The 'sending a JPG' to the baby-sitter starts out as a very neat idea, but what happens when baby-sitter has a popular e-mail virus which sends her e-mail to 100 people in her address book? Instant house party?
That highlights the real beauty of this system. The only access to your house is wanted access or forced access. If the sitter realizes that she has a virus or just thinks that someone else may have figured out your key, they can just call you on vacation and you can VNC into your Linux box or send an e-mail to it to change the code, then email them a new one or email one to someone else.
For as long as there have been door locks that you can buy in stores, people have been changing their locks because of stolen keys, angry family members or former lovers, and missing keys that may or may not been in someone else's hands. Under the current system, you have to buy new locks for every external door in your house if you want to change the key. Under this system, all you have to do is type up a command on a keyboard.
And yes, I'm aware that having door locks that can be controlled via the internet is insecure, but the point is that you can control it any way that you want. If you think you can set up a really good network that is unlikely to be hacked anyway, you can make it so it can be set through the internet. If you can't set up a really good network, you can just tell your sitter what to do over the phone.
He fails to mention that the scanner scans more than just barcodes. When it scans the correct barcode, it makes the door unlock. When it scans a boot or shoulder, it makes the door self-destructed
Also, barcodes for entry arn't very secure. If anyone gets ahold of your card for 10 seconds, they can make a photocopy and have your security level.
Personally, I see this as an upgraded form of "security through obscurity": security through weirdness. People know where the average person puts their keys and where the average person puts plastic cards (which most magnetic strips are put on)... but a barcode? W(here)TF does someone keep their BARCODE? A potential invader or an unscrupulous friend will be stunned by it. You can't look for a Hide-A-Key. He's not keeping it on a key rack. He probably can't just throw it down on his desk when he gets home. Hell, for all they know, his spare could be tattooed to his left ass cheek.
It's not obscurity, which is what the Hide-A-Key is. It's just weird, and on an individual basis, that could work for security.
I don't think you understand. Dojinshi in Japan is not fan fiction. It is fan comics, surprisingly well drawn and written fan comics, which are sold in stores and amass conventions around them that make many US comic and science fiction conventions look miniscule by comparison. So the difference is not only form and quality, but the openness of the copyright violation and the fact that money is actually exchanged for it.
And as someone already mentioned, fan fiction != slash. Slash is fan fiction with explicit homosexual sex, rather than just fan-written stories involving popular characters.
If authors believe allowing copycats is a great marketing technique, then they're welcome [in theory] to grant "copycat" rights to everyone.
Yeah, they're welcome to do it after the company that they've sold their works' rights to in order to get mass distribution dies off, sells the rights to someone else, and the process repeats until no one wants to buy the rights any more. After that, all they have to do is figure out a way to rise from the dead as a zombie writer/director/artist in the year 2300 and then they're welcome to grant "copycat" rights to everyone.
The difference between game companies (including Sony) and Sony as a whole is enormous. All of the things that you mentioned were game consoles, which have intellectual property law restricting what can appear on them. If Nintendo doesn't want someone making a certain GameCube game, that GameCube game doesn't get distributed, and the same goes for Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment. What the parent poster was talking about, though, was Sony Electronics, which makes things like DVD players. DVD players, of course, are open to everyone that feels like making a DVD, which is why we see pornographic DVDs (for one example) and not pornographic GameCube games.
Therefore, he's still sort of correct. Sony is the only company that I can think of that produces both content and the open, unrestricted technology to play it on, which is very different from Nintendo's, Microsoft's, or SCE's relationship to their video game consoles.
By "obsession" in this case, I think he really means fandom. Creating websites, fan works, and other entertaining, semi-productive time sinks around a commercial work that serve no purpose other than loving devotion. To geeks, this is not "obsession". To us, nothing is obsessive until it kills you. The rest of the world may have a more liberal idea of the word...
Has Microsoft ever, in its entire history, made a better product than the competition, sold it for a better price, and made a profit doing so? I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely curious to know if this has ever happened.
