The parent post is quite right. The Third Reich was as successful as it was at rounding up Jews throughout Europe because it was the largest and most advanced user of Herman Hollerith Tabulating Machines in the 1930s and 1940s.
First in their own country, then branching out to their annexed and occupied lands, the Germans took accurate censuses of all the people they ruled. Then, with the aid of tabulators and sorters, they printed out alphabetized lists of those people they wanted to deport to concentration camps.
The countries with the best data (such as Holland) had the most Jewish deaths per capital during the Second World War. Those countries with worse data (such as France) suffered far fewer deaths.
Remember, these were all mechanical machines, requiring a huge, toiling staff to run and maintain them. With the digital computers of today, keeping tabs on the entire population would be a trivial exercise in comparison.
Alright, so when we strip away the breathless excitement of this advertising copy, what do we have?
There are only so many ways to store electrical power: You could pump it into batteries, drive a flywheel, work against gravity by pumping water into a tank, or top up a huge capacitor bank.
My guess is that this is simply an uninterruptable power supply system. Essentially, you have a rectifer on the input, converting alternating current to direct current. The direct current then is pumped into batteries.
Then, to get power out, there's an inverter that's also connected to the batteries. When the algorithm governing the invertor decides to run on batteries, power will be drawn from them instead of from the mains.
Most modern inverters are always on. They switch from the mains to the batteries and back again when the AC crosses at zero volts, with both inputs perfectly in phase. Even your most demanding loads (like the switch-mode power supplies that run a typical PC) will never notice the difference.
So, in summary: AC Mains --> Rectifier --> Batteries --> Inverter --> AC Output
I've been running a Matrox Millennium P650 for the last three years in my PC and I absolutely love it. Matrox video cards rock.
Seriously, when you grow up and stop worrying about the number of 3D pixels you can render per millisecond, do yourself a favor and get yourself a decent card.
Ah, Matrox is goodness itself for 2D GUI applications. Mmm.
Yes parent post, this does sound very Cyberpunk, however it does apply to Gibson too. Consider the exchange where Molly goes to find the Panther Moderns in Gibson's book Neuromancer:
Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. "Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in the chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail. "Hey, Larry." "Molly." He nodded. "I have some work for some of your friends, Larry." Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothing into his head. His eyes narrowed. "Molly's got a rider," he said, "and Larry doesn't like that." "Hey," she said, "I didn't know you were so... sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive." "I know you, lady?" The blank look returned. "You looking to buy some softs?"
If the internet was separated into regions, how much would you lose?
It's funny you ask this question, because just this morning, I was realizing how much of a unifier the Internet is.
I needed to write an e-mail message from Canada to a supplier in Germany. So I wrote the simple sentences myself in German and got Google to translate the tough stuff for me. Of course, machine translation is pretty dodgy, so then I went to google.de to check the machine translation against the entire opus of German searchable texts on the Internet. If this ability was around when I was a kid, I would be a six-language polyglot by now.
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
With the exception of commerical websites, it's really hard to tell where your information is coming from. Even if you limit your searches to English, you're bound to hit popular sites in England, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and who knows where else?
Sometimes I'm curious about a country, so I go and search around it's part of the Internet. The layout of webpages is the same around the world, so once you've got the naviation down pat in one language, you can puzzle your way around another easily.
I surfed a bunch of Icelandic websites once, just to see webpages load with those weird characters that died out from Old English, the thorn and eth characters. (I don't know what character encoding Slashdot uses, so I won't post them here. Go look them up: Thorn's a lowercase b and p put together. Eth looks like a d with a horizontal bar driven through it.)
As a memory exercise, I'm thinking of learning Japanese, just to prove that I can remember two thousand arbitrary-looking ideograms. It's nice that I will be able to test my progress simply by loading up a free Japanese daily paper online and trying to discypher it.
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time. I work for a global company, so I'm often asked to do exactly that. I prefer to communicate with those who write in English, but I'm willing to try my French and German skills out if necessary.
Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
Sure. There seems to be a Google for ever ccTLD around. Why not try some yourself?
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
Personally, I would miss Questionable Content, the Onion, Homestar Runner, and Slashdot. Is Wikipedia also American? If it is, then I'd miss that too.
For news, I prefer the CBC, the BBC, NewScientist, and TheRegister. American news sites seem to be about natural disasters, race violence, crime, and celebrity gossip. So there would be no loss there.
How much more expensive and complicated would it be to access sites outside of 'your' internet, and how much slower would it be?
This is an absolute non-starter. Why would anyone want to regionalize the Internet? The strength is that the Internet really is a universal medium. If I address a message to you@somedomain.com, it doesn't matter where I am in the world -- it will get there.
Compare that to telephone service. I want to dial France? From Canada? Um, that's 011 for international, 33 for France, drop the 0 at the start of the French area code but dial the rest of the area code, then the number. Now let's say I want to dial the same number while travelling in Portugal? Um, I give up! I don't know! It keeps changing!
Seriously, the fact the URLs and e-mail addresses are fixed is one of the best innovations of the last century. My hope is that free, relatively-good machine translation will blossom. Erasing the language barrier will show citizens around the world just how much they have in common. When you can read an Arabic or Punjabi website directly instead of having it filtered through your own local politicians' and media's biases, then you will gain true insight into other people and cultures.
Microsoft wants Drivers in Windows not Firmware
on
No EFI Support for Vista
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article explains quite clearly why Microsoft will not be supporting EFI: Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch.
Obviously, the only real advantage that Microsoft has over other operating systems is that you and plug anything into it and Windows will recognize the device.
If you take the device drivers out of Windows and put them in EFI, then there is a level playing field for operating systems.
If you download the coverage map, you can see that the zone is going to stretch between Spadina (east) and Yonge Street (west), and from Bloor Street (north) to Lake Ontario (south).
Given that people don't wait for a two-state system to cycle to their state, why are they going to wait for a $floor_count state system?
Considering that all the elevators in any given building will be using this system, the lazy, retrograde complainers will have no choice but to adapt to the new system or learn how to climb the stairs.
It's time we ignore the fussy ladies like the one mentioned in the article. If we sent her back in time, she would be complaining that she had to press any type of button instead of just instructing the elevator attendant to take her to her floor.
And oddly enough, if we sent this same lady far, far into the future when elevators are controlled by speech, she probably would refuse to talk to it too. People. They're the worst.
After breaking up with the girl of my dreams after a six year relationship, I decided to spend some time alone. Just last month, I decided it's time to start dating again. Now if I would only leave the house...
I desperately wanted to dial into QuantumLink, but my desire was vetoed by my parents, and I can understand why. The costs would have bankrupted them.
The nearest dial up to QuantumLink was in Toronto, and from my parents' suburban home in Newmarket, this meant a long distance call.
Of course, during the mid 1980s, Bell Canada was the only phone company around, and if you did not like their rates, tough. Bell's non-peak rates were high (somewhere between 40 cents and less than a dollar) for one minute of connection time to Toronto, which was less than 50 kilometers to the south of my home.
I remember wishing my parents had decided to live one town closer to the city: In Aurora, a call to Toronto was priced as a local call, which meant you could dial Toronto all day for free, so long as you paid your monthly bill.
If the CRTC had allowed for telecom competition in my youth, I would have had QuantumLink. I sometimes wonder just how different a person I would have become if I had had that opportunity.
Can someone give an answer for us non-Mac users who have played with a Mac in some retail store? Is there a way to get applications to run full-screen, or must Mac users always worship the Dock?
This article is an excellent guide to the dangers of buying digital music. It puts on paper everything that I have been warning my friends and co-workers about for years.
My hope is that the EFF will produce a second guide, this time for new PCs. If consumers are not impressed with their music being locked down, just imagine how they will feel when everything digital is.
