Most other countries have cowed their corporations into not being as overtly out to get the consumer.
Can't say I agree with you. Most people I know in other countries (and I know a few) often have a lot of rather negative things to say about their Internet Service Providers. Corporations habitually rip off their customers, they do it in every country on the planet, and ISPs are no exception. That is particularly true in nations that have a single, national phone company that also happens to be the only legal purveyor of Internet services.
America's corporations exert a lot of undue influence upon our government, it is true... but that sort of behavior is hardly limited to the U.S. I think it's probably fair to say that the bulk of nations have their fair share of corporate and governmental corruption: in many cases it's damn near institutionalized.
So, if you're truly paranoid about informational attack, make sure your crucial systems are as secure as possible, and also varied in configuration, so that no single attack can take out all of them.
Excellent advice... the principle of biodiversity applied to computer systems. However, in this case paranoia has nothing to do with it: it is not an unreasonable fear that China (or any other nation) would use our computing infrastructure against us.
That would allow ISP's to present customers with clear service choices in an economically viable model.
You're assuming that ISPs have a recognizable business ethic. They don't. You're further assuming that they are interested in providing the best possible service scenario for the fees they charge. They aren't. Worse yet, your fundamental assumption that criminalizing encryption and giving ISPs total control of the type of traffic crossing their networks would do anything but trigger yet another round of price increases and lowered service levels. These simply aren't people that can be trusted with that kind of power, and ultimately that is what the Net Neutrality controversy is all about.
Look up the term "common carrier", realize that ISPs (even those that are also phone companies) are generally not common carriers, and maybe you'll grasp what your proposal actually means to the consumer. In any event, your thoughts are local in scope: the Internet has been a global phenomenon for some time and all outlawing encryption in one nation will do is help competing nations, one way or another. Bad idea.
Also, I have no idea where you get the flawed idea that my being able to encrypt my own communications to prevent anyone from reading it has anything to do with "avoiding security" or "hacking". You need to understand what those words mean first. I'm sure there are any number of Slashdotters that would be happy to fill in your knowledge gaps for you.
Illinois. I would hope it's not standard practice. It did seem to be one of those testing-the-waters situations, where they push the envelope a little to see what kind of reaction they get. A town I lived in about fifteen years ago had a situation where the local police had put in mobile radar cameras and begun issuing automated speeding tickets. There was a huge uproar and the cops had to get rid of them, after expressing "disappointment" at the "poor judgment" of the town's population.
That was then: now they're listening in to what have previously been considered private conversations. And given the court system's tolerance of law enforcement monitoring pretty much anything outside the home, I suspect this will hold up as well, particularly if use the "T" word to justify it. In reality this is just another way to increase the take from a selective tax.
It's a circular phenomenon. The ongoing failure of America's educational systems is producing a vast number of individuals with limited critical-thinking skills and no grasp of scientific method. These minds are fertile ground for irrational and unsupportable belief systems such as Creationism, yet you can't ignore the people who hold such beliefs simply because they are ignorant. They are dangerous because they make considerable efforts to acquire influence, and to inculcate others in their dubious thought processes. Worse yet, they eventually become part of the aforementioned plutocracy, which magnifies their power and influence manyfold.
If civilization is to survive and avoid another Dark Age, we're going to have to fight on multiple fronts. It's not going to be easy, because willful ignorance is a powerful force. It's easy to simply dismiss Creationists and the like as the foolish, uninformed people that they are. That's a serious mistake, though, because they are organized and have a definite agenda.
I slowly get a hunch just why the government is suddenly so keen on supporting religion and faith based education...
It just took them a century of decimating our schools first. Government has accomplished this (not through any specific actions, but by simply relaxing standards and allowing schools to churn out graduates with oatmeal for brains) to such good effect that people in this country will, by and large, believe anything. It astounds me how many people I know honestly think that belief is more powerful than fact, that the Universe is as they would wish it to be, rather than as it is.
