The ISP sells bandwidth but it oversells it because they know that not everyone will be online downloading a 1.7 Gig file at the same time. So it's economical for them to offer low low prices on the bandwidth they sell to us (consumers).
No, they oversell it because they are greedy bastards. End of story. The monthly fees they collect plus the enormous government grants they received over decades, combined with the fact that new technology allows much higher speeds at lower hardware cost are more then enough to satisfy these bandwith requirements. But not if you are planning to increase the cost per bandwith unit in order to abuse the public further.
They've chosen someone else, the big commercial bandwidth providers.
No, they've chosen all providers in order to both profit and in one motion eliminate pesky high-volume political sites not friendly to the agendas held dear by the owners of these corporations.
The market will find the path of least resistance one way or another.
Yet another clueless libertarian waxing musical about how "free market" will "fix it all", never you mind that everytime the market was left to its own devices in the past new and more horrendous forms of abuse inevietably followed. The "market" has no choices here because the telcos have established a steep barrier to entry via a combination of factors, major of which are the inter-city fiberoptics infrastructure and peering agreements, which prevent competition from any newcomers. Major telcos are essentially in cahoots with each other on this issue, knowing that if they stick together they will be able to rape the public unchallenged and knowing that only the wealthiest and most powerful corporations can even dream to try to enter the business, never you mind dislodging this cabal and that the "optimal" business strategy for these mega-corps is to join the cabal instead of fighting it.
Sometimes those in power ask for releasing the restraints during times of war. Sometimes you need to go to war, but I think before going to war you have to ask:
-Will this war ever end?
-Are the reasons we are entering this war legitimate?
Otherwise, you may be being tricked into going to war for other purposes, such as to enrich and empower those behind the decision. This is a responsibility for being a member of a democractic society.
Quite true. The uniquely modern difficulty, unpredicted by the US Founding Fathers for example, is howerver the fact that the majority of the voters have, frankly, all the political instincts of startled cattle. This condition was brought about by a long-term, persistent and ultimately rather succesful attempts by the power elites to re-establish what the Romans used to call the "panem et circenses", i.e. "Bread And Circusses" method of governance. Unlike the Romans however, the modern usurers are equipped with Satellite TV broadcast networks and the like. The result is that the majority of the population finds it far more important and profound to spy what happens on the next episode of the American Idiot or the Survivor then various activities of their government, complete with wholesale removal of their liberties, or better yet, foreign imperial wars of conquest.
And there is where your advice falls short. The wealth and power have successfully achieved a situation in which those who do take their "responsibility of a member of a democratic society" seriously are a minority, and those who in addition to that intent also posses sufficiently broad information to perform that responsibility effectively, form a truly tiny subset of the populace. In short, the wholly corporate ownership of the news media with no oversight has successfully killed the US democracy. The Internet is feebly fighting back, but I am afraid that in addition to the fact that Internet's penetration is a fraction of that of "traditional" media, moves are also alraedy underway to restore control of that last oasis of information freedom to the wealthy and the corporate.
In short, the enemies of the Grand United States Experiment, amongst others like it, have successfully figured out that democracy cannot function without each citizen having access to the in-depth knowledge of the operation of the governance of the society he lives in, but also without him or her having to be educated and trained to participate in the analysis of that knowledge, utilizing reason and logic, in an environment conductive to exchange and refinement of ideas. Kill that and any democracy will inevietably turn into a tyranny. As is the case with most of the present "liberal" democracies today, most of which manage just barely to retain the pretense of operating according to the grand principles laid down when they were created.
And yet socialism has at it's base a belief in the right to restrict the financial contracts of others.
Restricting some anti-social activities of individuals for the benefit of a group is called a "society". There is no way, under any conditions, to create a society without some restrictions and compromises that have to be enforced on its members in some way. Period.
It may be limited by a responsible government, but it asserts that right and uses it. If allowed to grow unchecked, it will eventually become totalitarian in nature.
True. But this is also true of any government, and thus of any society. Power corrupts. Governance requires power. Ergo, governance, of any kind, corrupts. That is why there is a need to create a system of checks and balances to control and restrict that power. The Grand United States Experiment, although pretty much completely failed by now, was very successful for a period of time, showing that such a system is possible, although Version 1.0 has clearly failed to withstand a concentrated assault of elements present in any society: those motivated by greed and lust for power (read: Evil) who always, since the dawn of history, seek to subjegate their respective societies for their own gain, quite irrespective of their political and economic structures at the time.
The government eventually finds that it must monitor it's people in order to produce what it considers an ideal economy.
Or "security". Or "moral values". Or "one and True Religion". Etc and so on. See above. All forms of governance, and thus all societies, are subject to the self-corrupting nature of that governance. The answer is to create a system where that governance is under control, not abandoning the governance and thus in effect the society itself. Anarchy is a state where the strongest wolves hunt the sheep and kill their competing wolf challengers with impunity. Anarchy is what all societies of the world have evolved to avoid, even at the cost of monarchies and tyrannies, as even those were empirically proven to be preferrable to Anarchy.