The problem is that this is all in the eyes of the beholder, so Microsoft really won't have done anything wrong until they kill the competition and then raise the price back up. I, personally, think that IE has been better than Netscape for my needs for a long, long time. When properly configured, it does not hassle me about anything at all, does not try to integrate itself with the company's other products like AOL's Netscape does, and leaves 90% of the screen to the site I'm viewing without causing any usability problems. Plenty of other people replying to your post, however, say that Netscape was and still is better and that Mozilla is far better any other browser on the market. After having run Mozilla and found the same problems with it that I had with Netscape, I don't agree.
But this is exactly the problem... if a virus manages to pass as a trusted program, then Palladium merely reverts back to the system we have today (except as a consumer you have less control over your own property). Viruses can still wreak havoc, etc. Once the trust is broken by one app, the whole system collapses.
I don't understand this logic at all. If a virus can act like a trusted program and other viruses that can act like a trusted program will stem from that, why can't a version of Linux or just a media player for Windows incorporate the same hack of the trusted computing platform that the viruses use?
How about better online games? Consider MMORPGs. To prevent cheating, they have to do various things server-side that would actually make more sense from a resource allocation point of view to do on the client.
Console online games like Phantasy Star Online provide an environment where the client cannot see or modify the code that goes through the machine, but they still have huge problems with cheating, and for the same reason that a Palladium-enabled PC would (at least from my understanding). You can modify the software and hardware all you want, locking them up in every way that you can think of, but eventually it will be hacked. You can only lock down a set of circuit boards and wires that are located in the consumer's home to a certain degree. With enough time and energy, people will eventually get past the lock down, and those people are usually the ones that are crafty enough to cheat like a pro and spread the wonders of hacked accounts and instantly created uber items clear across the game and into the hands of people that will not be pleased when the game developer takes their stuff from them.
Bottom line, there is simply no way to completely lock down an MMORPG. Cheating in an MMORPG is like a big, warm apple pie. Regardless of whether it's being sliced up for a million people or a few hundred, they always manage to eat the entire pie, and the only difference is the amount of it that each person shares. Either you get a lot of people cheating a little bit or a little bit of people cheating a lot, but either way, the users figure out how to give you a huge cheating problem.
If a TCPA/Palladium system is widespread media companies can sell digital content that they can rest assured isnt likely to be spread like clap in a dirty whore house.
Ooooooh! I get it now! It turns my computer into a $1000 spare satellite receiver without the Tivo functionality! Why didn't anyone tell me this? I'm fucking thrilled now!
Until I babysat some kids and showed them Terminator II, I didn't see a connection between a violent movie and violent behavior, but now I am certain there is one.
Did one of the kids shoot the other with a gun? Did the other one manage to take a knife and rip half of the other's face off before that?
What's that? No? Then your argument is pointless. Two kids pushing and shoving each other after seeing a violent film doesn't even approach this discussion, which is about kids planning out the murder of others over a period of hours, days, or even weeks or months and eventually carrying out that murder. It's as different as a grain of sand touching the ground is from a comet smacking into the Earth.
Ok this may be a stupid question, but doesn't this violate that DMCA thingy that everyone is all concerned about? Just a thought.
I'd just like to chime in here with the fact that whether or not it violates the DMCA does not matter. What matters is whether or not a judge will say, "That law doesn't even approach this, so you definitely have no case. Case dismissed". Given that it deals with computers and an encryption algorithm, a judge would probably let it go past a preliminary hearing and into a real trial, which is an automatic win for Microsoft because it's doubtful that the defendant would have enough money to let it stretch on for years.
I know only a little bit about encryption, so I may be completely talking out of my ass here (and feel free to educate me if I am), but I noticed this one point that you mentioned:
The RC5-64 project was able to brute force a key in 1757 days using 58,747,597,657 work units tested the winning key was found!
1,757 days is nearly 5 years, meaning that the project would have had to have started five years ago in order to have already been finished. My memory of where, exactly, computers were in 1997-1998 (depending on when the project finished, I'm not sure) is a little fuzzy, but I remember that in mid-1999, a 700mhz Pentium 3 was considered "high end" and the average Dell/Gateway type of computer was running a low-end processor like a Cyrix at roughly 200-300mhz. By comparison, it isn't out of the ordinary to find a 1.6-2ghz processor in a consumer PC right now and the sort of geeks that would make up a decent portion of this project probably have much faster processors than that and a lot more RAM. In addition to that, if Moore's Law were to hold, processors would be improving by at least 2ghz per year from now on instead of the 500-700mhz that they were in 1999.
