However, in the real world..there are a lot of shady outlets which either haven't bothered to make their privacy policy clear or don't respect the privacy of their customers.
It really dosn't matter if the policy is clear or not. If someone is a crook they will simply lie anyway. As well as it being trivial to write a policy full of loopholes. The only really meaningful policy would be one along the lines of "If you supply any customers' details to a third party without explicit authority (either from the customer or via a court order) then you go to jail."
A line must be drawn, however, when it comes to fighting and eliminating crime. Individuals who rape children deserve no privacy. Individuals who sell drugs deserve no privacy. Disgusting politicians who accept dirty money for their campaigns deserve no privacy.
Why should pharmacists (or bar tenders) have no privacy? Exactly what money is "dirty"...
I would recommend a triple boot option for all air traffic control towers and naval units.
Simply partition the hard drive three ways and use one for linux, one for windows, and the last for OS X. If a virus trashes one system at least you'd still have redundancy.
It isn't very redundent. A virus which trashes the HDD or the BIOS would render such a machine unbootable, as would a hardware failure.
I never even imagined it was about money. It's about security and accountability. I can't imagine being the fricking Navy and being willing to run Windows or similar on some of my combat capable equipment...
Which probably shouldn't be "off the shelf" hardware anyway. AFAIK there are no civilian systems which have to cope with both hostile environments and people activly trying to destroy them. Even though something like a chemical or nuclear power plant might have some similar risks, including counting terrorist attacks, it dosn't deliberatly place itself in "harms way". Would the USS Liberty still have been able to call for help had the ship been running Windows?
COTS stands for "Commercial, Off The Shelf"... Items that can be found in the civilian world. For example, instead of spending millions of dollars developing a navigation radar, they might just buy a commercial model from Furuno
In the process probably spending lots of money to check out if the whatever is actually suitable for military use. Possibly also hacking it to ensure that it's sufficently different from "stock" that a (potential) enemy can't test it out themselves. Both sides in a conflict having access to the same hardware has lead to situations like the Argentinian airforce being able to train to avoid being detected by Royal Navy (type 42) destroyers and Chechneans being unable to shoot down Russian aircraft.
They want the public to buy their stuff with the least govt. interference (i.e. regulation).
It can be rather more complex than that. If regulation will harm (potential) competitors more than then established industries may be very pro regulation. (So long as they are writing the regulations.)
Also, if the govt. is corrupt they will use the govt. to stifle competition.
Corruption and goverment appear to go together. Thus it's more meaningful to ask "How corrupt" a goverment is...
SLIGHT difference. The War on Drugs has a certain backing in the thinkofthechildren crowd, who think that if there are no drugs anymore, kids won't take them.
Only in the sense that the interest groups have slightly different lobbying techniques. In both cases there is a lot of lobbying going on.
Whenever a new design for a 2-legged robot shows up, people immediately complain about how impractical bipedalism is and that the problem can easily be solved with more legs. But if that were the case, if there were no advantage to bipedalism, then bipedal organisms would not have shown up at all, let alone numerous times in separate groups of animals through history.
The reason that bipedalism shows up in animals is that the basic bodyplan of all vertebrates has two sets on limbs. It's easier in evolutionary terms to modify the pectoral limbs than to add additional limbs. This does not apply to robots.
Maybe so that paralegics and quadriplegics can use stairs like everyone else?
Given the size of this thing you'd have a tough time getting it up most stairs. Even if it's feet could fit there's still the problem that the operator's head appears to be more than 3 metres above the ground.
A lighter and slimmer version would be a superior solution to using an electric wheelchair, provided it can be done sufficiently cheaply.
So long as it is closer to normal human size. Otherwise the operator is likely to be nicknamed "Hagrid".
and i suppose it did not occur to you that there is a very good reason WHY open source is not used extensively in defence? who wrote that code? did you audit every single line?
This kind of argument is even more applicable to any proprietary software. Try even getting the code to the typical Windows machine...
Lawmakers get all red-pen happy when issues pop up because whiny constituents demand that SOMEONE do SOMETHING to keep little Timmy from hearing "shit" on TV, or possibly, after specifically looking up how to accomplish it, have an encounter with a prostitute in a video game. It's not fair to blame legislatures, though, because they are acting in direct response to the public. They want them to write laws.
How do you tell the difference between "the public" and a special interest claiming the represent the public though? The latter can lobby 24/7 and ensure that they have a single clear message. Not only do regular people have lives to lead they need not have exactly the same opinion even amongst a group with broad agreement.
Having non-lawyers write laws will result in really poorly-written laws with plenty of loopholes.
This is a problem with plenty of existing laws. Even though it is specifically part of a legislature's job to look for loopholes and ammend as applicable. There is nothing stopping a proposed law being subjected to critical examination by either lawyers or members of the public.
