"Interservice rivalry is a political device to shift the blame away from people who hold elected positions when the government fscks something up."
No, interservice rivalry is about getting a bigger chunk of the budget at the expense of somebody else. When a three-letter agency gets a piece of vital information, unless they absolutely have to it is in their best interest to keep this information to themselves and use it as an example of how they're doing a better job than the other services (so Congress will vote them more money). The blame-shifting you mentioned in your post is just another example of this ("It's their fault! Cut their funding!")
Besides, three can keep a secret if two are dead. You don't survive a cold war by spreading information around needlessly.
"What is the problem in consolidating all this info into one source? That is all an national ID would do."
I don't know how they do things where you're from, but here in the US government exists to make the lives of the citizenry easier, not the other way around.
Reading all of the moderated posts in this article from all the happy Europeans with their ID system sends a cold chill up my spine. Most of their statements in support of a national ID system go something like this:
EU-member-state-X has had a national ID system in effect for years. The government has the ability to know where I am, what I'm doing there and who I'm doing it with.
I have no complains and I haven't heard of any either
My God! Don't you see the possible relation between those two statements? Are you that blind? Here, let me pull up an analogy that's sure to piss you off enough to get your attention:
The German government established an identification system for all Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. so that they could know where they are, what they're doing there and who they're doing it with
Nobody knew of any complaints
Before you can make a complaint about something you need to be in a situation where you are comfortable to make that complaint. And you just can't make a complaint when you have to fight to be heard over the din of "Four legs good, two legs bad!"
Do you think my little Orwellian metaphor is too harsh? Take a look at all the posts here that have been modded up to 5 that are in support of the ID system. You'll see words like "ridiculous," "ludicrous," "silly," "short-sighted," and any number of other words and phrases that indicate just how little credence the authors of those posts are giving to the system's detractors.
I could go on and on about the numerous policies and practices in the EU that scare me, but instead I'll just leave you with this thought: French voters handily abandoned their individual choices for the French president to support a man like Chirac (a man that can make Berlusconi seem downright respectable), all becuase some right-wing looney managed to scrape together a mere 20% of the vote. A victory for a democratic Europe, or a victory of the majority in crushing minority dissidence?
UK! You're the last bastion of sanity over there! Get out while you still can!
Voter registration, facilitated by a piece of mail sent to me proving that I live in said voting district
"accepted to schools,"
Becoming a legal resident in state X, also facilitated by a piece of mail.
"come on, the idea of a society with no tagging of who's a member is as rediculous as saying you don't need to release memory when you program. Memory leaks anyone?"
The US is a heck of a lot more immigrant-friendly than European countries and we don't see as much need to prevent "memory leaks" as you seem to. Most Americans would rather have a few people sneak into the system than to have a national ID card.
"when we are talking about a country, you are facing problems of population density calculations, which effect infrastructure development, housing, roads, schools, fire stations, everything. you have to keep track"
Again, we have a census every four years.
"otherwise you break into chaos and people are born and die without anyone taking care of it."
That's why states give out birth and death certificates.
"What I think Americans are afraid is the fact that the big brother(s) -NSA, CIA, FBI, whoever, are crossing the information. well ofcourse they are, and have been for years,"
Apparently you don't understand the concept of interservice rivalry...
"the fact it's not happening is because the system already exists."
If it already existed there wouldn't be so many pushes in Congress to pass new legislation creating it.
SP2 on CD: Get 'em while they last!
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 2
Let's face it: Windows 2000 continues to be the one and only holder of the title "The Windows that Doesn't Suck," and Microsoft is learning this the hard way (much to their chagrin) as they try to compete directly with it with Windows XP/.NET. Now while XP/.NET do have a few nice little bells and whistles in it that 2000 doesn't, the technical changes are insignifigant (we're talking about the differences between NT 5.0 and NT 5.1 here) especially compared to the licensing changes. About the only way Microsoft can hope to compete with their only real success it to deliberately try to break it. Of course, they could always just fix XP's EULA problems, but this is Microsoft we're talking about...
Service Pack 3 if nothing else gives Microsoft the ability to "convince" you to upgrade to XP with automatic "updates" and "patches" that do more harm to system performance than good (how much longer before benchmarks show XP is faster than 2000 SP3+?). While whether Microsoft will do it or not is debatable, it can't be denied that they now have the ability to and this was brought about by a deliberate change to the EULA terms.
Sooner or later Microsoft is going to try to exercise this new power of theirs to some degree and there's going to be a heck of a lot more fall-out than just an article on Slashdot. And when push comes to shove, it will still be in Microsoft's best financial interests to force their customers to upgrade to XP no matter what.
