Middle ground: Anon can contribute to the "talk" page, but only registered & logged in users can edit the article itself. That way anonymous can still contribute by suggesting info in the talk page. However, since the average person looking for information on stress tensors won't look at the talk page, there's no point trolling because none of the intended victims see it.
A small delay before an account can be used, like on Fark, might also be useful to prevent throwaway accounts.
Who the hell wants to download a twenty gigabyte file, and how many can you store on your hard drive? This protection will in fact be more effective than the DRM, possibly deterring many users for as long as a few years before connections get faster.
I join Ignignokt and rest of the online world in flipping the bird at the MAFIAA as hard as I can.
Oh, hell, I'll bite. Venus was always slightly too close to the sun for it's atmospheric water to condense. As a result, no oceans. Without aqueous chemistry, carbon dioxide couldn't turn into carbonates and stayed in the atmosphere. With no water and no life to create an ozone layer, and all it's water stuck in the upper atmosphere, high-energy radiation dissocated the water into hydrogen and oxygen. As the hydrogen went into space, sulfur-containing compounds got oxidized and reacted with the remaining water to make sulfuric acid.
And to make this worthwhile, consider: Earth's ecosystem handles the increasing luminance of the Sun by reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to reduce the warming effect. In 1 billion years, the concentration will hit zero and then earth fries. Cheers!
I said "for any length of time." A car's engine can put out 100KW of energy, yes. But if the engine were 33% efficient, and the generator 90%, one would have to feed it ten gallons of gasoline per hour (100kWh/8.76(kWh/l)/3.78(L/G)/.29). If you can sell the electric for more than $.25/kWh (probably $.35 this summer), you win. Here in the north-west US, it's about $.13.
The energy utility would see though this scam immediately for several reasons:
- The neighbors claim to be pushing 96KW of power onto the network, while in reality they're just shunting it from A's tap then back through B's tap, resulting in a net draw due to resistive and transformer losses. 96 missing KW won't go unnoticed.
- Nothing you can legally put on residential property will generate 96KW of electric for any length of time. This will generate suspicion.
- Funny, A's meter runs back while B's runs forward and vice-versa. Bill, take a truck and check this out...
- I'm fairly certain that the utility and/or city have to send out an inspector before you can connect a grid intertie. Said inspector will note the lack of any generating equipment.
ps: Be thankful that residential pole transformers are current-limited when you try and connect the wires.
Which of these do you think is more likely to happen if Net Neutrality is broken:
1. ISPs maintain the same level of service they do now, and allow some sites to pay more for a faster pipe to you.
2. ISPs cut your default service to squat, and make sites pay for anything resembling decent bandwidth.
Pieces of evidence to consider: N.N. wasn't even an issue until certain ISPs figured they could extort money out of sites like Youtube (which use a lot of bandwidth). Number 2 is cheaper.
What it comes down to it, your broadband ISP sold you an always-on connection that runs at >= 1Mbps but they aren't remotely capable of delivering it if everyone starts doing more than burst-type downloads. And now rather than own up to this mistake, they want to make the guys who made their error apparent (streaming video) pay. ISPs are corporations, which means that they don't care if it will destroy the Internet as we know it, because it's cheaper.
I'd be more than willing to bet that if legislation requiring minimum service levels passes, we'll see the minimum service level drop to squat, and anyone wanting decent bandwidth pays anyway.
Oh blast it, stupid LOC... *sigh* Go here, hit the "introduction of S.1" link, click "text of legislation" and scroll down to section 220. >_ Sorry, should've noticed the "temp" in the address.
For once, the provision in question was where it belonged: In the middle of a bill that helps expose lobbyists as lobbyists. See section 220-a-2, and the requirements before one must register: All of (Readership > 500, astroturfing for lobbying firm, paid at least $100,000 per year for it). The odds of a genuine blogger being impacted by this are between epsilon and zero.
So to answer your question, this was supposed to bring blogger-shills under the same requirements as other lobbying groups. Personally, I wish there had been a "Paid shills in question must prominently disclose that they are paid shills on the front page of their blog" clause.
Have you read the part of the bill in question? Rather than make you search it, I'll just copy-pastey the relevant bit:
(19) GRASSROOTS LOBBYING FIRM- The term `grassroots lobbying firm' means a person or entity that--
`(A) is retained by 1 or more clients to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of such clients; and
`(B) receives income of, or spends or agrees to spend, an aggregate of $25,000 or more for such efforts in any quarterly period.'.
(b) Registration- Section 4(a) of the Act (2 U.S.C. 1603(a)) is amended--
(1) in the flush matter at the end of paragraph (3)(A), by adding at the end the following: `For purposes of clauses (i) and (ii), the term `lobbying activities' shall not include paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying.'; and
(2) by inserting after paragraph (3) the following:
`(4) FILING BY GRASSROOTS LOBBYING FIRMS- Not later than 45 days after a grassroots lobbying firm first is retained by a client to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, such grassroots lobbying firm shall register with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives.'.