Fact is, we live in the Golden Age of the Talking Head, and as long as the Head we happen to be watching has a nice hairdo we'll take whatever it's saying at face value. Don't believe me? Just look at what we've been putting in the White House these past thirty-odd years. It is worrisome, since America is under attack from several quarters, including an overreaching government that just won't back off. If there's any one thing We the People desperately need at this point in our history, it is the ability to think clearly. We can't afford too many more mistakes, and frankly our Creationist friends are not helping.
Put it this way, if your mental faculties are so bereft of logic and reason that you are capable of accepting the Bible as historical fact, as the literal Word of God, then you're also an easy mark for the first demagogue to come along, for the first politician that says whatever you want to hear. And those guys are very good at telling us what we want to hear: it's their stock-in-trade. So yes, I tend to agree with you about so-called faith-based education.
And I'm not picking solely on Christians here: whenever I say "Bible" or "Word of God", feel free to substitute your own Holy Book and your own personal Supreme Being. Pick your poison, it's all the same in the end. The powers of unreason that kept humanity in the dark for thousands of years are alive and well, haven't changed their agenda one whit, and have one of their most powerful tools in organized religion.
This was never the case for military grade equipment in the past.
Not so. The military has long found that it is sometimes more efficient to simply discard malfunctioning equipment. Remember, cost is not so much an issue as availability. A radio that's out for repairs is unavailable, and the cost of that unavailability can be higher than the price tag of a brand new unit. Trained service technicians are not always on hand either, particularly under battlefield conditions.
My father was in the military a long time ago, and the techs he know would often just tag a piece of electronic equipment as "unrepairable" when the only thing wrong was something like a busted knob. That's because new equipment was readily available, tech time was expensive and limited and it just wasn't worth their time to try and fix it. They had more important things to do.
An intelligent child can certainly possess a measure of critical-thinking ability, one which is unadulterated by the learned preconceptions of their elders. Adults are often blinded by their own mental programming, by their own expectations of reality: children have had no such limitations imposed upon them yet.
If you drive on a public highway, you have no expectation of privacy.
You got that right. In my state the cops are using shotgun microphones to eavesdrop on passing cars. I know someone who was pulled over and had her car and her person searched because a passenger said the word "pot". I don't know in what context, but apparently the mere utterance of certain keywords is considered probable cause.
Makes me wonder if a mounting transducers to each window and feeding them a nice pink-noise signal would restore a measure of privacy to rolling conversations.
The real money is in taking existing ideas and twisting the idea just far enough to make it work in a fantastic new way.
Yes, that's called progress and it's precisely what the patent (and copyright) systems were set up to foster. Given current trends in the area of "intellectual property" (the current hot market sector... if you're a lawyer) the bigger question is whether or not America's best and brightest will be allowed to take an existing idea and do anything with it. We're locking down ideas (good and bad, and even bad ideas often be twisted into good ones with a little skull sweat) at an increasing pace. When the day comes when you can't have a creative thought without owing somebody a royalty, it really won't matter if you're a Google-killer. You'll never get off the ground.
Twenty-five years? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool science-fiction fan, have a substantial collection of sci-fi-books, have watched thousands of science fiction movies... but twenty-five minutes of Tron was too much. Not that Tron even vaguely resembled science-fiction, any more than Star Wars did.
Lots of small groups have extraordinary influence, politically, in this country.
Squeaky wheel gets the oil and all that. Some groups have influence that is far out of proportion to their actual value to society. Personally, I think we need to form a Slashdot Geek Squad and send some of the more literate and charismatic members among us to Washington to properly educate our lawmakers on these important technical and scientific issues.
Always assuming that such a thing as a literate, charismatic Slashdotter actually exists.
I've been burnt by returns being sold as new by Best Buy on several occasions. I always thought it was illegal to sell used products as new, but apparently not.
