> IANACL, but one fundamental aspect of contracts is that all involved parties give their consent. A machine is
incapable of giving consent.
True -- I was speaking figuratively, in the sense of whether or not the contract was for "one billable unit per IP address", or "one billable unit per networked device, whether behind a firewall/router or not".
That the/.er and most users view bandwidth - even metered bandwidth - as the commodity being sold, and the marketroid views "services to devices" as the commodity being sold.
The situation is very reminiscent of the geek-vs-telco (packet-switched vs. circuit) views of the world. A geek will look at a piece of fiber and describe it in terms of how much data can be shoved through it. A telco executive will describe it in terms of the number of phone conversations it can carry.
> What the cable co.s acctually do is to say "Hey! Come buy our services, you'll get x kbps line speed for
only $y" But when someone acctually uses x kbps they go "Oh, you can't really use x kbps, that's just a
marketing lie".
Marketroid: "Not a lie at all! Of course they can use x kbps! It's not our fault that users never ask how many 's' the 'k' apply to!"
> What right do they have to charge for my toaster? Do they have a
contract with *me*, or with *my device*?
Depends on who you ask.
If you ask a/.er, they have a contract with you.
If you ask a pigfscking marketroid who believes (in the words of the article), that "[a] crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear", then no, they have a contract with your devices.
...or rather, that "If we can find a way to charge you $4.95/month for your TiVO and another $4.95 for your toaster, we will."
Personally, I have no problem with saying "thou shalt not 802.11 thy neighbors onto thy cablemodem" -- cablemodem subscriptions really aren't priced with a full pipe in mind. If you need a full pipe 24/7, buy a T1 or T3.
But the solution to that problem is monitoring of bandwidth and peak usage. (And yes, the article even acknowledges this -- "until then [when we have the brave new world of us charging for your toaster], all indicators point to DOCSIS 1.1, which includes methods to monitor bandwidth consumption [...] and speed [...]".
Meantime, if CAT asks my firewall "Pardon, NAT, but what's that behind you?", I'll tell my firewall to tell the CAT to go stick itself in a sealed box with a poison bottle and a hammer hooked up to an intrusion detection system, and as far as they're concerned, my network can remain in a superposition of states until observed.
(Of course, that's redundant. Any BOFH knows that every computer network remains in a superposition of states between "up" and "down" until they actually try to accomplish something on one.;-)
> How is this definition any less arbitrary than the one I gave? In a sense it is more arbitrary because in addition to
defining what human life is, one needs to define the criteria of sentience.
I agree. The point I was making is that I didn't claim that human life was (factually) defined by sentience, merely that it was my opinion that sentience ought to be the defining criterion.
What this comes down to is a debate between two rational people about what constitutes humanity. For me, sentients deserve protection. For you, any collection of cells with the potential to grow into a fully-developed (whether sentient or not) human body, deserves protection.
If anyone comes up with an objective way to figure out which of us is "right", I'll be delighted -- but I won't be holding my breath, and neither should you. Indeed, I suspect we'd both agree that no such proof exists, or can exist.
Going one step further -- I'll take the absence of such a proof as an argument for "since it's all goofy metaphysics, let's protect nothing by keeping the Congresscritters away from it, and letting the scientists who actually know something about it play with the tech", and you'll take it as "since we can't know who's right, let's be as conservative as possible and protect everything".
Alas, figuring out which of those options is "right" is the same problem as the one we started out with, just one level removed.
> I think you guys gotta stop being SO freakin paranoid.....you think the FBI and CIA has
time to worry about every freakin MP3 and illegal copy of Windows someone might have laying around...
"When I grow up, I wanna be an Attorney-General!"
- excerpt from diary, the Bastard Child of Bill Gates and Hilary Rosen
> You're moving towards a situation in which you all become instruments of your own
government. You will no longer be able to resist supporting the system. It is as if the state had taken your right to
remain silent away.
The right to remain silent does not imply an obligation to remain silent.
