Those are all things that can go wrong with laptops, and I suppose it would be funny to hear a kid say he could not do his homework because "my S key did not work", or "the battery died". Just wait til one kid decides to sue because the flicker of the refreshment rate on his laptop monitor drove him insane or blind or caused him to not finish assignments on time.
But these laptops will belong to the school. And what is to stop the schools from monitoring what the students do. Keyloggers are cheap, can they be stuck inside the laptops? What about software monitors. Everytime you log into the school network for class, it downloads what you typed the night before, including the chat you had with your buddy about how you hate Mr. Teeths english lit class and want to stick a wad of dynamite up his ass and light it. Or worse, what if innocent Jenny, the schools love and joy was IM'ing with Johnson, the black no-no. Will teachers start looking at Jenny as a slut, worthless with no value? Can a teacher use this information to single out a student to expolit?
Who will own the content that is typed in the laptop. The school can claim they own the laptops. Unlike a paper notebook, that is mine and it would take a court order to look in it. Plus, it is not like mail, which is even more gaurded. I can see relationships between people breaking down as everyone is worried about saying the wrong thing.
My old highschool was in the newspaper last year. The decided to instal a new honor code policy, where students were expected to act a certain way on and off campus. That means if two kids get into a fight at the McDonalds, the school will get involved. When I was in school, the highschool did not give a rats ass what I did at 9pm, I was off grounds. What about laptops. How will this tie into the honor system?
Textbook sales are a racket worthy of the Gambino family
These teachers in universities, who make over $100,000 per year are not happy enough with their salaries. So they want to swindle the students even more. The teachers write a textbook, then sell it for over $100 a pop. Has anyone picked up a Biology or Chemistry textbook? I just looked, and the Chem 101 text at my old University is up to $148. And that does NOT include the lab or extra needed stuff (probably an extra $50).
Someone please explain why a new version of a book is needed every other year, and why a professor who is using the 7th edition of Chem won't let a student use the 6th edition of the book. Does the fundamentals of Chem 101 change that much year to year?
As for laptops, they are more expensive and will be stolen. One or two students, who are bright but anti-social will find a virus or write one, and try and take down the whole network. Soon, the schools will start banning knoppix cd's from the school right along with cigarettes.
The other problem of laptops is one my school had with calculators. The school entered into a contract with Texas Instruments, and then required all students to have a graphing TI-91 or some $100+ calculator for calc. I had a HP-48, and was told I could not take the class until I purchased a TI. What if some student has his own laptop, does he still have to buy the one the school is selling?
And you just know Microsoft will get involved in this. If the school decides to toss linux on all the laptops, MS will come running with free copies of windows. Everyone will use MS DRM software to read books. The school will not allow extra apps to be installed because of "security threats". So for 4 years, from ages 14-18, students will get stuck learning and using microsoft.
And while we are at it, what is to stop the same teacher who wrote Chem 101 for $148 from selling his ebook at $139? He can sell it at any price. The fact that it is on a laptop will not drive down cost.
However, when it comes to plain old literature, like Shakespear's works, paper-in-hand is a much more pleasing experience than laptop-on-lap.
I agree! One of my favorite things is to grab a paperback and go out under a tree to read on a nice warm day. If everything changes to an e-text, exactly at what tree can a laptop be plugged in?
And the feel of a book in my hands feels good. It is not to heavy to lift over my head, to lean back and read. I like the feel of flipping pages. With a laptop, my head would be looking down at the screen, i could not lift it over my head as i take a leasurly laid-back read.
And wait to see what will happen to eyesight after these kids graduate. We should keep track to see how much damage to vision is done from 4 years of extra and intense laptop monitor viewing, and compare it to a traditional school.
The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 Empire High School students for the entire year. The fast-growing district hopes to have 750 students at the new high school eventually. A set of textbooks runs about $500 to $600, Baker said.
First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.
Add to the list of concers, that Ferenhite 451 is comming. No more books. No more written records. Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate. I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase. Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses.
And how good is it for the eyes? Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer have bad eyes by the time they hit 25ish.
Just for fun, I tried running it with the latest CVS of Wine. It installs fine (which is most of the problem with Wine these days.) It also launches fine. I wasn't able to get too far since I don't have an Australian tax ID number, but it was enough to launch the program.
I wonder if someone will set up a proxy, and then use that program to do a "friends" taxes for them.
Of course, we don't want to get the SOB audited by claiming all sorts of shit as exemptions. But I am sure we can deduct $1,000 from taxes due to the donations given to the single moms charity, better known as Scores Gentlemans Club.
Then we can deduct the $500 we donated to the Palistinial Defense Fund for Martyrdom.
Finally, we'll claim a $1700 deductable for the Windows compatible PC needed to complete the taxes. Since the tax application won't work on my Mac, I need to buy a computer with Windows. It is a buisness expense, because I will only use the computer once, to send the IRS my tax returns. That is 100% buisness use.
I did not pay taxes last year. Or the year before.
I sent a letter to the IRS, and to the White House, informing them I could not pay taxes because I knew some of the money would be used to kill muslims in the Middle East. As a representative of God on earth, I knew killing is wrong.
Instead, I offered to offset my taxes by traveling accross the USA and leaving bibles in every hotel room.
I don't think people should pay taxes. I think taxes are evil. What we need is an income cap. That would do more to save our country. Has anyone been to a movie theater? $10 for a ticket, $4 for popcorn, $4 for a soda. Now multiply that by a family of 4. And add in some rasionettes. All of a sudden, Brad Pitt does not look so charming, when I know the motherfucker is getting $10,000,000 and $74 of that is comming from my wallet. Does that mean if he got $1,000,000 I would have only paid $7.40? Maybe not, but maybe the guy selling me my ticket would make more than minimum wage, and maybe I would not need to watch a Fandango commercial.
What was this post about?
Oh, taxes. And how Microsoft sucks. Maybe we can combine the two hates, and appoint Bill Gates as chief of the IRS. I'd hate to say it, but Gates would have a better chance of collecting Taxes from me than Uncle Sam. Bill has a say in how I view porn (Damn you and your DRM WRM v9, I never thought I would pay for porn).
Oh, about not paying for taxes. The government can not force you to. They can throw you in jail, that is true, but it will cost government $30,000 per year to house you and feed you and pay for the guards and electricity. So if you don't pay taxes, and government sends you to jail, you win. Not only did you not pay taxes, but you forced them to spend $30,000 a year on you.
1) Taxi Meddalions (the license to operate a taxi) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think I remember reading that one sold a few years ago for over $350,000.
2) The people driving the taxis, they don't look like the wealthy type.
