It is amazing to me how ready people are to believe the standard "we are all complete morons" defense, over and over again, every time there is some dirty dealing to explain, but however many times it is used still think their government, is both not composed of morons and is trustworthy.
See: Day of Deceit.
... there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation...
Microsoft has abandoned the present incarnation
of IE. There will be no more service packs. The
next version of Windows (2005 or later) will
have an integrated browser based on IE but if you
don't want to buy a new OS from Microsoft you are
stuck with IE6 SP1 forever... unless of course
you switch to Mozilla.
On a side note, there are certian things nVidia CAN'T publish if they have to use GPL! Much of the hardware they build is "patented" from outside sources...they would get into IBM/SCO style lawsuits...but without any cause to defend themselves! That leaves them [and us] with bianary drivers--or NO drivers.
I'm sorry but that is absolute rubbish. If the hardware is patented then all the details of it
are published by the patent office and there are
no secrets to hide. They may have secret, un-patented, stuff in their hardware that they don't want anyone else to know about, but their
competitors can buy their hardware and drivers,
the same as anyone else, and no doubt have many
people you can read machine code don't need the
drivers in C to be able to understand them. If they have any remotely rational reason for not publishing the C code for their drivers it will
be that they just don't want to give away something they spent money writing. You see similar behaviour from Intel with their compilier.
They are a hardware company and should be doing
everything to get people to buy their hardware
including giving away software to make it work better, but the people who run these companies
just don't get it.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it.
Whatever justification for the war in Iraq you accept, killing the whole population is not going
to win it. The Iraqi people will not be "free" and
Iraq will be producing no oil, if it is a nuclear
waste land. The 500,000 troops thing is just silly
too. Any country is ruled through individual fear.
Iraq is no different. The military is always massively out numbered by the civilian population.
If US troops start killing everyone, the whole population (20 million plus) would turn on them
and slaughter them. If everyone is certain they
are going to die they will fight. As it is the
majority is scared of getting killed and so does
nothing.
But I take your point, EMP weapons are not going to be much use against guerillas since they are
unlikely to be using much electronics. However
they are very useful in covert inforamtion warfare, such as knocking out TV transmitters etc.
in neutral countries to impede the spread of information. Nowdays the US military is as interested in "managing" what its civilian population knows about a war as it is what the enemy does.
Since you have access to statistics: Hoe many BTUs of energy are delivered by the Sun each day?
Dividing US energy useage by land area I get 0.344 W/m^2 compared to something like 164 W/m^2 from the sun (remembering that the Sun isn't up at night). However solar panel efficiencies are less
than 20 percent and are unlikely to improve. The
energy cost of making solar panels may improve but
their efficiencies will not. However coating a percentage of the US with solar panels would be close to impossible. Especially if your agriculture has suddenly got a lot less efficient
and needs more land because you don't have gas for
the mechanisation.
If we wanted to go this way we should have started twenty years ago. Solar power itself isn't really viable but wind turbines probably are. Unfortunately it would take a lot of energy
investment. You would need to build somewhere on
the order of 10,000 wind turbines a year for several decades. Once the oil starts running out
there will not be enough spare energy available
for such a massive engineering project though.
Well, since the USA is so good at making corn (another solar energy producer, effectively), why not see if enough can be made into biodesiel for all the diesel-powered tractors?
Unfortunately the agriculture thing is a vicious
circle. What you are suggesting, using land to
produce power to drive agriculture is what used
to happen. The grain was feed to animals that then
did the work, rather than producing biodesiel but
the effect is the same. You lose land for food production for humans. However you slice it once oil becomes scarce feeding six billion people becomes a challenge. I don't think in an ideal world a catastrophe has to happen but we don't live in an ideal world. When oil supplies dry up war and waste will be far more likely than sensible conservation and investment in alternatives.
Don't nuclear power plants extract one heckuva lot more energy per unit of fuel than oil?
Per unit mass of fuel yes. But that is not the
appropriate measure of their usefulness. For a
start uranium is relatively rare and a huge expansion in the use of nuclear power would soon
run into problems with fuel shortages. Also the
net energy return from nuclear, while postive,
isn't vast. Large amounts of energy must be invested to mine and enrich the fuel and to build
and operate the reactors. This all cuts into the
net energy you get out in the end.
We have 50 years to come up with alternatives to oil
Do you now where that 50 years number comes from?
They take known reserves of oil and divide it by
present consumption to get years left. However consumption rises at an exponential rate and so
would be much higher in the future, shortening the
time to exhaustion. Secondly the physics of oil
extraction is ignored. You cannot pump oil out
of the ground at any rate you like. At first it
is easy but as the well empties it be comes increasingly difficult to extract the remaining oil. After half the oil is gone production will
fall year on year, whatever you do.
This physical effect for a single oil well is
mirrored in the overall oil production figures.
It was predicted by M. King Hubbert in the 1950's that US oil production would peak around 1970
and then start to steadily fall. This is what happened and we are fast approaching the peak predicted for global oil production, likely within
the next decade. It will be possible to produce oil well past the end of the 21st century but it
will be in smaller and smaller quantities. What
matters is when oil production peaks and the shortages begin, not when the very last barrel is
pumped.
Also as I said before a barrel of oil is not a barrel of oil. The oil that is left in the ground
is has less net energy in it than the oil that has
already been used because it takes so much more energy to get it out of the ground. The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of oil has been steadily falling and when it gets near unity, oil
is no longer an energy source, no matter how much
is left in the ground. Other fossil fuels are affected in a similar way. The EROI of coal has
been falling steadily as it becomes necessary to
dig deeper to find it.
There is no shortage of energy. There will never by a shortage of energy until the Sun goes nova...
Sorry but that is a ridiculous statement. A shortage is when demand out strips supply. While large amounts of solar energy are incident on the Earth the present demand is truely staggering. US Energy Consumption in 1998 was 94.27 Quadrillion BTU or 9.945x10^19 Joules. 80 percent of it came
from fossil fuels. This is effectively solar energy that has been collected and stored by plants over millions of years and concentrated by
geology over billions of years. Once it is gone it
is gone for ever and we will be forced to survive
(on try to anyway) on much less concentrated energy sources.
Solar power isn't even an energy source at the moment. More energy in fossil fuels and human effort is used to make a solar panel than it will
ever collect during its lifetime. Economics is no
more connected with the real world than Monopoly.
The only true measure of an energy source is the
ratio of the energy it produces over the energy expended to get it. Oil runs out as an energy source when it takes more energy to get it out of the ground than it will yield when burned. That ratio has fallen from around 100 to less than 10 as the most accessible oil has been tapped.
Not all energy sources are the same. Even physically indentical barrels of oil are not the
same. A 1930's barrel of crude from Texas that shot out of the ground when a small well was drilled is a vastly superior energy source to
present day oil than must pumped up or forced up
by blowing steam down because the net energy
yielded is much higher. Globally the amount of energy produced per capita is already falling
and has been since 1979. Soon overall energy production will start falling as well.
Once it does start falling there isn't going to
be the spare energy available to invest in building vast numbers of wind turbines or solar
panels. Renewable energy involves a huge up front
investment in energy that is only payed back if
at all over decades. Even with technological improvements it is never going to have the 100:1
energy return ratios oil had and it will at the very best allow a steady state. The energy production growth of 8 percent a year seen through
most of this century will be a thing of the past.
