Imagine at least one FBI man and some staties (these groups are, in general, the least corrupt LEOs we have, by the way) handing over witnesses to a mob ringleader and several of them ending up dead in a ditch. It happened in Massachusetts. Oh, and the mobster's brother was the Senate President. And the mobster, Whitey Bulger, is still on the loose.
Now imagine automating this process. Now imagine operating overseas in some hellhole where the LEOs are all corrupt.
5. Equity/profit participation, on top of good pay.
6. Unparalleled tolerance of all matters of race, creed, more holes than God intended your body to have, etc.
7. Workers in very short supply, and can call the tune.
8. No corrupt union taking a cut of your pay to conduct political activities you don't agree with.
Oh for the days when entrepeneurialism meant buying a ship, filling it with a crew (of really swell guys, I'm sure), and sailing forth to rip off the natives of some hell-hole so you can sell their products back home and get rich, or die trying. Right?
Without two pieces of info it will be hard to issue a verdict: 1. The class libraries; 2. The VM, if there is one.
MS loves VMs. Pobably would love a universal VM for all languages, on all platforms. Might even make CE gizmos useful as clients in COM-based multi-tier apps. Or will the Common Runtime do the equivalent through JIT?
One of nice things about Java, is that it does not try to exist without classes. Yes automatic unboxing and boxing of primitives gives the appearance of a very minimal set of classes, but it will be intersting to see where this boundary actually ends up for C#.
The "Borland influence"'s name would be Anders Hejlsberg. His name is onthe cover of the reference manual, downloadable form the intro page pointed to in the post.
Skimmed the manual, no mention of class-library specifics in the manual. Which begs the question: does the language attempt to be useful without a class library? Or is it, in all practical respects, dependent on a class library. And will that class library be very WFC like, plus some Java-oid base classes? Inquiring minds want to know!
Check the size of your local and state budgets and ask yourself if you are getting value for money. Or do you think roads and schools could be had for half, a quarter, or less? Yes, some type and level of taxation is neccssary, but the present level in most places is quite a bit higher than needed. Could those millions for buses have been easily found in a budget in the billions? Or do you think maybe the politicians just want to cut the most visible and inconveniencing items first, in order to maintain the level of taxation?
So-called "overpackaging" is much more a wannabe regulator's soap box than it is an environmental problem. We are talking about a couple pennies worth of cardboard, maybe $10,000 worth over the entire production run. That's one or two magazine ads worth, and the magazine ads might consume more paper than the oversize packaging which is, basically, in-store advertizing. In might, in that case, be more resource-effective to have a large box, if it sells more product more efficiently.
Oh, but we should err on the side of caution, for the sake of the childeren, and hire bureaucrats to measure boxes, issue regulations, and fine violators, who would be summoned before an administrative magistrate (yup, if you can make up laws as you go along, you can make up courts, too). There is a downside to making laws about this kind of thing. Better just to say if it offends you, avoid it.
That would have been a Zenith TV. The remotes (way before IR or RF remotes) used ultrasound. The remote - also called a "clicker," would strike a metal bar inside to produce a tone. The TV had a mic and some filter arrangement to detct these clicks.
Jingling your keys would make the TV very loud and turn the picture green. Lots of fun.
Virata, which makes some very nice communications chips, do the same thing with multiple ARM and DSP cores on a chip. Their Boron ASSP has multiple CPUs, one for apps and high-level code, and one for network protocols, plus a DSP for ADSL DMT. They are fabless, and the chips do not try to set speed records. It is mostly a matter of simplifying: why multi-task a DSP between disparate types of tasks (in terms of real-time requirements) when you can add a second core and never have to worry about it?
In the article, Tops says they will give a choice of what processors. That is kind of a cop-out. The tough job is figuring out which porcessors and RTOSs to use, how to divide tasks among processors, and getting the tasks, protocols, and algorithms running on the RTOSs and CPUs. It isn't child's play.
Please cite the law regarding shouting "Fire!" A federal crime? Unlikely. Which state has such a law? What other speech does it prohibit? How well do laws of that nature stand up to constitutional challenges? I'd bet, for example, I could get away with a T-shirt that says "I'd step over you to the The Who." And would anyone care to compare the theatre trampling numbers in the U.S. with soccer riot casualties? I think this shouting "Fire!" thing is a load of hooey.