There are way too many ties between the people who write the law and the people who make money knowing the law. Politicans aren't about to put lawyers out of work by making the legal system intelligible to the common citizen.
There are actually two related problems, too many career politicans and too many of them being lawyers.
It's different because there is an actual law against copyrigth-infringement, and most of the people threathened are actually guilty of breaking that law.
If the courts are working correctly it's a requirement for the plaintiff (or prosecution) to prove that the defendent broke specific laws in specific ways.
Copyrigth-law, as currently written, makes everyone a criminal. But only the ones that RIAA (or other large copyrigth-holders) choose to go after, get punished.
"Everyone" almost certainly includes the RIAA themselves. In certain cases "unclean hands" can be a perfectly valid defence.
We should remove or change laws which we do not intend to uphold.
It's perfectly possible for laws which have little popular support to be enforced both randomly and extremely. e.g. the "war on drugs".
Otherwise we hand over the power of defining de-facto law to those deciding what and whom to investigate. (because if everyone is guilty, by deciding to investigate someone you are de-facto deciding to punish that person)
There dosn't even appear to be much actual investigation going on here. Instead more or less random demands for money.
One such group or perhaps a few do come out of the woodwork and it is part of their "act." They become popular, because they are "cute" and can sing and can dance. The labels observe the popularity and decide that the market can tolerate 100 of these bands. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Not just with music. The same thing can happen with TV and movies. If the reason the original was popular is that it/they were different then bringing in the "clones" is certain to be a failure.
Within Western Europe, the USA and Australia (Plus others) the money gained from private sales of pirated music is not used to fund terrorism, generally speaking.
Yet, ironically, "legitimate" sales may well help fund terrorism. The reason is that private sales generally don't involve taxation. A large number of governments use a portion of their taxpayers money to fund terrorists. (Sometimes fairly indirectly, sometimes not.)
And Phil Spector may have used his legitimate music money to purchase a weapon that he allegedly used to shoot Lana Clarkson.
There's also the issue of illegal drug use by "artists" and other people associated with the music industry. Thus it could be argued that "file sharing" is actually keeping money away from organised crime...
If they really wanted to stump the hackers, they could implement AACS in a custom ASIC, which would require an electron microscope to crack.
Except that it wouldn't. There are no doubt "hackers" who could get the use of an electron microscope. Either by use of money or trickery or maybe because it's part of their job/studies.
Unless you somehow find a way to get keys out of the chip, this will be 100% secure against key extraction. Probing buses with logic analyzers and power analysis were decent methods back when people were trying to crack 1980s-era smartcards running at a few hundred kilohertz. They don't work too well against modern hardware.
Except that the tools which can be used to perform such analysis have also gotten faster in the last 20 odd years.
I should point out what I said is true only for symmetrical keys. For asymmetrical keys, Alice has the private key and Bob has Alice's public key, and Alice can give Bob her public key at any point in public without fear of a typical Carol decrypting the communications. However, in this situation Carol owns Alice and thus owns Alice's private key; Carol effectively becomes Alice. Again, the encryption is broken.
Which is the reason the whole idea behind DRM is flawed. When it comes to data stored on a readonly media the cyphertext, hence the key(s) needed to decrypt it are fixed anyway.
And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.
Another relevent term might be "corporate socialism" where the redistribution is more to corporate than actual people...
What happened to all that campaigning for free trade... guess it's ok as long as it's not music... or bananas... or cars...
Exactly this kind of thing is more "business news" than "entertainment news". As it exposes the hypocricy of claims of "free trade", "globalization", etc. The real story here is the (ab)use of the legal system to hinder the "globalization" of retail business.
Prices for *everything* in the UK are outrageously higher than in continental Europe, USA and even Mexico.
Price comparisons would be easier if the UK were to adopt the Euro. Though it can be especially obvious in comparison with the US where the numbers are the same the only difference is the currency symbol.
It is so stupid that they do it *even* against their own companies. For another example see the Tesco vs Levi where Tesco (a Wal*Mart like supermarket) was importing Levi's jeans cheaper than the price they got from Levi's... guess what happened? Levi's sued and they where forced to buy directly from Levi's... at the highest price.
So called "free trade" and "globalization" appears to only be PC when it involves "outsourcing", manufacturing and "call centres". But not when it involves customers or retail companies. When it's cheaper for a retailer to buy goods (possibly from another retailer) thousands of miles away and ship them half way around the planet than it is to source them "locally" something is definitly very wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
However, in the real world..there are a lot of shady outlets which either haven't bothered to make their privacy policy clear or don't respect the privacy of their customers.
It really dosn't matter if the policy is clear or not. If someone is a crook they will simply lie anyway. As well as it being trivial to write a policy full of loopholes.