By way of example, I bought a cordless phone there, one that came with a couple of extra handsets. The box was shrinkwrapped, with lots of official-looking stickers all over it. When I got home and opened it, I discovered that the contents were all scuffed and beat up and the displays were almost unreadable, like somebody had sandpapered them. Only the base station worked, but it was pretty messed up as well. So I drove right back to Best Buy to return or exchange it, and was told that "I must have damaged it." What the HELL? After an unpleasant altercation with a so-called "manager" I was graced with a store credit (forget about an actual refund.) Absolutely incredible.
This was a few years ago, and maybe they've improved their dubious customer service (and I use the term loosely) since, but from what I'm reading here I doubt it. It really pissed me off, because obviously some idiot took the return the first time and happily repackaged it. I still wonder how many people that phone went through before someone finally decided to trash it.
Now, to be fair, other stores pull the same crap. I remember Tandy's "Computer City". One of those opened up by me some years ago (and closed shortly thereafter, huge surprise.) I picked up a nice joystick there one day, shelled out about fifty bucks. Get it home... same deal as the cordless phone. Beat all to hell, springs all broken, and the damn thing rattled. Took it back to the store a half hour after I bought it, and was told (again) that obviously I had damaged it and that they couldn't take it back since they couldn't sell it again in that condition. At that point I'm getting irritated and I said, why not, you sold it to me didn't you? Eventually I the store manager came over to see what was going on, and tried very patiently to explain to me that yes, the unit was broken and that sometimes they come from the factory that way. In any event, there was nothing he could do. At this point I'm starting to actually get angry, other customers are starting to notice... and that's probably why guy eventually caved and gave me my money back. Apparently I wasn't the only dissatisfied customer in the store at the time, since I received considerable applause from my audience when it was all over.
Honestly, I've never had a problem shopping at, say, a Sears or a K-Mart. Hell, even Wal-Mart treats their customers better than Best Buy. Best Buy had better watch it, or they'll end up like Computer City.
Only if you believe that corporations are people with inalienable rights (they seem to think they are, but they are mistaken.) Besides, there are literally thousands of laws on the books that negatively affect profit margins. Environmental regulations for one. Sarbanes-Oxley for another. The list goes on and on and on, and part of why big manufacturers (and not so big ones) are moving manufacturing overseas is because other countries place lesser burdens on business.
Now, some of those laws are necessary, and others are gratuitous, but nevertheless there's nothing intrinsically unConstitutional about placing restrictions of one kind or another on large organizations
But if they left the free samples outside without anyone to monitor who took them... now we're getting closer.
To get even closer with your analogy, they'd have had to leave the samples outside and taking them would have to be illegal. That's what happened to the guy in the article: the store gave something away that is apparently against the law to give away in that stupid little town (remind me never to move there.) The coffee shop didn't register a complaint about his using their service: the cop (who really should have better things to do with his time) did that all on his own and the village legal people (who also should have better things to do) pursued it into court (which I guarantee has better things to do.)
This is absolutely idiotic, and I'm being too generous at that. An open access point is an open access point. Don't want to provide a free service? Well, then don't provide a free service. If there's no password required then there should be no prohibition against using it, certainly not in the context of a service that is explicitly provided for free. I suppose if the shop had had a sign out stating clearly "our Wi-Fi is for customers only" the conviction might have made some sense.
Once the sattelite channels are devoting as much time to advertising as they are to music, we're right back to where we started - buy now you're PAYING to listen to it, which works out far better for the media companies. You're not naieve enough to think THAT won't happen, are you?
Charging for ad-free content is just a hook... once they get you used to paying for it you can bet your bottom dollar the advertisements will appear. This is just a rehash of what happened with cable television and anyone that thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. There's just too much money in advertising.
I wonder if this would work with transparent aluminum. It might be hard to see the reaction, but you could always sprinkle some of Scotty's ashes in the mix to help make it more visible.
Grabbing and shaking such people by the neck is a carrer limiting move.
Yeah. But it's fun to think about. Although, in some ways it's too bad our society isn't run more along the lines of the Klingon Empire. I mean, a Klingon underling wouldn't bother grabbing a boneheaded supervisor by the neck and shaking him. He'd execute the bastard on the spot for incompetence and disloyalty to the Empire... and take his job.