In my workplace, it's unprofessional to show up soaking wet and smelling like a pig, which is what I'd be if tried to rollerblade or bike to work.
Agreed, that's why you should shower once you arrive and change into a new set of clothes which you brought with you to work.
I have the good fortune to work in an office attached to a factory, which for OSHA reasons needs an emergency shower. I shower off, change into dress pants, shirt, and tie, then go sit in my "open concept" office all day.
The only exercise I get in an average week is the bike ride to work to and from work, which is about an hour a day. I just can't describe to you the total feeling of power and control that is possible after having biked to work. Driving a shiny metal box to work and drinking coffee afterwards just does not compare.
Besides, I have to admit that I am actually treated better by my bosses and co-workers. Because I bike, they have come to consider me the healthy, awake and alive, mover and shaker in the office. It gives me credibility that my fatter SUV-driving co-workers can't buy for themselves.
So, returning to the issue at hand: How can our "Ask Slashdot" poster get to work? My answer (sorry) is to cycle there. If there is no where to park at your office, that's fine. Find a place within a 5-10 minute walk that you can park and shower at and change there.
Ignore what you think the fat, ignorant sheep that make up the bulk of the population think. Lead by example. Show that you can exercise, enjoy the outdoors, and save the planet all in one fell swoop.
Incidentally, all that advice that comes out of California doesn't work for the rest of the world. These people ask: "Why not bike everyday to work?" Well, for people like me at 42 degrees North latitude, late fall / all winter / early spring have two distinct problems:
It's pitch black during the morning and evening commutes
It's cold outside, with snow on the ground
I'm sorry, but when my body starts to freeze to a block of solid ice while cycling, it's time to put the bike away.
And finally, to all you bicycle riders out there, a reminder: You are a vehicle on the road. Follow the rules of the road. Drive with traffic. Signal when you turn. Take an entire lane when you need it, and when you don't let others pass. If you do this, motorists won't go to pieces when they pass you, even if they don't want you on the road.
The whole reason that Google is an important company is that it crawls through the publicly-accessible parts of the Internet in order to index its contents.
If Google is to retain its premier position in the search engine market, then it will very much so remain firmly connected to the existing Internet.
This is why I agree with the parent post: It is quite reasonable to believe that Google might require this bandwidth for its own purposes.
There is nothing at all wrong with this. The Internet, after all, is merely a network of networks. All this means is that behind Google's accessible IP addresses lurks a mammoth network of its own.
The parent poster suffers from the mistaken belief that just because people are equal under the law that they must be equal in all rights and abilities too.
Although the specifics may be wrong, the examples of eugenics and phrenology show the importance of biology.
Eugenics has been given a bad rap, mainly because of its association with Nazi Germany's endless promotion of the ideal blond-haired and blue-eyed supermen and -women of tomorrow.
However, look at what our knowledge of DNA has given us today. If we can map the human genome, identify the sequences that cause inherited disease, and can do away with them, is not eugenics a good thing?
Phrenology is considered meaningless pseudoscience because modern science has repudiated that "bumps on the head" do not cause idleness, shiftlessness, and the host of other maladies that affect people.
However, until modern day, people bred and interbred in limited, small, geographical areas. If a population developed certain personal traits, these traits would be carried by the same genome that carries the "bumps on the head". So although the bumps are not proof positive of a certain disease or trait, they could indicate a strong correlation between the two.
We take for granted that we are of different heights, weights, and intellects. Why do we deny that there is a genetic contribution? Surely environment plays a part in how genotypes develop into phenotypes, but just as surely our genes also play a part in who we become.
In summary: We are different. Our genes play a part in these differences. Biology is not our complete destiny, but its contribution to these differences is definitely non-zero.
Until recently, computer hardware engineers were designing products that they themselves would want. Their products were faster, cheaper, smaller, clearer, sharper, or in some other tangible way better than all the designs that preceded their own.
