Just crash Mir into the Moon, rather than the Earth when it is no longer usable, and the Moon will grow a rind like a great spherical camembert, which we can then harvest.
Truth is stranger than wild speculation. Two examples:
At the "Information, National Policies, and International Infrastructure" Symposium held at Harvard Law School, Paul Strassmann, of the National Defense University, and William Marlow, of Science Applications International Corporation, in a session entitled "Anonymous Remailers as Risk-Free International Infoterrorists" were asked by Professor Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School, whether the CIA and similar government agencies are involved in running anonymous remailers as this would be a perfect target to scan possibly illegal messages. The answer: Yes. In addition they mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed systems to break encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they themselves use 1024 bit keys.
And this one is really amazing: Crypto AG, which several post have cited as having been revealed in numerous press accounts to have sold compromised crypto systems to governments around the world, is still in business! But the gold plating on the brass balls is the following statement from their CEO, which is currently on their Web site: "Since 1952, Crypto AG has been the specialist for information security at the highest cryptological and technical level. More than 130 countries have chosen Crypto AG as their trusted partner. This trust is based on the fact that Crypto AG is a financially and legally independent Swiss company. All shares are owned by one shareholder: a foundation with one goal, the commercial success of our company. Foundation status rules out any third-party influence, and this also guarantees full independence and freedom in the design, production and marketing of our products."
What does this mean? For one, it means that having a backdoor revealed will not sink your company even if supposedly secure government communication systems are your only customers. And second, it means that back doors, if they do exist, are an economy measure. If it was encrypted by any popular and widely used tool, it can be forced. Which might explain why you don't see Louis Freeh on TV every night bashing consumer crypto tools.
It says: "The Madison experiment will continue at least until December 31, 1999"
I thought I had heard of this stuff before. Based on non viable economics and the ease with which the resulting CDs can be ripped (no surprise there), I suspect this project is already dead. And 5:1 compression? It is to laugh.
A cautionary tale for technology companies: entering into content protection projects has proven to this point to be a total waste of time, money, and opportunity. Not to mention what is does for your karma.
Some 80-90% of a monitor's wieght is in the glass in the front of the CRT. It's lead and thickness that makes the glass so heavy. But to make this out as a threat to the environment is silly. Lick your monitor. Go ahead. Lick it. I mean a really big sloppy lick so that your boss gives you a few days off because he thinks you've cracked. Other than due to the utter foolishness of what you have just done, do you feel any stupider? Of course not. The lead in the monitor is going to stay in the glass of the monitor until way after a meteor blows us all to smithereens.
NTT has a fiber network initiative called Global Multimedia Network (GMN). There are a number of ways to look at it:
1. It's just a big ATM over fiber backbone for the Internet, plus it carries broadcast TV signals to regional broadcast facilities and other big bit-moving jobs networks of that kind do.
2. These guys really believe they can revive a pre-Internet world of specialized proprietary networks for, e.g. Playstations. Uh huh. Yeah. Right.
3. By blasting enough money at the problem, even if they have not defined the problem very clearly, they may end up with a kick-ass fiber-to-the-curb VDSL network that does telephony and Internet access really well, with a funky multimedia part nobody uses tacked on.
4. The Verio acquisition signals they get it, and know they need to recast GMN in an Internet light. Or, they don't get it and bought Verio to put a fig leaf over that.
Ironically, by building what could be a great Internet system, they obviate the need for separate multimedia-over-ATM-to-the-home hacks. They also import competition from all over the world in the form of Internet multimedia their proprietary network is unlikely to beat for choice and price.
Hey! Thanks for adding to the knowledge here. My experience is in converged communications, where equipment makers are promising carriers that they will make a lot of money by being able to charge extra for all kinds of stuff ("differntiated services"). Might happen for some really high value apps, but basically the gear makers are telling their customers what they want to hear. What will really happen is that multimedia downloads will create a market for off-peak bandwidth and carriers will use those fancy QoS-capable routers to auction off the cheapest bandwidth, and not to charge more for whatever the current "high value" fantasy is.