The Bill of Rights in the U.S. is constantly under pressure, but that does not mean that it has not been successfuly defended, at least in part, nor does it take away from the contrast in rights in the U.S. compared to other places. The U.S. is different, and some U.S. citizens like it that way.
Recently our Supreme Court dusted off the Commerce Clause of the Constitution after decades of neglect and started taking seriously the idea that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the states. So we are guilty of twisting our Constitution, enough so that you might not think we deserve to keep it. But occasionally we wake up and take it seriously.
This comment perfectly illustrates the difference between many who agrue against Microsoft, compared with those, like me, who are sceptical of the DoJ's position.
on the one hand, you have a point by point analysis of the legal situation. On the other hand, you have an essentially deconstructionist point of view. This view does not need the details. The law is complex, and busting up Microsoft seems like a good idea. Further, the government deserves respect, and Microsoft should cooperate.
This is a remarkable attitude from the generally anarcho-libertarian population in Slashdot. Were it the DoJ trying to regulate open source software because it is a threat to enforcement of the DMCA, for example, everyone here would rightly respond with: a) The DMCA is bad law; and b) How can it be enforced on the diffuse open source community? On the grounds that the DMCA tramples fair use and other well-established doctrines. I would expect to find well-researched articles here that go into considerable detail. I would expect to find the generalized "But it hurts Britney's royalties" argument on the other side.
So here we have an article that points out why, if we honor our laws and Constitution, we should probably call off the DoJ dogs. And a response that fully embraces the "meaning of is" approach to interpreting laws that the deconstructionist philosophy infecting our government has brought on. Interesting.
Such first order stats are true, but if you are not young, black, and part of the drug trade, American cities are, statistically speaking, surprisingly safe.
These stastical fallacies are similar to those that claim air travel is very safe compared with cars. True, but if you are not young, drunk and driving a Trans-Am, the airplane statistics are less compelleing. Or that shark attack is very rare. Rare for the population as a whole, but if you surf every day in shark-infested waters, your milage may vary.
The U.S. contains sub-populations that are at very high risk of being shot (or doing the shooting). I don't have the stats at hand but it would be a sucker-bet that most shooters are felons who posses their guns illegally. So more laws will do... what? Better enforcement and putting habitual criminals in jail for a long time is the only proven answer.
Schiller's reasoning is circular, and making a potential crisis out of "irrational exuberance" lends a shade of irony to his proposed solution: more, and more sophiticated, derivatives. His nod to solving social problems (with the the taxes on the derivatives, I suppose) gives him the PC stamp of aproval as opposed to us hard-hearted sort that think putting their own kids through college comes first. "Hey, you! You'll hurt yourself on Datek. Come listen to my plan, it'll only cost another 2% of GDP in taxation, and you'll feel safer." Yeah right.
God bless the Internet for bringing unfiltered news. It sure makes it feel as if our right are under siege, and I hope a lot of people share that feeling enough to vote their conscience and, even better, become politically active. Just to name a few of the reasons why:
Mitnick's parole officer.
Steve Jackson Games defective warrent and subsequent thuggery.
Elian Gonzales defective warrent and thuggery in light of parties represented by counsel, awaiting a scheduled hearing, situation under federal court injunction... but hey, let's storm the house anyway.
DMCA
Napster demand letters, and all other instances where private interests hijack government processes beyond the normal protections accorded by tort law.
This is all bad, bad, stuff. It hurts everyone on aggregate. Even if you only care for money, this kind of stuff should be alarming. Russia isn't poor because Marx was a lousy economist. Russia is poor because as soon as you got ahead (if you were not part of the protected few), some goons showed up and confiscated what you had and packed you off to Siberia. And if you allow enough of these goons to breed, you get a mafia when the state collapses. Reform now, or regret it later.
Excellent book, and anyone really interested in this discussion should read it. A couple of posts indicated that four dimensional spacetime is hard to visualize. Not really, unless visualizing gravity wells makes your head spin. String theory makes a clear distinction between the three visible dimensions and the "curled up" spatial dimensions used in string theory. These extra dimensions are curled up pretty tight. It isn't as if you could slip out of three-space if you jumped in the right "direction" fast enough.
The curvature in question in the experiment is the kind in various conjectures about the "shape" of the big, spread-out visible dimensions. They might wrap around, just like the tiny hairballs with the 6 or 7 extra spatial dimensions required for strings to work, only on a huge scale. This experiment says they don't.
