Lazarus Long once said, "Societies abide by the morals they can afford."
America was able to afford some pretty decent civil liberties. Compared to most, we still do. However, the Bush Administration is arguing that we can no longer afford the civil rights we've enjoyed for over two centuries. If that's truly the case, then we're screwed. And if it's not... then they're still lying to us. I know which explanation I prefer.
They have a well-paid staff of people whose only function is to raise such objections. Of course, if they blatantly update Office to simply not allow such add-ons they might get in some hot water, antitrust-wise.
Small change can often be found under seat cushions. Money is a powerful aphrodisiac... but flowers work almost as well. An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss. If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science. It is opinion. Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous (he is also a fool.) Never try and teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent. Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect. There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is not evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it? Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth. Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters. A generation which ignores history has no past--and no future. A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it! History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. Your enemy is never a villian in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -- and quickly. No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield, or on it." Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome. Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing---with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for the second and third place. Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. It is better to copulate than never. All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can, and must, be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly---and no doubt will keep on trying. A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate. There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk. When the need arises -- and it does -- you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don't farm it out -- that doesn't make it nicer, it makes it worse. Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks. It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier. One man's theology is another man's belly laugh. Sex should be friendly. Otherwise, stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary. Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled
No kidding. PDF support alone is worth the price of admission to Open Office (or would be, if there was one... price, that is), particularly when you consider what Adobe's Acrobat tools cost. They wouldn't buy me Acrobat at work: I was always bugging someone in Marketing to convert my doc files to PDFs for me (I often send documentation to customers and PDF is the preferred method.) So I installed Open Office and that was that.
Besides which, the GP's comment about "so '95" is pretty funny, considering how many people still use those old versions of Microsoft Office to earn their daily bread, and are perfectly happy with them because they do the job. The problem is that such technology is becoming fairly mature: there's not much that most users need that modern office suites can't do. Realistically, the last ten years of Microsoft Office has been about making gratuitous changes ("Hey! Let's rearrange the Edit menu again!") and adding more bloat in order to sell the next upgrade cycle. How many people have upgraded their MS-Office because there was some vital feature missing in their current version? Not many, I'll wager... but a lot have upgraded because one way or another Microsoft pushed them into it.
This plug-in is sheer genius on Sun's part, and is one hell of a tweak to Microsoft's nose. If there's anyone that can be trusted to actually make it work properly it is probably Sun, who has both a reputation for solid code and an intimate knowledge of ODF. That will lend it quite an air of legitimacy. Completely knocks the props out of a lot of Microsoft compatibility FUD too (or will, if the thing works as advertised.)
Of course, I would fully expect Microsoft to make Office incompatible with such plug-ins at some point, or maybe just lobby to have them made illegal.
increase the energy density by a factor of twenty... and then put a bullet or a bayonet through it.
I don't want to be anywhere near the grunt that gets hit wearing one of those things, and they'd better damn well specify in any production contracts that Sony is not to be an alternate source.
They wouldn't... but it's still an issue when you're a very large company with a layered product line: you really don't want to see your low end products becoming as capable as your higher end (read: much more expensive) products. You'll be cannibalizing sales of the more profitable products. As I mentioned in a previous post, I run a Linksys WRT54G with alternate firmware: it's so much more capable than the stock firmware that it isn't funny.
From a feature standpoint, there's no real reason that a low-end router box couldn't do everything that a much more costly device could do. It's just software, and its largely readily-available open source stuff at that. Sure, the cheap box won't have the reliability or performance of the higher-end product, but people will often buy solely on price. So, I can understand why a Cisco wouldn't want Linksys' stuff to get too powerful. On the other hand, I don't want to be restricted in what I can do with my own property either.
A random binary flash will not be able to functionally replace an engineered program.
I don't think that's what the GP meant. What he's saying is that firmware can be replaced, and if it's replaced with a functional open-source product then the FCC-mandated closed-source radio just became an open-source radio. Furthermore, it will probably be a better device because the reason people write such replacements is to improve upon the original.
For example, I'm using a Linksys WRT54G V4 wireless router using alternate open source firmware. Works very well, actually, and gives me a ton of features that weren't in the manufacturer's own code. The GUI is a polished AJAX-based design and I get substantially faster throughput. Hell, I even managed to flash it without destroying anything.