Klingon power plants are run very securely, I understand.
If he really wants to find out what copyright is all about, why we have it, what it was intended to accomplish, and why the current incarnation no longer serves that purpose, he should read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings on the subject. If that is too difficult for him, a quick review of the Constitution might grant him a clue.
The guy is either ignorant or self-serving (or both), and frankly I don't like either.
We had a customer that wanted to know if our monitoring system was protected from viruses, because they were worried about a Windows worm getting into their plant DCS via the Modbus interface. I tried to explain how that wasn't really an issue, that it would be very difficult to transmit a worm via Modbus registers over an RS-485 connection, but I was cut off with, "we know it's a problem, how are you going to deal with it?" My own thought was, "you people are going to be a problem, how are we going to deal with you?" but I kept my mouth shut.
Unfortunately from a security perspective, Ethernet is becoming more and more common for industrial process control nowadays. Hell, even the likes of Honeywell are pushing Microsoft-centric protocols like OPC (the thought of OLE and DCOM anywhere near a nuclear plant doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.) But I agree: a nuclear plant is likely to be using older technology and individually-addressable devices wouldn't be accessible from the outside. On the other hand, there's usually a Windows box or two somewhere that does interact with the internal network. Even if such machines start out isolated from the Internet at large, they eventually tend to get connected, because lazy people will usually put their convenience before safety. For that reason alone, I think Windows should be banned from critical infrastructure.
One of our biggest customers uses our equipment and software to perform data acquisition for plant control purposes: we dump data continuously via Modbus to a Honeywell DCS. However, they run our servers and client machines on a dedicated subnet with no physical connection whatsoever to the company in-house network or the Internet. That's because their IT people are actually very intelligent and realize that all networks can be attacked, all operating systems can be compromised, and that the only way to keep a mission-critical system safe is to keep it isolated. If it doesn't need a remote connection it shouldn't have one.
That same principle should be applied to power plants, nuclear or otherwise, or any industrial facility where substantial damage could result from unauthorized or malicious access. I'm always amazed when I hear otherwise. You just want to grab these people by the necks and shake them, all the while asking, "Are you goofy? What's the matter with you!"
True free speech can only prosper when both the right to speak and the right to be heard is available to all equally.
We have both of those rights in the United States. That's not the problem... the problem is having the ability to speak and be heard, and the fact of the matter is that broadcasts from the major media and content producers no longer provide even a semblance of that. Which is why, in practice, nations that may otherwise have fewer legal protections on public speech can be freer, in that regard, than the U.S. is today. It's just like the DMCA: sure, we have fair use "rights" but if we're unable to exercise them because of technological restrictions then we don't effectively have them. We have free speech rights, and the right to be heard... but only a few of us are granted the privilege to exercise them using traditional media.
That also explains why so many people in power have a real problem with the Internet, on so many different levels. The Internet is a worldwide end-run around what those who own big media, and big government, want their customers/citizens to see and hear. The Internet gave that ability to billions of people in a few short years, and power brokers worldwide are still having trouble coming to grips with that. The Internet also serves as a collective memory: politicians hate that because once they say something it's available and accessible forever. People that publish nude pictures of themselves have the same problem.
So far as I'm concerned, broadcast radio (AM, FM, XM, Sirius, whatever) can take a hike. They've had nothing to offer me since the seventies. Talk radio? News?! Bah. Music? What music? If I want music I'll jack in my MP3 player, if I want news... well, there's a whole lot of that available on the Web for free, and you don't have to live with the limited perspective granted by our domestic talking heads. I tend to go to Canadian and British news sites a lot, among others: I may (or may not) agree with what they have to say, but it's a different point of view and I like that. Makes you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Most other countries have cowed their corporations into not being as overtly out to get the consumer.
... but that sort of behavior is hardly limited to the U.S. I think it's probably fair to say that the bulk of nations have their fair share of corporate and governmental corruption: in many cases it's damn near institutionalized.