Asserting that there is no link is as absurd as asserting that socialism always and inevitably leads to a police state, but not quite as abusurd as claiming that they are fundamentally incompatible.
There is a link between any form of governance and thus any sort of enforcement of a particular economic model and a possibility of a tyrannical government. Simply, every government, and thus every society, carries with it its own seeds of tyranny, abuse and self-destruction. And they will carry those seeds indefintely into the future, as long as greedy and sociopathic individuals keep getting born. The trick is in not allowing those seeds to germinate.
There is a reason the console comes with a sensor bar, to detect position in 3d space, on top of the motion and tilt functionality in the controller itself.
That would indeed be able to resolve the position much better. But how much, it depends on the technology used in the bar. But even if the resolution is sufficient (it will be never close to that of an optical mouse, and if it could, you would not be able to hold your hand steady enough to aviod jitter) all my previous points about the "free-form", suspended mid-air, handgun-style nature of the controller still apply.
It's also pretty condenscating, and again, naive, to think that only "sheeple" are prone to excessive admiration. Computers geeks tend to have knowledge of many technical areas that the average person does not.
Who says that the two groups have no overlap? It is quite possible for people who are otherwise techically competent to be "sheeple" as far as the rest of their social life is concerned.
You need only watch how one sided discussions of topics like Microsoft, Google, Apple, GW Bush, etc.....
Right. If there was ever a thing that called for a one-sided treatment, it would be GW Bush and all those who support him. Or are you going to tell me that under all circumstances, no matter how patently obvious the evidence is, there is always two sides to the story? Like for example that "2+2=4" (in a decimal system) is an "opinion" and one should allow "alternative positions" on the subject, otherwise one is just a member of a "personality cult of the number four"? And speaking of Microsoft, the evidence against them in many, many areas is overwhelming. Google is at this point just another greedy corporation with a pretty PR spin. Ditto for Apple. Alas, both Google and Apple do have some quality products. With Microsoft that depends on your definition of "quality".
That's probably the only case where people have not agreed, by and large, with Linus, and even then there was fierce discussion.
You clearly do not visit LKML too often. Long before the BitKeeper there were flamewars about the devfs, the device number allocation schemes, about the 2.4 and then later 2.6 VM managers, the OOM handling, etc and so on.
Face it, people's opinions on Linus are remarkably one sided.
Yea that he is a clever programmer, most of the time. That seems to be the prevailing concensus.
To think that the subgroup you belong to happens to be immune to personality cults is merely to be in denial.
The subgroup I mentioned (i.e. FOSS coders/users) is pretty much immune to a "personality cult" of people like Linus or RMS. They might not be immune to a "personality" cult of, say, Natalie Portman, but the topic of discussion was Linus, no?
Cheap piezo accelerometers are VERY precise compared to what you might be familiar with from just 5 years ago. You do not need 'jerky' movements.The gyro in my very small model helicopters outputs digitally in increments of.00001G, and only cost $15.
You gotta be kidding. High cost, "precision", military grade, bulky, solid-state accelerometers have 1V per G +/-5% resolution, MEMS type capacitative ones are around +/- 1%. And that does not take into account the fact that most high-precision accelerometers have an effective range of 0-2G (or less). If you increase the range to, say 10G, you do so at the expense of sensitivity. That is why most planes and missiles still use gyro based inertial navigation systems.
The concept is very old, it is called Dead Reckoning.
Dead reckoning is extremely sensitive to the combined effects of the accelerometer precision, its maximum range (exceeding it throws the whole concept out of the window), precision of the A/D converters, sampling frequency and the precision of the clock in the measuring computer. Let me translate this for you: Nintendo = somewhat less then $100k worth of military gear = reasonably precise tilt measurement only + very crude (but possibly fun) motion sensing.
One more thing I forgot to mention. The Wii controller is most likely using a set of accellerometers to determine movement. The downside of such a system is that its sensitivity (and thus precision) declines along with the decrease in acceleration of the movement. That is if you slowly move the controller sideways with constant speed, it has no chance of detecting motion as the acceleration for the most of the movement range is zero (the movement occurs at fixed velocity). This means that such a controller can only detect tilt (a change of the orientation of the acceleration vector caused by gravity) or jerky motions sideways, and only if these motions are accelerating/deccelerating.
Think this through and you will see that such a controller makes a really lousy aiming device, far worse in fact then an already lousy handgun model.
I dunno. Last I heard, even the most technologically-advanced militaries still find mid-air hand motion the most efficient technique for infantry use.
That is because there is a drastic and fundamental difference between the field of view, and the types of motion involved. In real life combat you are using a long, two handed weapon, which is most effecively employed from a specific position, either aligned directly with your line of view and resting firmly on your sholder (a posture SWAT team would use) or more likely in a military scenario from a prone or a kneeling position, frequently supported by the arm resting on the ground or some other fixed cover being used. Some militaries also use the weapon's strap which has one end attached underbarrel in such a way that it is firmly tentioned under the elbow to provide further rigidity to the setup.
Contrast this with a small, one-handed, free motion controller, which has dynamics similar to that of a handgun. While it is possible to be used that way, as any military person will tell you, handguns make very lousy weapons as far as aim and range are concerned.
