I for one can not wait to see the first footage of Lions trying to hunt Kangaroos. It should make for a hilarious spectacle. I wonder if the Lions will even know what to make of a Kangaroo.
The inhabitants of a Canberra suburb were fled in panic as the city was overrun by a herd of thousands of Ferrel elephants that had escaped form a reserve for endangered African animals. The elephants have adapted to their new enviroment admirably and have begun to travel in herds of thousands. Just last week an infestation of ferrel Elephants levelled an entire district of the city of Sydney and then went on to ravage a large peanut factory...........
Firstly I would like to point out that I am do not intend to defend or condemn these teachers with my words here but simpl discuss the merits of laws that ban certain professions to strike.
You can make a case for banning strikes being both ritght and wrong. The case for it being right is that it (in this case) prevents disruption of the function of schools and guarantees that childresn education is not disrupted. That can be a plus. I come from a country where teachers are allowed to strike and my education suffered for it because of frequent strikes.
On the other hand these laws while in a way sensible can and very regularly are massively abused by governments. In my homeland Police officers, unlike teachers, are for example forbidden to strike and the Government has made good use of this situation to be very conservative when it comes to determining Police officers salaries. Conservative to the point where these guys go to the police academy for government funded training only to resign shortly afterwards and go to work for private security companies who pay them very significantly better. The same can be said about Fighter pilots and Military officers in a number of Nato countries who go off to work for Airlines and Construction, Security, Mining, or Oil companies as soon as they are free to do so. So you see these bans on strikes can be a double edged sword.
Like it or not Striking is one of the Workers primary defences against being abused and badly paid be it by governments or industry. You can piss and moan about this being a communist idea but it is really independent of your politican views. Abuse by Governments or Industry canstrike you no matter what part of the political spectrum you occupy.
Writing something like this is easy, implementing it isn't. To sucessfully introduce Rabbits Muscle genes into the human Gene code would require years of experiments on animals then higher primates and finally Humans and alot of the experiments would fail including the ones on Humans. When they wheeled that Cloned sheep "Dolly" out onto the Media stage it was called a great scientific achievement. Which may very well be true. That achievement was however preceeded by a legion of faliures which nobody mentioned. I for one am not going to be one of the first to try this, especiall if it involves some Underground Sports Doctor who hopes he knows what he is doing injecting animal Genes into my "System Code". The results this sort of gene splicing could easily leave you wising you were dead.
Fire up google and search. You will find them rather easily. At the moment the most common manifestations of genetic discrimination are:
Loss or denial of health/insurance.
Loss or denial of employment.
In the USA at least laws are being passed and in some places defeated who are meant to deal with this sort of thing. I.E. limit employers and insurers rights to terminate employment contracts or insurance contracts because an employee/customer is suddenly revealed as someone who MIGHT be at risk of becoming sick because of a Genetic disorder.
The list of things that happened in the communist block states are nothing like the other list you gave! Having a file on someonemeans you are actively collecting information about someone and storing that information as linked to them. Having CCTV footageof the rush hour on the M25... ok, so you have film of large numbers of people going about their business, but you arent storing that data as linked to each individal - you're storing it as something like "M25 camera 7 Junction 2 29/11/01". The film of me walking to the pub is likely to be stored as "West End camera 1 2100-2159 28/11/01" and not stuck in a file with my name on with the tag "Jonathan going to the pub on the 28th".
Of course my list are different. But the theme of the lists is the same, surveillance The security cameras in Britain, and Lately here in Germany are doing much more than just watching traffic. They are watching us. And if certain people have their way this will soon be expanded to doing much more than just watching us. How about monitoring peoples phones, email, internet surfing habits or banning/"backdooring" uncomfortably effective encryptions software? These are things that are already being seriously considered in a number of western countries. It may be that we are not being monitored with the same methods as the people in the communist bloc or that the governments of the west are monitoring other things than the communinsts did. The point is that in both cases the surveillance is more intense and intruseve than I am prepared to accept. I consider it just as intrusive if some one plants an informant on me to monitor my counterrevolutionary comments as i find it intruseve that someone intercepts my Email and scans it for Politically incorrect words that MIGHT indincate that I am a terrorist.
Crime is not a always a symptom of poverty, take serial killers for example. Also the entire illegal drug industry, from the adicts who go shop lifting to raise funds for their next hit, to the dealers and drugs barons who are most certainly not poor. Finaly there are people who comit crimes simply because it's a challenge for them.
Very true, but only if you generalise what I said. I do not think:
These cameras are being installed to watch the great drug lords of this world.
That serial killers or criminals who regard crime as a challenging hobby are the prime motivating factor behind these camera installations.
These cameras were set up to watch common small time criminals. It is drug dealers, Muggers, Hookers, Pickpockets and other such people who these cameras are meant to watch. And these types of criminals are to a large extent the product of poverty unemployment, lack of educational oppoutunities, bad upbringing and a generally deteriorating moral fibre in the western world.
I realise that ripping things out of context is SlashDots National Sport but your comment just took it into the realm of the ridiculous.