I also agree that CDPD and/or 2.5G stuff that is TCP/IP and Internet oriented is the way things are going to happen, and some carriers and net gear makers see that fact. Look at what Bluetooth implies: a tiny phone that links to your PDA that runs a real browser on a large-enough screen that you can really surf normal Web sites, with, perhaps, some trouble on sites that won't fit in a 300-400 pixels wide screen (turning a handheld on its side).
Good for you that you demand warrants. I know of carriers that are quite the LEA lapdogs.
You are wrong, but not totally. Stay worried for these reasons:
1. There are a ferkload of phones out there. The reason Phone.com has such a high market cap is that the number of cell phones totally swamps the number of computers with Internet connections. Phones do have the potential to change the direction of the Internet.
2. Intelligence and law enforcement authorities have a longstanding and cozy relationship with telcos. The more cleartext, tracking, and unencrypted voice, the better Big Brother knows what the people, in aggregate and in particular, are doing.
3. Carriers, for the most part, loathe flat-rate pricing. I could write a book on why but the basic reasons are pretty obvious.
4. Content publishers want total control, and phone-based access is an opportunity to get and keep control forever. They can bill you item by item, control the device you play/read your content on, and they know exactly what you do with it and for how long. Makes my skin crawl, but the MPAA/RIAA/TimwarnerAOLMSNBCCBSCNN love this s--t.
So, while I believe Internet standards and business models will prevail, there are a lot of vested interests working against this outcome.
Absolutely outstanding! A limited term of protection does have some historical meaning, and this ability to revoke access does appear to stretch this to the breaking point. While courts do defer to the Congress to do whatever moronic things it gets elected to do, this is at or over the line.
The only reason the feds (under the U.S. Constitution, your milage may vary) have any say at all in what goes on in a library is that we have a wacky tax system that sends a lot of our money to the federal government, which then sends a fraction of it back, as long as we kowtow to idiocy like this.
Or perhaps some uttery shameless congressional law monkey can explain how laws about libraries are justified by the Commerce Clause? Maybe becuase the library uses gas heat, and the gas line is connected to an interstate pipeline. (You think I'm joking, eh?)
Filtering is plenty controversial among conservatives. Conservatives often find themselves the target of censorship. Libertarian conservatives don't like filtering on principle. So it is not surprising that the Family Research Council and conservative Christians would be tepid in support of a tool that can be, and has been, turned against them.
Opponents of censorware would do well to make common cause with Christians worried about having their views frozen out. They know that it is easy and dengerous to politicize censorware.
Yes, but is that sufficient? By encrusting things like big business mergers with enough law, you can functionally get around most of the Constitution, but the question we should all be asking is: if you build it, do you own it, and can the government confiscate it? If the answer is "no" it should be "no" for AOL as much as it is for Slashdot, or Linux, or anything else we think is warm and fuzzy.
Aircraft instrumentation may not be a good example of a complex UI fitting the user. While a commercial or military pilot may want every detail of an aircraft's operations made available because he must be able to access and control these functions in extreme circumstances, this same level of complexity often enough kills private pilots. For example, is it a good thing that you have to be knowledgable enough to adjust carburetor mixture and and de-ice your carburetor flying in the mountains with some aircraft? Or would it be better to develop an engine that obviates this operation? Do not confuse a primitive state of development with appropriateness.
There is no need to watch water temperature and oil pressure even in a high performace car these days. Production car engines can produce frightening levels of performance without being anywhere near their operating limits, and automatic systems like rev-limiters prevent drivers from inadvertantly harming their engines. This is a good thing! It does not make us dumbed down. It saves aggravation and money. I do not need to take my valve covers off and adjust valve lash to feel I am manly man driving a manly car (or hire some cranky expert to insult and overcharge me for the same precious service). My tachometer is needed because my car has a stick (but am I really more efficient than a computer-controlled automatic?), the boost gauge, however, is pure prurient entertainment.
