Here is an exercise for you, Mr. New-School Thinker. Go buy a Commodore 64. (or use an emulator...) Install Contiki on it. There you have a complete GUI system that runs in 64 kilobytes of RAM. That's KILOBYTES, not megabytes!
Great! And what else can you now do with that GUI system? Can you run a DB? Can you, perhaps, run an IM client, a P2P client, an email client, listen to a streaming MP3 station, and be reading/. at the same time? Is this 64K GUI OS event driven, and can it efficiently schedule tasks?
Whatever. Sorry, friend, but you're taking that idea way too far, even if there is a kernel of truth in it.
running some beautifully written, hand-optimized C or assembly code, tuned and tweaked and whittled into glistening sleek perfection over the past 20 years.
Sure, but you're spending all your time improving existing code, while not adding any new functionality. Sure, it may not be the best. But if I have to choose between a bloated POS 1.0 version of pkzip, and no version at all, I'll pick the 1.0 version anyday.
I mean, what exactly are you proposing here? You seem to be bitching that code is bloated, and that if we just did things the "right" way -- "DAMN the shiny new tech" -- we'd be light years ahead. I don't think that's true, certainly not in any software that has a bit of maintainability or extensibility to it. Writing something in assembly would certainly make it lightning fast, but it certainly would make it difficult to improve and maintain. Over time, you wind up going backwards.
And what "shiny new tech" are you talking about? XForms? XML? HTML? CORBA? Where's the line, and how do you determine where that line is? You seem to imply that any technology developed after C++ is just redundant and worthless. If I'm wrong here please correct me.
Prove me wrong, if you can. There are good reasons why things like design patterns, OO, and other modern software design techniques have become widespread. And these reasons are above and beyond their newness. Things that are new but don't work well die, especially when better options beocme available.
Sad, but true. How can a donation be political (in support of policy), when you pay both teams?
Dunno. I'm keeping my eye out on the whole Howard Dean thing. They're raising tons of money using the net, and in the process they are democratizing fund raising. I agree that looking at big money donations is disheartening, but I disagree with St. Bill here. The Dean fundraising is just one reason why.
The other is the current occupant of the White House.
Republicans would no more rig an election than they would, I dunno, commit larceny.
Republicans don't do anything wrong, ever. Especially if it has political traction.
If they do do something wrong, well then, the Democrats did it first, which makes it excusable. The Republicans just did it to ensure their political survival, see. Or it's because the ends justifies the means. Abortion is murder, Jesus is coming, and liberals are commie terrorists. Anything is justifiable if you're purpose is higher.
to say Salon is independent is a bit of a stretch. They may print what you like to read, but independent is not an accurate description.
Perhaps I should have written more clearly. By independent I meant "financially independent of any parent organization." Salon is owned by no one other than themselves, and to my knowledge they are the only news site that can say that.
What do you mean when you say that they are not independent?
And so it's more free if it's controlled by the government?
Who the fuck said anything about government control? We're talking about placing ownership limits. That's it. If you own media outlets, you are limited in what you can own. Limits. On. Ownership. No government ownership. No "socialization" of the media. Lim. Its.
The UD is utopian crap which shouldn't really enter into any discussion of politics in the United States.
Really. I find it fascinating that you think that a topic shouldn't enter into a dicussion based on geography. So should it be discussed in Canada? Peru? Bangladesh, perhaps?
Oh, but perhaps you meant that the idea shouldn't be discussed because it goes against American ideals. Ideals such as a strong belief in free speech, the free exchange of ideas, and that the power to govern rests in the hands of the people. Hmm. Sounds pretty goddamn idealistic to me. Lord knows we ain't got room for idealism in MERKA.
And Zenger? How the hell is that even relevant? Thanks for reminding us how things were 200 years ago. I just bet you patted yourself on the back for that obscure historical reference: "How many people know about that? Heh, heh, heh. That'll learn 'em." News flash, Don Quixote: things be different now. Jurisprudence has changed, laws have changed, interpretation of the Constitution has changed.
You're a fucking idiot. Just wanted to let you know that. Go eat a Pop Tart and shut the fuck up.