Since modern argiculture is so dependent on oil
and as many as 5 billion people are alive today only because of the extra food mechanized agriculture allows the future does not look all that rosey.
It is fairly inoccuous. Even if the government forced the library to hand over its database it wouldn't be greatly different from it just getting
a record of the which books had been loaned to
who. The real problem is with having RFIDs in everything. When every product worth more than a
dollar has an RFID in it, it is entirely different. You will be carrying a dozen or more RFID tags around with you all the time. There will be hundreds in your car since every major part will doubtless be tagged. At that point identifying everyone as they walk around will be
trivial. Even if shops didn't give the tag numbers
of products they sold to the government and corporations it would only take a little detective work to get them. Identify some tags with you
(at an airport security screening say) and they
have you for life, unless you burn all you possessions and start again. And it won't just
be your indentity either. All your possessions
will be trackable and your associations with other
will be infered from exchanges of items.
What information do you think these tags will contain??
One number. That is all they need. They are like
licence plates on cars except invisible to the
naked eye. But every bit of clothing you wear, every item in your pockets, including any bank notes will have its own licence plate, its own unique number. You will be walking around with a dozen or more RFID tags on you. Your new car will
probably have hundreds of tags in, since car manufactures will probably tag individual parts
for stock control. It will be trival for governments and corporations to maintain databases
of the RFID tags in every item you have ever bought. As you walk and drive around these invisible tags will talk to every receiver you
pass. They will tell the receiver their tag ID and
one database lookup is all that is needed to indentify you. It is not just your indentity that
can be tracked. Everything that you are carrying
can be as well. The police can search your house
from across the street with an RFID scanner. You associations with other people can be tracked through the items you exchange. The list is endless. Orwell was only off by about twenty years.
I totally agree that technology in and of itself is neutral and having unique IDs in all the objects around you would be great if you lived in a free society. Just think you would never lose anything again. Lost your car keys, whip out your handheld computer, which has a built in RFID receiver and has the IDs of all your possessions stored in it, and it will lead you to your keys. The problem is we do not live in a free society. The State and its children, large corporations, control everything. They decide how technology is used not us. And since they are inherrently evil
and exist to exploit people, we all know how it is
going to turn out.
You contradict yourself when you say "Most people... hold absolutley no interest as individuals to any government agency or corporation" and then "other... activity is already... monitored". Your distinction
between trends and individual data is also irrelevant. They need to collect the individual
data to analyse the trends and information about
you is information about you. They do care about
your individual data anyway and it is worth money to corporations. Huge databases of peoples individual information (buying habits, salary etc.) sell for millions of dollars.
Of course information collection already happens but there is stuff you can do about it at the moment. I buy most items with cash if I can. I probably make less than a dozen credit card purchases a year. I never give any identifying
information when I buy things if I can avoid it.
I do this because, I resent people collecting
information about me and selling and I would like
to keep the amount of information floating around
about me to a minimum, since you never know whose
hands it will eventually end up in. With RFIDs it
will become impossible to anonymously purchase
anything.
The point is that information is power. Every little extra bit of information the government
and corporations have about you nibbles away at
the last bits freedom you have. Corporations are
interested in economic power. The more information
they have about you the more disadvantaged you are
in your dealings with them. Personalized pricing
is an extreme form of such a disadvantage but any information at all is of some help to them. Asymetric knowledge in any interaction leads to advantage, as in insider trading.
The government is more interested in political power although you could think of instances such as collecting sales tax off private sales between individuals (they do it for the only items they
tag at the moment, cars) where they might use RFIDs for monetary advantage. But just as corporations can leverage knowledge about you for
economic advantage so can the state for political
advantage. The state must do all sorts of very
unpopular things to feed its children and it is
extremely interested in managing the discontent
that this generates and not letting it build up
to dangerous (for it) levels.
All this talk about double standards regarding who
can have information is just silly. Governments and corporations are not people, they
have no rights (as much as they wish it was otherwise). Even if we were talking about individuals assymetric power relations come into
play. Most people cannot afford to place RFID scanners everywhere and maintain a massive mainframe to analyse and store the results. Bill
Gate and the Waltons can and that puts normal people at a huge disadvantage. Factor in corporations and the government and we are really screwed.
There is no choice about any of this stuff. We are not going to be asked whether we want RFIDs. We are certainly not going to be asked about how they are used. The way things worked with barcodes was Walmart mandated their use by its suppliers and suddenly they were
on everything. Try boycotting barcodes and see how
far it gets you. And with barcodes at least you can see them. With RFIDs you may not even know
they are there. They will be much more insideous
that barcodes. B
It is certainly true that it wouldn't be too hard
to jam present day RFID tags. However I don't really think it is the answer for several reasons. For a start to do this you would have to transmit a signal which itself could be tracked. All the people who are worried about being tracked by the government carrying radio transmitters with them is sort of self defeating. Also I am sure that if it actually interfered with anything it would be made illegal. After all these RFID tags are not
going to be sold to the public as surveilence
devices but as anti-theft and stock control devices. Anyone that jams RFID can therefore be
branded a shoplifter, even if the shops are more
interested in scanning the RFIDs you are carrying
when you walk in, to find out about you and help
them sell you stuff, rather than about you walking
off without pay for stuff.
Also at the theoretical level radio interference
doesn't exist. Photons do not carry electric charge and don't ordinarily interact with each other. Interference is due to inadequate receiver
technology, at least in a non-astronmical setting (you can imagine situations where the photon shot noise of terrestrial interference might be greater than an extremely weak extraterrestrial signal but I think such such a case would be unlikely for RFIDs). So almost any jamming you can invent could
be overcome with better receivers and the jammer
would be constrained by present radio power output
laws anyway so receiver technology is always likely to win.
That being said I am sure that there will be ways
of throwing a spanner in the works in extreme cases, say if you wanted to rob a bank etc. You
could certainly remove all RFIDs from your person
if you had a receiver and didn't mind cutting up
your clothes a bit but it would be like putting
a stocking over your face. It would protect your
identity but it would make you stand out like a
sore thumb. You wouldn't be able to walk around
all the time with no RFIDs on you because everyone
else would have them so the police would be used
to knowing who everyone was and would stop and
question anyone they couldn't indentify.
I would modify your grenade idea slightly and
put an electromagnetic flux compressor in it.
Basically a copper pipe bomb with some extra
electronics in it that convets the kinetic energy
of the explosion into an EM pulse similar to what
you get from a nuclear weapon. If bank robbers
weren't fairly stupid they would be using them
already to knock out CCTV cameras etc. I am not
sure if an EM pulse would take out an RFID tag
itself but it would certainly take out the receivers and temporarily halt surveilence in a
certain area. I wouldn't lose any sleep over RFIDs
if I was a criminal, but for the rest of us they
will ceratinly affect out every day lives.
The most obvious and intrusive stuff will undoubtedly be how corporations use them. Dynamic
billboards that display advertisments targeted at
you as you walk past (like in Minority Report) will be possible when RFIDs are widespread. Even
if you are not worried about the government knowing every little thing you do, think adverts
for help with your embassing personal problem (hemoroid cream etc.) flashing up on signs as you
walk past them down the street, for everyone to see.
