So a small handful of fanatics clinging to dogma are going to push us all around with threats of boycots. I believe that's part of the definition of terrorism.
It gets your knickers in a knot, but it's NOT terrorism.
I think a few fanatics pushed around the British Empire with a threat - and actual carrying out of a boycott.
Threatening to kill, maim or torture random people to get terrify people qualifies as terrorism (See "9/11", "Shock and Awe"). Using a boycott to get your point across: just non-violence in action. Whether you agree with the goals of the people doing the boycott is irrelevant.
We need a law similar to Godwin's Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving terrorism approaches 1.
IIRC, a year after I first heard of Google's Toolbar mainstream electronic stores were still selling pop-up blocking software.
There was huge demand for this type of functionality, and it's likely that whoever the engineer(s) was that wrote the toolbar would have wanted to add this feature.
So if they're evil, at least they have plausible deniability!
Sun supporting Postgres is not aiming at the low-end. MySQL will continue to develop features they told us we didn't need and Postgres has had for years.
Meanwhile moving to Postgres won't be that difficult. You'll probably find a few features that make it so you no longer need a few ugly hacks.
You wouldn't pay $300 for a happy-meal computer, but you would $200?
Well, you might might actually be in luck:
At the same time, they say they are hoping to authorize a commercial version that would sell for around $200, with a share of the profits ideally used to subsidize the educational project. "We are in talks with large, brand-name companies," Mr. Negroponte says, noting it will be up to them to decide where and how to sell it. "I would not hold my breath for it to be in Best Buy," he says.
The more people asking for this, the more likely it is to happen.
Heck, I'd probably even buy a happy meal to get one of those.
Check out the pledge to buy one. Although it's looking like the MIT lab won't have any problems getting enough orders to start production, it would be nice to see us comparatively rich/.'ers subsidize these- and maybe develop apps to run on them.
Wrote this for a non-geek audience. So far only one other media picked up on this... any comments before this goes out in the canadian political discussion boards? (Written for lefties that have not been historically on to tech issues)
Bill C-74 was introduced November 15th:
An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to facilitate the lawful interception of information transmitted by means of those facilities and respecting the provision of telecommunications subscriber information
Whereas a wiretap requires a warrant this new law would force an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to intercept communications from customers and hand over customer lists with a simple letter from a law enforcement official. Any future software deployed by the ISP would have to have a back door, which includes internet telephony.
Alerted by legal scholar Michal Geist's writing on the subject, the tech-nerds are calling for resistance including providing end-to-end encryption (see slashdot).
The techies realize that criminals will encrypt their communication- at least those most dangerous to national security. Those that remain are the petty criminals and civilians who won't know how to protect their privacy. The public won't be more secure, but we will have more surveillance; the panopticon culture grows.
For new software, any ISP will have to choose the version most suited to increase its snooping capacities, even if they have to acquire additional licenses or communication facilities. To put it plainly: when they start offering VoIP (Voice over Internet protocol) services, ISPs will have to allow tapping without a warrant. Additional costs have to be swallowed by the ISP.
What is perhaps most pernicious in the economic sense isn't that these compliance costs will be passed on- it is that innovation will be stifled. Right now a small VoIP player could get started on ridiculously small amounts of capital. The effect of these regulations will be to protect oligopolies.
Ironically, as the new technologies have be designed for ease of surveillance, crackers (criminal or black-hat hackers) will likely be able to leverage these back doors to their ends. Stalking, industrial espionage and snooping for blackmail or identity theft material all become more likely. Making surveillance easy for the RCMP and CSIS could make it trivial for criminals, even terrorists to get to sensitive information.
Here's to hoping the NDP will firmly trash this nonsense. Or do we trust those that film us at every peace demonstration (and happily send off immigrants back to their countries of origin for questioning) with more surveillance power?
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
FTFA: "[A pandemic] could easily claim more lives in a single year than AIDS has in 25."
