Actually, it's not just selection of media from the store which is a problem with CDs. It's selection of media for lissening. I wrote a little program called Smartplay which "tries" to do two things: (1) learn your moods to more effectivly chose songs to play for you and (2) minimize the ammount of time you spend chosing the music you want to lissen to (ala no long periods chosing playlists and no distractions from crappy songs comming up under random play).
It's buggy as hell, but it proves my point that a software mp3 player on a computer can be MUCH better then CD players and current hardware mp3 player.
Yes, I've known that their were the beginning's of this under the Mac. Plan9 has an interesting solution to this too: You push a menu button by cutting and pasting a command to your shell (the cut and paste is very efficent.. one mouse click). This makes the system more transparent and allows users to see what they are doing all the time.. instead of just when they open AppleScript. It also allows for things like a history and editing previous commands.
I would really love to see a scripting langauge based toolkit (like say Tcl/Tk) which forced the Plan9 style cut and paste based menus. It would make GUI applications much more transparent and functional to serious users.
Actually, I would really like to recommend that people who do not want to get harassed treat these things as school projects (option 1). There is a viberant cryptography and computer science literature which can provide a strong ligitimizing influence on your work.
Now, it's not enough to just call it a school project. You need to be really doing something original and worth publishing, but you can do quite a bit legally when your intentions are academic. We had a good speaker from Lucent give a talk on this exact problem recently (at Rutgers). this is what he told us paraphrased:
I'm going to tell you three stories about three diffrent people working in cryptography, but first I'm going to tell you the endings to the three stories and let you take a guess as to which stories have which endings. Two of these folling people went to jall and one recieved academic laurals.
The first guy reverse engenered top secret government encrpytion chip and was told not to publish the results by his boss (and maybe NSA), but published the results in the New York times anyway. The second guy wrote a program to help him watch DVDs on his computer under Linux instead of Windows. The third found a major flaw in bank security for financial transactions and reported this to the company handling the financial transactins.
Well the first guy (our speaker) recieved great academic awards, the second guy (Jon Johanson) spent a night in jail, and the thrid guy went to jail too (I donno how long). Actually, the third guys story is really intersting. Apperently the banking company said "no we do not believe that any money could be stolen with this exploit, could you prove it to us by making a transfer." the guy made a ransfer and they said "Oh you've stolen some money so we are going to throw you in jail." The implication being that they were tring to shut him up, so they tricked him into doing somthing illegal.
Anywho, the moral of the story is that you can get away with these things if you have a PhD and work for a security company. I would say that people who are not any whare near getting a PhD in crypto, but want to publish subversive stuff should take their message to the academics. Specifically, you should get a respected academic as a coauthor for a paper and get your paper published in a resprected jurnal.
That is, programmers are now trying to make things easy on the user, instead of easy to use productively.
Yes, this is the core of the problem. Actually, I would like to see an argument for this based on the Church-Turing thesis, i.e. it's really stupid to use a program which is not a programming langauge since you loose the full power of the computer.
I'd say the ideal user interface is a partially graphical scripting langauge where it is easy for a beginner to do basic things (like typing shell commands), but the langauge pushes the user to notice that they can combine/script commands to make more powerful commands, i.e. a GUI which gently pushes every user into knowing how to program.
Your argument is full of shit too. It's almost as stupid to say "we can make out GUIs as dumb as we want since people can always learn the command line" as it is to say "we can make our GUIs as stupid as we want since people can always learn assembler/C and write their own programms."
The problem is that the stupid GUI dose not (a) help develop a users intuition about they way the system works and (b) dose not interact well with scripting and user programming. These two flaws will effectivly reduce the number of power users and limit their knowledge/power.
The goal of user interface design should be to make it efficent for a person to move from a basic user to a power user, i.e. the GUI should be intermixed with it's scripting langauge, so that Joe adverage user starts scripting without knowing that they are doing it (kinda like a shell).
The thing I do not understand is why would anyone *want* new search / format features to come from Napster. We should want cool AI based search programs and flexible music category systems, but we should want them to be independent of any specific music distribution channel. Napster and Mp3.com are about the 2nd to last groups of of people I'd want to help me figure out what I want (the RIAA, Sony, etc. being the last people). First, we have no reason to trust Napster's opinion. Second, a company will not really experement with diffrent methods like haphazard development of independent internet music locating services/programs will.
Now, once we forget about Napster and start tallking about AIs and music categories there is a lot of interesting stuff. I wrote a little Perl/GTK front end to mpg123 a few years ago which tries to learn your moods from your past lissening habits (SmartPlay). We could create a forum (web page) where independent musicians could claim to be simillar to famous artists, provide mp3s of their music, and lisseners would vote on the simillarity.
Anywho, there are lots of interesting things which we can do to make it easy to find new music, but Napster is not the company to do these things.
