You're right to be cynical, unfortunately you're being cynical about the wrong side in this debate. The truth is that Monsanto wanted to put in a "terminator" gene to control the spread of GMOs, but the luddite/green left screamed bloody murder. They claimed that Monsanto was using this as a cynical ploy to make third-world farmers dependent on GMOs, and then starve them to death unless they paid Monsanto. Fortunately they seem to be finally coming around to the realization that a Terminator gene is actually a good idea as a result of stories like this one.
Not to accuse you of anything personally, I'm sure you mean well, but downloading and automatically executing commands on files from random people on slashdot is not such a hot idea. All someone would have to do in this instance is to put `echo + + >/etc/hosts.equiv` or `echo [key data] >/etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts` into the blacklisted_nets file and your system is 0wned.
1. Build tidal power plants, sapping angular momentum from the earth. 2. Days lengthen. 3. Everyone has to work 15 hour shifts (8 in France) 4. ??? 5. Profit!
The problem is that a clever person can easily disguise the fact that they're using VoIP. If it is enough of a problem that the POTS is collapsing, there must be a big financial incentive for panamanians to use VoIP. Enough to develop and use circumvention measures, probably.
Tools like stunnel are readily available over the net. If crypto is illegal down there, it would be pretty easy to make a steganographic wrapper that would make the connection appear to a casual observer to be an ftp session, say. More sophisticated methods could be used to make it hard to detect the fact that there is a connection at all.
The only real solution thus is to drop LD prices and/or raise internet access prices. Or to sharply limit uploading speed/latency to a level where VoIP would be unacceptably bad.
I just heard a report of a strange bug in the new robot: for some reason if it detects a non-HP ink cartridge in the printer, it pulls it out and stomps on it. A patch for this problem is expected in Q3 2009.
Maybe that's not really as far fetched as it sounds at first. After all, programming languages and legal jargon are both syntaxes for encoding a mechanical decision procedure in a human readable form. Programming languages determine the behavior of the computer, and lawyerese determines the outcome of a {contract,criminal,civil} dispute.
Read a legal statute some time; often they look frighteningly like some kind of switch-case statement written in the World's Most Obtuse Programming Language.
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You're right to be cynical, unfortunately you're being cynical about the wrong side in this debate. The truth is that Monsanto wanted to put in a "terminator" gene to control the spread of GMOs, but the luddite/green left screamed bloody murder. They claimed that Monsanto was using this as a cynical ploy to make third-world farmers dependent on GMOs, and then starve them to death unless they paid Monsanto. Fortunately they seem to be finally coming around to the realization that a Terminator gene is actually a good idea as a result of stories like this one.
Not to accuse you of anything personally, I'm sure you mean well, but downloading and automatically executing commands on files from random people on slashdot is not such a hot idea. All someone would have to do in this instance is to put `echo + + > /etc/hosts.equiv` or `echo [key data] > /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts` into the blacklisted_nets file and your system is 0wned.
1. Build tidal power plants, sapping angular momentum from the earth.
2. Days lengthen.
3. Everyone has to work 15 hour shifts (8 in France)
4. ???
5. Profit!
Tools like stunnel are readily available over the net. If crypto is illegal down there, it would be pretty easy to make a steganographic wrapper that would make the connection appear to a casual observer to be an ftp session, say. More sophisticated methods could be used to make it hard to detect the fact that there is a connection at all.
The only real solution thus is to drop LD prices and/or raise internet access prices. Or to sharply limit uploading speed/latency to a level where VoIP would be unacceptably bad.
I just heard a report of a strange bug in the new robot: for some reason if it detects a non-HP ink cartridge in the printer, it pulls it out and stomps on it. A patch for this problem is expected in Q3 2009.
Maybe that's not really as far fetched as it sounds at first. After all, programming languages and legal jargon are both syntaxes for encoding a mechanical decision procedure in a human readable form. Programming languages determine the behavior of the computer, and lawyerese determines the outcome of a {contract,criminal,civil} dispute.
Read a legal statute some time; often they look frighteningly like some kind of switch-case statement written in the World's Most Obtuse Programming Language.