Personally, I support the abolition of copyright law. They (the copyrightists) have apparently decided to make it a stark choice between communications liberty and enforcement of copyright.
If musicians were the only people making copyrighted works, then your position might be reasonable. Not all musicians care about copyright, and we can do without the "art" from those who do. But copyright also provides the only way to fund things that are extremely expensive, but also necessary.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction. The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here; no doubt there are many other examples of very complex programs that are only required by a small number of people. In a world without IP, who will pay for the R&D cost of these programs? Is it reasonable to expect them to be written for free, by free software guys, when there is so little demand for them? Conversely, is it reasonable to expect anyone pay for them if they can be legally pirated? Would your business pay $10k for an essential program if the Pirate Bay would legally give it to you for $0?
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips. The chips will be cheaper because Intel and AMD won't see any profit from them, and the costs won't include the substantial R&D cost of designing the chips in the first place. Intel and AMD would go out of business if this type of piracy was legal. And yet that is exactly the model advocated by the "imaginary property" crowd today: if it's information, then it can't be property.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property. It is not just the MPAA and RIAA who are affected by theft of information; it is every software engineer and everyone else who is trying to make a living by selling information. Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.). The "sell concert tickets", "sell ads", "make it into a service" and "ask for donations" business models just don't apply to every case. Make no mistake, we all need some form of IP law.
No way! Holodeck + AI = universal plot generator. Don't worry about a killswitch. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it's that all problems can be solved within 45 minutes if you just reverse the polarity of the photon warp field tachyon emitter array, which is way more interesting than just having an "off" button.
(Sorry.) But that's part of the teaching. You've got all these godlike powers, telekinesis for example, and your thetans are the only thing stopping you from using them. You can get rid of your thetans by giving the CoS all of your money for the rest of your life, and if you are sufficiently committed to the church, maybe one day you will be as magical as LRH. And then you'll never really die. Your entire life is a small price to pay for the chance of being a God.
This is pretty similar to other religious claims, I think. It covers all the basic tickboxes: "you are more important than non-believers", "you get everlasting life" and "you get to be like God". I think it is specifically tuned for extremely arrogant people, though, because there is no notion of God as something better than you, that you can at best only aspire to be like. I think this is a deliberate choice by LRH, who liked hanging around with film stars and seems to have figured out what they wanted to hear:
LRH: You're the most important guy in the Universe!
Tom Cruise: I already knew that, L. Ron. Have some more of my money!
Hmm. I thought they identified pirates by traffic analysis, e.g. connect to a tracker that is known to be sharing an infringing file, then keep a timestamped log recording the IP of everyone who sends you a part of that file. The logging part is automatic, but the connecting part is manual. They will only pick the files they are interested in; they are not going to police other people's copyrights. I can't see how this will produce false positives, although no doubt the pirates will use the old "my wireless access point is open" defence if they can. (I wonder if that defence still works if your Bittorrent client is listening for incoming connections...)
Personally I would much rather they did this than lobby for mandatory filtering, since I think the filtering approach will eventually affect everyone, pirate or not. Trivial filtering (blocking sites) won't work, so smarter solutions will be needed, and these will inevitably destroy online anonymity.
Portable music player chipsets already include MP3 support, partly in hardware and partly in firmware. It would now actually be more expensive to build a player without MP3 support, since you could not use off-the-shelf components to do it. Patent royalties are a very small part of the total cost of the device. Really, it is a non-issue.
But the study of historical events can be scientific. Historical sciences include geology, archaeology and astronomy for example. Many things in science cannot be directly observed, but their effects can be: they are still science. I think you may have inadvertently bought into a fallacy from the creationists, who claim that past events cannot be studied scientifically, and consequently the Bible is as reliable as any other evidence about the past. This position is not particularly helpful. It is a bit like solipsism. It has a degree of "what is reality anyway, man?" about it. In explaining the past, we can do better than that.
My point is that a young Earth would prove some of the claims of evolution deniers, not that an old Earth would disprove the Bible. Additionally many creationists also believe in a young Earth: the Discovery Institute is an example.
Why don't you just prove that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, like the Bible says? That way, you can falsify "macro evolution" as an explanation for life without having to make an artificial distinction between different types of evolution.