Criminals rights need not be central to the discussion. Searchable DNA database are just plain stupid no matter how you look at it for simple statistical reasons. I will explain:
Case 1: I'm a cop and I have a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the suspect and a DNA sample from the crime sceane. It is unlikely that I will get a false positive, but far from impossible.
Case 2: I'm a cop without a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the crime sceane and do a database search based on the sample. It is now about a million time more likely that I get a false positive. If I do this for 1000 case per year it is now 1 billion times more likely that I get a false positive sometime during the year. Ultimatly, I end up convicting a lot of innocent people based on bullshit.
There are two solution to this problem: (1) do not build finger print, DNA, etc. databases or (2) do not allow ANY evidence used as part of a search to enter into conviction, i.e. If a DNA search is used to identify suspects then DNA may not be used in court period.
Anyway, the U.S. already has a erious problem with false convictions based on DNA evidence from databases. There really needs to be some kind of reform of the policy allowing DNA evidence to be used both for locating suspects and for convictions.
I would buy a cell phone which supported PGP Fone. I would definitly buy a cell phone which allowed me to port PGP Fone to it (in pure software).
Actually, cell phones make perfectly logical secure login devices, i.e. a device which contains a PGP private key and authenticates it's self by signing data with that key. I would only need one password (the password for my phones PGP private key file) and I would ONLY type this password into my phone, which would then tell my system that it's really me who wants to login. No hacker could get my password because the system dose not know my password, it only knows a public key to authenticate me. Hey, you could feed all you email through your cell phone too (for PGP encryption) while your at it. I suppose you need some new way for the computer and phone to talk to one another (like infared). Anywho, the importent bit is that only you and your cell phone ever know your password and only your cell phone knows your public keys.
I'm not really shure, but I think that they would just fuck themselves over by recharging you when you reversed the charges. Specifically, the credit card company will just keep charging _them_ $20 per charge back which will fuck them over really quickly if they keep recharging you and you keep getting charge backs. Plus, they may loose their merchant account.
Yes, this service will most likely suck, but it could still be a very good thing for encrypted email. Specifically, if this service uses PGP and PGP Key Servers for the mail security (and SSL for the DL security) then it will give people a way to get started using encrypted email without really needing the overhead of setting up PGP. This could make it very easy for the rest of us to send and receve encrypted email. I know nothing passing through this service would really be secure (since Yahoo would have you public key), but it would get people started.. who might then switch to a real secure alternative.
Re:Online Voting vs. Online Shopping
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Online Voting?
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· Score: 2
You do not need to allow anyone to register to vote online. You could just give people a code when they register (in person) to vote online. They are responcible for not letting anyone get this code.. and canceling the code if someone gets it.
Actually, it would be smarter to just reassign social security numbers for this purpose.. and make it seriously illegal for anyone, but you and the social security administration, to know your social security number. Your employer would just make up a number for you, give you the number at the end of the year, and your tax return would tell the social security andministration to move the funds reserved for your by your employer to your account.
We do not want 100% of the population to vote. We want the people who lissen to what at least 4 significantly diffrent non-corperate special interest groups (like the EFF, NRA, GLAAD, CC, ACLU, ADL, etc.) and who read good news papers (like salon) to vote more, since these people will actually be influenced by the diffrent opinions they hear. We do not want people's opinions to be influenced by the stupid ads they see on TV. The internet has a real chance to make this happen.. not by preventing people from voting.. but by making it easy to research your choices, i.e. logon to the ACLU/RA/etc.'s web site and see what they think of the candidates. Thesee special interest groups may be very one sided, but they at least provide non-money influenced opinions. This could ultimatly shift power away from the rich corperate lobiests (and towards the poorer idealistic lobiests) which is a much needed change (witness DMCA, etc.).
The only real problem I see with online voting is that the polling place is not controlled, i.e. a parent could make their kid vote a specific way.
No, it is good for diffrent nations to have incompatable laws (not allowed to censor Nazis in the U.S., but required to censor Nazis in France) as this limits the multinationals and exposes people to diffrent laws and clutures. I'm saing that we do not want the internet to be governed seperatly from the countries.. we do not want the internet to be governed at all.. at least not in a traditional sence of the word, i.e. the powers to censor, tax, regulate, standardize, etc.
We want to internet to be governed by it's protocolls which we want to be developed by an academic style meritocrasy, i.e. that's cool lets write some programs which use that and see what happens. The internet needs no government.. only research and development.
It is unclear how the tipping system will really work with the anonymity of the internet, i.e. we do not know that small bands will get paid. I think there has been some research which showed that people tip waiters and waitresses to make themselves look good.. and not to get better future service. This means systems like fairtunes should try to make people who tip look good, i.e. publish your handle on a list of people who contribute to this artists AND give a message to the artist for you---the artist will tend to give your message a short read when it has money attached.
