I think they think we could use a little bloodless terror attack to shock us out of complacency and re-focus pre-election attention onto terror threats and homeland security and away from economic issues.
You think so? I don't. I think if the blackout in the US NE was due to a terrorist attack it would be highly embarrassing to the government.
You left out [..] the Grey Men's Mothership [..] Hey, could happen, right?
You are mocking me. Well, you know I was expecting it...
Let me put the converse to you. Do you believe that it is impossible, or even highly improbable, that a government would hush-up something like a terrorist attack? If you do, go ahead and call me paranoid. I'll call you naive. Read some modern history books. You'd be suprised what governments are capable of.
Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Oh come on. I agree that there are trends in news stories, but Italy had not had a power outage on this scale for decades, nor had London or the USA. These are getting reported because they are significant.
Is it just me or is there something really weird about all the blackouts this year?
Why is it that many of these countries have not had significant blackouts for years, decades even, and then they all have signigicant blackouts within the same six month period?
Personally I find it really hard to believe that, for instance, a falling tree branch somewhere in the mountains managed to down just the right powerline to cause a blackout in the whole of Italy. It just doesn't ring true to me. This is critical infrastructure for christsakes! Governments know where the weaknesses are and have all kinds of plans in place to prevent this type of thing happening in case of war. (My father used to be on some of the comittees that put these plans together in the UK. They know where the weaknesses in infrastructure are.)
So I find it really difficult to believe that there have been small incidents that just so happened to have hit the critical spot to take out large sections of the powergrids in a number of different countries all within a few months. Somethings going on here. What is it? I can only speculate:
1) These are actually well planned terrorist attacks which are hushed up because politically Bush/Blair etc. need to be seen to be "winning the war on terrorism", and so we the general public don't get to know about them. (Notice that the blackouts affected NY, London and Italy - all of which supported the Iraq war?)
2) There is some kind of power (pun not intended) game going on between different governments.
3) The utility companies are doing this on purpose in order to get more tax dollars invested in their industries.
(Some people are going to respond that I am paranoid and need a tinfoil hat. You might be right. But personally I think the current mentality of completely dismissing offhand anything that suggests governments or corporations can act in an underhand manner on a coordinated scale is unhealthy - these things should get discussed, otherwise people in power will start to think they can get away with crazy things just because nobody would believe they would do it!)
I've always had trouble getting the notion of being "forced" and "strong-armed" into upgrading a product.
Well, I know Macromedia's products better, so I'll talk about those. They have started to make lots of components for them, and to sell them individually. Prevously these would have been considered part of the application product.
The components in Flash MX for instance had small faults in them (which Macromedia never corrected) and now they've just released Flash MX 2004, which needs completely new components so I have to buy essentially the same thing twice. And they have released a "professional" version of the product with just a few additional elements to the main one, thus bumping up the price again.
The fact of the matter is that companies can "force" money out of you in the short term by exploiting your long term investment in them.
The interesting thing is that Abode is having exactly the same problems as Microsoft. That is, of application maturity.
Photoshop as a tool is completely mature. It has been for quite a while now. For many people that use it, there is no reason to upgrade. This is also true of Microsoft Office, and to an extent some of Macromedia's tools such as Dreamweaver.
The sad thing about all of this is that these companies are trying to find ways of forcing people to upgrade. Macromedia is especially guilty to this I think - it is trying myriad ways of squeezing more money out of the purchasers of their software. Well, I for one am not playing their game - I don't like being strong armed into purchases.
In the long run, I think these companies are going to die out, because they can't improve their applications much more but OSS solutions are going to evenutally catch up and become equally mature. Still, they've got a few years yet. I give them a decade.
It is not my goal to place restrictions on investment or innovation; it is only to present a new way of thinking that some people may find stimulating.
Here's looking forward to some creative new thinking...
Write free software for individual industries
What the f***? How is that supposed to help reverse falling unemployment?
Slashdot - if you're going to post links to economics related subjects, can you please make sure it is written by someone with a clue about economics?
