All governments suck, to a pretty large extent. in fact, government, like cola, cars, pizza, music, and blue jeans, is a product. Buy too much of it, with low quality and high price, and it sucks. The difference is that the government can hold a gun to you head and make you buy. IMO, most western governments are about 2X larger and more expensive than they should be. Put them on a PC price curve for a few years are they will suck a lot less.
Which brings us to guns: Guns are a way for the people to stop buying. In the beginning, the U.S. didn't try to sell too much government, and had no fear of an armed citizenry. In fact, selling less governemnt was the major market differentiator for the U.S. when the U.S. was a startup. Now, however, its buy or die.
Is crypto like guns? According to U.S. export law it is. In practice, and in relation to the choice to buy less government, is crypto like guns? Yup. In fact, crypto is more dangerous: It enables stored value that cannot be detected like currency. It enables large scale plans to remain secret. It enforces elements of the consitution, like secrity in one's documents, that are now deemed dangerous. It is better than guns at limiting governments' ability to make us buy.
OK, so who here would buy less government if they could?
In Afghanistan the Soviet Union was defeated with small arms, mortars, and a few man-portable rockets. So, with a bit of outside help, the violent overthrow of government is still possible.
For every high-tech wonder like radar imaging satellites, you have cases like the Yugoslav war where simple plywood decoys fooled extensive efforts to find stuff.
There is never a guarantee that a revolution will succeed, or that the most horrifying tactics, as in Cambodia or Rwanda, won't be employed. But the ability of small arms to change the course of history is proven in some cases.
Free access is here. It is called NetZero. NetZero is based on the permise that ads can pay for access. The math ain't hard. At $15 per thousand impressions, you are covering the costs of a modem-based ISP. If you can attract a better demographic, you can get up to $200 per thousand impressions, as the Wall Street Journal does. At some point between these two numbers, free broadband becomes possible. Interesting! So if both AOL and Microsoft don't get in gear and try something different, they are headed for the tar pits.
AllAdvantage will pay you to surf, and use whatever ISP you like. You can, right now, subsidize your broadband access this way and not even feel the loss of bandwidth used for ads. Or you could use NetZero and AllAdvantage and pocket all the money. Wierd, eh? But that's capitalism.
So why do/.'ers expect Microsoft to stand still? It isn't just narrow and devious motives that drive them. They do pay attention to larger trends.
The following is from today's Philidelphia Daily News:
A former IRS clerk in Philadelphia allegedly used a confidential government computer data bank to find and try to kill a restaurant manager who had accused him of robbing her.
Dameia "Omar" Smith, 27, of Magnolia Street near Walnut Lane, Germantown, was indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury on robbery, attempted murder, unauthorized computer access and related charges.
If convicted, Smith could be facing about 40 years in prison without chance of parole, said Assistant U.S. Attorney John J. Pease.
Earlier this month, Smith was sentenced to 111/2 to 23 months in prison by a Bucks County judge for an unrelated attempted bank robbery in January in Northampton Township.
In the new federal case, Smith allegedly pulled a pistol and robbed about $1,887 from a manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Sept. 6, 1998. At the time, Smith worked nights as a clerk in the IRS' collection division of the Philadelphia Service Center in Northeast Philadelphia.
The robbery happened in daylight outside a bank on City Avenue, where the restaurant manager had gone to deposit the restaurant's earnings from the prior night.
Later, Smith was arrested for the stickup and learned the restaurant manager would testify against him.
On Oct. 7, 1998, Smith allegedly tapped into an IRS computer data base, the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains "sensitive information about taxpayers."
He used the IRS computer, without authorization, to get the witness' home address, the grand jury said.
Then he used the information "to threaten and intimidate her to prevent her from cooperating with law enforcement officials," the prosecutor said.
After she testified against him at a hearing in December, Smith tried to persuade an associate to kill her by handing him a gun outside her house on Jan. 25, 1999, the grand jury said.
The associate, now cooperating with federal authorities, refused to do Smith's bidding.
In February, Smith was arrested in Baltimore on unrelated charges and was sentenced to a short prison term for possession of a stolen handgun. He's been in jail since then.
The IRS canned Smith in April, the prosecutor said.
Note: The article does not say why he still had access to IRS computer after being busted on two violent felonies! Still feel safe if you have nothing to hide?
