What about TrueCrypt, do they need a license as well? How about OpenSSH? The encryption horse has long since left the barn and any attempts to close the gate now are just security theatre. The real challenges going forward are key management and security at the endpoints.
You misunderstand, the reason that other countries try to acquire American technologies is not because they are not capable of reseraching and developing them, but rather to save the billions of dollars that would be necessary (and have already been spent by the United States) to duplicate work products which can be acquired for mere millions of dollars or less through overt or clandestine means. At the very least having working pieces of foreign technology is like having access to the source code. Everyone knows what an operating system is and basically what it does, but imagine trying to build one from scratch when the Linux and BSD source codes are availabe (if only to look at or strip for ideas). Perhaps now you see why nations prefer to take the five finger discount or the black market approach when they are unable to acquire the technology through legitimate means.
Well, that shouldn't take too long given the propensity of previous Congresses, controlled by whichever party, to extend copyright, increase statutory damages, and generally do just about anything that the MAFIAA asks them to do. The only hope for consumers is that constitutional challenges to the existing copyright laws, probably brought within the context of the ongoing file sharing lawsuits (the Boston judge named in this story discussed previously on Slashdot has allowed at least one defendant to amend his answer to the lawsuit to include constitutional claims, so these constitution issues will come up if the RIAA continues its litigation campaign), lead to the Supreme Court striking down some of the more onerous restrictions and punishments.
And as we see by the current turmoil in the financial world (including real-estate and soon to be credit card debt and student loans), the "Let do" approach is working wonders.
The Federal Reserve and fiat debt based currency are primarily responsible for providing the means for the asset bubbles and the subsequent and inevitable meltdown to occur in the first place and all of those institutions and mechanisms are operated and controlled by governments both here in the United States and abroad. The private banks made most of the loans yes, but they were operating within the money system setup and run by the governments. The Libertarians share no part of the ideological blame for the present mess, we have long said that such a crises would and will be again the inevitable result of our present government backed financial systems. In fact, we could say, "we told you so" if we felt like being crass, but for a more in depth and detailed discussion of how and why currency is at the root of these problems see the video: Money as Debt.
So again, why shouldn't we be clamouring for rich people and corporations to be paying up like the rest of us?
Part of the problem is our present system of taxing income and attempting to single out and classify different sources of income (a distinction without a difference really) for different rates combined with write-offs, credits, and other mechanisms which adjust the amount of taxable income. What really needs to be done is something like the fair tax. It might put a lot of tax accounts out of work (sorry, nothing against you personally mate), but it would serve the purpose of fairly taxing people of higher means by taxing their consumption (which also tends to be much higher and more extravagant) and not their income (which has proven to be impossible thanks to lobbying and professional tax accountants).
Government hands out billions of dollars of welfare a year and most of it does NOT go to struggling citizens. Most of it is wrapped up in corporate tax credits or in under-valued water, mining, forestry, radio-frequency, grazing and other leases that convert public property into private profits.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
It is important not to confuse Libertarians with Republicans in this and other respects in that the Libertarians, as part of their official platform, have long criticized any government bailouts, interventions, subsidies or any other government involvement which serves to alter or distort free market outcomes. Again, Libertarian != Republican so please take some time to understand our platform before criticizing us for the positions of our opponents.
The lesson to be learned here, from any other student who's paying attention, is simply to not tell anyone what you know.
It might sound cynical, but that is actually good advice for when these students get out into the real world. Unless speaking up is going to materially benefit you then keep it to yourself and NEVER EVER talk to the authorities under any circumstances, not even to say "hello" or "good morning", because it can do absolutely nothing to benefit you and has a very real possibility of hurting you. If you don't believe that then just ask any attorney worth their salt if talking to the police is ever a good idea or helps your case and you will get the same answer...don't do it, save it for the trial when your attorney can present it in court. It seems that otherwise smart people are especially vulnerable to falling into this trap, perhaps because they believe that a police interrogator couldn't possibly get the better of them, and they end up convicting themselves before the trial even begins.