Can't say I agree with you. Most people I know in other countries (and I know a few) often have a lot of rather negative things to say about their Internet Service Providers. Corporations habitually rip off their customers, they do it in every country on the planet, and ISPs are no exception. That is particularly true in nations that have a single, national phone company that also happens to be the only legal purveyor of Internet services.
America's corporations exert a lot of undue influence upon our government, it is true
So, if you're truly paranoid about informational attack, make sure your crucial systems are as secure as possible, and also varied in configuration, so that no single attack can take out all of them.
... the principle of biodiversity applied to computer systems. However, in this case paranoia has nothing to do with it: it is not an unreasonable fear that China (or any other nation) would use our computing infrastructure against us.
Excellent advice
That would allow ISP's to present customers with clear service choices in an economically viable model.
You're assuming that ISPs have a recognizable business ethic. They don't. You're further assuming that they are interested in providing the best possible service scenario for the fees they charge. They aren't. Worse yet, your fundamental assumption that criminalizing encryption and giving ISPs total control of the type of traffic crossing their networks would do anything but trigger yet another round of price increases and lowered service levels. These simply aren't people that can be trusted with that kind of power, and ultimately that is what the Net Neutrality controversy is all about.
Look up the term "common carrier", realize that ISPs (even those that are also phone companies) are generally not common carriers, and maybe you'll grasp what your proposal actually means to the consumer. In any event, your thoughts are local in scope: the Internet has been a global phenomenon for some time and all outlawing encryption in one nation will do is help competing nations, one way or another. Bad idea.
Also, I have no idea where you get the flawed idea that my being able to encrypt my own communications to prevent anyone from reading it has anything to do with "avoiding security" or "hacking". You need to understand what those words mean first. I'm sure there are any number of Slashdotters that would be happy to fill in your knowledge gaps for you.
Illinois. I would hope it's not standard practice. It did seem to be one of those testing-the-waters situations, where they push the envelope a little to see what kind of reaction they get. A town I lived in about fifteen years ago had a situation where the local police had put in mobile radar cameras and begun issuing automated speeding tickets. There was a huge uproar and the cops had to get rid of them, after expressing "disappointment" at the "poor judgment" of the town's population.
That was then: now they're listening in to what have previously been considered private conversations. And given the court system's tolerance of law enforcement monitoring pretty much anything outside the home, I suspect this will hold up as well, particularly if use the "T" word to justify it. In reality this is just another way to increase the take from a selective tax.
No, they'll end up like Comp-USA. Remember them?
I try not to.
It's a circular phenomenon. The ongoing failure of America's educational systems is producing a vast number of individuals with limited critical-thinking skills and no grasp of scientific method. These minds are fertile ground for irrational and unsupportable belief systems such as Creationism, yet you can't ignore the people who hold such beliefs simply because they are ignorant. They are dangerous because they make considerable efforts to acquire influence, and to inculcate others in their dubious thought processes. Worse yet, they eventually become part of the aforementioned plutocracy, which magnifies their power and influence manyfold.
If civilization is to survive and avoid another Dark Age, we're going to have to fight on multiple fronts. It's not going to be easy, because willful ignorance is a powerful force. It's easy to simply dismiss Creationists and the like as the foolish, uninformed people that they are. That's a serious mistake, though, because they are organized and have a definite agenda.
I slowly get a hunch just why the government is suddenly so keen on supporting religion and faith based education...
It just took them a century of decimating our schools first. Government has accomplished this (not through any specific actions, but by simply relaxing standards and allowing schools to churn out graduates with oatmeal for brains) to such good effect that people in this country will, by and large, believe anything. It astounds me how many people I know honestly think that belief is more powerful than fact, that the Universe is as they would wish it to be, rather than as it is.