Let us see the extraordinary evidence for the "young Earth" theory before we start arguing about "micro evolution". If you can prove that Earth isn't billions of years old using solid science, evidence and facts, no scientist will be able to argue with you. Science isn't a religion, it is a mechanism for learning things, and good scientists will not stick to their beliefs if those beliefs are proved wrong.
However, your evidence will have to be amazing, because it will have to override all of the other evidence that points to an old Earth. But since the Earth really is less than 10,000 years old, producing the evidence shouldn't present any difficulty, right? Ask your "creation scientists" why they can't prove even this one simple aspect of their "theory". No doubt a conspiracy of some kind is involved.
Is this article just taking the piss? On page 2 they say they can't understand the point of sex toys. Page 11 explains that the internal combustion engine is just wrong because "it's a bomb". They also diss Guitar Hero - not as a soon-to-be dated fad, or yet another game requiring you to buy special controllers that are useless for almost everything else, but because apparently it would have prevented Jimi Hendrix if it had existed in his time.
Right. This must be some terrifying dystopian future in which CNET articles aren't funny.
I agree that it's not 1984. Orwell references are as tired as that "liberty for security" quote that we often read here. "Score: -1, Tired Cliche", I say. However,
The difference between 1984 and Google is that google allows anybody to view the street.
This makes no difference in practice. Lets imagine the ultimate surveillance system: Google sets up CCTV along every street to capture real-time images, which can then be viewed inside Google Earth, complete with tags identifying those present. You can search for a person and find them now, and see what they are doing if they are in a public place. You can look at what they did in public in the recent past, and (for a fee) at any time since the system was set up. Everyone can watch anyone: it is David Brin's wet dream come true.
Of course this Google Street thing is not that system. We won't see that system for another decade at least. But even if the surveillance system were open for public viewing in this way, it wouldn't be particularly useful, because there are some people you're not going to be able to watch. It won't be a fair, egalitarian system. It really will be a "dystopian nightmare", because the people you cannot watch are the very people you should be watching: those in power. What's the solution? I don't think there is one... people like privacy, but they prefer convenience, and in the end it's only a nightmare if the authorities don't like you.
I don't think that's true. Other filesystem encryption does use CBC: it is used at the (hard disk) block level. For example, aes-loop works in this fashion. I think what you are missing is that it isn't completely random access. Nothing smaller than a hard disk block is read or written in one go, so you can encrypt entire blocks using a chain. You have to break the chain at each hard disk block boundary (>= 512 bytes), but this is still better than breaking it at every encryption block boundary (= 32 bytes) which is effectively what you get with ECB.
An ECB implementation is potentially simpler, though, which is presumably why it is used:).
Corsair Flash Padlock - physical security only: crack it by breaking open the case.
The Corsair Survivor - no security, so TrueCrypt is needed, but setup instructions for TrueCrypt are included.
The Imation Pivot Plus Flash Drive - uses AES-256, but in the insecure ECB mode. Hey, I suppose it's better than ROT13 at least.
The IronKey Secure Flash Drive - "To use the IronKey flash drive, you need to activate an online account." Well, that sounds like a great idea.
The Kingston DataTraveler Secure -- Privacy Edition - "Kingston refused to say what encryption mode the device runs in, citing that it was proprietary information." So that would be ECB again, then. Or maybe something even more pathetic.
The Lexar JumpDrive Secure II Plus - Special proprietary software is required to use this one.
The SanDisk Cruzer Professional - ECB again.
Really short summary: buy a conventional USB stick and do the encryption yourself using free software that you can trust. Because customers cannot tell the difference between a well secured device and some snake oil junk, there is no incentive to make these things work properly.
People have been saying that since the 1950s! In the future, we'll program our computers by talking to them, telling them what we want, and they'll be smart enough to understand us. "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." That sort of thing. Any day now...:)
Got to go, the fusion reactor in my flying car needs some more deuterium and I've got to get to Mars City by this evening.
Free software (in the Stallman sense of the word) comes with the price that you must share the changes you make. That is the cost of the intellectual property license - the changes remain free. That's why it's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
No-one should ever feel guilty about profiting from free software, so long as they obey its license.
When you are watching WoW traffic, have you ever been tempted to analyse the packets? I thought it might be useful to make a program that extracts English messages from a WoW bitstream, e.g. whispers and other chat. These are sent in plain text. But I discovered that the packets appeared to have no obvious structure that would allow chat messages to be distinguished from other data. The nearest thing to a packet header is a 32 bit word that appears every so often. Its position suggests a packet header, since it is at a consistent offset from chat message text, but it looks random (when passed through a frequency analysis, all bits have equally high entropy). It is as if the packet headers are being encrypted using an algorithm and key shared by both the server and client with the specific intention of making the protocol more difficult to reverse engineer.
