Exciting as these subjects are, what I'd really like to see is someone tackling these:
1. What are particles? - Particles are simply assumed a priori. Nobody has ever managed to explain what a particle is. 2. What is time - why is it different from space? 3. Mass is 'curvature of space', so to speak. So what is electric charge?
To paraphrase Death in Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather": "In a universe full of wonders humans have invented boredom". I think most people don't want to have their minds blown - this is why they keep watching never-ending, never-changing soap operas. People just want to fester in their own little stagnant pool of life.
And that is probably why science teaching is always underfunded and sabotaged.
Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering? No - the Olympics will not lead to more freedom for China. The good news is that China is already on the way to more freedom, and the Olympics are a symptom of that, or rather of the new-found wealth that China enjoys.
As for the "Great Firewall" - seeing that it is very easy to circumvent, combined with the fact that the Chinese are no fools, shouldn't that make you think a little about the purpose of it? To me it seems obvious that they are not trying to isolate the people from all information that isn't approved by the government; after all that task would be so tremendous that nobody could seriously contemplate it. But the internet isn't just a place full of useful information and good, innocent fun, it is also full of crap like pedophiles, scams and other things that exploit the inexperienced. I can fully sympathise with the intention to try to protect especially the children, but also the many adults who access the internet for the first time - perhaps a firewall is not really the best way, but I don't really see any other technology that can even attempt to stem the flood of serious crap on the internet.
This is of course not just a question of protecting the morals of the Chinese people, although I am sure that is actually a major part of the motivation; the Chinese are traditionally and culturally very occupied with moral. Another aspect is probably that the number of entirely new internet users in China is growing rapidly. If they all come online and immediately get screwed over by a large number of scams, they are going to want to ask their government "Why didn't you try to protect us?" - though they will probably not put it quite as politely as that - there would be riots and uprisings. So the government tries to avoid that happening. By making it non-trivial to get through the filter they also send out the message that "If you go out there and get cheated, you know who to blame".
Not the least bit absurd. Every person has the right to pursue their own happiness. If someone wants to be a complete screw-up, then it is a requirement of a free society that we let them be a screw-up. What an elegant way of saying "I don't care, let them rot". Let me enlighten you, then - very few people in the world "want to be screw-ups", and school-age children least of all. Everybody wants to be happy, everybody wants to succeed, but you have to learn what options life give you, as they are not programmed in to your instincts. For that, a child has to rely on parents, school and society in general. When you grow up in a deprived environment, what you learn is that you have very little hope and next to no options of making it out of there, because you are simply garbage at the bottom of the midden, and this is where you belong.
I suppose it shouldn't surprise me any more, but I can't help noticing how extreme America is becoming. It's a culture of my-self-first and I-don't-care, heartless, cold, cruel. This talk about "freedom" is just a thin veil over this basic egotism - you may be saying "they have the freedom to choose", but what you really mean is "I have the freedom to not care, 'cause I can't be bothered".
And that is the same thing that underlies taking such extreme measures as tagging young people for not going to school. If the authorities really cared, they would look into how they could integrate these kids into a positive, caring and productive society. All children want to learn; hell, you have to commit violence against them to stop them from learning, almost. If they don't want to go to school, it is because they don't feel it teaches them anything worthwhile.
We, the adults, we are the society - we even have the right to vote, and thus at least in principle the chance to influence the decisions made by those in charge. By not ensuring the best possible conditions for our young to grow up in, we are letting them down. Doesn't that bother you? Don't you care?
An earthquake hits China, tens or hundreds of thousands of people may have been killed. Response: idiotic jokes, complaints about this not being 'tech', ignorant nonsense about politics.
Planes hit a couple of tall buildings in New York, a few thousand people are killed. Response: wild cries of pain and anger, unbridled hatred against anything from the Middle East, America starts two wars of revenge.
Is there something about the proportions here that isn't quite right? I mean, after the 9/11 attack sympathy poured from all over the world, even Yasser Arafat expressed his outrage against the attackers. But the response of the Americans to a major disaster in China is one ridicule and cold, heartless arrogance hiding behind and thin excuse of 'but they are evil communists'. Is that really the best you guys can manage? You know, sometimes you really make it an uphill battle to love and respect America.