Drive around with a GPS and digicam, or put the combo on taxis and other vehicles, and you'd have a city's map in little time. That won't help you map tree cover in the Amazon, must most of the hackers I know interested in geodata are very interested in free street-level data.
That's fair. Search is only circumstantial evidence.
What history could show however is pre-meditation. e.g. Did the person we know committed the crime search for the implements in the months and weeks leading to the crime?
I know this probably won't interest Americans, but if this type of software can read street signs- can we also assume it will recognize traffic signs and house numbers?
A lot of countries don't have access to free information, so this technology if it worked would seriously harm some of the mapping data monopolies.
Car theft was the first thing that came to mind when reading about police stopping cars that drive through roadblocks. Of course, it should have been obvious that you're thinking about those "terrorists". Blame it on an all-nighter and silly amounts of caffeine.
You didn't try to refute my first point, and you make a fairly weak case as to this technology's use against terrorists. Even if we did surprise them, how long until someone figures it out? If we'll call that "security by surprise", you better be one creative guy and have deep pockets. How much did this toy cost? And even without surprise, how long until it loses most of its efficiency and you have to invent a new toy?
Overall the cost-benefit of these types of technologies is rather dismal. Plus, how long until the "terrorists" get their hands on one (or improvise one) and use it to down helicopters?
Mark my words: this is going to be a disaster, and not just because of the civilians this will inevitably be used on.
Yay! More security through...er, we're talking lasers here. Ok, two problems with your theory.
1- Do you trust the government to test weapons on the public without us knowing what they are? (And if you answered yes, what the FUCK are you doing here?)
2- People that steal cars are NOT going to wear anti-laser or welding helmets. Talk about not looking cool and making yourself conspicuous.
Ed, I perused the article. Scroll down to "Model of Projected Costs":
If the Nuclear Power Industry delivers this, it will likely place the price of electricity produced at around 3 US cents per KW-Hr.
Note that this is a big IF and the price is very sensitive to construction time and discount rate. Those are two assumptions that have been known to change fairly dramatically. (Wind is more sensitive to discount rates, and tends to have shorter construction times.)
Quoting upfront capital costs alone is rather useless- the important figure is the adjusted cost per KiloWatt-Hour. In this respect, wind is on course to beat these estimates from the nuclear industry. Even if this specific technology doesn't pan out, the trend is clear. And at $0.02/kWh, it will very likely be cheap enough to provide baseline power when coupled with hydrogen storage.
Turbine and solar cell manufacturers actually sell *stuff*. They have paying *customers* in a sector where the market is huge and their sector has been growing over 20% for more than 30 years.
The point of all this? Lack of capital has been one of the things holding growth back. That to me sounds a lot more serious than someone selling pet-food over the internet.
If not this particular company and technology, the prices they are giving are in line with most analysts' expectations.
Like a lot of other technologies, this one is going down in price in a predictable way. Check out the wind energy data at earth-policy.org, especially that last figure.
The sector has recently been experiencing Hockey-stick growth in investment. It's pretty much inevitable that this is going to be cheaper than coal- and likely cheap enough to make hydrogen for when wind is low. Cheap, guaranteed price, non-polluting.
Judging from nuclear's track record, it won't come close to wind. These turbines might not be the ones to put nuclear out of its misery- but wind certainly will play a large part (don't discount solar just quite yet).
Seems like a bit of a strawman argument, even if I agree with most of what you suggest government do instead.
From the summary it seems like a very interventionist approach. A more "organic" way would include all your recommendations, and when creating software in-house it would have to be open. Any commissioned custom software would also have to be open-source. Any barriers to OSS in procurement would have to be removed, including when making RFQ's. If an OSS package can have a feature added for $200,000, there's no way governments should be spending $3,500,000 on a "commercial" solution. There's a managerial phrase for that kind of CYA in the last point, but I forget it.
