to all this corruption may lay in "campaign finance reform", a well written finance reform bill could really take a lot of power away from the corporate lobbyists (though a "well written" one would surely be hard to pass).
It's also non trivial to write a law which excludes professional lobbyists, whilst still allowing petitioning of government.
Until the corporations stop having the right to buy politicians, stick em in their back pocket, and tell em how to vote i am afraid it will be hard to fight them...but we do have to try!
US corporations have done a lot nastier things than pass dodgy laws. They have started more than a few wars. Something the vast majority of the real people in the US would support. Especially against democratic governments, which are ironically, those most likely to hinder US corporates' activities. e.g. if they want labour cheaper than in the US they are hardly likely to find it in a country with similar rules on health & safety or statutory minimum wage. Corrupt as it may be the US still has to look after the interests of its citizens to a standard where they won't actually revolt.
Right. I guess you haven't heard about tamper-resistant hardware. When there'll be a solid block of resin sitting right on the neck of your monitor, I'll see how far your soldering iron will get you.
IIRC the Iopener people tried this kind of thing. It didn't work for long. Also if you mandate things be built this way there are awful lot of ways it can be circumvented in the manufacturing process. Are all monitors used in the US going to be assembled in the US watched by well paid armed guards?
Right. I guess he hasn't heard of a soldering iron. If the endmost device in the chain takes an analog input, like a CRT or speaker driver, then someplace there has to be an analog signal. Who cares if you can't capture an unencrypted bitstream?
Maybe soldering irons will be outlawed, followed by cameras and microphones, followed by anything anyone could use to build any of these....
Re:Starve record companies, not artists.
on
Chained Melodies
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· Score: 2
In Canada, Nortel stock was a huge percentage of people's investment and retirement funds (because of the Candian contents regulation). The Canadian government did nothing at all when Nortel stock took a nose dive. On the other hand they collect money on behave for the RIAA for just about every storage devices out there just because they lost 10% of their profit from a depression ? Nortel stock evaporated more than the Canadian RIAA made in 10 years.
Just as well the US has decided to help the telecoms industry out. Since if they pass this legislation the whole country will be needing a new security compliant telephone system. No doubt an SSSCADMS100 will cost a few times more than a regular DMS100:)
A new Prohibition. The destruction of the PC industry.
A lot more things than just PCs would be covered by this. Whilst people might think that "this is just about geeks with home PCs". It also covers cars, telephone systems, computers people use at work to get their jobs done, broadcast media, etc.
Do you REALLY think the average American could be made to understand just how bad the DMCA and SSSCA are?
If they can be persuaded that they are a good idea then they can be persuaded that either they are either a bad idea or things pointless for the US Congress to even bother debating in the first place.
Or would they just say, "Jack Valenti says only criminals/hackers are upset about it - so it must be good"?
Which is being very stupid. Simply blindly trusting someone else's opinion is stupid.
The system is broke, I admit that. Why was it able to break? Because the people are stupid.
Been going on for quite a while that many people have been brought up to be "stupid". "All men are created equal" is mutually exclusive with putting Jack Valenti (or for that matter G W Bush) on a pedestal.
Maybe a better question would be "how can it be fixed?" and "what would be the price..."
Sadly, though there are some senators and representitives that are more interested in serving the people than themselves (a special shout out to Rep Jim Matheson, District 2, Utah!), few if any of the people in power (or the people who *want* to be in power) can be as enlightened as your boss.
This is an old old problem. Partly a combination of "power corrupting" and "power attracting the easily corruptable". Often the people most capable of representing people are either uninterested in seeking it or lack the leven of charisma to get people to vote for them.
I think that if we ever discovered the amazing power that political parties hold over the legislative and executive process it would scare the hell out of us. Its best just to not think about it.
It also can be far easier for someone to get elected as a member of a political party than on his or her own merits. The US currently appears to be in the extreme case where anyone not a member of the democratic or republican party is unlikely to get elected to any level of government.
That's a common misconception. While it is true that many politicians recieve much money from many special intrest groups, almost none are "owned" by their contributers.
But what special interest groups, both those representing political extremes and commercial interests do tend to have is better access to politicians. What money may buy is "time to influence" than direct influence.
Obviously once a politician is in office he's more likely to listen to the people who voted for him; not the people that gave him money.
Do they actually know which electors actually voted for them? Also professional lobbiests posing as or recruiting constituents. Claims to be representing "silent majorities" are commonplace too.