While it's true that these options may (or may not) have existed a generation ago, it is my considered opinion that most of them are on the fringe, expensive to break into and maintain, and have yet to prove themselves viable.
I agree. So far as I can tell, the only independent news organization on the web is Salon, and it has barely been able to survive, let alone prosper enough to buy other organizations. Every other news site with original content is just an extension of some other, offline version: newspapers, cable news channels, etc.
In short, Powell's argument that there are more choices today rings hollow. The Internet has much to be said for it, but levelling the playing field of the media isn't something it has been able to accomplish.
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday afternoon that Orwell's dystopian vision of the future, in which Big Brother used technology as a form of social control, "didn't come true, and I don't believe it will."
Is it just me, or is the view when you're worth bookoo bagallions just a little bit different than from when you have to worry about finances more? Maybe it's just me, but it seems that Gates, being in the stratosphere as far as powerful men are concerned, doesn't have to concern himself with Orwellian government because he is above the fray.
"Class warfare" and yadda-yadda, but having that much money and influence simply has to affect how you view the world. This is a classic example of this in play. *I* worry about government intrusiveness and civil liberties because I am almost completely powerless - as an individual - to prevent it. Sure I got a couple of guns, but what good would that do against a government?
AFAIK, Intellivision was the first system to have a RTS/SimCity-ish game: Utopia. You controlled a couple of islands, and had to collect resources and such. Very fun and innovative game for the day.
I work at a pretty large.com, one who actually survived the bust and maintains a profit, and has a pretty significant amount of traffic. We have used ATG Dynamo for our application server for several years, partially based upon the built-in ability it has to do an MVC architecture, personalization, pools, and so forth.
However, we just completed a web application that was built using many open source components, including Struts, Validator, JUnit, and others. By using open source components we have completely divorced ourselves from using the proprietary technologies used by Dynamo, and have opened ourselves up to the possibility of using a different, and of course cheaper, application server. This would not have been possible were it not for stable, performant open soruce initiatives.
Not only is management happy because we have (potentially) saved a bunch of money, but the developers are happy because they are much more friendly towards open source than closed technologies; it is far easier to get an answer to a question via Google than it is to pay for and go through the hassle of using a support contract of some kind.
I do not mean to denegrate Dynamo at all, because it is actually a fairly good application server. The licensing costs, however, just cannot be justified when so much of the functionality provided by it is already available elsewhere, for free.
It's not like it isn't already being done every single day. OJ bought his way out of jail. Bill Gates bought his way out of having his company split up.
I'm not so sure that I disagree with you, but I certainly disagree with how you got there. Your argument is another variation of the "two wrongs make a right" argument, and it's a non sequitur on top of that. Simply because some wealthy person did something wrong does not excuse that wrong; wrong is still wrong.
And the connection between hiring expensive lawyers and paying to use a fast lane is at best a torturous one.
Pretty much the only language out there that is available on every OS and every system is JavaScript. Starting out beginning programmers with JavaScript would be easy, wouldn't require a (separate) compiler, and would allow the student to learn in a familiar environment, namely the web browser. Doing eye-candy tricks with the browser would provide immediate feedback, and JavaScript is complex enough that you could even introduce some mid-level concepts into the mix, such as classes and regexps.
Conversely, it also keeps the student from having to bother with crap like typecasting, exception handling, and null pointers until they are more ready for such things.
This:
alert("Hello, world.");
in an HTML file is much easier to explain to beginners (and for them to grasp) than is, for example, the following:
Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes.
So, instead of clacking away on a keyboard all day I can basically feel up boobies while I work?
What is more troubling is exactly what the original poster mentioned: just because Apple's use of DRM is reasonable today, doesn't mean it will be reasonable in six months or a year.
Although this is somewhat of a slippery slope, I tend to agree with you. The reason that I am able to personally forgive Apple's DRM scheme is that they seem to have come to a happy medium between the free-for-all that most users want and the totalitarian control desired by the industry. Their DRM addresses most concerns expressed by both camps, and is a comprosmise that is not 100% satisfying to either. For me, this is an indication that it is a decent arrangement.
So, yes we should be careful in accepting any DRM scheme. But we also should bear in mind that some form of DRM is probably inevitable, so long as most works fall under copyright and there are market interests at play in controlling the distribution of these works.