Getting out of the way AND dealing with their own purchasing could have a powerful impact. But any kind of "programme" that doesn't have immediate savings is just an ideological intervention in the market.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a few fanatics pushed around the British Empire with a threat - and actual carrying out of a boycott.
Threatening to kill, maim or torture random people to get terrify people qualifies as terrorism (See "9/11", "Shock and Awe"). Using a boycott to get your point across: just non-violence in action. Whether you agree with the goals of the people doing the boycott is irrelevant.
We need a law similar to Godwin's Law:
IIRC, a year after I first heard of Google's Toolbar mainstream electronic stores were still selling pop-up blocking software.
There was huge demand for this type of functionality, and it's likely that whoever the engineer(s) was that wrote the toolbar would have wanted to add this feature.
So if they're evil, at least they have plausible deniability!
Dear Flying pig,
Sun supporting Postgres is not aiming at the low-end. MySQL will continue to develop features they told us we didn't need and Postgres has had for years.
Meanwhile moving to Postgres won't be that difficult. You'll probably find a few features that make it so you no longer need a few ugly hacks.
Well, you might might actually be in luck:The more people asking for this, the more likely it is to happen.
Heck, I'd probably even buy a happy meal to get one of those.
Check out the pledge to buy one. Although it's looking like the MIT lab won't have any problems getting enough orders to start production, it would be nice to see us comparatively rich /.'ers subsidize these- and maybe develop apps to run on them.
En Anglais, c'est NGO (non-governmental organization) :)
Bill C-74 was introduced November 15th:Whereas a wiretap requires a warrant this new law would force an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to intercept communications from customers and hand over customer lists with a simple letter from a law enforcement official. Any future software deployed by the ISP would have to have a back door, which includes internet telephony.
Alerted by legal scholar Michal Geist's writing on the subject, the tech-nerds are calling for resistance including providing end-to-end encryption (see slashdot).
The techies realize that criminals will encrypt their communication- at least those most dangerous to national security. Those that remain are the petty criminals and civilians who won't know how to protect their privacy. The public won't be more secure, but we will have more surveillance; the panopticon culture grows.
For new software, any ISP will have to choose the version most suited to increase its snooping capacities, even if they have to acquire additional licenses or communication facilities. To put it plainly: when they start offering VoIP (Voice over Internet protocol) services, ISPs will have to allow tapping without a warrant. Additional costs have to be swallowed by the ISP.
What is perhaps most pernicious in the economic sense isn't that these compliance costs will be passed on- it is that innovation will be stifled. Right now a small VoIP player could get started on ridiculously small amounts of capital. The effect of these regulations will be to protect oligopolies.
Ironically, as the new technologies have be designed for ease of surveillance, crackers (criminal or black-hat hackers) will likely be able to leverage these back doors to their ends. Stalking, industrial espionage and snooping for blackmail or identity theft material all become more likely. Making surveillance easy for the RCMP and CSIS could make it trivial for criminals, even terrorists to get to sensitive information.
Here's to hoping the NDP will firmly trash this nonsense. Or do we trust those that film us at every peace demonstration (and happily send off immigrants back to their countries of origin for questioning) with more surveillance power?
FTFA: "[A pandemic] could easily claim more lives in a single year than AIDS has in 25."
Doesn't cover the whole world.
Is not free (as in speech).
No geocoder.
Lacks routing data.
Drive around with a GPS and digicam, or put the combo on taxis and other vehicles, and you'd have a city's map in little time. That won't help you map tree cover in the Amazon, must most of the hackers I know interested in geodata are very interested in free street-level data.
That's fair. Search is only circumstantial evidence.
What history could show however is pre-meditation. e.g. Did the person we know committed the crime search for the implements in the months and weeks leading to the crime?
I know this probably won't interest Americans, but if this type of software can read street signs- can we also assume it will recognize traffic signs and house numbers?
A lot of countries don't have access to free information, so this technology if it worked would seriously harm some of the mapping data monopolies.
I don't think that response was meant for me?