So really, doesn't the RC5-64 project essentially just show us the length of the race track without giving us any data about the speed of the cars that will be driving on it?
No they don't! That's just bad logic. Just because there have been a few large scale examples of that happening, it doesn't mean that one is causation of the other.
That's a distortion of the facts. There haven't just been "a few large scale examples of that happening". The reality, as I already pointed out, was that there was no example of the opposite happening. Rather than pointing out a few small examples of communist dictatorships, I said that I could not think of one that DID NOT have a totalitarian government. You furnished no example to refute that.
I liked the people like me part! Who are you grouping together with me? The commies? Well, sorry, I'm not one. I'm just a bit more prepared to examine other ideas than the ones I am fed during my upbringing, i.e. breaking from the "party line". Sorry for being an individual!
Again, a distortion. What is more likely, that by "you people" I meant "godless communists" or "people making the same exact argument that you were"? You assume that the other side is insulting you in your responses because you wish that I had just given you the old "oh, fuck you, you dirty commie" response, presumably because you would've handled that better and been more equipped to refute it.
A vote for a third party is generally a waste of time, and 9 times out of 10, people vote for the opposing canditate of someone they don't like.
Right there, you refute your own argument. People can vote for a third party. In fact, in most of the ballots I've seen, there are at least five people from five parties for each seat. That's democracy and the fact that the people don't want to vote for a third party does not change that. They have a choice and just because they keep sticking with what they've got doesn't mean that that's their only choice.
Often for silly reasons, such as their haircut, looks, or how their parents voted.
Again, you assume that other people are stupid because it helps your argument. Can you furnish any example of someone coming out an ballot booth and telling a journalist or pollster "I voted for him because I like his haircut" or "That's what daddy told me"? Or do you just assume that everyone that doesn't agree with you is "diluted"?
Hardly a great advertisment for the western way. Capitalism seems to work to a point, but the rich are just getting far too rich, and the poor are getting far to poor at the moment for me to agree with you that it "works".
If the rich are just getting richer and the poor are getting so much poorer, then I'd think that you would have a better example of that than the same quote that communists have been using throughout the last century. You make very sensationalist statements without backing them up.
For a detailed and extremely pragmatic (albeit idealistic and some might say naive) non-communist instruction manual on this subject please read R. Buckminster Fuller's book Critical Path. You never know, it just might open your eyes a bit and get you to think outside the capitalist/communist good/evil black/white world view.
For a detailed and extremely pragmatic (albeit idealistic and some might say naive) non-communist instruction manual on how to take a fucking joke, please turn on Comedy Central or just go out and get yourself a standup CD. The Anonymous Coward post above yours was making a joke, not seriously accusing someone of communism. That's why it says "(Score:3, Funny)".
I cannot think of any communist state that did not have a totalitarian government. In fact, no communist state stands today that is not a totalitarian shithole, China included. How many failed, corrupt communist states will it take before "pure/pristine communism" people like you realize that the two keep ending up together because communism naturally breeds totalitarianism?
Whenever your government mandate is to put tons of power in the hands of the few people running the government, that government eventually becomes corrupt. The chances of getting decades and centuries of consecutively benevolent leaders that can handle tons of power without being corrupt are very slim, so capitalist democracies like the United States and many European countries have made sure that the power in the government is spread very thinly and that as much of it as possible is in the hands of the people.
As fucked up as the RIAA is, it's even worse when, for instance, the holders of patents on medicine peofit off of the suffering and death of others.
If you think that society will fall apart without the stratifying influence of capitalism, and that the idea of intellectual property is necessary for the continued prosperity of the US, I say that's b.s. and there are other possible viable economic models.