It is incorrect IMHO, or at the very least misleading, to suggest that "the Internet is broken" merely because one does not like a couple of the more commonly used protocols. In any discussion of the merits or demerits of the Internet is important to recall the original design goals of the Internet, or those networks which preceded and naturally developed into what we now call the Internet. Although this information is doubtless well known to the members of the Slashdot crowd, it does bear repeating here to rebut the arguments of the "Twit" (pun intended) that the Internet is "built wrong". First and foremost the Internet was built to be redundant and decentralized in the event of failures and second, the general philosophy taken with protocol design was purposefully minimalist (i.e. the simplest thing that could possibly work) with the understanding that the network design would be stack based with increasingly complex and fully featured pieces built on top of and independent of the underlying core protocols. Although there have been minor flaws here and there the Internet as a whole has succeeded beyond perhaps even the wildest expectations of those who have labored both to create it and to perpetuate its existence, a testament to the wisdom and foresight of minimalist protocols and stack based network design which are taken for granted these days but were revolutionary at the time when the work which would become the Internet as we know it was first being done.
I agree and the most probable explanation is that core OS components (not the exciting new stuff) were probably copied verbatim (or very nearly so) from the Windows XP code base. In fact, it is likely that the paging and memory management routines haven't changed much since the Windows NT days although not being employed by Microsoft and having never seen the source code that is purely speculation based upon anecdotal evidence. I really do wish that Microsoft would do more to incorporate new OS ideas, such as the Completely Fair Scheduler, as Linux has done and better advertise how they improve core OS features instead of promoting their latest gee-whiz bloatware features instead.
Their idea for many different "tiers" to their operating system should have been the first clue to their management team that it is time to reign things in and refocus efforts.
Surely there are smart engineers working at Microsoft who have tried to tell this to the management and marketing people so one is left to wonder why, after being told this by their engineers and the marketplace (witness the Vista debacle), that they, the managers and marketers, persist in loading the operating system with bloat in a vain attempt to cram Microsoft application software down the collective throats of their customers. It seems to me that it would be much better long term strategy, and probably more profitable as well, to concentrate on their development tools (Visual Studio and.NET Framework) and their cloud computing initiative in order to better compete with Google, Amazon, and others for a share of what promises to be a lucrative hosted application data center market going forward into the future. They could host versions of their own applications and third party applications (probably written in.NET) and collect regular tolls for providing the infrastructure (as Google, Amazon, and others are doing or plan to do). However, in order to do this they need to change their OS strategy from one of leveraged lock-in to one of enabling access to the cloud (I actually hate that word but everyone seems to be using it these days to describe super-scalar hosted applications) and selling certain high end value-added OS components as extras to those who need and want them while selling the same stripped down and minimal core OS to everyone at a cute rate price (to better compete with the packaged Linux distributions). See how nice we are here on Slashdot? I didn't even charge for this excellent advice (Microsoft can thank me later).
There were some reports of problems with the Vista boot loader making certain assumptions about the physical location of the primary operating system partition on the disk and the boot sector contents (probably having something to do with the trusted computing DRM, although Microsoft was coy about this). For example, it is necessary to chain boot loaders when full disk encryption is used so that the encrypted partitions can be mounted first as virtual volumes before other processes attempt to select and boot an operating system. My question is to what extent are the various boot configurations and scenarios supported (or NOT supported) by Windows 7?
The state will probably not prosecute any individual perjury case brought by a citizen against a corporation and especially not as an independent case or action (i.e. not arising out of sworn testimony given in a previously prosecuted criminal case). As far as I know, privately initiated criminal prosecutions are not permitted under US law (although some other countries do allow that type of action, usually with caveats against the citizen initiating the case to prevent frivolous uses). IANAL, but I think that fairly well sums up the state of affairs here in the US.
This pretty much ruined Ted's shot of being reelected
Don't be so sure, in the Senate seniority is everything, it determines who chairs the powerful committees and who controls the agendas that come before those committees and ultimately how much money goes back to the home state. Now, Alaska is not a very big state population wise and would not get even HALF of the federal money that they currently get if they replaced Stevens and started all over again with a very junior Senator. It would take decades for Alaska to rebuild the influence that they currently have built up in Stevens who, along with the oil companies, has but tens of thousands of dollars (cold hard cash) directly into the pockets of average Alaskans over the years. Alaska under Stevens gets roughly $1.80+ of every tax dollar they spend back for a profit of 0.80+ cents for every tax dollar they send to the Federal Government. Meanwhile, States like California, which do not have Senators anywhere near as senior as Stevens, get much less than $1 back for every $1 in taxes paid to the Federal Government. Alaskans have too much invested in Stevens to cut him loose for failing to declare gifts from oil companies and as difficult as it may be for west coast Liberals to understand, most Alaskans like the oil companies and want even more drilling because royalties go directly into the pockets of average Alaskans (thousands of dollars per family per year).
