Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off.
Actually, it's hardly a secret that this has pretty much always been true, even for the old rotary "black phone" from the 1940s and 50s. Unlike modern phones, those didn't have any internal power source, and couldn't be plugged into wall power. They were powered by the 50 volts that the phone company provided on the phone line. And (except for a few rare models) it was openly admitted that they were "always on", usable as a microphone by anyone with the political clout or bribe money to get someone inside the phone company to set up the connection.
Of course, back in the analog days, doing this required having several humans handy to do it and manage the recording equipment, so listening in on more than a few citizens was beyond the logistical capability of any government. These digital days, the main difference is that it's a whole lot easier to automate.
Voice processing is still sufficiently intractable and expensive to limit the monitoring to a somewhat larger but still small percent of the population. Thus, as a prominent example, the US government has admitted to having recordings from a lot of calls by the perps in the 9/11 WTC attack, but didn't have the personnel (who could understand Arabic) to analyze the recordings. But we can look forward to this becoming cheaper and more practical as time and technology progresses.
How long until they can actually record and analyze everything within range of all our phones?
Here's an idea: Can we extend this to all government employees, too? And put the transcriptions online? It would be the ultimate democratic tool for feedback from the government to the citizens.
So he thinks I should get my ISO fix via google video? Does that work? I don't seem to find any of the latest linux releases there.
I can see google caching the ISOs and setting up a torrent to deliver them. But so far, I don't think they do that. Anyone know different? Where in google.com would I go to find out about it? Googling for it doesn't seem to get any hits...
I gotta admit I'm tempted to order an XO. If I do, it'll be the first time I've ever bought the first version of anything electronic.
Yeah, I know it'll probably have some problems. But it'd be fun to get into this thing on the ground floor.
And it could be fun to get my hands on a computer that's designed to work well for non-European languages. You just can't get those here in the US. ("Why does anyone need any language other than English?";-)
When screen resolutions are dense enough to render serif typefaces without hinting; only then will we have a device that can be often read without eye strain.
Huh? The text higher up in this window (your message) is in Helvetica sans, which I use because it's the font I found on this Mac that gives me the most readable text. This text I'm typing has serifs, but only because I haven't figured out how to change the font for a <textarea> HTML widget; it's noticably less readable (at a larger font size, which I also don't know how to change) than the sans-serif text above.
Font preference seems to be another "no accounting for taste" things. I may prefer sans serif because I've worked with crummy computer displays for several decades, and I've gotten accustomed to reading them. And when we finally got variable-width fonts on computer screens, sans-serif became materially easier for a lot of us computer geeks to read.
Anyhow, I found the screen shots of the kindle quite readable. I'm mostly put off by the small amount of text. When they do get a screen with better resolution, I'll be more interested. But first I'll verify that I can tell it to use a small font size, as I do with PDAs, so I can get more text on the screen. That'll probably wait until they can do a Helvetica sans on their little screen.
Re:I really hate these kind of books
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Head First SQL
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· Score: 1
... I find it appalling that only people with 100 years of experience should touch [SQL]...
Well, on a number of projects, I've often wished that they'd restricted the DB part to people who had 100 years of experience with it. That would have solved the DB problems we had quite handily.
I do however expect people to have at least a basic understanding what computing is and why ACID is very important.
Most of us who survived the 60s understand this. Timothy Leary taught us well.
Let the Early Adopters try it out and send in the bug reports. In a year or so, there'll be a version 1.1 that doesn't have as many annoying misfeatures as 1.0.
There's an old rule in the computer biz: Don't ever buy anything whose version number ends with an even digit.
Nah; people are mostly expressing grief over the fact that mean solar noon (or midnight) is drifting away from 12:00 (or 0/24:00). I doubt that many of the people posting here could tell you what a sidereal day is, and why it's different from a solar day.
I'd say this is all basically silly, because these same people happily use Standard Time zones, so their noons and midnights differ from mean solar noon and midnight by an average of around 15 minutes.
I'd expect that most of the people who understand the issue consider it somewhat silly. A lot of them are running on sidereal time, so the issue is irrelevant to them. The others are using ntpd to sync their clocks with assorted atomic clocks, and leap seconds are just a detail inside the library routines that convert network time to users' display formats. So the only real issue is how and when the tables in the library time-conversion routines get updated. Inside their code, time is simply a big number that advances by one second per second. Occasionally there are (local clock) seconds that are longer or shorter than others, mostly when ntpd decides to adjust the clock rate, but their code rarely notices that.
But I don't thing people here have been talking about that. They're getting all angsty about 12:00 network time diverging from 12:00 mean solar time by a second or two, while ignoring the fact that their clocks differ from solar time by up to half an hour. Why they consider the former worth discussing, while they silently accept the latter, is somewhat of a mystery. And they calmly go along with Daylight Saving Time, which shifts 12:00 by another hour.
What might be really fun is getting the US Congress to debate the topic. Can you imagine the fun if Congress decreed an American Standard Second that is slightly longer than the ISO second? Some of the messages here have suggested using such a variant second. We've had fun with the NASA disasters caused by confusing meters with feet; could you imagine the results if NASA were officially ordered to start using a different-length second? (Maybe they could also simplify pi at the same time.;-)
So much for AT&T sabotaging their whole "communications can save your business money" angle. Morons.
It might be noted that AT&T's management has a rather long history of failure to understand or cooperate with the integration of telecom with computers.
The poster child for this claim is the fact that unix was developed at Bell Labs, which of course was AT&T's main research division. But even when unix was adopted wholeheartedly by most academic researchers and lots of small companies, AT&T never saw it as a worthwhile product. They were one of the last companies to market a unix computer, and theirs flopped, mostly because its only telecom was modems and the phone system. They completely ignored the Internet, despite the fact that AT&T supplied most of the Internet's original long lines. They eventually abandoned any attempt to market their computers, and sold off the rights to unix, at a time when everyone except Microsoft and Apple had pretty much switched to unix (and there were rumors that Apple was planning to do the same).
As the Internet exploded in the 1990s, AT&T and its children pretty much refused to see it as an investment opportunity. They still view it as something good only for short-term profit, and steadfastly refuse to cooperate with the growing socialization of the Internet as our universal comm system. Just try getting permission to run your own server if your ISP is AT&T or any of the Baby Bells. This story is merely a part of that recalcitrance and obstructionism.
AT&T is stuck in 1927, and is being dragged into the 21st (or late 20th) Century kicking and screaming. A few of their marketers may see the future, but their management doesn't believe it at all.
Not that their offspring such as Verizon are much better.
Plus you can't force people to attend useless meetings if they telecommute.
Tell that to my wife. She has been working over VPN from home for several months now. And she complains that she has to "attend" more meetings than before. They all have Skype installed, and teleconferencing is the reason.