Anyone that doesn't take the time to really think about how capitalism works in a given industry will immediately arrive at the conclusion that it is soulless, evil, and utterly corrupt. Pharmaceutical companies have medicine, but they don't give it away for free ---- EVIL! Yet, when you actually stop to think about it, giving that medicine away or even just taking away the patents and letting other companies manufacture the drugs at a cheaper price is stupid. When a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug that can cure a disease that is very difficult to cure, such as a new vaccine or (hopefully, some day) a cure for cancer, they spend billions of dollars on it before it's even finished. Afterward, they have to make that money back or the company dies, the brilliant minds that it employs in making newer and better drugs become unemployed, and the equipment is either sold off or fall into disrepair. Do that to enough companies in the United States and around the world and you will have no more pharmaceutical companies, and thus no more medicine of any kind for anyone.
Capitalism really is a cold, heartless, greedy thing, but just because something isn't all that great doesn't mean that the alternative is a world full of rainbows and healthy children playing with fluffy white bunnies in an endless field of plenty. Sometimes, as in this case, the alternatives to a cold, heartless, and greedy thing are far worse than the thing itself. It would be wonderful if we could reach the ideal alternative, infinite global charity and every man working for the benefit of another, but that hasn't worked so far and until someone can make it work, we've got capitalism and its poison is what we need to cure the rest of the world's ills, like fatal disease.
Thanks to the wonders of global corporations, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of , the Recording Industry Association of , and probably the Recording Industry Association of are all pretty much the same people, or at least subsidiaries of those people that were once independent national businesses based in their home country. You could arguably refer to them as "The Recording Industry Association of Planet Earth (RIAPE)", but because the people posting this on Slashdot are Americans and most of the RIAPE's attacks on sane copyright law stem from the United States, we just call them the RIAA.
I've noticed that the development of the sort of robots that we've seen in movies and TV shows is being done in piece-meal by lots of different groups. There's this group, a group working on facial expressions, several groups working on creating a functional and reliable biped model, some other groups working on conversational skills, several companies working on voice recognition, a few working on face recognition, etc. When all of this is put together and we have a fully functional robot, maybe not akin to Data but certainly something similar to the robots in Bubblegum Crisis 2040 (basically sentient construction workers) or Rockman/Megaman (robots that are clearly robots, but with a human shape and face), how many patents will it violate? 20? 40? 80? 150?
I see the need for these specific aspects of humanoid or human-like robots to be concentrated on by dedicated groups with dedicated funding, rather than the entire thing being approached as a single project, but are we ever going to get an actual robot this way? Will these people ever be able to create the sort of functional and useful robot that they envision when they have to not only complete this specific project, but then build the entire rest of the robot themselves, using only their own research and development capabilities?
And before someone mentions that a "robot" isn't necessarily something similar to a human being, please note that this project specifically requires something that can aid a human being emotionally and thus be able to be accepted by a human being as something other than a soulless machine, necessitating that it be something more human-like than a laptop with wheels and a speaker.
I agree. However what about a future owner wanting to know the history of the car? Take it into service to find out what your getting.
The buyer has no right or expectation to a full record of everything that what they're buying has done. By your logic, I should have cameras in my house so that whoever I sell it to in a decade can be sure that the carpet was regularly vacuumed and cleaned. The privacy issue, even in a car, easily trumps the issue of the eventual buyer's right to know about the status and history of what they're buying.
This will someday be integrated into your ECU (engine control unit.) You will not be able to disable the recorder, because it will be built in.
Thus it is important that we (the open/free community) develop a free/open engine management system such as those sold for $3000 by haltech, so we can remove the factory computer and install our own.
If you can remove the recorder, then it can definitely be disabled. All you would have to do is put in a dummy recorder that accurately records the data, but just throws it on RAM or something so that it is written, but immediately disappears. Whatever the recorder is, I think we can be confident that it can be disabled, and probably for much cheaper than the cost of putting an "open hardware" recorder in. Whether that will be legal, however, as well as how stiff the penalty would be if there were a law against it, is another matter entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'sending a JPG' to the baby-sitter starts out as a very neat idea, but what happens when baby-sitter has a popular e-mail virus which sends her e-mail to 100 people in her address book? Instant house party?