Now there are some areas where I want clean, realible, transparent, and detailed instrumentation: I want to know every bit of code running on my system and what it is doing, and if any bit of it is snoopware, I want my system to hunt it down like the vermin such code is, and tell me all about it. But the paging, disk cache, etc.? Fugeddaboudit.
The dead white guys that wrote the U.S. Constitution were a gang of revolutionaries with the blood of their opressors on their hands. Don't confuse them with live guys and gals of any shade who suggest that revolution is bad for you.
Pre-paid cell phones might be effectively anonymous to ordinary law enforcement, if they do not know who you are to begin with, but there are reasons to think phone anonymity is not very reliable: One of the most plausible things I have seen written about Echelon is that it uses speaker identification. Speaker ID sounds very sci-fi, but, as speech recognition technologies go, it is one of the easiest to implement and most reliable. I do not doubt that if an intelligence agency wanted to be able to ID speakers they could, on a large scale, too.
Would a sigint agency want to use this technology? I think so: it means you can connect all the speakers in a call to a call solely on the basis of call content. Exceedingly convenient when you might not be able to intercept and decode all signaling and call acounting traffic, and still useful if you can, since a call to/from a land-line or a known cell gives you a pretty reliable indication of caller location, too. And once this is automated, the data just keeps coming.
As old as the PC revolution is, it keeps renewing itself, most recently with Linux, which will either take the business away from proprietary vendors, or make them provide enough openness and transparency to compete.
Much as consumer electronics makers now face new competitors from the computing business, telephone equipment makers may find they are not masters of the handset market if they do not deliver PC-like openness.
The problem is that phone people do not understand, and are in some ways hostile to the Internet:
1. The Internet is hard to control. If you want to put up content, and can afford the bandwidth, you are in business. No government licensing or lack of spectrum can stand in your way. To phone people, this is total anarchy. They don't grok it.
2. PCs are hard to control. Even with non-open software like Windows sometimes coming under suspicion of supporting interfaces for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and Intel messing around with snoopware in its CPUs, PCs are still powerful machines totally under the control of their individual owners. Telcos, OTOH, have a long history of actively enabling their national authorities to snoop.
3. Because of this lack of understanding, telephony products have stinted on supporting privacy, customer control, and anonymity. Imagine if a phone company offered a product about which they could say: It is open, absolutely private with no "back doors," possibly anonymous if you want that, and you can combine it with any software or service offering you desire. Hahahahaha. Suggest this in a telco, and off to the loony bin with you. But this can be said of PCs and the Internet. It illustrates the depth and breadth of the chasm telcos have to cross.
4. This also spells doom for phone/PDA combos. They do not embody PC-like control. With phone/PDA combos, you are exposed to the telco view of privacy (at their discretion) and contol (none).
5. The real answer is that convergence will happen when your phone is a PC, with all the attributes of a PC, and "phone service" is just a wireless Internet application.
6.In fact, for "phone service" to become an Internet application, it is more likely that our concept of a phone call will change (like voice chat, maybe), than that the Internet will start behaving like the telephone network.
Long, long ago I was at a science and engineering summer camp at Northwestern University and one of the project I built was a piezoelectric modulator for a laser beam that transmitted an audio signal across the room to a photocell that turned it back into an electrical signal. If you could do that with very little cost in parts (other than the laser, which was at that time a several hundred dollar device) 25 years ago, I'm actually surprised more "campus" networks are not glued together with laser beams instead of wire. Especially in commercial office complexes where companies move frequently and where new wire runs from building to building can be costly. Seems like it would be much easier and cheaper than microwave, and almost as reliable. Surely 100Mb optical modulators are not expensive these days.
It would make for a nifty way for a few houses to share a broadband connection, too, if the cost is a problem.
2. While laughably short of anything like an actual conservative fiscal approach, the Republican Congress did not let every pork project get fully funded.