If you're under arrest, and you voluntarily choose to confess to your crime, then yes, what you said can and will be used against you in a court of law. That's what the Miranda warning is for - to tell you to STFU if you're under arrest, lest you unwittingly give up your Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
But again - even the Fifth is just a right, not an obligation. If you choose to speak in such a way that you violate the law, such as yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you choose to do so in the presence of law enforcement, you should expect to suffer the consequences.
But that's for in the courtroom. Magic Lantern takes place during the investigative phase, while the suspect is under surveillance. The Fifth doesn't apply.
If it did, would you argue that the act of walking into a bank with a gun and saying "hand over the money" might be self-incrimination for armed robbery, and that therefore the testimony of the eyewitnesses must be thrown out?
("Yes, Your Honor, Officer Dobbs was tailing suspect John Doe when Doe walked into the bank, carrying a weapon, and said "I robbed Last National yesterday, now it's your turn!". Because Doe allowed all present in the bank to see him and hear his confession, he incriminated himself, and as such we must strike the testimony of Officer Dobbs and all eyewitnesses from the record with regards to the charges against Doe for both the Last National and the Second-To-Last National robberies! We were going to use forensic evidence, but we couldn't use the fingerprints, because Doe also said 'I know I'm leaving fingerprints, and I don't care', implying that he knew he might be incriminating himself with those too. The Prosecution therefore calls upon Miss Cleo, clairvoyant psychic, as its sole witness...")
> The principle is called "designing for the common case". Sure, it can be useful to have active windows not on top when
you're copying text from one window to another, but what about when you're not?
I dunno, to me, this breaks the desktop metaphor.
What the hell kind of a desktop is it where you can't scribble notes on one sheet of paper, because some of that paper is "beneath" the thing you're copying from?
The MS default of "window must be on top to have focus" is like having a typewriter which won't allow you to type unless you're looking at the typing paper, not the notes you're trying to transcribe from.
As for "designing for the common case", if your office is anything like mine, everyone (except me!) uses all windows maximized to fullscreen in every application. So having activation-follows-mouse wouldn't hurt lusers anyways, but it would greatly help those of us with clue.
> I could see this being used to control artificial limbs rather then control computers. It would be neat to have a brain w/o a
body to give your computer "logic" and reason.
And think of the possibilities for case modding!
(Seriously - when my body wears out, I'd love to have my brain implanted in a robot. Rad-harden the thing, graft on some controls for an ion engine, throw some glucose-producing plants into a hollow dome, and fire me into space, baby! I'm gonna tour the Solar System even if it's the last thing I do!)
> An idea I've had is to brew up a batch of mead with the herbs as flavouring. It could then be distilled and another
batch of herbs steeped in it to make a tincture. This tincture could then be used to fortify a second batch of the mead.
One could then drink several glasses of the mead and go to sleep with the pillow at one's head. I can only imagine
the dreams which might be produced thereby.
Drink several glasses of mead before going to bed, and you won't even remember last night when you were awake, never mind your dreams:)
> Research like this and embryonic stem cell research in general raises a very simple ethical question, one so simple
that I think most people miss it: Does any of us have the right to use another human being to better ourselves?
Whether that human being is fully devloped or not doesn't really matter. The fact is that it is human life.
No sir, your opinion is that an embryonic cluster constitutes a human life. And your opinion is not universally shared.
If you define "human life" in terms of sentience, you come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter that harvesting body parts from live humans is a Bad Thing (harvesting from dead humans is fine, so long as the human dies "naturally" or as a result of an expressed wish to die so that its organs may be harvested).
Why? Because if you define humanity by sentience, you realize you're not doing a Bad Thing if you chop up the blastocyst early enough, or learn how to differentiate the cells by yourself so that you can grow, say, only the desired organ.
(Yes, I would deny "human" status to the unfortunate gobs of flesh born without brains, e.g. acephalitic fetuses whose mothers brought them to term, etc... and I might very well be persuaded to argue for rights for chimpanzees and gorillas, as they appear to exhibit sentience on the order of a 3-year-old homo sapiens, which puts them head-and-shoulders above our current crop of technophobic landsharks and Congresscritters, to say the least.)