Ah, yes, the holy and ineffable market. This is what would happen if NASA was abolished and moved over to the private sector: The private sector would seek out the cheapest options and outsource to India and China. I'm not saying this would be bad, just that is what they would most likely do.
To me, space exploration is not about what is profitable or what would be profitable for a private company - that would be far too limited and shortsighted. It is about basic research, expanding our knowledge into unknown territory. If the onlyresearch that was allowed was what you could see immediate profit in, we wouldn't know anything about electricity, quantum mechanics, mathematics etc etc. The internet that is now considered so hugely important for our economy wouldn't be here - no quantum mechanics => no semiconductors, no maths => no digital computers, no electricity, well need I say more?
Electricity was nothing more than a curiousity for centuries - first described by the Greeks, as far as I remember. Most of the maths essential for modern technology was no more than intellectual games for a bunch of nerds; a sort of very esoteric philosophy with scarcely any practical relevance. If we don't do basic research, we will end up stagnating sooner or later. I don't think we can afford to be so myopic.
Knowing nothing about the area or indeed what kind of people live there, the only thing that springs to mind is to find somebody nearby ask pay them to latch onto their connection, if possible. Or, if nobody has it and everybody want it, how about forming a cooperative? The cooperative would build a shared broadband connection in whichever way was feasible, and perticipants would pay a share of the costs; it wouldn't necessarily have to be very expensive, and a shared facility could be built in an out of the way place that doesn't damage natural beauty, old houses etc.
When I look at the other comments here, it looks as if this is something we all have to use, whether we like or not. But as far as I remember we are still free to not buy devices with this on and will probably be so even in 20 years' time. Will Microsoft even exist then?
- that the NSA hasn't planted a backdoor somewhere in the code? Isn't that what they wanted in windows? I know it is OSS, but it is still a lot of code, and inspecting it all is a bit beyond me.
You misunderstand me - I am not saying that 'we are right and they are wrong'. I am talking about taking the power out of their arguments - eg. by genuinely trying to settle the conflict between Israel and Palestine, instead of just condoning whatever the Israeli government does to please their ultra-religious. If it wasn't so blindingly obvious that America is biased in favour of Israel, then the ordinary Iranian wouldn't necessarily listen to the nonsense about 'The Great Satan', and thus our arguments would be shown more respect. Simple, really.
It's literally incomprehensible I'll have to take your word for it. However, you have to accept that different people make different choices, and that this is right for them,even if you don;t like it. And you're right - in Europe we tend to trust our governments. Perhaps it is because we see them as 'one of us' to a greater extent, while Americans see their leaders as an aristocracy far removed from ordinary people.
Strange that this kind of stupid scaremongering gets modded up - oh, what am I talking about, this is slashdot.
So China choose to rely on their own stuff, just like the Europeans, because in their view America doesn't seem like a very reliable partner; and who can blame them, after nearly 8 years of Bush and the neocons? I realize that it pisses a lot of people off on/. every time this is brought up, but you might as well get used to it, because it will come back to haunt us for years to come.
And what is that nonsense about "it showed them how to build their own"? As if they aren't fully capable of thinking on their own. As far as I can see they entered into that partnership in good faith, and left when they had reason to feel that their good faith has been betrayed. There are many good reasons why China would want a closer partnership with Europe - one of them of being that they can see their advantage in having the US marginalised a bit, of course. And as things look at the moment, that can't be all bad either; the world needs a better balance of power, and the US could do with a bit of humble pie.
their entire country resembles an Orweillean dystopia Something tells me that you don't know what you are talking about. A lot of people in UK are very happy with the cameras, and in some places the locals themselves ask for them to be introduced.
The truth of the matter is, that there aren't all that many cameras - it isn't as if the whole place is covered wall to wall in lenses. And in the areas where there are any, such as London City, they do have an effect, mostly as a deterrent. So of course they don't do much to solve crimes - it isn't really the main purpose. This is part of what I think is a rather sympathetic world view we have in Europe: We don't go for secret surveillance. In fact, in most countries it is illegal even for shop owners to put up surveillance cameras without also putting up a clear warning that there are cameras. Or take speed cameras: We have quite a lot of them, but they are not only clearly signposted and painted brightly yellow - you can even find them online. Here's an example from BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/travel/speedcameras/speed_cameras.shtml.