The only really meaningful policy would be one along the lines of "If you supply any customers' details to a third party without explicit authority (either from the customer or via a court order) then you go to jail."
A line must be drawn, however, when it comes to fighting and eliminating crime. Individuals who rape children deserve no privacy. Individuals who sell drugs deserve no privacy. Disgusting politicians who accept dirty money for their campaigns deserve no privacy.
Why should pharmacists (or bar tenders) have no privacy? Exactly what money is "dirty"...
I would recommend a triple boot option for all air traffic control towers and naval units. Simply partition the hard drive three ways and use one for linux, one for windows, and the last for OS X. If a virus trashes one system at least you'd still have redundancy.
It isn't very redundent. A virus which trashes the HDD or the BIOS would render such a machine unbootable, as would a hardware failure.
I never even imagined it was about money. It's about security and accountability. I can't imagine being the fricking Navy and being willing to run Windows or similar on some of my combat capable equipment...
Which probably shouldn't be "off the shelf" hardware anyway. AFAIK there are no civilian systems which have to cope with both hostile environments and people activly trying to destroy them. Even though something like a chemical or nuclear power plant might have some similar risks, including counting terrorist attacks, it dosn't deliberatly place itself in "harms way". Would the USS Liberty still have been able to call for help had the ship been running Windows?
COTS stands for "Commercial, Off The Shelf"... Items that can be found in the civilian world. For example, instead of spending millions of dollars developing a navigation radar, they might just buy a commercial model from Furuno
In the process probably spending lots of money to check out if the whatever is actually suitable for military use. Possibly also hacking it to ensure that it's sufficently different from "stock" that a (potential) enemy can't test it out themselves.
Both sides in a conflict having access to the same hardware has lead to situations like the Argentinian airforce being able to train to avoid being detected by Royal Navy (type 42) destroyers and Chechneans being unable to shoot down Russian aircraft.
They want the public to buy their stuff with the least govt. interference (i.e. regulation).
It can be rather more complex than that. If regulation will harm (potential) competitors more than then established industries may be very pro regulation. (So long as they are writing the regulations.)
Also, if the govt. is corrupt they will use the govt. to stifle competition.
Corruption and goverment appear to go together. Thus it's more meaningful to ask "How corrupt" a goverment is...
SLIGHT difference. The War on Drugs has a certain backing in the thinkofthechildren crowd, who think that if there are no drugs anymore, kids won't take them.
Only in the sense that the interest groups have slightly different lobbying techniques. In both cases there is a lot of lobbying going on.
I don't know of any animals that naturally walk on two legs. Even primates don't normally walk on their legs...
:)
Guess you must have missed these animals known as "birds" as well as their extinct ancestors, therapod dinosaurs
Whenever a new design for a 2-legged robot shows up, people immediately complain about how impractical bipedalism is and that the problem can easily be solved with more legs. But if that were the case, if there were no advantage to bipedalism, then bipedal organisms would not have shown up at all, let alone numerous times in separate groups of animals through history.
The reason that bipedalism shows up in animals is that the basic bodyplan of all vertebrates has two sets on limbs. It's easier in evolutionary terms to modify the pectoral limbs than to add additional limbs. This does not apply to robots.
Maybe so that paralegics and quadriplegics can use stairs like everyone else?
Given the size of this thing you'd have a tough time getting it up most stairs. Even if it's feet could fit there's still the problem that the operator's head appears to be more than 3 metres above the ground.
A lighter and slimmer version would be a superior solution to using an electric wheelchair, provided it can be done sufficiently cheaply.
So long as it is closer to normal human size. Otherwise the operator is likely to be nicknamed "Hagrid".
and i suppose it did not occur to you that there is a very good reason WHY open source is not used extensively in defence? who wrote that code? did you audit every single line?
This kind of argument is even more applicable to any proprietary software. Try even getting the code to the typical Windows machine...
Lawmakers get all red-pen happy when issues pop up because whiny constituents demand that SOMEONE do SOMETHING to keep little Timmy from hearing "shit" on TV, or possibly, after specifically looking up how to accomplish it, have an encounter with a prostitute in a video game. It's not fair to blame legislatures, though, because they are acting in direct response to the public. They want them to write laws.
How do you tell the difference between "the public" and a special interest claiming the represent the public though? The latter can lobby 24/7 and ensure that they have a single clear message. Not only do regular people have lives to lead they need not have exactly the same opinion even amongst a group with broad agreement.
Having non-lawyers write laws will result in really poorly-written laws with plenty of loopholes.
This is a problem with plenty of existing laws. Even though it is specifically part of a legislature's job to look for loopholes and ammend as applicable. There is nothing stopping a proposed law being subjected to critical examination by either lawyers or members of the public.