Wow, a comment on/. that wasn't foaming at the mouth. The fact is the gov't wants to build on a narrow and specific finding an outcome that hangs way out there. Unlikely to survive appeal. The gov't may end up with a very small fig leaf in the end.
The above simple remedy is much easier to accomplish than a breakup. My bet is that the next DoJ, once you get rid of the 60 retread radicals running the current one, will settle for something like this simple remedy, plus, perhaps, a free or cheap source license like Sun offers.
DSL modems are properly called modems. They are every bit an analog modulated signal processing machine. They have big, crunchy DSPs (which the Moto software expects to eliminate), and they extract digital bits from an analog signal. A variety of modulation techniques are used, and there are a variety of DSLs, DMT being a common one for ADSL and G.Lite. The main difference between DSL modems and commonly used V.90 modems is that DSL modems cannot transmit a DSL signal any deeper into the telephone network than the DSL Access Multiplexer (DSLAM) at the other end of the local loop. Otherwise they are just a faster modem. Some DSL modems include a router. That "router" can be anything from a bridge to a full-on VPN-capable router with special encryption hardware. But the DSL part could be replaced by a V.90 modem, an ISDN TA, or a T1 interface. Which brings us to the sidebar that a lot of "T1" is actually SDSL because SDSL signals go much farther than T1 signals, eliminating the need for expensive repeaters in the outside plant. I am sceptical that current-generation PC users will find "softDSL" acceptable. Softmodems have a noticable performance impact and I would not use them outside of very well-defined applications, like a notebook computer where the modem would be used to fetch e-mail on the road. DSP power is relatively cheap, and CPUs are, these days, called on for multimedia signal processing (i.e. decompression) often enough that it makes sense to offload modem signal processing. DSL modems will probably take twice as much CPU power as a V.90 modem, maybe more. OTOH, Windows 2000 and Linux (Mac too?) do a good job of routing these days, so simple modems with DSPs probably make a lot of sense compared with modem/routers for many applications. With a fixed-function box it is difficult to add, for example, VPN or fancy firewall if you want it, where a desktop CPU should have plenty of headroom for the encryption.
Sounds like a really bad case of tweed poisoning. He makes a good point in prioritizing rare materials over commonly available books, but he misses a huge point: The Library of Congress has a role in the copyright system. Every book published in the U.S. should be in the Library. What better way to underscore the public good of limited copyright protection than to have the Library of Congress deliver electronic versions of books that are no longer protected? Further, what better way to discourage illegal copying of electronic material than to have a large supply of freely available electronic material?
Overall, he missed a tremendous opportunity to shape the electronic future. Instead he is simply standing athwart a tidal wave. He will make the Library of Congress another example of how gevernment doesn't get it when MP3.com or someone other commercial venture starts handing out free e-books.
This whole situation illustrates another point: government does have a role to play in the Internet future. It is not a inevitably libertarian future. But if government keeps screwing up, that is how it will turn out.
Re:Catching the OT thread...
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CFP 2000 Wrapup
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It is frustrating, but that is the point of three-strikes laws. Even if you catch him only 5% of the time, he'll hit three strikes well before the 100th car theft. Then you throw him in jail until he is too old for the game. Not unconstitutional at all. It also gives the cops an incentive to investigate these guys more thoroughly because it will result in a meaningful sentence.
All of which illustrates that it isn't crime prevention. No amount of Internet snooping will stop such criminals. The only solution for habitual criminals is long sentences. Unintrusive law enforcement, leniency for first offenders, and judicial discretion are all highly compatible with three strikes, because, as you point out, it usually isn't until strike #37 that these guys go up for the third time.
Neal Stephenson got it backward
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CFP 2000 Wrapup
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· Score: 3
If Roger Clarke quoted Neal Stephenson accurately, Stephenson got Conan Doyle's story exactly backward: Holmes did not like the countryside because the influence of society was less there than in the city.
The influence of law enforcement was never part of Doyle's point. Quite the opposite. His point was that social norms operate better in the city crowd than in the isolated countryside, implying police have little influence in crime prevention. (In most of Doyle's work, depictions of police range from well-meaning boobs to completely hopeless boobs.) This is a relevant point: current police obsession with crime prevention drives intrusions into privacy. Police should stick to being good at quickly and reliably catching the bad guys.