Separate temptation from politicians and you will see fewer troubles. It would be far cheaper to grant politicians in key positions generous allowances for the rest of their lives and to clear all expenses over certain through some sort of oversight board forbidden to have any contact with the people they are overseeing.
It is interesting to hear this suggested here on Slashdot where it is more frequently fashionable to decry the "overpaid" CEOs of corporate America who receive tens of millions of dollars even if they fail when the purpose is exactly as the parent has described above, to prevent outside interests, including the personal interests of the CEO (which the large salaries and severance packages serve to ameliorate), from corrupting dispassionate and considered judgments on matters concerning hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. People demand lower pay for CEOs without realizing that a large portion of lobbyist and special interest power in the United States Government is derived from providing perks, gifts, and other benefits to politicians that are well beyond the means of any similarly paid Americans. The US Congress is a wonderful example of what happens when you place people earning less than 200K per year in charge of billions of dollars with billion dollar corporations all competing for a piece of the largesse. The President of the United States is paid 400k and many of the rest earn less than 100k and the vast majority of federal employees, including those working at regulatory agencies, earn substantially less than that. Compared to the resources of a billion dollar corporation, a Congressman earning 170K per year (including benefits) can be bought for relatively cheap and they are every day. If you want to shield your government from the corrupting power of the special interests then you have to pay your politicians enough to move them beyond any serious consideration for bribes and other special interest incentives.
The advertisers and search engine optimizers have already shown that they have absolutely ZERO qualms about providing false or misleading information to search engine robots in the form of page cloaking, hidden frames, false meta tags, etc so what makes anyone believe that they will not play the same games, possibly with even greater result, against the semantic web? There is money to be made by gaming the system and as long as it is possible for website operators to describe themselves on the semantic web then they will describe themselves in any way they have to to drive traffic to their sites and get ad hits, truth be damned.
I am sure that there are people in the Pentagon, due to their age or lack of experience with modern web apps, who have never considered this possibility and it's probably good they are made aware.
They probably already were aware. The grey haired general or admiral in the Pentagon may not be up on the details of actually using these services from personal first hand experience, but they have entire staffs composed of younger officers (lieutenants to commanders usually) who's job it is to research, filter, and prepare reports for the admiral or the general, think of it like specialists and middle managers writing summaries for the executives, so that they have the information they need to make decisions and issue orders (usually long written ones). This report looks like it was prepared primarily to be sensational and scare up more program money from Congress and not so much to inform the generals and admirals about things that they already know.
There is nothing wrong with using debt for our money per se (it is the triple combination of debt money, forced universal acceptance of that money as payment by government fiat, and fractional reserve banking which leads to trouble), but we must, as the video suggests, take a more holistic view of money as part of a sustainable economy where we all live within the boundaries imposed upon us by our environment and are not dependent upon unsustainable growth and ever increasing consumption of non-renewable resources to survive. If we do not change the way that we live, part of which means changing the way that we think about money, then this planet that we live on will NOT be kind in making those changes for us and our daily lives much more "interesting" in the process.
The answer all the libertarians seem to give is "gold". But this is nonsensical. Gold is not particularly valuable. It has some worth in certain industrial processes and such, but mostly its value comes because people are collectively nuts.
First ask yourself, what is money (answer: it serves as a store of value and a widely accepted medium of exchange)? Now ask yourself, what features do we want out of any physical token that we are going to use as money? First, It should not be possible to produce without effort (mining to get the gold for example). Second, it should be compact so that large amounts of value can be stored and transported with the greatest possible convenience. Third, it should be durable and not decay or degrade over time. Fourth, it should be easily recognizable and identifiable with simple tests that everyone can understand and agree upon. Fifth and finally it should be easily divisible into individual different sized units of value to enable the greatest possible number of different sized transactions. The reason that gold has historically been used as money is that it satisfies, completely or to a large extent, all five of these features.
In this way, the value of gold is not much different from the value of the un-backed $20 bills in my wallet.