They should deregulate all taxis. Maybe prices would fall if there was free competition. I know, on days I am short on money, I would like to slap a taxi sign on my car and drive down to the airport. A couple hours later, I would have enough money to go back to the bar.
And I love the idea of green friendly cars. I think it is a step in the right direction. But what would be better than legislation is a green friendly car that gets 60+ mpg and has a sticker price of around $9,000. They would sell like hotcakes (which I think the Geo did for a while).
Will we get a cheap green car? I think we will, but probably not from Ford, GM, or Chrysler. I bet it will come from a hyundi or some asian car. The most attractive thing about a green friendly car is the MPG it gets, which appeals to people who don't want to get raped at the gas pumps. Unfortunatly, those people are not the ones buying $50,000 SUV's, they are the ones in economy sized cars.
Lower the price, and everyone will be buying them.
There needs to be more action against typosquatting/registering of domain names to provide useless ad-filled "search" sites with no real content. These sites are annoying when they come up as results on Google, and when I make a mistake, like typing slashdot and then Shift-Enter (for.net) instead of Ctrl-Shift Enter (for.org) and go to some other site. Domains registration should require review of the registration request, kind of like USPTO and patents. I find it annoying when I want to register a domain for a site and find it is being used for something stupid, and I can't afford to buy it off of them.
Google is protecting itself. They are not doing anything to remove commercial websites from their search results. For example, those websites that do nothing more than reffer you to a different website that pays the first website a penny for each refferal. Meanwhile, you are clicking through page after page, and can't find what you really want.
The problem is, nothing on the web is trusted. If there was a trusted network of usefull and good information, and a search engine for just those websites, I think everyone would want to use it. For example, when I do a search, I'll often use the "site:edu" to limit the results because I know there is less spam there than in the coms. Try doing a search for a good website to learn spanish.
The other thing that sucks is good websites get so burried in the search results that they will not be found by most people. All the websites I use are those I found the past couple years, like epinions for reveiws of electronics, tvtome for info abou television programs (now dead, no good replacement found yet), and so on.
I would be more impressed if I saw google do something to remove those annoying refferal websites from its search results. Or even if they started a second search engine "trusted-beta" where every website indexed is 1) sumbitted by multiple people as usefull, and 2) checked by someone at google to be sure it is not spam, and 3) there is a web form to indicate a website does not belong, and if there are 100 or 200 or 5000 reports, the website is removed. Google would know the threashold for what is significant for its traffic to remove it.
If a computer manufacturor sells desktops with various flavors of linux, you know the hardware will have drivers and work with those different distros. It won't be like the old days when you wanted to instal debian but your sound card was not supported. Everything should work, no matter which distro you toss on the machine. And the more open it is, the more people can enhance it.;)
The other part is, no matter how much you will disagree, I just won't use anything redhat, I had a horrible experiance with it years ago and that sticks. I loved SuSE and Debian, and would use those even if it required extra work (they don't). Having a choice is great for those who have a prefference (or hate) of a specific distro. There will be more websites with distro specific faq's to your hardware, because you know you're not the only one buying that machine with Distro X.
BTW, when they talk about Blue, don't they mean IBM? That is the original Big Blue.:)
I started a year and half ago with linux and it made computing fun for me again which I didn't think was possible. (Not since the Tandy 1000 days?)
I remember the good old days too. My first IBM clone was a 386sx. But that was when Apple ruled, and all IBM had was dos, which made the Apple IIgs look like it was 100 times better. Ahhh... the memories...
386sx.... $2700
cga monitor.... $400
playing strip poker in cga... priceless (for a 14 year old boy).
How do you stop a collection agency from calling you?
He'd call four times a day, and every time I'd ask "who is this" (because they're only allowed to call once a day, they don't like to identify themselves) and he would not. I'd hang up, he'd call back.
I had a credit card from Providian many, many years ago. It was a secured card, I had a deposit and limit of $500. To make a long story short, I did lose my job and could not pay the bill. I called and told them what happened, and told them to take the deposit and use it against my account. But the person on the phone sounded very sympathetic and said they would give me a grace period, and not to close the account. I listened to them.
They lied.
The next bill had a $30 late fee. The one after that had another $30 late fee, and a $30 over the limit fee (caused by the late fee). I called them back and told them to immediatly close my account, but they said my $500 deposit was not large enough to pay off the entire account, and they could not do a partial pay off. They kept charging me late fees and over the limit fees until I owed them $1200 (including the collection fees).
Now this is where it gets real nasty.
Providian started calling my house 8 times a day. Caller Id would always show "unavalable". They threatened me every way they could. Somehow, Providian found my mothers phone number, and called her. The guy told her I was going to get sued unless she paid my debt. I told her not to do anything, I was getting mad.
A few weeks later, my neighbor knocks on my door and says that Providian left a message for me, and that I should call them back.
I called Providian, and told them not to ever call me again. They told me they only respond to written corrispodance.
Providian made my life miserable for over two years. After a while, I would get phone calls and it would be them hanging up. It was all designed to be harrasment.
So I figured to hell with my credit rating, I would rather have 7 horrible years of bad credit than to pay Providian one penny. After a couple years passed, I got a letter from providian approving me for a secured credit card, $1500 to be exact. All Providian wanted was to put my charged off balance on the new credit card.
Here is the deal. If the bank can not collect in the statute of limitations, it gets taken off your credit report. The banks can no longer come after you. To get the debt back, they will try and offer something like credit. They are bastards.
But my question is this. How can you prove to a judge that a bank is calling you non-stop if the caller Id only shows "unavailable" and they don't identify themselevs?
For a while, I was seriously considering getting a gun, walking into Providians main bank, walking to the executive offices, and killing every motherfucker in the room. Them calling nonstop, humiliating me by calling neighbors, threatening my mom, it all was too much for me to take. The only thing that kept me sane was calling them "motherfucker" over the phone.
Is the cell phone company guilty for releasing your call history? What was on your cell phone history for last month? Did you call your psychiatrist to reschedule? Did you call an aborition clinic? Did you call your mistress? And do you want anyone knowing this information.
What I can't figure out is, how does a firm keep updating the call history?
Or should the laws punish the people who steal the data? For example, if a private investigator obtains your phone history, should that PI go to jail?
The new world of no privacy anywhere is getting ridiculous. Between having all your private information made public, having cell phones with cameras, websites with upskirt photos, and maps that image your house from space, there is nothing personal anymore. What is next, video cameras in toilet stalls to make sure thieft is not happening?
Even sadder still, there are many @#$%ing idiots who actually believe that going to Iraq is flushing out the existing terrorists and not creating new ones!