Here here! Read the Constitution. It isn't difficult, or long. It spells out what the government is permitted to do, what it is especially not permitted to do, and reserves all other rights to the people. Read the Declaration of Independence. It is frightening that espousing those views today makes you a dangerous potential terrorist if the tone of the media these days is any indication. And if you think what a bunch of dead white guys wrote is irrelevant today, go back farther, to St. Francis, to Rome, to Greece. It is amazing how much relvance Plutarch's "Lives" has to the vicissitudes of corporate culture today. People have not changed much in 3000 years. 220 years ago, the highest and best expression of personal freedom was created and enacted into the fundamental law of the U.S. It's a damn shame to let it slip away. For all our technical cleverness, we will be regarded as especially stupid if we let it happen.
Oh come on! If I have nothing to hide... my ass! Outside of first-world countries official corruption is endemic. Inside the U.S. there is a long history of IRS abuse and other federal law enforcement corruption. It is completely reasonable for the law-abiding to protect themselves. Ask youself: Are the odds greater that a terrorist will blow me up or that some bureaucrat with a hair across his ass is going to mess up my day?
As others have commented, the proposal, if it contains retrictions on commercials and if it makes onerous demands w.r.t. interference, will kill low power FM.
So support the idea, but makes sure your comments specifically point out the bad parts. And add that transmitting Internet data would be particularly beneficial as a way to boost throughput to users doomed to be modem connected for the foreseeable future. Cheap data recievers could make their life much better.
The good news is that there is a whole big world outside the U.S. that could use this kind of technology to make Internet access better.
No, people who find technology frightening are not, in general, intelligent. Mostly they are motivated by an impetus to slow down anything to do with economic expansion becuase they, in general, have not figured out how to participate in economic expansion. Instead, they like to participate in regulation of economic expansion. The criteria for an idea like this is, if you can get funding to try it, good for you. If not, oh well. The net effect of these so called concerned people is that it takes a lot of bakshish to third world despots in outfits like the U.N. to get anything like this off the ground. Seldom is any useful input generated. Finally, when concerned pseudo-geeks get it wrong, like with automobile airbags, they are seldom brought to account for it.
I love it because the opposition to ideas like this is so nakedly luddite (or scientifically illiterate). Even if there is some chance it doesn't work, why not build a pilot project and test it? It would be wonderful if it did.
Some people just can't stand the idea of progress, increased wealth, and higher standards of living. These are the same people who would be concerned about preserving the pristine state of the dark side of the moon.
Re:Instinctive libertarian knee-jerking on Slashdo
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
OK OK so I forgot the guy who lost to Clinton. And that was...? Um. Oh yeah, the next president dad, right!
Re:Instinctive libertarian knee-jerking on Slashdo
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
Reagan? You mean the guy who won the Cold War? Yeah that would be a disaster. Ask any Russian: Reagan is the most important world leader since Churchill. Reagan, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, stand astride the latter half of the 20th century. Read Kissinger's book Diplomacy if you really want to get a queasy feeling about the current bunch of Carter administration retreads. Even Reagan's Vice President, the legendary Dan Quayle, was more effective than the U.N. over the course of its entire existence. These guys, and Jesse Helms, are only irritating to people who find a strong U.S. irritating. Yeah, the U.N., just the people to make sure the whole world benefits from the Internet economy. Ha! Why do you think the WTO is not under the control of the UN? The UN is incompetent to handle any matter having to do with serious economic consequences. You do not have to be a libertarian to know that enabling the UN to tax any aspect of the Internet is a very very bad idea.
The conventional wisdom is that anything you can run down to the corner store to fetch is a lousy direct marketing item. There are exceptions, like those overpriced steaks you can order in the mail. These guys, however, seem to think their vans and warehouses are cheaper than stores to operate. If they are right, then it means the end of big, ugly, cookie-cutter stores. Stores would have to be places you actually want to go. Nothing wrong with this. High value items, like PCs, will continue to be delivered by FedEx and UPS. But I can definitely see some of the in-between items, like clothes and books, becoming the object of strategic investments by, say, L.L. Bean, etc., so that stock can be prepositioned for delivery at lower cost. On the other hand, the grocers may have a few cards to play: automated checkout and more efficient distribution can extend their lives. The really interesting thing about this is that if it really works, it's one of those poductivity enhancements that actually bumps up the GDP growth rate in a sustainable way. Much to the consternation of luddites who will wonder aloud what kinds of jobs the kind of people who bag groceries for a living will be able to find. I recently heard someone on NPR ripping Amazon for taking away mall jobs from kids who might be working at Barnes & Noble (this is on the days this same guy is not too busy ripping mall developers).