What am I getting at? Service Pack 2 can be downloaded here and for about $20 you also have the option of buying the CD instead of burning your own. How long do you think Microsoft will continue to maintain these files on their web servers? Especially if, six months from now, it's in their financial interests to all but deny any SPs before 3 even existed?
If you use Windows 2000, it's in your own best interests to grab a copy of this (or even two if you're really paranoid) and lock it away in a safe place if you ever need to re-install.
"Sued by Verizon Communications for millions of dollars, spammer Alan Ralsky said he may simply move beyond the reach of U.S. courts to where service providers value cash more than complaints.
"I think China is good place to be," Ralsky said. "You don't get the same kind of grief.""
You go do that. And as more and more Chinese domains are blocked at the border Beijing will start to notice the effect it has on business there, where their businesses aren't able to reach customers that can afford such luxuries like "indoor plumbing" (with the local GDP per capita still hovering around $3600, China needs Western markets). And Beijing will start to impose new anti-spam laws with penalties ranging from all-expense paid trips to one of the interior's lovely "re-education" camps to death by an accute case of lead poisoning delivered to the back of the head (conducted in stadiums so we all had the chance to cheer them on).
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
Re:Script kiddies' wet dream
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"A little sensationalistic to call this "remote admin rights" isn't it?"
Step 1: Log into Windows 2000 (any flavor) with a non-administrator user account.
Step 2: Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Step 3: Note the following message
Administrators Only
To install items from Windows Update, you must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group.
Step 4: Explain to me your insinuation that manual updates somehow require administrator rights but automatic ones don't.
Also, considering that the updates are installed automatically, imagine all the new and interesting EULAs that will spring up now that I no longer have the option of not agreeing to them.
Re:Forcing a contract is illegal.
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 2
"These people cannot contribute to the real work of the companies; all they can do is invent ways to abuse the customer."
What the hell are you smoking? We don't live in a capitalist society, we live in the United States. Here, the consumer doesn't matter half as much as the investor, and if a corporation becomes more profitable and investor-friendly by fucking over the consumer, guess what's going to happen every time...
Re:When will society and government learn
on
Spy Fly
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· Score: 2
"This basically means, like with the atomic bomb, the government is using technology for evil purposes."
Yeah, Lord knows "Ending WWII next month instead of next year" and "We can't be sure what the Soviets intend to do with theirs" are lousy reasons.
"Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?"
Irony: You're an example of how poorly US schools are doing by not knowing which level of government is supposed to be the one spending money on education. If you want more money for schools, talk to your state and local governments.
"Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to push the little red button which ends the world,"
If you can make monkeys understand the spoken word, you should be able to make enough money to retire comfortably in about five minutes flat.
"wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give this power to thousands, millions of monkeys."
I know you tried to put an analogy in there somewhere, but I still can't find it. Are you trying to say that the US government has passed out nuclear weapons to everybody? How come I didn't get mine then? I can think of quite a few places I'd like to use mine...
"For scientific minds reading this, the second law of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very logical way,"
Your attempt to try to apply entropy to anthropology is yet another example of how poorly US schools are doing...
"that unless humans are educated and evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to collapse,"
Even though you're way out in left field, let me try to help you. If you are trying to draw an alaogy in human behavior to entropy, what you should be saying is "We can never go back to the way things were five minutes ago." No stipulations. No exceptions. No "unless we're educated," no "unless the technology is kept secret," no nothing. Nothing short of time travel will fix that. Change will happen, and all we can do is try to shape the outcome. For someone who tries to reference the second law of thermodymanics, you sure have a poor understanding of the third...
"with technologies like this here, the atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these technologies in the hands of george bush or the average american."
The problem isn't having it get into the hands of somebody else (which will happen) once it has been invented (which will happen), the problem is shown in the fact that you didn't include yourself in that list.
"So why are we busy creating technology after technology without educating people in how to responsibly use these technologies we create?"
See, there it is again. You advocate the education of responsible use, and it seems that you have already decided just what is "responsible use." The problem is people just like you assume that they have the ultimate knowledge of what is Right and what is Wrong. Stalin, Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot, bin Laden... They didn't wake up one morning and decide "Hey, I think I'm going to be evil today." In their minds and their hearts they knew they were right. No doubt at all.
At any rate, people will die because of this technology. Period. There is nothing you or I or anybody else short of omnipotence can do about that. On the other hand, people will live because of this technology that would have died otherwise, and without this technology there would have been nothing you or I or anybody short of omnipotence could have done about it. And as is usually the case with technology, even military technology, more people would have died without a specific innovation than with.