Nope, bzzzzt, wrong...thanks for playing. The bills in your pocket are backed, ultimately, by the promise of someone else to repay the debts that they have incurred which, when combined with fractional reserve banking, means that the money in your bank account (perhaps not in your pocket, but do you keep all of your money in your pockets?) is subject to disappearance or destruction through no fault of your own. The nice thing about gold and other commodity monies (to greater and lesser degrees) is that they continue to exist and preserve their monetary properties even when governments are no longer around to enforce their acceptance (the dollars in your pocket might still exist after the fall of the government, but good luck getting anyone to accept them in exchange for anything useful).
You might want to check this video out: Money as Debt, it addresses many common misconceptions about historical and our present monetary systems.
I think that plasmacutter, like many others, has some basic misunderstandings about how fractional reserve banking and pure fiat currency (where new currency is backed by fractional reserves of existing currency which themselves were backed by previous reserves, etc which are ultimately backed by nothing other than the promise of someone else to repay, or in other words...debt) works and the limits of government regulation. Rohan, unassimilatible, AC, and the other Libertarians who posted on this thread are basically right, the free market, in and of itself, is NOT the root cause of the present financial crises, although it did more readily expose the underlying shortcomings of the present structure of debt backed fiat currency mandated by our government. For the edification of plasmacutter and other confused socialists might I suggest the following video: Debt as Money. Perhaps after watching the video they will better understand some of the fundamental problems with our present money system that we Libertarians have long sought to raise awareness of in the general population.
It is really tough to consider that these flagrant transgressions still go on in todays environment.
Perhaps if you've lived a sheltered life, as most Americans have compared to those living in the nastier parts of this world, but it is important to remember that much of that world is still run by religious quacks and if we want to remain independent and free of their control then we have to be willing, if necessary, to beat them down, stomp their guts out, and piss on their graves before they come over here and do the same to us.
Here is my solution. Let Iran build a nuke, and get the security council to agree that if Iran uses it, overtly _or_ covertly, we get to turn Iran into a parking lot
Which Iran would agree to immediately because they are controlled by a theocratic government whose religion espouses an afterlife. It is not easy to deter nations where the culture of death, supported and spread by religion, is glorified above life itself. There can be no meaningful deterrence when your opponent carries out "martyrdom operations" (aka suicide bombings) as a matter of national policy.
Slashdot Mirror
What about TrueCrypt, do they need a license as well? How about OpenSSH? The encryption horse has long since left the barn and any attempts to close the gate now are just security theatre. The real challenges going forward are key management and security at the endpoints.
You misunderstand, the reason that other countries try to acquire American technologies is not because they are not capable of reseraching and developing them, but rather to save the billions of dollars that would be necessary (and have already been spent by the United States) to duplicate work products which can be acquired for mere millions of dollars or less through overt or clandestine means. At the very least having working pieces of foreign technology is like having access to the source code. Everyone knows what an operating system is and basically what it does, but imagine trying to build one from scratch when the Linux and BSD source codes are availabe (if only to look at or strip for ideas). Perhaps now you see why nations prefer to take the five finger discount or the black market approach when they are unable to acquire the technology through legitimate means.
Well, that shouldn't take too long given the propensity of previous Congresses, controlled by whichever party, to extend copyright, increase statutory damages, and generally do just about anything that the MAFIAA asks them to do. The only hope for consumers is that constitutional challenges to the existing copyright laws, probably brought within the context of the ongoing file sharing lawsuits (the Boston judge named in this story discussed previously on Slashdot has allowed at least one defendant to amend his answer to the lawsuit to include constitutional claims, so these constitution issues will come up if the RIAA continues its litigation campaign), lead to the Supreme Court striking down some of the more onerous restrictions and punishments.
It would probably be more correct to refer to the Obama rebate plan as a negative income tax plan since that is essentially what it is.
And as we see by the current turmoil in the financial world (including real-estate and soon to be credit card debt and student loans), the "Let do" approach is working wonders.
The Federal Reserve and fiat debt based currency are primarily responsible for providing the means for the asset bubbles and the subsequent and inevitable meltdown to occur in the first place and all of those institutions and mechanisms are operated and controlled by governments both here in the United States and abroad. The private banks made most of the loans yes, but they were operating within the money system setup and run by the governments. The Libertarians share no part of the ideological blame for the present mess, we have long said that such a crises would and will be again the inevitable result of our present government backed financial systems. In fact, we could say, "we told you so" if we felt like being crass, but for a more in depth and detailed discussion of how and why currency is at the root of these problems see the video: Money as Debt.
So again, why shouldn't we be clamouring for rich people and corporations to be paying up like the rest of us?
