We've lived for centuries with unencrypted postal mail, and over a century with unencrypted phone messages, and a century with unencrypted radio communication.
Sure, but we've only had the computing power to uniformly and universally intercept all of those for a much, much smaller period of time. When it took two G-men to stakeout your house and check your garbage, government surveillance was much different than it taking two bored computer techs to intercept every single email in America with the words "bomb" and "Washington" in them. Now that the government has greater power and capability to infringe upon our rights, it needs more restrictions on it's use - not less. I particularly don't see why the public sector should make it easier to violate someone's rights, "We're only making it easier to go after criminals and terrorists" only works as long as you're not declared a terrorist I think.
But if your fire extinguisher heated up hot pockets, recorded digital cable, played Mp3s, scratched your back and listened to your wife whine about how much money you spent on electronics the EVERYONE would have one.
That is because corporations are viewed as legal individual enities; with the rights of a person. Which is a situaion I don't believe the founding fathers had any way to predict or develop contingency plans for.
Sure they did, it's called the SECOND Amendment...
But really, I think the problem here is that the government has had the misleading assumption over the past years that the fourth amendment (against unreasonable search and seizure) was intended solely as a restriction upon the government. Since the whole basis of privacy can be summed up in the fourth amendment, I think it's high time that it was used to protect the individual on the entire basis that I believe it was founded. No one, including and probably most especially the individual or corporation, should be able to subpoena records or enact searches without the full weight of a warrant dictated by probable cause. That would mean no blanket "file trading is done on your networks, give us access!" statements in the same way that (at least prior to the Patriot Act) the government can't issue warrants for every residence in Texas on the basis that "drugs come in there."
As I'm sure you all know, laws in the US are in large part based on precedent. Laws that force child molesters to register their presence to their neighbors will eventually evolve into laws that force felony assault criminals to announce their presence as well. Unless it involves a favorable supreme court or a civil war, most laws are ever reversed so much that the precedent for their submission to the legislature is ignored. That is, even if you stop a bill in one place the fact that it has been submitted before in another form somewhere almost guarantees that it will pop up again someplace else soon.
I'm not a constituent of Michigan, nor am I likely to become one as long as I retain my sense of horrible dread about snow and below freezing temperatures. The simple fact is though that what the Michigan state legislature does is important to me because it sets precedents that other state legislatures will recognize. This has very little to do with democracy or the power of a vote, short of an act of civil disobedience or voter fraud there simply isn't anything anyone outside of Michigan can do beyond bad press. If Michigan legislaters pass the law then it will bounce around the nearest states probably, or those involved in whatever power block brought up the law in the first place. Once it is passed in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvannia, Florida, Texas, or California though it's bound to have established enough recognition that at least some form of it will pass into law on the national level. Then we'll have to wait for the Supreme Court or that civil war, because the hardest thing for a government to do isn't to establish freedoms but to give up controls.
HEY! I thought Sony was on the verge of destruction thanks to the 47 billion dollars worth of illegal file trading my 11 year old engaged in last week! Now that I know it's just Spiderman I feel much better.
Um, excuse me but if the only way to get elected to an office is to become a politician...how are we ever improving our lot in life by electing ANYONE? I mean, if the road to change is paved in lies, compromised principles and deceit how does one affect change without corrupting the basic reasons you want change at all? The sad thing is, the republicans had it right to start out with - their basic concept of "big government=bad" was great until they realized that "big corporate=more money" and promptly made our political system equivalent to bad and worse instead of good and not as good.
As a current tourist in your quaint era, I can assure you that time-able persons such as myself amuse ourselves by participating in Slashdot forums, downloading p0rn, and watching that gem of two-dimensional entertainment - Saved By The Bell. We do NOT participate in "insider trading" since your credit cards are paltry to imitate using some peanut brittle, gum, and the inner workings of a common saucer part.
How is this much different than the penalizing honest people are made to endure because only those with low morals and a lust for power go into politics?