3. Large-scale attempts to explode the budget by enacting new entitlements failed. In part because Republicans sometimes remembered what party they belong to, and in greater part because Hillary handled the medicare expansion proposals so badly.
In other words, the Republicans sucked just enough less than the Democrats, and got a lot of help from a brilliant Fed chairman.
Constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy is meant to prevent multi-layer prosectutions where, when one jurisdiction loses, the state and then federal prosecutors take over. The knock on Megan's law is, AFAIK, a due-process argument, at least in cases of sex offenders convicted before the law was enacted. The question being, it it punishment, or just a regulation, like a concealed-carry permit? N.B. voter registration is public information, posted at polling places in some towns, and I would guess sex offenders were more common, and more in keeping with community standards, than Republicans when I lived in Cambridge.
That is if your carrier turns on encryption in the first place. AT&T, at least as of last time I was a customer, did not use encryption at all in their U.S. TDMA network.
The thing to note here is the paternalism in the system design: ideally, handsets would use strong crypto that would be end-to-end, and not decrypted once on the wireline network. But nooo, that would not be good for us. One could infer from this that preserving unencrypted speech as the most common traffic in the PSTN is important to some law enforcement or, more likley intelligence function, like, for example, the use of speaker identification on a wide scale.
Of course there is never the thesis one is looking for: Hillary Rodham's Wellesley undergraduate dissertation that is rumored to be a blistering Marxist screed. That is content I would pay to get.
Touche, regarding the war on drugs. Who, expect the Libertarians, are calling for an immediate cease-fire? This is a big one, and I don't have an answer. Neither does Al Gore, though.
Separation of church and state is not libertarian, or even Libertarian, AFAIK. The Constitution says that no official religion be established. The current mode is very anti-Christian and intolerant. The Objectivists might have a beef with a return to more open expression of reigious values, but I doubt many libertarianish Republicans would.
Abortion is as controversial among Libertarians as anyone, Republicans have raised H1-B quotas every chance they get, and "suicide rights" are often wrapped up in a rather ugly "kill the old and sick" mentality that stems from a view that anyone too old to break dance has no quality of life. That's part of the reason I want the right to keep that.357 under my blanket in the old age home in case any whippersnapper decides I drool too much to be worth keeping around.
And about the SAAB, I test drove an old SAAB when I bought my 900SE. The old ones suffer from a '70s design: chassis too flexy, dashboard layout too wierd. Already owned a BMW 2002, didn't need another nostalgia trip. At least the SEs have the SAAB turbo engine - no Opel V6 for me thank you.
I thought Republicans were for medicare medicaid soc sec and other privatization? I thought NAFTA was a Republican-signed treaty? Less government is less corporate welfare - got any better solution? OK, you got me on flag burning: I say light up if you want to. But really, how far up your priority list is that? Before or after gay marriage? Which brings me back to the point: most small-l libertarians would prefer to deal with ideological purity issues after they get to keep more of what they earn, which is right up there in libertarian priorities.
Speaking as a typical Republican, you might what to know what typical Republicans think:
Republicans are an increasingly Libertarian party nowadays. Ideologically pure Libertarians might sneer at them, but the main attractive element of the Republican party is that they are less statist than the Democrats. Republicans have evolved away from the sort of bluenose moralizing that is more symbolized by Tipper Gore than anyone else this election. And the record of FBI and IRS abuse by Clinton is alarming to many. By the Nixon yardstick, Clinton is three orders ofmagnitude more abusive of govenrment power.
A related attraction among the same not-so-firebrand libertarian conservatives is that the Republicans hew closer to the Constitution than do the Democrats. Now if you think the U.S. Constitution is an outdated institution, or a "living document," or the dead ideas of dead white men, then that holds no attraction. But there is a sizeable number of people in the U.S. dedicated to restoring the plainly understood ideas of the Constitution to everyday use. Which comes down to the idea that nations, much less international institutions, should stick to making and preventing war, and leave almost everything else to governments that are closer to the people.