But the specification of this new interface is just another example of how these days are over. Engineers are being mandated to adopt standards in their products that provide no value to the end user. In fact, they are creating designs that hobble and limit the usefulness of the very things they are creating.
Although computer equipment might be getting cheaper with every passing year, the equipment I will be buying in future years will probably be getting more expensive. Equipment that will not have Digital Restrictions Management systems will probably become a rarity, and my definition of an acceptable computer will be pushed to the periphery of the digital world.
Hopefully, the average consumer will decide that these impositions on them and the equipment they lawfully purchase are unacceptable, and the products with Digital Restrictions Management will be chucked along with the companies that support them.
I used to think that Apple was the blonde athlete who ran into the Congress Hall during the Two Minutes Hate and smashed Big Brother's video screen to dust, freeing the grey-skinned slaves who sat before it.
But apparently I was wrong. Apple is The Man on the screen, keeping us all under his thumb with digital restrictions.
Fortunately for Apple, thoughtcrime will soon be impossible. With DRM on every Apple computer, there will come a day when my computer will tell me that the 1984 video is unauthorized and unplayable.
Oh Apple, how I love your DRMed Intel machines. Apple is doubleplusgood!
Slashdot Mirror
The parent post is quite right. The Third Reich was as successful as it was at rounding up Jews throughout Europe because it was the largest and most advanced user of Herman Hollerith Tabulating Machines in the 1930s and 1940s.
First in their own country, then branching out to their annexed and occupied lands, the Germans took accurate censuses of all the people they ruled. Then, with the aid of tabulators and sorters, they printed out alphabetized lists of those people they wanted to deport to concentration camps.
The countries with the best data (such as Holland) had the most Jewish deaths per capital during the Second World War. Those countries with worse data (such as France) suffered far fewer deaths.
Remember, these were all mechanical machines, requiring a huge, toiling staff to run and maintain them. With the digital computers of today, keeping tabs on the entire population would be a trivial exercise in comparison.
You should retract your statement, human #4,321,982,324.
Don't forget we have embarrassing records on you starting from the day you were born.
Sincerely,
- The Authorities
Alright, so when we strip away the breathless excitement of this advertising copy, what do we have?
There are only so many ways to store electrical power: You could pump it into batteries, drive a flywheel, work against gravity by pumping water into a tank, or top up a huge capacitor bank.
My guess is that this is simply an uninterruptable power supply system. Essentially, you have a rectifer on the input, converting alternating current to direct current. The direct current then is pumped into batteries.
Then, to get power out, there's an inverter that's also connected to the batteries. When the algorithm governing the invertor decides to run on batteries, power will be drawn from them instead of from the mains.
Most modern inverters are always on. They switch from the mains to the batteries and back again when the AC crosses at zero volts, with both inputs perfectly in phase. Even your most demanding loads (like the switch-mode power supplies that run a typical PC) will never notice the difference.
So, in summary:
AC Mains --> Rectifier --> Batteries --> Inverter --> AC Output
I've been running a Matrox Millennium P650 for the last three years in my PC and I absolutely love it. Matrox video cards rock.
Seriously, when you grow up and stop worrying about the number of 3D pixels you can render per millisecond, do yourself a favor and get yourself a decent card.
Ah, Matrox is goodness itself for 2D GUI applications. Mmm.
Yes parent post, this does sound very Cyberpunk, however it does apply to Gibson too. Consider the exchange where Molly goes to find the Panther Moderns in Gibson's book Neuromancer:
... sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive."
Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.
"Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in the chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail.
"Hey, Larry."
"Molly." He nodded.
"I have some work for some of your friends, Larry."
Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothing into his head. His eyes narrowed.
"Molly's got a rider," he said, "and Larry doesn't like that."
"Hey," she said, "I didn't know you were so
"I know you, lady?" The blank look returned. "You looking to buy some softs?"
If the internet was separated into regions, how much would you lose?
It's funny you ask this question, because just this morning, I was realizing how much of a unifier the Internet is.