Actually, it might be possible to implement a tipping system based on email.. if you had one of those attach money to your emails things that people sometimes talk about.
Actually, If your interested in type system stuff you should really check out Haskell. Haskell is a lazy functional langauge (ML is strict), so things do not evaluate unless they are needed. This means no lisp/ML style cheating with side effects to do IO. Instead Haskell uses a type system construct called monads to allow for IO, variables, side effects, and OOP. Actually, monads are really the best resolution to the apperent conflict between object oriented and functional programming. the monads have evolved far enough to allow you to simulate an imperitive object oriented langauge within Haskell.
Anywho, Haskell's type system pretty much blows most langauge (including most functional langauges) out of thge water. The types for essentially every variable are derived from the contex where the variable is used, but there are still really nice systems for overloading / signatures / interfaces, type parameters, and type derivation.
It's possible that ML has caught up with Haskell's type features, but there are some interpreted varients of Haskell (maybe Gofer) which have crazy type parameterization by parameterizable type features (or something like that.. I forget). I think they have a type system for types (called kinds) to allow recursive type definitions or something insane like that.
Really, Haskell is one of the most fun langauges when you enjoy this sort of shit. I hear rummors you can use it for practical stuff too, but I wouldn't know anyhting about that.:)
Yes, there are people who will screw it all up, but there should be ways to compensate for these people. I don't really know how, but I'm not a user interface person.. and I think my vague ideas about how to compensate for these people will be made more clear by answering your other point below.
Yes, GNOME's source is available, but GNOME still tries to be a black box. The point is not *can* you script, but how *convienent* is it to script. A VCR with easy to replace ROMs and an assembly langauge compiler for a PC to create your own ROMs is not convienent since it requires you to learn a new way to control the VCR. Simillarly, a GUI with C++ bindings to write scripts is not convienent since I must learn a fundamentally diffrent way of interacting with my existing software. The real power of shell scripting under Unix is that you have been using the shell for years and everything works the same in a script as in interactive mode. My unserstanding is that Mac and maybe NeXT are the only operating systems to attempts a real "GUI scripting langauge" lke I'm describing.
Now, I should admit that I do not realy know how to do a GUI scripting langauge, but there are several ideas:
(1) force everything to use CORBA in predictable ways, so it's easy to pick out the useful core modules of another program and exploit them. This is probable the best solution, but unfortunatly people seem more interested in CORBA for providing stupid GUI widgets instead of structuring our programs to provid a nice library like interface to external programs.
(2) force everything to use a command line interface, but make your cut-n-paste so effecent that pull-down menus can be implemented via cut-n-paste. (Don't laugh. Plan9 tried this. It's one of the most bad ass things I've seen from a traditional shell users point of view)
I'm all for making things easy to learn. I am NOT in favor of making them just like Microsoft.
I totally agree that GNOME, KDE, Linux, and Posix based systems should try to avoid being like Microsoft (with the execption of COM / CORBA type stuff). Actually, I would say that user interface developers should say "Microsoft did it this way, that means it must be bad, unless there is real academic research backing this idea up." (real academic research means research not being preformed by the Microsoft did it all right morons who sometimes get tenure in CS departments.
Unfortunatly, I do not see how the complexity you describe relates to that (execpt the associate files of this type complaint). I do not think I'm the only one since all your other replies go to answering the library question without answering the associate file question or the larger question of copying Microsoft. This means you really need to express yurself more clearly.
Anyway, I agree with you, that there are many stupid things which GNOME (and KDE) get from Microsoft. They shuld really try to emulate a good user interface like Plan9.
The thing that most user interface people do not seem to understand is that the power of a computer really comes from the fact that a universal turing machine can simulate another universal turing machine. Ok, well that explained nothing, so let me be more specific:
Microsoft dose not (and dose not want to) sell powerful and flexable computers/interfaces. They want to take advantage of the fact that computer hardware manufacturors sell a universal turing machine to allow themselves to sell black inflexible easy to use boxes (like wordprocessors, web servers, web browsers, spreadshets, etc.).
This is just like a TV company saing You can buy a computer with a large monitor cheeper then our TVs, so I'll sell you a computer with a large monitor and software to make it act like a TV to save money.
Anywho, the moral of the story is that black boxes and uneccisarily specilized systems are bad. The power of a computer comes from the fact that it is not an unnecissarily specilized system.. and a powerful user interface must inherently be a programming langauge. Now, it may be an easy to use and learn programming langauge (like that scripting langauge Macs had), it may even be possible for a really stupid person to use a computer for years without noticing it's additional abilityies, but it must have the full power of a turing machine.
Note: I'm not talking about having a scripting langauge allongside the user interface. i'm talking about the very underling user interface being a scripting langauge. This is necissariy to make the transition for people from user to programmer as painless as possible.