That highlights the real beauty of this system. The only access to your house is wanted access or forced access. If the sitter realizes that she has a virus or just thinks that someone else may have figured out your key, they can just call you on vacation and you can VNC into your Linux box or send an e-mail to it to change the code, then email them a new one or email one to someone else.
For as long as there have been door locks that you can buy in stores, people have been changing their locks because of stolen keys, angry family members or former lovers, and missing keys that may or may not been in someone else's hands. Under the current system, you have to buy new locks for every external door in your house if you want to change the key. Under this system, all you have to do is type up a command on a keyboard.
And yes, I'm aware that having door locks that can be controlled via the internet is insecure, but the point is that you can control it any way that you want. If you think you can set up a really good network that is unlikely to be hacked anyway, you can make it so it can be set through the internet. If you can't set up a really good network, you can just tell your sitter what to do over the phone.
He fails to mention that the scanner scans more than just barcodes. When it scans the correct barcode, it makes the door unlock. When it scans a boot or shoulder, it makes the door self-destructed
Also, barcodes for entry arn't very secure. If anyone gets ahold of your card for 10 seconds, they can make a photocopy and have your security level.
Personally, I see this as an upgraded form of "security through obscurity": security through weirdness. People know where the average person puts their keys and where the average person puts plastic cards (which most magnetic strips are put on)... but a barcode? W(here)TF does someone keep their BARCODE? A potential invader or an unscrupulous friend will be stunned by it. You can't look for a Hide-A-Key. He's not keeping it on a key rack. He probably can't just throw it down on his desk when he gets home. Hell, for all they know, his spare could be tattooed to his left ass cheek.
It's not obscurity, which is what the Hide-A-Key is. It's just weird, and on an individual basis, that could work for security.
I don't think you understand. Dojinshi in Japan is not fan fiction. It is fan comics, surprisingly well drawn and written fan comics, which are sold in stores and amass conventions around them that make many US comic and science fiction conventions look miniscule by comparison. So the difference is not only form and quality, but the openness of the copyright violation and the fact that money is actually exchanged for it.
And as someone already mentioned, fan fiction != slash. Slash is fan fiction with explicit homosexual sex, rather than just fan-written stories involving popular characters.
If authors believe allowing copycats is a great marketing technique, then they're welcome [in theory] to grant "copycat" rights to everyone.
Yeah, they're welcome to do it after the company that they've sold their works' rights to in order to get mass distribution dies off, sells the rights to someone else, and the process repeats until no one wants to buy the rights any more. After that, all they have to do is figure out a way to rise from the dead as a zombie writer/director/artist in the year 2300 and then they're welcome to grant "copycat" rights to everyone.
The difference between game companies (including Sony) and Sony as a whole is enormous. All of the things that you mentioned were game consoles, which have intellectual property law restricting what can appear on them. If Nintendo doesn't want someone making a certain GameCube game, that GameCube game doesn't get distributed, and the same goes for Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment. What the parent poster was talking about, though, was Sony Electronics, which makes things like DVD players. DVD players, of course, are open to everyone that feels like making a DVD, which is why we see pornographic DVDs (for one example) and not pornographic GameCube games.
Therefore, he's still sort of correct. Sony is the only company that I can think of that produces both content and the open, unrestricted technology to play it on, which is very different from Nintendo's, Microsoft's, or SCE's relationship to their video game consoles.
By "obsession" in this case, I think he really means fandom. Creating websites, fan works, and other entertaining, semi-productive time sinks around a commercial work that serve no purpose other than loving devotion. To geeks, this is not "obsession". To us, nothing is obsessive until it kills you. The rest of the world may have a more liberal idea of the word...
Has Microsoft ever, in its entire history, made a better product than the competition, sold it for a better price, and made a profit doing so? I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely curious to know if this has ever happened.
The problem is that this is all in the eyes of the beholder, so Microsoft really won't have done anything wrong until they kill the competition and then raise the price back up. I, personally, think that IE has been better than Netscape for my needs for a long, long time. When properly configured, it does not hassle me about anything at all, does not try to integrate itself with the company's other products like AOL's Netscape does, and leaves 90% of the screen to the site I'm viewing without causing any usability problems. Plenty of other people replying to your post, however, say that Netscape was and still is better and that Mozilla is far better any other browser on the market. After having run Mozilla and found the same problems with it that I had with Netscape, I don't agree.