Of course, since it's audio only, she can usually listen with one ear while she gets some work done with her eyes and hands. I guess all her group has resisted the idea of video conferencing (and not just because "Then I'd have to get dressed.;-). This also got show down because most of them have ISPs that limit upload speeds so severely that video just doesn't work. For example, a lot of her group are on Comcast, and we all know what they do to customers who try to use the bandwidth they paid for.
Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes.
That criterion has already been satisfied, on a small scale. There are a number of bacteria known that have a few DNA encodings that are slightly different than ours. Usually it's just 1 or 2 encodings, and not all of them produce unusual amino acids.
There's an example in humans: Our mitochondria encode UGA to tryptophan rather than the usual "stop" signal as in our nuclei. So should we conclude that our mitochondria are an invading alien organism that has colonized our cells? Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, a few hundred variants like this are already known. Googling for "unusual DNA amino-acid encoding" gets 1.7 million hits. Many are for artificially-modified ("gene-engineered") bacteria, but a good number describe variants discovered in natural organisms.
Of course, these are all organisms whose DNA encodings are mostly identical to ours. Nothing has been yet reported to be mostly unusual encodings. This isn't really conclusive of anything, of course. There might well be a good reason that our encodings are as they are, and it may turn out that most of the universe's life uses approximately the same set of encodings.
I'd expect that any serious researchers would know all this, though a journalist (even one with scientific training) might not.
Well OK, I was mainly thinking about the sidereal day, which really is what varies in our leap-second problem,...
Actually, both the sidereal and the solar day vary, for different reasons. The sidereal day has variations due to assorted transfers of momentum between the earth, moon and sun. This is mostly due to tides. There is also a small component due to the atmosphere. Some time back in the 1990s, there was a minor scientific story about one May, during which the earth's atmosphere lost around 40% of its angular momentum. At the start of the month, winds nearly everywhere were blowing eastward; by the end of the month, most winds were blowing westward. So the atmosphere's rotation had slowed down. Nobody really knew why, but the effect was measured by astronomers: The angular momentum went into the planet, shortening the sidereal day by several milliseconds. This was enough to interfere with observations on the large telescopes, though nobody else much noticed. This sort of things happens often, but this one was the biggest one on record.
The main reason for variation in solar days is the fact that the earth's orbit isn't quite circular. The planet moves faster in its orbit when closer to the sun, making the sun appear to move a slightly different amount (against the stars) at different times of year. It's not a big difference, really, but astronomers do notice it. This is mostly a very predictable variation, unlike the above transfers of momentum. There are a number of geek jokes based on the fact that the "day" (i.e., the solar day) is actually shortest at around the northern winter solstice. (Note that I didn't say they were especially funny jokes.;-)
An interesting aspect to this is the tie-in with the climate change issue. We've seen a lot of the planet's ice melt in recent decades. Melting of sea ice doesn't affect the planet's rotation, but melting of land ice does. Ice tends to be at high latitudes, and land there is close to the rotational axis. As the ice melts, the resulting water is distributed throughout the oceans, and on the average the ocean surface is farther from the axis than the ice was. So the melting of land ice transfers mass towards the tropics and farther from the axis. The result is a (slight) slowing of rotational speed. The usual metaphor is the spinning figure skater. This is often given as one of the reasons for the increase in leap seconds in the past decade.
In any case, the leap second issue does seem a bit silly. Most of us use the "standard time" in our time zone. Unless you're exactly on the median longitude line, your clock is off from local (solar) time by up to half an hour (or more in some bizarrely-shaped time zones). This doesn't seem to bother people, except maybe those in the far eastern part of their time zone. It's not clear why anyone but astronomers and others who deal with microseconds would be discussing this issue. Why would you worry about being off from solar time by a second, if you're not bothered by being off by 20 minutes? It's not really an issue that we want politicians to decide; it should be handled by the tiny minority that find it critical to their work. To the rest of us, leap seconds are mostly poorly understood and utterly irrelevant.
I don't think it will ever be an untainted science so long as the government, businesses & religion stick their noses in it.
And the emphasis here should probably be mostly on "business". That is, as long as there is money to be made by selling the marks^H^H^H^H^Hpatients cheap nostrums, we'll continue to have unscientific medicine. Real science, unfortunately, is hard. It's a lot harder than just mixing something up and making unfounded claims about it.
This especially applies to the zillions of diets that have been promoted. Few of them have any sort of scientific basis at all. Others are based on half-assed science that would get a C grade in a high-school science lab. But most exist only to sell books, membership, and other schemes to make money.
And medicine in general is full of long-held beliefs and practices that you can't find in any published scientific publications. They're just things that "everyone knows". People are pointing out such unfounded beliefs on an ongoing basis, usually with no effect at all. Every year, we read about at least one of them debunked.
Occasionally we read of a medical belief being verified. But this shouldn't be treated as validation so much as pointing out that the belief had never actually been properly tested. The fact that testing shows something valid doesn't justify previous belief before testing was done.
But such arguments have little effect on people just looking to separate you from your money.
Next thing, they'll pass laws stating that zenith is always at noon, or that there will be a full moon every 29 days.
Some years back, I read about a cute example of the pitfalls of the post hoc fallacy. It seems that back during the "Little Ice Age", there was a town in the Alps that was being threatened by an approaching glacier. So the town council did the obvious thing: They passed an ordinance forbidding glaciers from entering the town.
It happened that this was in the early 1800s, and the Little Ice Age was coming to an end. Over the next few years, the glacier halted its advance, and started retreating. So apparently the town's law "worked".
I wonder if we could verify this story. I also wonder if there are any other reports of silly laws like this that "work".
The closest thing I've read about is the reports of various legislative bodies trying to declare the value of pi. But these turn out to be myths. It's true that such laws have been proposed, but when investigated, it seems they were never actually passed. In some cases, they were jokes; in others the legislators were persuaded that such a law would merely make them look ridiculous. I was disappointed when I read about this.
My first reaction to the summary was that there's been lots written on this topic, and it's all about routing. So it doesn't apply to web servers at all, because they're not the modules doing the routing. (At least not in any system with a minimally intelligent design.;-) Ant- and bee-inspired algorithms are useful, and have been used by routing code, of course, but why would one be talking about web servers?
So I took the radical step of actually reading the article. And I found it remarkably incoherent. It talks about web servers, not routers, and many of what should be the most informative sentences are just bizarre. They read as if written by someone who listened to a talk, picked out a lot of keywords, and jumbled them together in sentences that are only minimally grammatical English, but basically undecodable.
So I followed a few links. Sure enough, all the examples were about ants and bees giving each other travel direction, via pheromones or sun-oriented dances. This is nothing new, and has obvious application to decentralized packet routing. The critters are, after all, picking up packets (of food) and delivering them to a destination. You'd expect their algorithms to be useful in networks of data packets.
But I couldn't find any clue about how one might apply ant/bee algorithms to a web server's tasks. Did the folks writing the articles just invent this idea?