Re:Scalability issues
on
Hawaii Wi-Fi
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· Score: 2
That leaves the residents of the island who hunger for faster speeds two options:
Actually there appear to be at least 17 named islands. Hawai'i is the biggest, Molokini the smallest. The former is getting larger, due to active volcanism, the latter smaller due to errosion.
: 1) put up with 4.5sec latencies and use satellites to move data between Hawaii and the rest of the world, or 2) beg their sugar daddies in D.C. for a few million dollars to upgrade the island's aging hardwired links. Or 3) route low-latency traffic (games, ssh, etc.) over the T1, and route downloads over the satellite.
Wonder if the islands' legitimate government would have been short sighted enough to not bother with communications links to the west...
Uranium is not very radioactive, neither is plutonium, and they are ALPHA RADIATORS, even a damn sheet of paper would be enought to shield you from it, only way to get a cancer would be to inhale the stuff and get it stuck in your lungs for a long time, and as you said, it's molecular weight is enormous, it won't stay airborne long enough for people to really breath too much of the stuff.
If you has a solid lump of metal the risk is low. However if you have dust, is much more dangerous because it can either be ingested directly or react to form compounds which can be ingested.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that sending the fuel off planet is pretty dangerous. If a second Challenger were to happen, all those nuclear materials would be spread out in the atmosphere, which sounds pretty dad-gum dangerous.
Depends how well protected the fuel was. Even with the violence of the Challenger explosion identifiable pieces of wreckage were recovered. Aircraft carrying nuclear weapons have exploded before now.
The problem with launching nuclear waste into space is that the stuff is heavy. Remember, it's made out of stuff higher than lead on the periodic table.
Except that fission products arn't transuranic elements.They are more likely to be from the Rubidium to Xenon row on the periodic table. Indeed if you were to get symetrical fission of Plutonium you'd get Silver. (As an unplesently radioactive isotope.) Heavy Strontium and Iodine are also common fission products.
Of course, the trouble is that a lot of companies in the Applied Research area of development are trying to use IP-rights to squelch Basic Research/Invention that threatens them.
Also some of them might also be leaching off someone elses research.
Re:Wrong "Two Types Of Invention"
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2
Those that are more likely to occur when protection exists (a new type of motor that requires a $500,000,000 investment to perfect).
The other necessary criteria is that the object should be quite cheap to manufacture once it has been perfected. Drugs, at least in theory, fall into this catagory. (But only so long as the drug company is actually developing from scratch...)
Imagine a river! A huge, great big river running right to New York city - someone had better tell the mayor quick, because apparently no-one else has noticed it yet.
Maybe the water from the tunnels is cleaner and requires less treatment than river water.
For those of you not clued up, rivers are natures viaducts, they transport huge amounts of water from place to place, always going downhill - I'm willing to bet that Hudson river has more than enough drinking water in it for the whole of New York! For those of you who are sceptical about this whole point, there's also an ocean nearby - far nearer than the reservoirs - now you don't get much more water in one place than an ocean!
Water from the Atlantic off the Jersey shore is fundamentally undrinkable. After all the desalinization, distilliation and purification needed to make it fit for human consumption, it would probably run you about $2/gallon.
AFAIK the East coast of the US is not a desert. Does none of the rainwater come from the Atlantic?
Oh please -- people use water, not sprawl! A person will use the same amount of water for cooking, drinking, and bathing, whether they live in an apartment or on five acres in the "sprawl". About the only difference I can see is that the evil sprawl person might water their lawn, marginally driving up water usage.
Far more scope for unnoticed leaks in a system covering 5 acres of land than with a single building. Leaks in drinking water distribution systems and not uncommon, unless they are major they may simply be left. Unlike a gas distribution system where any leak is potentially highly dangerous.
However, turning on speech recognition by default really tells you that the people selling these preinstalled machines really don't know what they're doing.
How obvious is it if the feature is on or not. Have the OEM's explicitally enabled it or can it get enabled simply by choosing something completly unrelated. Windows is rather notorious for wanting to enable things which are frequently unneeded in "default" configurations. Also this further demonstrates that having the OS preinstalled can as likely be a disadvantage as it can be an advantage. In a great many situations, especially anything larger than a small network, OEM installes are simply overwritten anyway.