The sword, the gun, the atomic bomb... It's always so easy to count how many people have been killed by these weapons, but you never hear about how many people were not killed because of their existance. A weapon has two purposes, to kill and to frighten. Nobody ever really takes that second one into account.
Have you taken a look at some of the casualty figures of wars two thousand years ago? Looked at the sizes of the armies and how many each lost? At how long they lasted? Only a few hundred years ago wars were declared on almost a monthly basis and they lasted for years, decades even.
And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and with it wars became more immediately frightening. The destruction was more apparent because they took less time and less effort. Then we start seeing the birth of modern diplomacy, which is nothing if not the active avoidance of war. The machine gun ended WWI and the atomic bomb prevented WWIII. The only conflicts we really have left in the world are those between two powers without a modern technology base to cause immediate harm to one another, and those are the bloodiest. Have you looked at Rwanda and DRC lately?
"Are we supposed to be proud of our technology which will be used to spy on millions of people,"
Unless there have been some major AI advances, to watch one person requires at least one person. We learned this the hard way both on 12/7/41 and 9/11/01, where we just didn't have enough analysts to sift through the data.
Secondly, spying isn't always bad as you seem to imply. A decent spy network would have prevented 9/11.
"ruin millions of lives,get people killed etc?"
And it will save millions as well. That's what technology does. But you've already decided what's right and what's wrong...
Before you get on your high horse, I'm not saying that this (or any other) technology will always be good for Good (however you wish to define it). And I am also not saying that this will always be used for Good purposes by the US. However, I would prefer this technology be used by a government with little censorship and plenty of opportunities to complain about misuse. And we Americans are nothing if not complainers...
Re:Terrorists will love that.
on
Spy Fly
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· Score: 2
" Imagine a spy fly with a injection system which infects people with serious deseases like Hepatitis A/B/C or AIDS."
Solution: Stay inside and maintain a positive gague pressure in your house. Insects are too light to fight their way in. Problem solved.
What's the point with portal sites anyway? As far as I'm concerned Yahoo and MSN are nothing more than those annoying pages that certain browsers and IM tools try to point my start page to.
News coverage? news.bbc.co.uk Heck, even cnn.com is a better source of news than the portals that put Britney Spears in the headlines (note that they only push their own products).
Weather? weather.noaa.gov Why get weather information from a bunch of middlemen that think that "doppler radar" is nothing more than a catch phrase?
I admit that my start page points to the one EarthLink provides me, but not only does it tell me when I have e-mail (without having to sign up for a spam-laden free account), their USAA-branded service has information available that is just too obscure for the "real" portal sites to care about.
I realize that most internet users more resemble my mother than me, but I've seen her surf and she doesn't spend any amount of time on the start-up page, she just goes to her favorites and goes to the sites she knows to do her thing. Heck, I'm not sure she'd notice if her start page somehow got pointed to goatse.cx she spends so little time and attention on it. How do these people make money? Arthur Andersen Consulting?
Real simple: The mail client. I've got three e-mail accounts (personal, mailing list and business) that I need to juggle and I just don't have the time to figure out how I'd go about it in OE. In Mozilla I add the incoming servers and log-in names and I'm done.
On top of that, my business e-mail account all but requires me to use mail filters to manage incoming mail, and after having used OE's filters exetensively I'd have to say that Mozilla's are easier to configure and manage. It's the little touches like being able to create a new folder in the filter editor that's really nice. And when you delete the folder in question, Mozilla gives me the option of automatically deleting the related filters as well (something OE doesn't do).
Oh, and I find myself hitting Ctrl+T in IE all the time whenever I have to use it. I've been so pampered by tabs it's not even funny.
Yes, floppies are small and hold a miniscule amount of information. Yes, floppies are no longer the only boot media out there. However, there is one very big advantage that floppies have that no other removable computer media out there I know of has: Floppy disks and drives are commodities and an industry standard random-access media.
Zip disks (and their competitors) and flashROMs and such are all well and good, but when you get right down to it you're left with having to decide between two competing and incompatible manufacturers and hope you bet on the winner. What happens to your Zip disks if Iomega turns out to be the next tech company convicted of fuzzy accounting?