Take special note of the bolded text: To be subject to this bill, the faux-blogger in question has to be retained by clients AND be paid at a rate equal to a hundred thousand dollars per year in exchange for writing biased political articles [which also exhort thier viewers to action]. Which would make the writers in question not bloggers but lobbyist shills masquerading as bloggers, regardless of political views.
The content of a blog is irrelevant: If it's writer, who has enough readers to attract a lobbying firm's attention, is being paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to shill while ostensibly being just another blogger, it's only right that they be brought under the same kind of disclosure laws as any other lobbyist. This is no different from requiring disclosure of sponsors by political commercials, because the material in question is nothing but political commercials.
And you're right about politicans being self-serving douches: They just gave lobbyists have a channel to funnel money through without anyone knowing.
In-depth studies at the Institute For The Blindingly Obvious have confirmed that large corporations may sometimes behave in ways that do not benefit the users of their products. Followup studies reveal that despite the fact that this is blindingly obvious, many people uncritically believe anything they see on TeeVee. Sometime in May 2007, we expect the release of a groundbreaking study by our sister organization, the Ric Romero University Of Things Everyone Already Knows, which will purportedly claim that music and film labels are obsolete in the Internet Era. Stay tuned for the Institute's investigative segment, where our undercover reporters hope to either confirm or dispel rumors that many executives in the entertainment business are megalomaniacs and/or control freaks.
Other stories coming up on the 11 o'clock segment: That hot girl you met in the AOL chatroom? She wasn't hot, and she was a he. This shocking story of one nerd's attempt to meet a real woman. Also, the sky is blue and bears shit in the woods.
>>> But seriously, the entire MAFIAA business model is built around controlling you (the buyer's) access to the artist's work. The Internet shatters that, and they're terrified by the realization that they are now redundant elements in a capitalist system.
It's interesting that you mention Soviet Afghanistan. That debacle ended when Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist militia, funded by the CIA, drove them out. Then we sort of just left the Mujahadeen to be killed or arrested when they tried to go home now that their immediate use was finished, having taught them for almost a decade that violent insurgiency was the way to react to a presence one doesn't like. With nothing else left to do, they turn to religious fundamentalism and help the Taliban take over.
Use this fact all you want in the election process in the [US/UK/Whomever else you blame] but the bottomline is that we are there today (although by your own implicit admission at the start of this sentence we shouldn't be), there is a stability problem (Largely because of the Bush administration's incompetent handling) and the simple withdrawal of forces is going to end up having a very high death toll on Iraqi civilians. And the death toll isn't very high as it is? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month. Estimates place the toll somewhere from 50,000 to 500,000 dead. The death rate is higher than it was under Saddam, and that's saying something. No number of troops that the US can realistically commit will stop the situation from degenerating; You may remember the report of the 1999 war games which predicted that we couldn't control Iraq with 400,000 soldiers. This particular aspect's outcome is going to be the same whether we stay or leave. Since staying is costing us two lives, probably ten injuries, and three hundred million dollars per day, the only logical thing to do is get out.
What exact economic power does Iraq have these days? It's economy, educational system, and power grid are in shambles. It was supposed to pay for itself exporting oil, but that doesn't seem to be going exactly as per plan either. At any rate, perhaps we should re-evaluate the HeadOn theory of foreign policy (Callous, short-sighted manipulation: Apply directly to middle east!), and consider the cause rather than endlessly trying to supress the effects. Or does it hurt to think that not all of America's actions are good? And there's also Israel - let's not go there.
This is something I simply love about this whole discussion. It goes from being about the well being of others into political spin. These things never go hand in hand well. Are you going to be happy to see Bush impeached even as new mass graves are being filled in Iraq? It's fantastic that the lives of millions have served your political agenda.
The well being of tens of millions of Iraqis, as well everyone in America left with the bill for this war, is directly related to how soon this administration leaves the White House. Don't try and sidestep the claim that Bush and his administration should pay for the grossly unethical actions and incompetent handling of seemingly everything about Iraq from whence we can trace the cause of the mass-grave-filling pan-dimensional clusterfuck that has a distinctly non-zero probability of destablizing the entire middle east by dismissing it as "spin." It's simple: Bush & Co have done so many things wrong, and more importantly done so many wrong things, that they should be removed from office faster than the normal time frame to prevent any more damage being done.
Not going to happen for technical reasons: People complain that their desktops are slow enough as it is - Now we're going to replace the latency and speed of their hdd/memory with that of an internet connection? Forget it. I've run remote X apps on my home 100m ethernet (Konqueror, gaim, ethereal). The experience was acceptable, mainly because those apps were not present where I wanted them to be. They were entirely lacking the snappy response we all expect from a desktop, especially when there was no choice but to bitmap stuff (ie web pages). I have yet (thanks be to the Gods) been spared Konqueror-over-adsl. I'll consider giving this up when I my internet connection runs at 3gigabits per second rather than 3mbps, enough to play full-resolution full-screen games (well, today's games) with a bit left over for other uses. Seriously - Compare getting on a school's web page from the school's intranet vs home. The only time the site is remotely desktop-like is from the local intranet.