Part of the problem is our present system of taxing income and attempting to single out and classify different sources of income (a distinction without a difference really) for different rates combined with write-offs, credits, and other mechanisms which adjust the amount of taxable income. What really needs to be done is something like the fair tax. It might put a lot of tax accounts out of work (sorry, nothing against you personally mate), but it would serve the purpose of fairly taxing people of higher means by taxing their consumption (which also tends to be much higher and more extravagant) and not their income (which has proven to be impossible thanks to lobbying and professional tax accountants).
Government hands out billions of dollars of welfare a year and most of it does NOT go to struggling citizens. Most of it is wrapped up in corporate tax credits or in under-valued water, mining, forestry, radio-frequency, grazing and other leases that convert public property into private profits.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
It is important not to confuse Libertarians with Republicans in this and other respects in that the Libertarians, as part of their official platform, have long criticized any government bailouts, interventions, subsidies or any other government involvement which serves to alter or distort free market outcomes. Again, Libertarian != Republican so please take some time to understand our platform before criticizing us for the positions of our opponents.
I must have accidentally slipped into an alternate universe. Damn hidden wormholes...
Did you not see all of our goatees?
The lesson to be learned here, from any other student who's paying attention, is simply to not tell anyone what you know.
It might sound cynical, but that is actually good advice for when these students get out into the real world. Unless speaking up is going to materially benefit you then keep it to yourself and NEVER EVER talk to the authorities under any circumstances, not even to say "hello" or "good morning", because it can do absolutely nothing to benefit you and has a very real possibility of hurting you. If you don't believe that then just ask any attorney worth their salt if talking to the police is ever a good idea or helps your case and you will get the same answer...don't do it, save it for the trial when your attorney can present it in court. It seems that otherwise smart people are especially vulnerable to falling into this trap, perhaps because they believe that a police interrogator couldn't possibly get the better of them, and they end up convicting themselves before the trial even begins.
because they have all of the money, wasn't that easy?
It is incorrect IMHO, or at the very least misleading, to suggest that "the Internet is broken" merely because one does not like a couple of the more commonly used protocols. In any discussion of the merits or demerits of the Internet is important to recall the original design goals of the Internet, or those networks which preceded and naturally developed into what we now call the Internet. Although this information is doubtless well known to the members of the Slashdot crowd, it does bear repeating here to rebut the arguments of the "Twit" (pun intended) that the Internet is "built wrong". First and foremost the Internet was built to be redundant and decentralized in the event of failures and second, the general philosophy taken with protocol design was purposefully minimalist (i.e. the simplest thing that could possibly work) with the understanding that the network design would be stack based with increasingly complex and fully featured pieces built on top of and independent of the underlying core protocols. Although there have been minor flaws here and there the Internet as a whole has succeeded beyond perhaps even the wildest expectations of those who have labored both to create it and to perpetuate its existence, a testament to the wisdom and foresight of minimalist protocols and stack based network design which are taken for granted these days but were revolutionary at the time when the work which would become the Internet as we know it was first being done.
I agree and the most probable explanation is that core OS components (not the exciting new stuff) were probably copied verbatim (or very nearly so) from the Windows XP code base. In fact, it is likely that the paging and memory management routines haven't changed much since the Windows NT days although not being employed by Microsoft and having never seen the source code that is purely speculation based upon anecdotal evidence. I really do wish that Microsoft would do more to incorporate new OS ideas, such as the Completely Fair Scheduler, as Linux has done and better advertise how they improve core OS features instead of promoting their latest gee-whiz bloatware features instead.
Their idea for many different "tiers" to their operating system should have been the first clue to their management team that it is time to reign things in and refocus efforts.
Surely there are smart engineers working at Microsoft who have tried to tell this to the management and marketing people so one is left to wonder why, after being told this by their engineers and the marketplace (witness the Vista debacle), that they, the managers and marketers, persist in loading the operating system with bloat in a vain attempt to cram Microsoft application software down the collective throats of their customers. It seems to me that it would be much better long term strategy, and probably more profitable as well, to concentrate on their development tools (Visual Studio and .NET Framework) and their cloud computing initiative in order to better compete with Google, Amazon, and others for a share of what promises to be a lucrative hosted application data center market going forward into the future. They could host versions of their own applications and third party applications (probably written in .NET) and collect regular tolls for providing the infrastructure (as Google, Amazon, and others are doing or plan to do). However, in order to do this they need to change their OS strategy from one of leveraged lock-in to one of enabling access to the cloud (I actually hate that word but everyone seems to be using it these days to describe super-scalar hosted applications) and selling certain high end value-added OS components as extras to those who need and want them while selling the same stripped down and minimal core OS to everyone at a cute rate price (to better compete with the packaged Linux distributions). See how nice we are here on Slashdot? I didn't even charge for this excellent advice (Microsoft can thank me later).