You'd think that for all the anti-DRM prattle that goes on here at Slashdot the floppy disk would be as celebrated as the CD-ROM for having open standards that no one company or group of companies can deny you access to. Seriously, do I have to spell it out for you people? If the floppy drive vanished tomorrow, the de facto replacement would be Iomega's Zip drives. Five minutes after the end of the floppy drive, Iomega will announce it's new DRM initiative in parternship with the ??AAs where all Zip drives manufactured from now on will have manditory DRM features. What about Castlewood and 3M, you say? It's a heck of a lot easier to buy off 3 companies than 300...
We're already getting raped by DVD region codes, why are you advocating the same treatment from magnetic disks?
"So everyone, stop hammering the SSH site and give the RIAA [riaa.org] the affection they so sorely need."
It's already 403ed, so there's no fun in/.ing them any more. Instead, I'm going to go for the throat by visiting Sony and BMG and any other RIAA members I can think of.
And maybe we should all pay a visit to Fritz Hollings' website while we're at it so he too can feel the love.
"Nintendo cartridge games (GB and N64) prohibit making backup copies with ROM dumpers, saying that backups are "unnecessary"."
Um, that's so far from a EULA that it's not even funny. Here's a typical warning thingie from the back of the instruction manual of Pokemon Stadium 2:
WARNING: Copying of any Nintendo game is illegal and is strictly prohibited by domestic and international copyright laws. "Back-up" or "archival copies are not authorized and are not necessary to protect your software. Violators will be prosecuted.
There's nothing there saying anything along the lines of "By running this software you agree to..." The warning continues on with the usual "unauthorized copying devices void your warranty" stuff.
The next paragraph after this is more interesting, though:
The contents of this notice do not interfere with your statutory rights.
While the rest of the warning does very well in intimidating those people who don't know what the phrase "Title 9" refers to, this line right there essentially guarantees you all the fair use rights you can shake a stick at (including archival copying).
The closest thing to a EULA in all this is the next paragraph:
The rental of this game without permission of Nintendo or its licensees is strictly prohibited
. This doesn't effect the end users and, while IANAL, I don't think this statement has a legal leg to stand on (I don't recall the details of the lawsuit Nintendo brought against rental places in the late 80's).
"Guess they've never witnessed the abuse that consoles get put through.;)"
With a reasonable amount of care (ie. common sense) cartridge-based consoles and games last a heck of a lot longer than many PC parts I can think of. While the HDD on this computer dating from the late 90's is dying and racking up the bad clusters, my copy of The Legend of Zelda is old enough to drive (God I feel old...) and loads just fine, with the battery pak still holding data using the original (!) lithium battery. How CD- and DVD-based consoles (with their moving parts) fare remains to be seen...
Unless they've changed something with the GameCube that I don't know about (I don't have one yet), there are no licensing agreements for the end-users of Nintendo hardware or Nintendo-licensed software. There's a warning in the back of instruction manuals of recent games against copying, but that's all it is: a warning. Heck, we're talking about a company that has historically relied on nothing more than physical incompatibilities bewteen regional consoles (number of pins in NES vs. Famicom, plastic tabs in cartridge slots of SNES, N64, etc.) to separate their markets.
If you want to talk about SDK user and/or game liscencing and such, I can almost guarantee you that those licenses have mellowed dramatically over the years (from "Thou Shalt Not Release Games on non-Nintendo Systems for 4 Years" through a number of lawsuits to "Hey, we're just glad you're coding for our console").
In other news, CDs shatter under high impact. They have a tendancy to melt when exposed to very high temperatures. Oh, and don't try to put them under too much tension or shear either.
Hey, Einstein! What doesn't break when spun fast enough? This is news?!?!
Consumer trust? When the heck has that ever had anything to do with anything? If you notice all the headlines screaming "stock" this and "accounting" that, the people that really carry import here are the investors. Most large corporations care for their consumers exactly as much as their investors care for their consumers (and guess what happens if it's more profitable to screw consumers over), because the investors are where the real money comes from. Why do you think they fudged their accounting books to begin with?
Why do companies take these polls to begin with? To make money. Either there is money to be made in interpreting the results or even in providing the results in the first place (see election exit polls). If the pollsters are looking to make a profit off of the information, why not share that profit with the people that gave you the information to begin with?
Going back to the example of the exit poll, if all you're going to do is try to make money by predicting who will win an election, its much more satisfying for the voter to lie and watch them squirm when they get it wrong. Why should we tell the truth?
"Federal air marshals are one way to accomplish this; arming and training pilots is another;"
Air marshalls? Yes. But giving pilots guns strikes me as a really bad idea. About the only thing I see it accomplishing is guaranteeing that there is a gun to be had on the airplane and everybody knows where to get it.
We've already figured years ago that giving guns to prison guards is a bad idea, so why is it that everybody is cheering the idea of giving guns to pilots?