I'm not sure if I completely understand the point that you're trying to make.
Just because you've been into the "CU-See-Me" network and seen people showing their willies does not mean that video conferencing or picture phones or whatever will never take off, or that the CEO of AT&T is being ignorant.
It sounds to me like you should have done a bit more thinking and testing before you did your school installation. The failure of your one project does not write off a whole new up and coming area of technology.
In order to work out the full potential of new technologies, it is important to consider the sex uses first. I'm not joking - the sexual uses of new technologies will always outnumber, and incorporate, all other uses.
There is (apparently) an interesting new sexual practice in the UK called "dogging". This involves using the web to locate people anonymously, and then meeting up in public places (in a park for instance) to have anonymous sex. Other people go along to watch. This is I guess a type of smart mob (although "not very smart mob" might be more a appropriate name when you take sexual diseases into account).
I don't need to mention that the emergence of the picturephone will bring about whole new areas of creative uses of technology...
For some reason I'm always a little dissappointed whenever I see people list the reasons why I should be concerned. They usually point out the "dirty magazine collection" or something else dealing with those "embarassing" issues.
I think you are reading to much into my original post. It was just meant as a joke. You should have posted your observations as a new thread.
I often wonder why "Cheating on your wife" jokes are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I can't see the point in getting married if you don't intend to be faithful, and laughing about it doesn't make it any less tragic that so many people think otherwise... hmm.
Oops, -1 Depressing;)
Jokes aren't meant to be taken literally. You should try to lighten up.
Bob: What do you call 1000 lawyers drowned at the bottom of the ocean?
Bill: I don't know. What do you call 1000 lawyers drowned at the bottom of the ocean?
Bob: A start!
Bill: I don't understand why jokes advocating murding lawyers are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but murder is a very serious crime, and morally indefensible.
That's because you don't understand the dangers. The knee jerk reaction to this type of story is to worry about "big brother", government spooks, or whatever. But that's not where the danger lies...
What you do is becoming more and more traceable. Every telephone call you make on a mobile phone, for instance, is logged and traceable back to you. Don't need to worry about this because you're not paranoid? Think again. You see, it's not the government you need to worry about. It's your wife or girlfriend!
Sometime in the near future...
Wifie: Hey, I brought one of those personal stuff locators today, you know, the ones that locate stuff by RFID tags?
Nervous husband: Oh, erm. That will be useful...
Wifie: Yes, very useful. I found a large heap of pornographic magazines on top of the wardrobe...
Nervous husband: Oh! Erm... That's...
Wifie: And why do you keep condoms hidden in the back of your washbag? I'm on the pill. The machine says they were purchased only last week.
Nervous husband: Ah! Now then... I. Erm...
I'm guessing you're not paranoid because you're not married or you don't have a long term girlfriend. You will be...
The Brits are a funny lot (I'm British but haven't lived there for some years so I think I have both an internal and external view of them).
Currently there are all these increadably Orwellian things going on in the UK. It's amazing to drive anywhere in the UK now, there are cameras everywhere. And I don't mean the ones that photograph you when you speed (although there are lots of those), I mean video cameras. When I ask people what they are for, people don't seem to have thought about it very much.
And yet there are many people in the UK who fly into a rage to anything that they think is infringing their civil liberties. For instance, a lot of Brits really do not want to have identity cards at all, thinking that it will turn the UK into some kind of police state.
When you go to open a bank account in the UK, they will ask you for a gas bill with your name on it in order to indentify who you are. Really. Seriously. A gas bill. And how can you get such a gas bill? Find someone who already has one, phone up with Gas Board, and ask them to add your name to the bill. (Or any name for that matter). And that's it.
In order to claim benefits (unemployment benefits, housing, etc.) in the UK, you need a social security number. In order to get a social security number, you need a birth certificate to prove you are a real person. On the old birth certificates, the ink washes off. So get an old certificate, wash the name off, write a new one on, you get a new social security number. Rinse, repeat. This was told to me by a friend of a friend who was claiming unemployment benefit for four people in London.