Not going to happen for privacy reasons: You don't forsee any issues regarding a single monolithic entity (not yourself) that has access to all your data, all the time, and can do anything it wants with it? At least when AT&T tries to give the NSA a warrantless tap to everyone's information, you can use SSL. If all your information sits on one mainframe, look forward to the NSA, FBI, MAFIAA (music amd film industry association of America) demanding access. Look forward to some providers doing whatever those groups want without telling you. Look forward to DRM succeeding because you don't control the hardware or the software anymore. Look forward to your MP3s and MPEGs disappearing. "No hard drive to worry about, nothing police can find in your possession to investigate, charge, prosecute and punish you for, no viruses, no spyware, no adware, no trojan software." Sorry, but LOL!
Not going to happen because central bureaucracies are incompetent: Personal computers took off and timeshare systems died because I know what I want, and the geek running the 360 doesn't. My PC isn't arbitrarily given resource limits, and I don't need to bribe the sysadmin to give my system more RAM or a new video card because the idiots in accounting lost the last 5 requests.
There's a reason that dial-in timeshare systems died as shortly after it was practical to make a computer that fits unobtrusively in one's home. People will allocate given resources to get what they want, centralized systems will try and in comparison fail horribly. And one last thing, "Any software that the average person needs in the future will be streamed directly to their graphics display terminal..." So what about those of us who aren't content to just suck up whatever TermCo offers?
Step 1: If practical, all US military bases in Iraq suddenly get very fuzzy on Google Earth. Or better yet, they get photoshopped to try and screw the insurgients into planning their attack with the wrong data.
Step 2: If step 1 is not practical, just fuzz out all of Iraq. I believe they do something similiar with Israel and GPS and space photos - GPS is less accurate and public images are no better than 2M resolution, IIRC.
[The part referenced by my subject line ends here]
Step 3: Just admit that Iraq is the next Vietnam, and save a bunch of lives on both sides by leaving ASAP. The the hated government we're propping up is as useless and corrupt as the South Vietnamese government was. As in Vietnam, we've got a determined insurgiency that's being supported by outside forces (We're looking at YOU, Iran and Syria). As if to rub salt in the wound, this time they (Iran & Syria) finance their support using our own oil money. Once again, the enemy is proving that all our technology is fracking useless against them. Once again, we're spending outselves into a fiscal black hole.
And once again, we're discovering that our government lied to start this war (nit: Yeah, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was just the excuse to escalate), and frankly has been systematically lying ever since. Greeted as liberators - insurgiency in it's death throes - Don't need more troops - Pay for itself in oil exports - We don't torture - Undercounting civilian deaths - Yada yada yada. We even get our own version of Vietnamization ("We stand down as they stand up"), and we all know how well that went last time. Then again, Iraqi-ization is going nowhere because the Iraqi army will never, ever stand up (i.e. don't want to anger the insurgients that will control Iraq when we leave).
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So the question is... How long until we leave with our tail between our legs this time? And after Bush is impeached (?), will Cheney pardon him?
"What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy."
DRM will never be this advanced, because this proposal is fundamentally impossible, because it implies logically inconsistent outcomes. Either I can copy no part of the video for any reason, or I can copy some part of the video (no matter how small) for any reason. If I can copy any part, even screenshot by screenshot, for any reason, I can re-assemble it outside the player and the DRM is therefore useless. If I can't, fair use is violated.
DRM, in all it's manifold and perverted forms, can go to hell.
Baz is one byte too short, which I assume is part of your point.
Question though... I've read that memory allocation on most machines has to align along word boundaries, so if the end of an off-by-one overflow falls in the same word as the rest of the buffer, you're "OK" in the sense that it won't crash immediately. e.g. you malloc(30) on x86-32 and can technically write chars up to and including byte 32 without error, but b[32] will piss the memory manager off. If this is correct, then does the computer simply not care as long as you stay inside the word boundary, or does it actually allocate (bufsize + bufsize % wordlength?)
Gas prices decline? You should have been in the north-west last October. Prices start at $2.60+, decline linearly to $2.25 on election day, and literally the day after started going up again (Now hovering around $2.60). Since this isn't an election year, I fully anticipate being assraped for $3.00 this summer.
All I can say to the idiots involved, who think they can quash something that's on the 'Net, is: HAHA! You fail Internet-101. Trying to strike it down will make it more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You can be a celebrity or you can have privacy - Pick one and STFU.