If criminals are supposed to be reformed then let them use whatever, period. If they aren't then I suppose we should just either kill them the moment they are convicted or get some use out them. Maybe we could tattoo some numbers on them and have them work the rest of their short, unnatural lives in work camps.
The first time someone uses the exploit to commit a rape or murder, the kneejerk reaction of the corportation will be to point at the students who knew the exploit and told officials about it as the scapegoats.
"They told us that we didn't leave our door locked, since naturally it was intrusive to check our door to see if it was locked (even though it affected the security of the people telling us) we told the students to scram and forbid them to tell anyone that our doors were open. Unfortunately yesterday we had a sad epsiode on campus where someone entered through our unlocked doors and commited a heinous crime, sadly the conclusion to be derived from this is definite - those infiltrators that went checking our doors must have relayed the information to their despicable accomplices. The University declines any assumption of guilt or failure of any kind. Thank you."
Face it, people suck and they don't ever stop sucking. The world is run by imbeciles to protect imbeciles, and the intelligent are their favorite food group unless they are creating more ways to create morons or joining the pack in their cannabilistic orgy of idiocy.
Dear Sir or Madam,
Welcome to the potential terrorist watch list. We thank you for you reply and look forward to seeing you in the future. The Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps these records for 7 years or until imprisonment, whichever comes first.
WARNING: Discussion of this reply to your unamerican luddite liberal ranting with your raghead friends in Bagdad will result in severe civil and criminal penalties. This statement and all preceding statements are covered by the National Secrets Act, Amendment 100034 c.2003.
No, you can pry the first dollar off any major music label's cd directly from the RIAA's cold, dead fingers.
They just lost their class action lawsuit for price fixing, has anyone seen cheaper cds result? How many people have picked up their 20 dollar rebate on the hundreds of cds they bought in the 90s? Right. Big corporate is the same as big government, it assumes it's right and then attempts to pull the money straight out your anus to fund lobbying to make sure that it's right.
That would be a really wild redesign of the ISS, but it would be nice if someone managed to make it happen. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point in their "we need mass" point of deployment they didn't arrange to park and leave all sorts of crap to the orbital end.
I think the scary thought would be if they ever made the thing passenger friendly. That would mean windows....which would mean the world's largest crew of window washers EVER.
Did you notice the clauses in the article?
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
They said it could be done, not that it could be done NOW. If they put a 6mo. stop on military spending to build a space elevator they'd still have to invent mass producable carbon nanotubes, the infrastructure to transport such, figure out the hundreds of international treaties required to appease the rest of the planet who will be wondering like Slashdot "What happens if it falls", and train however many thousands of people in Space Elevator repair and maintenance. If nothing else, I didn't see anything in the article about what the initial payload to orbit would be. If it's really significant you're talking about having to build new launch platforms just to get the basics into orbit and shuttle launches to support it. THEN you have to wonder about the International Space Station, which would probably find itself shit out of luck in the funding department once something like this got rolling - and wouldn't that be just the king of wasted cash...
And they say art is dead, they obviously haven't seen what concerns physics grads are having to delve into to find something that hasn't be rehashed a million times.
The problem is that imperfect selection. People don't want mom and pop corner stores access to music, they want an online Walmart where everything ever made is in the catalog. You don't even get that with Kazaa, and if someone in the music industry would get off their ass and stop bitching about people ripping them off and consolidate their catalogs for cheap they might even access to everything themselves right back into control of the market. The only drawback is that I shudder to think of what the advertising would be like on a site with that many mouth's to feed.
Part of the idea of ad marketing is not that a viewer actually likes the product but that they see the name so much that when the time comes to purchase a product the consumer automatically thinks of the marketer's product. There might be dozens of chicken restaurants in town, but when crunch time comes and the consumer is trying to think "where will I eat right now" they can't come up with a better solution than KFC, Churches, or Popeyes. Word of mouth might be a better solution to judging value, but advertising doesn't attach itself to better solutions it attaches itself to recognition.