But why just the header? Can you shed any light on this? (I claim that this is slightly on topic because it is a very nerdy discussion, and, erm.. a possible use for additional CPU cores...)
Microsoft were giving away a kit for ISPs that installed and configured dial-up networking for new users. The kit also installed the latest version of IE, with ISP customisations: "Microsoft Internet Explorer - provided by BT Overpriced Dialup World". Netscape could have (should have) done something like that too, but Microsoft had a natural advantage since they could provide all the parts of the solution together: browser and dial-up configuration in one place. Lots of people got IE that way, since all the ISPs used the kit. (Presumably the Netscape branded dial-up service would be the only exception.)
I remember trying to fight Netscape's corner, trying to explain why everyone using one browser wasn't a good thing, going around and installing Netscape for people. I found it increasingly difficult, since even by that time it was obvious that Netscape was not improving, and since you still had to pay for Opera there wasn't another alternative. I used the monopoly argument to justify the install: the security monoculture argument never occurred to me as I had no idea that IE would turn out to be so insecure.
It's surprising that people are still using MIPS as a measurement! The (now very old) joke was that MIPS really stood for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed, on account of the fact that it's highly dependant on how much you can actually do with each instruction, and also which instruction you are measuring. That dates back to the 80s at least, possibly the 70s, and it's why everyone should use representative benchmarks to compare CPUs rather than clock speeds and/or MIPS. The joke even made it into Linux, where the bootup BogoMIPS measurement is said to be "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing."
You could require every packet to be digitally signed at its source, with a certificate identifying the originator, and check each packet as it passed through certain routers. Packets without valid signatures get dropped - you can't go online without an approved certificate, no doubt from some government authority. That would destroy online anonymity and privacy, and be expensive and inconvenient, but that hasn't been enough to stop bad laws in the past.
The book Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge has an accurate description of the type of infrastructure required to do this. Vinge calls it the "secure hardware environment". Any similarities to TCPA are purely coincidental.
Quite right. I signed another one at about the same time as the ID cards one. This is what happened: Q. "Dear Prime Minister, please abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools." A. "The Government remains committed to a diverse range of schools for parents to choose from, including schools with a religious character or "faith schools" as they are commonly known. Social divisions along religious lines are definitely a good thing and have certainly never caused any problems of any sort. Anyway we didn't read what you said, we don't care what your opinion is, because we are right." So I guess if you want to change things you just have to go out and vote. Ha ha, I split my own sides there.
But prohibition never went away, even though it never worked. In fact, it spread to other countries via "free trade" agreements, and continues to fund a vast worldwide criminal industry to this very day.
I think the analogy with prohibition is sound, though, and ultimately schemes to keep piracy off the net will lead to two things if they succeed: (1) no online anonymity or privacy, since you must track what people are doing if you are to enforce anti-piracy laws, and (2) a move back to sneakernet for duplication and distribution. The people who currently make vast profits from prohibition, i.e. drug dealers, will step into the gap left by strict online enforcement. When piracy was all online, only a few criminals were making money from it (e.g. Pirate Bay). Strict online enforcement will put it back on the streets.
Actually AiG draw an artificial distinction between what they call "macroevolution" and "microevolution". They claim that microevolution happens and macroevolution doesn't, using a circular argument to define the distinction between one and the other. They also claim that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. They are most definitely exactly the crazy fundamentalists I am talking about. The person I replied to here seemed to be quite willing to accept evolution and certainly wasn't making bizarre claims like "evolution happens on a small scale, but you never get new species", which you will hear from Ken Ham and his Discovery Institute lunatic asylum.
You're not one of the creationist fundies that I'm talking about, since you accept natural selection as part of the process that has created the life we see today. Some people have suggested that the term "evolution denier" would be a more appropriate term. You're not one of them.
However, you might possibly be confused about one thing which I should point out. Evolution isn't an explanation for the origins of life, i.e. inorganic matter to living cells. That's abiogenesis, quite a different thing.
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Personally, I support the abolition of copyright law. They (the copyrightists) have apparently decided to make it a stark choice between communications liberty and enforcement of copyright.