RFID tags only have a range of a few inches to a
foot
In fact companies have announced passive RFID tags with advertised ranges of 9 meters or more. Active tags can have ranges of
miles. The very first RFID tags had very short ranges but the technology has improved and will
no doubt continue to improve. The greater the range the more useful tags are (and the fewer recievers you need), even if they are not being used for surveilence. It is therefore highly likely that RFIDs will become even more surveilence friendly as time goes by. Directional receivers specially constructed for surveilence
(similar to parabolic microphones) could no doubt
increase the range at which tags could be scanned
by at least an order of magnitude.
RFID tags are fundamentally no different from barcodes
RFID tags can be invisible and impossible to remove from a product. Barcodes by definition
have to be visible and even if they are integeral
to a product can covered or scratched out. Barcodes need a clear line of sight to work whereas RFIDs can work though significant amounts of covering depending on the material. It is impossible to use barcodes to track people in any
meaningfully way (unless you force everyone to have one tatooed on their forehead), but RFIDs
can make such tracking trivially easy and totally
invisible.
Surveilence using RFIDs will be too expensive and difficult
If RFIDs are widely deployed then the receivers
will have to be cheap. If every shop is going to
have may of them, like they now have barcode reader, then they are not going to be extortionally expensive. Economies of scale mean that the police will be able to afford large numbers of receivers. It is also the case that you
do not need to cover even a small fraction of a
country to make surveilence work. All you need to
do is place receivers at strategic high volume
choke points where large numbers people pass by
(entrances to buildings, traffic intersections
etc.). Also the usefulness of handheld receivers,
especially in crowds, cannot be underplayed.
People exchanging tagged items will make surveilence impossible
This is only true if very few (presumably expensive) items are tagged and so the average
person only carries one or two tags around with
them. Once RFIDs are unbiquitous most people will
have a dozen or more tags on them so it will not
matter if you bought your PDA on ebay or your
shoes were a gift from you cousin. The majority
of the tags will be traceable to you. If fact at
this point this effect becomes a positive advantage surveilencewise, since it will make it
possible to track associations between people without seeing them meet. If you are carrying
a cheap ball point pen that was bought by someone
living twenty miles from you then there is a high
probabilty that you know each other (or have a mutual friend).
Tags will really come into their own once they are
are in a large fraction of products. At this point
most people will have at least a dozen tags on them most of the time and the majority of these
tags will be traceable to them through the initial
purchase. In fact even if such purchase records
were not kept (which they certainly will be) or the government didn't have access to them (which
seems unlikely given the present climate) it wouldn't really matter.
RFIDs are like having a dozen or so unique ID numbers stamped on you as you walk around. The numbers may vary as you swap clothes, shoes, and items like pens, wallets, PDAs, keyrings etc., but all that is needed is one instance where they scan all your RFIDs and know who you are. Such situations might include security checks at airports, being stopped by the police or any number of other situations.
Once the govenment has a list of RFIDs you were carrying at one particular time it will be trivial to correlate that against previous scans of unknown individuals to work out all the RFIDs that you routinely carry arou
Over a typical 20-year life span of a solar cell, a single produced watt should cost as little as $0.20, compared with the current $4.
A Watt is a unit of power (energy per unit time e.g 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second). So if the above statement is correct then it means that a solar panel that produces 1 kilowatt of power (i.e. 1 kilojoule per second) would cost $200. The "typical 20-year life span" stuff is a bit of a red herring. it just means you will need to fork
out another $200 after about 20 years when the panel breaks. Of course you do need to know the
typical lifespan to work out the cost per unit energy (usually quoted per kilowatt/hour for
electricity). For the quoted numbers this comes
out at about $0.003 per kilowatt/hour depending
on how many daylight hours you can operate it for.
Since average retail electricity prices in the
US are on the order of $0.08 per kilowatt/hour
this seems rather too good, so perhaps the above
statement is incorrect, not just confusing?
This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could
download, print out and skim through a dozen other
papers.
It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an
electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds
and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time
I want. Of course there is always the odd really
annoying case where there is some data I must have
but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in
an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you
have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it
is in electronic form.
However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but
the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now
that there are huge advances to be made just by
finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).
On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially
everyone can be a journalist and contribute.
Where things are lacking are in the searching and
filtering aspects? The infomation may be there
but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites
such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche
but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.
What is really needed is some sort of distributed
and semi(or fully)-automated system where good
sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where
you would select a number of individuals whose
opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust
etc. new sources would be suggested to you which
you can then rate etc.
Of course the real cause of the increased reaction
times etc. is almost certainly increased blood flow resulting from heating caused by absorption of the EM waves. Basically you are very gently microwaving your head. This effect has been known for some years in connection with radiation form the phones themselves. Experiments were done testing peoples reaction times with phones strapped to their heads. The reaction times increased when the phones were turned on.
What is worring about this study is that it is radiation from the base stations not the phones themselves. I have never thought that holding a radio transmiter next to your head for long periods of time can be entirely good for you but at least people are making a choice about that.
With base stations you don't have a choice however. The article is very short on details. It
would be very interesting to know at what distance
from a base station these effects maifest themselves. If it is over a sigificant fraction of
the cell area that would be extremely worrying.
I personally don't see any distinction between
positive and negative effects, increased reaction
time versus headaches. An effect on you brain is
an effect on your brain. What you really have to
worry about are the effects of long term exposure
and that is totally unknown. If there are short
term effects then there are likely to long term
effects as well and they may be very different and
are most likely to be always bad.
The long term trends you can see from the Netcraft
September 2003 Web Server Survey tell a totally different story from the article they have on their front page. Apache which is mostly (or though not always) run on free operating systems is at an all-time high. By comparison Microsoft is at a two year low.
I would suggest that this is the reason for the
article. To try and distract attention from IIS's
dwindling market share. How one particular software release is doing is irrelevant to the
big picture (especially when it only has 0.4 percent market share anyway). Most of this growth for Windows Server 2003 is present Windows customers upgrading
or buying new machines and if the latest version of their software wasn't growing in market share
they really would be screwed. You don't see articles about how the latest version of Apache is
growing compared to older versions do you.
Until recently this would all have been fine but now I have my new Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 I am actually concerned about other architectures appart from x86;-) At the moment for just generic ARM support in 2.4 you need a large patch from Russell King and then more patches for the Zaurus specific stuff. The last rmk patch was a month and a half ago for 2.6.0-test2 and as far as I know, no one is even working on porting the Zaurus
specific stuff to 2.6.
I don't really know what the arguements are for
the present development model where most of the
non-x86 architectures are kept separate from the
mainline development but I really don't see how
it can be a good idea. I guess I don't see what
the difference is between individual subsystems, for instance, and support for different architectures. In both cases individuals or teams
work on their own but in the subsystem case everything gets merged back in, by the time the
kernel it declared stable, whereas for non-x86 architectures this never happens.
It seems to me that given the large size of these
architecture patches, their maintainers must spend
most of their time just updating them to keep them
in sync with the new kernel versions, rather than
actually fixing bug or adding new features. Also the fact that ARM users cannot test the latest
kernels because there are no rmk patches for them
can only lead to a "negative feedback" situation
which will hurt kernel development. In general anything that unnecessarily fragments kernel development cannot be a positive thing.