Lastly, Republicans increasingly represent competency in government. A Republican mayor cleaned up New York, and George Bush helped Texas move up the education rankings more quickly than anyone thought possible.
In contrast, the Democrats still never saw a tax that wasn't too low. They are still beholden to trade unions that, in the U.S. anyway, are rife with corruption and mob influence, and are now confined to highly regulated old industries and government employees becuase they have failed almost universally to attract any New Economy workers. I cannot think of one way in which the Democrats have changed since the 1960s - if anything, the whole union/public-sector orientation is less mainstream than when unions mattered and public education worked.
All this, of course, is my view. But I'm a pretty typical Republican in these times: Gap chinos, not Sanz-a-belt polyester slacks; Drive a SAAB, not a Buick; Download MP3s (legally, from MP3.com), thinks the DMCA is awful. I am why Republicans are hard to demonize. We look like you.
COM is not "heavy." Distributed COM is arguably "heavy" because you must marshall the data in network-order, and SOAP does not make this lighter, only more inter-operable. But local COM objects are not appreciably "heavier" than DLLs without COM conventions for finding entry points, which is, at heart, what COM does.
In the case of a C# module, COM (or must we call it.NET now?) provides uniform conventions for describing the classes in the module. Some other convention would be unlikely to be substantially more efficient. If the scope of a class does not extend outside a module, I doubt COM enters the picture at all.
Cui bono indeed? For example, without the cooperation of submarine cable owners, installation of high-capacity Echelon-type tapping would not be possible. AT&T has a heritage of government cooperation that, while not undercutting the credibility of this seemingly well-documented and verifiable system, at the very least begs the question of: Why? It is very unlikely that the era of government cooperation of large carriers is over (and I mean cooperation above and beyond compliance with trap and trace orders). If it was over we would have tough crypto built in to mobile phones, and/or phone anonymity with cash pre-paid systems. When I had an AT&T mobile, I could not even activate the lame encryption the handset supported.
It is, at least, a sign that attitudes may be changing. If the commercial environment is tough enough, and the old Cold War fattened bag of government goodies is running out, big companies of all types might pay more attention to the desire of customers to have the benefits of privacy, fair use, and just generally fair treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
Just crash Mir into the Moon, rather than the Earth when it is no longer usable, and the Moon will grow a rind like a great spherical camembert, which we can then harvest.
At the "Information, National Policies, and International Infrastructure" Symposium held at Harvard Law School, Paul Strassmann, of the National Defense University, and William Marlow, of Science Applications International Corporation, in a session entitled "Anonymous Remailers as Risk-Free International Infoterrorists" were asked by Professor Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School, whether the CIA and similar government agencies are involved in running anonymous remailers as this would be a perfect target to scan possibly illegal messages. The answer: Yes. In addition they mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed systems to break encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they themselves use 1024 bit keys.
And this one is really amazing: Crypto AG, which several post have cited as having been revealed in numerous press accounts to have sold compromised crypto systems to governments around the world, is still in business! But the gold plating on the brass balls is the following statement from their CEO, which is currently on their Web site: "Since 1952, Crypto AG has been the specialist for information security at the highest cryptological and technical level. More than 130 countries have chosen Crypto AG as their trusted partner. This trust is based on the fact that Crypto AG is a financially and legally independent Swiss company. All shares are owned by one shareholder: a foundation with one goal, the commercial success of our company. Foundation status rules out any third-party influence, and this also guarantees full independence and freedom in the design, production and marketing of our products."
What does this mean? For one, it means that having a backdoor revealed will not sink your company even if supposedly secure government communication systems are your only customers. And second, it means that back doors, if they do exist, are an economy measure. If it was encrypted by any popular and widely used tool, it can be forced. Which might explain why you don't see Louis Freeh on TV every night bashing consumer crypto tools.
I thought I had heard of this stuff before. Based on non viable economics and the ease with which the resulting CDs can be ripped (no surprise there), I suspect this project is already dead. And 5:1 compression? It is to laugh.
