Screw linux. I'd rather see the banking companies running something obscure and reliable like a unix variant or some custom software. If I were a bank director I'd invest considerable capital in a decent secure standards based banking system or I'd consider unix before I'd consider linux or windows. My guess is that the banks wanted to implement the systems and new features faster than they cared about customers security which is, from my understanding, not a big deal.
I guess their system works a lot like las vegases in the sense that if someone steals a million bucks from a casino it leaves a paper trail. They then sick the bounty hunters on you; this system is effective. I remember awhile back someone stole 7 million from a casino in las vegas and 3 days later the car was found by the cops, still running, in the wrong direction facing las vegas.
Any hacker with sufficient knowledge of these systems isn't going to try to crash them because they will quickly realize that by destroying these systems they're screwing over and creating millions of desperate people, both people who can't access their accounts and companies who can't put out paychecks on time.
But, the main reason I'm guessing they chose windows was for the features. Windows has lots of features and useless crap and when you hire someone to fix the system you don't have to train them as much. Plus, you get good support from microsoft and nice salesman to walk off the cliff with you.
I'd feel a bit better if their security was better. When your bank doesn't give a shit if you loose a few hundred dollers, or next months rent, to a hack I think most people have a problem with that and they aren't going to be calling anyone accept the cops to try to catch the person who did it, especially if they continueously do it.
It's called newsspeak; the idea that the ruling class will attempt to screw over the working and under classes language to the point that it's so general describing a cupcake is difficult. When you can't say the word black person for fear of being called a racist, you've lost the ability to think about someone as black. When you can't think of things as master/slave but in some other fetish term which will be banned then you've lost that as well.
I personally think that anyone who wants to be politically correct can go right ahead but the moment someone comes upto me and starts telling me what I can and can't believe or say is the moment I tell them to fuck off. I'v ascertained this level of english, and a large vocabulary and I'm gonna use it.
Now, as for shopping for wires, we can easily change the terminology to "penis, vagina" and if they don't like that, "innie and outie". If they still think that's bad, we'll name the wire ends "this end was fucked by political correctness" and "this end was fucked more by political correctness". I like the current terminology, it works and everyone can get it from the get go.
A good measure of a leader is their ability to solve conflict. If something they do with their power causes more conflict than it solves, then they are not a good leader. By that logic, the moron who wanted this passed needs to get booted out of their nice cosy seat.
As long as Americans have it in their heads that their constitutional rights are still protected, they'll go on their lives peacefully until something like, oh I don't know, the ozone is gone or winter no longer happens anymore. As scary as it is to start saying shit like this, Mark My Words, we're in for a civil war within the next 30 or 40 years at this rate. They're fooled around with and screwed up every constitutional right and amendment we have. Pretty soon they'll be exercising the lack of our rights, and if they get that far, they'll start doing stuff like chipping people and screwing them over if they don't like them. Tommarrow people will be trying to make a living and they can't, and unlike in max headroom, those people in the fringes won't go about their daily lives happily. All it takes at that point is a few more people to say fsck it, I hate this and to pick up a gun or knife, and you've got civil war.
The number of protesters will continue to grow year after year after year, until what happened in the soviet union in georga happens here. People will get tired of the bullshit and getting no straight answer and with the goverment giving itself ample time to play with the system.
Seriously, think california's ballot system will be fixed by 2k5? I sure don't. How long can a geek keep a stupid person fixated?
"We want electronic voting."
Nerd: Sure, I'll make it.
1 year passes
"Um...you didn't do it right. We want it to check for security and work properly when tallying."
Nerd: The tech is still developing. Give it another year.
1 year passes
"Still isn't working properly."
Nerd: I'll get on it right away
Yet another year later
"We want you to print out the ballot to proove it tallies correctly, some landslide elections look suspicious"
Nerd: Ok, but it'll take awhile for everyone to change their systems, give it 2 years.
2 years pass for the implementation of printers.
"but now the ballot is printing out with the correct vote but it isn't being tallied, I want it to be tallied too."
Nerd: I didn't know you wanted it to be tallied, ok.
"Um..now it's stored on an insecure medium and broadcasted on an insecure medium, and the votes are still coming in wrong. Fix it."
Nerd: Ok, but I'll need another few years to fix it as well.
2 more years pass.
"Um, now the master server isn't working right, can you fix that?"
Nerd: Sure. Gimme a few months...
And by this time, everyone loves a certain party and the other party is somehow out of power. But nobody cares, all the elections are fixed and nobody said "that's enough, fix it and fix it now or we're going back to regular ballot until something that works comes along".
First of all, most of the internet's equipment is in america and europe, with an exception being made for china, japan, tiawan, and korea which also have substancial investment in the internet. So, letting some small country in africa dictate how the internet is run isn't a good idea, to start with. It can be looked at in a viewpoint of economic warfare; if Britan can get wal-mart.uk and register it to a britan based company instead of to wal-mart the international corperation, they could potentially make a lot of money importing.
After that, you've got problems with international corperations greasing the wheeles all over. The UN is even more corrupt than the US goverment. All the UN does is make "deals" (some of which involve bullying) between nations for resources as well as making it possible for GE to dump toxic waste in korea and if korea doesn't like that they can kiss the UN's sweet behind. This is why, as Jello Biafra says, the kidnapping rich people and corrupt goverment officials in mexico is what corperations like to call a growth industry.
So, if we move all the internets services to an even more corrupt govermental system with absolutely no responsability to a people but rather to goverments who want to supress people, what do you think will happen?
If china wants xyz banned internationally they can probably pull the strings to do that. If some "terrorist" group in the US puts leaked files on a website prooving conspiracy such as Diebold, what do you think the probability of them pulling the DNS registry would be? As long as the DNS stays under control of and protection by the biggest bully on the block it'll serve the needs of the biggest bully and so long as you don't fsck with it, the bully will leave you alone. It's a lot better than throwing it into the middle of a room with people ranging from weak babies to 500 pound strongmen and watching the freeforall.
Or better yet, what if they wanted to implement internet 2 so that stupid dinosaur people run the internet and not the smart people who do now (to put it in a blunt manner)? Hey, we don't like rantradio because it's a free, uncensored medium that's taking buisness away from RIAA affiliated companies so we're just going to take you off of DNS and fsck your internet connection.
I, as everyone else, would love to see the services ICANN trys to implement given real form and direction and be ruled by wise, progressive people instead of large international corperations and a goverment run amok as it does now.
All the mass media is owned by 6 major corperations as we already know. In our stimulation-happy culture where sitting ontop of a mountain taking in the view isn't appreaciated, so too is long complicated writing. Thanks to this media, people are raised to be consumers, and we're stimulated to the point that things like books are so boring that we fall asleep reading them. Why read a book when you can watch a movie? A person who plays FPS games for months on end is so thoroughly stimulated that sitting at a spot and just relaxing may be a bit much for them to do.
And now we've got a bunch of professors complaining about how the culture that has come into being is completly fucking their profession. This is understandable, and if studies were more available in web format they'd be more popular.