If musicians were the only people making copyrighted works, then your position might be reasonable. Not all musicians care about copyright, and we can do without the "art" from those who do. But copyright also provides the only way to fund things that are extremely expensive, but also necessary.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction. The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here; no doubt there are many other examples of very complex programs that are only required by a small number of people. In a world without IP, who will pay for the R&D cost of these programs? Is it reasonable to expect them to be written for free, by free software guys, when there is so little demand for them? Conversely, is it reasonable to expect anyone pay for them if they can be legally pirated? Would your business pay $10k for an essential program if the Pirate Bay would legally give it to you for $0?
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips. The chips will be cheaper because Intel and AMD won't see any profit from them, and the costs won't include the substantial R&D cost of designing the chips in the first place. Intel and AMD would go out of business if this type of piracy was legal. And yet that is exactly the model advocated by the "imaginary property" crowd today: if it's information, then it can't be property.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property. It is not just the MPAA and RIAA who are affected by theft of information; it is every software engineer and everyone else who is trying to make a living by selling information. Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.). The "sell concert tickets", "sell ads", "make it into a service" and "ask for donations" business models just don't apply to every case. Make no mistake, we all need some form of IP law.
No way! Holodeck + AI = universal plot generator. Don't worry about a killswitch. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it's that all problems can be solved within 45 minutes if you just reverse the polarity of the photon warp field tachyon emitter array, which is way more interesting than just having an "off" button.
(Sorry.) But that's part of the teaching. You've got all these godlike powers, telekinesis for example, and your thetans are the only thing stopping you from using them. You can get rid of your thetans by giving the CoS all of your money for the rest of your life, and if you are sufficiently committed to the church, maybe one day you will be as magical as LRH. And then you'll never really die. Your entire life is a small price to pay for the chance of being a God.
This is pretty similar to other religious claims, I think. It covers all the basic tickboxes: "you are more important than non-believers", "you get everlasting life" and "you get to be like God". I think it is specifically tuned for extremely arrogant people, though, because there is no notion of God as something better than you, that you can at best only aspire to be like. I think this is a deliberate choice by LRH, who liked hanging around with film stars and seems to have figured out what they wanted to hear:
LRH: You're the most important guy in the Universe!
Tom Cruise: I already knew that, L. Ron. Have some more of my money!
Hmm. I thought they identified pirates by traffic analysis, e.g. connect to a tracker that is known to be sharing an infringing file, then keep a timestamped log recording the IP of everyone who sends you a part of that file. The logging part is automatic, but the connecting part is manual. They will only pick the files they are interested in; they are not going to police other people's copyrights. I can't see how this will produce false positives, although no doubt the pirates will use the old "my wireless access point is open" defence if they can. (I wonder if that defence still works if your Bittorrent client is listening for incoming connections...)
Personally I would much rather they did this than lobby for mandatory filtering, since I think the filtering approach will eventually affect everyone, pirate or not. Trivial filtering (blocking sites) won't work, so smarter solutions will be needed, and these will inevitably destroy online anonymity.
Portable music player chipsets already include MP3 support, partly in hardware and partly in firmware. It would now actually be more expensive to build a player without MP3 support, since you could not use off-the-shelf components to do it. Patent royalties are a very small part of the total cost of the device. Really, it is a non-issue.
But the study of historical events can be scientific. Historical sciences include geology, archaeology and astronomy for example. Many things in science cannot be directly observed, but their effects can be: they are still science. I think you may have inadvertently bought into a fallacy from the creationists, who claim that past events cannot be studied scientifically, and consequently the Bible is as reliable as any other evidence about the past. This position is not particularly helpful. It is a bit like solipsism. It has a degree of "what is reality anyway, man?" about it. In explaining the past, we can do better than that.
My point is that a young Earth would prove some of the claims of evolution deniers, not that an old Earth would disprove the Bible. Additionally many creationists also believe in a young Earth: the Discovery Institute is an example.
Creationists,
Why don't you just prove that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, like the Bible says? That way, you can falsify "macro evolution" as an explanation for life without having to make an artificial distinction between different types of evolution.
Let us see the extraordinary evidence for the "young Earth" theory before we start arguing about "micro evolution". If you can prove that Earth isn't billions of years old using solid science, evidence and facts, no scientist will be able to argue with you. Science isn't a religion, it is a mechanism for learning things, and good scientists will not stick to their beliefs if those beliefs are proved wrong.
