If you want it that way, probably. But there are other choices. BTW, I once read in scientific american that Bangladesh has better health care (for ex. fewer dead babys per 1000 births) than some areas in the USA. Does that make you proud?
I'm Canadian, and our health care is OK, but it's in shambles. And I give near $2,000/month under threat of imprisonment (income tax!) to the Canadian Government to have a system that works, and they piss it away. Privatize it; Get a system that works for poor people; But don't bitch at me when almost half of my income is taxed. Or maybe you americans would like a what, 46% income tax? Huh?
I live in Canada; But I sure as hell have a Blue Cross card in my wallet just like all my American friends, and if you saw what a trip to the dentist or a few extra tests cost, or glasses, etc, you'd be shocked if it came out of your wallet. We have a two-tier system in Canada. Nobody just wants to call it that.
Here's something else. How is genetic engineering any different than picking a mate who's smart, looks good, and/or has a good family health history? Let's think about this: You can spend a lot of money chasing a signigigant other, and in my own current (serious) relationship, one of the factors is that she's good looking, and _very_ smart. If my kids did the same thing, and their kids did the same thing - the result would be the same as if I had imparted genes to them artifically, in that the offspring from these relationships would _undoubtedly_ have a genetic advantage over their peers. We do with with animals all the time.
How is this any different? Money and resources are involved along the way in just the same manner, as is genetic makeup.
Wow, WWI and WWII were fought for the sake of Capitalism?
Last time I checked they were about freedom - to choose, something that is tightly integrated with capitalism, e.g. the freedom to do with your economic resources what you want. One of the principles of a democratic state is also a free economy - relatively, anyhow. Although I suppose everyone could vote themselves into a dictatorship, too, which is argueably a situation faced by some nations today. *ahem*
Don't forget, the USSR was one of the Allies in WWII. The millions of Russians who died (the USSR suffered more casualties in WWII than any other country) certainly didn't die for the sake of Capitalism.
No, they died to keep their state free from German advances into eastern europe and Russia.
Am I the only one amazed that people are more concerned about economic systems (Capitalism vs. Socialism) than they are about political systems (democracy vs. authoritarianism)?
I'm more concerned about economic systems because it impacts my bottom line. I've given up on ever being able to do jack about the political system in which I live. A 2-3 party country doesn't give you much choice, period. Unless you're a minority lobby group. *tongue in cheek* As long as the goverment stays outta my face, the man doesn't hassle me too much, my taxes aren't oppressive (getting there, in Canada) I can save my money for an Acura NSX and mutant kids (*snicker*), they can do what they want.
A country can be ruled by a brutal dictator, but if that dictator is friendly to the powerful property owners and U.S. corporations, they're a U.S. ally. That's sad.
This is sad. It's also for the benefit of domestic corporations (I'm Canadian, but the oil/gas/mining corps here are just as bad as their US counterparts).
Why don't you get off your high horse! What kind of aristocrat are you? Sure, there are flaws to any kind of society, and capitalism's happens to be a separation of haves and have-nots.
I don't know what kind of world you live in. I'm not going to spend my money on your kids. I'm going to spend them on mine, and if that makes the world less equal, tough noogies. I plan on teaching my children the joys of learning and education just as I was, and I'll give them all the tools I have to do that. If I can make them more resistant to cancer, I'll do that too, just as I'll make sure they can go to the best school I can afford. You do the same, we'll toss in a few calls to rand(), and let the best man win. The society gets ahead that way. And who's to say my cancer-resistant offspring won't mate with your intelligence-enhanced offspring to create cancer-resistant intelligent-enhanced kids? People think that the gene pool is small. It's not. Is freaking *huge*. There are enough people on the planet so the gene pool will NEVER be hurt. Ever. Unless we nuke ourselves into oblivion.
But that doesn't mean we have to try to increase that flaw! No system is perfect, "pure" capitalism just leads to greed!
I don't argue this. Life's not fair though, and I'll use all the tools I can to make sure that my kids have a running head start on the evil world.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
I thought that was communism. One of the tenants of western society is FREEDOM. You are free to do what you want if it does not harm others. Equality - economic equality - is fundamentally communinst/socialist in nature. Sure, we're all "equal" - your life is worth no more than mine - but I would bet money our bank account statements are different (you probably have a lot more money than me!). I'll spend resources I have as I see fit, you do the same. Just don't tell me I can't spend them on making sure my kids aren't gimps.
And that is exactly what is wrong with the current state of genetic engineering. Already, we see on a limited scale the separation between the haves and the have-nots in the world of computing. The white-middle-class-computer-programmer group by far has a huge advantage in life (not that other groups can't succeed; they just have more obstacles). Do we really want a world where those with money are smarter, faster, stronger, and healthier than those without?
Get off your high horse. We do this now and we've done it for centuries. I have better health care, better education and better resources than the people down the street because my parents were educated and have money. I don't want to think about how much all those books cost or how much I spent on computing gear. How much does post secondary education cost in the United States of America, especially the 1st tier stuff?
No, I'll bloody well spend money on my kids, and I'll be damned if anyone tries to stop me, or tries to tax away my advantage. Do you think that the poor schmuck on the street gets the same medical attention you do when HE has a heart attack? Where do you live?
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system. I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Genomics is scarey, yes. The only way you will be able to change how the technology impacts your own life is to understand and develop it, not stick your head in the sand. I'd be far more worried about the thousands of Nuclear Missiles that are locked and loaded as we speak than any possible impacts 20 generations down the road from sequencing technology. Personally, I'd be suprised if life, on Earth, anyhow lasts that long. People are violent and irrational animals in groups, and they do horrific things like try and exterminate each other for as long as history has been recorded.
Personally, I would LOVE to know what each gene in my body does. DNA is fascinating; It's life's source code, and we don't even know what the symbols are yet! What we have is a really bad dissassembly and the odd bit of text to figure out what's going on. If there's one thing that makes life interesting to me, it's learning new stuff. And this certainly qualifies.
If our world is ready to stare down nuclear anhillation every single day for as long as homo sapiens contines to breathe on this planet, we're ready for Genetic Engineering. I'd rather see resources spent on engineering human genomes than engineering an airborne Ebola. Which your tax dollars subsidize, along with stockpiles of lots of other biological and chemical nasties. You think Brave New World was bad? Take a look at what a modern aerosol neurotoxin will do to your insides in a few minutes. And the USA is a world leader in "weapons of mass destruction" aka "facilitators of government genocide".