That's the reason commercials are sometimes cute and that you even KNOW Bob Dole does commercials, recognition. At some point eventually you run into an area that word of mouth doesn't cover, that's where advertising works best.
Strangely enough, in the hermit-media culture we live in advertising has it's best chance. People work at home or don't talk with their coworkers very much, when they go out they go places to experience media formats and not to talk. Word of mouth is probably on the upswing on the internet, but it's still lacking much sense of community that makes most people's word of mouth recognizable as having more value than your average advertising campaign. After all, there are a lot of idiots who actually WATCH those commercials.
Wow, I'm a moron because I allegedly don't watch tv. That's sort of funny if it weren't so sad too.
I do watch television, I never said I didn't. Part of knowing how to apply Sturgeons Law properly though is knowing when it applies to oneself my friend. That is if you're not part of the solution, you're probably part of the problem.
I mean if you think Farscape (muppets, bad guys in S&M outfits, anal humor) is better than Monet ("crappy modern art"), that pretty invalidates everything else you say.
If added value is subtracted value in the scheme of big business it's certain why most of the big media outlets are still shaking in their boots about the internet. Not only does Sony Music have to keep up whatever dubious value it promotes in it's acts, but it has to compete with the innovations of a still blossoming media sector. Every new innovation on a computer is something else to distract a person from the lack of value on a cd?
I suppose canning the Farscape crap for Battlestar Gallactica crap at least means that they're in some sort of rotation of crap over at SciFi. In any case next year everyone will be complaining about some new series that wasn't very good that's getting canned and the networks will be putting out new "crap" that everyone will complain about the year after.
Let's face it folks, if you're looking for art and culture, television shouldn't be the first place you look anyways. Go to museum.
The natural evolution of that as far as law enforcement and government would be to outlaw encryption technology or anything that would interfere with their pursuit of whomever they think are breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but we've only had the computing power to uniformly and universally intercept all of those for a much, much smaller period of time. When it took two G-men to stakeout your house and check your garbage, government surveillance was much different than it taking two bored computer techs to intercept every single email in America with the words "bomb" and "Washington" in them. Now that the government has greater power and capability to infringe upon our rights, it needs more restrictions on it's use - not less. I particularly don't see why the public sector should make it easier to violate someone's rights, "We're only making it easier to go after criminals and terrorists" only works as long as you're not declared a terrorist I think.
But if your fire extinguisher heated up hot pockets, recorded digital cable, played Mp3s, scratched your back and listened to your wife whine about how much money you spent on electronics the EVERYONE would have one.
I'm sure the horse market went under when Ford had his neat idea, and the shackles and whips market probably took a hit with the Civil War.
Sure they did, it's called the SECOND Amendment...
But really, I think the problem here is that the government has had the misleading assumption over the past years that the fourth amendment (against unreasonable search and seizure) was intended solely as a restriction upon the government. Since the whole basis of privacy can be summed up in the fourth amendment, I think it's high time that it was used to protect the individual on the entire basis that I believe it was founded. No one, including and probably most especially the individual or corporation, should be able to subpoena records or enact searches without the full weight of a warrant dictated by probable cause. That would mean no blanket "file trading is done on your networks, give us access!" statements in the same way that (at least prior to the Patriot Act) the government can't issue warrants for every residence in Texas on the basis that "drugs come in there."
As I'm sure you all know, laws in the US are in large part based on precedent. Laws that force child molesters to register their presence to their neighbors will eventually evolve into laws that force felony assault criminals to announce their presence as well. Unless it involves a favorable supreme court or a civil war, most laws are ever reversed so much that the precedent for their submission to the legislature is ignored. That is, even if you stop a bill in one place the fact that it has been submitted before in another form somewhere almost guarantees that it will pop up again someplace else soon.
