft guys know more that most of us about web server benchmarking, but they still screwed up and there are still questions of conflict of interest. I can at least run their tests myself. I can't lobby my congressman for an independant audit of Verisign.
Of course, now that digital certificates have some legal weight behind them, they will be regulated. The government is already involved. I'd much rather such an essential public service be run by a public institution that is efficient and self-sufficient, and yet still accountable to the citizens, than by a corporation, accountable only to tort law and the short-term profit motive of its shareholders, that still has a quasi-monopoly and government backing.
Why not, the government's got a monopoly on national defense. That's the biggest and most wasteful racket there ever was.
Besides, the NSA has its hands in the certification authorities anyways, so what difference does it make? At least as a public organization, we citizens have a right to oversight. As private companies, all we can do is threaten to switch to a competitor when find that their security is not up to par. Now, how do you find out when their security is not up to par?
(Interesting, with UCITA, it might become illegal to even test their security practices. Forge a certificate or find a security flaw, and you get sued off your ass or go to jail!)
Actually, the government does have it's hands all over the power grid and the phone network. True, it's all run by private companies now, but they are government granted monopolies, or at least have been through most of their history. There are price controls and regulation out the wazoo for that stuff, and for good reason, because both require a great deal of infrastructure that would be wasteful to duplicate, and both are critical systems that our entire nation depends on.
Besides, would you really trust someone like UPS or FedEx with official mail? I wouldn't trust UPS with anything critical based on the condition of the boxes I get from them. And do you really think they're going to charge the same rates to those in poor, rural areas as they do in cities? It will have to be subsidized, and/or highly regulated, just like phone and power. Is that what you really want?
Now think of it this way, based on the way they've handled the DNS system, would you trust someone like Network Solutions as your official guranteed delivery e-mail service and as your official certification authority? Both these services are need for legally binding electronic contracts, and they (as Verisign) are now well positioned to provide those services. To be legally binding, these services will be highly regulated, so the government will be invovled, whether you like it or not. Now, who do you trust more, Network Solutions, or the Post Office?
The liberals always do what they're told, because they haven't the imagination or strength of will to create their own freedom.
Nope, cause then they're no longer liberals in the boot-licking conservative lexicon, they're called subversives, revolutionaries, communists, anarchists, freedom-fighters, extremists, radicals, and guerrillas.
Here's an interesting example sure to invoke cognative dissonance in our troll here: ESR plays the flute (a fruity instrument if there ever was one) and even dabbled in the occult. He doesn't seem to a hold a real job either, sponging off his wife and anyone willing pay for his opinions (a lot like those new-age self-help gurus!). He probably spent a great deal of time in the machine room in his younger days (what a troglodyte!), and he encourages people to share the products of their labor in some sort of populist revolt against the market structure created by the (unregulated) software industry (commie!). He also borrowed from sociology literature in his manifesto, the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Oh my god, he must be a stupid, lazy, ineffectual *liberal* then! He probably hugs trees and wants to take our guns away! I bet he eats tofu and listens to Yanni! He must be the most useless, naval-gazing, dogma-spouting apparatchik of the liberal establishment there ever was!
Besides, I wonder who really is more useless, the person with a degree in game design, or the anonymous coward who must have spent this beautiful sunday afternoon writing trolls on slashdot.
If schools resources are to be used only for "learning", then why are student activity fees collected at most universities, often for recreational services most students never use?
And remember that universities are not usually strictly private profit-seeking entities. They are payed for by tuition and student fees, by charitable endowments, and by govenment money collected with taxes (even private schools receive federal funds for student programs and research).
You claim it's not censorship when someone else owns the wire, but what happens when everybody who owns the wires won't let you talk? What's your recourse, build your own Internet?
Yes, but compare it to Unicode, that wastes *nine* bits when used by all right-thinking people of the world. And my god, think of all those binary file formats that pad space for fields reserved for future use. And what about the people who don't compress their media, or those the whiners who think they are too good for lossy compression algorithms. Don't they realize that all *meaningful* information can be expressed in an mpeg bitstream?
Don't even get me started on those luddites who still insist on using dried wood pulp as their storage medium. It's as if they think all information metaphores equate to a 16th century printing press.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a (new, late '80s) Twilight Zone story where these kids are preparing for a big test, kind of like the SAT. They're real excited because passing this test allows them to use telephones and have adult rights. The parents of one child are really worried about their particularly bright son, and there are subtle hints that this is a bigger deal than is evident to the kids. It ends with a call to the parents, saying that he finished the test, and oh, btw, where would you like his body interred?
(See, they were living in a police state, a particularly subtle and nasty one. The test weeds out potential troublemakers).
It was terminal based, to an old Cyber mainframe. You could telnet to it and log in with SSN and password. They were still using it for class elections before I graduated two years ago.