The closest was the mention of a flock of servers trying to do load balancing (though the writer didn't call it that). But that's not really a web-server task, even if implemented inside a web server. And that would be a poor place to put the code, since it's an orthogonal task that, if done by a separate task, would be useful for most other network apps. Putting it inside the web server makes it useless for all the other tasks that could benefit from it.
Of course, such poor system design is rather common inside computers. We do a lot of things in an entirely wrong way. Maybe someone really is doing ant/bee routing inside a web server. Anyone have a link to an actual description of this?
Maybe the authors just don't understand the distinction between a server, a task manager, and a router?
If you read the article, the bug was a result of coding error.... Poor programming can be done in all languages.
Quite true.
However, some languages trick programmers into certain types of errors. In this case, we have a language that is advertised as having an automatic garbage collector, unlike those horrid languages like C and C++. And the programmers were suckered into trusting this claim. So they wrote code with a bug that likely wouldn't have appeared with C or C++, because programmers understand that those languages are "dangerous" in their handling of references to allocated memory, so they tend to learn the gotchas and take them into account.
One of the common failures in reporting tech problems is not understanding the problems that can be caused by misleading interfaces. It's easy to blame users or programmers when they fail to correctly use an interface whose design, marketing or documentation is misleading. In this case, it's an API whose marketing hype led them to trust the garbage collection. In other cases, it's other pieces of the interface that the users tend to misunderstand for various reasons. Part of the problem is the constant pressure to deliver code, which gravitates against spending the time it takes to study and understand all the gotchas in the underlying system. Time spent studying the system takes away from coding time, and employers don't like to subsidize such time-wasting activity.
I've preferred to stick with C for this very reason. That language forces me to write code for keeping track of my references. But this means that I don't fall victim to the universal pressure to deliver yesterday by casually using the builtin memory schemes of a language that I don't understand as well as I should. I've looked at C#, but I freely admit that I don't have (and haven't been permitted to have) enough experience with it to make any sort of guarantees about my code.
OTOH, I'll admit that I've written some rather big apps in perl, tcl and python, and I've never seen a memory-leak bug in any of those languages. Not even in programs that run in the background for weeks or months. Maybe it's because I don't really trust their memory-handling stuff, either, and program in my own tracking to make sure that I know where all the references are. Or maybe it's just been luck. There is a certain element of luck in programming for systems whose inner workings you don't (or can't, in the MS case) fully understand.
Heh, funny. But we could probably produce a closer parallel:
In other news, a breakin and robbery was reported at 42 Elm Street after the owner gave his front door key to a cleaning service, so they could clean his house while he's at work. But a local gang extorted copies of keys from the cleaning service, in exchange for "protection" from the gang's members, and they used the keys to burglarize customers' houses.
This is a lot closer to the actual story. The main difference is, when the government does this sort of thing, it's effectively legal.
... it's all our frequencies, we just choose to let the FCC govern it for us.
Funny, I keep seeing claims like this, but I don't recall ever taking part in any election in which I was allowed to vote on such a thing. And the FCC has certainly never asked me personally to give them permission to govern my part of the spectrum.
In fact, when I look at the history, I find that the FCC was created and handed control of the spectrum before I was born. I obviously didn't "choose" to let this happen, since I didn't exist when it happened.
Now, I might agree that it's for the best that we have some regulation of how the spectrum is used. Otherwise whoever pumps the most electrons into their antennas would outshout everyone else, or, more likely, most of the spectrum would be an unusable jumble of zillions of broadcasters trying to make themselves heard through the din. But claiming that the US citizenry chose to give the regulatory power to the FCC is just silly. I certainly didn't do that, and as far as I can determine, nobody else ever did, either.
Yeah, I know; you're going to claim that our duly elected representatives created the FCC. Well, sure, they were elected. But unless this issue was explicitly there in the preceding election, claiming that "the people" elected them to do this is absurd on its face. The people did no such thing, because (as far as I can determine) there was never an election in which regulation of the spectrum was a campaign issue. In reality, it was done by a few hundred politicians without ever bothering to ask their constituents anything about it.
If you claim that in the election(s) before the creation of the FCC, the candidates ran (in part) on creation of an agency to regulate the spectrum, where's your references? We definitely need historical citations to back up such a claim.
(And if you have such references, please post them. I'd like to be proven wrong here.;-)
I have inadvertently replied to your post but only after deliberating with a team of attorneys to find the best way to bring legal action to stop these inadvertent posts from being viewed inadvertently.
Easy. First, observe that in the US (where/. is based), everything anyone writes has an automatic copyright. As the notice at the top of every/. page says: The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
So everyone who downloads/. posts without prior written permission from the author is doing an illegal download. If you're really serious about stopping illegal downloading of copyrighted material, you might start right here. I'm sure that all the authors of the posts here would appreciate it if you would investigate, presumably with the gracious help of the people running slashdot.org, and send C&D letters to all those illegal downloaders. Many of them can be identified easily, as they have logged in. But it's possible that many of the Anonymous Cowards (the truely criminal ones who know what they're doing and hiding their identities) can also be identified.
Be sure to submit articles describing your progress on this project. We'd all like to download and read your reports, and especially your successful prosecutions.
I leave mine open. If I see someone abusing the privilege I'll kick them off, but if someone wants to check google maps real quick then I'm happy to have been of help. There's been a large number of situations in my own past where an open network was of immense help, and I like the idea of being able to return the favor in some sense.
Hey, who let a socially responsible person post to this discussion? Didn't we ban such people from slashdot?;-)
As a few others have pointed out, the wifi spectrum was intentionally made open for everyone to use. The intent was a Public Good: a wireless network capability that was available to anyone (or at least anyone with standards-compliant equipment).
But it seems we have a lot of people here who are profoundly anti-open-communication, and think that people who caught communicating openly should be punished. This strikes me as a rather perverse misinterpretation of what the wifi spectrum was all about. In the US, it's also against the whole idea of the First Amendment.
We should be arguing: If you don't believe in using the wifi spectrum for free, open communication, then you shouldn't be using it. Pay for a license to use your own block of restricted spectrum. Go away and don't bother those of us who want a small chunk of spectrum to remain a Public Good.
We also need more people complaining that they want their AP open, and they object to official harassment of people using the wifi spectrum as it was designed to be used. Would that get the message across? Or would the officials just start harassing those of us running open APs?
Many people actually put up an unsecured AP with the INTENTION of giving out access. (And thus this becomes common expectation)
Didn't I read here on/. a few months ago the explanation of why it's legally better to run an open access point? The case was someone arrested and charged with downloading (child?) porn or MP3s or something. He argued in court that they hadn't found the files on his machine; the only evidence was that the requests came from his IP address. But since he ran an open wifi access point, anyone out in the street could have done the download. The story went that the court agreed with this and declared him not guilty. The lesson was that if you have an open access point, that very fact debunks the claim that it must have been you because it was from your IP address. So the sensible thing is to always have an open access point running.