Please take your paranoid evangelical ramblings to the nearest psycho ward and seek professional help. The world is not out to get you, you are not important, there is no grand conspiracy, the "Left Behind" series was fiction, and drugged out Middle Easterners could not predict the future. This is not hyperbole, this is fact, and I can prove it to you on an Etch-a-Sketch.
But -- of course -- I am just a foolish tool of the conspiracy, duped by Satan's minions and too stupid to see The Truth that is The Word. Of course.
Listen, monkey spank, there are always nutbags in any given political movement. Always. Pointing out the jokers on either side of the political spectrum does nothing to bring us closer to the truth, and it does nothing to invalidate general principles.
Examples from the right? How about Rep. Tom "DDT never hurt anybody" Delay? Or perhaps Ken "Clinton's penis is my life" Starr? Pat Robertson? Newt Gingrich? Donald Wildmon? That guy who wrote the "Left Behind" series? Damn near every Southern Baptist preacher?
Pot, meet kettle. Next time try to say something that actually is intelligent and/or insightful. Setting up straw men is neither.
The article makes no claim about the typesafe enum pattern being broken, it just points out that you have to be careful if you use it and implement Serialzable. This is something that Bloch specifically addresses in Effective Java, and does not mean that the entire pattern should be scrapped. You just have to be aware of potential problems.
Since carriage return/line feed pairs are totally unimportant in HTML...
Should be, but aren't in IE. I don't have the code here at home, but we have had bugs in IE before where the fix was to put the table cell tags on a single line. It's nothing major, but there were 1-pixel differences that QA bounced back to us and which took forever to figure out. And the only difference between the working code and the broken code was the presence of new lines.
But, see, we spend all this money on the military and all the really badass toys that they have, so we just GOTTA use em. Otherwise, hell, we'd just be spending money for no good reason! So don't you worry your pretty little head. We'll protect you. Merka's enemies are legion.
By the way, have you seen the Global Hawk? Neat! There was a show about it on PBS last night. Love those military toys! Mmmmmboy! That's geek friendly propaganda right there!
I think this it would be helpful to keep in mind that there are people and organizations out there -- both commercial and governmental -- that would like to see the Internet become more controllable. Just off the top of my head:
Social conservatives - would like to see less porn available
Law enforcement agencies - would like having an easier time pinpointing who commits a crime, or uses the Internet as a tool in committing a crime
Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel, etc. e.g. - Those who would like to see power consolidated into fewer entities, allowing much greater control over what content is allowed for publication.
Corporatists/free market fundamentalists - Overlapping with the above, those who believe that corporate consolidation is always a good thing, or at least that the good of such consolidation almost always outweights the bad.
And so forth. Basically, there are many, many organizations who -- for reasons both noble and not -- wish to see this wild environment put under some sort of tighter control. Given the current political situation, where those with massive amounts of capital are able to shape these discussions, I would not be at all surprised to find the structure of I2 changed so that governments and large corporations have a much greater amount of control.
If there is a profit to be made in centralizing control of the internet I would imagine it will someday happen. If this can be combined with the "war on terrorism", such an outcome is almost guaranteed. The current distributed nature of the Internet can be changed or regulated. One need only look at China as an example of this, both pro and con.
I read a book many years ago called "Eon" by Greg Bear wherein he described something very similar to what you described. In this book, modern humans encountered humans from the future where body modification was quite common. In fact, there were styles and fashions for bodies, much like we have today with clothing.
This was a small part of the book, but I've thought about it several times since then, especially in regards to discussions on GM.
Because my GOD what if somebody holds political views that differ from yours! Why, that's just unpatriotic! Destructive! Communist! Give them money? HELL NO! Especially if they are so obviously bent on the destruction of MERKA! Anyone who doesn't support the GOP is in favor of nuking Washington, DC.
Must... support... the prevailing... political opinion... Must... be... politically... correct.
What's funny is that you don't even realize how PC you're being, and probably cringe at the label.
Your voice doesn't matter if you shout once and then shut up. But if you come back out, 8 months down the road, and yell the same thing, but louder, then people will start to listen.