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
First off, I won't get into the fact that sequencing genes is nothing more than effectively counting them. I'm not a genomics wizard but my Dad is (albeit Plant genetics, but, hey). It's an important first step, but this is more akin to the V2 rocket launches by Germany than it is landing on the moon. I suspect this is why nobody has heard of Professor What's-His-Face. That, and he's not the world's (2nd?) richest man, so your comparison sucks, Katz. IMHO, Biologists are too concerned with drawing pictures than looking at ways to engineer life, which is where this research is going. Bacteria are wonderful little machines, as are plants, and their power will be harnessed.
What I'm interested in is why people freak out when you concider applying this to your kids. The obvious one is to concieve many children - fertilize a lot of eggs - and then sequence the genomes and see what good 'ol mother nature did for you. I'd sign up for this in a second; I would not think twice (nor would my current SO) about aborting a clump of cells that is going to have a miserable existance, albeit by my standards, but I'm the one creating that life, not your diety of choice. YMMV.
The best comes when you think about a latter step; Changing the genes of your kids to make them better (tm). Looks don't bother me; The kids can look like their old man, he obviously found a mate. What about intelligence though? Contrary to popular belief, it's hundreds if not thousands of traits that combine to make a good whatever(Engineer, in this case). If I could give an edge here, I will. You're fooling yourself if you think this technology can be stopped, too - because it'll be done in some country, because there's a lot of interest in this.
I've always wondered what would make up for man stopping natural evolution - we're too successful, and it's too slow. I always thought eventually AI would come into the picture, but with the possiblilty of being able to engineer our genes in the next 25 years, maybe government will be bright enough to let us make choices for how we want our offspring be.
Mind you, this tech isn't going to be cheap. But, I'd rather leave my kids improved genetic code (resistance to Cancer, maybe?) than a big chunk of money when I die. That might even be worth saving up for.
Stockwell Day is an anti-abortionist, right-wing, seclusionist, racist politician who likes to avoid questions and panders to the lowest common denominator, even when that is most certainly not the moral high-ground. i'd rather have another five years of liberals than the canadian alliance
Maybe, but they're not getting elected on those issues. They're getting elected on the fact that I make a contribution to the government of nearly $2,000/month. That's insane. Absolutely insane. Anyone billing to reduce that by half is getting my vote, period, end of sale. I'm sick of the liberals wasting my money, and Joe Clark.. well, he was cool when my parents were 20. So in my world, it's the best of some bad choices, unless the PC's or Liberals would like to cut my taxes instead of losing a billion dollars here and there and spending it on whiney bleeding heart scam job creation grants instead of hospitals.
For the record, too. On the aforementioned "moral issues", representatives vote as they are told to by the people they represent, not the party line - like the liberals and conservates have to, lest Joe Clark or Cretien get medieval on your ass. This is how _I_ think this should work. Then you get _fair representation_. Sure there are areas of Canada pro-life just as there are areas pro-choice. I suggest you read the party platform before blindly charging off.
And, to keep this on-topic: Your MLA as well as your MP can have an effect (I put in the right link to the MP search page, FWIW.) The provinces can tell the federal parties people are pissed, and they might listen, maybe.
Unless you're working for the government, of course.
Why should I feel guilty about pirating music now, if artists are getting their fill? I would not that this only protects certain artists, and not the ones that need it most.
Write your MLA and get vocal on this. I can stomach the 5.2 cents, but as we all know in Canada, once a tax gets started it takes on a life of it's own. This is sick. Oh wait, this isn't a tax.
Make sure to mention that this "tax" assumes that anyone buying CDRs is guilty of a federal crime, and then ask the MLA if their children have PC's and if they have bought them any CDRs recently. Make sure you'd love to know in a public forum how they feel about being pirates, as they must be, because they're happily paying the pirate tax.
If you're sick of partisan politics, vote for the Canadian Alliance next time. Their members must vote on issues as their consistuants feel; Not the party line.
Re:"Reasonable Expectation" and "How to Snoop IRC"
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If a compromised server then attaches itself as a member of a larger network, by force or by guile, then you have Echelon/Carnivore proportion snooping possible, without one shred of "annoying flyby" behavior detected by the visitors to the network, or even to the other servers on the network
This arguement sucks. If I attach a compromised server to the phone network, I have no expectation of privacy there? Or hell, I use a "compromised" mail truck to deliver mail - do I have no expectation of privacy there, too?
Anything can be compromised. The law should work such that the public impression of the medium is all that matters - and I suspect that this is how it works. I don't even think you can tap a public phone in the united states without an extremely specific warrant (I might be wrong here). I wish we had some engineers that were judges, for some reason it feels like the FBI is trying to pull a fast one whenever possible.
This article distrurbs me. IRC is NOT always a public forum! If the channel you are in is marked as invite only, the public is denyed by definition. Also, what about private messaging? I mean, if you're in #chat or #hotsex I'm sure you know what you do can/will/is logged and monitored, but that about in your own channel shared with friends?
The IRC servers are the backbone of the communications network, just like the phone company. Unless I misunderstand this article, this is no different than setting up equipment at the telco to automatically scan all conversations that occur in a conference call, is it not? How can this possibly be legal and acceptable?
This isn't so bad though. It's easy to set up your own private IRC server on a linux machine to communicate amounst friends easily, and you can even use SSH for more security (ssh to the machine then launch the client). It would be nice to see some encryption capabilities in XChat, though, hrmm, there's an idea..
Oh well. One more step towards widespread encryption!
I think this also goes for more "abstract" moral/ethical behavior (i.e., how one treats oneself and others), and as a result I strongly disagree with people who think that children should be kept away from all ideas involving sexuality, prejudice, etcetera. With no exposure to difficult issues, how can children ever learn to deal wiuth them in a mature way?