Anyway, it's only when everyone has some limited programming instincts that people will not waist time doing the same thing over and over agian. This should be the goal of user interfaces and Unix got a nice start on this goal (via schell scriting), but it's necissary to expand this today to include GUI user interfaces too.
The only real tricky part is to leagalize the harder drugs like LSD and Cocain. We need some sort of system which monitors their use, i.e. your allowed to take PCP, but you must be under the care of a person who is trained and licensed to keep you from killing someone.
I suppose you might go so far as to require a liscence to smoke crack. Your liscence would limit the amount of crak you could obtain legally, force you to seek treatment, and require treatment providers to calculate how much you had really been smoking from blood measurments (i.e. catch you for smoking the stuff illegally).
I don't really like the privacy implicationf for this proposal, but it's notmuch worse then prescription drugs now. This system is more invacive since the dealers of recreational drugs are not doctors. Anywho, the ultimate goal should be a constitutioanal ammendment which say "the government may not outlaw a drug, only regulate it's usage."
The POBs and PHBs of the world will not understand this since the think the web is the internet, but having a brower is irrelevent.
We need a PDA / phone / walkman / etc. where all the phone / walkman/etc. features are *software*, i.e. it's got a sound card, speakers, microphone, and a cell network IO antenna, but the phone lives in the software. Why is this so importent? There is no way that the PDA / cell phone development groups can imagine the possible uses of their devices. The only way to really push the devices is to allow open source style adjusting of the software. Plus, people would add good encryption to the phone's.
The cell phone / walkman / PDA merger is pretty natural, but I agre that many people will want to have a camera with features that the PDA people would not include. I think the intelegent way to do this would be to keep the quality camera as an external device and build a scanner into the phone / walkman / PDA.
This will all change when people really start using wearables, but there will not be a diffrence betwen "good camera," "small camera," and "camera which can scan text by looking at it" by the time wearables really get going.
Struck me as ironic. I'll bet half the slashdot crowd is cheering along shouting "Hell Yeah!", and if you look at the whole Napster mess, there is a strange similarity. Can't have it both ways.
Yes, you can have it both ways: You can say anoyone can copy you IP, execpt law enforcment officials need a warrent to "use an invasive procedure like walking into your house or tapping your line. That sounds pretty good to me. It's not about what information law enforcment has, it's about how they get it. It would also be illegal to hack your friends system to read his email, but once your friend gave you a copy of a product he was working on then you could publish that product with being sued.
"Unreasonable searches" refers to the act of obtaning the information. IP laws only refer to the possion of the information.
BTW> I'm pretty shure you can not sue the gov. for possion of copyrighted material that they are usng to investigate a crim, no matter how they obtain the information.
Digression continued.. I'm under the opinion that taxes and Law enforcment should be the domain of the states. The federal government should be allowed to beat up the states when they don't give it money or when they break (or fail to enforce) federal laws, but the federal government should not reall have armed people running arround and should not directly collect money from people. It would be a nice expansion of seperation of powers which would be very effective at preventing law enforcment or tax agencies from having too much power. Specifically, congress would not want to give the states more power, so congress would be less likely to pass laws helping law enforcment or tax agencies in unreasonable ways. I know the states are pretty corupt, but vertical speration of powers has a streangth that horizontal lacks.
I think the EU will probable evolve into a good model of a large scale government. There is no way that the Europeans will allow the EU to tax them directly.
certainly [the FBI] intentions are not to destroy or harm.
Wrong! The have definitly had intentions to harm people like Martin Luther King when they collected information on him to try and ruin his credibility.
why is the internet so incredibly different?
They do not need to do it at the ISP. They can monitor a criminal's data transmissions with an ordinary wiretap request, i.e. tap his phone line to capter modem or DSL. Now, you'd need a way to tap cable modems, but that's not a big deal. I think most people who do not use cable or phone lines for internet do not use an ISP, so Carnivore would not catch them anyway. The point is to force them to wiretap down stream where they can get only the suspects traffic.
The only time they should really wiretap at the network level is when they think an entire ISP is dedicated to doing something illegal, like proving an ISPc is a money laundering job and not a real ISP by showing that it has no customers.
Actually, Carnivore may not be a bad thing for privacy in the long run. i think it's a safe bet that someone will crack it and use it for industrial espionage. This will for everyone to encrypt their email. Plus, once someone has exploited one FBI wiretap system then people will be very careful about allowing another one.
Yes, we need PGP built into all email applications, but there are some intermidiate steps which would allow for secure email to windows based systems with email applications which do not support PGP. Specifically, you cna email a Java program which connects back to your system to establish a secure connection and forces the recipiant of yourm ail to jump through some crazy questions to prove that they are who they say they are. This would not be any more secure then the authentication that our banks use to deal with us over the phone, but it would be helpful. Mose importently, it would put the burden of work on the recipiant who dose not publish a PGP key.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not just selection of media from the store which is a problem with CDs. It's selection of media for lissening. I wrote a little program called Smartplay which "tries" to do two things: (1) learn your moods to more effectivly chose songs to play for you and (2) minimize the ammount of time you spend chosing the music you want to lissen to (ala no long periods chosing playlists and no distractions from crappy songs comming up under random play).