(In related news, if you wish to avoid being taped having sex, not doing it in public helps)
Although what I propose would bury everyone in bureaucracy for some time (until the legal code were reduced to quasi-manageability again), that isn't it's purpose. Yes, at the present time most of what Congress does is bad. Not all, but I feel that the bad outweighs the good, if only because bad laws generally get more coverage and have a much greater potential for negative impact. But my objective is not to completely break the legislature via red tape tsunami.
I ended up proposing a second change in another post below here, with renewal-or-death for laws at regular intervals for a time before they become permanent (My post ended up with renewals after 10, 20, and 30 years before permanency). If you combine this with a code being reduced and cleaned up, the intent is not to bury the legislature but create a system where laws must be favored over a long period of time before becoming permanent. This acheives your objective of making lobbying much more difficult, because a bad law would have to be pushed through 4 times rather than once at long intervals. And by this, it would also help make it more difficult for Congress to do harm, intentionally or otherwise, because shit laws would probably get thrown out or forgotten.
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to most things in need of legislation already having been legislated. As far as things that happened historically up until now, we've pretty much got the civil and criminal bases covered. Of course, new things come onto the scene (Biotechnology, the Internet, soon nanotechnology), but Congress, slothful as it may be, can legislate faster than things in need of legislation happen. We need a way to use up their excess time, because the way they take it out now, by passing redundant gobbledegook, is (Danger inbound cliche) Destroying America. With nothing else to do, it seems they spend most of their time dreaming up novel punishments for having drugs and (over)reacting to whatever tragedy has grabbed the spotlight for the next 15 minutes (Terry Schaivo, anyone?)
What I'm getting at is that although creating two bickering Congresses would prevent anything from getting done, anything includes good as well. After getting past the initial hump of getting our crazy legal system under control, my changes would have the effect of allowing Congress to perform it's function (writing useful laws) while impeding the bad and safely burning off Congress's spare time in red tape. If I might jump to a nuclear analogy, I propose to insert the control rods far enough to get the reactor back under control rather than flood the moderator with hafnium nitrate solution.
Don't be too sure that the Democrats will do any better on digital freedom at the moment.
Clinton and Gore pushed for the clipper chip, which would've given the NSA a backdoor into any public-key hardware encryption. The DMCA was passed by both parties and signed by a Democrat. The media have their hands in both the Democrat's (CNN et al) and Republican's (FOX) pants. Hollywood is filled with limosine liberals who got rich in content production.
With a handful of exceptions on both sides of the aisle, both parties are out to destroy your digital rights. The MAFIAA see where the Internet is going - It's on the verge of making them all irrelevant, they're terrified of it, and they're desperate to control it before they finally sink. They're coopted both parties to help them.
In about 7 more years, large numbers of people who have no memories of the time before either ubiquitously available computers nor the ubiquitous Internet can run for House representative. We were born around 1987-88 - The big thing that happened when we were kids was the Internet exploding to power. We're "clued in." That's when things start looking up. Until then, we just have to make sure that all institutional DRM fails utterly.
Afer thinking about this, I believe that it's a great idea on the surface but won't work in practice. I forsee two problems in it: Burnout and laws that *shouldn't* come up for renewal.
If every law comes up for renewal every 10 years, lawmakers will end up blindly renewing everything because no one cares about the 12th renewal of that stupid National Grange-era farm subsidy statute unless someone (be it lobbyists, PACs, or their constituents) makes a stink about it. Then we have a situation where the sunset clause loses it's meaning because it becomes so routine. Every 10th year, Congress will walk in like Zombies to almost mechanically recite "Yea" to renew everything. We could also see a system where monied [Is it monied or moneyed?] interests will try and kill old but important laws. Imagine the MAFIAA lobbying congress about the 11th renewal of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 2015 or so... Who else but lawyers will even remember what that is?
Second, what about laws that should never be up for renewal? This creates a no-win situation. Some givens: we can probably agree that some laws should be forever-until-repealed and never face renewal (e.g. Bill of Rights). The B.o.R. hadn't been in effect for 20 years when Congress shat all over it with the Alien and Sedition acts - Imagine if they could've simply not-renewed it. Imagine Bush refusing to re-sign the 8th Amendment because he wants to be able to torture Guantanamo Bay detainees. But given this, and the existence of a "safe harbor" where laws (not necessarily just Amendments) will not face constant renewal-or-death, can you guess where congress will try to append everything because they hate renewing ten thousand bills every ten years?
I think the solution lay in a middle road... You have the Constitution and it's Amendments and Treaties. Then you have "established" laws which pass renewal X number of times and no longer face renewal. Then laws that are sort of on probation pending renewal X times. Thus, even if you do get bad laws like the unPatriot Act that are renewed once, a timespan of 20 or 30 years should weed out such transient mistakes. I say 20 or 30 years because that's long enough for the sort of mass panic and hysteria that tends to prompt such seriously malformed laws to pass and for reason to take hold again. This way, laws that are written by a congress that's over-reacting to a disaster (perceived or otherwise) will not have a genuinely lasting effect, whereas good laws (Sherman Antitrust act, child labor laws) will remain in power. Imagine if the DMCA faced renewal in 2008, 2018, and 2028 before it became permanent.