"(we were supposed to be *increasing* the security of the PC's, right?)"
How long ago did the NSA release their security templates for Windows 2000? In that time, have there been any documented rootings of a Windows 2000 machine that is using said security template? Anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on! I wrote that on a Monday morning! Cut me some slack! :)
"Interservice rivalry is a political device to shift the blame away from people who hold elected positions when the government fscks something up."
No, interservice rivalry is about getting a bigger chunk of the budget at the expense of somebody else. When a three-letter agency gets a piece of vital information, unless they absolutely have to it is in their best interest to keep this information to themselves and use it as an example of how they're doing a better job than the other services (so Congress will vote them more money). The blame-shifting you mentioned in your post is just another example of this ("It's their fault! Cut their funding!")
Besides, three can keep a secret if two are dead. You don't survive a cold war by spreading information around needlessly.
"What is the problem in consolidating all this info into one source? That is all an national ID would do."
I don't know how they do things where you're from, but here in the US government exists to make the lives of the citizenry easier, not the other way around.
- EU-member-state-X has had a national ID system in effect for years. The government has the ability to know where I am, what I'm doing there and who I'm doing it with.
- I have no complains and I haven't heard of any either
My God! Don't you see the possible relation between those two statements? Are you that blind? Here, let me pull up an analogy that's sure to piss you off enough to get your attention:- The German government established an identification system for all Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. so that they could know where they are, what they're doing there and who they're doing it with
- Nobody knew of any complaints
Before you can make a complaint about something you need to be in a situation where you are comfortable to make that complaint. And you just can't make a complaint when you have to fight to be heard over the din of "Four legs good, two legs bad!"Do you think my little Orwellian metaphor is too harsh? Take a look at all the posts here that have been modded up to 5 that are in support of the ID system. You'll see words like "ridiculous," "ludicrous," "silly," "short-sighted," and any number of other words and phrases that indicate just how little credence the authors of those posts are giving to the system's detractors.
I could go on and on about the numerous policies and practices in the EU that scare me, but instead I'll just leave you with this thought: French voters handily abandoned their individual choices for the French president to support a man like Chirac (a man that can make Berlusconi seem downright respectable), all becuase some right-wing looney managed to scrape together a mere 20% of the vote. A victory for a democratic Europe, or a victory of the majority in crushing minority dissidence?
UK! You're the last bastion of sanity over there! Get out while you still can!
Please don't throw me into that briar patch, your honor!
"how else are you counted as a citizen?"
The census, every four years
"given a voting right?"
Voter registration, facilitated by a piece of mail sent to me proving that I live in said voting district
"accepted to schools,"
Becoming a legal resident in state X, also facilitated by a piece of mail.
"come on, the idea of a society with no tagging of who's a member is as rediculous as saying you don't need to release memory when you program. Memory leaks anyone?"
The US is a heck of a lot more immigrant-friendly than European countries and we don't see as much need to prevent "memory leaks" as you seem to. Most Americans would rather have a few people sneak into the system than to have a national ID card.
"when we are talking about a country, you are facing problems of population density calculations, which effect infrastructure development, housing, roads, schools, fire stations, everything. you have to keep track"
Again, we have a census every four years.
"otherwise you break into chaos and people are born and die without anyone taking care of it."
That's why states give out birth and death certificates.
"What I think Americans are afraid is the fact that the big brother(s) -NSA, CIA, FBI, whoever, are crossing the information. well ofcourse they are, and have been for years,"
Apparently you don't understand the concept of interservice rivalry...
"the fact it's not happening is because the system already exists."
If it already existed there wouldn't be so many pushes in Congress to pass new legislation creating it.
Let's face it: Windows 2000 continues to be the one and only holder of the title "The Windows that Doesn't Suck," and Microsoft is learning this the hard way (much to their chagrin) as they try to compete directly with it with Windows XP/.NET. Now while XP/.NET do have a few nice little bells and whistles in it that 2000 doesn't, the technical changes are insignifigant (we're talking about the differences between NT 5.0 and NT 5.1 here) especially compared to the licensing changes. About the only way Microsoft can hope to compete with their only real success it to deliberately try to break it. Of course, they could always just fix XP's EULA problems, but this is Microsoft we're talking about...
Service Pack 3 if nothing else gives Microsoft the ability to "convince" you to upgrade to XP with automatic "updates" and "patches" that do more harm to system performance than good (how much longer before benchmarks show XP is faster than 2000 SP3+?). While whether Microsoft will do it or not is debatable, it can't be denied that they now have the ability to and this was brought about by a deliberate change to the EULA terms.
