"but I don't think your view of the impovershed is realistic..."
Maybe not. I do have this fairly naive belief that people want their situation to be better, and will work towards it in the majority of cases; however, I take the point that there are people who couldn't give a monkey's right nut about anything other than their next welfare cheque.
The problem is marginalising them all, which you've covered by stating that it's a generalisation...accepted, but it's also worthwhile to note that given the ability to RFID every product on the planet, is it not possible to start separating the wheat from the chaff?
"Many of these are built BRAND NEW and look like slums within a few years."
That sounds like the pride issue. Same thing happens over here, but it's that culture of 'someone will look after me'. I don't have any answers about doing anything with that, except for giving such areas the same treatment in terms of coverage by police and other social services and engaging the local people into taking a bit of initiative themselves. Some of Britain's more notorious slum areas are starting to come around simply from having schemes for the people to feel like they have a role in the community.
One thing that's always interested me is how people will often take on roles that have been created for them. The Stanford Prison experiment is often cited for abuse, but the other aspect is that ordinary people became monsters because they thought that was what they should become.
"My father mused that the apartment manager should get the welfare checks, take the rent out, and give the rest to the residents. She whined "but then they would think we didn't trust them!"
This actually happens over here; services are supplied on prepayment card meters (in most cases where council housing is involved), local taxation can be taken directly from welfare cheques and the rent comes directly from the government to the landlord. There are loopholes, but I'm astounded that it doesn't happen over there.
IOW, I agree with almost all of your points, but our systems are different and therefore we're seeing largely different problems.
"While maybe the advent of medicine in general is bigger than walking on the moon."
Trouble is there we're comparing a 20 year blip in terms of technological advance, and the best part of 10,000 years trial and error. I'll concede that my opinion is my opinion, but the race for the moon was way more political than based on advancement of the human race.
"i think it says that the US, when it wants to, can do whatever it wants and can succeed where others have failed, or failed to try even."
Which is why the seventies were a shock; hell you can see the turning point in the increased cynicism surrounding Nixon, and the vast inertia it took to actually consider that the man *was* a crook. Amusing that Clinton was threatened with impeachment for spooging an intern. Particularly a chubby one.
In terms of tried and failed or didn't try, there were robotic missions that were fulfilling most of the criterion of the moon missions apart from the aspects that required human intervention; personally I believe that more information came from Clementine than the manned missions.
"First off i don't think as many people follow the bible as literally as you imply."
They do. I can go get the figures if necessary, but the 'Born again' flavour of christianity tends to selectively promote a single gospel as 'truth' without talking about allegory or metaphor. Given that marriage is generally a contract of monogomy, the constant tirade against 'gay marriage' is almost amusing until you figure that the opposition is basing their argument on what the bible says. Why the hell shouldn't people want to make a committment to one another?
I should point out that I also treat the bible as a collection of guidelines and folktales, but there are those that believe in the literal word. The ministry of Van Impe is particularly vociferous, and before you dismiss them as whack jobs, they're whack jobs that get listened to, especially when they push a socialogical agenda.
"a lot of the stories simply say to use common sense."
Equally there is political and social agenda littered liberally through it that had relevance in patriarchal pre-industrial Middle East, but you're applying the idea that critical reasoning can make sense of it. I'm trying to tell you that some people just have no concept of critical reasoning, let alone the research skills to go find out about historical parallels or questioning events because they believe in higher authority.
"People just want to believe america is teh worst country on earth and that our government is full of shit."
No, they recognise the flaws, point them out and get branded as 'anti-american'. If you want to hear about Britain's problems, I could go into great detail, but it would probably bore you. BTW, we have our own Apollo detractors, but they're generally as well thought out as yours. The main problem is simply critical thinking and questioning arguments from positions of authority.
"he does basically have a point that governments currently monopolise space access and by doing so they are artificially restricting development and keeping costs high."
Governments do not monopolise space access. They're understandably twitchy about someone wanting to build a rocket that could carry a person or payload in the darkest depths of Chipping Norton, and so they control it. However, to suggest that they're keeping costs high is to miss the point; you can go to the other space agencies for quotations because it's still a free market.
The X-prize is one way in which they're encouraging private industry to get involved. The Japanese are talking about space tourism as a reality and even NASA has talked about using financial incentive to get people thinking outside the box
"Your analogies of the Californian power utilities and US media are not particularly apt"
That was to indicate short-sightedness rather than anything else, but I'll run with your ball here;
"This would simply have been inconceivable in the days of the government monopolised, flag carrying airlines."
Hence the constant appeals for government help by airlines that can't compete? How long ago did the airlines stop being nationally owned?
Airlines are in trouble, serious trouble, and given the competition around, the evolutionary nature of business will eventually give rise to a very small pond containing a couple of big fish; already there are monopolies on terminals in certain airports, check into the Lufthansa monopoly or the British Airways one; you didn't miss the problems between Virgin and BA in the past few years?
"In order for ordinary people to gain access to space travel, it must be deregulated."