Now restrict the field of view, and thus motion, from 360 degrees to maybe 30 (the screen in front of you, close up) or even 10 (screen further away).
Mouse on the other hand, even though it does not mimick the real-life dynamics directly, still works in conjunction with a natural way our brains process the motion information and you whole arm is usually supported, increasing the stability greatly. That latter part, combined with linear relationship of the motion of the mouse to the motion on screen, and further combined with high precision and repeatability of the readings of the sensor, and thus the motion, as well as a comparatively wide range of such motion, further augmented by low latency of the setup (when compared to joysticks for example) results in an effect similar (actually more precise) to that when using a real weapon. And the mouse does not depend on the range of field of view to correlate with its motion.
At least, if anyone's started equipping their troops with experimental mouse-operated weapons, they've managed to keep it jolly quiet.
Many (if not most) Western airborne and ship-borne combat systems have been utilizing mice (or trackballs) of one sort or another for ages now. For the very reasons I mentioned.
I could never play 3D FPS games simply because I could never control as well - the keyboard (most buttons) were too digital (no finetuned control) and the swivel sticks on many consoles these days too flimsy and no feedback - like steering wheels on arcade driving games generations earlier.
On PCs, where I wasted many hours playing FPS games, this problem has been solved quite effectively by the ASDW key combination (forward+back+strafe left/right) and a mouse aim. This achieves both the precision and the speed of motion required for such games. That is why you will find most experienced FPS players balking at the idea of using controllers, no matter how fancy, as they all inevietably lack one or the other.
Perheaps that Wii controller will offer something new, but I expect it to still suck in FPS scenarios (mid-air hand motion lacks precision even if it has the speed), although it has a great potential for fun in innovative games which were specifically designed for it, which incidentally seems to be the domain in which Nintendo excells.
Looks like you dared to challenge the Linus Torvalds personality cult.
Actually, I do not think there is such a thing, at least not to a degree that most brainless "celebrities" get. For a "personality cult" one needs continuous media hyping in places watched by the sort of sheeple who are prone to falling for "personalities" in the first place.
Linux and FOSS crowd is far more likely to become zealous about ideas (such as the whole concept of FOSS or the GPL) rather then people. Sure, some do admire Linus personally, but we are not beyond getting into regular flame wars with him when he is demonstrably wrong. Just check out the whole BitKeeper saga on the LKLM.
The offensive clause is (a), which shifts burden onto you, in that you must first offer up evidence that you did not have it.
However, "sufficient evidence... adduced" is clear and standard wording that does not raise the bar of the burden offensively high. While you may or may not not be able to simply deny that you had the key, you could certainly offer a plausible reason why you might not have had it.
However, this combined with the fact that the legislation is moot on the subject of the means of detection of "protected data", still leaves you screwed up beyond recourse. The prosecution can simply claim that the fact that there is some data on your computer which appears encrypted, combined with the fact that you are the only person with physical access to that computer means that you have the key and that all your vigorous denials are just desperate thrashing of a guilty man. Again, because of this, the burden of a negative proof is on the accused.
Conversely, should this not be the case, any sufficiently encrypted data, as being indistinguishable from random noise, is then permanently beyond the reach of the prosecution, as no means exist of showing that the data is in fact encrypted, save for applying the correct decryption key to it.
All the guesses about where this is coming from point to the Russian Mafia.
Actually, all that would be required is some diplomacy and international cooperation as the Russian authorities, contrary to some insinuations in the West, have no great love of their criminals either. I think maybe even an extradition process could be effective here.
Then on the other hand, I just realized what I am saying: diplomacy? international cooperation? Bush administration?
As someone who read the entire back-and-forth thread: you lost. Sorry.
Oh, yes, particularly the part where in the very section he quoted it is now the onus on the defense to provide a proof beyond reasonable doubt of the accused not posessing the key (i.e. 180 degree oposite to a normal trial). That is they must offer a negative proof. Beyond reasonable doubt.
I guess they don't teach logic there at the Anonymous Coward School of Deep Thought.
Cell phones, ISP's, operating systems, WalMarts, gas... the average customer doesn't want to make the effort to vote with its dollars.
Precisely. This is one of the more gaping holes in the "free-market will fix all ills" line or reasoning. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" requires a lot of pre-conditions to function, none of them provided by the markets themselves, and instead existing as external requirements. Such as an ability of consumers to comprehend value and thus for them to make rational choices when "voting" with their dollars, which is a pre-condition to competition. Whole schools of thought exist dedicated to separating the dollar "vote" from rationally ascertained value, chief amongst them "branding". Marketing, combined with technological complexity of the products sold, has long since destroyed the "better moustrap" type of consumer choice, and with it the foundantions of any sort of "free-market" in many domains. And no governmental involvement was needed in this, such self-destructive devolution is apparently an inherent property of the marketplace in real-life (as oposed to theoretical pipe-dreams of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and other "classical capitalism" types).
The onus to provide the "reasonable doubt" is on the defense
That should have said "proof beyond reasonable doubt". As in a role reversal, now the defense has to establish "proof beyond reasonable doubt" while the prosecution only the "reasonable doubt". An exact oposite to a normal trial.