Bullshit right back atcha. People get bored with crybabies moaning about the same thing, year after year. "Rights! Civil liberties!" Anachronisms. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum, they are competing with other opinions whose proponents are also screaming long and loud about their importance.
Not to mention that unforseen circumstances a la 9/11 tend to change what voices people listen and respond favorably to. On 9/10/2001 many more people might have been at least sympathetic towards the causes espoused by the EFF, et al. But since then we have seen a dramatic and fundamental shift both in public opinion and the behavior of law enforcement (especially the AG's office.) And people don't seem to care. They are incredibly concerned with security and their own personal safety, which they believe to be threatened. Liberty takes a back seat to safety, and Franklin can fuck himself.
Why not do away with entertainment purchases for a year to see how much of an impact we can make? Are we too addicted to their drug to do this?
Because for this to have any effect whatsoever it would have to be done by a significant percentage of the population. How will you be able to spread the word about this boycott? Do you think you could ever get more than a modicum of people to join in? Man, hell no! "Law & Order" is on tonight!
Think about this: There hasn't been an effective consumer boycotts since the 1980's. Even the religious right has given up on product boycotts. Why do you think that is? And do you think you could fight the backlash of propaganda from the media were this to ever even to show the smallest signs of gaining traction?
maybe it's just me but some of these bills seems to be blatantly in violation of the BILL OF RIGHTS. Anyone remember that thing? I'm sure you've heard of it.
Heard of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't carry much weight in modern judicial circles. Unless, of course, we're talking about the Second Amendment. The other amendments are hated and anachronistic tools of the secular liberal elites, used to prevent criminals from being vigorously persecuted and to protect pornographers and pedophiles.
America is a good, solid, conservative nation now. This means that we don't care about Constitutional rights, just so long as we feel safe and happy sitting on our fat asses watching whatever bile Fox is spewing out for sweeps week. "PATRIOT Act? Wazzat? DMCA? Never heard of it. Rights? Jesse Jackson complains about rights. I don't want to have anything to do with him. We have to fight terrorism, after all!"
And oh yeah, Jesus is coming. Gotta have neocons in office in case that happens.
The war of memetics has been fought and liberalism lost.
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Here is an exercise for you, Mr. New-School Thinker. Go buy a Commodore 64. (or use an emulator...) Install Contiki on it. There you have a complete GUI system that runs in 64 kilobytes of RAM. That's KILOBYTES, not megabytes!
Great! And what else can you now do with that GUI system? Can you run a DB? Can you, perhaps, run an IM client, a P2P client, an email client, listen to a streaming MP3 station, and be reading /. at the same time? Is this 64K GUI OS event driven, and can it efficiently schedule tasks?
Whatever. Sorry, friend, but you're taking that idea way too far, even if there is a kernel of truth in it.
running some beautifully written, hand-optimized C or assembly code, tuned and tweaked and whittled into glistening sleek perfection over the past 20 years.
Sure, but you're spending all your time improving existing code, while not adding any new functionality. Sure, it may not be the best. But if I have to choose between a bloated POS 1.0 version of pkzip, and no version at all, I'll pick the 1.0 version anyday.
I mean, what exactly are you proposing here? You seem to be bitching that code is bloated, and that if we just did things the "right" way -- "DAMN the shiny new tech" -- we'd be light years ahead. I don't think that's true, certainly not in any software that has a bit of maintainability or extensibility to it. Writing something in assembly would certainly make it lightning fast, but it certainly would make it difficult to improve and maintain. Over time, you wind up going backwards.
And what "shiny new tech" are you talking about? XForms? XML? HTML? CORBA? Where's the line, and how do you determine where that line is? You seem to imply that any technology developed after C++ is just redundant and worthless. If I'm wrong here please correct me.
Prove me wrong, if you can. There are good reasons why things like design patterns, OO, and other modern software design techniques have become widespread. And these reasons are above and beyond their newness. Things that are new but don't work well die, especially when better options beocme available.
Sad, but true. How can a donation be political (in support of policy), when you pay both teams?
Dunno. I'm keeping my eye out on the whole Howard Dean thing. They're raising tons of money using the net, and in the process they are democratizing fund raising. I agree that looking at big money donations is disheartening, but I disagree with St. Bill here. The Dean fundraising is just one reason why.