Sooner or later Microsoft is going to try to exercise this new power of theirs to some degree and there's going to be a heck of a lot more fall-out than just an article on Slashdot. And when push comes to shove, it will still be in Microsoft's best financial interests to force their customers to upgrade to XP no matter what.
What am I getting at? Service Pack 2 can be downloaded here and for about $20 you also have the option of buying the CD instead of burning your own. How long do you think Microsoft will continue to maintain these files on their web servers? Especially if, six months from now, it's in their financial interests to all but deny any SPs before 3 even existed?
If you use Windows 2000, it's in your own best interests to grab a copy of this (or even two if you're really paranoid) and lock it away in a safe place if you ever need to re-install.
"Sued by Verizon Communications for millions of dollars, spammer Alan Ralsky said he may simply move beyond the reach of U.S. courts to where service providers value cash more than complaints.
"I think China is good place to be," Ralsky said. "You don't get the same kind of grief.""
You go do that. And as more and more Chinese domains are blocked at the border Beijing will start to notice the effect it has on business there, where their businesses aren't able to reach customers that can afford such luxuries like "indoor plumbing" (with the local GDP per capita still hovering around $3600, China needs Western markets). And Beijing will start to impose new anti-spam laws with penalties ranging from all-expense paid trips to one of the interior's lovely "re-education" camps to death by an accute case of lead poisoning delivered to the back of the head (conducted in stadiums so we all had the chance to cheer them on).
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
Step 1: Log into Windows 2000 (any flavor) with a non-administrator user account.
Step 2: Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Step 3: Note the following message Step 4: Explain to me your insinuation that manual updates somehow require administrator rights but automatic ones don't.
Also, considering that the updates are installed automatically, imagine all the new and interesting EULAs that will spring up now that I no longer have the option of not agreeing to them.
"These people cannot contribute to the real work of the companies; all they can do is invent ways to abuse the customer."
What the hell are you smoking? We don't live in a capitalist society, we live in the United States. Here, the consumer doesn't matter half as much as the investor, and if a corporation becomes more profitable and investor-friendly by fucking over the consumer, guess what's going to happen every time...
"This basically means, like with the atomic bomb, the government is using technology for evil purposes."
Yeah, Lord knows "Ending WWII next month instead of next year" and "We can't be sure what the Soviets intend to do with theirs" are lousy reasons.
"Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?"
Irony: You're an example of how poorly US schools are doing by not knowing which level of government is supposed to be the one spending money on education. If you want more money for schools, talk to your state and local governments.
"Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to push the little red button which ends the world,"
If you can make monkeys understand the spoken word, you should be able to make enough money to retire comfortably in about five minutes flat.
"wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give this power to thousands, millions of monkeys."
I know you tried to put an analogy in there somewhere, but I still can't find it. Are you trying to say that the US government has passed out nuclear weapons to everybody? How come I didn't get mine then? I can think of quite a few places I'd like to use mine...
"For scientific minds reading this, the second law of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very logical way,"
Your attempt to try to apply entropy to anthropology is yet another example of how poorly US schools are doing...
"that unless humans are educated and evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to collapse,"
Even though you're way out in left field, let me try to help you. If you are trying to draw an alaogy in human behavior to entropy, what you should be saying is "We can never go back to the way things were five minutes ago." No stipulations. No exceptions. No "unless we're educated," no "unless the technology is kept secret," no nothing. Nothing short of time travel will fix that. Change will happen, and all we can do is try to shape the outcome. For someone who tries to reference the second law of thermodymanics, you sure have a poor understanding of the third...
"with technologies like this here, the atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these technologies in the hands of george bush or the average american."
The problem isn't having it get into the hands of somebody else (which will happen) once it has been invented (which will happen), the problem is shown in the fact that you didn't include yourself in that list.
"So why are we busy creating technology after technology without educating people in how to responsibly use these technologies we create?"
See, there it is again. You advocate the education of responsible use, and it seems that you have already decided just what is "responsible use." The problem is people just like you assume that they have the ultimate knowledge of what is Right and what is Wrong. Stalin, Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot, bin Laden... They didn't wake up one morning and decide "Hey, I think I'm going to be evil today." In their minds and their hearts they knew they were right. No doubt at all.
At any rate, people will die because of this technology. Period. There is nothing you or I or anybody else short of omnipotence can do about that. On the other hand, people will live because of this technology that would have died otherwise, and without this technology there would have been nothing you or I or anybody short of omnipotence could have done about it. And as is usually the case with technology, even military technology, more people would have died without a specific innovation than with.