The main purpose of cameras, CCTV and speed, is prevention, not 'catching offenders'. I mean, obviously, if you go around contemplating some crime, you don't want to be caught on camera, so you don't go to the places where they are; and therefore the cameras have no effect on solving the crimes that are committed.
By the look of it this book doesn't really address the fundamental issues underlying terrorism. I realise that this is outside the scope of the book and that it would be controversial, to put it mildly, in the US; but sooner or later we are going to have to tackle the issue of 'why'. We have at least since 9/11 had our heads stuck firmly in the sand, with fantasies about how terrorists are completely different from us, how they are 'evil', 'envious of our freedom' or at least 'insane' - this book goes some way to puncture that myth, at least.
The truth is, we are not going to win any war against terrorism - it's like the 'Gumby Brain Surgery'(ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumbys). We have to understand why something so utterly irrational as terrorism can not only exist, but spread rapidly; really, I would have thought that much was obvious. The good news is that it isn't impossible; as the book suggests, these people are rational, often intelligent, and if they can arrive at the conclusion that they have to go and blow themselves and other people up, then we can follow their logic. I should think that there is a good chance that we will discover one or two points that we can address intelligently, thus breaking the rationale of their reasoning. This is all about popular support - the terrorists have popular support because they can argue strongly for their goals; we can make their arguments weak if we know what we are doing, and once they lose popular support, they will soon cease to be a threat.
- is probably to go and lie down in dark room until the feeling passes. And here is an effective cure for toothache, which I learned from my mother: Fill your mouth with cold water and sit on a hot stove. When the water boils, the toothache will be gone. Works every time.
Seriously, though, what do you want to achive with your tinkering? If you go to a well stocked electronics shop, they'll have a lot of books about the theory and some about how to learn the right, practical skills: how to solder etc. I have approached the subject several times over the years, but the problem in my view is that the things one can easilty build are not all that interesting - to me, that is. It is easy to make USB thingies, for example, or things like amplifiers, programmable robots and so on, I think one of the things you will realize sooner or later is that electronics theory has amazingly little to do with practice - which is why you can use components with 10% or even 20% tolerance. You basically just slap things together sort of the right way and then adjust things with a couple of potentiometers if you really feel you must.
it's interesting that Krvaric has enjoyed instead a meteoric rise in conservative politics. People change their attitudes and beliefs when they get older, sometimes radically so. But I don't think their basic personality can change much - if you are bold, enterprising and feel that the rules don't apply to you when you are young, then you are likely to be the same way when you get older. And while "conservative" according to the dictionary means something like "someone who wants to preserve the existing", in American politics it more often seems to mean "reactionary, narrow-minded and selfish" - whereas "libertarian" means "reactionary, open-minded and selfish";-). (Note to the reader: This is of course meant as a sophisticated joke)
A young person who is a leader of organized SW piracy, for lack of a better word, probably doesn't feel that the rules apply to him - same goes for a surprising number of politicians; his perspective on the world is probably not the widest, and he probably sees himself as a "revolutionary" - the distance from "revolutionary" to "reactionary" is surprisingly short, so there is nothing strange in such a person becoming a politically conservative.
Now, before anybody gets going with how much of a communist I am, and what should be done to that kind of people, with a piece of rope and a tall tree, I would like to state that I am a conservative, in the traditional sense: I would like to conserve the good, old things (such as our beautiful nature), I would like to see us return to the good, old, traditional values, like personal freedom, responsibility and accountability, equality under the law, simple decency in dealing with others, and so on. Now, please go ahead and hang me.
Does Ballmer Need To Go? Definitely not. He has done marvellous things for OSS in his time at MS - he has single-handedly transformed a dynamic company that practically owned the world into a huge, lumbering invalid that only keeps going because of its enormous inertia. Just imagine if they had actually achieved to produce an OS that was technically equal to Linux or FreeBSD.
the UN's opinion that taser use is torture. Getting tasered isn't even as bad as being water boarded, as and you know you can't call that torture. Not unless you have an overpowering urge to visit our base in Cuba.
