In order for the control-freaks of the world to keep their socio-economic power, it's in their best interest to turn the open internet into a "Secure Internet" dystopia where only "Trusted Computing" devices are permitted to communicate.
As usual, they'll spin total-accountability as a good thing necessary for combatting the evil cyber-terrahists, economic pirates, and pedophiles. But I, for one, will NEVER bow to DRM mandated by government and/or pushed by monopoly interests.
Why do you feel the need to blameshift? Accept some personal responsibility and just admit that you suck. It's only a game.
The kids have even invented some slang for this purpose: When you screw up, you say, "my bad", instead of trying to blame it your non-Nike shoes or whatever.:) If you can say "my bad", you get my R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
They react like scared little rabbits. Which they really shouldn't.
Sure they should. They *know* in their gut that what they're doing is wrong, and it's only natural to get defensive when confronted by someone's who caught you in a lie.
I wonder what kind of mindset it takes to be a borderline-spammer who's able to shamelessly promote like that. Is it more greed, or just desperation? e.g. Give these people a million dollars to go away and would they stop their bullshit, or would they get a sparkle in their eye for their 2nd million? I'm thinking it's more desperation than greed that most people resort to slimy Amway-type persuasion.
what if all the authors say screw it and stop writing?
Authors were still writing long before the artificial concept of copyright was invented (and recently perverted), so it's impossible that ALL authors would say "screw it" and switch to more profitable careers. More likely we'd be left with a smaller core of above-average talented writers whose incentive was never primarily making money.
Even documentaries are having trouble due to copyrights, since they have to pay for the rights to a 4 second clip that appears on a TV set in the backgound of a shot
The trend in stock photography and vidclips is that it's getting very very cheap because the bar has been lowered to so far (which the old "pros" like to bitch about to no end), so hopefully this won't be as much of a problem going forward. Sites like istockphoto.com and creativecommons are making it happen, and you don't have to worry about lawyers, royalty contracts red-tape and other bullshit.
Remember the students that sing on Pink Floyd's The Wall? Well, they're demanding royalties now, thanks to 1997 legislation.
I'd heard about "Happy Birthday" still being restricted, and about MickeyMouse, and Gone with the Wind, and about many other insane abuses of copyright, but this one's a first. Greed can only go so far... it seems like a lot of people want to jump on the lazy gravy train of perpetual intellectual property "ownership" so they can live off the rent, but few think about the bigger picture.
The problem is that as fast as you can ship a million people to a new colony/moon-base/asteroid, the remaining 6+ billion people on the planet are still bonking each other's brains out and producing more children.
That's only a problem if you assume that us humans will still be limited to our volumous, inefficient, meat-based bodies and brains. Once we have the technology to transcend our biology, it's then very cheap for trillions upon trillions upon trillions of post-humans to live virtually on or offworld.
I really doubt we'll still be growing food the old-fashioned way once ultra-efficient nanotech matures. And even without the coming technology to transcend biology, studies show that we'll reach zero population growth a few decades down the road (assuming oil production doesn't peak and crash by then, which is a stupid assumption).
Screw inflated property values and lazy rent-seekers. *I* live on artificial island in the middle the ocean, you insensitive clod! I'm just waiting for the space elevator to finish getting built so I can finally move off this rock before President Jenna Bush liberates my little island of its liberty.
Just thought that it would be interesting to note that NetworkSolutions and Register.com are in the Top10 losing registrars. Seems many people have been wising up to overpaying for inferior service and are transfering their domains.
The fastest growing registrar happens to be GoDaddy.com, where I moved all my domains to several years ago.
You have to keep watching that bang/buck ratio in registrars, webhosting - in all things. You stay with one provider of anything too long and chances are you'll end up paying higher static prices for the convenience of not looking around at the competition once in a while...
He's probably just one of those Politically Correct, feminized-types who's jumped on the bandwagon of alternating between using "he" and "she" in order to appear less "sexist".
Government really isn't needed to roll out a MetroArea wireless Network, though; neither is the telco monopoly.