It's buggy as hell, but it proves my point that a software mp3 player on a computer can be MUCH better then CD players and current hardware mp3 player.
Yes, I've known that their were the beginning's of this under the Mac. Plan9 has an interesting solution to this too: You push a menu button by cutting and pasting a command to your shell (the cut and paste is very efficent.. one mouse click). This makes the system more transparent and allows users to see what they are doing all the time.. instead of just when they open AppleScript. It also allows for things like a history and editing previous commands.
I would really love to see a scripting langauge based toolkit (like say Tcl/Tk) which forced the Plan9 style cut and paste based menus. It would make GUI applications much more transparent and functional to serious users.
Actually, I would really like to recommend that people who do not want to get harassed treat these things as school projects (option 1). There is a viberant cryptography and computer science literature which can provide a strong ligitimizing influence on your work.
Now, it's not enough to just call it a school project. You need to be really doing something original and worth publishing, but you can do quite a bit legally when your intentions are academic. We had a good speaker from Lucent give a talk on this exact problem recently (at Rutgers). this is what he told us paraphrased:
I'm going to tell you three stories about three diffrent people working in cryptography, but first I'm going to tell you the endings to the three stories and let you take a guess as to which stories have which endings. Two of these folling people went to jall and one recieved academic laurals.
The first guy reverse engenered top secret government encrpytion chip and was told not to publish the results by his boss (and maybe NSA), but published the results in the New York times anyway. The second guy wrote a program to help him watch DVDs on his computer under Linux instead of Windows. The third found a major flaw in bank security for financial transactions and reported this to the company handling the financial transactins.
Well the first guy (our speaker) recieved great academic awards, the second guy (Jon Johanson) spent a night in jail, and the thrid guy went to jail too (I donno how long). Actually, the third guys story is really intersting. Apperently the banking company said "no we do not believe that any money could be stolen with this exploit, could you prove it to us by making a transfer." the guy made a ransfer and they said "Oh you've stolen some money so we are going to throw you in jail." The implication being that they were tring to shut him up, so they tricked him into doing somthing illegal.
Anywho, the moral of the story is that you can get away with these things if you have a PhD and work for a security company. I would say that people who are not any whare near getting a PhD in crypto, but want to publish subversive stuff should take their message to the academics. Specifically, you should get a respected academic as a coauthor for a paper and get your paper published in a resprected jurnal.
That is, programmers are now trying to make things easy on the user, instead of easy to use productively.
Yes, this is the core of the problem. Actually, I would like to see an argument for this based on the Church-Turing thesis, i.e. it's really stupid to use a program which is not a programming langauge since you loose the full power of the computer.
I'd say the ideal user interface is a partially graphical scripting langauge where it is easy for a beginner to do basic things (like typing shell commands), but the langauge pushes the user to notice that they can combine/script commands to make more powerful commands, i.e. a GUI which gently pushes every user into knowing how to program.
Your argument is full of shit too. It's almost as stupid to say "we can make out GUIs as dumb as we want since people can always learn the command line" as it is to say "we can make our GUIs as stupid as we want since people can always learn assembler/C and write their own programms."
The problem is that the stupid GUI dose not (a) help develop a users intuition about they way the system works and (b) dose not interact well with scripting and user programming. These two flaws will effectivly reduce the number of power users and limit their knowledge/power.
The goal of user interface design should be to make it efficent for a person to move from a basic user to a power user, i.e. the GUI should be intermixed with it's scripting langauge, so that Joe adverage user starts scripting without knowing that they are doing it (kinda like a shell).
The thing I do not understand is why would anyone *want* new search / format features to come from Napster. We should want cool AI based search programs and flexible music category systems, but we should want them to be independent of any specific music distribution channel. Napster and Mp3.com are about the 2nd to last groups of of people I'd want to help me figure out what I want (the RIAA, Sony, etc. being the last people). First, we have no reason to trust Napster's opinion. Second, a company will not really experement with diffrent methods like haphazard development of independent internet music locating services/programs will.
Now, once we forget about Napster and start tallking about AIs and music categories there is a lot of interesting stuff. I wrote a little Perl/GTK front end to mpg123 a few years ago which tries to learn your moods from your past lissening habits (SmartPlay). We could create a forum (web page) where independent musicians could claim to be simillar to famous artists, provide mp3s of their music, and lisseners would vote on the simillarity.
Anywho, there are lots of interesting things which we can do to make it easy to find new music, but Napster is not the company to do these things.