The problem with secrecy is that it takes away the public's ability to access the information they need in order to make informed decisions. That is something that can have huge consequences - from endangering democracy to giving companies free reins to metaphorically piss in the beer; I mean, in the case of the water supply, if the public can't see for themselves at any time that the water production is being run in a responsible manner, the company could in principle save money and use materials that would slowly poison people.
Secrecy is always a bad idea in an open society. The only reason some want to have secrecy is to save money on proper security.
Like it or not, isn't this exactly what copyright law was intended to protect: the right of an artist to profit from their own creative work? The motivation being that they more than other people depend on their creativity and the fame that follows for their livelyhood.
Whether this is the right way is an altogether different issue, and perhaps not one that is as clearcut as we would imagine. In recent years we have seen how both copyright and patent rules have been abused to hurt the free market, so I think it is time we made some serious changes to the whole IP concept. Perhaps the Open Commons idea is the way to proceed - something where a creative mind case establish a name and a reputation and which can serve as a basis for earning a living.
In many ways I don't think works of creativity should be anybody's property. The very essence of ownership is to exclude others from what you own, which in the case of works of art will mean that fewer get to enjoy it, and also dimishes the creativity, both of the 'owner' and of others who might have been inspired by it.
On May 1, 2000, the President of the United States signed an order disabling SA, and in late 2001, the entity managing GPS confirmed that the intent is to never re-enable selective availability.[14]. Though Selective Availability still exists, on September 19 2007, the US Department of Defense announced that they would not procure any more satellites capable of implementing Selective Availability.[15] This means the next wave of Block IIF satellites launching in 2009 will no longer support SA. As older satellites are deorbited and replaced, as part of the GPS Modernization program, SA will cease to exist. Well, that's certainly a relief. Now we know for certain that 1) the new satellites will not be able to enable SA (quote from the president: "Honest, guv"), and 2) no future US government will ever contemplate doing this at all, ever. Promise.
The thing is - since we know for a fact that this government has been lying consistently from the beginning, do we really have all that much basis for believing their promises now, all of a sudden? And even if we can actually trust them on this, there is no guarantee that a future administration will feel bound by the current government's promises. After all, we have seen how little even things like the convention of human rights and the constitution actually matter.
To me this simply looks like a feeble attempt at pulling the wool over people's eyes. And the people in question are the Americans - the US government knows full well that the rest of the world looks right through this. How long shall we tolerate this pseudo democracy, these hollow lies and the erosion of freedom?
"C and C++ becoming less popular with web developers" != "C and C++ becoming less popular in general". After all, Python, Ruby, Perl and other interpreted languages are all written in things like C or C++, I assume. And the convenience of automatic garbage collection is offset not only by the system overhead it causes, but also by the diminished of control over what goes on in your system, memorywise.
So, if the insurance companies are allowed to dicsriminate based on genes they will exclude the weakest, who will then lose out, and they aren't, those with bad genes will abuse the system, and the insurance companies will lose profit. There are two things to say about this:
1. Universal, public healthcare will remove the problem - no one will lose out because of their genes, and no one will lose profit, because the system isn't geared towards profit anyway.
2. Insurance companies are businesses and are supposed to be clever enough to do business the given reality. If they aren't, they have no right to exist as businesses.
In most European countries this is much less of a dilemma - the public healthcare takes care of everybody, and private healthcare is simply a luxury option that gives you faster access to non-emergency treatments etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Exciting as these subjects are, what I'd really like to see is someone tackling these:
1. What are particles? - Particles are simply assumed a priori. Nobody has ever managed to explain what a particle is.
2. What is time - why is it different from space?
3. Mass is 'curvature of space', so to speak. So what is electric charge?
To paraphrase Death in Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather": "In a universe full of wonders humans have invented boredom". I think most people don't want to have their minds blown - this is why they keep watching never-ending, never-changing soap operas. People just want to fester in their own little stagnant pool of life.
And that is probably why science teaching is always underfunded and sabotaged.