The sword, the gun, the atomic bomb... It's always so easy to count how many people have been killed by these weapons, but you never hear about how many people were not killed because of their existance. A weapon has two purposes, to kill and to frighten. Nobody ever really takes that second one into account.
Have you taken a look at some of the casualty figures of wars two thousand years ago? Looked at the sizes of the armies and how many each lost? At how long they lasted? Only a few hundred years ago wars were declared on almost a monthly basis and they lasted for years, decades even.
And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and with it wars became more immediately frightening. The destruction was more apparent because they took less time and less effort. Then we start seeing the birth of modern diplomacy, which is nothing if not the active avoidance of war. The machine gun ended WWI and the atomic bomb prevented WWIII. The only conflicts we really have left in the world are those between two powers without a modern technology base to cause immediate harm to one another, and those are the bloodiest. Have you looked at Rwanda and DRC lately?
"Are we supposed to be proud of our technology which will be used to spy on millions of people,"
Unless there have been some major AI advances, to watch one person requires at least one person. We learned this the hard way both on 12/7/41 and 9/11/01, where we just didn't have enough analysts to sift through the data.
Secondly, spying isn't always bad as you seem to imply. A decent spy network would have prevented 9/11.
"ruin millions of lives,get people killed etc?"
And it will save millions as well. That's what technology does. But you've already decided what's right and what's wrong...
Before you get on your high horse, I'm not saying that this (or any other) technology will always be good for Good (however you wish to define it). And I am also not saying that this will always be used for Good purposes by the US. However, I would prefer this technology be used by a government with little censorship and plenty of opportunities to complain about misuse. And we Americans are nothing if not complainers...
" Imagine a spy fly with a injection system which infects people with serious deseases like Hepatitis A/B/C or AIDS."
Solution: Stay inside and maintain a positive gague pressure in your house. Insects are too light to fight their way in. Problem solved.
What's the point with portal sites anyway? As far as I'm concerned Yahoo and MSN are nothing more than those annoying pages that certain browsers and IM tools try to point my start page to.
News coverage? news.bbc.co.uk Heck, even cnn.com is a better source of news than the portals that put Britney Spears in the headlines (note that they only push their own products).
Weather? weather.noaa.gov Why get weather information from a bunch of middlemen that think that "doppler radar" is nothing more than a catch phrase?
I admit that my start page points to the one EarthLink provides me, but not only does it tell me when I have e-mail (without having to sign up for a spam-laden free account), their USAA-branded service has information available that is just too obscure for the "real" portal sites to care about.
I realize that most internet users more resemble my mother than me, but I've seen her surf and she doesn't spend any amount of time on the start-up page, she just goes to her favorites and goes to the sites she knows to do her thing. Heck, I'm not sure she'd notice if her start page somehow got pointed to goatse.cx she spends so little time and attention on it. How do these people make money? Arthur Andersen Consulting?
Real simple: The mail client. I've got three e-mail accounts (personal, mailing list and business) that I need to juggle and I just don't have the time to figure out how I'd go about it in OE. In Mozilla I add the incoming servers and log-in names and I'm done.
On top of that, my business e-mail account all but requires me to use mail filters to manage incoming mail, and after having used OE's filters exetensively I'd have to say that Mozilla's are easier to configure and manage. It's the little touches like being able to create a new folder in the filter editor that's really nice. And when you delete the folder in question, Mozilla gives me the option of automatically deleting the related filters as well (something OE doesn't do).
Oh, and I find myself hitting Ctrl+T in IE all the time whenever I have to use it. I've been so pampered by tabs it's not even funny.
"You need new drives to write them, but only new drivers to read them."
On the other hand, I've never heard of a computer needing a floppy driver. Ever.
Yes, floppies are small and hold a miniscule amount of information. Yes, floppies are no longer the only boot media out there. However, there is one very big advantage that floppies have that no other removable computer media out there I know of has: Floppy disks and drives are commodities and an industry standard random-access media.
Zip disks (and their competitors) and flashROMs and such are all well and good, but when you get right down to it you're left with having to decide between two competing and incompatible manufacturers and hope you bet on the winner. What happens to your Zip disks if Iomega turns out to be the next tech company convicted of fuzzy accounting?
