That's the way it ought to be, but I've seen examples of where the incumbant politician used all his polical capital to get some neat infrastructure installed. (A pedestrian bridge) Just before it was installed, he was voted out and the new mayor took credit for the whole shebang.
Say you are the mayor of a large town/city, and you get pipes laid that everyone can use. You'll have to spend money. Some other politician can outspend you getting elected knowing that he can sell off your infrastructure to make up the difference. I know that there is a difference between public and private money, but some politician don't.
Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market...
The biggest barrier is the last mile. You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players. The problem is, some of these players like the phone company and the cable giants, has historically made exclusive agreements and done their best to keep the public from knowing. (Time Warner has packed town hall meeting with employees so the citizens wouldn't be able to speak)
So, in steps the State and Federal governments. Legislation is proposed to limit the big players, since they have defacto monopolies. These players, sensing that the new law would cost them money, send their paid lobbists to increase their monopoly status. Hilarity ensues.
I weigh 180Lbs. I'm 6'2" tall and can bench press 2000 Lbs. I have > $2,000,000,000 in the bank and I'm an incredible conversationalist. I'm always willing to try out new things, so if Mercedes or Lexus that wants me to try a experimental car or two, I'll be sure to give it a thorough review. My current client list includes 75 of the Fortune 100.
I highly recommend everyone put as much creative writing as possible on the web.
I've had real music really stolen from me. Thieves broke in and stole 1/3 of my CD collection. I didn't own the copyrights, but I did own the disks. (way before copying CD's was cost effective.)
As far as I'm concerned, those disks are gone. Some were rare and out of print. I really would have much appriciated it if those thieves had just copied the disks and left me with the originals.
Let's start calling this "SpySpam". For spyspam to be most effective, you have to hide it away where normal people won't find it. Ideally, you'd get other spyspammers to link to you and you'd just link to them, making self contained universes. One author could easily run several "people".
Someone should quietly introduce this at the next large gathering of Science Fiction writers. I'll bet Spider Robinson could pull it off.
Yeoch, the libility to the bank is resolved because they were hired by the bank, and I presume have a written agreement with them, but what if another companies employee happend by, picked one up, and was hacked. They could be in a world of hurt, both civilly and criminally.
USB thumbdrives are cool. Much more so than floppies. Their also more tolerant of gunk. If I had found an errant floppy years ago, I might have sent it to the lost and found, but I wouldn't have put it in my disk drive, because it would probably have dust and crude on it. If I were to find a USB thumb drive, I might think to mount it to find the owner.
After this article, if I see a thumbdrive on the ground, I'm going to pick it up with forceps and put in into a plastic bag so as not to disturb any fingerprints on it. Then send it to the FBI for analysis.
There's already lots of education in Africa supplied by organizations like the Peace Corp and churches. Trouble is, it's targetted at the best and brightest children, who, after they do well in school, tend to leave and never come back. What 3rd world countries need is broad education that includes adults. The networking aspects of this machine could help with that. The children could be less likely to leave if they are in constant contact with their peers, learning from and teaching them and their parents. Imagine, distributed schools. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them. (:-)
Almost good enough to be a movie plot. Dude buys stolen laptop for drugs, then finds it has multi-million dollar value for the data it contains. Suddenly, he realizes that everyone and his ex-wife will be looking for the thing, so he has to bump off the junkie that sold him the thing to cover his tracks.
I've had HP/UX machines with 2 years of uptime. FreeBSD machines with > 1 year were common too. Usually the machine had to be moved or repurposed before it crashed.
Sun machines weren't nearly as reliable as HP, generating 10 times the number of hardware service calls. That and the 250 day bug, gave them somewhat lower uptimes.
A properly configured Linux machine is at least as reliable. How could anything have 20% more uptime than a machine that's up 99.999% of the time?
Right, "citizen" is used in other parts of the constitution, but only "person" appears in the bill of rights.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...."