Of course, it's a good idea to configure your machines so they're hard for someone out on the street to break into. But, frankly, that's a whole lot easier than configuring most commercial wifi gadgets to be secure against breakins (and still be usable by anyone).
Oh yeah, and there's no possible way to use a web browser without being a criminal, you're making copies of copyrighted content on your own computer in RAM, on the Screen and in your cache and index therefore we should block every kind of internet transfer other than emails and IMs because copying stuff that you wouldn't buy anyway hurts artists!
Actually, you can't even download email or IMs legally. In the US, and in most other countries with the "standard" copyright laws, writers haven't had to register their copyrights for several decades now, because everything anyone writes is automatically copyrighted by default (unless they declare otherwise). Since I haven't waived my copyright claim on this message, it is copyrighted, and you have violated my copyright by downloading it, then copying it from your disk to your screen, then (gasp!) copying it from the screen to your eyes and into your brain. All this copying of my copyrighted material, and I didn't give you prior written permission! You're a vicious criminal!
And are you also impugning my artistry in my choice of words? You'll compounding your criminal copyright violations with libel. You'll hear from my lawyer.
Oh, wait; I don't have a lawyer. I'll have to get one. But wait... I have a daughter and a son-in-law with law degrees. Ah, but they didn't specialize in Intellectual Property law. Damn; this is getting too complex for my brain...
Actually, on a serious note, this sort of discussion has been going on in Internet forums since at least the early 1980s. Back then, almost all Internet development was done on projects funded by ARPA, the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency. The standard contracts forbid use of the funds for anything not related to your project's stated goals. Almost all of the early email software was developed "on the side" by people working on projects whose funding didn't mention email. So a lawyer could easily have argued that this software was a contract violation. DARPA was run by people with better sense than that, who fully understood that this was truly "advanced research" whose output couldn't be strictly determined beforehand without destroying much of the value of the research. They didn't both looking at such experimental software, unless the resource usage was really egregious. They got a lot of very useful serendipitous software out of it as a result. But this didn't stop the ongoing discussions about whether working on useful things like email was a legal use of the funding. It was never tested in court, and nowadays nobody criticizes those "rogue" developers, because the results were so valuable.
Don't expect any RIAA, MPAA, or ISP lawyers to be so reasonable. They aren't government agencies looking for new things. They are private corporations whose sole goal is maximizing income from their current "property".
With any new law, it's always useful to ask yourself "How could someone abuse this, and victimize innocent people?" In this case, it's quite easy.
First, ask yourself whether you may have any files on your machine that you don't know about, or which you couldn't decrypt. For most people, the answer is quite simple: "Yes." For example, do you run a browser? That browser has a cache. That cache contains files in an assortment of formats. It's quite likely that you've never seen some of those files' contents (maybe just because you didn't scroll far enough down the page to see the content). And if presented with only the file without any context, you'd have no idea what app to use to display its content, or even whether you have such an app installed.
On my web site, I have a demo of a bit of javascript that downloads files but doesn't display their contents. The intended use is to "preload" files used in the rest of the web site while you're looking at the main page, so that subsequent pages render faster. I also point out how this can be abused: My demo page downloads a file that is never used in subsequent pages. This "hidden" file can contain anything I like, from any web site. It could contain child porn, copyrighted MP3 music, a proprietary program that you haven't paid for - or an encrypted text for which you don't have a key.
As far as I can tell, this law doesn't distinguish this situation. The contents of your browser's cache are on your disk. This will be "proof" to most judges and juries that you downloaded them. So by merely viewing my web page or any other that uses such javascript, you could be framed for possession of such files. What would be your defense?
The obvious defense would be to try to convince the court that you could have been framed in this fashion. But even if you succeed at this, similar things could be done to you by any number of other means. Do you have anything installed that contains "auto-update" code? Note that most browsers now do this. Firefox asks you if you want an update installed, and it's probably trustworthy. But we recently learned that Microsoft software sometimes installs updates silently, even when you have turned auto-update off. An auto-update routine doesn't install its files in a labelled "cache" directory. Files can easily (and reasonably) be installed in any directory that you can write. So if anything at all on your machine has an auto-update feature, anyone who knows how to trigger it can install any files they like on your machine. And you could be prosecuted for failure to deliver the keys to decrypt these files that you didn't know about.
Almost every government contains people whose job includes finding ways to frame perceived "enemies" when the top people want. They won't have that as their job description, of course, and usually they are really working for the top officials or for a political party. This sort of law makes their job really easy, especially now that we have widely-used software such as browsers with caches, auto-update packages, and other things that download files without always telling the user about it.
To comply with this law, you had better be prepared to decode every file on your disks, including those that belong to any proprietary apps that you may have installed. If there's a single file anywhere on your disk that you can't convert to a human-readable form, you can be jailed for violating this law.
It's always a good idea to ask yourself "How can this be abused?"
C'mon; asking businesses to dump Windows would be a lot like asking America to dump Christianity, or asking Egypt to dump Islam. All three might be very good ideas, but suggesting any of them in the appropriate crowds will just get you fired/crucified/beheaded/whatever.
When faced with religious beliefs like these, the best you can do is try to make the best of them, while trying to minimize their damage to people and property.
[A couple decades ago I'd have included asking the USSR to dump Communism, but that happened. But I suspect that IBM/Microsoft, Christianity and Islam are much more deeply entrenched than Communism ever was. Anyway, my metaphor generator is redlined as it is.;-]
... but your assertion that economic theory precludes this behavior is incorrect.
Note that I didn't say "economic theory", but rather "economic theology". I'm familiar with, for example, Adam Smith's warnings of the perversities that unbridled capitalism can produce, and also his warnings about the possible effects of government-sponsored monopolies (e.g., the Hudson Bay company's history in what's now mostly Canada).
But in fora like this, we regularly see discussions derailed by the crowd that believes fervently in laissez-faire capitalism, and tells us that the current abusive corporations have a "right" to do whatever they believe is necessary to maximise shareholder profit. I've read that sort of stuff several times here in the past week. Since this sort of belief system doesn't even bother with the minimal scientific methods that Adam Smith had available, I classify them as "theology".
Of course, there are people here with a more jaundiced view of it all, who understand that anyone left to act outside the law is a potential hazard to the rest of us.
So now where's my flame war? This seems a topic that's ideal for one. After all, our favorite corporate whipping boy is looking to "do a Netscape" on another perceived competitor.;-)
Funny, but when I saw the same "typso" spelling used twice, my immediate thoughst were to wonder whether the writer speaks a variant dialect of English in which plursal are indicated by an infix -s- in or before the last syllable of worsd.
I've read of langusage that do plursal this way, but I've never studied any. Maybe some lingusist should find the author's (authos'r?) language community and do some field studsy on its membser.