I'm not a constituent of Michigan, nor am I likely to become one as long as I retain my sense of horrible dread about snow and below freezing temperatures. The simple fact is though that what the Michigan state legislature does is important to me because it sets precedents that other state legislatures will recognize. This has very little to do with democracy or the power of a vote, short of an act of civil disobedience or voter fraud there simply isn't anything anyone outside of Michigan can do beyond bad press. If Michigan legislaters pass the law then it will bounce around the nearest states probably, or those involved in whatever power block brought up the law in the first place. Once it is passed in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvannia, Florida, Texas, or California though it's bound to have established enough recognition that at least some form of it will pass into law on the national level. Then we'll have to wait for the Supreme Court or that civil war, because the hardest thing for a government to do isn't to establish freedoms but to give up controls.
HEY! I thought Sony was on the verge of destruction thanks to the 47 billion dollars worth of illegal file trading my 11 year old engaged in last week! Now that I know it's just Spiderman I feel much better.
Um, excuse me but if the only way to get elected to an office is to become a politician...how are we ever improving our lot in life by electing ANYONE? I mean, if the road to change is paved in lies, compromised principles and deceit how does one affect change without corrupting the basic reasons you want change at all? The sad thing is, the republicans had it right to start out with - their basic concept of "big government=bad" was great until they realized that "big corporate=more money" and promptly made our political system equivalent to bad and worse instead of good and not as good.
Puh-leease....
As a current tourist in your quaint era, I can assure you that time-able persons such as myself amuse ourselves by participating in Slashdot forums, downloading p0rn, and watching that gem of two-dimensional entertainment - Saved By The Bell. We do NOT participate in "insider trading" since your credit cards are paltry to imitate using some peanut brittle, gum, and the inner workings of a common saucer part.
How is this much different than the penalizing honest people are made to endure because only those with low morals and a lust for power go into politics?
If criminals are supposed to be reformed then let them use whatever, period. If they aren't then I suppose we should just either kill them the moment they are convicted or get some use out them. Maybe we could tattoo some numbers on them and have them work the rest of their short, unnatural lives in work camps.
The first time someone uses the exploit to commit a rape or murder, the kneejerk reaction of the corportation will be to point at the students who knew the exploit and told officials about it as the scapegoats.
"They told us that we didn't leave our door locked, since naturally it was intrusive to check our door to see if it was locked (even though it affected the security of the people telling us) we told the students to scram and forbid them to tell anyone that our doors were open. Unfortunately yesterday we had a sad epsiode on campus where someone entered through our unlocked doors and commited a heinous crime, sadly the conclusion to be derived from this is definite - those infiltrators that went checking our doors must have relayed the information to their despicable accomplices. The University declines any assumption of guilt or failure of any kind. Thank you."
Face it, people suck and they don't ever stop sucking. The world is run by imbeciles to protect imbeciles, and the intelligent are their favorite food group unless they are creating more ways to create morons or joining the pack in their cannabilistic orgy of idiocy.
Dear Sir or Madam,
Welcome to the potential terrorist watch list. We thank you for you reply and look forward to seeing you in the future. The Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps these records for 7 years or until imprisonment, whichever comes first.
WARNING: Discussion of this reply to your unamerican luddite liberal ranting with your raghead friends in Bagdad will result in severe civil and criminal penalties. This statement and all preceding statements are covered by the National Secrets Act, Amendment 100034 c.2003.
Thank you for your time,
GW
No, you can pry the first dollar off any major music label's cd directly from the RIAA's cold, dead fingers.
They just lost their class action lawsuit for price fixing, has anyone seen cheaper cds result? How many people have picked up their 20 dollar rebate on the hundreds of cds they bought in the 90s? Right. Big corporate is the same as big government, it assumes it's right and then attempts to pull the money straight out your anus to fund lobbying to make sure that it's right.
"Now, if we can only get Kong with some friggin' laser beams on his forehead...Would that be too much to ask folks?"
Personally I find the idea of gaining recognition of my accomplishments a thousand years after the fact interesting, but not very practical.
That would be a really wild redesign of the ISS, but it would be nice if someone managed to make it happen. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point in their "we need mass" point of deployment they didn't arrange to park and leave all sorts of crap to the orbital end.