As for the "Great Firewall" - seeing that it is very easy to circumvent, combined with the fact that the Chinese are no fools, shouldn't that make you think a little about the purpose of it? To me it seems obvious that they are not trying to isolate the people from all information that isn't approved by the government; after all that task would be so tremendous that nobody could seriously contemplate it. But the internet isn't just a place full of useful information and good, innocent fun, it is also full of crap like pedophiles, scams and other things that exploit the inexperienced. I can fully sympathise with the intention to try to protect especially the children, but also the many adults who access the internet for the first time - perhaps a firewall is not really the best way, but I don't really see any other technology that can even attempt to stem the flood of serious crap on the internet.
This is of course not just a question of protecting the morals of the Chinese people, although I am sure that is actually a major part of the motivation; the Chinese are traditionally and culturally very occupied with moral. Another aspect is probably that the number of entirely new internet users in China is growing rapidly. If they all come online and immediately get screwed over by a large number of scams, they are going to want to ask their government "Why didn't you try to protect us?" - though they will probably not put it quite as politely as that - there would be riots and uprisings. So the government tries to avoid that happening. By making it non-trivial to get through the filter they also send out the message that "If you go out there and get cheated, you know who to blame".
I suppose it shouldn't surprise me any more, but I can't help noticing how extreme America is becoming. It's a culture of my-self-first and I-don't-care, heartless, cold, cruel. This talk about "freedom" is just a thin veil over this basic egotism - you may be saying "they have the freedom to choose", but what you really mean is "I have the freedom to not care, 'cause I can't be bothered".
And that is the same thing that underlies taking such extreme measures as tagging young people for not going to school. If the authorities really cared, they would look into how they could integrate these kids into a positive, caring and productive society. All children want to learn; hell, you have to commit violence against them to stop them from learning, almost. If they don't want to go to school, it is because they don't feel it teaches them anything worthwhile.
We, the adults, we are the society - we even have the right to vote, and thus at least in principle the chance to influence the decisions made by those in charge. By not ensuring the best possible conditions for our young to grow up in, we are letting them down. Doesn't that bother you? Don't you care?
An earthquake hits China, tens or hundreds of thousands of people may have been killed. Response: idiotic jokes, complaints about this not being 'tech', ignorant nonsense about politics.
Planes hit a couple of tall buildings in New York, a few thousand people are killed. Response: wild cries of pain and anger, unbridled hatred against anything from the Middle East, America starts two wars of revenge.
Is there something about the proportions here that isn't quite right? I mean, after the 9/11 attack sympathy poured from all over the world, even Yasser Arafat expressed his outrage against the attackers. But the response of the Americans to a major disaster in China is one ridicule and cold, heartless arrogance hiding behind and thin excuse of 'but they are evil communists'. Is that really the best you guys can manage? You know, sometimes you really make it an uphill battle to love and respect America.
Ah, yes, the holy and ineffable market. This is what would happen if NASA was abolished and moved over to the private sector: The private sector would seek out the cheapest options and outsource to India and China. I'm not saying this would be bad, just that is what they would most likely do.
To me, space exploration is not about what is profitable or what would be profitable for a private company - that would be far too limited and shortsighted. It is about basic research, expanding our knowledge into unknown territory. If the onlyresearch that was allowed was what you could see immediate profit in, we wouldn't know anything about electricity, quantum mechanics, mathematics etc etc. The internet that is now considered so hugely important for our economy wouldn't be here - no quantum mechanics => no semiconductors, no maths => no digital computers, no electricity, well need I say more?
Electricity was nothing more than a curiousity for centuries - first described by the Greeks, as far as I remember. Most of the maths essential for modern technology was no more than intellectual games for a bunch of nerds; a sort of very esoteric philosophy with scarcely any practical relevance. If we don't do basic research, we will end up stagnating sooner or later. I don't think we can afford to be so myopic.
Knowing nothing about the area or indeed what kind of people live there, the only thing that springs to mind is to find somebody nearby ask pay them to latch onto their connection, if possible. Or, if nobody has it and everybody want it, how about forming a cooperative? The cooperative would build a shared broadband connection in whichever way was feasible, and perticipants would pay a share of the costs; it wouldn't necessarily have to be very expensive, and a shared facility could be built in an out of the way place that doesn't damage natural beauty, old houses etc.