The very idea of mass media is very very very wrong. It's a very bad thing for our society. How it used to be is that you'd know what's going on around you by seeing it. Now you've got to trust some news anchor on the television or internet and when they're reporting on some bitch or hoe on tv instead of doing their job of educating people on stuff that's important; do I care some star ran amok and molested his children? No. I do care however when congress decides it wants to take one more step towards turning me and every human on the planet into slaves and if it weren't for that, I wouldn't give a damn. I could just focus on my life and my ideas and be involved with society at my own level. My life would be so much more peaceful if I wasn't afraid of the US turning into a big pile of shit.
It's no wonder in this stimulation happy society of 1-sentance soundbytes and news stories that don't even have paragraphs that people won't pay attention or give credibility to research organizations. If a news agency that was once taught as a credible source of information such as the New York Times is now shit, should I consider other publications such as reuters just as credible? I give more credibility to my friend who heard from their friend who heard from a friend of a friend that xyz was happening than I do to NYT.
A major problem that even hits the intellegent people is that they want to know what's going on too. But to know what's going on it's a 2 hour ordeal every day. You've got to get up, get online, go through your daily checks folder and get your news. wade through the utter crap to get to the good stuff that you want. I'v got to look through 10 headlines of bullshit to find the 1 headline that's good, and read 10 stories on a subject to get an idea of what's going on.
So yes, webpages are going to degrade the content available. A million bumbling idiots will drum out the one that makes sense. At least they can establish some level of research distrobution via webpages and moreso, credibility if they want to stop this from happening but more to the point, so people like me don't have to wade through utter shit to find their stuff.
Just like a certain college near me requires students attending to live in dorms the first couple of semesters and bans all sex, public display of affection, dancing between different sex people, and non-christian music with the punishment of suspension and expulsion, they will lose buisness. Of course, they won't tell you about what they're doing. Oh no, they'll give you the rulebook after you sign up and have given them your money, not before.
This one reeks of a scam. Stay away from the university of florida. I surely am not going to live in dorms without free, unbiased, uncensored internet access. Throttle my access if you must, but tell me what I'm getting into. If they decided to implement this bullshit, I'd go ahead and get some friends who feel the same way and tell the staff "either take it of, or we won't be here next semester".
This also brings up a censorship part. Remember in the 1970's when govermental studies bodies found that "problem" of liberal people came mostly from campuses and poor areas? I'd bet they'd love to cut off students from all liberal views on the internet.
Do I also need to note that the only reason that college near me has stayed open is because some rich people and the local goverment breath funding into it year after year?
Ya know, it kinda makes me wonder; if you can't fill out a simple box sheet, mabye you shouldn't be voting?
Seriously, I know election officials will try all kinds of bullshit to rig elections if their hands are greased properly, as is happening right now. If you've ever played postal 2 and done the election day voting, you know what florida's ballot sheet looked like and no logical person can figure that sheet out. Everyone's been exposed to check in the box, it's not that difficult to understand and if you need to know how, then there should be clear instructions posted. If you can't read...well...then I REALLY don't think you should be voting because if you can't read, you can't get information properly but for these people, such as the blind or disabled, a voice option should be available.
In any case, when one takes upon the cause of designing such a system with such an importance (the voting system arguebly being the most important computer program on the planet) you've got to look for how it works and how you can keep elections from being rigged.
The reason paper ballot works so well is because you've got counting centers, then districts, then the state. The votes are counted as correctly as humans can count them on a center level. The on the district level, you get all of the counting centers votes tallied, then onto the state level.
It really wouldn't suprise me if someone at the state level decided to toy around with omit votes for their side of the bargain, but the beauty of even this system is that they've got to grease the hands of 50 state officials. So there's a distribuited component to it.
So, what'll take to make voting work properly with computer? First of all, the hardware needs to be cheap and difficult to rig. We can come up with all kinds of proprietary hardwired garble made by corperations with agenda's and loose pockets and make it cost $1000 a machine, but when it comes down to it, we need to make something that'll work on multiple platforms, that the average 40's-somthing old person windows user can setup and verify. It needs to be distribuited, needs to leave a verifyable paper trail to proove it's counting ability at all levels, it needs to record who made votes for whom such that records are kept incase of a recall election (so you don't have a bunch of dumasses coming in saying they voted x when they really voted for y). The hardware needs to be trustable, inexpensive, and simple to fix if something goes wrong.
Finally, it needs to have good security, crypto, anti-hacking measures etc out of the box. I should be able to throw it on a machine out of wallmart on a CD, it'll format the harddisk for me, install it's own hardware drivers, kernel, etc, ask for new drivers at install via disk (so you can't install new drivers later on) setup the polling option, hook it upto the internet, point it to the p2p master and be on our way. So, how do you go about making this system?
(note, the next part is imho)
Since X86 is an open standards compliant hardware platform that is extremly difficult to rig; is everyone going to buy from dell? No, that's already abundant; you can setup a lot of clients at schools, goverment buildings, etc and all the hardware is already there; that already has a connection platform; the internet, and has lots of readily available inexpensive hardware that is available everywhere, I choose it. (I could go mac, but you see, mac is proprietary.)
As for the software component, get an OSS GPL project going with some competant people (and by all means, multiple projects!). This way, people can check the whole system, they can put it on their machine and know it works and moreso, know it works at a hardware level.
So, what must this application have? First of all, it must be easy to install. I should be able to slap in a CD, have it install, select the options I want and it'll do it's own thing. Everything that needs to be installed should be installed at the first
The problem is that our money based economy is becoming dated and it's beginning to show. A money economy is great when it takes work to produce goods but as the work it takes to make stuff goes down (invariably due to the reliable automation of many of our industries) the price will drop as well. When the cost of food, shelter, and entertainment drop to all time lows the demand for the amount of work that needs to get done will drop. Soon everyone only has to work 7 hours a day to keep the food and goods coming in, then 6, 5, 2, 1, and in time 0.
This shifts an incredible amount of power and responsability onto the goverment and corperations. Another paradigm that will come into being is that media produced 20, 200, or 2000 years ago will still be popular today. Can you imagine the amount of music that can be created in this timespan? When demand is satiated, there is no demand. So why creat more media, for example, if there is already more than enough to last any one human their entire lifetime?
What will need to take place is a fundemental shift from a greed and need based economy, to a curiousity based economy. If all the things a person needs are free, then there is no reason to work for them. Therefore, one would learn how a machine works because they are curious and want to while a class of elietists would be kept to ensure the system would be maintained.
This may not happen for another thousand or two years, and may involve bloody uprisings and insurgencies, but it'll happen one way or another.
Do a google search for RIAA affiliated companies. All of the CD's that are put out have a label on them for the company that made the music, but won't be labeled by the RIAA. Carry this list around with you.
I agree. I don't like totalarian regimes, or dictatorships. I like democracy, in it's many forms. I'd prefer to sit here infront of my cosy computer, with my cosy lab and routers, eatin' warm mashed potatoes n' steak than getting angry over this shit.
But, thanks to modern day tech, we've got cameras inside of ligthers and portable video cams, and yes baby, the internet and p2p networks as our distrobution medium.