This reminds me of what happens in a lot of dorms first year. You get kids that have been isolated from the real world (tm) by their parents for most of their ~18 years on the planet. Then they see the other side of life - booze, drugs, women (heh, not to associate women as a vice..), sex, etc etc, and they have no mechanisms for dealing with it because those decisions have always been made for them. Ever since I was really young, my parents let me to what I wanted - with the understanding that there were concequences for what I did. (Don't do well in school? You'll be looking for a job when you're 18, then.. Stay up late? Tough, now you gotta go to school, etc.)
This had the effect that I learned both discipline and I developed my own sense of right and wrong, and could work within that, because I knew how to deal with the world.
So, you get these kids that don't have any concept of what to do. I've seen two extremes: One, blind following into alcoholic oblivion, or two, complete lack of ability to cope, causing many many problems with school and peers.
Congratulations on helping your kids learn one of the most important lessons of all: Responsibility. (One of the prices of freedom after all, is responsibility for your (free) choices)
Actually I believe there is some software on freshmeat to publically hide encrypted information in a picture (jpeg). It is quite easy to hide encrypted information as it's a binary. I could email you winzip.exe; Ooops, the binary is corrupted, etc.
The great thing about strong encrytion is that the transmission medium can be completely insecure; Hell, you could yell the symbols out in a crowded room, and nobody will know what you're saying.
Of course, getting caught with those tools might be a ticket to a concrete vacation somewheres with lots of bugs and bad food. (Resist temptation to poke fun at Carnival)
Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips.
You don't know what you're talking about. I have a running 6 and 7 year experiment with electromigration, and guess what? This hasn't been a problem, period. I have a 486/66 and a Pentium 100, bother overclocked, that have been running overclocked the respective times, 24/7, barring power outages. The motherboards are about the only thing in them that hasn't failed. The fans went, the drive (in the P100) failed, the CDROMs long since died, the floppies died, but the CPU's keep on mackin'. The power consumption is to the point where it almost equaled the cost of the machine, but, it's an experiment to see if the CPU (will ever) fail. That and they make nice servers.
Electromigration is something that while well documented in theory, I have yet to see cause a problem. One of my electrical engineering professors has a old transistor collection, and you can see a decay in Beta (B) of these devices, so the gain characteristics have changed a fair bit. This is _much_ more of a problem in a analog transistor, where the preformance is supposed to be linear. In a CPU, the transistors are acting as switches - and as long as they switch, everything is fine.
Heat failure is completely different. Heat goes up, resistance goes up, circuit goes to hell, and the magic smoke comes out. This is what happens when the chips fail due to overvoltage - you physically burned out the circuit. THIS IS NOT ELECTROMIGRATION!
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it.:)
You don't need weeks of physics and theory. If you overclock, you up the clock rate of a CMOS process. Power consumption goes up correspondingly. More clocks, more power, more heat. Too much heat, you burn it out. Better chips can handle more current, thusly running cooler, and therefore be able to run faster. Your watch is CMOS too; It can run for years because it's clock rate is 1Hz.
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
This doesn't make any sense. See above comments. Right now, I mildly overclock my athlon. There's nothing that even comes close to making it run slow, so I'll overclock it heavily when games catch up. I suspect this is what most people do.
I had the dubious pleasure of owning a MP120 5 or 6 years ago. It wasn't the 2100, which was supposed to have repaired some of these problems, but it wasn't the first model, either. My palm does a lot more for me that's useful than any of the messagepads ever could, and while they were a nifty piece of technology at the time, I can understand why Jobs gave them the axe. For example(s):
It drank 4 AA's a day. Ouch. This is under the same heavy usage I give my palm, which manages two weeks even with lots of IO.
The handwriting sucked for most things. Great for notes, useless for anything else, because while it DID do a respectable job (after a few months) you spent any time you saved writing formatting the text on the pathetic memopad.
The software support wasn't nearly as good (like, off by 2 orders of magnitude) what's available for the palm. Development tools weren't great, either.
Cost! These things were $1000-1500 cdn if I recall correctly (just south of a grand, american, I believe). This is too much.
Size! These things didn't fit in your pocket, and even if it did, they were so heavy you'd need suspenders. If you kept it in your breifcase it wasn't as useful. My sony vaio 505, Pentium 233, cost me $1099 USD over a year ago, it isn't much bigger, and it isn't much heavier, but it certainly does a lot more when it's stored in my satchel. The palm fits where it should - in my pocket. The Vx's even look good on your belt. They just need some external notification on the top like a pager does (from what I can tell, the article says the new palms will do this, but they're butt ugly)
Graphics. The graphics were OK, but one of the things I wanted to do was use it to keep a database of dynamics and statics problems in 1st year. The graphics tools available were too clumsy to do with any sort of efficiency; The palm, while primitive in graphics, has much better tools available.
All of those relegated newton to the niche market, and that's not what apple wanted. Had they have done more research a la palm, we might have something here.
What palm should do is work on getting the processor speed up without hurting battery life too much. This would enable a lot of applications that aren't possible right now, like handwriting (although graffiti does well for what it was intended to do). Color isn't important. If the screen went from 160x160 to 320x320 - whoooeee, baby. Or, paper white on black. I remember those notebooks back in the day.
This wasn't meant to flame anyone, but just put things in perspective. IM(ns)HO I think the vaio and the palm are a superior combination.
Took me about 30 minutes or so. Pretty sad if 98% of people can't do it.
Rob: We need a spoiler tag!!!
House 1: Norweigan, Yellow, Dunhill, Water, Cats.
House 2: Blue, Horses, Blends, Dane, Tea
House 3: Milk, Red, Brit, Pallmall, Birds
House 4: German, Coffee, Green, Prince (THIS IS THE FISH!)
House 5: White, Beer, Bluesmasters, Swede, Dog.
Missing the point: Slow hard drives aren't bad
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Slow hard drives are fine, as long as they hold what they're designed to and can read streaming media *ahem* at an acceptable rate (Which they can just fine; they're stupid fast for video and audio streaming, albeit single user).
What you need is a 1gb disk of solid-state storage that's fast, just like the high-speed SRAM cache that's on your motherboard/processor and how it talks to the slower (normal) dynamic memory.
I think you'd get interesting results if this was supported on the operating system level. I use huge hard drives for a central database of (my) mp3's and movies - this is really convienent. I don't need speed for that, cheap-ass 20gb 5400rpm drives are already overkill!