To go a bit OT here: Getting, and keeping, the high-productivity criminals off the street is very effective. If the system did this reliably, the remaining crimes would be much fewer in number, and traditional, non-intrusive police methods would be more than sufficient, not to mention the overall reduce tolerance for crime.
That LCD-like green font is a crime against nature. Anyone suggesting such an atrocity for a business productivity app would be drummed out in a thrice. Why am I expected to become stupid and unoffended at the such a pathetic attempt at home-electronics-display-nostalgia when I use WMP? Ick.
Not only do people have no choice with WinAmp, but Microsoft is trying to make a monkey out of me for having defended their software on occation in this forum. The new Windows Media Player has "skins" for its compact views, and the default "full" window has a "chrome" look you can't get rid of (or at least I have not been able to figure out how). A fine example of the freedom to innovate.
Why are media players so special as to require a gaudy, useless, and gratuitous "skin?" This is a "tradition" carried forward from the hideous "stereo component" UIs that come with the dreck that is bundled with sound cards. Does anyone have the spine to stand up and say "Who ordered this crap?" Are the people spec'ing these things at Apple and Microsoft such wimps they cannot question an idiotic decision made by designers much less capable than themselves? Faugh! I can't wait for the gratuitous "spine' on my e-books, and maybe cutesy "book marks," too. It's the "desktop metaphor" you dopes, not the "desktop regious fundamentalist literal interpretation."
Lazy, lazy, lazy. In fifteen years we cannot think of a better way to set margins than a visual analogue of a typewriter margin ruler? It makes you think PageMaker would squirt hot lead if it could. Or make you rub paste on your screen. And how about those spreadsheets that have not advanced significantly since Lotus made a half-hearted attempt at fundamental change (I forgot what it was called, but it made a lot more sense than equations hidden behind spreadsheet cells).
Clippy must die! And thank you for the letting me vent.
AOL is a lot worse than Microsoft, but it's a good idea to get focused on why that is:
1. It slows down the Internet's ability to disrupt the status quo. Time Warner, as an old-media publisher, won't let smaller online projects disrupt their old-media revenue streams. So no Gnutella, for starters. It will be made abundantly clear that protecting old media is the way to get ahead at AOL/Time-Warner.
2. It pollutes the Internet with political influence. Becuase Time-Warner is heavily dependent on government approvals and licenses in broadcasting, it toes the line: CNN stands for Clinton News Network. We're all surfing to avoid that stuff, and here comes a ton of it.
3. It makes the likeliest alternative to Microsoft hegemony AOL hegemony. And that means not just a lock on technology in Internet access devices, it means the extension of old-media monopolistic control of distribution to the Internet. Yup, it could be that bad.
What's worse? Microsoft has learned going against the Internet amounts to urinating upwind. AOL has learned no such lesson, being the only online service company to successfully move their proprietary protocols and content forward into the Internet era. That plus the Time-Warner old media bad mojo is much worse than Microsost could ever be. IMHO Microsoft will focus its business back onto computing and software and continue to get rid of media/Web holdings (as they did with Expedia). AOL's aim is to control as much content and content-distribution as possible. Ick.
Digital cash is a topic I would highly reccomend in a paper on crypto and how it can affect society. A lot of society is moved by money, and it will move differently when money is digital.
In one future, money will become intensely private: you will not be able to tell how much anyone has, or where it came from. But you will be able to feel confident about it not being counterfiet. Money itself is only representative of goods and services. Privacy in money therefore represents privacy in all matters.
In the other possible future, it will not be possible to pay for a stick of gum without the transactioin being tracable in both space and time to the person making the transaction. Compare and contrast.
The Bill of Rights does not grant rights. This is an important point, because it might be construed that people do not have rights not enumerated by the Bill of Rights, which would not be correct. People do have rights outside of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, just like the rest of the Constitution, forbids the government from doing things it should not do.
In the real world, the government uses the Bill of Rights to polish its jackboots on a regular basis. Just because a law exists, and, in some cases, has existed for a long time, does not mean it is in tune with the Constitution. There is a difference between legal realism and constitionality.