When the only companies using software patents to litigate don't produce software themselves, we'll have come to a whole new level of absurdity.
Congress-critters may still ignore this, but the asurdity will come into clearer focus for most non-techies. That's not a bad thing.
Quoting FTFA:So we're telling these suspects that their lives have to be put on hold for an extra 14 days because we can't double the resources on this issue?
This is a mockery. Trampling democratic rights makes for a poor defense of democracy.
Justice delayed and stale intelligence. Shouldn't we know ASAP what's on those hard drives?
define:shear,
define:sheer.
Although when talking about about researched being cancelled, shear does make for pretty vivid imagery. baaah!
Car theft was the first thing that came to mind when reading about police stopping cars that drive through roadblocks. Of course, it should have been obvious that you're thinking about those "terrorists". Blame it on an all-nighter and silly amounts of caffeine.
You didn't try to refute my first point, and you make a fairly weak case as to this technology's use against terrorists. Even if we did surprise them, how long until someone figures it out? If we'll call that "security by surprise", you better be one creative guy and have deep pockets. How much did this toy cost? And even without surprise, how long until it loses most of its efficiency and you have to invent a new toy?
Overall the cost-benefit of these types of technologies is rather dismal. Plus, how long until the "terrorists" get their hands on one (or improvise one) and use it to down helicopters?
Mark my words: this is going to be a disaster, and not just because of the civilians this will inevitably be used on.
Yay! More security through ...er, we're talking lasers here. Ok, two problems with your theory.
1- Do you trust the government to test weapons on the public without us knowing what they are? (And if you answered yes, what the FUCK are you doing here?)
2- People that steal cars are NOT going to wear anti-laser or welding helmets. Talk about not looking cool and making yourself conspicuous.
Quoting upfront capital costs alone is rather useless- the important figure is the adjusted cost per KiloWatt-Hour. In this respect, wind is on course to beat these estimates from the nuclear industry. Even if this specific technology doesn't pan out, the trend is clear. And at $0.02/kWh, it will very likely be cheap enough to provide baseline power when coupled with hydrogen storage.
Turbine and solar cell manufacturers actually sell *stuff*. They have paying *customers* in a sector where the market is huge and their sector has been growing over 20% for more than 30 years.
The point of all this? Lack of capital has been one of the things holding growth back. That to me sounds a lot more serious than someone selling pet-food over the internet.
If not this particular company and technology, the prices they are giving are in line with most analysts' expectations.
Like a lot of other technologies, this one is going down in price in a predictable way. Check out the wind energy data at earth-policy.org, especially that last figure.
The sector has recently been experiencing Hockey-stick growth in investment. It's pretty much inevitable that this is going to be cheaper than coal- and likely cheap enough to make hydrogen for when wind is low. Cheap, guaranteed price, non-polluting.
Judging from nuclear's track record, it won't come close to wind. These turbines might not be the ones to put nuclear out of its misery- but wind certainly will play a large part (don't discount solar just quite yet).
Seems like a bit of a strawman argument, even if I agree with most of what you suggest government do instead.
From the summary it seems like a very interventionist approach. A more "organic" way would include all your recommendations, and when creating software in-house it would have to be open. Any commissioned custom software would also have to be open-source. Any barriers to OSS in procurement would have to be removed, including when making RFQ's. If an OSS package can have a feature added for $200,000, there's no way governments should be spending $3,500,000 on a "commercial" solution. There's a managerial phrase for that kind of CYA in the last point, but I forget it.
Getting out of the way AND dealing with their own purchasing could have a powerful impact. But any kind of "programme" that doesn't have immediate savings is just an ideological intervention in the market.
Their JS API actually has fewer features than Google's- no native polyline support, e.g. Oh, and no cool sat view. A geocoder IS nice though.
The more competition the better. We all win in the end.
Only $500 million. Glad they found cost-effective way to find the porn downl.. er, terrorists in our midst.