Criminals rights need not be central to the discussion. Searchable DNA database are just plain stupid no matter how you look at it for simple statistical reasons. I will explain:
Case 1: I'm a cop and I have a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the suspect and a DNA sample from the crime sceane. It is unlikely that I will get a false positive, but far from impossible.
Case 2: I'm a cop without a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the crime sceane and do a database search based on the sample. It is now about a million time more likely that I get a false positive. If I do this for 1000 case per year it is now 1 billion times more likely that I get a false positive sometime during the year. Ultimatly, I end up convicting a lot of innocent people based on bullshit.
There are two solution to this problem: (1) do not build finger print, DNA, etc. databases or (2) do not allow ANY evidence used as part of a search to enter into conviction, i.e. If a DNA search is used to identify suspects then DNA may not be used in court period.
Anyway, the U.S. already has a erious problem with false convictions based on DNA evidence from databases. There really needs to be some kind of reform of the policy allowing DNA evidence to be used both for locating suspects and for convictions.
I would buy a cell phone which supported PGP Fone. I would definitly buy a cell phone which allowed me to port PGP Fone to it (in pure software).
Actually, cell phones make perfectly logical secure login devices, i.e. a device which contains a PGP private key and authenticates it's self by signing data with that key. I would only need one password (the password for my phones PGP private key file) and I would ONLY type this password into my phone, which would then tell my system that it's really me who wants to login. No hacker could get my password because the system dose not know my password, it only knows a public key to authenticate me. Hey, you could feed all you email through your cell phone too (for PGP encryption) while your at it. I suppose you need some new way for the computer and phone to talk to one another (like infared). Anywho, the importent bit is that only you and your cell phone ever know your password and only your cell phone knows your public keys.
I'm not really shure, but I think that they would just fuck themselves over by recharging you when you reversed the charges. Specifically, the credit card company will just keep charging _them_ $20 per charge back which will fuck them over really quickly if they keep recharging you and you keep getting charge backs. Plus, they may loose their merchant account.
Yes, this service will most likely suck, but it could still be a very good thing for encrypted email. Specifically, if this service uses PGP and PGP Key Servers for the mail security (and SSL for the DL security) then it will give people a way to get started using encrypted email without really needing the overhead of setting up PGP. This could make it very easy for the rest of us to send and receve encrypted email. I know nothing passing through this service would really be secure (since Yahoo would have you public key), but it would get people started.. who might then switch to a real secure alternative.
You do not need to allow anyone to register to vote online. You could just give people a code when they register (in person) to vote online. They are responcible for not letting anyone get this code.. and canceling the code if someone gets it.
Actually, it would be smarter to just reassign social security numbers for this purpose.. and make it seriously illegal for anyone, but you and the social security administration, to know your social security number. Your employer would just make up a number for you, give you the number at the end of the year, and your tax return would tell the social security andministration to move the funds reserved for your by your employer to your account.
We do not want 100% of the population to vote. We want the people who lissen to what at least 4 significantly diffrent non-corperate special interest groups (like the EFF, NRA, GLAAD, CC, ACLU, ADL, etc.) and who read good news papers (like salon) to vote more, since these people will actually be influenced by the diffrent opinions they hear. We do not want people's opinions to be influenced by the stupid ads they see on TV. The internet has a real chance to make this happen.. not by preventing people from voting.. but by making it easy to research your choices, i.e. logon to the ACLU/RA/etc.'s web site and see what they think of the candidates. Thesee special interest groups may be very one sided, but they at least provide non-money influenced opinions. This could ultimatly shift power away from the rich corperate lobiests (and towards the poorer idealistic lobiests) which is a much needed change (witness DMCA, etc.).
The only real problem I see with online voting is that the polling place is not controlled, i.e. a parent could make their kid vote a specific way.
No, it is good for diffrent nations to have incompatable laws (not allowed to censor Nazis in the U.S., but required to censor Nazis in France) as this limits the multinationals and exposes people to diffrent laws and clutures. I'm saing that we do not want the internet to be governed seperatly from the countries.. we do not want the internet to be governed at all.. at least not in a traditional sence of the word, i.e. the powers to censor, tax, regulate, standardize, etc.
We want to internet to be governed by it's protocolls which we want to be developed by an academic style meritocrasy, i.e. that's cool lets write some programs which use that and see what happens. The internet needs no government.. only research and development.
It is unclear how the tipping system will really work with the anonymity of the internet, i.e. we do not know that small bands will get paid. I think there has been some research which showed that people tip waiters and waitresses to make themselves look good.. and not to get better future service. This means systems like fairtunes should try to make people who tip look good, i.e. publish your handle on a list of people who contribute to this artists AND give a message to the artist for you---the artist will tend to give your message a short read when it has money attached.
