Face it, money has become so abstract a concept that it all ends up to a trading of trusts.
There is no way you can be sure of how much your dollar is worth. Even if it's backed with gold you just gotta trust the man that he really has your money's worth!
On second thought, nobody seems to care much about what money really is, so it might as well be backed by clamshells.
Re:There is no reasonable expectation of privacy
on
Carnivore To Die?
·
· Score: 1
You seem to have a real bad view of men. As a matter of fact, it sound as if life was real bad to you.
You would wonder, but a lot of positive scientific advances were done in secrecy. Medicine would be nowhere now without the autopsies done in the 1700s. Back then it was forbidden to handle with corpses and it had to be done in complete secrecy.
Almost all research done commercially is also done in secret, of cource. Otherwise the others would get the benifits. And we all know that Carnivore et al are formost for commercial spying.
Lastly, I just don't want everybody to know what brand coffee I buy, which magazines I subscribe, which way I go to work or who my friends are. It's neither your business nor anybody else's.
How about parallels to graphic formats?
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 1
Reading this, the.gif format comes to mind.
It's also patented and licensed - so what? File formats are just vehicles which are easily exchanged if they prove cumbersome.
I thought the content is important, but maybe that's just too idealistic
I was wondering about this when working with the ximian packages and evolution on my debian box.
Say I have package x, which needs libfoo-1.0.4-2, installed. I would like to install package y, but that needs libfoo-1.0.4-5.
Of course I could force the installation and hope it works out. But I can't be sure that libfoo-1.0.4-2 supplies the same functions that libfoo-1.0.4-5 does.
The problem here is that differences are made solely by the version numbers - and these can be arbitrary. What we really need is an intelligent package management system where packages query each other on function level, making sure the proper functions with proper signatures are available.
That way it wouldn't matter if I have libfoo in the version 1.0.4-2, 1.0.4, or 1.0.4-7-ximian.
The Germans have been scratching and paying for their prepaid cellphones for a while now, but I doubt that this will work.
If you pay for your cellphone, you can throw the card away after using the number. The card number is invalid right after you use it, and all the money if tranferred.
But with this system, you get to keep the card until the money "on" it is used up. How are all the vendors supposed to keep track of the cards? If it isn't done in realtime then I could overdraw a card. And that won't be a problem because I bought the card anonymously.
Also remember that all micropayment systems have failed. The Germany Bank are stopping their micropayment system because nobody uses it.
I just suppose some manager's generating work for his bored department.
In the beginning of the 90's, Telekom thought it would be doing everybody a favor when it completely replaced the ancient and worn out telephone network in eastern Germany with fiber.
Now, Telekom is really pushing DSL (the only alternative for a flatrate here), which half of the country can't get.
Thinking about it, it really sounds as if DSL were just a interim solution...
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, money has become so abstract a concept that it all ends up to a trading of trusts.
There is no way you can be sure of how much your dollar is worth. Even if it's backed with gold you just gotta trust the man that he really has your money's worth!
On second thought, nobody seems to care much about what money really is, so it might as well be backed by clamshells.
You seem to have a real bad view of men. As a matter of fact, it sound as if life was real bad to you.
You would wonder, but a lot of positive scientific advances were done in secrecy. Medicine would be nowhere now without the autopsies done in the 1700s. Back then it was forbidden to handle with corpses and it had to be done in complete secrecy.
Almost all research done commercially is also done in secret, of cource. Otherwise the others would get the benifits. And we all know that Carnivore et al are formost for commercial spying.
Lastly, I just don't want everybody to know what brand coffee I buy, which magazines I subscribe, which way I go to work or who my friends are. It's neither your business nor anybody else's.
Reading this, the .gif format comes to mind.
It's also patented and licensed - so what? File formats are just vehicles which are easily exchanged if they prove cumbersome.
I thought the content is important, but maybe that's just too idealistic
I was wondering about this when working with the ximian packages and evolution on my debian box.
Say I have package x, which needs libfoo-1.0.4-2, installed. I would like to install package y, but that needs libfoo-1.0.4-5.
Of course I could force the installation and hope it works out. But I can't be sure that libfoo-1.0.4-2 supplies the same functions that libfoo-1.0.4-5 does.
The problem here is that differences are made solely by the version numbers - and these can be arbitrary. What we really need is an intelligent package management system where packages query each other on function level, making sure the proper functions with proper signatures are available.
That way it wouldn't matter if I have libfoo in the version 1.0.4-2, 1.0.4, or 1.0.4-7-ximian.
The Germans have been scratching and paying for their prepaid cellphones for a while now, but I doubt that this will work.
If you pay for your cellphone, you can throw the card away after using the number. The card number is invalid right after you use it, and all the money if tranferred.
But with this system, you get to keep the card until the money "on" it is used up. How are all the vendors supposed to keep track of the cards? If it isn't done in realtime then I could overdraw a card. And that won't be a problem because I bought the card anonymously.
Also remember that all micropayment systems have failed. The Germany Bank are stopping their micropayment system because nobody uses it.
I just suppose some manager's generating work for his bored department.
In the beginning of the 90's, Telekom thought it would be doing everybody a favor when it completely replaced the ancient and worn out telephone network in eastern Germany with fiber.
Now, Telekom is really pushing DSL (the only alternative for a flatrate here), which half of the country can't get.
Thinking about it, it really sounds as if DSL were just a interim solution...
--