Fact is, we live in the Golden Age of the Talking Head, and as long as the Head we happen to be watching has a nice hairdo we'll take whatever it's saying at face value. Don't believe me? Just look at what we've been putting in the White House these past thirty-odd years. It is worrisome, since America is under attack from several quarters, including an overreaching government that just won't back off. If there's any one thing We the People desperately need at this point in our history, it is the ability to think clearly. We can't afford too many more mistakes, and frankly our Creationist friends are not helping.
Put it this way, if your mental faculties are so bereft of logic and reason that you are capable of accepting the Bible as historical fact, as the literal Word of God, then you're also an easy mark for the first demagogue to come along, for the first politician that says whatever you want to hear. And those guys are very good at telling us what we want to hear: it's their stock-in-trade. So yes, I tend to agree with you about so-called faith-based education.
And I'm not picking solely on Christians here: whenever I say "Bible" or "Word of God", feel free to substitute your own Holy Book and your own personal Supreme Being. Pick your poison, it's all the same in the end. The powers of unreason that kept humanity in the dark for thousands of years are alive and well, haven't changed their agenda one whit, and have one of their most powerful tools in organized religion.
This was never the case for military grade equipment in the past.
Not so. The military has long found that it is sometimes more efficient to simply discard malfunctioning equipment. Remember, cost is not so much an issue as availability. A radio that's out for repairs is unavailable, and the cost of that unavailability can be higher than the price tag of a brand new unit. Trained service technicians are not always on hand either, particularly under battlefield conditions.
My father was in the military a long time ago, and the techs he know would often just tag a piece of electronic equipment as "unrepairable" when the only thing wrong was something like a busted knob. That's because new equipment was readily available, tech time was expensive and limited and it just wasn't worth their time to try and fix it. They had more important things to do.
An intelligent child can certainly possess a measure of critical-thinking ability, one which is unadulterated by the learned preconceptions of their elders. Adults are often blinded by their own mental programming, by their own expectations of reality: children have had no such limitations imposed upon them yet.
If you drive on a public highway, you have no expectation of privacy.
You got that right. In my state the cops are using shotgun microphones to eavesdrop on passing cars. I know someone who was pulled over and had her car and her person searched because a passenger said the word "pot". I don't know in what context, but apparently the mere utterance of certain keywords is considered probable cause.
Makes me wonder if a mounting transducers to each window and feeding them a nice pink-noise signal would restore a measure of privacy to rolling conversations.
The real money is in taking existing ideas and twisting the idea just far enough to make it work in a fantastic new way.
... if you're a lawyer) the bigger question is whether or not America's best and brightest will be allowed to take an existing idea and do anything with it. We're locking down ideas (good and bad, and even bad ideas often be twisted into good ones with a little skull sweat) at an increasing pace. When the day comes when you can't have a creative thought without owing somebody a royalty, it really won't matter if you're a Google-killer. You'll never get off the ground.
Yes, that's called progress and it's precisely what the patent (and copyright) systems were set up to foster. Given current trends in the area of "intellectual property" (the current hot market sector
Twenty-five years? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool science-fiction fan, have a substantial collection of sci-fi-books, have watched thousands of science fiction movies ... but twenty-five minutes of Tron was too much. Not that Tron even vaguely resembled science-fiction, any more than Star Wars did.
Lots of small groups have extraordinary influence, politically, in this country.
Squeaky wheel gets the oil and all that. Some groups have influence that is far out of proportion to their actual value to society. Personally, I think we need to form a Slashdot Geek Squad and send some of the more literate and charismatic members among us to Washington to properly educate our lawmakers on these important technical and scientific issues.
Always assuming that such a thing as a literate, charismatic Slashdotter actually exists.
Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Dennis Kucinich
Is that in order of precedence? Personally, I wouldn't put either Clinton at the top of my list of honestish politicians.
I've been burnt by returns being sold as new by Best Buy on several occasions. I always thought it was illegal to sell used products as new, but apparently not.