Actually, Microsoft does not fear re-use of old PCs with Linux. If anything, this reduces the culture of software piracy in the developing world. This is also a tiny subculture compared with 10 million new PCs manufactured every month (more than TVs now). This is, as far as I can tell, the central story of Linux. It has been covered. And it is well known by most people. Microsoft should fear, and does fear, anything that might catch up to them in terms of the total value proposition, including performance, reliability, capabilities, available applications, etc. in markets where money can be made.
99.9% uptime would be an MTBF of a bit over 40 days. Not exactly space-shot quality, but acceptable for e-commerce. It will have to do better to work in a telco CO, but I would bet that NT-embedded, with the unneeded bits removed, would do pretty well. It looks as if each OS has its own deficiencies, among them: NT clustering is way behind, and Linux has some key kernel bottlenecks for high volume transaction applications. Is it that surprising to find that operating systems put their pants on one leg at a time?
Another knee-jerk liberal sees, and yet does not see.
You have a choice not to buy Microsoft products, and good for those people who actually make that choice instead of whining.
You have a choice of buying a shiny, fast, euro-yuppie car, or an old beater that gets you there.
You have a choice of what to eat and wear.
You do not have a choice of how much government you buy. You do get to vote, but I would glady sell you my vote for the price of my tax bill.
There are a lot of vile companies out there that would love to build walls for you to pay to cross. But, without government help, the RIAA would not be able to, for example, charge what is essentially a private tax enabled by legislation on all audio recording media.
Sure, it isn't a complete solution, but if you disconnected these rent-seekers from their government protectors, they would be SOL.
Is Katz ready to disconnect teacher's unions, construction worker's unions, and the whole "regulatory compliance" industry from their laws protecting their monopolies?
Sure there are a lot of corporations feeding at the trough. But, unless you think business is run by some international cabal (and some people really do think so), business in general, and most people who make their money capitalistically, would readly throw these trough feeders to the dogs in return for open shops, school funding portability, and a generally slashed tax and regulatory environment.
I cannot imagine operating anything sensitive without access to source code, at least in the components of the system that are supposed to keep it secure, like network monitoring, firewalls, and cypto. Otherwise who knows what "exploitable features" might be hidden inside. This is just plain prudence, and it is good to see it publicized. Too bad it took India going nuclear (and catching the U.S. by surprise) to make the Indian government get religion when it comes to securing their data.
It will take publicity like this to make U.S. businesses relaize that they are exposed to corrupt foriegn officials with access to intelligence gathering when they operate overseas. Then we may get some reform of the crypto laws in this country.
Assume it's true, then what?
on
Why Work Sucks
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· Score: 1
Assume everything Jon Katz says is true. Then what? Go back to big hierarchical companies like IBM, Digital, and Wang? Have old farts that drive Buicks and have no clue as your boss? Have a quota of old farts on staff? And what are all these old farts doing clogging up the golf courses when the job market is so tight? Are careers improved by stability? Are "flight attendants" happier than stewardesses were, now that they can stay in theur jobs until they get old, bitter, and snippy about their job being a profession?
Slashdot Mirror
All governments suck, to a pretty large extent. in fact, government, like cola, cars, pizza, music, and blue jeans, is a product. Buy too much of it, with low quality and high price, and it sucks. The difference is that the government can hold a gun to you head and make you buy. IMO, most western governments are about 2X larger and more expensive than they should be. Put them on a PC price curve for a few years are they will suck a lot less.
Which brings us to guns: Guns are a way for the people to stop buying. In the beginning, the U.S. didn't try to sell too much government, and had no fear of an armed citizenry. In fact, selling less governemnt was the major market differentiator for the U.S. when the U.S. was a startup. Now, however, its buy or die.
Is crypto like guns? According to U.S. export law it is. In practice, and in relation to the choice to buy less government, is crypto like guns? Yup. In fact, crypto is more dangerous: It enables stored value that cannot be detected like currency. It enables large scale plans to remain secret. It enforces elements of the consitution, like secrity in one's documents, that are now deemed dangerous. It is better than guns at limiting governments' ability to make us buy.
OK, so who here would buy less government if they could?
For every high-tech wonder like radar imaging satellites, you have cases like the Yugoslav war where simple plywood decoys fooled extensive efforts to find stuff.
There is never a guarantee that a revolution will succeed, or that the most horrifying tactics, as in Cambodia or Rwanda, won't be employed. But the ability of small arms to change the course of history is proven in some cases.
AllAdvantage will pay you to surf, and use whatever ISP you like. You can, right now, subsidize your broadband access this way and not even feel the loss of bandwidth used for ads. Or you could use NetZero and AllAdvantage and pocket all the money. Wierd, eh? But that's capitalism.
So why do /.'ers expect Microsoft to stand still? It isn't just narrow and devious motives that drive them. They do pay attention to larger trends.