Class registration used to be through that system, but started moving over to the web system sometime in '96(?). By the time I graduated, it was all browser based.
YHBT HAND
Do you realize that I was mocking the belligerent attitute of your first post, and highlighting some discrepancies between your statements and your apparent ideology (or, perhaps, highlighting contradictions that are inherent to your ideology)?
I read _Starship Troopers_ about seven years ago and enjoyed it, because I found it to be a very strong, yet subtle, criticism of fascism hidden inside a juvenile space adventure.
Of course, a lot of people have mistaken it to be *advocating* the society presented in the novel.
Even people in this thread.
Along comes the movie, and wow, it's a rather blatant satire of facism, complete with 90's themes, and targeted toward teenagers in a sort of self-deprecating comic book style. I though people would actually get it this time. I really enjoyed it, though I went into it thinking it would royally suck.
But of course, movie critics, stupid as ever, mistake this movie for advocating the society presented within it. "Nazi 90210" is as it was often described.
I even got in arguments about it. No one saw past the violence and militarism. You'd think people would respect a realistic depiction. I mean, they are fighting giant insects with machine guns. Of course they'd be slaughtered.
Now, consider this. How violent was the book? I remember one scene where Rico launches a grenade into a school or church-like building, slaughtering hundreds of civilian skinnies. The movie get's nowhere near that.
I've used some of the "distance learning" techniques while I was in school (primarily as a way to skip class). Mainly lectures on video tape and in RealAudio over the net. And you know, it wasn't really very useful. A boring lecture is three times as boring when you're experiencing it that way. The only advantage is you can pause and replay things, and you can make fun of the lecturer (a la MST3K).
But as for random access, that technology has already existed for thousands of years, in *books*. Books are very useful, and they are a lot cheaper than lectures. And in most cases, they're a heck of a lot more informative. I think of lectures as a way to make things more entertaining in order to hold my attention. But if I'm into something, I'd rather have a dozen books on it than listen to someone run their mouth for an hour or two.
Also, having attended a few company sponsored training classes in the "real world", I have to say that lectures like this are a scam. I can learn more from a book in one morning than what it takes three days to cover in a class setting.
I think any highly motivated person would be better served having access to electronic textbooks than to an electronic "university". And the benefit of free, electronic textbooks, is that they can be integerated in the curiculum of real cash-poor institutions. They can also be more easily translated, and easily updated.
Is anyone aware of any organized efforts to create textbooks of this nature? Something kind of like the Linux Documentation Project, but less specific for scientific and academic subjects.
No no no, the last pi date Dec 15, 1979.
At 9:27:45 pm, eastern time, to be exact.
The next won't happen for quite a while.
Dude, go back and read my post, and pay particular attention to the three adjectives that I used to qualify "law".
Remember that a great many forgeigners do business and own property in the United States. And remember that a great many Americans do business and own property in foriegn nations. That's commerce, and you can't have it without stable laws (local laws, and adherance to international treaties). No one wants to do business in nations where governments can come in and steal your trade secrets, or nationalize your property, or have their way with your secretaries, or whatever.
This has probably hurt American commercial interets, because even though it might help Boing or GM or whoever recieves these secrets, Joe Schmo Medium Business has now just had his foriegn relationships strained a little more. Why should you do business with Americans, when it invites your company to espionage?
Imagine if tomorrow France nationalized every American owned property on French soil. It's absurd, but no more than your example. What would you say then? "It's their law, they can do what they want."?
Oh, so because the world isn't a nice place, we should violate our own rules? I suppose I should be able to steal secrets from a corporate competitor, because it's in my company's best interests. I mean, why should we obey the law, be it our law, foreign law, or international law, when our government can break it, and claim moral superiority for doing it?
I suppose you think the people who steal American secrets for foriegn interests have the moral high ground too. They're acting in the best interests of their chosen nation.
Looks like DePalma took a really good premise and used it for his own political/social ends. But what do we expect from the Money Machine? Until we stop voting with our pocketbooks, they'll continue to pander to the lowest, most ignorant, Luddite common denominator.
What do you suggest, people should make movies for the good of all mankind, with their political and social agendas screened by some committee for ideological purity? You think people are too stpuid to be allowed to spend their money on what they want? Fucking elitist commie! That so called "Money Machine" is the only thing that keeps you lazy peaceniks alive.
This issue has been explored since, like forever, in science fiction. There is now even a name for it: "The Singularity", coined by writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. My gist of what it means is the point at which any and all "normal" humans will be unable to grasp, predict, or participate in, the further advancement of technology.