Now, I grant that the reason so many alternate firmware packages exist for Linksys equipment is because the vendor released their code under the GPL (kicking and screaming, but they did it.) However, my perspective is that I now have a more featureful, more secure product because of open source. Under the FCC's view of things, I'd have been stuck with Linksys' less secure, less functional offering. Matter of fact, the original firmware didn't do the things I need, and I wouldn't have bought the WRT54G in the first place. Linksys got a sale out of me because of open source, and if they had half a brain they'd fire their firmware developers and hire the guy who wrote the code I'm using now.
Interestingly enough, Linksys eventually released models of the WRT54 that didn't use the Linux kernel of the older units, and had too little flash and RAM to run it. There was sufficient hue-and-cry over that decision that the company released a new router that could run the various open-source firmware packages because the market demanded it.
The FCC got this one wrong, and I might add not for the first time.
Yes indeed. Which is no different than what IBM, Microsoft, Sun and all the other big boys do with their patent portfolios. Play nice with each other, and squeeze out the little guy, or any company that isn't part of their club.
And like I said, it would take a somewhat enlightened viewpoint to realize that everyone benefits from a large and growing public domain. The problem is, we aren't part of the "everyone" they care about. The arrogant presumption made by these assholes is that nothing useful can be created unless it comes from their library of pet performers (or their research facilities.) The guy writing a brilliant manuscript in his basement, or the inventor figuring out something useful in his kitchen, are the precisely the kind of people they want to own, and that the Constitution strove to protect. In the past publishers had an advantage: they controlled the means of content production and distribution. They've lost that in the Internet age, which is why they're focusing so much on legal means to maintain their leverage. It's all they have left.
Oh I agree... tip of the iceberg and all that. No question the world has large numbers of seriously malfunctioning individuals. But even so, I don't want the government exerting any more control over our lives than it already does, in yet another vain quest to make us "safer". It never, ever works out the way they promise, and in the end we're all the poorer for it.
Ask yourself this: what level of control would the government have to put in place in order to keep that 2% in line? None of the really bad stuff happens out in the open, so all the public cameras in the world won't stop it. You might get some results if put surveillance in people's homes, I suppose, but I don't like that idea either. Worse yet, all the really sociopathic behavior happens on golf courses, and in government offices and corporate boardrooms... okay, so maybe those would be good places to put a few cameras and microphones.
According to your estimates, that means 2% of the population does murder women and molest dogs. That's a lot of people, in the U.S. alone that would be approximately six million dog-fondling lady-killers are roaming the streets with impunity.
If were a woman or a dog, I'd never set foot outdoors.
*If he's sold all rights to a publishing house, then it's the publishing house's loss.
In the long run, it's also the publishing house's gain: a vast public domain is important for the creation of new and derivative works. Of course, you have to have a somewhat enlightened (for a publisher) view of the business to grasp that fact. Additionally, you must be willing to give up the temporary advantage afforded by copyright (one which, according to the Constitution, was never your property, even though most seem to regard it as such) for long term gain.
The RIAA (being about as unenlightened as it is possible to get) don't realize that because their member companies do not. None of the big media corporations do, so far as I'm aware: they just hang on to their copyrights as if nobody was ever going to produce anything new ever again. Worse, their policies are making it harder and harder for anyone to do just that.
The idea of an ecosystem, where everyone takes out more than they put in, is largely beyond these people.
This is a disease, it is called "unaccountability", and there are many people in our government that are infected by it. The only cure to this disease is a degree of transparency that is currently lacking.
On the other hand there might be an argument for banning phone lines which keep people on hold, playing bad music for half an hour, them connect to someone in India... Especially if they cost the caller money.
I'd vote for that one. Why they even pretend to call that "customer service" is beyond me. I deal with this sort of thing at work now and then, when I have to call for "technical support" for some product or other we're using. Hell, my ISP does the same thing, "NO I'M NOT GOING TO POWER CYCLE THE DAMN MODEM AGAIN AND I'M NOT BYPASSING MY FIREWALL!" Honestly, after a couple of hours on the phone with someone who might as well be speaking encrypted Swahili for all I can tell, well... let's just say I need some fresh air. I'll say this much: if America continues on its third-world decline, and India ends up outsourcing their technical support to us, I'm gonna get me a job answering the phone.
"Please power cycle your modem and turn off your firewall." They say payback's a bitch.
But this is exactly the problem. There is no simple fix..
No argument.