So take these two facts together: The U.S. Constitution tells the government what not to do, and sometimes the government tries to get away with it for as long as possible anyway, and you have a proper view of the law. A good example would be how far the Commerce Clause has been stretched to cover federal meddling is areas far outside of ensuring relatively friction-free commerce across state lines. A lot of laws may crumble when that catilever breaks off.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine automating this process. Now imagine operating overseas in some hellhole where the LEOs are all corrupt.
Oh c'mon, folks... "Remus Shepherd?" And to think Slashdotards can be fooled by a troll in shepherd's clothing.
1. No hard lifting.
2. Indoor work, air conditioned.
3. No hazmat contact.
4. No serious risk of disease.
5. Equity/profit participation, on top of good pay.
6. Unparalleled tolerance of all matters of race, creed, more holes than God intended your body to have, etc.
7. Workers in very short supply, and can call the tune.
8. No corrupt union taking a cut of your pay to conduct political activities you don't agree with.
Oh for the days when entrepeneurialism meant buying a ship, filling it with a crew (of really swell guys, I'm sure), and sailing forth to rip off the natives of some hell-hole so you can sell their products back home and get rich, or die trying. Right?
MS loves VMs. Pobably would love a universal VM for all languages, on all platforms. Might even make CE gizmos useful as clients in COM-based multi-tier apps. Or will the Common Runtime do the equivalent through JIT?
One of nice things about Java, is that it does not try to exist without classes. Yes automatic unboxing and boxing of primitives gives the appearance of a very minimal set of classes, but it will be intersting to see where this boundary actually ends up for C#.
Skimmed the manual, no mention of class-library specifics in the manual. Which begs the question: does the language attempt to be useful without a class library? Or is it, in all practical respects, dependent on a class library. And will that class library be very WFC like, plus some Java-oid base classes? Inquiring minds want to know!
Check the size of your local and state budgets and ask yourself if you are getting value for money. Or do you think roads and schools could be had for half, a quarter, or less? Yes, some type and level of taxation is neccssary, but the present level in most places is quite a bit higher than needed. Could those millions for buses have been easily found in a budget in the billions? Or do you think maybe the politicians just want to cut the most visible and inconveniencing items first, in order to maintain the level of taxation?
Oh, but we should err on the side of caution, for the sake of the childeren, and hire bureaucrats to measure boxes, issue regulations, and fine violators, who would be summoned before an administrative magistrate (yup, if you can make up laws as you go along, you can make up courts, too). There is a downside to making laws about this kind of thing. Better just to say if it offends you, avoid it.
Jingling your keys would make the TV very loud and turn the picture green. Lots of fun.
In the article, Tops says they will give a choice of what processors. That is kind of a cop-out. The tough job is figuring out which porcessors and RTOSs to use, how to divide tasks among processors, and getting the tasks, protocols, and algorithms running on the RTOSs and CPUs. It isn't child's play.
The Bill of Rights in the U.S. is constantly under pressure, but that does not mean that it has not been successfuly defended, at least in part, nor does it take away from the contrast in rights in the U.S. compared to other places. The U.S. is different, and some U.S. citizens like it that way.
Recently our Supreme Court dusted off the Commerce Clause of the Constitution after decades of neglect and started taking seriously the idea that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the states. So we are guilty of twisting our Constitution, enough so that you might not think we deserve to keep it. But occasionally we wake up and take it seriously.
on the one hand, you have a point by point analysis of the legal situation. On the other hand, you have an essentially deconstructionist point of view. This view does not need the details. The law is complex, and busting up Microsoft seems like a good idea. Further, the government deserves respect, and Microsoft should cooperate.
This is a remarkable attitude from the generally anarcho-libertarian population in Slashdot. Were it the DoJ trying to regulate open source software because it is a threat to enforcement of the DMCA, for example, everyone here would rightly respond with: a) The DMCA is bad law; and b) How can it be enforced on the diffuse open source community? On the grounds that the DMCA tramples fair use and other well-established doctrines. I would expect to find well-researched articles here that go into considerable detail. I would expect to find the generalized "But it hurts Britney's royalties" argument on the other side.
So here we have an article that points out why, if we honor our laws and Constitution, we should probably call off the DoJ dogs. And a response that fully embraces the "meaning of is" approach to interpreting laws that the deconstructionist philosophy infecting our government has brought on. Interesting.