What I do hope happens is that this crap gets cleaned up by 2010 at the absolute latest. As long as the ability to vote is intact, and the govverment isn't taken over by assholes it can still be salvaged and repaired over time without violent conflict. I understand it takes time to redo the systems and explain to old people how electronic voting works between their latte's and 5 o-clock hair dressings. If I knew how to program I wouldn't be sitting here bitching, I'd be working on a stripped down linux kernel with a voting package that can work on x86 and proceeding to put up and get a webpage with the stuff on it slashdotted.
How many slashdotters are willing to go out and march, infront of the white house with loaded guns, molitof cocktails, and the like raised to show the goverment that if they don't stop fucking with democracy, we're gonna start shooting.
Call me a violent hippy if you must. I'm tired of this shit, they don't fucking get it. I have patience, but I don't have any patience for this kind of thing. In a democracy, you exhert force peacefully through vote. Don't like that congressman? Fine then, we'll jjust hang the lot of you and your families, plunder your bank accounts and put some people in who can actually rule. Democracy is an alternative to violent rule. Do I want a civil war? No, does the goverment want civil war? Their goin' in that direction and damn fast. Why will there be a civil war? Gattica baby, that's why. There's already a couple hundred thousand protesters in miami protesting the WTC talks, and many of them aren't young kids. Many of them are logically thinking, responsable adults who see the consequences.
And what I REALLY FUCKING HATE is when someone says to me "Those are a bunch of stupid hippies protesting.". As if all protesters are stupid hippies. Do hippies get up in body armor, tower shields and gas masks and protect their kind in organized lines? Do hippies police their kind when they want to protest? In the 1970's millions came on capitol hill to do their work. Nowadays, if you get a couple hundred people together to protest anything you get charged with unlawful assembly and get teargassed. I always say "Those hippies are there to protect the rights you don't fucking deserve." and I mean it too. I really hate these dumbfucks and I think death is too good for them. Seriously, if you don't defend your rights you don't deserve them. It's that simple. The supreme law of nature is force, and what you're on right now bub is a lolly pop ride. If shit hit the fan you'd be dead in an instant and that's the truth of it.
If a few hundred thousand americans showed up on the doorstep of the whitehouse, weapons and ballots raised, and demanded that their voting system be put back into order, and demanded that they don't fuck with them, the congressman would do it or order mass genocide.
Unfortunatly, that's not happening because everyone is just talking about it and not doing anything about it. You can sign ballots till you're blue in the face and congress can hear form 100,000,000 americans through the EFF but if their pompous assholes they won't get it. Sometime a sniper rifle can say a million words.
To fucking hell with "by 2005". How about you suspend the incorperation rights of diebold, arrest and convict the representatives and senators who were involved with the scam, and invest in a open source alternative that can easily be deployed on x86 hardware? That's about as constructive as I get at this point, folks.
The idea: you creat a structure, throw a bunch of nanites onto it, they then lathe the structure with nanites which will, on command, chemically bond with eachother creating your scructure.
If you've played total annihilation, you know what I'm talking about. Nanolathing was the primary process of building an army. Within an hour a commander could easily take over a planet and begin converting it into a metal world.
Wrong, P2P apps have plenty of uses. Books are one of them, and I get lots of books off of the app. I got a good one a few days ago on sequences and series and boolean logic, and thanks to it I have a good founding on how boolean logic works. I also get programs that I can't get like a 10 year old midi editor I had that the disks got corrupted in. P2P is going to grow and grow both in sheer bandwidth and broadness of content. There's not a lot the RIAA or corperations can do to stop it accept completly shut off their information systems. To say that the only use is illegal is pure bullshit. What's wrong is forever copyright. You make some music, you market it, you get your reward and now it's open to everyone in a couple of years. Why must the beatles, aerosmith, and countless bands be under copyright? To keep them from competing with todays music. If I put together a good music archive ver 1, a couple hundred megs of good choice select music and threw it out on p2p some people would be set for 2 or 3 years of good listen. 10 billion a year industry my ass.
It's also an unfortunate fact that most of the current music and media is censored. If it weren't then people would make great music that makes you think instead of the crap briteny spears cranks out of her ass. System of a down and Eminem are good examples of music that makes you think. When eminem made a song about killing his wife, people thought. It showed emotion and what hate is, gave the reasons for it, made ya sick. What if all music was like that? People would think instead of droning on. The RIAA is a dinosaur; it takes far more food to saciate a dinosaur than it does a couple hundred small humans, if the weather gets too cold or warm, they die. And finally, in our hit-by-a-gigantic-meteor world, they are slowly dieng off for all of these reasons.
All they will accomplish with sueing p2p sharers is to push file sharers underground to apps with better and better security. Some of the congressmen in our goverment are thinking "Uh, they're doing what?".
As for what this will do, I can tell you right now. "Oh fsck, I can't share eminem anymore! But I can share this porn on beta, and some funker fogt or de/vision! " In this fashon, music that's copyrighted by the RIAA won't be shared, and the good cyberpunk, indie and compeditive stuff will be shared. "*search for pop* devision, wtf are they?". When you type in Techno or electronic ebm you won't get a bunch of RIAA garbage, you'll get independant stuff. This will, in turn, increase sales and popularity of independant music and independant labels and take away the RIAA's consumeristic base slowly but surely.
This is in fact the reason their music sales dropped 15%; part of it is that nobody likes their tactics, part of it is that they are destroying their primary medium of advertising, and part of it is what I talked about above.
In the end, however, p2p will live on despite their actions. If without music fine, it'll just become a vast ever growing sea of porn, books, files, warez apps and other junk. You can't block the apps, you can't track them down, and you can't stop them without pulling a lot of shit. And if all else fails listen to some good ol' rantradio (www.rantradio.com). Because nothin' on there is RIAA copyrighted and they're one of the only completly legal and completly independant internet radio stations.
It's not the people who deal with the e-mail I'm talking about. It's the dumbfucks who answer the e-mail. Have some responsability with how you respond to advertising. If a company puts a sticker on my windshield about a car repair service, I'm never going to buy anything from them. The people who say "oh, a sticker for car repair. kewl" are the problem. If you respond positivly to rude advertising, expect more rude advertising.
With that said, I believe the proper answer to this whole mess is vigalantesm. Hackers need to get together, track down the spammers and completly trash their computer systems time and time again so they know we don't appreciate the treatment and moreso, to drive them out of buisness like they are doing to us.
and if the rest of humanity is too stupid to do a 10 minute google search then I'm not paying for it. You want to stop spammers? Use a decent filtering scheme.
Same thing as with drug, gun, and sex ed. If the vast majority of people weren't so damn irresponsable and stupid then they'd be able to handle either not using drugs or using them responsabily (not only does this apply to marajuana, but also the likes of prozak), certain guns wouldn't need to be outlawed because some dumbfuck would press the trigger by accident and off his entire family. And finally, our kids would not only know where and when sex is ok, but why it is ok and how to make love responsabily.
Either way, if he passes a e-mail tax law, I'll just setup something else that isn't spammable like a VPN between my house and my family members that transmits txt documents into a local folder. Mabye that way the idiots who use the system won't open up sobig viruses and help to make virus problems worse.