Under current legislation, a person could be legally held indefinitely without trial for something as innocuous as speeding.
BBBBut, that won't happen to *us*, only to *them*.
Welcome to "Constitutional NIMBY", the game show where your rights are trampled in front of your eyes. Remember folks, the contestants on this show aren't really *People*, like you and me...
Well, they've thrown out the rest of the constitution, so why not the 1st and 4th. Once they've erroded the 2nd, the rest follow.
Anyway, people would rather feel safe, than be free. Even if they aren't really safe.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
The current administration has thrown this one out the window. What part of "No person" do they not understand. (Note, the "in cases arising in the land or naval forces" refers to *memebers* of those forces, not "Enemy Combatants")
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, UPN, and independent TV stations are given rights to a small part of the public airwaves. They don't pay for their bandwidth. (But are supposed to follow a few rules)
Now, stations are selling parts of their bandwidth to highest bidders. We, the people, gave them that bandwidth, shouldn't we get direct compensation for it?
PBS is a good thing, but I think it's roundabout for the government to say "We won't pay for you, but here's this incrediblely valueable asset. Sell it for what you can to offset your operation costs."
How much of a kickback do we get from the commercial stations that use the public airwaves right now? (Answer: Zip, nada, nothing)
The federal government has always been horrible at getting it's due from renting stuff like land or the airwaves. It's always been cheaper for companies to buy congresscritters and senate-beings than to pay market value to using public property.
the latter article states that you can get them for $49 now
$49 for how big a hard drive and a bunch of other parts? If it can store 8 movies, that average 1.5 hours, that's 12 hours. Assuming the high quality mode of Tivo, that about a 40 gig drive. Not that great a price, I'll wait for these boatanchors to be unloaded at yard sales and ebay to strip them. I wonder if the processor can run Linux? Sounds like they have a HD tuner inside, so they could be cool to hack.
Yes, it's entirely possible they've done the security "right".
The problem is if they've made the encryption that secure, one little glitch, and it's all over, No one can get anything and it's not likely that they'll be able to fix it.
There's a reason most products have manufacturer's codes and backdoors built-in. It makes troubleshooting possible.
Imagine you're watching a movie you've paid good money for, and there's a one bit drop in the tranmission. (After error correction) Remember, this is a shoot and forget systems. There's no oportunity to resend a bad packet like over the internet. Just one bit dropped from a really secure, compressed stream will render it useless.
My wife and I leave closed captioning on so we don't wake the kids. We recieve TV over the air, and even when reception is good, there's often errors in the stream. "To be or not to be, that is the &%%*&%*^(*"
If Ken Lay were to have stole my pension fund, right next door is exactly where I'd want him to be. That way if I needed anything, I'd just go over and take it from him. (:-) "Nice grill you got there Ken, could you help me wheel it over to my place?"
An additional punishment to restitution, would be to force him to have a big, scarlet 'E' tattoed on his forhead. That way it'd be less likely that anyone would trust him with their money in the future.
Of course, once the government had taken everything away from him, and I and my neighbors had taken anything left, he'd be homeless, jobless, and probably die penniless and insane. C'est L'vie.
The problem with restitution is that anyone can cause much more damage than can be repaired. For that, we use punishment as a deterrent.
When they say "The law is with us", they mean the appropriate politicians have been paid off. No district attorney will file criminal charges, no matter how much information they've stolen, or how may systems they paid someone to break into. Conspiracy charges are right out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's what got Leona Helmsley.
e ona_helmsley/index.html
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/scams/l
That's the way it ought to be, but I've seen examples of where the incumbant politician used all his polical capital to get some neat infrastructure installed. (A pedestrian bridge) Just before it was installed, he was voted out and the new mayor took credit for the whole shebang.
Say you are the mayor of a large town/city, and you get pipes laid that everyone can use. You'll have to spend money. Some other politician can outspend you getting elected knowing that he can sell off your infrastructure to make up the difference. I know that there is a difference between public and private money, but some politician don't.
Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market...
The biggest barrier is the last mile. You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players. The problem is, some of these players like the phone company and the cable giants, has historically made exclusive agreements and done their best to keep the public from knowing. (Time Warner has packed town hall meeting with employees so the citizens wouldn't be able to speak)
So, in steps the State and Federal governments. Legislation is proposed to limit the big players, since they have defacto monopolies. These players, sensing that the new law would cost them money, send their paid lobbists to increase their monopoly status. Hilarity ensues.
Researchers at Purdue developed a way to use sound to dry stuff like molasass and lemon juice.= 1G1:15511368&ctrlInfo=Round20%3AMode20c%3ADocG%3AR esult&ao=
http://www.highbeam.com/library/docfree.asp?DOCID
If I recall, they used something like 180dB.
I weigh 180Lbs. I'm 6'2" tall and can bench press 2000 Lbs. I have > $2,000,000,000 in the bank and I'm an incredible conversationalist. I'm always willing to try out new things, so if Mercedes or Lexus that wants me to try a experimental car or two, I'll be sure to give it a thorough review. My current client list includes 75 of the Fortune 100.
I highly recommend everyone put as much creative writing as possible on the web.
I've had real music really stolen from me. Thieves broke in and stole 1/3 of my CD collection. I didn't own the copyrights, but I did own the disks. (way before copying CD's was cost effective.)
As far as I'm concerned, those disks are gone. Some were rare and out of print. I really would have much appriciated it if those thieves had just copied the disks and left me with the originals.
Copyright infringment is *not* stealing.
Um, this is the N-Freak'n-SA. They have massive computers and actual databases that can immediately cull the bogus info from the good stuff.
(:^) for the humor impaired.
Let's start calling this "SpySpam". For spyspam to be most effective, you have to hide it away where normal people won't find it. Ideally, you'd get other spyspammers to link to you and you'd just link to them, making self contained universes. One author could easily run several "people".
Someone should quietly introduce this at the next large gathering of Science Fiction writers. I'll bet Spider Robinson could pull it off.
Um, someone like, say, the bank's customers!!!
Yeoch, the libility to the bank is resolved because they were hired by the bank, and I presume have a written agreement with them, but what if another companies employee happend by, picked one up, and was hacked. They could be in a world of hurt, both civilly and criminally.
USB thumbdrives are cool. Much more so than floppies. Their also more tolerant of gunk. If I had found an errant floppy years ago, I might have sent it to the lost and found, but I wouldn't have put it in my disk drive, because it would probably have dust and crude on it. If I were to find a USB thumb drive, I might think to mount it to find the owner.
After this article, if I see a thumbdrive on the ground, I'm going to pick it up with forceps and put in into a plastic bag so as not to disturb any fingerprints on it. Then send it to the FBI for analysis.
There's already lots of education in Africa supplied by organizations like the Peace Corp and churches. Trouble is, it's targetted at the best and brightest children, who, after they do well in school, tend to leave and never come back. What 3rd world countries need is broad education that includes adults. The networking aspects of this machine could help with that. The children could be less likely to leave if they are in constant contact with their peers, learning from and teaching them and their parents. Imagine, distributed schools. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them. (:-)
Almost good enough to be a movie plot. Dude buys stolen laptop for drugs, then finds it has multi-million dollar value for the data it contains. Suddenly, he realizes that everyone and his ex-wife will be looking for the thing, so he has to bump off the junkie that sold him the thing to cover his tracks.
I've had HP/UX machines with 2 years of uptime. FreeBSD machines with > 1 year were common too. Usually the machine had to be moved or repurposed before it crashed.
Sun machines weren't nearly as reliable as HP, generating 10 times the number of hardware service calls. That and the 250 day bug, gave them somewhat lower uptimes.