Perhaps you simply overlooked it. Can you suggest anything that would be sufficient evidence to even suggest that I didn't have an encryption key a month ago, let alone "raise an issue with respect to" the charge?
Precisely. The onus to provide the "reasonable doubt" is on the defense, which in the context if encrypted data, due to its nature is essentially spelled as "mission impossible".
You think a lawyer won't read that paragraph to a judge and say "Your Honour, has the prosecution proved that my client has the key?"
To which the prosecution will respond: "the accused had the suspect file in his possession and he was the only person with access to that computer, your honour". And because you failed to point out where does the law specify means of detection of such "protected data", the judge will have no choice but to declare the "suspect" guilty of not revealing such a key.
You're an idiot.
As if on cue. When you find yourself unable to produce coherent, logical arguments, the name calling starts.
Stop recycling everything your little chums in the student union tell you, and learn some basic reading comprehension.
More weak ad hominem attacks. And very ineffective ones too. You should work on that. For example, you failed to work my mother's army boots into this somehow.
I'm done with you.
I suggest you practice your "run away while braying indignantly" manouver some more, as it is, it was not very impressive.
And working the other way, the police should have no right to read a diary on your physical premises, even if they have a warrant to search and read the contents of your diary? After all, you wrote down your most private, innermost thoughts, so the government shouldn't get access to that?
Short answer: no.
Warrants should seek only corraborating evidence, such as receipts and other documents issued by third parties or by you to them. Diaries do not qualify.
The slippery slope argument only works if you don't acknowledge that the line actually does have to be drawn somewhere, and that by consensus we've already drawn it in a place that does allow the police some access to our private thoughts if they are recorded in certain formats.
Illogically and contrary to what the US founding fathers, in their great wisdom, sought to prevent. Even though I am a Canadian, I admire those men for, as flawed as some of them were, they advanced the ideas of oversight, checks and balances in governance to heights which are still not achieved by most countries all these years later, and sadly increasingly abandoned by the USA itself.
The current set of formats does include unencrypted diaries, does not include encrypted media, and does not include brain scans. Changing our opinion on one particular article, encrypted media, does not require changing our opinion on brain scans, nor does it lead to it inevitably.
As I said, the "slippery slope" started long ago, when diaries become fair game. It is a perfect example, and proof of the validity of such "slippery slope" argument, that we are, as predicted, now slowly progressing into encrypted data, and inevietably, into brain scans and removal of any pretense of a vail of privacy between us and the all-powerful, all-seeing, never-to-be-questioned, even in most secret thoughts, governments.
Go read Section 53(3)b, oh pretend lawyer of the internet.
I already replied to someone on this, that section is crafted to create an illusion of protection, while in fact not giving any. A nice trick to pacify fools. As I explained, if that section were to be followed, NO keys under NO circumstances would be elligible to be extracted by this law, unless the investigator saw the "suspect" to type them in with his own eyes. Such is the nature of encrypted data. And the law is definitely not going to stop at that.
You're a liar. RIPA is very specific where the burden of proof lies. It's in Section 53(3)b (although I don't know what use that would be to you, as you're clearly spouting off about an Act that you have not read.
You can read but apparently you cannot comprehend what it says. Show me where it defines what "protected information" is and how does one detect its presence. Furthermore, "sufficient evidence of that fact is abtucted" amounts to "he was in possession of the disk/computer/file at the time". Otherwise no possibilty of such
"proof" exists unless an investigator stood over the "suspect's" shoulder and saw him type the key in.
Bull. Cite me the section of the Act that says that.
I don't have to do that. It is pure and simple logic. Since there is no reliable method to prove that a blob of random data does contain ecrypted contents, if it were up to prosecutors to prove it, the law in its entirety would be moot. Clearly such an important matter as a "war on terror" and terrible suffering of children in the hands of "pedophiles" would require that the "criminals" and "terrorists" are compelled to reveal the encryption keys. Therefore the only practical and logical outcome is to demand keys to any data the Glorious Defenders of Freedom And Children suspect is encrypted. Or the law is useless. And I assure you, those drafting it are not intending for this law to be useless and will stop at nothing to make it as useful to them as possible. QED.
Much like a warrant to search a physical premises, having the police have the power to force you to expose your private data is perfectly reasonable, so long as it is similarly regulated by the cou
So, according to your logic, the government is entitled to any encrypted data in your possession? How about then, when such technology becomes inevietably available, a deep brain scan revealing to the investigators your most innermost secret thoughts. This is no different from your most secret innermost thoughts that you have put down in an encrypted file after all. So I assume that you would happily undergo such scans, because after all they are "perfectly reasonable", no? And there are no ill side-effects at all possible of governments being able to police your thoughts, yes?
Well, they go to court, and they have to try and convince a jury of your peers that they are correct, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Wrong. According to this new proposed law, it is up to you to prove that you are innocent and that it is not encrypted data.
Besides, there are already horribly injust mechanisms for detaining people in Britain without the need for a trial. Thats what we should be getting worked up about (although the Human Rights Act is doing for them, fortunately).