If you selectively filtered streaming content from a NVRAM cache that's big, and let things like games get loaded in there (and operating system libraries, etc) I think a real speedup would be possible. I wonder if anyone knows if this is planned for the next generation of hard drives? I know there's research into non-volatile solid state storage being done by IBM and Quantum.
For the record, I remember buggin my mom to get a abhorently expensive 10MB drive for my Commodore 64 (yeah, they existed!).. heh heh.
Good. Public transit. So I can sit in a subway train full of unwashed derelicts and third-world refugees.
Canada's a lot bigger than Toronto. I'm from the East Coast; No public transit here, period. I don't care as much about fuel consumption - that's what the high prices are for, spend your money how you want, it's a free country - I do care about people buying SUVs because they're more "safe". They're not. My mom is a nurse, and gets to clean up messes that SUV's make all the time - and I'm not talking about motor oil. I like trucks! Hell, you can do stuff with them. Try throwing a load of firewood in a Ford Extrusion, be careful not to hurt the leather. SUV's are going to be legislated in Canada to meet the same requirements as cars in 2003. Whoo-hoo.
Your shortsightedness comes from the fact that when I no longer make enough money to be able to drive to work every day, I will move. Period. I'll take my many skills and my good work ethic, and I will pick up and move to the United States, where I shall pursue citizenship and sever all my ties with Canada. And I'll leave Canada with its burgeoning population of highly trained and highly literate convenience store clerks.
Great, more work for me! For the record, I'm a EE - all my friends went to the wonderful USA. Big deal. Made it easy for me to get a job with decent pay, great stock options, and get the laid back atmosphere. You don't get that in the Valley. Demand wont go away. For the record, you are horribly mistake as far as artificially high gas prices go, my friend. Canada has the 2nd lowest prices in the industrialized world. The USA has the lowest prices - one could argue that these are artificially LOW, not artificially HIGH.
The brain drain will continue and Canada's standard of living will drop until all the tree-hugging idiots who can't understand the basic laws of supply and demand back off and let commerce take its place.
You're being funny, now. Do you think the air your car is breathing is free? No, that's a public good. As is the pollution you emit, and that's what the fuel taxes are supposed to cover - that and roads. Most countries price air and roads higher than north america, largely because we're dependant on cars for travel, as the only cities in Canada with subways (to the best of my knowledge) are Toronto, Montreal and Vancover (I think). So high costs affect everyone..
In celebration of gas guzzlers and noxious pollutants, on my way to the office in the morning, I'll disconnect a couple of the spark plug leads on my 6.6L V8 engine. I'll toast you, xtal, with my coffee cup as I drive across Toronto on the 401, listening to the Howard Stern Radio Show, and filling the air with unburnt hydrocarbons as my massive and temporarily detuned engine chugs me to work.
Sure! I'd love to see you burn more gas, because that's less tax that I have to pay - which is why I'm waiting for the $1.00/L prices to happen. The oil and gas industry sees typically 6-12 months in advance - they missed the consumption curve, which is why oil spiked. Spend your money as you want.. I want legislation protecting me from Soccer Moms in SUVs - specifically, training mandated in how to handle SUVs, they certainly don't brake or handle like a car - or outright bans on vehicles exceeding X lbs for passenger classifications.
Let me know when you're leaving for the US, so I can get your job. Until then, burn lots of gas and help lower my taxes!
One of the problems with sending encrypted mail is that I talk to a lot of non-geeks.. is there any support planned for GPG in Mozilla? Or some compaible alternative? This might be a chance to get encrypted communications more mainstream (I certainly make heavy use of SSH as is; It beats having to set up stupid display variables!)
How about the web though? If "the man" can see what you're surfing, I don't know if I might like that. Do slashdot comments count as mail? What about hotmail? Or for that matter, ICQ? The hordes use ICQ a lot, and I know more than one person that sends drug-related info over it (much to my concern). If they're going to tap that, then this isn't about an email sniffer, it's about a network packet sniffer looking for strings.
*sigh* Land of the free, indeed. Don't argue with the man, or he'll bust yo ass! It's not like you need to worry, unless you're a drug dealer/money laundrer/commie red pinko/branch davidian/mob leader/columbian national/insert group-of-the-month here
I like taking things to their obvious conclusion. If drugs are the horrible scourge on society you claim (I would argue that since being around before the beginning of time, hell, MONKS invented beer, people like getting loaded. I know I sure as hell do.), then we need much more extreme measures to deal with the drug plague. Current measures aren't working.
So, let's either make drug possession automatic life in prison, or punishible by death, as in some arab countries. Hell, let's do it right on the streetcorner. That's civilized. Throw anyone distributing drug related information in the slammer for 15 years on conviction, manditory. Instant confiscation of any computer equipment used to distribute drug information. We have to pay for the war!
Or, you can decriminalize drug use, get addicts treatment, distribute information about how to use a needle and not die, how to get clean needles, how to position someone who's passed out and tossing their cookies (one of the useful things I learned in university!). Make sure addicts get clean shit. Help them get off it if they need/want help. Deal with the social issues that are making them turn to drugs. Don't bother people who want to smoke weed on the weekends. Punish heavily those who sell to minors (my little sister informs me she can get pot in about 30 minutes in her JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, but alcohol is much, much harder to get, hrmm). Maybe even save some money to get schools new books and give kids hope outside a crack pipe. Have you ever thought of the billions in lost productivity when you lock away what, 2% of your population?
I wish people would see the rational side of the arguements. The answers aren't easy, but at least they're answers and not lies. Maybe I hope for too much.
Similarly, it should be illegal to transfer network data which carries out illegal activity into the US. There is no difference between bringing drugs into the US and replying to network traffic which is requesting to place illegal bets into to the US
So, then, speedy, how do you want to handle MP3s, VCDs, warez, etc ad nauseam? Set up government FBI monitoring stations with absolute authority, and ban encryption? If transferring illegal content is the responsibilty of the ISP as you state, then there is going to be no more internet. Do you know what "common carrier" means? This isn't just about illegal gaming, which was my point! What's next, the list of mp3 servers and warez sites? How do you propose law enforcement determine what is illegal? Or who is accessing it?