However, your evidence will have to be amazing, because it will have to override all of the other evidence that points to an old Earth. But since the Earth really is less than 10,000 years old, producing the evidence shouldn't present any difficulty, right? Ask your "creation scientists" why they can't prove even this one simple aspect of their "theory". No doubt a conspiracy of some kind is involved.
Is this article just taking the piss? On page 2 they say they can't understand the point of sex toys. Page 11 explains that the internal combustion engine is just wrong because "it's a bomb". They also diss Guitar Hero - not as a soon-to-be dated fad, or yet another game requiring you to buy special controllers that are useless for almost everything else, but because apparently it would have prevented Jimi Hendrix if it had existed in his time.
Right. This must be some terrifying dystopian future in which CNET articles aren't funny.
I agree that it's not 1984. Orwell references are as tired as that "liberty for security" quote that we often read here. "Score: -1, Tired Cliche", I say. However,
The difference between 1984 and Google is that google allows anybody to view the street.
This makes no difference in practice. Lets imagine the ultimate surveillance system: Google sets up CCTV along every street to capture real-time images, which can then be viewed inside Google Earth, complete with tags identifying those present. You can search for a person and find them now, and see what they are doing if they are in a public place. You can look at what they did in public in the recent past, and (for a fee) at any time since the system was set up. Everyone can watch anyone: it is David Brin's wet dream come true.
Of course this Google Street thing is not that system. We won't see that system for another decade at least. But even if the surveillance system were open for public viewing in this way, it wouldn't be particularly useful, because there are some people you're not going to be able to watch. It won't be a fair, egalitarian system. It really will be a "dystopian nightmare", because the people you cannot watch are the very people you should be watching: those in power. What's the solution? I don't think there is one... people like privacy, but they prefer convenience, and in the end it's only a nightmare if the authorities don't like you.
I don't think that's true. Other filesystem encryption does use CBC: it is used at the (hard disk) block level. For example, aes-loop works in this fashion. I think what you are missing is that it isn't completely random access. Nothing smaller than a hard disk block is read or written in one go, so you can encrypt entire blocks using a chain. You have to break the chain at each hard disk block boundary (>= 512 bytes), but this is still better than breaking it at every encryption block boundary (= 32 bytes) which is effectively what you get with ECB.
:).
An ECB implementation is potentially simpler, though, which is presumably why it is used
Corsair Flash Padlock - physical security only: crack it by breaking open the case.
The Corsair Survivor - no security, so TrueCrypt is needed, but setup instructions for TrueCrypt are included.
The Imation Pivot Plus Flash Drive - uses AES-256, but in the insecure ECB mode. Hey, I suppose it's better than ROT13 at least.
The IronKey Secure Flash Drive - "To use the IronKey flash drive, you need to activate an online account." Well, that sounds like a great idea.
The Kingston DataTraveler Secure -- Privacy Edition - "Kingston refused to say what encryption mode the device runs in, citing that it was proprietary information." So that would be ECB again, then. Or maybe something even more pathetic.
The Lexar JumpDrive Secure II Plus - Special proprietary software is required to use this one.
The SanDisk Cruzer Professional - ECB again.
Really short summary: buy a conventional USB stick and do the encryption yourself using free software that you can trust. Because customers cannot tell the difference between a well secured device and some snake oil junk, there is no incentive to make these things work properly.
People have been saying that since the 1950s! In the future, we'll program our computers by talking to them, telling them what we want, and they'll be smart enough to understand us. "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." That sort of thing. Any day now... :)
Got to go, the fusion reactor in my flying car needs some more deuterium and I've got to get to Mars City by this evening.
Free software (in the Stallman sense of the word) comes with the price that you must share the changes you make. That is the cost of the intellectual property license - the changes remain free. That's why it's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
No-one should ever feel guilty about profiting from free software, so long as they obey its license.
When you are watching WoW traffic, have you ever been tempted to analyse the packets? I thought it might be useful to make a program that extracts English messages from a WoW bitstream, e.g. whispers and other chat. These are sent in plain text. But I discovered that the packets appeared to have no obvious structure that would allow chat messages to be distinguished from other data. The nearest thing to a packet header is a 32 bit word that appears every so often. Its position suggests a packet header, since it is at a consistent offset from chat message text, but it looks random (when passed through a frequency analysis, all bits have equally high entropy). It is as if the packet headers are being encrypted using an algorithm and key shared by both the server and client with the specific intention of making the protocol more difficult to reverse engineer.