Sure. That is why they are piling these laws up, so that the amount of unjust laws in every field is so great that you no longer can fight them. They form a mutually-interlocking cage to imprison all citizens in, without recourse. That is what these new neo-this and neo-that idiots in the governments world-wide are truly after.
But this far more measured Act (which involves warrants, Section 49 orders, actual trials, and the need for evidence and all that) is what slashdotters choose to get worked up about. And why? Because it involves computers.
You assume of course that people here are not worked up about the other things. But Slashdot is a computer-related forum. And on such forum, computer-related laws are focused on more.
Frankly, thats pretty pathetic.
No, it is normal and natural. What is pathetic is your downplaying of this drastic abuse of governmental powers and your insinuation that Slashdot should become "British Law Discussion Forum", with only marginal emphasis on computer related laws.
Despite the slashdot spin, it's not about everyone turning their keys over the the Govt as a matter of course, its about the police/courts/judiciary's rights to demand that a suspect turn over the key for encrypted data believed to be material to a case.
Oh really? What happens if some blob of data on the computer is deemed "encrypted" by the Glorious Defenders from Assorted Boogeymen? How do you tell well encrypted data from random pile of binary junk?! Better the encryption, more mathematically similar to random noise the data is, no?
To me it is simple: this is a method for the State Security Apparatus to have yet another excuse to try someone as "uncooperative terrorist" for failing to decrypt the data on the empty sectors of the hard drive or some such. Police State, pure and simple.
And another thing, what is a difference between demanding "decryption keys" to some pile of encrypted data on your computer and demanding that you undergo a brain scan "decrypting" your innermost thoughts to prove yourself "innocent", should such technology become available? Do you even realize implications of a world in which you are not entitled to keep anything secret from the government, even if it deters terrorist/pedophile boogeymen?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they oversell it because they are greedy bastards. End of story. The monthly fees they collect plus the enormous government grants they received over decades, combined with the fact that new technology allows much higher speeds at lower hardware cost are more then enough to satisfy these bandwith requirements. But not if you are planning to increase the cost per bandwith unit in order to abuse the public further.
No, they've chosen all providers in order to both profit and in one motion eliminate pesky high-volume political sites not friendly to the agendas held dear by the owners of these corporations.
Yet another clueless libertarian waxing musical about how "free market" will "fix it all", never you mind that everytime the market was left to its own devices in the past new and more horrendous forms of abuse inevietably followed. The "market" has no choices here because the telcos have established a steep barrier to entry via a combination of factors, major of which are the inter-city fiberoptics infrastructure and peering agreements, which prevent competition from any newcomers. Major telcos are essentially in cahoots with each other on this issue, knowing that if they stick together they will be able to rape the public unchallenged and knowing that only the wealthiest and most powerful corporations can even dream to try to enter the business, never you mind dislodging this cabal and that the "optimal" business strategy for these mega-corps is to join the cabal instead of fighting it.
Quite true. The uniquely modern difficulty, unpredicted by the US Founding Fathers for example, is howerver the fact that the majority of the voters have, frankly, all the political instincts of startled cattle. This condition was brought about by a long-term, persistent and ultimately rather succesful attempts by the power elites to re-establish what the Romans used to call the "panem et circenses", i.e. "Bread And Circusses" method of governance. Unlike the Romans however, the modern usurers are equipped with Satellite TV broadcast networks and the like. The result is that the majority of the population finds it far more important and profound to spy what happens on the next episode of the American Idiot or the Survivor then various activities of their government, complete with wholesale removal of their liberties, or better yet, foreign imperial wars of conquest.
And there is where your advice falls short. The wealth and power have successfully achieved a situation in which those who do take their "responsibility of a member of a democratic society" seriously are a minority, and those who in addition to that intent also posses sufficiently broad information to perform that responsibility effectively, form a truly tiny subset of the populace. In short, the wholly corporate ownership of the news media with no oversight has successfully killed the US democracy. The Internet is feebly fighting back, but I am afraid that in addition to the fact that Internet's penetration is a fraction of that of "traditional" media, moves are also alraedy underway to restore control of that last oasis of information freedom to the wealthy and the corporate.
In short, the enemies of the Grand United States Experiment, amongst others like it, have successfully figured out that democracy cannot function without each citizen having access to the in-depth knowledge of the operation of the governance of the society he lives in, but also without him or her having to be educated and trained to participate in the analysis of that knowledge, utilizing reason and logic, in an environment conductive to exchange and refinement of ideas. Kill that and any democracy will inevietably turn into a tyranny. As is the case with most of the present "liberal" democracies today, most of which manage just barely to retain the pretense of operating according to the grand principles laid down when they were created.
Restricting some anti-social activities of individuals for the benefit of a group is called a "society". There is no way, under any conditions, to create a society without some restrictions and compromises that have to be enforced on its members in some way. Period.
It may be limited by a responsible government, but it asserts that right and uses it. If allowed to grow unchecked, it will eventually become totalitarian in nature.