... same deal as the cordless phone. Beat all to hell, springs all broken, and the damn thing rattled. Took it back to the store a half hour after I bought it, and was told (again) that obviously I had damaged it and that they couldn't take it back since they couldn't sell it again in that condition. At that point I'm getting irritated and I said, why not, you sold it to me didn't you? Eventually I the store manager came over to see what was going on, and tried very patiently to explain to me that yes, the unit was broken and that sometimes they come from the factory that way. In any event, there was nothing he could do. At this point I'm starting to actually get angry, other customers are starting to notice... and that's probably why guy eventually caved and gave me my money back. Apparently I wasn't the only dissatisfied customer in the store at the time, since I received considerable applause from my audience when it was all over.
By way of example, I bought a cordless phone there, one that came with a couple of extra handsets. The box was shrinkwrapped, with lots of official-looking stickers all over it. When I got home and opened it, I discovered that the contents were all scuffed and beat up and the displays were almost unreadable, like somebody had sandpapered them. Only the base station worked, but it was pretty messed up as well. So I drove right back to Best Buy to return or exchange it, and was told that "I must have damaged it." What the HELL? After an unpleasant altercation with a so-called "manager" I was graced with a store credit (forget about an actual refund.) Absolutely incredible.
This was a few years ago, and maybe they've improved their dubious customer service (and I use the term loosely) since, but from what I'm reading here I doubt it. It really pissed me off, because obviously some idiot took the return the first time and happily repackaged it. I still wonder how many people that phone went through before someone finally decided to trash it.
Now, to be fair, other stores pull the same crap. I remember Tandy's "Computer City". One of those opened up by me some years ago (and closed shortly thereafter, huge surprise.) I picked up a nice joystick there one day, shelled out about fifty bucks. Get it home
Honestly, I've never had a problem shopping at, say, a Sears or a K-Mart. Hell, even Wal-Mart treats their customers better than Best Buy. Best Buy had better watch it, or they'll end up like Computer City.
When it comes to the RIAA, MPAA and certain Congresspersons, I think this quote applies too:
"What an incredible new smell you've discovered!"
Only if you believe that corporations are people with inalienable rights (they seem to think they are, but they are mistaken.) Besides, there are literally thousands of laws on the books that negatively affect profit margins. Environmental regulations for one. Sarbanes-Oxley for another. The list goes on and on and on, and part of why big manufacturers (and not so big ones) are moving manufacturing overseas is because other countries place lesser burdens on business.
Now, some of those laws are necessary, and others are gratuitous, but nevertheless there's nothing intrinsically unConstitutional about placing restrictions of one kind or another on large organizations
But if they left the free samples outside without anyone to monitor who took them... now we're getting closer.
To get even closer with your analogy, they'd have had to leave the samples outside and taking them would have to be illegal. That's what happened to the guy in the article: the store gave something away that is apparently against the law to give away in that stupid little town (remind me never to move there.) The coffee shop didn't register a complaint about his using their service: the cop (who really should have better things to do with his time) did that all on his own and the village legal people (who also should have better things to do) pursued it into court (which I guarantee has better things to do.)
This is absolutely idiotic, and I'm being too generous at that. An open access point is an open access point. Don't want to provide a free service? Well, then don't provide a free service. If there's no password required then there should be no prohibition against using it, certainly not in the context of a service that is explicitly provided for free. I suppose if the shop had had a sign out stating clearly "our Wi-Fi is for customers only" the conviction might have made some sense.
Once the sattelite channels are devoting as much time to advertising as they are to music, we're right back to where we started - buy now you're PAYING to listen to it, which works out far better for the media companies. You're not naieve enough to think THAT won't happen, are you?
... once they get you used to paying for it you can bet your bottom dollar the advertisements will appear. This is just a rehash of what happened with cable television and anyone that thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. There's just too much money in advertising.
Charging for ad-free content is just a hook
It makes you wonder what else is still out there.
... it is a whole planet, after all.
Well, I mean, you know
I wonder if this would work with transparent aluminum. It might be hard to see the reaction, but you could always sprinkle some of Scotty's ashes in the mix to help make it more visible.
Grabbing and shaking such people by the neck is a carrer limiting move.
... and take his job.