But this is exactly the problem... if a virus manages to pass as a trusted program, then Palladium merely reverts back to the system we have today (except as a consumer you have less control over your own property). Viruses can still wreak havoc, etc. Once the trust is broken by one app, the whole system collapses.
I don't understand this logic at all. If a virus can act like a trusted program and other viruses that can act like a trusted program will stem from that, why can't a version of Linux or just a media player for Windows incorporate the same hack of the trusted computing platform that the viruses use?
How about better online games? Consider MMORPGs. To prevent cheating, they have to do various things server-side that would actually make more sense from a resource allocation point of view to do on the client.
Console online games like Phantasy Star Online provide an environment where the client cannot see or modify the code that goes through the machine, but they still have huge problems with cheating, and for the same reason that a Palladium-enabled PC would (at least from my understanding). You can modify the software and hardware all you want, locking them up in every way that you can think of, but eventually it will be hacked. You can only lock down a set of circuit boards and wires that are located in the consumer's home to a certain degree. With enough time and energy, people will eventually get past the lock down, and those people are usually the ones that are crafty enough to cheat like a pro and spread the wonders of hacked accounts and instantly created uber items clear across the game and into the hands of people that will not be pleased when the game developer takes their stuff from them.
Bottom line, there is simply no way to completely lock down an MMORPG. Cheating in an MMORPG is like a big, warm apple pie. Regardless of whether it's being sliced up for a million people or a few hundred, they always manage to eat the entire pie, and the only difference is the amount of it that each person shares. Either you get a lot of people cheating a little bit or a little bit of people cheating a lot, but either way, the users figure out how to give you a huge cheating problem.
If a TCPA/Palladium system is widespread media companies can sell digital content that they can rest assured isnt likely to be spread like clap in a dirty whore house.
Ooooooh! I get it now! It turns my computer into a $1000 spare satellite receiver without the Tivo functionality! Why didn't anyone tell me this? I'm fucking thrilled now!
Until I babysat some kids and showed them Terminator II, I didn't see a connection between a violent movie and violent behavior, but now I am certain there is one.
Did one of the kids shoot the other with a gun? Did the other one manage to take a knife and rip half of the other's face off before that?
What's that? No? Then your argument is pointless. Two kids pushing and shoving each other after seeing a violent film doesn't even approach this discussion, which is about kids planning out the murder of others over a period of hours, days, or even weeks or months and eventually carrying out that murder. It's as different as a grain of sand touching the ground is from a comet smacking into the Earth.
Advocating illegal activity is pretty unprofessional.
Yeah, and so is Slashdot. You haven't been around here long, have you?
Ok this may be a stupid question, but doesn't this violate that DMCA thingy that everyone is all concerned about? Just a thought.
I'd just like to chime in here with the fact that whether or not it violates the DMCA does not matter. What matters is whether or not a judge will say, "That law doesn't even approach this, so you definitely have no case. Case dismissed". Given that it deals with computers and an encryption algorithm, a judge would probably let it go past a preliminary hearing and into a real trial, which is an automatic win for Microsoft because it's doubtful that the defendant would have enough money to let it stretch on for years.
I know only a little bit about encryption, so I may be completely talking out of my ass here (and feel free to educate me if I am), but I noticed this one point that you mentioned:
The RC5-64 project was able to brute force a key in 1757 days using 58,747,597,657 work units tested the winning key was found!
1,757 days is nearly 5 years, meaning that the project would have had to have started five years ago in order to have already been finished. My memory of where, exactly, computers were in 1997-1998 (depending on when the project finished, I'm not sure) is a little fuzzy, but I remember that in mid-1999, a 700mhz Pentium 3 was considered "high end" and the average Dell/Gateway type of computer was running a low-end processor like a Cyrix at roughly 200-300mhz. By comparison, it isn't out of the ordinary to find a 1.6-2ghz processor in a consumer PC right now and the sort of geeks that would make up a decent portion of this project probably have much faster processors than that and a lot more RAM. In addition to that, if Moore's Law were to hold, processors would be improving by at least 2ghz per year from now on instead of the 500-700mhz that they were in 1999.