True. But this is also true of any government, and thus of any society. Power corrupts. Governance requires power. Ergo, governance, of any kind, corrupts. That is why there is a need to create a system of checks and balances to control and restrict that power. The Grand United States Experiment, although pretty much completely failed by now, was very successful for a period of time, showing that such a system is possible, although Version 1.0 has clearly failed to withstand a concentrated assault of elements present in any society: those motivated by greed and lust for power (read: Evil) who always, since the dawn of history, seek to subjegate their respective societies for their own gain, quite irrespective of their political and economic structures at the time.
The government eventually finds that it must monitor it's people in order to produce what it considers an ideal economy.
Or "security". Or "moral values". Or "one and True Religion". Etc and so on. See above. All forms of governance, and thus all societies, are subject to the self-corrupting nature of that governance. The answer is to create a system where that governance is under control, not abandoning the governance and thus in effect the society itself. Anarchy is a state where the strongest wolves hunt the sheep and kill their competing wolf challengers with impunity. Anarchy is what all societies of the world have evolved to avoid, even at the cost of monarchies and tyrannies, as even those were empirically proven to be preferrable to Anarchy.
Asserting that there is no link is as absurd as asserting that socialism always and inevitably leads to a police state, but not quite as abusurd as claiming that they are fundamentally incompatible.
There is a link between any form of governance and thus any sort of enforcement of a particular economic model and a possibility of a tyrannical government. Simply, every government, and thus every society, carries with it its own seeds of tyranny, abuse and self-destruction. And they will carry those seeds indefintely into the future, as long as greedy and sociopathic individuals keep getting born. The trick is in not allowing those seeds to germinate.
That would indeed be able to resolve the position much better. But how much, it depends on the technology used in the bar. But even if the resolution is sufficient (it will be never close to that of an optical mouse, and if it could, you would not be able to hold your hand steady enough to aviod jitter) all my previous points about the "free-form", suspended mid-air, handgun-style nature of the controller still apply.
Who says that the two groups have no overlap? It is quite possible for people who are otherwise techically competent to be "sheeple" as far as the rest of their social life is concerned.
You need only watch how one sided discussions of topics like Microsoft, Google, Apple, GW Bush, etc. ....
Right. If there was ever a thing that called for a one-sided treatment, it would be GW Bush and all those who support him. Or are you going to tell me that under all circumstances, no matter how patently obvious the evidence is, there is always two sides to the story? Like for example that "2+2=4" (in a decimal system) is an "opinion" and one should allow "alternative positions" on the subject, otherwise one is just a member of a "personality cult of the number four"? And speaking of Microsoft, the evidence against them in many, many areas is overwhelming. Google is at this point just another greedy corporation with a pretty PR spin. Ditto for Apple. Alas, both Google and Apple do have some quality products. With Microsoft that depends on your definition of "quality".
That's probably the only case where people have not agreed, by and large, with Linus, and even then there was fierce discussion.
You clearly do not visit LKML too often. Long before the BitKeeper there were flamewars about the devfs, the device number allocation schemes, about the 2.4 and then later 2.6 VM managers, the OOM handling, etc and so on.
Face it, people's opinions on Linus are remarkably one sided.
Yea that he is a clever programmer, most of the time. That seems to be the prevailing concensus.
To think that the subgroup you belong to happens to be immune to personality cults is merely to be in denial.
The subgroup I mentioned (i.e. FOSS coders/users) is pretty much immune to a "personality cult" of people like Linus or RMS. They might not be immune to a "personality" cult of, say, Natalie Portman, but the topic of discussion was Linus, no?
You gotta be kidding. High cost, "precision", military grade, bulky, solid-state accelerometers have 1V per G +/-5% resolution, MEMS type capacitative ones are around +/- 1%. And that does not take into account the fact that most high-precision accelerometers have an effective range of 0-2G (or less). If you increase the range to, say 10G, you do so at the expense of sensitivity. That is why most planes and missiles still use gyro based inertial navigation systems.
The concept is very old, it is called Dead Reckoning.
Dead reckoning is extremely sensitive to the combined effects of the accelerometer precision, its maximum range (exceeding it throws the whole concept out of the window), precision of the A/D converters, sampling frequency and the precision of the clock in the measuring computer. Let me translate this for you: Nintendo = somewhat less then $100k worth of military gear = reasonably precise tilt measurement only + very crude (but possibly fun) motion sensing.
Think this through and you will see that such a controller makes a really lousy aiming device, far worse in fact then an already lousy handgun model.
That is because there is a drastic and fundamental difference between the field of view, and the types of motion involved. In real life combat you are using a long, two handed weapon, which is most effecively employed from a specific position, either aligned directly with your line of view and resting firmly on your sholder (a posture SWAT team would use) or more likely in a military scenario from a prone or a kneeling position, frequently supported by the arm resting on the ground or some other fixed cover being used. Some militaries also use the weapon's strap which has one end attached underbarrel in such a way that it is firmly tentioned under the elbow to provide further rigidity to the setup.
Contrast this with a small, one-handed, free motion controller, which has dynamics similar to that of a handgun. While it is possible to be used that way, as any military person will tell you, handguns make very lousy weapons as far as aim and range are concerned.