I needed to write an e-mail message from Canada to a supplier in Germany. So I wrote the simple sentences myself in German and got Google to translate the tough stuff for me. Of course, machine translation is pretty dodgy, so then I went to google.de to check the machine translation against the entire opus of German searchable texts on the Internet. If this ability was around when I was a kid, I would be a six-language polyglot by now.
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
With the exception of commerical websites, it's really hard to tell where your information is coming from. Even if you limit your searches to English, you're bound to hit popular sites in England, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and who knows where else?
Sometimes I'm curious about a country, so I go and search around it's part of the Internet. The layout of webpages is the same around the world, so once you've got the naviation down pat in one language, you can puzzle your way around another easily.
I surfed a bunch of Icelandic websites once, just to see webpages load with those weird characters that died out from Old English, the thorn and eth characters. (I don't know what character encoding Slashdot uses, so I won't post them here. Go look them up: Thorn's a lowercase b and p put together. Eth looks like a d with a horizontal bar driven through it.)
As a memory exercise, I'm thinking of learning Japanese, just to prove that I can remember two thousand arbitrary-looking ideograms. It's nice that I will be able to test my progress simply by loading up a free Japanese daily paper online and trying to discypher it.
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time. I work for a global company, so I'm often asked to do exactly that. I prefer to communicate with those who write in English, but I'm willing to try my French and German skills out if necessary.
Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
Sure. There seems to be a Google for ever ccTLD around. Why not try some yourself?
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
Personally, I would miss Questionable Content, the Onion, Homestar Runner, and Slashdot. Is Wikipedia also American? If it is, then I'd miss that too.
For news, I prefer the CBC, the BBC, NewScientist, and TheRegister. American news sites seem to be about natural disasters, race violence, crime, and celebrity gossip. So there would be no loss there.
How much more expensive and complicated would it be to access sites outside of 'your' internet, and how much slower would it be?
This is an absolute non-starter. Why would anyone want to regionalize the Internet? The strength is that the Internet really is a universal medium. If I address a message to you@somedomain.com, it doesn't matter where I am in the world -- it will get there.
Compare that to telephone service. I want to dial France? From Canada? Um, that's 011 for international, 33 for France, drop the 0 at the start of the French area code but dial the rest of the area code, then the number. Now let's say I want to dial the same number while travelling in Portugal? Um, I give up! I don't know! It keeps changing!
Seriously, the fact the URLs and e-mail addresses are fixed is one of the best innovations of the last century. My hope is that free, relatively-good machine translation will blossom. Erasing the language barrier will show citizens around the world just how much they have in common. When you can read an Arabic or Punjabi website directly instead of having it filtered through your own local politicians' and media's biases, then you will gain true insight into other people and cultures.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch.
Obviously, the only real advantage that Microsoft has over other operating systems is that you and plug anything into it and Windows will recognize the device.
If you take the device drivers out of Windows and put them in EFI, then there is a level playing field for operating systems.
Thanks for the list, but you forgot one!
Here's the Toronto Hydro Telecom website, so you can go see for yourself.
If you download the coverage map, you can see that the zone is going to stretch between Spadina (east) and Yonge Street (west), and from Bloor Street (north) to Lake Ontario (south).
In fact, if installation goes very poorly, it might even trash some existing system files, thereby freeing storage capacity.
Given that people don't wait for a two-state system to cycle to their state, why are they going to wait for a $floor_count state system?
Considering that all the elevators in any given building will be using this system, the lazy, retrograde complainers will have no choice but to adapt to the new system or learn how to climb the stairs.
It's time we ignore the fussy ladies like the one mentioned in the article. If we sent her back in time, she would be complaining that she had to press any type of button instead of just instructing the elevator attendant to take her to her floor.
And oddly enough, if we sent this same lady far, far into the future when elevators are controlled by speech, she probably would refuse to talk to it too. People. They're the worst.
I'm 31 years old and it's been three years.
...