And you know, so what? It's not like a paleolithic man could grasp modern society. And just because you want be able to follow what your grandchildren are doing (whether they be humans, machines, or something inbetween), doesn't mean they won't still love and protect their feeble and slow grandparents.
Of course, Bill is right. Nanotechnology could be nasty shit in malicious hands. That's why we need to stay involved in the development of space, because there is no greater protective barrier than a few million miles of hard vacuume and radiation.
Georgia Tech's student government elections have been done by computer for many years. Sorry!
(And FYI, it was the first to have online class registration, the first large school to have web-based class registration, and the first to have a web-based course critique).
What is ludicrous in nature is lengths these politicians will go to in blaming the worlds problems on pornography and "subversive" influences on the internet. It is all about getting themselves in the media and creating fear and misunderstanding to further their agendas. Protecting children is only a convenient excuse.
Why do you think so many of these products block political sites and sites critical of censorship?
Heh, in their case, shouldn't the word be
"co-optition"?
How do you expect a modern economy to develop without a telecommunications infrastructure? The Internet is more than a toy for downloading mp3z and pr0n.
Anonymity is great when you're being hounded by criminals or an oppressive governments. But it is a temporary refuge, because generally those oppressive powers that want to know who you are have resources available to find out who you are. If you want long term freedom, anonymity is a crutch that will eventually fail you. You'd do much better to stand up and demand your rights.
There is a reason the phrase is "Anonymous Coward", because the anonymous have no credibility. When you can't tell a leader from a crank or the honest from the criminal, what good does it do you? All criminals want anonymity, while only a portion of the honest desire it. Therefore it is safer to distrust all anonymous people.
Would you give your credit card number to anonymous individual to buy something? Anonymity and security have opposite agendas. Authentication and non-repudiation, hear those words before? Ever used PGP, SSL, certificates or digitally signed something? It is all about trusting the party you are talking to, and holding those people to their word. You can't do that anonymously. Sure, you can have a proxy identifier, like my "0xdeadbeef" handle, but it is still an identity on slashdot, and there more I use it, the more tracable it is to my "RL" identity.
Anonymity is not privacy. Privacy is about protecting your sensitive information when information can be collected, bought and sold more easily than air. The anonymous have no need for privacy, because they have no information. They might generate it, but it is not linked to them. The anonymous have no "state" in the world, so they can't do anything that requires trust.
tags), but now I look like a bigger dufus than usual. Am I the only experiencing this? Because I don't see many bare tags in other posts, and this bug has been here for weeks. Perhaps it is related to user options?
(I'm using lightweight mode, sorted by score, posts expanded).
a friend of mine bought a shredder after her credit card fell victim to a Dumpster diver
<p>
How does she know it wasn't a clerk at a store she used the card, or a relative or coworker snooping in her purse, or an employee of the credit card company, or someone stealing her mail, etc..
<p>
It bugs me when people come up with grand conspiracy theories or elaborite scenarios for how simple thefts take place. All it does is serve the interests of the people selling security solutions, or the credit card companies who know full well how insecure credit cards are.
<p>
People hype about how "insecure" online transactions are, when they are many times as secure as physical transactions, because there are less people involved.* It's the same with blaming a dumpster diver for stealing a number. Yes, you should probably shred things with your number on it. But no, it's not the most likely scenario. The poor security of credit cards is a fundamental flaw in using an identifer as a secret key. Don't go blaming our eroding privacy for credit card theft.
<p>
* One cavet about that. Foolish companies that store credit card numbers on their web server are asking for trouble. In that case, it probably is easier to steal numbers from online merchants.
*
The key difference is that the phone and power networks can be locally managed. A private mail system will have to be very integrated between regions. I don't think the result would be better than what we've got now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Regarding 60 Minutes, do you think private corporations don't have theives and psycopaths working for them?
You, like many other people in here, seem to think that all of society's fundamental transactions are government regulated. Take a visit to your bank sometime and ask them if their wire transfers are government regulated (which is the most important type of "email" there is).
Dude, I write banking software. :) Every wire transfer is reported to the Federal Reserve. Heck, if I remember correctly, every wire goes through a Fed mainframe. The ACH network (aka direct deposit) is run by an independant organization, but the Fed has influence there as well. Most regulation is by a consortium of banks, but led by the Fed, whose leaders are appointed by the government. Besides, Congress has passed banking regulation. Laws to detect fraud and tax cheats, and fair lending come to mind.
Speaking of the Fed, there's another public institution that is effective and self suffucient. More evidence to the contrary that anything and everything "government" or "public" is wasteful and stupid.
You are refering to InterNIC and Network Solutions, right? Thanks for supporting my argument. ;)
There's a more recent article about Network Solutions, and everyone's favorite autocratic government band-aid, ICANN: http://slashdot.org /article.pl?sid=00/03/07/0713200&mode=nested
Exactly. FBI, NSA, CIA, Verisign, Network Solutions, U.S. Postal Service. Which one of these has the most trustworthy reputation?