I am under no obligation to check to see if when you order something it is legal in YOUR country. That is YOUR responsibility. I'll take your money and ship it. If it's legal in my country, it's not my problem. Since YOU are the person in the US, this is YOUR problem. American law stops at the border. If drugs are legal in amsterdam, I could ship you pot - it wouldn't be illegal for me to mail it (subject to the local laws). It is illegal for you to pick it up. Because you're in the US. Likewise, it would be legal for you to buy and fly back - the ILLEGAL part happens when you enter american territory.
I most certainly "get it". That's why I didn't move to the US like all of my friends after they graduated.
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If you want it that way, probably. But there are other choices. BTW, I once read in scientific american that Bangladesh has better health care (for ex. fewer dead babys per 1000 births) than some areas in the USA. Does that make you proud?
I'm Canadian, and our health care is OK, but it's in shambles. And I give near $2,000/month under threat of imprisonment (income tax!) to the Canadian Government to have a system that works, and they piss it away. Privatize it; Get a system that works for poor people; But don't bitch at me when almost half of my income is taxed. Or maybe you americans would like a what, 46% income tax? Huh?
I live in Canada; But I sure as hell have a Blue Cross card in my wallet just like all my American friends, and if you saw what a trip to the dentist or a few extra tests cost, or glasses, etc, you'd be shocked if it came out of your wallet. We have a two-tier system in Canada. Nobody just wants to call it that.
Here's something else. How is genetic engineering any different than picking a mate who's smart, looks good, and/or has a good family health history? Let's think about this: You can spend a lot of money chasing a signigigant other, and in my own current (serious) relationship, one of the factors is that she's good looking, and _very_ smart. If my kids did the same thing, and their kids did the same thing - the result would be the same as if I had imparted genes to them artifically, in that the offspring from these relationships would _undoubtedly_ have a genetic advantage over their peers. We do with with animals all the time.
How is this any different? Money and resources are involved along the way in just the same manner, as is genetic makeup.
Wow, WWI and WWII were fought for the sake of Capitalism?
Last time I checked they were about freedom - to choose, something that is tightly integrated with capitalism, e.g. the freedom to do with your economic resources what you want. One of the principles of a democratic state is also a free economy - relatively, anyhow. Although I suppose everyone could vote themselves into a dictatorship, too, which is argueably a situation faced by some nations today. *ahem*
Don't forget, the USSR was one of the Allies in WWII. The millions of Russians who died (the USSR suffered more casualties in WWII than any other country) certainly didn't die for the sake of Capitalism.
No, they died to keep their state free from German advances into eastern europe and Russia.
Am I the only one amazed that people are more concerned about economic systems (Capitalism vs. Socialism) than they are about political systems (democracy vs. authoritarianism)?
I'm more concerned about economic systems because it impacts my bottom line. I've given up on ever being able to do jack about the political system in which I live. A 2-3 party country doesn't give you much choice, period. Unless you're a minority lobby group. *tongue in cheek* As long as the goverment stays outta my face, the man doesn't hassle me too much, my taxes aren't oppressive (getting there, in Canada) I can save my money for an Acura NSX and mutant kids (*snicker*), they can do what they want.
A country can be ruled by a brutal dictator, but if that dictator is friendly to the powerful property owners and U.S. corporations, they're a U.S. ally. That's sad.
This is sad. It's also for the benefit of domestic corporations (I'm Canadian, but the oil/gas/mining corps here are just as bad as their US counterparts).
Why don't you get off your high horse! What kind of aristocrat are you? Sure, there are flaws to any kind of society, and capitalism's happens to be a separation of haves and have-nots.
I don't know what kind of world you live in. I'm not going to spend my money on your kids. I'm going to spend them on mine, and if that makes the world less equal, tough noogies. I plan on teaching my children the joys of learning and education just as I was, and I'll give them all the tools I have to do that. If I can make them more resistant to cancer, I'll do that too, just as I'll make sure they can go to the best school I can afford. You do the same, we'll toss in a few calls to rand(), and let the best man win. The society gets ahead that way. And who's to say my cancer-resistant offspring won't mate with your intelligence-enhanced offspring to create cancer-resistant intelligent-enhanced kids? People think that the gene pool is small. It's not. Is freaking *huge*. There are enough people on the planet so the gene pool will NEVER be hurt. Ever. Unless we nuke ourselves into oblivion.
But that doesn't mean we have to try to increase that flaw! No system is perfect, "pure" capitalism just leads to greed!
I don't argue this. Life's not fair though, and I'll use all the tools I can to make sure that my kids have a running head start on the evil world.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
I thought that was communism. One of the tenants of western society is FREEDOM. You are free to do what you want if it does not harm others. Equality - economic equality - is fundamentally communinst/socialist in nature. Sure, we're all "equal" - your life is worth no more than mine - but I would bet money our bank account statements are different (you probably have a lot more money than me!). I'll spend resources I have as I see fit, you do the same. Just don't tell me I can't spend them on making sure my kids aren't gimps.
And that is exactly what is wrong with the current state of genetic engineering. Already, we see on a limited scale the separation between the haves and the have-nots in the world of computing. The white-middle-class-computer-programmer group by far has a huge advantage in life (not that other groups can't succeed; they just have more obstacles). Do we really want a world where those with money are smarter, faster, stronger, and healthier than those without?
Get off your high horse. We do this now and we've done it for centuries. I have better health care, better education and better resources than the people down the street because my parents were educated and have money. I don't want to think about how much all those books cost or how much I spent on computing gear. How much does post secondary education cost in the United States of America, especially the 1st tier stuff?
No, I'll bloody well spend money on my kids, and I'll be damned if anyone tries to stop me, or tries to tax away my advantage. Do you think that the poor schmuck on the street gets the same medical attention you do when HE has a heart attack? Where do you live?
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system. I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Genomics is scarey, yes. The only way you will be able to change how the technology impacts your own life is to understand and develop it, not stick your head in the sand. I'd be far more worried about the thousands of Nuclear Missiles that are locked and loaded as we speak than any possible impacts 20 generations down the road from sequencing technology. Personally, I'd be suprised if life, on Earth, anyhow lasts that long. People are violent and irrational animals in groups, and they do horrific things like try and exterminate each other for as long as history has been recorded.