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Actually, this was tried and it failed at the turn of the century. P2P apps aren't going away any time soon, despite the RIAA's bullshit campaign. As for pirates, they aren't pirates. They have about 100 years of backed copyrights. Meaning, if they had to, they could start printing and selling old stuff like the beatles or any one other band like aerosmith, even though those bands are over 14 years old. Hell, even most classical music is still under copyright by them.
Read Gangs of america, do a google search. It's free in PDF. It'll give you the real reasion for the civil war.
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The RIAA is a cartel, that's why I consider them a company. It's no different than a corperation of size of say, AOL Time Warner or General electric. When corperations work with eachother to maximize eachother profits, are they really any different than a corperation who's goal is to maximize profit? No, they're just organized differently. Instead of having one big blacksmithing monopoly, you have 50 smaller guilds that make sure that a longsword is $300 in every part of the country.
Lots of people don't make the connection but
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If you remember back to the 1500's there used to be stock markets where pirate ships could get funding to go out and plunder other countries' merchant ships. The risks were high, but the payoff was huge. Is this any different? The only difference is that instead of the stocks being taken out for biker gangs that take on big rigs, you've got one corperation trying to exercise it's ability to legally wrangle other corperations for money through an entirely different system much like a bully, but at this point it's at the pirate. SCO is the first legal-pirate (tempting to call them lepirates,;) ) corperation; a corperation that adds nothing to society that uses strongarm tactics, extortion, blackmail, ect all given a hint of legality by their lawers lies and a couple patents and copyrights that are getting old.
Microsoft will turn into one when they start going downhill, so will the RIAA, etc. If the RIAA can't make money by competition they'll just go back through the past 100 years of copyrights they have and start releasing them. Microsoft will pull all kinds of BS on the linux community if htey have to. Same with the MPAA, and any other monopoly that has sufficient stake in the legal system of the country they are located in that they can effectivly control it and a market.
Although I am suprised the starwars kid hasn't killed himself to end the pain or in the very least, locked himself in a room far away from the dark recesses of the internet to keep away from the scrutiny, I think this article is a tub of bullshit. Mabye in the more social, personal, chatty circles where anyone will believe anything because they are dumasses it may be a problem, but for the rest of us geeks who handle their communication more like TCP/IP rather than humans it isn't much of a problem. Inotherwords, anyone who said "Omg, I didn't expect that" is a complete dumass; where there's a way to communicate there will always be dumasses using it.
Then again, school teachers have never thought it was their responsability to keep bullies from giving someone a verbal beating, but rather, to ensure that the bullies don't end up paralyzed from the neck down by a lucky punch of kick or full of bulletholes in my experience. Which is the whole reason these things happen because if the bully was educated and understood "If you piss jonny off enough, he will inflict great pain on you and may even kill you. Think columbine. Understand?" the kid might think it's a bad idea to tease other kids so badly they think it's a good idea to go on a killing spree. Of course, it may also be a good idea to hold verbal abuse on the level of physical abuse. While much harder to proove, if the annoying asshole who teased you got the crap kicked out of him he'd think twice about opening his big toothy maw, and if he got a detention for starting it he'd be real suprised at the fact the system actually worked. It's only logical that as new technology comes along it'll be abused in the same way.
I'm also kind of annoyed at this title "The rise of cyber bullying". What idiot thought it necissary or even interesting to write this article? Oh yea, after reading the first sentance the light went on in the brain; the same ones who try to make parents afraid of everything from antrhax in the mail to other parents abducting their kids. It's idiots like this that I'd like to take out into the street and beat into a bloody pulp, if they didn't do what they did then our culture wouldn't be so afraid of itself. If television wasn't the constant dispenser of FUD it is then people would let their kids go out on haloween and have fun or it could be like in the 1970's when the real asshole of a teacher got tp'd. If this kind of bullshit didn't exist parents would actually be decent and not have an escape from their responsabilities into the land of idiocy to bring back thoughtful and stupid ideas about parenting some idiot, given an austere of legitimancy by writing for an newspaper that lets them be more comfertable about raising their kids.
So, in my mind this gets filed under the "trivial bullshit" section where I keep most of my useless drivvel; behind steel walls so it doesn't seep into the other stuff by accident.
You can always turn off the device, and you can't block people dynamically. The medium gives trust inherently without asking how trustworthy the individual is. Much like the internet, it's upto you how much info you want to share.
Or more likely, a gaggle of ugly geeks get the alert on their badges and play "spot the pathethic normal women looking for millionairs". Then they all point their wifi antennas at "Ms. I'm a bitch and I want a millionair for a husband" and hack their devices so they say "Want sex, any man will do, will do 3-somes with other women, enjoys bdsm, please hurry I'm horny".
The geeks then watch as the women are barraged by men and the women asking for sex. Not knowing what to do, they begin to leave and one of the geeks walks upto the women and says "I noticed your tag got hacked, need some help? Can I buy you a drink?". After the women are good and liquored up, they return home with the geeks for a hot night of love making or at least give them their numbers after the geeks turn on the charm and show they aren't assholes or freaks.
So long as the goverment doesn't start chipping people we're ok. But I actually like the idea, if you goto a bar and are looking for a 1 night stand the device can automatically hook you up with another person, or if you're walking down the street and have your device set to lonely it can alert other people to your presence and make some new friends. In otherwords, a couple hundred years ago you had a town of 100 and knowing everyone was an eventuality, not a chore. Nowadays, getting to know everyone in a town like mine which is suburbia and has 10k people, even knowing your neighbors down the block is a chore because you never need to meet them. Devices like this can strengthen the social fabric and networking in a community and undo the damage television has done to the trust relationships in our society by breaking the barriar.
Alternativally, I can see advertising companies abusing the devices to get PI and marketing data. Normally I don't care if marketing departments market stuff directly to me when I'm looking for a gadget. If I can save a few hours of hunting around the web when I wanna buy something then I'm a happy camper, and it's always neat to be on slashdot and find a binary clock in a banner ad so long as I can turn the banner ad's off, but I'v got a problem with the shady bastards who will get my CC numbers and not tell me when they are charging me or try to get my money in a semi-legal way or who think harassing me is a good marketing tactic.
My mother took the route of trusting me with a computer, she even invested several hundred dollers for me to build a box and buy routing equipment. Now I admin our home network, I'v built her a machine, rebuilt my sisters and make sure all the machines are safe and I'm educating her on how to use the internet. Do I goto sites she thinks are bad? Definatly, but rarely. I do tons of reading online as well as gaming and chatting. Parents weren't meant to control the entirety of a kids developement. Most Pr0n won't damage your kids' minds, it'll make them think. Seeing a male or female n00d or having erotic sex is a far more complete education on their sexuality than they could ever have. Seeing neonazism sites or reading books on brainwashing will help them solidify why these things are wrong. Before our world was simple, now it's confined to cities and suburbs. The internet can bring the world to a kids hands, both the good and the bad, so they cabn better understand it.
What you do want to control is their gaming habits. I would've liked to learn woodworking from my father but instead I spent my troubled childhood shooting up on the computer because society hated me. It was a great escape but it's the wrong way to deal with reality.