When I look at the other comments here, it looks as if this is something we all have to use, whether we like or not. But as far as I remember we are still free to not buy devices with this on and will probably be so even in 20 years' time. Will Microsoft even exist then?
- that the NSA hasn't planted a backdoor somewhere in the code? Isn't that what they wanted in windows? I know it is OSS, but it is still a lot of code, and inspecting it all is a bit beyond me.
It is called RNA - it ran already before DNA, which has been around for 4+ billion years or so, and it is still running in all known lifeforms.
You misunderstand me - I am not saying that 'we are right and they are wrong'. I am talking about taking the power out of their arguments - eg. by genuinely trying to settle the conflict between Israel and Palestine, instead of just condoning whatever the Israeli government does to please their ultra-religious. If it wasn't so blindingly obvious that America is biased in favour of Israel, then the ordinary Iranian wouldn't necessarily listen to the nonsense about 'The Great Satan', and thus our arguments would be shown more respect. Simple, really.
Strange that this kind of stupid scaremongering gets modded up - oh, what am I talking about, this is slashdot.
/. every time this is brought up, but you might as well get used to it, because it will come back to haunt us for years to come.
So China choose to rely on their own stuff, just like the Europeans, because in their view America doesn't seem like a very reliable partner; and who can blame them, after nearly 8 years of Bush and the neocons? I realize that it pisses a lot of people off on
And what is that nonsense about "it showed them how to build their own"? As if they aren't fully capable of thinking on their own. As far as I can see they entered into that partnership in good faith, and left when they had reason to feel that their good faith has been betrayed. There are many good reasons why China would want a closer partnership with Europe - one of them of being that they can see their advantage in having the US marginalised a bit, of course. And as things look at the moment, that can't be all bad either; the world needs a better balance of power, and the US could do with a bit of humble pie.
The truth of the matter is, that there aren't all that many cameras - it isn't as if the whole place is covered wall to wall in lenses. And in the areas where there are any, such as London City, they do have an effect, mostly as a deterrent. So of course they don't do much to solve crimes - it isn't really the main purpose. This is part of what I think is a rather sympathetic world view we have in Europe: We don't go for secret surveillance. In fact, in most countries it is illegal even for shop owners to put up surveillance cameras without also putting up a clear warning that there are cameras. Or take speed cameras: We have quite a lot of them, but they are not only clearly signposted and painted brightly yellow - you can even find them online. Here's an example from BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/travel/speedcameras/speed_cameras.shtml.
The main purpose of cameras, CCTV and speed, is prevention, not 'catching offenders'. I mean, obviously, if you go around contemplating some crime, you don't want to be caught on camera, so you don't go to the places where they are; and therefore the cameras have no effect on solving the crimes that are committed.
By the look of it this book doesn't really address the fundamental issues underlying terrorism. I realise that this is outside the scope of the book and that it would be controversial, to put it mildly, in the US; but sooner or later we are going to have to tackle the issue of 'why'. We have at least since 9/11 had our heads stuck firmly in the sand, with fantasies about how terrorists are completely different from us, how they are 'evil', 'envious of our freedom' or at least 'insane' - this book goes some way to puncture that myth, at least.
The truth is, we are not going to win any war against terrorism - it's like the 'Gumby Brain Surgery'(ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumbys). We have to understand why something so utterly irrational as terrorism can not only exist, but spread rapidly; really, I would have thought that much was obvious. The good news is that it isn't impossible; as the book suggests, these people are rational, often intelligent, and if they can arrive at the conclusion that they have to go and blow themselves and other people up, then we can follow their logic. I should think that there is a good chance that we will discover one or two points that we can address intelligently, thus breaking the rationale of their reasoning. This is all about popular support - the terrorists have popular support because they can argue strongly for their goals; we can make their arguments weak if we know what we are doing, and once they lose popular support, they will soon cease to be a threat.
- is probably to go and lie down in dark room until the feeling passes. And here is an effective cure for toothache, which I learned from my mother: Fill your mouth with cold water and sit on a hot stove. When the water boils, the toothache will be gone. Works every time.