After breaking up with the girl of my dreams after a six year relationship, I decided to spend some time alone. Just last month, I decided it's time to start dating again. Now if I would only leave the house
Congratulations go to Stephen Sykes!
Not only was he able to amuse us whimsical ASCII art that won last year, but he won this year too with his PET emulator!
Three cheers! Huzzah!
Whether [a gloalized playing field is] a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
And how much are you willing to pay me for the answer for this particular Amazon HIT?
I desperately wanted to dial into QuantumLink, but my desire was vetoed by my parents, and I can understand why. The costs would have bankrupted them.
The nearest dial up to QuantumLink was in Toronto, and from my parents' suburban home in Newmarket, this meant a long distance call.
Of course, during the mid 1980s, Bell Canada was the only phone company around, and if you did not like their rates, tough. Bell's non-peak rates were high (somewhere between 40 cents and less than a dollar) for one minute of connection time to Toronto, which was less than 50 kilometers to the south of my home.
I remember wishing my parents had decided to live one town closer to the city: In Aurora, a call to Toronto was priced as a local call, which meant you could dial Toronto all day for free, so long as you paid your monthly bill.
If the CRTC had allowed for telecom competition in my youth, I would have had QuantumLink. I sometimes wonder just how different a person I would have become if I had had that opportunity.
Can someone give an answer for us non-Mac users who have played with a Mac in some retail store? Is there a way to get applications to run full-screen, or must Mac users always worship the Dock?
This article is an excellent guide to the dangers of buying digital music. It puts on paper everything that I have been warning my friends and co-workers about for years.
My hope is that the EFF will produce a second guide, this time for new PCs. If consumers are not impressed with their music being locked down, just imagine how they will feel when everything digital is.
Well done, EFF. Well done.
Agreed, that's why you should shower once you arrive and change into a new set of clothes which you brought with you to work.
I have the good fortune to work in an office attached to a factory, which for OSHA reasons needs an emergency shower. I shower off, change into dress pants, shirt, and tie, then go sit in my "open concept" office all day.
The only exercise I get in an average week is the bike ride to work to and from work, which is about an hour a day. I just can't describe to you the total feeling of power and control that is possible after having biked to work. Driving a shiny metal box to work and drinking coffee afterwards just does not compare.
Besides, I have to admit that I am actually treated better by my bosses and co-workers. Because I bike, they have come to consider me the healthy, awake and alive, mover and shaker in the office. It gives me credibility that my fatter SUV-driving co-workers can't buy for themselves.
So, returning to the issue at hand: How can our "Ask Slashdot" poster get to work? My answer (sorry) is to cycle there. If there is no where to park at your office, that's fine. Find a place within a 5-10 minute walk that you can park and shower at and change there.
Ignore what you think the fat, ignorant sheep that make up the bulk of the population think. Lead by example. Show that you can exercise, enjoy the outdoors, and save the planet all in one fell swoop.
Incidentally, all that advice that comes out of California doesn't work for the rest of the world. These people ask: "Why not bike everyday to work?" Well, for people like me at 42 degrees North latitude, late fall / all winter / early spring have two distinct problems:
- It's pitch black during the morning and evening commutes
- It's cold outside, with snow on the ground
I'm sorry, but when my body starts to freeze to a block of solid ice while cycling, it's time to put the bike away.And finally, to all you bicycle riders out there, a reminder: You are a vehicle on the road. Follow the rules of the road. Drive with traffic. Signal when you turn. Take an entire lane when you need it, and when you don't let others pass. If you do this, motorists won't go to pieces when they pass you, even if they don't want you on the road.
Google to create its own Internet? Unlikely.
The whole reason that Google is an important company is that it crawls through the publicly-accessible parts of the Internet in order to index its contents.
If Google is to retain its premier position in the search engine market, then it will very much so remain firmly connected to the existing Internet.
This is why I agree with the parent post: It is quite reasonable to believe that Google might require this bandwidth for its own purposes.