Similarly with hospitals, it is apparently very easy to get treatment in the uk even if you are not a UK taxpayer, because the hospitals have no reliable way to tell who you are.
So, in summary:
1) There are increadibly draconian/orwellian things happening in the UK, and yet there is very little public debate about it and nobody seems that bothered.
2) The Brits are dead against something that would actually be of great benefit in reducing all types of fraud - i.e. actually having a secure way to identify themselves.
Funny people.
Re:Who could possibly know more vibrant economies.
on
Red Herring Comes Back
·
· Score: 1
A more interesting question is what the under/over line is for the Euro collapsing.
Euro collapsing? Last time I looked the Euro has been gradually gaining strength against the dollar and sterling for the last couple of years. But then perhaps you know something that the markets don't... Or maybe you're just prejudiced against the Europeans...
I have just spotted my comment above posted on the BBC web site "Have your say: MSN Chat closure - your views" attributed to a Mark Bowen from Wales. Mark - if you are reading this - you could have at least corrected my typos before posting it on the BBC site!
I once went to the Sugababes' website (don't ask why)
Why?
I am strongly against actions such as banning technologies like Chat because the could be used by paedophiles. I also believe that in reality paedophiles are extremely rare. However, in the case of public chat groups like the one you mention, I do think that there is a moral obligation on behalf of the service provider to monitor it.
This is nothing new. New technologies always inspire fear. When doing some research once I read an article in a magazine from around 1890 talking about how young ladies should not be allowed to use the telephone for more than a few minutes at a time due to fear that they weren't mentally strong enough to cope with the sensation of talking to a disembodied voice for very long.
In my lifetime I seen fear of video cassette recorders (remember how "video nasties" were going to corrupt a whole generation of children?) and similar fear of video games, and now all this stuff related to the internet.
The really stupid thing about all this from my point of view is how the press in the UK has caused the general public to believe that paedophilia (that is, adults that find pre-pubescent children sexually attractive) is common, when in reality it is very rare and probably no more so today than it was fifty or 100 years ago. This has caused, for instance, parents to be afraid to let their children go out to play outside. This is a real shame.
I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing. Thoughts?
My take on this is that people who fear death are often those that don't make full use of the life they have. People that live full and rich lives don't fear death.
There is a memorable scene in a classic old movie, The Man Who Would Be King with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Facing death due to an avalanche in the Himalayas, one turns to the other and says something like "we may have lived half the time of most men, but we've lived twice the life". Thus, they face death with humour and with their heads held high, without regret or worry.
Re:Open goverment from the people who know...
on
eGovOS 3 Announced
·
· Score: 1
This is great to see, but lets not pretend that it isn't the big boys who are making sure the goverments play with Open Source toys.
Why do you assume this?
I know for a fact that quite a number of the projects in Europe that are going to be talked about were driven by the local governments, not by vendors. In the USA it is a common assumption that government employees = dumb, but that isn't so true in Europe where in many countries government jobs are well paid and respected, and so attract good people.
I know that nobody likes taxes, but given that some taxes have to be collected, why a special ban on "internet taxes"? I pay special taxes when I take a flight, for instance, why does the airline industry have to suffer special taxes but the internet industry doesn't?
Now, something like a tax per email would of course just be dumb, but would a fixed household-based tax on broadband be dumb? Especially bearing in mind that the gov. needs to police the internet to a certain extent (to those that say they don't, get back to me when your Mom gets their banking details stolen or your friend gets defrauded by a mock ebay site).
Slashdot Mirror
reports have said that the search for backdoors installed by national intelligence agencies is also among the aims of the agreement.
MS drone Bob: Did you remember to send those CDs of the source code to the Chinese?
MS drone Dave: Yes, I did it this morning. Posted it Express delivery!
MS drone Bob: You did remember to send the version with the backdoors taken out, didn't you?