The other is the current occupant of the White House.
Republicans would no more rig an election than they would, I dunno, commit larceny.
Republicans don't do anything wrong, ever. Especially if it has political traction.
If they do do something wrong, well then, the Democrats did it first, which makes it excusable. The Republicans just did it to ensure their political survival, see. Or it's because the ends justifies the means. Abortion is murder, Jesus is coming, and liberals are commie terrorists. Anything is justifiable if you're purpose is higher.
to say Salon is independent is a bit of a stretch. They may print what you like to read, but independent is not an accurate description.
Perhaps I should have written more clearly. By independent I meant "financially independent of any parent organization." Salon is owned by no one other than themselves, and to my knowledge they are the only news site that can say that.
What do you mean when you say that they are not independent?
And so it's more free if it's controlled by the government?
Who the fuck said anything about government control? We're talking about placing ownership limits. That's it. If you own media outlets, you are limited in what you can own. Limits. On. Ownership. No government ownership. No "socialization" of the media. Lim. Its.
The UD is utopian crap which shouldn't really enter into any discussion of politics in the United States.
Really. I find it fascinating that you think that a topic shouldn't enter into a dicussion based on geography. So should it be discussed in Canada? Peru? Bangladesh, perhaps?
Oh, but perhaps you meant that the idea shouldn't be discussed because it goes against American ideals. Ideals such as a strong belief in free speech, the free exchange of ideas, and that the power to govern rests in the hands of the people. Hmm. Sounds pretty goddamn idealistic to me. Lord knows we ain't got room for idealism in MERKA .
And Zenger? How the hell is that even relevant? Thanks for reminding us how things were 200 years ago. I just bet you patted yourself on the back for that obscure historical reference: "How many people know about that? Heh, heh, heh. That'll learn 'em." News flash, Don Quixote: things be different now. Jurisprudence has changed, laws have changed, interpretation of the Constitution has changed.
You're a fucking idiot. Just wanted to let you know that. Go eat a Pop Tart and shut the fuck up.
While it's true that these options may (or may not) have existed a generation ago, it is my considered opinion that most of them are on the fringe, expensive to break into and maintain, and have yet to prove themselves viable.
I agree. So far as I can tell, the only independent news organization on the web is Salon, and it has barely been able to survive, let alone prosper enough to buy other organizations. Every other news site with original content is just an extension of some other, offline version: newspapers, cable news channels, etc.
In short, Powell's argument that there are more choices today rings hollow. The Internet has much to be said for it, but levelling the playing field of the media isn't something it has been able to accomplish.
See this post.
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday afternoon that Orwell's dystopian vision of the future, in which Big Brother used technology as a form of social control, "didn't come true, and I don't believe it will."
Is it just me, or is the view when you're worth bookoo bagallions just a little bit different than from when you have to worry about finances more? Maybe it's just me, but it seems that Gates, being in the stratosphere as far as powerful men are concerned, doesn't have to concern himself with Orwellian government because he is above the fray.
"Class warfare" and yadda-yadda, but having that much money and influence simply has to affect how you view the world. This is a classic example of this in play. *I* worry about government intrusiveness and civil liberties because I am almost completely powerless - as an individual - to prevent it. Sure I got a couple of guns, but what good would that do against a government?
AFAIK, Intellivision was the first system to have a RTS/SimCity-ish game: Utopia. You controlled a couple of islands, and had to collect resources and such. Very fun and innovative game for the day.
I work at a pretty large .com, one who actually survived the bust and maintains a profit, and has a pretty significant amount of traffic. We have used ATG Dynamo for our application server for several years, partially based upon the built-in ability it has to do an MVC architecture, personalization, pools, and so forth.
However, we just completed a web application that was built using many open source components, including Struts, Validator, JUnit, and others. By using open source components we have completely divorced ourselves from using the proprietary technologies used by Dynamo, and have opened ourselves up to the possibility of using a different, and of course cheaper, application server. This would not have been possible were it not for stable, performant open soruce initiatives.