A cautionary tale for technology companies: entering into content protection projects has proven to this point to be a total waste of time, money, and opportunity. Not to mention what is does for your karma.
Some 80-90% of a monitor's wieght is in the glass in the front of the CRT. It's lead and thickness that makes the glass so heavy. But to make this out as a threat to the environment is silly. Lick your monitor. Go ahead. Lick it. I mean a really big sloppy lick so that your boss gives you a few days off because he thinks you've cracked. Other than due to the utter foolishness of what you have just done, do you feel any stupider? Of course not. The lead in the monitor is going to stay in the glass of the monitor until way after a meteor blows us all to smithereens.
1. It's just a big ATM over fiber backbone for the Internet, plus it carries broadcast TV signals to regional broadcast facilities and other big bit-moving jobs networks of that kind do.
2. These guys really believe they can revive a pre-Internet world of specialized proprietary networks for, e.g. Playstations. Uh huh. Yeah. Right.
3. By blasting enough money at the problem, even if they have not defined the problem very clearly, they may end up with a kick-ass fiber-to-the-curb VDSL network that does telephony and Internet access really well, with a funky multimedia part nobody uses tacked on.
4. The Verio acquisition signals they get it, and know they need to recast GMN in an Internet light. Or, they don't get it and bought Verio to put a fig leaf over that.
Ironically, by building what could be a great Internet system, they obviate the need for separate multimedia-over-ATM-to-the-home hacks. They also import competition from all over the world in the form of Internet multimedia their proprietary network is unlikely to beat for choice and price.
I also agree that CDPD and/or 2.5G stuff that is TCP/IP and Internet oriented is the way things are going to happen, and some carriers and net gear makers see that fact. Look at what Bluetooth implies: a tiny phone that links to your PDA that runs a real browser on a large-enough screen that you can really surf normal Web sites, with, perhaps, some trouble on sites that won't fit in a 300-400 pixels wide screen (turning a handheld on its side).
Good for you that you demand warrants. I know of carriers that are quite the LEA lapdogs.
1. There are a ferkload of phones out there. The reason Phone.com has such a high market cap is that the number of cell phones totally swamps the number of computers with Internet connections. Phones do have the potential to change the direction of the Internet.
2. Intelligence and law enforcement authorities have a longstanding and cozy relationship with telcos. The more cleartext, tracking, and unencrypted voice, the better Big Brother knows what the people, in aggregate and in particular, are doing.
3. Carriers, for the most part, loathe flat-rate pricing. I could write a book on why but the basic reasons are pretty obvious.
4. Content publishers want total control, and phone-based access is an opportunity to get and keep control forever. They can bill you item by item, control the device you play/read your content on, and they know exactly what you do with it and for how long. Makes my skin crawl, but the MPAA/RIAA/TimwarnerAOLMSNBCCBSCNN love this s--t.
So, while I believe Internet standards and business models will prevail, there are a lot of vested interests working against this outcome.
Absolutely outstanding! A limited term of protection does have some historical meaning, and this ability to revoke access does appear to stretch this to the breaking point. While courts do defer to the Congress to do whatever moronic things it gets elected to do, this is at or over the line.
Or perhaps some uttery shameless congressional law monkey can explain how laws about libraries are justified by the Commerce Clause? Maybe becuase the library uses gas heat, and the gas line is connected to an interstate pipeline. (You think I'm joking, eh?)
Opponents of censorware would do well to make common cause with Christians worried about having their views frozen out. They know that it is easy and dengerous to politicize censorware.
Yes, but is that sufficient? By encrusting things like big business mergers with enough law, you can functionally get around most of the Constitution, but the question we should all be asking is: if you build it, do you own it, and can the government confiscate it? If the answer is "no" it should be "no" for AOL as much as it is for Slashdot, or Linux, or anything else we think is warm and fuzzy.