As far as I know these cameras are not setup to watch Connecticut stockbrokers who steal their clients stock-portfolios. They are setup to watch people like muggers, drug dealers, junkies, hookers and other such unfortunate individuals. And if those are not manifestations of poverty I do no know what is. My comment was not meant to include white collar crime, I thought the context made that obvious. I apologize sincerely for that comments lack of encyclopedic exactness.
It is a gentele irony that whe here in the west continually critisize the old communist-block states. A place where:
Every letter was opened by state security forces.
A file was kept on everybody.
Where people were arrested and jailed without explanation
Then we turn around and defend things like:
Security cameras on every street corner.
Surveillance cameras on highway bridges that track our cars by their license plates.
Databases contianing all manner of personal informantion which are incerasingly becoming available to every Tom Dick and Harry.
People being discriminated on the base of their genetic makeup.
And we still manage to claim we are more free than the people who lived under Soviet communism. Well perhaps we are in some ways more free than the peoples of the old eastern-bloc. In others we are increasingly becoming less free. It is easy to point at Crime as a reason to put up security cameras. This however ignores the fact that Crime is the result of poverty. Setting up cameras is only treating the symptom of a disease and not the cause of it. Even the British admit that the only thing cameras achieve is to move the crime to places where there are no cameras.
A friend of mine bought a used PC for his mother. When he booted the thing up it turned out to have windows already installed. So he clicking around and found a nifty Icon. He clicked on it and wouldn't you know up pops this window which turns out to be a database interface to several thousand Patient profiles for the whole region where he lives. Turns out the Local Health center had sold off some mustered out PC's and forgot flatten the Hard Drives first. That is how easily this happenes.
This sort of thing will allways happen and especially if you hand this sort of information over to private companies. Information will become more easy to access and governments and corporations will abuse it. They regard it as an incontestable right. Just wait till they start putting genetic profiles into these databases and selling them to insurance companies, banks and employers for "Risk Management and Customer/Employee evaluations" Won't it be fun to have your dirty genetic secrets floating around for the public to scrutinize.
Let me see if I get this right. Somebody asked Bill:
"It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it, the key to success of a softwareproduct involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users,resellers, and so forth. Isn't the open source model a more efficient paradigm forbuilding such a community around your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?"
To which Bill answered:
"Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that... Blah, Blah, Blah"
Fistly Billys answer sounds like something from the mouth of Dan Quale or Ronald Regan (in his altsheimer phase). Secondly It also seems to me that confused as his staement is that Bill is not claiming to be the originator/father of the Open Sourcre movement. He did not say "I came in" He said "we came in" so depending on what he meand by we that statement may include IBM. At best he is claiming to have helped create the "ecosystem" refered to in the question. This statement has been ripped out of context and nobody seems to have bothered to post Bills entire answer. Is there a transcript of the debate somewhere. I'd like to see the place where he says "It is a little known fact that Microsoft actually invented the open source movement y'know" and not some badly formulated comment that can be read a dozen different ways depending on how much you hate Bill Gates.
Patents on hardware of all concievable kinds are used as weapons in the real world all the time. That is nothing new. That still does not mean that we should abandon Patents and let anachy reign. As for software breaking down into well known techiques? Fine but then so does a common Automobile Gearbox if you break it down into Cogwheels shafts screws rods and other components. A whole slew of a Gearboxes components like say, cogwheels have been in use in various forms since the Bronze age. Should people be unable to patenta a new Gearboxdesign because they use the well known common cogwheel? You can still build something out of common well known components and create a system out of those components that is patentable.
But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't.
Nobody died and made software god. Big evil companies have been using Patents as Weapons for over a hundred years. Sam Colt got a patent for his revolver and used it to kill his competitors for years until the patent expired. This was despite the fact that revovlers were nothing new and what he patented has existed since the 16'th century. I think that is called prior art! There was also the famous case of Ford vs. Selden another example of people generalizing a patent and using it to pulverize the competition. Seldens claim was eventually thrown out of court and the Patent system matured. So welcome to the real world. Software patents will happen because there is a good reason for them and the Software patenting system will eventually stabilize and if it does not there are the courts.
What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
Because they got to the patent office before you did. The road to faliure is littered with brave souls that thought of it first but got to the patent office second. Big evil corporations or any one else holding a patent can tell you not to write software, say a GIF editing utility because they (In this case Unisys) sunk money into developing GIF, they patented it or key components of it and they have a right to demand license payments of anyone who uses their patented technology. It sucks ass but that is the way the world works, people play hardball, and the real world just arrived in Software-land.
I know I will get flamed for this by every "Patents are the root of all evil" Zelot on/. and I know I will loose alot of karma over it. But believe it or not I not possibly care less, so here goes:
You can say whatever you want against patents but they are not the root of all evil. Patents have been an accepted part of doing business on this planet for a very long time. And they are not likely to disappear any time soon because like it or not they are essential to commerce. There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware. If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off??? If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor. Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission. Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves. Of course there is a thin line between people protecting their patented inventions and a few greedy misguided individuals b*tt f*cking patent-laws and using them in ways these laws were never intended to kill of pesky competitors but that still does not make patents the root of all evil
With regard to Apple: If Apple has a patent then it is Apples right to sue those who violate them. With regard to Apple I admit to being somewhat unfamiliar with its long and distingushed history of using patents to block file formats. Were these suits legitimate attempts at protecting its rights with regard to its patented inventions or were they all purely malicious attemts at killing off competitors??? And besides what do you think Apple has to gain from Killing PNG off?
