Indeed it is the a cache 22 problem. If what makes people free is making other people not free, then freedom is impossible.
There is no doubt that freedom means responsibility. Generally, trading away ones freedom for lapse of responsibility is one of those stupid things that humans just love doing (kind of like trading away your life for a pile of money).
Look at the American suing tradition, where nothing is ever ones own fault, and no one never takes resonsibility for anything. We mat not sue each other the whole time here in Europe, but instead we are always asking the government and the collective to take responsibility (and therefore freedom) away from us. It sickens me.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Need I say more? Once they start watermarking the cds, you can kiss your freedom to do whatever you like with your music goobye on any "sdmi" compliant hardware.
Hardware may be ideal for compression schemes, but its also ideal for big money/government extortion...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Can anyone with better insight into this whole soap opera answer the question that is notably missing from the press coverage, namely what this means for open development and online publishing?
I understand that is means companies like AOL, NA and co. can now get one license to export crypto products that would cover all shipments of the product, but it doesn't say anywhere that the regime will actually grant that license, or anything about the terms required. And while a company might be able to negoiate the terms with the american regime, that is completely out of the question for an open source effort, right? (I mean, they would still need to have it re-evaluated with every version).
What about the proffessor who posted his crypto routines on his webpage? As I understand the new law, he might actually be able to do it, but only after applying for a license and being granted one. Wow, that is sooo much better.
It seems to me that this is a bit out of touch with reality. It makes it clear how to export shrink wrapped crypto software, but how many of you bought your crypto software in a shrinkwrap anyways? The real issue is online, I couldn't care less if I will now start seeing american crypto products in stores here.
Good for Microsoft though... (they can dump the whole key thing and include the crypto modules in NTs installation now - just in time when the PR damage has been done, how sweet:-) )
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
No, freedom IS the right to do whatever you like. That is what it means.
However, freedom is also the right for everybody else to do what they like. Putting a gun to somebodies head and telling them what to do is not an act of freedom, even if it happens to be what you feel like doing that morning.
Same could be said for microsoft...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Like has been noted, this is a concession to the high tech industry, because they have money and have been up their playing the Washington game. It is evidence that the current regime is willing to heed to corruption from sources other than its own departments of love, but not much more than that.
Government by balanced corruption. How about it?
Does this mean that efforts like GPG will be able to accept American developers? Does it mean that we will no longer need to have two versions of every browser? And does this mean that Linus can start including crypographic features in the kernel?
As long as the American regime is still pushing crytography as something that will let evil terrophiles reign free, I wouldn't hold my breath.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Of course, you do realize that this same reasoning applies to the thousands of biological neural networks you deal with every day as well.
In fact, they even have a large track record of general failures to performance reasonably. In fact, certain such systems seem to loose their ability to make logically correct conclusions alltogether. And this after at least 100,000 generations...
Witness politics...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
This was on the news here (though pretty deep in the broadcast) tonight, and one of the channels (the youth oriented Mtv clone) had an interview with the a representative from IPIF.
He said he felt the court had misunderstood the technical nature of the Internet (personally I would say he is the one who has missunderstood it) and that they would most probably appeal it. Court cases can always be appealed here.
He did however concede that the topic was a "difficult" one.
Ironically, I have never seen mp3s mentioned on the news here before this case. As an mp3 supporter I think it did us more good than bad here. There is nothing like getting a hand from the enemy.
Oh, and, Kids: Go ahead an pirate all the music that you want, but when you pirate an album, put 1$ in an envelope and send it to the artist. That is more than he would have seen of your 15 for the album.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
"everybody" is not the problem
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
This is very naive. Why should you worry about people that have no power over you being able to impede your privacy? That might be annoying, but nothing else. I send private emails over the Internet every day knowing that everybody could be looking at them. Probably, so do you.
What I worry about is the combination of transparency and obedience. Freedom in the authorative society is directly related to the fact that most of our actions are not subject to scrutiny from above. The total government surveilance society is as much a nightmare with our current laws as under Ingsoc.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
Consider this one:
I recently read of a study that showed that Sweden has one of the highest levels of illicit usage of medicine by youth in the western world. Why? Because alcohol is controlled and expensive, so kids will take anything (including aspirin, penicilin etc) if they think it will make them get drunk faster.