The future of wifi is supposed to be an emergent thing called intelligent Mesh Networking, where each new private/public node contributes some of its resources to a networked fabric, rather than interfering with it like 802.11a/b/g. The more nodes (w/ caching) the better (like BitTorrent).
Of course, the major "drawback" of bottom-up mesh networking --besides the routing being somewhat complicated-- is that it lacks a Command&Control point for some entity to set up a tollbooth on and profit from, so it would be even more disruptive than conventional wifi.
If jackboot thug out there wants to arrest me for "implicitly supporting" the content of any of these links, feel free to abuse the PATRIOT ACT in order to force slashdot.org to reveal the IP address associated with this post, and in turn my ISP will reveal my name and home address associated with the DHCP lease (because I didn't bother to post through an anonymous proxy(s)). tinfoil_hat_mode off.
Q: 1 + 1 = ? A: 2? ## We've got a bright bulb here! fork to college-level section. Q: In the following sentence, fill in the blank with the word that makes the most sense: "Software patents _________ innovation." A: kill ## Oh dear, it seems we've got an open source communist on our hands. silently fork to MS re-education section. Q: True americans believe in the Constitution, baseball, apple pie, capitalism, private property, and a healthy ecosystem of private intellectual property which promotes progress. A: fuck this propaganda! ## profanity detected. lost cause. BlueScreenOfDeath(WITH_A_VENGENCE);
Actually, no, there's a profitable number of people that are too "polite" and gullible to hang up on telemarketer scum, and would rather be put on a DNC to hide that weakness. If the scumbags can use a loophole to exploit these people, they WILL make bank, at the greater expense of millions of other pissed off people.
Wouldn't the next best thing be a plugin for lightwave/maya/3dsmax/whatever that put the 3dviewport into "shutterglasses" mode? I've tried it for games at one point, and the sense of depth and perspective you get from the fake stereoview is very good... if you can handle the headaches from refreshes not being fast enough.
I realize that the problem of world hunger could be solved today, but it's not practical because of the problems of expensive distribution, and asshole politicians.
Both those roadblocks would go away with local molecular manufacturing. 1) you no longer have to grow surplus food aid in one place, then transport it at great oil cost to the middle of a desert - you instead efficiently assemble what you need in-place using the "old" atoms from your last meal. 2) asshole dictators will have as much luck keeping the power of nanotech away from people as China has in keeping "dangerous ideas" from pentrating their great firewall.
If the people can't afford food, they sure can't afford a molecular manufacturing machine to "build" the food.
You're not understanding the implications of MNT correctly. Desktop manufacturing would be mean a level of self-sufficiency such that after the first assembler is invented, the costs spiral downwards towards zero. You could make a copy of an assembler out of the carbon in the atmosphere, that then makes more copies, or instead makes food (recycled from the carbon,oxygen,nitrogen,etc molecules if your own compost).
Not to mention the energy to run the things.
How much energy does it take to grow a potato? Besides, if you need a ton of energy you could bootstrap your own solar arrays and store it for later.
If you're over... ~35, then you're old enough to have grown up the BSD-way before linux (killed you), and so you're obviously not choosing a (dead) OS for the sake of going against the grain.:)
That's just crazy-talk. That's like suggesting we should find a cure for a disease instead of a treatment that keeps you on the comeback. No, we can't have people becoming self-sufficient by recycling matter into more fabricators, food, and other objects - we need to keep them dependant on the state/corporation for their needs! Gotta control those sheeple for their own good.:)
Molecular manufacturing isn't the same as the idea behind Star Trek's Replicators. A lot of people don't care to know the difference, though, because it's all Sci-Fi to them anyway, but the difference is simple: Molecular manufacturing is "easy" matter-to-matter conversion (like how nature does it), but StarTrek Replicators do far-out energy-to-matter transmutation.
Another major difference is that desktop nanotech will be within our grasp within a few decades at most, but not Star-Trek-style Replication.
I can't wait for the hilarity to ensue when the uber-capitalists start complaining about the first wave of people "copying" McDonalds burgers and Gilette blades, rather than vastly down-sizing their old-business models to adjust to a new world of abundance and cheap luxury. Just the death of Wal-Mart, and the actual elmination of world hunger is enough to make me giddy.