If you're going to argue that a pancreas or liver is sentient, by all means, go ahead. But you'll have to arrest the Type-I diabetics for manslaughter (their immune systems destroyed their pancreas' insulin-producing cells during childhood), and alcoholics for reckless endangerment (that is, due to cirrhosis.)
I can see it all now - armies of fetus freaks turning their anger on a new evil, and fighting for Organ Rights Now. *sigh*
> If we start intentionally selecting out a certain set of genes as especially
desirable, what's to stop us from creating a hyper specialized race of savants that do great in math
and music, but don't have the ability to bind people together to a common goal?
Buggered if I know, but based on the track records of people who have the ability to "bind people together to a common goal", I'm a hell of a lot more worried about them than I am of mathematicians and musicians.
> I'd like to mention why IE is the superior porn browser.[... ]
Bah! Thumbnails! You wimps have it easy!
From a mailing list I frequent:
In *my* day, of course, we all have well-developed muscles in our right
arms *from* whacking off, and well-developed muscles in our *left* arms
from typing. ftp and xv are like that, of course. These days, well, just
about *anyone* can find (and whack off to) Internet Porn. What *is*
this world coming to? Fucking GUIs. Fucking Netscape.
...and you tell this to kids raised on GUIs and HTTP these days, and they don't believe you.
(Uphill! Both ways, I tell you!)
> I confess, I have selectivitus too. I have been selecting (highlighting) test as I read in web browesers for as long as I
remember. I thought I was the only person who did this. I think it helps me remember where I am in the page, despite
the negative color shifting. Band together, selectors!
Another selector speaks!
Me? I started when I realized I no longer needed to load images - 90% of the graphics were crap, or banners, or both.
So when some d00f decides to code his web page as all-white text on an all-white background, with a black.GIF as a background image, I just select the text, and voila, I can read.
Even now that I've Junkbustered-out all the banners, surfing without graphics and selecting the text still beats wasting time for 20 "spacer.gif" "upperleftroundedcorner.gif", "upperrightroundedcorner.gif" and similar files to get DNS lookups and download.
...and use a cron job to regenerate the blocks of random letters every couple of hours.
After enough bounced spam with apparent cryptographic content, the Chinese government will "fix" the relay for you. Or they'll "fix" the relay's administrator.
As a bonus, you can know that the more time the Chinese government's thugs spend chasing wild geese, liquidating incompetent sysadmins, and decrypting random noise, the less time they'll have to oppress their own people.
> If the Airbus A3x0 series can have a fly by wire autopilot that overrides the pilot and doesn't let him buzz the farm, why not light aircraft? Sure, it costs more, but in capital expenditure, which isn't the primary cost of flying.
Funny, wasn't that what got the Airbus pilot in trouble at the Paris Air Show? (That is, he would have done just fine if the damn autopilot hadn't overridden him while he was busy buzzing the farm;-)
That said, I'm in agreement with you -- I move for both stricter licensing and better flight aids. One does not preclude the other.
Personally, I can't see "everyone" flying for their commute, even with personal VTOL aircraft, simply by virtue of the parking problem -- when you have 1000 (or 10000!) people showing up at a large company's campus between 0830 and 0930, or the constant traffic volumes of a regional shopping mall, you have the same problems as you do with automobiles, except you have 'em in 3-D.
Which bums me out, because I still think it'd be damn cool and a hell of a lot of fun.
> Fix what we got first.... and figure out the social impact before going ahead with this one..
Og leave 'um meat on rock in summer. Kinda sux0rz in winter, but tribal leader tell Og to fix 'um what he got and figure out social impact before going ahead with fire stuff.
> So if you haven't given FBI-KEYLOGGING-BACKDOOR.EXE permission to access the internet, it won't be able to.
And what do you propose to do when untrusted KEYLOG~1.EXE calls trusted IEXPLORE.EXE or NETSCAPE.EXE and tells it to go to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=[harvested data]
I suppose you could log all traffic and burn it onto WORM media for future reference to find traffic you didn't authorize, but, uh, that probably isn't a viable option if you're worried about all your base are belonging to the Feebs.