Yeah, nothing cheers me up more than the thought of the Montana militia stockpiling launch vehicles. Regulation is needed because I categorically do not trust corporations to do anything but look at the bottom line. Unless you make them responsible for deaths and negligence more seriously than a fine and a slap on the wrist, there's no way I'd want to be downrange of a private industrial launch. Hell, go look at what's happened to the meadowland around Baikonur, and that was military.
"I personally don't consider a band experimenting and dabbling in different musical styles (which is pretty much what U2 has done with every one of their albums)"
BS, pre-joshua tree was when they built a pretty good fanbase by producing intensely political songs. Joshua Tree saw them break the states, and then they went on extended 'wanking' while they knocked around with BB King...they made it, and proceeded to try and make an 'event' out of everything that had Bono tearing down the Berlin Wall and generally acting like a very downmarket Bob Geldof. Incidentally, learning 3 chord riffs isn't generally considered the best way of entering international politics as anything but a talking head.
Another aspect is I've yet to see the U2 concept polka album, which would mean their experimentation had moved out of the shallows of accessible pop.
"Maybe I'm defensive, but I think Pop is a great album."
Great. Now compare it with Boy, War or the unforgettable fire. There's a difference between the corporate whore and the passionate irish kids. Hell, they really dumped it for me after Bono's 'incarnations', like he was Bowie, or to a stranger extent 'Madonna'.
Put it this way, they gained a world market at the time when the fans back home were thinking, 'WTF?'.
I have no problem with your fandom, BTW; I just remember Bono in a tank-top and really bad mullet. It should be pointed out that 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' could have been commercial suicide in the UK when it was released.
"timing of the album's release, most especially if it's not finished"
Unless it's a publicity stunt. Hell, I have to ask the question why the CD was even at the photoshoot; the language is certainly loaded to add more fuel to the 'P2P is a method of fencing stolen goods' line. Personally, their last two albums haven't even registered on my radar because the charts are dying on their arse in the UK.
"They are admitting that they cannot control what file sharers do, which is something a lot of the music industry has yet to come to grips with, but they are putting their money where their mouth is by saying that the actions of file-sharers will ultimately cause the end product to suffer."
That isn't putting the money where the mouth is. That's putting up flak to defend a *possibly* bad album; you think they wouldn't have slapped it on iTunes?
Look, the simple fact of the matter is that album sales for the past twenty years have been a case of hiding the fillers in with the good tracks, which usually come out singly for 1/3 the price of a 12-17 track album. The singles market has died because people couldn't be bothered paying that money for something they'll hear in constant rotation ad infinitum for up to two months before release. They saturate, and wonder why nobody buys; elementary marketing.
"...hopefully whoever stole the unfinished album will feel the same way."
"The retriever tool uses the search tool and crawls across the Web, like a Web spider, to locate and retrieve desired or suitable content, based on defined criteria, in HTML format."
Well, it's nice and overbroad, as the above example shows. I'm wondering if it's a valid tactic to make the document so repetitive and boring that someone just rubberstamps it and sends it out.
Isn't there a defense of laches that protects against this?
"Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001."
Arthur C Clarke isn't that wide. Even Gerard O'Neill conceded that some of his designs wouldn't be done by 2001, BUT, when Kennedy announced that they were going to the moon, it was a boom time for space. The limits were removed, only to slam back in as space was put on a backburner because the grey dust of the moon's surface failed to keep feeding the novelty. Hence the various stunts they pulled.
Politically, it was a time when the US thought they couldn't be beaten. Vietnam was a bit of a shock.
"THE #1 defining moment of human civilization."
As much as I am a fan of space in general, I think contraception was probably bigger, as it meant that we could control our own population; medical science in general has reduced our lability to environmental pressures and increased lifespan. Walking on the moon may well have been the defining moment for a generation, though.
"No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
Except people are already forgetting it, and the vast majority follow a book of myths and legends called the 'Bible' that was cobbled together roughly two thousand years ago.
Do you even want to speculate on the fine people that think it was all staged in California?
"I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars"
They're committed to a moon base, but what the other side of the bamboo curtain says and does are two completely different things. Mars has no interest for them at the moment because they're realists. That's one of the nicer aspects of communist nations...none of that PR stuff to sway the public. (Yes, this is a downside, I was tongue in cheek there.)
"Can you imagine how much even 1/10th of that budget could do to help raise the standard of living?"
That isn't a money problem, but more of a socialogical one. For one thing, America will have to stop treating the underclass like scum and start treating people properly, not only from the perspective of being a G8 nation and being able to afford it, but also from the standpoint that you don't want a socialogical strata of dumb people with nothing to do, living in poverty and becoming epidemic incubators. There's also an element of pride that could be tapped; slums are slums because people don't give a damn about them.
"As any economist will tell you, and as all you Linux people know, a monopoly of any kind is bad, and NASA has one on SPACE."
Hi, coward. This is the rest of the world; we took slight umbridge at the implication that NASA is the only space agency, and we'd like to invite you to check out Ariane, Long March and Huygens.
And it's 'monoculture'.
"but in order to do that it must obey the same laws as business and NASA will never do that."
You mean like charging people for satellite launch, repair and retrieval? Yeah, they'd never do that.