However, limiting the content available to entire societies to suit some arbitrary least-common-denominator psychotic is most definitely not a fix. Not even heading in the right direction... besides, if someone is truly that dangerous they should be l o c k e d - u p, psychotherapy or not. If they are not that dangerous, the rest of us should not be restricted in what we can see and hear, simply because some of that might (might, mind you) send somebody postal.
Any individual who is so on the edge of sanity that watching some pornography would tip them into deadly psychosis will sooner or later be set off by something, regardless of what is available on the Internet. Besides which, is this politician even aware that the Internet is actually a global network, and that other countries needn't abide by his silly little regulation? Unless what he wants is more along the lines of a "Great Porno Filter of Great Britain" or something similar, because that's what it would take.
Maybe the idea of all this nonsense (and we get plenty of it here in America too, believe me) is just to get us so inured to these dangerous ideas that we just give up and accept them. It is getting truly tiresome.
Maybe... but not for the really important tasks. The stuff that Google uses to provide end-user services is not the same equipment they have for important internal functions. For example, payroll and accounting at Google are provided by software running on big iron. Such things are far too important to be left to GFS and a bunch of cheap rack-mounts.
You don't "follow British politics closely enough" but you know enough to make a sweeping statement like "The UK is quite quickly becoming the creepiest democratic country in the world"?
Two things: A. this is Slashdot, where such things are commonplace and expected, so deal with it, and B. as an American I've been on the receiving end of quite a number of such sweeping generalities from Europeans of all stripes, so I have little sympathy for you. What you're saying is that you resent a foreigner presuming that all Britishers are the same, and that none of you object to the bad things that are going on in your country. I can respect that, because we feel the same way. So the next time you read a post that starts out "Americans are all obese, SUV-driving, war-mongering, Bush-loving jackasses that want to take over the world" you'll realize you aren't the only people subject to gross generalizations. Well, okay, the obese part isn't far from the truth (75% of us are clinically obese, so I'll give you that one.) The irony in our case is that we are so fractious a nation that it's actually hard for us to get anything important done, particularly if it takes a sustained effort We seem do be doing alright with our own camera network, though.
And I'm sorry, but given the number of cameras you people have watching your every move... England is creepy. The GP thoroughly understated the matter... England isn't "quickly becoming" the creepiest democratic country in the world. It already is. East Germany, during its heyday, would have been impressed with your efforts to keep an eye on each other.
Now, having said that, and after passing a couple of dozen pole-mounted cameras on my way home from work today (I know there are more but that's all that were visible) I can state with some authority that America isn't far behind you in overall creepiness. It disturbs me more than a little that England, the nation that built the world's greatest Empire, the originator of the Industrial Revolution itself, has been reduced to such a state. It saddens me even more that my own country has chosen to follow in its footsteps.
if you're a major business operation, and you have the usual multiple terabytes of data that needs to be stored and processed with near-100% reliability, you need big iron. My company has an AS400, and it does a lot of things that we'd be hard pressed to accomplish using PCs. Predicting the demise of the mainframe is like predicting the demise of our economy. You'd best hope it doesn't ever actually happen.
At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind.
Man, the bullshit is really flowing now. If I may be serious for a moment, the reality is that the only unbalanced minds worth concerning ourselves about receive government paychecks.
Here's the thing. Why don't the British and United States governments just come out and admit it: they really like the way the Chinese do things, and would like to be just like them. Freedom of speech? Screw that. The Internet? Dangerous toy. Popularity Ratings? Phooey. We don't care what you think. The Rule of Law? An inconvenience.
I have some advice for the lawmakers in both countries: stop sprinkling this shit with sugar in a vain effort to make it more palatable: it's always been shit, it's still shit, and it will always be shit, and trying to convince us that your shit don't stink just insults our collective intelligence.
I gotta tell ya: in spite of all the efforts the Federal Government has made to rationalize this same kind of shit, even the really stupid, complacent "it'll never happen here" people I know are beginning to notice the stench. It's getting that bad.
I've realized that what I know is a minuscule fraction of what the universe has to offer.
Good. You've come to the conclusion that Man doesn't know everything yet, and have further realized that simple ignorance does not imply the existence of God. That's all you really need to know. The rest will come in time, even if we never live to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Lazarus Long once said, "Societies abide by the morals they can afford."
... then they're still lying to us. I know which explanation I prefer.
America was able to afford some pretty decent civil liberties. Compared to most, we still do. However, the Bush Administration is arguing that we can no longer afford the civil rights we've enjoyed for over two centuries. If that's truly the case, then we're screwed. And if it's not
Looks pretty slick. Thanks for the tip ... I think this might come in handy at work.