There is no need to watch water temperature and oil pressure even in a high performace car these days. Production car engines can produce frightening levels of performance without being anywhere near their operating limits, and automatic systems like rev-limiters prevent drivers from inadvertantly harming their engines. This is a good thing! It does not make us dumbed down. It saves aggravation and money. I do not need to take my valve covers off and adjust valve lash to feel I am manly man driving a manly car (or hire some cranky expert to insult and overcharge me for the same precious service). My tachometer is needed because my car has a stick (but am I really more efficient than a computer-controlled automatic?), the boost gauge, however, is pure prurient entertainment.
Now there are some areas where I want clean, realible, transparent, and detailed instrumentation: I want to know every bit of code running on my system and what it is doing, and if any bit of it is snoopware, I want my system to hunt it down like the vermin such code is, and tell me all about it. But the paging, disk cache, etc.? Fugeddaboudit.
The dead white guys that wrote the U.S. Constitution were a gang of revolutionaries with the blood of their opressors on their hands. Don't confuse them with live guys and gals of any shade who suggest that revolution is bad for you.
Would a sigint agency want to use this technology? I think so: it means you can connect all the speakers in a call to a call solely on the basis of call content. Exceedingly convenient when you might not be able to intercept and decode all signaling and call acounting traffic, and still useful if you can, since a call to/from a land-line or a known cell gives you a pretty reliable indication of caller location, too. And once this is automated, the data just keeps coming.
Much as consumer electronics makers now face new competitors from the computing business, telephone equipment makers may find they are not masters of the handset market if they do not deliver PC-like openness.
1. The Internet is hard to control. If you want to put up content, and can afford the bandwidth, you are in business. No government licensing or lack of spectrum can stand in your way. To phone people, this is total anarchy. They don't grok it.
2. PCs are hard to control. Even with non-open software like Windows sometimes coming under suspicion of supporting interfaces for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and Intel messing around with snoopware in its CPUs, PCs are still powerful machines totally under the control of their individual owners. Telcos, OTOH, have a long history of actively enabling their national authorities to snoop.
3. Because of this lack of understanding, telephony products have stinted on supporting privacy, customer control, and anonymity. Imagine if a phone company offered a product about which they could say: It is open, absolutely private with no "back doors," possibly anonymous if you want that, and you can combine it with any software or service offering you desire. Hahahahaha. Suggest this in a telco, and off to the loony bin with you. But this can be said of PCs and the Internet. It illustrates the depth and breadth of the chasm telcos have to cross.
4. This also spells doom for phone/PDA combos. They do not embody PC-like control. With phone/PDA combos, you are exposed to the telco view of privacy (at their discretion) and contol (none).
5. The real answer is that convergence will happen when your phone is a PC, with all the attributes of a PC, and "phone service" is just a wireless Internet application.
6.In fact, for "phone service" to become an Internet application, it is more likely that our concept of a phone call will change (like voice chat, maybe), than that the Internet will start behaving like the telephone network.
It would make for a nifty way for a few houses to share a broadband connection, too, if the cost is a problem.
2. While laughably short of anything like an actual conservative fiscal approach, the Republican Congress did not let every pork project get fully funded.
3. Large-scale attempts to explode the budget by enacting new entitlements failed. In part because Republicans sometimes remembered what party they belong to, and in greater part because Hillary handled the medicare expansion proposals so badly.
In other words, the Republicans sucked just enough less than the Democrats, and got a lot of help from a brilliant Fed chairman.
Constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy is meant to prevent multi-layer prosectutions where, when one jurisdiction loses, the state and then federal prosecutors take over. The knock on Megan's law is, AFAIK, a due-process argument, at least in cases of sex offenders convicted before the law was enacted. The question being, it it punishment, or just a regulation, like a concealed-carry permit? N.B. voter registration is public information, posted at polling places in some towns, and I would guess sex offenders were more common, and more in keeping with community standards, than Republicans when I lived in Cambridge.
The thing to note here is the paternalism in the system design: ideally, handsets would use strong crypto that would be end-to-end, and not decrypted once on the wireline network. But nooo, that would not be good for us. One could infer from this that preserving unencrypted speech as the most common traffic in the PSTN is important to some law enforcement or, more likley intelligence function, like, for example, the use of speaker identification on a wide scale.