> Extra bonus points if the entire operating system and software suite on the encryption machine lives on read
only media, such as a CD-Rom.
Remember Ken Thompson's hack! You only get the bonus points if you compiled the OS (and CD-ROM burning software) from source on a compiler you wrote yourself;-)
> Does this mean it will now be illegal to use a secure system? Having any type of security/virus protection will be
circumvention of law-enforcing software.
More to the point, what about the poor bastard who sees it showing up on his firewall and says "Hey, what the hell's this, and shuts it down?
Oh, I get it, the FBI's only smart enough to catch the stupid criminals.
"The ministry of communication is duty-bound to make the use of the Internet impossible."
- Some taliban government official, quoted in an article on wired.com, summer 2001
"The internet interprets censorship and routes around it, although occasionally it takes a little longer and involves a bit more busting of heads than John Gilmore of the EFF might originally have imagined."
- Some guy in Afghanistan, November 2001.
> Forget firemen -- what about accountants? Take your typical CPA firm. Not only do
they refer to their collegues as their "brothers" (or "sisters"), but I've heard a typical accountant will even let
his brother accountant borrow his pencil sharpener
Yo! Tha H-dog iz givin propz to tha bruthaz in tha Accountz Reeceevable depawtment, an' fuck y'all Accountz Payabo muthafuckas. Fuck ya! Y'all iz wack!
Slashdot Mirror
True -- I was speaking figuratively, in the sense of whether or not the contract was for "one billable unit per IP address", or "one billable unit per networked device, whether behind a firewall/router or not".
That the /.er and most users view bandwidth - even metered bandwidth - as the commodity being sold, and the marketroid views "services to devices" as the commodity being sold.
The situation is very reminiscent of the geek-vs-telco (packet-switched vs. circuit) views of the world. A geek will look at a piece of fiber and describe it in terms of how much data can be shoved through it. A telco executive will describe it in terms of the number of phone conversations it can carry.
(For a good illustration of that, read Neal Stephenson's essay, Mother Earth, Mother Board
Good point -- pay $5/month for a signal that, unless you have a $10000 TV, gets rendered onto an NTSC TV screen and still looks like ass.
I'll bet the marketing data (demographics/viewing times) from the more advanced cable boxes pays for a good portion of that $5/month.
Shit, I've done 2.5 gigs a month on dialup.
Can someone explain to me why I need broadband again? ;)
Marketroid: "Not a lie at all! Of course they can use x kbps! It's not our fault that users never ask how many 's' the 'k' apply to!"
Depends on who you ask.
If you ask a /.er, they have a contract with you.
If you ask a pigfscking marketroid who believes (in the words of the article), that "[a] crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear", then no, they have a contract with your devices.
Personally, I have no problem with saying "thou shalt not 802.11 thy neighbors onto thy cablemodem" -- cablemodem subscriptions really aren't priced with a full pipe in mind. If you need a full pipe 24/7, buy a T1 or T3.
But the solution to that problem is monitoring of bandwidth and peak usage. (And yes, the article even acknowledges this -- "until then [when we have the brave new world of us charging for your toaster], all indicators point to DOCSIS 1.1, which includes methods to monitor bandwidth consumption [...] and speed [...]".
Meantime, if CAT asks my firewall "Pardon, NAT, but what's that behind you?", I'll tell my firewall to tell the CAT to go stick itself in a sealed box with a poison bottle and a hammer hooked up to an intrusion detection system, and as far as they're concerned, my network can remain in a superposition of states until observed.
(Of course, that's redundant. Any BOFH knows that every computer network remains in a superposition of states between "up" and "down" until they actually try to accomplish something on one. ;-)
I agree. The point I was making is that I didn't claim that human life was (factually) defined by sentience, merely that it was my opinion that sentience ought to be the defining criterion.