There is nothing at all wrong with this. The Internet, after all, is merely a network of networks. All this means is that behind Google's accessible IP addresses lurks a mammoth network of its own.
The parent poster suffers from the mistaken belief that just because people are equal under the law that they must be equal in all rights and abilities too.
Although the specifics may be wrong, the examples of eugenics and phrenology show the importance of biology.
Eugenics has been given a bad rap, mainly because of its association with Nazi Germany's endless promotion of the ideal blond-haired and blue-eyed supermen and -women of tomorrow.
However, look at what our knowledge of DNA has given us today. If we can map the human genome, identify the sequences that cause inherited disease, and can do away with them, is not eugenics a good thing?
Phrenology is considered meaningless pseudoscience because modern science has repudiated that "bumps on the head" do not cause idleness, shiftlessness, and the host of other maladies that affect people.
However, until modern day, people bred and interbred in limited, small, geographical areas. If a population developed certain personal traits, these traits would be carried by the same genome that carries the "bumps on the head". So although the bumps are not proof positive of a certain disease or trait, they could indicate a strong correlation between the two.
We take for granted that we are of different heights, weights, and intellects. Why do we deny that there is a genetic contribution? Surely environment plays a part in how genotypes develop into phenotypes, but just as surely our genes also play a part in who we become.
In summary: We are different. Our genes play a part in these differences. Biology is not our complete destiny, but its contribution to these differences is definitely non-zero.
you can switch to Linux, which will always be free, always be DRMless ...
Well, not really. Someone could write the drivers to use Digital Restriction Management hardware and authentication routines on Linux machines.
Oh wait, that's already happened.
Of course, your personal version of Linux may not be encumbered with DRM, but that does not mean that Linux as a whole will be free of it.
Until recently, computer hardware engineers were designing products that they themselves would want. Their products were faster, cheaper, smaller, clearer, sharper, or in some other tangible way better than all the designs that preceded their own.
But the specification of this new interface is just another example of how these days are over. Engineers are being mandated to adopt standards in their products that provide no value to the end user. In fact, they are creating designs that hobble and limit the usefulness of the very things they are creating.
Although computer equipment might be getting cheaper with every passing year, the equipment I will be buying in future years will probably be getting more expensive. Equipment that will not have Digital Restrictions Management systems will probably become a rarity, and my definition of an acceptable computer will be pushed to the periphery of the digital world.
Hopefully, the average consumer will decide that these impositions on them and the equipment they lawfully purchase are unacceptable, and the products with Digital Restrictions Management will be chucked along with the companies that support them.
Basically the TPM has the following tasks:
- Monitoring the trustworthiness of the platform it is bound to.
- Providing strong authentication mechanisms for identifying the platform.
- Providing secure storage for the users keys and secrets.
- Providing additional cryptographic services to applications.
By "platform" the author means your PC.This is great news. Now our PCs will not trust us.
I imagine the Woz would be deeply disappointed by all this TCPA/TPM DRM nonsense.
Has anyone interviewed him about it yet?
Apple seems to always be focused on having a high-quality user experience.
Agreed. That is why many here on Slashdot are having a hard time with hardware DRM on Apple's Intel machines.
Really, can you think of one reason why a user would want DRM on his or her machine?
By adding the Infineon 1.1 chip to its motherboards, Apple is telling the world that it is now making machines for copyright holders, not for users.
So who became more evil Apple or Microsoft?
I used to think that Apple was the blonde athlete who ran into the Congress Hall during the Two Minutes Hate and smashed Big Brother's video screen to dust, freeing the grey-skinned slaves who sat before it.
But apparently I was wrong. Apple is The Man on the screen, keeping us all under his thumb with digital restrictions.
Fortunately for Apple, thoughtcrime will soon be impossible. With DRM on every Apple computer, there will come a day when my computer will tell me that the 1984 video is unauthorized and unplayable.
Oh Apple, how I love your DRMed Intel machines. Apple is doubleplusgood!