Not only is management happy because we have (potentially) saved a bunch of money, but the developers are happy because they are much more friendly towards open source than closed technologies; it is far easier to get an answer to a question via Google than it is to pay for and go through the hassle of using a support contract of some kind.
I do not mean to denegrate Dynamo at all, because it is actually a fairly good application server. The licensing costs, however, just cannot be justified when so much of the functionality provided by it is already available elsewhere, for free.
It's not like it isn't already being done every single day. OJ bought his way out of jail. Bill Gates bought his way out of having his company split up.
I'm not so sure that I disagree with you, but I certainly disagree with how you got there. Your argument is another variation of the "two wrongs make a right" argument, and it's a non sequitur on top of that. Simply because some wealthy person did something wrong does not excuse that wrong; wrong is still wrong.
And the connection between hiring expensive lawyers and paying to use a fast lane is at best a torturous one.
Pretty much the only language out there that is available on every OS and every system is JavaScript. Starting out beginning programmers with JavaScript would be easy, wouldn't require a (separate) compiler, and would allow the student to learn in a familiar environment, namely the web browser. Doing eye-candy tricks with the browser would provide immediate feedback, and JavaScript is complex enough that you could even introduce some mid-level concepts into the mix, such as classes and regexps.
Conversely, it also keeps the student from having to bother with crap like typecasting, exception handling, and null pointers until they are more ready for such things.
This:
alert("Hello, world.");in an HTML file is much easier to explain to beginners (and for them to grasp) than is, for example, the following:
try {out.print("Hello, would.");
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Exception in out.print()");
}
I would like to restate the key argument here: JavaScript is available on every modern desktop system, and is therefore available to everybody.
From the article:
Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes.
So, instead of clacking away on a keyboard all day I can basically feel up boobies while I work?
Is there a downside to this?
What is more troubling is exactly what the original poster mentioned: just because Apple's use of DRM is reasonable today, doesn't mean it will be reasonable in six months or a year.
Although this is somewhat of a slippery slope, I tend to agree with you. The reason that I am able to personally forgive Apple's DRM scheme is that they seem to have come to a happy medium between the free-for-all that most users want and the totalitarian control desired by the industry. Their DRM addresses most concerns expressed by both camps, and is a comprosmise that is not 100% satisfying to either. For me, this is an indication that it is a decent arrangement.
So, yes we should be careful in accepting any DRM scheme. But we also should bear in mind that some form of DRM is probably inevitable, so long as most works fall under copyright and there are market interests at play in controlling the distribution of these works.
Hello,
Please take your paranoid evangelical ramblings to the nearest psycho ward and seek professional help. The world is not out to get you, you are not important, there is no grand conspiracy, the "Left Behind" series was fiction, and drugged out Middle Easterners could not predict the future. This is not hyperbole, this is fact, and I can prove it to you on an Etch-a-Sketch.
But -- of course -- I am just a foolish tool of the conspiracy, duped by Satan's minions and too stupid to see The Truth that is The Word. Of course.
Weirdo.
My, my. Aren't we high and mighty.
Listen, monkey spank, there are always nutbags in any given political movement. Always. Pointing out the jokers on either side of the political spectrum does nothing to bring us closer to the truth, and it does nothing to invalidate general principles.
Examples from the right? How about Rep. Tom "DDT never hurt anybody" Delay? Or perhaps Ken "Clinton's penis is my life" Starr? Pat Robertson? Newt Gingrich? Donald Wildmon? That guy who wrote the "Left Behind" series? Damn near every Southern Baptist preacher?
Pot, meet kettle. Next time try to say something that actually is intelligent and/or insightful. Setting up straw men is neither.
The article makes no claim about the typesafe enum pattern being broken, it just points out that you have to be careful if you use it and implement Serialzable. This is something that Bloch specifically addresses in Effective Java, and does not mean that the entire pattern should be scrapped. You just have to be aware of potential problems.
Since carriage return/line feed pairs are totally unimportant in HTML...
Should be, but aren't in IE. I don't have the code here at home, but we have had bugs in IE before where the fix was to put the table cell tags on a single line. It's nothing major, but there were 1-pixel differences that QA bounced back to us and which took forever to figure out. And the only difference between the working code and the broken code was the presence of new lines.