OTOH, I really like your thinking. California's never had power supplies this good, Litigation is at an all-time low and the media isn't trying to position itself as a government protected subscription outfit. no siree. None of that happening.
"I think every government budget should be slashed, from schools to police. FORCE them to be efficient."
Nice idea, but most places work from the ground up when figuring out the corners to cut, usually because they give the jobs to managers, and you appear to have missed the point that the whole system is dedicated to keeping a strata of middle-management in paperclips.
As for 'wasting' money, they're in a pretty unique situation regarding doing stuff for the first time, in terms of pure research, they're in the enviable position of having more stuff go to market than, say, high temperature physics or cosmology.
"I'm willing to believe that there is substantial similarity. However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the code came from Linux (or more properly, IBM, perfectly within its rights) into SCO, and not the other way 'round."
Perhaps you can give me a hand, as a fellow Grokker. Didn't SCO recently file to state that this wasn't about Linux copyrights anymore, and this was a contract dispute?
In which case this has nothing to do with the court case with IBM anymore, and only has relevance to the Red Hat case.
"If I have a WiFi card in my PDA I access the mail server and the web directly. If (or when based on other Outlook products) someone finds an Pocket Outlook exploit, what use is your desktop then?"
Absolutely none, however, 'if' someone steals your keys and makes a copy of them, what use is your front door? As people have pointed out, PocketPC is extremely heavily sandboxed and the last few worms/viruses haven't exactly stretched the imagination too much.
Security isn't about stapling a wrist to a forehead and complaining that someone else isn't being responsible for you, it's about taking a bit of responsibility for yourself and taking a hit in the convinience gland...and not downloading viral attachments onto a vulnerable platform. If that means blocking all attachments, then you should consider it. I personally keep attachments out of my PDA because most of the time I'd want to be checking them on a much larger screen anyway.
"Hell, with my WiFi card my PDA is always visible on the network."
That's a pretty bad PDA, then. Battery life sucky and prone to the wifi DoS, is it?
"I can use the desktop to attempt to clean up the mess of my PDA after it has got a virus."
You do know that the word 'backup' has special relevance here? It's also handy when some thieving chav steals the PDA.
I did a six year stint as a librarian sysop on Compuserve, (pre-AOL and that horrible binary format) and as a matter of course we had to run four, yes, four virus checkers across each file. That's for security. It was inconvinient, and some might say anal, but the number of transmitted viruses in that time was zero.
"Welcome to the perpetual moral panic that is Britain."
That's the papers. Everyone else is just in a sort of daze because this seems to be a replay of the Brass Eye Peadophile special.
"which forms the other moral panic just ahead of you."
...Your driver for the evening is David Blunkett. Don't worry about the dog, madam, you don't need 20/20 vision for hindsight, although admittedly it's too late to do much when the event is past.
"For example, in the UK at least, you can return anything you buy within 10 days of buying it, for full refund, even if you simply decide you don't like it anymore."
14 days. It's a standard contractual 'cooling off' period where you can suddenly decide you don't want it. However, collecting on that clause in the Sale of Goods Act is _extremely_ hard unless you have something heavy to bludgeon the store with. Woolworths, for example, decided that they didn't want to play in terms of computer games, DVDs and CDs. I tend to go around pointing out that signs taped to the cash desk don't actually invalidate statutory rights...
One little known clause is 'fitness of purpose'; anything you buy has to be fit for the purpose for which it was bought.
Of course, my favourite is the implied and statutory 12 month warranty. I've had many an argument over a limited time warranty before now.
However, this is all normally policed by Trading Standards, and they _really_ have their hands full dealing with internet purchases/scams.
BTW, the major cost increase in the UK compared with anywhere else is importation duties and the recognition of the UK market as a cash cow...
"I'm not in favor of increasing the complexity of the bios."
Tough, it's happening.
"They can barely get them stable after a few updates now, how will it be when they are doing alot more?"
Modern BIOS is a lot more capacious that the days of the XT and AT, and it's usually really low level stuff that goes on. Given the separation between the people that do the hardware and people that have to handle the low level drivers, it's no surprise that hardware leaves the warehouse with unfinished drivers; couple to that the dizzying array of hardware that can attach to a motherboard, and you are going to have some patching. EFI look a lot more flexible in what it can do.
"I don't trust Microsoft and Intel to do it right."
And they speak so highly of you. Despite crappy business practices, they actually have some talented people that produce some good solid work. If you want to be paranoid, why don't you look up EFI and cross reference with DRM?
"Anybody who says that the music being produced today "isn't as good" as older music are just lazy in my book. If you can't put forth a little effort in finding new music that isn't force-fed to you by MTV or the radio, then you don't really know the whole story, do you?"
No, NO, look up, damn....that point missed you by inches.
Minority appeal is minority appeal; the RIAA doesn't really care about the piracy of Shonen Knife tracks beyond the obvious monetary amount...it's more about the wholesale ripping of Britney Spears et al. They represent the biggest investment by the record companies, and rightly or wrongly, they expect the largest return from those poor butt-puppets.