Anyway, here's to hoping we even survive a future of matter like data (followed closely by Singularity) with our primitive brains not synched to the increasing power of our tech...
But don't try to convince anyone here that money isn't important, because it IS...
Sure, money's still important TODAY, but only because there's a lot of physical scarcity in the world that people must trade for to earn their living.
But at some point in the not too distant future, we'll have the technology to lift billions of people out of poverty at very little cost. With a non-sci-fi device such as a self-sufficient molecular manufacturing "3D printer" in every home, money loses a lot of its traditional value because you don't need as much to live happily in luxury. Yeah, you still need to provide other value to earn some money if you want to trade up for actual scarcity, like prime realestate, but otherwise you can exit the rat race and cooperate instead of compete.
The vast majority of people are content to live within their means; it's a select few who are greedy enough to do ANYTHING to increase their relative wealth & power. It's an evolutionary psych thing that drives some people to want to be at the top of the pyramid at any cost.
I suppose you could say I've got a strange perspective though: All the evidence I've read points to a nearing technology singularity, which makes a lot of old world beliefs irrelevant, if you can manage to get past the cognitive dissonance first.
Slashdot Mirror
In order for the control-freaks of the world to keep their socio-economic power, it's in their best interest to turn the open internet into a "Secure Internet" dystopia where only "Trusted Computing" devices are permitted to communicate.
As usual, they'll spin total-accountability as a good thing necessary for combatting the evil cyber-terrahists, economic pirates, and pedophiles. But I, for one, will NEVER bow to DRM mandated by government and/or pushed by monopoly interests.
The kids have even invented some slang for this purpose: When you screw up, you say, "my bad", instead of trying to blame it your non-Nike shoes or whatever. :) If you can say "my bad", you get my R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Sure they should. They *know* in their gut that what they're doing is wrong, and it's only natural to get defensive when confronted by someone's who caught you in a lie.
So, according to you, it's OK to be manipulated, as long as it doesn't feel like you're being mentally engineered? That's some kind of bullshit.
Personally, dishonesty and hidden agendas always bother me.
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Authors were still writing long before the artificial concept of copyright was invented (and recently perverted), so it's impossible that ALL authors would say "screw it" and switch to more profitable careers. More likely we'd be left with a smaller core of above-average talented writers whose incentive was never primarily making money.
--
The trend in stock photography and vidclips is that it's getting very very cheap because the bar has been lowered to so far (which the old "pros" like to bitch about to no end), so hopefully this won't be as much of a problem going forward. Sites like istockphoto.com and creativecommons are making it happen, and you don't have to worry about lawyers, royalty contracts red-tape and other bullshit.
Remember the students that sing on Pink Floyd's The Wall? Well, they're demanding royalties now, thanks to 1997 legislation.
I'd heard about "Happy Birthday" still being restricted, and about MickeyMouse, and Gone with the Wind, and about many other insane abuses of copyright, but this one's a first. Greed can only go so far... it seems like a lot of people want to jump on the lazy gravy train of perpetual intellectual property "ownership" so they can live off the rent, but few think about the bigger picture.
That's only a problem if you assume that us humans will still be limited to our volumous, inefficient, meat-based bodies and brains. Once we have the technology to transcend our biology, it's then very cheap for trillions upon trillions upon trillions of post-humans to live virtually on or offworld.
Singularity or bust.
I really doubt we'll still be growing food the old-fashioned way once ultra-efficient nanotech matures. And even without the coming technology to transcend biology, studies show that we'll reach zero population growth a few decades down the road (assuming oil production doesn't peak and crash by then, which is a stupid assumption).
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The fastest growing registrar happens to be GoDaddy.com, where I moved all my domains to several years ago.
You have to keep watching that bang/buck ratio in registrars, webhosting - in all things. You stay with one provider of anything too long and chances are you'll end up paying higher static prices for the convenience of not looking around at the competition once in a while...