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Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off.
Actually, it's hardly a secret that this has pretty much always been true, even for the old rotary "black phone" from the 1940s and 50s. Unlike modern phones, those didn't have any internal power source, and couldn't be plugged into wall power. They were powered by the 50 volts that the phone company provided on the phone line. And (except for a few rare models) it was openly admitted that they were "always on", usable as a microphone by anyone with the political clout or bribe money to get someone inside the phone company to set up the connection.
Of course, back in the analog days, doing this required having several humans handy to do it and manage the recording equipment, so listening in on more than a few citizens was beyond the logistical capability of any government. These digital days, the main difference is that it's a whole lot easier to automate.
Voice processing is still sufficiently intractable and expensive to limit the monitoring to a somewhat larger but still small percent of the population. Thus, as a prominent example, the US government has admitted to having recordings from a lot of calls by the perps in the 9/11 WTC attack, but didn't have the personnel (who could understand Arabic) to analyze the recordings. But we can look forward to this becoming cheaper and more practical as time and technology progresses.
How long until they can actually record and analyze everything within range of all our phones?
Here's an idea: Can we extend this to all government employees, too? And put the transcriptions online? It would be the ultimate democratic tool for feedback from the government to the citizens.
So he thinks I should get my ISO fix via google video? Does that work? I don't seem to find any of the latest linux releases there.
...
I can see google caching the ISOs and setting up a torrent to deliver them. But so far, I don't think they do that. Anyone know different? Where in google.com would I go to find out about it? Googling for it doesn't seem to get any hits
I gotta admit I'm tempted to order an XO. If I do, it'll be the first time I've ever bought the first version of anything electronic.
;-)
Yeah, I know it'll probably have some problems. But it'd be fun to get into this thing on the ground floor.
And it could be fun to get my hands on a computer that's designed to work well for non-European languages. You just can't get those here in the US. ("Why does anyone need any language other than English?"
When screen resolutions are dense enough to render serif typefaces without hinting; only then will we have a device that can be often read without eye strain.
Huh? The text higher up in this window (your message) is in Helvetica sans, which I use because it's the font I found on this Mac that gives me the most readable text. This text I'm typing has serifs, but only because I haven't figured out how to change the font for a <textarea> HTML widget; it's noticably less readable (at a larger font size, which I also don't know how to change) than the sans-serif text above.
Font preference seems to be another "no accounting for taste" things. I may prefer sans serif because I've worked with crummy computer displays for several decades, and I've gotten accustomed to reading them. And when we finally got variable-width fonts on computer screens, sans-serif became materially easier for a lot of us computer geeks to read.
Anyhow, I found the screen shots of the kindle quite readable. I'm mostly put off by the small amount of text. When they do get a screen with better resolution, I'll be more interested. But first I'll verify that I can tell it to use a small font size, as I do with PDAs, so I can get more text on the screen. That'll probably wait until they can do a Helvetica sans on their little screen.
... I find it appalling that only people with 100 years of experience should touch [SQL] ...
Well, on a number of projects, I've often wished that they'd restricted the DB part to people who had 100 years of experience with it. That would have solved the DB problems we had quite handily.
I do however expect people to have at least a basic understanding what computing is and why ACID is very important.
Most of us who survived the 60s understand this. Timothy Leary taught us well.
Let the Early Adopters try it out and send in the bug reports. In a year or so, there'll be a version 1.1 that doesn't have as many annoying misfeatures as 1.0.
There's an old rule in the computer biz: Don't ever buy anything whose version number ends with an even digit.
Nah; people are mostly expressing grief over the fact that mean solar noon (or midnight) is drifting away from 12:00 (or 0/24:00). I doubt that many of the people posting here could tell you what a sidereal day is, and why it's different from a solar day.
;-)
I'd say this is all basically silly, because these same people happily use Standard Time zones, so their noons and midnights differ from mean solar noon and midnight by an average of around 15 minutes.
I'd expect that most of the people who understand the issue consider it somewhat silly. A lot of them are running on sidereal time, so the issue is irrelevant to them. The others are using ntpd to sync their clocks with assorted atomic clocks, and leap seconds are just a detail inside the library routines that convert network time to users' display formats. So the only real issue is how and when the tables in the library time-conversion routines get updated. Inside their code, time is simply a big number that advances by one second per second. Occasionally there are (local clock) seconds that are longer or shorter than others, mostly when ntpd decides to adjust the clock rate, but their code rarely notices that.
But I don't thing people here have been talking about that. They're getting all angsty about 12:00 network time diverging from 12:00 mean solar time by a second or two, while ignoring the fact that their clocks differ from solar time by up to half an hour. Why they consider the former worth discussing, while they silently accept the latter, is somewhat of a mystery. And they calmly go along with Daylight Saving Time, which shifts 12:00 by another hour.
What might be really fun is getting the US Congress to debate the topic. Can you imagine the fun if Congress decreed an American Standard Second that is slightly longer than the ISO second? Some of the messages here have suggested using such a variant second. We've had fun with the NASA disasters caused by confusing meters with feet; could you imagine the results if NASA were officially ordered to start using a different-length second? (Maybe they could also simplify pi at the same time.
So much for AT&T sabotaging their whole "communications can save your business money" angle. Morons.
It might be noted that AT&T's management has a rather long history of failure to understand or cooperate with the integration of telecom with computers.
The poster child for this claim is the fact that unix was developed at Bell Labs, which of course was AT&T's main research division. But even when unix was adopted wholeheartedly by most academic researchers and lots of small companies, AT&T never saw it as a worthwhile product. They were one of the last companies to market a unix computer, and theirs flopped, mostly because its only telecom was modems and the phone system. They completely ignored the Internet, despite the fact that AT&T supplied most of the Internet's original long lines. They eventually abandoned any attempt to market their computers, and sold off the rights to unix, at a time when everyone except Microsoft and Apple had pretty much switched to unix (and there were rumors that Apple was planning to do the same).
As the Internet exploded in the 1990s, AT&T and its children pretty much refused to see it as an investment opportunity. They still view it as something good only for short-term profit, and steadfastly refuse to cooperate with the growing socialization of the Internet as our universal comm system. Just try getting permission to run your own server if your ISP is AT&T or any of the Baby Bells. This story is merely a part of that recalcitrance and obstructionism.
AT&T is stuck in 1927, and is being dragged into the 21st (or late 20th) Century kicking and screaming. A few of their marketers may see the future, but their management doesn't believe it at all.
Not that their offspring such as Verizon are much better.
Plus you can't force people to attend useless meetings if they telecommute.
;-). This also got show down because most of them have ISPs that limit upload speeds so severely that video just doesn't work. For example, a lot of her group are on Comcast, and we all know what they do to customers who try to use the bandwidth they paid for.
Tell that to my wife. She has been working over VPN from home for several months now. And she complains that she has to "attend" more meetings than before. They all have Skype installed, and teleconferencing is the reason.