I know if someone killed a member of my family, I would never forgive that person. So if an air force airplane drops a bomb, and people who I cared about die, it would make that person want to get even. They can't fight the airplane, so they start looking for where to take out their frustrations. Before you know it, a person who was reasonable is now strapping on a suicide bomb, and getting ready to go and explode on a bus or in a cafe.
The only reason this is not so bad is because nobody has done suicide bombs in the USA. I think if there was 1 suicide bomb each day in the USA for 30 days, at the end of the 30 days the people would be ready to vote every member of congress out of office, and elect pacifists. War is hell, but we don't have war on USA soil. So most people in the USA have no idea what having fighting and a police state is like.
Getting back to the OP, those deep feelings of hate that are developing will be very difficult to mend. Those are the kinds of hate that parents will teach their children.
Damage was done to the reputation of the USA. When Bush says we liberated Iraq, I wonder how many other places that get liberated want to kill the people who give them freedom. Did the Germans have insurgents who wanted to kill all Americans when we liberated the concentration camps?
I'm pleased to see that at least in one case, someone actually gets it. You can't stop the terrorists.
You can stop terrorists. Don't give them a good enough reason to attack you. It takes time and money to fight, and lots of people need to be highly motivated. If someone does not hate you, then why would they take all their energy and direct it at trying to kill and terrorize you?
more money should not be spent on trying to prevent disasters, it should be spent on ways to clean up after them.
I don't know what to think here. If you prevent the disaster, you won't have to clean it up. Is it a simple money equation? It costs X dollars for R&D to prevent a disaster, but a disaster only costs 1/8th of prevention. Does anyone here suggest if only 7 disasters happen, it is better to spend the money cleaning it up rather than stopping it because you would save some money?
What is the price of a human life worth?
It is like the bombings in Iraq that the USA military is doing. They say, for example, we wanted to get rid of insurgents and because of that, we had to kill some innocent people who were at the worng place at the wrong time.
In all honesty, I think the real power of such a channel only comes to light in a contingency that directly hits regular communication lines like telephone etc. In that case, an extra "hidden" link could actually have value.
The police shut down all phones and cell phones. The early news reports were questioning if cell phones were used to detonate the bombs.
Plus, if you have a group of terrorists, and they all have pre-paid cell phones, it is a good way to coordinate.
On the other side, it must suck if you are hurt and need help, and your cell phone does not work. No, not at the site of the bombing because the police will be there, but if you are somewhere else, and have a heart attack or get hit by a car.
Maybe they should have kept it a secret a while longer.
There are no secrets. If you want to know what a country has or might do, just get together 10 of your super bright friends and spend 2 years thinking about what systems a country might have. I bet you would figure most of it out. Before you label that idea stupid, ask yourself 2 questions. What does the CIA do? Hire 1000 smart people who read newspapers, listen to gossip, look at satellite images, and they think and try and figure things out. #2, I bet Al Queda has been spending many years thinking these exact same questions.
All you need to know is that everything created by the other side was done by human minds. Chances are they are using logic. So if you think about it long enough, you can figure it out.
You need to take a closer look at the evidence... There was some very odd stuff that happened that day. It's pretty clear to anyone looking at the facts that what we were told happened is not physically possible. It's tough to digest...but the more you look, the more you can not deny it.
Can you give some expamples? How is flying an airplane into a tower not physically possible? Are you saying the tower should have withstood the explosion, and that the heat from the fires should not have caused the buildings to collapse? Those gas tanks were filled, and the fire was very hot.
Or are you saying it was not muslim terrorists who caused the attacks, but some capitalists who wanted more control over USA society, more restrictive laws, less freedom.
The fact is, even if you locked your door or built a chainlink fence, they're just marking a boundary, not being an unbreakable barrier. Whether you lock it or not, your real defense isn't the door, it's the law. The door is really just a marker that says "my property starts here, if you're caught here, we'll throw your sorry ass in jail."
I don't have a chainlink fence, does that mean my property should become a neighborhood hang out? Or should people know, if I don't own it, then I should not use it?
Granted, with the internet it is different than in the real world. Cybercrimes are not real crimes, not in the sense like if you stuck a gun in someones ribs and ordered them to give you their money.
But I would like to think that if I buy a wireless router, I can take it out of the box, plug it in, and not do anything else and it will work. If it broadcasts to the world, that is something the manufacturer did wrong, setting it as default that way. The other end of the spectrum is the people who will get a router with restricted access, and not be able to configure it to work with their computers. What do you do? Does owning a wireless router require someone to read a 100 page manual. How many people read the manual that comes with their car, that tells them what grade of oil to use? Most people say fuck it, and just have the oil change place put in the 10w40, regardless of what is best for their car.
The problem with computers, and cyber crimes, will continue to be the balancing act between having products that work and securing computers.
There was an old saying in my political philosophy class. I don't remember the author, but he said "Where do my rights start and yours end? When your hand touches my nose". So where do my cyber rights end and your start? When my packet touches your nic card?
Lets just say Gnome is better than KDE regardless of distro.;)
Seriously, I have always been a big fan of Debian. SuSE was a close second, but getting it is more of a pain in the ass. Often their ftp is slow, and cryptic to find for newbies. I think SuSE preffers people buying their boxed sets. Having said that, I have found SuSE to be an great desktop replacement for windows. Everything works out of the box, no tinkering required.
But my #1 choice is Debian. The apt-get is the hands down winner for getting new packages. I always hated Red Hat because as soon as I ran into a dependancy problem, I knew the rest of my day was booked. Mandrake just plain sucks in my humble opinion. It looks unprofessional, and weak. Debian, on the other hand, can be a pain in the but to instal, but once you get it up and running, it is unbeatable.
My advice to people is, if you want something easy and are willing to spend $100, get SuSE in the box. There are a ton of applications to help you configure your system. You can use SuSE to run a server, and not worry about downtime (unlike Mandrake which will crash, I have seen it happen at a linux fest, where 12 of us stood in disbelief looking at the new blue screen of death). I knew another guy who had a webserver and ssh set up on SuSE and it ran for over 200 days without a glitch (he took it down when he upgraded his system).
More advice. If your system is old, don't mess with KDE or Gnome, get IceWM. If you want to run Java, stay away from Red Hat. If you want apps wich are bran spanking new, running off the latest packages, stay away from Red Hat.
And the golden rule before installing any linux. Take 2 minutes before starting the instal, open your box, write down on paper what video card you have, what nic you have, what sound card, etc. It will save you 2 hours after instal trying to edit the conf files.
I agree with some of the points you are making (influence in politics based on personal wealth etc), but do you not think that your last sentence is taking this more than just a few steps too far? I mean, c'mon... take your tinfoil-hat off...