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The future of wifi is supposed to be an emergent thing called intelligent Mesh Networking, where each new private/public node contributes some of its resources to a networked fabric, rather than interfering with it like 802.11a/b/g. The more nodes (w/ caching) the better (like BitTorrent).
Of course, the major "drawback" of bottom-up mesh networking --besides the routing being somewhat complicated-- is that it lacks a Command&Control point for some entity to set up a tollbooth on and profit from, so it would be even more disruptive than conventional wifi.
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If jackboot thug out there wants to arrest me for "implicitly supporting" the content of any of these links, feel free to abuse the PATRIOT ACT in order to force slashdot.org to reveal the IP address associated with this post, and in turn my ISP will reveal my name and home address associated with the DHCP lease (because I didn't bother to post through an anonymous proxy(s)). tinfoil_hat_mode off.
--
Q: 1 + 1 = ?
A: 2?
## We've got a bright bulb here! fork to college-level section.
Q: In the following sentence, fill in the blank with the word that makes the most sense: "Software patents _________ innovation."
A: kill
## Oh dear, it seems we've got an open source communist on our hands. silently fork to MS re-education section.
Q: True americans believe in the Constitution, baseball, apple pie, capitalism, private property, and a healthy ecosystem of private intellectual property which promotes progress.
A: fuck this propaganda!
## profanity detected. lost cause. BlueScreenOfDeath(WITH_A_VENGENCE);
--
--
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Both those roadblocks would go away with local molecular manufacturing. 1) you no longer have to grow surplus food aid in one place, then transport it at great oil cost to the middle of a desert - you instead efficiently assemble what you need in-place using the "old" atoms from your last meal. 2) asshole dictators will have as much luck keeping the power of nanotech away from people as China has in keeping "dangerous ideas" from pentrating their great firewall.
You're not understanding the implications of MNT correctly. Desktop manufacturing would be mean a level of self-sufficiency such that after the first assembler is invented, the costs spiral downwards towards zero. You could make a copy of an assembler out of the carbon in the atmosphere, that then makes more copies, or instead makes food (recycled from the carbon,oxygen,nitrogen,etc molecules if your own compost).
How much energy does it take to grow a potato? Besides, if you need a ton of energy you could bootstrap your own solar arrays and store it for later.
--
If you're over ... ~35, then you're old enough to have grown up the BSD-way before linux (killed you), and so you're obviously not choosing a (dead) OS for the sake of going against the grain. :)
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--
Another major difference is that desktop nanotech will be within our grasp within a few decades at most, but not Star-Trek-style Replication.
I can't wait for the hilarity to ensue when the uber-capitalists start complaining about the first wave of people "copying" McDonalds burgers and Gilette blades, rather than vastly down-sizing their old-business models to adjust to a new world of abundance and cheap luxury. Just the death of Wal-Mart, and the actual elmination of world hunger is enough to make me giddy.
Anyway, here's to hoping we even survive a future of matter like data (followed closely by Singularity) with our primitive brains not synched to the increasing power of our tech...
--
Better laugh at me too now - I run KDE w/ SuSE so I must be a EuroN00b. Blah. kiddies and their ricer OS's.
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Sure, money's still important TODAY, but only because there's a lot of physical scarcity in the world that people must trade for to earn their living.
But at some point in the not too distant future, we'll have the technology to lift billions of people out of poverty at very little cost. With a non-sci-fi device such as a self-sufficient molecular manufacturing "3D printer" in every home, money loses a lot of its traditional value because you don't need as much to live happily in luxury. Yeah, you still need to provide other value to earn some money if you want to trade up for actual scarcity, like prime realestate, but otherwise you can exit the rat race and cooperate instead of compete.
The vast majority of people are content to live within their means; it's a select few who are greedy enough to do ANYTHING to increase their relative wealth & power. It's an evolutionary psych thing that drives some people to want to be at the top of the pyramid at any cost.
I suppose you could say I've got a strange perspective though: All the evidence I've read points to a nearing technology singularity, which makes a lot of old world beliefs irrelevant, if you can manage to get past the cognitive dissonance first.
--