What stupid people do effects everyone? It is far
from clear that we will ALWAYS have a choice. All
this stuff about Apple is rubbish for a start. They are large company with shareholders to satisfy and they will jump on the DRM bandwagon if the wind starts blowing strongly that way. As for free software, that freedom largely rests on the freedom of the x86 hardware platform. But the manufacturers of that hardware build it to run Windows (since that has the dominant market share) so the will follow where Microsoft leads.
There are other worrying trends as well. Consoles
for instance. The way things are going most people
won't be using general purpose computers at all.
The XBox wasn't a stupid attempt by Microsoft to
diversify. It was the only thing they could do to
try and stop Sony from stealing the whole home
computer market. Unless things change radically
within the next decade home computers are going
to be largely replace by consoles that do games,
web surfing, email etc. and little else. Once that
happens the work place will be next. Consoles (probably the same hardware with different firmware) that just have an office suite, e-mail
etc. will replace computers in most offices.
Sure there will still be some demand for general
purpose computers but without the volume that
they are produce in today their price will beyond
the means of most individuals. It was only a few
years ago that academic computer purchases were
dominated by $20,000 workstations from Sun and DEC. That is what the computers of the future will
be like. Things are far worse than you realise. Not only will the general purpose computers all be
DRMed to the eyeballs but they will be so expensive that they will only be for academia, large companies and the government. Your ONLY choice will be a special purpose device, console
or handheld, that will only perform a limited
number of tasks, none of which will possibly allow
any copyright violation.
The present freedom we enjoy with general purpose
computers is a lucky accident. That quote from the
head of IBM saying there would only be a market for a few computers in the entire world is idicative of how no one at the top ever thought personal computers were possible and you can be
sure that they don't want it this way. Like it or
not if the masses can be weaned off general purpose computers onto consoles then we are screwed. It is all the idiots buying computers that makes it cheap for the rest of us. Without
them it is only us and the big boys and you can
be sure that no one is going to be selling $1,000
general purpose computers to a small hobbyist market and undermining their $20,000 workstation
sales to governments and corporations.
Who are you going to vote for? I don't remember many Democrats being opposed to the USA PATRIOT Act when it was voted on. I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone to vote for who wants it repealed. The only time the "democractic" process will actually deliver change is where you can find some very rich people who are affected by a particular issue. In
this case I think you are out of luck. Laws like this are ment for ordinary people only.
Only the copyright itself is property
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Even defined as to "take property without permission" and with the loose definition
it still doesn't work because it is the
copyright or patent etc. that is the property,
not the work or idea that it covers. Someone
owns the copyright to the text of a book,
they don't own the text itself. You can probably
think of some way to steal a copyright (most
likely involving fraud I guess) but you can't
steal a copyrighted work (other than a physical
representation). You can copy a work without permission and so infringe on the copyright but
this is entirely different. Copyright infringement
was only a civil matter until recently after all.
If it was stealing then it would be covered under
existing laws against theft but it took all the
recent ammendments to the copyright legislation to
make it a crime.
Anyway before you start quoting dictionary definitions you have to realize that dictionaries
are descriptive not proscriptive. They just describe the current general usage of words rather
than proscribing their definative meaning. Since
most people are idiots, even if there wasn't deliberate attempts to reshape the meanings of
words, a description of how a word is generally
used is likely to be contaminated by the idiocy
of the general public. When you add in the fact
that the media, who are the enemy here, are in
a perfect position to manipulate the general usage
of words to be whatever they want, and you see that Orwell's Newspeak is far from fiction.
Your analog hole arguement is flawed because in the future there will be no analog devices. They exist now but soon they will stop making them and the existing ones will all break in time. The whole point of DRM is that it has to be pervasive. You will not be able to record a video off your computer screen using a digital video camera because the camera will have DRM in it as well. Everything will. There will be a black rectangle where your screen is on the video because the camera will recognise that it is "protected content" from the watermark and will not record that section of the image. All computers and monitors will be DRM enabled so there will be no
way of stripping the watermark out before you display it.
TPCA/Palladium is being developed because it is
useful for DRM. It may have other uses but they
could be achieved in other ways. All security
problems (defined as users/programs doing things
that the computer owner doesn't want done) can be
handled at the firmware/OS level (with the possible addition of a lock on the case so a user can't pull the battery on the CMOS). Putting this
functionality in hardware is only necessary if
the owner of the computer themselves is not trusted (i.e. a DRM setting).
Why if all this
security stuff is such a pressing problem does
Windows not allow for only running signed binaries
already? Or Linux for that matter? 99 percent of
this can be implemented at the OS level already.
And the rest could be achieve by flashing a new
secure bios. The reason it has not been done is a)
there is no real problem that merits it and b) if
it was done it would compete with a hardware solution, which is necessary for DRM.
a firewall that cannot run introduced code is something so useful that we will not be able to prevent it
This is true but you don't need TPCA to do this.
Putting this functionality at the firmware level
is sufficient to achieve what you suggest. In fact
I would be suprized if it wasn't done already by
specialized vendors. There is a difference between
not trusting the computer user and the owner. An
organisation can have firewalls with secure firmware such that no one can load any old software on to them without the right codes or keys (without pulling the battery on the CMOS, which is good enough, especially if you have a
lock on the case). Putting the functionality in hardware is only useful for stopping the owner of the computer from using it anyway they want.
There is no valid security reason for TPCA.
All security problems to do with stopping users
from doing stuff the owner of the computer doesn't
want done can be handled at the firmware and OS
level. This sort of hardware solution is only necessary for DRM where even the owner of the computer isn't trusted. TPCA/Palladium is likely
enough to spread through the installed base, leveraged by Microsoft's market share, without
any help from the free software community. If it
succeeds then free software is dead in the long
term, so any cooperation with it is akin to attempted suicide.
Haven't you heard of globalisation? The Congo may
be the other side of the world for you but it is
just next door as far as the transnational corporations that are driving the war there are concerned. A big war in Africa doesn't just happen. A hundred years ago it would have been
the governments of major european powers that
called the shots. Now it is large mining corporations, IMF, World Bank, CIA etc. that pull
all the strings.
To use your analogy the western "democracies" already have the bull crippled trussed up and
are now preparing to slaughter it. They love
to play the disinterested bastards who should
really get involved and help the poor niggers
out, while behind the scenes they are engineering
the whole thing, as they did in Rwanda. People
are dying in the Congo right now so the west can get diamonds and coltan
for next to nothing. I am sure the people of the
Congo would be really happy to see the west even
more involved.
The most important characteristic of such a system
is the false positive rate. A system that flags everyone who passes through will flag 100 percent
of terrorists but would be no better than having
no system at all. They do not give the false
positive rate but it is highly unlikely to be less
than 10 percent and may be much larger. Since the
ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists is probably
on the order of a billion to one a system with an
unrealistically low 1 percent false positive rate
will flag 10 million non-terrorists for every
0.5 terrorists if it has a 50 percent correct ID
rate. Even if you do extra searches on those 10 million people, with a 50 percent correct ID rate
the terrorist is just a likely to be in the 990 million people who do not get flagged as in the
flagged group.
You need a close to 100 percent correct ID rate
and a false positive rate below one in a million,
which is probably impossible, before the
system would be of any use. However all this assumes that you have pictures of all terrorists.