Of course, since it's audio only, she can usually listen with one ear while she gets some work done with her eyes and hands. I guess all her group has resisted the idea of video conferencing (and not just because "Then I'd have to get dressed.
Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes.
That criterion has already been satisfied, on a small scale. There are a number of bacteria known that have a few DNA encodings that are slightly different than ours. Usually it's just 1 or 2 encodings, and not all of them produce unusual amino acids.
There's an example in humans: Our mitochondria encode UGA to tryptophan rather than the usual "stop" signal as in our nuclei. So should we conclude that our mitochondria are an invading alien organism that has colonized our cells? Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, a few hundred variants like this are already known. Googling for "unusual DNA amino-acid encoding" gets 1.7 million hits. Many are for artificially-modified ("gene-engineered") bacteria, but a good number describe variants discovered in natural organisms.
Of course, these are all organisms whose DNA encodings are mostly identical to ours. Nothing has been yet reported to be mostly unusual encodings. This isn't really conclusive of anything, of course. There might well be a good reason that our encodings are as they are, and it may turn out that most of the universe's life uses approximately the same set of encodings.
I'd expect that any serious researchers would know all this, though a journalist (even one with scientific training) might not.
Well OK, I was mainly thinking about the sidereal day, which really is what varies in our leap-second problem, ...
;-)
Actually, both the sidereal and the solar day vary, for different reasons. The sidereal day has variations due to assorted transfers of momentum between the earth, moon and sun. This is mostly due to tides. There is also a small component due to the atmosphere. Some time back in the 1990s, there was a minor scientific story about one May, during which the earth's atmosphere lost around 40% of its angular momentum. At the start of the month, winds nearly everywhere were blowing eastward; by the end of the month, most winds were blowing westward. So the atmosphere's rotation had slowed down. Nobody really knew why, but the effect was measured by astronomers: The angular momentum went into the planet, shortening the sidereal day by several milliseconds. This was enough to interfere with observations on the large telescopes, though nobody else much noticed. This sort of things happens often, but this one was the biggest one on record.
The main reason for variation in solar days is the fact that the earth's orbit isn't quite circular. The planet moves faster in its orbit when closer to the sun, making the sun appear to move a slightly different amount (against the stars) at different times of year. It's not a big difference, really, but astronomers do notice it. This is mostly a very predictable variation, unlike the above transfers of momentum. There are a number of geek jokes based on the fact that the "day" (i.e., the solar day) is actually shortest at around the northern winter solstice. (Note that I didn't say they were especially funny jokes.
An interesting aspect to this is the tie-in with the climate change issue. We've seen a lot of the planet's ice melt in recent decades. Melting of sea ice doesn't affect the planet's rotation, but melting of land ice does. Ice tends to be at high latitudes, and land there is close to the rotational axis. As the ice melts, the resulting water is distributed throughout the oceans, and on the average the ocean surface is farther from the axis than the ice was. So the melting of land ice transfers mass towards the tropics and farther from the axis. The result is a (slight) slowing of rotational speed. The usual metaphor is the spinning figure skater. This is often given as one of the reasons for the increase in leap seconds in the past decade.
In any case, the leap second issue does seem a bit silly. Most of us use the "standard time" in our time zone. Unless you're exactly on the median longitude line, your clock is off from local (solar) time by up to half an hour (or more in some bizarrely-shaped time zones). This doesn't seem to bother people, except maybe those in the far eastern part of their time zone. It's not clear why anyone but astronomers and others who deal with microseconds would be discussing this issue. Why would you worry about being off from solar time by a second, if you're not bothered by being off by 20 minutes? It's not really an issue that we want politicians to decide; it should be handled by the tiny minority that find it critical to their work. To the rest of us, leap seconds are mostly poorly understood and utterly irrelevant.
I don't think it will ever be an untainted science so long as the government, businesses & religion stick their noses in it.
And the emphasis here should probably be mostly on "business". That is, as long as there is money to be made by selling the marks^H^H^H^H^Hpatients cheap nostrums, we'll continue to have unscientific medicine. Real science, unfortunately, is hard. It's a lot harder than just mixing something up and making unfounded claims about it.
This especially applies to the zillions of diets that have been promoted. Few of them have any sort of scientific basis at all. Others are based on half-assed science that would get a C grade in a high-school science lab. But most exist only to sell books, membership, and other schemes to make money.
And medicine in general is full of long-held beliefs and practices that you can't find in any published scientific publications. They're just things that "everyone knows". People are pointing out such unfounded beliefs on an ongoing basis, usually with no effect at all. Every year, we read about at least one of them debunked.
Occasionally we read of a medical belief being verified. But this shouldn't be treated as validation so much as pointing out that the belief had never actually been properly tested. The fact that testing shows something valid doesn't justify previous belief before testing was done.
But such arguments have little effect on people just looking to separate you from your money.
Next thing, they'll pass laws stating that zenith is always at noon, or that there will be a full moon every 29 days.
Some years back, I read about a cute example of the pitfalls of the post hoc fallacy. It seems that back during the "Little Ice Age", there was a town in the Alps that was being threatened by an approaching glacier. So the town council did the obvious thing: They passed an ordinance forbidding glaciers from entering the town.
It happened that this was in the early 1800s, and the Little Ice Age was coming to an end. Over the next few years, the glacier halted its advance, and started retreating. So apparently the town's law "worked".
I wonder if we could verify this story. I also wonder if there are any other reports of silly laws like this that "work".
The closest thing I've read about is the reports of various legislative bodies trying to declare the value of pi. But these turn out to be myths. It's true that such laws have been proposed, but when investigated, it seems they were never actually passed. In some cases, they were jokes; in others the legislators were persuaded that such a law would merely make them look ridiculous. I was disappointed when I read about this.
My first reaction to the summary was that there's been lots written on this topic, and it's all about routing. So it doesn't apply to web servers at all, because they're not the modules doing the routing. (At least not in any system with a minimally intelligent design. ;-) Ant- and bee-inspired algorithms are useful, and have been used by routing code, of course, but why would one be talking about web servers?
So I took the radical step of actually reading the article. And I found it remarkably incoherent. It talks about web servers, not routers, and many of what should be the most informative sentences are just bizarre. They read as if written by someone who listened to a talk, picked out a lot of keywords, and jumbled them together in sentences that are only minimally grammatical English, but basically undecodable.
So I followed a few links. Sure enough, all the examples were about ants and bees giving each other travel direction, via pheromones or sun-oriented dances. This is nothing new, and has obvious application to decentralized packet routing. The critters are, after all, picking up packets (of food) and delivering them to a destination. You'd expect their algorithms to be useful in networks of data packets.
But I couldn't find any clue about how one might apply ant/bee algorithms to a web server's tasks. Did the folks writing the articles just invent this idea?