There were some reports of problems with the Vista boot loader making certain assumptions about the physical location of the primary operating system partition on the disk and the boot sector contents (probably having something to do with the trusted computing DRM, although Microsoft was coy about this). For example, it is necessary to chain boot loaders when full disk encryption is used so that the encrypted partitions can be mounted first as virtual volumes before other processes attempt to select and boot an operating system. My question is to what extent are the various boot configurations and scenarios supported (or NOT supported) by Windows 7?
The state will probably not prosecute any individual perjury case brought by a citizen against a corporation and especially not as an independent case or action (i.e. not arising out of sworn testimony given in a previously prosecuted criminal case). As far as I know, privately initiated criminal prosecutions are not permitted under US law (although some other countries do allow that type of action, usually with caveats against the citizen initiating the case to prevent frivolous uses). IANAL, but I think that fairly well sums up the state of affairs here in the US.
This pretty much ruined Ted's shot of being reelected
Don't be so sure, in the Senate seniority is everything, it determines who chairs the powerful committees and who controls the agendas that come before those committees and ultimately how much money goes back to the home state. Now, Alaska is not a very big state population wise and would not get even HALF of the federal money that they currently get if they replaced Stevens and started all over again with a very junior Senator. It would take decades for Alaska to rebuild the influence that they currently have built up in Stevens who, along with the oil companies, has but tens of thousands of dollars (cold hard cash) directly into the pockets of average Alaskans over the years. Alaska under Stevens gets roughly $1.80+ of every tax dollar they spend back for a profit of 0.80+ cents for every tax dollar they send to the Federal Government. Meanwhile, States like California, which do not have Senators anywhere near as senior as Stevens, get much less than $1 back for every $1 in taxes paid to the Federal Government. Alaskans have too much invested in Stevens to cut him loose for failing to declare gifts from oil companies and as difficult as it may be for west coast Liberals to understand, most Alaskans like the oil companies and want even more drilling because royalties go directly into the pockets of average Alaskans (thousands of dollars per family per year).
Separate temptation from politicians and you will see fewer troubles. It would be far cheaper to grant politicians in key positions generous allowances for the rest of their lives and to clear all expenses over certain through some sort of oversight board forbidden to have any contact with the people they are overseeing.
It is interesting to hear this suggested here on Slashdot where it is more frequently fashionable to decry the "overpaid" CEOs of corporate America who receive tens of millions of dollars even if they fail when the purpose is exactly as the parent has described above, to prevent outside interests, including the personal interests of the CEO (which the large salaries and severance packages serve to ameliorate), from corrupting dispassionate and considered judgments on matters concerning hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. People demand lower pay for CEOs without realizing that a large portion of lobbyist and special interest power in the United States Government is derived from providing perks, gifts, and other benefits to politicians that are well beyond the means of any similarly paid Americans. The US Congress is a wonderful example of what happens when you place people earning less than 200K per year in charge of billions of dollars with billion dollar corporations all competing for a piece of the largesse. The President of the United States is paid 400k and many of the rest earn less than 100k and the vast majority of federal employees, including those working at regulatory agencies, earn substantially less than that. Compared to the resources of a billion dollar corporation, a Congressman earning 170K per year (including benefits) can be bought for relatively cheap and they are every day. If you want to shield your government from the corrupting power of the special interests then you have to pay your politicians enough to move them beyond any serious consideration for bribes and other special interest incentives.
The advertisers and search engine optimizers have already shown that they have absolutely ZERO qualms about providing false or misleading information to search engine robots in the form of page cloaking, hidden frames, false meta tags, etc so what makes anyone believe that they will not play the same games, possibly with even greater result, against the semantic web? There is money to be made by gaming the system and as long as it is possible for website operators to describe themselves on the semantic web then they will describe themselves in any way they have to to drive traffic to their sites and get ad hits, truth be damned.
I am sure that there are people in the Pentagon, due to their age or lack of experience with modern web apps, who have never considered this possibility and it's probably good they are made aware.