Y'see, since the advent of punk in the UK, the record companies have been convinced that the public will buy prettily packaged sh**, and although it was hit and miss in those anarchic days, they've refined the whole process. Entire industries are now set up to handle the fostering and promotion of one or two pretty people for the delight of the prepubescent. Incidentally the biggest age group with a limited budget.
Like the Saturday morning toy ads, they're targetting their market directly.
"online radio is a great way to find new artists that you like."
And the record companies have left that well alone, haven't they?
"Also, I know you can't trust Hollywood for learning history, but it seems to me that in depictions of the Revolutionary War, the colonialists are shown to be clever and resourceful against the better equipped, more organized, and more numerous British. For example, while the British would march in lines, the colonialists would hide behind trees and rocks and pick them off."
And convieniently forgot the French.
As for 'sporting', That's something you have to thank Ealing for. At no time has the British Army operated in a 'sporting' manner, although the horrendous casualties of World War I prompted a revision of the 'rules' of warfare which has been suspended on numerous occasions due to necessity; ie the bombing of bedoiuns with gas during the 1950s.
"There have been rumors for years that the NSA has ownage over PGP in a major way."
There are similar rumours about aliens on the moon.
PGP is an implementation. Don't trust it, use another.
Back in the day there was some debate about the clipper chip (hardware encryption) having backdoors for agencies (it turned out to have a slight problem with large amounts of data, and would let this through unencrypted), but there would be hints from different services. Despite what you might think, every agency has to fight for it's own budget, and would have a hell of a time even trusting that one agency might have the keys to the secrets. Besides which, even people in positions of trust can show themselves to be untrustworthy after the fact.
"Either that certain keys are multiplied by a known number or that the combination of algorithms, as is such with PGP, weakens the security of the encryption."
Where the content of the message is known, the _RSA_ algorithm is fairly weak, because you're just hunting down a key. Likewise having an exposure of the private key on either side will weaken the encryption, but it's all about the hinting. If this bothers you, change the structure of the message, use pre-arranged codes or one-time pads (still the best form of encryption when coupled with source/destination verification).
"On top of all of this, they have a super-duper-factory-sized super computer thats liquid cooled that can brute force it. But even then, they would have to be selective about which documents they brute force."
Best estimates at the very top end of computing suggest a couple of centuries for a non-hinted 128-bit key. Personally I think this is a PR stunt to divert attention away from more traditional forms of data collection and putting the wind up terrorists. If they're so effective, why the vaguely random attacks coordinated from different countries? The telephone system isn't really _that_ encrypted and a huge amount is packet-switched these days...
"I see your "Mathematics" and I'll raise you a couple hundred top flight mathematicians and a couple billion dollars worth of the best super computers money can buy."
The scaling doesn't happen that way, and go check how easy it is to routinely use 1024-bit encryption. That's one of the reasons the UK codified in law the ability to imprison someone who refuses to supply keys.
This did give me a thought about double steganography that would have an intersection between keys and show the non-critical payload if one key was displayed, but I'm not a cryptographer* and my bad guy credentials only stretch as far as wanting to see the RIAA drowned slowly in their own waste.
* I do know about progression in running brute force attacks against encryption, though.
"'Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws"
It's worth pointing out that there is US soverign territory in other countries, usually just under the massive 'golfball' domes and dishes.
Nice way for the spooks to justify their increasing budgets since the end of the cold war...
"For those of you attempting to probe the moral questions of this project."
There isn't much point looking at the moral points when you've acted illegally and unethically. Social 'experiments' are generally required to have full disclosure, and you haven't even got a control experiment, which makes your back pedalling just look desparate.
The worst aspect of this is that your malware is now out in the wild. You can't recall it, you can't kill it, and now you've identified yourself.
Well done. You are a Vx'er for life. Doesn't matter what your intentions are, and I wouldn't bank on the MPAA/RIAA offering you a job because what you did was trivial and foolish.
Next time you have a bright idea *Think* about what you're doing. If there's any grey areas, or interpretation that can be done, don't do it.
History is littered with people who thought it wouldn't matter...
"It comes down to money. It costs money to police your network, while this cost may be less than the damage inflicted upon 3rd parties, the ISP doesn't care (and the ISP's customers don't want to pay more)."
Oh, the ISPs care when their bandwidth charges start to skyrocket because of the sheer volume of traffic going through, but they can't be seen to take action because it would change their status from 'carrier' to being responsible for what was going through the servers...which would kick off the next round of internet censorship for any interested group that takes a dislike to a web page. Bear in mind that ISPs pay for bandwidth; they don't have the flat cost model, but a volume rate.
One answer is for the ISPs to start offshore proxies to filter traffic and look for patterns; failing that, you can individually start logging your firewall traffic and issue reports; that's alledgedly what abuse addresses are for.
I've also thought about creating something that could track the action from ISPs regarding reports to abuse, but I lack the time at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
"but I don't think your view of the impovershed is realistic..."
Maybe not. I do have this fairly naive belief that people want their situation to be better, and will work towards it in the majority of cases; however, I take the point that there are people who couldn't give a monkey's right nut about anything other than their next welfare cheque.
The problem is marginalising them all, which you've covered by stating that it's a generalisation...accepted, but it's also worthwhile to note that given the ability to RFID every product on the planet, is it not possible to start separating the wheat from the chaff?