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Screw linux. I'd rather see the banking companies running something obscure and reliable like a unix variant or some custom software. If I were a bank director I'd invest considerable capital in a decent secure standards based banking system or I'd consider unix before I'd consider linux or windows. My guess is that the banks wanted to implement the systems and new features faster than they cared about customers security which is, from my understanding, not a big deal.
I guess their system works a lot like las vegases in the sense that if someone steals a million bucks from a casino it leaves a paper trail. They then sick the bounty hunters on you; this system is effective. I remember awhile back someone stole 7 million from a casino in las vegas and 3 days later the car was found by the cops, still running, in the wrong direction facing las vegas.
Any hacker with sufficient knowledge of these systems isn't going to try to crash them because they will quickly realize that by destroying these systems they're screwing over and creating millions of desperate people, both people who can't access their accounts and companies who can't put out paychecks on time.
But, the main reason I'm guessing they chose windows was for the features. Windows has lots of features and useless crap and when you hire someone to fix the system you don't have to train them as much. Plus, you get good support from microsoft and nice salesman to walk off the cliff with you.
I'd feel a bit better if their security was better. When your bank doesn't give a shit if you loose a few hundred dollers, or next months rent, to a hack I think most people have a problem with that and they aren't going to be calling anyone accept the cops to try to catch the person who did it, especially if they continueously do it.
It's called newsspeak; the idea that the ruling class will attempt to screw over the working and under classes language to the point that it's so general describing a cupcake is difficult. When you can't say the word black person for fear of being called a racist, you've lost the ability to think about someone as black. When you can't think of things as master/slave but in some other fetish term which will be banned then you've lost that as well.
I personally think that anyone who wants to be politically correct can go right ahead but the moment someone comes upto me and starts telling me what I can and can't believe or say is the moment I tell them to fuck off. I'v ascertained this level of english, and a large vocabulary and I'm gonna use it.
Now, as for shopping for wires, we can easily change the terminology to "penis, vagina" and if they don't like that, "innie and outie". If they still think that's bad, we'll name the wire ends "this end was fucked by political correctness" and "this end was fucked more by political correctness". I like the current terminology, it works and everyone can get it from the get go.
A good measure of a leader is their ability to solve conflict. If something they do with their power causes more conflict than it solves, then they are not a good leader. By that logic, the moron who wanted this passed needs to get booted out of their nice cosy seat.
As long as Americans have it in their heads that their constitutional rights are still protected, they'll go on their lives peacefully until something like, oh I don't know, the ozone is gone or winter no longer happens anymore. As scary as it is to start saying shit like this, Mark My Words, we're in for a civil war within the next 30 or 40 years at this rate. They're fooled around with and screwed up every constitutional right and amendment we have. Pretty soon they'll be exercising the lack of our rights, and if they get that far, they'll start doing stuff like chipping people and screwing them over if they don't like them. Tommarrow people will be trying to make a living and they can't, and unlike in max headroom, those people in the fringes won't go about their daily lives happily. All it takes at that point is a few more people to say fsck it, I hate this and to pick up a gun or knife, and you've got civil war.
The number of protesters will continue to grow year after year after year, until what happened in the soviet union in georga happens here. People will get tired of the bullshit and getting no straight answer and with the goverment giving itself ample time to play with the system.
Seriously, think california's ballot system will be fixed by 2k5? I sure don't. How long can a geek keep a stupid person fixated?
"We want electronic voting."
Nerd: Sure, I'll make it.
1 year passes
"Um...you didn't do it right. We want it to check for security and work properly when tallying."
Nerd: The tech is still developing. Give it another year.
1 year passes
"Still isn't working properly."
Nerd: I'll get on it right away
Yet another year later
"We want you to print out the ballot to proove it tallies correctly, some landslide elections look suspicious"
Nerd: Ok, but it'll take awhile for everyone to change their systems, give it 2 years.
2 years pass for the implementation of printers.
"but now the ballot is printing out with the correct vote but it isn't being tallied, I want it to be tallied too."
Nerd: I didn't know you wanted it to be tallied, ok.
"Um..now it's stored on an insecure medium and broadcasted on an insecure medium, and the votes are still coming in wrong. Fix it."
Nerd: Ok, but I'll need another few years to fix it as well.
2 more years pass.
"Um, now the master server isn't working right, can you fix that?"
Nerd: Sure. Gimme a few months...
And by this time, everyone loves a certain party and the other party is somehow out of power. But nobody cares, all the elections are fixed and nobody said "that's enough, fix it and fix it now or we're going back to regular ballot until something that works comes along".
First of all, most of the internet's equipment is in america and europe, with an exception being made for china, japan, tiawan, and korea which also have substancial investment in the internet. So, letting some small country in africa dictate how the internet is run isn't a good idea, to start with. It can be looked at in a viewpoint of economic warfare; if Britan can get wal-mart.uk and register it to a britan based company instead of to wal-mart the international corperation, they could potentially make a lot of money importing.
After that, you've got problems with international corperations greasing the wheeles all over. The UN is even more corrupt than the US goverment. All the UN does is make "deals" (some of which involve bullying) between nations for resources as well as making it possible for GE to dump toxic waste in korea and if korea doesn't like that they can kiss the UN's sweet behind. This is why, as Jello Biafra says, the kidnapping rich people and corrupt goverment officials in mexico is what corperations like to call a growth industry.
So, if we move all the internets services to an even more corrupt govermental system with absolutely no responsability to a people but rather to goverments who want to supress people, what do you think will happen?
If china wants xyz banned internationally they can probably pull the strings to do that. If some "terrorist" group in the US puts leaked files on a website prooving conspiracy such as Diebold, what do you think the probability of them pulling the DNS registry would be? As long as the DNS stays under control of and protection by the biggest bully on the block it'll serve the needs of the biggest bully and so long as you don't fsck with it, the bully will leave you alone. It's a lot better than throwing it into the middle of a room with people ranging from weak babies to 500 pound strongmen and watching the freeforall.
Or better yet, what if they wanted to implement internet 2 so that stupid dinosaur people run the internet and not the smart people who do now (to put it in a blunt manner)? Hey, we don't like rantradio because it's a free, uncensored medium that's taking buisness away from RIAA affiliated companies so we're just going to take you off of DNS and fsck your internet connection.
I, as everyone else, would love to see the services ICANN trys to implement given real form and direction and be ruled by wise, progressive people instead of large international corperations and a goverment run amok as it does now.
All the mass media is owned by 6 major corperations as we already know. In our stimulation-happy culture where sitting ontop of a mountain taking in the view isn't appreaciated, so too is long complicated writing. Thanks to this media, people are raised to be consumers, and we're stimulated to the point that things like books are so boring that we fall asleep reading them. Why read a book when you can watch a movie? A person who plays FPS games for months on end is so thoroughly stimulated that sitting at a spot and just relaxing may be a bit much for them to do.
And now we've got a bunch of professors complaining about how the culture that has come into being is completly fucking their profession. This is understandable, and if studies were more available in web format they'd be more popular.