They have a well-paid staff of people whose only function is to raise such objections. Of course, if they blatantly update Office to simply not allow such add-ons they might get in some hot water, antitrust-wise.
I hear Sony is making batteries from the stuff now. They're trademarked as "Cordite".
I dunno ... he definitely had cojones. I'm going to go with Testicles.
Heinlein did hit a lot of nails on the head:
... but flowers work almost as well.
Small change can often be found under seat cushions.
Money is a powerful aphrodisiac
An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science. It is opinion.
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous (he is also a fool.)
Never try and teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is not evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.
A generation which ignores history has no past--and no future.
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it!
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
Your enemy is never a villian in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -- and quickly.
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield, or on it." Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing---with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for the second and third place.
Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
It is better to copulate than never.
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can, and must, be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly---and no doubt will keep on trying.
A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.
There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk.
When the need arises -- and it does -- you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don't farm it out -- that doesn't make it nicer, it makes it worse.
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Sex should be friendly. Otherwise, stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled
They're not sure. Nobody's been able to ping him for ages, but that might be just his firewall.
No kidding. PDF support alone is worth the price of admission to Open Office (or would be, if there was one ... price, that is), particularly when you consider what Adobe's Acrobat tools cost. They wouldn't buy me Acrobat at work: I was always bugging someone in Marketing to convert my doc files to PDFs for me (I often send documentation to customers and PDF is the preferred method.) So I installed Open Office and that was that.
... but a lot have upgraded because one way or another Microsoft pushed them into it.
Besides which, the GP's comment about "so '95" is pretty funny, considering how many people still use those old versions of Microsoft Office to earn their daily bread, and are perfectly happy with them because they do the job. The problem is that such technology is becoming fairly mature: there's not much that most users need that modern office suites can't do. Realistically, the last ten years of Microsoft Office has been about making gratuitous changes ("Hey! Let's rearrange the Edit menu again!") and adding more bloat in order to sell the next upgrade cycle. How many people have upgraded their MS-Office because there was some vital feature missing in their current version? Not many, I'll wager
This plug-in is sheer genius on Sun's part, and is one hell of a tweak to Microsoft's nose. If there's anyone that can be trusted to actually make it work properly it is probably Sun, who has both a reputation for solid code and an intimate knowledge of ODF. That will lend it quite an air of legitimacy. Completely knocks the props out of a lot of Microsoft compatibility FUD too (or will, if the thing works as advertised.)
Of course, I would fully expect Microsoft to make Office incompatible with such plug-ins at some point, or maybe just lobby to have them made illegal.
increase the energy density by a factor of twenty ... and then put a bullet or a bayonet through it.
I don't want to be anywhere near the grunt that gets hit wearing one of those things, and they'd better damn well specify in any production contracts that Sony is not to be an alternate source.
They wouldn't ... but it's still an issue when you're a very large company with a layered product line: you really don't want to see your low end products becoming as capable as your higher end (read: much more expensive) products. You'll be cannibalizing sales of the more profitable products. As I mentioned in a previous post, I run a Linksys WRT54G with alternate firmware: it's so much more capable than the stock firmware that it isn't funny.
From a feature standpoint, there's no real reason that a low-end router box couldn't do everything that a much more costly device could do. It's just software, and its largely readily-available open source stuff at that. Sure, the cheap box won't have the reliability or performance of the higher-end product, but people will often buy solely on price. So, I can understand why a Cisco wouldn't want Linksys' stuff to get too powerful. On the other hand, I don't want to be restricted in what I can do with my own property either.
A random binary flash will not be able to functionally replace an engineered program.
I don't think that's what the GP meant. What he's saying is that firmware can be replaced, and if it's replaced with a functional open-source product then the FCC-mandated closed-source radio just became an open-source radio. Furthermore, it will probably be a better device because the reason people write such replacements is to improve upon the original.
For example, I'm using a Linksys WRT54G V4 wireless router using alternate open source firmware. Works very well, actually, and gives me a ton of features that weren't in the manufacturer's own code. The GUI is a polished AJAX-based design and I get substantially faster throughput. Hell, I even managed to flash it without destroying anything.