Who funds these audits? As a Verisign customer, am I authorized to conduct a security audit over their entire certificate operation? Even if I get every one of their customers to participate, short of a class action lawsuit, is there any way I can demand they comply?
Remember, the Mindcraft guys know more that most of us about web server benchmarking, but they still screwed up and there are still questions of conflict of interest. I can at least run their tests myself. I can't lobby my congressman for an independant audit of Verisign.
Of course, now that digital certificates have some legal weight behind them, they will be regulated. The government is already involved. I'd much rather such an essential public service be run by a public institution that is efficient and self-sufficient, and yet still accountable to the citizens, than by a corporation, accountable only to tort law and the short-term profit motive of its shareholders, that still has a quasi-monopoly and government backing.
Why not, the government's got a monopoly on national defense. That's the biggest and most wasteful racket there ever was.
Besides, the NSA has its hands in the certification authorities anyways, so what difference does it make? At least as a public organization, we citizens have a right to oversight. As private companies, all we can do is threaten to switch to a competitor when find that their security is not up to par. Now, how do you find out when their security is not up to par?
(Interesting, with UCITA, it might become illegal to even test their security practices. Forge a certificate or find a security flaw, and you get sued off your ass or go to jail!)
Actually, the government does have it's hands all over the power grid and the phone network. True, it's all run by private companies now, but they are government granted monopolies, or at least have been through most of their history. There are price controls and regulation out the wazoo for that stuff, and for good reason, because both require a great deal of infrastructure that would be wasteful to duplicate, and both are critical systems that our entire nation depends on.
Besides, would you really trust someone like UPS or FedEx with official mail? I wouldn't trust UPS with anything critical based on the condition of the boxes I get from them. And do you really think they're going to charge the same rates to those in poor, rural areas as they do in cities? It will have to be subsidized, and/or highly regulated, just like phone and power. Is that what you really want?
Now think of it this way, based on the way they've handled the DNS system, would you trust someone like Network Solutions as your official guranteed delivery e-mail service and as your official certification authority? Both these services are need for legally binding electronic contracts, and they (as Verisign) are now well positioned to provide those services. To be legally binding, these services will be highly regulated, so the government will be invovled, whether you like it or not. Now, who do you trust more, Network Solutions, or the Post Office?
The liberals always do what they're told, because they haven't the imagination or strength of will to create their own freedom.
Nope, cause then they're no longer liberals in the boot-licking conservative lexicon, they're called subversives, revolutionaries, communists, anarchists, freedom-fighters, extremists, radicals, and guerrillas.
Here's an interesting example sure to invoke cognative dissonance in our troll here:
ESR plays the flute (a fruity instrument if there ever was one) and even dabbled in the occult. He doesn't seem to a hold a real job either, sponging off his wife and anyone willing pay for his opinions (a lot like those new-age self-help gurus!). He probably spent a great deal of time in the machine room in his younger days (what a troglodyte!), and he encourages people to share the products of their labor in some sort of populist revolt against the market structure created by the (unregulated) software industry (commie!). He also borrowed from sociology literature in his manifesto, the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Oh my god, he must be a stupid, lazy, ineffectual *liberal* then! He probably hugs trees and wants to take our guns away! I bet he eats tofu and listens to Yanni! He must be the most useless, naval-gazing, dogma-spouting apparatchik of the liberal establishment there ever was!
Besides, I wonder who really is more useless, the person with a degree in game design, or the anonymous coward who must have spent this beautiful sunday afternoon writing trolls on slashdot.
The Beacon School is a selective secondary public school on West 61st Street in New York City.
Due to financial constraints placed on public schools, Beacon has to get the most out of every piece of technology they have.
If schools resources are to be used only for "learning", then why are student activity fees collected at most universities, often for recreational services most students never use?
And remember that universities are not usually strictly private profit-seeking entities. They are payed for by tuition and student fees, by charitable endowments, and by govenment money collected with taxes (even private schools receive federal funds for student programs and research).
You claim it's not censorship when someone else owns the wire, but what happens when everybody who owns the wires won't let you talk? What's your recourse, build your own Internet?
Yes, but compare it to Unicode, that wastes *nine* bits when used by all right-thinking people of the world. And my god, think of all those binary file formats that pad space for fields reserved for future use. And what about the people who don't compress their media, or those the whiners who think they are too good for lossy compression algorithms. Don't they realize that all *meaningful* information can be expressed in an mpeg bitstream?
Don't even get me started on those luddites who still insist on using dried wood pulp as their storage medium. It's as if they think all information metaphores equate to a 16th century printing press.