The very idea of mass media is very very very wrong. It's a very bad thing for our society. How it used to be is that you'd know what's going on around you by seeing it. Now you've got to trust some news anchor on the television or internet and when they're reporting on some bitch or hoe on tv instead of doing their job of educating people on stuff that's important; do I care some star ran amok and molested his children? No. I do care however when congress decides it wants to take one more step towards turning me and every human on the planet into slaves and if it weren't for that, I wouldn't give a damn. I could just focus on my life and my ideas and be involved with society at my own level. My life would be so much more peaceful if I wasn't afraid of the US turning into a big pile of shit.
It's no wonder in this stimulation happy society of 1-sentance soundbytes and news stories that don't even have paragraphs that people won't pay attention or give credibility to research organizations. If a news agency that was once taught as a credible source of information such as the New York Times is now shit, should I consider other publications such as reuters just as credible? I give more credibility to my friend who heard from their friend who heard from a friend of a friend that xyz was happening than I do to NYT.
A major problem that even hits the intellegent people is that they want to know what's going on too. But to know what's going on it's a 2 hour ordeal every day. You've got to get up, get online, go through your daily checks folder and get your news. wade through the utter crap to get to the good stuff that you want. I'v got to look through 10 headlines of bullshit to find the 1 headline that's good, and read 10 stories on a subject to get an idea of what's going on.
So yes, webpages are going to degrade the content available. A million bumbling idiots will drum out the one that makes sense. At least they can establish some level of research distrobution via webpages and moreso, credibility if they want to stop this from happening but more to the point, so people like me don't have to wade through utter shit to find their stuff.
Just like a certain college near me requires students attending to live in dorms the first couple of semesters and bans all sex, public display of affection, dancing between different sex people, and non-christian music with the punishment of suspension and expulsion, they will lose buisness. Of course, they won't tell you about what they're doing. Oh no, they'll give you the rulebook after you sign up and have given them your money, not before.
This one reeks of a scam. Stay away from the university of florida. I surely am not going to live in dorms without free, unbiased, uncensored internet access. Throttle my access if you must, but tell me what I'm getting into. If they decided to implement this bullshit, I'd go ahead and get some friends who feel the same way and tell the staff "either take it of, or we won't be here next semester".
This also brings up a censorship part. Remember in the 1970's when govermental studies bodies found that "problem" of liberal people came mostly from campuses and poor areas? I'd bet they'd love to cut off students from all liberal views on the internet.
Do I also need to note that the only reason that college near me has stayed open is because some rich people and the local goverment breath funding into it year after year?
Ya know, it kinda makes me wonder; if you can't fill out a simple box sheet, mabye you shouldn't be voting?
Seriously, I know election officials will try all kinds of bullshit to rig elections if their hands are greased properly, as is happening right now. If you've ever played postal 2 and done the election day voting, you know what florida's ballot sheet looked like and no logical person can figure that sheet out. Everyone's been exposed to check in the box, it's not that difficult to understand and if you need to know how, then there should be clear instructions posted. If you can't read...well...then I REALLY don't think you should be voting because if you can't read, you can't get information properly but for these people, such as the blind or disabled, a voice option should be available.
In any case, when one takes upon the cause of designing such a system with such an importance (the voting system arguebly being the most important computer program on the planet) you've got to look for how it works and how you can keep elections from being rigged.
The reason paper ballot works so well is because you've got counting centers, then districts, then the state. The votes are counted as correctly as humans can count them on a center level. The on the district level, you get all of the counting centers votes tallied, then onto the state level.
It really wouldn't suprise me if someone at the state level decided to toy around with omit votes for their side of the bargain, but the beauty of even this system is that they've got to grease the hands of 50 state officials. So there's a distribuited component to it.
So, what'll take to make voting work properly with computer? First of all, the hardware needs to be cheap and difficult to rig. We can come up with all kinds of proprietary hardwired garble made by corperations with agenda's and loose pockets and make it cost $1000 a machine, but when it comes down to it, we need to make something that'll work on multiple platforms, that the average 40's-somthing old person windows user can setup and verify. It needs to be distribuited, needs to leave a verifyable paper trail to proove it's counting ability at all levels, it needs to record who made votes for whom such that records are kept incase of a recall election (so you don't have a bunch of dumasses coming in saying they voted x when they really voted for y). The hardware needs to be trustable, inexpensive, and simple to fix if something goes wrong.
Finally, it needs to have good security, crypto, anti-hacking measures etc out of the box. I should be able to throw it on a machine out of wallmart on a CD, it'll format the harddisk for me, install it's own hardware drivers, kernel, etc, ask for new drivers at install via disk (so you can't install new drivers later on) setup the polling option, hook it upto the internet, point it to the p2p master and be on our way. So, how do you go about making this system?
(note, the next part is imho)
Since X86 is an open standards compliant hardware platform that is extremly difficult to rig; is everyone going to buy from dell? No, that's already abundant; you can setup a lot of clients at schools, goverment buildings, etc and all the hardware is already there; that already has a connection platform; the internet, and has lots of readily available inexpensive hardware that is available everywhere, I choose it. (I could go mac, but you see, mac is proprietary.)
As for the software component, get an OSS GPL project going with some competant people (and by all means, multiple projects!). This way, people can check the whole system, they can put it on their machine and know it works and moreso, know it works at a hardware level.
So, what must this application have? First of all, it must be easy to install. I should be able to slap in a CD, have it install, select the options I want and it'll do it's own thing. Everything that needs to be installed should be installed at the first
No, pushing the humans down the stares is the way to save them from the teereble secret of time and space.
...
No, Shoving the humans is the answer
No, pushing them is
No, shoving
Either way, we're fucked.
The problem is that our money based economy is becoming dated and it's beginning to show. A money economy is great when it takes work to produce goods but as the work it takes to make stuff goes down (invariably due to the reliable automation of many of our industries) the price will drop as well. When the cost of food, shelter, and entertainment drop to all time lows the demand for the amount of work that needs to get done will drop. Soon everyone only has to work 7 hours a day to keep the food and goods coming in, then 6, 5, 2, 1, and in time 0.
This shifts an incredible amount of power and responsability onto the goverment and corperations. Another paradigm that will come into being is that media produced 20, 200, or 2000 years ago will still be popular today. Can you imagine the amount of music that can be created in this timespan? When demand is satiated, there is no demand. So why creat more media, for example, if there is already more than enough to last any one human their entire lifetime?
What will need to take place is a fundemental shift from a greed and need based economy, to a curiousity based economy. If all the things a person needs are free, then there is no reason to work for them. Therefore, one would learn how a machine works because they are curious and want to while a class of elietists would be kept to ensure the system would be maintained.
This may not happen for another thousand or two years, and may involve bloody uprisings and insurgencies, but it'll happen one way or another.
Do a google search for RIAA affiliated companies. All of the CD's that are put out have a label on them for the company that made the music, but won't be labeled by the RIAA. Carry this list around with you.
I agree. I don't like totalarian regimes, or dictatorships. I like democracy, in it's many forms. I'd prefer to sit here infront of my cosy computer, with my cosy lab and routers, eatin' warm mashed potatoes n' steak than getting angry over this shit.
But, thanks to modern day tech, we've got cameras inside of ligthers and portable video cams, and yes baby, the internet and p2p networks as our distrobution medium.