So really, doesn't the RC5-64 project essentially just show us the length of the race track without giving us any data about the speed of the cars that will be driving on it?
No they don't! That's just bad logic. Just because there have been a few large scale examples of that happening, it doesn't mean that one is causation of the other.
That's a distortion of the facts. There haven't just been "a few large scale examples of that happening". The reality, as I already pointed out, was that there was no example of the opposite happening. Rather than pointing out a few small examples of communist dictatorships, I said that I could not think of one that DID NOT have a totalitarian government. You furnished no example to refute that.
I liked the people like me part! Who are you grouping together with me? The commies? Well, sorry, I'm not one. I'm just a bit more prepared to examine other ideas than the ones I am fed during my upbringing, i.e. breaking from the "party line". Sorry for being an individual!
Again, a distortion. What is more likely, that by "you people" I meant "godless communists" or "people making the same exact argument that you were"? You assume that the other side is insulting you in your responses because you wish that I had just given you the old "oh, fuck you, you dirty commie" response, presumably because you would've handled that better and been more equipped to refute it.
A vote for a third party is generally a waste of time, and 9 times out of 10, people vote for the opposing canditate of someone they don't like.
Right there, you refute your own argument. People can vote for a third party. In fact, in most of the ballots I've seen, there are at least five people from five parties for each seat. That's democracy and the fact that the people don't want to vote for a third party does not change that. They have a choice and just because they keep sticking with what they've got doesn't mean that that's their only choice.
Often for silly reasons, such as their haircut, looks, or how their parents voted.
Again, you assume that other people are stupid because it helps your argument. Can you furnish any example of someone coming out an ballot booth and telling a journalist or pollster "I voted for him because I like his haircut" or "That's what daddy told me"? Or do you just assume that everyone that doesn't agree with you is "diluted"?
Hardly a great advertisment for the western way. Capitalism seems to work to a point, but the rich are just getting far too rich, and the poor are getting far to poor at the moment for me to agree with you that it "works".
If the rich are just getting richer and the poor are getting so much poorer, then I'd think that you would have a better example of that than the same quote that communists have been using throughout the last century. You make very sensationalist statements without backing them up.
it's amazing what images can be evoked using only punctuation. :-)
Yeah, like some jackass in a robe with a Bible in one hand, a torch in the other, and a stack of "lascivious writings" in front of him...
For a detailed and extremely pragmatic (albeit idealistic and some might say naive) non-communist instruction manual on this subject please read R. Buckminster Fuller's book Critical Path. You never know, it just might open your eyes a bit and get you to think outside the capitalist/communist good/evil black/white world view.
For a detailed and extremely pragmatic (albeit idealistic and some might say naive) non-communist instruction manual on how to take a fucking joke, please turn on Comedy Central or just go out and get yourself a standup CD. The Anonymous Coward post above yours was making a joke, not seriously accusing someone of communism. That's why it says "(Score:3, Funny)".
I cannot think of any communist state that did not have a totalitarian government. In fact, no communist state stands today that is not a totalitarian shithole, China included. How many failed, corrupt communist states will it take before "pure/pristine communism" people like you realize that the two keep ending up together because communism naturally breeds totalitarianism?
Whenever your government mandate is to put tons of power in the hands of the few people running the government, that government eventually becomes corrupt. The chances of getting decades and centuries of consecutively benevolent leaders that can handle tons of power without being corrupt are very slim, so capitalist democracies like the United States and many European countries have made sure that the power in the government is spread very thinly and that as much of it as possible is in the hands of the people.
As fucked up as the RIAA is, it's even worse when, for instance, the holders of patents on medicine peofit off of the suffering and death of others.
If you think that society will fall apart without the stratifying influence of capitalism, and that the idea of intellectual property is necessary for the continued prosperity of the US, I say that's b.s. and there are other possible viable economic models.