The closest was the mention of a flock of servers trying to do load balancing (though the writer didn't call it that). But that's not really a web-server task, even if implemented inside a web server. And that would be a poor place to put the code, since it's an orthogonal task that, if done by a separate task, would be useful for most other network apps. Putting it inside the web server makes it useless for all the other tasks that could benefit from it.
Of course, such poor system design is rather common inside computers. We do a lot of things in an entirely wrong way. Maybe someone really is doing ant/bee routing inside a web server. Anyone have a link to an actual description of this?
Maybe the authors just don't understand the distinction between a server, a task manager, and a router?
If you read the article, the bug was a result of coding error. ... Poor programming can be done in all languages.
Quite true.
However, some languages trick programmers into certain types of errors. In this case, we have a language that is advertised as having an automatic garbage collector, unlike those horrid languages like C and C++. And the programmers were suckered into trusting this claim. So they wrote code with a bug that likely wouldn't have appeared with C or C++, because programmers understand that those languages are "dangerous" in their handling of references to allocated memory, so they tend to learn the gotchas and take them into account.
One of the common failures in reporting tech problems is not understanding the problems that can be caused by misleading interfaces. It's easy to blame users or programmers when they fail to correctly use an interface whose design, marketing or documentation is misleading. In this case, it's an API whose marketing hype led them to trust the garbage collection. In other cases, it's other pieces of the interface that the users tend to misunderstand for various reasons. Part of the problem is the constant pressure to deliver code, which gravitates against spending the time it takes to study and understand all the gotchas in the underlying system. Time spent studying the system takes away from coding time, and employers don't like to subsidize such time-wasting activity.
I've preferred to stick with C for this very reason. That language forces me to write code for keeping track of my references. But this means that I don't fall victim to the universal pressure to deliver yesterday by casually using the builtin memory schemes of a language that I don't understand as well as I should. I've looked at C#, but I freely admit that I don't have (and haven't been permitted to have) enough experience with it to make any sort of guarantees about my code.
OTOH, I'll admit that I've written some rather big apps in perl, tcl and python, and I've never seen a memory-leak bug in any of those languages. Not even in programs that run in the background for weeks or months. Maybe it's because I don't really trust their memory-handling stuff, either, and program in my own tracking to make sure that I know where all the references are. Or maybe it's just been luck. There is a certain element of luck in programming for systems whose inner workings you don't (or can't, in the MS case) fully understand.
Heh, funny. But we could probably produce a closer parallel:
In other news, a breakin and robbery was reported at 42 Elm Street after the owner gave his front door key to a cleaning service, so they could clean his house while he's at work. But a local gang extorted copies of keys from the cleaning service, in exchange for "protection" from the gang's members, and they used the keys to burglarize customers' houses.
This is a lot closer to the actual story. The main difference is, when the government does this sort of thing, it's effectively legal.
... it's all our frequencies, we just choose to let the FCC govern it for us.
;-)
Funny, I keep seeing claims like this, but I don't recall ever taking part in any election in which I was allowed to vote on such a thing. And the FCC has certainly never asked me personally to give them permission to govern my part of the spectrum.
In fact, when I look at the history, I find that the FCC was created and handed control of the spectrum before I was born. I obviously didn't "choose" to let this happen, since I didn't exist when it happened.
Now, I might agree that it's for the best that we have some regulation of how the spectrum is used. Otherwise whoever pumps the most electrons into their antennas would outshout everyone else, or, more likely, most of the spectrum would be an unusable jumble of zillions of broadcasters trying to make themselves heard through the din. But claiming that the US citizenry chose to give the regulatory power to the FCC is just silly. I certainly didn't do that, and as far as I can determine, nobody else ever did, either.
Yeah, I know; you're going to claim that our duly elected representatives created the FCC. Well, sure, they were elected. But unless this issue was explicitly there in the preceding election, claiming that "the people" elected them to do this is absurd on its face. The people did no such thing, because (as far as I can determine) there was never an election in which regulation of the spectrum was a campaign issue. In reality, it was done by a few hundred politicians without ever bothering to ask their constituents anything about it.
If you claim that in the election(s) before the creation of the FCC, the candidates ran (in part) on creation of an agency to regulate the spectrum, where's your references? We definitely need historical citations to back up such a claim.
(And if you have such references, please post them. I'd like to be proven wrong here.
I have inadvertently replied to your post but only after deliberating with a team of attorneys to find the best way to bring legal action to stop these inadvertent posts from being viewed inadvertently.
/. is based), everything anyone writes has an automatic copyright. As the notice at the top of every /. page says:
/. posts without prior written permission from the author is doing an illegal download. If you're really serious about stopping illegal downloading of copyrighted material, you might start right here. I'm sure that all the authors of the posts here would appreciate it if you would investigate, presumably with the gracious help of the people running slashdot.org, and send C&D letters to all those illegal downloaders. Many of them can be identified easily, as they have logged in. But it's possible that many of the Anonymous Cowards (the truely criminal ones who know what they're doing and hiding their identities) can also be identified.
Easy. First, observe that in the US (where
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
So everyone who downloads
Be sure to submit articles describing your progress on this project. We'd all like to download and read your reports, and especially your successful prosecutions.
I leave mine open. If I see someone abusing the privilege I'll kick them off, but if someone wants to check google maps real quick then I'm happy to have been of help. There's been a large number of situations in my own past where an open network was of immense help, and I like the idea of being able to return the favor in some sense.
;-)
Hey, who let a socially responsible person post to this discussion? Didn't we ban such people from slashdot?
As a few others have pointed out, the wifi spectrum was intentionally made open for everyone to use. The intent was a Public Good: a wireless network capability that was available to anyone (or at least anyone with standards-compliant equipment).
But it seems we have a lot of people here who are profoundly anti-open-communication, and think that people who caught communicating openly should be punished. This strikes me as a rather perverse misinterpretation of what the wifi spectrum was all about. In the US, it's also against the whole idea of the First Amendment.
We should be arguing: If you don't believe in using the wifi spectrum for free, open communication, then you shouldn't be using it. Pay for a license to use your own block of restricted spectrum. Go away and don't bother those of us who want a small chunk of spectrum to remain a Public Good.
We also need more people complaining that they want their AP open, and they object to official harassment of people using the wifi spectrum as it was designed to be used. Would that get the message across? Or would the officials just start harassing those of us running open APs?
Many people actually put up an unsecured AP with the INTENTION of giving out access. (And thus this becomes common expectation)
/. a few months ago the explanation of why it's legally better to run an open access point? The case was someone arrested and charged with downloading (child?) porn or MP3s or something. He argued in court that they hadn't found the files on his machine; the only evidence was that the requests came from his IP address. But since he ran an open wifi access point, anyone out in the street could have done the download. The story went that the court agreed with this and declared him not guilty. The lesson was that if you have an open access point, that very fact debunks the claim that it must have been you because it was from your IP address. So the sensible thing is to always have an open access point running.