There is a long history of the rich taking as much as the poor will tolerate. For a while, the USA had factories filled with children working 60 hour weeks, for slave wages. It took an act of Congress to shut down these factories, and only because of massive outrage.
Look at what Bush just did, last year. He did away with many provisions of the overtime law. No longer is a worker garunteed overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in one week.
And what about companies that require a personality test, or iq test, or credit check for a job, even a job as a janitor.
What about companies like GM that laid off 35,000 people and moved factories to Mexico? Does anyone remember the NAFTA debates of the 1980's? NAFTA was supposed to increase jobs in the USA, to increase pay in the USA, by making trucking between the USA and Mexico easier. Instead, all NAFTA did was take jobs that paid $25 an hour and move them to a place where the same job pays $1.50 an hour. It is not like we are doing Mexico any favors, or giving them good jobs.
Smart people believe their gifts, their intellect entitles them to riches more than anyone else. And not just double or triple, but on a scale where there is no comparison. How much does a business leader, who makes $10,000,000 a year care if the price of gasoline goes from $2 a gallon to $3 a gallon? Yet, for many families, this can create problems.
I'll give you one other example. Property taxes. Say I work for 20 years, and I save up enough money to pay for my modest house, I don't owe anyone anything. I want to retire, I have a very small income, I want to grow food in the backyard. I am pretty good at that, and I like organic foods. One day I get in the mail a $1000 property tax bill. Government is saying they will throw me off my land. Property tax forces the poor to keep working, it is a slavery like force.
The whole system is designed to force people to work.
...from those of us living where government was too stupid to know the difference between copyrights and patents and has ignited a building war over what Intellectual Property should mean or be.
I still don't understand much of these laws. They seem stupid and dumb to me, designed to protect the rich corporations, not people.
Problem #1. What if there is an idea that everyone would have, but someone out there patents it first? Does that mean that everyone else can not use that idea for their own benifit or profit? For example, the way something is sold on the internet.
Problem #2. What when this patent creates a monopoly. Does that mean everyone is stuck with having to pay extremely high prices, prices the market would never allow if there was competition?
And an interesting question. Why can anyone make a tire? Nobody will sue Joe Blow because he starts a tire company. Now what if Ford decided to patent tires. Can anyone imgaine how much a tire would cost if nobody else could make them? I would bet the cost would be double.
Here is the lawsuit I am waiting for. Say, for example, Ford patents a new rubber compound that will not burst. They use this rubber to make a safer tire. Everyone figures out all Ford did was add sand to their rubber mix, or something easy and stupid. Company B wants to make these tires, as a very cheap alternative to Fords premium "keep the family safe" tires. Ford sues this company, and wins. There is only one "safe" tire. Now the Smith family is a poor inner city black family. They need tires, but they can't afford the $400 per tire Fords. So they buy the non-safe $50 per tire generics. One day, on the way back from church, a tire blows on the highway and the car rolls, killing one of their children. Now, if the generic company could have made those tires, the Smiths would be alive because they could have purchased a generic "safe" tire for non-Ford prices. I would like to see someone like this sue Ford for the death of their family member.
Capitalism has its abuses. Patents are one of them. I can understand protecting a persons idea if it is so new and complex that nobody else would think of it, and the only way someone could have it is by theift. Patents should not be a mad rush to see who can fill out an application first, or for ideas that are unlikely to be had by one person only. Even if the idea is very complex, and unlikely that another person will have it, the patent should only last so long so that person can have a chance at enterting the marketplace without having large companies crush him. Patents should not harm society as a whole to make one person rich.
The buisness people can and will pass any law they want on demand.
The EU is still new. They have members voting on ideals, and what is best for the people. That will change.
The USA is forcing its' system of government everywhere in the world. Soon, the "people" will elect thier new representatives. And the rich and wealthy businessmen will use their money to advertise candidates who are most favorable to their interests.
As long as money = speech, the people are the ones who will keep getting screwed.
As soon as money is taken out of politics, then people can debate which policy best fits their needs. But as long as 7 million dollars is spent on advterising about how the candidate is an asshole or fear, we are screwed. Can anyone in the USA honestly believe the pharmasutical companies advertising that drugs in Canada are dangerous for consumption in the USA? All the pharmasutical companies want to do is sell the exact same drugs in the USA at much higher prices. But when it comes to politics, there is no requirement that the truth is told.
What will happen in the EU is the powerful and rich will get people into positions of power. It is like the MAFIA. For a long run, they worked the system. They took low level thugs and got them jobs in the police force. They paid for the education of lawyers, and got some elected as judges. Before you knew it, the MAFIA could sell drugs, even if there was a police officer watching. If some good and ethical cop arrested someone the MAFIA wanted to protect, there was a good chance they would get a judge which would throw out the charges.
That is what the rich are doing. They are buying political offices. This will destroy the world, most will be forced in factories, into a slave like exsistance.
In regards to 2), I find it unbelievable, as it would require buying out every ISP in the world (more or less).
Not really...
Look at TvTOME.com, the guy who started it wanted a place to keep information about tv shows. It was the best place if you wanted information on any television show, to learn the cast, the have a description of every episode, and to have details. What happened to TVTOME? A commercial website that was competing with them wanted their subscriber base. So the offered the dude who started TvTOME 5 million dollars.
As for routers and ISP's, money talks. I can see a "new" model where newer routers give priority to transmissions from preffered provioders. For example, a major series of routers now will let all data pass at 5 kbps, but if you are a pressered provider, you get to pass at 500 kbps. After all, the internet is growing and the amount of data that can be transmitted is finite. I am sure they will tell us something like that. Plus, who knows what new kinds of HDTV over the IP is comming. How large is that stream for 720p? Now imagine 50 million homes subscribing to it (trust me, even if you don't want it, the cable companies will find some way to force you to buy it, maybe bumping the price of cable modems up by $20 if you don't buy their other service).
So, the point is, companies are greedy and they will fuck the people every chance they can.
For example, probably the best source of information about tv shows, casts, and epsiode details was tvtome.com. Guess what happened? A different website, not wanting the competition, paid the original website money to close their doors. The new website is commercial, and is just there to make money. The information is not as good at the new website. All the old forums and posts are gone. So if you wanted to know, for example, any symbolism about the series finale of Quantum Leap, they are all gone, all the posts, all the information. Was the bartender God?
I would rather have 1 quality website than get 10 new bad websites and lose that quality website.
I'll give one more example. Even if you like porn, say you want to find MILF's. So you type in MILF in google, and you get 1 real MILF website for every 20 websites that just refeer you to the original website.