A properly configured Linux machine is at least as reliable. How could anything have 20% more uptime than a machine that's up 99.999% of the time?
What we need to do is to hand over religion to computers.
l
Holy "Nine Billion Names of God", Batman!
http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.htm
Right, "citizen" is used in other parts of the constitution, but only "person" appears in the bill of rights.
..."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Under current legislation, a person could be legally held indefinitely without trial for something as innocuous as speeding.
BBBBut, that won't happen to *us*, only to *them*.
Welcome to "Constitutional NIMBY", the game show where your rights are trampled in front of your eyes. Remember folks, the contestants on this show aren't really *People*, like you and me...
Well, they've thrown out the rest of the constitution, so why not the 1st and 4th. Once they've erroded the 2nd, the rest follow.
Anyway, people would rather feel safe, than be free. Even if they aren't really safe.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
The current administration has thrown this one out the window. What part of "No person" do they not understand. (Note, the "in cases arising in the land or naval forces" refers to *memebers* of those forces, not "Enemy Combatants")
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Well, hell, these are right out too.
PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, UPN, and independent TV stations are given rights to a small part of the public airwaves. They don't pay for their bandwidth. (But are supposed to follow a few rules)
Now, stations are selling parts of their bandwidth to highest bidders. We, the people, gave them that bandwidth, shouldn't we get direct compensation for it?
PBS is a good thing, but I think it's roundabout for the government to say "We won't pay for you, but here's this incrediblely valueable asset. Sell it for what you can to offset your operation costs."
How much of a kickback do we get from the commercial stations that use the public airwaves right now? (Answer: Zip, nada, nothing)
The federal government has always been horrible at getting it's due from renting stuff like land or the airwaves. It's always been cheaper for companies to buy congresscritters and senate-beings than to pay market value to using public property.
the latter article states that you can get them for $49 now
$49 for how big a hard drive and a bunch of other parts? If it can store 8 movies, that average 1.5 hours, that's 12 hours. Assuming the high quality mode of Tivo, that about a 40 gig drive. Not that great a price, I'll wait for these boatanchors to be unloaded at yard sales and ebay to strip them. I wonder if the processor can run Linux? Sounds like they have a HD tuner inside, so they could be cool to hack.
Yes, it's entirely possible they've done the security "right".
The problem is if they've made the encryption that secure, one little glitch, and it's all over, No one can get anything and it's not likely that they'll be able to fix it.
There's a reason most products have manufacturer's codes and backdoors built-in. It makes troubleshooting possible.
Imagine you're watching a movie you've paid good money for, and there's a one bit drop in the tranmission. (After error correction) Remember, this is a shoot and forget systems. There's no oportunity to resend a bad packet like over the internet. Just one bit dropped from a really secure, compressed stream will render it useless.
My wife and I leave closed captioning on so we don't wake the kids. We recieve TV over the air, and even when reception is good, there's often errors in the stream. "To be or not to be, that is the &%%*&%*^(*"
If Ken Lay were to have stole my pension fund, right next door is exactly where I'd want him to be. That way if I needed anything, I'd just go over and take it from him. (:-) "Nice grill you got there Ken, could you help me wheel it over to my place?"
An additional punishment to restitution, would be to force him to have a big, scarlet 'E' tattoed on his forhead. That way it'd be less likely that anyone would trust him with their money in the future.
Of course, once the government had taken everything away from him, and I and my neighbors had taken anything left, he'd be homeless, jobless, and probably die penniless and insane. C'est L'vie.
The problem with restitution is that anyone can cause much more damage than can be repaired. For that, we use punishment as a deterrent.
The real question is how many planes today allow the autopilot to completly take over the controls when sent a signal from the home base?
Watch the eyes in this movie. It's all about the eyes.
When they say "The law is with us", they mean the appropriate politicians have been paid off. No district attorney will file criminal charges, no matter how much information they've stolen, or how may systems they paid someone to break into. Conspiracy charges are right out.