MS drone Dave: D'oh! [Slaps forehead]
I think they think we could use a little bloodless terror attack to shock us out of complacency and re-focus pre-election attention onto terror threats and homeland security and away from economic issues.
You think so? I don't. I think if the blackout in the US NE was due to a terrorist attack it would be highly embarrassing to the government.
You left out [..] the Grey Men's Mothership [..] Hey, could happen, right?
You are mocking me. Well, you know I was expecting it...
Let me put the converse to you. Do you believe that it is impossible, or even highly improbable, that a government would hush-up something like a terrorist attack? If you do, go ahead and call me paranoid. I'll call you naive. Read some modern history books. You'd be suprised what governments are capable of.
Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Oh come on. I agree that there are trends in news stories, but Italy had not had a power outage on this scale for decades, nor had London or the USA. These are getting reported because they are significant.
Is it just me or is there something really weird about all the blackouts this year?
Why is it that many of these countries have not had significant blackouts for years, decades even, and then they all have signigicant blackouts within the same six month period?
Personally I find it really hard to believe that, for instance, a falling tree branch somewhere in the mountains managed to down just the right powerline to cause a blackout in the whole of Italy. It just doesn't ring true to me. This is critical infrastructure for christsakes! Governments know where the weaknesses are and have all kinds of plans in place to prevent this type of thing happening in case of war. (My father used to be on some of the comittees that put these plans together in the UK. They know where the weaknesses in infrastructure are.)
So I find it really difficult to believe that there have been small incidents that just so happened to have hit the critical spot to take out large sections of the powergrids in a number of different countries all within a few months. Somethings going on here. What is it? I can only speculate:
1) These are actually well planned terrorist attacks which are hushed up because politically Bush/Blair etc. need to be seen to be "winning the war on terrorism", and so we the general public don't get to know about them. (Notice that the blackouts affected NY, London and Italy - all of which supported the Iraq war?)
2) There is some kind of power (pun not intended) game going on between different governments.
3) The utility companies are doing this on purpose in order to get more tax dollars invested in their industries.
(Some people are going to respond that I am paranoid and need a tinfoil hat. You might be right. But personally I think the current mentality of completely dismissing offhand anything that suggests governments or corporations can act in an underhand manner on a coordinated scale is unhealthy - these things should get discussed, otherwise people in power will start to think they can get away with crazy things just because nobody would believe they would do it!)
I've always had trouble getting the notion of being "forced" and "strong-armed" into upgrading a product.
Well, I know Macromedia's products better, so I'll talk about those. They have started to make lots of components for them, and to sell them individually. Prevously these would have been considered part of the application product.
The components in Flash MX for instance had small faults in them (which Macromedia never corrected) and now they've just released Flash MX 2004, which needs completely new components so I have to buy essentially the same thing twice. And they have released a "professional" version of the product with just a few additional elements to the main one, thus bumping up the price again.
The fact of the matter is that companies can "force" money out of you in the short term by exploiting your long term investment in them.
The interesting thing is that Abode is having exactly the same problems as Microsoft. That is, of application maturity.
Photoshop as a tool is completely mature. It has been for quite a while now. For many people that use it, there is no reason to upgrade. This is also true of Microsoft Office, and to an extent some of Macromedia's tools such as Dreamweaver.
The sad thing about all of this is that these companies are trying to find ways of forcing people to upgrade. Macromedia is especially guilty to this I think - it is trying myriad ways of squeezing more money out of the purchasers of their software. Well, I for one am not playing their game - I don't like being strong armed into purchases.
In the long run, I think these companies are going to die out, because they can't improve their applications much more but OSS solutions are going to evenutally catch up and become equally mature. Still, they've got a few years yet. I give them a decade.
It is just me, or is that article rubbish?
It is not my goal to place restrictions on investment or innovation; it is only to present a new way of thinking that some people may find stimulating.
Here's looking forward to some creative new thinking...
Write free software for individual industries
What the f***? How is that supposed to help reverse falling unemployment?