This is just plain impossible, especially in the
case of suicide attacks. This is not like bank
robbers where there are multiple incidents allowing evidense from witnesses etc. to be used
to catch them when they try again. With suicide
attack the attackers will likely be model citizens
(who will not be on any list) right up until the attack and afterwards any info on them that is
gathered is close to useless.
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It is amazing to me how ready people are to believe the standard "we are all complete morons" defense, over and over again, every time there is some dirty dealing to explain, but however many times it is used still think their government, is both not composed of morons and is trustworthy. See: Day of Deceit.
What has firefox got that's not coming in the next service pack for IE?
To quote Brian Countryman, IE program manager:
Microsoft has abandoned the present incarnation of IE. There will be no more service packs. The next version of Windows (2005 or later) will have an integrated browser based on IE but if you don't want to buy a new OS from Microsoft you are stuck with IE6 SP1 foreverOn a side note, there are certian things nVidia CAN'T publish if they have to use GPL! Much of the hardware they build is "patented" from outside sources...they would get into IBM/SCO style lawsuits...but without any cause to defend themselves! That leaves them [and us] with bianary drivers--or NO drivers.
I'm sorry but that is absolute rubbish. If the hardware is patented then all the details of it are published by the patent office and there are no secrets to hide. They may have secret, un-patented, stuff in their hardware that they don't want anyone else to know about, but their competitors can buy their hardware and drivers, the same as anyone else, and no doubt have many people you can read machine code don't need the drivers in C to be able to understand them. If they have any remotely rational reason for not publishing the C code for their drivers it will be that they just don't want to give away something they spent money writing. You see similar behaviour from Intel with their compilier. They are a hardware company and should be doing everything to get people to buy their hardware including giving away software to make it work better, but the people who run these companies just don't get it.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it.
Whatever justification for the war in Iraq you accept, killing the whole population is not going to win it. The Iraqi people will not be "free" and Iraq will be producing no oil, if it is a nuclear waste land. The 500,000 troops thing is just silly too. Any country is ruled through individual fear. Iraq is no different. The military is always massively out numbered by the civilian population. If US troops start killing everyone, the whole population (20 million plus) would turn on them and slaughter them. If everyone is certain they are going to die they will fight. As it is the majority is scared of getting killed and so does nothing.
But I take your point, EMP weapons are not going to be much use against guerillas since they are unlikely to be using much electronics. However they are very useful in covert inforamtion warfare, such as knocking out TV transmitters etc. in neutral countries to impede the spread of information. Nowdays the US military is as interested in "managing" what its civilian population knows about a war as it is what the enemy does.
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
Afghanistan US Fatalities
Contrast for example Galileo, one of the only people doing astrological work at the time.
I hope you mean astronomical! Grrrr.
Since you have access to statistics: Hoe many BTUs of energy are delivered by the Sun each day?
Dividing US energy useage by land area I get 0.344 W/m^2 compared to something like 164 W/m^2 from the sun (remembering that the Sun isn't up at night). However solar panel efficiencies are less than 20 percent and are unlikely to improve. The energy cost of making solar panels may improve but their efficiencies will not. However coating a percentage of the US with solar panels would be close to impossible. Especially if your agriculture has suddenly got a lot less efficient and needs more land because you don't have gas for the mechanisation.
If we wanted to go this way we should have started twenty years ago. Solar power itself isn't really viable but wind turbines probably are. Unfortunately it would take a lot of energy investment. You would need to build somewhere on the order of 10,000 wind turbines a year for several decades. Once the oil starts running out there will not be enough spare energy available for such a massive engineering project though.
Well, since the USA is so good at making corn (another solar energy producer, effectively), why not see if enough can be made into biodesiel for all the diesel-powered tractors?
Unfortunately the agriculture thing is a vicious circle. What you are suggesting, using land to produce power to drive agriculture is what used to happen. The grain was feed to animals that then did the work, rather than producing biodesiel but the effect is the same. You lose land for food production for humans. However you slice it once oil becomes scarce feeding six billion people becomes a challenge. I don't think in an ideal world a catastrophe has to happen but we don't live in an ideal world. When oil supplies dry up war and waste will be far more likely than sensible conservation and investment in alternatives.
Don't nuclear power plants extract one heckuva lot more energy per unit of fuel than oil?
Per unit mass of fuel yes. But that is not the appropriate measure of their usefulness. For a start uranium is relatively rare and a huge expansion in the use of nuclear power would soon run into problems with fuel shortages. Also the net energy return from nuclear, while postive, isn't vast. Large amounts of energy must be invested to mine and enrich the fuel and to build and operate the reactors. This all cuts into the net energy you get out in the end.
We have 50 years to come up with alternatives to oil
Do you now where that 50 years number comes from? They take known reserves of oil and divide it by present consumption to get years left. However consumption rises at an exponential rate and so would be much higher in the future, shortening the time to exhaustion. Secondly the physics of oil extraction is ignored. You cannot pump oil out of the ground at any rate you like. At first it is easy but as the well empties it be comes increasingly difficult to extract the remaining oil. After half the oil is gone production will fall year on year, whatever you do.
This physical effect for a single oil well is mirrored in the overall oil production figures. It was predicted by M. King Hubbert in the 1950's that US oil production would peak around 1970 and then start to steadily fall. This is what happened and we are fast approaching the peak predicted for global oil production, likely within the next decade. It will be possible to produce oil well past the end of the 21st century but it will be in smaller and smaller quantities. What matters is when oil production peaks and the shortages begin, not when the very last barrel is pumped.
Also as I said before a barrel of oil is not a barrel of oil. The oil that is left in the ground is has less net energy in it than the oil that has already been used because it takes so much more energy to get it out of the ground. The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of oil has been steadily falling and when it gets near unity, oil is no longer an energy source, no matter how much is left in the ground. Other fossil fuels are affected in a similar way. The EROI of coal has been falling steadily as it becomes necessary to dig deeper to find it.
See these links: 1 2 3 for more info.
There is no shortage of energy. There will never by a shortage of energy until the Sun goes nova...
Sorry but that is a ridiculous statement. A shortage is when demand out strips supply. While large amounts of solar energy are incident on the Earth the present demand is truely staggering. US Energy Consumption in 1998 was 94.27 Quadrillion BTU or 9.945x10^19 Joules. 80 percent of it came from fossil fuels. This is effectively solar energy that has been collected and stored by plants over millions of years and concentrated by geology over billions of years. Once it is gone it is gone for ever and we will be forced to survive (on try to anyway) on much less concentrated energy sources.
Solar power isn't even an energy source at the moment. More energy in fossil fuels and human effort is used to make a solar panel than it will ever collect during its lifetime. Economics is no more connected with the real world than Monopoly. The only true measure of an energy source is the ratio of the energy it produces over the energy expended to get it. Oil runs out as an energy source when it takes more energy to get it out of the ground than it will yield when burned. That ratio has fallen from around 100 to less than 10 as the most accessible oil has been tapped.
Not all energy sources are the same. Even physically indentical barrels of oil are not the same. A 1930's barrel of crude from Texas that shot out of the ground when a small well was drilled is a vastly superior energy source to present day oil than must pumped up or forced up by blowing steam down because the net energy yielded is much higher. Globally the amount of energy produced per capita is already falling and has been since 1979. Soon overall energy production will start falling as well.