"Many of these are built BRAND NEW and look like slums within a few years."
That sounds like the pride issue. Same thing happens over here, but it's that culture of 'someone will look after me'. I don't have any answers about doing anything with that, except for giving such areas the same treatment in terms of coverage by police and other social services and engaging the local people into taking a bit of initiative themselves. Some of Britain's more notorious slum areas are starting to come around simply from having schemes for the people to feel like they have a role in the community.
One thing that's always interested me is how people will often take on roles that have been created for them. The Stanford Prison experiment is often cited for abuse, but the other aspect is that ordinary people became monsters because they thought that was what they should become.
"My father mused that the apartment manager should get the welfare checks, take the rent out, and give the rest to the residents. She whined "but then they would think we didn't trust them!"
This actually happens over here; services are supplied on prepayment card meters (in most cases where council housing is involved), local taxation can be taken directly from welfare cheques and the rent comes directly from the government to the landlord. There are loopholes, but I'm astounded that it doesn't happen over there.
IOW, I agree with almost all of your points, but our systems are different and therefore we're seeing largely different problems.
"While maybe the advent of medicine in general is bigger than walking on the moon."
Trouble is there we're comparing a 20 year blip in terms of technological advance, and the best part of 10,000 years trial and error. I'll concede that my opinion is my opinion, but the race for the moon was way more political than based on advancement of the human race.
"i think it says that the US, when it wants to, can do whatever it wants and can succeed where others have failed, or failed to try even."
Which is why the seventies were a shock; hell you can see the turning point in the increased cynicism surrounding Nixon, and the vast inertia it took to actually consider that the man *was* a crook. Amusing that Clinton was threatened with impeachment for spooging an intern. Particularly a chubby one.
In terms of tried and failed or didn't try, there were robotic missions that were fulfilling most of the criterion of the moon missions apart from the aspects that required human intervention; personally I believe that more information came from Clementine than the manned missions.
"First off i don't think as many people follow the bible as literally as you imply."
They do. I can go get the figures if necessary, but the 'Born again' flavour of christianity tends to selectively promote a single gospel as 'truth' without talking about allegory or metaphor. Given that marriage is generally a contract of monogomy, the constant tirade against 'gay marriage' is almost amusing until you figure that the opposition is basing their argument on what the bible says. Why the hell shouldn't people want to make a committment to one another?
I should point out that I also treat the bible as a collection of guidelines and folktales, but there are those that believe in the literal word. The ministry of Van Impe is particularly vociferous, and before you dismiss them as whack jobs, they're whack jobs that get listened to, especially when they push a socialogical agenda.
"a lot of the stories simply say to use common sense."
Equally there is political and social agenda littered liberally through it that had relevance in patriarchal pre-industrial Middle East, but you're applying the idea that critical reasoning can make sense of it. I'm trying to tell you that some people just have no concept of critical reasoning, let alone the research skills to go find out about historical parallels or questioning events because they believe in higher authority.
"People just want to believe america is teh worst country on earth and that our government is full of shit."
No, they recognise the flaws, point them out and get branded as 'anti-american'. If you want to hear about Britain's problems, I could go into great detail, but it would probably bore you. BTW, we have our own Apollo detractors, but they're generally as well thought out as yours. The main problem is simply critical thinking and questioning arguments from positions of authority.
"he does basically have a point that governments currently monopolise space access and by doing so they are artificially restricting development and keeping costs high."
Governments do not monopolise space access. They're understandably twitchy about someone wanting to build a rocket that could carry a person or payload in the darkest depths of Chipping Norton, and so they control it. However, to suggest that they're keeping costs high is to miss the point; you can go to the other space agencies for quotations because it's still a free market.
The X-prize is one way in which they're encouraging private industry to get involved. The Japanese are talking about space tourism as a reality and even NASA has talked about using financial incentive to get people thinking outside the box
"Your analogies of the Californian power utilities and US media are not particularly apt"
That was to indicate short-sightedness rather than anything else, but I'll run with your ball here;
"This would simply have been inconceivable in the days of the government monopolised, flag carrying airlines."
Hence the constant appeals for government help by airlines that can't compete? How long ago did the airlines stop being nationally owned?
Airlines are in trouble, serious trouble, and given the competition around, the evolutionary nature of business will eventually give rise to a very small pond containing a couple of big fish; already there are monopolies on terminals in certain airports, check into the Lufthansa monopoly or the British Airways one; you didn't miss the problems between Virgin and BA in the past few years?
"In order for ordinary people to gain access to space travel, it must be deregulated."
Yeah, nothing cheers me up more than the thought of the Montana militia stockpiling launch vehicles. Regulation is needed because I categorically do not trust corporations to do anything but look at the bottom line. Unless you make them responsible for deaths and negligence more seriously than a fine and a slap on the wrist, there's no way I'd want to be downrange of a private industrial launch. Hell, go look at what's happened to the meadowland around Baikonur, and that was military.