Combining medicine and alcohol can be dangerous. Really dangerous.
The amount of illegal (moonshine and smuggled) alcohol used here is about the same as the amount of legal. In fact, we now have a whole new class of organized crime built up around the smuggeling and illegal production of alcohol.
I couldn't agree more with the "choose one" statement. Life isn't simple, my favorite proverb about cake always holds.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 2
This is well known to everyone. Email are postcards, any discussion is public, and from a privacy perspective just about anything you do on the Internet should be considered to be done in public, naked, and with people reading your thoughts. Unless you encrypt it. Then you are safe. Really safe, safer then you could EVER be without crypotology. Safer in printing your deepest secrets on the first page of the New York Times then if you should go to remotest spot of deepest siberia and whisper them into the wind.
By extension, consider that the FBI/NSA knows this as well. So too do the "terrophiles" (generic term for unquestionably bad people to must be stopped at any cost to freedom).
Consider: Who is using encryption today?
People who know they need it - The terrophiles.
Who is not using encryption today?
The common man.
Who is impeded in his use of cryptography by the FUD and complication campaigns enacted to the maximum of its power by the American regime?
The common man.
Who could get ahold of and use as strong cryptos as they like even if they were outlawed completely?
The terrophiles.
See a pattern here? Asking yourself who the American regime really is interested in spying on? If not, did you, by any chance, grow up on the ruins of Trantor?
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
On the other hand, if there had been articles like this around when I was in school, and teachers and councelers had deemed I didn't need to go to music and gym because of my nerdiness, I wouldn't have shed a tear:-)
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Why give any examples when others are so eager to do it for you? I make posts dissing the US (where I have not lived for almost a decade) here all the time, and most of the time they are either ignored, or granted with just critisism and comment. Yet, although their are probably 100x as many Americans reading this as Swedes, one Sweden dissing comment deep down in a thread gets me 7 angry replies in half an hour.
Which is sort of what I was talking about...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Didn't Apple make the same mistake when IBM was just a start-up company? Thinking there was still lots of business in the mainframe market while IBM dove for the PC market and became the standard, leaving Apple to content themselves with being second best?
Yeah, Apple's moves around 1911 were horrible, and really hurt the company. I know my great-grandfather got hit pretty bad for investing in Apple stock around that time.
They should have opened up their Abacus design and allowed clones, but no...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
As fucked up as this may be, the Swedish legal system is a lot more sane than the american one. We have professional juries, and even if found guilty they are unlikely ask for anything like "punitive damages" or cede to the ridiculous cost estimates of American counterparts.
Hell, most of the time we don't even lock up our violent criminals...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Personal freedom isnt dead in Sweden. There hasnt been a verdict yet (he'll be freed, imho), only a report in a german mag. where they probably dont know anything about swedish law.
Either you don't live here or you are blind. Bar the far east, Sweden has one of the most collective value systems in the world. There has never been individual freedom here, which is why we thrived for a while (50s-60s-70s) and then went right to the shitter today. Same reason places like SIngapore can thrive now, but are heading straight for the shitter tomorrow.
Say what you want about the American regime, but until now America has had better individual freedom then we do - by a long run. American kids may be forced to say the pledge of allegance in the morning, but that is nothing compared to silent indoctrination into the social (-ist) system that goes on from the the very start here.
Since my childhood was split evenly between the two countries, for once I do know what I am talking about.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
The entire whois database is still in the gigabyte range (read somewhere), which is no problem to copy between network level domain servers with todays datarates. The TLDs created for the proposed system would be short, probably no more than 10 bytes or so on average, so even a million of them would be less than a 100 megabyte database (name + 128 bit ipv6 name server reference).
That was definetly the best proposal I have heard on the subject.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Yes, I know that trademark law stinks too, and that in this particular case maybe it is what needs to go first: but the dns situation is just going to get worse and worse.