Slashdot Mirror
Middle ground: Anon can contribute to the "talk" page, but only registered & logged in users can edit the article itself. That way anonymous can still contribute by suggesting info in the talk page. However, since the average person looking for information on stress tensors won't look at the talk page, there's no point trolling because none of the intended victims see it.
A small delay before an account can be used, like on Fark, might also be useful to prevent throwaway accounts.
Who the hell wants to download a twenty gigabyte file, and how many can you store on your hard drive? This protection will in fact be more effective than the DRM, possibly deterring many users for as long as a few years before connections get faster.
I join Ignignokt and rest of the online world in flipping the bird at the MAFIAA as hard as I can.
Oligatory fuck the MPAA song link.
Oh, hell, I'll bite. Venus was always slightly too close to the sun for it's atmospheric water to condense. As a result, no oceans. Without aqueous chemistry, carbon dioxide couldn't turn into carbonates and stayed in the atmosphere. With no water and no life to create an ozone layer, and all it's water stuck in the upper atmosphere, high-energy radiation dissocated the water into hydrogen and oxygen. As the hydrogen went into space, sulfur-containing compounds got oxidized and reacted with the remaining water to make sulfuric acid.
And to make this worthwhile, consider: Earth's ecosystem handles the increasing luminance of the Sun by reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to reduce the warming effect. In 1 billion years, the concentration will hit zero and then earth fries. Cheers!
Nature is not animal cruelty. People hurting animals or forcing them to hurt each other for entertainment is animal cruelty.
The extraordinary proof quote is from Carl Sagan.
I prefer:
Cult: A small, unpopular religion.
Religion: A large, popular cult.
I said "for any length of time." A car's engine can put out 100KW of energy, yes. But if the engine were 33% efficient, and the generator 90%, one would have to feed it ten gallons of gasoline per hour (100kWh/8.76(kWh/l)/3.78(L/G)/.29). If you can sell the electric for more than $.25/kWh (probably $.35 this summer), you win. Here in the north-west US, it's about $.13.
The energy utility would see though this scam immediately for several reasons:
- The neighbors claim to be pushing 96KW of power onto the network, while in reality they're just shunting it from A's tap then back through B's tap, resulting in a net draw due to resistive and transformer losses. 96 missing KW won't go unnoticed.
- Nothing you can legally put on residential property will generate 96KW of electric for any length of time. This will generate suspicion.
- Funny, A's meter runs back while B's runs forward and vice-versa. Bill, take a truck and check this out...
- I'm fairly certain that the utility and/or city have to send out an inspector before you can connect a grid intertie. Said inspector will note the lack of any generating equipment.
ps: Be thankful that residential pole transformers are current-limited when you try and connect the wires.
Which of these do you think is more likely to happen if Net Neutrality is broken:
1. ISPs maintain the same level of service they do now, and allow some sites to pay more for a faster pipe to you.
2. ISPs cut your default service to squat, and make sites pay for anything resembling decent bandwidth.
Pieces of evidence to consider: N.N. wasn't even an issue until certain ISPs figured they could extort money out of sites like Youtube (which use a lot of bandwidth). Number 2 is cheaper.
What it comes down to it, your broadband ISP sold you an always-on connection that runs at >= 1Mbps but they aren't remotely capable of delivering it if everyone starts doing more than burst-type downloads. And now rather than own up to this mistake, they want to make the guys who made their error apparent (streaming video) pay. ISPs are corporations, which means that they don't care if it will destroy the Internet as we know it, because it's cheaper.
I'd be more than willing to bet that if legislation requiring minimum service levels passes, we'll see the minimum service level drop to squat, and anyone wanting decent bandwidth pays anyway.
Oh blast it, stupid LOC... *sigh* Go here, hit the "introduction of S.1" link, click "text of legislation" and scroll down to section 220. >_ Sorry, should've noticed the "temp" in the address.
For once, the provision in question was where it belonged: In the middle of a bill that helps expose lobbyists as lobbyists. See section 220-a-2, and the requirements before one must register: All of (Readership > 500, astroturfing for lobbying firm, paid at least $100,000 per year for it). The odds of a genuine blogger being impacted by this are between epsilon and zero.
So to answer your question, this was supposed to bring blogger-shills under the same requirements as other lobbying groups. Personally, I wish there had been a "Paid shills in question must prominently disclose that they are paid shills on the front page of their blog" clause.
Take special note of the bolded text: To be subject to this bill, the faux-blogger in question has to be retained by clients AND be paid at a rate equal to a hundred thousand dollars per year in exchange for writing biased political articles [which also exhort thier viewers to action]. Which would make the writers in question not bloggers but lobbyist shills masquerading as bloggers, regardless of political views.