Maybe the solution is a better search engine. One that is not based on money, so nobody can buy a better result. A search engine that rejects refferal websites and spam.
reports that the Internet grew by 2.7 million sites in June, the second-largest gain in the history of its Web Server Survey
I think the best days of the web are behind us.
When the internet first hit, almost all websites were free. If Joe wanted to tell the world about his love of aviation, he set up a website. People put in lots of hours, with quality information.
But how has the internet evolved?
Money currupted the internet.
For example, try typing in "learn spanish" in google. How many websites are places that want your money? When the internet first started, there were better websites that were free. Not anymore, they got pushed off the web.
I think the web has outlived its usefullness. It is like TV. Too many commercials. I wonder if the next computer will come with a machine to suck in dollar bills. Maybe it can transmit the numbers off a $10 bill and shred it, so that way the bank credits the other end.
This is the WORST time for a justice to retire
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Justice O'Connor Retiring
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The Senate has never in its history been so owned by corporations. Hell, the RIAA has a few senators in their pockets. The Senate just passes a law allowing the exporting of more USA jobs. This senate is very pro-buisness, the gap between the poor and rich is huge. Just from the news, Motorola lays off 11,000, GM lays off 25,000, Motorola builds plant outside the USA, GM moves jobs to Mexico (for a wage 1/20th of the USA, so it is not like Mexicans are getting good jobs), the RIAA sues grandmothers for downloading songs, Chicago puts up 3,000 cameras for the police department.
If Bush gets his 2 replacements, we could be fucked. Because I don't think the Senate will take anyone the RIAA is against, someone who is pro-people, someone who is anti big buisness. Bush pused to do away with the 40 hour work week, by killing overtime pay. I can just imagine what the future holds- the 6 day work week, 9 hours a day. I am suprised buisnesses have not started selling advertising space in their offices. I can just see an spreadsheet open on the bottom 3/4ths of a monitor, with an advertisment on the top 1/4th.
Slashdot Mirror
But these laptops will belong to the school. And what is to stop the schools from monitoring what the students do. Keyloggers are cheap, can they be stuck inside the laptops? What about software monitors. Everytime you log into the school network for class, it downloads what you typed the night before, including the chat you had with your buddy about how you hate Mr. Teeths english lit class and want to stick a wad of dynamite up his ass and light it. Or worse, what if innocent Jenny, the schools love and joy was IM'ing with Johnson, the black no-no. Will teachers start looking at Jenny as a slut, worthless with no value? Can a teacher use this information to single out a student to expolit?
Who will own the content that is typed in the laptop. The school can claim they own the laptops. Unlike a paper notebook, that is mine and it would take a court order to look in it. Plus, it is not like mail, which is even more gaurded. I can see relationships between people breaking down as everyone is worried about saying the wrong thing.
My old highschool was in the newspaper last year. The decided to instal a new honor code policy, where students were expected to act a certain way on and off campus. That means if two kids get into a fight at the McDonalds, the school will get involved. When I was in school, the highschool did not give a rats ass what I did at 9pm, I was off grounds. What about laptops. How will this tie into the honor system?
These teachers in universities, who make over $100,000 per year are not happy enough with their salaries. So they want to swindle the students even more. The teachers write a textbook, then sell it for over $100 a pop. Has anyone picked up a Biology or Chemistry textbook? I just looked, and the Chem 101 text at my old University is up to $148. And that does NOT include the lab or extra needed stuff (probably an extra $50).
Someone please explain why a new version of a book is needed every other year, and why a professor who is using the 7th edition of Chem won't let a student use the 6th edition of the book. Does the fundamentals of Chem 101 change that much year to year?
As for laptops, they are more expensive and will be stolen. One or two students, who are bright but anti-social will find a virus or write one, and try and take down the whole network. Soon, the schools will start banning knoppix cd's from the school right along with cigarettes.
The other problem of laptops is one my school had with calculators. The school entered into a contract with Texas Instruments, and then required all students to have a graphing TI-91 or some $100+ calculator for calc. I had a HP-48, and was told I could not take the class until I purchased a TI. What if some student has his own laptop, does he still have to buy the one the school is selling?
And you just know Microsoft will get involved in this. If the school decides to toss linux on all the laptops, MS will come running with free copies of windows. Everyone will use MS DRM software to read books. The school will not allow extra apps to be installed because of "security threats". So for 4 years, from ages 14-18, students will get stuck learning and using microsoft.
And while we are at it, what is to stop the same teacher who wrote Chem 101 for $148 from selling his ebook at $139? He can sell it at any price. The fact that it is on a laptop will not drive down cost.
I agree! One of my favorite things is to grab a paperback and go out under a tree to read on a nice warm day. If everything changes to an e-text, exactly at what tree can a laptop be plugged in?
And the feel of a book in my hands feels good. It is not to heavy to lift over my head, to lean back and read. I like the feel of flipping pages. With a laptop, my head would be looking down at the screen, i could not lift it over my head as i take a leasurly laid-back read.
And wait to see what will happen to eyesight after these kids graduate. We should keep track to see how much damage to vision is done from 4 years of extra and intense laptop monitor viewing, and compare it to a traditional school.
First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.
Add to the list of concers, that Ferenhite 451 is comming. No more books. No more written records. Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate. I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase. Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses.
And how good is it for the eyes? Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer have bad eyes by the time they hit 25ish.
I wonder if someone will set up a proxy, and then use that program to do a "friends" taxes for them.
Of course, we don't want to get the SOB audited by claiming all sorts of shit as exemptions. But I am sure we can deduct $1,000 from taxes due to the donations given to the single moms charity, better known as Scores Gentlemans Club.
Then we can deduct the $500 we donated to the Palistinial Defense Fund for Martyrdom.
Finally, we'll claim a $1700 deductable for the Windows compatible PC needed to complete the taxes. Since the tax application won't work on my Mac, I need to buy a computer with Windows. It is a buisness expense, because I will only use the computer once, to send the IRS my tax returns. That is 100% buisness use.
I sent a letter to the IRS, and to the White House, informing them I could not pay taxes because I knew some of the money would be used to kill muslims in the Middle East. As a representative of God on earth, I knew killing is wrong.
Instead, I offered to offset my taxes by traveling accross the USA and leaving bibles in every hotel room.
I don't think people should pay taxes. I think taxes are evil. What we need is an income cap. That would do more to save our country. Has anyone been to a movie theater? $10 for a ticket, $4 for popcorn, $4 for a soda. Now multiply that by a family of 4. And add in some rasionettes. All of a sudden, Brad Pitt does not look so charming, when I know the motherfucker is getting $10,000,000 and $74 of that is comming from my wallet. Does that mean if he got $1,000,000 I would have only paid $7.40? Maybe not, but maybe the guy selling me my ticket would make more than minimum wage, and maybe I would not need to watch a Fandango commercial.