I agree with you!! Blocking free file formats by trying to rape patent-laws sounds more like M$ than Apple. I would be greatly suprised if they actually went ahead with a serious attempt to block PNG. Being shaken down by Unisys for license fees is not exactly a great motivator for Apple to block free alternatives to GIF. The only reason Unisys is able to demand license fees anyway is because of the GIF formats unique features which in the past at least made it the only entry on the list of developers alternatives. If anything it is in Apples interest to help create a free alternative which would leave Unisys with the choice of abandoning its license policy or watch the GIF format die a slow death.
Never mind Cleaning up the apartment or vacuming the Potato chips of your chest while you are lounging roung on the sofa whatching a "Farscape" marathon on TV. And it could also deal with the pesky old woman from the down stairs apartment when she comest to complain about the way the 3D surround sound rig hookedup to your PC (Set to Max Volume of course) makes the walls shiver when you fire your AK 47 while you play Counter Strike at 2'o clock at night.
You seem to be the type of person who will believe anything certain, non expert people say. Your population analogy is awful. First the world has more than 50 years of useful oil products, second we can survive without them. As it becomes an actual problem there will be actual motivation to fix the problem.
The issue of oil running out is not as trivial as you seem to think. For one thing 50 years is not a s much time as you seem to think when it comes to fundamentally changing the infrastructures that service hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans to new power sources. Just building up Eastern Germay is a burden to the German Economy that is still dragging it down today, imagine the cost of recostructing your entire infrastructure entirely. Even 50 years is a not much time for that. We have perhaps 25 years to prepare our selves for the 25 years before the Oil begins to run out. That means perfecting and putting into general use Hydrogen fuel cells which will probably become the dominant technology for automobile propulsion. It will also mean Coming up with an efficient technology for the energy intensive process of producing hydrogen fuel and a practical method for shipping the stuff in same HUGE quantities we ship oil today. All these undertakings will be fought every step of the way by the Oil lobbys. Hydrogen production will also require a slew of new powerplants that we do not need today because the oil mining and refining is considerably less energy intensive. This increase in power consumption will require us to build even more coal fired and nuclear fueled power plants which will cause political unrest and aggrivate the CO2 problem. This could of course be minimized by developing localised supplementary solutions for energy production such as Wind energy Solar energy and burning locally available biomass or using it to generate methane for energy production. Finally it will also be necesary to sharply increase energy efficiency starting with a ban on the use of the incandessent lightbulb and replacing it with the 5-6 times more efficient alternatives allready available. With a president in office in the US that seems singularly unconcerned about the fact that the average american consumes twice the amount of energy per annum than the average European, who seems totally unconcerned about creating an energy policy commonto all US states and does not see any need to promote energy efficiency in the US nor any reason to minimize the use of coal and oil in US powerplants I would say the USA for one will be in a world of shit 30 years from now. And 30 years pass by faster than you think.
About global warming. Nobody is claiming that the climate isn't changing, it has been changing for as long as we can tell, but only a small fraction of that is humans, completely eclipsed by the natural cycles. If you were to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would change the temperature by no more than half a degree. Looking back, the temperature changes by several degrees every few hundred years.
For starters no one has to my knowledge even come close to proving that only a small fraction of the current buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is human generated. It is true however that there are indications that this is a to a large extent a natural process. But there are also indications that human generated CO2 emissions are siginficantly accelerating the process of Global warming which may it self be the trigger for even more catastrophic and unpredictable climate change. Especially if the melting of Polar ice (Which recentyl progressed from being a theory to being a proven fact) will cause a shift in the Gulf current or even a disruption of the so called "conveyor belt" current. Another issue with climatic change is mass extinction. Climatic change will also disrupt food production and there by cause famine whcih leads to population migratins and war. Personally I would rather be safe than sorry.
The kyoto accord is an easy way for densely populated countries to inprove their local environment without falling behind countries like Canada, the US and Austrailia. You also have to take issue with the use of 1991 levels giving post soviet central europe a distinct advantage. I'll assume the developing countries were given exemptions so that they could get an impressive number of signatures on it.
What should we do? Require the Russins and EU to use pre 1991 emissions as a reference? That would have the effect of the EU and Russia basically having to do nothing to reduce emissions since they have not raised their emission levels significanly above the pre 1991 levels and it would reward the USA for its proud tratition of complete disintrest in maintaining anything like a semblance of control over the nations excessive energy consumption.
Considering its goals the Kyoto protocol is an incredible acievement despite its numerous faults. Especially if it remains even half way functional after all the various interests and political and monetary agendas have been serviced by making this that or the other clause more vague and fuzzy. It may not be perfect but then nobody ever said it was. It is as good a starting point as any. The Kyoto protocol is a beginning that can be built upon as time passed and situations change. I see these shortcomings just as well as you but unlike you I do not aboandon a system just because it does not work at the moment I improve it. The only reason that the USA bowed out of Kyoto is that they thought it would be one of these one sided affairs that everybody would sign and no one would observe. Kind of like the ban on landmines and an ancient international law that bans bombing civillians with aircraft.