What I do hope happens is that this crap gets cleaned up by 2010 at the absolute latest. As long as the ability to vote is intact, and the govverment isn't taken over by assholes it can still be salvaged and repaired over time without violent conflict. I understand it takes time to redo the systems and explain to old people how electronic voting works between their latte's and 5 o-clock hair dressings. If I knew how to program I wouldn't be sitting here bitching, I'd be working on a stripped down linux kernel with a voting package that can work on x86 and proceeding to put up and get a webpage with the stuff on it slashdotted.
How many slashdotters are willing to go out and march, infront of the white house with loaded guns, molitof cocktails, and the like raised to show the goverment that if they don't stop fucking with democracy, we're gonna start shooting.
Call me a violent hippy if you must. I'm tired of this shit, they don't fucking get it. I have patience, but I don't have any patience for this kind of thing. In a democracy, you exhert force peacefully through vote. Don't like that congressman? Fine then, we'll jjust hang the lot of you and your families, plunder your bank accounts and put some people in who can actually rule. Democracy is an alternative to violent rule. Do I want a civil war? No, does the goverment want civil war? Their goin' in that direction and damn fast. Why will there be a civil war? Gattica baby, that's why. There's already a couple hundred thousand protesters in miami protesting the WTC talks, and many of them aren't young kids. Many of them are logically thinking, responsable adults who see the consequences.
And what I REALLY FUCKING HATE is when someone says to me "Those are a bunch of stupid hippies protesting.". As if all protesters are stupid hippies. Do hippies get up in body armor, tower shields and gas masks and protect their kind in organized lines? Do hippies police their kind when they want to protest? In the 1970's millions came on capitol hill to do their work. Nowadays, if you get a couple hundred people together to protest anything you get charged with unlawful assembly and get teargassed. I always say "Those hippies are there to protect the rights you don't fucking deserve." and I mean it too. I really hate these dumbfucks and I think death is too good for them. Seriously, if you don't defend your rights you don't deserve them. It's that simple. The supreme law of nature is force, and what you're on right now bub is a lolly pop ride. If shit hit the fan you'd be dead in an instant and that's the truth of it.
If a few hundred thousand americans showed up on the doorstep of the whitehouse, weapons and ballots raised, and demanded that their voting system be put back into order, and demanded that they don't fuck with them, the congressman would do it or order mass genocide.
Unfortunatly, that's not happening because everyone is just talking about it and not doing anything about it. You can sign ballots till you're blue in the face and congress can hear form 100,000,000 americans through the EFF but if their pompous assholes they won't get it. Sometime a sniper rifle can say a million words.
To fucking hell with "by 2005". How about you suspend the incorperation rights of diebold, arrest and convict the representatives and senators who were involved with the scam, and invest in a open source alternative that can easily be deployed on x86 hardware? That's about as constructive as I get at this point, folks.
Preferably choked full of normal people who have access to computers and e-mail, Please? ;)
The idea: you creat a structure, throw a bunch of nanites onto it, they then lathe the structure with nanites which will, on command, chemically bond with eachother creating your scructure.
If you've played total annihilation, you know what I'm talking about. Nanolathing was the primary process of building an army. Within an hour a commander could easily take over a planet and begin converting it into a metal world.
Wrong, P2P apps have plenty of uses. Books are one of them, and I get lots of books off of the app. I got a good one a few days ago on sequences and series and boolean logic, and thanks to it I have a good founding on how boolean logic works. I also get programs that I can't get like a 10 year old midi editor I had that the disks got corrupted in. P2P is going to grow and grow both in sheer bandwidth and broadness of content. There's not a lot the RIAA or corperations can do to stop it accept completly shut off their information systems. To say that the only use is illegal is pure bullshit. What's wrong is forever copyright. You make some music, you market it, you get your reward and now it's open to everyone in a couple of years. Why must the beatles, aerosmith, and countless bands be under copyright? To keep them from competing with todays music. If I put together a good music archive ver 1, a couple hundred megs of good choice select music and threw it out on p2p some people would be set for 2 or 3 years of good listen. 10 billion a year industry my ass.
It's also an unfortunate fact that most of the current music and media is censored. If it weren't then people would make great music that makes you think instead of the crap briteny spears cranks out of her ass. System of a down and Eminem are good examples of music that makes you think. When eminem made a song about killing his wife, people thought. It showed emotion and what hate is, gave the reasons for it, made ya sick. What if all music was like that? People would think instead of droning on. The RIAA is a dinosaur; it takes far more food to saciate a dinosaur than it does a couple hundred small humans, if the weather gets too cold or warm, they die. And finally, in our hit-by-a-gigantic-meteor world, they are slowly dieng off for all of these reasons.
All they will accomplish with sueing p2p sharers is to push file sharers underground to apps with better and better security. Some of the congressmen in our goverment are thinking "Uh, they're doing what?".
As for what this will do, I can tell you right now. "Oh fsck, I can't share eminem anymore! But I can share this porn on beta, and some funker fogt or de/vision! " In this fashon, music that's copyrighted by the RIAA won't be shared, and the good cyberpunk, indie and compeditive stuff will be shared. "*search for pop* devision, wtf are they?". When you type in Techno or electronic ebm you won't get a bunch of RIAA garbage, you'll get independant stuff. This will, in turn, increase sales and popularity of independant music and independant labels and take away the RIAA's consumeristic base slowly but surely.
This is in fact the reason their music sales dropped 15%; part of it is that nobody likes their tactics, part of it is that they are destroying their primary medium of advertising, and part of it is what I talked about above.
In the end, however, p2p will live on despite their actions. If without music fine, it'll just become a vast ever growing sea of porn, books, files, warez apps and other junk. You can't block the apps, you can't track them down, and you can't stop them without pulling a lot of shit. And if all else fails listen to some good ol' rantradio (www.rantradio.com). Because nothin' on there is RIAA copyrighted and they're one of the only completly legal and completly independant internet radio stations.
It's not the people who deal with the e-mail I'm talking about. It's the dumbfucks who answer the e-mail. Have some responsability with how you respond to advertising. If a company puts a sticker on my windshield about a car repair service, I'm never going to buy anything from them. The people who say "oh, a sticker for car repair. kewl" are the problem. If you respond positivly to rude advertising, expect more rude advertising.
With that said, I believe the proper answer to this whole mess is vigalantesm. Hackers need to get together, track down the spammers and completly trash their computer systems time and time again so they know we don't appreciate the treatment and moreso, to drive them out of buisness like they are doing to us.
and if the rest of humanity is too stupid to do a 10 minute google search then I'm not paying for it. You want to stop spammers? Use a decent filtering scheme.
Same thing as with drug, gun, and sex ed. If the vast majority of people weren't so damn irresponsable and stupid then they'd be able to handle either not using drugs or using them responsabily (not only does this apply to marajuana, but also the likes of prozak), certain guns wouldn't need to be outlawed because some dumbfuck would press the trigger by accident and off his entire family. And finally, our kids would not only know where and when sex is ok, but why it is ok and how to make love responsabily.
Either way, if he passes a e-mail tax law, I'll just setup something else that isn't spammable like a VPN between my house and my family members that transmits txt documents into a local folder. Mabye that way the idiots who use the system won't open up sobig viruses and help to make virus problems worse.