The content of a blog is irrelevant: If it's writer, who has enough readers to attract a lobbying firm's attention, is being paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to shill while ostensibly being just another blogger, it's only right that they be brought under the same kind of disclosure laws as any other lobbyist. This is no different from requiring disclosure of sponsors by political commercials, because the material in question is nothing but political commercials.
And you're right about politicans being self-serving douches: They just gave lobbyists have a channel to funnel money through without anyone knowing.
In-depth studies at the Institute For The Blindingly Obvious have confirmed that large corporations may sometimes behave in ways that do not benefit the users of their products. Followup studies reveal that despite the fact that this is blindingly obvious, many people uncritically believe anything they see on TeeVee. Sometime in May 2007, we expect the release of a groundbreaking study by our sister organization, the Ric Romero University Of Things Everyone Already Knows, which will purportedly claim that music and film labels are obsolete in the Internet Era. Stay tuned for the Institute's investigative segment, where our undercover reporters hope to either confirm or dispel rumors that many executives in the entertainment business are megalomaniacs and/or control freaks.
Other stories coming up on the 11 o'clock segment: That hot girl you met in the AOL chatroom? She wasn't hot, and she was a he. This shocking story of one nerd's attempt to meet a real woman. Also, the sky is blue and bears shit in the woods.
>>> But seriously, the entire MAFIAA business model is built around controlling you (the buyer's) access to the artist's work. The Internet shatters that, and they're terrified by the realization that they are now redundant elements in a capitalist system.
"You won't need to worry about any of this because all this technology is being designed to ignore you and your attitude about it. So relax."
Those with control never take kindly to those who refuse to be controlled.
It's interesting that you mention Soviet Afghanistan. That debacle ended when Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist militia, funded by the CIA, drove them out. Then we sort of just left the Mujahadeen to be killed or arrested when they tried to go home now that their immediate use was finished, having taught them for almost a decade that violent insurgiency was the way to react to a presence one doesn't like. With nothing else left to do, they turn to religious fundamentalism and help the Taliban take over.
Use this fact all you want in the election process in the [US/UK/Whomever else you blame] but the bottomline is that we are there today (although by your own implicit admission at the start of this sentence we shouldn't be), there is a stability problem (Largely because of the Bush administration's incompetent handling) and the simple withdrawal of forces is going to end up having a very high death toll on Iraqi civilians. And the death toll isn't very high as it is? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month. Estimates place the toll somewhere from 50,000 to 500,000 dead. The death rate is higher than it was under Saddam, and that's saying something. No number of troops that the US can realistically commit will stop the situation from degenerating; You may remember the report of the 1999 war games which predicted that we couldn't control Iraq with 400,000 soldiers. This particular aspect's outcome is going to be the same whether we stay or leave. Since staying is costing us two lives, probably ten injuries, and three hundred million dollars per day, the only logical thing to do is get out.
What exact economic power does Iraq have these days? It's economy, educational system, and power grid are in shambles. It was supposed to pay for itself exporting oil, but that doesn't seem to be going exactly as per plan either. At any rate, perhaps we should re-evaluate the HeadOn theory of foreign policy (Callous, short-sighted manipulation: Apply directly to middle east!), and consider the cause rather than endlessly trying to supress the effects. Or does it hurt to think that not all of America's actions are good? And there's also Israel - let's not go there.
This is something I simply love about this whole discussion. It goes from being about the well being of others into political spin. These things never go hand in hand well. Are you going to be happy to see Bush impeached even as new mass graves are being filled in Iraq? It's fantastic that the lives of millions have served your political agenda.
The well being of tens of millions of Iraqis, as well everyone in America left with the bill for this war, is directly related to how soon this administration leaves the White House. Don't try and sidestep the claim that Bush and his administration should pay for the grossly unethical actions and incompetent handling of seemingly everything about Iraq from whence we can trace the cause of the mass-grave-filling pan-dimensional clusterfuck that has a distinctly non-zero probability of destablizing the entire middle east by dismissing it as "spin." It's simple: Bush & Co have done so many things wrong, and more importantly done so many wrong things, that they should be removed from office faster than the normal time frame to prevent any more damage being done.
Not going to happen for technical reasons: People complain that their desktops are slow enough as it is - Now we're going to replace the latency and speed of their hdd/memory with that of an internet connection? Forget it. I've run remote X apps on my home 100m ethernet (Konqueror, gaim, ethereal). The experience was acceptable, mainly because those apps were not present where I wanted them to be. They were entirely lacking the snappy response we all expect from a desktop, especially when there was no choice but to bitmap stuff (ie web pages). I have yet (thanks be to the Gods) been spared Konqueror-over-adsl. I'll consider giving this up when I my internet connection runs at 3gigabits per second rather than 3mbps, enough to play full-resolution full-screen games (well, today's games) with a bit left over for other uses. Seriously - Compare getting on a school's web page from the school's intranet vs home. The only time the site is remotely desktop-like is from the local intranet.