There simply are not enough phrases around to give everyone a fair chance with a DNS system where no one cares about anything except the second level name in.com tld. I read on the original vision for the web (from CERN) the other day (it was linked here I believe) and it included critism for keyword systems, and yet what has DNS turned into: write "flowers.com" for flowers, "greetingcards.com" for Greeting Cards, "drugs.com" for drugs (not that kind, of course, that would not be fitting).
The fact that DNS is controlled from the top down plays right into the hands of all kinds of abuse, everything from lawyer happy MN corporations, to NSI's constant monopolist practices, to the intervention of the American regime that is last thing we want on the Net.
Will adding more tlds help? Hell no, companies are already buying out there domains in.org.com and.net, they will go ahead and buy them in.wtf as well.
I can't say that I have a beautiful replacement in mind that solves all the problems, but we have to start looking for a decentralized, non-commericial, non-governmental naming system. The current domain name system is not, and will never be, anything but a bad compromise and a headache for the way the Internet has turned out.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I know, I have lived in America and I realize that if I still lived there now I would probably be getting a drivers license and a pollutomobile as we speak, but it is only because you have built your cities that way.
Dallas is a lot bigger than Stockholm (x2-x3 I guess) but you don't need to look around to long to find cities of comparable size where it is possible to get by living a normal life without a car.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Personally I don't see the point with this thing at all. Ok, you can now burn a cd with more music on it, but you are still burned by physical media, and the player is still big an clumsy.
I read somewhere that the most important music market in America is the car, since you people are always driving around (* cough * cough * its my fucking atmosphere too) while in Europe and Japan walkman style portables are most important since we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent. But even if I did have drivers license or a car, I think that if all that mp3 has to offer us is a higher density CD the hoopla is a little exagerated.
True, the current flash based players have to little memory to be good for anything but short trips, but they represent a much more interesting direction (music stored as data, and treated as such).
What I want: A portable player with 100+ mb memory (enough for the train to school/work back, and any dead time inbetween) that can patch into my lan and pull mp3s off a server, as well and a stationary unit with a large harddisk and ethernet connection to replace the linux pc currently in my bookcase with the stereo (which works great but is a little noisy for true listening).
Actually, come to think of it, what I really want is a PDA with enough power to do decoding in software - gonna need that for running cracked SDMI players...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
As I remember it, it was the First Foundation that was based on the mathematical calculation of where society was heading. The Second Foundation was basically the opposite - they were created to police the world of the problems that Psychohistory (mathematics) could not predict...
The mathematical aspect was indeed the most interesting part of the Foundation books, and it always surprised me that Asimov played it down as the series continued. Sort of like how the problems with trying to implement an absolute ethical system into a being was the most interesting part of his Robot stories, yet he wormed his way out of that (zeroeth law etc).
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Forgive me if I'm wrong (the TiVo webiste sorta sucks) but isn't this one of those devices that records/caches tv shows onto a large harddisk?
Where does that come off being a digital Video Cassette Recorder? I believe that there is such a thing as a Digital VCR, they are used by video proffesionals and use small digital cassettes.
It doesn't really matter if that is what people are calling it, that doesn't meen we should...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Exactly what do you mean by "authoritarian government"? Are you anarchist, or simply pushing for smaller government? Personally, I am strongly in the second category.
Anarchist, but smaller government is obviously a step in the right direction.
You are completely right about the whole convenience for freedom thing. Except the "government" as an entity is just protecting its own existance, which is very defendable. The population is all to blame.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
If your going to let this government rule over you, tell you what do to, how to live, what you are allowed to do freely and what you aren't, send you to prison, and even kill you, certainly they should be entiteled to having photographs of you.
I believe we already have something like this here, and while I'm against the whole idea of authoritarian government, if you are going to have one, it might as well know what you look like.
Lifting the Crypto restictions is SO much more important to your future as free men than this is, but I guess these sorts of issues tend to get spotlight because it doesn't involve mathematics. Sigh.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it is the a cache 22 problem. If what makes people free is making other people not free, then freedom is impossible.