But why just the header? Can you shed any light on this? (I claim that this is slightly on topic because it is a very nerdy discussion, and, erm.. a possible use for additional CPU cores...)
Never mind that: how do I get out of this shopping mall?
I modified the GNU C Compiler and then redistributed the binaries without the source code. Was that stealing?
Microsoft were giving away a kit for ISPs that installed and configured dial-up networking for new users. The kit also installed the latest version of IE, with ISP customisations: "Microsoft Internet Explorer - provided by BT Overpriced Dialup World". Netscape could have (should have) done something like that too, but Microsoft had a natural advantage since they could provide all the parts of the solution together: browser and dial-up configuration in one place. Lots of people got IE that way, since all the ISPs used the kit. (Presumably the Netscape branded dial-up service would be the only exception.)
I remember trying to fight Netscape's corner, trying to explain why everyone using one browser wasn't a good thing, going around and installing Netscape for people. I found it increasingly difficult, since even by that time it was obvious that Netscape was not improving, and since you still had to pay for Opera there wasn't another alternative. I used the monopoly argument to justify the install: the security monoculture argument never occurred to me as I had no idea that IE would turn out to be so insecure.
It's surprising that people are still using MIPS as a measurement! The (now very old) joke was that MIPS really stood for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed, on account of the fact that it's highly dependant on how much you can actually do with each instruction, and also which instruction you are measuring. That dates back to the 80s at least, possibly the 70s, and it's why everyone should use representative benchmarks to compare CPUs rather than clock speeds and/or MIPS. The joke even made it into Linux, where the bootup BogoMIPS measurement is said to be "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing."
You could require every packet to be digitally signed at its source, with a certificate identifying the originator, and check each packet as it passed through certain routers. Packets without valid signatures get dropped - you can't go online without an approved certificate, no doubt from some government authority. That would destroy online anonymity and privacy, and be expensive and inconvenient, but that hasn't been enough to stop bad laws in the past.
The book Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge has an accurate description of the type of infrastructure required to do this. Vinge calls it the "secure hardware environment". Any similarities to TCPA are purely coincidental.
Quite right. I signed another one at about the same time as the ID cards one. This is what happened:
Q. "Dear Prime Minister, please abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools."
A. "The Government remains committed to a diverse range of schools for parents to choose from, including schools with a religious character or "faith schools" as they are commonly known. Social divisions along religious lines are definitely a good thing and have certainly never caused any problems of any sort. Anyway we didn't read what you said, we don't care what your opinion is, because we are right."
So I guess if you want to change things you just have to go out and vote. Ha ha, I split my own sides there.
Ah, I stand corrected. I'm not ashamed to be unable to keep track of their craziness :).
But prohibition never went away, even though it never worked. In fact, it spread to other countries via "free trade" agreements, and continues to fund a vast worldwide criminal industry to this very day.
I think the analogy with prohibition is sound, though, and ultimately schemes to keep piracy off the net will lead to two things if they succeed: (1) no online anonymity or privacy, since you must track what people are doing if you are to enforce anti-piracy laws, and (2) a move back to sneakernet for duplication and distribution. The people who currently make vast profits from prohibition, i.e. drug dealers, will step into the gap left by strict online enforcement. When piracy was all online, only a few criminals were making money from it (e.g. Pirate Bay). Strict online enforcement will put it back on the streets.
Actually AiG draw an artificial distinction between what they call "macroevolution" and "microevolution". They claim that microevolution happens and macroevolution doesn't, using a circular argument to define the distinction between one and the other. They also claim that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. They are most definitely exactly the crazy fundamentalists I am talking about. The person I replied to here seemed to be quite willing to accept evolution and certainly wasn't making bizarre claims like "evolution happens on a small scale, but you never get new species", which you will hear from Ken Ham and his Discovery Institute lunatic asylum.
You're not one of the creationist fundies that I'm talking about, since you accept natural selection as part of the process that has created the life we see today. Some people have suggested that the term "evolution denier" would be a more appropriate term. You're not one of them.
However, you might possibly be confused about one thing which I should point out. Evolution isn't an explanation for the origins of life, i.e. inorganic matter to living cells. That's abiogenesis, quite a different thing.