"I personally don't consider a band experimenting and dabbling in different musical styles (which is pretty much what U2 has done with every one of their albums)"
BS, pre-joshua tree was when they built a pretty good fanbase by producing intensely political songs. Joshua Tree saw them break the states, and then they went on extended 'wanking' while they knocked around with BB King...they made it, and proceeded to try and make an 'event' out of everything that had Bono tearing down the Berlin Wall and generally acting like a very downmarket Bob Geldof. Incidentally, learning 3 chord riffs isn't generally considered the best way of entering international politics as anything but a talking head.
Another aspect is I've yet to see the U2 concept polka album, which would mean their experimentation had moved out of the shallows of accessible pop.
"Maybe I'm defensive, but I think Pop is a great album."
Great. Now compare it with Boy, War or the unforgettable fire. There's a difference between the corporate whore and the passionate irish kids. Hell, they really dumped it for me after Bono's 'incarnations', like he was Bowie, or to a stranger extent 'Madonna'.
Put it this way, they gained a world market at the time when the fans back home were thinking, 'WTF?'.
I have no problem with your fandom, BTW; I just remember Bono in a tank-top and really bad mullet. It should be pointed out that 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' could have been commercial suicide in the UK when it was released.
"timing of the album's release, most especially if it's not finished"
Unless it's a publicity stunt. Hell, I have to ask the question why the CD was even at the photoshoot; the language is certainly loaded to add more fuel to the 'P2P is a method of fencing stolen goods' line. Personally, their last two albums haven't even registered on my radar because the charts are dying on their arse in the UK.
"They are admitting that they cannot control what file sharers do, which is something a lot of the music industry has yet to come to grips with, but they are putting their money where their mouth is by saying that the actions of file-sharers will ultimately cause the end product to suffer."
That isn't putting the money where the mouth is. That's putting up flak to defend a *possibly* bad album; you think they wouldn't have slapped it on iTunes?
Look, the simple fact of the matter is that album sales for the past twenty years have been a case of hiding the fillers in with the good tracks, which usually come out singly for 1/3 the price of a 12-17 track album. The singles market has died because people couldn't be bothered paying that money for something they'll hear in constant rotation ad infinitum for up to two months before release. They saturate, and wonder why nobody buys; elementary marketing.
"...hopefully whoever stole the unfinished album will feel the same way."
Ha. Two words. Highest bidder.
"The retriever tool uses the search tool and crawls across the Web, like a Web spider, to locate and retrieve desired or suitable content, based on defined criteria, in HTML format."
Well, it's nice and overbroad, as the above example shows. I'm wondering if it's a valid tactic to make the document so repetitive and boring that someone just rubberstamps it and sends it out.
Isn't there a defense of laches that protects against this?
"Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001."
Arthur C Clarke isn't that wide. Even Gerard O'Neill conceded that some of his designs wouldn't be done by 2001, BUT, when Kennedy announced that they were going to the moon, it was a boom time for space. The limits were removed, only to slam back in as space was put on a backburner because the grey dust of the moon's surface failed to keep feeding the novelty. Hence the various stunts they pulled.
Politically, it was a time when the US thought they couldn't be beaten. Vietnam was a bit of a shock.
"THE #1 defining moment of human civilization."
As much as I am a fan of space in general, I think contraception was probably bigger, as it meant that we could control our own population; medical science in general has reduced our lability to environmental pressures and increased lifespan. Walking on the moon may well have been the defining moment for a generation, though.
"No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
Except people are already forgetting it, and the vast majority follow a book of myths and legends called the 'Bible' that was cobbled together roughly two thousand years ago.
Do you even want to speculate on the fine people that think it was all staged in California?
"I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars"
They're committed to a moon base, but what the other side of the bamboo curtain says and does are two completely different things. Mars has no interest for them at the moment because they're realists. That's one of the nicer aspects of communist nations...none of that PR stuff to sway the public. (Yes, this is a downside, I was tongue in cheek there.)
"Can you imagine how much even 1/10th of that budget could do to help raise the standard of living?"
That isn't a money problem, but more of a socialogical one. For one thing, America will have to stop treating the underclass like scum and start treating people properly, not only from the perspective of being a G8 nation and being able to afford it, but also from the standpoint that you don't want a socialogical strata of dumb people with nothing to do, living in poverty and becoming epidemic incubators. There's also an element of pride that could be tapped; slums are slums because people don't give a damn about them.
"As any economist will tell you, and as all you Linux people know, a monopoly of any kind is bad, and NASA has one on SPACE."
Hi, coward. This is the rest of the world; we took slight umbridge at the implication that NASA is the only space agency, and we'd like to invite you to check out Ariane, Long March and Huygens.
And it's 'monoculture'.
"but in order to do that it must obey the same laws as business and NASA will never do that."
You mean like charging people for satellite launch, repair and retrieval? Yeah, they'd never do that.
OTOH, I really like your thinking. California's never had power supplies this good, Litigation is at an all-time low and the media isn't trying to position itself as a government protected subscription outfit. no siree. None of that happening.
"I think every government budget should be slashed, from schools to police. FORCE them to be efficient."
Nice idea, but most places work from the ground up when figuring out the corners to cut, usually because they give the jobs to managers, and you appear to have missed the point that the whole system is dedicated to keeping a strata of middle-management in paperclips.