Not going to happen for privacy reasons: You don't forsee any issues regarding a single monolithic entity (not yourself) that has access to all your data, all the time, and can do anything it wants with it? At least when AT&T tries to give the NSA a warrantless tap to everyone's information, you can use SSL. If all your information sits on one mainframe, look forward to the NSA, FBI, MAFIAA (music amd film industry association of America) demanding access. Look forward to some providers doing whatever those groups want without telling you. Look forward to DRM succeeding because you don't control the hardware or the software anymore. Look forward to your MP3s and MPEGs disappearing. "No hard drive to worry about, nothing police can find in your possession to investigate, charge, prosecute and punish you for, no viruses, no spyware, no adware, no trojan software." Sorry, but LOL!
Not going to happen because central bureaucracies are incompetent: Personal computers took off and timeshare systems died because I know what I want, and the geek running the 360 doesn't. My PC isn't arbitrarily given resource limits, and I don't need to bribe the sysadmin to give my system more RAM or a new video card because the idiots in accounting lost the last 5 requests.
There's a reason that dial-in timeshare systems died as shortly after it was practical to make a computer that fits unobtrusively in one's home. People will allocate given resources to get what they want, centralized systems will try and in comparison fail horribly. And one last thing, "Any software that the average person needs in the future will be streamed directly to their graphics display terminal..." So what about those of us who aren't content to just suck up whatever TermCo offers?
Step 1: If practical, all US military bases in Iraq suddenly get very fuzzy on Google Earth. Or better yet, they get photoshopped to try and screw the insurgients into planning their attack with the wrong data.
Step 2: If step 1 is not practical, just fuzz out all of Iraq. I believe they do something similiar with Israel and GPS and space photos - GPS is less accurate and public images are no better than 2M resolution, IIRC.
[The part referenced by my subject line ends here]
Step 3: Just admit that Iraq is the next Vietnam, and save a bunch of lives on both sides by leaving ASAP. The the hated government we're propping up is as useless and corrupt as the South Vietnamese government was. As in Vietnam, we've got a determined insurgiency that's being supported by outside forces (We're looking at YOU, Iran and Syria). As if to rub salt in the wound, this time they (Iran & Syria) finance their support using our own oil money. Once again, the enemy is proving that all our technology is fracking useless against them. Once again, we're spending outselves into a fiscal black hole.
And once again, we're discovering that our government lied to start this war (nit: Yeah, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was just the excuse to escalate), and frankly has been systematically lying ever since. Greeted as liberators - insurgiency in it's death throes - Don't need more troops - Pay for itself in oil exports - We don't torture - Undercounting civilian deaths - Yada yada yada. We even get our own version of Vietnamization ("We stand down as they stand up"), and we all know how well that went last time. Then again, Iraqi-ization is going nowhere because the Iraqi army will never, ever stand up (i.e. don't want to anger the insurgients that will control Iraq when we leave).
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So the question is... How long until we leave with our tail between our legs this time? And after Bush is impeached (?), will Cheney pardon him?
"What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy."
DRM will never be this advanced, because this proposal is fundamentally impossible, because it implies logically inconsistent outcomes. Either I can copy no part of the video for any reason, or I can copy some part of the video (no matter how small) for any reason. If I can copy any part, even screenshot by screenshot, for any reason, I can re-assemble it outside the player and the DRM is therefore useless. If I can't, fair use is violated.
DRM, in all it's manifold and perverted forms, can go to hell.
What is it on your motherboard that requires Maxwell Lab's supercapacitors? :)
baz = malloc(strlen(foo) + strlen(bar));
sprintf(baz, "%s%s", foo, bar);
Baz is one byte too short, which I assume is part of your point.
Question though... I've read that memory allocation on most machines has to align along word boundaries, so if the end of an off-by-one overflow falls in the same word as the rest of the buffer, you're "OK" in the sense that it won't crash immediately. e.g. you malloc(30) on x86-32 and can technically write chars up to and including byte 32 without error, but b[32] will piss the memory manager off. If this is correct, then does the computer simply not care as long as you stay inside the word boundary, or does it actually allocate (bufsize + bufsize % wordlength?)
Gas prices decline? You should have been in the north-west last October. Prices start at $2.60+, decline linearly to $2.25 on election day, and literally the day after started going up again (Now hovering around $2.60). Since this isn't an election year, I fully anticipate being assraped for $3.00 this summer.
All I can say to the idiots involved, who think they can quash something that's on the 'Net, is: HAHA! You fail Internet-101. Trying to strike it down will make it more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You can be a celebrity or you can have privacy - Pick one and STFU.
(In related news, if you wish to avoid being taped having sex, not doing it in public helps)
Although what I propose would bury everyone in bureaucracy for some time (until the legal code were reduced to quasi-manageability again), that isn't it's purpose. Yes, at the present time most of what Congress does is bad. Not all, but I feel that the bad outweighs the good, if only because bad laws generally get more coverage and have a much greater potential for negative impact. But my objective is not to completely break the legislature via red tape tsunami.