A former IRS clerk in Philadelphia allegedly used a confidential government computer data bank to find and try to kill a restaurant manager who had accused him of robbing her.
Dameia "Omar" Smith, 27, of Magnolia Street near Walnut Lane, Germantown, was indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury on robbery, attempted murder, unauthorized computer access and related charges.
If convicted, Smith could be facing about 40 years in prison without chance of parole, said Assistant U.S. Attorney John J. Pease.
Earlier this month, Smith was sentenced to 111/2 to 23 months in prison by a Bucks County judge for an unrelated attempted bank robbery in January in Northampton Township.
In the new federal case, Smith allegedly pulled a pistol and robbed about $1,887 from a manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Sept. 6, 1998. At the time, Smith worked nights as a clerk in the IRS' collection division of the Philadelphia Service Center in Northeast Philadelphia.
The robbery happened in daylight outside a bank on City Avenue, where the restaurant manager had gone to deposit the restaurant's earnings from the prior night.
Later, Smith was arrested for the stickup and learned the restaurant manager would testify against him.
On Oct. 7, 1998, Smith allegedly tapped into an IRS computer data base, the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains "sensitive information about taxpayers."
He used the IRS computer, without authorization, to get the witness' home address, the grand jury said.
Then he used the information "to threaten and intimidate her to prevent her from cooperating with law enforcement officials," the prosecutor said.
After she testified against him at a hearing in December, Smith tried to persuade an associate to kill her by handing him a gun outside her house on Jan. 25, 1999, the grand jury said.
The associate, now cooperating with federal authorities, refused to do Smith's bidding.
In February, Smith was arrested in Baltimore on unrelated charges and was sentenced to a short prison term for possession of a stolen handgun. He's been in jail since then.
The IRS canned Smith in April, the prosecutor said.
Note: The article does not say why he still had access to IRS computer after being busted on two violent felonies! Still feel safe if you have nothing to hide?
Here here! Read the Constitution. It isn't difficult, or long. It spells out what the government is permitted to do, what it is especially not permitted to do, and reserves all other rights to the people. Read the Declaration of Independence. It is frightening that espousing those views today makes you a dangerous potential terrorist if the tone of the media these days is any indication. And if you think what a bunch of dead white guys wrote is irrelevant today, go back farther, to St. Francis, to Rome, to Greece. It is amazing how much relvance Plutarch's "Lives" has to the vicissitudes of corporate culture today. People have not changed much in 3000 years. 220 years ago, the highest and best expression of personal freedom was created and enacted into the fundamental law of the U.S. It's a damn shame to let it slip away. For all our technical cleverness, we will be regarded as especially stupid if we let it happen.
Oh come on! If I have nothing to hide... my ass! Outside of first-world countries official corruption is endemic. Inside the U.S. there is a long history of IRS abuse and other federal law enforcement corruption. It is completely reasonable for the law-abiding to protect themselves. Ask youself: Are the odds greater that a terrorist will blow me up or that some bureaucrat with a hair across his ass is going to mess up my day?
So support the idea, but makes sure your comments specifically point out the bad parts. And add that transmitting Internet data would be particularly beneficial as a way to boost throughput to users doomed to be modem connected for the foreseeable future. Cheap data recievers could make their life much better.
The good news is that there is a whole big world outside the U.S. that could use this kind of technology to make Internet access better.
No, people who find technology frightening are not, in general, intelligent. Mostly they are motivated by an impetus to slow down anything to do with economic expansion becuase they, in general, have not figured out how to participate in economic expansion. Instead, they like to participate in regulation of economic expansion. The criteria for an idea like this is, if you can get funding to try it, good for you. If not, oh well. The net effect of these so called concerned people is that it takes a lot of bakshish to third world despots in outfits like the U.N. to get anything like this off the ground. Seldom is any useful input generated. Finally, when concerned pseudo-geeks get it wrong, like with automobile airbags, they are seldom brought to account for it.
Some people just can't stand the idea of progress, increased wealth, and higher standards of living. These are the same people who would be concerned about preserving the pristine state of the dark side of the moon.
OK OK so I forgot the guy who lost to Clinton. And that was...? Um. Oh yeah, the next president dad, right!