These stastical fallacies are similar to those that claim air travel is very safe compared with cars. True, but if you are not young, drunk and driving a Trans-Am, the airplane statistics are less compelleing. Or that shark attack is very rare. Rare for the population as a whole, but if you surf every day in shark-infested waters, your milage may vary.
The U.S. contains sub-populations that are at very high risk of being shot (or doing the shooting). I don't have the stats at hand but it would be a sucker-bet that most shooters are felons who posses their guns illegally. So more laws will do... what? Better enforcement and putting habitual criminals in jail for a long time is the only proven answer.
Schiller's reasoning is circular, and making a potential crisis out of "irrational exuberance" lends a shade of irony to his proposed solution: more, and more sophiticated, derivatives. His nod to solving social problems (with the the taxes on the derivatives, I suppose) gives him the PC stamp of aproval as opposed to us hard-hearted sort that think putting their own kids through college comes first. "Hey, you! You'll hurt yourself on Datek. Come listen to my plan, it'll only cost another 2% of GDP in taxation, and you'll feel safer." Yeah right.
Mitnick's parole officer.
Steve Jackson Games defective warrent and subsequent thuggery.
Elian Gonzales defective warrent and thuggery in light of parties represented by counsel, awaiting a scheduled hearing, situation under federal court injunction... but hey, let's storm the house anyway.
DMCA
Napster demand letters, and all other instances where private interests hijack government processes beyond the normal protections accorded by tort law.
This is all bad, bad, stuff. It hurts everyone on aggregate. Even if you only care for money, this kind of stuff should be alarming. Russia isn't poor because Marx was a lousy economist. Russia is poor because as soon as you got ahead (if you were not part of the protected few), some goons showed up and confiscated what you had and packed you off to Siberia. And if you allow enough of these goons to breed, you get a mafia when the state collapses. Reform now, or regret it later.
The curvature in question in the experiment is the kind in various conjectures about the "shape" of the big, spread-out visible dimensions. They might wrap around, just like the tiny hairballs with the 6 or 7 extra spatial dimensions required for strings to work, only on a huge scale. This experiment says they don't.
The above simple remedy is much easier to accomplish than a breakup. My bet is that the next DoJ, once you get rid of the 60 retread radicals running the current one, will settle for something like this simple remedy, plus, perhaps, a free or cheap source license like Sun offers.
DSL modems are properly called modems. They are every bit an analog modulated signal processing machine. They have big, crunchy DSPs (which the Moto software expects to eliminate), and they extract digital bits from an analog signal. A variety of modulation techniques are used, and there are a variety of DSLs, DMT being a common one for ADSL and G.Lite. The main difference between DSL modems and commonly used V.90 modems is that DSL modems cannot transmit a DSL signal any deeper into the telephone network than the DSL Access Multiplexer (DSLAM) at the other end of the local loop. Otherwise they are just a faster modem. Some DSL modems include a router. That "router" can be anything from a bridge to a full-on VPN-capable router with special encryption hardware. But the DSL part could be replaced by a V.90 modem, an ISDN TA, or a T1 interface. Which brings us to the sidebar that a lot of "T1" is actually SDSL because SDSL signals go much farther than T1 signals, eliminating the need for expensive repeaters in the outside plant. I am sceptical that current-generation PC users will find "softDSL" acceptable. Softmodems have a noticable performance impact and I would not use them outside of very well-defined applications, like a notebook computer where the modem would be used to fetch e-mail on the road. DSP power is relatively cheap, and CPUs are, these days, called on for multimedia signal processing (i.e. decompression) often enough that it makes sense to offload modem signal processing. DSL modems will probably take twice as much CPU power as a V.90 modem, maybe more. OTOH, Windows 2000 and Linux (Mac too?) do a good job of routing these days, so simple modems with DSPs probably make a lot of sense compared with modem/routers for many applications. With a fixed-function box it is difficult to add, for example, VPN or fancy firewall if you want it, where a desktop CPU should have plenty of headroom for the encryption.
Overall, he missed a tremendous opportunity to shape the electronic future. Instead he is simply standing athwart a tidal wave. He will make the Library of Congress another example of how gevernment doesn't get it when MP3.com or someone other commercial venture starts handing out free e-books.
This whole situation illustrates another point: government does have a role to play in the Internet future. It is not a inevitably libertarian future. But if government keeps screwing up, that is how it will turn out.