Yeah. But it's fun to think about. Although, in some ways it's too bad our society isn't run more along the lines of the Klingon Empire. I mean, a Klingon underling wouldn't bother grabbing a boneheaded supervisor by the neck and shaking him. He'd execute the bastard on the spot for incompetence and disloyalty to the Empire
Klingon power plants are run very securely, I understand.
If he really wants to find out what copyright is all about, why we have it, what it was intended to accomplish, and why the current incarnation no longer serves that purpose, he should read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings on the subject. If that is too difficult for him, a quick review of the Constitution might grant him a clue.
The guy is either ignorant or self-serving (or both), and frankly I don't like either.
We had a customer that wanted to know if our monitoring system was protected from viruses, because they were worried about a Windows worm getting into their plant DCS via the Modbus interface. I tried to explain how that wasn't really an issue, that it would be very difficult to transmit a worm via Modbus registers over an RS-485 connection, but I was cut off with, "we know it's a problem, how are you going to deal with it?" My own thought was, "you people are going to be a problem, how are we going to deal with you?" but I kept my mouth shut.
Unfortunately from a security perspective, Ethernet is becoming more and more common for industrial process control nowadays. Hell, even the likes of Honeywell are pushing Microsoft-centric protocols like OPC (the thought of OLE and DCOM anywhere near a nuclear plant doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.) But I agree: a nuclear plant is likely to be using older technology and individually-addressable devices wouldn't be accessible from the outside. On the other hand, there's usually a Windows box or two somewhere that does interact with the internal network. Even if such machines start out isolated from the Internet at large, they eventually tend to get connected, because lazy people will usually put their convenience before safety. For that reason alone, I think Windows should be banned from critical infrastructure.
One of our biggest customers uses our equipment and software to perform data acquisition for plant control purposes: we dump data continuously via Modbus to a Honeywell DCS. However, they run our servers and client machines on a dedicated subnet with no physical connection whatsoever to the company in-house network or the Internet. That's because their IT people are actually very intelligent and realize that all networks can be attacked, all operating systems can be compromised, and that the only way to keep a mission-critical system safe is to keep it isolated. If it doesn't need a remote connection it shouldn't have one.
That same principle should be applied to power plants, nuclear or otherwise, or any industrial facility where substantial damage could result from unauthorized or malicious access. I'm always amazed when I hear otherwise. You just want to grab these people by the necks and shake them, all the while asking, "Are you goofy? What's the matter with you!"
True free speech can only prosper when both the right to speak and the right to be heard is available to all equally.
... the problem is having the ability to speak and be heard, and the fact of the matter is that broadcasts from the major media and content producers no longer provide even a semblance of that. Which is why, in practice, nations that may otherwise have fewer legal protections on public speech can be freer, in that regard, than the U.S. is today. It's just like the DMCA: sure, we have fair use "rights" but if we're unable to exercise them because of technological restrictions then we don't effectively have them. We have free speech rights, and the right to be heard ... but only a few of us are granted the privilege to exercise them using traditional media.
... well, there's a whole lot of that available on the Web for free, and you don't have to live with the limited perspective granted by our domestic talking heads. I tend to go to Canadian and British news sites a lot, among others: I may (or may not) agree with what they have to say, but it's a different point of view and I like that. Makes you think.
We have both of those rights in the United States. That's not the problem
That also explains why so many people in power have a real problem with the Internet, on so many different levels. The Internet is a worldwide end-run around what those who own big media, and big government, want their customers/citizens to see and hear. The Internet gave that ability to billions of people in a few short years, and power brokers worldwide are still having trouble coming to grips with that. The Internet also serves as a collective memory: politicians hate that because once they say something it's available and accessible forever. People that publish nude pictures of themselves have the same problem.
So far as I'm concerned, broadcast radio (AM, FM, XM, Sirius, whatever) can take a hike. They've had nothing to offer me since the seventies. Talk radio? News?! Bah. Music? What music? If I want music I'll jack in my MP3 player, if I want news