By the way, if my message isn't clear, medicine is not a 'right'. 'Human rights' aren't even well standardized to begin with. For you to tell a company they "do not deserve" their profit because someone's poor, but it's ok if someone else is rich, is such a crock.
Making a profit isn't a "right" either. When corporate profits are placed before human lives there must be one twisted value system involved. Patents are intended to create specific ends, if they are not currently doing it then it's time to reform them.
Re:The Government and the SSSCA
on
SSSCA Editorials
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· Score: 2
Once the United States passes the SSSCA it can use its great leverage over global trade agreements to force all other nations to pass similar legislation.
The differance here is that time becomes of the essence. How long do you think the US can hold out against the rest of the world if they pass and attempt to enforce the SSSCA?
Airbuses have been using digital flight controls for a while, and several crashes have been influenced by them. (See comp.risks back issues for details.)
Also cases of aircaft behaving so strangely that not crashing is actually suprising...
The Aegis software worked exactly as designed on the Vincennes, except that the UI was so bad the sailors couldn't tell that the target was climbing, not descending.
Plenty of cases of military radar systems not working as they should do in the middle of a real shooting war. e.g. the Sea Dart system on HMS Coventry. Also turns out that the Patriot missile system used in the Gulf war wasn't as effective as was claimed at the time, more that the Scuds were an utterly awful missile system.
Even the (Dish Network) receiver on my TV needs rebooting about once a month. (Can't speak for cellphones: I stay as far away from them as possible.)
Nokia released a phone which can lock up completly.
Last month the top executives of two of the most powerful media companies in the world traveled to Washington to testify before Congress about the most dangerous threat they face: the American consumer.
Wonder why they think the American consumer is more of a threat than the rather greater number of people in the rest of the world who generally want much the same things...
This SSSCA is certainly legislatable, but hardly enforceable. Ya can't stop people from owning compilers. The US IT economy would stifle itself so fast that foreign heads would spin,
Not just the IT industry, expect the telecoms industry to follow. Then every bit of US industry which relied on either IT or telecoms.
no other country would enact similar legislation, and the US IT infrastructure would collapse
The US, if it still existed as a functional nation state, might well attempt to get similar laws passed in the rest of the world. In the same way that there are attempts to get DMCA clones passed elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
to all this corruption may lay in "campaign finance reform", a well written finance reform bill could really take a lot of power away from the corporate lobbyists (though a "well written" one would surely be hard to pass).
It's also non trivial to write a law which excludes professional lobbyists, whilst still allowing petitioning of government.
Until the corporations stop having the right to buy politicians, stick em in their back pocket, and tell em how to vote i am afraid it will be hard to fight them...but we do have to try!
US corporations have done a lot nastier things than pass dodgy laws. They have started more than a few wars. Something the vast majority of the real people in the US would support. Especially against democratic governments, which are ironically, those most likely to hinder US corporates' activities. e.g. if they want labour cheaper than in the US they are hardly likely to find it in a country with similar rules on health & safety or statutory minimum wage. Corrupt as it may be the US still has to look after the interests of its citizens to a standard where they won't actually revolt.
Right. I guess you haven't heard about tamper-resistant hardware. When there'll be a solid block of resin sitting right on the neck of your monitor, I'll see how far your soldering iron will get you.
IIRC the Iopener people tried this kind of thing. It didn't work for long. Also if you mandate things be built this way there are awful lot of ways it can be circumvented in the manufacturing process. Are all monitors used in the US going to be assembled in the US watched by well paid armed guards?
Right. I guess he hasn't heard of a soldering iron. If the endmost device in the chain takes an analog input, like a CRT or speaker driver, then someplace there has to be an analog signal. Who cares if you can't capture an unencrypted bitstream?
Maybe soldering irons will be outlawed, followed by cameras and microphones, followed by anything anyone could use to build any of these....
In Canada, Nortel stock was a huge percentage of people's investment and retirement funds (because of the Candian contents regulation). The Canadian government did nothing at all when Nortel stock took a nose dive. On the other hand they collect money on behave for the RIAA for just about every storage devices out there just because they lost 10% of their profit from a depression ? Nortel stock evaporated more than the Canadian RIAA made in 10 years.
:)
Just as well the US has decided to help the telecoms industry out. Since if they pass this legislation the whole country will be needing a new security compliant telephone system. No doubt an SSSCADMS100 will cost a few times more than a regular DMS100
A new Prohibition. The destruction of the PC industry.