What this comes down to is a debate between two rational people about what constitutes humanity. For me, sentients deserve protection. For you, any collection of cells with the potential to grow into a fully-developed (whether sentient or not) human body, deserves protection.
If anyone comes up with an objective way to figure out which of us is "right", I'll be delighted -- but I won't be holding my breath, and neither should you. Indeed, I suspect we'd both agree that no such proof exists, or can exist.
Going one step further -- I'll take the absence of such a proof as an argument for "since it's all goofy metaphysics, let's protect nothing by keeping the Congresscritters away from it, and letting the scientists who actually know something about it play with the tech", and you'll take it as "since we can't know who's right, let's be as conservative as possible and protect everything".
Alas, figuring out which of those options is "right" is the same problem as the one we started out with, just one level removed.
"When I grow up, I wanna be an Attorney-General!"
The right to remain silent does not imply an obligation to remain silent.
If you're under arrest, and you voluntarily choose to confess to your crime, then yes, what you said can and will be used against you in a court of law. That's what the Miranda warning is for - to tell you to STFU if you're under arrest, lest you unwittingly give up your Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
But again - even the Fifth is just a right, not an obligation. If you choose to speak in such a way that you violate the law, such as yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you choose to do so in the presence of law enforcement, you should expect to suffer the consequences.
But that's for in the courtroom. Magic Lantern takes place during the investigative phase, while the suspect is under surveillance. The Fifth doesn't apply.
If it did, would you argue that the act of walking into a bank with a gun and saying "hand over the money" might be self-incrimination for armed robbery, and that therefore the testimony of the eyewitnesses must be thrown out?
("Yes, Your Honor, Officer Dobbs was tailing suspect John Doe when Doe walked into the bank, carrying a weapon, and said "I robbed Last National yesterday, now it's your turn!". Because Doe allowed all present in the bank to see him and hear his confession, he incriminated himself, and as such we must strike the testimony of Officer Dobbs and all eyewitnesses from the record with regards to the charges against Doe for both the Last National and the Second-To-Last National robberies! We were going to use forensic evidence, but we couldn't use the fingerprints, because Doe also said 'I know I'm leaving fingerprints, and I don't care', implying that he knew he might be incriminating himself with those too. The Prosecution therefore calls upon Miss Cleo, clairvoyant psychic, as its sole witness...")
I dunno, to me, this breaks the desktop metaphor.
What the hell kind of a desktop is it where you can't scribble notes on one sheet of paper, because some of that paper is "beneath" the thing you're copying from?
The MS default of "window must be on top to have focus" is like having a typewriter which won't allow you to type unless you're looking at the typing paper, not the notes you're trying to transcribe from.
As for "designing for the common case", if your office is anything like mine, everyone (except me!) uses all windows maximized to fullscreen in every application. So having activation-follows-mouse wouldn't hurt lusers anyways, but it would greatly help those of us with clue.
And think of the possibilities for case modding!
(Seriously - when my body wears out, I'd love to have my brain implanted in a robot. Rad-harden the thing, graft on some controls for an ion engine, throw some glucose-producing plants into a hollow dome, and fire me into space, baby! I'm gonna tour the Solar System even if it's the last thing I do!)
Drink several glasses of mead before going to bed, and you won't even remember last night when you were awake, never mind your dreams :)
No sir, your opinion is that an embryonic cluster constitutes a human life. And your opinion is not universally shared.
If you define "human life" in terms of sentience, you come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter that harvesting body parts from live humans is a Bad Thing (harvesting from dead humans is fine, so long as the human dies "naturally" or as a result of an expressed wish to die so that its organs may be harvested).
Why? Because if you define humanity by sentience, you realize you're not doing a Bad Thing if you chop up the blastocyst early enough, or learn how to differentiate the cells by yourself so that you can grow, say, only the desired organ.
(Yes, I would deny "human" status to the unfortunate gobs of flesh born without brains, e.g. acephalitic fetuses whose mothers brought them to term, etc... and I might very well be persuaded to argue for rights for chimpanzees and gorillas, as they appear to exhibit sentience on the order of a 3-year-old homo sapiens, which puts them head-and-shoulders above our current crop of technophobic landsharks and Congresscritters, to say the least.)