All of which illustrates that it isn't crime prevention. No amount of Internet snooping will stop such criminals. The only solution for habitual criminals is long sentences. Unintrusive law enforcement, leniency for first offenders, and judicial discretion are all highly compatible with three strikes, because, as you point out, it usually isn't until strike #37 that these guys go up for the third time.
The influence of law enforcement was never part of Doyle's point. Quite the opposite. His point was that social norms operate better in the city crowd than in the isolated countryside, implying police have little influence in crime prevention. (In most of Doyle's work, depictions of police range from well-meaning boobs to completely hopeless boobs.) This is a relevant point: current police obsession with crime prevention drives intrusions into privacy. Police should stick to being good at quickly and reliably catching the bad guys.
To go a bit OT here: Getting, and keeping, the high-productivity criminals off the street is very effective. If the system did this reliably, the remaining crimes would be much fewer in number, and traditional, non-intrusive police methods would be more than sufficient, not to mention the overall reduce tolerance for crime.
That LCD-like green font is a crime against nature. Anyone suggesting such an atrocity for a business productivity app would be drummed out in a thrice. Why am I expected to become stupid and unoffended at the such a pathetic attempt at home-electronics-display-nostalgia when I use WMP? Ick.
Why are media players so special as to require a gaudy, useless, and gratuitous "skin?" This is a "tradition" carried forward from the hideous "stereo component" UIs that come with the dreck that is bundled with sound cards. Does anyone have the spine to stand up and say "Who ordered this crap?" Are the people spec'ing these things at Apple and Microsoft such wimps they cannot question an idiotic decision made by designers much less capable than themselves? Faugh! I can't wait for the gratuitous "spine' on my e-books, and maybe cutesy "book marks," too. It's the "desktop metaphor" you dopes, not the "desktop regious fundamentalist literal interpretation."
Lazy, lazy, lazy. In fifteen years we cannot think of a better way to set margins than a visual analogue of a typewriter margin ruler? It makes you think PageMaker would squirt hot lead if it could. Or make you rub paste on your screen. And how about those spreadsheets that have not advanced significantly since Lotus made a half-hearted attempt at fundamental change (I forgot what it was called, but it made a lot more sense than equations hidden behind spreadsheet cells).
Clippy must die! And thank you for the letting me vent.
1. It slows down the Internet's ability to disrupt the status quo. Time Warner, as an old-media publisher, won't let smaller online projects disrupt their old-media revenue streams. So no Gnutella, for starters. It will be made abundantly clear that protecting old media is the way to get ahead at AOL/Time-Warner.
2. It pollutes the Internet with political influence. Becuase Time-Warner is heavily dependent on government approvals and licenses in broadcasting, it toes the line: CNN stands for Clinton News Network. We're all surfing to avoid that stuff, and here comes a ton of it.
3. It makes the likeliest alternative to Microsoft hegemony AOL hegemony. And that means not just a lock on technology in Internet access devices, it means the extension of old-media monopolistic control of distribution to the Internet. Yup, it could be that bad.
What's worse? Microsoft has learned going against the Internet amounts to urinating upwind. AOL has learned no such lesson, being the only online service company to successfully move their proprietary protocols and content forward into the Internet era. That plus the Time-Warner old media bad mojo is much worse than Microsost could ever be. IMHO Microsoft will focus its business back onto computing and software and continue to get rid of media/Web holdings (as they did with Expedia). AOL's aim is to control as much content and content-distribution as possible. Ick.
In one future, money will become intensely private: you will not be able to tell how much anyone has, or where it came from. But you will be able to feel confident about it not being counterfiet. Money itself is only representative of goods and services. Privacy in money therefore represents privacy in all matters.
In the other possible future, it will not be possible to pay for a stick of gum without the transactioin being tracable in both space and time to the person making the transaction. Compare and contrast.
In the real world, the government uses the Bill of Rights to polish its jackboots on a regular basis. Just because a law exists, and, in some cases, has existed for a long time, does not mean it is in tune with the Constitution. There is a difference between legal realism and constitionality.
So take these two facts together: The U.S. Constitution tells the government what not to do, and sometimes the government tries to get away with it for as long as possible anyway, and you have a proper view of the law. A good example would be how far the Commerce Clause has been stretched to cover federal meddling is areas far outside of ensuring relatively friction-free commerce across state lines. A lot of laws may crumble when that catilever breaks off.