A lot more things than just PCs would be covered by this. Whilst people might think that "this is just about geeks with home PCs". It also covers cars, telephone systems, computers people use at work to get their jobs done, broadcast media, etc.
Do you REALLY think the average American could be made to understand just how bad the DMCA and SSSCA are?
If they can be persuaded that they are a good idea then they can be persuaded that either they are either a bad idea or things pointless for the US Congress to even bother debating in the first place.
Or would they just say, "Jack Valenti says only criminals/hackers are upset about it - so it must be good"?
Which is being very stupid. Simply blindly trusting someone else's opinion is stupid.
The system is broke, I admit that. Why was it able to break? Because the people are stupid.
Been going on for quite a while that many people have been brought up to be "stupid". "All men are created equal" is mutually exclusive with putting Jack Valenti (or for that matter G W Bush) on a pedestal.
Maybe a better question would be "how can it be fixed?" and "what would be the price..."
Sadly, though there are some senators and representitives that are more interested in serving the people than themselves (a special shout out to Rep Jim Matheson, District 2, Utah!), few if any of the people in power (or the people who *want* to be in power) can be as enlightened as your boss.
This is an old old problem. Partly a combination of "power corrupting" and "power attracting the easily corruptable". Often the people most capable of representing people are either uninterested in seeking it or lack the leven of charisma to get people to vote for them.
I think that if we ever discovered the amazing power that political parties hold over the legislative and executive process it would scare the hell out of us. Its best just to not think about it.
It also can be far easier for someone to get elected as a member of a political party than on his or her own merits. The US currently appears to be in the extreme case where anyone not a member of the democratic or republican party is unlikely to get elected to any level of government.
That's a common misconception. While it is true that many politicians recieve much money from many special intrest groups, almost none are "owned" by their contributers.
But what special interest groups, both those representing political extremes and commercial interests do tend to have is better access to politicians. What money may buy is "time to influence" than direct influence.
Obviously once a politician is in office he's more likely to listen to the people who voted for him; not the people that gave him money.
Do they actually know which electors actually voted for them? Also professional lobbiests posing as or recruiting constituents. Claims to be representing "silent majorities" are commonplace too.
That leaves the residents of the island who hunger for faster speeds two options:
Actually there appear to be at least 17 named islands. Hawai'i is the biggest, Molokini the smallest. The former is getting larger, due to active volcanism, the latter smaller due to errosion.
: 1) put up with 4.5sec latencies and use satellites to move data between Hawaii and the rest of the world, or 2) beg their sugar daddies in D.C. for a few million dollars to upgrade the island's aging hardwired links. Or 3) route low-latency traffic (games, ssh, etc.) over the T1, and route downloads over the satellite.
Wonder if the islands' legitimate government would have been short sighted enough to not bother with communications links to the west...
Uranium is not very radioactive, neither is plutonium, and they are ALPHA RADIATORS, even a damn sheet of paper would be enought to shield you from it, only way to get a cancer would be to inhale the stuff and get it stuck in your lungs for a long time, and as you said, it's molecular weight is enormous, it won't stay airborne long enough for people to really breath too much of the stuff.
If you has a solid lump of metal the risk is low. However if you have dust, is much more dangerous because it can either be ingested directly or react to form compounds which can be ingested.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that sending the fuel off planet is pretty dangerous. If a second Challenger were to happen, all those nuclear materials would be spread out in the atmosphere, which sounds pretty dad-gum dangerous.
Depends how well protected the fuel was. Even with the violence of the Challenger explosion identifiable pieces of wreckage were recovered. Aircraft carrying nuclear weapons have exploded before now.
The problem with launching nuclear waste into space is that the stuff is heavy. Remember, it's made out of stuff higher than lead on the periodic table.
Except that fission products arn't transuranic elements.They are more likely to be from the Rubidium to Xenon row on the periodic table. Indeed if you were to get symetrical fission of Plutonium you'd get Silver. (As an unplesently radioactive isotope.) Heavy Strontium and Iodine are also common fission products.
Of course, the trouble is that a lot of companies in the Applied Research area of development are trying to use IP-rights to squelch Basic Research/Invention that threatens them.
Also some of them might also be leaching off someone elses research.
Those that are more likely to occur when protection exists (a new type of motor that requires a $500,000,000 investment to perfect).