Now restrict the field of view, and thus motion, from 360 degrees to maybe 30 (the screen in front of you, close up) or even 10 (screen further away).
Mouse on the other hand, even though it does not mimick the real-life dynamics directly, still works in conjunction with a natural way our brains process the motion information and you whole arm is usually supported, increasing the stability greatly. That latter part, combined with linear relationship of the motion of the mouse to the motion on screen, and further combined with high precision and repeatability of the readings of the sensor, and thus the motion, as well as a comparatively wide range of such motion, further augmented by low latency of the setup (when compared to joysticks for example) results in an effect similar (actually more precise) to that when using a real weapon. And the mouse does not depend on the range of field of view to correlate with its motion.
At least, if anyone's started equipping their troops with experimental mouse-operated weapons, they've managed to keep it jolly quiet.
Many (if not most) Western airborne and ship-borne combat systems have been utilizing mice (or trackballs) of one sort or another for ages now. For the very reasons I mentioned.
On PCs, where I wasted many hours playing FPS games, this problem has been solved quite effectively by the ASDW key combination (forward+back+strafe left/right) and a mouse aim. This achieves both the precision and the speed of motion required for such games. That is why you will find most experienced FPS players balking at the idea of using controllers, no matter how fancy, as they all inevietably lack one or the other.
Perheaps that Wii controller will offer something new, but I expect it to still suck in FPS scenarios (mid-air hand motion lacks precision even if it has the speed), although it has a great potential for fun in innovative games which were specifically designed for it, which incidentally seems to be the domain in which Nintendo excells.
That was supposed to be LKML, as in Linux Kernel Mailing List, but my keyboard got the upper hand (key?) in its revolt against me, temporarily.
Actually, I do not think there is such a thing, at least not to a degree that most brainless "celebrities" get. For a "personality cult" one needs continuous media hyping in places watched by the sort of sheeple who are prone to falling for "personalities" in the first place.
Linux and FOSS crowd is far more likely to become zealous about ideas (such as the whole concept of FOSS or the GPL) rather then people. Sure, some do admire Linus personally, but we are not beyond getting into regular flame wars with him when he is demonstrably wrong. Just check out the whole BitKeeper saga on the LKLM.
However, "sufficient evidence ... adduced" is clear and standard wording that does not raise the bar of the burden offensively high. While you may or may not not be able to simply deny that you had the key, you could certainly offer a plausible reason why you might not have had it.
However, this combined with the fact that the legislation is moot on the subject of the means of detection of "protected data", still leaves you screwed up beyond recourse. The prosecution can simply claim that the fact that there is some data on your computer which appears encrypted, combined with the fact that you are the only person with physical access to that computer means that you have the key and that all your vigorous denials are just desperate thrashing of a guilty man. Again, because of this, the burden of a negative proof is on the accused.
Conversely, should this not be the case, any sufficiently encrypted data, as being indistinguishable from random noise, is then permanently beyond the reach of the prosecution, as no means exist of showing that the data is in fact encrypted, save for applying the correct decryption key to it.
Actually, all that would be required is some diplomacy and international cooperation as the Russian authorities, contrary to some insinuations in the West, have no great love of their criminals either. I think maybe even an extradition process could be effective here.
Then on the other hand, I just realized what I am saying: diplomacy? international cooperation? Bush administration?
Oh forget it.
Oh, yes, particularly the part where in the very section he quoted it is now the onus on the defense to provide a proof beyond reasonable doubt of the accused not posessing the key (i.e. 180 degree oposite to a normal trial). That is they must offer a negative proof. Beyond reasonable doubt.
I guess they don't teach logic there at the Anonymous Coward School of Deep Thought.
Next.
Precisely. This is one of the more gaping holes in the "free-market will fix all ills" line or reasoning. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" requires a lot of pre-conditions to function, none of them provided by the markets themselves, and instead existing as external requirements. Such as an ability of consumers to comprehend value and thus for them to make rational choices when "voting" with their dollars, which is a pre-condition to competition. Whole schools of thought exist dedicated to separating the dollar "vote" from rationally ascertained value, chief amongst them "branding". Marketing, combined with technological complexity of the products sold, has long since destroyed the "better moustrap" type of consumer choice, and with it the foundantions of any sort of "free-market" in many domains. And no governmental involvement was needed in this, such self-destructive devolution is apparently an inherent property of the marketplace in real-life (as oposed to theoretical pipe-dreams of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and other "classical capitalism" types).
That should have said "proof beyond reasonable doubt". As in a role reversal, now the defense has to establish "proof beyond reasonable doubt" while the prosecution only the "reasonable doubt". An exact oposite to a normal trial.
Precisely. The onus to provide the "reasonable doubt" is on the defense, which in the context if encrypted data, due to its nature is essentially spelled as "mission impossible".
To which the prosecution will respond: "the accused had the suspect file in his possession and he was the only person with access to that computer, your honour". And because you failed to point out where does the law specify means of detection of such "protected data", the judge will have no choice but to declare the "suspect" guilty of not revealing such a key.
You're an idiot.
As if on cue. When you find yourself unable to produce coherent, logical arguments, the name calling starts.