They probably already were aware. The grey haired general or admiral in the Pentagon may not be up on the details of actually using these services from personal first hand experience, but they have entire staffs composed of younger officers (lieutenants to commanders usually) who's job it is to research, filter, and prepare reports for the admiral or the general, think of it like specialists and middle managers writing summaries for the executives, so that they have the information they need to make decisions and issue orders (usually long written ones). This report looks like it was prepared primarily to be sensational and scare up more program money from Congress and not so much to inform the generals and admirals about things that they already know.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Kurros, from ST:VOY season 5 episode 20 Think Tank.
There is nothing wrong with using debt for our money per se (it is the triple combination of debt money, forced universal acceptance of that money as payment by government fiat, and fractional reserve banking which leads to trouble), but we must, as the video suggests, take a more holistic view of money as part of a sustainable economy where we all live within the boundaries imposed upon us by our environment and are not dependent upon unsustainable growth and ever increasing consumption of non-renewable resources to survive. If we do not change the way that we live, part of which means changing the way that we think about money, then this planet that we live on will NOT be kind in making those changes for us and our daily lives much more "interesting" in the process.
The answer all the libertarians seem to give is "gold". But this is nonsensical. Gold is not particularly valuable. It has some worth in certain industrial processes and such, but mostly its value comes because people are collectively nuts.
First ask yourself, what is money (answer: it serves as a store of value and a widely accepted medium of exchange)? Now ask yourself, what features do we want out of any physical token that we are going to use as money? First, It should not be possible to produce without effort (mining to get the gold for example). Second, it should be compact so that large amounts of value can be stored and transported with the greatest possible convenience. Third, it should be durable and not decay or degrade over time. Fourth, it should be easily recognizable and identifiable with simple tests that everyone can understand and agree upon. Fifth and finally it should be easily divisible into individual different sized units of value to enable the greatest possible number of different sized transactions. The reason that gold has historically been used as money is that it satisfies, completely or to a large extent, all five of these features.
In this way, the value of gold is not much different from the value of the un-backed $20 bills in my wallet.
Nope, bzzzzt, wrong...thanks for playing. The bills in your pocket are backed, ultimately, by the promise of someone else to repay the debts that they have incurred which, when combined with fractional reserve banking, means that the money in your bank account (perhaps not in your pocket, but do you keep all of your money in your pockets?) is subject to disappearance or destruction through no fault of your own. The nice thing about gold and other commodity monies (to greater and lesser degrees) is that they continue to exist and preserve their monetary properties even when governments are no longer around to enforce their acceptance (the dollars in your pocket might still exist after the fall of the government, but good luck getting anyone to accept them in exchange for anything useful).
You might want to check this video out: Money as Debt, it addresses many common misconceptions about historical and our present monetary systems.
I think that plasmacutter, like many others, has some basic misunderstandings about how fractional reserve banking and pure fiat currency (where new currency is backed by fractional reserves of existing currency which themselves were backed by previous reserves, etc which are ultimately backed by nothing other than the promise of someone else to repay, or in other words...debt) works and the limits of government regulation. Rohan, unassimilatible, AC, and the other Libertarians who posted on this thread are basically right, the free market, in and of itself, is NOT the root cause of the present financial crises, although it did more readily expose the underlying shortcomings of the present structure of debt backed fiat currency mandated by our government. For the edification of plasmacutter and other confused socialists might I suggest the following video: Debt as Money. Perhaps after watching the video they will better understand some of the fundamental problems with our present money system that we Libertarians have long sought to raise awareness of in the general population.
It is really tough to consider that these flagrant transgressions still go on in todays environment.
Perhaps if you've lived a sheltered life, as most Americans have compared to those living in the nastier parts of this world, but it is important to remember that much of that world is still run by religious quacks and if we want to remain independent and free of their control then we have to be willing, if necessary, to beat them down, stomp their guts out, and piss on their graves before they come over here and do the same to us.
Here is my solution. Let Iran build a nuke, and get the security council to agree that if Iran uses it, overtly _or_ covertly, we get to turn Iran into a parking lot
Which Iran would agree to immediately because they are controlled by a theocratic government whose religion espouses an afterlife. It is not easy to deter nations where the culture of death, supported and spread by religion, is glorified above life itself. There can be no meaningful deterrence when your opponent carries out "martyrdom operations" (aka suicide bombings) as a matter of national policy.