But, see, we spend all this money on the military and all the really badass toys that they have, so we just GOTTA use em. Otherwise, hell, we'd just be spending money for no good reason! So don't you worry your pretty little head. We'll protect you. Merka's enemies are legion.
By the way, have you seen the Global Hawk? Neat! There was a show about it on PBS last night. Love those military toys! Mmmmmboy! That's geek friendly propaganda right there!
I think this it would be helpful to keep in mind that there are people and organizations out there -- both commercial and governmental -- that would like to see the Internet become more controllable. Just off the top of my head:
And so forth. Basically, there are many, many organizations who -- for reasons both noble and not -- wish to see this wild environment put under some sort of tighter control. Given the current political situation, where those with massive amounts of capital are able to shape these discussions, I would not be at all surprised to find the structure of I2 changed so that governments and large corporations have a much greater amount of control.
If there is a profit to be made in centralizing control of the internet I would imagine it will someday happen. If this can be combined with the "war on terrorism", such an outcome is almost guaranteed. The current distributed nature of the Internet can be changed or regulated. One need only look at China as an example of this, both pro and con.
I read a book many years ago called "Eon" by Greg Bear wherein he described something very similar to what you described. In this book, modern humans encountered humans from the future where body modification was quite common. In fact, there were styles and fashions for bodies, much like we have today with clothing.
This was a small part of the book, but I've thought about it several times since then, especially in regards to discussions on GM.
Because my GOD what if somebody holds political views that differ from yours! Why, that's just unpatriotic! Destructive! Communist! Give them money? HELL NO! Especially if they are so obviously bent on the destruction of MERKA! Anyone who doesn't support the GOP is in favor of nuking Washington, DC.
Must... support... the prevailing... political opinion... Must... be... politically... correct.
What's funny is that you don't even realize how PC you're being, and probably cringe at the label.
Your voice doesn't matter if you shout once and then shut up. But if you come back out, 8 months down the road, and yell the same thing, but louder, then people will start to listen.
Bullshit right back atcha. People get bored with crybabies moaning about the same thing, year after year. "Rights! Civil liberties!" Anachronisms. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum, they are competing with other opinions whose proponents are also screaming long and loud about their importance.
Not to mention that unforseen circumstances a la 9/11 tend to change what voices people listen and respond favorably to. On 9/10/2001 many more people might have been at least sympathetic towards the causes espoused by the EFF, et al. But since then we have seen a dramatic and fundamental shift both in public opinion and the behavior of law enforcement (especially the AG's office.) And people don't seem to care. They are incredibly concerned with security and their own personal safety, which they believe to be threatened. Liberty takes a back seat to safety, and Franklin can fuck himself.
Why not do away with entertainment purchases for a year to see how much of an impact we can make? Are we too addicted to their drug to do this?
Because for this to have any effect whatsoever it would have to be done by a significant percentage of the population. How will you be able to spread the word about this boycott? Do you think you could ever get more than a modicum of people to join in? Man, hell no! "Law & Order" is on tonight!
Think about this: There hasn't been an effective consumer boycotts since the 1980's. Even the religious right has given up on product boycotts. Why do you think that is? And do you think you could fight the backlash of propaganda from the media were this to ever even to show the smallest signs of gaining traction?
maybe it's just me but some of these bills seems to be blatantly in violation of the BILL OF RIGHTS. Anyone remember that thing? I'm sure you've heard of it.
Heard of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't carry much weight in modern judicial circles. Unless, of course, we're talking about the Second Amendment. The other amendments are hated and anachronistic tools of the secular liberal elites, used to prevent criminals from being vigorously persecuted and to protect pornographers and pedophiles.
America is a good, solid, conservative nation now. This means that we don't care about Constitutional rights, just so long as we feel safe and happy sitting on our fat asses watching whatever bile Fox is spewing out for sweeps week. "PATRIOT Act? Wazzat? DMCA? Never heard of it. Rights? Jesse Jackson complains about rights. I don't want to have anything to do with him. We have to fight terrorism, after all!"
And oh yeah, Jesus is coming. Gotta have neocons in office in case that happens.
The war of memetics has been fought and liberalism lost.