There is no doubt that freedom means responsibility. Generally, trading away ones freedom for lapse of responsibility is one of those stupid things that humans just love doing (kind of like trading away your life for a pile of money).
Look at the American suing tradition, where nothing is ever ones own fault, and no one never takes resonsibility for anything. We mat not sue each other the whole time here in Europe, but instead we are always asking the government and the collective to take responsibility (and therefore freedom) away from us. It sickens me.
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In software yes, but hacking a closed hardware system is, em, difficult. Which was my point in the first place.
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Need I say more? Once they start watermarking the cds, you can kiss your freedom to do whatever you like with your music goobye on any "sdmi" compliant hardware.
Hardware may be ideal for compression schemes, but its also ideal for big money/government extortion...
-
Can anyone with better insight into this whole soap opera answer the question that is notably missing from the press coverage, namely what this means for open development and online publishing?
:-) )
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I understand that is means companies like AOL, NA and co. can now get one license to export crypto products that would cover all shipments of the product, but it doesn't say anywhere that the regime will actually grant that license, or anything about the terms required. And while a company might be able to negoiate the terms with the american regime, that is completely out of the question for an open source effort, right? (I mean, they would still need to have it re-evaluated with every version).
What about the proffessor who posted his crypto routines on his webpage? As I understand the new law, he might actually be able to do it, but only after applying for a license and being granted one. Wow, that is sooo much better.
It seems to me that this is a bit out of touch with reality. It makes it clear how to export shrink wrapped crypto software, but how many of you bought your crypto software in a shrinkwrap anyways? The real issue is online, I couldn't care less if I will now start seeing american crypto products in stores here.
Good for Microsoft though... (they can dump the whole key thing and include the crypto modules in NTs installation now - just in time when the PR damage has been done, how sweet
-
No, freedom IS the right to do whatever you like. That is what it means.
However, freedom is also the right for everybody else to do what they like. Putting a gun to somebodies head and telling them what to do is not an act of freedom, even if it happens to be what you feel like doing that morning.
Same could be said for microsoft...
-
Like has been noted, this is a concession to the high tech industry, because they have money and have been up their playing the Washington game. It is evidence that the current regime is willing to heed to corruption from sources other than its own departments of love, but not much more than that.
Government by balanced corruption. How about it?
Does this mean that efforts like GPG will be able to accept American developers? Does it mean that we will no longer need to have two versions of every browser? And does this mean that Linus can start including crypographic features in the kernel?
As long as the American regime is still pushing crytography as something that will let evil terrophiles reign free, I wouldn't hold my breath.
-
Of course, you do realize that this same reasoning applies to the thousands of biological neural networks you deal with every day as well.
In fact, they even have a large track record of general failures to performance reasonably. In fact, certain such systems seem to loose their ability to make logically correct conclusions alltogether. And this after at least 100,000 generations...
Witness politics...
-
This was on the news here (though pretty deep in the broadcast) tonight, and one of the channels (the youth oriented Mtv clone) had an interview with the a representative from IPIF.
He said he felt the court had misunderstood the technical nature of the Internet (personally I would say he is the one who has missunderstood it) and that they would most probably appeal it. Court cases can always be appealed here.
He did however concede that the topic was a "difficult" one.
Ironically, I have never seen mp3s mentioned on the news here before this case. As an mp3 supporter I think it did us more good than bad here. There is nothing like getting a hand from the enemy.
Oh, and, Kids: Go ahead an pirate all the music that you want, but when you pirate an album, put 1$ in an envelope and send it to the artist. That is more than he would have seen of your 15 for the album.
-
This is very naive. Why should you worry about people that have no power over you being able to impede your privacy? That might be annoying, but nothing else. I send private emails over the Internet every day knowing that everybody could be looking at them. Probably, so do you.
What I worry about is the combination of transparency and obedience. Freedom in the authorative society is directly related to the fact that most of our actions are not subject to scrutiny from above. The total government surveilance society is as much a nightmare with our current laws as under Ingsoc.