Personally, I would LOVE to know what each gene in my body does. DNA is fascinating; It's life's source code, and we don't even know what the symbols are yet! What we have is a really bad dissassembly and the odd bit of text to figure out what's going on. If there's one thing that makes life interesting to me, it's learning new stuff. And this certainly qualifies.
If our world is ready to stare down nuclear anhillation every single day for as long as homo sapiens contines to breathe on this planet, we're ready for Genetic Engineering. I'd rather see resources spent on engineering human genomes than engineering an airborne Ebola. Which your tax dollars subsidize, along with stockpiles of lots of other biological and chemical nasties. You think Brave New World was bad? Take a look at what a modern aerosol neurotoxin will do to your insides in a few minutes. And the USA is a world leader in "weapons of mass destruction" aka "facilitators of government genocide".
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
First off, I won't get into the fact that sequencing genes is nothing more than effectively counting them. I'm not a genomics wizard but my Dad is (albeit Plant genetics, but, hey). It's an important first step, but this is more akin to the V2 rocket launches by Germany than it is landing on the moon. I suspect this is why nobody has heard of Professor What's-His-Face. That, and he's not the world's (2nd?) richest man, so your comparison sucks, Katz. IMHO, Biologists are too concerned with drawing pictures than looking at ways to engineer life, which is where this research is going. Bacteria are wonderful little machines, as are plants, and their power will be harnessed.
What I'm interested in is why people freak out when you concider applying this to your kids. The obvious one is to concieve many children - fertilize a lot of eggs - and then sequence the genomes and see what good 'ol mother nature did for you. I'd sign up for this in a second; I would not think twice (nor would my current SO) about aborting a clump of cells that is going to have a miserable existance, albeit by my standards, but I'm the one creating that life, not your diety of choice. YMMV.
The best comes when you think about a latter step; Changing the genes of your kids to make them better (tm). Looks don't bother me; The kids can look like their old man, he obviously found a mate. What about intelligence though? Contrary to popular belief, it's hundreds if not thousands of traits that combine to make a good whatever(Engineer, in this case). If I could give an edge here, I will. You're fooling yourself if you think this technology can be stopped, too - because it'll be done in some country, because there's a lot of interest in this.
I've always wondered what would make up for man stopping natural evolution - we're too successful, and it's too slow. I always thought eventually AI would come into the picture, but with the possiblilty of being able to engineer our genes in the next 25 years, maybe government will be bright enough to let us make choices for how we want our offspring be.
Mind you, this tech isn't going to be cheap. But, I'd rather leave my kids improved genetic code (resistance to Cancer, maybe?) than a big chunk of money when I die. That might even be worth saving up for.
Kudos.
Looks like the claimed specs for the 3DFX Voodoo5 6000!
*joke*
Stockwell Day is an anti-abortionist, right-wing, seclusionist, racist politician who likes to avoid questions and panders to the lowest common denominator, even when that is most certainly not the moral high-ground. i'd rather have another five years of liberals than the canadian alliance
Maybe, but they're not getting elected on those issues. They're getting elected on the fact that I make a contribution to the government of nearly $2,000/month. That's insane. Absolutely insane. Anyone billing to reduce that by half is getting my vote, period, end of sale. I'm sick of the liberals wasting my money, and Joe Clark.. well, he was cool when my parents were 20. So in my world, it's the best of some bad choices, unless the PC's or Liberals would like to cut my taxes instead of losing a billion dollars here and there and spending it on whiney bleeding heart scam job creation grants instead of hospitals.
For the record, too. On the aforementioned "moral issues", representatives vote as they are told to by the people they represent, not the party line - like the liberals and conservates have to, lest Joe Clark or Cretien get medieval on your ass. This is how _I_ think this should work. Then you get _fair representation_. Sure there are areas of Canada pro-life just as there are areas pro-choice. I suggest you read the party platform before blindly charging off.
And, to keep this on-topic: Your MLA as well as your MP can have an effect (I put in the right link to the MP search page, FWIW.) The provinces can tell the federal parties people are pissed, and they might listen, maybe.
Unless you're working for the government, of course.
You'll just get popped when the package clears the border and a bill in the mail.
Why should I feel guilty about pirating music now, if artists are getting their fill? I would not that this only protects certain artists, and not the ones that need it most.
Write your MLA and get vocal on this. I can stomach the 5.2 cents, but as we all know in Canada, once a tax gets started it takes on a life of it's own. This is sick. Oh wait, this isn't a tax.
Make sure to mention that this "tax" assumes that anyone buying CDRs is guilty of a federal crime, and then ask the MLA if their children have PC's and if they have bought them any CDRs recently. Make sure you'd love to know in a public forum how they feel about being pirates, as they must be, because they're happily paying the pirate tax.
You can find out who your MLA is and their email/contact information right here. A phone call or a written letter is a lot more powerful than an email; Last time I at least got a written reply back explaining why the spineless bastard was voting with the party line.
If you're sick of partisan politics, vote for the Canadian Alliance next time. Their members must vote on issues as their consistuants feel; Not the party line.
If a compromised server then attaches itself as a member of a larger network, by force or by guile, then you have Echelon/Carnivore proportion snooping possible, without one shred of "annoying flyby" behavior detected by the visitors to the network, or even to the other servers on the network
This arguement sucks. If I attach a compromised server to the phone network, I have no expectation of privacy there? Or hell, I use a "compromised" mail truck to deliver mail - do I have no expectation of privacy there, too?
Anything can be compromised. The law should work such that the public impression of the medium is all that matters - and I suspect that this is how it works. I don't even think you can tap a public phone in the united states without an extremely specific warrant (I might be wrong here). I wish we had some engineers that were judges, for some reason it feels like the FBI is trying to pull a fast one whenever possible.
This article distrurbs me. IRC is NOT always a public forum! If the channel you are in is marked as invite only, the public is denyed by definition. Also, what about private messaging? I mean, if you're in #chat or #hotsex I'm sure you know what you do can/will/is logged and monitored, but that about in your own channel shared with friends?
The IRC servers are the backbone of the communications network, just like the phone company. Unless I misunderstand this article, this is no different than setting up equipment at the telco to automatically scan all conversations that occur in a conference call, is it not? How can this possibly be legal and acceptable?