Seriously, though, what do you want to achive with your tinkering? If you go to a well stocked electronics shop, they'll have a lot of books about the theory and some about how to learn the right, practical skills: how to solder etc. I have approached the subject several times over the years, but the problem in my view is that the things one can easilty build are not all that interesting - to me, that is. It is easy to make USB thingies, for example, or things like amplifiers, programmable robots and so on, I think one of the things you will realize sooner or later is that electronics theory has amazingly little to do with practice - which is why you can use components with 10% or even 20% tolerance. You basically just slap things together sort of the right way and then adjust things with a couple of potentiometers if you really feel you must.
A young person who is a leader of organized SW piracy, for lack of a better word, probably doesn't feel that the rules apply to him - same goes for a surprising number of politicians; his perspective on the world is probably not the widest, and he probably sees himself as a "revolutionary" - the distance from "revolutionary" to "reactionary" is surprisingly short, so there is nothing strange in such a person becoming a politically conservative.
Now, before anybody gets going with how much of a communist I am, and what should be done to that kind of people, with a piece of rope and a tall tree, I would like to state that I am a conservative, in the traditional sense: I would like to conserve the good, old things (such as our beautiful nature), I would like to see us return to the good, old, traditional values, like personal freedom, responsibility and accountability, equality under the law, simple decency in dealing with others, and so on. Now, please go ahead and hang me.
The problem with secrecy is that it takes away the public's ability to access the information they need in order to make informed decisions. That is something that can have huge consequences - from endangering democracy to giving companies free reins to metaphorically piss in the beer; I mean, in the case of the water supply, if the public can't see for themselves at any time that the water production is being run in a responsible manner, the company could in principle save money and use materials that would slowly poison people.
Secrecy is always a bad idea in an open society. The only reason some want to have secrecy is to save money on proper security.
Like it or not, isn't this exactly what copyright law was intended to protect: the right of an artist to profit from their own creative work? The motivation being that they more than other people depend on their creativity and the fame that follows for their livelyhood.
Whether this is the right way is an altogether different issue, and perhaps not one that is as clearcut as we would imagine. In recent years we have seen how both copyright and patent rules have been abused to hurt the free market, so I think it is time we made some serious changes to the whole IP concept. Perhaps the Open Commons idea is the way to proceed - something where a creative mind case establish a name and a reputation and which can serve as a basis for earning a living.
In many ways I don't think works of creativity should be anybody's property. The very essence of ownership is to exclude others from what you own, which in the case of works of art will mean that fewer get to enjoy it, and also dimishes the creativity, both of the 'owner' and of others who might have been inspired by it.
The thing is - since we know for a fact that this government has been lying consistently from the beginning, do we really have all that much basis for believing their promises now, all of a sudden? And even if we can actually trust them on this, there is no guarantee that a future administration will feel bound by the current government's promises. After all, we have seen how little even things like the convention of human rights and the constitution actually matter.
To me this simply looks like a feeble attempt at pulling the wool over people's eyes. And the people in question are the Americans - the US government knows full well that the rest of the world looks right through this. How long shall we tolerate this pseudo democracy, these hollow lies and the erosion of freedom?
"C and C++ becoming less popular with web developers" != "C and C++ becoming less popular in general". After all, Python, Ruby, Perl and other interpreted languages are all written in things like C or C++, I assume. And the convenience of automatic garbage collection is offset not only by the system overhead it causes, but also by the diminished of control over what goes on in your system, memorywise.
So, if the insurance companies are allowed to dicsriminate based on genes they will exclude the weakest, who will then lose out, and they aren't, those with bad genes will abuse the system, and the insurance companies will lose profit. There are two things to say about this:
1. Universal, public healthcare will remove the problem - no one will lose out because of their genes, and no one will lose profit, because the system isn't geared towards profit anyway.
2. Insurance companies are businesses and are supposed to be clever enough to do business the given reality. If they aren't, they have no right to exist as businesses.
In most European countries this is much less of a dilemma - the public healthcare takes care of everybody, and private healthcare is simply a luxury option that gives you faster access to non-emergency treatments etc.
Did you know, incidentally, that today is World Book and Copyright Day? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_and_Copyright_Day)