Didn't I read here on
Of course, it's a good idea to configure your machines so they're hard for someone out on the street to break into. But, frankly, that's a whole lot easier than configuring most commercial wifi gadgets to be secure against breakins (and still be usable by anyone).
Now where was that article?
Oh yeah, and there's no possible way to use a web browser without being a criminal, you're making copies of copyrighted content on your own computer in RAM, on the Screen and in your cache and index therefore we should block every kind of internet transfer other than emails and IMs because copying stuff that you wouldn't buy anyway hurts artists!
... I have a daughter and a son-in-law with law degrees. Ah, but they didn't specialize in Intellectual Property law. Damn; this is getting too complex for my brain...
Actually, you can't even download email or IMs legally. In the US, and in most other countries with the "standard" copyright laws, writers haven't had to register their copyrights for several decades now, because everything anyone writes is automatically copyrighted by default (unless they declare otherwise). Since I haven't waived my copyright claim on this message, it is copyrighted, and you have violated my copyright by downloading it, then copying it from your disk to your screen, then (gasp!) copying it from the screen to your eyes and into your brain. All this copying of my copyrighted material, and I didn't give you prior written permission! You're a vicious criminal!
And are you also impugning my artistry in my choice of words? You'll compounding your criminal copyright violations with libel. You'll hear from my lawyer.
Oh, wait; I don't have a lawyer. I'll have to get one. But wait
Actually, on a serious note, this sort of discussion has been going on in Internet forums since at least the early 1980s. Back then, almost all Internet development was done on projects funded by ARPA, the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency. The standard contracts forbid use of the funds for anything not related to your project's stated goals. Almost all of the early email software was developed "on the side" by people working on projects whose funding didn't mention email. So a lawyer could easily have argued that this software was a contract violation. DARPA was run by people with better sense than that, who fully understood that this was truly "advanced research" whose output couldn't be strictly determined beforehand without destroying much of the value of the research. They didn't both looking at such experimental software, unless the resource usage was really egregious. They got a lot of very useful serendipitous software out of it as a result. But this didn't stop the ongoing discussions about whether working on useful things like email was a legal use of the funding. It was never tested in court, and nowadays nobody criticizes those "rogue" developers, because the results were so valuable.
Don't expect any RIAA, MPAA, or ISP lawyers to be so reasonable. They aren't government agencies looking for new things. They are private corporations whose sole goal is maximizing income from their current "property".
With any new law, it's always useful to ask yourself "How could someone abuse this, and victimize innocent people?" In this case, it's quite easy.
First, ask yourself whether you may have any files on your machine that you don't know about, or which you couldn't decrypt. For most people, the answer is quite simple: "Yes." For example, do you run a browser? That browser has a cache. That cache contains files in an assortment of formats. It's quite likely that you've never seen some of those files' contents (maybe just because you didn't scroll far enough down the page to see the content). And if presented with only the file without any context, you'd have no idea what app to use to display its content, or even whether you have such an app installed.
On my web site, I have a demo of a bit of javascript that downloads files but doesn't display their contents. The intended use is to "preload" files used in the rest of the web site while you're looking at the main page, so that subsequent pages render faster. I also point out how this can be abused: My demo page downloads a file that is never used in subsequent pages. This "hidden" file can contain anything I like, from any web site. It could contain child porn, copyrighted MP3 music, a proprietary program that you haven't paid for - or an encrypted text for which you don't have a key.
As far as I can tell, this law doesn't distinguish this situation. The contents of your browser's cache are on your disk. This will be "proof" to most judges and juries that you downloaded them. So by merely viewing my web page or any other that uses such javascript, you could be framed for possession of such files. What would be your defense?
The obvious defense would be to try to convince the court that you could have been framed in this fashion. But even if you succeed at this, similar things could be done to you by any number of other means. Do you have anything installed that contains "auto-update" code? Note that most browsers now do this. Firefox asks you if you want an update installed, and it's probably trustworthy. But we recently learned that Microsoft software sometimes installs updates silently, even when you have turned auto-update off. An auto-update routine doesn't install its files in a labelled "cache" directory. Files can easily (and reasonably) be installed in any directory that you can write. So if anything at all on your machine has an auto-update feature, anyone who knows how to trigger it can install any files they like on your machine. And you could be prosecuted for failure to deliver the keys to decrypt these files that you didn't know about.
Almost every government contains people whose job includes finding ways to frame perceived "enemies" when the top people want. They won't have that as their job description, of course, and usually they are really working for the top officials or for a political party. This sort of law makes their job really easy, especially now that we have widely-used software such as browsers with caches, auto-update packages, and other things that download files without always telling the user about it.
To comply with this law, you had better be prepared to decode every file on your disks, including those that belong to any proprietary apps that you may have installed. If there's a single file anywhere on your disk that you can't convert to a human-readable form, you can be jailed for violating this law.
It's always a good idea to ask yourself "How can this be abused?"
C'mon; asking businesses to dump Windows would be a lot like asking America to dump Christianity, or asking Egypt to dump Islam. All three might be very good ideas, but suggesting any of them in the appropriate crowds will just get you fired/crucified/beheaded/whatever.
;-]
When faced with religious beliefs like these, the best you can do is try to make the best of them, while trying to minimize their damage to people and property.
[A couple decades ago I'd have included asking the USSR to dump Communism, but that happened. But I suspect that IBM/Microsoft, Christianity and Islam are much more deeply entrenched than Communism ever was. Anyway, my metaphor generator is redlined as it is.
... but your assertion that economic theory precludes this behavior is incorrect.
;-)
Note that I didn't say "economic theory", but rather "economic theology". I'm familiar with, for example, Adam Smith's warnings of the perversities that unbridled capitalism can produce, and also his warnings about the possible effects of government-sponsored monopolies (e.g., the Hudson Bay company's history in what's now mostly Canada).
But in fora like this, we regularly see discussions derailed by the crowd that believes fervently in laissez-faire capitalism, and tells us that the current abusive corporations have a "right" to do whatever they believe is necessary to maximise shareholder profit. I've read that sort of stuff several times here in the past week. Since this sort of belief system doesn't even bother with the minimal scientific methods that Adam Smith had available, I classify them as "theology".
Of course, there are people here with a more jaundiced view of it all, who understand that anyone left to act outside the law is a potential hazard to the rest of us.
So now where's my flame war? This seems a topic that's ideal for one. After all, our favorite corporate whipping boy is looking to "do a Netscape" on another perceived competitor.
Funny, but when I saw the same "typso" spelling used twice, my immediate thoughst were to wonder whether the writer speaks a variant dialect of English in which plursal are indicated by an infix -s- in or before the last syllable of worsd.
I've read of langusage that do plursal this way, but I've never studied any. Maybe some lingusist should find the author's (authos'r?) language community and do some field studsy on its membser.