I think the scary thought would be if they ever made the thing passenger friendly. That would mean windows....which would mean the world's largest crew of window washers EVER.
They said it could be done, not that it could be done NOW. If they put a 6mo. stop on military spending to build a space elevator they'd still have to invent mass producable carbon nanotubes, the infrastructure to transport such, figure out the hundreds of international treaties required to appease the rest of the planet who will be wondering like Slashdot "What happens if it falls", and train however many thousands of people in Space Elevator repair and maintenance. If nothing else, I didn't see anything in the article about what the initial payload to orbit would be. If it's really significant you're talking about having to build new launch platforms just to get the basics into orbit and shuttle launches to support it. THEN you have to wonder about the International Space Station, which would probably find itself shit out of luck in the funding department once something like this got rolling - and wouldn't that be just the king of wasted cash...
And they say art is dead, they obviously haven't seen what concerns physics grads are having to delve into to find something that hasn't be rehashed a million times.
The problem is that imperfect selection. People don't want mom and pop corner stores access to music, they want an online Walmart where everything ever made is in the catalog. You don't even get that with Kazaa, and if someone in the music industry would get off their ass and stop bitching about people ripping them off and consolidate their catalogs for cheap they might even access to everything themselves right back into control of the market. The only drawback is that I shudder to think of what the advertising would be like on a site with that many mouth's to feed.
Part of the idea of ad marketing is not that a viewer actually likes the product but that they see the name so much that when the time comes to purchase a product the consumer automatically thinks of the marketer's product. There might be dozens of chicken restaurants in town, but when crunch time comes and the consumer is trying to think "where will I eat right now" they can't come up with a better solution than KFC, Churches, or Popeyes. Word of mouth might be a better solution to judging value, but advertising doesn't attach itself to better solutions it attaches itself to recognition.
That's the reason commercials are sometimes cute and that you even KNOW Bob Dole does commercials, recognition. At some point eventually you run into an area that word of mouth doesn't cover, that's where advertising works best.
Strangely enough, in the hermit-media culture we live in advertising has it's best chance. People work at home or don't talk with their coworkers very much, when they go out they go places to experience media formats and not to talk. Word of mouth is probably on the upswing on the internet, but it's still lacking much sense of community that makes most people's word of mouth recognizable as having more value than your average advertising campaign. After all, there are a lot of idiots who actually WATCH those commercials.
I'm sure that what we're all REALLY afraid of is when those kooky kids at MIT invent robot CRABS. Talk about ants in your pants....
Wow, I'm a moron because I allegedly don't watch tv. That's sort of funny if it weren't so sad too.
I do watch television, I never said I didn't. Part of knowing how to apply Sturgeons Law properly though is knowing when it applies to oneself my friend. That is if you're not part of the solution, you're probably part of the problem.
I mean if you think Farscape (muppets, bad guys in S&M outfits, anal humor) is better than Monet ("crappy modern art"), that pretty invalidates everything else you say.
You sir, are part of the 90%.
If added value is subtracted value in the scheme of big business it's certain why most of the big media outlets are still shaking in their boots about the internet. Not only does Sony Music have to keep up whatever dubious value it promotes in it's acts, but it has to compete with the innovations of a still blossoming media sector. Every new innovation on a computer is something else to distract a person from the lack of value on a cd?
I suppose canning the Farscape crap for Battlestar Gallactica crap at least means that they're in some sort of rotation of crap over at SciFi. In any case next year everyone will be complaining about some new series that wasn't very good that's getting canned and the networks will be putting out new "crap" that everyone will complain about the year after.
Let's face it folks, if you're looking for art and culture, television shouldn't be the first place you look anyways. Go to museum.
"I did not, I repeat I did not, have private notes with this woman." -Bill
The natural evolution of that as far as law enforcement and government would be to outlaw encryption technology or anything that would interfere with their pursuit of whomever they think are breaking the law.