-
Consider this one:
I recently read of a study that showed that Sweden has one of the highest levels of illicit usage of medicine by youth in the western world. Why? Because alcohol is controlled and expensive, so kids will take anything (including aspirin, penicilin etc) if they think it will make them get drunk faster.
Combining medicine and alcohol can be dangerous. Really dangerous.
The amount of illegal (moonshine and smuggled) alcohol used here is about the same as the amount of legal. In fact, we now have a whole new class of organized crime built up around the smuggeling and illegal production of alcohol.
I couldn't agree more with the "choose one" statement. Life isn't simple, my favorite proverb about cake always holds.
-
This is well known to everyone. Email are postcards, any discussion is public, and from a privacy perspective just about anything you do on the Internet should be considered to be done in public, naked, and with people reading your thoughts. Unless you encrypt it. Then you are safe. Really safe, safer then you could EVER be without crypotology. Safer in printing your deepest secrets on the first page of the New York Times then if you should go to remotest spot of deepest siberia and whisper them into the wind.
By extension, consider that the FBI/NSA knows this as well. So too do the "terrophiles" (generic term for unquestionably bad people to must be stopped at any cost to freedom).
Consider: Who is using encryption today?
People who know they need it - The terrophiles.
Who is not using encryption today?
The common man.
Who is impeded in his use of cryptography by the FUD and complication campaigns enacted to the maximum of its power by the American regime?
The common man.
Who could get ahold of and use as strong cryptos as they like even if they were outlawed completely?
The terrophiles.
See a pattern here? Asking yourself who the American regime really is interested in spying on? If not, did you, by any chance, grow up on the ruins of Trantor?
-
For $200, I'm selling (don't have 82 points though, yet
-
On the other hand, if there had been articles like this around when I was in school, and teachers and councelers had deemed I didn't need to go to music and gym because of my nerdiness, I wouldn't have shed a tear
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Why give any examples when others are so eager to do it for you? I make posts dissing the US (where I have not lived for almost a decade) here all the time, and most of the time they are either ignored, or granted with just critisism and comment. Yet, although their are probably 100x as many Americans reading this as Swedes, one Sweden dissing comment deep down in a thread gets me 7 angry replies in half an hour.
Which is sort of what I was talking about...
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Didn't Apple make the same mistake when IBM was just a start-up company? Thinking there was still lots of business in the mainframe market while IBM dove for the PC market and became the standard, leaving Apple to content themselves with being second best?
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Yeah, Apple's moves around 1911 were horrible, and really hurt the company. I know my great-grandfather got hit pretty bad for investing in Apple stock around that time.
They should have opened up their Abacus design and allowed clones, but no...
-
As fucked up as this may be, the Swedish legal system is a lot more sane than the american one. We have professional juries, and even if found guilty they are unlikely ask for anything like "punitive damages" or cede to the ridiculous cost estimates of American counterparts.
Hell, most of the time we don't even lock up our violent criminals...
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Personal freedom isnt dead in Sweden. There hasnt been a verdict yet (he'll be freed, imho), only a report in a german mag. where they probably dont know anything about swedish law.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Either you don't live here or you are blind. Bar the far east, Sweden has one of the most collective value systems in the world. There has never been individual freedom here, which is why we thrived for a while (50s-60s-70s) and then went right to the shitter today. Same reason places like SIngapore can thrive now, but are heading straight for the shitter tomorrow.
Say what you want about the American regime, but until now America has had better individual freedom then we do - by a long run. American kids may be forced to say the pledge of allegance in the morning, but that is nothing compared to silent indoctrination into the social (-ist) system that goes on from the the very start here.
Since my childhood was split evenly between the two countries, for once I do know what I am talking about.
-
The entire whois database is still in the gigabyte range (read somewhere), which is no problem to copy between network level domain servers with todays datarates. The TLDs created for the proposed system would be short, probably no more than 10 bytes or so on average, so even a million of them would be less than a 100 megabyte database (name + 128 bit ipv6 name server reference).
That was definetly the best proposal I have heard on the subject.
-
Yes, I know that trademark law stinks too, and that in this particular case maybe it is what needs to go first: but the dns situation is just going to get worse and worse.