You are right! It seems to me people have a problem distinguish between getting a patent:
for a method to implement an algorithm in software
and getting a patent that covers not only ones own implementation of the algorithm but also all other possible implementations.
The former is sensible. Why should one not be able to enjoy the fruits of developing a partickularly efficient method to code a certain algorithm? People get patents for implementing algorithms in hardware all the time. What is an FPU anyway other than a bunch of algorithms implemented in Hardware? So why not patents on methods to implement algorithms in software?
The latter however is stupid becasuse it means that anyone who develops a method to code the same algorithm one has patented no matter how different his methods design is from ones own will be violating ones patent.
It is silly to write off the concept of Software patents in general just because a few brain-donors want to use them to monopolize common well known algorithms.
It seems to me that a lot of times one part of the European government doesn't know what another part is doing.
That is no less true in the USA. It is almost funny how one half of the NSA is trying to make computers more secure and the other half trying to make George Orwells novel "1984" into reality.
As far as I could see, i.e. decrypt the lawyer speak in the treaty investigators have to have what the lawyers in the US call "probable cause". This did not read like an open ticket to conduct surveillance on anyone at all for no parcikular reason other that that there is nothing to do at the Bin Laden desk at MI.6 HQ at the moment, you have picked your nose clean, and you are in the mood for reading some poor sods personal E-Mail. In fact I like the how far they went in the Child Pornography section in banning even "Over 18 looks like 14" stuff. I rather doubt that Tony Blair and his fellow slimers will be able to order say Siemens, Dupont or the Airbus consortium to hand over the keys to encrypted transmissions just so that HM government can brown nose Uncle Sam with nice data-morsels for Boeing or Motorola. But then who in the EU trusts the British anymore when it comes to keeping the lid on sensitive commercial data and not leaking to the US for Brownie Points?
As for Echelon the EU should kick the CIA/NSA listening stations out and set up their own. If the US wants access after that let them come asking for it. And that will happen sooner or later if the US keeps abusing ECHELON. Hell, even the Germans are planning their own spy satilites
This would be even more significant if the award had come from an indipendent party. That would have been a kick in Microsofts ass since KDE is everyting the Microsoft desktop should be but isn't because Microsoft is afraid the average user is too stupid to figure out how to use many Virtual Desktops on a single monitor.
I was not referring to what the US Government does to bar its own citisens from downloading inside the borders of the USA. I wast trying to make the point that the US: Does not seem to like other countries trying to stop US citisens from breaking foreign laws from inside the US but might not be as thrilled at other countries taking that same stance.
I ask the question:
Would the US be equally thrilled as it is about enabling its citisens to go unpunished while selling contraband to other countries if other countries followed the USA's example and refused to stop their citisens from breaking US laws by selling contraband to US citisens from inside the borders of said foreign countries?
The lets face it, contrary to popular beleif, the USA has just like the rest of the world a long and distinguished history of "Expecting to be able to freely do unto others whatever it wants but getting pissed off when others do the same unto the US".
So by your logic I suppose the US can blow it out its arse when it tries to stop US citisens from downloading material illegal in the US from sites in countries where such material is legal because these countries do not feel bound by US laws?? Or is that suddenly a whole different matter? Can we expect the USA to obide by the same rules it opposes on others?!?
That is actually not quite true. The German Police AFAIK like many other EU police forces has liason officers in Thailand that monitor these perverts in cooperation with the Thai police and arrest them over there if they catch them red handed. That is however not as easy as saying it and most of them get away. A more effective method has been to just monitor these groups and make lists of the names of suspicious tourist and search them thoroughly in Customs when they come off the plane in Germany loaded with porn and home videos. There have also been arrests of numerous people organising these tours. Which is why this filthy trade is beginning to move else away from Thailand at least the German part of it.
That depends on how you look at it. Judge Fogel would probably approve of Skylarov being locked up. The question is how would he feel about the same thing happening to a US citisen in France??
Ridiculous thought??
If you take the US action in the Skylarov case as the USA laying down the ground rules. It is only a logical expect that if a Yahoo site in the US sells Nazi religia to French citisens, this ruling together with a Skylarov guilty sentence would have least the two following consequences:
This ruling ensures that French law can not touch the US site's administrator/owner for doing so in the USA.
He would however not be untouchable. This administrator/owner had better not show his face anywhere in the EU or its perspective future member countries because due to the ground rules layed down by the US in the Skyralov affair the French could, if they were pissed off enaugh, have him arrested and extradited to France. Where he would presumably spend years in a jailcell futally trying to avoid a fate of becoming the girlfriend of big horny Korsican.
From the very beginning of this whole Greenhouse/ozone scare there has been:
A near complete lack of proof for the fact that humans are causing either.
No shortage of people claiming that humanity is more or less solely to blaim.
I do not think anyone can argue with the fact that human generated pollution is not helping but given the complete absence of long term data on the development of the Ozone layer the Ozone gap could(I am not saying it is just that it could) just as well be an natural phenomenon. Which is what responsible scientist have been saying from the very beginnin. So this development should not be all that suprising. But then serious science seems always to get gagged by the rhetoric of fanatical enviromentalism and conservative politics just like those few brave souls that blasphemed by suggested climate change happens rapidly over a few hundred years or even less and not over tens of thousands of years or even less time after analysing the results of the Greenland glacier ice core drillings. And that perhaps humanity is only contributing to/accelerating a climate change and not casusing it. Perhaps the stiffnecked Conservatives and the Treehuggers alike should let scientist do their work and not use their work for mudslinging before it has even produced definitive results.