As for 'wasting' money, they're in a pretty unique situation regarding doing stuff for the first time, in terms of pure research, they're in the enviable position of having more stuff go to market than, say, high temperature physics or cosmology.
"I'm willing to believe that there is substantial similarity. However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the code came from Linux (or more properly, IBM, perfectly within its rights) into SCO, and not the other way 'round."
Perhaps you can give me a hand, as a fellow Grokker. Didn't SCO recently file to state that this wasn't about Linux copyrights anymore, and this was a contract dispute?
In which case this has nothing to do with the court case with IBM anymore, and only has relevance to the Red Hat case.
Am I missing something here?
"If I have a WiFi card in my PDA I access the mail server and the web directly. If (or when based on other Outlook products) someone finds an Pocket Outlook exploit, what use is your desktop then?"
Absolutely none, however, 'if' someone steals your keys and makes a copy of them, what use is your front door? As people have pointed out, PocketPC is extremely heavily sandboxed and the last few worms/viruses haven't exactly stretched the imagination too much.
Security isn't about stapling a wrist to a forehead and complaining that someone else isn't being responsible for you, it's about taking a bit of responsibility for yourself and taking a hit in the convinience gland...and not downloading viral attachments onto a vulnerable platform. If that means blocking all attachments, then you should consider it. I personally keep attachments out of my PDA because most of the time I'd want to be checking them on a much larger screen anyway.
"Hell, with my WiFi card my PDA is always visible on the network."
That's a pretty bad PDA, then. Battery life sucky and prone to the wifi DoS, is it?
"I can use the desktop to attempt to clean up the mess of my PDA after it has got a virus."
You do know that the word 'backup' has special relevance here? It's also handy when some thieving chav steals the PDA.
I did a six year stint as a librarian sysop on Compuserve, (pre-AOL and that horrible binary format) and as a matter of course we had to run four, yes, four virus checkers across each file. That's for security. It was inconvinient, and some might say anal, but the number of transmitted viruses in that time was zero.
"Welcome to the perpetual moral panic that is Britain."
...Your driver for the evening is David Blunkett. Don't worry about the dog, madam, you don't need 20/20 vision for hindsight, although admittedly it's too late to do much when the event is past.
That's the papers. Everyone else is just in a sort of daze because this seems to be a replay of the Brass Eye Peadophile special.
"which forms the other moral panic just ahead of you."
"Maybe, but this also gives the government one more reason as to why P2P is evil and should be banned, don't you think?"
Yeah, time to finally close down that 'freedom of speech' loophole that the fags and pinkos have been hiding behind all these years.
"For example, in the UK at least, you can return anything you buy within 10 days of buying it, for full refund, even if you simply decide you don't like it anymore."
14 days. It's a standard contractual 'cooling off' period where you can suddenly decide you don't want it. However, collecting on that clause in the Sale of Goods Act is _extremely_ hard unless you have something heavy to bludgeon the store with. Woolworths, for example, decided that they didn't want to play in terms of computer games, DVDs and CDs. I tend to go around pointing out that signs taped to the cash desk don't actually invalidate statutory rights...
One little known clause is 'fitness of purpose'; anything you buy has to be fit for the purpose for which it was bought.
Of course, my favourite is the implied and statutory 12 month warranty. I've had many an argument over a limited time warranty before now.
However, this is all normally policed by Trading Standards, and they _really_ have their hands full dealing with internet purchases/scams.
BTW, the major cost increase in the UK compared with anywhere else is importation duties and the recognition of the UK market as a cash cow...
"Considering that you're more likely to trip over a siberian tiger in Manhattan than to find an OGG file"
Right, that's my trip to Manhatten off. I've found quite a few Ogg files.
"If memory space for running programs on my PDA was not limited enough. Now I'll have to waste more of it running a virus checker."
Run the virus checker on your sync platform and stop whining.
"I'm not in favor of increasing the complexity of the bios."
Tough, it's happening.
"They can barely get them stable after a few updates now, how will it be when they are doing alot more?"
Modern BIOS is a lot more capacious that the days of the XT and AT, and it's usually really low level stuff that goes on. Given the separation between the people that do the hardware and people that have to handle the low level drivers, it's no surprise that hardware leaves the warehouse with unfinished drivers; couple to that the dizzying array of hardware that can attach to a motherboard, and you are going to have some patching. EFI look a lot more flexible in what it can do.
"I don't trust Microsoft and Intel to do it right."
And they speak so highly of you. Despite crappy business practices, they actually have some talented people that produce some good solid work. If you want to be paranoid, why don't you look up EFI and cross reference with DRM?
"but can you imagine any sort of Windows-dependent BIOS?"
No. Luckily, the article didn't mention one.
"Anybody who says that the music being produced today "isn't as good" as older music are just lazy in my book. If you can't put forth a little effort in finding new music that isn't force-fed to you by MTV or the radio, then you don't really know the whole story, do you?"
No, NO, look up, damn....that point missed you by inches.