Stop recycling everything your little chums in the student union tell you, and learn some basic reading comprehension.
More weak ad hominem attacks. And very ineffective ones too. You should work on that. For example, you failed to work my mother's army boots into this somehow.
I'm done with you.
I suggest you practice your "run away while braying indignantly" manouver some more, as it is, it was not very impressive.
Short answer: no.
Warrants should seek only corraborating evidence, such as receipts and other documents issued by third parties or by you to them. Diaries do not qualify.
The slippery slope argument only works if you don't acknowledge that the line actually does have to be drawn somewhere, and that by consensus we've already drawn it in a place that does allow the police some access to our private thoughts if they are recorded in certain formats.
Illogically and contrary to what the US founding fathers, in their great wisdom, sought to prevent. Even though I am a Canadian, I admire those men for, as flawed as some of them were, they advanced the ideas of oversight, checks and balances in governance to heights which are still not achieved by most countries all these years later, and sadly increasingly abandoned by the USA itself.
The current set of formats does include unencrypted diaries, does not include encrypted media, and does not include brain scans. Changing our opinion on one particular article, encrypted media, does not require changing our opinion on brain scans, nor does it lead to it inevitably.
As I said, the "slippery slope" started long ago, when diaries become fair game. It is a perfect example, and proof of the validity of such "slippery slope" argument, that we are, as predicted, now slowly progressing into encrypted data, and inevietably, into brain scans and removal of any pretense of a vail of privacy between us and the all-powerful, all-seeing, never-to-be-questioned, even in most secret thoughts, governments.
I already replied to someone on this, that section is crafted to create an illusion of protection, while in fact not giving any. A nice trick to pacify fools. As I explained, if that section were to be followed, NO keys under NO circumstances would be elligible to be extracted by this law, unless the investigator saw the "suspect" to type them in with his own eyes. Such is the nature of encrypted data. And the law is definitely not going to stop at that.
You can read but apparently you cannot comprehend what it says. Show me where it defines what "protected information" is and how does one detect its presence. Furthermore, "sufficient evidence of that fact is abtucted" amounts to "he was in possession of the disk/computer/file at the time". Otherwise no possibilty of such "proof" exists unless an investigator stood over the "suspect's" shoulder and saw him type the key in.
I don't have to do that. It is pure and simple logic. Since there is no reliable method to prove that a blob of random data does contain ecrypted contents, if it were up to prosecutors to prove it, the law in its entirety would be moot. Clearly such an important matter as a "war on terror" and terrible suffering of children in the hands of "pedophiles" would require that the "criminals" and "terrorists" are compelled to reveal the encryption keys. Therefore the only practical and logical outcome is to demand keys to any data the Glorious Defenders of Freedom And Children suspect is encrypted. Or the law is useless. And I assure you, those drafting it are not intending for this law to be useless and will stop at nothing to make it as useful to them as possible. QED.
So, according to your logic, the government is entitled to any encrypted data in your possession? How about then, when such technology becomes inevietably available, a deep brain scan revealing to the investigators your most innermost secret thoughts. This is no different from your most secret innermost thoughts that you have put down in an encrypted file after all. So I assume that you would happily undergo such scans, because after all they are "perfectly reasonable", no? And there are no ill side-effects at all possible of governments being able to police your thoughts, yes?
Wrong. According to this new proposed law, it is up to you to prove that you are innocent and that it is not encrypted data.
Besides, there are already horribly injust mechanisms for detaining people in Britain without the need for a trial. Thats what we should be getting worked up about (although the Human Rights Act is doing for them, fortunately).
Sure. That is why they are piling these laws up, so that the amount of unjust laws in every field is so great that you no longer can fight them. They form a mutually-interlocking cage to imprison all citizens in, without recourse. That is what these new neo-this and neo-that idiots in the governments world-wide are truly after.
But this far more measured Act (which involves warrants, Section 49 orders, actual trials, and the need for evidence and all that) is what slashdotters choose to get worked up about. And why? Because it involves computers.
You assume of course that people here are not worked up about the other things. But Slashdot is a computer-related forum. And on such forum, computer-related laws are focused on more.
Frankly, thats pretty pathetic.
No, it is normal and natural. What is pathetic is your downplaying of this drastic abuse of governmental powers and your insinuation that Slashdot should become "British Law Discussion Forum", with only marginal emphasis on computer related laws.
Oh really? What happens if some blob of data on the computer is deemed "encrypted" by the Glorious Defenders from Assorted Boogeymen? How do you tell well encrypted data from random pile of binary junk?! Better the encryption, more mathematically similar to random noise the data is, no?
To me it is simple: this is a method for the State Security Apparatus to have yet another excuse to try someone as "uncooperative terrorist" for failing to decrypt the data on the empty sectors of the hard drive or some such. Police State, pure and simple.
And another thing, what is a difference between demanding "decryption keys" to some pile of encrypted data on your computer and demanding that you undergo a brain scan "decrypting" your innermost thoughts to prove yourself "innocent", should such technology become available? Do you even realize implications of a world in which you are not entitled to keep anything secret from the government, even if it deters terrorist/pedophile boogeymen?