What was this post about?
Oh, taxes. And how Microsoft sucks. Maybe we can combine the two hates, and appoint Bill Gates as chief of the IRS. I'd hate to say it, but Gates would have a better chance of collecting Taxes from me than Uncle Sam. Bill has a say in how I view porn (Damn you and your DRM WRM v9, I never thought I would pay for porn).
Oh, about not paying for taxes. The government can not force you to. They can throw you in jail, that is true, but it will cost government $30,000 per year to house you and feed you and pay for the guards and electricity. So if you don't pay taxes, and government sends you to jail, you win. Not only did you not pay taxes, but you forced them to spend $30,000 a year on you.
1) Taxi Meddalions (the license to operate a taxi) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think I remember reading that one sold a few years ago for over $350,000.
2) The people driving the taxis, they don't look like the wealthy type.
They should deregulate all taxis. Maybe prices would fall if there was free competition. I know, on days I am short on money, I would like to slap a taxi sign on my car and drive down to the airport. A couple hours later, I would have enough money to go back to the bar.
And I love the idea of green friendly cars. I think it is a step in the right direction. But what would be better than legislation is a green friendly car that gets 60+ mpg and has a sticker price of around $9,000. They would sell like hotcakes (which I think the Geo did for a while).
Will we get a cheap green car? I think we will, but probably not from Ford, GM, or Chrysler. I bet it will come from a hyundi or some asian car. The most attractive thing about a green friendly car is the MPG it gets, which appeals to people who don't want to get raped at the gas pumps. Unfortunatly, those people are not the ones buying $50,000 SUV's, they are the ones in economy sized cars.
Lower the price, and everyone will be buying them.
Google is protecting itself. They are not doing anything to remove commercial websites from their search results. For example, those websites that do nothing more than reffer you to a different website that pays the first website a penny for each refferal. Meanwhile, you are clicking through page after page, and can't find what you really want.
The problem is, nothing on the web is trusted. If there was a trusted network of usefull and good information, and a search engine for just those websites, I think everyone would want to use it. For example, when I do a search, I'll often use the "site:edu" to limit the results because I know there is less spam there than in the coms. Try doing a search for a good website to learn spanish.
The other thing that sucks is good websites get so burried in the search results that they will not be found by most people. All the websites I use are those I found the past couple years, like epinions for reveiws of electronics, tvtome for info abou television programs (now dead, no good replacement found yet), and so on.
I would be more impressed if I saw google do something to remove those annoying refferal websites from its search results. Or even if they started a second search engine "trusted-beta" where every website indexed is 1) sumbitted by multiple people as usefull, and 2) checked by someone at google to be sure it is not spam, and 3) there is a web form to indicate a website does not belong, and if there are 100 or 200 or 5000 reports, the website is removed. Google would know the threashold for what is significant for its traffic to remove it.
So, you can't enter an IP as a proxy in IE and trick slashdot?
Anyone know the work around? How do you keep your identity secret and fool the proxy check?
The other part is, no matter how much you will disagree, I just won't use anything redhat, I had a horrible experiance with it years ago and that sticks. I loved SuSE and Debian, and would use those even if it required extra work (they don't). Having a choice is great for those who have a prefference (or hate) of a specific distro. There will be more websites with distro specific faq's to your hardware, because you know you're not the only one buying that machine with Distro X.
BTW, when they talk about Blue, don't they mean IBM? That is the original Big Blue. :)
I started a year and half ago with linux and it made computing fun for me again which I didn't think was possible. (Not since the Tandy 1000 days?)
I remember the good old days too. My first IBM clone was a 386sx. But that was when Apple ruled, and all IBM had was dos, which made the Apple IIgs look like it was 100 times better. Ahhh... the memories...
386sx.... $2700
cga monitor.... $400
playing strip poker in cga... priceless (for a 14 year old boy).
He'd call four times a day, and every time I'd ask "who is this" (because they're only allowed to call once a day, they don't like to identify themselves) and he would not. I'd hang up, he'd call back.
I had a credit card from Providian many, many years ago. It was a secured card, I had a deposit and limit of $500. To make a long story short, I did lose my job and could not pay the bill. I called and told them what happened, and told them to take the deposit and use it against my account. But the person on the phone sounded very sympathetic and said they would give me a grace period, and not to close the account. I listened to them.
They lied.
The next bill had a $30 late fee. The one after that had another $30 late fee, and a $30 over the limit fee (caused by the late fee). I called them back and told them to immediatly close my account, but they said my $500 deposit was not large enough to pay off the entire account, and they could not do a partial pay off. They kept charging me late fees and over the limit fees until I owed them $1200 (including the collection fees).
Now this is where it gets real nasty.
Providian started calling my house 8 times a day. Caller Id would always show "unavalable". They threatened me every way they could. Somehow, Providian found my mothers phone number, and called her. The guy told her I was going to get sued unless she paid my debt. I told her not to do anything, I was getting mad.
A few weeks later, my neighbor knocks on my door and says that Providian left a message for me, and that I should call them back.
I called Providian, and told them not to ever call me again. They told me they only respond to written corrispodance.
Providian made my life miserable for over two years. After a while, I would get phone calls and it would be them hanging up. It was all designed to be harrasment.
So I figured to hell with my credit rating, I would rather have 7 horrible years of bad credit than to pay Providian one penny. After a couple years passed, I got a letter from providian approving me for a secured credit card, $1500 to be exact. All Providian wanted was to put my charged off balance on the new credit card.
Here is the deal. If the bank can not collect in the statute of limitations, it gets taken off your credit report. The banks can no longer come after you. To get the debt back, they will try and offer something like credit. They are bastards.
But my question is this. How can you prove to a judge that a bank is calling you non-stop if the caller Id only shows "unavailable" and they don't identify themselevs?
For a while, I was seriously considering getting a gun, walking into Providians main bank, walking to the executive offices, and killing every motherfucker in the room. Them calling nonstop, humiliating me by calling neighbors, threatening my mom, it all was too much for me to take. The only thing that kept me sane was calling them "motherfucker" over the phone.
Is the cell phone company guilty for releasing your call history? What was on your cell phone history for last month? Did you call your psychiatrist to reschedule? Did you call an aborition clinic? Did you call your mistress? And do you want anyone knowing this information.
What I can't figure out is, how does a firm keep updating the call history?