Minority appeal is minority appeal; the RIAA doesn't really care about the piracy of Shonen Knife tracks beyond the obvious monetary amount...it's more about the wholesale ripping of Britney Spears et al. They represent the biggest investment by the record companies, and rightly or wrongly, they expect the largest return from those poor butt-puppets.
Y'see, since the advent of punk in the UK, the record companies have been convinced that the public will buy prettily packaged sh**, and although it was hit and miss in those anarchic days, they've refined the whole process. Entire industries are now set up to handle the fostering and promotion of one or two pretty people for the delight of the prepubescent. Incidentally the biggest age group with a limited budget.
Like the Saturday morning toy ads, they're targetting their market directly.
"online radio is a great way to find new artists that you like."
And the record companies have left that well alone, haven't they?
"Also, I know you can't trust Hollywood for learning history, but it seems to me that in depictions of the Revolutionary War, the colonialists are shown to be clever and resourceful against the better equipped, more organized, and more numerous British. For example, while the British would march in lines, the colonialists would hide behind trees and rocks and pick them off."
And convieniently forgot the French.
As for 'sporting', That's something you have to thank Ealing for. At no time has the British Army operated in a 'sporting' manner, although the horrendous casualties of World War I prompted a revision of the 'rules' of warfare which has been suspended on numerous occasions due to necessity; ie the bombing of bedoiuns with gas during the 1950s.
And yes, I'm British.
"There have been rumors for years that the NSA has ownage over PGP in a major way."
There are similar rumours about aliens on the moon.
PGP is an implementation. Don't trust it, use another.
Back in the day there was some debate about the clipper chip (hardware encryption) having backdoors for agencies (it turned out to have a slight problem with large amounts of data, and would let this through unencrypted), but there would be hints from different services. Despite what you might think, every agency has to fight for it's own budget, and would have a hell of a time even trusting that one agency might have the keys to the secrets. Besides which, even people in positions of trust can show themselves to be untrustworthy after the fact.
"Either that certain keys are multiplied by a known number or that the combination of algorithms, as is such with PGP, weakens the security of the encryption."
Where the content of the message is known, the _RSA_ algorithm is fairly weak, because you're just hunting down a key. Likewise having an exposure of the private key on either side will weaken the encryption, but it's all about the hinting. If this bothers you, change the structure of the message, use pre-arranged codes or one-time pads (still the best form of encryption when coupled with source/destination verification).
"On top of all of this, they have a super-duper-factory-sized super computer thats liquid cooled that can brute force it. But even then, they would have to be selective about which documents they brute force."
Best estimates at the very top end of computing suggest a couple of centuries for a non-hinted 128-bit key. Personally I think this is a PR stunt to divert attention away from more traditional forms of data collection and putting the wind up terrorists. If they're so effective, why the vaguely random attacks coordinated from different countries? The telephone system isn't really _that_ encrypted and a huge amount is packet-switched these days...
"I see your "Mathematics" and I'll raise you a couple hundred top flight mathematicians and a couple billion dollars worth of the best super computers money can buy."
The scaling doesn't happen that way, and go check how easy it is to routinely use 1024-bit encryption. That's one of the reasons the UK codified in law the ability to imprison someone who refuses to supply keys.
This did give me a thought about double steganography that would have an intersection between keys and show the non-critical payload if one key was displayed, but I'm not a cryptographer* and my bad guy credentials only stretch as far as wanting to see the RIAA drowned slowly in their own waste.
* I do know about progression in running brute force attacks against encryption, though.
"'Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws" It's worth pointing out that there is US soverign territory in other countries, usually just under the massive 'golfball' domes and dishes.
Nice way for the spooks to justify their increasing budgets since the end of the cold war...
Draconis
"For those of you attempting to probe the moral questions of this project."
There isn't much point looking at the moral points when you've acted illegally and unethically. Social 'experiments' are generally required to have full disclosure, and you haven't even got a control experiment, which makes your back pedalling just look desparate.
The worst aspect of this is that your malware is now out in the wild. You can't recall it, you can't kill it, and now you've identified yourself.
Well done. You are a Vx'er for life. Doesn't matter what your intentions are, and I wouldn't bank on the MPAA/RIAA offering you a job because what you did was trivial and foolish.
Next time you have a bright idea *Think* about what you're doing. If there's any grey areas, or interpretation that can be done, don't do it.
History is littered with people who thought it wouldn't matter...
"It comes down to money. It costs money to police your network, while this cost may be less than the damage inflicted upon 3rd parties, the ISP doesn't care (and the ISP's customers don't want to pay more)."
Oh, the ISPs care when their bandwidth charges start to skyrocket because of the sheer volume of traffic going through, but they can't be seen to take action because it would change their status from 'carrier' to being responsible for what was going through the servers...which would kick off the next round of internet censorship for any interested group that takes a dislike to a web page. Bear in mind that ISPs pay for bandwidth; they don't have the flat cost model, but a volume rate.
One answer is for the ISPs to start offshore proxies to filter traffic and look for patterns; failing that, you can individually start logging your firewall traffic and issue reports; that's alledgedly what abuse addresses are for.
I've also thought about creating something that could track the action from ISPs regarding reports to abuse, but I lack the time at the moment.