Once it does start falling there isn't going to be the spare energy available to invest in building vast numbers of wind turbines or solar panels. Renewable energy involves a huge up front investment in energy that is only payed back if at all over decades. Even with technological improvements it is never going to have the 100:1 energy return ratios oil had and it will at the very best allow a steady state. The energy production growth of 8 percent a year seen through most of this century will be a thing of the past. Since modern argiculture is so dependent on oil and as many as 5 billion people are alive today only because of the extra food mechanized agriculture allows the future does not look all that rosey.
Only an idiot would believe that windmills and solar panels can run bulldozers, elevators, steel mills, glass factories, electric heat, air conditioning, aircraft, automobiles, etc.
It is fairly inoccuous. Even if the government forced the library to hand over its database it wouldn't be greatly different from it just getting a record of the which books had been loaned to who. The real problem is with having RFIDs in everything. When every product worth more than a dollar has an RFID in it, it is entirely different. You will be carrying a dozen or more RFID tags around with you all the time. There will be hundreds in your car since every major part will doubtless be tagged. At that point identifying everyone as they walk around will be trivial. Even if shops didn't give the tag numbers of products they sold to the government and corporations it would only take a little detective work to get them. Identify some tags with you (at an airport security screening say) and they have you for life, unless you burn all you possessions and start again. And it won't just be your indentity either. All your possessions will be trackable and your associations with other will be infered from exchanges of items.
What information do you think these tags will contain??
One number. That is all they need. They are like licence plates on cars except invisible to the naked eye. But every bit of clothing you wear, every item in your pockets, including any bank notes will have its own licence plate, its own unique number. You will be walking around with a dozen or more RFID tags on you. Your new car will probably have hundreds of tags in, since car manufactures will probably tag individual parts for stock control. It will be trival for governments and corporations to maintain databases of the RFID tags in every item you have ever bought. As you walk and drive around these invisible tags will talk to every receiver you pass. They will tell the receiver their tag ID and one database lookup is all that is needed to indentify you. It is not just your indentity that can be tracked. Everything that you are carrying can be as well. The police can search your house from across the street with an RFID scanner. You associations with other people can be tracked through the items you exchange. The list is endless. Orwell was only off by about twenty years.
I totally agree that technology in and of itself is neutral and having unique IDs in all the objects around you would be great if you lived in a free society. Just think you would never lose anything again. Lost your car keys, whip out your handheld computer, which has a built in RFID receiver and has the IDs of all your possessions stored in it, and it will lead you to your keys. The problem is we do not live in a free society. The State and its children, large corporations, control everything. They decide how technology is used not us. And since they are inherrently evil and exist to exploit people, we all know how it is going to turn out.
You contradict yourself when you say "Most people ... hold absolutley no interest as individuals to any government agency or corporation" and then "other ... activity is already ... monitored". Your distinction
between trends and individual data is also irrelevant. They need to collect the individual
data to analyse the trends and information about
you is information about you. They do care about
your individual data anyway and it is worth money to corporations. Huge databases of peoples individual information (buying habits, salary etc.) sell for millions of dollars.
Of course information collection already happens but there is stuff you can do about it at the moment. I buy most items with cash if I can. I probably make less than a dozen credit card purchases a year. I never give any identifying information when I buy things if I can avoid it. I do this because, I resent people collecting information about me and selling and I would like to keep the amount of information floating around about me to a minimum, since you never know whose hands it will eventually end up in. With RFIDs it will become impossible to anonymously purchase anything.
The point is that information is power. Every little extra bit of information the government and corporations have about you nibbles away at the last bits freedom you have. Corporations are interested in economic power. The more information they have about you the more disadvantaged you are in your dealings with them. Personalized pricing is an extreme form of such a disadvantage but any information at all is of some help to them. Asymetric knowledge in any interaction leads to advantage, as in insider trading.
The government is more interested in political power although you could think of instances such as collecting sales tax off private sales between individuals (they do it for the only items they tag at the moment, cars) where they might use RFIDs for monetary advantage. But just as corporations can leverage knowledge about you for economic advantage so can the state for political advantage. The state must do all sorts of very unpopular things to feed its children and it is extremely interested in managing the discontent that this generates and not letting it build up to dangerous (for it) levels.
All this talk about double standards regarding who can have information is just silly. Governments and corporations are not people, they have no rights (as much as they wish it was otherwise). Even if we were talking about individuals assymetric power relations come into play. Most people cannot afford to place RFID scanners everywhere and maintain a massive mainframe to analyse and store the results. Bill Gate and the Waltons can and that puts normal people at a huge disadvantage. Factor in corporations and the government and we are really screwed.
There is no choice about any of this stuff. We are not going to be asked whether we want RFIDs. We are certainly not going to be asked about how they are used. The way things worked with barcodes was Walmart mandated their use by its suppliers and suddenly they were on everything. Try boycotting barcodes and see how far it gets you. And with barcodes at least you can see them. With RFIDs you may not even know they are there. They will be much more insideous that barcodes. B
It is certainly true that it wouldn't be too hard to jam present day RFID tags. However I don't really think it is the answer for several reasons. For a start to do this you would have to transmit a signal which itself could be tracked. All the people who are worried about being tracked by the government carrying radio transmitters with them is sort of self defeating. Also I am sure that if it actually interfered with anything it would be made illegal. After all these RFID tags are not going to be sold to the public as surveilence devices but as anti-theft and stock control devices. Anyone that jams RFID can therefore be branded a shoplifter, even if the shops are more interested in scanning the RFIDs you are carrying when you walk in, to find out about you and help them sell you stuff, rather than about you walking off without pay for stuff.
Also at the theoretical level radio interference doesn't exist. Photons do not carry electric charge and don't ordinarily interact with each other. Interference is due to inadequate receiver technology, at least in a non-astronmical setting (you can imagine situations where the photon shot noise of terrestrial interference might be greater than an extremely weak extraterrestrial signal but I think such such a case would be unlikely for RFIDs). So almost any jamming you can invent could be overcome with better receivers and the jammer would be constrained by present radio power output laws anyway so receiver technology is always likely to win.
That being said I am sure that there will be ways of throwing a spanner in the works in extreme cases, say if you wanted to rob a bank etc. You could certainly remove all RFIDs from your person if you had a receiver and didn't mind cutting up your clothes a bit but it would be like putting a stocking over your face. It would protect your identity but it would make you stand out like a sore thumb. You wouldn't be able to walk around all the time with no RFIDs on you because everyone else would have them so the police would be used to knowing who everyone was and would stop and question anyone they couldn't indentify.
I would modify your grenade idea slightly and put an electromagnetic flux compressor in it. Basically a copper pipe bomb with some extra electronics in it that convets the kinetic energy of the explosion into an EM pulse similar to what you get from a nuclear weapon. If bank robbers weren't fairly stupid they would be using them already to knock out CCTV cameras etc. I am not sure if an EM pulse would take out an RFID tag itself but it would certainly take out the receivers and temporarily halt surveilence in a certain area. I wouldn't lose any sleep over RFIDs if I was a criminal, but for the rest of us they will ceratinly affect out every day lives.