Or should the laws punish the people who steal the data? For example, if a private investigator obtains your phone history, should that PI go to jail?
The new world of no privacy anywhere is getting ridiculous. Between having all your private information made public, having cell phones with cameras, websites with upskirt photos, and maps that image your house from space, there is nothing personal anymore. What is next, video cameras in toilet stalls to make sure thieft is not happening?
I know if someone killed a member of my family, I would never forgive that person. So if an air force airplane drops a bomb, and people who I cared about die, it would make that person want to get even. They can't fight the airplane, so they start looking for where to take out their frustrations. Before you know it, a person who was reasonable is now strapping on a suicide bomb, and getting ready to go and explode on a bus or in a cafe.
The only reason this is not so bad is because nobody has done suicide bombs in the USA. I think if there was 1 suicide bomb each day in the USA for 30 days, at the end of the 30 days the people would be ready to vote every member of congress out of office, and elect pacifists. War is hell, but we don't have war on USA soil. So most people in the USA have no idea what having fighting and a police state is like.
Getting back to the OP, those deep feelings of hate that are developing will be very difficult to mend. Those are the kinds of hate that parents will teach their children.
Damage was done to the reputation of the USA. When Bush says we liberated Iraq, I wonder how many other places that get liberated want to kill the people who give them freedom. Did the Germans have insurgents who wanted to kill all Americans when we liberated the concentration camps?
You can stop terrorists. Don't give them a good enough reason to attack you. It takes time and money to fight, and lots of people need to be highly motivated. If someone does not hate you, then why would they take all their energy and direct it at trying to kill and terrorize you?
more money should not be spent on trying to prevent disasters, it should be spent on ways to clean up after them.
I don't know what to think here. If you prevent the disaster, you won't have to clean it up. Is it a simple money equation? It costs X dollars for R&D to prevent a disaster, but a disaster only costs 1/8th of prevention. Does anyone here suggest if only 7 disasters happen, it is better to spend the money cleaning it up rather than stopping it because you would save some money?
What is the price of a human life worth?
It is like the bombings in Iraq that the USA military is doing. They say, for example, we wanted to get rid of insurgents and because of that, we had to kill some innocent people who were at the worng place at the wrong time.
The police shut down all phones and cell phones. The early news reports were questioning if cell phones were used to detonate the bombs.
Plus, if you have a group of terrorists, and they all have pre-paid cell phones, it is a good way to coordinate.
On the other side, it must suck if you are hurt and need help, and your cell phone does not work. No, not at the site of the bombing because the police will be there, but if you are somewhere else, and have a heart attack or get hit by a car.
Maybe they should have kept it a secret a while longer.
There are no secrets. If you want to know what a country has or might do, just get together 10 of your super bright friends and spend 2 years thinking about what systems a country might have. I bet you would figure most of it out. Before you label that idea stupid, ask yourself 2 questions. What does the CIA do? Hire 1000 smart people who read newspapers, listen to gossip, look at satellite images, and they think and try and figure things out. #2, I bet Al Queda has been spending many years thinking these exact same questions.
All you need to know is that everything created by the other side was done by human minds. Chances are they are using logic. So if you think about it long enough, you can figure it out.
Can you give some expamples? How is flying an airplane into a tower not physically possible? Are you saying the tower should have withstood the explosion, and that the heat from the fires should not have caused the buildings to collapse? Those gas tanks were filled, and the fire was very hot.
Or are you saying it was not muslim terrorists who caused the attacks, but some capitalists who wanted more control over USA society, more restrictive laws, less freedom.
What are you saying?
I don't have a chainlink fence, does that mean my property should become a neighborhood hang out? Or should people know, if I don't own it, then I should not use it?
Granted, with the internet it is different than in the real world. Cybercrimes are not real crimes, not in the sense like if you stuck a gun in someones ribs and ordered them to give you their money.
But I would like to think that if I buy a wireless router, I can take it out of the box, plug it in, and not do anything else and it will work. If it broadcasts to the world, that is something the manufacturer did wrong, setting it as default that way. The other end of the spectrum is the people who will get a router with restricted access, and not be able to configure it to work with their computers. What do you do? Does owning a wireless router require someone to read a 100 page manual. How many people read the manual that comes with their car, that tells them what grade of oil to use? Most people say fuck it, and just have the oil change place put in the 10w40, regardless of what is best for their car.
The problem with computers, and cyber crimes, will continue to be the balancing act between having products that work and securing computers.
There was an old saying in my political philosophy class. I don't remember the author, but he said "Where do my rights start and yours end? When your hand touches my nose". So where do my cyber rights end and your start? When my packet touches your nic card?
Seriously, I have always been a big fan of Debian. SuSE was a close second, but getting it is more of a pain in the ass. Often their ftp is slow, and cryptic to find for newbies. I think SuSE preffers people buying their boxed sets. Having said that, I have found SuSE to be an great desktop replacement for windows. Everything works out of the box, no tinkering required.
But my #1 choice is Debian. The apt-get is the hands down winner for getting new packages. I always hated Red Hat because as soon as I ran into a dependancy problem, I knew the rest of my day was booked. Mandrake just plain sucks in my humble opinion. It looks unprofessional, and weak. Debian, on the other hand, can be a pain in the but to instal, but once you get it up and running, it is unbeatable.
My advice to people is, if you want something easy and are willing to spend $100, get SuSE in the box. There are a ton of applications to help you configure your system. You can use SuSE to run a server, and not worry about downtime (unlike Mandrake which will crash, I have seen it happen at a linux fest, where 12 of us stood in disbelief looking at the new blue screen of death). I knew another guy who had a webserver and ssh set up on SuSE and it ran for over 200 days without a glitch (he took it down when he upgraded his system).
More advice. If your system is old, don't mess with KDE or Gnome, get IceWM. If you want to run Java, stay away from Red Hat. If you want apps wich are bran spanking new, running off the latest packages, stay away from Red Hat.
And the golden rule before installing any linux. Take 2 minutes before starting the instal, open your box, write down on paper what video card you have, what nic you have, what sound card, etc. It will save you 2 hours after instal trying to edit the conf files.
Happy 'puttering around!
There is a long history of the rich taking as much as the poor will tolerate. For a while, the USA had factories filled with children working 60 hour weeks, for slave wages. It took an act of Congress to shut down these factories, and only because of massive outrage.
Look at what Bush just did, last year. He did away with many provisions of the overtime law. No longer is a worker garunteed overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in one week.
And what about companies that require a personality test, or iq test, or credit check for a job, even a job as a janitor.