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I for one can not wait to see the first footage of Lions trying to hunt Kangaroos. It should make for a hilarious spectacle. I wonder if the Lions will even know what to make of a Kangaroo.
Yes I can see it now. NY Times headline:
Ferrel elphant plague strikes Australia!!
The inhabitants of a Canberra suburb were fled in panic as the city was overrun by a herd of thousands of Ferrel elephants that had escaped form a reserve for endangered African animals. The elephants have adapted to their new enviroment admirably and have begun to travel in herds of thousands. Just last week an infestation of ferrel Elephants levelled an entire district of the city of Sydney and then went on to ravage a large peanut factory...........
Firstly I would like to point out that I am do not intend to defend or condemn these teachers with my words here but simpl discuss the merits of laws that ban certain professions to strike.
You can make a case for banning strikes being both ritght and wrong. The case for it being right is that it (in this case) prevents disruption of the function of schools and guarantees that childresn education is not disrupted. That can be a plus. I come from a country where teachers are allowed to strike and my education suffered for it because of frequent strikes.
On the other hand these laws while in a way sensible can and very regularly are massively abused by governments. In my homeland Police officers, unlike teachers, are for example forbidden to strike and the Government has made good use of this situation to be very conservative when it comes to determining Police officers salaries. Conservative to the point where these guys go to the police academy for government funded training only to resign shortly afterwards and go to work for private security companies who pay them very significantly better. The same can be said about Fighter pilots and Military officers in a number of Nato countries who go off to work for Airlines and Construction, Security, Mining, or Oil companies as soon as they are free to do so. So you see these bans on strikes can be a double edged sword.
Like it or not Striking is one of the Workers primary defences against being abused and badly paid be it by governments or industry. You can piss and moan about this being a communist idea but it is really independent of your politican views. Abuse by Governments or Industry canstrike you no matter what part of the political spectrum you occupy.
I'm not convinced. After all it is a well known fact that in European hell all the engineers are French!!!
Writing something like this is easy, implementing it isn't. To sucessfully introduce Rabbits Muscle genes into the human Gene code would require years of experiments on animals then higher primates and finally Humans and alot of the experiments would fail including the ones on Humans. When they wheeled that Cloned sheep "Dolly" out onto the Media stage it was called a great scientific achievement. Which may very well be true. That achievement was however preceeded by a legion of faliures which nobody mentioned. I for one am not going to be one of the first to try this, especiall if it involves some Underground Sports Doctor who hopes he knows what he is doing injecting animal Genes into my "System Code". The results this sort of gene splicing could easily leave you wising you were dead.
Fire up google and search. You will find them rather easily. At the moment the most common manifestations of genetic discrimination are:
Loss or denial of health/insurance.
Loss or denial of employment.
In the USA at least laws are being passed and in some places defeated who are meant to deal with this sort of thing. I.E. limit employers and insurers rights to terminate employment contracts or insurance contracts because an employee/customer is suddenly revealed as someone who MIGHT be at risk of becoming sick because of a Genetic disorder.
The list of things that happened in the communist block states are nothing like the other list you gave! Having a file on someonemeans you are actively collecting information about someone and storing that information as linked to them. Having CCTV footageof the rush hour on the M25... ok, so you have film of large numbers of people going about their business, but you arent storing that data as linked to each individal - you're storing it as something like "M25 camera 7 Junction 2 29/11/01". The film of me walking to the pub is likely to be stored as "West End camera 1 2100-2159 28/11/01" and not stuck in a file with my name on with the tag "Jonathan going to the pub on the 28th".
Of course my list are different. But the theme of the lists is the same, surveillance The security cameras in Britain, and Lately here in Germany are doing much more than just watching traffic. They are watching us. And if certain people have their way this will soon be expanded to doing much more than just watching us. How about monitoring peoples phones, email, internet surfing habits or banning/"backdooring" uncomfortably effective encryptions software? These are things that are already being seriously considered in a number of western countries. It may be that we are not being monitored with the same methods as the people in the communist bloc or that the governments of the west are monitoring other things than the communinsts did. The point is that in both cases the surveillance is more intense and intruseve than I am prepared to accept. I consider it just as intrusive if some one plants an informant on me to monitor my counterrevolutionary comments as i find it intruseve that someone intercepts my Email and scans it for Politically incorrect words that MIGHT indincate that I am a terrorist.
Crime is not a always a symptom of poverty, take serial killers for example. Also the entire illegal drug industry, from the adicts who go shop lifting to raise funds for their next hit, to the dealers and drugs barons who are most certainly not poor. Finaly there are people who comit crimes simply because it's a challenge for them.
Very true, but only if you generalise what I said. I do not think:
These cameras are being installed to watch the great drug lords of this world.
That serial killers or criminals who regard crime as a challenging hobby are the prime motivating factor behind these camera installations.