The most obvious and intrusive stuff will undoubtedly be how corporations use them. Dynamic billboards that display advertisments targeted at you as you walk past (like in Minority Report) will be possible when RFIDs are widespread. Even if you are not worried about the government knowing every little thing you do, think adverts for help with your embassing personal problem (hemoroid cream etc.) flashing up on signs as you walk past them down the street, for everyone to see.
RFID tags only have a range of a few inches to a foot
In fact companies have announced passive RFID tags with advertised ranges of 9 meters or more. Active tags can have ranges of miles. The very first RFID tags had very short ranges but the technology has improved and will no doubt continue to improve. The greater the range the more useful tags are (and the fewer recievers you need), even if they are not being used for surveilence. It is therefore highly likely that RFIDs will become even more surveilence friendly as time goes by. Directional receivers specially constructed for surveilence (similar to parabolic microphones) could no doubt increase the range at which tags could be scanned by at least an order of magnitude.
RFID tags are fundamentally no different from barcodes
RFID tags can be invisible and impossible to remove from a product. Barcodes by definition have to be visible and even if they are integeral to a product can covered or scratched out. Barcodes need a clear line of sight to work whereas RFIDs can work though significant amounts of covering depending on the material. It is impossible to use barcodes to track people in any meaningfully way (unless you force everyone to have one tatooed on their forehead), but RFIDs can make such tracking trivially easy and totally invisible.
Surveilence using RFIDs will be too expensive and difficult
If RFIDs are widely deployed then the receivers will have to be cheap. If every shop is going to have may of them, like they now have barcode reader, then they are not going to be extortionally expensive. Economies of scale mean that the police will be able to afford large numbers of receivers. It is also the case that you do not need to cover even a small fraction of a country to make surveilence work. All you need to do is place receivers at strategic high volume choke points where large numbers people pass by (entrances to buildings, traffic intersections etc.). Also the usefulness of handheld receivers, especially in crowds, cannot be underplayed.
People exchanging tagged items will make surveilence impossible
This is only true if very few (presumably expensive) items are tagged and so the average person only carries one or two tags around with them. Once RFIDs are unbiquitous most people will have a dozen or more tags on them so it will not matter if you bought your PDA on ebay or your shoes were a gift from you cousin. The majority of the tags will be traceable to you. If fact at this point this effect becomes a positive advantage surveilencewise, since it will make it possible to track associations between people without seeing them meet. If you are carrying a cheap ball point pen that was bought by someone living twenty miles from you then there is a high probabilty that you know each other (or have a mutual friend).
Tags will really come into their own once they are are in a large fraction of products. At this point most people will have at least a dozen tags on them most of the time and the majority of these tags will be traceable to them through the initial purchase. In fact even if such purchase records were not kept (which they certainly will be) or the government didn't have access to them (which seems unlikely given the present climate) it wouldn't really matter.
RFIDs are like having a dozen or so unique ID numbers stamped on you as you walk around. The numbers may vary as you swap clothes, shoes, and items like pens, wallets, PDAs, keyrings etc., but all that is needed is one instance where they scan all your RFIDs and know who you are. Such situations might include security checks at airports, being stopped by the police or any number of other situations.
Once the govenment has a list of RFIDs you were carrying at one particular time it will be trivial to correlate that against previous scans of unknown individuals to work out all the RFIDs that you routinely carry arou
Over a typical 20-year life span of a solar cell, a single produced watt should cost as little as $0.20, compared with the current $4.
A Watt is a unit of power (energy per unit time e.g 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second). So if the above statement is correct then it means that a solar panel that produces 1 kilowatt of power (i.e. 1 kilojoule per second) would cost $200. The "typical 20-year life span" stuff is a bit of a red herring. it just means you will need to fork out another $200 after about 20 years when the panel breaks. Of course you do need to know the typical lifespan to work out the cost per unit energy (usually quoted per kilowatt/hour for electricity). For the quoted numbers this comes out at about $0.003 per kilowatt/hour depending on how many daylight hours you can operate it for. Since average retail electricity prices in the US are on the order of $0.08 per kilowatt/hour this seems rather too good, so perhaps the above statement is incorrect, not just confusing?
This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could download, print out and skim through a dozen other papers.
It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time I want. Of course there is always the odd really annoying case where there is some data I must have but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it is in electronic form.
However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now that there are huge advances to be made just by finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).
On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially everyone can be a journalist and contribute. Where things are lacking are in the searching and filtering aspects? The infomation may be there but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.
What is really needed is some sort of distributed and semi(or fully)-automated system where good sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where you would select a number of individuals whose opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust etc. new sources would be suggested to you which you can then rate etc.
Of course the real cause of the increased reaction times etc. is almost certainly increased blood flow resulting from heating caused by absorption of the EM waves. Basically you are very gently microwaving your head. This effect has been known for some years in connection with radiation form the phones themselves. Experiments were done testing peoples reaction times with phones strapped to their heads. The reaction times increased when the phones were turned on.
What is worring about this study is that it is radiation from the base stations not the phones themselves. I have never thought that holding a radio transmiter next to your head for long periods of time can be entirely good for you but at least people are making a choice about that. With base stations you don't have a choice however. The article is very short on details. It would be very interesting to know at what distance from a base station these effects maifest themselves. If it is over a sigificant fraction of the cell area that would be extremely worrying.
I personally don't see any distinction between positive and negative effects, increased reaction time versus headaches. An effect on you brain is an effect on your brain. What you really have to worry about are the effects of long term exposure and that is totally unknown. If there are short term effects then there are likely to long term effects as well and they may be very different and are most likely to be always bad.
The long term trends you can see from the Netcraft September 2003 Web Server Survey tell a totally different story from the article they have on their front page. Apache which is mostly (or though not always) run on free operating systems is at an all-time high. By comparison Microsoft is at a two year low.
I would suggest that this is the reason for the article. To try and distract attention from IIS's dwindling market share. How one particular software release is doing is irrelevant to the big picture (especially when it only has 0.4 percent market share anyway). Most of this growth for Windows Server 2003 is present Windows customers upgrading or buying new machines and if the latest version of their software wasn't growing in market share they really would be screwed. You don't see articles about how the latest version of Apache is growing compared to older versions do you.
Until recently this would all have been fine but now I have my new Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 I am actually concerned about other architectures appart from x86 ;-) At the moment for just generic ARM support in 2.4 you need a large patch from Russell King and then more patches for the Zaurus specific stuff. The last rmk patch was a month and a half ago for 2.6.0-test2 and as far as I know, no one is even working on porting the Zaurus
specific stuff to 2.6.
I don't really know what the arguements are for the present development model where most of the non-x86 architectures are kept separate from the mainline development but I really don't see how it can be a good idea. I guess I don't see what the difference is between individual subsystems, for instance, and support for different architectures. In both cases individuals or teams work on their own but in the subsystem case everything gets merged back in, by the time the kernel it declared stable, whereas for non-x86 architectures this never happens.
It seems to me that given the large size of these architecture patches, their maintainers must spend most of their time just updating them to keep them in sync with the new kernel versions, rather than actually fixing bug or adding new features. Also the fact that ARM users cannot test the latest kernels because there are no rmk patches for them can only lead to a "negative feedback" situation which will hurt kernel development. In general anything that unnecessarily fragments kernel development cannot be a positive thing.