Slashdot - if you're going to post links to economics related subjects, can you please make sure it is written by someone with a clue about economics?
I'm not sure if I completely understand the point that you're trying to make.
Just because you've been into the "CU-See-Me" network and seen people showing their willies does not mean that video conferencing or picture phones or whatever will never take off, or that the CEO of AT&T is being ignorant.
It sounds to me like you should have done a bit more thinking and testing before you did your school installation. The failure of your one project does not write off a whole new up and coming area of technology.
In order to work out the full potential of new technologies, it is important to consider the sex uses first. I'm not joking - the sexual uses of new technologies will always outnumber, and incorporate, all other uses.
There is (apparently) an interesting new sexual practice in the UK called "dogging". This involves using the web to locate people anonymously, and then meeting up in public places (in a park for instance) to have anonymous sex. Other people go along to watch. This is I guess a type of smart mob (although "not very smart mob" might be more a appropriate name when you take sexual diseases into account).
I don't need to mention that the emergence of the picturephone will bring about whole new areas of creative uses of technology...
For some reason I'm always a little dissappointed whenever I see people list the reasons why I should be concerned. They usually point out the "dirty magazine collection" or something else dealing with those "embarassing" issues.
I think you are reading to much into my original post. It was just meant as a joke. You should have posted your observations as a new thread.
I often wonder why "Cheating on your wife" jokes are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I can't see the point in getting married if you don't intend to be faithful, and laughing about it doesn't make it any less tragic that so many people think otherwise... hmm.
Oops, -1 Depressing
Jokes aren't meant to be taken literally. You should try to lighten up.
Bob: What do you call 1000 lawyers drowned at the bottom of the ocean?
Bill: I don't know. What do you call 1000 lawyers drowned at the bottom of the ocean?
Bob: A start!
Bill: I don't understand why jokes advocating murding lawyers are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but murder is a very serious crime, and morally indefensible.
Bob: ?!?!?!!!
Or perhaps because he has enough integrity that being caught out isn't a problem?
It was a joke! Laugh!
Why should I? I'm not paranoid.
That's because you don't understand the dangers. The knee jerk reaction to this type of story is to worry about "big brother", government spooks, or whatever. But that's not where the danger lies...
What you do is becoming more and more traceable. Every telephone call you make on a mobile phone, for instance, is logged and traceable back to you. Don't need to worry about this because you're not paranoid? Think again. You see, it's not the government you need to worry about. It's your wife or girlfriend!
Sometime in the near future...
Wifie: Hey, I brought one of those personal stuff locators today, you know, the ones that locate stuff by RFID tags?
Nervous husband: Oh, erm. That will be useful...
Wifie: Yes, very useful. I found a large heap of pornographic magazines on top of the wardrobe...
Nervous husband: Oh! Erm... That's...
Wifie: And why do you keep condoms hidden in the back of your washbag? I'm on the pill. The machine says they were purchased only last week.
Nervous husband: Ah! Now then... I. Erm...
I'm guessing you're not paranoid because you're not married or you don't have a long term girlfriend. You will be...
Remember folks -- when you buy tinfoil, remember to remove the RFID tag from it before you make your hat.
The Brits are a funny lot (I'm British but haven't lived there for some years so I think I have both an internal and external view of them).
Currently there are all these increadably Orwellian things going on in the UK. It's amazing to drive anywhere in the UK now, there are cameras everywhere. And I don't mean the ones that photograph you when you speed (although there are lots of those), I mean video cameras. When I ask people what they are for, people don't seem to have thought about it very much.
And yet there are many people in the UK who fly into a rage to anything that they think is infringing their civil liberties. For instance, a lot of Brits really do not want to have identity cards at all, thinking that it will turn the UK into some kind of police state.
When you go to open a bank account in the UK, they will ask you for a gas bill with your name on it in order to indentify who you are. Really. Seriously. A gas bill. And how can you get such a gas bill? Find someone who already has one, phone up with Gas Board, and ask them to add your name to the bill. (Or any name for that matter). And that's it.