These cameras were set up to watch common small time criminals. It is drug dealers, Muggers, Hookers, Pickpockets and other such people who these cameras are meant to watch. And these types of criminals are to a large extent the product of poverty unemployment, lack of educational oppoutunities, bad upbringing and a generally deteriorating moral fibre in the western world.
I realise that ripping things out of context is SlashDots National Sport but your comment just took it into the realm of the ridiculous.
As far as I know these cameras are not setup to watch Connecticut stockbrokers who steal their clients stock-portfolios. They are setup to watch people like muggers, drug dealers, junkies, hookers and other such unfortunate individuals. And if those are not manifestations of poverty I do no know what is. My comment was not meant to include white collar crime, I thought the context made that obvious. I apologize sincerely for that comments lack of encyclopedic exactness.
Every letter was opened by state security forces.
A file was kept on everybody.
Where people were arrested and jailed without explanation
Then we turn around and defend things like:
Security cameras on every street corner.
Surveillance cameras on highway bridges that track our cars by their license plates.
Databases contianing all manner of personal informantion which are incerasingly becoming available to every Tom Dick and Harry.
People being discriminated on the base of their genetic makeup.
And we still manage to claim we are more free than the people who lived under Soviet communism. Well perhaps we are in some ways more free than the peoples of the old eastern-bloc. In others we are increasingly becoming less free. It is easy to point at Crime as a reason to put up security cameras. This however ignores the fact that Crime is the result of poverty. Setting up cameras is only treating the symptom of a disease and not the cause of it. Even the British admit that the only thing cameras achieve is to move the crime to places where there are no cameras.
A friend of mine bought a used PC for his mother. When he booted the thing up it turned out to have windows already installed. So he clicking around and found a nifty Icon. He clicked on it and wouldn't you know up pops this window which turns out to be a database interface to several thousand Patient profiles for the whole region where he lives. Turns out the Local Health center had sold off some mustered out PC's and forgot flatten the Hard Drives first. That is how easily this happenes.
This sort of thing will allways happen and especially if you hand this sort of information over to private companies. Information will become more easy to access and governments and corporations will abuse it. They regard it as an incontestable right. Just wait till they start putting genetic profiles into these databases and selling them to insurance companies, banks and employers for "Risk Management and Customer/Employee evaluations" Won't it be fun to have your dirty genetic secrets floating around for the public to scrutinize.
Let me see if I get this right. Somebody asked Bill:
"It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it, the key to success of a softwareproduct involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users,resellers, and so forth. Isn't the open source model a more efficient paradigm forbuilding such a community around your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?"
To which Bill answered:
"Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that... Blah, Blah, Blah"
Fistly Billys answer sounds like something from the mouth of Dan Quale or Ronald Regan (in his altsheimer phase). Secondly It also seems to me that confused as his staement is that Bill is not claiming to be the originator/father of the Open Sourcre movement. He did not say "I came in" He said "we came in" so depending on what he meand by we that statement may include IBM. At best he is claiming to have helped create the "ecosystem" refered to in the question. This statement has been ripped out of context and nobody seems to have bothered to post Bills entire answer. Is there a transcript of the debate somewhere. I'd like to see the place where he says "It is a little known fact that Microsoft actually invented the open source movement y'know" and not some badly formulated comment that can be read a dozen different ways depending on how much you hate Bill Gates.
Look on the bright side. Working stainding up means no more Hemorrhoids!!!
Patents on hardware of all concievable kinds are used as weapons in the real world all the time. That is nothing new. That still does not mean that we should abandon Patents and let anachy reign. As for software breaking down into well known techiques? Fine but then so does a common Automobile Gearbox if you break it down into Cogwheels shafts screws rods and other components. A whole slew of a Gearboxes components like say, cogwheels have been in use in various forms since the Bronze age. Should people be unable to patenta a new Gearboxdesign because they use the well known common cogwheel? You can still build something out of common well known components and create a system out of those components that is patentable.
But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't.
Nobody died and made software god. Big evil companies have been using Patents as Weapons for over a hundred years. Sam Colt got a patent for his revolver and used it to kill his competitors for years until the patent expired. This was despite the fact that revovlers were nothing new and what he patented has existed since the 16'th century. I think that is called prior art! There was also the famous case of Ford vs. Selden another example of people generalizing a patent and using it to pulverize the competition. Seldens claim was eventually thrown out of court and the Patent system matured. So welcome to the real world. Software patents will happen because there is a good reason for them and the Software patenting system will eventually stabilize and if it does not there are the courts.
What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
Because they got to the patent office before you did. The road to faliure is littered with brave souls that thought of it first but got to the patent office second. Big evil corporations or any one else holding a patent can tell you not to write software, say a GIF editing utility because they (In this case Unisys) sunk money into developing GIF, they patented it or key components of it and they have a right to demand license payments of anyone who uses their patented technology. It sucks ass but that is the way the world works, people play hardball, and the real world just arrived in Software-land.