You'd think that for all the anti-DRM prattle that goes on here at Slashdot the floppy disk would be as celebrated as the CD-ROM for having open standards that no one company or group of companies can deny you access to. Seriously, do I have to spell it out for you people? If the floppy drive vanished tomorrow, the de facto replacement would be Iomega's Zip drives. Five minutes after the end of the floppy drive, Iomega will announce it's new DRM initiative in parternship with the ??AAs where all Zip drives manufactured from now on will have manditory DRM features. What about Castlewood and 3M, you say? It's a heck of a lot easier to buy off 3 companies than 300...
We're already getting raped by DVD region codes, why are you advocating the same treatment from magnetic disks?
"So everyone, stop hammering the SSH site and give the RIAA [riaa.org] the affection they so sorely need."
/.ing them any more. Instead, I'm going to go for the throat by visiting Sony and BMG and any other RIAA members I can think of.
It's already 403ed, so there's no fun in
And maybe we should all pay a visit to Fritz Hollings' website while we're at it so he too can feel the love.
Um, that's so far from a EULA that it's not even funny. Here's a typical warning thingie from the back of the instruction manual of Pokemon Stadium 2: There's nothing there saying anything along the lines of "By running this software you agree to..." The warning continues on with the usual "unauthorized copying devices void your warranty" stuff.
The next paragraph after this is more interesting, though: While the rest of the warning does very well in intimidating those people who don't know what the phrase "Title 9" refers to, this line right there essentially guarantees you all the fair use rights you can shake a stick at (including archival copying).
The closest thing to a EULA in all this is the next paragraph: . This doesn't effect the end users and, while IANAL, I don't think this statement has a legal leg to stand on (I don't recall the details of the lawsuit Nintendo brought against rental places in the late 80's).
"Guess they've never witnessed the abuse that consoles get put through.
With a reasonable amount of care (ie. common sense) cartridge-based consoles and games last a heck of a lot longer than many PC parts I can think of. While the HDD on this computer dating from the late 90's is dying and racking up the bad clusters, my copy of The Legend of Zelda is old enough to drive (God I feel old...) and loads just fine, with the battery pak still holding data using the original (!) lithium battery. How CD- and DVD-based consoles (with their moving parts) fare remains to be seen...
Unless they've changed something with the GameCube that I don't know about (I don't have one yet), there are no licensing agreements for the end-users of Nintendo hardware or Nintendo-licensed software. There's a warning in the back of instruction manuals of recent games against copying, but that's all it is: a warning. Heck, we're talking about a company that has historically relied on nothing more than physical incompatibilities bewteen regional consoles (number of pins in NES vs. Famicom, plastic tabs in cartridge slots of SNES, N64, etc.) to separate their markets.
If you want to talk about SDK user and/or game liscencing and such, I can almost guarantee you that those licenses have mellowed dramatically over the years (from "Thou Shalt Not Release Games on non-Nintendo Systems for 4 Years" through a number of lawsuits to "Hey, we're just glad you're coding for our console").
In other news, CDs shatter under high impact. They have a tendancy to melt when exposed to very high temperatures. Oh, and don't try to put them under too much tension or shear either.
Hey, Einstein! What doesn't break when spun fast enough? This is news?!?!
Consumer trust? When the heck has that ever had anything to do with anything? If you notice all the headlines screaming "stock" this and "accounting" that, the people that really carry import here are the investors. Most large corporations care for their consumers exactly as much as their investors care for their consumers (and guess what happens if it's more profitable to screw consumers over), because the investors are where the real money comes from. Why do you think they fudged their accounting books to begin with?
Why do companies take these polls to begin with? To make money. Either there is money to be made in interpreting the results or even in providing the results in the first place (see election exit polls). If the pollsters are looking to make a profit off of the information, why not share that profit with the people that gave you the information to begin with?
Going back to the example of the exit poll, if all you're going to do is try to make money by predicting who will win an election, its much more satisfying for the voter to lie and watch them squirm when they get it wrong. Why should we tell the truth?
"Federal air marshals are one way to accomplish this; arming and training pilots is another;"
Air marshalls? Yes. But giving pilots guns strikes me as a really bad idea. About the only thing I see it accomplishing is guaranteeing that there is a gun to be had on the airplane and everybody knows where to get it.
We've already figured years ago that giving guns to prison guards is a bad idea, so why is it that everybody is cheering the idea of giving guns to pilots?
DSS receiver boxes have been sold with TiVo and UltimateTV hardware for quite some time now.
Once again the cable television industry is doing too little, too late to keep from losing yet more customers to digital satellite...
"(we were supposed to be *increasing* the security of the PC's, right?)"
How long ago did the NSA release their security templates for Windows 2000? In that time, have there been any documented rootings of a Windows 2000 machine that is using said security template? Anyone?