What stupid people do effects everyone? It is far from clear that we will ALWAYS have a choice. All this stuff about Apple is rubbish for a start. They are large company with shareholders to satisfy and they will jump on the DRM bandwagon if the wind starts blowing strongly that way. As for free software, that freedom largely rests on the freedom of the x86 hardware platform. But the manufacturers of that hardware build it to run Windows (since that has the dominant market share) so the will follow where Microsoft leads.
There are other worrying trends as well. Consoles for instance. The way things are going most people won't be using general purpose computers at all. The XBox wasn't a stupid attempt by Microsoft to diversify. It was the only thing they could do to try and stop Sony from stealing the whole home computer market. Unless things change radically within the next decade home computers are going to be largely replace by consoles that do games, web surfing, email etc. and little else. Once that happens the work place will be next. Consoles (probably the same hardware with different firmware) that just have an office suite, e-mail etc. will replace computers in most offices.
Sure there will still be some demand for general purpose computers but without the volume that they are produce in today their price will beyond the means of most individuals. It was only a few years ago that academic computer purchases were dominated by $20,000 workstations from Sun and DEC. That is what the computers of the future will be like. Things are far worse than you realise. Not only will the general purpose computers all be DRMed to the eyeballs but they will be so expensive that they will only be for academia, large companies and the government. Your ONLY choice will be a special purpose device, console or handheld, that will only perform a limited number of tasks, none of which will possibly allow any copyright violation.
The present freedom we enjoy with general purpose computers is a lucky accident. That quote from the head of IBM saying there would only be a market for a few computers in the entire world is idicative of how no one at the top ever thought personal computers were possible and you can be sure that they don't want it this way. Like it or not if the masses can be weaned off general purpose computers onto consoles then we are screwed. It is all the idiots buying computers that makes it cheap for the rest of us. Without them it is only us and the big boys and you can be sure that no one is going to be selling $1,000 general purpose computers to a small hobbyist market and undermining their $20,000 workstation sales to governments and corporations.
Who are you going to vote for? I don't remember many Democrats being opposed to the USA PATRIOT Act when it was voted on. I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone to vote for who wants it repealed. The only time the "democractic" process will actually deliver change is where you can find some very rich people who are affected by a particular issue. In this case I think you are out of luck. Laws like this are ment for ordinary people only.
Even defined as to "take property without permission" and with the loose definition it still doesn't work because it is the copyright or patent etc. that is the property, not the work or idea that it covers. Someone owns the copyright to the text of a book, they don't own the text itself. You can probably think of some way to steal a copyright (most likely involving fraud I guess) but you can't steal a copyrighted work (other than a physical representation). You can copy a work without permission and so infringe on the copyright but this is entirely different. Copyright infringement was only a civil matter until recently after all. If it was stealing then it would be covered under existing laws against theft but it took all the recent ammendments to the copyright legislation to make it a crime.
Anyway before you start quoting dictionary definitions you have to realize that dictionaries are descriptive not proscriptive. They just describe the current general usage of words rather than proscribing their definative meaning. Since most people are idiots, even if there wasn't deliberate attempts to reshape the meanings of words, a description of how a word is generally used is likely to be contaminated by the idiocy of the general public. When you add in the fact that the media, who are the enemy here, are in a perfect position to manipulate the general usage of words to be whatever they want, and you see that Orwell's Newspeak is far from fiction.
Your analog hole arguement is flawed because in the future there will be no analog devices. They exist now but soon they will stop making them and the existing ones will all break in time. The whole point of DRM is that it has to be pervasive. You will not be able to record a video off your computer screen using a digital video camera because the camera will have DRM in it as well. Everything will. There will be a black rectangle where your screen is on the video because the camera will recognise that it is "protected content" from the watermark and will not record that section of the image. All computers and monitors will be DRM enabled so there will be no way of stripping the watermark out before you display it.
TPCA/Palladium is being developed because it is useful for DRM. It may have other uses but they could be achieved in other ways. All security problems (defined as users/programs doing things that the computer owner doesn't want done) can be handled at the firmware/OS level (with the possible addition of a lock on the case so a user can't pull the battery on the CMOS). Putting this functionality in hardware is only necessary if the owner of the computer themselves is not trusted (i.e. a DRM setting).
Why if all this security stuff is such a pressing problem does Windows not allow for only running signed binaries already? Or Linux for that matter? 99 percent of this can be implemented at the OS level already. And the rest could be achieve by flashing a new secure bios. The reason it has not been done is a) there is no real problem that merits it and b) if it was done it would compete with a hardware solution, which is necessary for DRM.
a firewall that cannot run introduced code is something so useful that we will not be able to prevent it
This is true but you don't need TPCA to do this. Putting this functionality at the firmware level is sufficient to achieve what you suggest. In fact I would be suprized if it wasn't done already by specialized vendors. There is a difference between not trusting the computer user and the owner. An organisation can have firewalls with secure firmware such that no one can load any old software on to them without the right codes or keys (without pulling the battery on the CMOS, which is good enough, especially if you have a lock on the case). Putting the functionality in hardware is only useful for stopping the owner of the computer from using it anyway they want.
There is no valid security reason for TPCA. All security problems to do with stopping users from doing stuff the owner of the computer doesn't want done can be handled at the firmware and OS level. This sort of hardware solution is only necessary for DRM where even the owner of the computer isn't trusted. TPCA/Palladium is likely enough to spread through the installed base, leveraged by Microsoft's market share, without any help from the free software community. If it succeeds then free software is dead in the long term, so any cooperation with it is akin to attempted suicide.
Haven't you heard of globalisation? The Congo may be the other side of the world for you but it is just next door as far as the transnational corporations that are driving the war there are concerned. A big war in Africa doesn't just happen. A hundred years ago it would have been the governments of major european powers that called the shots. Now it is large mining corporations, IMF, World Bank, CIA etc. that pull all the strings.
To use your analogy the western "democracies" already have the bull crippled trussed up and are now preparing to slaughter it. They love to play the disinterested bastards who should really get involved and help the poor niggers out, while behind the scenes they are engineering the whole thing, as they did in Rwanda. People are dying in the Congo right now so the west can get diamonds and coltan for next to nothing. I am sure the people of the Congo would be really happy to see the west even more involved.
The most important characteristic of such a system is the false positive rate. A system that flags everyone who passes through will flag 100 percent of terrorists but would be no better than having no system at all. They do not give the false positive rate but it is highly unlikely to be less than 10 percent and may be much larger. Since the ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists is probably on the order of a billion to one a system with an unrealistically low 1 percent false positive rate will flag 10 million non-terrorists for every 0.5 terrorists if it has a 50 percent correct ID rate. Even if you do extra searches on those 10 million people, with a 50 percent correct ID rate the terrorist is just a likely to be in the 990 million people who do not get flagged as in the flagged group.
You need a close to 100 percent correct ID rate and a false positive rate below one in a million, which is probably impossible, before the system would be of any use. However all this assumes that you have pictures of all terrorists. This is just plain impossible, especially in the case of suicide attacks. This is not like bank robbers where there are multiple incidents allowing evidense from witnesses etc. to be used to catch them when they try again. With suicide attack the attackers will likely be model citizens (who will not be on any list) right up until the attack and afterwards any info on them that is gathered is close to useless.