Now, I grant that the reason so many alternate firmware packages exist for Linksys equipment is because the vendor released their code under the GPL (kicking and screaming, but they did it.) However, my perspective is that I now have a more featureful, more secure product because of open source. Under the FCC's view of things, I'd have been stuck with Linksys' less secure, less functional offering. Matter of fact, the original firmware didn't do the things I need, and I wouldn't have bought the WRT54G in the first place. Linksys got a sale out of me because of open source, and if they had half a brain they'd fire their firmware developers and hire the guy who wrote the code I'm using now.
Interestingly enough, Linksys eventually released models of the WRT54 that didn't use the Linux kernel of the older units, and had too little flash and RAM to run it. There was sufficient hue-and-cry over that decision that the company released a new router that could run the various open-source firmware packages because the market demanded it.
The FCC got this one wrong, and I might add not for the first time.
Do any such countries exist?
Probably not anymore.
What would the "copyright cops" do if they found a "pirate bay" type site in a country that refused to enforce "western IP rights"?
Send ICBMs.
Yes indeed. Which is no different than what IBM, Microsoft, Sun and all the other big boys do with their patent portfolios. Play nice with each other, and squeeze out the little guy, or any company that isn't part of their club.
And like I said, it would take a somewhat enlightened viewpoint to realize that everyone benefits from a large and growing public domain. The problem is, we aren't part of the "everyone" they care about. The arrogant presumption made by these assholes is that nothing useful can be created unless it comes from their library of pet performers (or their research facilities.) The guy writing a brilliant manuscript in his basement, or the inventor figuring out something useful in his kitchen, are the precisely the kind of people they want to own, and that the Constitution strove to protect. In the past publishers had an advantage: they controlled the means of content production and distribution. They've lost that in the Internet age, which is why they're focusing so much on legal means to maintain their leverage. It's all they have left.
Oh I agree ... tip of the iceberg and all that. No question the world has large numbers of seriously malfunctioning individuals. But even so, I don't want the government exerting any more control over our lives than it already does, in yet another vain quest to make us "safer". It never, ever works out the way they promise, and in the end we're all the poorer for it.
... okay, so maybe those would be good places to put a few cameras and microphones.
Ask yourself this: what level of control would the government have to put in place in order to keep that 2% in line? None of the really bad stuff happens out in the open, so all the public cameras in the world won't stop it. You might get some results if put surveillance in people's homes, I suppose, but I don't like that idea either. Worse yet, all the really sociopathic behavior happens on golf courses, and in government offices and corporate boardrooms
According to your estimates, that means 2% of the population does murder women and molest dogs. That's a lot of people, in the U.S. alone that would be approximately six million dog-fondling lady-killers are roaming the streets with impunity.
If were a woman or a dog, I'd never set foot outdoors.
*If he's sold all rights to a publishing house, then it's the publishing house's loss.
In the long run, it's also the publishing house's gain: a vast public domain is important for the creation of new and derivative works. Of course, you have to have a somewhat enlightened (for a publisher) view of the business to grasp that fact. Additionally, you must be willing to give up the temporary advantage afforded by copyright (one which, according to the Constitution, was never your property, even though most seem to regard it as such) for long term gain.
The RIAA (being about as unenlightened as it is possible to get) don't realize that because their member companies do not. None of the big media corporations do, so far as I'm aware: they just hang on to their copyrights as if nobody was ever going to produce anything new ever again. Worse, their policies are making it harder and harder for anyone to do just that.
The idea of an ecosystem, where everyone takes out more than they put in, is largely beyond these people.
This is a disease, it is called "unaccountability", and there are many people in our government that are infected by it. The only cure to this disease is a degree of transparency that is currently lacking.
On the other hand there might be an argument for banning phone lines which keep people on hold, playing bad music for half an hour, them connect to someone in India... Especially if they cost the caller money.
... let's just say I need some fresh air. I'll say this much: if America continues on its third-world decline, and India ends up outsourcing their technical support to us, I'm gonna get me a job answering the phone.
I'd vote for that one. Why they even pretend to call that "customer service" is beyond me. I deal with this sort of thing at work now and then, when I have to call for "technical support" for some product or other we're using. Hell, my ISP does the same thing, "NO I'M NOT GOING TO POWER CYCLE THE DAMN MODEM AGAIN AND I'M NOT BYPASSING MY FIREWALL!" Honestly, after a couple of hours on the phone with someone who might as well be speaking encrypted Swahili for all I can tell, well
"Please power cycle your modem and turn off your firewall." They say payback's a bitch.