I ended up proposing a second change in another post below here, with renewal-or-death for laws at regular intervals for a time before they become permanent (My post ended up with renewals after 10, 20, and 30 years before permanency). If you combine this with a code being reduced and cleaned up, the intent is not to bury the legislature but create a system where laws must be favored over a long period of time before becoming permanent. This acheives your objective of making lobbying much more difficult, because a bad law would have to be pushed through 4 times rather than once at long intervals. And by this, it would also help make it more difficult for Congress to do harm, intentionally or otherwise, because shit laws would probably get thrown out or forgotten.
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to most things in need of legislation already having been legislated. As far as things that happened historically up until now, we've pretty much got the civil and criminal bases covered. Of course, new things come onto the scene (Biotechnology, the Internet, soon nanotechnology), but Congress, slothful as it may be, can legislate faster than things in need of legislation happen. We need a way to use up their excess time, because the way they take it out now, by passing redundant gobbledegook, is (Danger inbound cliche) Destroying America. With nothing else to do, it seems they spend most of their time dreaming up novel punishments for having drugs and (over)reacting to whatever tragedy has grabbed the spotlight for the next 15 minutes (Terry Schaivo, anyone?)
What I'm getting at is that although creating two bickering Congresses would prevent anything from getting done, anything includes good as well. After getting past the initial hump of getting our crazy legal system under control, my changes would have the effect of allowing Congress to perform it's function (writing useful laws) while impeding the bad and safely burning off Congress's spare time in red tape. If I might jump to a nuclear analogy, I propose to insert the control rods far enough to get the reactor back under control rather than flood the moderator with hafnium nitrate solution.
Don't be too sure that the Democrats will do any better on digital freedom at the moment.
Clinton and Gore pushed for the clipper chip, which would've given the NSA a backdoor into any public-key hardware encryption. The DMCA was passed by both parties and signed by a Democrat. The media have their hands in both the Democrat's (CNN et al) and Republican's (FOX) pants. Hollywood is filled with limosine liberals who got rich in content production.
With a handful of exceptions on both sides of the aisle, both parties are out to destroy your digital rights. The MAFIAA see where the Internet is going - It's on the verge of making them all irrelevant, they're terrified of it, and they're desperate to control it before they finally sink. They're coopted both parties to help them.
In about 7 more years, large numbers of people who have no memories of the time before either ubiquitously available computers nor the ubiquitous Internet can run for House representative. We were born around 1987-88 - The big thing that happened when we were kids was the Internet exploding to power. We're "clued in." That's when things start looking up. Until then, we just have to make sure that all institutional DRM fails utterly.
Afer thinking about this, I believe that it's a great idea on the surface but won't work in practice. I forsee two problems in it: Burnout and laws that *shouldn't* come up for renewal.
If every law comes up for renewal every 10 years, lawmakers will end up blindly renewing everything because no one cares about the 12th renewal of that stupid National Grange-era farm subsidy statute unless someone (be it lobbyists, PACs, or their constituents) makes a stink about it. Then we have a situation where the sunset clause loses it's meaning because it becomes so routine. Every 10th year, Congress will walk in like Zombies to almost mechanically recite "Yea" to renew everything. We could also see a system where monied [Is it monied or moneyed?] interests will try and kill old but important laws. Imagine the MAFIAA lobbying congress about the 11th renewal of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 2015 or so... Who else but lawyers will even remember what that is?
Second, what about laws that should never be up for renewal? This creates a no-win situation. Some givens: we can probably agree that some laws should be forever-until-repealed and never face renewal (e.g. Bill of Rights). The B.o.R. hadn't been in effect for 20 years when Congress shat all over it with the Alien and Sedition acts - Imagine if they could've simply not-renewed it. Imagine Bush refusing to re-sign the 8th Amendment because he wants to be able to torture Guantanamo Bay detainees. But given this, and the existence of a "safe harbor" where laws (not necessarily just Amendments) will not face constant renewal-or-death, can you guess where congress will try to append everything because they hate renewing ten thousand bills every ten years?
I think the solution lay in a middle road... You have the Constitution and it's Amendments and Treaties. Then you have "established" laws which pass renewal X number of times and no longer face renewal. Then laws that are sort of on probation pending renewal X times. Thus, even if you do get bad laws like the unPatriot Act that are renewed once, a timespan of 20 or 30 years should weed out such transient mistakes. I say 20 or 30 years because that's long enough for the sort of mass panic and hysteria that tends to prompt such seriously malformed laws to pass and for reason to take hold again. This way, laws that are written by a congress that's over-reacting to a disaster (perceived or otherwise) will not have a genuinely lasting effect, whereas good laws (Sherman Antitrust act, child labor laws) will remain in power. Imagine if the DMCA faced renewal in 2008, 2018, and 2028 before it became permanent.