Of course there is never the thesis one is looking for: Hillary Rodham's Wellesley undergraduate dissertation that is rumored to be a blistering Marxist screed. That is content I would pay to get.
Separation of church and state is not libertarian, or even Libertarian, AFAIK. The Constitution says that no official religion be established. The current mode is very anti-Christian and intolerant. The Objectivists might have a beef with a return to more open expression of reigious values, but I doubt many libertarianish Republicans would.
Abortion is as controversial among Libertarians as anyone, Republicans have raised H1-B quotas every chance they get, and "suicide rights" are often wrapped up in a rather ugly "kill the old and sick" mentality that stems from a view that anyone too old to break dance has no quality of life. That's part of the reason I want the right to keep that .357 under my blanket in the old age home in case any whippersnapper decides I drool too much to be worth keeping around.
And about the SAAB, I test drove an old SAAB when I bought my 900SE. The old ones suffer from a '70s design: chassis too flexy, dashboard layout too wierd. Already owned a BMW 2002, didn't need another nostalgia trip. At least the SEs have the SAAB turbo engine - no Opel V6 for me thank you.
I thought Republicans were for medicare medicaid soc sec and other privatization? I thought NAFTA was a Republican-signed treaty? Less government is less corporate welfare - got any better solution? OK, you got me on flag burning: I say light up if you want to. But really, how far up your priority list is that? Before or after gay marriage? Which brings me back to the point: most small-l libertarians would prefer to deal with ideological purity issues after they get to keep more of what they earn, which is right up there in libertarian priorities.
Republicans are an increasingly Libertarian party nowadays. Ideologically pure Libertarians might sneer at them, but the main attractive element of the Republican party is that they are less statist than the Democrats. Republicans have evolved away from the sort of bluenose moralizing that is more symbolized by Tipper Gore than anyone else this election. And the record of FBI and IRS abuse by Clinton is alarming to many. By the Nixon yardstick, Clinton is three orders ofmagnitude more abusive of govenrment power.
A related attraction among the same not-so-firebrand libertarian conservatives is that the Republicans hew closer to the Constitution than do the Democrats. Now if you think the U.S. Constitution is an outdated institution, or a "living document," or the dead ideas of dead white men, then that holds no attraction. But there is a sizeable number of people in the U.S. dedicated to restoring the plainly understood ideas of the Constitution to everyday use. Which comes down to the idea that nations, much less international institutions, should stick to making and preventing war, and leave almost everything else to governments that are closer to the people.
Lastly, Republicans increasingly represent competency in government. A Republican mayor cleaned up New York, and George Bush helped Texas move up the education rankings more quickly than anyone thought possible.
In contrast, the Democrats still never saw a tax that wasn't too low. They are still beholden to trade unions that, in the U.S. anyway, are rife with corruption and mob influence, and are now confined to highly regulated old industries and government employees becuase they have failed almost universally to attract any New Economy workers. I cannot think of one way in which the Democrats have changed since the 1960s - if anything, the whole union/public-sector orientation is less mainstream than when unions mattered and public education worked.
All this, of course, is my view. But I'm a pretty typical Republican in these times: Gap chinos, not Sanz-a-belt polyester slacks; Drive a SAAB, not a Buick; Download MP3s (legally, from MP3.com), thinks the DMCA is awful. I am why Republicans are hard to demonize. We look like you.
In the case of a C# module, COM (or must we call it .NET now?) provides uniform conventions for describing the classes in the module. Some other convention would be unlikely to be substantially more efficient. If the scope of a class does not extend outside a module, I doubt COM enters the picture at all.
It is, at least, a sign that attitudes may be changing. If the commercial environment is tough enough, and the old Cold War fattened bag of government goodies is running out, big companies of all types might pay more attention to the desire of customers to have the benefits of privacy, fair use, and just generally fair treatment.