There are way too many ties between the people who write the law and the people who make money knowing the law. Politicans aren't about to put lawyers out of work by making the legal system intelligible to the common citizen.
There are actually two related problems, too many career politicans and too many of them being lawyers.
It's different because there is an actual law against copyrigth-infringement, and most of the people threathened are actually guilty of breaking that law.
If the courts are working correctly it's a requirement for the plaintiff (or prosecution) to prove that the defendent broke specific laws in specific ways.
Copyrigth-law, as currently written, makes everyone a criminal. But only the ones that RIAA (or other large copyrigth-holders) choose to go after, get punished.
"Everyone" almost certainly includes the RIAA themselves. In certain cases "unclean hands" can be a perfectly valid defence.
We should remove or change laws which we do not intend to uphold.
It's perfectly possible for laws which have little popular support to be enforced both randomly and extremely. e.g. the "war on drugs".
Otherwise we hand over the power of defining de-facto law to those deciding what and whom to investigate. (because if everyone is guilty, by deciding to investigate someone you are de-facto deciding to punish that person)
There dosn't even appear to be much actual investigation going on here. Instead more or less random demands for money.
One such group or perhaps a few do come out of the woodwork and it is part of their "act." They become popular, because they are "cute" and can sing and can dance. The labels observe the popularity and decide that the market can tolerate 100 of these bands. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Not just with music. The same thing can happen with TV and movies. If the reason the original was popular is that it/they were different then bringing in the "clones" is certain to be a failure.
Within Western Europe, the USA and Australia (Plus others) the money gained from private sales of pirated music is not used to fund terrorism, generally speaking.
Yet, ironically, "legitimate" sales may well help fund terrorism. The reason is that private sales generally don't involve taxation. A large number of governments use a portion of their taxpayers money to fund terrorists. (Sometimes fairly indirectly, sometimes not.)
And Phil Spector may have used his legitimate music money to purchase a weapon that he allegedly used to shoot Lana Clarkson.
There's also the issue of illegal drug use by "artists" and other people associated with the music industry. Thus it could be argued that "file sharing" is actually keeping money away from organised crime...
pay me to observe the posts of the notoriously secretive and suspected Al Quaida member Anonymous Coward.
Unfortunatly they have run out of money. Looks like it was all given to an Australian firm run by Terry Wrist and Al Kyder.
If they really wanted to stump the hackers, they could implement AACS in a custom ASIC, which would require an electron microscope to crack.
Except that it wouldn't. There are no doubt "hackers" who could get the use of an electron microscope. Either by use of money or trickery or maybe because it's part of their job/studies.
Unless you somehow find a way to get keys out of the chip, this will be 100% secure against key extraction. Probing buses with logic analyzers and power analysis were decent methods back when people were trying to crack 1980s-era smartcards running at a few hundred kilohertz. They don't work too well against modern hardware.
Except that the tools which can be used to perform such analysis have also gotten faster in the last 20 odd years.
I should point out what I said is true only for symmetrical keys. For asymmetrical keys, Alice has the private key and Bob has Alice's public key, and Alice can give Bob her public key at any point in public without fear of a typical Carol decrypting the communications. However, in this situation Carol owns Alice and thus owns Alice's private key; Carol effectively becomes Alice. Again, the encryption is broken.
Which is the reason the whole idea behind DRM is flawed.
When it comes to data stored on a readonly media the cyphertext, hence the key(s) needed to decrypt it are fixed anyway.
And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.
Another relevent term might be "corporate socialism" where the redistribution is more to corporate than actual people...
What happened to all that campaigning for free trade... guess it's ok as long as it's not music... or bananas... or cars...
Exactly this kind of thing is more "business news" than "entertainment news". As it exposes the hypocricy of claims of "free trade", "globalization", etc.
The real story here is the (ab)use of the legal system to hinder the "globalization" of retail business.
Prices for *everything* in the UK are outrageously higher than in continental Europe, USA and even Mexico.
Price comparisons would be easier if the UK were to adopt the Euro. Though it can be especially obvious in comparison with the US where the numbers are the same the only difference is the currency symbol.
It is so stupid that they do it *even* against their own companies. For another example see the Tesco vs Levi where Tesco (a Wal*Mart like supermarket) was importing Levi's jeans cheaper than the price they got from Levi's... guess what happened? Levi's sued and they where forced to buy directly from Levi's... at the highest price.
So called "free trade" and "globalization" appears to only be PC when it involves "outsourcing", manufacturing and "call centres". But not when it involves customers or retail companies.
When it's cheaper for a retailer to buy goods (possibly from another retailer) thousands of miles away and ship them half way around the planet than it is to source them "locally" something is definitly very wrong.