In order to claim benefits (unemployment benefits, housing, etc.) in the UK, you need a social security number. In order to get a social security number, you need a birth certificate to prove you are a real person. On the old birth certificates, the ink washes off. So get an old certificate, wash the name off, write a new one on, you get a new social security number. Rinse, repeat. This was told to me by a friend of a friend who was claiming unemployment benefit for four people in London.
Similarly with hospitals, it is apparently very easy to get treatment in the uk even if you are not a UK taxpayer, because the hospitals have no reliable way to tell who you are.
So, in summary:
1) There are increadibly draconian/orwellian things happening in the UK, and yet there is very little public debate about it and nobody seems that bothered.
2) The Brits are dead against something that would actually be of great benefit in reducing all types of fraud - i.e. actually having a secure way to identify themselves.
Funny people.
A more interesting question is what the under/over line is for the Euro collapsing.
Euro collapsing? Last time I looked the Euro has been gradually gaining strength against the dollar and sterling for the last couple of years. But then perhaps you know something that the markets don't... Or maybe you're just prejudiced against the Europeans...
How could any service provider actually monitor EVERY anonymous chat room? It's not possible.
By service provider I am referring to whoever is responsible for the Sugababes web site.
I have just spotted my comment above posted on the BBC web site "Have your say: MSN Chat closure - your views" attributed to a Mark Bowen from Wales. Mark - if you are reading this - you could have at least corrected my typos before posting it on the BBC site!
I once went to the Sugababes' website (don't ask why)
Why?
I am strongly against actions such as banning technologies like Chat because the could be used by paedophiles. I also believe that in reality paedophiles are extremely rare. However, in the case of public chat groups like the one you mention, I do think that there is a moral obligation on behalf of the service provider to monitor it.
This is nothing new. New technologies always inspire fear. When doing some research once I read an article in a magazine from around 1890 talking about how young ladies should not be allowed to use the telephone for more than a few minutes at a time due to fear that they weren't mentally strong enough to cope with the sensation of talking to a disembodied voice for very long.
In my lifetime I seen fear of video cassette recorders (remember how "video nasties" were going to corrupt a whole generation of children?) and similar fear of video games, and now all this stuff related to the internet.
The really stupid thing about all this from my point of view is how the press in the UK has caused the general public to believe that paedophilia (that is, adults that find pre-pubescent children sexually attractive) is common, when in reality it is very rare and probably no more so today than it was fifty or 100 years ago. This has caused, for instance, parents to be afraid to let their children go out to play outside. This is a real shame.
I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing. Thoughts?
My take on this is that people who fear death are often those that don't make full use of the life they have. People that live full and rich lives don't fear death.
There is a memorable scene in a classic old movie, The Man Who Would Be King with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Facing death due to an avalanche in the Himalayas, one turns to the other and says something like "we may have lived half the time of most men, but we've lived twice the life". Thus, they face death with humour and with their heads held high, without regret or worry.
This is great to see, but lets not pretend that it isn't the big boys who are making sure the goverments play with Open Source toys.
Why do you assume this?
I know for a fact that quite a number of the projects in Europe that are going to be talked about were driven by the local governments, not by vendors. In the USA it is a common assumption that government employees = dumb, but that isn't so true in Europe where in many countries government jobs are well paid and respected, and so attract good people.
More interesing recent story on cell phones:
Mobiles 'betray' cheating Italians.
I know that nobody likes taxes, but given that some taxes have to be collected, why a special ban on "internet taxes"? I pay special taxes when I take a flight, for instance, why does the airline industry have to suffer special taxes but the internet industry doesn't?
Now, something like a tax per email would of course just be dumb, but would a fixed household-based tax on broadband be dumb? Especially bearing in mind that the gov. needs to police the internet to a certain extent (to those that say they don't, get back to me when your Mom gets their banking details stolen or your friend gets defrauded by a mock ebay site).