.com tld. I read on the original vision for the web (from CERN) the other day (it was linked here I believe) and it included critism for keyword systems, and yet what has DNS turned into: write "flowers.com" for flowers, "greetingcards.com" for Greeting Cards, "drugs.com" for drugs (not that kind, of course, that would not be fitting).
.org .com and .net, they will go ahead and buy them in .wtf as well.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
There simply are not enough phrases around to give everyone a fair chance with a DNS system where no one cares about anything except the second level name in
The fact that DNS is controlled from the top down plays right into the hands of all kinds of abuse, everything from lawyer happy MN corporations, to NSI's constant monopolist practices, to the intervention of the American regime that is last thing we want on the Net.
Will adding more tlds help? Hell no, companies are already buying out there domains in
I can't say that I have a beautiful replacement in mind that solves all the problems, but we have to start looking for a decentralized, non-commericial, non-governmental naming system. The current domain name system is not, and will never be, anything but a bad compromise and a headache for the way the Internet has turned out.
-
I know, I have lived in America and I realize that if I still lived there now I would probably be getting a drivers license and a pollutomobile as we speak, but it is only because you have built your cities that way.
Dallas is a lot bigger than Stockholm (x2-x3 I guess) but you don't need to look around to long to find cities of comparable size where it is possible to get by living a normal life without a car.
-
Personally I don't see the point with this thing at all. Ok, you can now burn a cd with more music on it, but you are still burned by physical media, and the player is still big an clumsy.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I read somewhere that the most important music market in America is the car, since you people are always driving around (* cough * cough * its my fucking atmosphere too) while in Europe and Japan walkman style portables are most important since we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent. But even if I did have drivers license or a car, I think that if all that mp3 has to offer us is a higher density CD the hoopla is a little exagerated.
True, the current flash based players have to little memory to be good for anything but short trips, but they represent a much more interesting direction (music stored as data, and treated as such).
What I want: A portable player with 100+ mb memory (enough for the train to school/work back, and any dead time inbetween) that can patch into my lan and pull mp3s off a server, as well and a stationary unit with a large harddisk and ethernet connection to replace the linux pc currently in my bookcase with the stereo (which works great but is a little noisy for true listening).
Actually, come to think of it, what I really want is a PDA with enough power to do decoding in software - gonna need that for running cracked SDMI players...
-
As I remember it, it was the First Foundation that was based on the mathematical calculation of where society was heading. The Second Foundation was basically the opposite - they were created to police the world of the problems that Psychohistory (mathematics) could not predict...
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
The mathematical aspect was indeed the most interesting part of the Foundation books, and it always surprised me that Asimov played it down as the series continued. Sort of like how the problems with trying to implement an absolute ethical system into a being was the most interesting part of his Robot stories, yet he wormed his way out of that (zeroeth law etc).
-
Forgive me if I'm wrong (the TiVo webiste sorta sucks) but isn't this one of those devices that records/caches tv shows onto a large harddisk?
Where does that come off being a digital Video Cassette Recorder? I believe that there is such a thing as a Digital VCR, they are used by video proffesionals and use small digital cassettes.
It doesn't really matter if that is what people are calling it, that doesn't meen we should...
-
Exactly what do you mean by "authoritarian government"? Are you anarchist, or simply pushing for smaller government? Personally, I am strongly in the second category.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Anarchist, but smaller government is obviously a step in the right direction.
You are completely right about the whole convenience for freedom thing. Except the "government" as an entity is just protecting its own existance, which is very defendable. The population is all to blame.
-
If your going to let this government rule over you, tell you what do to, how to live, what you are allowed to do freely and what you aren't, send you to prison, and even kill you, certainly they should be entiteled to having photographs of you.
I believe we already have something like this here, and while I'm against the whole idea of authoritarian government, if you are going to have one, it might as well know what you look like.
Lifting the Crypto restictions is SO much more important to your future as free men than this is, but I guess these sorts of issues tend to get spotlight because it doesn't involve mathematics. Sigh.
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