This isn't so bad though. It's easy to set up your own private IRC server on a linux machine to communicate amounst friends easily, and you can even use SSH for more security (ssh to the machine then launch the client). It would be nice to see some encryption capabilities in XChat, though, hrmm, there's an idea..
Oh well. One more step towards widespread encryption!
I think this also goes for more "abstract" moral/ethical behavior (i.e., how one treats oneself and others), and as a result I strongly disagree with people who think that children should be kept away from all ideas involving sexuality, prejudice, etcetera. With no exposure to difficult issues, how can children ever learn to deal wiuth them in a mature way?
This reminds me of what happens in a lot of dorms first year. You get kids that have been isolated from the real world (tm) by their parents for most of their ~18 years on the planet. Then they see the other side of life - booze, drugs, women (heh, not to associate women as a vice..), sex, etc etc, and they have no mechanisms for dealing with it because those decisions have always been made for them. Ever since I was really young, my parents let me to what I wanted - with the understanding that there were concequences for what I did. (Don't do well in school? You'll be looking for a job when you're 18, then.. Stay up late? Tough, now you gotta go to school, etc.)
This had the effect that I learned both discipline and I developed my own sense of right and wrong, and could work within that, because I knew how to deal with the world.
So, you get these kids that don't have any concept of what to do. I've seen two extremes: One, blind following into alcoholic oblivion, or two, complete lack of ability to cope, causing many many problems with school and peers.
Congratulations on helping your kids learn one of the most important lessons of all: Responsibility. (One of the prices of freedom after all, is responsibility for your (free) choices)
Actually I believe there is some software on freshmeat to publically hide encrypted information in a picture (jpeg). It is quite easy to hide encrypted information as it's a binary. I could email you winzip.exe; Ooops, the binary is corrupted, etc.
Step 1: Download Gnu Privacy Guard.
Step 2: Exchange keys
Step 3: Communicate to your heart's content.
The great thing about strong encrytion is that the transmission medium can be completely insecure; Hell, you could yell the symbols out in a crowded room, and nobody will know what you're saying.
Of course, getting caught with those tools might be a ticket to a concrete vacation somewheres with lots of bugs and bad food. (Resist temptation to poke fun at Carnival)
Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips.
You don't know what you're talking about. I have a running 6 and 7 year experiment with electromigration, and guess what? This hasn't been a problem, period. I have a 486/66 and a Pentium 100, bother overclocked, that have been running overclocked the respective times, 24/7, barring power outages. The motherboards are about the only thing in them that hasn't failed. The fans went, the drive (in the P100) failed, the CDROMs long since died, the floppies died, but the CPU's keep on mackin'. The power consumption is to the point where it almost equaled the cost of the machine, but, it's an experiment to see if the CPU (will ever) fail. That and they make nice servers.
Electromigration is something that while well documented in theory, I have yet to see cause a problem. One of my electrical engineering professors has a old transistor collection, and you can see a decay in Beta (B) of these devices, so the gain characteristics have changed a fair bit. This is _much_ more of a problem in a analog transistor, where the preformance is supposed to be linear. In a CPU, the transistors are acting as switches - and as long as they switch, everything is fine.
Heat failure is completely different. Heat goes up, resistance goes up, circuit goes to hell, and the magic smoke comes out. This is what happens when the chips fail due to overvoltage - you physically burned out the circuit. THIS IS NOT ELECTROMIGRATION!
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it. :)
You don't need weeks of physics and theory. If you overclock, you up the clock rate of a CMOS process. Power consumption goes up correspondingly. More clocks, more power, more heat. Too much heat, you burn it out. Better chips can handle more current, thusly running cooler, and therefore be able to run faster. Your watch is CMOS too; It can run for years because it's clock rate is 1Hz.
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
This doesn't make any sense. See above comments. Right now, I mildly overclock my athlon. There's nothing that even comes close to making it run slow, so I'll overclock it heavily when games catch up. I suspect this is what most people do.
I had the dubious pleasure of owning a MP120 5 or 6 years ago. It wasn't the 2100, which was supposed to have repaired some of these problems, but it wasn't the first model, either. My palm does a lot more for me that's useful than any of the messagepads ever could, and while they were a nifty piece of technology at the time, I can understand why Jobs gave them the axe. For example(s):
All of those relegated newton to the niche market, and that's not what apple wanted. Had they have done more research a la palm, we might have something here.
What palm should do is work on getting the processor speed up without hurting battery life too much. This would enable a lot of applications that aren't possible right now, like handwriting (although graffiti does well for what it was intended to do). Color isn't important. If the screen went from 160x160 to 320x320 - whoooeee, baby. Or, paper white on black. I remember those notebooks back in the day.
This wasn't meant to flame anyone, but just put things in perspective. IM(ns)HO I think the vaio and the palm are a superior combination.
Took me about 30 minutes or so. Pretty sad if 98% of people can't do it.
Rob: We need a spoiler tag!!!
House 1: Norweigan, Yellow, Dunhill, Water, Cats.
House 2: Blue, Horses, Blends, Dane, Tea
House 3: Milk, Red, Brit, Pallmall, Birds
House 4: German, Coffee, Green, Prince (THIS IS THE FISH!)
House 5: White, Beer, Bluesmasters, Swede, Dog.
Slow hard drives are fine, as long as they hold what they're designed to and can read streaming media *ahem* at an acceptable rate (Which they can just fine; they're stupid fast for video and audio streaming, albeit single user).
What you need is a 1gb disk of solid-state storage that's fast, just like the high-speed SRAM cache that's on your motherboard/processor and how it talks to the slower (normal) dynamic memory.
I think you'd get interesting results if this was supported on the operating system level. I use huge hard drives for a central database of (my) mp3's and movies - this is really convienent. I don't need speed for that, cheap-ass 20gb 5400rpm drives are already overkill!
If you selectively filtered streaming content from a NVRAM cache that's big, and let things like games get loaded in there (and operating system libraries, etc) I think a real speedup would be possible. I wonder if anyone knows if this is planned for the next generation of hard drives? I know there's research into non-volatile solid state storage being done by IBM and Quantum.
For the record, I remember buggin my mom to get a abhorently expensive 10MB drive for my Commodore 64 (yeah, they existed!).. heh heh.
Good. Public transit. So I can sit in a subway train full of unwashed derelicts and third-world refugees.