I know I will get flamed for this by every "Patents are the root of all evil" Zelot on /. and I know I will loose alot of karma over it. But believe it or not I not possibly care less, so here goes:
You can say whatever you want against patents but they are not the root of all evil. Patents have been an accepted part of doing business on this planet for a very long time. And they are not likely to disappear any time soon because like it or not they are essential to commerce. There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware. If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off??? If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor. Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission. Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves. Of course there is a thin line between people protecting their patented inventions and a few greedy misguided individuals b*tt f*cking patent-laws and using them in ways these laws were never intended to kill of pesky competitors but that still does not make patents the root of all evil
With regard to Apple: If Apple has a patent then it is Apples right to sue those who violate them. With regard to Apple I admit to being somewhat unfamiliar with its long and distingushed history of using patents to block file formats. Were these suits legitimate attempts at protecting its rights with regard to its patented inventions or were they all purely malicious attemts at killing off competitors??? And besides what do you think Apple has to gain from Killing PNG off?
I agree with you!! Blocking free file formats by trying to rape patent-laws sounds more like M$ than Apple. I would be greatly suprised if they actually went ahead with a serious attempt to block PNG. Being shaken down by Unisys for license fees is not exactly a great motivator for Apple to block free alternatives to GIF. The only reason Unisys is able to demand license fees anyway is because of the GIF formats unique features which in the past at least made it the only entry on the list of developers alternatives. If anything it is in Apples interest to help create a free alternative which would leave Unisys with the choice of abandoning its license policy or watch the GIF format die a slow death.
Never mind Cleaning up the apartment or vacuming the Potato chips of your chest while you are lounging roung on the sofa whatching a "Farscape" marathon on TV. And it could also deal with the pesky old woman from the down stairs apartment when she comest to complain about the way the 3D surround sound rig hookedup to your PC (Set to Max Volume of course) makes the walls shiver when you fire your AK 47 while you play Counter Strike at 2'o clock at night.
You seem to be the type of person who will believe anything certain, non expert people say. Your population analogy is awful. First the world has more than 50 years of useful oil products, second we can survive without them. As it becomes an actual problem there will be actual motivation to fix the problem.
The issue of oil running out is not as trivial as you seem to think. For one thing 50 years is not a s much time as you seem to think when it comes to fundamentally changing the infrastructures that service hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans to new power sources. Just building up Eastern Germay is a burden to the German Economy that is still dragging it down today, imagine the cost of recostructing your entire infrastructure entirely. Even 50 years is a not much time for that. We have perhaps 25 years to prepare our selves for the 25 years before the Oil begins to run out. That means perfecting and putting into general use Hydrogen fuel cells which will probably become the dominant technology for automobile propulsion. It will also mean Coming up with an efficient technology for the energy intensive process of producing hydrogen fuel and a practical method for shipping the stuff in same HUGE quantities we ship oil today. All these undertakings will be fought every step of the way by the Oil lobbys. Hydrogen production will also require a slew of new powerplants that we do not need today because the oil mining and refining is considerably less energy intensive. This increase in power consumption will require us to build even more coal fired and nuclear fueled power plants which will cause political unrest and aggrivate the CO2 problem. This could of course be minimized by developing localised supplementary solutions for energy production such as Wind energy Solar energy and burning locally available biomass or using it to generate methane for energy production. Finally it will also be necesary to sharply increase energy efficiency starting with a ban on the use of the incandessent lightbulb and replacing it with the 5-6 times more efficient alternatives allready available. With a president in office in the US that seems singularly unconcerned about the fact that the average american consumes twice the amount of energy per annum than the average European, who seems totally unconcerned about creating an energy policy commonto all US states and does not see any need to promote energy efficiency in the US nor any reason to minimize the use of coal and oil in US powerplants I would say the USA for one will be in a world of shit 30 years from now. And 30 years pass by faster than you think.
About global warming. Nobody is claiming that the climate isn't changing, it has been changing for as long as we can tell, but only a small fraction of that is humans, completely eclipsed by the natural cycles. If you were to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would change the temperature by no more than half a degree. Looking back, the temperature changes by several degrees every few hundred years.
For starters no one has to my knowledge even come close to proving that only a small fraction of the current buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is human generated. It is true however that there are indications that this is a to a large extent a natural process. But there are also indications that human generated CO2 emissions are siginficantly accelerating the process of Global warming which may it self be the trigger for even more catastrophic and unpredictable climate change. Especially if the melting of Polar ice (Which recentyl progressed from being a theory to being a proven fact) will cause a shift in the Gulf current or even a disruption of the so called "conveyor belt" current. Another issue with climatic change is mass extinction. Climatic change will also disrupt food production and there by cause famine whcih leads to population migratins and war. Personally I would rather be safe than sorry.
The kyoto accord is an easy way for densely populated countries to inprove their local environment without falling behind countries like Canada, the US and Austrailia. You also have to take issue with the use of 1991 levels giving post soviet central europe a distinct advantage. I'll assume the developing countries were given exemptions so that they could get an impressive number of signatures on it.
What should we do? Require the Russins and EU to use pre 1991 emissions as a reference? That would have the effect of the EU and Russia basically having to do nothing to reduce emissions since they have not raised their emission levels significanly above the pre 1991 levels and it would reward the USA for its proud tratition of complete disintrest in maintaining anything like a semblance of control over the nations excessive energy consumption.