Actually, it might be possible to implement a tipping system based on email.. if you had one of those attach money to your emails things that people sometimes talk about.
Actually, If your interested in type system stuff you should really check out Haskell. Haskell is a lazy functional langauge (ML is strict), so things do not evaluate unless they are needed. This means no lisp/ML style cheating with side effects to do IO. Instead Haskell uses a type system construct called monads to allow for IO, variables, side effects, and OOP. Actually, monads are really the best resolution to the apperent conflict between object oriented and functional programming. the monads have evolved far enough to allow you to simulate an imperitive object oriented langauge within Haskell.
:)
Anywho, Haskell's type system pretty much blows most langauge (including most functional langauges) out of thge water. The types for essentially every variable are derived from the contex where the variable is used, but there are still really nice systems for overloading / signatures / interfaces, type parameters, and type derivation.
It's possible that ML has caught up with Haskell's type features, but there are some interpreted varients of Haskell (maybe Gofer) which have crazy type parameterization by parameterizable type features (or something like that.. I forget). I think they have a type system for types (called kinds) to allow recursive type definitions or something insane like that.
Really, Haskell is one of the most fun langauges when you enjoy this sort of shit. I hear rummors you can use it for practical stuff too, but I wouldn't know anyhting about that.
Yes, there are people who will screw it all up, but there should be ways to compensate for these people. I don't really know how, but I'm not a user interface person.. and I think my vague ideas about how to compensate for these people will be made more clear by answering your other point below.
Yes, GNOME's source is available, but GNOME still tries to be a black box. The point is not *can* you script, but how *convienent* is it to script. A VCR with easy to replace ROMs and an assembly langauge compiler for a PC to create your own ROMs is not convienent since it requires you to learn a new way to control the VCR. Simillarly, a GUI with C++ bindings to write scripts is not convienent since I must learn a fundamentally diffrent way of interacting with my existing software. The real power of shell scripting under Unix is that you have been using the shell for years and everything works the same in a script as in interactive mode. My unserstanding is that Mac and maybe NeXT are the only operating systems to attempts a real "GUI scripting langauge" lke I'm describing.
Now, I should admit that I do not realy know how to do a GUI scripting langauge, but there are several ideas:
(1) force everything to use CORBA in predictable ways, so it's easy to pick out the useful core modules of another program and exploit them. This is probable the best solution, but unfortunatly people seem more interested in CORBA for providing stupid GUI widgets instead of structuring our programs to provid a nice library like interface to external programs.
(2) force everything to use a command line interface, but make your cut-n-paste so effecent that pull-down menus can be implemented via cut-n-paste. (Don't laugh. Plan9 tried this. It's one of the most bad ass things I've seen from a traditional shell users point of view)
I'm all for making things easy to learn. I am NOT in favor of making them just like Microsoft.
I totally agree that GNOME, KDE, Linux, and Posix based systems should try to avoid being like Microsoft (with the execption of COM / CORBA type stuff). Actually, I would say that user interface developers should say "Microsoft did it this way, that means it must be bad, unless there is real academic research backing this idea up." (real academic research means research not being preformed by the Microsoft did it all right morons who sometimes get tenure in CS departments.
Unfortunatly, I do not see how the complexity you describe relates to that (execpt the associate files of this type complaint). I do not think I'm the only one since all your other replies go to answering the library question without answering the associate file question or the larger question of copying Microsoft. This means you really need to express yurself more clearly.
Anyway, I agree with you, that there are many stupid things which GNOME (and KDE) get from Microsoft. They shuld really try to emulate a good user interface like Plan9.
The thing that most user interface people do not seem to understand is that the power of a computer really comes from the fact that a universal turing machine can simulate another universal turing machine. Ok, well that explained nothing, so let me be more specific:
Microsoft dose not (and dose not want to) sell powerful and flexable computers/interfaces. They want to take advantage of the fact that computer hardware manufacturors sell a universal turing machine to allow themselves to sell black inflexible easy to use boxes (like wordprocessors, web servers, web browsers, spreadshets, etc.).
This is just like a TV company saing You can buy a computer with a large monitor cheeper then our TVs, so I'll sell you a computer with a large monitor and software to make it act like a TV to save money.
Anywho, the moral of the story is that black boxes and uneccisarily specilized systems are bad. The power of a computer comes from the fact that it is not an unnecissarily specilized system.. and a powerful user interface must inherently be a programming langauge. Now, it may be an easy to use and learn programming langauge (like that scripting langauge Macs had), it may even be possible for a really stupid person to use a computer for years without noticing it's additional abilityies, but it must have the full power of a turing machine.
Note: I'm not talking about having a scripting langauge allongside the user interface. i'm talking about the very underling user interface being a scripting langauge. This is necissariy to make the transition for people from user to programmer as painless as possible.