Anyone that doesn't take the time to really think about how capitalism works in a given industry will immediately arrive at the conclusion that it is soulless, evil, and utterly corrupt. Pharmaceutical companies have medicine, but they don't give it away for free ---- EVIL! Yet, when you actually stop to think about it, giving that medicine away or even just taking away the patents and letting other companies manufacture the drugs at a cheaper price is stupid. When a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug that can cure a disease that is very difficult to cure, such as a new vaccine or (hopefully, some day) a cure for cancer, they spend billions of dollars on it before it's even finished. Afterward, they have to make that money back or the company dies, the brilliant minds that it employs in making newer and better drugs become unemployed, and the equipment is either sold off or fall into disrepair. Do that to enough companies in the United States and around the world and you will have no more pharmaceutical companies, and thus no more medicine of any kind for anyone.
Capitalism really is a cold, heartless, greedy thing, but just because something isn't all that great doesn't mean that the alternative is a world full of rainbows and healthy children playing with fluffy white bunnies in an endless field of plenty. Sometimes, as in this case, the alternatives to a cold, heartless, and greedy thing are far worse than the thing itself. It would be wonderful if we could reach the ideal alternative, infinite global charity and every man working for the benefit of another, but that hasn't worked so far and until someone can make it work, we've got capitalism and its poison is what we need to cure the rest of the world's ills, like fatal disease.
Thanks to the wonders of global corporations, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of , the Recording Industry Association of , and probably the Recording Industry Association of are all pretty much the same people, or at least subsidiaries of those people that were once independent national businesses based in their home country. You could arguably refer to them as "The Recording Industry Association of Planet Earth (RIAPE)", but because the people posting this on Slashdot are Americans and most of the RIAPE's attacks on sane copyright law stem from the United States, we just call them the RIAA.
I've noticed that the development of the sort of robots that we've seen in movies and TV shows is being done in piece-meal by lots of different groups. There's this group, a group working on facial expressions, several groups working on creating a functional and reliable biped model, some other groups working on conversational skills, several companies working on voice recognition, a few working on face recognition, etc. When all of this is put together and we have a fully functional robot, maybe not akin to Data but certainly something similar to the robots in Bubblegum Crisis 2040 (basically sentient construction workers) or Rockman/Megaman (robots that are clearly robots, but with a human shape and face), how many patents will it violate? 20? 40? 80? 150?
I see the need for these specific aspects of humanoid or human-like robots to be concentrated on by dedicated groups with dedicated funding, rather than the entire thing being approached as a single project, but are we ever going to get an actual robot this way? Will these people ever be able to create the sort of functional and useful robot that they envision when they have to not only complete this specific project, but then build the entire rest of the robot themselves, using only their own research and development capabilities?
And before someone mentions that a "robot" isn't necessarily something similar to a human being, please note that this project specifically requires something that can aid a human being emotionally and thus be able to be accepted by a human being as something other than a soulless machine, necessitating that it be something more human-like than a laptop with wheels and a speaker.
Unless it becomes state or federal law not to, maybe it is and I am unaware of the respective laws, than no info recorded, no info reported.
Yes, because as we all know, politicians have no interest in using technology to intrude into our lives and/or further corporate profits.
I agree. However what about a future owner wanting to know the history of the car? Take it into service to find out what your getting.
The buyer has no right or expectation to a full record of everything that what they're buying has done. By your logic, I should have cameras in my house so that whoever I sell it to in a decade can be sure that the carpet was regularly vacuumed and cleaned. The privacy issue, even in a car, easily trumps the issue of the eventual buyer's right to know about the status and history of what they're buying.
This will someday be integrated into your ECU (engine control unit.) You will not be able to disable the recorder, because it will be built in.
Thus it is important that we (the open/free community) develop a free/open engine management system such as those sold for $3000 by haltech, so we can remove the factory computer and install our own.
If you can remove the recorder, then it can definitely be disabled. All you would have to do is put in a dummy recorder that accurately records the data, but just throws it on RAM or something so that it is written, but immediately disappears. Whatever the recorder is, I think we can be confident that it can be disabled, and probably for much cheaper than the cost of putting an "open hardware" recorder in. Whether that will be legal, however, as well as how stiff the penalty would be if there were a law against it, is another matter entirely.