Canada's a lot bigger than Toronto. I'm from the East Coast; No public transit here, period. I don't care as much about fuel consumption - that's what the high prices are for, spend your money how you want, it's a free country - I do care about people buying SUVs because they're more "safe". They're not. My mom is a nurse, and gets to clean up messes that SUV's make all the time - and I'm not talking about motor oil. I like trucks! Hell, you can do stuff with them. Try throwing a load of firewood in a Ford Extrusion, be careful not to hurt the leather. SUV's are going to be legislated in Canada to meet the same requirements as cars in 2003. Whoo-hoo.
Your shortsightedness comes from the fact that when I no longer make enough money to be able to drive to work every day, I will move. Period. I'll take my many skills and my good work ethic, and I will pick up and move to the United States, where I shall pursue citizenship and sever all my ties with Canada. And I'll leave Canada with its burgeoning population of highly trained and highly literate convenience store clerks.
Great, more work for me! For the record, I'm a EE - all my friends went to the wonderful USA. Big deal. Made it easy for me to get a job with decent pay, great stock options, and get the laid back atmosphere. You don't get that in the Valley. Demand wont go away. For the record, you are horribly mistake as far as artificially high gas prices go, my friend. Canada has the 2nd lowest prices in the industrialized world. The USA has the lowest prices - one could argue that these are artificially LOW, not artificially HIGH.
The brain drain will continue and Canada's standard of living will drop until all the tree-hugging idiots who can't understand the basic laws of supply and demand back off and let commerce take its place.
You're being funny, now. Do you think the air your car is breathing is free? No, that's a public good. As is the pollution you emit, and that's what the fuel taxes are supposed to cover - that and roads. Most countries price air and roads higher than north america, largely because we're dependant on cars for travel, as the only cities in Canada with subways (to the best of my knowledge) are Toronto, Montreal and Vancover (I think). So high costs affect everyone..
In celebration of gas guzzlers and noxious pollutants, on my way to the office in the morning, I'll disconnect a couple of the spark plug leads on my 6.6L V8 engine. I'll toast you, xtal, with my coffee cup as I drive across Toronto on the 401, listening to the Howard Stern Radio Show, and filling the air with unburnt hydrocarbons as my massive and temporarily detuned engine chugs me to work.
Sure! I'd love to see you burn more gas, because that's less tax that I have to pay - which is why I'm waiting for the $1.00/L prices to happen. The oil and gas industry sees typically 6-12 months in advance - they missed the consumption curve, which is why oil spiked. Spend your money as you want.. I want legislation protecting me from Soccer Moms in SUVs - specifically, training mandated in how to handle SUVs, they certainly don't brake or handle like a car - or outright bans on vehicles exceeding X lbs for passenger classifications.
Let me know when you're leaving for the US, so I can get your job. Until then, burn lots of gas and help lower my taxes!
One of the problems with sending encrypted mail is that I talk to a lot of non-geeks.. is there any support planned for GPG in Mozilla? Or some compaible alternative? This might be a chance to get encrypted communications more mainstream (I certainly make heavy use of SSH as is; It beats having to set up stupid display variables!)
How about the web though? If "the man" can see what you're surfing, I don't know if I might like that. Do slashdot comments count as mail? What about hotmail? Or for that matter, ICQ? The hordes use ICQ a lot, and I know more than one person that sends drug-related info over it (much to my concern). If they're going to tap that, then this isn't about an email sniffer, it's about a network packet sniffer looking for strings.
*sigh* Land of the free, indeed. Don't argue with the man, or he'll bust yo ass! It's not like you need to worry, unless you're a drug dealer/money laundrer/commie red pinko/branch davidian/mob leader/columbian national/insert group-of-the-month here
I like taking things to their obvious conclusion. If drugs are the horrible scourge on society you claim (I would argue that since being around before the beginning of time, hell, MONKS invented beer, people like getting loaded. I know I sure as hell do.), then we need much more extreme measures to deal with the drug plague. Current measures aren't working.
So, let's either make drug possession automatic life in prison, or punishible by death, as in some arab countries. Hell, let's do it right on the streetcorner. That's civilized. Throw anyone distributing drug related information in the slammer for 15 years on conviction, manditory. Instant confiscation of any computer equipment used to distribute drug information. We have to pay for the war!
Or, you can decriminalize drug use, get addicts treatment, distribute information about how to use a needle and not die, how to get clean needles, how to position someone who's passed out and tossing their cookies (one of the useful things I learned in university!). Make sure addicts get clean shit. Help them get off it if they need/want help. Deal with the social issues that are making them turn to drugs. Don't bother people who want to smoke weed on the weekends. Punish heavily those who sell to minors (my little sister informs me she can get pot in about 30 minutes in her JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, but alcohol is much, much harder to get, hrmm). Maybe even save some money to get schools new books and give kids hope outside a crack pipe. Have you ever thought of the billions in lost productivity when you lock away what, 2% of your population?
I wish people would see the rational side of the arguements. The answers aren't easy, but at least they're answers and not lies. Maybe I hope for too much.
Similarly, it should be illegal to transfer network data which carries out illegal activity into the US. There is no difference between bringing drugs into the US and replying to network traffic which is requesting to place illegal bets into to the US
So, then, speedy, how do you want to handle MP3s, VCDs, warez, etc ad nauseam? Set up government FBI monitoring stations with absolute authority, and ban encryption? If transferring illegal content is the responsibilty of the ISP as you state, then there is going to be no more internet. Do you know what "common carrier" means? This isn't just about illegal gaming, which was my point! What's next, the list of mp3 servers and warez sites? How do you propose law enforcement determine what is illegal? Or who is accessing it?
I am under no obligation to check to see if when you order something it is legal in YOUR country. That is YOUR responsibility. I'll take your money and ship it. If it's legal in my country, it's not my problem. Since YOU are the person in the US, this is YOUR problem. American law stops at the border. If drugs are legal in amsterdam, I could ship you pot - it wouldn't be illegal for me to mail it (subject to the local laws). It is illegal for you to pick it up. Because you're in the US. Likewise, it would be legal for you to buy and fly back - the ILLEGAL part happens when you enter american territory.
I most certainly "get it". That's why I didn't move to the US like all of my friends after they graduated.