What about companies like GM that laid off 35,000 people and moved factories to Mexico? Does anyone remember the NAFTA debates of the 1980's? NAFTA was supposed to increase jobs in the USA, to increase pay in the USA, by making trucking between the USA and Mexico easier. Instead, all NAFTA did was take jobs that paid $25 an hour and move them to a place where the same job pays $1.50 an hour. It is not like we are doing Mexico any favors, or giving them good jobs.
Smart people believe their gifts, their intellect entitles them to riches more than anyone else. And not just double or triple, but on a scale where there is no comparison. How much does a business leader, who makes $10,000,000 a year care if the price of gasoline goes from $2 a gallon to $3 a gallon? Yet, for many families, this can create problems.
I'll give you one other example. Property taxes. Say I work for 20 years, and I save up enough money to pay for my modest house, I don't owe anyone anything. I want to retire, I have a very small income, I want to grow food in the backyard. I am pretty good at that, and I like organic foods. One day I get in the mail a $1000 property tax bill. Government is saying they will throw me off my land. Property tax forces the poor to keep working, it is a slavery like force.
The whole system is designed to force people to work.
I still don't understand much of these laws. They seem stupid and dumb to me, designed to protect the rich corporations, not people.
Problem #1. What if there is an idea that everyone would have, but someone out there patents it first? Does that mean that everyone else can not use that idea for their own benifit or profit? For example, the way something is sold on the internet.
Problem #2. What when this patent creates a monopoly. Does that mean everyone is stuck with having to pay extremely high prices, prices the market would never allow if there was competition?
And an interesting question. Why can anyone make a tire? Nobody will sue Joe Blow because he starts a tire company. Now what if Ford decided to patent tires. Can anyone imgaine how much a tire would cost if nobody else could make them? I would bet the cost would be double.
Here is the lawsuit I am waiting for. Say, for example, Ford patents a new rubber compound that will not burst. They use this rubber to make a safer tire. Everyone figures out all Ford did was add sand to their rubber mix, or something easy and stupid. Company B wants to make these tires, as a very cheap alternative to Fords premium "keep the family safe" tires. Ford sues this company, and wins. There is only one "safe" tire. Now the Smith family is a poor inner city black family. They need tires, but they can't afford the $400 per tire Fords. So they buy the non-safe $50 per tire generics. One day, on the way back from church, a tire blows on the highway and the car rolls, killing one of their children. Now, if the generic company could have made those tires, the Smiths would be alive because they could have purchased a generic "safe" tire for non-Ford prices. I would like to see someone like this sue Ford for the death of their family member.
Capitalism has its abuses. Patents are one of them. I can understand protecting a persons idea if it is so new and complex that nobody else would think of it, and the only way someone could have it is by theift. Patents should not be a mad rush to see who can fill out an application first, or for ideas that are unlikely to be had by one person only. Even if the idea is very complex, and unlikely that another person will have it, the patent should only last so long so that person can have a chance at enterting the marketplace without having large companies crush him. Patents should not harm society as a whole to make one person rich.
The EU is still new. They have members voting on ideals, and what is best for the people. That will change.
The USA is forcing its' system of government everywhere in the world. Soon, the "people" will elect thier new representatives. And the rich and wealthy businessmen will use their money to advertise candidates who are most favorable to their interests.
As long as money = speech, the people are the ones who will keep getting screwed.
As soon as money is taken out of politics, then people can debate which policy best fits their needs. But as long as 7 million dollars is spent on advterising about how the candidate is an asshole or fear, we are screwed. Can anyone in the USA honestly believe the pharmasutical companies advertising that drugs in Canada are dangerous for consumption in the USA? All the pharmasutical companies want to do is sell the exact same drugs in the USA at much higher prices. But when it comes to politics, there is no requirement that the truth is told.
What will happen in the EU is the powerful and rich will get people into positions of power. It is like the MAFIA. For a long run, they worked the system. They took low level thugs and got them jobs in the police force. They paid for the education of lawyers, and got some elected as judges. Before you knew it, the MAFIA could sell drugs, even if there was a police officer watching. If some good and ethical cop arrested someone the MAFIA wanted to protect, there was a good chance they would get a judge which would throw out the charges.
That is what the rich are doing. They are buying political offices. This will destroy the world, most will be forced in factories, into a slave like exsistance.
Not really...
Look at TvTOME.com, the guy who started it wanted a place to keep information about tv shows. It was the best place if you wanted information on any television show, to learn the cast, the have a description of every episode, and to have details. What happened to TVTOME? A commercial website that was competing with them wanted their subscriber base. So the offered the dude who started TvTOME 5 million dollars.
As for routers and ISP's, money talks. I can see a "new" model where newer routers give priority to transmissions from preffered provioders. For example, a major series of routers now will let all data pass at 5 kbps, but if you are a pressered provider, you get to pass at 500 kbps. After all, the internet is growing and the amount of data that can be transmitted is finite. I am sure they will tell us something like that. Plus, who knows what new kinds of HDTV over the IP is comming. How large is that stream for 720p? Now imagine 50 million homes subscribing to it (trust me, even if you don't want it, the cable companies will find some way to force you to buy it, maybe bumping the price of cable modems up by $20 if you don't buy their other service).
So, the point is, companies are greedy and they will fuck the people every chance they can.
I would rather have 1 quality website than get 10 new bad websites and lose that quality website.
I'll give one more example. Even if you like porn, say you want to find MILF's. So you type in MILF in google, and you get 1 real MILF website for every 20 websites that just refeer you to the original website.
Maybe the solution is a better search engine. One that is not based on money, so nobody can buy a better result. A search engine that rejects refferal websites and spam.
I think the best days of the web are behind us.
When the internet first hit, almost all websites were free. If Joe wanted to tell the world about his love of aviation, he set up a website. People put in lots of hours, with quality information.
But how has the internet evolved?
Money currupted the internet.
For example, try typing in "learn spanish" in google. How many websites are places that want your money? When the internet first started, there were better websites that were free. Not anymore, they got pushed off the web.
I think the web has outlived its usefullness. It is like TV. Too many commercials. I wonder if the next computer will come with a machine to suck in dollar bills. Maybe it can transmit the numbers off a $10 bill and shred it, so that way the bank credits the other end.
If Bush gets his 2 replacements, we could be fucked. Because I don't think the Senate will take anyone the RIAA is against, someone who is pro-people, someone who is anti big buisness. Bush pused to do away with the 40 hour work week, by killing overtime pay. I can just imagine what the future holds- the 6 day work week, 9 hours a day. I am suprised buisnesses have not started selling advertising space in their offices. I can just see an spreadsheet open on the bottom 3/4ths of a monitor, with an advertisment on the top 1/4th.