If you're going to argue that a pancreas or liver is sentient, by all means, go ahead. But you'll have to arrest the Type-I diabetics for manslaughter (their immune systems destroyed their pancreas' insulin-producing cells during childhood), and alcoholics for reckless endangerment (that is, due to cirrhosis.)
I can see it all now - armies of fetus freaks turning their anger on a new evil, and fighting for Organ Rights Now. *sigh*
Buggered if I know, but based on the track records of people who have the ability to "bind people together to a common goal", I'm a hell of a lot more worried about them than I am of mathematicians and musicians.
Bah! Thumbnails! You wimps have it easy!
From a mailing list I frequent:
Another selector speaks!
Me? I started when I realized I no longer needed to load images - 90% of the graphics were crap, or banners, or both.
So when some d00f decides to code his web page as all-white text on an all-white background, with a black .GIF as a background image, I just select the text, and voila, I can read.
Even now that I've Junkbustered-out all the banners, surfing without graphics and selecting the text still beats wasting time for 20 "spacer.gif" "upperleftroundedcorner.gif", "upperrightroundedcorner.gif" and similar files to get DNS lookups and download.
> Opera doesnt have password auto complete, form complete etc.
Consistency is the hobgoglin of small minds, no?
> Now that would be an ugly sight.
As opposed to the last time around, where the soldiers got to play Grand Theft Auto, except with tanks.
Bounce all mail from China with:
"550 FCJHV URTIG HRVCP JRIUA KQWHB - covert channel located, transmitting message block UYMPW"
After enough bounced spam with apparent cryptographic content, the Chinese government will "fix" the relay for you. Or they'll "fix" the relay's administrator.
As a bonus, you can know that the more time the Chinese government's thugs spend chasing wild geese, liquidating incompetent sysadmins, and decrypting random noise, the less time they'll have to oppress their own people.
Funny, wasn't that what got the Airbus pilot in trouble at the Paris Air Show? (That is, he would have done just fine if the damn autopilot hadn't overridden him while he was busy buzzing the farm ;-)
That said, I'm in agreement with you -- I move for both stricter licensing and better flight aids. One does not preclude the other.
Personally, I can't see "everyone" flying for their commute, even with personal VTOL aircraft, simply by virtue of the parking problem -- when you have 1000 (or 10000!) people showing up at a large company's campus between 0830 and 0930, or the constant traffic volumes of a regional shopping mall, you have the same problems as you do with automobiles, except you have 'em in 3-D.
Which bums me out, because I still think it'd be damn cool and a hell of a lot of fun.
Og leave 'um meat on rock in summer. Kinda sux0rz in winter, but tribal leader tell Og to fix 'um what he got and figure out social impact before going ahead with fire stuff.
And what do you propose to do when untrusted KEYLOG~1.EXE calls trusted IEXPLORE.EXE or NETSCAPE.EXE and tells it to go to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=[harvested data]
I suppose you could log all traffic and burn it onto WORM media for future reference to find traffic you didn't authorize, but, uh, that probably isn't a viable option if you're worried about all your base are belonging to the Feebs.
Remember Ken Thompson's hack! You only get the bonus points if you compiled the OS (and CD-ROM burning software) from source on a compiler you wrote yourself ;-)
More to the point, what about the poor bastard who sees it showing up on his firewall and says "Hey, what the hell's this, and shuts it down?
Oh, I get it, the FBI's only smart enough to catch the stupid criminals.
I feel safer already.
- Some taliban government official, quoted in an article on wired.com, summer 2001
"The internet interprets censorship and routes around it, although occasionally it takes a little longer and involves a bit more busting of heads than John Gilmore of the EFF might originally have imagined."
- Some guy in Afghanistan, November 2001.
Yo! Tha H-dog iz givin propz to tha bruthaz in tha Accountz Reeceevable depawtment, an' fuck y'all Accountz Payabo muthafuckas. Fuck ya! Y'all iz wack!