But this is exactly the problem. There is no simple fix..
... besides, if someone is truly that dangerous they should be l o c k e d - u p, psychotherapy or not. If they are not that dangerous, the rest of us should not be restricted in what we can see and hear, simply because some of that might (might, mind you) send somebody postal.
No argument.
However, limiting the content available to entire societies to suit some arbitrary least-common-denominator psychotic is most definitely not a fix. Not even heading in the right direction
Any individual who is so on the edge of sanity that watching some pornography would tip them into deadly psychosis will sooner or later be set off by something, regardless of what is available on the Internet. Besides which, is this politician even aware that the Internet is actually a global network, and that other countries needn't abide by his silly little regulation? Unless what he wants is more along the lines of a "Great Porno Filter of Great Britain" or something similar, because that's what it would take.
Maybe the idea of all this nonsense (and we get plenty of it here in America too, believe me) is just to get us so inured to these dangerous ideas that we just give up and accept them. It is getting truly tiresome.
I think you think too highly of our collective intelligence.
Now that may be. But they are getting more and more obvious about it.
Maybe ... but not for the really important tasks. The stuff that Google uses to provide end-user services is not the same equipment they have for important internal functions. For example, payroll and accounting at Google are provided by software running on big iron. Such things are far too important to be left to GFS and a bunch of cheap rack-mounts.
You don't "follow British politics closely enough" but you know enough to make a sweeping statement like "The UK is quite quickly becoming the creepiest democratic country in the world"?
... England is creepy. The GP thoroughly understated the matter ... England isn't "quickly becoming" the creepiest democratic country in the world. It already is. East Germany, during its heyday, would have been impressed with your efforts to keep an eye on each other.
Two things: A. this is Slashdot, where such things are commonplace and expected, so deal with it, and B. as an American I've been on the receiving end of quite a number of such sweeping generalities from Europeans of all stripes, so I have little sympathy for you. What you're saying is that you resent a foreigner presuming that all Britishers are the same, and that none of you object to the bad things that are going on in your country. I can respect that, because we feel the same way. So the next time you read a post that starts out "Americans are all obese, SUV-driving, war-mongering, Bush-loving jackasses that want to take over the world" you'll realize you aren't the only people subject to gross generalizations. Well, okay, the obese part isn't far from the truth (75% of us are clinically obese, so I'll give you that one.) The irony in our case is that we are so fractious a nation that it's actually hard for us to get anything important done, particularly if it takes a sustained effort We seem do be doing alright with our own camera network, though.
And I'm sorry, but given the number of cameras you people have watching your every move
Now, having said that, and after passing a couple of dozen pole-mounted cameras on my way home from work today (I know there are more but that's all that were visible) I can state with some authority that America isn't far behind you in overall creepiness. It disturbs me more than a little that England, the nation that built the world's greatest Empire, the originator of the Industrial Revolution itself, has been reduced to such a state. It saddens me even more that my own country has chosen to follow in its footsteps.
if you're a major business operation, and you have the usual multiple terabytes of data that needs to be stored and processed with near-100% reliability, you need big iron. My company has an AS400, and it does a lot of things that we'd be hard pressed to accomplish using PCs. Predicting the demise of the mainframe is like predicting the demise of our economy. You'd best hope it doesn't ever actually happen.
At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind.
Man, the bullshit is really flowing now. If I may be serious for a moment, the reality is that the only unbalanced minds worth concerning ourselves about receive government paychecks.
Here's the thing. Why don't the British and United States governments just come out and admit it: they really like the way the Chinese do things, and would like to be just like them. Freedom of speech? Screw that. The Internet? Dangerous toy. Popularity Ratings? Phooey. We don't care what you think. The Rule of Law? An inconvenience.
I have some advice for the lawmakers in both countries: stop sprinkling this shit with sugar in a vain effort to make it more palatable: it's always been shit, it's still shit, and it will always be shit, and trying to convince us that your shit don't stink just insults our collective intelligence.
I gotta tell ya: in spite of all the efforts the Federal Government has made to rationalize this same kind of shit, even the really stupid, complacent "it'll never happen here" people I know are beginning to notice the stench. It's getting that bad.
I've realized that what I know is a minuscule fraction of what the universe has to offer.
Good. You've come to the conclusion that Man doesn't know everything yet, and have further realized that simple ignorance does not imply the existence of God. That's all you really need to know. The rest will come in time, even if we never live to see it.