The other necessary criteria is that the object should be quite cheap to manufacture once it has been perfected. Drugs, at least in theory, fall into this catagory. (But only so long as the drug company is actually developing from scratch...)
Imagine a river! A huge, great big river running right to New York city - someone had better tell the mayor quick, because apparently no-one else has noticed it yet.
Maybe the water from the tunnels is cleaner and requires less treatment than river water.
For those of you not clued up, rivers are natures viaducts, they transport huge amounts of water from place to place, always going downhill - I'm willing to bet that Hudson river has more than enough drinking water in it for the whole of New York! For those of you who are sceptical about this whole point, there's also an ocean nearby - far nearer than the reservoirs - now you don't get much more water in one place than an ocean!
Sea water isn't drinkable...
Water from the Atlantic off the Jersey shore is fundamentally undrinkable. After all the desalinization, distilliation and purification needed to make it fit for human consumption, it would probably run you about $2/gallon.
AFAIK the East coast of the US is not a desert. Does none of the rainwater come from the Atlantic?
Oh please -- people use water, not sprawl! A person will use the same amount of water for cooking, drinking, and bathing, whether they live in an apartment or on five acres in the "sprawl". About the only difference I can see is that the evil sprawl person might water their lawn, marginally driving up water usage.
Far more scope for unnoticed leaks in a system covering 5 acres of land than with a single building. Leaks in drinking water distribution systems and not uncommon, unless they are major they may simply be left. Unlike a gas distribution system where any leak is potentially highly dangerous.
Voice recognition is cool when you are playing a game and can give voice commands.
Just so long as they listen to the sound through headphones. Otherwise you'd gen some interesting feedback effects.
However, turning on speech recognition by default really tells you that the people selling these preinstalled machines really don't know what they're doing.
How obvious is it if the feature is on or not. Have the OEM's explicitally enabled it or can it get enabled simply by choosing something completly unrelated. Windows is rather notorious for wanting to enable things which are frequently unneeded in "default" configurations.
Also this further demonstrates that having the OS preinstalled can as likely be a disadvantage as it can be an advantage. In a great many situations, especially anything larger than a small network, OEM installes are simply overwritten anyway.
By the way, if my message isn't clear, medicine is not a 'right'. 'Human rights' aren't even well standardized to begin with. For you to tell a company they "do not deserve" their profit because someone's poor, but it's ok if someone else is rich, is such a crock.
Making a profit isn't a "right" either. When corporate profits are placed before human lives there must be one twisted value system involved.
Patents are intended to create specific ends, if they are not currently doing it then it's time to reform them.
Once the United States passes the SSSCA it can use its great leverage over global trade agreements to force all other nations to pass similar legislation.
The differance here is that time becomes of the essence. How long do you think the US can hold out against the rest of the world if they pass and attempt to enforce the SSSCA?
Airbuses have been using digital flight controls for a while, and several crashes have been influenced by them. (See comp.risks back issues for details.)
Also cases of aircaft behaving so strangely that not crashing is actually suprising...
The Aegis software worked exactly as designed on the Vincennes, except that the UI was so bad the sailors couldn't tell that the target was climbing, not descending.
Plenty of cases of military radar systems not working as they should do in the middle of a real shooting war. e.g. the Sea Dart system on HMS Coventry. Also turns out that the Patriot missile system used in the Gulf war wasn't as effective as was claimed at the time, more that the Scuds were an utterly awful missile system.
Even the (Dish Network) receiver on my TV needs rebooting about once a month. (Can't speak for cellphones: I stay as far away from them as possible.)
Nokia released a phone which can lock up completly.
Last month the top executives of two of the most powerful media companies in the world traveled to Washington to testify before Congress about the most dangerous threat they face: the American consumer.
Wonder why they think the American consumer is more of a threat than the rather greater number of people in the rest of the world who generally want much the same things...
One thing I just realized is that the SSSCA is raising way too many questions.
But are these questions being raised in the right place, which would be the US Congress?
This SSSCA is certainly legislatable, but hardly enforceable. Ya can't stop people from owning compilers. The US IT economy would stifle itself so fast that foreign heads would spin,
Not just the IT industry, expect the telecoms industry to follow. Then every bit of US industry which relied on either IT or telecoms.
no other country would enact similar legislation, and the US IT infrastructure would collapse
The US, if it still existed as a functional nation state, might well attempt to get similar laws passed in the rest of the world. In the same way that there are attempts to get DMCA clones passed elsewhere.