Anyway, it's only when everyone has some limited programming instincts that people will not waist time doing the same thing over and over agian. This should be the goal of user interfaces and Unix got a nice start on this goal (via schell scriting), but it's necissary to expand this today to include GUI user interfaces too.
The only real tricky part is to leagalize the harder drugs like LSD and Cocain. We need some sort of system which monitors their use, i.e. your allowed to take PCP, but you must be under the care of a person who is trained and licensed to keep you from killing someone.
I suppose you might go so far as to require a liscence to smoke crack. Your liscence would limit the amount of crak you could obtain legally, force you to seek treatment, and require treatment providers to calculate how much you had really been smoking from blood measurments (i.e. catch you for smoking the stuff illegally).
I don't really like the privacy implicationf for this proposal, but it's notmuch worse then prescription drugs now. This system is more invacive since the dealers of recreational drugs are not doctors. Anywho, the ultimate goal should be a constitutioanal ammendment which say "the government may not outlaw a drug, only regulate it's usage."
The POBs and PHBs of the world will not understand this since the think the web is the internet, but having a brower is irrelevent.
/etc. features are *software*, i.e. it's got a sound card, speakers, microphone, and a cell network IO antenna, but the phone lives in the software. Why is this so importent? There is no way that the PDA / cell phone development groups can imagine the possible uses of their devices. The only way to really push the devices is to allow open source style adjusting of the software. Plus, people would add good encryption to the phone's.
We need a PDA / phone / walkman / etc. where all the phone / walkman
The cell phone / walkman / PDA merger is pretty natural, but I agre that many people will want to have a camera with features that the PDA people would not include. I think the intelegent way to do this would be to keep the quality camera as an external device and build a scanner into the phone / walkman / PDA.
This will all change when people really start using wearables, but there will not be a diffrence betwen "good camera," "small camera," and "camera which can scan text by looking at it" by the time wearables really get going.
Struck me as ironic. I'll bet half the slashdot crowd is cheering along shouting "Hell Yeah!", and if you look at the whole Napster mess, there is a strange similarity. Can't have it both ways.
Yes, you can have it both ways: You can say anoyone can copy you IP, execpt law enforcment officials need a warrent to "use an invasive procedure like walking into your house or tapping your line. That sounds pretty good to me. It's not about what information law enforcment has, it's about how they get it. It would also be illegal to hack your friends system to read his email, but once your friend gave you a copy of a product he was working on then you could publish that product with being sued.
"Unreasonable searches" refers to the act of obtaning the information. IP laws only refer to the possion of the information.
BTW> I'm pretty shure you can not sue the gov. for possion of copyrighted material that they are usng to investigate a crim, no matter how they obtain the information.
Digression continued.. I'm under the opinion that taxes and Law enforcment should be the domain of the states. The federal government should be allowed to beat up the states when they don't give it money or when they break (or fail to enforce) federal laws, but the federal government should not reall have armed people running arround and should not directly collect money from people. It would be a nice expansion of seperation of powers which would be very effective at preventing law enforcment or tax agencies from having too much power. Specifically, congress would not want to give the states more power, so congress would be less likely to pass laws helping law enforcment or tax agencies in unreasonable ways. I know the states are pretty corupt, but vertical speration of powers has a streangth that horizontal lacks.
I think the EU will probable evolve into a good model of a large scale government. There is no way that the Europeans will allow the EU to tax them directly.
certainly [the FBI] intentions are not to destroy or harm.
Wrong! The have definitly had intentions to harm people like Martin Luther King when they collected information on him to try and ruin his credibility.
why is the internet so incredibly different?
They do not need to do it at the ISP. They can monitor a criminal's data transmissions with an ordinary wiretap request, i.e. tap his phone line to capter modem or DSL. Now, you'd need a way to tap cable modems, but that's not a big deal. I think most people who do not use cable or phone lines for internet do not use an ISP, so Carnivore would not catch them anyway. The point is to force them to wiretap down stream where they can get only the suspects traffic.
The only time they should really wiretap at the network level is when they think an entire ISP is dedicated to doing something illegal, like proving an ISPc is a money laundering job and not a real ISP by showing that it has no customers.
Actually, Carnivore may not be a bad thing for privacy in the long run. i think it's a safe bet that someone will crack it and use it for industrial espionage. This will for everyone to encrypt their email. Plus, once someone has exploited one FBI wiretap system then people will be very careful about allowing another one.
Yes, we need PGP built into all email applications, but there are some intermidiate steps which would allow for secure email to windows based systems with email applications which do not support PGP. Specifically, you cna email a Java program which connects back to your system to establish a secure connection and forces the recipiant of yourm ail to jump through some crazy questions to prove that they are who they say they are. This would not be any more secure then the authentication that our banks use to deal with us over the phone, but it would be helpful. Mose importently, it would put the burden of work on the recipiant who dose not publish a PGP key.