Actually, this was tried and it failed at the turn of the century. P2P apps aren't going away any time soon, despite the RIAA's bullshit campaign. As for pirates, they aren't pirates. They have about 100 years of backed copyrights. Meaning, if they had to, they could start printing and selling old stuff like the beatles or any one other band like aerosmith, even though those bands are over 14 years old. Hell, even most classical music is still under copyright by them.
Read Gangs of america, do a google search. It's free in PDF. It'll give you the real reasion for the civil war.
The RIAA is a cartel, that's why I consider them a company. It's no different than a corperation of size of say, AOL Time Warner or General electric. When corperations work with eachother to maximize eachother profits, are they really any different than a corperation who's goal is to maximize profit? No, they're just organized differently. Instead of having one big blacksmithing monopoly, you have 50 smaller guilds that make sure that a longsword is $300 in every part of the country.
If you remember back to the 1500's there used to be stock markets where pirate ships could get funding to go out and plunder other countries' merchant ships. The risks were high, but the payoff was huge. Is this any different? The only difference is that instead of the stocks being taken out for biker gangs that take on big rigs, you've got one corperation trying to exercise it's ability to legally wrangle other corperations for money through an entirely different system much like a bully, but at this point it's at the pirate. SCO is the first legal-pirate (tempting to call them lepirates, ;) ) corperation; a corperation that adds nothing to society that uses strongarm tactics, extortion, blackmail, ect all given a hint of legality by their lawers lies and a couple patents and copyrights that are getting old.
Microsoft will turn into one when they start going downhill, so will the RIAA, etc. If the RIAA can't make money by competition they'll just go back through the past 100 years of copyrights they have and start releasing them. Microsoft will pull all kinds of BS on the linux community if htey have to. Same with the MPAA, and any other monopoly that has sufficient stake in the legal system of the country they are located in that they can effectivly control it and a market.
Although I am suprised the starwars kid hasn't killed himself to end the pain or in the very least, locked himself in a room far away from the dark recesses of the internet to keep away from the scrutiny, I think this article is a tub of bullshit. Mabye in the more social, personal, chatty circles where anyone will believe anything because they are dumasses it may be a problem, but for the rest of us geeks who handle their communication more like TCP/IP rather than humans it isn't much of a problem. Inotherwords, anyone who said "Omg, I didn't expect that" is a complete dumass; where there's a way to communicate there will always be dumasses using it.
Then again, school teachers have never thought it was their responsability to keep bullies from giving someone a verbal beating, but rather, to ensure that the bullies don't end up paralyzed from the neck down by a lucky punch of kick or full of bulletholes in my experience. Which is the whole reason these things happen because if the bully was educated and understood "If you piss jonny off enough, he will inflict great pain on you and may even kill you. Think columbine. Understand?" the kid might think it's a bad idea to tease other kids so badly they think it's a good idea to go on a killing spree. Of course, it may also be a good idea to hold verbal abuse on the level of physical abuse. While much harder to proove, if the annoying asshole who teased you got the crap kicked out of him he'd think twice about opening his big toothy maw, and if he got a detention for starting it he'd be real suprised at the fact the system actually worked. It's only logical that as new technology comes along it'll be abused in the same way.
I'm also kind of annoyed at this title "The rise of cyber bullying". What idiot thought it necissary or even interesting to write this article? Oh yea, after reading the first sentance the light went on in the brain; the same ones who try to make parents afraid of everything from antrhax in the mail to other parents abducting their kids. It's idiots like this that I'd like to take out into the street and beat into a bloody pulp, if they didn't do what they did then our culture wouldn't be so afraid of itself. If television wasn't the constant dispenser of FUD it is then people would let their kids go out on haloween and have fun or it could be like in the 1970's when the real asshole of a teacher got tp'd. If this kind of bullshit didn't exist parents would actually be decent and not have an escape from their responsabilities into the land of idiocy to bring back thoughtful and stupid ideas about parenting some idiot, given an austere of legitimancy by writing for an newspaper that lets them be more comfertable about raising their kids.
So, in my mind this gets filed under the "trivial bullshit" section where I keep most of my useless drivvel; behind steel walls so it doesn't seep into the other stuff by accident.
You can always turn off the device, and you can't block people dynamically. The medium gives trust inherently without asking how trustworthy the individual is. Much like the internet, it's upto you how much info you want to share.
Or more likely, a gaggle of ugly geeks get the alert on their badges and play "spot the pathethic normal women looking for millionairs". Then they all point their wifi antennas at "Ms. I'm a bitch and I want a millionair for a husband" and hack their devices so they say "Want sex, any man will do, will do 3-somes with other women, enjoys bdsm, please hurry I'm horny".
The geeks then watch as the women are barraged by men and the women asking for sex. Not knowing what to do, they begin to leave and one of the geeks walks upto the women and says "I noticed your tag got hacked, need some help? Can I buy you a drink?". After the women are good and liquored up, they return home with the geeks for a hot night of love making or at least give them their numbers after the geeks turn on the charm and show they aren't assholes or freaks.
So long as the goverment doesn't start chipping people we're ok. But I actually like the idea, if you goto a bar and are looking for a 1 night stand the device can automatically hook you up with another person, or if you're walking down the street and have your device set to lonely it can alert other people to your presence and make some new friends. In otherwords, a couple hundred years ago you had a town of 100 and knowing everyone was an eventuality, not a chore. Nowadays, getting to know everyone in a town like mine which is suburbia and has 10k people, even knowing your neighbors down the block is a chore because you never need to meet them. Devices like this can strengthen the social fabric and networking in a community and undo the damage television has done to the trust relationships in our society by breaking the barriar.
Alternativally, I can see advertising companies abusing the devices to get PI and marketing data. Normally I don't care if marketing departments market stuff directly to me when I'm looking for a gadget. If I can save a few hours of hunting around the web when I wanna buy something then I'm a happy camper, and it's always neat to be on slashdot and find a binary clock in a banner ad so long as I can turn the banner ad's off, but I'v got a problem with the shady bastards who will get my CC numbers and not tell me when they are charging me or try to get my money in a semi-legal way or who think harassing me is a good marketing tactic.
My mother took the route of trusting me with a computer, she even invested several hundred dollers for me to build a box and buy routing equipment. Now I admin our home network, I'v built her a machine, rebuilt my sisters and make sure all the machines are safe and I'm educating her on how to use the internet. Do I goto sites she thinks are bad? Definatly, but rarely. I do tons of reading online as well as gaming and chatting. Parents weren't meant to control the entirety of a kids developement. Most Pr0n won't damage your kids' minds, it'll make them think. Seeing a male or female n00d or having erotic sex is a far more complete education on their sexuality than they could ever have. Seeing neonazism sites or reading books on brainwashing will help them solidify why these things are wrong. Before our world was simple, now it's confined to cities and suburbs. The internet can bring the world to a kids hands, both the good and the bad, so they cabn better understand it.
What you do want to control is their gaming habits. I would've liked to learn woodworking from my father but instead I spent my troubled childhood shooting up on the computer because society hated me. It was a great escape but it's the wrong way to deal with reality.