Considering its goals the Kyoto protocol is an incredible acievement despite its numerous faults. Especially if it remains even half way functional after all the various interests and political and monetary agendas have been serviced by making this that or the other clause more vague and fuzzy. It may not be perfect but then nobody ever said it was. It is as good a starting point as any. The Kyoto protocol is a beginning that can be built upon as time passed and situations change. I see these shortcomings just as well as you but unlike you I do not aboandon a system just because it does not work at the moment I improve it. The only reason that the USA bowed out of Kyoto is that they thought it would be one of these one sided affairs that everybody would sign and no one would observe. Kind of like the ban on landmines and an ancient international law that bans bombing civillians with aircraft.
The former is sensible. Why should one not be able to enjoy the fruits of developing a partickularly efficient method to code a certain algorithm? People get patents for implementing algorithms in hardware all the time. What is an FPU anyway other than a bunch of algorithms implemented in Hardware? So why not patents on methods to implement algorithms in software?
The latter however is stupid becasuse it means that anyone who develops a method to code the same algorithm one has patented no matter how different his methods design is from ones own will be violating ones patent.
It is silly to write off the concept of Software patents in general just because a few brain-donors want to use them to monopolize common well known algorithms.
It seems to me that a lot of times one part of the European government doesn't know what another part is doing.
That is no less true in the USA. It is almost funny how one half of the NSA is trying to make computers more secure and the other half trying to make George Orwells novel "1984" into reality.
As far as I could see, i.e. decrypt the lawyer speak in the treaty investigators have to have what the lawyers in the US call "probable cause". This did not read like an open ticket to conduct surveillance on anyone at all for no parcikular reason other that that there is nothing to do at the Bin Laden desk at MI.6 HQ at the moment, you have picked your nose clean, and you are in the mood for reading some poor sods personal E-Mail. In fact I like the how far they went in the Child Pornography section in banning even "Over 18 looks like 14" stuff. I rather doubt that Tony Blair and his fellow slimers will be able to order say Siemens, Dupont or the Airbus consortium to hand over the keys to encrypted transmissions just so that HM government can brown nose Uncle Sam with nice data-morsels for Boeing or Motorola. But then who in the EU trusts the British anymore when it comes to keeping the lid on sensitive commercial data and not leaking to the US for Brownie Points?
As for Echelon the EU should kick the CIA/NSA listening stations out and set up their own. If the US wants access after that let them come asking for it. And that will happen sooner or later if the US keeps abusing ECHELON. Hell, even the Germans are planning their own spy satilites
This would be even more significant if the award had come from an indipendent party. That would have been a kick in Microsofts ass since KDE is everyting the Microsoft desktop should be but isn't because Microsoft is afraid the average user is too stupid to figure out how to use many Virtual Desktops on a single monitor.
I was not referring to what the US Government does to bar its own citisens from downloading inside the borders of the USA. I wast trying to make the point that the US: Does not seem to like other countries trying to stop US citisens from breaking foreign laws from inside the US but might not be as thrilled at other countries taking that same stance.
I ask the question:
Would the US be equally thrilled as it is about enabling its citisens to go unpunished while selling contraband to other countries if other countries followed the USA's example and refused to stop their citisens from breaking US laws by selling contraband to US citisens from inside the borders of said foreign countries?
The lets face it, contrary to popular beleif, the USA has just like the rest of the world a long and distinguished history of "Expecting to be able to freely do unto others whatever it wants but getting pissed off when others do the same unto the US".
So by your logic I suppose the US can blow it out its arse when it tries to stop US citisens from downloading material illegal in the US from sites in countries where such material is legal because these countries do not feel bound by US laws?? Or is that suddenly a whole different matter? Can we expect the USA to obide by the same rules it opposes on others?!?
That is actually not quite true. The German Police AFAIK like many other EU police forces has liason officers in Thailand that monitor these perverts in cooperation with the Thai police and arrest them over there if they catch them red handed. That is however not as easy as saying it and most of them get away. A more effective method has been to just monitor these groups and make lists of the names of suspicious tourist and search them thoroughly in Customs when they come off the plane in Germany loaded with porn and home videos. There have also been arrests of numerous people organising these tours. Which is why this filthy trade is beginning to move else away from Thailand at least the German part of it.
Ridiculous thought??
If you take the US action in the Skylarov case as the USA laying down the ground rules. It is only a logical expect that if a Yahoo site in the US sells Nazi religia to French citisens, this ruling together with a Skylarov guilty sentence would have least the two following consequences:
A near complete lack of proof for the fact that humans are causing either.
No shortage of people claiming that humanity is more or less solely to blaim.
I do not think anyone can argue with the fact that human generated pollution is not helping but given the complete absence of long term data on the development of the Ozone layer the Ozone gap could (I am not saying it is just that it could) just as well be an natural phenomenon. Which is what responsible scientist have been saying from the very beginnin. So this development should not be all that suprising. But then serious science seems always to get gagged by the rhetoric of fanatical enviromentalism and conservative politics just like those few brave souls that blasphemed by suggested climate change happens rapidly over a few hundred years or even less and not over tens of thousands of years or even less time after analysing the results of the Greenland glacier ice core drillings. And that perhaps humanity is only contributing to/accelerating a climate change and not casusing it. Perhaps the stiffnecked Conservatives and the Treehuggers alike should let scientist do their work and not use their work for mudslinging before it has even produced definitive results.