Reagan? You mean the guy who won the Cold War? Yeah that would be a disaster. Ask any Russian: Reagan is the most important world leader since Churchill. Reagan, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, stand astride the latter half of the 20th century. Read Kissinger's book Diplomacy if you really want to get a queasy feeling about the current bunch of Carter administration retreads. Even Reagan's Vice President, the legendary Dan Quayle, was more effective than the U.N. over the course of its entire existence. These guys, and Jesse Helms, are only irritating to people who find a strong U.S. irritating. Yeah, the U.N., just the people to make sure the whole world benefits from the Internet economy. Ha! Why do you think the WTO is not under the control of the UN? The UN is incompetent to handle any matter having to do with serious economic consequences. You do not have to be a libertarian to know that enabling the UN to tax any aspect of the Internet is a very very bad idea.
The conventional wisdom is that anything you can run down to the corner store to fetch is a lousy direct marketing item. There are exceptions, like those overpriced steaks you can order in the mail. These guys, however, seem to think their vans and warehouses are cheaper than stores to operate. If they are right, then it means the end of big, ugly, cookie-cutter stores. Stores would have to be places you actually want to go. Nothing wrong with this. High value items, like PCs, will continue to be delivered by FedEx and UPS. But I can definitely see some of the in-between items, like clothes and books, becoming the object of strategic investments by, say, L.L. Bean, etc., so that stock can be prepositioned for delivery at lower cost. On the other hand, the grocers may have a few cards to play: automated checkout and more efficient distribution can extend their lives. The really interesting thing about this is that if it really works, it's one of those poductivity enhancements that actually bumps up the GDP growth rate in a sustainable way. Much to the consternation of luddites who will wonder aloud what kinds of jobs the kind of people who bag groceries for a living will be able to find. I recently heard someone on NPR ripping Amazon for taking away mall jobs from kids who might be working at Barnes & Noble (this is on the days this same guy is not too busy ripping mall developers).
Actually, Microsoft does not fear re-use of old PCs with Linux. If anything, this reduces the culture of software piracy in the developing world. This is also a tiny subculture compared with 10 million new PCs manufactured every month (more than TVs now). This is, as far as I can tell, the central story of Linux. It has been covered. And it is well known by most people. Microsoft should fear, and does fear, anything that might catch up to them in terms of the total value proposition, including performance, reliability, capabilities, available applications, etc. in markets where money can be made.
99.9% uptime would be an MTBF of a bit over 40 days. Not exactly space-shot quality, but acceptable for e-commerce. It will have to do better to work in a telco CO, but I would bet that NT-embedded, with the unneeded bits removed, would do pretty well. It looks as if each OS has its own deficiencies, among them: NT clustering is way behind, and Linux has some key kernel bottlenecks for high volume transaction applications. Is it that surprising to find that operating systems put their pants on one leg at a time?
Another knee-jerk liberal sees, and yet does not see.
You have a choice not to buy Microsoft products, and good for those people who actually make that choice instead of whining.
You have a choice of buying a shiny, fast, euro-yuppie car, or an old beater that gets you there.
You have a choice of what to eat and wear.
You do not have a choice of how much government you buy. You do get to vote, but I would glady sell you my vote for the price of my tax bill.
There are a lot of vile companies out there that would love to build walls for you to pay to cross. But, without government help, the RIAA would not be able to, for example, charge what is essentially a private tax enabled by legislation on all audio recording media.
Sure, it isn't a complete solution, but if you disconnected these rent-seekers from their government protectors, they would be SOL.
Is Katz ready to disconnect teacher's unions, construction worker's unions, and the whole "regulatory compliance" industry from their laws protecting their monopolies?
Sure there are a lot of corporations feeding at the trough. But, unless you think business is run by some international cabal (and some people really do think so), business in general, and most people who make their money capitalistically, would readly throw these trough feeders to the dogs in return for open shops, school funding portability, and a generally slashed tax and regulatory environment.
Those are the really expensive walls.
I cannot imagine operating anything sensitive without access to source code, at least in the components of the system that are supposed to keep it secure, like network monitoring, firewalls, and cypto. Otherwise who knows what "exploitable features" might be hidden inside. This is just plain prudence, and it is good to see it publicized. Too bad it took India going nuclear (and catching the U.S. by surprise) to make the Indian government get religion when it comes to securing their data.
It will take publicity like this to make U.S. businesses relaize that they are exposed to corrupt foriegn officials with access to intelligence gathering when they operate overseas. Then we may get some reform of the crypto laws in this country.
Assume everything Jon Katz says is true. Then what? Go back to big hierarchical companies like IBM, Digital, and Wang? Have old farts that drive Buicks and have no clue as your boss? Have a quota of old farts on staff? And what are all these old farts doing clogging up the golf courses when the job market is so tight? Are careers improved by stability? Are "flight attendants" happier than stewardesses were, now that they can stay in theur jobs until they get old, bitter, and snippy about their job being a profession?